Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), this is where we try to draw your attention to things that matter and the importance of our attention, why is that? Because ‘let us remember this again, ‘What we give our Attention to matters,’ as Our life’s experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. Attention: is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. Once our attention is drawn to the mechanism of why and what we give attention to, it is as if a veil has been stripped off and we become freer in our action and choices. And that is our endavour. This week I bring to your attention another excerpt which we have titled – Gifts & Change from the book titled ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ – Technology’s capture and control of our minds and Culture by James Burke and Robert Ornstein. This book is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds. The gifts we accepted from them gave us the power to change the way we lived, but doing so also changed the way we thought. It is a stunning account of how scientific thinking and technology have gained control over the way we perceive and value the world.  Gifts & Change Their gifts not only changed the world of their time but also remain in use, to affect later periods. Any modern environment is a mixture of these world-altering changes, whose origins range back thousands of years into the past. The fact that you are able to read this book originates with the effects of the fifteenth-century printing press. The food you ate for breakfast today was delivered to the supermarkets thanks to the nineteenth-century combustion engine. The clothes you’re wearing now began their existence on a prehistoric loom. You are alive, in all probability, thanks to one or another medical advance dating from some time in the last hundred years or maybe older than that. Your workplace probably includes thirteenth-century paper, sixteenth-century lathe-turned furniture, nineteenth-century plastics, fifteenth-century toilets, seventeenth-century electricity powering nineteenth-century telephones, and early twentieth-century computers. The water supply in the restrooms is delivered by sixteenth-century pumping systems. The paint on the office walls contains nineteenth-century artificial dyes. Your business itself likely runs on a top-down decision hierarchy dating from command structures first established seven thousand years ago to run the first city-states. Only rarely, if ever, did we look back to examine the effect of our passage on the world, because our axemaker’s always led us forward, toward the horizon we never expected to reach. Excerpt from ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ by James Burke and Robert Ornstein I am sure that you will enjoy reading this book; you can buy your copy from the following link: The Axemakers Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture Enjoy reading it with your family, friends and near and dear one’s. Namaste! a class="a2a_button_twitter" href="https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/twitter?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fqsconsultants.in%2Fblog%2Fgifts-change%2F&linkname=Gifts%20%26%20Change" title="Twitter" rel="nofo...