Developmental processes proceed through increasing levels of complexification, then through a process of differentiation, and then higher levels of integration…to be repeated over and over again. And that integration can no longer be seen separately from the culture or context within which that integration unfolds.

Original writing date: June 16, 2008

I’m always fascinated by names out from the past, especially those which were particularly big names at one point in time. Who of us does not remember the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who is not only famous for his involvement with the Beatles, but also infamous for the many Rolls Royce’s this spiritual master managed to assemble. Lo and behold, I came across this obituary in The Week Magazine which puts that spiritual conflict into perspective. Enjoy.

News & Opinion
Friday, February 22, 2008

Obituaries
The guru who gave the world Transcendental Meditation
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
1918 (?)–2008

To his estimated 6 million followers, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was a visionary whose philosophy could accomplish everything from relieving inner tension to promoting global peace. To his detractors, he was a huckster who, after glomming on to the Beatles, got rich by peddling metaphysical mumbo jumbo. Either way, the Maharishi (a Hindu word meaning “great seer”) was responsible for popularizing meditation in the West, establishing its health benefits through scientific studies, and making a household word out of the term “mantra.”

The Maharishi’s origins, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, were as elusive as his philosophy, said the Los Angeles Times. “Various accounts give the years of his birth as 1911, 1917, or 1918.” Originally named Mahesh Prasad Varma, he apparently earned a physics degree at Allahabad University in 1942; after graduating, he studied yoga with the master Swami Brahmananda Saraswati. At one point, he “retreated into the Himalayas for a two-year period of meditation.” In 1959, he established the International Meditation Society to promote the Swami’s idea of enlightenment. The formula was simple: “A person could reduce stress and attain happiness by meditating 20 minutes twice a day on a secret Sanskrit word, or mantra.”

In an age of flower power and Vietnam, said the London Independent, the idea proved wildly popular. People from all walks of life sought the Maharishi’s spiritual guidance, most famously the Beatles, who made a much-publicized pilgrimage to his ashram in Rishikesh, India, in February 1968. “Daily meditation certainly helped the group, especially John Lennon, who came off drugs completely.” The experience also inspired much of the Beatles’ “white album.” But when the Maharishi began suggesting that he and the Beatles make a movie and tour together, they grew suspicious. The breaking point came when the avowedly chaste holy man supposedly made advances toward Mia Farrow, who had accompanied the Beatles on their pilgrimage. When the Maharishi asked why they were leaving, Lennon shot back, “If you’re so cosmic, you’ll know why.”

“None of this dented the Maharishi’s growing global popularity,” said the London Mirror. Transcendental Meditation exploded in the 1970s, attracting such celebrities as Shirley MacLaine, Kurt Vonnegut, Clint Eastwood, and the director David Lynch. Featured on the cover of Time in 1975, the “Giggling Guru”—so nicknamed because of his merriment and witticisms—built a business empire with assets of $300 million in the U.S. alone. He established a university in Fairfield, Iowa, and worldwide meditation centers at which students pay $2,500 for five-day sessions to learn how to meditate. Despite his claims of simplicity—“I am a monk, I have no pockets,” he said—the Maharishi lived an opulent life, complete with a Rolls-Royce, helicopter, and pink private airplane.

Over time, the Maharishi’s claims grew increasingly outlandish, said The Washington Post. “His introduction of ‘yogic flying’ as an advanced meditation technique, which he had described as levitation, brought scorn from critics who said it was nothing more than cross-legged hopping.” He claimed that if the square root of 1 percent of the world’s population meditated simultaneously, their good vibrations could bring about world peace. He even suggested rearranging the world’s capitals for maximum cosmic harmony. The U.S. government, for example, was to move to Smith Center, Kan., “near the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states and the nation’s center of energy.”

The Maharishi eventually became a recluse, holing up in his log cabin on the German-Dutch border and generally communicating through closed-circuit television. In a rare 2006 interview, when a journalist asked about the Beatles, he snorted, “Forget about it! I did not become great by association of the Beatles! Beatles make Maharishi great? Pah! It is a waste of thought.”

Original writing date: April 22, 2008
Article date: February 22, 2008

As I read this article on Robert Vesco, I have to ask myself, to what avail?

I remember the articles and the hoopla when Vesco fled the United States in the early 1970s after pilfering several hundred million dollars from unsuspecting shareholders. After looking for a home in the Caribbean, he finally ended up in Cuba where he apparently spent the rest of his life. He presumably died on November 23, 2007.

To what avail? When it’s all said and done, we’re all going to die! The question is how do we want to live?

The Week Daily
News & Opinion
Friday, May 16, 2008

The world at a glance . . . Americas

Havana

U.S. fugitive reported dead: Fugitive American millionaire Robert Vesco died of lung cancer in Cuba six months ago, his family said this week. A burial record at Havana’s Colon Cemetery shows that a man with the same name and birth date died on Nov. 23, age 71. In 1972, Vesco fled the U.S., amid allegations that he stole $224 million from a stock fund and tried to bribe the Nixon administration to avoid an investigation into his financial dealings. He renounced his U.S. citizenship and spent decades evading capture by flitting around the Caribbean in yachts and private planes. He was jailed in Cuba in 1996 for defrauding a nephew of Fidel Castro.

Original writing date: May 16, 2008
Article date: May, 16, 2008

Classic literature addresses archetypes through human history. Primary archetypes continue to pervade every aspect of culture or history, at least to the extent that we can access it. Most repetitive among those primary archetypes are:

• The good/evil axis
• The male/female axis
• The physical/spiritual axis

To some extent, there are other archetypes, but in most cases, they can somehow be subsumed under one of the larger ones. For example, duality associated with “the one and the many”—a recognition that while there are sensory perceptions of separate objects, there is a corresponding conscious perception of a single underlying reality—that perception is really simply a subset of the physical/spiritual axis.

What is interesting in the conversation is those three primal archetypes do not depend upon doctrine, culture, belief system, religion, or whatever. They all emanate from consciousness, an attribute most fully developed in homosapians. However, the archetypes are differentiated in countless forms through countless cultures and civilizations throughout history.

Original writing date: June 23, 2008

In the world of real estate it’s been said that if you want to assure yourself the opportunity to pay retail, then build a building from scratch—don’t buy used and don’t rehab or renovate.

In the world of business, I’ve come to recognize, after some forty startup businesses and eight rehabs that the rules are probably no different. If you want to assure yourself spending the maximum amount, build from scratch — do a start-up!

If you have some capital—not a lot of capital, but some capital—then don’t build from the bottom up, buy something used or buy something capable of being renovated.

A business that has a successful business model, even though, for whatever reason, it’s not necessarily scalable by the current owner, becomes your stock in trade. For every business that reaches that level, there are 6 businesses which have failed and 3 businesses which are simply treading water.

To identify the characteristics of a successful business model premised not on a particular business but on the business of business, the following rules apply:

1. Identify a business with a successful business model.
2. Focus on those businesses with a successful business model you have the means of acquiring.
3. Acquire the business incentivizing the existing management (owners or not).
4. Focus on leveraging the primary attributes of the business and diminishing or eliminating non primary activities.
5. Maintain corporate oversight, but let the business managers operate the business itself.

There is nobody who can explain a successful model to consistently leverage a business. However, based on where I am today, the preceding reflects my current thinking.

Original writing date: May 16, 2008

The issue of enlightenment is less the question of how am I to be enlightened than it is the question of what happens when I am enlightened? How do I live in this world? How do I operate? How do I behave?

Original writing date: June 16, 2008

A friend of mine sent this article along which she recently used to engage a leadership team on end of fiscal year financial performance.

The thoughts are evergreen and are well worth a reminder to all of us involved in building and maintaining our enterprises. Enjoy the article.

Original writing date: June 11, 2008
Article date: May 10, 2008

Everything around us has emerged from a few simple principles and a handful of elementary particles. Now we have an increasingly and gradually growing attribute—a Godlike capacity—called consciousness. And that cosmic complexity allows us to know more than ever before what we’re doing, appreciate everything around us, and choose each of our actions.

Original writing date: June 16, 2008

I read this special to the Orlando Sentinel written by Elliot S. Berke back in March of this year. I thought it was worth keeping and thinking about.

As the debate has now been engaged between Senator John McCain and Senator Barrack Obama and, certainly as to international policy between the two political positions, I went back and reread this article on Ronald Reagan’s speech and put it together with my own recollection of events at the time they unfolded.

On the one side, it’s manifestly clear that the international politics of President George W. Bush have produced a debacle in virtually every quadrant. On the other hand, it is not clear to me where are the shades of grey when it comes to international diplomatic relations with what appear to be predatory sovereigns.

Do you go to the table to negotiate and discuss without preconditions? To Senator McCain, the answer is no. To Senator Obama, the need to get to the table and talk is precisely because they are predators.

I certainly don’t know the right answer, but I do know that the debate will become very strident over these next months.

Take a look at this article on Ronald Reagan’s speech in Orlando for some insight on the subject.

OrlandoSentinel.com

OTHER VIEWS

Good man, evil empire: Ronald Reagan made history 25 years ago in Orlando

Elliot S. Berke

Special To The Sentinel

March 4, 2008

Twenty-five years ago this week, President Ronald Reagan came to Orlando and delivered one of the most influential foreign-policy
addresses ever given on American soil. To the text of an otherwise conventional speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Reagan added the paragraph that marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, and Soviet totalitarianism:

“I urge you to beware the temptation of pride,” warned Reagan, “the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an Evil Empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle
between right and wrong and good and evil,” he said.

That same day, Natan Sharansky, the Jewish refusnik, was in a cell in Siberia, a prisoner of that “evil empire.” Even in the darkest corners of the Soviet gulag, word reached the prisoners that a hero had risen in the West and challenged the intrinsic immorality of the Soviet regime. Twenty years later, Sharansky described that “great brilliant moment when we learned that Ronald Reagan had proclaimed the Soviet Union as an Evil Empire before the entire world. . . . It was the brightest, most glorious day . . . the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution — Reagan’s Revolution.”

Not since Winston Churchill declared that an Iron Curtain had descended over Eastern Europe had a world leader described the stranglehold Soviet communism had on human freedom with such moral clarity. At the time, Reagan was criticized for his undiplomatic frankness; today, he is universally remembered for his courage and vision. In many ways, Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech and Reagan’s Evil Empire speeches are linked as rhetorical bookends to the underlying saga that was the Cold War. While Churchill exposed the veil descending over the world’s view of the evils and human-rights abuses of the communist regime, Reagan peeled it back to reveal the horrors behind.

In the years that followed, Reagan’s challenge was answered by a ringing chorus of hundreds of millions of people ultimately freed when the Soviet Union came apart and the Iron Curtain came down. The West’s victory in the Cold War was one of the great triumphs in all of human history, and the Evil Empire speech remains the signal moment when America finally shook off its doubt and malaise and spoke again in the terms of victory and in the names of all who longed to be free. It was a moment when America became America again.

The overwhelming outpouring of respect and gratitude by the American people upon Reagan’s death erased forever the partisan aspects of his legacy. He no longer belongs to the Republican Party but to all of us: the last, great unifying figure from our past, great conflict on behalf of freedom. The speech, too, is no longer provocative but evocative, harkening back to a moment of national unity and resolve.

Reagan’s speech in Orlando remains as inspiring and timely today as it was when he delivered it, a timeless memorial to all those who stand in defiance of evil and defense of the defenseless. It is time this speech was memorialized in more than words and memories. In Fulton, Mo., where Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech, a memorial to the old lion reminds visitors of what he said and did to defeat oppression in his time.

Yet no suitable memorial exists to date in Orlando to commemorate the Evil Empire speech. It is time for Orlando to recognize the historical significance of Reagan’s speech, so future generations can not only remember what he said and what we did to win the Cold War, but also those trapped behind the Iron Curtain. This community was honored to host this pivotal moment in the history of freedom, and the time has come to memorialize what was said, who said it, and for whom.

Elliot S. Berke grew up in the Orlando area and is now an attorney in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at esberke@yahoo.com.
Copyright © 2008, Orlando Sentinel

Original writing date: June 11, 2008
Article writing date: March 4, 2008

So, I’m thinking, as I check out this place which is a single’s haven, that there’s probably no temporal limit to the opportunities offered by places like this. Time moves on, with it, populations grow up, and there tends to be an endless supply of young things replacing the earlier young things that are now older things. The changes which have to occur are the changes which occur in yourself as you look for personal satisfaction and emotional completion inside a life force unfolding around you.

There will definitely come a time in which I am invisible to that life force circumventing me. That time is not yet, although I see it coming by steady gradations. I do my best to keep up, but it continues to remind me that I really don’t have much choice; it will occur whether I like it or not.

Someday, I’ll look back at this moment as if it’s ancient history and lamenting that it’s gone. And I will barely remember at that time that there was a day in which I looked back today at a time in which what I experienced today was a future moment from a prior time.

Original writing date: February 8, 2008