What strikes me as being the most important “Commons” resource, the most fundamental, the most basic of All — the basis of the base —, is consciousness. Yet, what are we doing to this resource?
Pfffffffff. Few talk or think about it. Sadly, some don’t even realize it exists.
If efforts and money were devoted to better undestand and manage it, an unimaginable amount of problems would get solved, which would improve the lives of considerable portions of the population, of incalculable and unimaginable ways.
I chose him because he best fits my aspirations. If I had $100 billion to give away to care for “Commons”, I would spend it exactly the way he suggested. “Restoring balance”, I consider that is the smartest thing to do. And it starts with each individual. Not to mention governments, which have a long way to restore the balance of power and re-distribute it to citizens, among others through collaboration.
When an individual is able to trigger the process to restore balance in his/her being (that is to say with JOY) he/she heals the totality of the cells of his/her body. This does not happen by focusing on a diseased organ. Not at all! In medicine, and many other areas, we tend to focus on problems rather than seek solutions at large. Our sick bodies show us that we are wrong. Our relationships suffer. So do our businesses. And our economy. And the entire ecosystem. All of this is related to consciousness.
The reason why I am interested in open government is only because I see in it some opportunities to solve problems. Maybe I am not an open government activist at all. Open government only represents for me a really imperfect tool that tends a bit towards my biggest and most important goal. My real profond interest, what lies beyond everything else, has to do with consciousness. In this sense, I fully share the views of Dr. Chopra. He explains these things much better than I do. But it does not prevent me from having these ideas. These got there, in my mind, in forms obviously less well formulated than Chopra (I did not write 60 books), by hands-on experience. I did not learn this in books. I consider these as my greatest achievement. The day I die, when I contemplate the whole film of my life, I will have these sort of thoughts to show my Self.
See the video on this page http://bigthink.com/ideas/5218 - Think Big - Recorded on: Aug 17, 2007
DEEPAK CHOPRA: If I had $100 billion to give away, I would spend it in creating immediately a network of people in the world that would engage in personal transformation, in collective transformation, and in creative problem solving to solve the four major areas in our world that need to be immediately healed: the environment, social injustice, conflict resolution, and poverty, which is the cause of so many other problems, including diseases.
I think I would use the $100 billion to create a worldwide net of consciousness much more than the Internet. It would be a net where I would be able to harness the collective creativity for problem solving.
There is already great data in the fact that if you put a few people together in the room and you give them a problem, if they’re not specialists they will solve it. If they’re specialists, their minds will never go out of the box.
So this is the opportune moment to harness the collective caring and the collective creativity, and recognize that human development is much more important than development in the classical sense. So no longer pouring money into, you know, solving one problem at a time.
We seen it in medicine. As soon as you treat one disease, something else pops up. You have to create balance in the total mind-body system, and establish that integration between body, mind, soul and spirit.
And I think $100 billion could be used to just focus on one idea. And that idea is well being of the individual; well being emotionally; well being of our relationships; well being of our businesses; well being of our economy; well being of our ecosystem; and well being of the world at large. It’s a broad term, but all it means is restoring balance.
If you can think of all the ways that we can harness the collective intelligence and the collective compassion; and one of the ways to do that, by the way, is through story telling. There is nothing more transformational than storytelling. So I would create a huge information network which would take everything into account: educational institutions, entertainment, music, news networks, information technologies, the Internet, and saturate this network and these technologies with stories that have the power to transform us.