Obama: The Tao is in Fashion
“Excess is out of fashion,” Obama said, according to participants in the gathering.
Someone has to teach these rudderless poor souls how to truly meet the President’s challenge; for it is the one thing that cannot be done superficially. The elimination of excess cannot be taught by a marketer or a focus group or a PR firm or a spreadsheet. If these banking magnates are going to learn how to understand and apply the President’s message, they will need to start — guess where — right within themselves.
But enduring change of this sort does require a guide. This, in fact, is what I specialize in. It’s not that I’m a Master or guru — there are no such things, in my view — I’m just a student of freedom from excess, who happened to start well before you did, my banker friends.
Therefore, Kings of Finance: my door is open. Start by checking out my counseling page, and then review the course syllabus below. You may also wish to refer to my translation of the poems of Lao Tzu. Here’s an excerpt that is apt to the moment:
Empty yourself, and be made full;
Strip yourself of excess
And you will know true rejuvenation.Thus does diminishment attract abundance,
While accumulation nurtures conflict.The ancient teaching lives
Within this very moment:
“Drop your burden, abandon the superficial,
And you will find your perfect center.”
This was not a shallow teaching.Release your true nature;
Express your original being;
Return to the Source.
This is all I have to teach.
Here is the outline of the course — most people I work with require no more than 10 sessions. With you guys, who have modeled your entire lives on excess, it might take a little longer. But I am 100% confident that you will learn.
1. Conscious Meditation: a conversation with your true self. In this, we teach the practice that lights the path of diminishing excess. CM adapts traditional meditative practice to the needs of people like you, men used to action and focus in their dealings. We will begin with a very simple meditation that is the foundation practice of CM (see Chapter 3 of my Tao of Potter — “Entering the Pensieve”).
2. Taking the dragon-tail off the body of capital: I have written extensively of the need to take the “-ism” off the perfectly natural concept of capital. When the tail of ideology and corrupt belief is removed from Nature, excess drops away and true being arises without effort. We will focus on returning to the origin here — “primordial capital” — and learn how business can be best done without the “-ism” to obstruct its natural movement. Note: this is not a teaching in socialism. That’s just another “-ism” — and we don’t need any more of those.
3. Abundance and Wealth: This section will draw upon teachings from the I Ching (specifically, Hexagrams 14 and 55), Lao Tzu’s poems, and Keynesian theory to help students perceive how a life of abundance may be created, free of the obstructive and fearful stench of wealth. For a brief look at the perspective we will be taking on natural possession, see my “gift-thanks” video.
4. The Open Source Society and its values: We will compare traditional perspectives on marketing, production, profit, and teamwork with those of the open source software movement. For an introduction, see my “open source values” post here. We will explore together how an open source approach to business can be integrated into an enterprise model.
5. Inner Elimination: We will delve into some crucial questions in this section; the insights we draw from them will pervade everything else we do in the course. One central question is: what if you couldn’t shit, sneeze, piss, fart, etc.? Why, you’d get sick and die, of course. We will apply the same understanding to the mind; and also study the biological process of “apoptosis,” or programmed cell death, and what it may have to teach us in both our inner and material lives about what Lao Tzu called “daily unburdening” — the regular elimination of excess.
6. Inner Downsizing (Non-Attachment): The Challenge of Letting Go. You have all had to order the layoffs of hundreds or thousands of your own employees. Now it is time for you to learn how to downsize your life. It begins by examining everything you have, and releasing it. No, I’m not Jesus telling you to impoverish yourself and follow me to Heaven. But I will be teaching you to let go your inner grip on your material wealth. There are a number of very effective practices toward this end, and the benefits are too numerous and profound to describe; they must be experienced.
7. Inner Teamwork and the natural order of the personality: We will explore neuroscientific research into the heart and brain in discovering the synergy that exists in the living body and the natural personality. Our insights into the open source society will add depth and practical purpose to this understanding as we turn within and discover the wholeness that vibrates within us, beyond intellect and the insular realm of the forebrain. We will see how so much of corporate America’s failure relates not to specific individuals or groups, but all the way back to the belief in the monarchy of intellect. It has been pushed onto the stage of life, naked and alone, without support from any other organ or feature of the personality. We can recover the natural teamwork of the whole self and take it back to our companies and our society.
8. Corporate Democracy: Here we will learn how we can take the insights and experiences of conscious meditation, inner elimination, and whole-being teamwork into the workplace, the boardroom, and our professional relationships. We will study the United States Constitution, specifically its first ten amendments, and examine how we may bring these documents to life within our organizations. By the end of this unit, we should clearly perceive how the life of excess actually restricts our scope, our influence, and indeed our democratic values. We will then be ready to return to our corporate towers armed with the strength of gentleness, as Lao Tzu expressed in the 76th Chapter of the Tao Te Ching:
When we are born,
We are soft and tender.
After we die,
We become rigid and brittle.A living tree can sway,
A living blade of grass can bend,
For suppleness is the strength of life.
Only in death is flexibility stilled.Tough and taut is the body of death;
Gently moving is the way of life.Powerful forces crush themselves
Because they cannot move or yield.
A stiff and heavy tree will soon be broken
By wind or by axe.Thus does rigid power always crumble,
While the supple and the humble
Gently endure.
