You Are What You Eat…or Meet

I’ve been sitting by a beautiful lake on the Pacific coast in New South Wales watching the winter sun dance in the chilly palms outside.  The occasional visit from some friendly kookaburras has punctuated the silence with their comical appearance and even more hilarious vocalizations.  I spread some wholesome grain-filled cereal on the porch rail this morning and am intrigued by the fact that, while some of the bits were gobbled up by the local feathered visitors, other bits have been left untouched.  The label on the gluten-free, vegan, raw container says that this is all good for me but apparently the birds know better!  “Full of healing benefits,” and “assists with cellular repair” do not seem to convince the birds to gobble down these morsels.  Can’t they read?  Don’t they know what’s good for them?

Traffic stops, a therapist trying to calm disturbed patients, dads, sons, friends… hardly a day goes by without another highly publicized – often videoed – shooting or murder of black man in the United States by police officers.  “I thought I saw a gun,” is now exoneration for murder.  What black motorist in his or her right mind would solve this riddle: try to escape a Zion Illinois police officer and get shot through your car or, as has happened elsewhere, get pulled over, stop, reach for your driver’s license and get murdered in cold blood only to have a judge rule that the shooting was justified months later?  Or the middle-aged woman who struggles to sleep peacefully with frequent ‘dreams’ of being unable to breathe.  When she closes her eyes, she sees a man with his hand over her mouth.  What’s he doing?  Is it a stranger, a family member?  Why can’t she remember any details?  Or it’s the man who lives with a reflex to detach from all feelings – good or bad – whenever emotions elevate because he conditioned himself as a little boy to flee the pain of corporal punishment for not conforming.  Or it’s the veteran who thought that enlisting would be the only way to pay for college.  “What’s 4 years if the GI Bill can get me through school?”  And that only way turned into killing, hiding from mortar rounds and RPGs.  Now every snapping, cracking, or popping sound brings up the images of horror etched in the mind.

Clifford Brooks Stevens – more commonly known as Brooks – was born in Milwaukee in 1911 and as a child was one of the millions who suffered from polio.  The famous designer of the Jeep, Harley-Davidson motorcycles and the Evinrude outboard motor, built a world that defines all of our modernity with his promotion of planned obsolescence.  The notion that one would “instill in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than necessary,” has permeated all of culture.  In a relationship that’s challenging – leave it.  See your neighbor’s Tesla while you’re driving your 2013 Audi – trade up!  Desire a minimum viable pathway to escape the illusionary mantra that “life is suffering” by surrounding yourself with confidants who will reinforce the righteous indignation for a life that’s not playing out the way your picture postcard looked? – hire a ‘friend’ and layer on the justification for why it’s everyone else’s fault that your life is the way it is.  How is it that we can walk right past the most generous love, life, and abundance while we focus on the fraction of life that’s “not working”? 

Have we become a society of self-centered, consumer-driven, masochists?  Are we incapable of seeing sufficiency in what is right before our eyes?  Is this a cultural phenomenon or is there something much deeper going on?  And can just the right amount of positive thinking be the cure?

Hammurabi – known in the 18^th century BCE to be the codifier of civil laws – legalized the public burning of women for promiscuity and men for incest.  Senusret I in Egypt used humans as torches to celebrate military victories.  Jewish law sets forth dozens of reasons – most of them having to do with sex – that justify public burnings.  Christianity’s founder was a fan of public executions by fire or by “pouring molten lead down the throats” of those who committed transgressions.  By the 7^th century, if you were accused of performing magic, desecrating what was considered sacred, or labeled as a heretic, you could be burnt in a public execution or placed in a “leather sack with a rooster, a viper, a dog, and a monkey and thrown into the sea.”  As a slave, you displease your master – public lynching.  A heretic that defies the church’s authority – a millstone around your neck and a public drowning.  Accused of witchcraft – burn her.  Failing to conform to society’s expectations – be beaten.

A growing body of evidence is showing that humans and other mammals have a particularly alarming genetic response to the experience of, and the witnessing of, inhumane treatment.  In the Journal of Translational Psychiatry, Dr. Eva Unternaehrer and her colleagues found alterations in DNA methylation (the addition of methyl groups to DNA which may repress gene transcription) in adult humans exposed to acute psychosocial stress (2012).  Interestingly, they found significant alterations in oxytocin receptors (oxytocin is considered to play an important role in social bonding and sexual reproduction) and no effect on brain-derived neurotrophic factor (considered to play an important role in memory and higher order thinking).  Work done by Dr. Roth and her colleagues showed that early-life adversity, in contrast, has a permanent and possible generationally transferrable impact on BDNF (Journal of Neuroscience, 2008).  By publicly rendering humans obsolete – through early sexual and physical abuse, traumatic separation, public shootings, hate speech, and mass media disseminated violence – have we genetically modified ourselves into beings less capable of deep social bonding and collective memory and consciousness?  Not to worry, we’ve got a therapist, a pill, a drug, a distraction, a virtual reality simulation-of-an-actual-life-worth-living experience for that!  All you need to do is pay me $300 / hour and I’ll give you the high-fructose-corn-syrup-version-of-the-life-you-can’t-have long enough to get you addicted to whatever panacea I’m selling.

I think that the police shootings, the 24-hour CNN drumbeat of violence, the terrorist du jour publicity is to our society what the witch burnings were to Salem and what the lynchings were during slavery.  I think that these acts are not sociopathic anomalies.  Rather, I think they are mass-scale epigenetic modifications which are de-humanizing us into greater dependency on externalities – no matter how heinous they become.  And I think that it’s time for a few of us to take the other road.  I think that We The People – however few of us there may be – are at a moment where we’re called to proliferate conspicuous acts of love and kindness.  And mind you, this is not just at a small scale.  Remember that even our “good” stories – Martin Luther King, JFK, Gandhi, Sadat – end with public violence.  We simply aren’t telling the stories of public goodness that don’t reinforce the epigenetic manipulation of our species. 

We are 4 millennia into the sanctioned public violation of humanity.  It’s time we step up and say, “Enough.”  We are not meant for obsolescence.  Our children are not the objects of gratification for subsequent shame.  Our families are not safe-havens for violence and abuse.  Our homes are not sanctuaries for silence.  Our communities are not shooting ranges for those who have over-refined fear reflexes.  Our countries are not agencies of militarization.  We are not worthy of extinction.  Today, in fact right now, make a public stand for goodness.  Call a family member.  Stop and help a stranger.  Offer aid to someone who is struggling… and DO IT PUBLICLY.  Show the world that there’s a humanity everywhere you go.  And never tire of doing so.  In so doing, we might find a way to heal our DNA and weave ourselves into a more perfect union.

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Found What You Needed… and other myths

I am embarking on a long-awaited journey.  It was one that commenced one year ago when I spent a week of solitude at Tara Mandala in Pagosa Springs, CO.  I was the recipient of the kindness of a few close friends who knew that my life was at a point where deep contemplation could be just the right intervention to examine, and potentially address, some of the growing dis-ease I was experiencing.  Throughout my life, I’ve been thrilled to have experiences born of a world-view that is based on well-being – the capacity for an individual to engage at liberty without diminishing the equivalent capacity for others.  For as many years, I’ve marveled at the near-universal response I encounter to my chosen path of life.  While an intrepid few are more than delighted to receive what I offer and manifest and find their own pathway to equivalently offer and manifest that which I and others can experience, the vast majority absorb and take with no recognition of the exchange and currency of well-being.  As a photon in isolation is not light until it engages in coherent energetic transmission with other activated photons, so I was finding my light illuminating far less than I thought it could.  So, my week long hermitage was a moment to disentangle from the reflectors, absorbers, and diffractors, and examine the photon that is me.

In a recent message, a dear friend made the statement, “I’m glad you have finally found what you needed.”  Today, in a casual conversation, another friend said, “It’s sure hard to find good news we need these days.”  As I was engaged in the curious human activity of selective aesthetic biome alteration (better known as weeding) in which I was removing plants that seemingly effortlessly proliferate in favor of the selected plants I want to thrive, my biome altering accomplice mused about how plants find “what they need” to survive.  Find.  Need.  There they were again.  Two words that serve as a cognitive fulcrum in my brain over the last year.  What was it about these two words that so voraciously consumed my thoughts and emotions?  How could it be that the first statement did more to confirm my friend’s lack of awareness of my essential nature than almost anything else she could have said?  And is there anything about the three comments that all converge around something that is worth considering more deeply? 

The etymology of the word “need” suggests that the term is derived from an old Germanic word signifying “danger”.  Since 1800, it’s prevalence in English literature has increased nearly 800%.  This may suggest that in about 200 years, we’ve become needier.  Ironically, need’s companion “want” is a bit less prevalent and only doubled during the same 200 year literary period.  In 1943, Abraham Maslow’s paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation” published in the Psychological Review put “need” into a social model built around a “hierarchy of needs” that has become the de facto justification for nearly every enterprise or effort.  The base of his pyramid is elemental – calories, air, water, shelter – and is based on a principle of “protection from the elements”.  As though the ‘elements’ are conspiring to do you in.  From there, you get to “safety” – another term that implies an absence of a generative, caring nature.  From there love, belonging and then esteem – all needs that must come from others.   Somewhere at the top – and loosely linked to the concept of “need” – he placed self-actualization and later self-transcendence.  Tragically, Maslow succeeded in brainwashing an enormous swath of humanity to a belief that they were operating in a secular model identical to most religious dogmatic memes which place cosmology in a conflict with humanity.  Something’s out to get you.  Be afraid.  NEED, for Christ’s sake!

Do plants “find” the nutrients they “need”?  Do humans “find” partners and settings that fulfill their “needs”?  Does the 8ft ceiling in your home fulfill your “need” for shelter?  Does the job you have or the degree you earned fulfill your “need” for esteem? 

What’s wrong with “finding what you needed”?  Well, for starters, everything.  Let’s assume that you are the sum of about 724 trillion cells (give or take a few trillion if, like me, you are follicularly challenged).  Let’s assume that your amazing fact of existence is so delightfully complex that you don’t even think about your breathing, your heart beat, your digestion, your animation, or much of any of the other 7 primary organ systems in your body.  Do you have any idea what actually benefits the very systems that you don’t even know exist?  Are you sure that whatever you put in your mouth last is good for your lymphatic system?  Did you even know you had one of those systems?  Of course not!  And even if you whipped out your Wikipedia, you’d still not know if the chocolate you ate was pro-reproductive but anti-digestive.  So just eat the chocolate, enjoy it, and read on.  What’s the point?  The point is that none of us live in abject “need”.  None of live in relative “need”.  And if we think we “need” to “find” something – or think someone else does – how presumptuous can we be?  Millions of people fill their experiences of living with NEED.  Need stuff.  Need connections.  Need relationships.  Need intimacy.  Need relevance.  Need, need, need. 

Here’s an idea.  I’m starting a discipline of removing “need” from my vocabulary.  And not just my vocabulary but the vocabulary I choose to be exposed to.  The irony is that my friend who was glad I “found what I needed” never realized the joy of living in a world in which being fully grateful for the abundance that surrounds each and every moment calls forth a human impulse that never entered Maslow’s hierarchy.  There’s another form of humanity – one that inverts the pyramid of need.  One that realizes that the basis for human existence and interaction STARTS with emanating from one’s core essence.  Being the most beautiful and authentic expression of who you are and what you’re meant to manifest on this earth.  Oddly enough, starting from that point, you’ll find yourself coherent with others similarly manifesting.  And who knows, maybe they’ll become your co-conspirators to serve the world, maybe they’ll become your lovers and partners, maybe they’ll band together and give you confidence and support, and maybe they’ll share a roof, a table, a blanket, and a meal with you.  There are only tens of thousands of years of evidence showing that living in, and emanating, gratitude for abundance is persistent and generative. 

On this anniversary of my monastic journey, I’m grateful to know that there are a growing number of people who are awakening to the realization that there’s a life more beautiful than one defined by need; more beautiful than one defined by labels, titles, social conventions, norms, and all other contrivances to withhold life from living.  And I’m glad that my journey to Tara Mandala still serves to remind me to BE the person I authentically am.  Fully provisioned.  Fully equipped.  And ready for whatever and whomever comes my way. 

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The Dangerous Gift: The Gift of Knowing

I am flying to Sydney Australia on United 839.  United has been one of the most important utilities in my lifetime carrying my life in relative comfort to all corners of the globe.  The flight crew was particularly helpful on this flight.  On my way back from the bathroom, I went to place my ring encrusted with the insignia of tribes in Papua New Guinea on my finger and it slipped down into the complex workings of the seat.  Fifteen minutes later, I knew more about seat 4D than I ever thought I’d know.  I also knew that M&M’s, ear plugs, and all manner of mystery lurks beneath the seats!  I don’t know when the last service crew vacuumed under the seat but I know that it’s a bit cleaner now.  I also know that I found my ring. 

We were 7 hours into the flight when this little episode happened and, fully awake, I decided to watch Concussion. This is the story of the CTE brain injury involving the NFL’s retired players’ disproportionately high incidence of significant neurological damage resulting in suicide, profound disability, and destruction of quality of life.  Near the film’s climax, Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian pathologist who was responsible for the work leading to the CTE inquiry makes an interesting statement. 

“I have a dangerous gift, the gift of knowing.”

I cared about this film for a bunch of reasons.  One of my colleagues in graduate school went on to work on brain injury and had much of his work supported by the NFL and by helmet manufacturers.  I count as many of my dearest friends current and former players, some of whom suffer from the effects of CTE.  As I’ve worked with them over the years, I’ve come to love them for the fierce elegance they bring to life and I count that experience one of life’s most cherished gifts.  I love the idea that, with greater awareness, there may be interventions that can preserve the game and preserve their lives.  I know that the NFL’s denial of evidence is driven, not by bad individual commissioners, league executives, lawyers and owners.  I know that the entertainment and gaming billions of dollars create an illusion of something that cannot survive the truth.  And tragically, many great men (yes, mostly men) cower in the face of the truth.  When billions are at stake, telling the truth is quite unpopular.

There’s a reasonably good chance that I may be suspending my writing of Inverted Alchemy for some time.  The reason is simple.  By carrying torches into crevices far darker than the NFL’s brain injury cover-up, I’ve learned the value of Dangerous Gifts.  By having unusual abilities to sense into things that are subtle traumas in the lives of others, I’ve been able to help many.  But this has come at a dear price.  It has cost me love, friendship, external validations of “success”, opportunity, credibility, and unspeakable inhumanities.  And while “being human” is routinely used as an excuse for weakness or failings, I’m at least one voice that takes the opposing view.  Dr. Omalu was fully human.  And like the intrepid fellowship of those who chose to stick to their “gift of knowing”, he paid dearly. I salute him and I salute the entire production effort behind telling his story.

But as I watched the film, it dawned on me that I wanted to write a very different blog post.  Not one that reminds us about our willful neglect of each other and our harm of our own well-being.  Not one that highlights ever more egregious examples of corruption and destruction.  No, I wanted to immediately write a thank you letter to a few people who you may not know but you should.  They are people that have decided to make this week an amazing week.  And, by the way, before I go any further, let me state that I’ll leave many great people out of this list.  That’s fine.  I’ll get to you later.  This is written for people I don’t usually mention. 

Before getting on this flight, I had a wonderful opportunity to appear on CNBC.  M·CAM was asked nearly a year ago to consider providing a metric for the “innovation economy” that would update or replace the industrial models set forth over 120 years ago with the advent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  This impulse to help measure the innovation fitness of publicly traded companies was substantiated by the great work of Hayden Luse, Pam Cole, Stuart Holman, Bob Kendall and the General and Limited Partners of the Purple Bridge funds.  But before that, the first impulse arose in conversations with Joe O’Shea while he worked at GE Licensing & Trading in the early 2000s.  During our work on the index with CNBC, a phenomenal man and colleague, David Spiegel asked us if we’d help measure the innovation fitness of private companies applying for the honor of being on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list.  Led by Dex Wheeler – one of M·CAM’s greatest unsung heroes – we came up with a scoring mechanism that contributed to this year’s rankings.  And because of David, Nikhil Deogun, Gina Francolla, and Steve Lewis, I was invited to sit on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and help unveil the metrics of the Innovation Economy.  I’ve spent 21 years preparing for those 4 minutes.  And I’m deeply grateful that this moment happened.

Just one day earlier, David Pratt, Colleen Martin, Pam and I went up to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.  Those of you familiar with any of my work know that I have been the world’s most outspoken critic of the patent system and the abuses thereof.  Years ago, Jay Erstling suggested that we develop systems that could allow the world to understand the quality of patents that were being issued around the world.  On a rainy afternoon in Geneva, WIPO Director Francis Gurry let fears far more ominous than the NFL’s CTE issue overrule what ethics would dictate.  Francis knew that if the world could see the abuses of the patent system - the millions of lives that are lost to patent restrictions around health care, communication, agriculture, energy, water and so much more - trillions of dollars of corporate corruption would be at risk of being exposed.  So he buried it.  But on Monday, the Under Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner of the USPTO invited me to present our work once again.  And not just in one perfunctory gathering.  We met with judges, executives, economists, and technologists to discuss how reform could come to the world of innovation.  Had it not been for the advocacy of the U.K.’s Tony Clayton, the U.S.’s Alan Marco, and the hospitality of Janet Gongola, this would not have been possible.  These individuals went to the mat for a voice that has been silenced for years.  I’m deeply grateful that this moment happened.

And I’m on this trip to meet with a number of individuals in Australia to discuss how to align the future economy of Australia with the transforming economic landscape of the world’s market.  Through the persistence of colleagues like Richard David Hames, Laurent Labourmene, Christine McDougall and Adam Jacoby, a new conversation is emerging that may hold promise for new models of public policy, academic activity and scholarship, and economic engagement.  I was sent on my way with the blessing of Colleen who has valiantly and lovingly endured three decades of living with the Dangerous Gift.  And I’ll be engaging this conversation with Kim Phillips who is standing taller each day as partner and colleague. 

There’s no question that the old adage “Ignorance is Bliss” has a siren seduction to it.  Sure, if you didn’t know, you could simply muddle your way through life.  But the “Gift of Knowing” comes with benefits far more precious than any elixir of ignorance.  The Gift of Knowing comes with the amazing act of humanity that says, “I’ll stand with you.”  And of all people, I’ve been most blessed by those few, beautiful, amazing, wonderful, souls who have borne, even if for only a moment, the most Dangerous Gift.  Napier Collyns, without your request, this blog would not have been written.  Hundreds of posts later, I want to thank you, above all, for asking me to start Inverted Alchemy in 2008!  It has been a true gift!  Godspeed, fair winds, and following seas!

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Fulcrumage

Flashback to flash forward... Fulcrumage is upon us!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hW2zg-boQE

Zombie Capitalism

As the world stares in disbelief at the U.S. elections, what I find even more incredulous is the abject failure of anyone focusing on the elections that really matter – the Class 3 U.S. Senate races.  The Republicans have 24 seats up for elections and the Democrats have 10.  These are the races that matter and no one is watching.  Far more impactful than the illusion of the Presidency (see my novel Coup D’Twelve) is the power wielded by the Senate and this class is one that could tackle some of modernity’s greatest challenges.  Towards the top of that list is the looming financial crisis in the welfare and pension system known as Social Security.

When Social Security was enacted in 1935, the retirement age was established as 65 years of age.  In 2016, this sounds like the prime of life well before death.  But in 1935, life expectancy was 60 years.  In other words, the majority of the working population was never supposed to live to receive any benefit as the program was set up to deal with the inconvenience of those who lived too long.  In 1935, only 15% of the working population had any corporate pension plan.  By 1970, this had tripled to 45%.  In 1974, under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), what was meant to increase the private sector employer’s responsibility for retirement economic security had within it the seeds of the demise of retirement income as we know it.  But more on that in a minute.

Living longer presents a host of problems for a system that was designed for working until death.  With baby-boomer retirement, the nearly 3:1 ratio of workers to retirees is expected to drop to about 2:1 by 2035.  The Social Security Board of Trustees reported that their cash reserves will be exhausted by 2035 with all of their programs running decreasing cash reserves since the peak in 2012.  In 2000, about one quarter of the population relied on Social Security as its primary source of retirement income.  Last year, that number rose to one third.  Of current retirees, nearly 2/3s rely on Social Security as their primary source of income and these are the ones who will experience the coming economic shocks the hardest.  To make it to cash-reserve burn out in 2035, the Social Security program must decrease benefits by as much as an estimated 21% while increasing the collection of payroll taxes.  And what makes all of the statistics most troubling is that they’re all incorrect.  Together with the private pensions under the ERISA programs, Social Security funds and their life-expectancy are based on a series of assumptions that do not hold. 

Since the mislabeled GFC of 2007-08, the intervention of Central Banks to pump low-interest capital into the economy has allegedly averted the crisis facing the markets in the wake of reckless behavior.  This intervention did have the effect of moving citizens into deeper debt linked to real estate investments.  Creating massive overweight investment focus on real estate and, in so doing, extending the cash-flow requirements for workers well-beyond their pre-retirement years places compounded risks on a system that’s already fragile.  The same government that creates agency loans for real estate is the same government that invests in the debt of its citizens.  That same government uses these debt instruments as the “assets” that backstop the pensions and pension liabilities that are due in the future.  So, when the 21% benefit reduction hits the market and defaults on real estate assets start climbing, the very “assets” that insure pensions will be illiquid at the very moment that beneficiaries are stretched to address their indebtedness.  This correlated market risk is not factored into the actuarial assumptions for public or private pensions and the tsunami is already in the water rushing towards the unsuspecting public. 

Historians suggest that the Greeks stored olive oil as a means of securing their economic security in times of instability or at latter stages of life.  As it was relatively easy to store and could be monetized at will, olive oil was a prudent commodity to smooth the effects of changes in economic status.  Government-backed real estate loans are not olive oil!  When Thomas Paine suggested that the American experiment should include old-age investment support to deal with poverty in his treatise Agrarian Justice (1795), his efforts were to modernize the nearly 200 years of “Poor Laws” that had built massive social failures for those in dire straits.  In 1882, piano and organ manufacturer Alfred Dolge established America’s first corporate pension program which, regrettably failed due to the failure of the business.  Eighteen years later, 4 other companies joined Dolge.  Despite these early efforts to recognize that rent-based labor was inadequate to sustain the life of laborers, at no point did the market or public realize that it was industrial capitalism, not end-of-life charity, that was the problem.

So, as we look forward into January 2017, we’re going to encounter a looming super-storm.  We have the 115^th Congress that will take its place to preside over the collapse of the Social Security paradigm as we know it.  We have corporations who have been so derelict in reporting the status of their pension funding (which is under-funded and over leveraged in many instances) that the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) has doubled fines on those who don’t report adequately in a desperate effort to get more money.  Bloomberg reported on what’s become known as “zombie pension plans” and the fact that financial managers are frequently abusing these funds to the detriment of their fiduciary obligations.  The PBGC has been petitioned to reduce the financial obligations of pension schemes as a growing number of programs are under-funded or outright insolvent.  And the PBGC itself is not clear whether it has enough money to cover its obligations without curtailing benefits. The “baby-boomer” zombie pensions are coming home to roost and those who think their retirement is covered have another think coming.  We have ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which will move more corporate treasuries (and jobs) overseas well out of illiquid pension retrieval reach.  And we’ll have a President who…, oh that’s right, who isn’t qualified to lead the country through any one of these storms – saying nothing about all of them descending at once.

I’m going to writing more about the critique of capitalism as it’s practiced now.  Regrettably, we have not had an intervention-free experiment anywhere on earth yet so a critique of the principles is inaccessible in any date.  But what we know is that by failing to measure the value of humanity’s contribution to the march of industry, many of the laborers who have been chewed up by the system are going to have serious tummy aches when they find out the promises that the capitalist system made are as soulless as… a zombie. 

x

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

In 65 AD, Seneca the Younger wrote in Naturales Quaestiones Book 1 that a rainbow “requires both sun and cloud, and these opposite to each other.”  Optical physics informs us that, to see a rainbow, we need to be positioned at approximately 42° from the interaction between sunlight and rain or atmospheric water droplets to perceive the refraction of light.  All of which adds to the apparent mystery that took place at 6:30am AEST on Saturday, April 30 around the Spring Cove Sydney Harbor.  While we were commencing our morning yoga and meditation at the Breathing Enterprise inaugural laboratory at the Manly Q Station beach, a massive rainbow appeared before the sunrise in the East!  Aristotle, Seneca, and others have explained that morning rainbows are to the west and afternoon rainbows are to the East.  But this rainbow, on this day, didn’t get the memo.  It sprung up in a solid light column in the southern bank of the Sydney harbor opening and arched its way north to the Manly beach.  The sun had yet to rise yet there it was – a gorgeous arch of brilliant colors.

During the weekend, close to 60 of us were working through an intensive process of reorienting our perspective to examine the human condition and see if there are some principles in nature that could inform and better serve humanity’s interaction in the world.  This involved a number of modalities engaged to deconstruct and integrate principles that are observed in nature to examine what makes them Persistent, Generative, and Infinitely Orthogonal while most, if not all, of our human systems seem to “require” effort and conflict.  Using a method recently described by Jacques Derrida in his 1967 work Of Grammatology and sympathetic to works of Gregory Bateson, Bertrand Russell and others, I sought to awaken the minds of the participants by holding tension between the words we use – the technology of language – and the essence that they seek to awaken or engage.  Deconstruction is a rigorous process and it stretches everyone to the edge (and for a few, beyond) their comfort zone.  In the film I produced with Kaya Finlayson, Future Dreaming, I discussed the ways in which we’ve enslaved our human experience with language.  I was intrigued, throughout the weekend, how many people, in spite of the explicit critique of our terms of indenture (having to “make a living”, the “need for…”, “if I had…”), continued to use as justification for their feelings of hurt, isolation, and purposelessness the illusion that the world is somehow conspiring against them and that they’re trapped.  “Yes, I’d love to do things that deeply engage my true sense of purpose but I have to go to my job to make a living…”, was a refrain that echoed in many early hours of our interaction. 

When light passes through a droplet of water, the luminance of the sun is refracted and is subtly dispersed based on the wavelengths within the light.  Shorter wavelengths (blue) appear to distinguish from longer wavelengths (red) and the appearance of difference emerges.  Our perception of the energy of light allows us, through the introduction of a temporal variation optimizing the spectrum, to manifest a momentary appreciation for dimensions that we could not otherwise perceive.  The droplet of water – a time and space machine allowing for more precise discernment in the moment – is to light what the Breathing Enterprise laboratory is to the consensus energy of our social systems.  By placing the droplet or the experience into the flow of existence, we can discern the subtle components of what appears to be an indecipherable whole.  But like the rainbow which affords distinction in the unseen ray of light (you don’t see the shaft of light that is refracted by the droplet) so to does the deconstruction of language-linked reality afford us to perceive components that were not otherwise available for distinction and discernment. 

Many enterprises strive to be capable of delivering a consensus product or service.  “Come to the workshop and you will…,” is the siren that brings people into the modality of the modern social technology of learning.  When we discussed The Awakening, I was very explicit on the fact that this was meant to be a laboratory – not a workshop in the common use of the term.  Quite ironically, inspite of the clarity of that message, some people came expecting what they’ve been conditioned to experience in the past: an event that is constructed to salve the pain of the consensus illusion.  These people left in frustration and in varying degrees of motivation to malign and diminish.  Others came having no idea what to expect and it was in the very willingness to engage in the not knowing that their insights and personal break-through moments happened. 

See the funny thing about nature is that it’s wisdom is available in its observation, not in its manipulation.  The rainbow on Saturday couldn’t happen yet it did.  And the life-transformations – the reality that for the first time many people uncovered as a path to their lives’ purposes – which also lay as fallow prospects in the distant memory of most manifest not because of a “truth” that was shared.  These came about because of the dance between light and the storm.  I’m deeply honored by all of the team in the Breathing Enterprise and I’m deeply honored by all of those who came and stuck through the process to the end.  For in the end, we found our true beginnings and that, my friends, is the pot-of-gold at the end of the rainbow!

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Panama Papers and the Paralyzed Public

Close to 800,000 French citizens lost much if not all of their monetary wealth including a reported 15,000 single women in the Panama scandal.  510 politicians had pocketed bribes to keep the matter out of the public eye.  Many were indicted.  Of the few who went to trial for admitted corruption, all were acquitted save one minister for city development who committed suicide.  After the press broke the scandal, there were allegations that the leak of information to the public was part of some deeper anti-Semitic agenda as some of the middle-men were dodgy Jewish financiers.  When all was said and done, corrupt politicians involved in covering up the deception pocketed over half the total 1.8 billion Francs that were stolen from the public.  And nothing changed.  This was 123 years ago and the event was the bankruptcy of the Panama Canal Company.  The public outcry led to lasting reform and the people all got the justice that for so long had been denied them.   Oops!  No.  In fact, this evisceration of public investment led to the distressed acquisition of the Panama Canal by the United States for about $40 million dollars and the permanent loss of economic assets by the French public. 

When the report of the leaked 80 gigabits of records of Mossack Fonseca was published in February 2015 (a year before the public learned of the “Panama Papers” scandal) in Süddeutsche Zeitung the scope of corruption of public officials and corporations was not fully understood.  The next 2.6 terabytes of data – ultimately uploaded to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in Washington D.C. – were reviewed revealing the records of nearly 10% of all offshore companies with land holdings in Britain.  Edward Snowden referred to the Panama Papers as the “biggest leak in the history of journalism,” knowing full well he’s holding onto the even bigger leak about other corporate activities that will make tax evasion and asset hiding child’s play.  And by this, I’m not referring to the SZ comment that, “what’s coming next,” may include a lot more information about Americans and American corporations.  What I’m referring to is the massive number of U.S. corporations that have used their commercial access around the world for corrupt and clandestine purposes referenced in Hank Crumpton’s The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service. 

What do the Panama Paper’s tell us about ourselves?  What is the significance of the Panama Papers in the larger context of the economic system in which we operate?  What does it say about our political leadership to realize those who are setting public policy see their own policies as so odious that they need to evade their own rules? 

The Panama Papers evidence, above all else, that the illusion of the dominant economic framework of our time is a rigged game.  While I’ve been a long-standing critic of the immoral worldview that was promulgated by the Judeo-Christian contrivance of human “dominion” over everything – these papers genuinely indict those who perceive beneficence in the “unseen hand” in the market place.  The unseen hand is connected to the public’s pocket and has been picking it for longer than anyone wants to admit.  The hypnosis under which most of the general public operate – that finance and politics are beyond the remit of the pedestrian brain – is as much to indict as the actors that prey on this apathetic social meme.  And it’s rather important to note that the ICIJ did not release all of the records.  In other words, editorial decisions about who to vilify and who to shield were part and parcel of the “greatest leak” to date.  In short, even those who are allegedly at the vanguard of disclosure are still holding onto the illusion that someone somewhere needs to be the “bad guy” and someone else is “not”.  Like so many disclosures before, the paternalistic determination of what the “public needs to know” supports the very information arbitrage that keeps those in power in power and those without power impotent against the certainty that corruption marches on unabated. 

The Panama Papers conveniently demonstrate the genius of the British Empire.  In the First Article of the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812, the groundwork for revenue shifting and base erosion (the OECD’s term for tax evasion) was laid in subtle most favored nations concessions ratified by the United States, His Britannic Majesty and the Dey of the Regency of Algiers.  In the agreement to an inviolable, universal peace – a lofty sounding concession – the ability for the Empire to preserve its banking and asset shielding status was solidified.  And while the United States – having recently gained independence from Great Britain – was going to turn into an industrial juggernaut compared to its former colonial master, Great Britain, its laws, its concessions to aristocracy, and its financial institutions was going to have the last laugh repatriating the wealth from the very lands it had “lost”.  In short, the brash American experiment failed before it even had a generation under its belt and the Panama Papers are just the tip of the iceberg when we see how much the British Empire controls or holds in terms of global assets.

I have encountered, over the past month, a stream of humanity who have all lamented their incapacity to “do something” about the certainty that they have that the economic house of cards is about to collapse in a manner far worse than the GFC in 2007-08.  From the “consciousness-minded” to the mercantile industrialist to the entrepreneur, the sense that the game is rigged is universal but equally universal is the perception that there’s not a damn thing that you can do about it.  This is not the case.  But like most other systemic failures, when massive “leaks” are released, it’s important to look at what else is moving in the shadows while the focus is on the “leaks”.  For example, during the week that the world was focused on the Panama Papers, no one seemed to focus on the 2016 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers issued by the White House.   In this document, the Obama Administration addresses the motivations behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement signed in February 2016 in Auckland.  So while we’re talking about tax shelters, we’re explicitly working to install tax policies that favor U.S. trade advantage for the estimated $131 billion per year from our trading partners in the Pacific, “because we know that when the playing field is level, our workers and businesses can compete – and win – in the global economy.”  Cool thing is that when level means “flowing in favor of the U.S.” the winning is a bit easier.  Create enough noise in the Atlantic and Caribbean and no one will look in the Pacific!

So what’s it going to be?  123 years from now, will this bluster in the Caribbean be yet another in the long line of humanity being robbed, feeling like it’s incapable of responding, and then being primed to be robbed again?  Is this another time when we acquiesce to the establishment and our notion that corruption is a necessary evil?  Are we unwilling to call out the violations of social dignity because somewhere we know we’d do it ourselves if we had the resources and the power to do so?  Or are we ready to play on a different playing field – one that doesn’t require leveling because all the contours and sand traps are known to all the players?  Are we willing to use models that are not based on corrupt incumbencies and be courageous enough to face a world in which our “salaries”, “assets” and our “economic status” do not define us but our productive engagement and social utility does?