Patricia Aburdene

"When you sign up for spirituality,
 you sign up for truth.."

Hello Patricia. We’re glad to be talking with you again. In your previous book, you said that the most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st Century will occur, not because of technology, but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.

Absolutely.

You’ve said there’s a lot more to it. Not everybody’s caught on to it yet. Why are more people catching on now?

Well, you know, the 1990s were a period of extraordinary expansion in a lot of ways. Spirituality absolutely took off. You saw all of the new bestsellers, such as Conversations With God, and all of this amazing expansion in spirituality.

At the same time, ironically, it was also an amazing expansion for capitalism. We in the West saw what you might call the triumph of capitalism, which was the Soviet Union is doing capitalism now. China is doing capitalism now. That was very curious, I think, to people that those two trends were happening, especially people who couldn’t imagine any kind of spirituality in capitalism. And indeed, we – in the collective, big picture, megatrends label level – were signing up for more spirituality and capitalism as the system (the economic system) that was going to be running most of the world. The interesting thing is that as we signed up for capitalism, we signed up for spirituality. When you sign up for spirituality, you sign up for truth.
And so the amazing thing that happened was that, as we got over into the year 2000-2001, everything in capitalism that was inconsistent with this higher vision of integrity, of spirituality, of truth, of ethics, just was in our faces. In 2001 you had the scandals: Enron, WorldCom. That was just the beginning and it went on and on and on. And so this amazing sort of spiritual process happened where everything in capitalism that was inconsistent with this higher vision was revealed and the shadow side of capitalism was completely in our faces. It really showed us the vulnerabilities in our economic system in business, so that people, again at the collective level, could start to say, “Wow, this isn’t what we want. This isn’t what we signed up for. This isn’t our idea of capitalism.”

It’s one thing to be criticizing government, business and all those greedy folks on Wall Street. But what’s the alternative? You know all that stuff isn’t great. You know it’s probably bad but what’s something that might replace it? The answer is Conscious Capitalism, a revolutionary transformation in capitalism that’s going in two simultaneous directions, from the top down because economic necessity is forcing enormous amounts of reform in corporations, on Wall Street and all the rest. And, equally importantly, probably more importantly, it’s also happening from the bottom up, as consumers and investors like you and I, say, “We’re not going to continue to endorse a brand of capitalism that says, as the late Milton Friedman put it, ‘the social responsibility of capitalism is to make more money, to make more profit.’ We don’t go along with that. We believe there’s another kind of capitalism.” This new form of capitalism, this Conscious Capitalism, looks at business as a whole.”
We have holistic health. Now we’re truly having holistic business that says, “Sure, profits are important. They’re a symbol of a healthy system, but everybody is in this together – the customers, the companies, the employees, the environment. It’s a whole system and if you want a company to be successful, you’ve got to treat it like a system.”

That was great! Since you mentioned China, how is consciousness working in that environment? Is this just an American thing, or is it translating across the ocean?

I cannot speak about China in particular because I’m not an expert in that area. In the East, traditions of spirituality are strong. However, I think that conscious capitalism is a state that happens when capitalism itself is more mature. So I think that it will translate.

There’s a wonderful organization called the Association for Spirit at Work which gives the International Spirit at Work Award. Many of their awards have gone to financial corporations in India. The Times of India, the leading newspaper of India, has an altar in one of the major hallways. So, do I think conscious capitalism translates globally? Yes. Would I pick China as a great example to start with? Probably not, because capitalism is really undergoing a resurgence now and it’s a kind of gung-ho, old-fashioned capitalism. Do I think that it will come to China eventually? Yes, I do.

It has to if its an energy thing. As we all know, energy moves and expands; it cannot remain stagnant.

Very good.

In India, in their establishments, the first thing inside you notice inside the front door is a small altar in honor of their gods or goddesses. They are aware that they’re not running the business alone. They are just there to steward it through. How refreshing it is to see evidence that they recognize the Source, who’s really the boss.

Awesome! That’s fantastic!

Some of this started with Marilyn Ferguson when she brought out The Aquarian Conspiracy years ago.

That’s one of my favorite books.

Now it’s coming full circle, we’re taking it into our everyday lives.

Exactly. That is such an important thing. In fact, in my new book, which I’m tentatively calling The Conscious Capitalist, I’m going to be talking about how we bring it into our day-to-day life. Since I’ve been very involved in this kind of research, I’ve noticed that the bank I deal with is involved with socially responsible investing. I have the pleasure of knowing that my bank is investing in the community and doing great things.

I shop at Whole Foods and I know that a lot of the employees are getting profit sharing. Their health care is paid for. I bought my first hybrid car last year. And, as I get more into conscious capitalism, I know that I really do want all of my economic choices to reflect my values. There’s an enormous amount of congruity and a sense of being whole in that. You’re not working at cross purposes within yourself. And I think that that really enhances your capacity to attract financial abundance to yourself. When you’re making choices with your money that really reflects who you are, it’s a good thing.

Absolutely. We love how you mention Spirit at lot in your book. What is your definition of Spirit with a capital “S?”

I define Spirit as the great I Am, the aspect of the divine that dwells within all of us, whether we are religious or not, whether we adhere to a certain religion or certain spirituality. It’s that inner sense of connection to the divine, as opposed to religion, which is the formal worship of God according to various different rituals and rites. Some people are both religious and spiritual. Just because somebody’s religious doesn’t mean they’re not spiritual.

You mention meditation in your book and that many CEOs meditate and do yoga. What is your take on that? Do you do that as well?

I have always wanted to do yoga but I don’t know if my knees will ever let me. But I certainly do meditate. It’s a very regular part of my life. I couldn’t do the things that I do without meditation. It’s an enormous and wonderfully important thing. I also do what I call “meditation with a pen” and that’s journaling. That’s a very, very core tool and technique to my own personal spirituality.

Years ago, probably in the early 1970’s, there was a book by Douglas Dean called Executive ESP.

What a great title!

He had interviewed all the blue chip CEOs and when he got them aside he asked, “Tell me, to what do you attribute to your success?” And they said, “It’s largely instinct.”

They said, “My marketing people can bring me all the books and charts and graphs and all those kinds of things but if I have an instinct or a gut feeling to go this way or that way, then I do that and that’s made the most major contributions to my success.” He was calling it ESP, which is really intuition, being connected, a part of the spirituality that’s going on now. With today’s CEOs, they are just beginning to experience this.

Yes. I think it feels more comfortable doing that today, and that’s absolutely a great thing. I have a dear friend in the Boston area named Lynn Robinson. She’s just come out with a wonderful book called Trust Your Gut. And the subtitle of it is How the Power of Intuition Can Grow Your Business. The book has specific exercises that you can use to grow your business, whether you’re a small consultant or running your own department. The book gives you techniques to use in making a decision, for instance. Just sit and see how it feels to you. I tried that with a business decision that I was thinking about and it was amazing. I got this horrible feeling in my throat. Intuition is so powerful. It’s important to honor it and pay attention to it.

You mentioned that there are 63 million conscious consumers. What is your definition of a “conscious consumer?”

I’m using the figures put out by the LOHAS organization, which stands for Lifestyles Of Health And Sustainability. These are people who are interested in green building, hybrid cars and organic foods. They have a whole marketing institute that has studied this. I used their figures. Their emphasis is mostly on the values of health and sustainability, whereas my notion of the conscious consumer is a little bit broader than that. It certainly includes those sectors, but it would also include some other sectors.

A lot of 1960s New Ager kind of folks could have been the pioneers of conscious consumerism.

Oh, without doubt! Pioneers, and now there’s a younger generation of people. I’m a Boomer. It’s fascinating to me to see the people in their 20s and 30s being absolutely devout environmentalists. They’re taking the movement in a new direction, which is great.

Is there a trend, too, of the Boomer folk who are getting to retirement and not doing the typical retirement thing?

Oh, this is the second time this has come up for me in the past two weeks. Someone wrote me an email saying they’d like me to do a letter or article on retirement, not your father’s or your mother’s retirement. I really need to do some research on that. I think it’s absolutely true. To turn it into an on-the-spot trend: no one’s planning on retiring! That’s the trend as I see it. Almost all the people I know don’t work at a 9 to 5 job. They work doing what they want to do and so to think about retirement wouldn’t even be a possibility for them. Then the few people I know who actually have jobs from which they would retire are planning their second careers. I cannot think of one person in my age group, which we’ll leave as well over 50, who’s saying, “Wow, the countdown’s on. Only X more years to retirement!” It’s just not happening!

And it’s very interesting. The editor of AARP magazine brought out a book called 50 Plus in which he mentions that we’re not going to sit on the porch or something. We all want to get involved.

There’s another trend right there.

Absolutely. You mention in the book Megatrends: where do we put spirit to work, when we’ve got all that excess spirit and that divine at work in us – in a project, a cause, a mission, a place somewhere that attracts our now higher conscious – and that’s the kind of trend we’ve been seeing in our area. It was thrilling to read that in your book, that you see that as very important, also.

I think the reactions I’ve gotten to that is that there was always this kind of split between political activism and spirituality. You were either going to change the world or you were going to retreat from the world. It’s all coming together now. Some of the people who have enjoyed that passage the most are major activists who say, “This is so encouraging to us because this is how we feel; this is where the balance and the energy is.”

What do you see another 10 years down the road?

I think that this conscious capitalism megatrend is going to play out over at least another 10 years. I think that when all is said and done, it is going to play out for 15 or 20 years. I should also say that, although the trend toward conscious capitalism is very firmly established, that there’s a little bit of a backlash, countertrend happening now, too.

Do you see a woman president in the near future?

In Megatrends for Women, which was published in 1992, I predicted that there would be a woman president by 2008.

Ooo! We hope you’re right! That would be awesome!

I did not think it would be in the way that it’s shaking out. I would have seen the first woman president having been a governor a while, not necessarily a senator, because I think governors get that administrative experience that you really need to be a president. You have to have managed a budget. But we shall see. I’d like to see more woman candidates in the field than just Hillary Clinton. But God knows she’s got the smarts and she’s showing herself as a great senator. I’d like to see someone with more experience.

If you had a last pearl of wisdom to leave with us, what would that be?

I want to go back to this notion about top down and bottom up, because I think it’s so absolutely critical. Social change happens at the crossroads of economic necessity and new values. We have the economic necessity of the excesses of capitalism bearing down on the economic system on Wall Street and all the rest. And we have the new values that have been around: socially responsible investing and consumer action. These have been quietly around for decades now. Then when the accounting scandals hit, there was this perfect storm that ignited the power of transformation, this sense that business as usual just can’t keep going on and on and on. If we don’t create the reform, we’re going to lose more of our IRAs to these corporate scandals and we’re not going to have created the society that we want to create.

It really brought everything to bear and now people are really looking at the world in a new way, a way where we’ll see, in my opinion, the transformation of capitalism from unconscious capitalism, as in “I prefer to remain unconscious of the social and moral and economic costs of the Freidmanite version of capitalism,” to conscious capitalism that says, “Yes, we want to make money, but the best way to make money is to treat business as a system in which consumers are important, employees are important, certainly stockholders are important, the community’s important, the environment is important, and if you can juggle all those, you’re going to have a business that is more sustainable in the economic sense and in the spiritual sense and the environmental sense. And it’s going to make more money, too.”

Excellent! It will not only improve the economy. It will improve the world. Well said! Thank you so much!

Patricia Aburdene’s website is www.patriciaaburdene.com