Since the past few months I’d been nurturing a desire to spend some time at Krishnamurti’s retreat at Brockwood Park, but somehow it wasn’t quite working out. Then this weekend, circumstances so developed that on a rainy Saturday morning I finally found myself driving down from London to the place that had been calling me all this while. I really didn’t know what to expect, wasn’t even clear why exactly I wanted to go…but there was this inner calling that said ‘go and be’.

What a day – I think it was one of the most transformational twenty four hours of my life. Come to think of it, didn’t attend any talk or class or lesson or programme – all I did was spend time with myself, read a few books from the library, watch a few thought provoking videos, observe the mind, listen to the silence, go for long nature walks, have conversations with the lovely fellow guests at the retreat…and something shifted inside me.

Walking in the forest watching the deer run away from me, listening to the calling of the birds, breathing the fresh and divine air, observing the heavenly shades of white, yellow, purple, pink and red dotting the various tints of green, my heart is filled with a feeling of joy and eternal peace that I’ve never know before. My eyes are filled with tears of happinees. Suddenly I realise I am free from fear, free from thought and filled with love, only love.

I come back still overwhelmed by my experience and am looking for the right words to describe what I went through. I open a book on the coffee table, and the page I open to contains just those words:

“If you pass on through the meadows with their thousand flowers of every colour imaginable, from bright red to yellow and purple, and their bright green grass washed clean by last night’s rain, rich and verdant – again without a single movement of the machinery of thought – then you will know what love is – J. Krishnamurti”

I got what love is.

(this is my first post from an iPhone. Quite cool!)

There are times in life when you don’t know what’s happening to you and around you (well actually you do know, but you can’t accept or come to terms with them), when you find yourself becoming someone you never wanted to be, when the environment you are in is against the very fabric of your being, when you do all what you know to do and still things do not change – well, that’s my last six month period for you. In the process I realised how long and difficult the personal transformation journey can be and how human I am. Not that that I ever considered myself sub or super human, but  the negative emotions of anger, envy, desire, hatred, which I thought I transcended – I realise they are still very much present within me. Just needs the right (or rather wrong) triggers for them to come out in the open.

The other thing I got was the distinction  between internal and external sources of happiness. Yes, yes everyone says that true happiness lies within…but experientially, am only getting it now. Till a couple of weeks ago I was trying to swim in the sea of negativity and hopelessness, and I blamed the world around me for being that way, and others for having pushed me into that sea. And I was miserable and suffering. Then after a few conversations, reflections, readings and musings, something shifted…I still am where I was in a physical sense, and practically with the same set of circumstances/environment as before, but now happiness has found its way in. And it came from within. But I did have to go through the grind, for it all to come together for me. So there do not seem to be any quick fix answers. Circumstances are the way they area, it’s how one choses to react to them that makes the difference in how the whole experience occurs.

The other important thing I am getting now is the distinction between concepts and reality. We turn to concepts when things do not go well (or in Krishnamurti’s words, when they fail to give us pleasure), but what we actually have is only the real world – our job, our family, our daily chores, our experience of every day life! So now, I am less bullish on esoteric concepts, and tend to subscribe only to ideas (or concepts!) that can be evidenced in everyday life; not governed by fear (what will happen if I don’t do x or y or z), not to please someone, not because I should/have to, not in the hope of gaining nirvana five lifetimes from now…but what I can experience and transform in this lifetime.

After these learnings, yes I can say that the season has changed. But as I found out when I expected the tide to turn soon last time around, life, unlike seasons, has no fixed pattern – one cannot say how long a phase will last…but real transformation does indeed come from within, and gets evidenced in our everyday life.

Yes, it’s been a long time since I wrote, and the inactivity at my end can be attributed to being overwhelmed by the magnitude of impact of changes in my life, and still waiting to reach a steady state condition, when I would achieve something and then have something of significance to share about. But an unexpected message from an old friend today morning inspired me to get rid of all that monologue inside my head and just share.

So what’s been happening in my life…well for starters, I did achieve the goal I had been chasing, but not with a bang – instead, with a whimper! I’ve been through a lot of toil and turmoil over the past few months and seemed to be within an endless dark tunnel. But I always believed that something really extraordinarily beautiful would lie at the other end, that would make all the struggle and all the sacrifices worthwhile.

I reach the end of that tunnel, with all excitement, look out and then plunge into a state of sadness, anger, despair and frustration – where I end up is far from extraordinary, far from beautiful and is even something that I never wanted and ran away from. I feel cheated – that’s not what should’ve been there…I’m sure there’s a mistake somewhere. Unfortunately, it is reality, not a mistake.

This is what my life has been about for the past couple of months – trying to accept and cope with my new reality. Not been a very pleasant journey I must say, and the negative emotions that I thought I had achieved mastery over – example anger and frustration – have resurfaced. Spiritually, I’ve been doing the things but looks like the bruised ego has been more at play there rather than the Self…so nothing’s been working out. The only one time when the connection with Self was re-established recently was at a workshop of Angel Therapy Practitioners – that experience was indeed magical – my energy receptors got unblocked and suddenly I found a renewed sense of one-ness with the world around. That gave me hope, once again.

So I tell myself now – hold on…some elements of your ego are falling (along with their, even misplaced, expectations, hopes, aspirations…). It’s all a part of regeneration. You’ve received subtle signs that you are on the right path. Stay on that path. Seasons will change…

After a few moments of despair, anguish, self-pity, anger, upset, I then burst out laughing…what a silly question to ask? I mean what was I expecting when I asked that question – a voice to come from somewhere and say  ”in your previous birth you were a tyrant so in this life you are paying for your sins” or “the placement of your bed is incorrect” or “you are chanting the wrong mantra” or “your stars are not placed correctly”! Who is it that can really answer that question – Why me?  And even if you hear the answer from some esoteric source – how authentic is that? And does the answer even matter – will it move things forward or only plunge you deeper in the abyss of ex-post analysis to try and rationalise events that are beyond your control?

And suddenly I wasn’t feeling all that bad afterall…I accepted the ‘what is’ of the situation, and that paved the way to other interesting pathways. And now I’ve taken on resisting asking questions that prevent life from moving forward.

At one end we have people who leave everything to destiny and don’t do anything about it. At the other, we have people who are really focused and driven to get a particular result by a particular date.  I belonged to the latter category, with comprehensive 5-year plans, annual plans, monthly plans highlighting the intended accomplishments down to the last detail (which place would I be in which period, what will the income be, where it will come from, when will the new home  happen, where will it be located, what month will the kids arrive, what would their names be, where and when will I go for vacation…some of them now appear quite funny and wishful). Planning is good, no doubt, but expecting plans to go exactly the way you want them to…hmm, that may not be too realistic. Life is too unpredictable for that. Yes, yes there are those who say create your own life, be a master of your own destiny. But I’ve come to believe that action and intention we can control, but the outcome is not fully in our control. My father once gave an analogy of a dog on a leash…yes we can move about, yes we have freedom and control, yes we can change things, but only to the extent permitted by the leash, by the destiny. It’s futile to try and control it.

I have consulted astrologers, fortune tellers, channel readers, mystics (some of them quite renowned), but have found no one who was able to predict outcomes with a consistent degree of accuracy. That doesn’t mean that they are wrong, the good ones in fact do a great job of indicating likely possibilities or directions life could take. But there are so many inter-related energies and forces that are at work around our lives, that even for them it is difficult to predict one single outcome with accuracy.

The best way, I have now come to believe, is to form an intention, be in action, and then surrender to the universe to let it do its work, to let destiny pave the wave for you. And through it all, specially when things don’t go as per plan or expectations, one needs to have an unshakeable belief and complete trust that it’ll all turn out fine, that you’ll be taken care of.

My metamorphosis is still in progress so I really don’t know what lies on the other side, but I have been able to better understand my journey, and individuation most closely resonates with what I’ve been going through. Individuation typically begins in the second half of life (if some soothsayers are to be believed, I recently crossed the exact mid-point of my life) in which individuals who have achieved success and reached the zenith of their lives, suddenly find themselves confronted in an unfamiliar place. Typically the impetus is a crisis – finances, relationships, tragedy, health. Key point to note is that one can’t force or cause individuation to happen – it happens when it’s meant to happen. Up until now the individual may have been driven by the ego, chasing the material, following the typical socially accepted path of fame, fortune and success. Now suddenly, the centre of the personality starts moving from the ego to the Self. The hidden aspects of one’s personality – interests, desires, wishes, characteristics – come forth. The unconsciousness sends signals – dreams, visions, synchronicities – to send the message to the conscious. The demand for self-awareness is willed by the unconsciousness, to comprehend what is being communicated, and it is important to heed to that calling of elevating the level of self-knowledge. Sometimes we can go wrong as well. As Carl Jung wrote in his autobiography “When one follows the path of individation, when one lives one’s own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete without them”.

What lies on the other is a different person. One’s true personality is expanded and there is a conscious realisation and integration of all the possibilities congenitally present in the individual. Yet it’s not the goal where the value lies, the value lies in that journey, in the path of individuation.

For now I’ve submitted my Self to this journey. Curious to see what lies ahead.

But in the past couple of years, more so in the past few weeks, I’ve read and understood what Mahatma Gandhi was about, and am left with a feeling of sheer admiration and respect, almost bordering worship, for him. What a great man he was, a true Mahatma, the saint.

One aspect I never really knew about him was how deeply spiritual he was and how whenever looking for a solution to a problem or an issue, he would go into a meditative state and turn to his inner voice to give him answers. It was his inner voice that told him to launch the Civil Disobedience movement, the Dandi March, the Quit India movement, all of which played a key role in shaping India’s independence. No one understook India better than him, as his understanding was based on first hand experience of living and being with the commoners, the masses in the hundreds of thousands of villages in India. It was this understanding which made him a staunch detractor of the  partition India. While everyone (Jinnah and Nehru included) thought that the partition would be a clean, surgical operation…Gandhiji was the only one who warned of the horrors and bloodshed it would bring along. He was right.

There was something magical in the sheer energy he radiated. 55,000 troops in Punjab could not prevent the mass-scale violence and destruction related to partition, but it was this one man, without any weapon except his energy, words and ideology, who saved Calcutta. While Punjab burned, Calcutta, which incidentally had witnessed some of the worst communal massacres a couple of months ago, turned into the epitome of peace, unity and brotherhood. All because of this one man.

Yet this saint had started his life of fairly humble and ordinary beginnings. He had struggled to find work as a lawyer in India. He had struggled to adjust culturally while living in England. His story just reminds me of one thing – we probably have no clue about what our destiny is about. We may be like that struggling barrister now, and maybe a few decades later will change the way the world thinks. Destiny has role to play in it, but so does Self-awareness and listening to that calling. Here’s to finding that calling.

What a fool I was!

I recently picked up a book on Krishnamurti, and found answers to so many profound questions I’d been searching for all this while. Frankly, it left me spellbound. After absorbing his thoughts and words, I first laughed at myself…all this while I thought that my quest was about discovering the Self within, and now it suddenly hit me that there is another place to go to…beyond the Self, a Self-less state. It was almost like you’ve spent all your life searching for something, found it, only to realise that the very purpose of finding it was its dissolution.

I got some clarity on what my spiritual journey is about – it’s about ending the conflict and sorrow within, bringing forth eternal peace and fulfillment.  The term Self-awareness has now taken on a whole new meaning in my life. One can’t get to the ‘what if’, without first becoming aware of the ‘what is’. I also realised first hand the nature of the human mind – how it can deceive, how it can trick, and how it can be the biggest barrier in one’s spiritual journey. That one actually came as a rude shock. A lot of issues that were a source of continuous internal struggle for me – the societal pressure to follow/imitate an accepted/established path; the practice of identifying with everything – objects, people, ideologies; the need to balance existence in the outer and inner worlds and the endless pursuit of desiring and having more…well! the issues have become a lot clearer for me now. The focus has come back to the present, to this life, to the joy of living every single moment and to the evolution towards a new consciousness.

All the answers do not lie with a guru or a messiah or a way of life or a teaching or a course or a book or a video…it’s for each one of us to find our own answers. We have our own unique path to traverse…

P.S. Here’s a video of Krishnamurti answering a question from the audience “Who are you?”

We don’t have to look too far to see what all this has led to. The financial meltdown, caused by the the very nature of today’s business corporations (asshole management, short term focus, prescriptive solutions, concern only about money), has eroded wealth on a scale never known before in decades. What’s more, our response of job cuts, investment freeze, production freeze is only creating an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, doubt, survival, stress. Amidst all this, we have messiahs preaching “innovate your way out of the crisis. this is the best time for innovation”. How can we innovate when we are destroying the very context  for innovation. Neurochemically, spiritually, philosophically, psychologically…fear, anxiety doubt, stress are all detrimental to creativity, imagination and innovation. It’s that context we need to address and recreate first.

Investors are devastated with their financial losses, customer dissatisfaction with products and services is as high as ever, employees are increasingly frustrated with their work and working environment (only 10% are purposeful, with that unique blend of vigour, focus and personal commitment), society is outraged by the tactics and practices of corporations, the regulators are baffled by what they need to do to set things right.

So what is today’s business corporation all about – a state where every stake-holder is outraged, frustrated and devastated?

How did it get to be this way? The foundation, the very basis on which we run today’s business is itself based on misplaced theories and assumptions. The theories that almost every leader or manager grows up studying is his or her MBA days – Porter’s theory, Agency Theory, Transaction Cost Theory, Theory of the Firm – are all based on misplaced assumptions. Porter advocates stealing value from others (value appropriation) through increased dominance over suppliers, customers, competitors, rather than creating value through co-operation. Transaction cost theory assumes individuals are opportunistic crooks. Agency theory states that managers cannot be trusted to do their jobs. Theory of the firm speculates that the firm’s purpose is profit maximisation, revenue maximisation, growth maximisation or utility (a function of manager’s salary, reportee headcount, power and prestige) maximisation. It’s thanks to these misplaced assumptions that we’ve created the system of control system, hierarchies, legal mechanisms. Its thanks to them that the role of a corporation conflict with that of the society. A company is for itself we say – the purpose of business is business!? We are obsessed with efficiency – in reality there is no absolute definition of efficiency – what goals are we pursuing, in whose interests are we acting…few ask those questions.

The role of employees has evolved, but from a master-servant relationship to viewing them as factors of production to finally as strategic assets. Pick up any corporate brochure and you are bound to find some reference to the statement “people are our assets”. They still remain assets – faceless entities, like raw materials or machine parts or equipment, to be used, harnessed, exploited…Then there’s the age old management practice of a carrot and stick – reward to encourage and punish to discourage. Social experiments have actually proved that material rewards reduce the attractiveness of pleasurable activities. Are we not reinforcing the fact that work is not pleasure and making it less so through our reward policies? Human beings work through pride, volition, free will and intent as well, not just carrot and stick.

Then there’s the practice of borrowing principles from physical sciences and applying them blindly to management science, an inherently social science. In physical science, what we say or think does not impact the actual event itself. For example, if I say the Sun is composed of some new particle like xenylokhom, it won’t impact the Sun rising from the East and setting in the West.  But in social sciences like management, what we say or think impacts the actual event itself. If we say that there is a crisis, then we all start behaving more and more like there is one, and the crisis becomes deeper and deeper, further reinforcing the behaviours. In that sense, it is self fulfilling. Yet we treat management like a physical science. We call our understanding of management, theories, even though they actually aren’t fully validated by empirical evidence. Even if there is one observation that does not fit into a theory, then it is not a universally valid theory. We ignore that and we ignore the conditions under which a theory is valid, and blindly assume it to be universally valid. It’s what Sumantra calls ‘the pretence of knowledge’

Then there are bad and irrational business practices. Leaders overvalue the power of their judgement, caught up in the generic human bias which makes us believe that we are able to predict the future better from the past, than we actually can. We look for evidence to support our predictions and fail to recognise evidence that would reduce faith in our judgement. We distort, ignore, misinterpret facts to fit in with our beliefs and decisions. We build causal stories in our heads to explain why our judgement is right. We come arrogant. And soon tread down the path of satisfactory underperformance and the eventual slide into crisis.

We think speeches, posters, flashy taglines can change organisational culture and significantly alter human behaviour. They don’t. We have a fanciful, romantic, heroic notion of leadership – a persona or style that is to be imitated. Where is authenticity? Where is character?

So what is the next generation organisation all about? An organisation that is not a utopia, not a goal that is idealistic, lofty or impossible. It is not something that takes 10 to 15 years to develop, but something that we can readily bring about in any organisation. The next generation organisation creates wealth from a holistic perspective. It generates money, it provides inner
peace, fulfilment and well-being to employees and brings about happiness to all stakeholders. It makes a positive, enduring difference in this world. It creates value and contributes to a larger cause. It continuously reinvents itself, taking daring steps, chartering new unfamiliar territories, fuelled by creativity and imagination. It is high-performing, on all parameters that matter.

How can we create such an organisation? We really do not need another theory. Theory would bring its own baggage of misplaced assumptions, biases and fallacies. But we do need a new way of looking at businesses. A new paradigm. Up until now tour view was focused on the content – creating that product, that strategy, that business plan, that operating model. But as we have found that content by itself is not the only thing that helps create successful business organisations or opportunities, specially those aligned with the concept of the next generation organisation. The thing missing in content is real customer centricity. That’s the core fundamental of design. So the content bit, we could say needs to be design; of whatever…the plan, the strategy, the product, the service, the organisation. What else is required? Purpose…an authentic, holistic purpose that is more that a tagline, more than being self-absorbed. That people buy into, that is meaningful, that brings about volition (inside out) rather than just motivation (outside in). A purpose that is focused on value creation. And we need to look at the most ignored bit – the behavioural context. Neuroscience has indicated that what we experience, what we see around us, the culture that we have been and are continuously exposed to, is what shapes our brain, our mind, our thinking.  Given that we spend typically 30% of our time at work, the work environment can have the single biggest impact in our thinking and behaviour. It can either bring out the worst in us (through that system of control, compliance, constraints and contracts) or the best in us (by creating the context of trust, discipline, support and stretch).

Purpose. Design. Context. That’s a new paradigm for creating the next generation organisation.

<Disclaimer: the ideas presented in this essay are not entirely my own. The essay draws heavily on the work of Professor Sumantra Ghoshal, and I have often quoted his statements and thoughts verbatim>