Takeaways from a talk by Sapiens and Unstoppable Us author Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari. (Photo: Facebook)

Yuval Noah Harari, who is a lecturer at the Department of History in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is out with a new book series called Unstoppable Us, published by Penguin Random House. It revisits the ideas from his bestselling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) and packages them for children and teenagers.

Penguin Random House, 208 pages, Rs 790.

Harari was in Mumbai recently to release Volume 1 of the series — How Humans Took Over The World — and to interact with his target audience at an event hosted by Crossword Bookstores, Kidsstoppress.com and his publisher at the Sophia Bhabha Auditorium. He stopped by on the way to Igatpuri in Maharashtra, where he is currently sitting in a Vipassana meditation retreat.

Here are some key takeaways from his talk and the new book:

According to Harari, it is a mistake to approach history as baggage from the past that we are doomed to carry. He believes that the whole purpose of learning history is to liberate ourselves from our fears, illusions and miseries. History can help us understand how things and people evolved over time, and how they came to be the way they are today.

Harari points out that when the sight of a spider makes us scream with fear, we react based on memories from a time when our ancestors lived in Africa millions of years ago. Humans had to protect themselves from dangerous spiders in the wild. Today, very few people in the world die because of poisonous spiders; a large number die in car accidents. We are not scared of cars because they came into existence a little over a hundred years ago. It takes a long time for a species to acquire a deep-seated fear of something.

As the only animals that can create myths, legends and fairy tales, humans have a superpower that can benefit and harm. Stories are told to teach values and pass down ideas that are important to communities. This function of storytelling inspires people to cooperate. Stories also have the ability to perpetuate beliefs and reinforce feelings of us versus them. These can be used by politics and religion to foster divides between humans. Harari is of the opinion that humans need to use this superpower with great responsibility.

Harari has been practising Vipassana meditation since the last 20 years. It has helped him understand that the mind is like a factory, which is constantly producing stories about the self and the world. When he first began learning to observe the in-breath and the out-breath as a form of mind training, it was difficult to do that practice even for a few seconds. The frustration pushed him to keep trying. He realised that his desire to unravel the history of humanity would remain unfulfilled if he couldn't bring his mind to focus on a single moment of reality.

Harari's meditation practice has taught him that it is unhelpful to characterise meditation as good or bad. The focus should be on maintaining awareness of whatever comes up including so-called negative feelings such as anger. Witnessing them helps us know the nature of the mind. One realises, for example, that anger and happiness cannot be present at the same time. When the mind is generating thoughts of anger, it is often acting upon stories that we tell ourselves or that others tell us rather than reality. The mind can be a source of misery or happiness because we can train it.