by Alan Briskin | Conscious Capitalism, Consciousness, Spirituality
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Fourteen
Moving from Duality to Wisdom
Part Two: The Triadic Mind of Kabbalah
Time Range: Future Times
I find it to be one of the great paradoxes of creative thought that only by wiping the mind clean of categories and assumptions can we think clearly and in new ways. Yet, it makes perfect sense if it is our habitual thought that keeps us trapped. In the physical brain, there is a very real neurocognitive architecture that keeps us confined to certain ways of thinking. At the collective level, there are social fields that influence individual thought and action. All the categories we have discussed directly or indirectly—privilege, poverty, protest, rebellion, anguish, revenge, reform—all have had thousands of years to imprint themselves on the human collective through repetitive patterns. These patterns have within them predicable associations and moral judgments, good or bad, just or unjust, moral or immoral. The mind seeks to find new solutions but often simply re-creates the old patterns in new ways.
Some today are asking if there is larger purpose behind these patterns or a meaning we should glean. Is it all part of a greater evolutionary destiny moving us toward divinity? Or, are these patterns the breadcrumbs leading to species annihilation? Let us for the moment answer mu.
In the movement away from duality, what the wisdom traditions offer are enhanced cognitive and emotional tools. Provocatively, I believe that wisdom traditions, properly understood, cast grave doubt on the propositions that answers can all be found inside ourselves and, conversely, that solely by altering social institutions can we achieve a more stable society. We must, as Einstein prophetically proposed, find answers from a state of consciousness different from the one in which the problem was created. Let us return to the Kabbalist structure of the triadic mind to see what elements are crucial to continually move from duality to noticing something new.
The first element, Binah, is a hungering for the logic of a given situation. Sometimes compared to the methodical skills of the brain’s left hemisphere, the emphasis with Binah is on analytic understanding. The analytic way of understanding is the home of the scientist but also anyone who uses logic and quantitative analysis to gather, analyze, and build hypotheses based on data and observable information. But the true power of this mode of thinking is its capacity for coherence, the ability to show how facts hang together in regard to the questions that are being asked. This process requires imagination but operates within strict parameters.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
The legendary physicist Richard Feynman offers a good description of the quality of this way of thinking. To make his point, he contrasts the analytic form of mental activity with that of fiction writers.
But the scientist’s imagination always is different from a writer’s in that it is checked. A scientist imagines something and then God says “incorrect” or “so far so good.” God is experiment, of course, and God might say, “Oh no, that doesn’t agree.” You say, “I imagine it works this way. And if it does, then you should see this.” Then other guys look and they don’t see it. That’s too bad. You guessed wrong. You don’t have that in writing. (Mlodinow, L, Feynman’s Rainbow)
Along with analysis, we need something further to extend beyond duality. The second aspect of mind that Kabbalists describe is Chokhmah, or wisdom. Here we have something closer to the power of intuitive insight, flash understandings, even revelations. It is why the composer Tchaikovsky can say, “The germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. If the soil is ready …” Chokhmah is the constant preparation of the soil through study, observation, playfulness, flow—the deepening presence of a mind capable of emergence. Wisdom of this kind is aware of subtle shifts in interior awareness as well as shifts in the external circumstances of a group or larger collective.
Wisdom of this nature has the capacity of transcending conventional categories and the power of linking the world as it is with how the world might be. This is the kind of wisdom that led Mahatma Gandhi to read Henry David Thoreau’s account of personal civil disobedience and see in it a larger collective form of protest tied to universal principles of justice and truth. If Binah seeks the logic of how something is put together, Chokhmah asks to what end? Why should we put effort into something if not to create something that has a larger more universal truth.
So far so good. A mind capable of creating coherence from logic and the agility to leap categories in a single bound is a formidable instrument but still incomplete. In the triadic tradition of mind formulated by Kabbalists, a third thing is necessary to ground and complement both logic and intuition. This third thing is knowledge, or Da’at. This is the willingness to engage in study, to continually gather information, and to adjust one’s thinking in alignment with new information. We become less capable of remaining in duality if all three forms of intelligences are activated.
But the Kabbalists took it one step further. They understood the mind as an infinitely elusive channel seeking wonder, awe, and beauty but capable of being caught in its own web of individual mental thought. The triadic mind required something more, a secret sauce, also associated with Da’at. This secret sauce was reflective consciousness, a joining together of multiple layers of awareness equated metaphorically with sexual union.
The great Kabbalist Reb Zalman Schachter Shalomi compares this form of reflective intelligence to the brain’s cerebellum, which acts as a switchboard for our attention. What is worthy of our attention? What do we consider important or irrelevant? Do we pay greater attention to threat or opportunity? What about our memory? Do we selectively choose bits and pieces of our past, or do we work at retaining wholeness? What is the nature of our attention? Is it disciplined or jumping from thing to thing? Is our attention primarily self-referential or about others? What ultimately do we pay attention to, and what is the quality of that attention?
To move beyond dualism is to be capable of slipping the chains of having to be aligned with one thing or another. Reflective consciousness simultaneously is a deepening of one’s own presence.
I am reminded of a dialogue I facilitated with Deepak Chopra and three wonderful Japanese thought leaders: a filmmaker, a philosophy professor, and a spiritual leader. The philosophy professor, as best as I could understand through translation, was describing with rigor the question of whether the ego actually exists. I was finding myself exhausted following the subtle points he was making about ego and its illusory nature. Deepak listened with great patience, and after the man finished, he simply said, “There is no greater drama for the ego than to debate its own existence.”
Immediately, I could feel my body relax and the crease in my brow ease. I had been caught in the duality of the question, and my attention had become entirely analytic. Does the ego exist or not? Come on now, follow the argument! But the moment Deepak spoke about the ego’s excitement about debating its own existence, I was brought back to my reflective consciousness. I became aware that my thoughts about ego had taken on separateness. Deepak’s comment brought me back into my body and with that my intuitive intelligence. Suddenly, there appeared a great deal of subtle humor—the ego debating with itself about its existence. This could be theater, an interior version of Waiting for Godot, becoming more and more ludicrous by the minute. Now, everything shifted and I came closer to mu and ayin, the obliteration of dualistic form and the opening to new creative formulations. I could pay attention in a new way.
Next Week: Chapter Fifteen, Part One: Moving from Factions to the Whole
“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”
~ James Madison, Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
by Alan Briskin | Business, Conscious Capitalism, Consciousness, Leadership
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Nine
Wages Decline, Credit Expands, Rapidly
Time Range: 1978-1985
What I did not know, setting my sights on creativity and meaning, was that the economic rocket ship we were on was about to sputter and go sideways. For 150 years, capitalism in the United States had functioned, despite its busts and booms, to move in an upward spiral. Working people, on average, saw their real wages rising decade after decade.
Until the 1970s, every generation had a reasonable chance to expect a better life than the previous one. Imagine if my father had not believed that. If he had believed that his sacrifices would make little positive difference for his children’s circumstances. Yes, he was disappointed in me and likely wondered if my crazy talk would ever lead anywhere, but I was in college. I would have a degree that was never an option for him. Anti-Semitism was on the decline. He had no reason to fear that roads would be blocked in front of me. And they were not, but wages for the average worker hit a wall.
From 1978 to 2011, real wages after adjusting for inflation went flat, nada, nothing. I’ll say it again. As best as we know from our economic models, there have been no wage increases for the average worker since the year I finished working at St. Johnsbury prison in 1978. This means that many of the inmates who found jobs in lumber mills, retail services, maintenance, and construction would be earning exactly the same amount today, once adjusted for inflation, as when they began. Or they might be unemployed. How did this come about?
Dr. Richard Wolf is an economist with an impeccable professional pedigree. He received his undergraduate degree at Harvard, his master’s at Stanford, and his doctorate at Yale. He was educated at institutions with a reverence for capitalism but supplemented his studies with a curiosity about its critics, most notably Karl Marx. He argues that beginning in the 1970s, there were at least four trends that help us put today’s circumstances in perspective.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
The first was the introduction of new technology, accelerating the use of computers to replace labor. Imagine, for example, the use of scanning devices to replace people physically counting business inventories. Human beings count slowly and get distracted. Forget jobs that are repetitive and can be automated. Gone.
Second was the increasing use of offshore factories for manufacturing. Recall that surplus value is enhanced when the cost of labor decreases. Finding workers on other continents who could be paid less was the perfect marriage of increasing profit while simultaneously creating new markets.
Third was downward pressure on wages as an increasing number of women and immigrants entered the workforce. This was the period when corporations began to deal with the visible reality of diversity, but the economic effect of a greater labor supply was far less visible or obvious. Women were consistently paid less than their male counterparts, and the greater overall labor supply meant more competition for jobs, thus creating a labor market in which supply outstripped demand.
The fourth trend was a response to the first three, increased use of personal debt. As the earning power of workers was eroding, the rapid rise of credit cards began to supplement income, but at a huge cost. Will Rogers’s famous aphorism that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging, became instead a search for bigger shovels. And there was no bigger shovel than credit cards and eventually mortgage debt. All these developments were slow moving and never in a straight line, but we can now see where they were leading.
Other social and economic forces were operating as well. In roughly the same 30-year period when workers’ wages were slowing down to a crawl, Fortune 500 companies saw corporate profit increasing as they grew in size and complexity. Amid this growth, fascination with the organizational leader (CEO) became quasi-cultish, symbolized by life-sized cutouts of Chrysler’s CEO, Lee Iacocca, filling bookstore windows. His autobiography was the best-selling hardcover nonfiction book in both 1984 and 1985. And just two years earlier, the birth of popular management books began with the hugely successful In Search of Excellence, attributing success to management savvy.
The success part turned out to be illusory, but the fascination with heroic leadership and management techniques became a major industry. Meanwhile, no one paid attention to the calculus of surplus value, how limiting wages was a driver of capital profits. In academia and professional consulting, we may have become more conscious of organizations as systems and the need for strategy, discipline, and leadership, but as citizens, we for the most part did not question the economic institution we operated within. We were, to put it simply, unconscious of capitalism and its myriad influences.
FLASH POINT
San Francisco, 1984
In a friend’s San Francisco apartment, I dictated my doctoral dissertation from handwritten notes to a typist working with one of the first home computers. For someone who had never mastered the typewriter and whose handwriting was virtually illegible, this was a technological event with great personal meaning. Advances in technology literally gave me an opportunity to pursue my life’s work.
The subject of my dissertation, however, was somewhat off the beaten trail of society’s progress. I was researching the parallel historical conditions of social institutions such as prisons, mental institutions, public schools, and workplaces. My thesis was that surveillance and control had become dominant characteristics of these institutions, resulting in the institutionalization of the soul. We were losing a fundamental relationship with both nature and our own inner world. We were losing a spiritual connection to the transcendent, a perspective larger than just our own self-interest.
What I had not considered was another kind of person who was gaining greater and greater freedoms. This was the corporate person. I don’t mean the organizational man of the ’50s and ’60s. I’m talking about a corporate entity with the legal rights of a person and whose sole legal concern was self-interest.
Next Week:
Chapter Ten: Corporate Persons: What Does Not Serve Me Shall Not Be My Concern
Who even knew that corporations had legal rights as if they were actual persons? In a strange twist of legal gymnastics, the originating idea of a corporation being birthed and legitimized by a government grant had been transformed into a corporate body beholden to no one but its owners.
Economic self-interest was the law of the land, and the corporate persons cultivated in such an environment could be as sweet as your dear auntie or as self-serving and weird as the guy down the block wearing just a raincoat.
by Alan Briskin | Conscious Capitalism, Consciousness, Leadership
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Eight
Planetary Consciousness Arises, Cautiously
FLASH POINT
Himalayas, 1964
“Slowly and painfully, we are seeing worldwide acceptance of the fact that the wealthier and more technologically advanced countries have a responsibility to help underdeveloped ones. Not only through a sense of charity, but also because only in this way can we ever hope to see any permanent peace and security for ourselves.”
~ Sir Edmund Hillary, Schoolhouse in the Clouds
World Population, 1967
“[H]istorians have estimated that the world’s population at the beginning of the Christian era was 250 million. By the middle of the seventeenth century it had doubled, rising to about 500 million. By the middle of the nineteenth it had doubled again and reached the first billion mark.… By 1965, it was well over three billion, and the doubling period had shrunk from 1,500 years to about 35 years …
“Returning to the planet as a whole, the prospect is: 7 billion people in 2000; 14 billion in 2035; 25 billion a hundred years from now. ‘But,’ as a sober Ford Foundation report says, ‘long before then, in the face of such population pressure, it is inevitable that the Four Horsemen will take over.’”
— Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine
United Nations, 1969
I do not wish to seem overdramatic, but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me as secretary-general that the members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control.
— U Thant, Secretary-General, United Nations
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
New York City, 1973
In the early 1970s, I worked summers for my father delivering packages and assembling hand machines that stapled nailheads and rhinestones into fabric. His shop was almost exactly two miles from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on 23–29 Washington Place, which burned down in 1911. It was hot and muggy in his shop, and I didn’t enjoy working there, but it was nothing like the sweatshops that had existed over a half-century earlier. One reason for this was unions.
Marx was correct in predicting, counter to the sentiment of his time, that workers would not simply have more children, diluting their bargaining power, but would become ever more skillful in negotiating their immediate and mostly economic self-interest. For Marx, however, it would be this very advance that would trigger the system’s instability, as the workers’ demands would threaten profit and control. Owners would reject their workers’ ever-increasing demands, and workers would seek to strike back. Marx was quite certain that both sides would remain unconscious of their predicament. They would battle ceaselessly with each other until social unrest upended the whole system. How different circumstances were for me.
I recall one evening riding home with my father on a bus that took us from Manhattan to Queens. He wondered if I would be interested in taking over the business one day. It was an awkward moment between us, and I sat in silence looking out the window. “I don’t think so,” I mumbled. He didn’t respond, and we sat together in silence the rest of the way.
For me, taking over the business would have been abandoning myself. I would have preferred stapling nailheads through my hand. I was in college and passionate about finding alternatives to what I believed were soul-crushing institutional forces beginning in public schools and continuing through college, professional education, and most definitely the workplace.
My plan was to chart a new path, although how I might do that was unknown to me. I shared, with many others, a belief that economic survival was no longer the key determinant of career choices. Survival was at the bottom of a hierarchy of needs that included meaning, creativity, and human development. The work of the future involved social change, greater personal and interpersonal depth, and healing our planet earth. The stars in the sky proclaimed that this was the Age of Aquarius—or at least the stars on Broadway shouted it out loud, which was good enough for me.
Next Week: Wages Decline, Credit Expands, Rapidly
What I did not know, setting my sights on creativity and meaning, was that the economic rocket ship we were on was about to sputter and go sideways. For 150 years, capitalism in the United States had functioned, despite its busts and booms, to move in an upward spiral. Working people, on average, saw their real wages rising decade after decade. Until the 1970s, every generation had a reasonable chance to expect a better life than the previous one.
From 1978 to 2011, real wages after adjusting for inflation went flat, nada, nothing. I’ll say it again…
