BLINK

BLINK: DECISION-MAKING ACCELERATOR FOR A BETTER LIVING

I. What is BLINK? BLINK is many things. It is a book by Malcolm Gladwell (the author of The Tipping Point). It is the description of a decision-making process that combines awareness, research, a high-speed brain and knowledge. This essay refers to these four points. BLINK is also the word that describes an instant (a two-second period of time) in which one becomes aware of a thought that implies a decision. Mainly, for me, BLINK is the one change in my life that will clearly save me years of time in my life in decision-making processes. This is one of those things I have learned that I consider so good that I want to share it with everyone.

II. What does the book say? The book is an academic research, with footnotes and endnotes the way academic papers do, documenting everything they say. This increases dramatically the reliability of the things that are said that are true. Fortunately, what is most important about it is not the book itself, but the practical implications it may have. So, my idea is not to share the contents of the book. You can read the book if you want to know more about it. I will explain the process that I created after reading the book and relating to the book’s contents.
To say a bit more about the book, it is a masterpiece. It is written with much care and dedication, with endless hours of research, of very delicate research. It is delicious to read because of how marvelous every page turns out to be, regardless of how boring the topic we thought it might be. It is also a page-turner. You want to get to the end the moment you begin. In my experience, I reached the end of the book but the mentality and knowledge and the results of reading it are still on going. I would say BLINK is the one book that has changed my way of thinking on my list of Top 10 mind-changing books of the last three years.

III. How does BLINK work? The mind receives a vast number of impulses collected by the senses of sight, hearing, speech, taste and smell. Apart from these, there are other self-generated impulses in the brain: our thoughts. Most of them are triggered, or at least strongly influenced by our emotions. When we see cow, we immediately project that cow to our emotional library to match it with something we already know and remember, see what it feels like, and decide which attitude to take from then on. This entire process of developing an attitude about something takes two seconds –at the most – from the moment you are in presence of that “thing” until the time you make your decision. Two seconds. Finally something you can do several times while you hold your breath. You can do it while you sleep, while you play cards, while you exercise. Actually, the ideal of BLINK is that you train yourself to do it so often that you train your mind until it becomes a habit. All it takes is a little bit of knowledge, some degree of self-awareness and a little bit of self-discipline.

a. Knowledge: as I mentioned before, this process starts by identifying a moment in life and become aware of it. The moments will come to you. You don’t have to go after them. For example, when you know your favorite team is playing a very exciting match tonight, there are times during the day when you think: “shite, what if my team loses?” The first two seconds after you ask the question, as long as you remain focused on searching for an answer, will become sufficient information you need to get the process started. Remember that the process we are aiming for is how to improve our decision-making process specifically regarding speed, but not only. It also has to do with approximation of success through the process, and the simplification of something that human beings have been historically so ineffective at doing: making decisions. And if you still feel you have been good enough at it, why not try to improve it even more, reducing the time invested in making decisions to a few seconds a day?
b. Self-awareness: BLINK is not possible if there is no capability to stop at that very instant to take control over the process itself, and not let emotions run freely, drifting the focus of concentration away from the decision-making process. It is not easy, but it is easy to learn. You have to program your mind to this. First, close your eyes and remember the first memory you remember about today. Freeze the film and focus on that picture. You see a picture, which is a summary of an event or a series of events that were taking place simultaneously in your life. Have you ever been traveling and had a picture taken of yourself? How much do you remember from that instant? You remember that big plaza. It was a park and there was a main entrance where one had to pay to get in. From the outside it looked spectacular. Certainly not something one sees on a daily basis back home. It was simply breathtaking. Also, you remember if you were having money problems, if you were hungry or stuffed or with diarrhea or if you had not slept much or if you had been kissing the person taking the picture the night before. You also remember the weather, rainy, foggy, hot, cold; you remember the noise, where you bought those shoes, who’s birthday it was and you forgot to call that day; or tried and didn’t manage.
All this collection of memories comes from a picture. Well, your mind also stores pictures. The difference is that, your mind has so much more “memory” than a camera that it stores entire videos, thousands and thousands of them, so you don’t have to remember what a picture reminds you of, but you can actually see the entire video, as long as you want, of all the details that relate to this event you are remembering.
Upon remembering this, one reaches a point in the video where the video reaches its end (which you also remember) and you give it a positive or negative value. Why? Because it is a human characteristic to value-base our events and circumstances so we can conduct ourselves through the path of what we consider “good”.
So, one can BLINK and in two seconds know if a cow makes you feel good or bad. Perhaps not everything is as easy as a cow if you have seen many all your life. You can already say that you like cows. Period. Or that you don’t, and you don’t question it anymore. [Should you? That’s a different topic that can also help in decision-making process improvement, mainly regarding quality of the decisions made.]
The importance about self-awareness, in my opinion, has more to do with taking control over the process than becoming introspective. One area in which self-awareness is fundamental is in conflict analysis. We all have conflicts every day, small ones, like what shirt to wear, and big ones, like having a car accident. No matter how big or small our conflicts are, it is difficult for us to become aware of them. Remember denial stage: first thing we do is pretend and believe there is no conflict. So, once we identify the conflict, we are one step closer to its solution than when we still believed there was none.
Once you have identified a conflict or a situation that is bringing you stress, you are setting yourself in the line of BLINKing to solve it. How? The moment you identify a conflict, you must project it into the future. How bad can this go? What is the worst-case scenario (WCS)? Your brain has the capability to “show” you this WCS in two seconds. Then, your brain will process the event and trigger emotions in you. You could let yourself go with those emotions of WCS and feel “bad”, frustrated, depressed, scared, worried. Or you can stop after that BLINK, press pause before the feelings go rampant around your system, and think about your best-case scenario (BCS). Your BCS will also trigger emotions that will most likely be associated with “good”, comfortable, positive, enjoyable. Still, don’t let them take you away from this decision-making process you are in. Remember you are making decisions, so you can’t waste valuable time in your life feeling emotions about a future that DOES NOT EXIST (WCS and BCS are a product of your imagination only; those events you BLINKed do not exist in reality).
Then, once you have identified WCS and BCS you can decide which way to go. It could very well be that your WCS is not so bad, so you don’t fear much going the wrong way. Or it could be that your BCS is not so good, so it is not worth the effort going in that direction. The important thing is that you already felt, if only for an instant, what it feels like to be in that WCS or BCS so you can make decisions right now to avoid or approach those scenarios.
c. self-discipline: it is very important to develop the strength to be able to stop emotions when they start running wild after picturing a WCS or a BCS. The way you train your mind to do this is the exact same way you train your mind or your body to do everything: through practice. Try it out whenever you feel happy or sad about the future. Suppose, for example, that you have a sentimental partner that lives in a different country than you do. Imagine you meet him/her one day and ask him/her if s/he thinks the two of you are going to meet again. Imagine your partner responds “I don’t know”. You feel very sad because you really wanted to see him/her again, and s/he doesn’t know if you two are going to meet again (which is in fact true, because no one knows anything about the future). Still, you make a big drama in your head (far longer than the two seconds you need) and you let your emotions run wild, thinking how much you are going to miss your partner, and you end up crying out of the frustration of losing him/her.
Now, suppose after having this episode of sadness, four years later you end up marrying this partner, and you live happily ever after. Was it worth all the suffering of that day you cried because you didn’t know if you would see him/her again? Not really. Especially if you think you were able then to picture a BCS (marrying your partner) and considering the possibility that it could eventually happen in the future. The idea is not to create false expectations or illusions, but to think about the WCS and the BCS. If you cried because your partner said there was no certainty you two would meet again in the future, you pictured your WCS but failed to do the same with your BCS. Four years later, this failure proves that if you would have BLINKed your BCS you could have avoided all that unnecessary suffering.
This is very important, because the more self-discipline you have, the faster and easier it will be for you to stop a BLINK after two seconds to use it as valuable information to make a decision. If you let your emotions run wild, controlling them later will be more difficult than after a short two seconds.

IV. Making decisions: whenever we make a decision, we are choosing from a universe of options (at least two, but in many cases an unlimited amount), which means we are basically taking one and leaving all the rest behind. That’s how the world works. Every time we buy a pair of shoes, we are not choosing to buy dozens of other pairs that are sitting on the same rack as the one you chose. How did you choose them?
When making decisions, we choose what we think is best according to our knowledge, to our thoughts, our feelings, our wishes. Sometimes, even when we know everything about something and we think it will be the best and we have the most positive feelings about it and we wish for it intensely, we might make a decision and not succeed at it. This failure has to do with how the decision adapts to your reality. The shoes you bought might not be as good as you thought they were going to be. You might have to cancel the trip you were going to make for your vacation even though you had already paid tickets and hotels. The future is unexpected, so no matter how well we plan a decision, it might turn out to be not as “good” as we expected it to be.
So, when making decisions we always have to remember that they are not permanent states, but temporary. Every decision you make is temporary, as long as its consequences can be reversed along the way. For example, jumping off a plane without a parachute is a decision that most likely may not be reversed. But choosing a professional career or a spouse or a car, have a higher degree of reversibility.
Then, you could make a decision without really thinking much about the future and it could result in a very good decision. For example, suppose you have the opportunity to present an exam to become an official translator for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You don’t really want to do it, you don’t see or understand the purpose, but in the long run, ten years down the road, you can look back at the benefits and think everything you wouldn’t have had if you wouldn’t have made that decision.
From these two last thoughts we conclude that no matter how well or unwell you prepare a scenario for making a decision, the result can still be unexpectedly good or unexpectedly bad for you. This does not mean that life is “a box of chocolates”, as Forrest Gump used to say (“you never know what you are going to get”). There are many ways of influencing your circumstances, through your decision-making processes, through your attitude, to conduct your life on the path you designed for yourself.
What BLINK suggests is that no matter how much time you invest in making decisions, they can still come out to be very bad, so why not learn how to invest only two seconds per decision so you at least don’t lose so much time in the process, and then concentrate on adjusting the circumstances, or better, your attitude towards your circumstances.

V. The origin of fear: one of the most important things to consider about life is the origin of fear. One cannot understand what one does not know. The biggest problem with fear is that we ignore its origins. The origin of fear is a BLINK where we fail to take control over the process and, especially, over the emotions. This BLINK of fear is an instant, two seconds, during which one projects into the future an event or a circumstance that has happened to you or to someone else something that you would dislike experiencing. So, if a snake bit a neighbor and you saw how his leg became after the bite, you BLINK for two seconds, see the WCS, and you make that WCS a reality in your future. But the process goes so out of hand, emotionally, that you start fearing snakes, even though you normally don’t see them and you normally don’t hear of many people being bit by snakes around the places you normally visit. Still, you make a BLINK a reality.
The emotions of this kind of BLINK are so powerful, so out of control, that the fear takes control over you, to the point of physical impact: you cry, you yell, you shiver, you ask for help. Do you remember when you were a child and had nightmares that you called your parents to come in your rescue? What was the origin of that fear? You had a dream, probably a projection of something you heard or saw or created out of your imagination, then you woke up and shifted that picture into reality. Then, in those two first seconds, instead of taking control of the process, we give in to the emotions that start running wild to the point that we cry and we yell for help, even though that vision does not exist in reality.
Then, the process of BLINKing is very useful to overcome fear. First, choose something you fear. For example, flying on an airplane. I am afraid because I would not want my plane to crash into a building and die. That event that I saw became a projection from outside of myself into my personal future. So, when I get on a plane, I think I am going to crash into a building. But this fear exists only because I saw that happening. If I didn’t, most likely that wouldn’t be my fear. Still, I can BLINK for two seconds and realize that the origin of this fear comes from the outside and from the past. None has a direct relationship on me, except if I allow this to happen. Then, I can change my attitude after those two seconds and understand that the odds of crashing into a building while flying on a plane are so small that we can almost say “that will never happen to me”. Fear, then, is eliminated, uprooted where it is born, in our minds. We uproot it taking away the structure that holds fear, which is fantasy, imagination, past and outside world.

November 23, 2005

Cambio Climático: adaptación o mitigación?

Solía ser partidario de que la adaptación y la mitigación debían ser procesos simultáneos, principalmente porque debemos salvarnos nosotros (adaptación) y asegurarnos de no heredar un problema mayor a las siguientes generaciones (mitigación). Sin embargo, así como ahora se sabe que no es que nos quedaremos sin agua sino que cambiará el ciclo del agua en el planeta entero, también hay lugares donde es más urgente la mitigación (Estados Unidos y China, los dos gigantes contaminantes) que la adaptación (Maldivas y Costa Rica, pequeños y de fragilidad geográfica o ecosistémica).

Hago un llamado de atención para que seamos proactivos como país y empecemos a hablar -ojalá después de pensar un poco- sobre la adaptación al cambio climático. De todas maneras, es altamente probable que nuestro país ya sea neutral en emisiones de carbono.

También es importante que sepamos que la iniciativa no tiene que surgir del gobierno. Puede también surgir de la sociedad civil y de la empresa privada.

Quién se apunta?

A breath of fresh air

Imagine you are practicing that sport of free diving, where you dive deep down into the ocean without equipment to assist your breathing. You must hold your air, despite the increasing pressure and the burning of oxygen in your lungs to your blood. Suddenly, you realize you are short of air, you start feeling a pulse behind your eyes, your throat feels a growing pressure between holding back and wanting to breathe -knowing well you can't since you are dozens of meters below sea level- and you wonder what to do.

My wife says she wants to be "normal" again, meaning she doesn't have to question whether she will have free access to internet tools and websites.

I never knew what I had in Costa Rica until I left to study peace and conflict transformation in Norway for a couple of years. Costa Rica is a demilitarized nation, and I only knew what it meant when I was gone and when I started studying the causes of war and the consequences of having military armies, both in developed and in developing nations.

Now that I have moved again I have started to realize the treasures we have in Costa Rica with our democratic system, where we can be certain that every four years, every citizen will have the right to vote for the candidate of their choosing to lead the country. Where you have a Constitution that guarantees your individual freedoms, your civil and political rights, your human rights.

There are many things to improve in our system. Yes. Definitely. A lot of work to do. It is not time to fail, falter or rest. We must be aware of what we already have, to know that progress and transformation and sustainable development will start from a very strong, solid base that our ancestors have already constructed. It is the inheritance we have received and we must do the best we can to make it better, to multiply our talents, to think about what we will inherit onto the generations yet to be born.

I inhale deeply and enjoy the smell and taste of clean, fresh, free air.

Until next proxy.

Explotación de Parques Nacionales

El planeta ha llegado a un punto de inflexión respecto a su sostenibilidad, la cual depende principalmente de la humanidad, quien, sin ser su mayor poblador en número de especies o en peso total de especímenes, ciertamente sí es su principal amenaza. Somos la única especie que se desarrolla insosteniblemente. Similar a como lo hace una plaga o un virus.

También somos la única con la virtud de la conciencia para transformar nuestras acciones y orientarlas hacia la sostenibilidad.

Costa Rica tiene un liderazgo marcado a nivel mundial en generación de energías renovables. Ha llegado la hora de hablar del tema de la explotación de los recursos de los Parques Nacionales, en merecidas mayúsculas. Pronto será hora de calcular la densidad vegetal de nuestros Parques Nacionales y demás zonas boscosas del país, para vender certificados de conservación ambiental, de captación de carbono, de generación de oxígeno y de almacenamiento de agua limpia. Sería esto posible ya con la legislación actual sobre Parques Nacionales? También hay que empezar a dialogar, con madurez, no con afán de bochinche estilo "reality show", sobre la posibilidad de transformar, en el transcurso del presente siglo, el origen de nuestras fuentes de energía predominantemente hidroeléctrica a energía geotérmica. Por dos razones: primero, las cuencas hidrográficas, aunque se encuentren fuera de zonas protegidas, también son bienes demaniales. O sea, le pertenecen al Estado. Merecen protección como lo que son. Las represas representan una visión sin igual por parte de sus creadores. Nos dan el orgullo de decir hoy que 93% de nuestra electricidad es renovable. En eso, le llevamos un siglo de ventaja a la mayoría de países del mundo. Sin embargo, no podemos llevar esa valiosa solución al absurdo de crear represas en todos los ríos. Entonces, cuál es el límite? La segunda razón es que en nuestro pequeñísimo territorio nacional existen al menos nueve volcanes activos, y todos son Parques Nacionales. La energía que de ellos proviene para generar electricidad es prácticamente inagotable. Costa Rica podría convertirse, con un nuevo golpe de visión nacional, en exportadora de energía tal como lo es hoy Noruega con su petróleo. Sólo que nosotros lo podemos hacer con energía renovable Y limpia. Para ello, debemos valorar cuál es la mejor forma de realizar factibilidad, de minimizar el impacto ambiental y además compensarlo con otras medidas de conservación como por ejemplo, aumento de la educación ambiental y de sostenibilidad en escuelas, colegios y universidades. Tanto la venta de certificados por conservación como la explotación del subsuelo volcánico podría hacer al país alcanzar el desarollo económico de un brinco. Estamos por ver si ya tenemos el desarrollo sociopolítico necesario para tener esa visión sin igual, que sí se tenía hace medio siglo. Esperamos que así sea.

Vivir después de la vida

Cuentan las leyendas de algunos historiadores navales que a inicios del Siglo XV, el Emperador chino envió una flota de cientos de buques a surcar los mares en busca de riquezas. En aquellos viajes –continúan las leyendas- los buques chinos alcanzaron todos los rincones del planeta intercambiando bienes, prácticas y costumbres en las interacciones con otras comunidades.

Hoy, seis siglos después, la pequeña gran Costa Rica se ha embarcado en una aventura similar, ya no en barcos, pero sí con China. Hasta las costas pacíficas de Asia ha llegado un contingente costarricense que trajo consigo una multitud de riquezas en forma de arte; una muestra de la cultura patria que se intercambia con la china en una puesta en escena llena de gracia.

La obra se titula “Amighetti”, y es un homenaje al acervo artístico de este gran hombre que fue don Francisco. El espectáculo era de danza, con nueve bailarines que parecían cientos; con elásticos movimientos llenos de clase y de trópico que invitaban a sentir en la intimidad de la butaca el deseo de libertad expresado en el escenario. Esa forma de ser costarricense, esa cultura cálida de darse brazos, besos y abrazos, estremeció a los que fuimos testigos de una pequeña ventana de Costa Rica que se abrió en Pekín el viernes de noche.

Dicen que nadie sabe lo que tiene hasta que lo pierde. Cuán cierto es cuando se trata del terruño. Esta representación artística nos transportó de vuelta al país, con un magnífico juego de luces que semejaban atardeceres de noviembre y celajes de febrero, y claros de luna de alguna noche romántica. El romance de esta noche fue con la música, que provocó la danza y jugueteó con los artistas, con una melodía y otra y otra, que parecían ser mías y de nadie más.

La poesía narrada fue el pasaporte visado para transportarse a Costa Rica a recordar viejos tiempos, y algunos otros tan viejos que sólo cuentan historias de antaño. Historias de amas de casa que aman, de enamorados que se enamoran, de seducción, de pasión y de silencio, enmarcadas entre lienzos recordando  el pincel y la gubia de don Francisco. 

Probablemente –sugiere Amighetti- morir es estar solo // quedarse con los labios sellados // mientras pasan aquellos, los que cantan // los que besan y aman…

En aquella disyuntiva entre guardar silencio y querer romperlo para sabernos vivos, cayó liviana y luminosa en mi regazo la vida y obra del gran artista.

…Dormir en una colina // con los ojos abiertos y el corazón paralizado // mientras estalla el sol // con pétalos de llama.

Esa lumbre de su vida la sentí profundamente en un teatro en Pekín, a pocos pasos del majestuoso Templo del Cielo, donde el Emperador venía en el solsticio de invierno a orar por las buenas cosechas.

Su cosecha, amigo Amighetti, tan buena, tan prolija, me transportó por varios instantes a la vida que viví en aquella Costa Rica.

Wealth equality

Last century, societies around the world were profoundly transformed towards more social justice and economic equality of its citizens. Social security, labor laws and access to public education became consistent pillars of socioeconomic development. Slavery saw its definitive end.

Towards the end of the century, the computer revolution of the 90s created a tool that made the average employee many times more efficient. At the beginning of the present century, software development and information and communication technologies (ICTs) revolutionized yet again the employee's capacity to produce far more in the same period of time, and far better than only 15 years before. Nowadays, in fact, work is ubiquitous. An e-mail or a phone call can be taken during the commute or while on vacation, at night, at home, or abroad. 

The combination between formal education and the know-how to use ICTs and software has prompted the arrival of the knowledge era that the world is living today. Connectivity has become a must for governments, private enterprises -mainly transnational ones- academic institutions, NGOs, etc. Despite poverty indexes, countries across the world, from Latin America to China, India and Africa, have access to the benefits of connectivity that the more developed world is also having. 

Nevertheless, despite this exponential enhancement of productivity in employees, instead of this representing the possibility to work less time or earn more for the time worked, the average employee is working more hours (24/7) earning in disproportion to their hyper-effectiveness. 

If this hyper-effectiveness is multiplying the wealth that is being created globally, and employees are still earning a salary without regard of their productivity, this means that the widely acclaimed exploitation that socialists and communists abhorred during the communist hype of the previous century has only gotten much worse. 

As long as the working classes do not come to this realization, then the status quo is safe. Problem is, the present global economic crisis has accelerated awareness on behalf of employees who have lost their jobs or felt threatened to lose it, or have seen how rich some people have become in the last decade and how they have gotten away with wrongdoing in the last few months with the bursting of the financial bubble. 

This awareness has triggered millions of people worldwide to feel cheated. The longer this recession lasts, and the more consumption contracts, the more people will become aware of this unequal situation regarding their work and the retribution they obtain from it.

The world was unable to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the death of communism, because capitalism, as we knew it, lies on its deathbed too. These are the times to review, far more carefully, the political and economic positions around the center of the ideological spectrum. Perhaps it is even time for economists and journalists to start researching more seriously the other half of Adam Smith's capitalist proposition, yet to be discovered: The Theory on Moral Sentiments, where Smith spoke about ethics, morality and justice for capitalism to work as a sustainable system. 

Meanwhile, let's just hope for more equality in wealth distribution, as there is no doubt that in wealth creation humankind has already proven successful. 

Afghanistan: careful strategy

President Obama has launched a new strategy to tackle the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It seems this Administration is taking this battlefront quite seriously, and this is what had to be done. 

There is no single-handed solution for this conflict. During the Taliban regime, even fellow Afghan Muslims were victims of their oppression and extremism with which they interpreted the Qu'ran. That seemed to be yet another turning point of a country that has suffered repeated invasions, poverty and scarcity for decades. 

Additionally, during the last couple of decades the country has become one of the world's largest producers of poppy seed, raw material to manufacture heroin. 

Now, this Taliban extremism has overflowed across the Pakistani border, where frequent terrorist attacks have been destabilizing the country politically and militarily. The greatest risk of all would be to see an extremist organization in control of nuclear weapons, as Pakistan does have. Therefore, the need for action was urgent, and the strategy must be bold. 

Apart from the additional 4000 military trainers and the 17,000 soldiers that the US will deploy in the country, and the US$1.5 billion a year that the country will give to Pakistan as cooperation to fight the extremist insurgency there, the United Nations must act accordingly with diplomatic action to gear nonmilitary power towards the transformation of the conflict and the development of Afghanistan. 

It is not a country easy to run, and not a conflict easy to be transformed. Twelve local tribes coexist in the country, and they have had two generations of people living under the law of the bullet, fighting the Soviets in the seventies and eighties, and now dealing with the homegrown Taliban and what they consider to be American invaders. 

Perhaps the most important objective is to empower both the Afghani and the Pakistani governments, and to eradicate the form of extremism that seeks to destabilize through terrorist action. Most important of all, though, is to offer a peaceful society for new generations of Afghani people, to allow them to develop with healthcare, with proper education, with the necessary tools and financial resources to make it a sustainable economy. 

Eradicating poppy seed production is only good if it can be substituted by another product that can employ people and ensure them a formal source of income. 

It is not much of a war but a nation-building strategy what Afghanistan has needed for decades. Let's hope this time it comes out right. 

Marca Costa Rica

En tiempos de globalización, resulta paradójicamente importante distinguir a los países individualmente pese a la colectivización de la comunidad global. Quizás esto responda a la regla tácita de los procesos interculturales de que "las semejanzas nos unen; las diferencias nos enriquecen."

En décadas recientes esta percepción nacional se ha comercializado, pues hay diversos factores de la economía internacional que hacen más atractivo a un país que a otro en la puja por atraer turismo, promover exportaciones, atraer inversiones, en fin, distinguirse de entre el gran concierto de naciones en el que vivimos en la actualidad. 

La marca de un país -o la percepción que el público general tiene- no es constante. Oscila invariablemente entre las marcas de buena percepción y las de mala percepción. 

Un país que tiene regularmente una buena marca-país a nivel mundial es Brasil. En cualquier rincón del mundo alguien sabe de Pelé o de Ronaldo o de Ronaldinho, que son sinónimo de éxito, de calidad, de triunfo. 

Un país como Estados Unidos, que durante la mayor parte del siglo XX tuvo una excelente marca-país, parece haberla perdido durante la última década, quizás como consecuencia de la invasión a Irak y la renuencia a firmar el protocolo de Kioto sobre cambio climático. 

En el caso de Costa Rica, la marca de este país ha sido tradicionalmente reputada. Es importante reconocer las causas, sobre todo para fijar el rumbo para la nueva imagen que el país querrá posicionar a nivel mundial por los próximos veinte años. Durante quince años fue muy exitosa la campaña turística de "sin ingredientes artificiales." Sin embargo, la globalización demanda una imagen-país que trascienda unos cuantos sectores productivos y se enfoque en elaborar una marca que distinga lo hecho en Costa Rica como un reflejo de lo que crece y vive en el país. 

Cuando se lanzó aquella campaña publicitaria, Intel no se había instalado en el país todavía. Esta semana, que la compañía lanza al mercado su nuevo procesador Nehalem, se debe hacer del conocimiento del mundo entero que un equipo de 70 ingenieros costarricenses de la firma trabajaron en la investigación y desarrollo de este procesador, llamado a ser el primero de una generación ambientalmente amigable de microprocesadores. O sea, aún con ingredientes artificiales, Costa Rica se destaca a nivel mundial. 

Si bien el país está preparándose para salir de un letargo de 15 años en materia de telecomunicaciones, pasando de una red celular TDMA a una de tercera generación en cuestión de un año, en materia de generación de energías renovables el país tiene décadas de ventaja a nivel mundial. Esto es importante de mencionar considerando que, así como la gran revolución de los noventas fue la informática y la computación y la de esta década ha sido la de las tecnologías de información y comunicación (TIC), la próxima gran revolución aparentemente será la de la generación de energía renovable. 

En este ámbito, Costa Rica ya produce el 93% de su electricidad a partir de fuentes renovables, entre las cuales destacan mayoritariamente la generación hidroeléctrica, la energía geotérmica, la energía eólica y la energía por biomasa. Mientras otros países del mundo luchan por buscar formas económicamente viables de reducir su huella de carbono en el cada vez más contaminado medioambiente planetario, Costa Rica está procurando convertirse en el primer país carbono-neutral para el 2021, año del bicentenario de su independencia. 

En materia de pobreza, Costa Rica parece haber encontrado una fórmula bastante eficaz para controlar esta patología socioeconómica. Eliminó sus fuerzas armadas hace 60 años, priorizó desde entonces el gasto público en salud y educación, y mantiene un régimen democrático reconocido como el más antiguo de América Latina. 

Es importante resaltar el tema de la desmilitarización. Mientras el gasto militar del planeta ya alcanza los 1.2 billones de dólares (en inglés, trillion dollars), el gasto de Costa Rica es cero. Peor aún, cuando se revisan las Metas de Desarrollo del Milenio fijadas por las Naciones Unidas en el año 2000 y los costos para alcanzarlas, con ese dinero en armas se podrían cumplir todas las metas ocho veces. Así lo ha desacado vehementemente el presidente Óscar Arias Sánchez, Premio Nóbel de la Paz, ante la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas, acto en el cual presentó la propuesta para crear el Consenso de Costa Rica, un pacto mundial por medio del cual los países en vías de desarrollo que reduzcan su gasto militar para destinarlo a salud y educación serán mejor considerados para recibir cooperación de los países desarrollados. 

Esto no quiere decir que en Costa Rica se viva sin violencia. La violencia es inherente al ser humano, por lo tanto nos corresponde a nosotros mismos aprender a lidiar con ella. Lo que sí es cierto es que Costa Rica ha descartado, constitucionalmente, verse involucrado alguna vez en un conflicto bélico con cualquier otro estado vecino. Esto también quiere decir que en Costa Rica no es posible realizar un golpe de estado, pues no hay ejército para sustentarlo. Parafraseando al presidente Arias, las madres costarricenses pueden estar tranquilas de saber que jamás verán a sus hijos morir en la guerra. 

El tema de la paz por desmilitarización es tan actual hoy como lo fue hace 60 años. Hoy en día también es indispensable el tema de la paz con el medio ambiente, y Costa Rica busca compartir con el mundo la fórmula que la hacen merecedora de un impresionante quinto lugar en el Índice de Desempeño Ambiental. Por ello, la presente administración Arias Sánchez ha lanzado la iniciativa Paz con la Naturaleza para demostrarle al mundo cómo se logra el desarrollo socioeconómico de manera sostenible. El liderazgo que el país ha alcanzado en las últimas dos décadas en campos como ecoturismo, reforestación y biodiversidad, sólo se comparan con el liderazgo que el país asumió desde hace 60 años cuando empezó a reservar áreas naturales para la conservación y la reserva biológicas. En la actualidad, más del 25% del territorio son áreas de conservación, uno de los porcentajes más altos del mundo. 

Sin afán de agotar el tema, se conoce poco lo que han sido las culturas prehispánicas en Costa Rica. Sin embargo, se han encontrado en el territorio nacional decenas de milenarias esferas de piedra que datan de una época en la que ninguna otra civilización conocida comprendía el concepto de la esfericidad. Este gran aporte a la humanidad que data de más de dos mil años atrás es un referente histórico de la fertilidad que ha brotado del ser humano que ha ocupado estas tierras. 

Así, con algunos ingredientes artificiales, siempre con la paz como rector y el desarrollo sostenible como objetivo, Costa Rica atrae importantes inversiones transnacionales que buscan esa paz y ese desarrollo alcanzado por el empleo de una mano de obra libre, saludable, educada, democrática, pacífica, quizás los elementos esenciales para que brote la creatividad, pilar fundamental de la innovación. También, la fertilidad de la tierra respetada por las manos y las mentes que la labran produce miles de bienes agrícolas, industriales y agroindustriales que trascienden las fronteras de más de 140 países del mundo. 

Eso es lo que significa "hecho en Costa Rica." Esa marca y esa imagen son las que se deberían divulgar para que el planeta entero se informe y se forme percepciones que hagan honor a la verdad de lo que se cree que es un modelo de desarrollo eficaz y sostenible. 

The Power of Now

A quoted summary of Eckhart Tolle's book. 

“All that arises passes away” (A Buddhist monk)

Chapter 1: You are not your mind

"The word “god” has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created."

"Does it point beyond itself to that transcendental reality, or does it lend itself too easily to becoming no more than an idea in your head that you believe in, a mental idol?"

"It is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being."

"Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don’t realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal."

"This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It also creates a false mind-made self that casts a shadow of fear and suffering."

"Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking."

"The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly – you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is a disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken over."

"Have you found the “off” button?"

"You also realize that all the things that truly matter – beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace – arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken."

"Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease."

"When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream – a gap of 'no mind.'”

"Create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation."

"There is one certain criterion by which you can measure your success in this practice: the degree of peace that you feel within."

"So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger."

"About 80 or 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy."

“This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns into pain.”

“It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it – who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there.”

“No-mind is consciousness without thought.”

“The simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don’t know how to think but because they don’t know how to stop thinking!”

“The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not.”

“If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time.”

“Often a vicious cycle builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they feed each other.”

“Emotion literally means ‘disturbance.’ The word comes from the Latin emovere, meaning ‘to disturb.’”

“Emotions, being part of the dualistic mind, are subject to the law of opposites. This simply means that you cannot have good without bad.”

 

Chapter 2: Consciousness: The way out of pain

“The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.”

“The pain that you create now is always some form of non-acceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.”

“The mind cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.”

“The accumulation of time in the collective and individual human mind also holds a vast amount of residual pain from the past.”

“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.”

“Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.”

“You can assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear.”

“The secret of life is to ‘die before you die’ – and find that there is no death.”

 

Chapter 3: Moving deeply into the Now

“Dysfunction sets in when you seek your self in your mind and mistake it for who you are.”

“To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.”

“The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now.”

“All forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”

“Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be free now.”

“Find out if you have any problem at this moment. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now. Do you have a problem now?”

“Problems are mind-made and need time to survive. They cannot survive in the actuality of the Now.”

“It is impossible to have a problem when your attention is fully in the Now.”

“As there are no problems in the Now, there is no fear either.”

“You cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.”

“In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual teachings in existence, non-attachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of ‘consecrated action.’”

 

Chapter 4: Mind strategies for avoiding the Now

“To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.”

“Anything unconscious dissolves when you shine the light of consciousness on it.”

“Your unhappiness is polluting not only your own inner being and those around you but also the collective human psyche of which you are an inseparable part.”

“The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.”

“Once a mind pattern, an emotion, or a reaction is there, accept it. You were not conscious enough to have a choice in the matter. That’s not a judgment, just a fact. If you had a choice, or realized that you do have a choice, would you choose suffering or joy, ease or unease, peace or conflict?”

“How is it possible that humans killed in excess of one hundred million fellow humans in the twentieth century alone? Humans inflicting pain on such magnitude on one another is beyond anything you can imagine. And that’s not taking into account the mental, emotional an physical violence, the torture, pain, and cruelty they continue to inflict on each other as well as on other sentient beings on a daily basis.”

“Once you realize that a certain kind of food makes you sick, would you carry on eating that food and keep asserting that it is okay to be sick?”

“To complain is always non-acceptance of what is.”

“Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it’s no longer a mistake.”

“Are you worried? Do you have many ‘what if’ thoughts? You are identified with your mind, which is projecting itself into an imaginary future situation and creating fear. There is no way that you can cope with such a situation, because it doesn’t exist.”

“It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.”

“Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity. It cannot come in the future.”

“When you are on a journey, it is certainly helpful to know where you are going or at least the general direction in which you are moving, but don’t forget: The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment.”

“The sooner you realize that your outer purpose cannot give you lasting fulfillment, the better.”

“Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time. Access the power of Now. That is the key. None other than the power of your presence, your consciousness liberated from thought forms.”

“What is essential is your conscious presence. That dissolves the past.”

 

Chapter 5: The state of presence

“Understanding presence is being present.”

“Zen masters use the word satori to describe a flash of insight, a moment of no-mind and total presence.”

“No civilization has ever produced so much ugliness.”

“Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don’t get off, you will go down with it.”

“’The teacher and the taught together create the teaching.’”

“Silence is an even more potent carrier of presence; to listen to the silence, wherever you are, is an easy and direct way of becoming present.”

“If you are drawn to an enlightened teacher, it is because there is already enough presence in you to recognize presence in another.”

 

Chapter 6: The inner body

“The ‘illusion of the self’, as the Buddha calls it, is the core error: to believe that you are nothing more than your physical body and your mind.”

“Don’t get stuck on the level of words. A word is no more than a means to an end. It’s an abstraction.”

“If you focus your attention in the body as much as possible, you will be anchored in the Now.”

“Unless you stay present – and inhabiting your body is always an essential aspect of it – you will continue to be run by your mind. The script in your head that you learned a long time ago, the conditioning of your mind, will dictate your thinking and your behavior. You may be free of it for brief intervals, but rarely for long. This is especially true when something ‘goes wrong’ or there is some loss or upset. Your conditioned reaction will then be involuntary, automatic, and predictable, fueled by the one basic emotion that underlies the mind-identified state of consciousness: fear.”

“What matters is not whether you can attach a mental label to an emotion but whether you can bring the feeling of it into awareness as much as possible. Attention is the key to transformation – and full attention also implied acceptance. Attention is like a beam of light – the focused power of your consciousness that transmutes everything into itself.”

“Place your attention on feeling the emotion, and check whether your mind is holding on to a grievance pattern such as blame, self-pity, or resentment that is feeding the emotion. If that is the case, it means that you haven’t forgiven. Non-forgiveness is often toward another person or yourself, but it may just as well be toward any situation or condition – past, present or future – that your mind refuses to accept.”

“Yes, there can be non-forgiveness even with regard to the future.”

“Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life – to allow life to live through you. The alternatives are pain and suffering, a greatly restricted flow of life energy, and in many cases physical disease.”

“Non-forgiveness is the very nature of the mind, just as the mind-made false self, the ego, cannot survive without strife and conflict. The mind cannot forgive. Only you can.”

“Feeling will get you closer to the truth of who you are than thinking.”

“When you inhabit your body, it will be hard for unwanted guests to enter. ’Flood’ your body with consciousness.”

“Don’t just think with your head, think with your whole body.”

“When you are listening to another person, don’t just listen with your mind, listen with your whole body. Feel the energy field of your inner body as you listen. That takes attention away from thinking and creates a still space that enables you to truly listen without the mind interfering. You are giving the other person space – space to be. It is the most precious gift you can give.”

 

Chapter 7: Portals into the unmanifested

“Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be.”

“Everybody pays attention to the things in space, but who pays attention to space itself?”

“Pay attention to ‘nothing.’”

“Nothing could be more awe-inspiring and majestic than the inconceivable vastness and stillness of space, and yet what is it? Emptiness, vast emptiness.”

“When you are utterly and totally present, you encounter it as the still inner space of no-mind. Within you, it is vast in depth, not in extension. Spacial extension is ultimately a misperception of infinite depth – an attribute of the one transcendental reality.”

“Buddhist saying: ‘If there were no illusion, there would be no enlightenment.’”

 

Chapter 8: Enlightened relationships

“You are waiting for an event in time to save you. Salvation is not elsewhere in place or time. It is here and now.”

“True salvation is a state of freedom – from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging. It is freedom from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need.”

“It is easier to recognize the source of negativity in your partner than to see it in yourself.”

“The romantic love relationship seems to offer liberation from a deep-seated state of fear, need, lack, and incompleteness that is part of the human condition in its unredeemed and unenlightened state.”

“On your physical level, you are obviously not whole, nor will you ever be: you are either a man or a woman, which is to say, one-half of the whole.”

“Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to – alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person – you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain.”

“Intimate relationships do not cause pain or unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you. Every addiction does that.”

“The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way.”

“The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower.”

“True communication is communion – the realization of oneness, which is love.”

“Whenever your relationship is not working, whenever it brings out the ‘madness’ in you and in your partner, be glad. What was unconscious is being brought up to the light. It is an opportunity for salvation.”

“The relationship then becomes your sadhana, your spiritual practice.”

“If you react at all to your partner’s unconsciousness, you become unconscious yourself. But if you then remember to know your reaction, nothing is lost.”

“Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now.”

“If you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world.”

“When your partner behaves unconsciously, relinquish all judgment. Judgment is either to confuse someone’s unconscious behavior with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake that for who they are.”

“To relinquish judgment does not mean that you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when you see it. It means `being the knowing’ rather than ‘being the reaction’ and the judge. You will then either be totally free of reaction or you may react and still be the knowing, the space in which the reaction is watched and allowed to be.”

“Instead of fighting the darkness, you bring in the light. Instead of reacting to delusion, you see the delusion yet at the same time you look through it.”

“Being the knowing creates a clear space of loving presence that allows all things and all people to be as they are. No greater catalyst for transformation exists. If you practice this, your partner cannot stay with you and remain unconscious.”

“If you both agree that the relationship will be your spiritual practice, so much the better. You can then express your thoughts and feelings to each other as soon as they occur, or as soon as a reaction comes up, so that you do not create a time gap in which an unexpressed or unacknowledged emotion or grievance can fester and grow.”

“Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming. Learn to listen to your partner in an open, non-defensive way. Give your partner space for expressing himself or herself. Be present.”

“Accusing, defending, attacking – all those patterns that are designed to strengthen or protect the ego or to get its needs met will then become redundant.”

“Giving space to others – and to yourself – is vital. Love cannot flourish without it.”

“When you have removed the two factors that are destructive to relationships – when the pain-body has been transmuted and you are no longer identified with mind and mental positions – and if your partner has done the same, you will experience the bliss of the flowering of relationship.”

“Instead of mirroring to each other your pain and your unconsciousness, instead of satisfying your mutual addictive ego needs, you will reflect back to each other the love that you feel deep within, the love that comes with the realization of your oneness with all that is. This is the love that has no opposite.”

“The light is too painful for someone who wants to remain in darkness.”

“When the mind took over and humans lost touch with the reality of their divine essence, they started to think of god as a male figure. Society became male-dominated, and the female was made subordinate to the male.”

“You are responsible for your inner space now – nobody else is – and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.”

“If a woman is still holding on to anger, resentment, or condemnation, she is holding on to her pain-body.”

“The stronger the ego, the more distant you are from your true nature.”

“If you then develop a sense of identity based on your gayness, you have escaped one trap only to fall into another.”

 

Chapter 9: Beyond happiness and unhappiness there is peace

“Seen from a higher perspective, conditions are always positive. To be more precise: they are neither positive nor negative. They are as they are. And when you live in complete acceptance of what is, there is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in your life anymore.”

“Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs? (Marcus Aurelius)”

“Through forgiveness, which essentially means recognizing the insubstantiality of the past and allowing the present moment to be as it is, the miracle of transformation happens not only within but also without. A silent space of intense presence arises both in you and around you. Whoever or whatever enters that field of consciousness will be affected by it, sometimes visibly and immediately, sometimes at deeper levels with visible changes appearing at a later time.”

“You dissolve discord, heal pain, dispel unconsciousness – without doing anything – simply by being and holding that frequency of intense presence.”

“Most of the so-called bad things that happen in people’s lives are due to unconsciousness. They are self-created, or rather, ego-created. I sometimes refer to those things as ‘drama.’”

“When you feel guilty or anxious, that’s drama.”

“Most people are in love with their particular life drama. Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life. They have their whole sense of self invested in it. Even their – usually unsuccessful – search for an answer, a solution, or for healing becomes part of it. What they fear and resist most is the end of their drama. As long as they are their mind, what they fear and resist most is their own awakening.”

“Dissolution is needed for new growth to happen. One cannot exist without the other.”

“All conditions are highly unstable and in constant flux, or, as the Buddha put it, impermanence is a characteristic of every condition, every situation you will ever encounter in your life. It will change, disappear, or no longer satisfy you.”

“The most essential kind of knowledge is not yet widely accessible.”

“Happiness and unhappiness are in fact one. Only illusion of time separates them.”

“The whole advertising industry and consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and no longer sought to find their identity through things. The more you seek happiness in this way, the more it will elude you.”

“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness.”

“Being takes you beyond the polar opposites of the mind and frees you from dependency on form. Even if everything were to collapse and crumble all around you, you would still feel a deep inner core of peace. You may not be happy, but you will be at peace.”

“If ‘you’ – the mind – did not believe that unhappiness works, why would you create it?”

“Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry, or hard-done-by person. You will then ignore, deny, or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane.”

“No other life-form on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life-form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it.”

“I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats. Even ducks have taught me important spiritual lessons. Just watching them is meditation.”

“Occasionally, two ducks will get into a fight. The fight usually lasts only for a few seconds, and then the ducks separate, swim off in opposite directions, and vigorously flap their wings a few times. By flapping their wings they were releasing surplus energy, thus preventing it from becoming trapped in their body and turning into negativity. This is natural wisdom, and it is easy for them because they do not have a mind that keeps the past alive unnecessarily and then builds an identity around it.”

“Yes, recurring negative emotions do sometimes contain a message, as do illnesses. Any changes that you make, whether they have to do with your work, your relationships, or your surroundings, are ultimately only cosmetic unless they arise out of a change in your level of consciousness.”

“What is the purpose of irritation? None whatsoever. Why did you create it? You didn’t. The mind did. It was totally automatic, totally unconscious. Why did the mind create it? Because it holds the unconscious belief that its resistance, which you experience as negativity or unhappiness in some form, will somehow dissolve the undesirable condition.”

“Somebody says something to you that is rude or designed to hurt. Offer no resistance. It is as if there is nobody there to get hurt anymore. That is forgiveness. You become invulnerable. You can still tell that person that his or her behavior is unacceptable, if that is what you choose to do. But that person no longer has the power to control your inner state. You are then in your power – not in someone else’s, nor are you run by your mind.”

“Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.”

“When you accept what is, every moment is the best. That is enlightenment.”

“At the level of Being, all suffering is recognized as an illusion. Suffering is due to identification with form. Miracles of healing sometimes occur through this realization, by awakening Being-consciousness in others.”

“Compassion is the awareness of a deep bond between yourself and all creatures. You share the vulnerability and mortality of your physical form with every other human and with every living being.”

“One of the most powerful spiritual practices is to meditate deeply on the mortality of physical forms, including your own. This is called: Die before you die.”

“Nothing that was real ever died, only names, forms, and illusions.”

“On the level of form, you share mortality and the precariousness of existence. On the level of Being, you share eternal, radiant life.”

“To have deep empathy for the suffering of another being certainly requires a high degree of consciousness but represents only one side of compassion. It is not complete. True compassion goes beyond empathy or sympathy. It does not happen until sadness merges with joy, the joy of Being beyond form, the joy of eternal life.”

“Teach through being, through demonstrating peace. You become ‘the light of the world,’ an emanation of pure consciousness, and so you eliminate suffering on the level of cause. You eliminate unconsciousness from the world.”

“Who you are is always a more vital teaching and a more powerful transformer of the world than what you say and more essential even than what you do.”

“Without a profound change in human consciousness, the world’s suffering is a bottomless pit.”

“Make sure that you carry no resistance within, no hatred, no negativity. ‘Love your enemies,’ said Jesus, which means ‘have no enemies.’”

“Once you get involved in working on the level of effect, it is all too easy to lose yourself in it. Stay alert and very, very present. The causal level needs to remain your primary focus, the teaching of enlightenment your main purpose, and peace your most precious gift to the world.”

 

Chapter 10: The meaning of surrender

“Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation.”

“Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects you with Being. Resistance is the mind.”

“A visual analogy is this: you are walking along a path at night, surrounded by a thick fog. But you have a powerful flashlight that cuts through the fog and creates a narrow, clear space in front of you. The fog is your life situation, which includes past and future; the flashlight is your conscious presence; the clear space is the Now.”

“If you find your life situation unsatisfactory or even intolerable, it is only by surrendering first that you can break the unconscious resistance pattern that perpetuates that situation.”

“Surrender is perfectly compatible with taking action, initiating change, or achieving goals. But in the surrendered state a totally different energy, a different quality, flows into your doing. Surrender reconnects you with the source-energy of Being, and if your doing is infused with Being, it becomes a joyful celebration of life energy that takes you more deeply into the Now.”

“Through non-resistance, the quality of whatever you are doing or creating is enhanced immeasurably. The results will then look after themselves and reflect that quality. We could call this surrendered action. It is not work as we have known it for thousands of years. As more humans awaken, the word work is going to disappear from our vocabulary, and perhaps a new word will be created to replace it.”

“No truly positive action can arise out of an unsurrendered state of consciousness.”

“In the state of surrender, you see very clearly what needs to be done, and you take action, doing one thing at a time and focusing on one thing at a time.”

“Acknowledge that there is resistance. Be there when it happens, when the resistance arises. Observe how your mind creates it, how it labels the situation, yourself, or others.”

“Negativity, unhappiness, or suffering in whatever form means that there is resistance, and resistance is always unconscious.”

“If you were conscious, that is to say totally present in the Now, all negativity would dissolve almost instantly. It could not survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.”

“Through surrender, spiritual energy comes into this world. It creates no suffering for yourself, for other humans, or any other life form on the planet.”

“Non-resistance doesn’t mean doing nothing. All it means is that any ‘doing’ becomes non-reactive. Remember the deep wisdom underlying the practice of Eastern martial arts: don’t resist the opponent’s force. Yield to overcome.”

“The ego believes that in your resistance lies your strength, whereas in truth resistance cuts you off from Being, the only place of true power. Resistance is weakness and fear masquerading as strength. What the ego sees as weakness is your Being in its purity, innocence, and power. What it sees as strength is weakness. So the ego exists in a continuous resistance-mode and plays counterfeit roles to cover up your ‘weakness,’ which in truth is your power.”

“Time and pain are inseparable.”

“Choice implies consciousness – a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice.”

“The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar.”

“The mind adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it.”

“As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have?”

“How will you know when you have surrendered? When you no longer need to ask the question.”

Melting news

This week's meeting in Copenhagen gathered 2000 researchers to discuss climate change prior to the UN-sponsored global encounter this coming December also in Copenhagen. It has revealed new, solid and consistent scientific evidence that the polar caps are melting twice as fast as it had been thought only two years ago. Now the worst-case scenarios (WCS) appear to be grimmer, or the same WCS from 2007 may occur sooner than expected.

This is not only causing a raise in the sea levels, but it is also releasing great amounts of methane gas that has been trapped within the polar ice caps since last Ice Age, around 9000 years ago.

The issue is not whether the planet is heating up or cooling down. Hence, the term "global warming," although related to the increase of the average temperature of the planet, is less accurate than "climate change," which refers to the impact this oscillation in temperature is having on micro and macro ecosystems which the human species is only a tiny part of. Recession or not, dozens of animal and plant species are becoming extinct every 24 hours, nonstop.

I see no reason to get scared. We should have gotten scared 30 years ago. Now we are too late for that. Put in more proactive terms, fear is not going to help us be more effective dealing with this situation. Right now, there are two lines of action to follow: adaptation and mitigation.

It is also too late to expect that mitigation efforts -or tackling the causes of climate change- will prevent humanity from adapting to an unknown and rapidly changing environment. Therefore, we need to assess vulnerabilities worldwide and start helping those most in need in their efforts of changing permanently the way they have been living until now, however comfortably or uncomfortably.

On the other hand, it is preposterous to believe, as some do, that adaptation will be enough, that we can burn all the fossil fuels we want, deforest all we pretend, and contaminate our aquifers further. We can still improve the quality of the Earth's environment for those of us that are still to come. So let's do it.

Perhaps the G-20 gathering early next month in London can be a good setting for the twenty political leaders of the 20 most responsible countries for climate change to do something considerably effective about it. In fact, it could be the last setting in which the 20 suspects of the largest global crime will have a chance to right their environmental wrongs under the delicate state of social cohesion that the world is still in. The recession is only starting, and every new unemployed person is a family without income to support itself. The Economist's dire forecast of today, Friday 13th of March, 2009, is that unemployment by the end of 2010 could reach 10% in developed countries. If we reach that scenario, the "poorest billion", as the same newspaper quotes today, will suffer famine and disease like globalization never expected.

Let's hope then that the G-20 finds leadership within to conduct the group towards virtue, instead of yet another photo opportunity to boost their public relations and opinion polls -well, at least for those leaders whose countries elected them democratically.

Meanwhile, rivers of water that had been frozen for millennia is running free around the clock, as we speak.

Sustainable Synergy

The famous approach of creating win-win situations has had several criticisms as well as praises. As much as the proposal to cooperate is appreciated, in terms of human interaction it is not enough anymore that both parties obtain an advantage from the bond. The deeper we move into the scientific diagnosis of environmental issues, especially the deterioration of micro and macro ecosystems of which humans are just a part of, the more necessary it becomes to include the environmental dimension in the equation of all human interactions.

If synergy is the the greater result of an interaction than the sum of its isolated elements, then by definition, one of the elements has to be the environment -because it is only one we all share- and it has to be positive, or at least not negative. Aiming at a human interaction in which there was a negative environmental impact and still hoping to have a positive balance in the equation is neither rational nor sensitive. It would be the equivalent of thinking three friends will set up a business, but from the start they all know that the contribution of one of them will be negative, hoping that, in the end, the result of the interaction will have a positive balance.

Therefore, all ideas, plans, businesses, innovation, policy and any new human creation for better quality of human life must consider the environmental impact. Otherwise, the creation is not virtuous, not sustainable, and clearly not win-win anymore. In fact, a new human creation that deteriorates the environment is a lose-lose situation.

One way to improve this condition is to start building consensus with our counterparts to evaluate if our creation is virtuous and of public interest. Eventually, one day this could become a global best practice: the same way there are certificates for high corporate standards, there could be certificates of global interest to sponsor businesses, policies, innovations, etc.

Likewise, the generation of wealth in the knowledge era has radically altered the purpose behind taxation, which was a retribution by the capitalist to the society, administrated by the government, for the improvement of public conditions as a means to redistribute wealth more evenly.

Today, when a single individual can have earnings of over $1 billion in a year, a 40% taxation falls short of the purpose of more equally redistributing wealth in society. What would happen if earnings over $1 million were taxed with 40%, over $10 million with 50%, and over $100 million with 70%? Is this really a negative incentive for wealth generation? Is this really going to make a difference in the quality of life and purchasing power parity of the individuals and corporations that earn the highest incomes? Is this scenario really so scary as to call it "SOCIALISM?"

In times when the environment, the financial markets, globalization and capitalism are at the intensive-care unit, before switching radically to the opposite side -communist planning and deglobalization- let us try to fix the system we already have so we start generating synergies in human interactions including the environment and the reduction of socioeconomic inequality as two of its advantageous outcomes in the quadruple-win elements.

Sustainable Globalization

Mainstream media has started making reference to the term "deglobalization", perhaps coined by Walden Bello, a Filipino professor and activist that published a relevant book with that title. This economic contraction the globe is experiencing these days could very well make the term the Spring fashion term. If that happens, the discussion about globalization could enter one of those deadlocks so common after 9-11: are you in favor or against it?

The point is not whether globalization works or not. There is no absolute criteria to approve or reject it as a valid hypothesis. We can agree that in terms of telecommunications, information, entertainment, religion, science, tourism, and trade, it works.

We can also agree that there are at least two global processes that seem to be suffering with the growth of the last phase globalization has had in the last 25 years. Those are the global environment and the social inequality standards. Although correlation does not imply causality, two researchers from the University of Siena, Italy, have proposed that these two processes have been deteriorating while globalization has been deepening worldwide. Borghesi and Vercelli have argued scientifically that the depletion and exhaustion of natural resources that has been taking place in the later decades is detrimental to all of us living on the planet. Also, that globalization has resulted in far greater opportunities for further development for those who already have the economic means to develop, say, through more and better training and education, than for those who have less economic means to do so.

Making a long-term projection, the process by which globalization promotes more production of more diverse products to sell in more open markets, tends towards the severe destruction of many ecosystems, some of which are vital for life in the planet. Think about the timber and logging industries that have compromised important forests in Brazil, Africa and Indonesia. Or about the need for biofuels or cattle meat that have also provoked higher rates of deforestation.

If globalization has been valuable for something, it has been for allowing global diagnostics of localized phenomena that a few decades ago we were unable to determine its global impact. Today we know that even though the skies in Europe are cleaner, the fact that they have shipped some "dirty" production overseas does not mean the planet's climate is cleaner.

If the expected economic growth will demand the corresponding growth in energy generation it is expected to require, and if the generation and consumption of energy does have an impact in the condition of the planet's climate, then there are reasons to worry about the tendencies towards global growth.

In terms of social inequality, even though there are more people coming out of poverty because there are more job opportunities where factories are opening and service centers are established to support larger-than-local demand, statistics show that the income gap between the rich and the poor is larger than ever. It is the case in the United States, in Latin American countries (with the fortunate exception of Brazil) and in Asian countries. For example, China. Only thirty years ago, everybody was nearly equally poor. Today, hundreds of millions have come out of poverty. Unfortunately, other hundreds of millions are still as poor as they were thirty years ago, while others are entering the list of the richest people in the world.

Generating wealth is not a problem. In fact, that is the mere virtue of capitalism. The problem is failing to distribute it in a way that deters inequality instead of promoting it. This may or may not be a weak link of capitalism. Perhaps we should start considering Adam Smith's second half of the explanation of what capitalism is and how it should work. He wrote Wealth of Nations and also wrote Theory of Moral Sentiments. Of the latter we know little about.

Truth is, the system seems to be not working well, and a crisis this deep at this time of economic evolution does not allow to argue otherwise.

This does not mean that we should embrace deglobalization necessarily. It means we should carefully revise the system's processes so we fine tune the weak links to make them stronger. In two words, what we need is to focus on sustainable globalization, or ways in which the interaction of all of us in this planet will ensure healthy environmental conditions not only for us and for our children and grandchildren, but for the seven generations yet to come after us. Also, to make sure we can all enjoy the process of global wealth-generation having dealt successfully with social inequality at a local and global level.

Both are insurmountable challenges, yes. At this time in history, when the promises of globalization seem to be failing, while the planet's ecosystems are changing so dramatically that dozens of species are becoming extinct every 24 hours, and where less rich accumulate more wealth than ever before in history, then it might be time to take on the challenges before an unsustainable system breaks down completely.

Celebrating Tibet

With the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the conflict between the People's Republic of China and the Tibetan government in exile, led by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, there are a few reasons to celebrate this relationship.

First and foremost, the presence of a conflict implies a bond between the parties. The Chinese government cannot speak about the issue without referring to its Tibetan counterpart, and the Dalai Lama cannot refer to the conflict without mentioning the Chinese.

Second, both parties have focused more on attacking the Other than on pointing out what they could contribute to the Other's cause. Especially, there has not been a clear will to achieve a harmonious interaction between both parties, being harmony a value shared and promoted by both: Tibetans from a Buddhist perspective, and Chinese from a Confucian approach.

Third, the time dimension of this conflict is the greatest adversary for both parties. So, the sooner they are able to start the process of transformation of the conflict, the sooner they will both start profiting from the process. If the Dalai Lama dies and the process has not began, he will surely become a martyr. As we all know, martyrdom becomes a motivational force that comes from above or from beyond this life. This could mean more -not less- trouble for the Chinese aspirations of controlling the conflict. On the Chinese side, aiming at controlling the situation by the use of force represents a contradiction of its government principles of achieving a "global harmonious society," in detriment of its country-image abroad. Country-image results in perhaps the most important tool for trust-building with other countries and regions worldwide. If and when China becomes a global power, it would do itself much good if it was able to achieve so by peaceful means, distinguishing itself from the world powers that have attempted at dominating the world during the last five centuries.

Fourth, in fifty years of conflict there have been no serious and consistent efforts on behalf of the parties involved to work on a joint diagnosis of the conflict. Doing so will help the parties and the international public opinion understand the dimension of the problem. Only then can it be possible to start elaborating -the parties themselves- proposals for the transformation process necessary to move from this state of conflict to a state of constructive peace.

Fifth, both parties could gain a lot of political capital if there is a peaceful transformation of the conflict. Tibetan Buddhism could represent a valid option of a religion that strives for peace, along with all the positive public opinion it could harvest from this worldwide. China, on the other hand, could show the world, especially the mainstream Western diplomatic community, how to do effective peace-building.

Sixth, it would clearly set a difference between the way of interacting in conflict in Western cultures, and the way of interacting in non-Western cultures.

Who should take the initiative? The party that feels strongest, definitely. As Gandhi said, only the strong can forgive; and only the strong can stretch an open hand as a sign of peace.

The New Argonauts

The following are extracts of a book by this title written by AnnaLee Saxenian, Dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Argonaut: foreign-born, technically skilled entrepreneurs who travel back and forth between Silicon Valley and their home countries."

"Communities of US-educated migrant engineers now routinely transfer up-to-date information and know-how to help their home economies participate in the IT revolution. Capitalizing on their experience and the support of professional networks, these new Argonauts can quickly identify promising new market opportunities, raise capital, build management teams, and establish partnerships with specialist producers located far away."

"Ethnic professional associations and networks extend these advantages by enabling new as well as established ventures to quickly identify and build partnerships with distant suppliers and costumers."

"The new Argonauts are a small subset of highly educated professionals whose potential contributions to economic development are disproportionately significant. They are not typically drawn from the traditional economic or political elites of their home countries. Instead, they are often the top engineering students from middle-class households whose access to education in the United States has exposed them to a very different technological and institutional environment."

"Economic historians have documented the contributions of personnel recruitment to knowledge transfer and have demonstrated that the experience, relationships, and tacit knowledge that reside in individuals and their communities play a central role in long-distance transfers of technology and economic institutions. But tacit knowledge alone is no sufficient. Transforming production to a new location requires deep knowledge of the local context-the subtle as well as the more apparent differences in social, cultural and institutional settings. And long-distance collaboration rarely succeeds without the shared language and social context that facilitate communication. Because there are few substitutes for native experience, cross-regional entrepreneurs accelerate the adaptation of technology and institutions to local circumstances that are inevitably different from those in the United States."

"Silicon Valley's growth since the 1970s has been based on entrepreneurship, a deepening division of labor, and open information exchange."

"The Silicon Valley Venture Capital industry thus institutionalized the informal sharing of information, experience, contacts, know-how and advice -along with capital- with new enterprises, and serves as one of many mechanisms for collective learning in the region."

"The paradox of the Silicon Valley economy is that a key source of value, the know-how of individual workers, diffuses rapidly between local firms because of the region's open, high-velocity labor markets [...] THe Silicon Valley experience suggests that it is the diffusion of a wide range of know-how of individual employees, not their employers' trade secrets, that accelerates the pace of innovation and growth; it does so without undermining the incentive to innovate."

"Entrepreneurship is risky by definition. Even in the best circumstances, a majority of start-ups fail or grow very slowly. Entrepreneurs actively reshape the local environment as they grow their firms by supporting one another and by working to influence policy. Success reinforces success in these regions, as spinoffs from successful companies define new markets and technological pathways while also providing training grounds and role models for subsequent entrepreneurs."

"The new Argonauts are building technological and entrepreneurial capabilities in distant regions [...] They engage policy-makers on policies to improve the local environment for entrepreneurship; they emphatically reject the familial, opaque and frequently corrupt business practices that dominate in many developing economies. In short, they transfer institutional know-how as well as technology, capital and contacts to their home countries."

"Governments and multinationals alone could not have achieved the combination of local capability building and blobal integration that characterizes modern technology regions. The ARgonauts have provided the essential mix of focal knowledge and global connections required to initiate and motivate the experimentation and co-development that are transforming producers in once-peripheral locations into technology leaders."

"The new Argonauts retain an advantage in these long-distance collaborations because their shared language, culture and professional and educational experiences help them avoid the miscommunication, cultural misunderstandings and conflicting expectations that frequently plague long-distance work."

"Silicon Valley producers no longer view locating in or sourcing from India or China as an efficient way to reduce costs; instead they frequently argue that the reason to do work in those locations is to gain access to local talent."

"The new Argonauts will remain vital to the global economy as they pave the way for the development of new centers of technology entrepreneurship and new technology markets. They are most likely to favor regions that educate their youth, forgive failure and reward success, resist the impulse to protect yesterday's markets and jobs at the expense of tomorrow's, and welcome the openness, diversity and initiative that have built Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley likewise has much to gain from participating in a widening network of more and more capable partners, both local and long-distance, that can provide new skills, insights and resources to solving human problems."

Wéi Jí

This is the Chinese word for "crisis". It means both "danger" and "opportunity". Since the current global financial crisis is an opportunity, at least under some cultural parameters, how can we take better advantage of the situation while it lasts?

First, try to separate the issues that we cannot do anything about, like economic statistics that are fluctuating towards the negative end of the spectrum, from the issues that we can do something about, like public policy, innovation for processes, systems, goods and services, attitudes of proactivity and solidarity, and long-term vision for the future.

Second, seriously consider the options presented by the Doha Round for liberalization of global trade. The global economic system is wasting billions of dollars that could be redirected to other purposes. Of course, Free Trade must mean fair trade. Otherwise, no way, Jose.

Third, revise the human accomplishments that have not had virtuous results, for example efficient generation and use of energy and environmental sustainability of economic growth in most regions of the world.

Fourth, review the values and principles that should guide human action. For example, the meaning of quality of life; happiness; justice; peace.

Fifth, identify the least sustainable businesses in the world, like arms and military industry, production of beef, and all other businesses that either imply massive deforestation, indiscriminate deployment of natural resources, or that pollute air and water sources without compensating the environmental damage.

Sixth, remember the importance of education as an effective means to distribute knowledge more evenly, therefore, distributing wealth more evenly. Take advantage of such reminder to review how to make formal education more effective. Sending a human being to school for 12 years to become a hand-laborer is a waste of public resources educating this person. Some of the skills required by modern "mind-labor" are learned outside academic institutions. Identifying the skills that should be promoted or developed by modern employees would improve the diagnosis to solve the education and training problem of qualified "mind-labor" for today's working needs.

In 2000, I started thinking long-term about how I would have liked 2030 to look like. Although the vision has not changed much, we don't have 30 years to get there anymore. Nor do we have any sort of consensus -not even consideration- for such long-term future scenario. Ten years are gone. Before we know it, another ten will be gone. To make the conflict scenario a bit more complicated, if we continue the rate of natural resource extraction and depletion to feed our voracious industrial growth and consumerism, there won't be many resources left to think about the "next 30-year plan".

This crisis -opportunity- might be a good stop on the way to really think things over. Who's up for it?