April 23rd-25th 2015
THE GOLDEN PATH TO CREATIVITY
MEDITATION-INDIVIDUATION-INTUITION-INSPIRATION -INTELLECTION- I INVENTION-INNOVATION
CREATIVITY FROM A CEO’s PERSPECTIVE
GOLD is the symbol of the reality which we cannot describe or explain. This is the Divine, or in Christianity we may say GOD, or Emptiness in Buddhism, or Allah in Islam, or Brahman in Hinduism or Jahweh in the Jewish Religion. The GOLDEN PATH is a way to innovation, created by this reality based on deeper levels of consciousness of the one who is the transmitter from this field of reality to its manifestation in our world.
Whoever has a management position has the obligation to take part in the creative process for answering the questions of today and the future. From my point of view it is necessary and essential that a manager is on a path of inner growth to be able to work in the outside world with creativity and ethical spirit.
If a manager changes, the whole company is changing. His style of leadership is essential, and this may determine, whether the company is innovative or not. Is he open for intuition s or is he limited by his mind? Companies without a
stream of innovations are on the way to die. Very often they don’t know it yet. They cut costs and start one efficiency program after the other. These actions are only Ego-centric. But it doesn’t help to survive, because the competitors are doing the same and the competitive edge is gone.
Efficiency programs kill the creativity. People feel more and more unsafe. They are afraid that their jobs will be eliminated.
Anxiety is not a good ground for creativity.
DÜRCKHEIM makes it very clear:
“Where ever you work in our society and whatever responsibility you take over, the blessing of your work depends on the depth and the maturity of your own person. It is crucial to witness the other world within. Only the individual can witness the other world, not a group, not an institution, not a society.”
The responsibility “to make the living more lively” ( Hans-Peter DÜRR ) is leading us to learn the use our inner spiritual and divine source for our creativity
“We experience much more than we know” says Hans-Peter DÜRR, quantum physicist and scholar of HEISENBERG. The rational capability of our mind is very much limited.
Since René Descartes’s “Cogito, ergo sum,” (I think, therefore I am), we have achieved incredible advances in science, technology, medicine and economics by narrowly focusing upon fulfillment of the Ego, taking an ‘I-centered’ worldview. This has happened at the expense of progress on humanistic, personal intrinsic values.
Many people define wholeness, which should be the development program for your life, as the unity of body, soul and mind. The overemphasis of mind is a fatal error. The whole person consists of a unity of body, soul and spirit, not mind (Lat.: corpus, anima and spiritus---Greek: soma, psyche and pneuma). Through this error we forgot the spiritual dimension. This mistake is the real reason for a lot of problems of today. To heal the wounds we must discover our spiritual dimension. This is only possible if we are increasing our “transparency for the immanent transcendence”.
Intuition is delivering additionally unlimited ideas and only with a combination of our LOGOS and INTUITION we exploit the maximum potential. But how can we open the door for intuitions on the management level?
The one who is practicing meditation or contemplation for years has experienced that creativity is increasing when we disappear from our problem with a certain absence of intention. Then and only then the intuition may gracefully flow. You cannot make it or force yourself to achieve the solution for the problem.
A meditative spiritual life is the condition for extending the creative potential. I practice ZEN-Meditation for 30 years now and used the experience in top management positions for 20 years. Besides meditating every day we have the daily opportunity to enter mindfully into spaces of experience like nature, art, music, dance, encounters, etc. and experience the source of intuition.
According to DÜRR there is a “Background Field, a “Permanent Acting Process” which creates “Reality” in each and every moment. The field is empty, but has the potentiality to manifest permanently as reality. That is the reason why everything is connected. If someone acts as an individual he influences the field and all other individuals in the world of management. All individuals with large responsibilities must take this in to account when they decide. If not, they act irresponsible and fail.
A leader must realize that life is the essential background for all what we do in business. DÜRR’s advice is to play the “Plus-Sum-Game” and not, as often observed, the “Zero-Sum-Game”, in which one gains at the expense of the other. For DÜRR the real meaning of sustainability in our creative process is:
“To make The Living more Lively”.
DÜRR has never meditated but he has practiced what he called “the loving dialogue:” “It is easier for me to explore new terrain with someone else rather than alone. I need to combine the ‘cautious’ and the ‘spontaneous’ and I cannot do it alone. When spontaneity simply goes dancing without knowing with whom it will dance or how, that's wonderful. That is when communication is also communion. Suddenly opening before you is a whole reservoir of images that are waiting for expression! It only takes a pulse, the energy of compassionate encouragement such as is found in dialogues such as these.
The stumbling block for most of us is the letting go. It takes a dedicated, concerted and repetitive effort to overcome the fear of surrender.
There is more than one pathway leading to enlightenment. One is consciously deciding to open oneself to the experience of stillness, reflection and contemplation which in turn opens up to us an experiencing of the Cooperative Background Field and of an all-embracing healing love.”
In the so called old economy this understanding is not well known or practiced but in the New Economy there are signs to take mindfulness, meditation and compassion very serious.
Zynga, PayPal, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, just to name a few, started with great success the first Wisdom 2.0 conference in Mountain View/California. Many conferences followed with growing numbers of participants. I participated in the WISDOM 2.0 conference in Dublin in the Google-Headquarter in September this year.
“Mindfulness and compassion in the Digital Age” was the topic.
Mindfulness is the door into spiritual growth of the individual. It will change the whole mindset of the employees.
Now some companies of the new economy are supporting the a.m. inner growth.
There is a deep desire in the young generation to work in a company which takes their values serious. Those companies which follow their needs, are the winners. They get the best talents.
These companies are on the way to become “Caring Companies”. They offer meditation and Yoga.
According to my longstanding expertise for many people meditation alone is not enough for the internal growth to become a whole person and act accordingly. Personal attributes like sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egoism and self-interest, which arise out of the EGO, may not disappear fast enough. Therefore, parallel to a meditation practice, one should enter into a development of individuation based on Depth Psychology. We should not try to get rid of our EGO like many esoteric advisors are recommending. We need our EGO to survive. There are plenty of people in our society who have a too weak EGO. But we should work on our program to get rid of the egocentric bad habits. We must learn how to ground our Ego on our Self. The balance of the Ego and the Self, the balance of male and female and the balance of the Good and the Bad is the core of individuation.
Especially the integration of our dark side is essential for our creativity flow. INTUITION
Intuition comes from Lat.: “intueri”. That means to turn inside like in a meditation. Of course the problem which should be solved must be known as a question. Then all of a sudden, not in the office or in the lab, may be in nature or in music i.e., an intuition flows into our consciousness. Many very famous scientists and Nobel Prize Winners report of an intuition to experience the breakthrough.
To name a few: Georges Köhler, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Alex Müller, Carl Friedrich Gauss, August Kekule, Justus von Liebig, Henri Poincare. Gerd Binnig, Rene Descartes.
The recent example is the Nobel Prize Winner in 2014 for Chemistry Stefan
Hell:
“I got the enlightenment as an intuition on the ferry boat to Finland”.
EINSTEIN: “Intuition is that what really counts”.
HUMBOLDT:” Very often the imagination is prior to the knowing” SHELDRAKE:” Especially in Europe and the USA many people were taught lack of intuition at an early age. In our society which is marked through our mind there are prejudices towards this form of information. It is called superstition and irrational.”
EINSTEIN:” The most beautiful what we can experience is the Mysterious. It is the real source of al art and science.”
If we live compassionately in the moment, faithfully trusting in benevolent universal forces, we open ourselves to an unimaginably powerful source of previously untapped energy, energy of healing, of contentment and of success, which is measured by growth. When we allow our intuition, which is our personal link with the universe, to direct our thoughts they become our most powerfully energetic gifts which, when joined with a multitude of similar thoughts from others, are able to manifest as ‘events’ which interact in accordance with the Laws of Nature, allowing us to literally, ‘move mountains’. The energetic dimension through which we are all connected, not only one
with the other but also with all knowledge and all potential that exists, has
been given various names by different authors, including the Divine Matrix, the undifferentiated Reality, the Cooperative Background and the Permanent Acting Process of Life.
DÜRR:” Everybody has intuitions, just a few and never enough. But he does not know where they come from. Intuition means very simple that something is coming from somewhere. They come from the “Ever Acting Process” which has the potentiality to manifest as reality in each and every moment. Many people
believe that they just think with their mind but they don’t get really new results. We don’t know our potential resulting from intuitions, because we are not able to enter the trans-rational space.”
According to my teacher Willigis Jäger, intuition flows out of stillness and silence. When you are silent, in peace and quietness, then spontaneous ideas, valuable insights and intuitions are coming up. All of a sudden you understand correlations which you have never known before. Intuition is emerging not out of the Subconscious but out the Unconscious, one layer deeper.
Let’s assume we get many intuitions due to our spiritual life. They show up all of a sudden and they disappear all of a sudden. We need to inhale them immediately to make them part of our own. Inspiration comes from Lat.: “inspirare” that means to take a deep breath. Therefore we have to inhale the intuition. Otherwise the intuition is lost.
The intuitions and inspirations are collected by our intellect and compared with our knowledge and inner images.
Intellect is a combination of the Latin words “intra-legere” and “collectio”. With our intellect we collect and read inside of us everything what is inside of us and what come from outside. This action is the condition for all INVENTIONS.
But most people work only with their mind, or if you include psychological sources, in the limits of their psycho-mental capabilities. They live like fishes in a little aquarium. The limits of the aquarium are defined by their limited the aquarium is in the ocean. They don’t use the resources of the “Unlimited” and make them accessible for their intellect.
By linking the intuitions and inspirations with our knowledge we may be able to invent new things. We can do the linking ourselves or together with other people. A very good practice is DÜRR’s “Loving Dialogue” as mentioned above. It opens new dimensions. Empathy and compassion are conditions to harvest the input of one or more persons.
Innovations are successfully introduced inventions in the marketplace. Very often this depends on a very close customer relation. Sales representatives, Technical Service people and marketing managers who have developed mindfulness and compassion are excellently prepared for successful innovations. But on the way to success intuition and creativity are extremely helpful.
Creativity in Management does not mean only to support innovations in R&D. All other management decisions can be enormously improved by intuitions. Many fail because only our mind and our egocentric attitude have created these decisions. A lack of spirituality is the reason. More than 50% of all mergers and acquisitions fail. Investments are all of a sudden obsolete. Wrong personal and organizational are encumbering the whole company. Strategies are developed to the wrong direction.
Mindfulness is the first step of meditation and creativity. But we must work hard to avoid distractions which can short-circuit our path to a greater awareness of our Divine potential. Being distracted is the opposite of being focused. We can enter into a distraction purposefully, or we can find ourselves unwittingly distracted by allowing someone else’s intent to envelop us.
The focus which we can achieve through the gateway of mindfulness and awareness is lost. The result is dissatisfaction and restlessness, which in turn hinders our ability to experience the “Permanent Acting Process”, the source of our creativity. Escape into distraction is typical of our times, a modern ‘dis- ease’. We seem uncomfortable with mindful concentration. The art of conversation is lost. People no longer listen to others they would rather speak about themselves. We feel powerless to remain focused, our fortitude and resolve is undermined by the pace and ‘noise’ of the society.
Despite following a very intensive and disciplined spiritual path for many
years and avoiding distractions I nevertheless found I continued to occasionally experience unsettling symptoms which I did not expect after such a prolonged period of meditative practices. The triggers I will describe, which many others have also experienced and reported upon, are a phenomenon that, while apparently common, have received very little attention or examination. Meditation literature generally only speaks of the progress one achieves through meditation.
‘Meditate and you’ll be fine!’ Well, as lovely a thought as that is, it is not always the case. Despite all of our mindfulness and spiritual practices, when we enter into our various spaces of experiences, we may all of a sudden be triggered to experience the dark side in us when:
This all comes out of our shadow, in which all our bad habits and failures are suppressed. We are hiding this dark side of our person behind a mask. The integration of the shadow is a necessary condition to be a so called “Whole Person”. Then and only then, beside all the spirituality of our life, the creativity can develop without any blockages.
Managers have to develop their own spirituality and creativity and have to support the spiritual potential and growth of the employees.
How true, how true it is as Horst Eberhard Richter says, “Only he who is reconciled with himself, can work with others in a caring way.”
Only then managers are able to create enough innovations, necessary for the survival of the company.
