7,000 kids a day drop out of school in the United States, 13 percent of those remaining are in special ed, and more and more mainstream students are on medication.
There are more jails than colleges, and 30 percent of college students report days being too depressed to function effectively.
Rates of cancer, heart disease, addiction, anxiety, suicide, poverty, homelessness are epidemic. Economies are teetering, health care in the U.S. is the most expensive but ranked worst among 11 wealthiest countries, water crises and environmental degradation abound.
When might people step back and say, “Hey, maybe we need to rethink our most fundamental assumptions about how the world and humans run best?” People will consider a new consciousness after the leaders open up the conversation.
We need leaders who have the imagination to consider whole new realities, like Einstein, Mandela or Gandhi, and fundamentally challenge the established paradigms. We need visionary leaders who can inspire as well as motivate, who have the wherewithal to shepherd a new problem-resolving consciousness.
Non-material motivators
The realm of inspiration is the realm of meaning, in the sense of beyond-personal-concerns. Dan Pink, former editor of the Yale Law Review and a best-selling business author, in his book “Drive,” recounts back to the 1960s when it was first proposed there are higher drives that motivate people and business leaders should take heed.
Current research continues to find that non-material benefits, like feeling a valued part of a bigger mission that transcends purely material considerations, is what most motivates employees. But we are very much steeped in material systems.
The challenge is to reach a healthy balance and integration of material and transcendent, outer and inner, self and other.
In his book “Whole New Mind,” Pink talks about our conventional ever-tightening focus in education and life on left-hemisphere capacities for linear, reductive logistical and verbal skills, which are outer- and language-focused. That means a focus on categorizing separate parts and pieces.
Those are powerful skills to be sure, but he says the capacities we now most need are the strengths of the right hemisphere: intuitive, non-linear, imagistic and transcendent; involving inner awareness and attention to non-material dimensions of life.
Harvard neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke that shut down her left hemisphere for 8 years and, consistent with hemispheric specialization, she perceived and experienced a boundary-free universe with much compassion and little logistical capacity.
She said after recovery you can tell how left-brain an education system is by how time-enslaved and short-fused people are.
Vaclav Havel, the first president of the Czech Republic, spoke at Independence Hall in 1994. He said: “The truly reliable path to peaceful co-existence and creating cooperation must start from what is at the root of all cultures and lies in human hearts. It must be rooted self-transcendence. Transcendence is the only real alternative to extinction.”
There is no serious physicist today who would insist there are only three dimensions (plus time). We are wired for transcendence and inner reflection but modern education and life relegate those to side pursuits or diminished status since the days of “women’s” intuition.
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift,” said Einstein.
He also said, “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe.’ He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a prison restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. We must widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Greek philosopher/scientists thousands of years ago said our five senses deceive us and the material world is an illusion. Now there’s scientific evidence that, despite what appears to our five senses, “solid” is really 99.9 percent space.
We have a scientific and societal focus on what our five senses tell us is real, on the three material dimensions, on separation-perception and labeling, yet we wonder why there is so much materialism and alienation.
We emphasize prediction and control as the means to success and security because we are acculturated in an us-against-them survival of the fittest mindset, when research shows that we are wired for compassion and interconnectedness. Our immune system thrives on compassion and the sense of belonging.
`We are at a brink’
Though the left hemisphere capacities are crucial, as is the instinct for physical survival and a competitive spirit, those capacities are a tool. Unfortunately they’ve dominated the current paradigm. They’ve become the map.
The problem is that our fundamental assumptions about what makes people tick have led to an alarming display of what makes people sick. And tired and distracted. The stresses, illnesses, dysfunctions and dissatisfactions of people drag down workplace productivity.
Research shows we are wired to function most effectively in a state of optimism, motivated by meaning that transcends personal logistics and concerns.
We are at a brink. We need visionary leaders to consider whole new paradigms. Fortunately there’s compelling evidence for a new consciousness that makes use of probability thinking but leads from possibility thinking.
The new paradigm includes intuitive logic that can use rational logic but transcend its limitations. Rational logic says something can’t be solid and 99.9 percent space at the same time. But it’s true. It’s also true that photons are material and non-material at the same time.
This is not business as usual. We need a new set of operating assumptions. People want leaders to help them maximize their capacities, and take them to a sense of interconnectedness and optimism where logically impossible things can be true. It’s what we’re wired for. It’s what engages and motivates employees.
Those who embrace these truths display visionary leadership, and that’s very good for business.
