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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

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 is a bold and comforting guide into the afterlife. Eternity is the true home of the soul, yet we fear to explore experience of death and our place beyond now. Deepak has brilliantly accomplished this journey on our behalf." ---Caroline Myss, Author, ANATOMY of the SPIRIT and SACRED CONTRACTS

"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 (Harmony Books; October 17, 2006). Cutting through fear, skepticism, belief, and superstition, his conclusions are sure to startle skeptics and believers alike. Using his unique knowledge of cutting-edge physics and the world's great wisdom traditions, Chopra will transform the way you think about life's greatest mystery.

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 aims to give everyone a chance for freedom, here and in every world to come. "Whatever it is that occurs at death," he writes, "I believe it deserves to be called a miracle. The miracle, ironically, is that we don't die."

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, the first major book on the afterlife in decades. Inspiring, brilliant, and ultimately encouraging, his insights will change the minds of countless people who have pondered the mystery that lies on 'the other side.' It also contains a great gift: an antidote to our fears, so we can see clearly the full majesty of the infinite arc of birth, death and the life beyond.

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.

-----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

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 thoughts, observations and views. Thank you.

Best wishes

For and on behalf of DK Matai
Chairman, Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ATCA)
____________________________________________________________________________

-----Original Message-----
From: Intelligence Unit
Sent: 22 September 2006 10:34
To: 'atca.members@mi2g.com'
Subject: 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.]

Remembering John F Kennedy's speech -- I am a Berliner! -- or as he said it "Ich bin ein Berliner", which actually translates to "I am a jam doughnut!", in June 1963, we watched the collapse of the Berlin wall with some of our faculty at the University of Southampton, England, in the same department of electronics and computer science where Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web at CERN, now holds a Chair. On 9th November 1989, I remember that one of the students queried, "Is this the collapse of Socialism and the Soviet Doctrine?" and one of our faculty members who had liaised with Eastern Europe and had also worked extensively at the Nobel Prize winners club -- also known as Bell Labs -- in the US remarked, "Yes, and the beginning of the end of extreme Capitalism as we know it." "How long?" shot another query. "The Berlin wall has collapsed because the Soviet Union has failed in Afghanistan and emboldened by their retreat the Eastern European dominoes are falling one by one beginning with the fault line. When Western Capitalism meets its Afghanistan, then we will see the beginning of the end of the present confrontational thinking based around the cold war." Little did we realise that his prediction may be alluding to the real Afghanistan [and Iraq] and not a metaphorical one!

Capitalism has lost its way in some of its ruthlessness, short-termism and down right disregard for leaving people, the planet and its environment in a healthy condition for generations to come. Of this, there is no doubt. However, what will replace it. Totalitarianism based on an ever increasing restriction on civil rights and liberties? Perhaps not. And we may indeed head towards the Blended Value approach, which would require a new way of thinking, accounting and management practices.

Value is what gets created when investors invest and organisations act to pursue their mission. Traditionally, we have thought of value as being either economic (created by for-profit companies) or social (created by non-profit or Non-governmental Organizations, ie, NGOs). What the Blended Value Investment Approach states is that all organisations, whether for-profit or not, create value that consists of economic, social and environmental value components - and that investors (whether market-rate, charitable or some mix of the two) simultaneously generate all three forms of value through providing capital to organisations.

The outcome of all this investment activity is value creation and that value is itself non-divisible and, therefore, a blend of these three elements. The term 'blended value' was coined by Dr Jed Emerson, Senior Fellow at The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and Lecturer at The Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Dr Emerson utilised the term to articulate that all forms of organisational activity have social, environmental, cultural and financial dimensions.

There is a fundamental schism in modern capitalistic thinking which needs to be redressed. The vast majority of people divide the world into business on the one hand, which is perceived to be principally about economic activity and the financial bottom line, and the public sector and civil society on the other hand, which are perceived to be about social and environmental bottom lines.

The reality of "Blended Value" is being increasingly reflected in a blurring of the lines in the 21st century between public, private and civil society activity. Large corporations are becoming ever more concerned about their environmental and social impacts; NGOs are becoming increasingly engaged with private sector organisations, and many are also looking at the extent to which some of their activities can be commercialised through social enterprise activities; while governments continue to increase the reach of public private partnerships, and are now also encouraging the 'social sector' to compete with the private sector in tendering for the delivery of public services.

However, the majority of decision makers still tend to operate with an isolationist mentality and act as if the public, private and civil society sectors are separate worlds. So we live compartmentalised parallel lives, wearing multiple hats and operating according to different rules depending on which hat we are wearing: business executive, family member, counsellor, charitable trustee, and so on. The prevailing mentality remains that business is about making money whereas charity is about addressing social or environmental issues, after one has made the money. So the default strategy of even the more socially conscious business leaders is to make their money in the commercial world first and put it to 'good use' later through philanthropic activities. This strategy is frequently undertaken with no apparent awareness of the conflicts and contradictions within their overall portfolio of business and philanthropic activities -- where sometimes the very problems that their philanthropic donations are being targeted at are being exacerbated by their business and investment strategies. How sad is that?

Philanthropists feel good because they may donate around 5% per annum of their capital base to charitable causes -- helping to build a better world -- whilst growing their main capital pool by 7% to 10% per annum by investing in projects that may be busy destroying, damaging or disabling the world. Where is the sanity in that?

Would it not be better to invest ethically in the first place keeping blended value in mind and execute the "building a better world" strategy through prudent investment so that 100% of their capital is being employed judiciously to achieve harmony and well being. Although the returns may be somewhat lower as a result, this would still be better than giving less than 5% amounts away to charity to clean the conscience, whilst Rome burns. Using the lever of properly directed investment can change a lot more than "charity peanuts".

These contradictions are often most apparent within large existing foundations. What are they really? Mostly they are investment management businesses that donate 5% or so of their profits to charity every year. When we are in private dialogue with such foundations, It is an uphill battle to persuade the trustees and asset managers of many of these foundations that it makes sense to ensure that their investment activities do not merely consider the maximisation of financial returns within certain risk parameters, but are also in sync with the social mission of the foundation. Speaking to the founder of the foundation can be an entirely different story!

When one considers the scale of the complex social and environmental challenges that the world faces today, it is clear that we have no hope of moving ourselves off the losing trajectory we are now on without mobilising the business and finance sectors in a more serious way. According to multiple sources, private philanthropic activity amounts to only 2% of GDP in the US, 1% in the UK, and less in much of the rest of Europe and elsewhere. So while it is commendable that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are giving away their wealth to address social causes, ultimately it is highly unlikely that such gestures will ever amount to more than a drop in the ocean compared to what we could achieve (and need to achieve) by mobilising the full weight of business behind our greatest social and environmental issues.

This is not about the 'corporate community involvement' activities under the banner of PR -- Public Relations -- and CSR -- Corporate and Social Responsibility -- that operate at the fringes of corporate activity, commendable and self-serving as they are -- but rather it is about the more serious efforts of all businesses, from large multi-national organisations through to entrepreneurial start-ups, in putting their financial and intellectual firepower into finding innovative commercial opportunities to address social and environmental issues.

The Philanthropia

Encouragingly there is a small but growing band of private investors who are beginning to understand that these worlds need not remain separate as exemplified by The Philanthropia approach. This is the vision of The Philanthropia for 21st century wealth management, which is bringing together over 1,000 ultra high net-worth philanthropists and family foundations from across the world. In Greek, Philos means Love and Anthropos means Humankind so The Philanthropia means love for humankind. The Philanthropia was founded in 2005 and focuses on The Trinity Club, Uni-purpose Investment Syndicates and Ethical Investment Funds dedicated to clean energy, sustainable technologies, micro-finance, water and eco-friendly infrastructure. The Geneva Chapter was inaugurated in Switzerland in May 2006. As more and more wealthy investors and philanthropists get their heads around the idea of a blended value approach to investing and philanthropy, we feel we are truly making some progress.

Long Term Vision

In the long term, The Philanthropia wishes to empower an integrated approach towards wealth management -- beyond the traditional Private Banking approach -- that looks at financial, social and environmental objectives and then takes a holistic approach to asset allocation across all classes of investment, including philanthropic donations viewed as an asset class, as well as sub-market social investments, micro-finance, sustainable technologies, clean water, clean energy and eco-friendly infrastructure. Rather than focusing purely on the risk return profile an investor seeks, what sort of creative thinking could Blended Value wealth managers inspire by asking their clients: "How would you like to build a better world for the next generation and beyond by utilising the resources you have at your disposal to help create that world?"

[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)
____________________________________________________________________________

Posted by ATCA at 03:48 AM | Comments (6)

September 24, 2006

Weekly Intent - Joanie Reisfeld

Joanie Reisfeld

Hi all, In the spirit of a lighter side of IntentBlog...I am sharing my pictures of the Butterfly Exhibit that I recently went to...

We have had a longstanding "Butterfly Connection" here on IntentBlog. Being at this exhibit was just so refreshing! The butterflies just do their thing….speaking of doing their thing…check out the mating picture…So how do butterflies do this…anyway? Whatever… their gracefulness shows in all respects…

For those of you that know I founded a non-profit 13 years ago to support women on bedrest due to high-risk pregnancies… www.betterbedrest.org. Check out where the butterfly landed on my back…pretty cool!

Well, enjoy….and may we all take some moments to enjoy the “lightness” in life too, just like these butterflies who bring beauty to our lives for such a short time. The butterfly is my good luck symbol….. Click on Photo Show.

http://albums.photoshow.net/Show?id=747707-hpkhrktg

Enjoy!

Posted by Intent at 01:14 AM | Comments (22)

September 23, 2006

Wounds are yet superficial

I am wounded by concepts,
I am drawn to mystify and daydream.
Food is rotting in the drawers of my mind,
and nobody is picking up the mail stuff,
my muscles are losing their tone.

Debts are dancing gleefully
around the fire being set in my heart,
waiting to consume my roasted body
like a pig in carnival.

I have anointed my forehead with the symbols of hope,
I have breathed in and out,
I have closed my eyes and made sounds
that no Tibetan monk can emulate,

I have stood in circles with folded hands
praying at unison to the Oversoul.
I have danced in dervish, and pronounced incantations,
I have drafted memos and business plans
in logical frameworks of poetry unknown.

I have done the rituals of non-ritual,
the conventions and the non,
and yet I find myself intact,
distant from the point,
carrying this fraudulent id.

Looking for the formulas
that yield that nectar of light somehow.

This longing, mama mia,
this longing is not yet painful enough,
this pain, oh dear God, this pain is not deep enough,
this fed-upness not full enough.

Can you have compassion on your little brother,
who still is churning these contexts of nothing,
still playing with all these words,
playing with himself in dark closets?

Posted by Arsenio Rodriguez at 04:51 PM | Comments (36)

The Temple

I often sit in the temple across the street from my house in Mumbai. Not to pray, but just to bathe myself in the vibrations of all those that do, all those lucky ones that so easily believe in the divine power of faith ...

I usually have a space in a back corner on the floor of the temple, a little hidden from sight, where I can be the observer rather than the observed. A lot of young actors frequent the temple asking for divine interventions in their careers. Imagine their surprise when they turn around and see one of India's recognizable directors crouched in a corner. They may read too much into divine intervention !

This day someone had taken my place. A nice looking young man, his mouth whispering a silent prayer, eyes closed. He had a cloth laid across his lap as if he planned to be in meditation for a long time. I just quitely crouched on the floor next to him. A little irritated at having my secluded corner usurped.

His whispering stopped. I turned and he was staring at me. I suddenly noticed his nice looks and extremely wide broad shoulders. An actor I thought. For they spend half their lives in the Gym.

But he sounded more humble and had no self consciousness. He asked me why I had forsaken my fans in India and gone to the West. He spoke intelligently about my films and about cinema in general. He even extracted a promise from me to make my next film in India and in Hindi.

What did he do ? He was an assistant accountant in a small firm in Mumbai by day and was studying computers by night. He had come from a village from northern India and was sending home money monthly to support his parents, who were now too old to work in the fields. Saving money to do that meant certain sacrifices.

like walking to the temple every morning from his shared shelter in a slum 2 miles away. To save bus fare. And then to work.

He suddenly smiled, put a hand out to touch my feet, and said goodbye. As he removed his cloth from his lap and moved away from me, I realized why this young man had such strong shoulders,

He had no legs. They were just small shrivelled useless bone and skin tucked permanently under is upper body. He moved by pushing himself along his haunches.

Two miles everyday to say a prayer.

Shekhar

Posted by Shekhar Kapur at 09:30 AM | Comments (38)

Oscar Wilde -- "All Art is Quite Useless!" Is it?

On a light hearted note, The Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is worth noting:

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and to conceal the artist is art's aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.

This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies.

An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.

From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

[ENDS]

Is all art quite useless? Your thoughts, observations and views are welcome.

Warm wishes

DK Matai
The Philanthropia, ATCA, mi2g.net

Posted by DK Matai at 04:07 AM | Comments (24)

Nip & Tuck

I was at the park with some moms, and the conversation turned to tummy tucks. Living in La La land,

such conversations are somewhat common. So when my cousin, who was visiting from India, expressed shock at the natural way in which everyone was talking about a new belly suction process -- whom no one of course admitted to getting -- I realized how I personally have become used to everyone around me looking so completely amazing.

I will admit it. I have considered getting a nose job. Since I was about 15, I have contemplated "fixing" my deviated septum and in the process, doing a little cut at the bottom and a little straightening out of the bridge. (Now, dont study my nose too much, please!) But, my family -- my father, my brother, my sister in law, and my husband -- have all been against it. My mom, who has never done any cosmetic surgery, finally said at one stage that if it was really going to make me feel better, perhaps I should do it. So, I went and met a doctor to get more information. And, then, I got pregnant.

Many of the moms and women whom I see everyday look so phenomenal that I secretly wonder if it is the natural filtering of who moves here, plastic surgery, botox, obsessive dieting and exercise with a trainer, etc. Cosmetic surgery, in general, amongst both men and women is booming.

For me, there are moments of insecurity -- well more than moments actually -- where I question my looks, my lack of makeup, my gray hair, my not-skinny body.

But, at some level, after having two daughters, I have become more comfortable about not trying to make myself look so perfect. I feel I need to show them that beauty is more than looking absolutely fabulous. That said, I am not anti-plastic surgery -- in fact, I wonder if I had got a nose job when I was 15 if I would have saved myself so much agony over my looks over the years.

But, given where I am today and how I look today, I want them to be proud of their uniqueness, their imperfections. And, really the only way to teach them is to personally embrace that uniqueness of my nose and be proud of it.

Posted by Mallika Chopra at 01:41 AM | Comments (36)

September 22, 2006

The Missing Man: Part 2

One man's answer lies in his disappearance; the answer to his quest for belonging entirely to himself.

Part 1
He woke up from his alcohol-induced sleep. He looked at the watch. It was 7.39 am. A straight line of sunlight sieved through two folds of curtains. On the floor lay a heap of books. A book mark peeped from a Bulgarian novel. He suddenly had this urge to disappear.

When he was a child, Srikant would lay hiding amid the bushes behind his house, deriving pleasure from controlling his bowels. He would imagine to have in his possession an invisible space ship that would carry him wherever he wanted. The ship could even enter a room through its keyhole.

When he grew up he wished he were an orphan. He wished that he were brought up by an old man who would have died later, leaving him alone in this world, bereft of any relation. Then he would live life as he wanted to. Imagine what fun it would be to live a life where you had no duty towards anyone including yourself. One day, you would just not want to go back to where you lived. You would not have to call anyone and offer an explanation. You could aimlessly sit in a bus that took you anywhere. You could come back after a week or a month or a year and decide to make love to a young prostitute. You could choose to stay naked inside your house and not venture out for, say, ten days. You could just shut yourself up in your bathroom and not come out till evening. You could decide to eat nothing for two days. Then eat only a banana for two days. And then eat platefuls of rice and chicken curry for two days. And then lift a flower vase and break it against a wall. And then dance over the glass shreds, leaving blood imprints all over the house. And then go and watch a burning pyre on the banks of the river Yamuna. And then put a Nirgun Bhajan sung by Kumar Gandharva on your player and lie on the cold marble floor. And sing aloud with him. And then cry like he did once, in the middle of a busy street, while thinking about the despondency of art. And futility of life.

There was a loud thud. The newspaper had landed in the balcony. But Srikant had no desire to get up. He wanted to disappear. This was a week before he went missing.

Posted by Rahul Pandita at 11:53 PM | Comments (12)

Name Aanya's New Sister...

Hi everyone, So I've got about 8 weeks to go....before baby #2 arrives. Thought, since the mood on the site seems a bit heavy, I'd lighten things up for a change! Anyone want

to suggest some names for Baby XX? We have a very short shortlist....but no clear winners....and I will let you all know what we've decided come Thanksgiving!
Thanks!
Love,
Kanika

Posted by Kanika Sethi at 09:09 PM | Comments (57)

No Courtesy Flush

It was interesting this week to watch Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad roll through nyc like a couple of West Coast rappers and steal the show from the natives.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in particular, seemed both insane and endearing at the same time. Despite being simultaneously fascist and oddly sensible, he seems to exude a charisma that you can't help but kind of like. His "aw shucks" apology to the people of NYC for causing traffic jams and his confused smile toward journalists asking questions he just didn't understand kind of reminded me of another aw shucks president who often exhibits the same strange affect.

Then there was Chavez. Not quite as endearing because he's been around too long crying wolf, he's kind of like the local Bin Laden. Not quite as resourceful or inspiring charisma-wise, he still is good for some fiery salvos aimed at the US. It was just sort of fascinating to see him launch them IN THE US. No matter what, you have to love that about the US of A - the way that a bad house guest can just enter the can, drop the meanest you-know-what, not courtesy flush, not light a candle, not anything - and then just carry on at the buffet line. I mean seriously, it takes one hell of a host to tolerate that.

Then there were our own guys - the presidents Bush, Clinton, and Gore (I'm counting him) - all very visible and audible. Everyone seems annoyed - Bush for not being the coolest cat in his own kennel, Clinton for suddenly being blamed for everything that's wrong in the world, and Gore for, well, not being legitimately considered a president. Actually I made that up - but I would still be pissed for that if I were him.

My favorite moment of the week, however, came today in DC when Presidents Bush and Musharraf (Pakiland) held a joint news conference. Rumors were swirling about the alleged threat the US levelled against Pakistan back in 2001 that it would "bomb Pakistan back to the stone age." Um yeah - that sounds like something our president would say :(. When asked about it President Bush just looked uncomfortable as if he was the guy who had to use the aforementioned bathroom just after the messy guest. But Musharraf was even better, declaring that he was gag bound by his publisher Simon Schuster because presumably the explanation or verification of the declaration is contained in his upcoming memoir - to be published by the SS next week. You just had to love that moment - a head-of-state not revealing stuff to protect his advance. That's good stuff. The fact that Pakistan and the US are outright allies remains an amazing thing altogether. Pakistan continues to be a pretty radical place and the fact that they just cut a "you don't harass us, we won't even pretend to harass you" deal with the Taliban is pretty awesome. It's good Americans don't really pay attention because then we'd be really sad. Oh well.

Anyway - I'm trying to read the newspaper again more so I can feel plugged in and relevant. We have a war going on amongst our neighbors which is pretty fascinating because you can kind of see how the same impulses, motivations, and petty enmities drive conflicts big and small. I won't bore you with details but that's what's up.

Seriously - just light the candle.

Later

Posted by Gotham Chopra at 07:53 PM | Comments (12)

Owning The World

Hugo Chavez, the firebrand president of Venezuela, visited the UN this week and called President Bush "the devil." Specifically, Chavez told the assembly, "The devil came here yesterday. He came here talking as if he were the owner of the world." How should we react to that accusation?

On the surface it was a reckless political jibe like the one Krushchev hurled at the U.S. when he pounded his shoe and shouted "We will bury you!" That display also took place at the UN, about fifty years ago, and was meant as pure theater.

But at some level Chavez got it right, the second part at least. Neo-conservative theory, beginning after the collapse of the Soviet Union, wanted to promote the world's only superpower into the owner of the world, in the sense that America could work its will anywhere without opposition. Iraq has proved how unworkable that theory actually was in practice.

Looking even deeper, Chavez's outburst has more disturbing implications for all of us, not just the right wing. He was accusing the U.S. of moral bankruptcy, a message that's become enormously popular in recent years. He was defying our power, which other countries like North Korea and Iran also do with impunity. He was brandishing a new kind of power based on oil (Venezuela, the country that founded OPEC, has a keen sense of the power that oil-rich nations can wield), and also based on outrage. Without oil, every OPEC country would be as impoverished as its neighbors, and Chavez, speaking from the far left, represents the voice of the dispossessed. He hates America for being rich, for maintaining an arrogant post-colonial attitude, and for assuming that we are privileged in everything we think and do around the world.

Perception is reality, and millions of people agree with him. The neo-conservative policy of owning the world has been disastrous, and yet the American public has been slow to give up the idea that we have a right to own the world. Global dominance has been our birthright since the end of WW II and the Cold War, when "freedom" became the slogan that justified anything America did abroad.

We need to wake up and realize that we are a long way from standing for freedom today. By interfering in other countries' politics, backing reactionary regimes, selling arms on a massive scale, spreading environmental poison, and forcing our will through military means, the U.S. occupies the moral low ground in the eyes of the world. These are facts, and although there are other, more positive facts to counter them, Chavez spoke the truth in emotional terms. The best thing America can do to reclaim the high ground is to stop trying to own the world and begin to shape ourselves into a friend that the world can turn to without fear and outrage.
Love,
Deepak

Posted by Deepak Chopra at 07:00 AM | Comments (45)

September 21, 2006

Ultimate Triumph of Good over Evil

In 1963, His Holiness Master Kirpal was asked in the USA, "Will there be a Third World War?" Master said, "Father cannot see His children dying." His Holiness explained:

"With the yardstick of love (the very essence of God's character) with us, let us probe our hearts:

. Is our life an efflorescence of God's love?

. Are we ready to serve one another with love?

. Do we keep our hearts open to the healthy influences coming from outside?

. Are we patient and tolerant toward those who differ from us?

. Are our minds coextensive with the creation of God and ready to embrace the totality of His being?

. Do we bleed inwardly at the sight of the downtrodden and the depressed?

. Do we pray for the sick and suffering humanity?

. If we do not do any of these things, we are yet far removed from God and from religion, no matter how loud we may be in our talk and pious in our platitudes and pompous in our proclamations.

. With all our inner craving for peace, we have failed and failed hopelessly to serve the cause of God's peace on earth.

. Ends and means are interlocked and cannot be separated from each other.

. We cannot have peace so long as we try to achieve it with war-like means and with the weapons of destruction and extinction.

With the germs of hatred in our hearts, racial and colour bars rankling within us, thoughts of political domination and economic exploitation surging in our bloodstream, we are working for wrecking the social structure which we have so strenuously built and not for peace, unless it be peace of the grave; but certainly not for a living peace born of mutual love and respect, trust and concord, that may go to ameliorate mankind and transform this earth into a paradise for which we so fervently pray and preach from pulpits and platforms and yet, as we proceed, it recedes away into the distant horizon."

"Where then lies the remedy? Is the disease past all cures. No, it is not so.

. "Life and Light of God" are still there to help and guide us in the wilderness.

. We see this wilderness around us because we are bewildered in the heart of our hearts and do not see things in their proper perspective.

. This vast outer world is nothing but a reflex of our own little world within us.

. The seeds of discord and disharmony in the soil of our mind bear fruit in and around us and do so in abundance.

. We are what we think and see the world with the smoke-coloured glasses that we choose to put on.

. It is a proof positive of one thing only: that we have so far not known the "Life and Light of God" and much less realized "God in man."

. We are off center in the game of life.

. We are playing it at the circumference only and never have a dip in the deepest waters of life at the center.

. This is why we constantly find ourselves caught in the vortex of the swirling waters on the surface.

. The life at the circumference of our being is, in fact, not different from the life at the center of our being. The two are, in fact, not un-identical, yet when one is divorced from the other, they look dissimilar.

. Hence the strange paradox: the physical life though a manifestation of God is full of toil and turmoil, storm and stress, dissipation and disruption.

. In our enthusiasm and zest for outer life on the plane of the senses, we have strayed too far away from our center, nay, we have altogether lost sight of it; and worse still, have cut the very moorings of our barque and no wonder then we find ourselves tossing helplessly on the sea of life.

. Rudderless and without a compass to guide our course, we are unwittingly a prey to chance winds and waters and cannot see the shoals, the sandbanks and the submerged rocks with which our way is strewn. In this frightful plight, we are drifting along the onrushing current of life—Where? We know not."

"We must then sit together as members of the One Great Family of Man so that we may understand each other.

. We are above everything else, ONE—from the level of God as our Father, from the level of Man as His children, and from the level of worshipers of the same Truth or Power of God called by so many names.

. In this august assembly of the spiritually awakened, we can learn the "Great Truth of Oneness of Life" vibrating in the Universe.

. If we do this, then surely this world with so many forms and colours will appear a veritable handiwork of God and we shall verily perceive the same life-impulse enlivening all of us.

. As His own dear children embedded in Him, like so many roses in His rose bed, let us join together in sweet remembrance of God and pray to Him for the well-being of the world in this hour of imminent danger of annihilation that stares us in the face.

. May God, in His infinite mercy, save us all, whether we deserve it or not."

With love in His Name

DK Matai
The Philanthropia, ATCA, mi2g.net

Posted by DK Matai at 03:13 PM | Comments (51)

Peace One Day - Live Virtual Event

Heart in Action and SMT Invtie

Our friends at Heart In Action Enterprises and SMT have sent an invitation, inviting all friends and members of IntentBlog to join us:

Online Celebration of Peace One Day on September 21st with Founder Jeremy Gilley and Special Guests at www.sweetmother.org

Several organizations from various geographic regions have joined forces and are hosting the Live Virtual Event.

We invite you all to watch ON-LINE LIVE VIRTUAL EVENT

WHAT: PEACEONEDAY
WHEN: September 21st, 2006
TIME: 12.00pm(noon) PST, 3.00pm EST, 8.00pm GMT
all you need is a computer, internet and speakers !!!!!!!!!!!!!

ONLINE On Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 3pm EDT (12pm PDT, 8pm GMT) tune in to www.sweetmother.org for a celebration of Peace One Day, featuring founder Jeremy Gilley and a host of special guests - Grammy-winning producer Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, up and coming Jamaican rap-star Nadirah X, Ugandan MC Silas Bavubuka of the Bavubuka Project, Rex Weyler writer, journalist, and historian,Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi activist filmmaker and producer of "Inventos: Hip-Hip Cubano, and award-winning musician, actor and public speaker Derrick N. Ashong (aka DNA).

Jeremy's award-winning documentary "Peace One Day" inspired the unanimous adoption by UN member states of the first ever day of global ceasefire and non-violence on 21 September annually. Gilley will be talking about the sequel to Peace One Day, his recent filming in southern Sudan and the various life-saving initiatives and celebrations taking place in all 192 UN member states on Peace Day this year with his fellow panelists.

In partnership with MidNet Inc. and Heart in Action Ent, SMT Interactive, a company pioneering the next generation of independent media, has held live virtual conferences connecting youth from across Africa, Europe, N. America and Latin America to world leaders such as renowned spiritualist and President of the Alliance for a New Humanity Deepak Chopra, Grammy-winning producer Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, former US Ambassador to Nigeria Walter Carrington, and former Clinton advisor John Prendergast. SMT Interactive has been a leader in leveraging high quality, affordable online video-telephony to bridge the digital divide.

For more information about Peace One Day visit www.peaceoneday.org.

Simply register for an SMT account and when you return on Sept. 21st, 2006 at 3pm EDT (12pm PDT, 8pm GMT), log in and view the virtual conference right on the homepage of www.sweetmother.org

If you already have an SMT account, just show up on Sept. 21st and log in.

It is really just that simple!

Posted by Intent at 06:12 AM | Comments (20)

September 20, 2006

Skinny Models ?

paulkail.famine.jpg

Madrid's Fashion Week, the Pasarela Cibeles, announced last week it was banning models with a Body Mass Index, or height to weight ratio, below 18, causing a huge controversy all over the world press, garnering almost as much attention as the Pope and Darfur,

And now a British Cabinet minister has taken up the controversy, asking the London Fashion Week also to ban super thin models.

This is such an unequal world. Why should the international press be so fascinated by this strange controversy when 95 % of the population of our planet are so thin becasue they just cannot get enough to eat !

Are we surprised that there are revolts all over the world against such unequal consumerism ?

shekhar

Posted by Shekhar Kapur at 03:45 PM | Comments (38)

Beyond Delusion -- Ashtavakra Gita and Advaita

When we have met friends on various world tours of The Great Spiritual Masters, the paradox of "Afflicted with Delusion" 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 delusion, 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 II follows, post the salutations and signature.

With love in His Name

DK with family

DK Matai
The Philanthropia, ATCA, mi2g.net

Ashtavakra Gita

Chapter - II

Raja Janak said in acknowledgement to His Perfect Master Ashtavakra:

1. Truly I am spotless and at peace, the awareness beyond natural causality. All this time I have been afflicted by delusion.

2. As I alone give light to this body, so I do to the world. As a result the whole world is mine, or alternatively nothing is.

3. So now that I have abandoned the body and everything else, by good fortune my true self becomes apparent.

4. Waves, foam, and bubbles do not differ from water. In the same way, all this which has emanated from oneself is no other than oneself.

5. When you analyse it, cloth is found to be just thread. In the same way, when all this is analysed it is found to be no other than oneself.

6. The sugar produced from the juice of the sugarcane is permeated throughout with the same taste. In the same way, all this, produced out of me, is completely permeated with myself.

7. From ignorance of oneself, the world appears, and by knowledge of oneself it appears no longer. From ignorance of the rope it appears to be a snake, and by knowledge of it it does so no longer.

8. Shining is my essential nature, and I am nothing other than that. When the world shines forth, it is only me that is shining forth.

9. All this appears in me imagined due to ignorance, just as a snake appears in the rope, the mirage of water in the sunlight, and silver in mother of pearl.

10. All this, which has originated out of me, is resolved back into me too, like a jug back into clay, a wave into water, and a bracelet into gold.

11. How wonderful I am! Glory to me, for whom there is no destruction, remaining even beyond the destruction of the world from Brahma down to the last clump of grass.

12. How wonderful I am! Glory to me, solitary even though with a body, neither going or coming anywhere, I who abide forever, filling all that is.

13. How wonderful I am! Glory to me! There is no one so clever as me! I who have borne all that is forever, without even touching it with my body!

14. How wonderful I am! Glory to me! I who possess nothing at all, or alternatively possess everything that speech and mind can refer to.

15. Knowledge, what is to be known, and the knower -- these three do not exist in reality. I am the spotless reality in which they appear because of ignorance.

16. Truly dualism is the root of suffering. There is no other remedy for it than the realisation that all this that we see is unreal, and that I am the one stainless reality, consisting of consciousness.

17. I am pure awareness though through ignorance I have imagined myself to have additional attributes. By continually reflecting like this, my dwelling place is in the Unimagined.

18. For me here is neither bondage nor liberation. The illusion has lost its basis and ceased. Truly all this exists in me, though ultimately it does not even exist in me.

19. Recognising that all this and my body too are nothing, while my true self is nothing but pure consciousness, what is there left for the imagination to work on now?

20. The body, heaven and hell, bondage and liberation, and fear too, all this is pure imagination. What is there left to do for me whose very nature is consciousness?

21. I do not even see dualism in a crowd of people, so what do I gain if it is replaced by a desert?

22. I am not the body, nor is the body mine. I am not a living being. I am consciousness. It was my thirst for living that was my bondage.

23. Truly it is in the infinite ocean of myself, that, stimulated by the colourful waves of the world, everything suddenly arises in the wind of consciousness.

24. In the infinite ocean of myself, the wind of thought subsides, and the world boat of the living-being traders is wrecked by lack of goods.

25. How wonderful it is that in the infinite ocean of myself the waves of living beings arise, collide, play, and disappear, in accordance with their nature.

[ENDS]

Chapter I is available from here.

Posted by DK Matai at 01:35 PM | Comments (58)

My eternal lover

locked in your embrace
every moment
every breath
together
we walk

you
my lover
that waits to strike me
to betray me
to consume me
at any moment
and have done so
forever

and yet
i cannot let you go
for
i am
because you are
i breathe
because you allow me to
i do
because
the fear of you
provokes me to

i am alive
because I feel your embrace

yet
like a cobra
one day u will strike me
though i dance with joy
in the thought
that you will
but have not

for every moment
that you are faithful
is a moment
blessed upon me
by your presence

and when your final embrace
does come
we will rest together
in eternity

till then
walk with me
show me
how to live every moment
joyfully
by reminding me
every moment
that you will strike

and then, my spirit
will finally
be released
from your embrace

but will you
before that
let me see who you really are
will you reveal your dark secrets
my eternal lover ?

shekhar

Posted by Shekhar Kapur at 12:18 PM | Comments (13)

Open Thread

Posted by Intent at 10:45 AM | Comments (51)

September 18, 2006

If Sleeplessness was Wealth

If sleeplessness was wealth,
I would live in a palace alongside the moon.
and from my window I would see the gracious spilling of light
over everything that crawls and flies.

A sidereal breeze would herald mornings,
sprinkling stars on my window sill
with music so delightful, that smiles
would spring in lovers lips and dreams.

I would walk all night awake
while everyone else is asleep.
Imagining ways to dare, to let go.
So that those impulses of forever
dissolve the tribal context of my mind
-the spaces of my ignorance.

I would dance with the svelte night,
so elegantly dressed in her dark cloak,
adorned with sounds of mystery,
and stories of love, shadows and memories.

Tender rains would then pour on me;
maternal woos, sensual lips,
and the laughter of children in eternal play.
-a total feminine display.

My body would collapse.
All the jars within my mind would pop open their lids,
spilling silly things like intellectual pride,
irony, sarcasm, wittiness, and cynicism.

And of all that insistence in showing off
would vanish like vapor
through the windows of the mind-heart open ajar.

For whenever we dance with the Splendorous Night,
our shadows are diluted by her Shadow, our dark side
is devoured by her deep darkness.

Carriages with damsels aboard would gaily cruise in front of the awakened palace,
as Beauty dressed in woman, walks the universe.

All those tribes,
of our collective imagination
would parade incessantly before my open eyes,
Jews, Shiites, Sunni, Kurds, Tarahumara,
French, Aztecs, Mayas, Masai, Kikuyu,
Japanese, Chinese, American and Thai.

And so many, many others that I don’t remember
and that I never knew.

We would all parade in carnival’s caravans,
dancing, whining, laughing, suffering,
struggling, murdering, justifying, guessing,
forgiving, loving, each in our own script.

In sleepless nights I dream of you awake
and it brings the deluge again,
drowning all and everything that is perishable
with the flood of our derelict passions.

I then recount all my happenings
I remember everyone I have met,
every thought that crossed my mind
everything I should have said but didn’t.

Every feeling upturned by antagonism in conversation
when approaches and flavors differ.
(Because one is so attached to our own utterance stuff.)
So we invented fencing with concepts and words,
in a contest of who knows better, when we know nobody does.

Our heart feels sad when the friend’s embrace becomes evasive,
as reproaches follow the diversity of approaches on this and that,
whenever we forget that we are not apart in this slumber.

If sleeplessness was wealth, everything would have been forgiven,
we would live alongside the moon making light to shine,
over the marvelous things we illuminate
with our long moon fingers.

Laughter would fill every instant
and bitterness would be a flavor
in a British drink.
We would dance all night in rounds
of day and life.

Existence would be the essence of every glance and word.
Pillows and beds, just imaginary fluffy things
to whisper in stories into our ears,
as we dance so closely the sensual rhythms
of the naked night.

A night so intimate,
profound and authentic,
that everyone is unique
while being exactly the same.

Our sleeplessness of love would burn,
making the sun wake up before daybreak,
in an unexpected rave never seen .

The sun and the moon would then dance together
their steps of light within the night.

Our souls in a merry go round
will conceive a whole new universe again.

Out of this endless love.

Posted by Arsenio Rodriguez at 04:03 PM | Comments (6)

Should The Pope Say Sorry?

I have been meaning to blog about Pope Benedict's reference to Muhammad's "evil and inhuman" teachings, but NORM beat me to it! So lets start the conversation from a different perspective. Here is NORMS comment:

Foggy....Yeeeeoowwwww....it's foggy out here!! Blurred lines of right and wrong....

Well, lets see if we can stir up a ruckus here!!

The pope!! Ahhh yes, the pontiff!! He quoted someone, who showed Mohammed in less than a perfect light!! Hmmmm....lessee here!! A nun has already been murdered, and war has been declared....wow!!

Now, if someone at a place of higher learning in the US, decides to cast aspersions at Christianity, or Catholicism...things get really rough!! Some of the Christians will actually write letters to the editor of their paper!! They might even hold a street corner demonstration!! They're tough!!

Let's see now...a few months ago...weren't there some cartoons lampooning Mohammed?? Diddn't a lot of people die??

Well...here's the Kentucky, Redneck, boot in the ass take on it!! The pope, and every other leader of the free world should hold a press conference and say, "these Jihadists, are lowdown, murdering thugs!! And if the Koran actually tells them to do what they're doing, Mohammed was a lowdown murdering thug also! And to all the so called moderate Muslims out there: where the hell is your condemnation of these yahoos, and why aren't you marching in the streets voicing your opposition to the one's who have hijacked your 'peaceful' religion? Could it be....it's really not a peaceful religion??"

Actually, the Fog is clearing a way just a little bit now.....we can see clearly....there really is aright and a wrong here!!

C'mon Deepak....blog again about the 'poverty' that causes a mutlimillionaire bin laden to become a terrorist!!

Whew...those fog lights are blinding me...

norm

The quote from the Pope that has enraged people was in reference to a conversation between 14th century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and an educated Persian on the truths of Christianity and Islam.

"The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war," the pope said. "He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'"

The Pope has expressed regret at the reaction to the comments, but hasnt directly apologized for the statement. Al Quaeda has been sure to issue threats against Christians everywhere.

Does the Pope need to make a direct apology? Is there an opportunity here?

Posted by Mallika Chopra at 11:24 AM | Comments (153)

The Body's Wisdom

Although the medical establishment maintains a fanatical adherence to drugs and surgery as the only respectable way to treat illness, nevertheless researach supporting the common sense wisdom of the body's of common sense can still be found.

1. Vegetarianism is good for you. There are two reasons for this. First, avoiding meat is a way to keep your weight down. Second, you have to eat a lot of vegetables to get enough calories per day, and this increases your intake of vitamins and minerals.

2. Stress reduction works. The best studies of heart disease and cancer indicate that high stress is harmful. Stress reduction brings the body back into balance generally, which is itself a good thing. It reduces high blood pressure, although it isn't a cure. Meditation is a proven stress reducer.

3. Small amounts of exercise are absolutely necessary. A completely sedentary life is a major cause of overweight ad higher risk of many diseases. An adequate amount of exercise would include regular housecleaning, walking on a daily basis, taking care of a small child, climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator, etc. As far a weight loss goes, it's been shown that walking a mile loses more weight than jogging a mile, and jogging loses more than running. This is because heavier exercise is anaerobic (doesn't use oxygen) and causes the body to preserve calories rather than shed them.

4. Fresh pure food is best. Even though organic food has not been proven to be a major factor in good health, it still makes perfect sense to opt for the least contaminated food you can. The general public is right to be suspicious of chemical preservatives in goods, and processed food tends to have too many calories in proportion to vitamins and minerals. Life span is steadily increasing, with the decrease in the incidence of heart disease and strokes, but the worldwide intake of processed and junk food is promoting gross obesity and type 2 diabetes.

5. Staying away from the doctor is good for you. The medical establishment gave up on the old recommendation that everyone get a six-month checkup because it wasn't working. About 90% of serious illness is first detected by the patient. Secondly, people who live to great old age tend to not see doctors and to avoid taking drugs. It's not healthy to rely on drugs, to haunt the doctor's office, or to worry over minor illness and discomforts.

6. Moderation is the best preventive. It sounds banal, but doing a bit of what's good for you is the best medicine, while too much of a good thing is bad. Eat when you are hungry, stop eating when you aren't hungry. Omega 3 fish oil is good for thinning the blood, but too much runs the risk of stroke. Red wine is good for you, too much is bad for the liver. Eating your vegetables is good for you, trying to live on megavitamins probably isn't. For lacto-tolerant individuals, organic milk remains a healthy food.(men who drink a quart of milk a day seem to reduce their risk of heart attack, for example). Making sure you exercise into old age is good, but over-exercise at younger ages can lead to joint problems later on. Finally, natural exercise like jogging outside does more good to more muscle groups than running on a treadmill. Using gym equipment is fine, but being outside in the sunshine is better.

None of this sounds revolutionary, but there is an underlying wisdom at work. Your body knows what it is doing, and if you listen to it and cooperate sensibly, good health is the norm, not the exception. We are a society with incredible advantages in terms of health, and the sooner we stop relying only on outside authorities, and begin to rely more on the wisdom of our bodies, the better.
Love,
Deepak

Posted by Deepak Chopra at 10:58 AM | Comments (32)

Time to wake up, to Unite the Nations and the United Nations

It is raining in New York. But, the rain in New York makes the Big Apple look even better, nicer and sexier. Umbrellas come out, hats are out and the raincoats, not ordinary ones but fashionable hats,

umbrellas and raincoats.

It is not only that, dresses, skirts, jeans, boots and stockings come out too and the leggy looks, the wet looks, they come out in fashionable sizes and shapes.

It all has to happen because it’s the BIG Apple. There is colour in the New York rain because the New Yorkers add colour to that rain. So, let sing in the rain and the raindrops sing too.

It is also the UN time in New York , where the divided nations unite or tries to unite in the month of September every year during the United Nation’s General Assembly sessions.

This is the time you see the Iranian President Ahmedinejad who challenged the President of the United States , George Bush to an open debate, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, US President George Bush and Cuba ’s Fidel Castro address the world from under one roof.

Oh! but the world will miss the Great Comrade Fidel at this year’s UN Sessions. But, this time the world will see and hear from New York Fidel’s brother Raul though it would not be easy to replace that larger than life figure and the beard of Fidel Castro. But, Raul will be seen and heard.

This year’s sessions will also miss India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. India will be represented this year by the Defence Minister Pranab Mukerjee. However, Sigh’s neighbour Pakistani President General Pervez Musharaff will be here.

This will also be the first time the world will see from New York and the UN a Kurakkan Satakaya (a shawl he puts over the nationl dress) from deep village from the south of Sri Lanka , when President Mahinda Rajapaksa, a son of the soil addresses the world body on the 20th.

There is also more colour and female touch at the UN this year. All because it took 37 long years to have a woman as the President of the 61st sessions of the UN General Assembly, a lawyer from the Kingdom of Bahrain, Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa. She is trilingual in Arabic, English and French.

This UN General Assembly will also be Kofi Anan’s last as UN Secretary- General. UN may not serve Kofi after this year. We wouldn’t know who will be the next General who would try to unite the divided nations of the world. Will he be from Korea , Thailand , India , Sri Lanka , Singapore , Jordon or a surprise or a compromise candidate, we wouldn’t know at this time or the world wouldn’t know. But, who knows? May be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, controversial and outspoken John Bolton may know. I wonder if it’s hidden under his famous thick moustache.

There will be all sorts of limousines, security types, beefy ones, skinny ones, intelligent ones and intelligence ones. There will be traffic blocks and more closed roads and barricades.

New Yorkers are used to ‘Operation George Bush’ in New York , that’s the time when the US president will be in New York where the secret service will not take any chances. The New Yorkers may have to get used to other things too, though they have their own life to lead here, they may have to put up with some world leaders who think they own New York when they are here. They also will have to sympathize with descending diplomats, officials, politicians, the press and the NGO wallahs. But, we got some good advice from a New York cabbie for them. He said “Hey man, we must tell them to walk in New York because going in those limousines will only bring them trouble and delays in the Apple which is BIIIG.”

It is also the time that Hollywood Stars like George Clooney comes to the UN. Because they have a cause and some are looking for a cause. It is also the time when Inter Press Service’s (IPS) Chief , Sri Lanka ’s Thalif Deen and Clooney wave at each other like long lost friends, or let me say Lost and Found friends. After all it is the United Nations’ time. It is time to wake up and to Unite the Nations and the United Nations.

Posted by Bandula Jayasekara at 09:28 AM | Comments (4)

September 17, 2006

Weekly Intent - Indira Chatterjee

Indira Chatterjee
A Walk Down the Street

I get up bleary eyed every morning, brush my teeth and rush to the gym to shed the flab that is added due to ever increasing incomes and better lifestyles (however hard earned that may be).

Saturdays are different though, I dont have to wake up at the crack of dawn, I take my time, read the paper, have breakfast and then go for my workout. Saturdays are all the more special because I have time for other 'pamper myself' activities too. While coming back home I walk half the way, window shop, browse though the local library and buy a few things for home.

One such Saturday afternoon, all the usual Saturday activities I was feeling great about myself and thought that I would indulge in one of those delicacies that my dietician strictly forbade me to eat and went ahead and got a few things which I would gorge on (ok nibble on!) while I read a book at home.

While walking down, I pass a popular restaurant, my pace was slow, I had time to observe my surroundings and in doing so I noticed a beggar sitting under a tree, the sight is common enough to people living in big cities. I looked further and I saw that he had some half rotten discarded leftovers (probably from the plates of the patrons of that restaurant) and a newspaper from a nearby bin for a plate. I thought of the rumblings in my stomach, the goodies in my bag and the feelings of anticipation about enjoying them.

My inner voice screamed at me to give my bag of goodies to this beggar, let him enjoy his food for once. But unfortunately I have acquired a lot of flab in areas other than my physical body. I didn't listen and walked on and told myself that I will do this tomorrow. I will find the beggar, buy him a meal etc etc. I went home and tried reading my book and nibble on the stuff which I had brought which seemed to taste a lot like cardboard or perhaps it was just the taste of disgust (aimed at self).

Perhaps the inner joy of giving my bag of goodies to the beggar would have been far greater than eating it myself. Since that day I try to look out for the beggar but I haven't seen him since. I guess opportunities to truly shed the flab of apathy are rare.

I blog at http://ichatteralot.blogspot.com

Posted by Intent at 08:02 AM | Comments (42)

September 16, 2006

Ancient Companion

Under that old moon of stillness, bathed in her light so golden, so many steps have been taken, so many mysteries unfolded. I have walked again pretending to be what you want me to. These bundles

of impressions, collected as I experienced innumerable forms and situations, are now distilled in this new liquor called me. Every morning it reawakens with the same identification, same definitions, preferences and inner perceptions, uniquely crafted through a cascading kaleidoscope of endless moments.

Quietude for a few instants, reflecting on my nature before I follow the attractors and curved spaces that will still delineate my path upon impact, as impressions express their inertia of centuries against the patterns of the scripted story. Yet I will further unfold, till all is consummate in this arena of gathering and spectacle.

I heard your voice across the ages, explaining, momentarily completing me, in love embraces of intimacy that cannot be forgotten nor explained.

As a child, when I began to unwrap the potentials, I searched so intensely for you my dear, first in caring hands, then in symbols, and I do remember our secret street walks holding hands, and your intimate kisses that I could not understand. Yet I knew somehow, that since times immemorial I had longed for you, that so many times you had crossed my path and I had been dazzled by you and adored you from afar.

This time you kissed me in breeze and revealed your presence so clearly in my heart that I trembled, my form was on fire of genders unrevealed, crisscrossing me in a burning unseen by none except you and me.

Forgetfulness came with mind, so full of thought, all my being clamors now for you, as I fear the loneliness of empty, and miss the caresses that so tenderly you gave. I stumble around but manage to move ahead in drunkenness and bravado, but my passions do not find wholeness in body-mind unions, just passing comfort and uneasiness. Only vacant eyes like mine bounce back, speaking all sorts of inanity, nothing that would quench this scorching thirst.

Confusion grows, filling mental spaces as heart struggles to surface once again to embrace you.

Suddenly I remember those eyes of light, burning in my forehead as penetrating memories archetypal, and I recognize you again somehow. My body shivers and ancient rocks are displaced in the deepest. I rediscover lost continents of breeze and warmth. Unknown silent memories project themselves into the screen of my consciousness like shadows of light, and I know, my Beloved, that it is you again in a new disguise.

I am now walking on your footsteps as you help me tread safe ground amongst the minefields of my own creation. At times I think I know, and venture a step out of synch with yours, and I fall in pain only to look up from my fear and see your extended hand with a lucid smile urging me to hurry back into your footsteps.

Posted by Arsenio Rodriguez at 05:59 AM | Comments (7)

September 15, 2006

Fighting In a Fog

The fifth anniversary of 9/11 passed with a clash of opinions. Are we safer than five years ago? Has the Iraq war created more terrorists? Is the battle against al-Qaida set to last a generation? Voices on all sides

seemed certain of their position, but the prevailing truth is actually one of uncertainty. If the Republicans keep the House and Senate in the upcoming elections, it will be a victory for those who manipulated our uncertainty. The Bush administration will have convinced people to fight endlessly, to never allow a relaxation of tension, to consider "Islamic fascism" an ever-present danger to each of us.

It's difficult to live with painful uncertainty. The head has to overrule physical fear. Researchers in stress management point out that random stresses are more difficult to endure than predictable ones. A predictable stress would be something like the morning traffic jam that greets commuters every day. People don't like such stresses, but they cope with them normally. Terrorism, since it strikes out of the blue, is unpredictable, and therefore coping is much more difficult--Bush's policy of fighting all the time offers, if nothing else, a predictable response.

Unfortunately, this tactic doesn't work to stop terrorism, to eradicate it at its root source, or even to push it back within check. As long as American troops stand on Muslim soil, there will be a bottomless supply of new jihadists. In interviews last week the official 9/11 commission unanimously declared the failure of our response to the attacks that day.

If you want certainty, there you are. For certain we will keep on financing terrorism through Arab oil profits. For certain the number of terrorists is growing. For certain the worldwide perception of the U.S. is that of an uncontrollable aggressor. People don't want to face these certainties. They accepted Bush's "win the battle at any cost" mentality, but now that conditions are growing ever worse and the Iraqi policy ever more frustrating, there's no way out but to start living with uncertainty.

Two years from now, when right-wing war makers no longer control the White House, we can hope for intelligent, flexible, realistic talk from the next President. Meanwhile, we are fighting terrorism blinded by fog.
Love,
Deepak

Posted by Deepak Chopra at 11:02 AM | Comments (52)

Eyes of Fire & Greenpeace at 35 years

Today is the 35th birthday of Greenpeace. Thanks to Mallika and Deepak and everyone at Intentblog for inviting me to contribute. And thanks to Dave Stewart for his many years of support for Greenpeace and the environment. I keep in my memory Irving Stowe,

Ben Metcalf, Davie Gibbons, John Cormack, and Bob Hunter, who have passed on, but whose vision helped create Greenpeace and helped awaken the world to ecology. Thirty-five years ago today a little fishboat departed from Vancouver, Canada to sail into a nuclear test zone. The following accounts of that voyage are from my book: Greenpeace (Raincoast Books, Rodale Press): As May Sarton says: “One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.”

The Phyllis Cormack slipped quietly out of Burrard Inlet at dusk on September 15, 1971, past Point Atkinson and Bowen Island and into the gentle roll of the Strait of Georgia, the half-moon high above the port stern. Captain Cormack and Dave Birmingham stood alert in the wheelhouse. Everyone else sat below, drinking wine or beer around the galley table.

Cormack gave the wheel to Birmingham and directed him northwest along the coast. They would cross the strait at the southern tip of Lasquiti Island and then head north-northwest toward Discovery Passage where the open water collapses into treacherous narrows.

Birmingham, a modest man in work clothes and wire-rim glasses, was a no-nonsense, capable, even brilliant, engineer. Cormack confided, “We’ll shape up these hippy farmers and newspaper guys.” The two men could stand for hours without speaking. Then Cormack might say, “Stay outside of White Island there, then ya just head north a’ them lights.”

“Yup,” said Birmingham, and it was done.

…

The 66-foot halibut seiner Phyllis Cormack cut through the calm water, far more sound and stately than she may have appeared to Jim Bohlen a year earlier. Marine View Boat Works in Tacoma, Washington built the fish boat in 1941, designed for stability and space, beamy, with massive oak timbers and fine, edge-grain cedar planks fixed flush with each other against the oak ribs. She rested solidly in the water, not tossing about at each petty stirring of the sea. The wheelhouse and flying bridge stood forward with just enough room at the foredeck for a few coiled lines, two air-intake columns, and the anchor chain. The iron-plough anchor sat out on the bow where a forebrace rose over the wheelhouse to the single mast, rising thirty feet above the cabin, amidships. Metal stabilizing poles stood up from the gunwales on either side of the boat, to be lowered in heavy seas. Off the wheelhouse, outside on the flying bridge, was a second wheel – weathered wood, with eight spokes and knobs, looking to Bob Hunter like the Buddhist eight-fold wheel of the Dharma.

The Greenpeace symbols – a peace sign and an ecology sign – appeared on a great, pale-green, triangular sail, fixed to the mast and to a boom that was lashed securely to the stern. The decks were rough, working decks, tortured by boots and salt, knives, chains, and fallen tools. A large square hatch-cover stood three feet above the afterdeck. Behind that, the deck rose to the stern, where aluminum rollers sat ready to feed seine nets to and from the sea. The boat was painted white and trimmed out in aqua-green, with PHYLLIS CORMACK in black letters at the bow.

The glum engine room and oily bilge notwithstanding, the Phyllis Cormack made for a proud vessel. As beamy and stately as she was, however, this was no pleasure boat. The cabins were small and the gangways tight. Six small, round portholes provided scant light in the confined forward crew cabin, where ten bunks had been crammed for this voyage, although a fishing crew would be smaller. Sleepers had the Northern single-sideband radio hissing above their heads and the diesel engine pounding below them. The captain’s quarters opened from the wheelhouse.

Hunter relished steering and grew fond of both the boat and the skipper. The Phyllis Cormack passed red-barked arbutus, eagles feeding in the eddies, abandoned canneries, and boarded-up hovels swallowed by the forest. As they rounded Chatham Point into Johnstone Strait, Ben Metcalfe raised the marine operator on the single-sideband radio. Metcalfe’s transmission would be broadcast across Canada on the CBC that evening:

“We Canadians started the Greenpeacing of America last night,” he began. “We call our ship the Greenpeace because that’s the best name we can think of to join the two great issues of our times, the survival of our environment and the peace of the world. Our goal is a very simple, clear, and direct one – to bring about a confrontation between the people of death and the people of life.” The crew crowded around the door to listen. “We do not consider ourselves to be radicals. We are conservatives, who insist upon conserving the environment for our children and future generations… If there are radicals in this story, they are the fanatical technocrats who believe they have the power to play with this world like an infinitely fascinating toy of their own. We do not believe they will be content until they have smashed it like a toy. The message of the Greenpeace is simply this: The world is our place … and we insist on our basic human right to occupy it without danger from any power group. This is not a rhetorical presumption on our part. It is a sense and idea that we share with every ordinary citizen of the world.”

. . .

Hunter admired the tough captain. He studied his moods and steered around them carefully. He studied his desires and tried to please him. Cormack, for his part, appreciated the effort and more or less adopted Hunter. The young writer dubbed the Captain, “Lord of the Piston Rings,” and although the elder skipper didn’t recognize the reference to Tolkien, he took it as a compliment.

Cormack, however, could turn ferocious when the crew made minor errors. Darnell opened a can of evaporated milk upside down in the galley, and when Cormack saw it, he shrieked. “Bloody idiots!” He hurled the can overboard and stomped back into the galley. “You damned perfessors don’t know shit!” The Captain grabbed his coffee and disappeared into the wheelhouse. The crew learned from Birmingham that opening cans upside down was considered bad luck and obviously the Captain took it seriously. There were more rules. Hanging cups open end out was also bad luck. Standing in a doorway could prove perilous as the Captain might run you over as if you were invisible. When the skipper entered the galley, anyone sitting at the end of the table would be well advised to slide over and make room. Ignorance of these rules was no defense.

On the third day, the Phyllis Cormack passed through Johnstone Strait and approached the Kwakiutl Indian village at Alert Bay. Cormack informed the crew that they had been invited ashore for a blessing and a gift of salmon. Lucy and Daisy Sewid, the chief’s daughters, met the crew at the dock and escorted them to a formal ceremony in the longhouse. Kwakiutl families came aboard and blessed the ship, and fisherman brought Coho salmon. Daisy Sewid told Hunter that although the Kwakiutl supported Greenpeace, the ceremony was made possible because the fishing families from the village were devoted friends of John Cormack.

The following morning, Hunter filed a column with The Vancouver Sun, by radiophone. He saw something disquieting in the closed canneries and abandoned fish boats along the coast. The Kwakiutl had lived from the bounty of the inland sea for thousands of years before the factory trawlers arrived in the 1960s with their massive drift nets. Catch levels in the North Pacific had reached all-time highs and then crashed. As the Pacific perch, herring, and yellowfin sole disappeared, Japanese and Soviet trawlers moved north after the Bering Sea pollock. By the fall of 1971, the pollock harvest had increased from 175,000 tons per year to almost two million tons per year, and then declined like the other commercial species. Crab and shrimp populations went into decline. Hunter saw in the depressed fishing economies a warning from the environment, a sign that humankind had reached some dangerous Rubicon.

After transmitting his column, Hunter dug into his duffle bag and found the Warriors of the Rainbow. Since the book had first been given to him, he had browsed the stories, and even quoted from it in his new book, The Storming of the Mind. Now, he read with a fresh perspective. He paused at an excerpt from The Ten Grandmothers by Alice Marriott. “Of course you don’t know what it’s about when I sing of the old days,” said the Grandmother. “You’re just calves. You don’t remember. You were born inside the fence, like my own grandchildren.” Hunter found himself weeping on the back deck.

A story called “Return of the Indian Spirit” told of a 12-year-old boy who asked his Great Grandmother, Eyes of Fire, “Why have such bad things happened to our people?” Hunter discovered in the story a confirmation of his feeling in Alert Bay, that the aboriginal people had something important to offer humanity. It impressed him that they didn’t hate the race that had stolen their land. In the story, the old Grandmother tells the boy that there are many good things in the religion of the White race, and that they were sent here to learn about other ways of being. She tells the boy of a prophecy that someday people from all the races of the world will join together to save the earth from destruction and that these people will be known as “Warriors of the Rainbow.”

The Phyllis Cormack passed between Hope Island and Cape Caution, and into Queen Charlotte Sound. Long, lazy swells rolled in from the open ocean, and crewmembers had their first taste of what they would face in the North Pacific. Cormack tucked inside again through a patchwork of narrows, 100 miles north to the Kitasoo fishing village of Klemtu. Cheering Kitasoo children, who had seen their departure on television, met them at the dock. They grabbed the hands of the crew of the Greenpeace and toured the boat. They fawned over the longhaired crewmembers wearing beads and bright colors – Hunter, Moore, and Thurston. They sang nursery rhymes, television theme songs, and national anthems, to entertain their guests. Hunter could not stop the tears from welling in his eyes. These people are counting on us, he thought to himself.

==========

A special appreciation should go out today to Dorothy Stowe, Dorothy Metcalf, Zoe Hunter, Bobbi Hunter, Jim & Marie Bohlen, Paul Watson, and many others who helped create Greenpeace. And a special appreciation to the thousands of Greenpeace volunteers and supporters around the world who keep alive the dream of a green and peaceful world.

Cheers, Rex
September 15, 2006

Posted by Rex Weyler at 07:24 AM | Comments (7)

September 14, 2006

How you can help ensure that Senator Allen is held accountable in the Meet the Press debate

This is a cross post to Sepia Mutiny where I report briefly on how you can ensure that Senator George Allen, who used an ethnic slur in referring to an Indian-American volunteer for his opponent, doesn't escape accountability by making his usual nonsensical explanations during Sunday's "Meet the Press" debate with his opponent, Jim Webb. Please act by sending an email to Meet The Press so host Tim Russert hears from you before the show! A sample letter appears after the jump.

Please click here to send an email to “Meet the Press” and make sure Allen is effectively held accountable for his mistreatment of S.R. Sidarth. I am offering the following form for you to copy, modify, and use as you see fit:
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This Sunday during the debate between George Allen and Jim Webb, Tim Russert should please challenge Allen to respond to the point that Allen’s mother was a French-Tunisian immigrant, that the term “macaca” he used referring to Webb volunteer S.R. Sidarth is used by French colonials to refer to dark-skinned people, and that Allen himself speaks French fluently. Russert might also recite Allen’s Confederate-flag history documented at http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060515&s=lizza051506 and http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060508&s=lizza050806. He could show the Allen photo with leaders of a white supremacist group documented at http://www.alternet.org/story/41085/. He could then ask, “Given all that, Senator, how believable should it be to viewers that you didn’t know what you were saying?”

“Meet the Press” under Tim Russert is famous for its research and its fearlessness. Please don’t give Allen the usual pass that every other other journalist has given him when asking him about the issue, blindly accepting his explanations without confronting him with the specific facts that belie the explanations.

______________________________________

Please let us all know when you've sent such an email so we can keep count and watch on Sunday to see if Russert was paying attention.

Posted by Subodh Chandra at 09:25 PM | Comments (4)

Help Komal Singh Sengar

The murder, unintentional or otherwise, of Professor Sabharwal in Madhav College in Ujjain has thrown up some pertinent issues, some which this country has been talking about in the last few months, and others it has not. The most obvious of the latter is the entire question of student politics and whether it has become the sole preserve of political parties using the college campus to play dangerous power games.

More important, are the people behind student elections bonafide students or have they been planted by political entities to further their party’s cause? That the answer to both questions has been fairly obvious for a few decades now – student politics has almost entirely become non-student politics with its players interested in anything but the pursuit of knowledge – is not enough in the light of the incidents at Madhav College. It is time to ask why college elections have been allowed to become politicized to such an extent that people’s lives are on the line during campaigning and voting. Speak to university authorities across the country and you will hear how their hands have been tied with a mix of intimidation and political pressure. So what is the solution?

It is indicative of the deep-rootedness of electoral politics in this country that while many political leaders have condemned the attack in Madhav College, not a single realistic, constructive step has been mooted to empower college administrations to uproot this reign of terror in campuses across the country. As a liberal I would be the first person to fight any draconian measures designed to silence the voice of the student or the practice of student government, but there has to be a way to distinguish the participatory student from the overgrown bully. Look further and the news gets more shameful. Not one political party has stepped forward and said they undertake to permanently step out of dirty college politics. How can they? It will imply they were involved in that arena in the first place. But who is fooled by all of this? Not a single Indian who has studied beyond secondary school. So while everybody, from the Prime Minister downwards knows what is going on, nothing is done to rectify things. This then is the bottomline about the worst of India. This is what shapes an Indian’s psyche from his or her teenage years – the sickening knowledge that no matter how many suitcases full of cash are paraded in front of the media, no matter how many sting operations show corruption occurring on all rungs of the administrative ladder, no matter how many politicians are named as illegal beneficiaries of thousands of crores, the powerful will get away scot-free. The law strikes you only if you are poor or middle class, the law clinically works against you only if the law makers know your vote does not count, the law works beautifully to put you away only if your absence will not inconvenience the powers that be.

Professor Sabharwal’s murderers had absolute confidence his demise would not inconvenience their pursuit of power. But it has - thank the media and the voice of those who are still independent-minded in this country. But if the senseless killing of an elderly academic in broad daylight has been received with condemnation, why not an equal amount of outrage and support for Madhav College peon, Komal Singh Sengar, an eye witness to the attack, who had the courage to file an FIR against the professor’s murderers, when he alleges there were other witnesses who have chosen to remain silent? When he alleges his life has been threatened by those implicated by him? When he says he had to hide in a water tank for six days for fear of being killed? When he says he was offered a bribe in the form of all expenses paid for both his daughters’ weddings in exchange for the withdrawal of his testimony? When he says with anger-choked resignation that he knows he will be killed once the media glare on him lessens? Surely we haven’t sucked all we wanted from this story and moved on? Because the question that Sengar’s words throws up is the question that we are most scared of asking ourselves - what are we going to do about this?

While the Jessica Lall and Priyadarshini Mattoo cases must be fought with tenacity and vigilance they are cases that cannot save the lives of the two women in question. But tenacity and vigilance can and will save Sengar’s life. Tenacity, vigilance and financial support. Financial support so that when the threat perception to his life is ordained to have lessened to ‘mild’ and the armed guards are withdrawn from his protection, we, all of us, some of us, any of us can reinstate his security detail. Realistically? It will serve only to give him some relief from a life of continuous fear, because that’s what awaits Sengar through the course of the oncoming trial and its result. Everyday this man goes to and from work in Madhav College he will look over his shoulder for the accomplices of the people he has incriminated in his testimony, men and women who will bide their time before devising an unrelated cause of his death. The terrible beauty is that Komal Singh Sengar knows this. What a chance then to tell him something he does not know. To tell him in the form of the guards who we arrange to continue to protect him that India, we Indians, some of us any of us, stand with him, stand for him, his honesty, bravery, his incorruptibility. This is a moment we cannot miss. This is a moment where we can lock the stable doors before the horse has bolted When we don’t have to wait to fight for justice in the case of the butchering of an intrepid eye-witness in Ujjain. This is a moment when we can step in where politicians fear to tread - reversing that sickeningly familiar sensation of wrongdoing happening in broad daylight and nothing being done about it.

Posted by Rahul Bose at 11:00 AM | Comments (15)

September 13, 2006

Open Thread

Posted by Intent at 11:30 PM | Comments (165)

Permian labyrinthodonts, and Arctic Bedouins

Thanks for the critique & comments. In response to my last post about global warming, a colleague wrote to me: “Temperatures and CO2 levels have been much higher in past history. During the Eocene [50 million years ago] the CO2 level reached 2,000 parts per million (ppm),

compared to less than 400 ppm today. Climate changes constantly.” Yes, but there is more. Here then is a short history of earth temperature, CO2 levels, and climate change:

Planetary temperature and atmospheric CO2 remain intimately linked, always and forever, like devoted lovers. Yes, CO2 levels and temperatures have been much higher than they are today, but the intense heat wiped out everything on land except lizards, tough plants, insectivores, and a few burrowing marsupials.

About 250 million years ago (mya) the earth began heating up, leading into a long “Mesozoic Heat Wave.” At this time, earthly life systems experienced the largest environmental collapse of all known history, the Permian extinction, claiming 95% of all species. A meteorite, volcanic eruptions, or other influence may have caused this. The planet experienced run-away heating. Lizards and trees thrived in the heat. About 100 million years ago (mya), atmospheric CO2 levels peaked at about 2000 parts per million (ppm), the earth’s maximum CO2 build-up and hottest period in known history. But the emerging and spreading forests helped cool the earth. You can thank the Cretaceous Angiosperms for hanging in through the long hot “summer” that lasted 200 million years. Keep in mind: The forests cooled down the planet by removing carbon from the atmosphere, allowing large mammals, such as humans, to evolve.

As the trees gobbled up carbon, atmospheric CO2 dropped, and the planet cooled until the series of ice ages we all know. After the last ice retreat, humanity spread around the planet, began to build cities, and the earth has been gradually warming for the past 1000 years, with minor fluctuations. Pre-industrial concentrations of CO2 remained stable around 280 parts per million. For our purposes of devising a human plan for the next, say, 2000 years, this pre-industrial level of carbon in the air is our baseline, not the extreme Mesozoic levels from 100 million years ago, since nothing remotely like human civilization could have survived the Mesozoic heat.

Since the 1800s – due primarily to human hydrocarbon burning and forest destruction – CO2 in the atmosphere has risen on an exponential growth curve resulting in the current 400 ppm, record temperatures, melting icecaps, monster hurricanes, and unearthly denial on the part of our alleged leaders. We've witnessed a 43% growth in atmosphere CO2, mostly in the last 100 years. Anyone can follow the curves for atmosphere CO2 and planet temperatures. They travel together.

James Lovelock’s concern is that even if we did all right things now, the current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere could continue to heat the planet for a thousand years until the forests returned. But we’re not doing the right things. We’re driving gas-guzzlers. China’s planning 110 new coal-fired plants. We’re cutting down 30 million acres of forest a year.

These are the numbers and facts that count for our future generations. If current CO2 growth continued for three centuries, we'd be at 1000 ppm, but of course we'd never get there, because we'd bake first. Even now, we're watching the ice melt like the poor Permian labyrinthodonts with the possible exception that we may know what's going on. When Lovelock talks about the tropics baking to a crisp and human survivors migrating to the poles, he may sound gloomy and alarmist, but, (1) he's making a visual picture for a civilization that doesn't appear to get the concept, and (2) he's the bloody premier atmospheric scientist on the planet, so we should take his metaphoric narratives seriously.

If the increased heat absorption from ice melting does take over or add critically to human hydrocarbon burning and forest loss, we could fry as Dr. Lovelock suggests, and a few huddled Arctic Bedouins may have to hold out for a hundred million years. Maybe this won't happen, but that's not the point for our children's children, and their children. For them, we have to wake up and do everything humanly possible to reverse our Big Blind Blunder. The posturing and denial just prolong the mistake. Nature will not be mocked.

A high school class could do the math. There is no real mystery in this, except of course the big mystery of the universe itself. The so-called uncertainty is just ordinary scientific uncertainty that all scientists know as their constant companion. The variables remain vast and complex but the data and general trends remain clear. Furthermore, climate prediction is more complex than most science because climate modeling is not a typical experimental science. Nature controls the experiment. And therein lies the important paradigm shift for humanity: “You are inside the experiment!” Wake up and read the data. “You don’t believe in ghost stories?” Captain Barbaroosa says in Pirates of the Caribbean: “Well, you better start believing. You’re in one.”

In 1979 we had a graph of exponential atmosphere CO2 in our Greenpeace Chronicles office on 4th Avenue in Vancouver, Canada. I can see it now, stuck to the wall with a thumbtack. Anyone paying attention then, Lovelock for example, knew what was coming.

Don’t get depressed. Get informed, get stoked, and get active.

Cheers, Rex
Sept. 13, 2006

Posted by Rex Weyler at 10:59 PM | Comments (9)

Kablalistic Thinking (Timothy Leary)

"The most interesting time of human life, I think, is when your heart stops, and for between two and 15 minutes, your brain is still running.

I think the most interesting part of my life is going to happen in those two to 15 minutes. Because time doesn't exist then. When the body's gone and you've got 120 billion neurons whirring. It's like LSD. More can happen in one minute than in a thousand lifetimes."

Timothy Leary

Peace. Zappy

Posted by Zappy at 10:07 PM | Comments (15)

Egg-vertisements!

This Fall, CBS plans to imprint a laser image of its logo on eggs with teasers for its Fall shows. Its a 35 Million egg-vertisement campaign. Similarly, some school districts in the US are allowing advertisements on childrens school buses. As a marketing major in Business School,

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to build buzz and create an impression in a consumers mind around a product. I often think about my classmates who are brand managers for a new Zip-lock bag or brand of paper towels and the challenges they have to get their message out amidst all the noise out there. I have to admit the egg campaign is pretty original!

I am not sure how I feel about putting ads on children's school buses. If a school district can earn $70,000 a year from bus ads to provide more resources for their children and pay teachers better, does it hurt to have a Coca-Cola banner on the side of the bus? Is this a bad influence on our children? Critics argue that it "teaches children that ... they're for sale."

And, I had never thought about funerals... From the USA Today article I read: "The growing trend toward personalizing the rites of the dying has brought us Harley-Davidson-themed memorials and caskets designed in homage to favorite beers and sports teams."

Alas, we may be reaching the point where we need to put select sponsors/advertising or Google Ads on Intentblog to hire an editor to monitor comments and manage the site on a more regular basis. Will that change what we do or say here substantially?

Check out your eggs before you crack them this Fall -- there may be a slogan or two that catches your eye!

Posted by Mallika Chopra at 09:19 PM | Comments (4)

ME NOT SO SPIRITUAL

Growing up Chopra is an interesting experience. You have the big spiritual target on your back at all times. People freak out when your drink a coke, taste some steak, or curse.

I get asked all the time if I consider myself a "spiritual person." And I say no - because I think I know what people connote with the word and don't qualify myself that way. Any time a discussion about spirituality takes place, I usually sense some rightousness attached to it - some level of judgement as to what is good or bad, moral or amoral, or a descent into a discussion about values. This makes me uncomfortable - I don't know. I'm not a teacher - not qualified to tell others how they should live, speak, act - so I stay out of the discussion altogether as much as I can.

And yet, I do think of myself as "spiritual" really because I define spirituality as a state of awareness. My father always taught Mallika and I, "not to take ourselves too seriously." He said that was the core spiritual value that we needed to internalize. To this day, that's my motto. I think most people take themselves too seriously. I think presidents and prime ministers and terrorists all take themselves too seriously and that leads to enormous planetary problems.

As a journalist, I traveled to some truly horrible places. I spent considerable time with Narco-traffickers, terrorists, assassins, dictators, and other so-called evil people. They all took themselves way too seriously. They tended not to know how to laugh. To me, it was always sad. They took offense very easily - not only personally but if you joked about their families or communities or various other allegiances, they took grave personal offense. Hence you had to be on your toes around them - you couldn't crack a joke for fear of them reacting badly. This is the stuff that great conflicts are sparked over.

Our blog too has somehow become a battlefield - people take offense at blogs, commenters attack one another and take things very personally. Mallika and I are greatly saddened by all of this and are at a crossroads - how to take this forward and insure that it is the creative idea exchange that we aspired for, not an emotional graveyard or confessional for people to loiter in.

I ask for your cooperation, your maturity, and your involvement in this blog. We encourage free speech and exploration of ideas, issues, and current events. Please don't bring your personal problems here and please don't use this forum to attack one another, make psychological analysis of others or voice your own anxieties. We - and I mean all of us, posters, commenters, contributors, founders etc - are better than that.

Posted by Gotham Chopra at 10:21 AM | Comments (54)

September 12, 2006

Bad Snuff Film

The last thing I'll ever be accused of is being a Bush lover. Okay - maybe the second to last thing, since I'll never EVER be called a Yankee lover.

And yet I find myself repulsed by some of the latest Busg bashers out there and the horribly salacious and in-poor-taste feature film that so many right wing extremists are hailing as "provocative" and "edgy" and "insightful" and "powerful." The film DEATH OF A PRESIDENT depicts the assassination of President Bush.

No I have not seen it so pile on because I am criticizing without even the full knowledge of seeing the film. But I have no desire to see the film because I think it's a cheap trick and one destined to actually hurt the cause of all those who oppose Bush's brutish tactics in his war on terrorism and his war on logic. Idiocy like this film simply fuels the venom of the left that portrays liberals as nothing but salaciously pandering to a reckless and illogical agenda. In this case, they would be absolutely right.

We have dealt in a very microcosmic way on this blog with the issue of free speech and taste. It's a fine line because complete lack of discretion and observation can result in chaos which can fuel the downfall of even a small cyber community. And yet at the core of the community is the principle ethic of free expression. Still, the freedom to express oneself doesn't necessarily mean one should abuse it or so carelessly reveal their own impudence.

In my humble opinion, DEATH OF A PRESIDENT is a cheap attention grabbing trick. Because in the end - in the false pursuit of what the so-called progressive film-makers claim was their mission - to make people think-they have actually made people simply shrug and overlook some of the critical issues of this administration that we should be discussing.

Posted by Gotham Chopra at 11:24 PM | Comments (5)

Everything is Music

Dave Stewart and Deepak Chopra jam again. Hope you enjoy!

Posted by Intent at 01:29 PM | Comments (16)

Moon lozenge

Last night I placed the moon between my eyes, thin veils of grayish gauzy-cloud materials surrounded her so gently. She dissolved gradually into my brain like a sweetmeat on a hungry mouth. My neurons glowed in moonlight soft and processed impulses in a more romantic and reflective way.

The signaling to far away operational stations was now moon-mellowed. Image receptors in optic nerves were interpreted in tones of bluish texture, and passersby glowed in an eerie otherworldliness. There was a sense of tropical breeze, of sandy beaches, of songs of forest, in the midst of the pavement when the moon lozenge dissolved in my scratchy brain last evening.

Word games, interpretations and knowledge had been assaulting me all day long, -. I wondered how meanings relate to actual experience? How many words are there in the languages to think and speak on? What are the things that they describe? I wondered, as I drove under the influence, of a moon-drunk brain.

A hundred mile long lines of words, like elephants catching their tails in procession, are contained in the recesses of my mind. A million times more in the bookshelves of libraries and in forgotten attics. They are all packed in neat bundles of black and white, waiting to be brought to life, legend, and conviction, by the gazing beams of light from somebody’s eyes. Some are classified into: things that are measured and predicted –science; others a collection of thoughts about whence and whither –philosophy. Everything is of course subcategorized. Then there are manuals of all sorts: for cooking, business and sex, for etiquette and car repair. For every thing that is conceived in space, there are words, books, different schools, different opinions, prevailing and minority trends. Cogitations infinite are there in these words that buzz around my mind like wild mosquitoes in a swamp.

There are also as books about the inner worlds non-measurable, the books of symbol, the ones who try to chart the subtle, the ineffable. Metaphysical explanations in mythological rhymes, which use the stars and the planes of consciousness in a woozy poetic language, to describe your placement in the cosmos, allowing for each a casting and a role that is understandably enchanting. Really a beautiful story that helps counterbalance the arid word chains of the describers and measurers who fill the bookshelves with life’s procedures and prevailing norms. As well as the short lived cacophony describing the last tragedies and gossips in repetition, to saturate our minds and feed the curious nature of our human condition.

Yes there are so many books, titles, words, definitions, all embraced with so much passion and conviction. It is like grasping clouds with desperate hands to feed a hungry child, unsubstantial and impossibly futile, while creating the illusion of nourishment.

I do not know much beyond this body sac and its accompanying consciousness, what else to say. Oh yes, I am no doubt under the influence, of many of these books of different types and inclinations, and have matriculated myself in many of those schools of thought that mean so much to so many, at any one particular moment in time.

But nowadays with this moon tumor in my brain I can’t explain why, I have become word shy, except for the very basic. Neurons have become engorged and fluffy, hypnotized into a trance of yellow, and can’t handle long sentences for a long time.

Now, this is very embarrassing, as people do write and phone, and even stop me on the road to talk and say. I do look at their bluish contoured figures, or listen to their vibrating voices in cellular phones that reveal secrets behind the word chain addiction, or see the logic, or the poetic when it enters the screen of phosphorescence in an electronic apparition, or opens up in letters of antiquity written with pen and ink and feeling. I react to all these communications avoiding long definitions which escape my understanding, feeling just the undertones, which are somehow quite clear for my moon infested brain cells.

I can only answer in kind with a moon response, with an old story lived and accumulated like vintage wine in my soul that now emerges spontaneously like a song. It says.

-I came traversing a long distance of water and lands to a place were they lived, the ones that knew the most about everything. I prepared myself as for a final entry exam to a top university. I reviewed all the schools of prevailing thought on the things conceived in space, I read also all the mystic, astrological, Vedanta, Sufi, and Rosicrucian treatises.

For four years I was under intense absorption and meditation in all poses, preparing to join and understand this secret society of the knowledgeable. My temples were bursting with contents and symbols, as I saw myself in mythological presence traversing the valleys confronting the dragons, guided by the stars and their glorious signs and the numbers in magical combinations. Elves , fairies, angels as well as the spirits of my ancestors, were all summoned to help me prepare, for the encounter with those that knew the most about everything.

I arrived to a simple beautiful countryside across narrow roads and pleasant peasants of time immemorial, with their usual sheep and cows and crops. At the end of the dusty white road there was a small compound. My heart was in a flurry of anticipation and expectation, how would they look? with long white robes, svelte, magnificent like Gandalf the wise, radiating an eerie light from their auras, their words soft and mysterious?.

I walked in and found an old bespectacled man, chubby and strong with a T-shirt and a pair of ordinary pants, who looked at me like an uncle I had not seen in a long time and embraced me so tenderly, as he said welcome home. The towers of words, collapsed with my imagined masks, I became a child again in my being, no more symbols in my brain, no more universal categories, no more myths, nor complicated orders and paths.

I just sat by his side totally relaxed and bathed in the atmosphere of certainty and knowledge when I heard his response to somebody, about something or other, about a particular corner on the path, and a particular school of thought “about that”, he smiled a smile of oceans and said ‘I don’t know, I am sorry, I do not know anything about that”

I then knew that there is nothing to know except to abandon all the “knowledge” and surrender to love. I have been trying since to lose all those accumulated words, to get rid of those habits of explaining things. To sit down take the hand of the One who in Silence accompanies you and just follow.-

It is becoming slightly easy these days after the moon metastasis in my brain.

Posted by Arsenio Rodriguez at 05:19 AM | Comments (5)

Move the f@#$ over Chris Rock, Sri Rajneesh is in the house

Thanks to my cousin Bharat for emailing me an audio file of one of my favorite speeches of all time.

I'm not sure when this was originally recorded but the context of it is the following: one of Sri Rajneesh's (google him if you need the bio) during one of his lectures remarked that he felt the Guru too often casually used the "f word." Rajneesh contemplated the comment (complaint) for a moment and then proceeded to spontaneously deliver the following. Move over Chris Rock. This is pure fucking genius.

Posted by Gotham Chopra at 12:13 AM | Comments (35)

September 11, 2006

Dr Guinness: Living with our Deepest Differences

second, that in the era of global communications we have to recognize the emergence of a global public square; and third, that some of the better solutions to balancing liberty and diversity, such as the American, are themselves under acute pressure today, and not serving as the models their advocates once claimed.

Dear ATCA Colleagues; dear IntentBloggers

We are grateful to Dr Os Guinness from Washington DC for his submission to ATCA, "Living with our Deepest Differences."

Dr Os Guinness

Dear DK and Colleagues

Re: Living with our Deepest Differences

Allow me to make a contribution to the Spiritual Socratic Dialogue on ATCA. I believe what you have launched is important, both for each of us as individuals as well as for the future of the world. But before we go much further, it would be valuable to discuss some of the needed foundational assumptions, without which the contributions will not amount to all they might.

The twentieth century was the most murderous century in history, and it ended with an orgy of ethnic and sectarian violence that raised a number of important issues: first, that "living with our deepest differences" is one of the most urgent questions in today's world; second, that in the era of global communications we have to recognize the emergence of a global public square, and third, that some of the better solutions to balancing liberty and diversity, such as the American, are themselves under acute pressure today, and not serving as the models their advocates once claimed.

The question of "living with our deepest differences" sounds abstract when compared with, say, world hunger and HIV-AIDS. But it is actually highly practical because when the differences are religious, absolute, and involve not just private worldviews but entire ways of life, they lead to situations that are philosophically incommensurable and politically and socially intractable. In other words, there are differences between different faiths that are irreducible, ultimate, and irreconcilable, and such differences make a difference not only for individuals but for entire countries and civilizations.

As often pointed out, there are two extreme positions in the emerging "global public square," both of which would be disastrous for the world. One extreme is progressive universalism, the belief of those who are convinced that their way is the right way, the one way, and the way for everyone - even to the point of seeing it right to coerce others. Plainly, this view leads directly to conflict, whether the proponents are Communists or advocates of democracy.

The other extreme is multicultural relativism, the belief of those who believe there is no truth, no right way, and no way to adjudicate between rival claims. At first blush, this view looks infinitely more tolerant and therefore better than the other extreme, but it leads inevitably to complacency. For if we are unable to judge anyone else, and everything is a matter of cultural relativity, we will have to turn a blind eye to evils such as female castration, slavery and human trafficking that are permissible in certain cultures, for who are we to judge?

The third way is to work toward a chartered pluralism and therefore toward civility. This is the view that respects the right of everyone to belief, what they believe on the basis of freedom of conscience, and therefore to enter and engage public life on that basis - but to do so within an agreed framework (hence "chartered" pluralism) of what is just and free for all others too. A right for one is a right for another and a responsibility for all.

In a world as diverse and hostile as ours, this third position may seem rather far off at the moment. But as we work toward a global civility and cosmopolitanism in the next century, we have to beware of two pitfalls.

One pitfall is the secularists' temptation - to act as if the global public square is a two-tier arrangement in which religious believers are tolerated at the lesser and local level while the top level of global leaders is cosmopolitan, liberal, and secular. This is deeply condescending, and a fundamental denial of religious liberty.

The other pitfall is the temptation of certain religious believers' - to act as if there was a unity below all diversity which we will reach if we are nice enough to each other and talk long enough to each other. Some religious believers assent to this - for instance, most Buddhists and Hindus - but many do not: most obviously the monotheistic family of faith, and also secularists.

What is the alternative? While we must recognize the extreme perils of conflict, we must also recognize the stubborn limits of dialogue. We will never be one humanity without human differences. We will never see Kant's "perpetual peace" or a humanity without borders. We will never speak one universal language or share one common faith. There is no one rational way to which all reasonable people will subscribe.

The alternative, then, is to create a covenanted framework of agreed principles by which we recognize each other's rights and within which we negotiate our deep and important differences - civilly and peacefully.

This brief argument may be too sketchy to make much sense of issues that are complex, controversial, and urgently await being addressed by world leaders and at venues such as ATCA or the World Economic Forum. But it should be enough to explain why I read recent ATCA submissions, such as the Dalai Lama's, with respect and interest, but in complete disagreement. As a follower of Jesus and a subscriber to Socrates' "examined life," I simply cannot subscribe to notions such "universal consciousness" or to hope in "world peace through inner peace."

I fully respect people's right to believe what they believe, but that does not mean that I accept everything they believe as right. The former is freedom of conscience; the latter is indifference to truth and in the end, potentially the path to nonsense or worse, ie, evil. What it means is that I must hold what I believe clearly and civilly, speaking the truth with love; and when I find it necessary to disagree with what others believe, I must do so civilly and peacefully. In short, while nothing will ever be the subject of world agreement, nothing comes closer than the Golden Rule.

With gratitude and appreciation for the Socratic dialogue and all the contributions on ATCA.

Sincerely

Os Guinness

[ENDS]

Dr Os Guinness is an author and speaker who lives in the Washington DC area in the US. Great-great grandson of Arthur Guinness, the Dublin brewer, he was born in China in World War Two where his parents were medical missionaries. A witness to the climax of the Chinese revolution in 1949, he was expelled with many other foreigners in 1951 and returned to Europe where he was educated in England. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of London and his DPhil in the social sciences from Oriel College, University of Oxford. Os has written or edited more than twenty books, including The America Hour, Time for Truth, The Call, Invitation to the Classics, and Long Journey Home. His latest book is Unspeakable: Facing up to evil in a world of genocide and terror, which was published by Harper San Francisco in January 2005.

Previously, Dr Os Guinness was a freelance reporter with the BBC. Since coming to the United States in 1984, he has been a Guest Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies and a Guest Scholar and Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. From 1986 to 1989, Os served as Executive Director of the Williamsburg Charter Foundation, a bicentennial celebration of the First Amendment. In this position he helped to draft the Williamsburg Charter and co-authored the public school curriculum Living With Our Deepest Differences. From 1991 to 2004 he was a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, and a frequent speaker and seminar leader at political and business conferences in both the United States and Europe. As a European visitor to the US and a great admirer but detached observer of American culture today, he stands in the long tradition of outside voices who have contributed so much to America's ongoing discussion about the state of the union. He lives with his wife Jenny.

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)
____________________________________________________________________________

Posted by ATCA at 02:27 PM | Comments (7)

Desire and the Chain of Command

If Vedanta is right and there is only one reality, then all desires must follow the same mechanics. Desires arise and are fulfilled in consciousness. Making yourself happy involves

fulfilling many desires every day; this is also the path of evolution, for as desires become more refined, they lead to higher states of consciousness. It is impossible to achieve any level without wanting to, and impossible to be blocked if the mechanics of desire support you.

If you want a piece of chocolate cake and go to buy some at a restaurant, you are fulfilling your desire exactly the same way as someone who wants a piece of chocolate cake and tastes it in his dreams. That is the point made by Vedanta, and it seems totally improbable to a materialist, who makes a huge distinction between a real piece of cake and a piece of cake in a dream.

Materialism focuses on the object of desire, Vedanta focuses on the source of desire. The only way to prove which one is right is to test the theory of consciousness. How do we do that? Personally, by mapping out the path in our own consciousness that desires follow. If the map is right, then Vedanta must have hit upon a deep truth and not just a pure philosophical whim.

I am going to give a linear description of this path first, even though to be completely true to Vedanta, there is only the "pathless path," which isn't linear at al. Our minds work in a linear fashion, and the path of desire won't seem real unless we can connect the dots between cause ("I want a piece of chocolate cake") and effect ("Ah, here it is.")

Desires pass through four layers of manifestation:
1. The desire appears in your mind.
2. It is processed in the unconscious or subtle body
3. It passes through collective consciousness
4. It is organized cosmically in pure consciousness.

This is the chain of command for every desire, and it follows the Vedic structure of consciousness: the person, the Jiva, Atman, and Brahman. Naturally, these levels of awareness have a great deal in common. Karma, for example, operates for the person and for Jiva, is calculated in Atman, but does not apply to Brahman (unity is beyond action). But I won't go into technicalities here; we want to keep our eye on the prize, which is fulfillment of desire.

1. The personal level. Your desire will come true if you first state it clearly in your mind. Repetition isn't all that important. You don't have to go around saying, "I want a new car" over and over again. But your mind must be clear that it wants the car. Contrary to popular belief, wanting something really, really, really badly doesn't help. Craving and desperation are obstacles, in fact. Clarity is a quieter, more subtle state. It feels right, or even inevitable, to have a particular desire, and the desire is consistent with who you are. (I had a friend whose father despaired all his life that he never got to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. I asked my friend if his father ever learned how to sing opera. The answer was no, which says something about the lack of fulfillment in this case!) But of course all kinds of desires are fulfilled without perfect clarity. The more you are clear, the fewer unexpected consequences you will experience when your desire comes back.

2. The unconscious level: When you learn a new word, it gets added to your vocabulary, but you don't see it fit into a slot. The fitting in happens unconsciously. The same is true for any desire. It must fit into your storehouse of desires, which we can call your desire body. In your desire body you've stored beliefs, self-image, various repressed or shadow energies, and the whole history of your self. This is the level where desire hits its first and biggest obstacles, for no matter what you think you want, if your desire body won't compute that desire correctly, you will achieve little or nothing. You might even get failure instead of success. When people quote Murphy's Law (Whatever can go wrong will go wrong) they are actually observing the difficulties thrown up in the desire body.

It's undeniable that the desire body is too complicated to figure out mentally. If you want a new car, it would be staggering task to compute how this one desire fits into your whole history, not to mention the invisible intricacy of your karma. But we can simplify the desire body by saying that if you tell yourself "I want a new car," the desire body will route that intention along either the Yes path or the No path. Not that these paths are completely clear, either, but at the unconscious level you either deny yourself or accept yourself, and this overall self-judgment tells the major story when it comes to desire.

3. The level of collective consciousness: If your desire is allowed to go down the Yes path toward fulfillment, it heads into a subtler level of consciousness, the shared level of groups. The group can be family, community, nation, or the world. If you desire peace for the whole world, then at the collective level you are one intention among billions. If you want your parents not to get a divorce, you are one intention among only a few people.

At this level you can be blocked again. Millions of people may want Hitler to die or for a hurricane not to hit the gulf coast, yet there are larger intents at work. Some people are very sensitive to the collective level--politicians, for example, and great geniuses. A great mind can literally move all of collective consciousness, as Buddha and Christ did.

Here we also encounter myths and archetypes, which help to shape the vision and therefore the desires of a whole race or an entire epoch. But consciousness gets clearer as we approach subtler levels, so here one doesn't meet with obstacles quite so stubbornly. People you consider to be not on your side are totally allied with you at subtler levels. Also, in computing how our desire fits into the overall picture of your destiny, the decision made is totally fair. Hence we find that desire A may not come true, but it leads to an even bigger, more important desire B that does.

4. The level of pure consciousness: At this level everything is coordinated so that your desire can reach some kind of fulfillment. Here there is never an obstacle, never a no. The quantum field will move however it must to accommodate the new intention you have place in it. Naturally, if your desire hasn't made it through the other levels, not much effect will be produced. But something will happen; no desire escapes without affecting the universe.

If this is the actual chain of command for desires, improving your share of fulfillment can be improved on all four levels. There is no linear path but a nonlocal process in which everything is affected simultaneously.

Personal: Become clearer about who you are and what would make you happy. Don't follow external notions of success. Set aside labels of status, money, possessions, and social connections. Look into your psychological issues, especially the points of stress. Examine your beliefs. If a desire doesn't come true, look to yourself for the reason why, but do this without blame or judgment. Consider that you want to improve the mechanics of desire as they exist in you. Don't wish for negative things, because you will only be adding to the obstacles.

Unconscious: Here is the workshop of desire. What is most changeable in you exists at this level, where hidden things can be brought to light. Be open to whatever is happening inside you. Sincerely work on the negative or blocking energies that you find inside. These are
I don't deserve
I am afraid
I am guilty or ashamed
God doesn't care
Everything is set up against me
Nobody is paying attention
I don't matter anyway

Resolve to believe that you are responsible for what happens to you. All kinds of energy work, therapy, hypnosis, meditation, etc. are available to you, but keep in mind that if you intend to achieve clarity, there are thousands of steps in this maze of the mind. What you need to see will appear when you need to see it. Your job is to be alert to anything awareness needs to notice.

Collective: Two things help at this level: First, avoid the drag of group beliefs and don't add to group negativity. Consciousness flows wherever it is called, and if you join with the negativity of any social group, including the family, those energies will come to you. Beliefs are always on the move, attaching to one person, detaching from another.
Second, find a vision of life that inspires you and maintain contact with it. This level of awareness is alive--as are all levels of awareness--and the highest ideals you think about, talk about, and put into action have an effect here. Action in consciousness is powerful, which is why you so often read in the biographies of great men and women that they dreamed in childhood of the very deed they later accomplished. Invisible forces came to their aid, not mystically but from the level of collective need and evolution.

Pure consciousness: At this level there is no action, only being. A law of consciousness says that consciousness becomes more powerful at subtler levels, which implies that at this level, the very subtlest, all power is at your command. How can it be that doing nothing can accomplish everything? The Vedic sages asserted this truth, which must be validated personally. To do that, they pointed to the state of Samadhi, or deep consciousness in which objects and desires disappear. Samadhi isn't a void, however. It is the subjective experience of the womb of creation, a connection to the source.
The deeper your awareness, in and of itself, the more your desires will come true. Patanjali has written the textbook on this subject in the Yoga Sutras, but to simplify things, we can say that as you meditate longer and bring in more Being, the whole mechanics of desire gets clearer. In true Samadhi, where there is no gap between the person and pure consciousness, the path becomes completely pathless. In the absence of a gap, time and space have no effect; you are in a timeless, perfectly organized, universal domain that is nevertheless yourself. Desire and fulfillment are instantaneous and without obstacle.
Thus we have the map of desire given to us in Vedanta. It applies to all intentions, however small and insignificant. If you are willing to put yourself in play as the source and en-point of your desires, you will find that the map becomes more and more useful as your awareness evolves. to me, the greatest gift of this map is that it keeps me focused inward, a huge benefit in a world that is constantly dragging out attention outward.
Love,
Deepak

Posted by Deepak Chopra at 11:51 AM | Comments (54)

Climate change, soy beans, and bacon

My friend and colleague Paul Watson sent me Dr. James Lovelock’s most recent assessment of the global ecology. Fifty years ago, Lovelock designed the electron capture device that provided Rachel Carson with the data to show that DDT had contaminated bird’s eggs and mother's milk. He uncovered the effects of CFCs, alerted the planet to the hole in the ozone, discovered the exponential CO2 build-up in the atmosphere, and wrote the Gaia Hypothesis in 1978, changing the way biologists look at the natural world. Lovelock brought common decency, urgency, and good science to the discussion about our environmental future.

In his latest book, Revenge of Gaia, not yet available in North America except on-line, Lovelock suggests that the added heat absorption on earth due to melting ice and forest loss could spin the climate catastrophe out of control faster than we imagine. He points out that even if we do all the right things now, it would take the earth 1000 years to recover. He believes the northern boreal forests will dry and parish, inducing more climate warming. He suggests the equatorial zones will grow uninhabitable and surviving humans could be migrating toward the poles.

I have long felt that Paul Ehrlich and even Thomas Malthus would eventually be proven correct in their fundamental concerns regarding exponential human population growth and consumption. We might well be reminded that this is not a disaster to come; it is a disaster that is here, now, for most of the world.

About 9 million people die each year from malnutrition and dehydration. That's 25,000 per day starving and thirsting to death, most of them children, all of them poor. That's equivalent to 60-70 jumbo jets dropping out of the sky every day, killing everyone on board. Eight 9/11s. Every day. Those who claim Malthus was wrong, that there is no mass starvation, spin the belief that industrial agriculture will defeat nature and mathematics. Excuse my poor English, but the chirpy industrialists are wrong and, with each passing day, getting wronger.

In Argentina last year, I witnessed bulldozers moving like panzer divisions across the landscape, clearing and burning the forest with astounding efficiency, creating plantations for Monsanto and Cargill to grow soya feed for European and Chinese pigs. Somehow I don't believe this promises more bacon for the babies in Darfur. We watched night and day as the fires lit up the horizon, soil blew across the sky, and ash fell on our tortillas.

With the local Greenpeace team, and considerable support from celebrities and politicians, we managed to save 18,000 hectares as a homeland for the Wichi Indians, the poorest of the poor by modern economic standards, but people who actually have a sustainable civilization as long as they have a forest to live in. However, every year, in Argentina alone, over 400,000 hectares of forest disappears under the blades of bulldozers. A million acres per year literally up in smoke. This is the great plan of industrial agriculture. The share price of Monsanto is thriving.

[For readers in Canada: A documentary of our work in Argentina, and a short Greenpeace retrospective, will air on Global Television, Saturday September 23, 7PM. The film is also a tribute to our late colleague and friend Bob Hunter.]

As we wait for the frat-boy, cokehead president and his northern affairs staffer, the Canadian Prime Minister, to finally notice that hydrocarbon civilization is baking the planet, our communities dutifully send their bright-eyed boys and girls to die in the deserts and keep the oil flowing in the right direction at the right price. This is the apogee of the great democratic dream?

Still, I don't get depressed when I read predictions such as those from Lovelock. I get energized. I thank Gaia that someone has the courage to speak up. I know that those of you working in the media and in the sciences face huge challenges to get this information through the fine screen of feel-good, support-the-troops, pop journalism, and you are the earth's saints for persisting.

To future generations I want to say, "I'm sorry," but more precisely I want to say: "Not everyone bought the lie. A lot of us stood up. A lot of us dedicated our lives to averting these disasters perpetrated by greed, ignorance, and denial. Some of us passed on the first-class ride and stood our ground in the neighbourhoods, in the newsrooms, in the academic journals, in the forests, on the oceans."

I want future generations to know this: Many from our generation never sold you out. We witnessed the truth, kept our eyes open, and did our best to warn our bumbling, myopic, spin-doctored civilization.

To those of you who never give up, you are my heroes.

Rex

Posted by Rex Weyler at 09:56 AM | Comments (12)

Bon Jour Nostalgie

I walked softly,-stepping through the chambers of my heart. Blood dynamics and palpitations made my feet tremble, but I did not find whatever I was looking for. I emerged wet and red, bathed in wine. I came out of the confines of my body and

walked each one of the rooms of the house. They lied silently as in a trance, frozen in some other time of memory, telling stories of moments that left a while ago and will never come back. Museums of non important things, except for the small group of actors who enacted the most intense, lovely and deep plays within their walls and furnishings.

Nostalgia was sitting there, her long grey face of late dusk projecting a shadow of eeriness to the forgotten rooms. I walked, and looked in old chest of drawers and culverts, in all nooks and corners. I still did not find whatever it was I was looking for.

I left the house, the moments in those rooms of wonder, and looked at the world, first at all the things constructed by the engineers, then at the lengthy narrations of information about so many things that were happening or had, I looked into boxes laden with images in rapid succession, I peeked into boxes in movement and rode them to various destinations, to markets with things exchanged and coveted and displayed, to be kept in those rooms of nostalgia in some distant future. Nowhere there could I find whatever it is that I am looking for.

I moved away from the constructs and theories and pride of achievement of the world, and wandered into nature to search in the beauty and processes of evolving form. I was fascinated by color and diversity and the energy of life’s drives in every one of its bubbles, but I could not find anything there of whatever it is I am looking for. The rooms of nature were also colored by nostalgia, her grayish fingers extending to all spaces my sight would pose on.

It was you I am missing darling, I have searched for you in each one of your favorite hiding places, yet you simply have disappeared, isn’t it funny that you who are omnipresent are not present anywhere.

I sat and decided to enjoy your latest gift of feeling and opened a bottle of wine and invited nostalgia to join in. We sat and remembered her bygones and enjoyed and relished each of the moments passed in each of the rooms of had been, and music of certain sadness, sweet with a hint of joy, started to be heard as I surrendered to her grey long-fingered embraces.

Then I knew it! There you were again, source of all mischief, soul-terrorist, lover. There were you all the time pretending, hiding in the memories of time, you who have neither past nor future. How could you?

And we laughed and embraced ever so subtly, as you were still playing the mellow role, all your passion now modulated by that savoring of yester moments.

Hand in hand, we walked quietly, complete, as the last vestiges of light disappeared and we were welcomed by the moon smiling in soft tones, bathing your visage with a mystery and a glow, as we walked in your Silence.

Posted by Arsenio Rodriguez at 05:02 AM | Comments (21)

5 Years Post 9/11 -- Schizmogenesis: Asymmetry

We are grateful to Dr Charles Hampden-Turner for his deeper analysis of 9/11 effects with a new addition today as Post #19. Our thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims of 9/11 and subsequent tragedies across the globe and also with the innocent victims of the subsequent War on Terror.

9/11 Tribute, New York

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.]

Our thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims of 9/11 and subsequent tragedies across the globe and also with the innocent victims of the subsequent War on Terror. We are grateful to Dr Charles Hampden-Turner for his submission to ATCA, 5 years post 9/11 -- Schizmogenesis: Towards a Development in the Concept of Asymmetry.

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.

Dr Charles Hampden-Turner

Dear DK and Colleagues

Re: 5 years post 9/11 -- Schizmogenesis: Towards a Development in the Concept of Asymmetry

I began receiving ATCA Socratic Dialogues only a few weeks ago, for which I am grateful, and since then, I have been trying to tease out the concept of asymmetry. What follows are my own reflections on the topic 5 years post 9/11.

One characteristic of asymmetry is a relentless ambiguity. We are used to murderers and to the suicidal, but suicidal murderers are perplexing. What happens to "deterrence"? This new challenge seems to "spook" us and we are not far from collective hysteria. We outgun our opponents by at least a hundred to one and yet we are afraid! My mentor was the social anthropologist Gregory Bateson. He coined a word which never even got into a social science dictionary, much less a general dictionary. He described the progressive splitting of ideas in a culture as Schizmogenesis. He wrote a prophetic essay on German fascism in 1937 in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a book still in print today. German culture was characterised by nationalism and socialism, draconian discipline and wild disorder, huge physical courage combined with existential cowardice, love of insiders and an all-consuming hatred of outsiders. And these values formed vicious circles, biting each other like Uroboros, yet escalating in intensity.

I find the concept almost impossible to convey in writing, yet a few moments with a movie camera says it all. You cut from goose-stepping soldiers to Krystal Nacht and flaming torches, "better a terrible end than an endless terror" as the brownshirts liked to say.

Or look at the last ten minutes of The Godfather. They have chosen to massacre the rival Mafia family at the least likely moment, during the christening of their own child. The camera cuts from the christening service to the massacre, from the Sacred to the Profane, from life beginning to life ending, as a married couple are machine-gunned in their bed, from total Innocence to utter Malice. In the film, religion is used as the cloak for murder, much as the Ku Klux Klan set fire to a cross, the symbol of compassion ablaze with race hate.

These are, of course, deliberate assaults on the human nervous system. But some of our asymmetries occur without our intending this. Take the Vietnam War and the much publicised "body count" which showed that America was "winning". Surely if we kill many more of them than they of us we win, right? 2 million Vietnamese lost their lives, very asymmetrical, much as the ratio of Lebanese deaths to Israelis today. That is why the Americans and Israelis persist with such vehemence. Soon now the enemy will break and our harsh necessity will be vindicated. We can forgive ourselves. But unfortunately the Vietcong and Hezbollah believed they were winning and perhaps they were, because each side was counting different "gains".

Every time the Americans won their lopsided victories in Vietnam they were killing more enemies but causing thousands to defect to the enemy's side. Remember France's "victory" in Algiers. It broke the FLN through a regime of torture, a great silence fell and then the entire population burst into the streets acclaiming the "losers". One can win militarily even as one is losing politically and ideologically.

Let us for the moment try to identify with the luckless civilian population during these brutal wars. Let us suppose that they heartily detest both sides, which seems to me likely. But they cannot stay neutral. For the sake of survival they must join one side or the other. Which side will they choose? They will choose the side that best knows who they are. They have a good chance of saving their life if they join the Vietcong or Hezbollah because their allegiance can be read after a fashion. Also the resistance can help them dig a shelter, share their food, while Americans may tend to distrust all "gooks" even those formally allied to them. They rain defoliants impartially on everyone and "destroy the village in order to save it", the "pitiful, helpless giant in a quagmire."

One major complaint against terrorists is their tactic of indiscriminate savagery. They blow up innocent Australian tourists in Bali and kill ordinary Spanish commuters. But if the terrorists are genuinely less discriminating than we are then take heart, we will win in the end. The Algerian population turned against the Islamists after a particularly grisly series of massacres. My question is whether on most occasions we discriminate even more poorly than they do, notwithstanding "smart" bombs which may be able to take out a particular house but have no idea who else is sheltering there. "Smart" bombs are socially quite dumb. The chance of being killed accidentally by Americans is very high indeed. If you emerge from a side street in Baghdad within 25 feet of an American vehicle you can expect to be machine gunned whatever were your real intentions.

It is time we took a hard look at "terror". What is "shock and awe" if not terrifying and intended to terrify? Let us suppose that everyone suffers moments of terror before they die violently. If we routinely kill ten of them for every one of us then who is the chief instigator of terror? Can we only "defeat terror" by creating more of it than they do! The War on Terror makes no sense at all if we ourselves become the source. The only real "weapons of mass destruction" were our own.

The West uses a Rational Model which makes eminent sense to us but for our opponents is the mark of Satan. We reason that people do not want to die and can always use money. So we develop the capacity to kill all Iranians around fifty times over and offer HUGE bribes of USD 25 million for anyone who will betray their leaders to us. It makes good sense doesn't it? Americans have always had bounty hunters. But when you concentrate on over-kill in the way we have, do not be surprised when the answer comes back, "but we are not afraid to die." It is the only possible answer to the level of threat we have prepared and refuse to relinquish. As for offering USD 25 million to betray your leaders, it amazing what few takers there are! Perhaps "money makes the world go around" not as perfectly as we imagine. In the meantime they see us as subverting their faith, which in a sense we are.

What is starting to happen is that our opponents are deliberately presenting us with dilemmas and these unhinge us. Imagine a good looking young woman approaching a group of Americans with a bunch of flowers. How sweet! How charming! Now suppose that just 5% of those bunches have a bomb inside them and you want to go home again. A lot of innocent young women are going to die who only wanted to greet you! You cannot just arrest her, she will detonate the charge as you try. De Mendez could be just the beginning. The present crisis will demand the sacrifice of our values upon the altar of security.

We have to drop this pretence that we are "too moral" to be able to talk to extremists and that any concession we make is appeasement, We disagree. We both draw on the weapons we have at hand, Our weapons, launched from far away to save casualties, are generally less accurate then theirs and cause more "collateral damage". That we were not aiming for women and children is no excuse. You cannot build and run an Empire without being a more effective killer than your subject peoples. Is it not time we faced up to this?

Best wishes

Charles Hampden-Turner

[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)
____________________________________________________________________________

Posted by ATCA at 12:58 AM | Comments (37)

September 10, 2006

Rooms within rooms

It started with rooms looking kind of strange. Walls were wobbly and translucent. I had a sense of not belonging gnawing at the core of my awareness, and it made me wonder why was I aiming to go here and there, and what was the true nature of my pursuits.

Flashes of moments unfolded instantly, like accelerated playbacks of rose blooms, a procession of relationships in clips of fast memory agglomerated at the gates of the conscious, as I searched for the definition of me, in the midst of that sensation of not belonging, provoked by the meltdown of the surrounding room walls.

Where do I start to tell you about the integrated result of all this momentum of life lived? Of this constant yearning, of the million faces that have peeked into my own, exchanging glances and recognition, defining me? I am still a child, still wide eyed and amazed at the world-toys that surround me. I am a sensuous woman, provocatively walking with hips swaying in invitational rhythms, and I am the man in fire and desire, anxious to rest and act in her arms and body, this sacred impulse of completion, I am a mind intrigued by the logic of the assemblage of thought and nature, but also a subtle heart that can’t forget the caresses of old hands of mother, nor the embraces of God given by the most humble.

No wonder I am woozy today, as the solid walls of all these rooms become permeable and translucent, and all these roles and faces mingle and party in loud voices. I lose my concentration, and forget the latest instructions of convention. Instead of getting dressed to go, I disrobe seeking to be naked. The man-body resulting is affected by this translucence; its solidity dissolves.

I am so naked now that I do not know my gender.

The sandy shores of femininity, tenderness and beauty are painted in the contours of my being, while waves of ocean masculine, creative, passionately embrace them. I am feeling kisses from both sides now.

I decide not to go into the world today, in this all-naked state, as others might not understand. I just let go and allow the kissing to continue, it swoons my vision and translucence transforms into transparency. The seer is no longer peeking out through the eye-periscopes, another vision sense has opened.

Substance becomes insubstantial, mass just empty force fields between atoms and inside atoms pretending solidity. Energy eyes open, all a continuum of light, an ocean of luminosity. Every thought, every form, is now dissolved, and only oneness, a non-ending pulsating oneness Is.

After eternity the room walls come back to form, lovers are split again, gender defined. I dress with all these layers of me that meet decorum’s exigencies. I look into the mirror and recognize that aging familiar form that has been accompanying this sense of being. Reflected on the screen of my consciousness is the script written in my mind, the character that needs to be played.

In a deeper layer, I glimpse at imprinted feelings of sublime that I have now stored in a secret room, that shine when opened, from where a guiding subdued light inspires my performance even when the door is closed.

I feel within, a presence deeper than me, a quiet formless, wordless, thoughtless, silence that hums a constant silent hum, which I hear when my noises stop. A Silence so real that it rests and sources every word and movement.

I walk out on stage to play my role uncompromisingly.

Posted by Arsenio Rodriguez at 08:25 AM | Comments (10)

Dalai Lama -- World Peace begins with Inner Peace

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, His Holiness the XIV (14th) Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan people, and an occasional ATCA Contributor, joined scientists -- including Dr Deepak Chopra and Prof Allan Young -- on Saturday in Vancouver, Canada, to discuss how stress can affect health.

His Holiness The Dalai Lama

Dear ATCA Colleagues; dear IntentBloggers

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, His Holiness the XIV (14th) Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan people, and an occasional ATCA Contributor, joined scientists on Saturday in Vancouver, Canada, to discuss how stress can affect health.

The 71-year-old monk, clad in traditional robes, answered questions from three prominent scientists who work in fields related to mental health. The Dalai Lama journeyed to Vancouver over the weekend to open a new centre for peace and education and wrapped up his visit Saturday night before a crowd of 14,000 people at GM Place.

Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan and Canadian Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Monte Solberg presented The Dalai Lama with the honorary Canadian citizenship that Parliament unanimously decided to award him earlier this year. It was only the third time the honour has been granted. South African leader Nelson Mandela and Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved Jews from extermination during the Second World War, have both received the honour. "Your Holiness, if you know anything at all about our Parliament, you will know that we never agree on anything, let alone unanimously," said Mr Solberg. "Clearly you really have had the ability to bring people together."

The honorary citizenship drew strong opposition from China, which warned the gesture could harm relations. The Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) said Canada recognises China as the legitimate government of both China and Tibet, but has great respect for His Holiness The Dalai Lama. His Holiness fled into exile in northern India in 1959, following a failed uprising against Chinese rule, but is still widely revered in Tibet and across many parts of the world.

Among the three experts on the panel with His Holiness was the medicine and health scientist, Dr Deepak Chopra, also an ATCA Contributor, who noted that rising violence and terrorist attacks are increasing the world's yearning for peace. The Dalai Lama replied that early stress in life from poverty or abuse leads to negative emotions such as fear, jealousy and anger which turn into violence. Essentially, the Dalai Lama believes world peace begins with inner peace, tolerance and compassion. He said that once people develop compassion -- mercy and forgiveness -- more meaningful dialogue can take place which will ultimately lead to a less violent world.

Dr Deepak Chopra

"In order to understand meaningful dialogue first you must understand others' interests and you must respect them as your brothers and sisters and also consider them as a part of yourself," His Holiness said. He said people could look to the example of a nurturing mother to understand true compassion.

At one point Dr Deepak Chopra, who studies the mind-body connection in relation to good health extensively, asked The Dalai Lama if world peace would come about if society elevated the profession of motherhood. The Dalai Lama chuckled, scratched his head and said, "Yes that's good...The long term is the answer to deal with violence motivated by anger and fear, so we must have compassion to create more humanity."

His Holiness said he believed even a child who had suffered abuse could be healed by learning how to change his or her perspective from a negative one to a positive one. "Make the effort. Work hard. Be united. I think you should know you have a responsibility to work together," he told a packed audience at Vancouver's Orpheum Theatre.

Prof Allan Young

Psychiatrist Prof Allan Young, who holds the leadership Chair in Depression Research and is the Associate Director at the Institute of Mental Health at the University of British Columbia, asked the Dalai Lama for his thoughts on the parallels between compassion and mental ill health. He wanted to know why it seems people have less compassion for people with mental disorders than for those with physical ones. "It would be a scandal if someone had to sleep in the street with cancer but why is it not for someone who has schizophrenia?" asked Prof Young. "I don't know." said the Dalai Lama, noting that the new centre for peace and education would be a good place to conduct more research on why people fall ill from depression with seemingly little reason.

After the honorary citizenship ceremony, the floor was handed over to the Dalai Lama, who spoke about how to cultivate happiness. "I feel for a successful and happy life much of it depends on our mental outlook," His Holiness said, as he sat cross-legged on a couch onstage. "The money, power or even health, I think is secondary. If mental state is calm, at peace, then you really enjoy your life."

The Dalai Lama's thoughtful observations are particularly relevant given ATCA's concentration on opportunities and threats arising from climate chaos, radical poverty, organised crime, extremism, informatics, nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, artificial intelligence and financial systems. All of the 10 complex global challenges of the 21st century identified by ATCA, depend on the trio of "Compassion, Calmness and Peace" to begin to resolve some of the seemingly intractable yet interlinked confrontations with the appropriate universal values. As those inherent confrontations accelerate and feed off each other's momentum they possess the capability to damage and to disrupt the delicate global dynamic equilibrium. Faced with this unpalatable prospect for humanity in the coming two to three decades or less, it is necessary to rethink strategically because geo-politics coupled with short term unsustainable demand for resources has indeed brought humanity to its crossroads, yet again.

Background

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, His Holiness the XIV (14th) Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan people. Born to an ordinary family, His Holiness was recognized at the age of two, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the reincarnation of his predecessor the 13th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas are the manifestations of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, who chose to reincarnate to serve the people. Dalai Lama means Ocean of Wisdom. Tibetans normally refer to His Holiness as Yeshin Norbu, the Wish-fulfilling Gem, or simply, Kundun, meaning The Presence. He began his education at the age of six and completed the Geshe Lharampa Degree (Doctorate of Buddhist Philosophy) when he was 25.

In 1950, at 16, His Holiness was called upon to assume full political power as Head of State and Government when Tibet was threatened by the might of China. In 1954 he went to Beijing to talk with Mao Zhe Dong and other Chinese leaders, including Chou En-Lai and Deng Xiaoping. In 1956, while visiting India to attend the 2,500th Buddha Jayanti, he had a series of meetings with Prime Minister Nehru and Premier Chou about deteriorating conditions in Tibet. In 1959 he was forced into exile in India after the Chinese military occupation of Tibet. Since 1960 he has resided in Dharamsala, aptly known as "Little Lhasa", the seat of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. In the early years of exile, His Holiness appealed to the United Nations on the question of Tibet, resulting in three resolutions adopted by the General Assembly in 1959, 1961 and 1965. In 1963, His Holiness promulgated a draft constitution for Tibet which assures a democratic form of government. In the last four decades, His Holiness has set up educational, cultural and religious institutions which have made major contributions towards the preservation of the Tibetan identity and its rich heritage.

Unlike his predecessors, His Holiness -- forced into exile in 1959 whilst in India -- has met and talked with many Westerners and has visited most major countries in North & South America, Europe and Asia. He has met with religious leaders from all those countries. His Holiness met with the late Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in 1973, and with His Holiness Pope John Paul II in 1980, 1982, 1986 and 1988. At a press conference in Rome, His Holiness the Dalai Lama outlined his hopes for the meeting with John Paul II: "We live in a period of great crisis, a period of troubling world developments. It is not possible to find peace in the soul without security and harmony between the people. For this reason, I look forward with faith and hope to my meeting with the Holy Father; to an exchange of ideas and feelings, and to his suggestions, so as to open the door to a progressive pacification between people."

In 1981, His Holiness talked with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, and with other leaders of the Anglican Church in London. He also met with leaders of the Roman Catholic and Jewish communities and spoke at an interfaith service in his honour by the World Congress of Faiths. His talk focused on the commonality of faiths and the need for unity among different religions: "I always believe that it is much better to have a variety of religions, a variety of philosophies, rather than one single religion or philosophy. This is necessary because of the different mental dispositions of each human being. Each religion has certain unique ideas or techniques, and learning about them can only enrich one's own faith."

[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)
____________________________________________________________________________

Posted by ATCA at 12:55 AM | Comments (27)

September 09, 2006

Weekly Intent - Navin Bajaj

Navin Bajaj

Blasphemy.

For definitions and various interpretations of this word, pls go here: http://www.answers.com/topic/blasphemy

While the most common and widely accepted definitions of blasphemy are
1. A contemptuous or profane act, utterance, or writing concerning God or a sacred entity.
2. The act of claiming for oneself the attributes and rights of God;

the meaning of this word would change with the change in geographical location, religious setting and the era in which you live. Blasphemy is open to individual interpretation. It depends on what *your* religious beliefs are. Yet the Blasphemy laws of some established religions are harsh to the point that you could be killed for expressing your disagreement with their beliefs. Remember the fatwa on Salman Rushdie?

What good is a God who'd get affected by a few profane words? I would say a true God would love to give us the freedom to be blasphemous. Was I blasphemous when I chanted Allahu-Akbar in a recent blog of my friend, Rahul P, inspite of being a Hindu? Would a Muslim become blasphemous if s/he chanted Jai Mata Di? Some fellow bloggers wanted me to elaborate on my spontaneous comment in that blog, hence I'm writing this piece.

I have always believed that there could be as many paths to reach the Almighty (or Truth, if u prefer that word) as there are people in this world. Why follow somebody else's path? Why restrict yourself to organised religions like Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, Jainism, Shinto etc. I would say that a religious revolution is currently underway in this world where more and more people are shunning organised religion and becoming spiritual. So much so, that a new option has appeared while filling up various forms in the field which asks for your religion. It is: "Spiritual, not religious".

The world is also seeing contentious issues dragged from decades and decades like the Kashmir issue, Israel-Palestine etc. Most of the disharmony arises due to claims over land. But I can tell you this today that these disputes will become redundant with the rise of a New Borderless World within the next fifty years or so. Countries will be reduced to administrative blocs. You can consider this an astrological prediction too. Would it be a blasphemy if I call for a pooling in of all the Earth's resources (both natural & man-made) in one Unified World account and re-distributing it equitably among all it's inhabitants? I think such a move can wipe out poverty and inequality from this planet for a very long time. There is enough for eveyone's need but not enough for everyone's greed.... said Gandhi. The world needs a fresh start.

All great truths begin as blasphemies..........George Bernard Shaw

I am posting below poetry by Bulleh Shah. To me, it is the best Sufiana Punjabi poetry ever written. You could also listen to a contemporary rendition of these couplets in a song by Rabbi Shergill.

Na main momin vich maseet aan
Na main vich kufar diyan reet aan
Na main paakaan vich paleet aan
Na main moosa na pharaun.

Bulla! ki jaana main kaun

Na main andar ved kitaab aan,
Na vich bhangaan na sharaab aan
Na vich rindaan masat kharaab aan
Na vich jaagan na vich saun.

Bulla! ki jaana main kaun.

Na vich shaadi na ghamnaaki
Na main vich paleeti paaki
Na main aabi na main khaki
Na main aatish na main paun

Bulla!, ki jaana main kaun

Na main arabi na lahori
Na main hindi shehar nagauri
Na hindu na turak peshawri
Na main rehnda vich nadaun

Bulla, ki jaana main kaun

Na main bhed mazhab da paaya
Ne main aadam havva jaaya
Na main apna naam dharaaya
Na vich baitthan na vich bhaun

Bulla , ki jaana main kaun

Avval aakhir aap nu jaana
Na koi dooja hor pehchaana
Maithon hor na koi siyaana
Bulla! ooh khadda hai kaun

Bulla, ki jaana main kaun

Not a believer inside the mosque, am I
Nor a pagan disciple of false rites
Not the pure amongst the impure
Neither Moses, nor the Pharoh

Bulla! to me, I am not known

Not in the holy Vedas, am I
Nor in opium, neither in wine
Not in the drunkard`s intoxicated craze
Niether awake, nor in a sleeping daze

Bulla! to me, I am not known

In happiness nor in sorrow, am I
Neither clean, nor a filthy mire
Not from water, nor from earth
Neither fire, nor from air, is my birth

Bulla! to me, I am not known

Not an Arab, nor Lahori
Neither Hindi, nor Nagauri
Hindu, Turk (Muslim), nor Peshawari
Nor do I live in Nadaun

Bulla! to me, I am not known

Secrets of religion, I have not known
From Adam and Eve, I am not born
I am not the name I assume
Not in stillness, nor on the move

Bulla! to me, I am not known

I am the first, I am the last
None other, have I ever known
I am the wisest of them all
Bulla! do I stand alone?

Bulla! to me, I am not known

Cheers!
Navin

http://navinsuperstar.blogspot.com

Invitation by Admin: The above entry was Navin's second contribution for Weekly Intent. If you want your voice to be heard on this platform and would like to write for weekly intent, send us a mail on intentblog (at) gmail.com and we can feature you here. Thank You.

Posted by Intent at 09:18 AM | Comments (57)

Dr M Kiernan -- CARBON DISCLOSURE PROJECT

The last thirty days have been busy ones indeed for the climate chaos file. First, UK Prime Minister Blair and California Governor Schwarzenegger announced an ambitious trans-Atlantic collaboration on countering climate chaos. Next,

the State of California has passed landmark legislation to bring UK-style carbon regulation a giant step closer to reality in America. Next up will be the international launches of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) beginning with New York City on September 18th.

Climate Chaos

Dear ATCA Colleagues; dear IntentBloggers

Dr Matthew Kiernan with UK Foreign Secretary The Rt Hon Margaret Beckett

Dear DK and Colleagues

Re: CARBON DISCLOSURE PROJECT: More Action on the Climate Chaos Front

The last thirty days have been busy ones indeed for the climate chaos file. First, UK Prime Minister Blair and California Governor Schwarzenegger announced an ambitious trans-Atlantic collaboration on countering climate chaos that neatly bypassed (and, of course, in so doing, highlighted) US federal intransigence and immobilisation on the topic.

Next, the State of California has passed landmark legislation to bring UK-style carbon regulation a giant step closer to reality in America. Next up will be the international launches of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). The first will occur on September 18th in New York City, with others are to follow in London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Paris, and elsewhere. Former US Vice-President, Al Gore, will be headlining the New York launch. ( ATCA members are encouraged to visit the CDP website, at

Now in its fourth year, the CDP is arguably the largest collaboration among institutional investors in history. This year's CDP unites 225 institutional investors, with a staggering USD 30 trillion in combined assets either owned or under management. As in previous years, the group has written to the Chief Executives of the FT Global 500 -- the 500 largest publicly-traded companies in the world -- asking them some pointed questions about their responses (or lack thereof) to the climate problematic.

This year's "information request" had the greatest gravitas to date, with a seven-fold increase in shareholder assets behind the questions relative to the project's first year. The results, as always, were illuminating. Among the Report's most salient findings:

. Climate risk potentially impacts a much broader range of industry sectors than generally acknowledged;
. The variability of climate risk is considerable, both between and even within industry sectors;
. Contrary to widespread opinion, climate chaos can also bring significant economic opportunities and benefits, including accelerating energy efficiency and the commercialisation of "clean" technologies;
. Accordingly, climate risk has three dimensions, not just one. In addition to the potential level of risk, investors need to consider two further factors: companies' ability to manage that risk, and their ability to recognize and seize commercial opportunities on the upside;
. For some, well-positioned firms, carbon regulations could actually be financially beneficial; and
. While investors as a group are now far more aware of climate chaos, very few have to date acted on that awareness by integrating climate risk into their day-to-day investment decisions.

This last point is especially critical, but fortunately it is likely to be significantly less true even ninety days from now than it is today. Behind the scenes, some substantial commitments are currently being made by blue-chip institutions to innovative new investment strategies which explicitly factor in climate risk.

As I have previously argued to ATCA colleagues and others, once the major purveyors of the "financial oxygen supply" of major transnational companies (ie, their institutional owners) begin allocating their investment capital in a different, climate-conscious way, the companies will inevitably change their attitudes, strategies, and behaviour -- all for the better.

With best regards

Matthew Kiernan

[ENDS]

Dr Matthew Kiernan is Founder and Chief Executive of Innovest Strategic Value Advisors Inc, an environmental investment research firm based in New York, Toronto and London. Innovest's clients include a number of Fortune 100 companies, as well as several of America's largest institutional investors. Dr Kiernan had previously co-founded a strategy consulting company which he later sold to KPMG Peat Marwick, one of the largest business consultancies in the world, where he then served as a senior partner. Previously, he was Director of The Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD), a Geneva-based group including the CEOs of such leading industrial companies as DuPont, Volkswagen, Royal/Dutch Shell, Asea Brown Boveri and Mitsubishi. The BCSD -- now the WBCSD -- served as the Principal Business and Industry Advisor to the Secretary General of the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (1992) and Dr Kiernan directed the group's Capital Markets Task Force. He has also lectured on environmental finance in senior executive programs at the Wharton School, Columbia Business School, and Oxford University. He holds advanced degrees in political science and environmental studies, as well as a PhD in strategic environmental management from the University of London. His recent publications on environmental factors in global competitive strategy appear in a number of leading business journals, and his new book, The 11 Commandments of 21st Century Management, is published by Simon & Schuster and has been translated into six languages.

Please note: Dr Kiernan's firm, Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, has conducted the research and analysis for the CDP in each of its four years to date.

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)
____________________________________________________________________________

Posted by ATCA at 09:00 AM | Comments (4)

Men Smarter than Women?

so says this

study! My question is-in your personal experience, is it true in day to day life, be it academics, relationships or problem solving? Would love to hear from every one.

Read on..
This was in today's Times of India

"HOUSTON: Women all over may not like it but it has been proved that men are smarter than women.

A study of 100,000 17- to 18-year-olds on the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) published in the September 2006 issue of the journal Intelligence, has confirmed a surprising new finding-that men have a 4 to 5-point IQ advantage over women by adulthood.

Because girls mature faster than boys, the sex difference is masked during the school years, which explains why the sex difference was missed for 100 years.

The new study, based upon an analysis of SAT scores that correlates to IQ, appears to confirm the similar earlier research, using a different methodology, that concluded adult men have IQs 3.3 to 5 points higher than women.

It also found that the g factor--the general factor of mental ability underlay both the SAT Verbal (SAT-V) and the SAT Mathematics (SAT-M) scales with the congruence between these components greater than 0.90, and that it was the g factor that predicted student grades better than the traditionally used SAT-V and SAT-M scales.

The male and the female g factors were congruent in excess of .99, and they favoured males to an equivalent of 3.63 IQ points.

The male-female differences were present at every socioeconomic level, and across several ethnic groups.

The average male advantage was found "throughout the entire distribution of scores, in every level of family income, for every level of fathers' and of mothers' education, and for each and every one of seven ethnic groups," said J Philippe Rushton, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, one of the authors of the study.

The paper's results dovetail with those from several other recently published studies showing that men--surprisingly--have a 4 to 5 IQ point advantage over women by late adolescence and early adulthood. Before that age the two sexes are equal in general intelligence.

As such, the findings overturn a 100 year consensus that men and women average the same in general mental ability.

Because girls mature faster than boys, the sex difference is masked during the school years. Since almost all the data showing an absence of sex differences were gathered on school children, this might explain why the sex difference was missed for so long.

For decades, however, psychologists have accepted that men and women differ in their test "profiles," with males averaging higher on tests of "spatial ability" and females higher on tests of "verbal ability." These differences were assumed to average out.

The authors of the study, psychologists Douglas N Jackson and J Philippe Rushton at the University of Western Ontario, conducted the study because two recent sets of observations had raised anew the question of sex differences in general intelligence.

The first was that the general factor of mental ability--g--was found to permeate all tests to a greater or lesser extent. Thus, a "spatial" test may be relatively high on g (mental rotation) or low (perceptual speed), a "verbal" test may be relatively high (reasoning) or low (fluency), as may a "memory" test be high (repeating a series in reverse order) or low (repeating a series in presented order).

More than any other factor, the test's g loading best determines a test's power to predict academic achievement, creativity, career potential, and job performance. Hence, the question of sex differences became formulated more precisely as: "Are there sex differences on the g factor?"

Another set of observations concerned the sex difference found in brain size and the relation between brain size and cognitive ability. Studies published in 1992 at the University of Western Ontario by zoologist C Davison Ankney, and also by psychologist Rushton, showed men average a 100-gram advantage over women in brain weight (and volume).

Earlier, a study of 1,261 adults, published in 1992 by zoologist C Davison Ankney, found that men's brains were about 8 percent heavier than those of women.

A 1997 study in Denmark documented that men have about 15 per cent more neurons -- the functional unit of the brain -- than women.

Posted by Kavita Chhibber at 06:15 AM | Comments (43)

September 08, 2006

Greenpeace and Dave Stewart Celebrate Their Birthdays!

Live webcast in the studio with Dave Stewart

In honor of the 35th anniversary of Greenpeace’s founding, musician and producer Dave Stewart (Eurythmics) announces the launch of a new song which will be recorded on September 9th at a recording session featuring a wide array of current & legendary musicians & celebrities.

The track will be co-produced by Grammy award winning producers Stewart and Glen Ballard. The event also coincides with Stewart’s birthday, who will host the green carpet reception and recording session at the legendary SIR recording studios in Hollywood

Greenpeace began in September 1971 when a small group of committed activists set sail from Amchitka Island, Alaska in order to bear witness to a U.S. nuclear test at sea. This tradition of exposing the grave threats facing our planets and the use of creative confrontation and nonviolent protest continues in the Greenpeace of today. “This song is my way of giving back to those who take a stand for our future,” said Dave Stewart. “The people coming together for this song want to gather to thank Greenpeace for their work over the past thirty-five years, and take part in an effort to raise awareness of the threats our planet faces, and Greenpeace’s ability to address them.”

The finished song will be released as a music video available for download from Greenpeace.

Posted by Dave Stewart at 11:29 PM | Comments (3)

The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tsu -- Towards Taoism

Amongst the Great Spiritual Masters espousing the "Path of the Saints", the name of Lao Tsu from China, often comes up. He is as much a legend as their Holinesses: Socrates and Pythagoras from Greece, Jesus Christ from Jerusalem, Rumi and Hafez from Persia, and Kabir and Kirpal from India.

The philosophy of Taoism really begins with Lao Tsu (or 'Old Sage') who lived in the 6th century BC. According to legend, Lao Tsu was the keeper of the archives at the Imperial Court. When he was eighty years old he set out for the western border of China, towards what is now Tibet, saddened and disillusioned that men were unwilling to follow the path to natural goodness. At the border (Hank Pass), a guard, Yin Xi, asked Lao Tsu to record his teachings before he left. He then composed in 5,000 characters the Tao Te Ching (The Way and Its Power).

Per the teachings of Lao Tsu, the central vehicle of achieving tranquillity is the Tao, a term which has been translated as 'the way' or 'the path.' Te in this context refers to virtue and Ching refers to laws. Thus the Tao Te Ching can also be translated as The Laws of Virtue and their Way.

The Taoist philosophy can perhaps best be summed up in a quote from Chuang Tsu: "To regard the fundamental as the essence, to regard things as coarse, to regard accumulation as deficiency, and to dwell quietly alone with the spiritual and the wise -- herein lie the techniques of the Tao of the ancients."

A few of the teachings of Lao Tsu presented below are drawn from an interpolation of the translations of: Lin Yutang, Ch'u Ta-Kao, Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English, Richard Wilhelm and Aleister Crowley. This amalgamation was done by Peter Merel, to whom we are grateful.

With love and warm well wishes to all

Yours ever

DK Matai
The Philanthropia, ATCA, mi2g.net

1. Tao

The Tao that can be known is not Tao.
The substance of the World is only a name for Tao.
Tao is all that exists and may exist;

The World is only a map of what exists and may exist.
One experiences without Self to sense the World,
And experiences with Self to understand the World.
The two experiences are the same within Tao;
They are distinct only within the World.
Neither experience conveys Tao
Which is infinitely greater and more subtle than the World.

2. Qualities

When Beauty is recognised in the World
Ugliness has been learned;
When Good is recognised in the World
Evil has been learned.
In this way:
Alive and dead are abstracted from growth;
Difficult and easy are abstracted from progress;
Far and near are abstracted from position;
Strong and weak are abstracted from control;
Song and speech are abstracted from harmony;
After and before are abstracted from sequence.

The sage controls without authority,
And teaches without words;
He lets all things rise and fall,
Nurtures, but does not interfere,
Gives without demanding,
And is content.

4. Properties of Tao

Tao is a depthless vessel;
Used by the Self, it is not filled by the World;
It cannot be cut, knotted, dimmed or stilled;
Its depths are hidden, ubiquitous and eternal;
I don't know where it came from;
It came before Nature.

5. Nature

Nature is not kind;
It treats all things impartially.
The Sage is not kind,
And treats all people impartially.
Nature is like a bellows
Empty, yet supplying all needs,
The more it moves, the more it yields;
The sage draws upon Tao in the same way
And can not be exhausted.

7. Self

Nature is everlasting because it does not have a Self.
In this way the sage:
Serves his Self last and finds it served first;
Sees his body as accidental and finds it endures.
Because he does not serve his Self, he is content.

9. Hubris

Stretch a bow to its limit and it is soon broken;
Temper a blade to its sharpest and it is soon blunted;
Amass the greatest treasure and it is soon stolen;
Claim credit and honour and you will soon fall;
Retire once your purpose is achieved - this is the way of Nature.

10. Love

Embracing Tao, you become embraced.
Supple, breathing gently, you become reborn.
Clearing your vision, you become clear.
Nurturing your beloved, you become impartial.
Opening your heart, you become accepted.
Accepting the World, you embrace Tao.
Bearing and nurturing,
Creating but not owning,
Giving without demanding,
Controlling without authority,
This is love.

12. Distraction

Too much colour blinds the eye
Too much tone deafens the ear
Too much taste dulls the palate
Too much play maddens the mind
Too much desire tears the heart.
The sage provides for the belly, not for the senses;
He lets go of sensation and accepts substance.

14. The Continuity of Tao

Looked at but cannot be seen - it is beyond form;
Listened to but cannot be heard - it is beyond sound;
Grasped at but cannot be touched - it is beyond reach;
These depthless things evade definition,
And blend into a single mystery.
In its rising there is no light,
In its falling there is no darkness,
A continuous thread beyond description,
Lining what can not exist,
Its form formless,
Its image nothing,
Its name mystery,
Meet it, it has no face,
Follow it, it has no back.
Understand the past, but attend the present;
In this way you know the continuity of Tao,
Which is its essence.

16. Transcending Nature

Empty the Self completely;
Embrace perfect peace.
The World will rise and move;
Watch it return to rest.
All the flourishing things
Will return to their source.
This return is peaceful;
It is the way of Nature,
An eternal decay and renewal.
Understanding this brings enlightenment,
Ignorance of this brings misery.
Who understands Nature's way becomes all-cherishing;
Being all-cherishing he becomes impartial;
Being impartial he becomes magnanimous;
Being magnanimous he becomes part of Nature;
Being part of Nature he becomes one with Tao;
Being one with Tao he becomes immortal:
Though his body will decay, Tao will not.

17. Rulers

The best rulers are scarcely known by their subjects;
The next best are loved and praised;
The next are feared;
The next despised:
They have no faith in their subjects,
So their subjects become unfaithful to them.
When the best rulers achieve their purpose
Their subjects claim the achievement as their own.

19. Simplicity

If we could discard wisdom and sagacity
Then people would profit a hundredfold;
If we could discard duty and justice
Then loving relationships would form;
If we could discard artifice and profit
Then corruption and theft would disappear -
Yet such remedies treat only symptoms
And so they are inadequate.
People need personal remedies:
Reveal your naked Self,
Embrace your original nature,
Bind your self-interest,
Control your desire.

25. Four Infinities

Before the World exists
There is mystery:
Silent, depthless,
Alone, unchanging,
Ubiquitous and ever moving,
The mother of the World.
I do not know its name, so I call it Tao;
I do not know its limit, so I call it infinite.
Being infinite, it flows away forever
Flowing away forever, it returns to the Self.
The Self follows the way of the World;
The World follows the way of Nature;
Nature follows the way of Tao;
Tao is the way.
Tao is infinite,
Therefore Nature is infinite,
Therefore the World is infinite,
Therefore the Self is infinite.
There are four infinities,
And the Self is one of them.

28. Being the Female

Knowing the male, being the female,
Being the course through which flows the World,
One embraces unfailing Love
And is again as a newborn.
Knowing the light, being the dark,
Being the World,
One becomes unerring Love
And returns to Tao.
Knowing honour, being humble,
Being the valley of the World,
Love suffices,
And one is as unshaped wood.

When wood is shaped it becomes tools.
Used by the sage, tools become powerful;
So a good carpenter wastes little.

29. Blindness

Those who wish to change the World
According with their desire
Cannot succeed.

The World is shaped by Tao;
It cannot be shaped by Self.
If one tries to shape it, one damages it;
If one tries to possess it, one loses it.

Therefore:

Sometimes things flourish,
And sometimes they do not.
Sometimes life is hard
And sometimes it is easy.
Sometimes people are strong
And sometimes they are weak.
Sometimes you get where you are going
And sometimes you fall by the way.
The sage is not extreme, extravagant, or complacent.

33. Virtue

Who understands the World is learned;
Who understands the Self is enlightened.
Who conquers the World has strength;
Who conquers the Self has love.
Who is contented has riches;
Who is determined has purpose.
Who maintains his home will long endure
Who maintains his influence will live long after death.

34. Tao Favours No One

Infinite Tao flows everywhere, creating and destroying,
Implementing all the World, attending to the tiniest details,
Claiming nothing in return.
It nurtures all things,
Though it does not control them;
It has no intention,
So it seems inconsequential.
It is the substance of all things;
Though it does not control them;
It has no exception,
So it seems all-important.
Because it favours no finite thing,
It is infinite.

38. Religion

The loving do not act.
The kind act without self-interest;
The just act to serve self-interest;
The religious act to reproduce self-interest.
For when Tao is lost, there is love;
When love is lost, there is kindness;
When kindness is lost, there is justice;
And when justice is lost, there is religion.
Well established hierarchies are not easily uprooted;
Closely held beliefs are not easily released;
So religion enthralls generation after generation.

Religion is the end of love and honesty,
The beginning of confusion;
Faith is a colourful hope or fear,
The origin of folly.
The sage goes by knowledge, not by hope;
He dwells in the fruit, not the flower;
He accepts the former, and rejects the latter.

43. Overcoming the Impossible

The soft overcomes the hard;
The formless penetrates the impenetrable;
Therefore I value taking no action.
Teaching without words,
Work without action,
Are understood by no one.

50. Life and Death

Death enters life as man enters woman.
The limits of man:
Thirty years of growth;
Thirty years of decay;
Thirty years inbetween;
So death and life reproduce themselves.

He who would prolong his life
Will not meet tigers or rhinoceri in the wilds,
Nor soldiers in battle
So the rhinoceros finds no place in him for its horn,
The tiger no place for its claw,
The soldier no place for a weapon;
So death finds no place to enter his life.

51. Love

Tao bears us,
Love nurtures us,
Nature shapes us,
Circumstance completes us.
We worship Tao and honour love;
For worship of Tao and honour of love
Are performed by being alive.
Tao bears us,
Love nurtures, develops, cares for,
Shelters, comforts, and makes a home for us.
Making without controlling,
Giving without demanding,
Guiding without interfering,
Helping without profiting,
This is love.

60. Emotions

Because the sage follows Tao his emotions do no harm;
It is not that they lose their power
But that they do not hurt others;
Because they do not hurt others
He does not hurt others:
Because his emotions do no harm,
All his relations with people are loving.

62. Sin

Tao is the source of all things,
The treasure of the saint,
And the refuge of the sinner.
Fine words win honour
And fine actions win respect,
But if a man sins, do not abandon him;
And if a man gains power, do not bribe him;
Just be calm and show accordance with Tao.
Why is Tao the treasure of the saint?
Because it absolves all sin.
Why is Tao the refuge of the sinner?
Because it is easily found when sought.
It is the most valuable gift.

63. Confront Difficulty

Practise no-action;
Attend to do-nothing;
Taste the flavourless,
Examine the small,
Multiply the few,
Return love for hate.

Deal with difficulty while it is yet easy;
Deal with the great while it is yet small;

The difficult develops naturally from the easy
And the great from the small;
So the sage, by dealing with the small
Achieves the great.
He who finds it easy to promise finds it hard to deliver;
He who takes things lightly makes things hard;
The sage confronts difficulty, and so has none.

78. Accept Responsibility

Nothing in the World is as yielding as water;
Nor can anything better overcome the hardened.
Just as the yielding overcomes the hardened,
The weak may overcome the strong;
Yet they do not.
The sage says:
"Who accepts responsibility for his people rules the country;
Who accepts responsibility for the World rules the World",
But his words are not understood.

Posted by DK Matai at 11:08 PM | Comments (33)

Cultivating Detachment

In Eastern thought, detachment is a state that doesn't condemn desire or give in to it, either. This is a strange alternative, since 99% of the time our natural inclination is to either give in to a desire or push it away, usually for a competing desire. We eat when we're hungry, we diet when we think hunger doesn't serve us well and we want to be thinner instead. What would it even mean to be detached from hunger? The twists and turns of the detachment argument have worried generations of seekers, and still do.

When told that detachment is desirable (that word again!), seekers are given certain points, not all of them consistent:

--Detachment means that your desires are raised from lower to higher.
--Detachment comes about by transcending your desires.
--If you listen to your soul--which is already detached--it will lead you out of the prison of desire.
--The mind craves things out of habit and can never be detached until its habits are broken.
--Desire moves naturally along a path that will eventually end in freedom from desire--detachment is this evolved state.
--Desire is an endlessly revolving wheel, and it can only be escaped by stepping off. By stepping away you become detached.
--God favors purity of mind and body, which requires abstinence and renunciation. These are the essence of detachment.
--Detachment is the same as overcoming the material world; this must be done to attain a higher world.

Nobody can adhere to all of these dicta, and since they often contradict each other, the result is conflict and confusion. (In the West, Jesus's involvement with the poor and his teaching of love seems to negate detachment, calling for its opposite, a passionate commitment to God.) There is a way out of confusion, which consists of placing desire where it belongs, as a natural aspect of everyday life. That is, one can handle desire basically the same way one's society dictates. If a woman must be extremely modest in Muslim society, that doesn't dictate behavior to a Catholic sunning herself on a beach on the Riviera.

Desire is a give-and-take between what you want to do and what is allowed. On one side is society, on the other our raw impulses. Society also includes family upbringing, religious teaching, and peer pressure. Each of us has to pay attention to these factors. We are all engaged in the same give-and-take, which keeps changing. Living out of wedlock and having illegitimate babies were both socially unacceptable in our parents' generation but much less so now. The forces that push desire back and forth exist inside and outside our social selves.

This give-and-take isn't spiritual. The spiritual life consists of paying attention to something else--the expansion of one's consciousness. Just as growing from infancy to adulthood radically shifts what you want from life, so does growing spiritually. Desire is always involved, but it's inner desire, not the impulses governed by society.

The phrase "second attention" has always seemed appealing to describe the difference between the two. In first attention you deal with the material world. In second attention you experience something else: silent mind, Being, the numinous, the presence of the soul, the transcendent.

Detachment, then, consists of second attention. If you put little stock in what it's about, you aren't detached. If you put value on it, detachment increases. Which is to say, you integrate more Being, essence, or the divine into the structure of yourself. The self has an endless capacity to accommodate new things. It may happen, as second attention grows, that the things which dominate first attention--money, sex, family, status, possessions, success--begin to shift down, and eventually the appeal of the transcendent may take you outside material considerations altogether. This would be the state Jesus describes as being in the world but not of it.

For the time being, no one has to pretend that the world is irrelevant or evil. Detachment is a process, not a pretense. And it seems to be a natural process, as one can learn by conversing with mature people who have deeply considered their own lives. The beauty of detachment is that it needn't be a doctrine or a religious dictum. It can be the way your life is going once you contact the inner person who wants more than material desires can bring.

Love,
Deepak

Posted by Deepak Chopra at 10:56 AM | Comments (31)

Travel Within

I bow humbly at the intimacy of body. While I sit here discussing logical frameworks, inside the core of this organism that carries my consciousness, I suddenly become aware of those minute potassium ions crossing hurriedly a cellular membrane or other, while their sodium partners cross to the opposite side, like migrant workers along porous national borders.

They do the crossing so purposefully, and by doing enable sensitivity and cell communication, those little ions traversing those vast lands of interface like hobbits walking into Mordor.

‘The goal of our action plan is to achieve a reduction of (poverty, illiteracy, forest encroachment, population, pollution by year 2098) and how are we going to measure if we are being successful’ ‘What are the performance indicators’-said the speaker.

My colleague had thick dark eyebrows which moved graciously up and down, as his voice asserted his well known points of logic, and we all looked through him (at least I did) and saw so many things. There was a transparent, particular light that fell upon that room, unbeknown to all, or at least not recognized publicly. So translucent that it seemed endowed by a magnifying x-ray glass, and one could see those sacred body intimacies of laborious cells miraculously singing in organismic orchestration, in synchrony of so many processes.

There were runaway ions crossing membranes, and nested coves of protein allowing quiet lovemaking between molecules, coupled cozy, establishing a relationships that procreated essential worlds in that firmament of fluids, internal rivers, synthesis and excretion.

‘Measurable indicators have to be measurable, how are you going to determine if the project to promote sustainable agriculture in Burkina Faso has been successful, each activity is linked to a goal and to a result that is measurable.’-continued my colleague.

My memory took me into some inner realms and I used the special light effects of the room to journey into yester days. I remembered the thrill of Christmas mornings when I woke up and saw the wrapped boxes under the tree adorned with intergalactic boiling lights that had all color, it was a tree of magic and golden glow, my heart skipped a beat or two, as I ran with a shout of pure delight and started opening those boxes of mystery, with objects of magic in plastic and wood, of all forms and shapes, frozen miniatures of the world, models to play, toys.

My colleague’s eyebrows continued their up and down motion in shifts of intense expression as he imprinted effectively his course on logical frameworks.

I jumped from memory to interstice, and marveled at my now aging joints, how flexible they were, these hands that I discovered as a baby and marveled at when I finally found that they were connected to me, until I forgot.

I stood in awe at the intimacy of body.

I stand in awe at the crisscrossing ions creating fluxes of electrical impulses, upon which sensitivity travels, connecting all cells and tissues, the secretion of fluids and the incorporation of the ingredients that nourish and protect, this body-temple that houses our mind-heart.

I am astonished at the inventiveness of mind, she integrates all the perceptions of light, sound, caresses, fragrances and flavors, and conceives in space-time magnificent forms, concepts of thought, dreams, quests, technologies to expand the hands and endows the senses with remote.

Where do all these thoughts come from? I wondered, as I hear in the background my friend’s good intention, for me to learn logical frameworks, when I am lying down in some space that has absolutely no light but is not darkness, looking at some inner horizons where I see these thoughts crawling, shooting-in, oozing, (depending on their nature). They show up in the screen of my consciousness, like conceptual falling stars. Some do stay, as I play with them, clothed in memories they talk about the past, others clothed in concern talk about the future, still others connect with energy lying around in the periphery, and energized, they become desires and request implementation.

I wonder at the creativity of mind and I am humbled with the multidimensionality of its alcoves and their exquisite links with the intimacies of body.

The words of the speaker are coming to an end.. I just realize that my daydreaming has prevented me from knowing more about logical frames, and that I know still less about myself, than when I started the roller coasting through my veins, to reach the capillary country roads and have a cup of coffee on cellscapes as I watched the gurglings and the whooshes of the ions in the membrane borders and the quiet lovemaking of molecules in cozy beds of enzymes.

Or even as I tried to understand the innermost boundary, the backstage where thoughts are assembled, to understand why some were energized into desires and some juts passed by in reflection.

My turn came to say something in response to a question, and my mouth opened and words came out in a flow that surprised even those who had been mystified by the logical frameworks. Just then, I saw myself talking and was taken aback for a while, for if that was my mind and my body, hand in hand acting out a performance of intellect and sound generated from lungs, who was that silent witness that from behind was watching the whole play with me inside of it.

Could it be this fellow, the one that I sense since I have a memory of always? Silently smiling as he sees me in all sorts of conditions? The one who surfaces when I am overwhelmed by the magic of the Universe? The one that sings when I love?

In spontaneous reverence I then recognized the purity of the heart, the abode of the Most Lovely, the Silent One, who is all that life, is.

Posted by Arsenio Rodriguez at 05:38 AM | Comments (7)

September 07, 2006

Are you ready for some football?

If there is any evidence that I am adopted (as Mallika used to tell me when we were young), it is by virtue of the fact that I am a diehard (American) football fan.

As such, today is a big day because, while MY team the New England Patriots, don't play until the sunday, the season officially kicks off today with the Steelers-Dolphins game this evening. I am pumped and coordinating my day around being able to watch the game and get ready for the season.

It's not clear how my fascination with football (and sports in general) began. While my father (like every Indian man of his generation) claimed he was an excellent cricket player and could have really pursued a professional career had he wanted to, I kind of doubt it. Moreover, he's never had any interest at all in any sports and when he once, out of paternal obligation to me, "intended for my team to win," he "intended" on the wrong player (Kareem Abdul Jabar) and the f'ing Lakers beat the Celtics. Since then, I've stopped trying.

Meanwhile, my mother in all her grace, for many years out of maternal obligation, listened to sports radio and generally kept up so that she could share in my interest. However with the emergence of her grand daughters and a daughter-in-law, she has happily sceded the role to my wife. My wife, for many years out of spousal obligation (and even more so when were wooing) really took up my obsession, came to sports bars with me, ate disgusting chicken wings, and talked the talk with the best of the. Alas, the honeymoon is over and I am essentially all alone in my obsession (my dog cleo pretends to care and barks at all the big moments).

To that end, I have supplied myself with all the necessary acouterments - big flat HD screen, supplementry food and drink, comfortable seating, computer within reach (for fantasy purposes) etc. For me, sports are a great distraction from everything else and there is little I enjoy more than the few hours of total immersion in a competition, the outcome of which I am attached to, and yet have no control over at all.

So - good for me - it's football season again and I am ready!!!!

Posted by Gotham Chopra at 11:00 AM | Comments (16)

35 Things You Can Do For My Birthday

I'm celebrating my birthday in conjunction with the 35th Anniversary of Greenpeace. Here are 35 thing you can do for me:

• Believe in Global Warming. It is real.
• Drive a hybrid.
• Swear off plastic bags. They are rampant in our oceans and wildlife feeds off them, thinking they are plankton. Bring your own bags to the supermarket and visit oceans.greenpeace.org for more on how to Defend our Oceans.
• Support renewable energy. Install solar panels on your house.
• Bring your family to visit our newest and fastest ship, the Esperanza, when it makes a stop in San Diego in November.
• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
• Write about environmental issues.
• Place environmental messages in your lyrics.
• Use musical instruments made of wood approved by the Forest Stewardship Council. For more info, visit www.musicwood.org.
• Support wind farms, even when they interfere with your view.
• Learn to drive a Greenpeace Zodiac.
• Provide bail money for a Greenpeace action.
• Participate in a peaceful direct action with Greenpeace.
• Eat organic foods. Support farmers’ markets.
• Restrict your fish consumption: fish may be good for you, but not when it contains mercury. And overfishing is perhaps the single biggest, most immediate threat facing the world’s ocean. If in doubt about what to eat from the sea, check out www.seafoodchoices.org for a list of “safe” fish, retailers and restaurants.
• Don’t use anti-bacterial soap: the chemicals they contain wind up in wastewater and ultimately in the environment-and anyway, studies suggest they’re probably no more effective at combating germs than normal soap and water.
• Participate in a beach clean up.
• Conserve energy.
• Conserve water.
• Don’t litter, and confront those who do.
• Stay away from genetically engineered foods.
• Help build a PVC-free Habitat for Humanity House.
• Avoid farmed fish. Huge amounts of fish are caught to feed aquaculture species, and fish farms can cause severe damage to coastal environments.
• Use energy efficient lightbulbs.
• Turn those lights off when you’re not using them.
• See “An Inconvenient Truth.” Tell a friend or a family member to see it too. And have them tell another friend…
• Take your own coffee cup to be filled up at your own local coffee shop.
• Print on both sides of paper.
• Dispose of computers and other electronic products responsibly. Every year, hundreds of thousands of old computers and cell phones are dumped in landfills or burned in smelters. Thousands more are exported, often illegally, to Asia, where workers at scrap yards, often children, are exposed to a cocktail of toxic chemicals and poisons.
• Don’t run the dishwasher until it is full.
• Speak out against wars of any kind.
• Stay informed except when you can’t take it any more. Then, take a short break and get back to it.
• Support Greenpeace, one of my favorite organizations. Operating in over 30 countries worldwide, they’re active day in, day out where it counts: on the front lines to protect the planet.
• Listen to my song to celebrate Greenpeace’s 35th Anniversary -- I will post it when it is ready.
• Wish me a Happy Birthday!

Posted by Dave Stewart at 10:51 AM | Comments (22)

Lord Howell -- Commonwealth as Ideal Model

With the rise of India, Lord Howell argues from The Palace of Westminster that the Commonwealth is becoming a completely transformed entity and that an enlarged and reformed version of it should be centre stage in addressing the problems of the new international order.

The Commonwealth normally refers to 53 member countries, formerly members of the British Empire. The Head of the Commonwealth is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

The Lord Howell of Guildford

Dear ATCA Colleagues; dear IntentBloggers

We are grateful to The Right Honourable Lord Howell of Guildford from the Palace of Westminster for his contribution to ATCA, "The Commonwealth as the Ideal Model for International Relations in the 21st Century".

The Lord Howell argues that the Commonwealth is becoming a completely transformed entity and that an enlarged and reformed version of it should be centre stage in addressing the problems of the new international order. The British FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) should be re-named the CFO (Commonwealth and Foreign Office) and that the Commonwealth network should be enhanced and made the centrepiece of British Foreign Policy. He also argues that sections of the British overseas aid budget currently administered through the EU in Brussels could be much more effectively handled through Commonwealth machinery.

The Commonwealth normally refers to 53 member countries, formerly members of the British Empire. The Commonwealth's membership includes both republics and monarchies. The Head of the Commonwealth is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Headquarters are at Marlborough House in London. Her Majesty also reigns as monarch directly in a number of states, known as Commonwealth Realms, notably the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and others. The Commonwealth's 1.8 billion citizens, about 30 per cent of the world's population, are drawn from the broadest range of faiths, races, cultures and traditions. About half of this population are less than 25 years old. Members range from vast democratic countries like India, Canada and Australia to smaller city states like Singapore. The Commonwealth has three intergovernmental organisations: the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Commonwealth Foundation, and the Commonwealth of Learning.

The Right Honourable Lord (David) Howell of Guildford, President of the British Institute of Energy Economics, is a former Secretary of State for Energy and for Transport in the UK Government and an economist and journalist. Lord Howell is Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords and Conservative Spokesman on Foreign Affairs. Until 2002 he was Chairman of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, (the high level bilateral forum between leading UK and Japanese politicians, industrialists and academics), which was first set up by Margaret Thatcher and Yasuhiro Nakasone in 1984. In addition he writes a fortnightly column for The JAPAN TIMES in Tokyo, and has done so since 1985. He also writes regularly for the International Herald Tribune. David Howell was the Chairman of the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, 1987-97. He was Chairman of the House of Lords European Sub-Committee on Common Foreign and Security Policy from 1999-2000. In 2001 he was awarded the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Treasure (Japan). He writes:

Dear DK and Colleagues

Re: The Commonwealth as the Ideal Model for International Relations in the 21st Century

The idea of the Commonwealth as a marginal international institution, doing good works, uttering virtuous aspirations and blessing a host of unofficial organisations is now completely redundant. We now face entirely new international conditions and in these the Commonwealth should shed its past diffidence and prepare itself to take a lead in setting the global agenda. This will require the Commonwealth to raise its game all round, expand its ambitions and activities and forge new links with non-members. It needs to demonstrate boldly its new significance in the promotion of world trade and investment and to build on the role it has already begun to carve out in the WTO debate.

This in turn depends, of course, upon its leading member states. Until they wake up fully and understand the staggering potential of the new Commonwealth network, as an ideal model for international collaboration in the 21st century, the backing needed will not be there. This means persuading Commonwealth Governments to give place and recognition to the Commonwealth network in their foreign and overseas economic and development policies at a level which, for various reasons (mostly now outdated), they have hitherto failed to do, the big exception being India, which almost alone, with its new flair and dynamism, has recognised the Commonwealth as ‘the ideal platform for business and trade’.

So the first task is to bring home to a half-interested world a few new facts about the Commonwealth system which have clearly escaped them. First, far from being a run-down club, held together by nostalgia and decolonisation fixations, today’s Commonwealth now contains thirteen of the world’s fastest growing economies, including the most potent emerging markets. Outside the USA and Japan, the key cutting edge countries in information technology and e-commerce are all Commonwealth members. The new ‘jewel in the Commonwealth Crown’ turns out to be the old jewel, dramatically re-polished and re-set, namely booming India , the world’s largest democracy with a population set to exceed China’s .

This presents a picture so far removed from the old image of the Commonwealth, bogged down in demands for more aid and arguments about South Africa (or latterly Zimbabwe) that many sleepy policy makers find it simply too difficult to absorb. The unloved ugly duckling organisation has grown almost overnight into a true swan. Or to use a different metaphor the Commonwealth of today and tomorrow has been described as ‘The Neglected Colossus’. It should be neglected no longer.

It has been recently estimated that in the new information age context the Commonwealth’s commonalities of language, law, accounting systems and business regulations gives a 15 percent cost advantage over dealing with countries outside the Commonwealth.

As for finance, the market capitalizations of Toronto, Sydney and London alone, combined, exceed New York’s. The assets of the financial services sectors of the Commonwealth group of nations are actually now larger than those of the whole EU.

Finally, on the economic and commercial front it should be noted that recent detailed academic analysis has identified a growing ‘Commonwealth effect’ – namely a perceived reduction in what is termed the psychic distance between Commonwealth member states, and a consequent increased propensity for Commonwealth states -- especially the smaller developing ones -- to engage in increased trade and investment activity between each other in preference to, and prior to, trade and investment elsewhere in the global community.

A Wider Role than Trade

The Commonwealth Flags in Abuja

But the new story should not just be about bread and butter matters and new economic opportunities staring us in the face. The Commonwealth needs to be re-assessed in terms of its real weight in securing world stability, in balancing the dialogue with the U.S. giant, in linking rising Asia and the West, in helping to handle the prickliest of issues such as the Middle East and Iran, in promoting better development links, in bringing small and larger nations, poorer and richer, together on mutually respectful and truly friendly terms and in bridging the faith divides which others seek to exploit and widen.

In all these areas I believe the Commonwealth, reformed, reinforced, built upon and enlarged, offers, as the Indian Industry Minister Mr Kamal Nath, wisely perceives, ‘ the ideal platform’. But, it will inevitably be asked, how can such a disparate and scattered grouping possibly be a force and a weight in these dangerous and contentious areas? Who will take the lead? Where is central control going to be?

To understand the answer to these questions requires the biggest shift of all between the 20th century and the 21st century mindset, a shift which many still find it impossible to make. In the 20th Century the solution had to be in terms of blocs, consolidated organisations, centrally controlled in the name of efficiency, organisational pyramids, perhaps with some delegation, but basically radiating down from a superior and central point.

All this has now been invalidated, not only in business but in governmental affairs and in relations between countries and societies. Thanks to the extraordinary power and pervasiveness of the information revolution we live in an era now not of blocs and pyramid tiers of power and management but of networks and meshes, both formal and informal.

By accident as much as design the Commonwealth emerges from a controversial past to take a perfect place in this new order of thinking and acting. The fact that the Commonwealth now has no dominant member state, or even a coterie of such states, far from being a weakness is now a strength.

Because the Commonwealth is founded on respect for nation states, each following its own path, yet recognising the imperative of interdependence, constant adjustment can take place to new challenges, with partnerships and coalitions being swiftly tailored to each new scene.

This answers three dilemmas:

The first is that people want more than ever in an age of remote globalisation, to develop their own identities, to have countries and localities to love and defend and take pride in. They recognise the fact of interdependence but they long equally for ownership and a degree of independence. Superior ideas of supra-national government and super-states, along with sweeping dismissals of the relevance of the nation state, can play no part in resolving these deep and competing needs, and indeed utterly fail to do so when imposed by well-intentioned integrationists, as in the case of the EU.

Second, rigid bloc alliances cannot keep up with the kaleidoscope of change. The more that the European Union tries to draw its members into a rigid and unified political and military bloc the less effective it becomes. The more that the world is seen as clinging to a structure of blocs established in rivalry to each other the more the real criss-cross network of bilateral linkages between nations is neglected. Yet it is just this new and more flexible pattern which provides far the best guarantee of stability and security.

Third, the new texture of international relations is made up not just of inter-governmental and official contacts but of a mosaic of non-governmental and sub-official agencies and organisations. This takes time to grow, but grow it has under the Commonwealth canopy into an amazing web of organizations and alliances between the professions, the academic and scholastic worlds, the medical, educational, scientific and legal communities and a host of other interest groups linked together across the 54 nation Commonwealth Group.

Filling a Dangerous Vacuum

The tragic collapse of America’s ‘soft power’, reputation and influence almost across the entire globe is leaving a dangerous vacuum. Into this vacuum, cautiously, subtly, but steadily are moving the Chinese – with cash, with investment projects, with trade deals, secured access to oil and gas supplies in an energy hungry world, with military and policing support and with technology.

This is a gap which ought to be filled not by the Chinese dictatorship but by the free democracies of the Commonwealth, from both North and South, banded together by a commitment to freedom under the rule of law and ready to make real and common sacrifices in the interests of a peaceful and stable world and the spread of democratic governance in many different forms.

The Commonwealth possesses the vital attributes for dealing with this new world which the old 20th century institutions so conspicuously lack.

It stretches across the faiths, with half a billion Muslim members; it stretches across all the Continents, thus by its very existence nullifying the dark analysis of a coming clash of civilisations.

Better still if a more confident Commonwealth now reaches out and makes friendly associations with other like-minded nations, both in Europe and Asia. Japan, with some twelve percent of the entire world’s GNP, and with its confidence and dynamism now restored, is ready to make links with the Commonwealth, especially with India and Britain together. Poland and some other Central European nations long to have association with a grouping less parochial than their own local European Union. Even Russia, despite its prickly inward-looking mood and latent nationalist sentiments, could yet emerge a good democratic partner of like-minded nations inside the Commonwealth club.

So in a sense I am asking that the Commonwealth Secretariat should be encouraged to develop its external wing in a much more powerful way than hitherto and perhaps have a nominated high official to work with the Secretary General and act as the Commonwealth’s High Representative. Make such an enhanced Commonwealth the central platform of the international future and there will then be an enlightened and responsible grouping on the planet, ready to be America’s candid friend, but not its lapdog -- a serious and respected force, both in economic and trading terms and in terms of upholding security and peace-keeping.

A Key UK Priority

This is the body the strengthening of which our own UK should now make a key aim and together with which it should re-build its own foreign policy priorities. It should do so because this route offers far the best way both for a nation such as ours, with our history and our experience and skills, to make a maximum contribution to meeting the world’s many ills and, even more, because it is the best way to promote and protect our own interests world-wide.

In particular the UK should consider transferring the administration of that part of its overseas development effort which at present goes through the EU from that unhappy channel to the Commonwealth system, and encourage both other Commonwealth members to do likewise and the Secretariat to develop the full capacity to handle this role. This single move would give the Commonwealth huge new prestige and resources, direct our aid efforts far more effectively to poorer Commonwealth member states, who are our closest friends and to whom we owe the strongest duty and greatly strengthen the UK’s own prestige and effectiveness in the global development process.

And when the Prime Minister calls for children here to be taught a ‘greater sense of British identity’, I say that should be ‘British and Commonwealth identity’. That alone conveys the broader and outward-looking sense of interdependence and duty which is the true message with which young British children should carry in today’s world.

Of course we must always be the best possible local members of our European region –- as, incidentally we nearly always have been, although some people forget this.

But Europe is no longer the world’s most prosperous region. It is our duty to build up our links, many of which were so strong in the distant past, with what are becoming the world’s most prosperous and dynamic areas of the world, but also with the smaller nations as well as the large ones, the struggling poor ones as well as the rapidly industrialising and increasingly high-tech ones. This is what an enlarged Commonwealth can do for us in a way that the European Union can never do and for which it lacks the reach and the right basic policy structure.

That is why Britain’s external relations priorities need major re-alignment and why I would like to christen the home of our able and experienced diplomats the Commonwealth and Foreign Office – the CFO not the FCO.

Regards

David Howell

[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)
____________________________________________________________________

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 10:00 AM | Comments (4)

September 06, 2006

Open Thread

Posted by Intent at 09:33 PM | Comments (107)

Hawking -- Can humans sustain 100 more years?

It has been an unusual move for one of the world's most eminent scientists. Having built a career shedding light on the darkest secrets of the universe, from the essence of space-time to the complexity of black holes, Professor Stephen Hawking has turned to the Internet for answers to the latest conundrum occupying his thoughts.

Prof Stephen Hawking

Dear ATCA Colleagues; dear IntentBloggers

Re: Question of Our Survival from a Genius -- "In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?" -- Prof Stephen Hawking

Prof Stephen W Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 (300 years after the death of Galileo) in Oxford, England. His parents' house was in north London, but during the second world war Oxford was considered a safer place to have babies. At eleven Stephen went to St Albans School, and then on to University College, Oxford, his father's old college. Stephen wanted to do Mathematics, although his father would have preferred medicine. Mathematics was not available at University College, so he did Physics instead. After three years and not very much work he was awarded a first class honours degree in Natural Science. He then went on to Cambridge to do research in Cosmology, there being no-one working in that area in Oxford at the time. His supervisor was Prof Denis Sciama, although he had hoped to get Prof Fred Hoyle who was working in Cambridge. After gaining his PhD he became first a Research Fellow, and later on a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. After leaving the Institute of Astronomy in 1973 Stephen came to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and since 1979 has held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. The chair was founded in 1663 with money left in the will of the Reverend Henry Lucas, who had been the Member of Parliament for the University. It was first held by Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), and then in 1663 by Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) -- the greatest English mathematician and physicist of his generation, who laid the foundation for differential and integral calculus and whose work on optics and gravitation makes him one of the greatest scientists the world has known.

Prof Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Prof Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great Scientific development of the first half of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science. His many publications include The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with G F R Ellis, General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, with W Israel, and 300 Years of Gravity, with W Israel. Stephen Hawking has two popular books published; his best seller A Brief History of Time, and his later book, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays. Prof Hawking has twelve honorary degrees, was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 1982, and was made a Companion of Honour in 1989. He is the recipient of many awards, medals and prizes and is a Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Stephen Hawking continues to combine family life (he has three children and one grandchild), and his research into theoretical physics together with an extensive programme of travel and public lectures.

His question "In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?" appeared on an Internet website two months ago, immediately stirring up an internet storm that saw more than 25,000 people log on to give their deeply-considered views: some said we should just learn to get along, others predicted technology would see us through, and more still invoked the powers of God, love and peace. But what the world wanted most of all was to hear the great scientist answer his own question, an intervention, most were convinced, that would amount to nothing less than a definitive treatise for human survival.

Last month, Prof Hawking's response finally arrived. In a video-clip submission, the familiar electronic voice pronounced:

"How can the human race survive the next hundred years? I don't know the answer. That is why I asked the question, to get people to think about it, and to be aware of the dangers we now face.

Before the 1940s, the main threat to our survival came from collisions with asteroids. Such collisions have caused mass extinctions in the past, but the last one was 70m years ago, so the likelihood that we will need the services of Bruce Willis [Allusion to Film: Armageddon (1998)] in the next hundred years is very small.

A much more immediate danger, is nuclear war. America and Russia, each have more than enough warheads to kill everyone on Earth, several times over, and the same may now be true of China. The world came perilously close to nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion in the last 50 years. With the ending of the cold war, the threat has become less acute, but it has not gone away. There are still enough nuclear weapons stockpiled to kill us all, and their use might be triggered by an accident that convinced a country that it was under attack. There is now a new danger from small and potentially unstable countries acquiring nuclear weapons. Such minor nuclear powers might cause millions of deaths, but they would not threaten the survival of the entire human race, unless they sparked a conflict between the major powers.

These dangers of asteroid collision and nuclear war, have now been joined by a host of other threats to our survival. Climate change is happening at an ever increasing rate. While we are hoping to stabilise it, and maybe even reverse it, by reducing our CO2 emissions, the danger is that the climate change may pass a tipping point at which the temperature rise becomes self sustaining.

The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice reduces the amount of solar energy that is reflected back into space and so increases the temperature further. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of CO2, trapped at the bottom of the ocean, which will further increase the greenhouse effect. Let's hope we don't end up like our sister planet Venus with a temperature of 250C and raining sulphuric acid. There are other dangers, such as the accidental or intentional release of a genetically engineered virus. Each time we increase our technological powers, we add new possible ways in which things could go disastrously wrong. The human race faces an increasingly dangerous future. There's a sick joke that the reason we haven't been visited by aliens is that when a civilisation reaches our stage of development, it becomes unstable and destroys itself. In fact, I think there are other reasons why we haven't seen any aliens, but the story shows how perilous the situation is. The long-term survival of the human race will be safe only if we spread out into space, and then to other stars. This won't happen for at least 100 years so we have to be very careful. Perhaps, we must hope that genetic engineering will make us wise and less aggressive."

[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)
____________________________________________________________________

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 03:11 PM | Comments (31)

September 05, 2006

Mike Harris -- Disruptive Innovation

"Leave your stepping stones behind,
something calls for you.
Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you.
The vagabond who's rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
Strike another match, go start anew
And it's all over now, Baby Blue."
-- Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman)

Dear ATCA Colleagues; dear IntentBloggers

We are grateful to Mike Harris, Chairman, Group Innovation, Royal Bank of Scotland for submitting his inspirational thoughts on "The Asymmetric Threat and Opportunity from Disruptive Innovation" or "Confronting Failure from Mavericks - 'He not busy being born, Is busy dying'."

Mike Harris's ground-breaking comments -- based on the "ab initio" reinvention of financial services solutions TWICE -- are particularly relevant given the ATCA concentration on opportunities and threats arising from climate change, radical poverty, organised crime, extremism, informatics, nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, artificial intelligence and financial systems. All of the 10 complex global challenges of the 21st century identified by ATCA, depend on the elixir of "Disruptive Innovation" and "Confronting Failure from Mavericks" to address and to begin to resolve some of the seemingly intractable yet interlinked confrontations. As those inherent confrontations accelerate and feed off each other's momentum they possess the capability to damage and to disrupt the delicate global dynamic equilibrium. Faced with this unpalatable prospect for humanity in the coming two to three decades or less, it is necessary to rethink strategically because "He who is not busy being born, Is busy dying."

Mike Harris is the Chairman, Group Innovation, at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBoS). He is the founding Chief Executive of Egg (part of The Prudential), a leading internet bank in Europe known for providing a broad array of financial services with an unprecedented level of excellence; Harris built a financial services organization that continues to experience profitable growth. As founding Chief Executive of Firstdirect (part of HSBC), Harris built a bank with unprecedented levels of customer loyalty. He has led companies that consistently stand out from the competition. As CEO of Mercury Communications, Harris created an exciting, fast growing consumer brand. Upon leaving Egg, in August 2005, Harris has taken on two new challenges. He is a co-founder and Executive Chairman of Richmond Informatics Ltd - a start up aiming to build a global consumer business based on next generation internet technology known as the semantic web and he is Chairs Group Innovation at RBoS. He writes:

Dear DK and Colleagues

Re: "The Asymmetric Threat and Opportunity from Disruptive Innovation" or "Confronting Failure from Mavericks - 'He not busy being born, Is busy dying'"

Martin Scorsese’s documentary of Bob Dylan "No Direction Home" also shown on television generated a lot of comment on news web sites. I could identify with this post from a woman who like me was at school in the 60s and a Dylan fanatic: "We all just loved everything he did. A real quirky, charismatic individual had come into our lives to stir us all up and give us a soundtrack to live by. I’m still going strong with the man. In moments of stress I’m known to lapse unconsciously into Dylanese."

· Well me too! And for me the song that pops into my head is "It’s all over now Baby Blue" Why? Well if you take on radical change whether it’s business change or career change you are going to constantly be confronted by the prospect of failure - the prospect of it being all over.

· What Dylan has to say about this:

"Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you.
The vagabond who's rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
Strike another match, go start anew
And it's all over now, Baby Blue."

Although he’s writing about a failed relationship I think his words have strong meaning for anyone confronting any sort of failure. To me he’s saying at times you need to accept defeat, leave the past behind and move on. An individual can always do that, which should give everyone the strength and courage they need to take on whatever challenge is exciting for them. A company can’t always move on so easily , but it’s the nature of business for companies to come and go, to thrive and decline. It always has been and probably always will be.

§ We live in a world of constant change, constant innovation. The vagabond who was rapping at your door a few years ago (think of the lightweight Vodafone of 1992, the impossibly tiny Google of 2001, the unknown Finnish Timber company and manufacturer of televisions called Nokia) that vagabond is now wearing the clothes that others once wore – Vodafone is now the global giant and BT the local player, Google is dominant in search and attacking the Desktop – the very heart of Microsoft’s strength , Nokia came from nowhere to dominate mobile technology.

§ If you have been beaten at the change game, beaten at innovation, then it really can be all over baby blue; there’s often no way back for your company – but you personally, well as I said before you can always leave the past behind: Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you. Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you; strike another match and start anew – now that’s the entrepreneurs motto.

§ I want to talk about change and innovation - how it works , what its effect has been over the past few years, and what lessons those years have for us now. This is going to be a very personal story – the last 10 years of change as experienced by me!

§ Do you remember the summer of 1997 in London? It was a hot lively celebration of Cool Britannia, full of energy: as the wave of political change fuelled by the new Blair Government promised to put the grey Major years behind us; and as a wave of business change fuelled by deregulation, liberalization and developments in telecoms, media and technology promised to blow away the final cobwebs of the early 90s hangover from the ultimate overindulgences of the Thatcher/Reagan era.

§ If you were involved in either of those waves of change London was a magical place to be then; for me, never more magical than one steamy July night in the heart of Soho. Just looking out of the window of the restaurant onto the crowd moving towards the Jazz clubs in Frith St one could feel the energy, feel the hope.

§ Reluctantly I turned my attention back to my dinner companion. Ervin Lazslow had words of caution to moderate my enthusiasm. Egg, he said, for we were discussing the concept that was to launch a year later and rapidly become the biggest Internet Bank in the world, Egg does have a chance. It’s impossible to say how big a chance – you see we are facing a change which will have as much impact as the revolution which created the modern Industrial age but in a matter of a decade or so not centuries. The pack will be well and truly shuffled in the next 10 years for sure .

§ I always listened carefully to Ervin who was a famous, now retired, philosopher and futurologist whose views were widely respected. By then he had authored over 70 books – one of the most recent being on the new science of complexity. I had participated in a small way in a think tank (The Club of Budapest) he had created.

§ Trying to engage him more in the debate about what it would take to make Egg successful I said well the complexity guys at Sante Fe seem to think with all the barriers to competition coming down – geographical and political, then the winners will be the already big companies – success to the successful they say. The systems dynamics guys at MIT on the other hand seem to think most innovation comes from new companies albeit at least half the time the innovations are later adopted and exploited better by large companies. I hope the MIT guys are right!

§ He responded that whilst anticipating future challenges and opportunities was a useful strategic tool, trying to predict the future was futile; determined leaders and entrepreneurs however could shape the future by their own actions and that was what was worthwhile. Wise words indeed.

§ Let’s just get some context by looking back to 1997 for a moment:

. In computing the PC model was dominant, the mighty IBM temporarily on its knees; competition was driving much innovation in telecoms but if the internet was stirring almost no-one appreciated its ultimate power and email was still a tool for the few. The letters www and .com meant nothing to the vast majority of consumers.

. The mobile phone had become ubiquitous in business but not yet an indispensable social tool

. In banking, in the UK, we still talked about the big 4: Natwest, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds/TSB and we kept an eye on the emerging giants: Abbey and Halifax. The only real change in 10 years was Midland had been taken over by HSBC, Lloyds and TSB had merged and mutuality was slowly dying.

· In those heady days of 1997, Tony Blair was still the future, the word Russian and billionaire did not naturally fall together let alone have an association with Chelsea. The English language did not include in common everyday usage the verbs to Google and to text let alone to Skype

· Really the environment in 1997 was not that different from 1989 when Firstdirect attempted to attack a saturated market with the innovation of “banking without branches” – fuelled by the new digital telecommunication technologies which enabled call centres to thrive.

· Disruptive innovation is a classic way to attack an apparently stable market with entrenched incumbents. Think of Microsoft’s raid on the value generating core of IBM, Apple’s frequent insurgencies against bigger competitors, Orange initially stealing the future from BT and Vodafone, Google leaving Yahoo, AOL, MSN and Lycos for dead, Dell coming from nowhere and defeating the PC manufacturing giants

· Firstdirect had all the characteristics of classic innovation:

o Identification of a segment of customers with unmet needs and open to a new approach, enabled by a new technology. In this case the unmet needs were to have their banking dealt with at their convenience by people who occurred to them as highly trained, intelligent and helpful

o A small committed, cash strapped, entrepreneurial team working with urgency – brainstorming solutions which were then rapidly proto-typed with customers until we knew we had a winner

o Everybody, especially my mother, telling me why it couldn’t possibly work

o A massive debate amongst the team about the best way to actually make it work – everybody being convinced it would only work if we did it their way

o A pilot to hone to the service prior to launch

o A launch with powerful communication which touched an emotional need in consumers as well as meeting a functional one.

· The incumbents response to Firstdirect was also classic – dismissal as irrelevant followed a couple of years later by a large investment in telephone banking which turned out to be a great growth area for them. Other new entrants emerged, often from adjacent industries like insurance. Finally telephone banking itself became saturated and market shares became stable.

· I have for many years been studying and indeed participating in the work of the Sloan Business school at MIT on the way markets cycle through successive phases of innovation and change and the story I have just told you is repeated again and again:

o Change starts with disruptive innovation often from a bunch of industry outsiders or mavericks

o Incumbents dismiss it at first and then either absorb it and become major players as new products are scaled for the mass market (like the banks response to telephone banking and indeed everything else that has ever been thrown at them) or incumbents find they have missed out on the new wave altogether and are heading for decline (like the direct sales life companies). If you do miss out on a wave of innovation it really is all over baby blue

o Eventually market shares stabilize and change slows down and the market consolidates often with a new set of winners, until of course another wave of disruptive innovation starts the whole cycle all over again.

· Think PCs, mobile telephony, digital photography, internet shopping, satellite TV, low cost airlines mutual funds and credit cards; even further back the motor car, the electric light, the telephone and you will find perfect examples of this pattern

· Now here’s an interesting point, with acknowledgments to Laszlow – years ago these change cycles played out over decades – now it can all happen in less than one decade

· In 1997, just 8 years after the launch of Firstdirect the telephone banking market had gone through the complete cycle from first innovator to stability. At this point Pru bank entered the market with a new attempt at disruptive innovation which at the time we called double direct - leveraging the man from the Pru, the awesome and feared direct life assurance sales force that had made the Pru mighty, alongside telephone banking. A great idea in theory but as strong in practice as its weakest link: the man from the Pru who was rapidly regulated out of existence soon after we launched.

· It really was all over baby blue for Pru bank and time to strike another match and start anew and we responded with the Internet inspired Egg:

· Egg is another classic innovation story by the way:

o Remember change starts with disruptive innovation often from a bunch of industry outsiders or mavericks (tick)

o Egg identified a segment of customers and a new technology (this time the internet) with which to meet a set of currently unmet needs (this time for a larger degree of self direction) (tick)

o A small committed, entrepreneurial team working with urgency – brainstorming solutions which were then rapidly proto-typed with customers until we knew we had a winner -

o Everybody, telling me why it couldn’t possibly work (tick)

o A massive debate amongst the team about the best way to actually make it work – everybody being convinced it would only work if we did it their way (tick)

o A pilot to hone to the service prior to launch (tick)

o A launch with powerful communication which touched an emotional need in consumers (a financial services company that speaks my language and seems like its on my side) as well as meeting a functional one (tick)

o Incumbents dismiss it at first (it’s very funny to look now at what large banks said about Internet banking in 1999) and then absorb it and become major players as new products are scaled for the mass market. Eventually market shares stabilize and change slows down and the market consolidates often with a new set of winners (Internet itself only provoked a minor shuffling of the pack in banking - other forces ie globalization and consolidation were more powerful) (tick)

· Now let’s just reflect on other innovations we have seen in the last few years:

o Genetic engineering has started to rewrite science fiction

o The mobile phone and email from being a complete nothing for most employees and consumers have come to dominate our working and social lives

o The internet has grown from the trivial to the biggest most impactful creation of mankind and is now growing faster then ever as individuals take over its development through blogs and other similar services .

§ Somebody told me the other day that the web now contains more words than have ever been spoken in human history – How they know that I have no idea but it does give a sense of unimaginable scale and it’s certainly the biggest construction project ever undertaken by mankind – and from effectively nothing 10 years ago

§ we have been up and down the dot com boom and bust and the pack has been well and truly shuffled; the internet allowed disruptive innovators to attack almost every industry and the battle for dominance as new business models emerged has been fast and fierce - the winners are impressive indeed – honed by a battle of unprecedented ferocity which they have won.

o They survey their empires now from apparently unimpregnable heights and I reflect that the complexity scientists who turned their minds to predicting the effect on business of the digital revolution were right. Success to the successful they said. Look out for a small number of very large dominant players in each industry. Everything will accrue to them – they will attract the best people, be able to afford the best R and D, buy anything they want, outspend all others, get bigger and stronger, be untouchable. Think football – think Chelsea and the other handful of clubs now forming a global elite. Oh yes the giants will get bigger and more successful.

o These global giants do, and with good reason, fear each other – in many of their significant markets they are in a fight primarily with each other.

§ In UK banking we have two of the top 5 banks in the world fighting it out in our market, and two others of the top 5 looking greedily at how they might join in

§ In telecoms we have four of the top 5 global mobile operators fighting for share of our market: all dwarf BT by the way – victim of a global strategy which failed

§ Tesco vs Wall mart is another battle in the UK of two companies with global operations and global scale

§ Globally Microsoft fight IBM for operating system revenues and Google for the desktop

§ Oracle fight IBM for database dominance

§ Oracle fight SAP for Enterprise software

§ IBM and Accenture are the only games in town for large scale organizational reinvention

I can tell you what these global giants are good at:

§ Growing shareholder value, managing the bottom line, managing market expectations, governance, regulatory affairs, execution - getting unimaginably complicated things done to budget on time, efficient and effective use of resources; exploiting their scale; mergers and acquisitions; strategy

§ They had to be good at this stuff to win the battles of the last 10 years

· So where might the battle grounds lie in the future – assuming the winners all have global scale and are all excellent at pretty much everything Harvard teaches you and are all fighting each other?

· How about skills at dealing with unknowable threats?

o The emergence of China and India as global economic powers and the renaissance of Japan

o The interconnected and uncontrollable nature of global politics

§ From climate change to terrorism through famine and ethnic cleansing to corporate scandals and regulatory overkill responses - to world trade and climate agreements thru the EU budget and Israeli politics: one country’s action affects every other; one companies action affects every other, one person’s action affects every others

§ For example I heard Tony Blair say poverty and famine in Africa fundamentally blights every Western economy and so it’s in our interests let alone a moral imperative to deal with it. I don’t understand that in detail but it does make sense to me intuitively

o The entrepreneur in a garage somewhere, connected via the internet to the accumulated wisdom of mankind and creating new wisdom in real time with a network of collaborators all over the world - constructing a new product which turns out to be a silver bullet with your companies name on it. The unknowable threat the vagabond who’s knocking on your door might indeed end up wearing the clothes that you once wore.

· So a competence in continuous innovation might well be critical in repelling the vagabonds don’t you think?

o Big companies often got big by being innovators but the bigger they get the worse they become at it. Innovation thrives on urgency, lack of controls creativity, powerful expressions of the human spirit, risk taking. Big companies stay big by controlling things. Big companies don’t like disruptive influences. People don’t get on in big companies by delivering the set of small failures which almost always provide the learning for a major successful innovation.

o According to research at the Sloan school big companies that develop a competence in innovation, despite many committed and well funded attempts are remarkable and few.

· In my companies: Firstdirect, Mercury and Egg I gave huge priority to creating an environment where people felt it was safe to bring their humanity to work with them, not check it in at the cloakroom on the way in. I encouraged them to express themselves and not worry about how it looked. Worry about being extraordinary, don’t worry about looking good or being politically correct I used to tell them. Don’t worry about honest mistakes we all make them and no-one here is going to ask who’s to blame if something goes wrong - we will just get on with fixing it and honour those with the courage to get on the pitch and give it their all – win or lose.

· As a result I was rewarded with all human beings have to offer: wisdom, courage, commitment, creativity, stupidity, anger irrational emotions – everything. You can’t have one without the other – every human being is a flawed genius in one dimension or another – I set out to find the genius in people and I was prepared to ignore the flaws.

· It certainly made for an interesting life! And it got some success – each of my start from scratch consumer businesses grew to a substantial size – all over a billion dollars in value one way or another. But for all the human genius that seemed to get liberated in these companies none of them could beat larger scale competitors over the long run. Firstdirect and One to One became valuable parts of the global giants HSBC and DeuscheTelecom. The Mercury consumer business was sold for cash to NTL. Egg has been reabsorbed into Prudential where the CEO says it will be his source of innovation in the future. I don’t feel too bad about this – when the mighty MBNA can’t prosper stand alone and is absorbed by B of A almost no-one short of the real global giants can feel secure as a stand alone company.

· That’s an interesting model – perhaps larger companies will buy in innovation by spotting and buying the small innovators as Yahoo and Google do regularly.

· Even then they need to develop the skills of allowing the acquired company to thrive and not be stifled.

· So there you are – my business model for the 21st Century. The winners will be big and global and they need to develop the essentially human skills of mastering innovation and coping with unknowable threats. Perhaps the phrase "our people are our greatest assets" might actually start to mean something. Mastering the art of human motivation, human insight, human wisdom and human courage may become sought after skills. After many years of false starts are we finally witnessing the birth of an age where the winners will be companies who compete by creating an environment in which the human spirit can flourish where natural commitment and creativity can be harnessed, where essentially human values are given equal weight with financial values. Doing this at global scale alongside a continuing competence in performance management is a real challenge and one that will really separate the sheep from the goats.

Finally let me return to Dylan and another song - It’s alright Ma (I’m only dying) - from the same Bringing it all Back Home album which contained “It’s all over now Baby Blue”. This song is a 7 minute poetic rant epic which no-one can interpret for you: but for me there is a verse which speaks to all of us about change and renewal

"For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying."

He not busy being born is busy dying! True of individuals and businesses. You must keep reinventing, keep creating, keep innovating, always be engaged in the birth of a new idea, a new vision or a new you. Then you are busy being born and not dying.

[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)
____________________________________________________________________

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 11:10 PM | Comments (16)

The Crocodile Hunter

Yesterday, when someone told me that "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray, my immediate reaction was "Don't talk about it in front of Tara..." Tara is 4 1/2 years old, and like many kids around the world loved Steve Irwin. I was not ready to explain to her his accident and his death. Steve's programs -- particularly The Wiggles Safari movie -- helped Tara overcome a fear of certain animals, so

how do I explain to her that he was indeed killed by a stingray while shooting a film?

As many of you know, I have been working on my second book. The book, 100 Questions from My Baby, is a natural follow-up to my first one which was based on promises I made to my daughters when I was pregnant. (And, yes, I did deliver the book on time last week -- thank you everyone for your support.)

Some of the more challenging questions I have faced from Tara in the last year are ones like:

Mommy, whats a bomb?
If God is always watching, why do bad things happen to good people?
Why is that baby lying naked on the side of the road?
Will you also get sick and die?

Steve Irwin's death brought up another potential question for me. How do I explain to her that Steve Irwin, who demonstrated to her the incredible beauty and gentleness in so many animals, died from such a dramatic death? Would it be more important to focus on the fact that he died doing what he loved to do -- being with animals? At 4 1/2 years old, perhaps she does she even need to know... She can still enjoy his videos and hear his message without being reminded of a deeper fear. I guess, when, and if, the time is right, I can have the needed conversation with her.

I did not know Steve Irwin, nor do I know his family. But I do want to thank them for their words and their work -- he, (along with his wife, daughter, Bindi, and the Wiggles) helped my daughters develop a fascination with animals, nature and the earth. For that, my family will forever be grateful.

Posted by Mallika Chopra at 02:21 PM | Comments (24)

ATCA and Intentblog

I am excited to formally announce our relationship with ATCA. Through them, we will bring you informed opinions and dialogue from distinguished leaders around the world. I have been voraciously reading their daily e-letter, and am thrilled that they have chosen to collaborate with us. Following is a formal announcement:

ATCA And IntentBlog Join Forces To Address Complex Global Challenges Together

London, UK - 5th September 2006: ATCA, the London based leading global forum to address complex threats to humanity, and IntentBlog, a group blog featuring unique voices from around the world from Los Angeles to Mumbai, have begun to share seminal Socratic Dialogue threads. The dialogue threads seek to address the top ten complex global challenges of the present age by bringing together important decision makers in major governments, corporations, voluntary organisations and NGOs as well as experts from academia and philanthropists. The top ten asymmetric risks and opportunities identified in the 21st century include climate chaos, radical poverty, organised crime, extremism, informatics, nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, artificial intelligence and financial systems.

The first eleven Socratic Dialogue threads within the 'Open ATCA' series presented on IntentBlog are focussed on the Hydrogen Economy, Climate Chaos, Einstein-Russell, New Orleans, Buddha, Blended Value, Iran, Advaita, Social Entrepreneurship, Unity and Non-Violence. Apparently diverse on first reading, Socratic Dialogue threads have demonstrated that these subjects are closely interlinked -- with multiple cross references -- in terms of addressing some of the key global complexities witnessed in the short and medium term with long term impact.

"IntentBlog is very privileged to collaborate with ATCA and elevate the level of dialogue that comes to us from this distinguished group of thinkers," said Deepak Chopra, Co-Founder, IntentBlog. "We hope to change our collective narrative via this initiative so there is deeper understanding of the tangled hierarchy and inseparability of co-arising complex global challenges. Understanding is the basis for intuition, love, compassion and creative solutions. Let us hope this accelerates the formation of a critical mass of global consciousness to help build a better world."

"We are delighted to start the 'Open ATCA' initiative on IntentBlog which allows members of both communities to interact with each other as one and address complex global challenges in unison," said DK Matai, Chairman, The Philanthropia, ATCA and mi2g.net. "Having reached critical mass, we have been searching for the past year for an ideal high quality online partner that will allow the ATCA closed group of distinguished thinkers to engage with the global community in a positive and meaningful way. After examining many options, we are delighted to begin the friendly alliance between the ATCA and IntentBlog distinguished communities."

ATCA: The Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance is a philanthropic expert initiative founded in 2001 in London, England, 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.

Posted by Mallika Chopra at 01:24 PM | Comments (10)

September 04, 2006

Indian President -- Transforming India by 2020

Dr APJ Abdul Kalam is one of the most distinguished scientists of India and became the 11th President of India in 2002. His focus is on transforming India into a developed nation by 2020.

Dr APJ Abdul Kalam

Dear ATCA Colleagues; dear IntentBloggers

Re: Transforming India into a Developed Nation by 2020: Dr A P J Abdul Kalam, The Indian President's Vision

Earlier in the year in Mumbai, The Indian President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, a rocket engineer and scientist, delivered:

1. The seminal address to a packed hall of CEOs on the concluding day of The NASSCOM Leadership Summit, 2006, which sets the tone of public policy for the Indian software industry; and

2. The valedictory address at the International Conference on Computing in High-Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP'06) organised by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), where the recent CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) of Geneva's grid computing breakthrough of One Gigabyte per second sustained data transfer was announced.

Who is Dr APJ Abdul Kalam?

Nearly 40 years ago a young man -- APJ Abdul Kalam -- stepped into the premises of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) at Colaba, Mumbai, to appear for an interview for the post of a rocket engineer. The youngster, interviewed by Dr Vikram Sarabhai -- Father of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Programme -- and Prof MGK Menon -- Director of TIFR at the time and later Chairman of ISRO -- was selected and on July 18, 1980, he launched India into the space age with the successful flight of the Satellite Launch Vehicle III (SLV-III). Earlier this year, the rocket engineer revisited the institute, which is the cradle of India's space and nuclear programmes, after nearly 40 years, to deliver the valedictory address at CHEP'06.

Dr APJ Abdul Kalam is one of the most distinguished scientists of India and became the 11th President of India in 2002. His focus is on transforming India into a developed nation by 2020. He specialised in Aeronautical Engineering from Madras Institute of Technology. Dr Kalam made significant contribution as Project Director to develop India's first indigenous Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV-III) which successfully injected the Rohini satellite in the near earth orbit in July 1980 and made India an exclusive member of The Space Club. He was responsible for the evolution of ISRO's launch vehicle programme, particularly the PSLV configuration. After working for two decades in ISRO and mastering launch vehicle technologies, Dr Kalam took up the responsibility of developing Indigenous Guided Missiles at Defence Research and Development Organisation as the Chief Executive of Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP). He was responsible for the development and operationalisation of "Agni" and "Prithvi" Missiles and for building indigenous capability in critical technologies through networking of multiple institutions. He was the Scientific Adviser to The Defence Minister and Secretary, Department of Defence Research & Development from July 1992 to December 1999. During this period he led to the weaponisation of strategic missile systems and the Pokhran-II nuclear tests in collaboration with the Department of Atomic Energy, which made India a nuclear weapon State. He also gave thrust to self-reliance in defence systems by progressing multiple development tasks and mission projects such as Light Combat Aircraft.

As Chairman of Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC) and as an eminent scientist, he has led the country with the help of 500 experts to arrive at Technology Vision 2020 giving a road map for transforming India from the present developing status to a developed nation. Dr Kalam has served as the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, in the rank of Cabinet Minister, from November 1999 to November 2001 and was responsible for evolving policies, strategies and missions for many development applications. Dr Kalam was also the Chairman, Ex-officio, of the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Cabinet (SAC-C) and piloted India Millennium Mission 2020. In his literary pursuit four of Dr Kalam's books - "Wings of Fire", "India 2020 - A Vision for the New Millennium", "My journey" and "Ignited Minds - Unleashing the power within India" have become household names in India and among the Indian diaspora. These books have been translated in many Indian languages. He has been awarded the coveted Indian civilian awards - Padma Bhushan (1981), Padma Vibhushan (1990) and the highest civilian award Bharat Ratna (1997). He is a recipient of several other awards and Fellow of many professional institutions.

At the NASSCOM leadership summit, with a 1,500-strong retinue of policemen and security personnel standing on-guard, President Kalam urged the Indian IT industry to:

1. Aim at acquiring 50 per cent of the world IT market;
2. Revise their revenue target to USD 200 billion by 2010 from the current NASSCOM projection of USD 60 billion; and
3. Acquire a lion’s share of the world’s USD 300 billion global offshoring market.

"The NASSCOM-McKinsey Report 2005 indicates that the addressable market for global offshoring including BPO is around USD 300 billion presently, whereas we are only tapping 10 per cent of this addressable market," President Kalam said. He also said that India’s cost competitiveness in software products must aim for quality and just-in-time delivery. "Since there are a number of countries competing for the USD 300 billion target, we continuously have to aim high," he said.

According to the Indian President the ITES (Information Technology Enterprise Solutions) and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) sector accounts for 3.5 per cent of the global market, which should be increased to 15 per cent of the global business volume. He asked the IT industry to focus on regions which require IT solutions in education, healthcare, eGovernance and eBusiness. The President said that the booming tech sector should explore new markets in Asia, ASEAN and African nations for achieving sharply higher growth. He also suggested to establish joint ventures with countries such as the Philippines, [South] Korea and other East Asian countries.

"The idea is to look East," he said, stressing that mission was convergence of "Bio", "Nano" and "Info" to make "the world peaceful, prosperous and safe." Citing examples from his visit to [South] Korea, the President also suggested tablet PCs for school students in the range of USD 100-150; embedded systems for use in "consumer durables to defence systems"; and leveraging knowledge products like tele-medicine, tele-education etc to reach the target.

"During my visit to the Philippines I found that they are very keen to work with India in the IT services and the IT sector. I also found that the electronic infrastructure is extremely well developed there," he said. Philippines has a 155 mbps bandwidth connectivity around Manila connecting government, educational and R&D institutions; APAN.NET, established in association with Japan."

He also said that India’s existing policy objectives for Africa should map on to its IT goals so as to establish a "Pan-African eNetwork that connects 53 countries for providing tele-education, tele-medicine and connecting the Heads of State."

The Indian Government is focusing on developing infrastructure in 63 cities, which include many Tier-II cities, President Kalam said in response to the software industry’s demands for better infrastructure to enable expansion into smaller towns and cities. Expansion into Tier-II cities will also reduce the cost of support infrastructure such as buildings, drainage, electricity and water as compared to what is incurred in the big cities, he said. BPOs should be promoted in Tier-II cities with a population of around one million and later extended to smaller towns having a population of about half a million.

At CHEP'06, President Kalam's address, which detailed the importance of networking and grid computing for scientific research as well as for educational purposes and knowledge acquisition, met with an enthusiastic response from both Indian and foreign listeners. With an active participation in the building of the Geneva-based accelerator Large Hadron Collider (LHC), it should be possible for Indian scientists and technologists "to enhance the development and production of Thorium based reactors in the country," President Kalam said.

"The knowledge you have gained and will be gaining in building LHC and the results will be of great utility to many technology ventures in the world," he said while suggesting his ideas to the global scientists attending the conference. To the computing particle Physicists, who are working on LHC, Kalam said one of the greatest challenges for the computing scientists working on such long-term projects is to make sure the technology remains robust and does not become obsolete. On the mission for space research and particle research, he said, "it would be worthwhile to consider the possibility of integrating the data from accelerators, the scientific simulations and the space and ground based observations."

President Kalam said India must aim at enhancing bandwidth immediately, and "as a nation, we must get 1 Gigabit per second connectivity." Addressing some of the world's leading scientists, he said, "I have a vision that bandwidth should be free and made available to all those who need it." Calling on the Government to take the lead in making it available, he dwelt at length on equitable access to education and knowledge in the digital era. Describing it as the "primary goal" of virtual universities, he said availability of high bandwidth would ensure that the best resources were accessible to all participants. "Bandwidth is the demolisher of imbalances and a great leveller in the knowledge society."

Prof Harvey Newman, a leading figure in research networking in the United States, said it was important to quantify the President's vision. President Kalam's vision of the knowledge grid was a great technical challenge and would require Terabytes per second connectivity to implement. It was a programme which, if implemented, would change the way people thought about networks and grids and the way they interacted with each other.

Prof Shobo Bhattacharya, Director, TIFR, said the President's vision was important in a country where high-quality human resources in education were scarce. Institutions such as the TIFR could contribute considerably to education if high-bandwidth networking were available. President Kalam praised the work of Indian high-energy physicists and welcomed their scientific collaboration with the European Centre for High Energy Physics [CERN]. After the valedictory function, he viewed the demonstrations set up to illustrate various high-bandwidth networking applications.

President Kalam said the Indian industries are beginning to understand the importance of fundamental science. "The Indian industries have still not tasted the result of fundamental research and have just begun to understand that if the economic growth of the country has to reach 10 per cent, they need technology which is based on fundamental research," he said in his reply to a query. "There is a realisation with the global competition also," he said adding, for both government and industries, realisation has come and "we are pushing it". When a research student asked on the importance of having the Bangalore model Indian Institute of Science in Pune and Kolkata, President Kalam said "it is to promote scientific and teaching culture in the country". "This effort will create scientific cadre in the country with employment assurance," he said adding, "I hope the parents are listening to this."

[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)
____________________________________________________________________

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 10:59 PM | Comments (6)

Do We Have a Self? (Part 2)

I won't recap the earlier post except to say that there does seem to be a good argument for a higher self that gives us a sense of having a self at all. I took awhile to reach that conclusion, but I think we're there. The entire universe is discontinuous but appears to be continuous. Every subatomic particle has no location but seems to be somewhere. It's very necessary to feel that you have a self, in the sense of an ego and personality, a home base for "I". Otherwise, experience would float like a cloud, applying to nothing but isolated events.

Most people are happy with the ego-personality. They have settled for a faulty mirror image of the real Self. Moreover, they are made quite anxious when told that they have no self. Nobody wants to fly apart, but the "no self" argument really means exchanging a smaller self for a greater one. All the qualities you value in yourself are much more real and substantial when the higher self becomes your focus.

The ultimate way to describe the higher self must account for everything. "Aham brahmasmi," or '"I am the universe," is a famous phrase from Vedanta. In our Indian tradition we are fortunate that this isn't a scandalous claim. I was on Larry King once when a distinguished Bible teacher of the strict sort turned to me and said, "I've read your books. I know you think you're God." To him that was scandalous. But in the Vedic tradition one can choose which self to accept. You can remain inside ego and personality to worship gods outside yourself; you can take a halfway position and accept these gods as actually external images of yourself. You can follow Vedanta all the way and see the higher self, or Atman, as simply true, with no gods at all except as reflections of the same Oneness constantly manifesting in myriad forms.

As seekers we all have to deal with the various and sundry anxieties our egos exhibit on the path. Sometimes the ego puffs up to hear "I am the universe," mistaking the "I" as ego-bound. Sometimes the ego quakes in fear that the higher self will gobble it up and end its existence. But in truth there is a process that carries the whole self system from the small "I' to the big "I." This process begins here and now and ends with Aham brahmasmi. It isn't scandalous at all, and it doesn't hurt, except insofar as it hurts to pull out a thorn, to use the Buddhist metaphor.

First, you accept that you and the world you live in is continuous only at the level of the higher self, or consciousness if you prefer that term.

Second, you see that birth and death are discontinuities that interrupt this eternal continuity. Which means basically that all experience is also discontinuous. Your brain is a quantum machine for making the world seem to flow along--and you to flow along in it--using the raw material of electrical and chemical activity.

Third, because it is connected to the real continuity, your brain can be used to shift your perception from the unreal to the real. Perception has this amazing ability to look onto itself. Self-consciousness is a real phenomenon, and our greatest ally.

The illusion created by the brain is complex but being interrelated, you can get at it any way you want, and your efforts will affect the whole system. I think of the process in three steps:
1. Notice what's real
2. Give it significance
3. Value it

By "real" I mean any quality that you are taking from the higher self, any way that you are participating in it.

QUALITIES OF THE HIGHER SELF: The things you can begin to participate in

Telling the truth
Feeling that you love and are loved
Beauty in all its forms
Appreciation of Nature
Instinct, intuition, inner knowing
Self-sufficiency, knowing that you are enough
Trusting your inner intelligence
Evolving, growing, progressing
Feeling connected
Feeling that presence of Being
Eternity, infinity, a faint sense of being outside time
Connection to a tradition of wisdom
Acceptance, tolerance, appreciation of common humanity
Compassion
Peace, non-violence
Non-judgment
Having a vision and following it
Patience and forgiveness with yourself and others

These are laudable qualities that almost nobody thinks they disagree with. But actions speak louder than beliefs. How many do you actually participate in? Until you give these things significance and value, the cords of connection to the higher self remain weak. It's worth noting that society and our own egos have a huge stake in doing the opposite of everything on this list. Your present allegiance is to a discontinuous self--one separated from the higher self--with its long history of habits and biases.

QUALITIES OF HTE LOWER SELF: The things you might be participating in

Avoiding the truth because it's painful or unpopular
Feeling that you aren't loved, doling out your own love meagerly
Ignoring beauty as a luxury or add-on to the more serious things in life
Forgetting or despoiling Nature
Ignoring instinct and intuition, judging them to be irrational or "a woman's thing"
Feeling that you are lacking, dependent on someone else to be complete
Relying on the opinions and beliefs of others, second-hand thinking
Defending the status quo, ignoring self-growth
Feeling lonely, embattled, disconnected
Feeling the emptiness of life, fearing that you have a void inside
Being weighed down by aging and the burden of old experiences
Adhering to no tradition of wisdom, scoffing at wisdom
Us-versus-Them thinking
Sitting in judgment, seeing others as inferiors
Living for status, money, possessions instead of following a vision
Being a perfectionist who criticizes yourself and others constantly

The difference between these two lists couldn't be more clear cut, and it's understandable that like it or not, everyone has a lot invested in the second list, which keeps perpetuating the enormous suffering we see all around us. To break the habits of the lower self, given that they have been imprinted for a long, long time, is a big challenge. But isn't it the only way to live? We must begin to see how chaotic and discontinuous we really are. At any given moment, our minds are caroming from one event to the next, and it is nearly impossible to focus on the self because it keeps slipping away to a new activity.

This brings up the principle of one-pointedness or mindfulness. Neither is mystical or difficult. When you are mindful, you remind yourself that you want to follow the qualities of the higher self rather than the lower. When you are one-pointed, you are focusing on your vision instead of the million and one distractions thrown up by the lower self. To use the beautiful Buddhist imagery, the self is like a full moon seen on a lake, where the waves chop the moon up into a thousand pieces.

You don't have to practice Yoga ten hours a day to be self-conscious, one-pointed, or mindful. But some discipline is needed; otherwise, the machinery of the lower self keeps rolling along. Some seekers are comfortable with a strict regimen of spiritual practices. I find that this way makes me an most other people very uncomfortable, because kicking the habit of the lower self is a lot harder than kicking cigarettes or overeating.

Not to be too casual, I prefer the Chinese menu approach. I know that my ego-personality is hungry for experience, but I also know that it won't be hungry for long, and it won't stick with one food for long, however nutritious that food may be. So I give it a list of choices. Here's what's on the menu, and I find that at any given moment, my ego-personality finds at least one item attractive, which is all I ask:

A SPIRITUAL MENU

--Stop for a moment and say to yourself, "I am conscious." Feel what that is like.
--Sit quietly and feel your body for a few moments
--Close your eyes and meditate
--Close your eyes and feel the gentle in and out of your breath
--Do something kind
--Give generously of time, money, or attention
--Regard someone in a better light than you usually do, suspend judgment
--Notice the voice of fear an ask it what it really wants you to know
--When you are able, ignore fear and look for a different viewpoint
--Stop and appreciate a flower, a sunset, the full moon
--Make a friendly comment to a stranger and pay attention to their response
--Befriend someone you regard as inferior, if only for five minutes
--Stop struggling if you can
--Release a bottled-up emotion in private
--When on the verge of issuing a critique, stop and use a positive reinforcement instead
--Check back with your highest vision of yourself and do something to further it
--Take one thing you know you're doing wrong and correct it
--Say you're sorry when it's tough to do it
--When you most feel like arguing, back away for a day
--When you catch yourself harshly judging someone, ask if your blame is really a way to escape seeing the same bad quality in yourself
--Ask for viewpoints outside your own and take them seriously
--Ask someone else how they feel, be sincerely caring
--Direct love to someone who obviously needs it
--Pay attention to someone who is obviously asking for it
--Stop being suspicious, give the benefit of the doubt
--Give when you know it's right
--Walk away form gossips and any kind of heated discussion of religion or politics
--Read something inspirational, keep in touch with the traditions of great sages and spiritual masters

If you can catch yourself in a habitual reaction, substitute one of these activities instead, and keep on doing that day after day, the influence of the higher self will become a factor in your life at the core rather than on the periphery. Whether you think of it as chipping away at your old conditioning, breaking bad habits, improving yourself, or reaching a higher state of evolution, this steady shift of allegiance to the higher self is what it takes to exchange illusion for reality.

Love,
Deepak

Posted by Deepak Chopra at 11:56 AM | Comments (80)

September 03, 2006

Dr H Scheer -- Alternative to the Kyoto Protocol

"Alternative to the Kyoto Protocol -- The Solar Global Economy" is a very deeply felt and thoughtful presentation on what is wrong with just building a global consensual approach to countering climate chaos via Kyoto and how solar energy initiatives at state level can pave the way to address this complex global challenge facing humanity.

The presentation has been developed by the world famous German Parliamentarian at the Deutscher Bundestag and Alternative Nobel Prize Winner Dr Herman Scheer based in Berlin, Germany.

Dear ATCA Colleagues; dear IntentBloggers

We are grateful to Dr Hermann Scheer, a Member of The Deutscher Bundestag -- The National Parliament of The Federal Republic of Germany -- in Berlin, for his submission to ATCA, "Alternative to the Kyoto Protocol -- The Solar Global Economy".

Dr Hermann Scheer, born 29th April 1944, is a Member of the German Parliament (Bundestag) and a socio-economist and political author. He is the President of the European Association for Renewable Energies EUROSOLAR and General Chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy (WCRE). He is a member of the Founding Council of The World Future Council. He completed his PhD at Freie Universitaet (Free University) Berlin. He was awarded: the Alternative Nobel Prize for his worldwide commitment to Renewable Energy in Stockholm [1999]; the World Solar Prize by the 2nd World Conference on Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conversion in Vienna [1998]; World Prize on Bio-Energy by the 1st World Conference on Biomass in Seville [2000]; Hero for the Green Century by the TIME Magazine [2002]; Global Leadership Award by the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACROE)in New York [2004]; World Wind Energy Award by the World Wind Energy Conference in Beijing [2004]; and Solar World Einstein Award in Bonn [2005]. His seminal books on the renewable energy transition include: Sonnenstrategie (1993), 8th edition 1999, published also in English (A Solar Manifesto) and in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Czech and Hungarian; Solare Weltwirtschaft (1999), 5th edition 2002, published also in English (Solar World Economy) and in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Italian, Danish, Czech and Korean; and Energieautonomie (2005). He writes:

Dear DK and Colleagues

RE: Alternative to the Kyoto Protocol -- The Solar Global Economy

"Let’s improve the atmosphere" -- that was how the German government greeted delegates to the conference on climate change held in Bonn in July 2001, the eighth such conference since 1992. Yet even before the conference took place, it was abundantly clear that even if the Kyoto Protocol were to be implemented in full through to 2012 without being watered down, the most it could achieve would be to bring emissions back down to the already dangerously high levels of 1990. On the basis of existing agreements, the objective was no longer to improve matters, but merely to prevent them getting any worse. And while the negotiations rumble on, the climate situation remains precarious. A short study undertaken by the Wuppertal Institute predicts that by 2012, global emissions will actually have risen by ten per cent. The Kyoto debate would appear to have run its course.

In reality, it is now time to open the debate up. When reporting to the public, politicians face understandable pressure to present even minimal results as a success. The truth is, however, that holding international conferences has proved to be an inadequate response to the dangers and challenges that climate change presents. Despite the general consensus that we have to stick to the path originally chosen, it is now past time we asked whether these conferences have not in fact done more harm than good. While the delegates have been debating over the past decade, emissions have been rising by an unprecedented 30 per cent. We can no longer afford to measure the success of climate change conferences in terms of agreements reached. In view of the consensus assumption that such conferences represent the international instrument par excellence for tackling climate change, it is fair to ask how much has been neglected, postponed, cut, omitted or mishandled since they began. The roll-call of failure is so long that it would be irresponsible not to look for a better way forward. "Let’s improve the policy" should be the new leitmotiv.

At first glance, the case for global climate change conferences appears convincing. Global problems need global –- and thus consensual –- solutions. All governments must recognize that they have a direct responsibility to tackle climate change, and their commitment must be binding. The right way to achieve such an outcome is to hold global negotiations to decide on a joint programme of action on which no-one can renege. The apparently common-sense nature of this approach, however, is blinding us to basic questions, questions which the now parlous state of the Kyoto Protocol imbues with new urgency. Why should we expect comprehensive, fast and effective policy responses to emerge from what is the most long-winded political decision process imaginable, namely consensus-orientated negotiations between the parties to an international treaty? What were the reasons for the success or failure of other international treaty negotiations? But above all, is it even possible to achieve international agreement on the technological and structural transformation of the energy sector that a successful climate change strategy would require?

The conference process has given governments a perfect excuse to postpone any environmental overhaul of their respective domestic energy sectors until a global treaty has been agreed and ratified, on the pretext that a global framework is essential to preserve international competitiveness. Governments have thus largely been able to forestall taking swifter action at national level –- such as increased taxation on fossil energy –- while still protesting innocence on the global stage. The effect of the climate change negotiations has thus been to preserve the status quo. The recent history of the energy industry has seen unprecedented growth in the lobbying power of the energy industry and its ongoing internationalization through forced market liberalization, a process which has received hefty governmental and legislative backing. Movement towards sustainable energy supplies is conspicuous by its absence, and the power of those primarily responsible for global warming is structurally more entrenched than ever. The energy industry’s current environmental rhetoric is the only distracting factor in this regard.

National governments have proved themselves incapable of moving on from their traditional role as the protectors of the energy industry at the national level, and they are unlikely to do any better as delegates to international conferences. It comes as no surprise that the most important topics are not even up for discussion: not global carbon dioxide taxation, nor an end to the tax exemption for aviation fuel (although the rapid growth in air travel represents the greatest single danger to the climate), nor the abolition of conventional energy subsidies, currently amounting to USD 300 billion a year. And yet this latter at least would fit nicely with the ideal of free-market capitalism trumpeted by the WTO process.

It is also no coincidence that the global conferences have become fixated on policy instruments such as tradable emissions permits and the ‘win-win’ solutions that they claim to offer. Environmental economists who front such proposals hope that they can reconcile the interests of the fossil energy industry with the goal of preventing climate change. The energy industry, however, is betting on being able to maintain its established structures and retain its control over global energy investment. These supposedly realistic proposals take on trust the assertion by the energy industry that its interests are identical with those of the economy as a whole, and thus that the cost for individual companies of preventing climate change is a burden on the economy as a whole. Where all the talk is of costs and burdens, it is easy to lose sight of the economic benefits of tackling climate change.

Negotiating a global agreement probably only has a real chance of success where the subject of the negotiations is manageable and can be clearly defined, and only a few scattered interests are adversely affected –- or when the dominant interest groups expect to benefit on a large scale. The subject of climate change negotiations is the supply and consumption of energy, which is neither manageable nor easy to delineate. And if the benefit in terms of climate protection is to be large enough to justify the considerable international effort, then the interests of the energy industry must inevitably suffer. The outlook for a consensus-based intergovernmental process is consequently less than promising.

By contrast, the Montreal Protocol on the protection of the ozone layer did have a manageable and clearly defined object. The task –- difficult enough in itself –- was to reign in the interests of certain manufacturers of coolants and cooling systems. The Antarctic Treaty was agreed before any vested interests had arisen, and before any significant investments had been made. The WTO treaty, while extremely broad in scope, matches the interests of the most influential states and other global economic agents. International agreements on disarmament and arms control treaties do also have well-defined objects, but go against influential interests in the defence industry. In most cases, unsurprisingly, arms treaties are only ratified if –- as in the case of the ban on chemical weapons –- the core interests of the defence industry are not significantly affected and the companies concerned, like the chemicals industry, produce primarily for the civilian market. In other cases, the price of ratification was compensation for the affected interests in the form of new defence contracts in areas not controlled by the respective treaties.

The Kyoto Protocol also contains compensatory measures for the energy industry. It is not just emissions trading and the accreditation of energy-efficient investment in developing countries that come into this category, but also the measures agreed in Bonn to compensate the oil-producing countries for lost sales. It is clear in the light of these so-called ‘flexible mechanisms’ that the real compromise lies in the widespread failure to consider structural reform of the energy system. The participating countries are tacitly banking on a more efficient fossil energy system, rather than its replacement with renewable energy. Yet the transition to inexhaustible and emission-free sources of energy must form the core of any sustainable climate and environment strategy.

There is no point in constructing a global strategy for climate change if renewable energy is seen as a secondary issue. Where the aim is to replace fossil with renewable energy, there can be no question of compensation for the fossil energy industry. There can be no environmental revolution in energy supply without creative destruction (à la Schumpeter) of the existing conventional energy industry. Renewable energy, correctly understood, must supplant fossil primary energy and the infrastructure and businesses that supply it. Sunlight and wind are supplied by nature free of charge, and biomass primary energy requires a switch from oil, gas and coal suppliers to an entirely different structure of agricultural and forestry businesses. Having set out on the wrong premise, the negotiating parties have been swept along by the ever more absurd logic of the discussions. Their only response has been to build in a system of controls to guard against abuse of the ‘flexible mechanisms’. Ever since the decision was taken to pursue climate protection through the instrument of international conferences designed to achieve equitable and binding obligations, it has been inevitable that the goal of climate protection would (at best) be watered down or (more probably) compromised.

It is not just the tangled web of vested interests that makes global climate change negotiations, as they have hitherto been conducted, unlikely to succeed. Even if this web did not exist –- albeit it is broader-based and more intense than the links between politics and the defence industry –- there are still economic and technological reasons why a negotiation-based approach has little chance of success. An energy supply which protects climate and environment must necessarily be based on renewable, not fossil or nuclear energy, which means replacing the current system with more efficient energy technology using renewable sources. For this reason, and because renewable energy implies a wholly different supply chain, other economic agents and other industrial sectors are implicated than the conventional energy industry –- and consequently also other economic interests. Renewable energy requires a highly distributed approach –- each energy consumer is potentially also a producer –- while also affording wholly new opportunities for agriculture (biomass), the construction materials industry (energy-efficient materials), for engineering professionals and for tradesmen (building to make maximum use of the sun), for manufacturers of industrial plants, machinery and motors (wind turbines, biogas plants, distributed motor generators, fuel cells), for the electrical industry (devices with no need for mains electricity) and many others besides. Properly followed through, this would be an economic revolution of the most far-reaching kind. It is fear of the revolutionizing change that it would bring that motivates the widespread resistance to renewable energy.

History provides many examples of technological revolutions that have reshaped the world. None have run their course without encountering massive resistance, no change has been brought about in consensus with those on the losing end and none has been the subject of an international treaty, even where its effects were felt on a global scale. Nevertheless, many of these revolutionary changes have needed a political framework or targeted help at their inception in order to develop and showcase the economic and cultural benefits. The list includes railways, electricity grids, the car society, shipping and aviation, nuclear power and telecommunications.

This is the way dynamic processes have developed and continue to develop, to the point where they become self-sustaining (a point which the politically sheltered conventional energy industry has yet to reach). The microelectronic revolution happened because of the productivity gains it brought, despite the almost universal structural upheaval it caused. Countries that promoted microelectronics –- for example, through government-sponsored research and development –- benefited accordingly. Those who held back in order to forestall economic turmoil subsequently fell behind. The same process can be seen today in the biotech industry.

Demands that these technologies should be introduced on the basis of an international agreement with binding quotas, in order to forestall incalculable economic upheaval, were conspicuous by their absence. Anyone who made such a suggestion would have been derided as an economic illiterate. Countries strove and continue to strive to bolster national competitiveness by being the first to make the next breakthrough. And yet the lessons of the past are comprehensively disregarded in the case of sustainable energy technology, although the range of potential applications is greater than for any other technological innovation.

A dynamic climate change strategy that takes the threat seriously must have at its heart the economic opportunities arising from a revolution in energy supplies. It does not take a global treaty to unlock the benefits of renewable energy. Rather, first one and then ever more states and companies must be prepared to seize new opportunities without pandering to the fossil energy industry. The German Renewable Energy Act leads the way in this respect. To the surprise of international observers, it has resulted in unexpectedly high growth rates and brought forth new industries. Inspired by this example, Egypt, China, India, Brazil, Argentina, France and some US state governments are now developing ambitious wind-power programmes of the order of thousands of megawatts.

The trailblazers who proved the doubters and the ignorant wrong were what was needed to make this happen. Opportunities for such trailblazing are legion, ranging from government research programmes, through agricultural and development policy to profit-driven entrepreneurial product innovation that has no need of political aid. In the latter case, the greatest opportunities lie in combining microelectronics with photovoltaic technology, what one might call solar information technology. If governments are to put substance behind the climate change rhetoric, then they must –- finally! -– change their policies on research, agriculture, development aid, architecture and market regulation. Simply plodding on with the intractable Kyoto process and negotiating refinements to the questionable emissions trading policy is not an adequate response.

This is not to say that global negotiations have no role to play. Rather, what is needed is a new focus, such as changed priorities for the World Bank, a global renewable energy agency to facilitate technology transfer, reciprocal environmental quality requirements on imports and domestic production, an end to trade restrictions on sustainable energy technology and global standards for the same, a ban on subsidized energy exports or an environmental chamber for the International Court.

The result would be a dynamic, goal-oriented climate change policy, free of bureaucratic impediments, and a step forward from simply prolonging and refining the current series of international conferences. Preventing climate change through consensus-building conferences is fantasy politics –- all talk and no action.

‘The Solar Global Economy’ offers an alternative programme to the Kyoto Protocol. It details the links between energy resources and economic structures that have given rise to the fossil energy economy, and maps the dynamic road towards renewable energy that will lead to a new and sustainable global economy.

Hermann Scheer

[ENDS]

Best wishes

For and on behalf of DK Matai
Chairman, Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ATCA)
____________________________________________________________________

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 10:50 PM | Comments (14)

September 02, 2006

Weekly Intent - Ruby Bahl

Seeing the spoon-feeding of youngsters by parents these days reminds me of an incident of my earlier years, when I had the opportunity of visiting the backstage in a Circus.

It was a great experience. I was able to have a closer look at the lions, tigers, bears and all the other circus animals. As I was passing the elephants, I noticed that these huge creatures were being held by only a small rope tied to their front leg. No chains, no cages. It was obvious that the elephants could, at any time, break away but for some reason, they did not. I saw a trainer near by and asked why these beautiful, magnificent animals just stood there and made no attempt to get away. "Well," he said, "when they are very young and much smaller we use the same size rope to tie them and, at that age, it's enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They think the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free."

I was amazed. These animals could at any time break free from their bonds but because they believed they could not, they were stuck right where they were. They were conditioned and hanged on to a belief that they can’t run away simply because they failed at it when young.

Most of the younger generation is cautioned not to take risks to avoid any kind of hurt/pain usually by well-intentioned parents and family. These parents are the dream stealers who, due to their own fear and beliefs, attempt to discourage their children to take plunge at all cost. They forget the adage ‘No pain no gain’. These parents/family in a way stop the young to acquire the necessary survival technique.

Like the elephants, many of these children go through life hanging onto a belief that they cannot do without the assistance from their parents or family, simply because they are conditioned to such a belief. I am not suggesting that one should not seek advice from parents who has the welfare of the child on mind, but the child need not be swayed by the limiting beliefs of parents.

As early as possible one must let the child take charge of life and live life to the fullest. He/She deserves the best.

Ruby Bahl

Posted by Intent at 10:04 PM | Comments (14)

Could Ganesha be my soulmate?

... do soulmates really exist?

See I've been having this discussion with my girlfriends for a while. Most of the men or boys i know pooh pooh this theory of soulmates & always put it in the realm of probabilty without commiting. Like yeah its possible but at any given time there could be many potential soulmates and its upto you to pick, or that one cannot base a life on just instinct or gut feeling etc etc. But then i get back to discussing it with the girls and these are some of our doubts -mind you some are in very satifying and committed relationships,while some are single, but the doubts still rage

1. How do you know if he/she is the one? If he/she is the one why am i not in a state of joy?

2.Is it possible to zero in on someone and deciding that they are your soulmate without them having a clue-isnt that a bit loony like picking on some gorgeous celebrity and deciding thats it for me?

3. What exactly is it that you need to work out in your present life till you arrive at the soulmate level? or should one accept that there is nothing to work out, we are perfect and wait for the soulmate to drop out of the sky?

4. Is there a cellular memory that draws us to others of a similar cellular memory so that we can then fuse together like some great scientific miracle that explodes into the world in an atombomb of love?

5. So is it just one for one?

6. If the soul is omnipresent, omnipotent and all pervading why does it feel the need for a mate?

7. Could your soulmate be of the same sex? Like is my best friend my soul mate then? Could your soulmate be of a different species then? Like your dog? Isnt it presumptous and vain to beleive that only the human form has a soul?

8. Is it that human beings feel inadequate and incomplete and so need a mate to complete them? Does that necessarily have to do with our souls or our emotional financial and physical needs?

9. If we all have male and female in us should we not be able to rely on only ourselves? Like the ying and yang ardha nari, or right brain left brain theories....

10. Coming to the male female in all of us-does that mean like Shiva and Parvati? Were they the same person then?
Or were they two individuals who became one?

11. Is it possible that we are ignoring our immediate reality, refusing to accept the perfection in our lives as it exists and therfore clinging on to the notion of a soulmate ? Keep it at a level of fantasy and dream on... create a mgical mystical web in our own heads and...

12. If Meera considered Krishna her soulmate without even meeting him...considering she lived in a diferent era and was married to a Rana of Jaipur(not sure about this historical fact -will have to check with my mother!) in Akbars time . She left her princely home, tired of her husbands jealousy and lack of understanding and spent her life offering Krishna's stone idol her love and her music and finally ended her life by merging into the deity in Dwaraka

I think i can do it too- why does a soulmate have to take a human form?
I can beleive Ganesha is my soulmate
the thought is making me really happy right now
and i can eat as many modaks as i like - he dosent even notice that I'm getting fat!

Posted by Suchitra Krishnamoorthi at 09:15 PM | Comments (54)

The Citizen-centric Bio Intelligence Age -- eHealth & Telemedicine -- Prof Ricky Richardson

Excerpt: The term eHealth is being used increasingly as a generic expression to refer to any form of IT enabled health system reform. eHealth addresses both changes in the access of healthcare information and services as well as the wider dissemination of healthcare related skills and specialist expertise into the community, into the home, and ultimately to the individual.

This transformation -- enabled by eHealth -- challenges the traditional roles of hospitals and clinics where healthcare exchange has always taken place previously. The next phase includes the use of mobile devices to provide a user-friendly interface and a conduit for healthcare providers to bring healthcare services directly into the personal space of the world citizen. [With permission from the ATCA Council.]

Dear ATCA Colleagues; dear IntentBloggers

We are grateful to Professor Ricky Richardson for his submission to ATCA, "Entering the Citizen-centric Bio Intelligence Age -- The Asymmetric Role of eHealth in Healthcare Systems Transformation worldwide."

Dear DK and Colleagues

Re: Entering the Citizen-centric Bio Intelligence Age -- The Asymmetric Role of eHealth in Healthcare Systems Transformation worldwide

The Asymmetric Role of eHealth

The term eHealth is being used increasingly as a generic expression to refer to any form of IT enabled health system reform. eHealth addresses both changes in the access of healthcare information and services as well as the wider dissemination of healthcare related skills and specialist expertise into the community, into the home, and ultimately to the individual. This transformation -- enabled by eHealth -- challenges the traditional roles of hospitals and clinics where healthcare exchange has always taken place previously. The next phase includes the use of mobile devices to provide a user-friendly interface and a conduit for healthcare providers to bring healthcare services directly into the personal space of the world citizen.

NHS (National Health Service) Connecting for Health in England is arguably the largest single eHealth project on the planet but future developments are likely to be in the domain of mobile applications and services personally configured and delivered directly to each member of the community according to his/her health related needs.

We are entering the Bio Intelligence Age, where there is convergence of the biological sciences, physical and engineering sciences and information technology. The unravelling and understanding of the human genome will allow us to analyse the genetic fingerprint either before or at birth and thus predict some of the health risk throughout the lifetime of the individual. Biomathematics is now being applied to the science of medicine.

The demographic changes, which are a global phenomenon, with an increasing population of senior citizens reaching 65 years of age and beyond is unmasking chronic and non-communicable diseases, which are swamping current healthcare services and consuming between 60-70% of national healthcare budgets. This problem is going to get worse.

In developed counties, there is now between 16-20% of the population over 65, but this trend can be partially balanced by falling birth rates. In developing countries, however, like Mexico, there is both an increasing number of over 65 year olds and the birth rate continues to rise. This trend will place an increasing burden on healthcare systems in the years to come, thus begging the question as to who will support the health and welfare systems of the world, in the future.

We have not yet achieved full integration of IT into healthcare services around the world. The manufacturing and the financial services industries adopted IT over a period of 5-10 years during the 80s and 90s respectively. In the healthcare sector, we are just emerging out of the phase when networks are being developed, but complete IT integration will follow rapidly. The term eHealth is widely misunderstood.

It is best defined by Professor Jean Claude Healy of the World Health Organisation (WHO), who says, "eHealth is the instrument for productivity gains in the context of existing healthcare systems, but also provides the backbone for the future citizen centred environment."

We are truly at the dawn of the age of citizen centric healthcare systems. In future, the only healthcare plan will be yours. eHealth can conveniently be allocated into four major domains:

The first domain embraces those clinical applications, which include individual electronic health records, Tele-consultation and the use of video conferencing, clinical decision making support software, vital signs monitoring services for those with chronic disease, Tele-homecare, the emerging field of ambulatory eHealth and the wearing of smart clothing, such as eWear for continuous monitoring of vital sign parameters, the deployment of national ePrescribing and eBooking systems, eNursing and National Picture Archiving Communication Systems (PACS).

The second domain addresses the use of eLearning tools and the worldwide web to deliver personalised healthcare professional continuing education. As the half life of medical knowledge shrinks, it is important for all those working in the healthcare sector to keep their skills and knowledge base, current.

The third domain addresses public health education and information. There is an under-use of media channels to inform citizens to increase self help in relation to healthcare matters and consequently change healthcare demand profiles. The impact of appropriate healthcare knowledge imparted to the individual citizen will reduce the demand on healthcare systems for conditions which could be self treated or perhaps treated in the community environment by increasing the involvement of pharmacists, for example, in the health knowledge pool.

The fourth domain to explore is the use of aggregated individual electronic healthcare records, which capture longitudinal healthcare events for each individual citizen. By aggregating key elements of the data, one could achieve population based tracking of population based health trends in real time, leading to advance prediction and anticipation of hostile disease trends and thus initiate prevention strategies.

Perhaps the biggest impact of these new models of healthcare access and delivery in the immediate future, will be on the primary care teams. Increasingly, patients will arrive for a consultation with the family doctor, already well informed about their condition with opinions, (possibly strong opinions), about management and treatment options.

Patient web communities have already been set up, where strangers with similar medical conditions communicate with each other and therefore add to the care pathway. I wonder if the family doctor will eventually become a “wellness guardian” and there will be a separate service geared to respond to acute problems possibly through a call centre model, such as NHS Direct.

It is important to understand that Telemedicine and eHealth are only one of a number of drivers, which are impacting on healthcare delivery and thus changing healthcare models:

. There is a universal search for cost containment as healthcare costs spiral out of control.

. The demographic changes are impacting heavily, especially unmasking patients with chronic disease.

. There is the increasing ability to provide both diagnostic and treatment services on an ambulatory basis.

. Disease patterns are changing globally.

. Globalisation is enabling us to share resources across international borders and this applies to healthcare.

. Epicentres of medical excellence are emerging with specialist expertise, such as cardiac centres or oncology, which can now be spread regionally or indeed globally through eHealth.

The differing time zones could be used to advantage with radiologists, for example, living in India, who are awake during office hours, being able to provide primary readings for hospitals in the UK during the night, thus removing the need to hire expensive UK radiologists to work or be on call during the night hours.

The issues in Europe are focused on an ageing population and the spiralling costs of looking after those older citizens with chronic disease. Countries who have recently joined the European Community have very different levels of service delivery and healthcare outcomes. Given the ability to share healthcare resources across borders using eHealth, it may be possible to substantially improve levels of care in a number of newly joined countries. This may impact adversely on those European member states who currently enjoy high standards of healthcare provision.

There is a universal realisation that the present healthcare models are unsustainable in financial terms and thus need radical rearrangement. The solutions are to drive the interface point of care outwards and out of current buildings (hospitals & clinics) and to use eHealth as a platform in order to achieve this transformation. It will be necessary to migrate both patients and healthcare professionals across borders and to reconfigure the professional eHealthcare team as well as to reconfigure the infrastructures involved.

Conclusion

. The challenges for the future are not technological, but are focused upon persuading colleagues who work within the healthcare sector to embrace the new technologies, applications and services and to consider how this might change the way they practice and work.

. The patients need to move away from a fixation around their local hospital and consider improved means of looking after their own health and disease processes.

. The adoption of eHealth and the consequent health system transformation is not an easy journey.

. There are sufficient examples, however, from around the world that alternative approaches to healthcare delivery are workable and are now imperative if we are to continue to enjoy high standards of healthcare provision in our respective countries.

. Our children and grandchildren deserve better healthcare provision than we currently enjoy today.

Best

Ricky Richardson

[ENDS]

Professor Ricky J Richardson is an internationally acknowledged authority on the emerging fields of eHealth and Telemedicine. He was Chairman of the UK eHealth Association from 1999–2006 and he is now Life President. He served as Chairman of the Pan European eHealth Working Group of The European Health Telematics Association (EHTEL) from 1999 to 2003. EHTEL is a European Commission funded body -- mandated to promote and to implement eHealth and Telemedicine activities across the whole of the European Community. He served on the governing Board of EHTEL from 2001–2003. He currently serves as one of the founding board of directors of the European eHealth Forum. He was elected Vice-President of the International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth – ISfTeH – in September 2003. Professor Richardson is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, a Fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine. He was appointed as Visiting Professor in eHealth to Imperial College, London, in February 2004. He was appointed to the UK Focus Group of The Royal Academy of Engineering in May 2005. He serves as one of the judges of Medical Futures, a national award scheme to recognise innovation in Healthcare.

In 1986, Prof Richardson was appointed Honorary Consultant Physician at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, a position he held until October 2005. He was founding chairman of The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children’s Telemedicine and eHealth Committee (2001-2004). He is a general paediatrician with a special clinical interest in children with specific learning and behavioural difficulties. He is Group Clinical Director at HealthSystems Group Limited. Prof Richardson also acts as senior eHealth advisor to several large commercial organisations who are establishing global eHealth strategies. He has worked for Save the Children Fund -- a UK based global charity -- in Burkina Fasso, West Africa and Nicaragua, Central America. In 1983, he had conferred on him, the title of Dato (The Most Honourable Order of the Crown of Brunei) by His Majesty The Sultan of Brunei, for his services to the children of Negara Brunei Darussalam. On leaving Brunei in 1985, he spent two years in Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman as Senior Paediatric Consultant and advisor to the Ministry of Health. In 1986, he returned to the United Kingdom to take up an academic position in the University of London firstly as Lecturer and then as Senior Lecturer in International Child Health, and he was appointed Sub-Dean (Clinical) of the Institute of Child Health. During this period, he performed numerous overseas consultancies for international aid agencies, including UNICEF, UNWRA, the Overseas Development Administration (ODA), The British Council and Save the Children Fund. In 1990, he co-founded WhizzKidz, a children’s charity that has become the largest supplier of mobility aids and specialist services to disabled children outside of the NHS (National Health Service).

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 12:36 PM | Comments (18)

September 01, 2006

Do We Have a Self? (Part 1)

We have to use the same words to communicate, and one of the terms we share is "self." Myself, yourself, himself, herself. This everyday word has leaked into spirituality as the Self or higher self, and people have become comfortable with it. "God is really your higher self." There's a fairly acceptable sentence among many kinds of seekers.

It comes as a surprise to realize that in neurology no one has ever found this "self." There is no part of the brain where it resides, and even though current thinking holds that more than one area of the brain often interacts with another , this observation doesn't mean (so far) that any pattern inside the brain gives rise to the self.

After all, you feel like yourself in almost any situation. When your brain is processing a memory, having an emotion, reacting to a sensation, or doing anything at all but sleeping, you feel like yourself. So where is this self if not in the brain? You can answer that question in two ways. 1. Everything has to be in the brain, so it's just a matter of time before we find the self. 2. There is a self organized by the brain but not exactly in it, the way a sock is in a drawer.

In Vedanta the higher self or Atman is not the same as the self we know as personality or ego. I do not use Vedanta as an absolute authority on every subject. Naturally, human beings have moved on to live in a world almost totally different from the world of the ancient Vedic sages. But when Lord Krishna says in a famous verse that fire cannot burn it, water cannot wet it, the wind cannot blow it away, he is referring to an "inward dweller" that must be akin to the self. It isn't the soul, even though in other cultures the soul is seen as an inward dweller, a ghost in the machine.

What this verse is trying to impart, I think, is that the inward dweller is beyond sensations and untouched by time. Let's say that's true. Then how does the Atman turn into the personality, or Jiva? How does the timeless become a creature of time? Many people would consider that a very abstract question, but in fact it relates to the basic structure of the cosmos.

At the quantum level all subatomic particles exist in a shadowland between time and the timeless, between matter and energy. The universe winks in and out of existence millions of times per second, and the fundamental vibrations that underlie matter have "virtual" equivalents that have no fixed location the way matter does.

In a very basic way, this means that the universe is discontinuous, that it gives the illusion of being a real, solid, verifiable, sensual world while at a deeper level none of these qualities exist. Now let's jump to the self. You feel just as real as the universe you live in. Why? Because your brain and your senses create a "self at the center," a person who remembers a continuous life from the past, has certain preferences, and identifies with all kinds of labels: you know implicitly where you live, what your job is, how much you make, the names of your family, etc. This entire collection of "facts" about the self make you feel real.

One of the big problems in neurology today is the binding problem, which centers on the way different areas of the brain light up simultaneously to create a memory or a feeling or a thought. Quite often the related areas are far apart, yet they interact instantaneously. What binds them? There seems to be physical apparatus, no trunk telephone line to alert a clump of neurons that another clump of neurons on the other side of the brain is about to fire. In fact, such a telephone system makes no sense, because these firings really are simultaneous. One part of the cortex doesn't send out a message saying, "Be on the lookout. This guy's about to say the word hamburger and begin to get hungry." Things happen all at once, then disappear to make way for a new set of things that happen all at once.

This is precisely how the quantum world acts. Some kind of "binding" holds together billions of local events, and whatever it is that makes paired electrons spin in sync even though they are light years apart must be "nonlocal."

Love,
Deepak

Posted by Deepak Chopra at 09:18 AM | Comments (114)

11 "Open ATCA" Socratic Dialogues @ IntentBlog

To kick-off the return to work in September, we have initiated a series of 11 Open ATCA Socratic Dialogues at IntentBlog on The Hydrogen Economy, Climate Chaos, Einstein-Russell, New Orleans, Buddha, Blended Value, Iran, Advaita, Social Entrepreneurship, Unity and Non-Violence.

Dear ATCA Colleagues; dear IntentBloggers

[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.]

Re: Hydrogen Economy, Climate Chaos, Einstein-Russell, New Orleans, Buddha, Blended Value, Iran, Advaita, Social Entrepreneur, Unity, Non-Violence

We trust that you had an excellent summer break. To kick-off the return to work in September, we have initiated a series of "Open ATCA" Socratic Dialogues at IntentBlog in Carlsbad, California. Anybody from across the world can join in to enrich the debates. You, your colleagues as well as your family members -- especially the younger generation -- are encouraged to contribute:

The Dawn of the New Hydrogen Economy

Countering Climate Chaos -- California breaks away from US Federal Government

Beyond the Einstein-Russell Manifesto of 1955: The Potsdam Denkschrift for the 21st Century

New Orleans Anniversary & Ernesto hits Florida

Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path & The Paradox of our Times

Beyond Extreme Capitalism -- The Blended Value Investment Philosophy

Latest Iran response requires 'careful' analysis

How to be happy? -- Ashtavakra Gita and Advaita

Towards Sustainable Development: What is a Social Entrepreneur?

Interfaith Dialogue - Unity of Man & Conflict

Is non-violence out-of-fashion in the 21st century?

We look forward to your further thoughts, observations and views at the Open Socratic Dialogue at IntentBlog. The ATCA "members only" Socratic Dialogue will continue more discreetly by email. Thank you.

Best wishes

For and on behalf of DK Matai
Chairman, Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ATCA)
____________________________________________________________________________

Posted by ATCA at 05:00 AM | Comments (14)