Transcript
Edited for readability.
Axiom: Every individual has infinite potential
Just like geometries have axioms on which they are built, the axiom that we build [on] here, is that if you have infinite potential inside each human being, what are we doing about it?
Does this mean we can radically transform our lives in a new way? Does it mean we can transform our institutions, communities, society in a new way using this one insight – which is, that we have infinite potential sitting inside each one of us?
Is it just words, or is it real?
So if we begin with this thought – to awaken people to their whole potential, what would that mean?
Exploring the impact of this axiom on 4 aspects of life & society…
Impact Area 1: Education
The first big impact that we can see and build, is on education.
Fundamentally, what we need is ‘assimilation of ideas’. We don’t want to stuff people with knowledge. This idea of assimilation means that our education system cannot be trading in concepts and words alone. It can’t mean arguments. It has to mean ‘assimilation’. And what does assimilation mean?
> Assimilation means that the totality of me as a person undergoes a change. Assimilation, therefore means, that it is the water of knowledge that is flowing at the roots of my being (in the tree) rather than pouring into my head. \[It means\] we don’t have, so to speak, a mind-body problem, because we are essentially trying to ‘become’ through our education.
That is going to mean that our schooling has to be different. We have to produce better human beings from our schools. We have to produce stronger, more resilient human beings who are capable of dealing with the world. It doesn’t mean we are producing highly qualified human beings. That’s a paradigm shift.
It can mean that you can redesign subjects as different as geography and algebra. We have experimented with these and you find that we can redesign curricula completely.
You can redesign the classroom experience, because the classroom experience, then, is one of encountering knowledge and trying to use that knowledge to ask oneself, “how should I live?”, “How should I respond?” What is the purpose of history? Is it to know facts or to change the way I think about the future, see the future in a very different way and make choices differently?
All of this is part of the assimilation process in several different ways. This is the first big shift that we are looking at.
We have been trying to apply this shift to values education - because that is the biggest area where you find ‘words’ and ‘action’ don’t match. World over, we have ‘moral science’ in different ways being shared with children, where parents tell them, “do this, don’t do this” in different ways. It is a structure of “don’t dos”.
But what you are saying is they need to assimilate the ideas of freedom, they need to assimilate the ideas of universality, and they have to assimilate the ideas of inclusion & expansion of self. Now, how do you get them to assimilate these ideas?
If you have to get them to assimilate these ideas, you have to land it in their lives. What we have done is, we have taken this essential idea, of infinite potential of a human being, and transformed it into what it means at the physical level. Going one level deeper, what kind of potential I am going to unfold at an intellectual level – how am I going to be a creative visionary?, or a problem solver?, or an innovator? And various other possibilities that our children, or people have around us. Going one more level deeper, what does it mean in terms of transforming my character? – how do I become heroic, dynamic and yet obedient at the same time? How am I going to have commitment and yet have flexibility at the same time? How do I reconcile the agility that I need, with stability that I need in order to build anything lasting and sustainable in the world?
So you have to land these ideas into those kinds of possibilities for human beings, and get children to connect with them, and play with them. And how do you let them play with it? You have to land it one level deeper. You have to land it at a level where they now say, “How am I going to respond if I am facing a problem with a bully?”, “How am I going to respond if I am facing a problem with my studies?”, “how am I going to deal with life differently if I am going out with friends and facing some conflicts?”. So I have to land it into the way I respond to life, on an hour-to-hour, day-to-day basis.
That is the kind of education that we need to be building; that we are already working on. Up to a million children, annually, are getting this program, where over 3 years – 7th, 8th, 9th – they are assimilating these ideas and shifting the way they think about themselves.
Impact Area 2: Individuals
The issue is that all of us are bound. One, is the bounded-ness that we keep talking about, from the world outside. But what is the bounded-ness that we bring from within ourselves? Are we not bounded from within? Are we not bounded by hundreds of different fears? Are we not bounded by hundreds of different theories about how other people behave, or what we should do and not do? How do we break those boundaries? How do I make you free?
This means I need to free myself of myself. I have to also free other people from their victimhood – this continuous happy state, where you are sitting and blaming the whole world for your own ills. It is like an itch which you go on rubbing at. We need to get people off it.
The ointment is what we call, Cognitive Empowerment. Empowering people cognitively and saying, no, I am not a victim, but I am a creator of my own destiny.
And when you do that, if you notice the picture, there are 2 kinds of things there – there is a glow inside and a glow outside. The glow inside says, I have to power within to transform my life, and the second one says how am I going to transform the world. So, first transform yourself, then transform the world. We are ever-eager to transform the world before we transform ourselves. There is a dual story there.
And this dual story has to be given. How do you give it? You give it through small programs and encounters. For example, we created programs where the parent and child work together around it. In our experience we have found, that the parent changes as much as the child. Because the parent starts finding that deep within, inside the parent also lies the same set of cob webs, and the same kind of self-made boundaries which are preventing him/her from actually being who s/he can be and who the child can be. These kinds of shifts are what we need to bring about.
I think that this kind of Cognitive Empowerment is what I call ‘Proto-Counseling’. Counseling comes after the damage is done, but Proto-Counseling is so that you reinforce people so that no damage is done in the first place. One way of handling depression is after it has arrived, but one way of handling it is to create people strong enough, so that they are able to engage with life in a way so that it is not superficial, and therefore, deadening. Because when you engage and dive deep into life, suddenly it is opening up incredible new shifts in yourself which give you the strength to deal with any kind of forces from outside you.
These are the shifts we need to bring about.
And these are shifts which need to sweep across society, because in one society that cage maybe caste, in another it may be gender, in a third society it may be simply lack of self-belief, in another place it could be social hierarchy, in a fifth place it could be simply trying to impress others and trying to look good on social media. All of them are cages. And cognitive empowerment is about breaking those cages for people.
Impact Area 3: Institutions
Today institutions are more powerful than nations. Institutions control every part of our life. And by institutions I don’t just mean businesses, but also governments, social institutions. We have all kinds of institutions around us, which in a sense, shape and control our destinies in several different ways. The question for us is this simple diagram which I will walk you through –
There are two aspects to each one of us in the institution. “Who am I”, and “what I do”. If someone asked you to introduce yourself, most of us find the need to express ourselves in terms of “what I do” – in society what kind of profession do I carry, what is my positioning in society – it is my “what I do” that shapes the answer to the question can you introduce yourself. But there is a deeper aspect of us, which is the ‘being dimension’.
Over the years people have equated practicality, with functionalism. But practicality is not functionalism. They have assumed that if I am going to talk simply about the functional, simply talk about what needs to be done and ignore you as a human being, then I am being immensely practical, efficient and productive. I am not so sure whether that is leadership alone. You find that the greatest leaders seem to have a profound human touch. They are profoundly connected with the people around them. People are willing to live and die for them because something else has been touched, and that something else is that being level – which is that “who am I”.
This raises a fundamental kind of question in us: can we re-humanize businesses? Can we get this being dimension back into businesses?
So, how do you land it? how do you make this happen? There are several things which we have tried out with several large corporations, at really large scales. But when we look at all these numbers, what we find is that there are simple models for doing it. What are those models? Let’s take 3-4 of them.
One simple model is to ask people “why do I work?” – People find their work meaningless. They find it purposeless. They become transactional with their employers. Naturally, they are running away from that and looking for that strange thing called work-life balance. Isn’t work life? And isn’t life work in different formats and different places. So how am I going to integrate the two? Work-Life balance is nothing but saying the function layer is work and the being later is life. But all of it has to be one. So how do you do it?
I’ll give you a very simple tool that, for example, people used. We asked people (bankers with 20-30 years experience) – what was the most important and memorable incident in your work life? They discuss in groups and no one is telling them. They arrive at some examples and discuss it. Then we say can you put down what you got out of that incident. And we gave them a simple mental tool to use – Ask yourself , “what are the outer fruits I get?” and “what are the inner fruits I get?”. And every time they came to the same conclusion, that the most memorable incidents of my life were those that gave me inner fruits. People when they get a bigger car, a nicer house, a bigger salary, they are happy for a few days, but the effects go down and the next craving starts. But the events in your life when your being is touched, are the events which stay with you your whole life. They transform your relationships forever. That is why we value family so much.
And it is in a sense this re-humanization of institutions, which is to say, “how do I use that to re-connect with communities?” Can’t corporations reconnect? We have done it. For example, simple things – for example an oil company, it has thousands of petrol pumps. You go to them and say, “here’s a suggestion, here’s an idea – would you want to try it out? Why don’t you go out there and find out who are the truckers living in the area around you, and why don’t you do a health camp? They reluctantly agreed to do it in a few places. When they do that, what do they find? All that they have done is gone and cared for that human being, and re-humanized that relationship. They have gone and done a health camp and gone and given them some glasses, or done something else, found out that he’s got diabetes or something like that, and helped him along. The net result is, sales go up 40% in the oil industry!
30,000 truckers were impacted, and the company paid for it. 3-4 years later, the company has reached out to one million truckers and the company has not paid a rupee thereafter, because the dealers have done it, because they find it is in their enlightened self-interest to do it.
That’s my point, why can’t we get businesses to think in terms of enlightened self-interest? Why should money have to be made only by taking away from your pocket? Why can’t money be made by creating more in your pocket and more money in my pocket together? Aren’t we capable of that kind of innovation that really creates win-win for both sides? Is it necessary that I have to grab everything and keep it on my side of the table and leave you with nothing?
These are the questions that businesses will have to ask themselves, because those are the businesses that shift the paradigm, or the businesses that are likely to win.
Impact Area 4: Communities
Everywhere, the whole notion of aid implies in a sense that you need resources, that if you had enough resources, your problems would be solved. But people are realizing that if I supply you with resources, that doesn’t mean that your life is going to change, because that means you are going to need those resources all your life and it is going to make you a slave. I am going to make you someone who is dependent on me and I am going to create an unequal relationship of a giver and a taker between the person who is supposing to be helping the community and the person who is supposed to be helped.
That’s not where the starting point is. The starting point is, they are capable of solving their own problems and can they come together and design answers to their own problems, which are their own indigenous answers. And maybe if you want to help, can you give them some tools and enablers that allow them to leverage themselves.
This means our whole notion of aid, our whole notion of this idea of “giving”, this idea of going & helping people - I think we need to question that. I don’t think the world is about some countries trying to help other countries. It is about each community becoming strong enough & resilient enough to transform its own destiny. Can we trust others to re-design their destiny? Can we help them re-design their destiny.
This is the kind of spectrum of things that we could do.