Reflections on our efforts to build a wholesome organization – Our principles of action and our gradual training

“ Just as the ocean has a gradual shelf, a gradual slope, a gradual inclination, with a sudden drop-off only after a long stretch, in the same way this Dhamma and Discipline has a gradual training, a gradual performance, a gradual progression, with a penetration to gnosis only after a long stretch” — saying attributed to Gautam Buddha in The Udāna 5.5.

Wholesomeness of truth

I state the following tersely as a fact of life — truth is profoundly wholesome.

Truth, for practical and existential reasons of humanity, must be rightfully organized in its various sub-domains of sub-truths. However, awareness of this singular fact must be anything but forgotten in this great organization.

Else, this great organization of truth starts manifesting as its great fragmentation. In other words, such an organization is not static. It is in a profound dynamic governed by this singular fact.

Wholesome truth’s collapse and fragmentation in common life: suffering and peace

All sub-domains contain inherently within them, as if birthed by the fact of life, subtle to obvious signs that reveal not just how, but also why we must keep this great awareness. However, it appears that in ordinary life this great equanimity of truth starts to collapse. Or it becomes elusively profound and transcendental.

Such signs keep getting increasingly subtle to becoming non-existent. Experiences of ordinary life appear more consistent with the great fragmentation of truth, and, therefore, with more existential suffering and practical problems than with peace and prosperity. The wholesomeness of human beings, let alone organizations, feels more like a fool’s errand. It seems accessible only to the extremely far and few.

I write the above with humility and the awareness that such may just be our existential condition and even consistent with this singular fact. However, we also have deep personal and collective experiences of glimpses of wholesomeness through subtle to obvious signs in all sub-domains of knowledge. We all have had fleeting, to even significantly long-lasting, experiences of freedom from suffering, in other words, of peace.

A thesis for compassion

Thus, I wonder what if we can use just one such sub-domain to not so much dig into its technical details but as steps on a path to wisdom that bestows the ability to look profoundly higher and wider with this great awareness of singular truth and with its insights alleviate suffering and bring peace?

Consider the following arguments, which are anything but comprehensive or complete. However, hopefully, these are inviting enough to be accepted to make a thesis for compassion.

Compassion and experience of wholesome truth: The ability to be compassionate is directly dependent on our ability to experience and understand the nature of wholesome truth.

Compassion to fill the great voids of our times: Is it not that but for deeper spiritual connections and loving-kindness, for most of us, in our personal lives, and relative to all our great material and cultural development, it continues to feel like a void?

Compassion as a relevant and practical system of secular ethics: Is it time we realize that we have a deep, inherent need for frameworks that make coherent practices of secular ethics that are inclusive of compassion and other flows of spirituality? This is critical for both existential and practical reasons. We need not forsake these just because we have not been able to make arguments for them in analytical, predictive and computable frameworks. Their grounding in other frameworks, for example, in religion, contemplative and other traditional philosophies, need not be a ground for forsaking them.

Compassion and education: Education is of many kinds. It includes learning at home, in schools, colleges, professional life, and the generalized experience of learning of human beings. In all these settings and processes how many of us are directly working on our respective abilities to be compassionate as noted above, viz-a-viz all the various abilities that we are working so hard at otherwise?

We find such arguments, based on our experiences of daily life, to be compelling. In fact, these are compelling enough for us to put forward and work from the thesis of cultivating compassion in an effort to be a wholesome organization.

The first foundational-stone rule and the right start on the path

“Don’t act out of fear or anger.” We see this thesis as the foundation in our efforts to build a wholesome organization7 that is exploring compassion as the basis for work. Karunar Kheti in English means “cultivation of compassion”. We may not get into theories8 of the what/why/how of fear and anger. However, we start with their experiential mindful awareness. I, from the depth of experiences of life’s dukkha9 , have made just this one request in action to all our teachers and staff. We can unapologetically, yet compassionately, hold us all accountable to it.

I did so because I knew if we could practically follow this through, we would get off to the right start. In due time, through a larger collective churn, the depth of the values and practices will flow from just this one rule. We would together write it with the profound simplicity-terseness, for example like that of Gautam Buddha’s four Noble Truths or Einstein’s two postulates of Special Relativity.

The path We are now on the path. Each day is now above all being in the wisdom of making the right effort to cultivate and practice the emerging values. Not just dealing with our challenges~opportunities, but to weave into a larger fabric of culture and consciousness. This is especially useful, if one yearns to be collectively compassionate and prosperous.

Overarching and key challenges of Karunar Kheti: The what/why/how of such a start for us humbly began from me12 and my personal experiences growing up and living in the tea-plantations of Assam. This also stemmed from my experiences as a student and professional in various parts of India and the world. There are two overarching aspects, which Karunar Kheti needs to respond to. These are not exclusively independent.

Being an organization of wholesome peace in a landscape of fragmentation and crisis

The tea-plantations of Assam are facing an extreme crisis. This crisis is rooted in the increasing knottiness in socio-economicpolitical-environmental realities of a vast scale of humanity. These have their origins in the colonial times. These are only getting more complicated in emergent modern India.

Be a fundamentally new institution for the post-colonial world: The word fundamental here connotes something particular with respect to India and other post-colonial nation states. At independence in 1947, India emerged as an overwhelmingly agrarian economy. It had a dominantly traditional culture in a modern world. Yet, it had also been deeply transformed by developments spanning material to consciousness— scientific and industrial revolutions, new socio-economic-political systems, and culture—during the colonial era.

We need to use our wholesome intelligence and compassion to create wholesome models of development. We must note here that a disproportionately large population of people16 are anything but participating in such emergent systems, at least not to any significant degree. In fact, such disproportionately large populations of people are entangled in energies that fuel deep systemic cycles of disempowerment, fragmentation and crisis.

It’s in this perspective that India needs fundamentally new institutions where disempowered people are peacefully empowered for a wholesomely balanced accountability to humanity.

The first foundational resource and the education crisis

Efforts to build such a fundamentally new institution in a landscape of deep-rooted fragmentation, crisis and disempowerment are impossible without developing the hard-working capacity of the heart. Karunar Kheti began at the individual level of reinfusing the balance of the heart with the mind and body. There has also been a simultaneous striving to build larger coherence of heart body mind at individual collective levels. We have tried to keep these efforts mindful of the interactions with larger approaching scales of culture and consciousness.

The fear and anger that I wanted our teachers and staff to be mindfully aware of are but symptoms of our two overarching challenges. These are also at the core of the education crisis. Education is central to the process of moving away from fear and toward freedom. Education will be anything but complete without the resources of the heart in balance with the mind and the body.

Our current emergent principles of action

I deliberately use the words “current emergent.” This is because, it is all in flow/ flux. It is paramount that we maintain the awareness of being in the process. We need not feel rushed toward the steady asymptote reached by the Buddha or Einstein. As such, our current emergent principles of action, which are basically making values actionable in a wholesome framework, include the following.

Empower communities directly disempowered by problems to become a part of the solution.

Listen to the communities. And then build wholesome empowering movements together, mindfully, reflexive of the communities’ capability and capacity, scale of economy, pace of the cultures, and wisdom of the consciousness.

Develop ground-up and contextual. This process, if required, must be based on first principles. It must also involve practical systems applicable in the real world. This is important if we want to manifest the coherent wisdom skills of the individual collective heart body mind. In this context, the discipline of truth and participatory processes go hand in hand.

Such principles of action are in a feedback loop with our experiences and some deliberate rules, principles, and practices to deepen our understanding of them. We will list below our first mixed-bag building blocks of such, and from those that are becoming particularly steady.

Our first mixed-bag building blocks of rules, principles and practices

From “Don’t act out of fear or anger,” we found ourselves flowing with a mixed bag of practices reflecting our developing intention through explorations, experimentation, learning through mistakes, and attempts to be inclusive. We share a few of these here.

The first is of course – “Don’t act out of fear or anger.”

We have tried hiring not for specialized skills validated by degrees and experience, but for wholesome character.

We have also been hiring locally. This is not to fragment external internal. However, this involved an intention to begin to trust and build confidence in ourselves.

We deliberately don’t use existing curricula or textbooks in our school. This is especially true in the 1st year. This helps our teachers to experientially unlearn learn – from rote learning toward becoming curious and to trust the process of learning from mistakes. It also helps them in their journey from being a know-it-all teacher, toward trusting children, listening to them, and learning from them.

We have even deliberately used formal organization development processes as aids to unlearning-learning. We have not wanted to directly get bogged down by all such skills that no one in our community has had. Instead, we use these opportunities to unfurl the wholesome character of people we have hired.

We also have been involved in exploratory practices to cultivate a community of compassion. These include circles of trust and listening. We have also opened ourselves up to learn and share with each other our various non-material traditions (faith, religion and spirituality, etc.). We have also been deliberately trying to prevent their fragmentation from material traditions (such as science, industry, and the socio-economic political systems).

Our teachers, staff and leaders are encouraged to be the custodians of our classrooms, toilets, grounds, plants and trees. Our open and informal meeting structures try to focus more on the non-linear individual-collective journeys. This makes the linear school/organizational outcomes a part of these larger trajectories.

Our current emergent steady state practices We also share our current emergent mixed bag of practices to nourish our principles of action here. We practice morning and evening circles. We are developing meditation as a tool for building concentration, mindfulness, gratitude and compassion. We also conduct circles of trust for diverse expressions of speaking-listening, which include silence, dance, songs, stories, reflections, etc.

Our team members practice collective community work as the custodians of our school and earth. Our meetings function as wholesome, balance-making processes that explore the interstices of nonlinear self-collective journeys and linear organizational/school-related outcomes.

From a single stepping stone toward a terse completeness of coherency

Einstein’s two Postulates of Special Relativity and Siddhartha Gautama’s four Noble Truths are but two deeply personally experienced examples of profoundly terse, fundamental and irreducible encapsulations of the essence of particular domains of knowledge, which are vast in their scale and diversity.

In other words, from two to four points that can appear trivial in superficial reading—those that can be written in half a page—emerge lifetimes of coherency of the individual-collective heart-body-mind work spanning immediate challenges-opportunities to the significantly larger aspects of culture and consciousness.

As a leader of an organization with a vision to weave from our immediate stepping stones into problems old at the scale of centuries, and, further, into the still deeper fabrics of culture and consciousness, the knowing that there can be such terse encapsulations that will take up insignificantly little space in memory to remember deeply calms my being because we will never lose our essential points of reference. Our current principles of action, as such, are but above all the right effort toward such a terse completeness of coherency.

End notes

1. Consider, for example, science and spirituality, and how carving out for them the exclusively permanent domains of objectivity and subjectivity, respectively, can cause such fragmentation of a wholesome understanding of truth. Yes, in particular experiences, science appears to be objective and spirituality subjective. However, there are just as many experiences where it is the opposite. This is powerfully reminiscent of the obfuscating debates related to the “wave-particle duality of matter” in physics. In these debates this duality is simply resolved when one considers that it is the particular scale of experience of phenomena that renders one or the other picture practically useful in scientific calculations. But this is not so in any mutually exclusive and permanent or divisive sense.
2. This practical collapse is powerfully reminiscent of theories of physics where unifying symmetries of physical phenomena are so only in theory. In reality, they are, to various degrees, broken. These may even have to be so, for life to manifest.
3. The story of Gautam Buddha is powerful in this regard. After attaining enlightenment, it is said that he had decided not to teach his great wisdom. Either it was his compassion that made him act otherwise, or, as they say, he had to be pleaded to at least teach the extremely few.
4. “Interbeing” in this regard is a profound concept to develop the awareness of “the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all elements of existence” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Interbeing). It is developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the most singularly insightful teachers of compassion in the modern world, whose teachings are rooted in the 2,600 years old wisdom of Gautama Buddha, even in a literal sense to the Sutta Pitaka that note Buddha’s spoken words.
5. “Have we become more terrified of intimacy than interstellar travel?” is a particularly insightful and validating reference, which reflects the scale of such a void, crafted in words by Aaron Stewart in “On Interstellar, love, time, and the limitless prison of our cosmos.”
6. Words like “right” and “path” are generally used here in the context of Dhamma’s Eight-Fold Path. My personal principles of action are becoming increasingly coherent, and even coming to direct submission to the already existing wisdom of Dhamma. Sometimes this is even attuned with the wisdom, as expressed in the literal words of its suttas. This emergent understanding, and its interactions with, and feedback from, Karunar Kheti is my experiment with this wisdom, its path, and its many techniques.
7. The need to be wholesome is a core thesis of our organization’s concept note.
8. There is a perfectly profound balance between theory and experience. However, one must begin somewhere in this vast space, even if to create the configuration space of this balance.
9. Dukkha is used in the contextual meaning of the Dhamma’s four Noble Truths.
10. On occasions, even if extremely few but just as intense, I am anything but an example of not acting out of fear or anger, and when the challenge of being a leader can only be met because I am able to submit to, seek empowering forgiveness, and follow this great overall accountability that we all have created.
11. Tilde (~) is deliberately used between words when needing to be grounded in their interdependency viz-a-viz their exclusivity.
12. Not the ego-centric me, but the me that is simultaneously a drop of water and the whole river.
13. Tea-plantations of Assam are the third largest employer after the Indian Railways and Armed Forces.
14. “Coolies of capitalism: Assam tea and the making of coolie labour” by Nitin Verma is a comprehensive reference for the colonial history of tea in Assam (Varma, N. (2017). ‘Tea in the colony,’ in “Coolies of Capitalism: Assam Tea and the Making of Coolie Labour” (1st ed., pp. 15–42). De Gruyter.
15. Our concept note contains several references.
16. “Can the Subaltern Speak” by Gayatri Spivak, a post-colonial scholar, is a powerful scholarship for reference (In “Marxism and the interpretation of culture” – edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 271–313. 1988.).
17. First and last are meaningless in an equanimous perspective, where all resources are equally valuable. It is only in the practical perspective of having to begin somewhere is the word “first” used.