Last night we went to Bikram Yoga Brisbane - “Brisbane’s Hot Spot”.

I’m on a two week break from the yoga teacher training so I’m at a loose end with my led classes, and someone at work told me that Bikram Hot Yoga was in Bardon, near Red Hill, and that they heat the room up to 37 degrees and lock the doors.

Well, you know that that got my interest. I checked out the website and saw the offer that Laxmivan in Newcastle told me he copied to get his yoga school up and running last year - $17 for unlimited classes over 10 days, which carries me over to term 2 of my teacher training.

Elliott and I rocked up at 6:15 pm last night and joined the queue filing past reception. When we got up to the reception desk we signed the disclaimers and were issued our membership cards. They have a flat panel LCD with some customer management software running. We have discussed using a bar code scanner and membership cards at Atma Yoga, and I’ll keep looking into that. With few students it’s more organic and personal to not have it, but when we start dealing with hundreds a day we’re going to need it.

The mood outside was part gym, part cult - or maybe that was just my imagination. The brochure carries the advisory: “Warning: Seriously Addictive!”

The website, the brochure, and the studio itself are pink and gold.

You have to take your own mat, a towel to put over it, and a bottle of water. You can hire mats and towels at $2 each, and you can buy water.

A board in the reception area had the names of students who are doing the “60 day challenge” - come every day for 60 days and you get a free month. You also get the benefit of 60 days of practice, obviously.

There are lockers where you lock up your gear and take the key into the class with you.

The Class

If the outside mood was part gym, part cult, the inside was pure S&M dungeon. Afterwards I joked with Elliott - “Hey man, I can fire my dominatrix and start coming here. All I need to do is imagine the ‘You’ve been a baaaad boy’.”

First of all when we went in it was like going into a sauna, like Mensana. Dimly lit and hot. We laid our mats out with the other students (who eventually reached 30 in number), and laid down on our towels over them.

One wall was taken up with a mirror that ran the entire length of the classroom.

The teacher was Jan, who I later learned was half German, half French, which probably contributed to the dominatrix mood. When she came into the room she cranked the lights up to full, blinding me, and then it was all on.

Having watched some videos of Power Yoga classes, after going to this class I have to say that Atma Power Yoga’s lineage has Bikram in its family tree somewhere very close by.

Talking continuously, cajoling and urging us on, Jan ran us through the 26 posture Bikram Yoga sequence in sets of two, all precisely timed and expertly described.

Now I can see how Atma Power Yoga can succeed here at Atma Yoga Brisbane.

Number 1: Talk continuously. Don’t let people internalize and space out. Keep the pace fast.

Number 2: Punish the people. Some people are not going to like Power Yoga. They just won’t like it. Don’t try to accomodate them. Here is what you say: “If this pose is a little too hard, then try…. coming to a different class!”

Of course you encourage everyone, but this is not for the “Gentle Hatha” crowd. This is pure passion, unadulterated with any tinge of goodness or ignorance

Encourage the people who come, and make it POWER Yoga. I think that this might be my calling here. “Sitapati’s 90 minute Hour of Power”. Our heating system at Atma Yoga goes up to 30 degrees (I checked it after the Bikram class last night), but as Andy suggested, we can throw in some free standing heaters. Maybe ones with naked flames. “Brisbane’s Independently Verified Hottest Yoga”. Longer, hotter, pinker, golder… Anyway, let’s see what a year of teacher training brings.

The Bikram class was intense. I have a pitta body - high in the fire element, so I was sweating like anything in no time. As the class progressed my heart rate climbed. Elliott, who is recovering from bronchitis, flaked out for a while on his mat.

I also felt like I needed a rest, but I also felt that if I dropped out of the flow of the class I wouldn’t be able to get back up again. As I lay there in one brief resting posture, looking up at the ceiling and feeling my heart pounding in my chest, I thought: “Man, people could die in this class.”

That’s very inspirational.

Anyway, I was back there this morning at 6 am for another round, like any true believer with another potential convert in tow. This stuff is good. Today I got up at 4 am feeling energized and not at all sore. I’ll be pushing to do a class a day over the eight remaining days, and I’ll probably switch to a class a week after that.

Do One Thing - Do It Well

Bikram Yoga - the sequence and the business model - is based on doing one thing and doing it well. All the schools whose websites I’ve looked at, look tight. Their facilities are purpose built and streamlined to what they do. Everything is low fat, high efficiency. The only way to make the registration processing faster would have been to have bar code scanning, or a dedicated receptionist (that would be fat).

The sequence is tight. It is suspiciously similar to the Atma Power Yoga sequence, but it was delivered with more authority than any Atma Power Yoga class I’ve been to, which may affect my perception of it. After my eight days on this I’ll try the Atma Power Yoga sequence again and see how it stacks up. The Bikram sequence feels right. It hits all the areas of the body. There is no minute alignment adjustment, but amazingly, like Prabhupada’s books, it is accessible to beginners and advantageous to the more experienced.

The main thing is to make your body strong and flexible, and the sequence does this. There is no discussion at the level that we get at our “Alignment in Practice” classes on the training course - but it’s not necessary. This is not the thinking man’s dance floor - it’s pure gabba. It’s not Dream Theater - it’s Motorhead. This is Everyman’s Yoga. It’s a tool that people can use for specific outcomes. It’s a drop of nectar brought back from the ocean.

Yeah man, for the next 8 days, I’m drinking the Bikram Kool-Aid.

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Here are some links to the Bikram Yoga websites:

Bikram Yoga Brisbane
Bikram Yoga Wellington
Bikram Yoga Auckland

In his article Editing the Unchangeable Truth, H.H. Jayadvaita Swami describes a system under development now that is

a searchable hypertext library, perhaps accessible on the internet, that would enable a researcher who selects a particular verse or passage to view the relevant pages of the original and revised manuscripts, any editorial notes, the first and later editions, the Sanskrit or Bengali commentaries Srila Prabhupada consulted, and so on.

Also included for each title would be a production history, naming the original editors, typesetters, proofreaders, layout people, and other production people, telling where the prepress work was done, giving the size of the first print run, and telling who were the printers and binders for the original edition.

How cool is that?

Having vedabase.net online is great. Having access to this additional historical information will be nectar.

Today is the one year disappearance anniversary of His Holiness Bhakti Tirtha Swami. The entry from last year contains three videos about His Holiness Bhakti Tirtha Swami Krishnapada.

Tonight we will celebrate the festival at the temple.

H.H. Jayadvaita Swami, who has been writing some on point articles of late, recently wrote (’Shabby Behaviour‘) about an article of his that was reprinted on the web without his permission.

In today’s world of point-and-click publishing it’s pretty a standard occurrence, and practically impossible to control.

It is attributed to him and unmodified, however it doesn’t contain a link to his website, the source of the article text. This is more a question of etiquette. Both Vaisnava Blog Feeds and ISKCON News reprint entire articles, and include a link to the source. It’s both a service to the reading public, who may wish to check out more of a given author’s material, and a nod in the direction of the author, helping them to expose their ideas to a wider audience.

The legal concept of copyright is a modern development which has been designed to protect the commercial interests of publishers, rather than the rights of authors or the public. Only corporations have the resources to legally prosecute copyright infringers. However, modern information technology, especially peer-to-peer networking, is changing that balance of power.

In the Vedic system there is no legal copyright. It is a case of satyam eva jayate - “may the best idea win”, regulated by the principle that was enunciated by Srila Prabhupada in the immortal phrasing: “Purity is the Force”.

Freely copying earlier literary works, quoting from them and commenting on them, brahmanas, the Vedic thought leaders, create a rich intellectual culture.

Imagine a world in which Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu had been forbidden to copy the Brahma Samhita because of “copyright concerns”, where Baladeva Vidyabhusana was forbidden to write a commentary on Vedanta-sutra, or where a hostile agency gains control of the copyright of Srila Prabhupada’s books and halts printing.

It’s a flawed concept.

Here are some interesting articles for the more intellectually inclined amongst the readership:

No Copyright on Krishna - Swami B.A. Paramadvaiti

H.H. Paramadvaiti Swami is a controversial figure in Gaudiya Vaisnava circles, and is a very forceful personality who some might say sometimes overstates his case (and some would say that that is an understatement). This one I read a number of years ago as an interesting intellectual piece. That was until a couple of years later when I suddenly found myself in charge of the BBT in the zone where His Holiness Paramadvaiti Swami is active in preaching and publishing. I had the opportunity to personally discuss his views with him, and to see the practical reality in an area where the BBT was unable to print and supply books, but was simultaneously trying to forbid unauthorized printing.

We simply started an authorized BBT operation printing and importing and they started buying. We also worked together on some imports from Spain. As Sun Tzu would say, if you have to go into battle, you’ve already lost.

Justifying our control of the copyright there I asserted it as necessary to control the content of the books, so that they were not modified, and also the quality. We needed to legally challenge their printing in the absence of our ability to supply in order to retain a legal right to defend the copyright against people in the future who might modify the books. I wasn’t totally comfortable with that line, but it’s the one I preached. After all - while we are justifying it in the name of preserving purity, under that system, now and in the future, who will watch the watchers?

I think that superior quality will win out naturally, and producing higher quality competitively priced products is the real solution to the quality issue, and satyam eva jayate is the real solution to the modification issue. While copyright theoretically protects the integrity of the material by forbidding unauthorized modifications, it unilaterally gives the copyright controller the power to make modifications, which is obviously open to potential abuse.

Free Culture - Lawrence Lessig

This is a link to a flash presentation by Lawrence Lessig.

Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig is one of the minds behind Creative Commons. I use one of their licenses for this website and its content.

In this presentation, which is in a presentation style so distinctive it has become known as the “Lessig Method”, Professor Lessig talks about the legal development of the modern concept of copyright and its implications. As he explains, it exists to protect the commercial interests of publishers by creating a monopoly, rather than to protect the interests of authors, the public, or freedom of thought and expression.

He examines other philosophical and legal models that actually begin to approach the idea of the Vedic tradition where simple principles are enacted at a local level to create a culture, and that complex culture is the moderator.

It’s a complex situation, and I’m not advocating that the BBT and all other institutions should abandon copyright. We exist in a particular environment and compromises and transitional structures need to be put in place and utilized. The ongoing dialogue about the issues, however, which Paramadvaiti Swami’s prophetic paper (published 12 years ago almost to the day) contributes to, is part of the process, and ensures that we will have a dynamically evolving conception and response to the environment as the situation changes.

—————————————–
Note: the license I use for this site, accessible at the bottom of the page, allows you to use, reuse, and modify the material published here, including for commercial purposes - vaisyas, do your thing!

You must redistribute any derived works under the same license - no taking advantage of freedom without contributing to it!

Legally speaking, you must also give props to me as the original author, including putting an inbound link to my website if you directly quote the material.

I agonized over this one. While the other points create the same legal framework as the classical Vedic environment (leaving aside the “no sudras reading the sastras” type injunctions), this one attempts to recreate the cultural etiquette of giving props. I won’t sue you if you don’t do it, because I’m not interested in bringing people to me, but rather of getting ideas out there. I include it not so that people have to do it, but just to indicate that that’s the usual way it works.

Satyam eva jayate!

One week to go until I change roles at work, moving in to my 40-hour a week, Monday to Friday position as a writer.

I’m on the interview team to recruit my replacement. To get a job at the company I work at you go through a rigorous selection process designed to get the right person for the position. The understanding is that with 90% effort in selection, 10% of effort will be spent in managing the person. With 10% in selection, the person will require 90% effort in management. The essence of management is putting the right person in the right place and giving them a little push forward from time to time.

There are several interviews conducted by different persons, analyzing different aspects of the person’s “fit” for the position and the company.

This time around I’m responsible for assessing their “Organizational Commitment”.

Over the previous intakes I’ve developed a style based on the techniques used by the Iraqi Secret Police to interrogate my home boy Mike Coburn, of B Squadron 22 SAS, during the First Gulf War back in 1991. Injured and captured 300kms behind enemy lines Mike was subjected to weeks of interrogations by various seasoned professionals in Saddam’s Service. Mike and I went to the same school, Mount Albert Grammar School.

We open with some light banter about the applicant, where they’re from, what they like doing. Before they know it, they’re completely relaxed and at ease, the tension of the interview situation forgotten as the interaction degenerates into a light social chat. Just when they are at their most defenseless I casually ask: “So, where are you working at the moment?”

No sooner than they slip up and tell me that, the floodlights come on and the rubber hose comes out. With the rubber hose tapping on the palm of my hand I ask: “…and does your boss know that you are here today?”

Remember, I’m testing for “Organizational Commitment” here.

I kid, I kid…

The idea of Organizational Commitment that we’re after in this organization is like the contemporary ideal of monogamy: “One at a time” - rather than the jihadi “strap on the suicide belt - all the way to death” concept.

Here is another question that I pose to the applicant to see how they react:

“Tell me about a time when you willingly and joyfully allowed yourself to be exploited by the capitalist class - for example sacrificing some aspect of your personal life in order to make more money for the shareholders…”

I let the question hang in the air for seconds, as if waiting for a response. I know there will never be one. Then I smile and say: “Just kidding, just kidding!” Hahahahaha.

Applicants are taking the process seriously you see, so that are trying to formulate a serious answer, assessing what they think I want to hear or what will cast them in the best possible light. Little do they realize that this particular question is like a zen koan - it has no answer, and is designed to disrupt their thought processes, disorientate them and destroy their sense of reality so that we can find out which unit they are really from, and what their mission is.

Especially in a volunteer organization, to get results, focus on relationships first.

It’s the only way.

Whether it’s a partnership, a family, or a larger organization - the principle is universal.

Whether it’s a question of preaching or leadership - the principle is universal.

In a human society aligned with fundamental universal principles (a “Vedic civilization”) spiritual and seminal family structure are aligned. The husband and father of the family is the natural leader and is the spiritual authority or guru. Making sure that the spiritual and seminal families remain synchronized is the dynamic function of the spiritual preceptors of society, the brahmanas.

The Sanskrit term gotra refers to both family and disciplic succession (ref: gotra).

The family is the institution of socialization, education, and spiritual formation. It’s a naturally occurring sociological construct which is built up from obvious biological principles. The aggregation of individuals into families and then families into larger agrupations gives rises to human society and human social structure.

The family is the basic building block of human society.

Presently spiritual and seminal family structures are misaligned. Beginning with Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura, spiritual and seminal son of Srila Bhaktivinode Thakura, a conscious reengineering of human society has begun, in order to resynchronize the spiritual and seminal family structure of human society.

The first phase of this involves re-establishing spiritual principles and spiritual family structure. The next stage is to align seminal family structures with spiritual family structures. This is the 50% of work that Srila Prabhupada said remained undone. In the language of the tradition it’s “re-establishing Varnashram-dharma”

Doing this involves creating community within an already existing community that is misaligned from spiritual principles. It would be nice to theorize about what the final result should look like and then try to artificially create it, but some reflection, as well as experience trying this, shows that such an approach is like a farmer trying to force shoots to rise up out of the ground.

Step-by-step, guided by simple principles. Change course gradually but surely. Allow the complex system to grow organically from simple fundamental principles implemented at a local level. Who knows what it will look like, except in a general, abstract sense? Society is a complex thing.

Next: Some reflections on the progress so far…

We missed yesterday, but for today’s listening pleasure - here is a version of Narottama das Thakura’s song recently made famous by having a melody composed by Srila Visnujana Maharaja at Srila Prabhupada’s request.

Vasanti Rasa - Aditi Dukha das (10.5MB, .mp3)

(note: this is not the melody that H.H. Visnujana Swami composed, it’s a different one)

Enjoy!

From a recent news story:

PEOPLE who eat chicken, minced beef, pork chops and lettuce may develop an immunity to the drugs used to treat potentially fatal conditions such as meningitis and pneumonia.

Seven years after a landmark report by the Joint Expert Technical Advisory Committee on Antibiotic Resistance warned of drug immunity being passed through the food chain from animals to humans, an investigation is to be launched to measure the risk to consumers.

Scientists have long warned that the overuse of antibiotics, such as growth promoters in chicken, cattle and pigs, can breed drug-resistant bugs that may impede antibiotic treatments of diseases in humans.

The inquiry, due to be completed next May, will estimate the amount of antibiotic-resistant bacteria existing in food. Chicken, minced beef, pork-shoulder chops and iceberg lettuce heads will be the initial focus of the study, after overseas research identified them as containing common antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Canberra Hospital Infectious Diseases Unit director Peter Collignon welcomed the research, saying people had the right to know what they were eating.

“This is an issue and we need this data,” Professor Collignon said. “It is beyond doubt that whenever you use antibiotics, you get resistance. But the animal industry seems to be denying this is happening.

“In Australia we use 250,000kg of antibiotics in people every year. In animals we use 500,000kg…

(source: news.com.au)

Guys - this is why we don’t use iceberg lettuce at Atma Yoga.

With profit-driven farming, farmers are forced to maximize their profit in order to stay competitive. If they don’t use growth hormones to boost the production of meat they will be driven out of business. Using growth hormones accelerates the metabolism of the animal. The stress of accelerated metabolism combined with the conditions of factory farms make animals more susceptible to disease. In order to counteract this animals are routinely given massive amounts of antibiotics.

People then eat the bodies of these animals and in this way ingest large amounts of antibiotics and potentially antibiotic resistant bacteria.

This is what happens when you have meat eating and a profit driven economy.

The solution to this is a simple principle at a fundamental level - stop eating meat.

Swallowing a spider to catch the fly, and a bird to catch the spider, and then a cat to catch the bird, is not the right way to address these complex issues. Don’t swallow the fly in the first place!

Families from the ksatriya and vaisya sections of society would send their male children to live in their youth for some time as part of a brahmana family. This is referred to as gurukula, the family of the guru (kula means family).

It wasn’t like today’s industrialized mass-production education system. The basic building block of society was the family. It was the unit of socialization for young people, and the social welfare system for the invalid and the elderly.

This is an organic, decentralized system.

The brahmacari ashram refers to that period of life where the person acts as a brahmana, practicing a lifestyle of simple living focused on character development and cultivation of spiritual practices, even if later on they go to a career as an executive or business leader.

Those children who have the nature to continue with such a simple, spiritually-focused lifestyle become brahmanas, or the formal thought leaders of society. When they marry they are called grhasta-brahmacaris. A small percentage of these people may never marry, but may live as celibate monks.

Others, whose nature has a greater bias toward action, go on to directly exercise the knowledge of executive and business leadership that they are taught, whereas the brahmanas primarily teach it. These persons all get married and live in family life, called grhasta, householder life.

In this way the society has a solid spiritual basis. The executive and business leaders have all spent some time in their youth living in a spiritual environment. They continue to practice spiritual disciplines, and they are awarded the sacred thread in a special ceremony by their brahmana guru (upanayana) before embarking on their career.

Thus we find the description of Krishna’s gurukula life, living with his guru Sandipani Muni and Sandipani Muni’s son Sudama. There is not so much specific mention of Sudama’s mother, the wife of Sandipani Muni, but we can understand that she is present, and that she is a mother to Krishna.

It is described that there are seven mothers, and among them is the wife of the guru. In the Manu Samhita there are a number of instructions on the etiquette of the interaction between the disciple and the wife of the guru, including the injunction that the disciple should not allow her to braid his hair or massage his body with oil, especially if she is young and good-looking.

Life is a complex affair.

So that’s what the past looks like. No industrial paradigm of mass production. No overarching impersonal institutions. The family is the basic building block - it performs the tasks of socialization, education, and social welfare.

And that’s what the future will look like too.

Networked - decentralized, distributed responsibility, infinitely scalable.

Coming up: Some considerations on getting from here to there…

You might have noticed a change in my blogging output lately.

At the moment I’m thinking out loud, working on my strategic plan for the next 2 - 3 years. Since 2004 I’ve been working in the context of the material printed in the first edition of the Network Centric Preaching Review, and on the Network Centric Preaching Blog. This material consists of an analysis of the external environment, as well as articles on tactics and a strategic response.

At the moment I am writing the wider strategic story, and then I will write some articles on tactics, and then I will have my direction and context for the next 2 - 3 years. I’ll have some more articles on the Network, some articles about the world situation and likely trends for the near term future, and then I’ll start churning that into a set of guiding principles going forward. The overall plan will be termed: “From 15 to 150″.

This is the 10 week checkpoint for the Yoga Teacher Training that I am doing. I have an exam for my physiology and anatomy course tonight, then there is a 12 hour weekend workshop this weekend and a lead practice on Monday morning, and then it’s almost two weeks break.

There are two terms of 10 weeks each left in this year.

I’m finding that the length of the course is helping me to develop a more long range approach to my practice, which is good. Modifying subconscious patterns takes work. Superficial things can be modified easily. Stretching can loosen ligaments and muscles - but loosening the mental patterns that give rise to the tightness, and recreate it again, takes a little more work.

During the yoga practice I’ve been experiencing a flood of memories from this life and previous ones. It’s nice to perceive them consciously and let them go. Naturally it can’t substitute for the hearing and chanting yoga practices of bhakti yoga, but it is a nice adjunct for me at this stage of my life.

We’re winding back the clock to get to the past, to see what the future will look like. A lesson from “mid-history”.

From Back to Godhead Magazine Vol. 28, No. 2, 1994.

Excerpts from “The Return of the One-Room Schoolhouse”
by Urmila devi dasi

When most people lived in villages, each school had so few children that students couldn’t be divided by age. So teaching them together was a convenience. But parents, students, and communities also understood that the main curriculum was the teacher rather than the syllabus or the textbook. The teacher’s personality permeated the school. The teacher gave each student personal attention. And the students were expected to learn character and behavior by working under a moral and self-controlled teacher, rather than by attending a “values clarification” course.

But industrialization pulled together large numbers of people to work in factories. So instead of a village school with twenty or fifty children, suddenly you had a town or city school with five hundred. How to teach them?
…
The present Western school system, therefore, has not come about because we’ve found a better way to teach. Rather, it has grown from cities and factories. And like so many adjustments to the industrial revolution, it has simply created more problems.

With the crowding of many students into one school, the concept of master and pupil is practically gone. The student is no longer expected to serve and emulate his teacher, because education now aims at a set of “learning objectives” decided by a committee of parents and union workers. Modern schooling is built on textbooks, not teachers. And even if a teacher has high moral and spiritual character, for him to put across his ideals to the students might offend some of the hundreds of families involved. After all, the school a child attends is not the one parents choose because of the teacher they admire but the one that falls in the school district where the parents live and work.

Schools responded to having large numbers of students by grouping them by age and then teaching all students of the same age the same things at the same time. But children learn at different speeds. So in a modern class of thirty students, may-be two can follow what the teacher is saying. The rest are either frustrated or bored. The students who can’t follow become discipline problems, the frustrated ones often falling behind, later to become society’s misfits.
…
In the days of the one-room schoolhouse, no one heard of a “generation gap.” But today’s fifteen-year-old student can avoid contact with most adults and with most young children. So we now have subcultures of children and teenagers with their own music, language, customs, and styles of clothing and hair. Denied an opportunity to mingle with all ages, children and young people lose a sense of responsibility and of their own place in life. For example, instead of helping adults, teenagers see them as being almost a different species.

Two things from this:

1. The modern schooling system is based on an industrial age paradigm of mass production
2. The exaggerated “generation gap” is a product of this artificial stratification

Next: The Old School is the True School…

On my playlist at the moment are the sweet bhajans and kirtans of Aditi Dukha das. One a day, for your listening pleasure:

Parama Karuna - Aditi Dukha das (18M, .mp3)

You can also listen to some powerful kirtans by the meister here.

By following their qualities of work, every person can become perfect. Now please hear from Me how this can be done.

By worship of the Lord, who is the source of all beings and who is all-pervading, a person can attain perfection through performing their own work.

- Bhagavad-gita 18.45 - 46

“It’s not about you”, but you are part of it.

It’s not about artificially denying the identity of your body and mind, the gifts and talents that you’ve been given. It’s not about renouncing the divine purpose for which your body and mind were created, forcing yourself into a painful position in a form of subtle asceticism.

Neither is it about misusing the body and mind and their abilities, “taking the company car for a joyride”.

Beyond karma (misdirected action) and jnana (the incomplete knowledge that you are not the body), beyond exploitation and renunciation: the holistic plane of dedication - activity devoted to divine purpose - bhakti.

The question “what is the basic building block of ISKCON?” is an interesting one.

Most people pause when I ask them the question. They don’t have a “prepared answer” floating around in their consciousness. It’s not something that many people think about.

When they start to think about it, oftentimes they don’t find a clear answer. Especially after the first question: “What is the basic building block of human society?” they can feel the contrast of clarity.

The answer to the second question is of course, in theory, the same as the first. Family is the basis of human society. “Society for Krishna Consciousness” means “Authentic Human Community”.

In practice, attempting to answer this question persons have floated to me: “Projects?” “Sannyasis and their disciples?” “Temples?”

The theory and the practice have some way to go.

The family is the metaphor for relationships in the network. It is the language of the story that is used as the higher-order synthesis to comprehend the complex web of relationships.

We need a story to give coherency to the otherwise overly complex permutations of relationships and interactions between a large number of people. It is not a story of a corporate structure, a military-industrial hierarchy. It is a family - a social structure.

We can see the theory evident in our terminology - god sister / god brother, “mataji”.

“Family” is the network metaphor.

Next: Some history, and the future - just like the past, only completely different

(Written before today’s yoga teacher training)

What’s the basic building block of human society?

It shouldn’t take you too long to answer “the family”, at least in theory. We can see that in today’s society it is increasingly becoming “the individual consumer”, as relationships are increasingly defined as economic relations, however, we understand that the basic building block of human society is the family.

Now another question:

What’s the basic building block of ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness?

to be continued…

In his new book The Origin of Wealth, McKinsey & Company Senior Advisor Eric D. Beinhocker argues that the traditional view of economics as a static, equilibrium-balanced system is going through a radical rethinking involving a multitude of disciplines. The new spin: “complexity economics,” in which the economy is viewed as a highly dynamic and constantly evolving system that is all but impossible to predict. This excerpt deals with how companies can set strategy when the future is unknowable.

Read the excerpt at Harvard Business School Working Knowledge

Not much on the “Communicating” front lately. The most fundamental thing in successful marketing is to have a good product. We’ve seen many “one-hit wonder” acts propelled up the charts by a multi-million dollar marketing campaign, only to disappear into obscurity shortly afterwards.

As one US Army Field Training Manual puts it: “First Be, Then Do, Then Tell”.

If you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter how much you talk it up.

Having said that, once you’ve got the substance, the presentation should also be done artfully.

Here is a 15 page tutorial from the specialist presentation firm Missing Link on creating presentations:

Attention Spam (605K, .pdf)

Leadership in organic systems (such as a network) is not the kind of leadership that one person can do. It is leadership that requires many people – a “leader-full” organization. In a network, one person cannot control the system, nor can one person fully understand it. Therefore models of collaborative, shared, or multi-level leadership become more important and critical. Developing the capacities of others becomes essential in building a “leader-full” organization.

- excerpted from “What makes a network a learning network?” (available at NCSL’s Introduction to Network Learning page.)