Ideas from a guest lecture with Arvind Singhal, April 7, 2011:
Martin Buber: Goodness exists in the space between people.
Douglas Thomas & John Seeley Brown: Listen with humility.
Arvind Singhal: Practice habits of the heart. The human system is complex, so it’s impossible to make predictions and there is no formula for navigation. Cultivate a network and keep in touch. “Good” people like to work with “good” people. Speak when you’re invited, and invite people into your conversation — if they say yes, they own it. Amongst diehards, there are always deviants; if you’re mindful, you can spot them and invite them into the conversation. Acknowledge the elephant in the room, sooner rather than later, playfully if possible. The value of play in difficult situations is underestimated. A micro-behavior is to nurture more opportunities that might have a serendipitious outcome — again, cultivating relationships. You will be quite amazed at what will come your way, and you will be comfortable. You don’t have to follow someone else’s script, you can author your own script. When people say, “You must be really crazy,” that’s when you say, “All the more reason.” Compassion to yourself (bravery, according to Paula Woodley). These choices have worked for me because I’ve been comfortable. Never miss an opportunity to be playful.
According to complexity science, the quality of the relationships is far more important than the quality of the agents.
Paula Woodley: Offer service.
Complexity science, on the other hand, values this lack of centralized control as an essential quality of healthy systems. The most illuminating paradox of all is that in complex adaptive systems order is emergent and self-organizing. In a healthy, complex adaptive system, control is distributed rather than centralized, meaning that the outcomes emerge from a process of self-organization rather than being assigned and controlled externally by a centralized body. Order emerges from the interactions among the individuals. It results as a function of the patterns of interrelationships between the agents, and it is characterized by unpredictability. It is not able to predict precisely how the interrelationships between the parts will evolve (Lacayo, 2010).
Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others’ actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others’ activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others. Nor is it so remarkable that our greatest joy should come when we are motivated by concern for others. But that is not all. We find that not only do altruistic actions bring about happiness but they also lessen our experience of suffering. Here I am not suggesting that the individual whose actions are motivated by the wish to bring others’ happiness necessarily meets with less misfortune than the one who does not. Sickness, old age, mishaps of one sort or another are the same for us all. But the sufferings which undermine our internal peace — anxiety, doubt, disappointment — these things are definitely less. In our concern for others, we worry less about ourselves. When we worry less about ourselves, an experience of our own suffering is less intense.
What does this tell us? Firstly, because our every action has a universal dimension, a potential impact on others’ happiness, ethics are necessary as a means to ensure that we do not harm others. Secondly, it tells us that genuine happiness consists in those spiritual qualities of love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness and so on. For it is these which provide both for our happiness and others’ happiness (HIS HOLINESS the 14th Dalai Lama, 1999).