It is nearly two years ago when I got my own enlightenment to draw our material and moral development as two crossing lines. I wrote a book about it (in Dutch “Geheimen van echte Welvaart”) which of course has been my worst selling book ever ;-). Who cares about morality these days? Yet, one of the readers immediately saw enough material for a nomination for the Nobel price for Peace, not now but maybe in ten or twenty years time. It made me laugh.

I laughed because my book was a spiritual and professional semi-autobiography based on my personal awareness enriched by spontaneous illuminations in the process, normally at night while in the twilight of near sleep or near awakening. It had nothing academic, nothing scientific, but surely a personal message for humankind, and especially entrepreneurship.

Two years have past since that mid night eye opener I had on the crossed lines and many times they have been used now to explain the evolution of human beings and their social, business, personal or political interaction. It is being used to explain business strategies, evolution of countries and dynasties, and even the present global shift. Above all the crossed lines are being used to understand ourselves!

Deeper and deeper we dig into our insight and awareness as globalization of our current human organization reaches boiling point after boiling point. Even that the model shows and still we try to fight our way back our way up against the current, trying to avoid the unavoidable collapse and chaos. We lack the “science of awareness”.

For at least half a million years the human being has been struggling between her material and moral evolution. We could not keep pace and kept falling back into disaster after periods of wealth. We have been confronted for millenia with ourselves and our quest to understand, but to understand what? There are two things that need to be understood: the touchable and the untouchable.

Understanding the touchable: We call this “science”. The touchable can be accounted for as it can be counted, measured, visualized and described. It can also be reproduced. We can count the amount of people in a country, the electricity consumption, the atoms in an element, the genes of a species, the amount of stars in the sky, etc. We can study this to the immenseness of the universe and the minuteness of the smallest particals or elements.

We have based our science on the touchables and created another touchable, called money. We want to “understand” our physical world and created over time a humankind that is very much focussed on controlling in one way or another this physical world. Science has helped business by inventing cheaper resources, faster transportation systems, hierarchies over other people, miniaturizing technologies to nano-level, space travel, internet and mobile communication infrastructures. Science has stimulated political organizations to build economies and power positions around material productivity and purchasing power of all civilians.

We have concentrated our investigation, intelligence and science on our greed, not only to have but also to control, as a person, a business and as a society. We have become obsessed by science as an instrument, not only for our understanding but as a servant to our greed. We have gone to great length and depth to “understand” that part of our existence.

Now we realize (hopefully not too late) that this is not the only side of the medal of human historic and unique existence.

Understanding the untouchable: When we talk about the untouchable we become weak, we do not grasp the significance at our present (material) state of mind. It is easy to think of the solar energy that makes life possible at all. We may consider the winds and water currents that spread life (and death) across the earth. We may even start asking ourselves the significance of love, friendship, hate, marriage, religion, trust? Some even go beyond and ask about humanity, planet earth, the universe?

When we get into such domain we feel insecure. We lack “intelligence”. We even fear the word “spirituality”, the science of our conscience. It is easy to grasp back to the touchable, the accountable and avoid the untouchable. So much has been discovered in the touchable world that the average human being is happy, especially if this touchable world can be possessed and accounted for. “Having” is power in such touchable world.

Now we enter the untouchable world, the world of energies, flows, unpredictables, interaction and competition. It is the universal world of what we as humans perceive as chaos, yet it has been there for billions of years, survived meteorite impacts, volcanoes, dinosaurs, etc. Why should it not survive “the human being”?

“Action = Reaction” has been a basic law adopted by all of us, for whatever reason. It is an equation for ever lasting balance. It seems simple but it is in fact extremely difficult. It addressed human intellect to the full in a quest to destruction or sustainable progress. What it really means is that whatever changes (no matter how minute) we make we provoke necessary changes elsewhere to re-establish balance. Those changes are not always and mostly not under human control.

We are, like it or not, part of a larger organization.

So if human kind, in all its abundant presence on the globe (6.7 billion people now and growing), work to a degree of material wellness that some territories have enjoyed for decades, it will have consequences somewhere. Here we enter the field of the “untouchable”. Where do the consequences appear? Do they affect us intimately and directly or someone/thing else in the unknow?

The very first human “untouchable” is the deteriorating relationship between countries that want to defend their own wealth. Another one is that people realize that they have become slaves of human power systems that are difficult to break out of. We do not even control them in any way.

And we become aware that we do not even know anymore how to climb the human barricades. We feel controlled and managed by government.

We suddenly become aware that we know nothing anymore about true interpersonal relationships, ie that are not based on material interests, but on kindness, love and care. We realize that our behavior is putting ourselves at danger.

We become aware that we need to enter a new era, the era of insight an awareness. This era is as important as the scientific era we no leave behind, we have enough, we need to assimilate now.

What science did to our material progress does insight and awareness to our spiritual development. One day both will consciously line up and provide sustainable progress to the human kind.

About 150.000 years ago human beings started to realize that they were different, special. We were not like animals! We could manage nature to our benefit. We learned to manage fire, grow crops and keep animals. We could reason and communicate among each other.

Typical animal genes however still motivated us in our decisions. It was difficult to understand our speciality, confusing even. If you have the gift of reasoning in the competitive aninal life one develops first of all a talent to serve oneself. In times of dinosaurs the one who is small needs to be smart to survive.

For many millenia we have tried to understand how to control more and more our environment for self preservation. As we developed our knowledge we never let go of our competitive, animal like behavior of gathering more than we need for survival. In fact we pictured our personal safety on our level of possessions  and created societies around it.

Current human societies are still based on this ancient attitude of “having”, ie the control by possessing. We have created countries, corporate organizations and communities around this mentality and behaviour. We even created hierarchies among our fellow beings to possess and use mankind to keep it that way. Intellect was used to create slaves among equals for the benefit of a few. We created herritage to ensure that our offspring would continue our quest of possessing more and more.

What we forget is that everyting that one possesses materially  will be lost eventually. Matter may be controlable but is never possessed but it is used. Even our own carnal  lifetime, our physical body, will die, no matter the wealth we accumulated along the way. We go as we came: naked. The only thing that remains is what people may remember of us.

We always will HAVE TO LET GO!

“Matter is an energetic carrier, not a foundation”

This lesson is the one we are learning now. For the first time ever a combination of factors have come together to go beyond a historical lesson, we may make a quantum jump in our human evolution. Here is the combination:

• Scientific knowledge on matter has reached a point of detail that it can now understand and serve “the whole”.
• Global industrialization has reached a point that now understands that matter is finite, so material growth can not be infinite.
• Borders have been abolished to sustain capitalistic growth and created the very first basis for global welbeing.
• Everything is already transforming, reluctant and with opposition but without escape.
• We discover a new field for human development and welbeing: interpersonal relationships and energy.
• This field has endless potential.
• Economies based on material possessions need to transform into economies based on the wealth of interhuman relationships, interaction and energetic, intellectual progress. 

Letting go of our material dependence is key to gain sustainable balance and a sustainable future. Matter can be used cyclically for ever. Our energy for positive interaction can hence create true progress: we become what we are and contribute, not what we have.

One of the most horrible personalities is one with a maths and international business degree after a severe culture shock. Well, that is me. Why would this be horrible? The culture shock put my live up side down. It got me into a deep, black personal problem. My marriage broke up, I was left to take care of my two small children, got all kinds of problems with local government authorities, lost my job, my house and was left with a huge debt. Mmmm, that is horrible, but what does it have to do with math or business, for that matter?

When dramatics things occur in ones life we either look for answers or hang our selves. In my case I just wanted to know what the hell had happened? But who cares? Pick up your life, lick you wounds and focus on the future! No big deal. Yeah, but this was different. I had traveled the whole world and lived/worked in many places, including 25 years in Spain! Adn the culture shock happened in my own country of birth! Can you believe it? Holland had changed so much in 27 years that it struck me and my family like lightning. What on earth could make a country go from a warm, social community into a cold, individualistic, complaining, materialistic society? In such a small time frame? I did not feel at home at home!

A mathmetician wants to find logic behind it and an international business man wants to know what risks and opportunities arise. Well first things first. Why did Holland cool down?

I developed a thought, spiritually. I woke up on morning with two lines in my head: a line for the material complexity of our lives, governed by systems, knowledge, organizations and above all: money. The second line refered to the moral complexity, governed by our self conscience of identity, equality, emancipation, trust and higher values. Of course I had to get this insight because I was asked to lecture for Prof. Paul de Blot, university teacher on Business Spirituality. I quickly wrote a book on it and started a new life letting people know what happens to them as it had happened to me. With my model I could predict the course of any organization. Wow, I had become a prophet.

Normal business analyst take key figures and by looking back they try to determine the future. Well, if the future is highly unstable as it is, you can look back as much as you want but your company will go down the drain. Looking at figures is safe for analysts, of course. They are correct, already past and cannot be disputed, just analyzed. Predicting the future means that you have to have knowledge of the outside world, what happens and how you can connect your competences to it. Or find out that you need to change business all together.

My model looks like this:

Human complexities

At the end of 2008 I pushed  three little booklets based on my theory and positioned companies along this axes and inside the quadrants. I used 120 different measurement points that I could simply find on internet. With the score on 10 different subitems (s.a. positioning, added value for customers, market definition, etc) and one total score in my hands I could predict the course of the organization by just continuing the clockwork lines of the cycle.

My predictions came true after already one year.

But I am a mathmetician too. What does that have to do with all this? Well, I listenend to Dr Bartlett and his excellent exposee on exponentials, captured on YouTube. His truth is a simple but a generally denied given. If I apply his maths to the same cyclic picture of mine I can prodict the level of sustainability of a multinational, a country or a region. In fact I predict (know for sure) that we are all structurally vulnerable right now and enter crisis after crisis as different sectors move from greed to chaos.

Try to figger it out by yourselves by applying my model to your country or company, using Dr. Bartlett. If you can not do it, ask me, I’ll do it for you.