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September 29, 2006
Ashtavakra's Response to Eliminating Desire
"Of all four categories of beings, from Brahma (Creator of the natural world) down to the last clump of grass, only the man of knowledge is capable of eliminating desire and aversion... 'I am infinite like space, and the natural world is like a jar', 'I am like the ocean, and the multiplicity of objects is comparable to a wave' and 'I am in all beings, and all beings are in me.' To know this is knowledge, and then there is neither renunciation, acceptance, or cessation of it."
Dear friends and fellow IntentBloggers
Thank you for your thoughts, observations and views.
In order to respond to the Socratic Dialogue underway at the IntentBlog post, "Beyond Desire -- Ashtavakra Gita and Advaita", it is necessary to offer the following chapters of The Ashtavakra Gita as an appropriate response.
John Richards translation of the Chapters IV, V and VI follows, post the salutations and signature.
With love in His Name
DK with family
DK Matai
The Philanthropia, ATCA, mi2g.net
Ashtavakra Gita
Chapter IV
Master Ashtavakra said:
1. The wise person of self-knowledge, playing the game of worldly enjoyment, bears no resemblance whatever to samsara's bewildered beasts of burden.
2. Truly the yogi feels no excitement even at being established in that state which all the Devas from Indra down yearn for disconsolately.
3. He who has known That, is untouched within by good deeds or bad, just as space is not touched by smoke, however much it may appear to be.
4. Who can prevent the great-souled person who has known this whole world as himself from living as he pleases?
5. Of all four categories of beings, from Brahma down to the last clump of grass, only the man of knowledge is capable of eliminating desire and aversion.
6. Rare is the man who knows himself as the non-dual Lord of the world, and he who knows this is not afraid of anything.
Chapter V
Master Ashtavakra said:
1. You are not bound by anything. What does a pure person like you need to renounce? Putting the complex organism to rest, you can find peace.
2. All this arises out of you, like a bubble out of the sea. Knowing yourself like this to be but one, you can find peace.
3. In spite of being in front of your eyes, all this, being insubstantial, does not exist in you, spotless as you are. It is an appearance like the snake in a rope, so you can find peace.
4. Equal in pain and in pleasure, equal in hope and in disappointment, equal in life and in death, and complete as you are, you can find peace.
Chapter VI
Master Ashtavakra said:
1. I am infinite like space, and the natural world is like a jar. To know this is knowledge, and then there is neither renunciation, acceptance, or cessation of it.
2. I am like the ocean, and the multiplicity of objects is comparable to a wave. To know this is knowledge, and then there is neither renunciation, acceptance or cessation of it.
3. I am like the mother of pearl, and the imagined world is like the silver. To know this is knowledge, and then there is neither renunciation, acceptance, or cessation of it.
4. Alternatively, I am in all beings, and all beings are in me. To know this is knowledge, and then there is neither renunciation, acceptance, or cessation of it.
[ENDS]
Posted by DK Matai at 11:04 PM | Comments (19)
I'm Not Hysterical, It's My Brain (The Mind-Body Bridge, Part 2)
Many people are turning their backs on the real value of mind-body medicine, at just the wrong time. The evidence for this comes from many quarters; here's one of the most interesting. As reported recently in the New York Times, an old, widely discredited mental diagnosis may be returning.
Is Hysteria Real?
The disorder in question, hysteria, was quite familiar to Freud. He used the term to describe serious physical symptoms (paralysis and seizures being the most common) that suddenly appear without physical cause. Most of the hysterical patients that Freud saw were women, and he theorized that their symptoms were symbols for unconscious wishes and fears, usually sexual in nature. In part because this hypothesis was never proved, and in part because the diagnosis seemed sexist, hysteria disappeared from the medical lexicon. Yet the disorder itself didn't.
What the Times reported on was a paper by brain researchers in Cardiff, Wales, who believe they have located the area of the brain that is causing such drastic symptoms without any physical illness. Paralysis and seizures lead directly to the motor cortex that is responsible for muscle motion. The researchers discovered that this area of the brain wasn't responding correctly to signals from the part of the cortex responsible for higher thinking. But the motor centers weren't damaged, as they would be in someone suffering from paralysis caused by disease.
Instead, the higher brain was refusing to send the proper signals, in effect censoring what the person wanted to do. If this finding is validated, the mystery of hysteria will have been solved. As we've seen in recent years, dysfunction in the brain is responsible for depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and perhaps a host of behaviors including overeating and addiction.
But by so precisely mapping brain dysfunction, are we really finding a cause? Depressed and anxious patients are generally helped by giving them drugs that rebalance certain areas of their brains, yet this is never a cure. As soon as thee drug is removed, the symptoms return. Presently, doctors feel that this is all they can do. If a sick brain can't be permanently repaired, there's nothing else to try.
And yet the mind-body connection says otherwise. Depressed patients can also be helped with couch therapy, that is, through talking about the issues at hand and resolving them. If you're depressed because you're too shy to go to job interviews, the realistic solution isn't to dope your brain but to boost your confidence. Recent studies in compulsive-obsessive disorder have shown that the same regions of the brain are improved through talk therapy as through psychotropic drugs like Prozac. So confronting your problems is "real" medicine. This point is overlooked in our rush to drug the brain and make symptoms subside.
There's no guarantee that talk therapy will be permanent, yet that's not the issue. The fact is that talking isn't a brain function but a mental one. A drug may fix a specific chemical imbalance, but that's the same as fixing a broken radio. You wouldn't claim that fixing a radio is the same as fixing the programs playing through it. The brain receives messages from the mind and turns them into physical functions. Fixing the receiver doesn't cure a disturbed mind.
It's understandable that science dismisses the mind as invisible and therefore illusory, while the brain, being an object, can be endlessly tinkered with. Some philosophical skeptics assert that mid is a complete fiction to begin with, a ghost we've learned to live with but never proven the existence of. The refutation of that position stares us squarely in the face, though, because every time we respond to words, a mental event changes the brain, not vice versa.
If I tell you that you've lost your job or your entire savings, you will get depressed. Your brain will exhibit the same chemical imbalance as someone with chronic depression. Yet the cause isn't a mystery. You are responding to a mental event known as bad news. Bad news, sudden stress, failed expectations, guilt, shame, and a host of other mental events can throw the brain into severe imbalance. Without such stimuli, the brain simply coasts along normally with no ability to change a person's mood, any more than a radio can change a song from happy to sad.
This may sound like an abstract point, but the future direction of medicine depends upon it. In recent decades mind-body therapies have made tremendous strides, and yet the prejudice against them is enormous. For example, do you believe that high cholesterol is the chief cause of premature heart attacks? Millions of people do, and yet the classic long-term study on premature heart attacks that began at Harvard after WW II didn't find that the chief risk factor was high cholesterol. The chief risk was unexamined psychological issues. Men who confronted their personal problems in their twenties were less likely to die of a premature heart attack than those who didn't. This correlation was stronger than the correlation with cholesterol, only treating high cholesterol, being materialistic, fit the bias of medicine better.
The same holds true in a variety of diseases, Cancer is correlated to emotional repression. Early retirement or the sudden loss of a spouse shortens life expectancy. High stress, or even working on the night shift, causes a host of disorders to become more likely. The fact that doctors don't take these factors seriously enough isn't going to make them go away. The need to build the mind-body bridge is crucial, and until we face that fact, pushing drugs and performing surgery will be a drastic, often short-sighted mode of treatment for millions of people.
Love,
Deepak
Posted by Deepak Chopra at 05:41 PM | Comments (25)
September 28, 2006
Beyond Desire -- Ashtavakra Gita and Advaita
When we have met friends on various world tours of The Great Spiritual Masters, the challenge of going "Beyond Desire" has often come up. The Ashtavakra Gita has been universally cited as a step in the right direction
towards solving this challenge and going beyond desire, because it presents the traditional teachings of Advaita (Non-Dualism) Vedanta with a clarity and power very rarely matched. Since many have found the synopsis of the Ashtavakra Gita useful over the years, John Richards translation of the Chapter III follows, post the salutations and signature.
With love in His Name
DK with family
DK Matai
The Philanthropia, ATCA, mi2g.net
Ashtavakra Gita
Chapter - III
Master Ashtavakra said to His true disciple King Janak:
1. Knowing yourself as truly one and indestructible, how could a wise man possessing self-knowledge like you feel any pleasure in acquiring wealth?
2. Truly, when one does not know oneself, one takes pleasure in the objects of mistaken perception, just as greed arises for the mistaken silver in one who does not know mother of pearl for what it is.
3. All this wells up like waves in the sea. Recognising, "I am That," why run around like someone in need?
4. After hearing of oneself as pure consciousness and the supremely beautiful, is one to go on lusting after sordid sexual objects?
5. When the sage has realised that he himself is in all beings, and all beings are in him, it is astonishing that the sense of individuality should be able to continue.
6. It is astonishing that a man who has reached the supreme non-dual state and is intent on the benefits of liberation should still be subject to lust and in bondage to sexual activity.
7. It is astonishing that one already very debilitated, and knowing very well that its arousal is the enemy of knowledge, should still hanker after sensuality, even when approaching his last days.
8. It is astonishing that one who is unattached to the things of this world or the next, who discriminates between the permanent and the impermanent, and who longs for liberation, should still be afraid of liberation.
9. Whether feted or tormented, the wise man is always aware of his supreme self-nature and is neither pleased nor disappointed.
10. The great-souled person sees even his own body in action as if it were someone else's, so how should he be disturbed by praise or blame?
11. Seeing this world as pure illusion, and devoid of any interest in it, how should the strong-minded person, feel fear, even at the approach of death?
12. Who can be compared to the great-souled person whose mind is free from desire even in disappointment, and who has found satisfaction in self-knowledge?
13. How should a strong-minded person who knows that what he sees is by its very nature nothing, consider one thing to be grasped and another to be rejected?
14. An object of enjoyment that comes of itself is neither painful nor pleasurable for someone who has eliminated attachment, and who is free from dualism and from desire.
[ENDS]
Chapter II is available from here.
Background
The Ashtavakra Gita, or the Ashtavakra Samhita (Ashtavakra's Collection) as it is sometimes called, is a very ancient Sanskrit text. There is little doubt amongst scholars in the East and West that it dates back to the days of the classic Vedanta period. The Sanskrit style and the doctrine expressed warrant this assessment. The text sees duality as the root of evil, asserts the importance of belief in sharing one's world view as unlimited or unbounded, and confidently proclaims the radical unity of "Universal Consciousness" and Its Creative Connections including humankind.
The obscure Ashtavakra Gita "Ashtavakra's Song" -- as distinct from the famous Bhagavad Gita "Divine Song" of Lord Krishna's within the Mahabharata -- is a divine discourse between the Perfect Master Ashtavakra (Eight times Knotted or Gnarled Guru) and Raja Janak (King Janaka), who later in his life became a Perfect Master. Raja Janak was the only one to have been born a Royal and to remain one throughout his life whilst dispensing the duties of King and Perfect Saint simultaneously. The Great Perfect Masters have all stressed the importance of this inspirational and true piece of work in their talks by way of a treatise on the true path -- a manual towards continuous self-improvement.
Posted by DK Matai at 12:14 PM | Comments (37)
Welcome, Prime Minister Abe!
Why is Japan's New Prime Minister -- Shinzo Abe -- so important to the World at large and Asia in particular?
Shinzo Abe, 90th Prime Minister of Japan
Dear ATCA Colleagues
[Please note that the views presented by individual contributors are not necessarily representative of the views of ATCA, which is neutral. ATCA conducts collective Socratic dialogue on global opportunities and threats.]
We are grateful to Jesper Koll, Chief Economist at Merrill Lynch Japan, based in Tokyo, for his submission to ATCA, "Welcome, Prime Minister Abe! -- Why is Japan's New Prime Minister so important to the World at large and Asia in particular?"
Shinzo Abe, 52, has recently been elected Japan's 90th Prime Minister, elected by a special session of the National Diet (Parliament) on September 26, 2006. Mr Abe is the first Prime Minister born after World War II. His maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was Japan's Prime Minister and his father, Shintaro Abe, was Foreign Minister. Mr Abe was born in Nagato and studied political science at Seikei University, graduating in 1977. He later moved to the United States to study politics at the University of Southern California. In April 1979, Mr Abe began working for Kobe Steel. He left the company in 1982 and pursued a number of governmental positions: Executive assistant to the Minister for Foreign Affairs (his father), Private Secretary to the Chairperson of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) General Council, and Private Secretary to the LDP Secretary-General. He has been elected four times since 1993. Mr Abe's profile increased four years ago when he arranged the repatriation of Japanese nationals abducted to North Korea.
____________________________________________________________________________
Jesper Koll, Chief Economist & Managing Director, Merrill Lynch Japan, has been researching Japan's economy and financial markets since becoming a resident of Japan in 1986. Prior to joining Merrill Lynch in August 1999, he was a Managing Director of Tiger Management LLC. Before that he was the chief economist and head of economic and market research for JP Morgan in Tokyo. Mr Koll has been serving on several Japanese government advisory councils, including the MITI committee on "Big Bang 2001 - Japan's financial system reform." He was a member of the Economic Planning Agency council for anti-deflation policy measures. Since 2002, he has been a member of the Koizumi administrations' project team of private sector analysts. He currently serves on the Ministry of Finance Advisory Council on Global Capital Flows. Mr Koll is also one of the few non-Japanese members of the Keizai Doyukai, Japan's Association of Corporate Executives.
For the first two years of his stay in Japan, Mr Koll was a research fellow at the Kyoto University Economic Research Center and the Tokyo University Institute for Social Sciences. After that, Mr Koll served as an aide to a Japanese Member of Parliament for two years. He is the author of many articles and two books, "Towards a New Japanese Golden Age" (2000) and "The End of Heisei Deflation" (2003). Both are in Japanese. Before his Japan specialization, Mr Koll worked as an assistant economist for the OECD in Paris. He holds a Masters degree from The Johns Hopkins University, SAIS and is a graduate of the Lester B Pearson College of the Pacific (1980). He is a native of Germany and was born in 1961. He writes:
Dear DK-san and Colleagues
Re: Welcome, Prime Minister Abe! -- Why is Japan's New Prime Minister so important to the World at large and Asia in particular?
Prime Minister Abe is off to a good start. First polls suggest his public support rate is around 65-70%. Although below the awe-inspiring 75-90% Koizumi basically maintained throughout his five-year rule, Abe's initial popularity is well above the pre-Koizumi norm. The initial strong popular mandate should give the young prime minister confidence and room to act boldly. He is poised to do so in foreign and security policy, more so than economic policy.
Abe's policy priorities are very different from those of Koizumi. The reason for this is a fundamentally different economic backdrop. Five-and-a-half-years ago, when Koizumi came to power, Japan's economy was in a desperate state. The banks were bankrupt, unemployment was surging and the economy was at the brink of a deflationary spiral. Koizumi and his team had one priority - fix the economy.
The Japan that Abe faces could not be more different. The economy is fixed, banks are lending, unemployment is falling and land prices are rising. The latest world competitive survey, published on the day Abe was confirmed as prime minister, finds Japan upgraded to seventh-best country in which to do business, behind the US in sixth-place and well ahead of England, Taiwan and Korea. In the last five years, Japan has climbed about 10 places.
For Abe, the message is clear: The economy is fine and basically can be managed on autopilot. This gives him room to focus on his real passion, foreign policy in general and Japan-China relations in particular.
Focus on Japan-China relations
Right from the start, Abe's first public policy statements show great enthusiasm for more active political engagement between Japan and China. He said Japan and China see it in their mutual interest to cooperate more closely. This is a marked turn-around from Koizumi's policy of de-facto neglect and almost exclusive focus on Japan-US relations. Make no mistake: Prime Minister Abe is paving the way for a historic Japan-China summit meeting.
Although we do not know any details about what a concrete Japan-China diplomatic initiative may yield, Abe's foreign policy focus has the potential to turn the US-Japan bilateral relationship into a more complex US-Japan-China trilateral power axis. Indeed, true and constructive Japan-China cooperation and friendship has the power to de-throne the US as global hegemon.
Think the unthinkable
What could be discussed at a Japan-China summit meeting? Here are three points that I believe might signal true constructive engagement:
1. A Japan-China clean energy initiative;
2. An Asia airbus project; and
3. A Japan-China Free Trade Agreement.
While these are highly speculative ideas, we believe they help focus the debate on what may be at stake and the far reaching consequences a true engagement between Asia's two biggest economies may mean.
1) A Japan-China clean energy initiative
Japan and China have the power to set the global standard for a new energy policy. The world clearly needs a decisive push toward more ecologically sustainable, less fossil-fuel-dependent energy. If China and Japan could jointly develop the new standard for the next generation of hybrid or hydrogen passenger cars and trucks, agree on the design and specifications of ecologically sound and economically efficient alternative energy plants, both countries would set a new global gold standard for what should and can be done.
Like the French-German coal and steel union in the 20th century, the joint development of a new energy policy and ecological standards is poised to forge deep-rooted alliances between both countries. The new growth opportunities from China and Japan agreeing on what will become the de-facto the new global standard for energy policy are obvious. By working out jointly the new global standard, deep-rooted Japan-China fears and mistrust around technology transfer and intellectual property issues should be solved naturally. Not in theory, but in practice.
There is another key benefit to such a project. Successful promotion of a new and ecologically sound, yet efficient energy policy at the commercial and private use level is poised to elevate both China and Japan to the status of true global leaders. Both countries would become an inspiration to other governments around the world.
2) An Asia airbus project
This idea is straightforward. Japan and China would agree to develop an "Asia Airbus" commuter plane, possibly in joint cooperation with Korea. Nothing pulls people together like working together. For example, if China developed the wings, Korea the cabin and Japan the engine, a powerful bridge across Asia could be built.
3) A China-Japan Free Trade Agreement
From an economist's perspective, Japan and China is a match made in heaven. Both countries are hugely complementary, given Japan's overwhelming capital endowment and China's outstanding labour supply. It has been estimated that gains from more free trade could add as much as 0.3-0.5% to Japan's potential growth rate. China's path toward sustainable growth meanwhile should be aided greatly by more active Japanese technology transfer.
All of these proposals would mark the start of a fundamentally different Japan-China relationship. A new rules-based policy of engagement between the two largest economies in Asia would begin, not just with lofty diplomatic ideals, but with specific projects.
Clearly, a more constructive Japan-China relationship would force more active engagement of the US. If both Japan and China agreed to cooperate, however, the US would join the debate as a virtually equal partner, rather than a unilateral hegemon. For example, the energy policy initiative could not be ignored by the US simply because of the enormous economies of scale implied by China's 1.2bn people combining with Japan's 125mn.
Reality check
For Abe, the challenge is clear. He has taken first bold steps to seek active reengagement of Japan-China diplomacy. This is long overdue, given the already very strong economic ties between the two countries. However, it is not enough to merely re-establish proper top-level diplomatic dialogue. The world, particularly Asia, needs constructive ideas and constructive policy leadership that builds institutions, and sets legal standards that allow lasting and stable regional integration, independent of the whims of individual political leaders.
The good news is that, in contrast to Koizumi, Abe seems passionate and willing to lead this process. Chances are high that his Chinese counterparts are just as pragmatic and visionary. By redefining Japan-China relations, Abe could do a lot to redefine Japan's new national identity, just as Chinese leaders could help redefine China's global leadership role. Whether he will deliver remains to be seen. To put it bluntly, true and constructive Japan-China cooperation would pose a most viable challenge to US global dominance. Perhaps this is what makes it so difficult to conceive, with both the Chinese and Japanese elites having too much vested interest in maintaining their primary focus on their US bi-lateral relations. At the same time, the greater the risks of US isolationism, the higher the probability of Asia's two great powers working together.
[ENDS]
We look forward to your further thoughts, observations and views. Thank you.
Best wishes
For and on behalf of DK Matai
Chairman, Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ATCA)
____________________________________________________________________________
ATCA: The Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance is a philanthropic expert initiative founded in 2001 to understand and to address complex global challenges. Adhering to the doctrine of non-violence, ATCA conducts collective Socratic dialogue on global opportunities and threats arising from climate chaos, radical poverty, organised crime, extremism, informatics, nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, artificial intelligence and financial systems. Present membership of ATCA is by invitation only and has over 5,000 distinguished members: including several from the House of Lords, House of Commons, EU Parliament, US Congress & Senate, G10's Senior Government officials and over 1,500 CEOs from financial institutions, scientific corporates and voluntary organisations as well as over 750 Professors from academic centres of excellence worldwide.
The views presented by individual contributors are not necessarily representative of the views of ATCA, which is neutral. Please do not forward or use the material circulated without permission and full attribution.
____________________________________________________________________________
Posted by ATCA at 11:50 AM | Comments (18)
September 27, 2006
Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
Click here for details and all editorials reviews.
“Chopra presents a fascinating account of life after death for Westerners that will certainly please his avid fans and draw in new readers as well.” -- Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Deepak Chopra has written a masterpiece that is long overdue in our spiritual culture. Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
"A must read for everyone who will die. Deepak Chopra has been my friend and mentor for nearly 20 years. Now, when we baby-boomers are finally admitting our own mortality, he has tackled the ultimate subject which fascinates us all - life after death. Drawing from many cultures, and emphasizing the idea of Karma from his own, Deepak interweaves mythical lore with first hand spellbinding anecdotes to somehow make the subject of death very useful and relevant to making the most time on the Earth here and now. "Candace B. Pert, Ph.D., Author of Everything You Need To Know to Feel Good
Dear Friends,
I wanted to share this information with you.
Warm regards,
Carolyn Rangel
Office of Deepak Chopra
A conversation with Dr. Deepak Chopra about his new book
Q. Why did you choose to write a book about the afterlife?
A. To dispel the common notion, held even by scientists, that the afterlife is a matter of faith that cannot be proved. Second, and just as important, to console people who are afraid of death.
Q. Why did you wait 20 years to write this book? Is a discussion of the afterlife particularly important today?
A. Twenty years ago we began to get proof that consciousness might survive death. Near-death experiences were already gaining public recognition. But it took two more decades to provide an adequate body of research to support this possibility and bring it closer to being a fact.
Q. What may shock or surprise readers most about this book?
A. They may be shocked to find that the afterlife is a rational subject that is knowable to us before we die. Also, that such things as heaven and hell exist, not 'out there' in some mythical region but here on earth, at this moment.
Q. What do you mean when you say that death is a fulfillment of our purpose here on earth.
A. The ultimate purpose of life is to evolve, to discover who you are, and to shape your own future. After death we see much more clearly that all these goals can be attained.
Q. Why is science such an important element in your discussion of the afterlife?
A. Because after centuries of faith as the only support for life after death, we can't hope to provide rational proof without turning to science. Also, in recent decades physics has probed deeper into the subtle realms of Nature, uncovering phenomena that give us fascinating clues about a so-called "intelligent universe." Such a universe could be the same as the subtle worlds of the afterlife described in the great wisdom traditions, East and West.
Q. Why did you choose to use allegory, such as the story of Savitri and Yama, in writing LIFE AFTER DEATH
A. To provide an emotional experience of confronting death, and also to reach into the archetypal level of consciousness, the shadow, where death is always present.
Q. Why does information theory inform our understanding of the afterlife?
A. Physics already accepts that matter and energy cannot be destroyed. Information theory posits that the same is true of all the information in the universe. This implies that our minds--the source of information in the form of thoughts--cannot be destroyed, either. The mind may undergo transformation after death, but it would still survive in some form.
Q. What do you when you say that death can be as creative as living?
A. All the mental abilities we use to create things in our life continue after death and in fact become more powerful.
Q. Did your concept of the afterlife change as you wrote the book? If so, how?
A. I became more aware of how the different spiritual traditions on earth, and their various stories about the afterlife, lead back to a single source in consciousness.
“Birth is a miracle... so is death. With his customary wit and intelligence, Deepak offers us teaching stories, childhood memories, quantum puzzles, neuroscience, religion and common sense in a rich and very satisfying exploration of what we really are, what the Hell we’re doing here, and where we’re going. It’s all a journey towards liberation and bliss.”
--Richard Gere
Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
By Deepak Chopra
Harmony Books
October 17, 2006
What happens to us when we die?
Deepak Chopra, a leader in mind-body medicine and author of over 49 books, shines daring new light on this question in his latest book Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
He begins by immersing the reader in the lore of the India of his childhood, explaining how the afterlife can be seen as open-ended and fluid, like life itself. Weaving his narrative around the haunting tale of Savitri, a humble woodcutter's wife in ancient India who came home to find Lord Yama, the god of death, sitting before her house, and her desperate struggle to vanquish him, Chopra entices the reader into a world where heroes battle darkness in order to emerge into the light.
He then takes us far beyond the Christian story of heaven and hell, showing why the only conception of death that makes sense must allow the freedom to experience everything. LIFE AFTER DEATH
Fascinatingly, Chopra finds some of his most profound answers by looking to the anomalies physicists are trying to explain, and explores how the rishis, the ancient sages of Vedanta, dealt with the very same dilemmas. Marrying science and wisdom, Chopra builds his case for an afterlife that merges seamlessly with material life: “The idea that I have a fixed body locked in space and time is a mirage.”
Faith takes a back seat to rational proof in the book. In fact, Chopra says, the afterlife is a field where science is quickly advancing over worn-out religious beliefs. The assumption that no knowledge can be gained about 'the other side' is being disproved on many fronts.
• At the Univ. of Virginia an ongoing program has located more than 2,500 children who remember past lives, including details about former lifetimes that can be factually verified.
• Information theory is having an influence on cutting-edge physics. It theorizes that like matter and energy, information cannot be destroyed. In other words, survival of the soul may be a matter of conserving information.
• Also in physics, quantum field theory has led to experiments (at Princeton among other places) where ordinary people can change reality through intention alone--they can make a computer generate numbers, for example, in a certain pattern. This goes a long way to showing that the mind isn't confined to the brain.
• Cross-cultural studies are showing that societies as diverse as Tibet and modern America display exactly the same near-death phenomena.
Chopra has waited twenty years to write Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
Posted by Deepak Chopra at 06:24 PM | Comments (125)
The Missing Man: Part 4
There are so many strange things in life. Like the noise that you hear occasionally in your head. Or the fact that the only thing you forget in the pocket of your trousers, most of the times, is movie tickets. Or that very few people use the first urinal in a public toilet. Or that some people sleep so much in a bus that you almost think that they have passed away.
In the street where Srikant lived, there would come, every Thursday, a man whose face was painted to make him look like a monkey. He wore tiny bells in his ankles and carried a whip in his hand. He would be accompanied by a woman, probably his wife, who carried a small drum around her neck. On the beats of the drum, the monkey-man would contrive dance steps and at the same time whip himself. After every whip, he sought alms from people who passed by. Srikant watched this spectacle secretly from behind the muslin curtains of his room.
After he would have gone, Srikant often equated life with the monkey-man’s act. Every moment was a whip, he thought, for which one got one breath in charity. The trick for living life was to remain oblivious to moments, or at least pretend to. When you began to feel every moment, the pain would surface, like the mark of a whiplash, making it difficult to live. The thing with Srikant was that he felt every moment intensely. As a result, he would get flogged with existence.
The bus had been moving for more than six hours and Srikant did not know where it was going. It didn’t matter as long as he could maintain his flight. He knew that somewhere Sneha would be in a similar flight, the wings of which were shaped in mind.
There was some movement beside him and Srikant found that the old man had woken up. He was taking out something from his bag.
‘Where is this bus going?’ Srikant asked him.
The old man turned his head slowly towards Srikant as if he could not believe what he had heard just now.
‘Where are you going, Sir?’, the man asked back.
Srikant let a weak smile and replied, ‘Nowhere in particular. So where is this bus going?’
The old man sighed and said, ‘I am going to Rudraprayag, where the mighty rivers of our land meet, Sir. The bus is also going there. That would be the last stop.’
‘What takes you to Rudraprayag?’, Srikant asked.
The man waited for a moment or two. He felt something in his bag and then replied, ‘Actually, Sir, it was at Rudraprayag, fifty years ago, that I met a girl who would later become my wife. She is no more now and I can feel that my body has also set itself in the mode of an invisible transition. Before the transition is complete, I want to visit those places where my wife and I spent some time together. Before dying she had expressed a desire that her bangles be thrown at the spot where the three rivers met. So I have brought them along.’
He took the bangles partially out of the bag and put them back.
Srikant thought of the first instance when he had met Sneha. That meeting was also strange. Strange like the noise in his head.
Posted by Rahul Pandita at 11:07 AM | Comments (17)
Open Thread
Sept. 27, 2006
Posted by Intent at 10:34 AM | Comments (276)
Quietude
An inevitable quietude threatens everything today.
Movement rests, all motion is laying down.
Sound has frozen into silence.
A presence of serenity invades all.
Thoughts are perched in mind’s branches.
Tranquil, devoid of energy or desire
they sleep a deep siesta.
Feelings have collapsed into one point of consciousness.
Hatreds and loves, pains and joys are intimately embraced.
Duality is in suspension, exhausted, resolved, spent.
Experience no longer determined by opposites.
Existence is now an endless calm of moments,
a time without time, the undefined no longer yearns
for explanation.
Words are now like munitions without war,
stored in useless piles, devoid of sentences.
Serenity has rained on the universe
images have folded into a point of
light to be.
Today waters are like before they were;
a stillness in lake.
Today caresses and kisses are naked
in the purity of love
Everything is quiet, tranquil, a windless shoreless sea.
Being is fulfilled without motion, trajectory or destination.
My soul has disappeared in itself,
it is not alone, nor accompanied.
Today time and imagination rest without space.
Beyond dreams, beyond the possible and the impossible,
In this point of Nothing that could always Be,
in this intelligence supreme.
Posted by Arsenio Rodriguez at 03:18 AM | Comments (19)
September 26, 2006
"All these areas used to be nothin but trees..."
Environmental Justice for All is coordinating a tour right now that
"brings together environmental justice, social justice, public health, human rights, and workers' rights groups from all over the country to host a national tour of communities directly impacted by industrial pollution to meaningfully link these communities together in a public call for safe solutions to unnecessary toxic contamination."
They're blogging every night to document their journey. I found this woman from Santa Clara crazy-inspiring. Check out her video.
Posted by radhika at 11:48 PM | Comments (16)
September 25, 2006
The Missing Man: Part 3
The city spreads in you. And then you miss your loneliness.
The diesel fumes of the bus woke him up. His head had been banging subtly with the glass pane of the window but he had managed to keep his eyes shut. A folk song played, probably on a radio set, in the rear of the bus. Srikant looked at his watch. He was a few hundred miles away from his home now. They must be looking for him – his family members – Srikant thought. But inside the State Roadways bus, no one recognised him.
The bus negotiated a curve and Srikant imagined it to skid off the narrow road into the overwhelming river below. All the passengers would die and their bloated corpses would be found miles down, playing footsie with the iron gates of a dam built over the river. No one would come to claim his body and it would lay, for roughly a week, in the freezing drawer of a mortuary. Then he would be cremated (cremated because they would see that his penis was not circumcised and they always assumed such unclaimed body, as per their convenience, to be of a Hindu). Moreover, they would find no identification papers on his body.
Someone snored beside him. Srikant looked at the old man. His head dangled as if he was replying in affirmation to a question. But even in his sleep, the old man was clutching hard a gunny bag. After some time, his head came sideways to rest over Srikant’s shoulder. Srikant could feel the man’s breath making a warm contact with his neck. He looked outside from the window.
The night had taken over from the evening and countless bulbs shone like fireflies in the valley below. Srikant concentrated on one bulb and imagined what could be happening inside the house in its light. May be a young couple was copulating. Or may be a drunkard was beating his wife. Or may be a mother was singing a lullaby to her sleepy child. Or may be a restless man was writing poetry. Or may be someone cried behind that light.
Srikant didn’t know why, but he remembered a few verses of an Urdu poet:
Ghar ki tameer chahe jaisi ho
Isme rone ki kucch jagah rakhna
Jism mein phelne laga hai shehr
Apni tanhaiyan bacha rakhna
(No matter how you construct a home
Make sure you leave some space for crying
The city is spreading in the body
Make sure you save your loneliness)
What did a man seek ultimately, Srikant thought. Was it not that some unknown happiness remained, like residue, while one was unhappy? And what of the unhappiness, that invisible ounce, pervading like the smell of damp moisture, during moments of joy? And what about the point when a man felt neither joy nor sorrow? Did he seek something beyond that point? If yes, what?
If Sneha was around, Srikant thought, she would have loved to gather answers for these questions as one gathered berries. But was she not doing that already? May be, one of those lights in the valley below was actually shining over her, as she lay on a bed, feeling the cut on her arm. And may be she had found some answers.
Posted by Rahul Pandita at 10:08 AM | Comments (56)
The Mind-Body Bridge
There was general rejoicing last week when Wal-Mart announced that it was reducing the price of 150 generic drugs to as little as $4 a month, a move quickly followed by Target and K-mart. Forecasters in the drug industry predict that this move will pressure other huge retailers to lower their prices and expand the range to 400 generics or more. Good news all around.
Yet beneath the surface lies the fact that the average senior in America is taking 7 prescription drugs. That's not a step in the right direction, no matter how cheap the price. The field of mind-body medicine has reached the stage where we know a great deal about preventing disease through means far less toxic than prescription drugs. This knowledge isn't being taken advantage of nearly as much as it should be.
American medicine should be helping people build a mind-body bridge. The human body contains enormous wisdom, and we could be tapping into it. For example:
--Meditation and stress management are effective in reducing blood pressure.
--Meditation also reduces pain as well as how often people get sick.
--Psychotherapy has prolonged survival rates in studies of late-stage breast-cancer victims.
--Psychiatry has been shown through MRIs to alter and improve the same areas of the brain that respond to psychotropic drugs like Prozac.
--Cognitive therapies have restored brain function lost to senile dementia.
--Stroke victims and patients with muscular dystrophy have been shown to make amazing gains in restoring lost function through guided exercise therapies.
--Mental techniques as simple as post-hypnotic suggestion have been successful in weight loss.
--Chronic back pain has been shown to respond to exercise, often better than to surgery.
Taking all this into account, an old person with high blood pressure, an aching back, moderate memory loss, and a pot belly could remedy all these conditions without taking a single drug. Shouldn't that be our goal?
I mention exercise as part of restoring the body's wisdom because it stimulates what the body naturally wants to do--remain strong and balanced. Yet how many physicians even consider such therapies? Far too few. This is particularly egregious in the case of older patients, who are routinely sent home on medicines for hypertension and elevated cholesterol that simply aren't necessary. We need more research to follow up initial findings that the elderly are not helped by attempting to give them the blood pressure and cholesterol readings of 25-year-olds or even 45-year-olds.
The sad fact today, as twenty years ago, is that the average physician remains a pill pusher, giving little thought to the enormous benefits of prevention. Since prevention is largely a lifestyle issue, and changing your lifestyle involves the mind, it can be rightly said that America's biggest health challenge is to keep the mind-body bridge strong. Every report indicates that we aren't doing that. Prevention, the watchword of the Eighties, has given way to a growing reliance on drugs that isn't healthy in the long run, or ever.
Love,
Deepak
Posted by Deepak Chopra at 07:29 AM | Comments (69)
Rowena Young -- Growing Social Capital Markets
Is the creation of better functioning social capital markets set to be one of the big stories of social change in the coming decades?
Rowena Young
Dear ATCA Colleagues
[Please note that the views presented by individual contributors are not necessarily representative of the views of ATCA, which is neutral. ATCA conducts collective Socratic dialogue on global opportunities and threats.]
We are grateful to Rowena Young from Oxford, England, for her submission to ATCA "Growing Social Capital Markets -- Market virtues and vices" in response to:
1. "The Genesis of Philanthrocapitalism -- The Blended Value Investment Philosophy beyond Extreme Capitalism"; and
2. "The Rise of the Creative Class" by Dr Charles Hampden-Turner from Cambridge, England.
Dear DK and Colleagues
Re: Growing Social Capital Markets -- Market virtues and vices
Is the creation of better functioning social capital markets set to be one of the big stories of social change in the coming decades? Or is it just the over-hyped hobby of a few newcomers to the field, mainly with backgrounds in financial services, who have yet to understand the complexities involved in financing social projects, and whose grand visions will end up with little more than a few loan funds for income-generating social enterprises?
I wish to take forward the debates from the 2006 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, in which you also participated, to scope out the ways we can most constructively think about capital markets for social ventures, and to describe some of the most promising approaches that already show what can be done.
The fact that social capital markets have come on to the agenda now can be attributed to changes both on the demand side and on the supply side.
Changes on the demand side
Let's start with demand. Social enterprises depend on increasingly diverse sources of money: philanthropic donations, funds from public agencies, trading income, and the occasional loan from a bank. But their sources are often unreliable, and the steady diversification has increasingly shown up the limitations of existing sources of finance.
Social entrepreneurs and NGOs today have moved far beyond the more traditional domains of agriculture, health and education. They run banking services (K-Rep in Kenya), news services (Oh My News in Korea), retailing and market access programmes (People Tree fashion in Japan and the UK, and numerous other trade justice organizations), public finance systems (Centre for Participatory Budgeting), transport (Riders for Health) and high-growth businesses (CelTel International). They produce pharmaceuticals (Institute for One World Health), run cities (Jamie Lerner, the Mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, is setting the gold standard with a carless transport system and innovations in education, housing for poor people, waste and health) and carry out conflict prevention (International Crisis Group).
All these activities depend on very diverse kinds of capital. Recoverable grants, soft loans, market-rate loans, loan guarantees and equity-like investments are likely to be as important as ordinary grants.
There is also a collective benefit to the social sector in building access to higher levels of appropriate finance. As the number of social sector organizations grows, so too does the opportunity cost of funding these newer models from grant finance. If we can improve the mix of funding sources, we can do better at channelling grants to those NGOs that really need them.
Changes on the supply side
This demand for a wider pool of finance has coincided with greater willingness to supply investment for social purposes. This willingness has three main sources:
· philanthropists and foundations wanting to use money in more strategic ways, with more of a mix of investment and grants so that money can go further;
· financial institutions on the look-out for new outlets with better patterns of risk and reward, and slowly recognizing that social enterprises are often less risky than commercial investments (even if they also generally offer lower rewards); and
· governments offering new incentives and encouragements, like the community investment tax credits in the US and UK.
The ability to grow
The promise of this combination of enhanced supply and more sophisticated demand is that it will help more enterprises to grow, and thus to have a bigger impact. At the moment one of the ironies of the social sector is that there is little correlation between effectiveness and scale. Because of the lack of market incentives to reward social returns and the lack of any standardized measures of social returns, together with internal factors such as overdependence on founders or governance arrangements that are ill-suited to growth, many initiatives remain small or still-born however well conceived they are, and whatever their potential for replication.
Some social enterprises do manage to grow, trading successfully in competition with for-profit companies, finding niches that have been ignored by mainstream business or tapping into public contracts or grant funding because their goals coincide with those of governments or donor agencies like the World Bank. A handful strike it lucky, gaining long-term support from foundations, perhaps gaining an asset which can be managed to provide sustainable income.
Some of the most famous social enterprises, like Grameen Bank, have managed all of these. Yet most fail to tap into these sources of growth and most feel that they have to run just to sustain their current scale of operation.
Changes in attitudes needed
Not surprisingly, few practitioners in the social sector understand much about corporate finance, and few have structured their organizations to make it easier to absorb capital from a range of sources. As Victoria Hornby of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts observed at the Skoll World Forum, few even employ finance officers or advisers who can help them become investment-ready. Moreover, many are suspicious of anything other than grants, since accepting investment inevitably means accepting a new set of strings and constraints that inevitably accompany grant funding.
New providers of finance that combine financial and social return, and additionally help practitioners think through how they can use different types of finance to scale up their activities, are beginning to change attitudes. At the moment the value of the small number of providers of alternative finance (members of the European Venture Philanthropy Association, Acumen Fund, Futurebuilders and others) lies as much in the ways they enable practitioners to change as in the value of the money they disperse. This shift in attitudes is also being influenced by steady improvements in the range, quality, transparency and comparability of performance information.
New intermediaries
The foundations for more developed markets that can link the needs of thousands of social enterprises with the pools of finance that exist in foundations and financial institutions and among wealthy individuals are thus being laid. Indeed, the best sign that a new market is taking shape is the growing importance of a new breed of intermediaries, the worker bees that connect the different parts of the system.
Like Acumen Fund, they may use charitable grants from northern foundations to lever mainstream capital in emerging economies. Venturesome is using underwriting to enable mainstream providers such as retail banks to extend debt to enterprising charities and social enterprises, while GEXSI is researching a similar role in mitigating risk sufficiently for the private sector to invest in overseas development. Boutique brokers such as Blue Orchard are helping microfinance providers grow their sector by repackaging social enterprise and small and medium enterprise loans into portfolios that can be invested in.
Some in the social sector will worry that a proliferation of intermediaries will raise overheads, but, as commentators such as The Economist's Matthew Bishop have argued, they are critical to achieving the efficiencies of a better functioning system. All mature capital markets have such specialists.
Yet the truth is that all this is still at a very early stage - whether we are talking of the venture philanthropy, community development and microfinance movements; the designers of new metrics and brokers of information such as GuideStar and New Philanthropy Capital; or the work of international agencies such as CDC (Capital for Development) and Aureos Capital, which are effectively serving as venture capitalists in places like Africa. All of these organizations are acting as pioneers - with the risks as well as the excitement that brings.
The big question is where this is all heading. Some of the evangelists of social capital markets forecast a rapid growth of secondary markets, new products, and funds offering various mixes of financial returns and social impact. Sir Ronald Cohen, chair of the UK Social Investment Taskforce, for example, already sees the need for a new wholesaler for the community development sector though it is only a few years old in the UK (and he may have persuaded the UK Government that this would be a good use for the billions of pounds left unclaimed in personal bank accounts).
What will all this achieve?
The optimists promise that such markets could help to solve several problems at once. For the philanthropic world, they promise a more results-oriented approach that may reinforce the current wave of philanthropic giving that has come at the tail end of the long boom that the West has been through over the last 15 years. Richer and more sophisticated information could be made available and adapted both for relatively time-rich professionals and for the time-poor wealthy. A full continuum of different types of investment vehicle could become normal - from full grants through repayable grants and below-market return models to full commercial investment.
For the recipients of funding, they offer the prospect of a more transparent and tailored relationship based on milestones for performance rather than capricious priorities and conditions. This is where equity funding is so important: it gives organizations the freedom to grow on their own terms and without undue risk (because investors don't receive any money back unless the enterprise is successful) as they enter new sectors or experiment with hybrid business models or take time to grow.
Experiments with both institutional investors (including Blue Orchard's MFI issue and some of the bond issues featured in this issue of Alliance) and individuals (Calvert Foundation's Community Investment Note, Charity Bank in the UK, Shared Interest, and direct share issues at social enterprises such as Café Direct, Baywind and the Ethical Property Company) suggest there is no shortage of supply. For the right business models, there is in theory access to the right scale of growth capital on appropriate terms and with a sympathetic investor profile.
Another reason why social enterprises and NGOs should be interested in this field is time. It is commonly estimated that CEOs spend half their time raising funds - Rodrigo Baggio of CDI admits to spending 70 per cent of his time fundraising. With social investment, there is the potential to reduce this time commitment, particularly once the deals on offer and their reporting requirements become more standardized. Loans and equity finance are not right for all, but where the fit is good they can offer the freedom social entrepreneurs aspire to.
Doubts on the demand side ...
What is striking, however, is the lack of enthusiasm from social ventures themselves, given that many social entrepreneurs and NGOs are clearly dissatisfied with the funding that is currently available to them. A recent survey by nfpSynergy in the UK, for example, reported that charities would trade in a restricted grant of GBP 1 million for the freedom granted by less than GBP 600,000 of unrestricted income. Most respondents were no doubt thinking of core funding grants, but the argument extends to loans and equity, where providers may place fewer conditions on the way their money is used.
Of course, investment brings with it other constraints. Generally, there are fewer if any constraints on how money is used but much tighter constraints on how much is paid out, either in repayments or in dividends. This is why so many small businesses have traditionally avoided equity - a few bad years can easily lead to a loss of control. But few institutions are truly independent anyway - the real question is what types of dependency are most appropriate.
... and on the supply side
These doubts are matched on the supply side. Some fear that for all the hype it will turn out that there aren't all that many investment opportunities in the social sector, and that most funds will end up providing relatively low-risk loan funding for ventures in less innovative parts of the social sector such as housing. It certainly remains unclear whether there is the appetite for investing in truly radical and innovative projects. For higher-risk investors, incentives are lacking. Whereas in business the venture capital model allows a high level of risk because of the very high returns associated with intellectual property in a new drug or web venture, there is no equivalent prospect in the social sector.
It is equally unclear whether the more conservative investors will become involved in social ventures on any scale. In the US the regulatory requirements of the Community Reinvestment Act forced many banks into social investment - and many learned to their surprise that they could make profits in communities they had previously written off. But most financial institutions see this sector as at best marginal.
Attempts to change investor behaviour
This is why some of the bolder attempts to change behaviour are so interesting.
Generation Investment Management, represented at the Skoll World Forum, is illustrative of this approach. Led by the powerful partnership of Goldman Sachs' former CEO David Blood and former US Vice President and environmental champion Al Gore, Generation attempts to show how one can achieve better returns than from the mainstream market if one looks beyond the short-termism of quarterly reports to analyse the influence of drivers such as changing demographics, population movements, climate change and changing public attitudes on corporate success. Their aim is to 'green' the public equities market, which dwarfs all others, so that it better reflects the real time horizons of a world with an ageing population and chronic challenges like climate change.
Even if they are successful, it remains unclear how much this will affect the social sector. Generation's primary targets include the more progressive car manufacturers and energy giants, not hospices or projects for the homeless. But they are at least trying to expand the horizons of the notoriously narrow-minded financial world, and their work does throw down a strong challenge to charitable foundations and wealth managers who invest their assets - typically 95 per cent of their wealth - with no regard for their social impact. The standard defence, reinforced by habit and tradition, is that they are required to maximize financial returns, but in fact they are required by law to invest wisely in support of their mission and many could if they wished choose to run down their assets.
Pioneers such as the F B Heron Foundation in the US have demonstrated the potential for using very different investment criteria and far higher levels of 'mission-related investments' (MRIs). Heron currently invests 25 per cent of its assets in support of employment, enterprise, housing and stronger communities among the poor, and performs at around the halfway point for its class. A rough count suggests a further USD 150 billion could be released for social purposes if all foundations did the same.
The way forward
Social capital markets are coming, though the landscape remains messy, incomplete and uncertain. If you cut your teeth on grassroots activism in the mines of Fife, the streets of Dhaka or the favelas of Rio, all this may well appear morally dubious as well as practically daunting.
Commentators such as John Goldstein at Medley Partners or Jennifer Moses at ARK may yet be right in warning that the 'fuzzy' space between philanthropy and mainstream finance may prove too complex (though complexity is something the social sector has never fought shy of). It is certainly true that the recipients need to be closely involved in designing innovations - which happens all too rarely, apart from occasional exceptions such as described by Sheela Patel of SPARC or Jamie Hartzell at the Ethical Property Company, a keen advocate for social equity markets.
For everyone involved, the promise is of a richer ecology of finance, with many more networks linking providers of capital and the people engaged in social change, with more information, more deals, faster growth and greater impact - a web of exchange that might resemble the flight paths of bees in a dense, busy meadow, each of them cross-pollinating ideas between different sources. We live in a world that combines many unmet social needs and enormous wealth, mostly disconnected from each other. Any new approaches that can put that wealth to work to address compelling needs must be welcomed - even if we should expect failures as well as successes as new markets take shape.
Rowena Young
[ENDS]
Rowena Young is the Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Saïd Business School, Oxford University, which is dedicated to promote the advancement of social entrepreneurship worldwide. Rowena has been a part of the UK social entrepreneurship movement from the outset. First, working at the leading think-tank Demos, where Charlie Leadbeater published The Rise of the Social Entrepreneur, then heading up operations and business development respectively at two leading ventures - Children's Express, which enables 8-18 year-olds to influence issues which affect them by publishing in mainstream news media, then Kaleidoscope, a highly innovative illicit drug treatment agency. In 2000, she launched simplyworks, a web-enabling business which continues to create training and employment for long term drug users today. Her work for the Foreign Policy Centre, From War to Work: drug treatment, social inclusion and enterprise (2002), drew on experience across Asia and encouraged a more preventive government strategy.
Formerly, Rowena was Chief Executive of the School for Social Entrepreneurs. The School was launched by Michael Young (founder of some 60 public benefit organizations including the Open University and the Consumers' Association) to transform the effectiveness of social entrepreneurs. Rowena has also worked through a number of voluntary positions. As vice-chair of governors, she was part of a strategic team which turned around the worst failing school in the country. She has been a board member of Children's Express and the Social Enterprise Coalition ('the CBI for social business'), an advisor to MySociety and screener for the Schwab Foundation, a commissioner on the Joseph Rowntree Inquiry on drug-testing and a judge for the Guardian's Public Service Awards, the DTI's Enterprising Solutions, New Statesman's Upstart and Arts and Business awards. She is currently a member of VSO's UK committee (Voluntary Service Overseas), the committee overseeing innovation programmes at NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), the learning panel in NEF's (New Economics Foundation) Local Alchemy regeneration programme, and an advisor to People Tree, a unique Fair Trade fashion company trading in Japan and the UK and creating benefits for over 200 producer groups in the global South. Rowena started her career in journalism. She writes:
We look forward to your further thoughts, observations and views. Thank you.
Best wishes
For and on behalf of DK Matai
Chairman, Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ATCA)
____________________________________________________________________________
ATCA: The Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance is a philanthropic expert initiative founded in 2001 to understand and to address complex global challenges. Adhering to the doctrine of non-violence, ATCA conducts collective Socratic dialogue on global opportunities and threats arising from climate chaos, radical poverty, organised crime, extremism, informatics, nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, artificial intelligence and financial systems. Present membership of ATCA is by invitation only and has over 5,000 distinguished members: including several from the House of Lords, House of Commons, EU Parliament, US Congress & Senate, G10's Senior Government officials and over 1,500 CEOs from financial institutions, scientific corporates and voluntary organisations as well as over 750 Professors from academic centres of excellence worldwide.
The views presented by individual contributors are not necessarily representative of the views of ATCA, which is neutral. Please do not forward or use the material circulated without permission and full attribution.
____________________________________________________________________________
-----Original Message-----
From: Intelligence Unit
Sent: 25 September 2006 07:52
To: 'atca.members@mi2g.com'
Subject: Response: The Rise of the Creative Class -- Dr Charles Hampden-Turner; ATCA: The Genesis of Philanthrocapitalism -- The Blended Value Investment Philosophy beyond Extreme Capitalism
Dear ATCA Colleagues
[Please note that the views presented by individual contributors are not necessarily representative of the views of ATCA, which is neutral. ATCA conducts collective Socratic dialogue on global opportunities and threats.]
We are grateful to Dr Charles Hampden-Turner from Cambridge, England, for his submission to ATCA, "The Rise of the Creative Class" in response to "The Genesis of Philanthrocapitalism -- The Blended Value Investment Philosophy beyond Extreme Capitalism."
Dr Charles Hampden-Turner has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, UK, since 1991 and a consulting supervisor for the Institute for Manufacturing at their School of Engineering. He is co-founder of an Amsterdam based consultancy on cross-cultural communication, Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner, acquired by KPMG in 2002, but bought-back, post-Enron. He is the author of seventeen books, four with Fons Trompenaars, including Riding the Waves of Culture which has passed 180,000 copies world wide and Maps of the Mind which sold over a 100,000 copies and was a "Book of the Month Club for Science" selection. He is a pioneer of dilemma theory, or paradox theory, which he devised in 1974 in a half-way house for ex-convicts in San Francisco. He received an MBA and a DBA from the Graduate School of Business, Harvard University, after studying history at Cambridge. From 2002-2005 he was the Goh Tjoe Kok Distinguished Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He was the Cambridge University Hutchinson Visiting Scholar to China in 2003 and toured Chinese Universities at the invitation of the Li Ka Shing Foundation. He is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, an Honorary Fellow of Arts and Business. He is a past recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships and a past winner of the Douglas McGregor Memorial Award. He writes:
Dear DK and Colleagues
Re: The Rise of the Creative Class
I was fascinated by your contribution on Philanthrocapitalism and Blended Value.
We have to ask ourselves, "Why capitalism works better than communism?" Why the private sector, preaching self-interest, so often performs better than the public sector or even the charitable sector?
There is the ideological case for capitalism: that self-interest is superior to social concern; that the individual is real and "community" an abstract concept; that we are driven by profit etc.
But this misses the crucial truth of "blended value". One reason capitalism is currently unchallengeable is because in this system we mostly profit by indirection. One gets rich, for the most part, by asking oneself what customers want. One gains via their patronage. Of course there are many exceptions to this rule, monopoly and oligopoly powers, inside information, speculation of all kinds. But most of us in business, most of the time, have to please other people to "make it".
In contrast many relationships in which government is involved, has the Government-Agent-Recipient -- GAR -- triangle, which is "three cornered". G pays A to help R. In that event, either G and A can collude to cheat R; or R and A can collude to cheat G; or G and R can collude against A. As an example, The British National Health Service, a magnificent vision of benevolence, suffers from all three. The government may be overcharged, the patient malnourished and the carer can hardly afford to live near the hospital. Yet everyone meant well!
Capitalism works because its values are more blended than in most other spheres. But of course they are not blended enough and the social side of capitalism is condemned as "socialistic", naive, "bleeding heart" etc. If Richard Branson or Anita Roddick and other similar business personalities profit by helping other people, they may be accused by some of being self-serving or worse still: frauds! This in turn, may not be true.
My contention for some thirty years remains that all genuine values are really a blend of opposites: One profits through being concerned for customers. When one loves people one inevitably hate some of the things they do, all the more because one cares so much. The brave soldier is not the suicidal one but the one who risks himself to make himself and others more secure. In short, he blends Courage and Caution. He wants to go home again. We are more likely to heed the dissent of someone loyal to us, and as the Iraqi war grinds out body parts we might reflect that the protestors were the real patriots.
When someone is kind to us we don't want them to make a sacrifice! We don't want to feel forever in their debt. We want them to enjoy helping us! And the giver, if s/he is kind will disguise the trouble taken. "It is nothing. You are welcome! It's my pleasure too."
We have to redesign society to break the pernicious dualism between Egoism and Altruism. Charity and Profitability. No one "wants to live on charity." It blights the soul. I teach for a living. When Romeo says to Juliet, "the more I give you the more I have" I resonate. "I'll be dead in a few years so what I pass on is all I'll ever be!" I agree with Samuel Butler that we won't live in Elysian fields but...
"Meet we will and meet and meet again,
Where dead men meet on lips of living men."
And industry is becoming more knowledge intensive and educational by the day! It is not just a set of short term objectives, a set of "finite games" it is one long, "Infinite Game" that goes on beyond our lifetimes.
Capitalism is an extraordinarily flexible and adaptable system. It lived happily with the slave trade. It refused to intervene in the Irish Potato Famine lest the economy be wrecked for more enterprising types! It collaborated with Hitler and Mussolini. And yet...the EU has supplied the longest continued period of peace in Europe since Roman times. The Ismaeli Muslims, a trading sect, are among the most peaceful, prosperous and charitable communities in the world. Capitalism can also clean up the environment and get paid for it and turn the poor into enterprising borrowers via micro finance, a blend of "square" banking with NGO compassion.
Those parts of a America that are genuinely innovative, accounting for 85% of all business innovations, eg Cambridge Boston, Seattle Washington, the Bay Area, Boulder Colorado, Austin Texas, Gainesville Florida, Silicon Valley, New York City, voted in a landslide against Bush and his "pro-business" positions, We are witnessing what Richard Florida calls The Rise of the Creative Class. And what is creativity? Surely a novel blend! Something that makes me so deliriously happy I want to share it with others.
Charles Hampden-Turner
[ENDS]
We look forward to your further thou