http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brB9IwLha4o

I’ve just finished listening to these lectures on Radio New Zealand over the last few weeks. They’re wonderful. Intricate, beautiful explorations of endangered cultures, their complexities and the functions they serve. It makes an absolute knock out case that indigenous cultures are neither failed attempts at modernity, nor static and incompatible with technology or change. They’re alternative modes of thought and development that prove humanity isn’t destined to live out one system of development, or incapable of fundamental change if it’s needed.

My favourite line in the lectures came from a Tibetan monk - ” We don’t really think you went to the moon, but you did. You don’t really think we achieve enlightenment in a single life time, but we do.”