Welcome to the Conversion Science and Earned Student Forum podcast on collaboration.
I'm Paul Verschure and together with my colleague Babani Rao,
we speak with Swami Shantam Ritananda
Puri, a Brahmacari monk at the Mata Amritananda Maya Center in Chicago.
For his engagement in social education and spiritual activities worldwide,
Swami Puri shares his perspectives So collaboration, how it differs from collaboration,
elements and intangibles that are involved, and how it is interwoven in most aspects of it.
Welcome, Shanta, to our podcast.
Thank you. Great that you could join us.
So before we really delve into the substance of around collaboration,
it would be helpful that maybe you give a little sketch of your life trajectory
that brought you to where you are today as Swami Shantan Ritannadapuri.
Yes, okay. Okay. Well, it really started in college because I was focused on
the humanities and it was more,
philosophy and religion, but my focus was on Asia, including Japanese.
But what happened is at the end of those four years, I became very inspired
by the classical concept of justice as being like the ideal perfection in human relationships.
So what that did is that took me to apply for officer candidate school in the
armed forces, because I wanted to protect justice. That was my concept.
I was accepted, but then I ended up taking an offer to work for the Japanese
government in a rural fishing village because I spoke the language.
And there I learned a lot about international collaboration,
intercultural, interlingual collaboration, which really taught me quite a bit. it.
And after some time, though, I found myself being pulled towards my deeper roots.
And I that would be my roots in like philosophy and religion.
So it was I think I was about 25 when I joined a traditional ashram in South
India and began a new life in a hut on the Arabian Sea.
And that that ashram ended up blossoming into a worldwide humanitarian mission.
And we have people collaborating with us in every country of the world, practically.
But I ended up, I started off by training as a novice monk.
And I lived there for 10 years before I was sent somewhere.
And during those 10 years, I became very involved in a variety of collaborative projects.
The first one was the construction of a 1,500-bed hospital and a project to
build 100,000 houses for the underserved people.
And then I was dispatched to Tokyo for 10 years.
And that was where I got involved in our projects in Kenya, the disaster relief
in Japan and in the Philippines, a public health project in Papua New Guinea,
and a lot of interfaith activities with the Buddhist community.
And the most recent decade has landed me in Chicago area, where I've been involved
in a lot of collaborations in the fields of youth activity and the environment,
online education and scientific research.
So these have all become my duties as part of that massive humanitarian organization.
And currently, where are you located? Oh, sorry, my Bluetooth is not working.
Hang on, I'm going to turn it off. Okay.
Please say that again. No, so I was just asking where you're located now. Okay.
Today? At the moment, I'm in India. Okay, good. Okay, but the home base for
your work is now Chicago?
Chicago, and that's where a scientific research center is going to start soon.
Okay, great. So, well, thank you very much for that summary.
So, to open up, so what is collaboration and what is it good for?
I was thinking i was asking myself the
same thing i i was thinking i i'm
not qualified to offer a definition but but
it was funny because when you when you when this invitation came along you know
i asked myself that what what is it you know and uh and because i it it didn't
approach It didn't initially evoke an immediate image,
but then I gave it a little thought,
and it seems to me it's similar to cooperation but feels different.
It's not quite the same, and I knew that much.
But what I can say is what cooperation feels like and what collaboration looks like to me.
So for me, cooperation is like if there's one guy doing a task,
and if you give him three more people, then the task can be done in one quarter of the time.
That's what cooperation seems to feel like to me.
Whereas collaboration feels really different.
It's like through that collaboration, we become stronger and we're well-rounded.
We have more talents. talents, we have more resources, human or otherwise,
and so we become more adaptable to the circumstances.
Resources that are brought in by the the participants
um i feel that they yield more
intangible benefits that wouldn't
have been achieved otherwise and uh that's basically my uninitiated sense of
the concept but but when i looked at the concept of collaboration even more
you know i came to the conclusion that basically my whole adult life has been
a conglomeration of various collaborations.
And if we include these intangible goals and rewards.
We could even say that everybody's life is kind of compromised by variegated
and overlapping collaborations.
And the whole world, from a holistic perspective, I felt like it was very difficult
to come up with an example that it doesn't qualify as a collaboration of some kind.
But now, what are these intangibles? The intangibles that I'm thinking of are,
one would be intangible in the sense of you cannot detect it with your five senses.
So it would be like personal growth.
It would be trust. it would be a deeper understanding about other cultures and
yourself and a lot of other such uh.
Experiences, but you can't quantify
them so easily, not like revenue or promotions or something like that.
But now, so you've been involved in a number of really big projects that have
collaborative aspects, but could you maybe take one or two examples where you say, look,
it's by virtue of these following features that these projects,
as large-scale collaboration, succeeded?
Right. Yeah. So, I mean, I've been fortunate in a lot of ways that most of the
people that I collaborate with have shared some similar values, I guess you could say.
And they, in general, we all have all felt that these intangible results and goals were important.
And we gave them, we tend to give, or I do at least, give as much importance
to those intangibles than compared with the physical or concrete results.
So I'll give you a few examples.
That 100,000 house building project,
I found that I learned how to be sensitive to the subtle cues that people are
giving when they don't feel happy with their experience.
And then we can adapt
that project and what we're doing every day
to take that into consideration initially i
didn't quite get it i i wasn't sensitive enough to
people's exhaustion or their cultural reactions and the culture shock but over
time i learned a lot more about that and how to understand people's emotional
state based on some external cues.
And also I learned the importance of having a big heart.
And the more people we have that have the big hearts, the better the project does.
But can you make it a bit more tangible for us who weren't there in your project? Sure.
Yeah, so what I would say is when these intangibles are very striking,
then we get more people to participate the following year.
You know, like, for example, we listen to them, and we listen to them,
and we don't judge them, we don't...
They're really here for. Some people come with the intention of just trying
to get a job and have put it on their resume.
So when they go back to Japan or wherever it is, they have a better CV or a bio.
But my goal is to have them have a really profound experience when they join
that, for example, the housing project.
And so that they can learn more, not just about other cultures, but about themselves.
And then so when they go back, yeah it looks
good on the on the bio but also it changes
their life and they will tell other people and other people
will come and we will have more participation more transformation so these to
me are it's hard to quantify that because you know the reason why increases
is not due to like advertising or um we invested more money it's because somebody
was inspired by participating
and they influenced other people but no
i have a yeah i have a question
so you think that this kind of transformation could not
have happened without collaboration and because you said i mean if what if they
would uh what if there was no collaboration maybe there was an individual that
were actually going into the field and not a bunch of people so i'm just wondering
how do you these these things about being sensitive to whether somebody is happy or not
being the intangibles that you had mentioned?
Is it, can you not pick them up without collaboration?
You can. Of course you can.
I mean, that would be more of, but depends on how sensitive that person is and
how sincere they are about how much focus they have on those in the first place.
But I think a lot of people learn about it through the collaboration because
it stimulates different parts of their individuality when they interact with
people who are different from them and who have different values.
But there's always a coalescence of some of those values.
And so once you realize this person is also just as sincere as you are,
then you can say, well, I'm wondering why he or she values such and so so much.
I want to understand that better. So I feel that that collaborative effort really
opens our eyes to deeper levels of our own self, too.
Shant, I'm confused about this still. I'm sorry.
No problem. What is really interesting now, collaboration, as you described
it also earlier, means that you have a bunch of individuals who also coalesce around the common goal.
But now what you're describing is the trajectory of a single individual to be
pulled into that process because there's self-interest to be pulled in,
like my CV will look better.
And in some sense, I could even argue that the coordinator of the collaborative
process has their own interest of opening their mind to a broader perspective on reality.
But we're still not talking about collaboration now, because this is how tens
or hundreds or thousands of people together in space and time in some way achieve that common goal.
And I have not understood yet how you then manage that part of the project to
actually build your thousands of houses. Thank you.
Right so um could you just be
you're talking about the logistics of it
or the strategy behind it or yeah well in the end
look you have i don't know tens hundreds of
people working together at any point yes i'm in a project right
okay how do you how do you keep them working together in that to achieve that
common goal of building these houses and of course then meta level you can of
course say yeah but building the houses is more like a metaphorical act to come
to a deeper end But I would like to unpack that better.
Sure, sure. Well, I mean, that is a little more of the,
we could call it the sort of the logistics of it and how we put together the
teams and actually do that.
Is that an example of what you're looking for?
Well, yeah, I would like to understand how you have these hundreds of people
working together. Yeah, okay, okay.
Yeah. Well, one thing is definitely trust is a big factor because I don't have,
I'm not involved in all the dozens of countries that the people are coming from.
So we're assuming that we have guidelines to bring the people over.
So that part I don't really get involved in, but we trust that there's somebody
who is coordinating it on that side.
But before all the people come, someone like myself or another person will go
there and make sure everything is um prepared and that it's going to be um and say,
not a a swami i think maybe he's looking for more uh in the direction like once
the children once the students from uh japan are actually there on the ground
how do you actually get them involved in working on the on the project with
the others like with the indians how does.
That's where a lot of language issues come in
because especially japanese people they don't speak even english
so we have i mean i translate other
people translate and we divide them up
into crews of about 10 depending
on the site and we and depending on
how many tools we have and then we we there's no usually there's no transportation
so they have to walk and i walk to like five to ten work sites and then i'm
constantly running around checking in on them Did the mason arrive when he said he did?
Because if he doesn't arrive, they're just sitting there and doing nothing because
they've got the tools and everything, but they don't know how to lay bricks.
So you have to go and you have sometimes the person who is in the house,
you know, they want to communicate something to the people.
And if they can do that, it will make the participants overjoyed and it'll give
them a great experience.
And then they resume the work. So there's always something we have to be constantly
visiting every work site so that we make sure that people are able to do the
work that they came to do,
the tangible work, and also have a good experience so that they can communicate
with those people and feel the impact that they're making and learning why these.
And for the people on the recipient side, for the beneficiaries,
they also want to understand why these college students came from all the way
from Japan with their hard-earned money that they worked a part-time job.
And so why have they done that? And there has to be both the...
Physical part of providing them with the tools and help they need to build something
as well as the i guess you could say the tools to have a good experience but
now how so in a sort of minimal interpretation you could say well look we take
a bunch of people with good intentions,
right and we just put them together and then by virtue
of the good intentions things will sort of work out
because you give them the tools and the bricks and something will
happen yeah but i would assume that
that there's an additional coordination on top of
that yes not not i don't necessarily mean like top down direction but there
must be additional especially in to to deal with intangibles of the process
right there must be let's say communication information yes playing a structuring
role. Could you explain that?
Sure. Sure. So one thing you said made me want to fill in a little blank that
I left there is that structurally we have people making sure that these houses
are not going to fall over tomorrow.
They make sure that the roof is done properly with the concrete and all that.
There are people who are watching that.
But in terms of,
The rest of it, basically, someone like myself is making sure that all those things take place.
Does this always work out, or does it sometimes also fail, this process? It fails sometimes.
I have a few examples.
Okay. See, it's often due to lack of communication between two coordinators
on our side or their side.
The people who are coming from foreign countries.
And one case, we were doing it
on an island that had no vehicles on it anywhere, and it was very remote.
And the only way to get the raw materials there was by boat,
like those Venetian boats which you punt with a long end for miles and miles.
And it was really tiresome. And the Japanese college students that year,
they had just unloaded a bunch of boats and they were totally exhausted.
But this one other coordinator from the project who was a little senior to me,
he insisted that they wake up in the middle of the night and go and do it again.
And then I knew at that point that it was not going to work.
These guys are just going to say, I'm not going to like it at all.
But then I said, if anybody wants to come, they're welcome to come.
And I said, I'm going to go. I'm going to load the boat and unload it.
And if anybody wants to join me, they can.
And a few people came, but it left a very sour taste in their mind, in their mouth.
And they didn't come the next year, actually.
So it took a year for them to recuperate from that.
But so intangibles in the end have to be constructed, right? So we have to our mind,
assign a label or a construct or a
process to or a value right a
rule to an intangible so and
you mentioned trust so how do you
manage trust then in in this situation like
in the case also of these students who might feel in some
sense abused right so how is trust sure they
probably felt a little bit um vulnerable and
not you know i probably i
should have protected them a little bit more because that's because
i'm for them i'm the protector from outside influences and and but but really
um they've over the next few years of our collaboration with them and and this
is not just the housing project other projects as well we we build up that trust through our own.
Actions that's the that's what i feel is most important we see that people are
ready to to to make some kind of sacrifice of their own to further this noble
project, whatever it may be.
And then we share that same value and also showing some humility,
showing some flexibility, some maturity.
All of these qualities go towards us really trusting the character of that person
and then say, look, I trust you fully.
At one point, we can just say, whatever you say, we're going to go with that.
And then they say, okay, on your side, you take care of all that. We trust you.
Now, do you see a trade-off here between trust, which is in some sense also given, right?
And the need to explain objectives?
Because you could say the more trust you lose in the situation,
the more in some you have to cudgel your participants by explaining why this
is all very relevant and important. Do you see a trade-off there?
Could you say a little bit one more time? I'm trying to understand what the trust and goals, right?
So for instance, if someone loses trust in leadership, then leadership could
respond by saying, oh, I will explain in more detail why this is super important
for the whole world and everybody and you included. Therefore,
you should follow my lead.
If I trust the leader or the a coordinator blindly you don't need to tell me
anything about planning on doing because I'll just follow you right so do you
see also a trade off between goals explanation and trust yeah also yeah,
Yes, I, as a leader of sorts, I will, I mean, I've learned to ask a lot of questions
before I ask them to follow me.
You know, I need to know what their limitations are, what their goals are and
all that, make sure that I can help them achieve those.
And they ask me a lot of questions also. So I think clarifying those goals ahead
of time is really, really important.
And then after that, once we're in the thick of it, it's a lot of just,
you could call it blind trust.
But there's also every night, another thing I should point out,
every night we have meetings about how the day's work went.
And then even the students, everybody participates in groups.
And then we talk about how it went. Was it successful?
What didn't work and then if it didn't work then
the next day we don't do it we don't wait for the whole project to
end okay so so
that also means there's a collective if you want
interpretation and meaning generation stage yes
yes would that be a good way to describe it yeah i mean they the meaning what
they learned from that day they they we tend to look at it sooner than later
so So we understand what did we learn and then we can leverage that for the next day.
And, um, and also funny stories. And it's, it's a time to kind of relax and,
and get out of your head and get out of, you know, that exertion and then just
sit and reflect without, uh, any judgment.
And so I find it's very helpful for us, any collaboration.
Right. But then how many, so how many people have gone through this process?
Thousands uh-huh just just the um the housing project alone i mean there's somehow we i i got,
engrossed in that topic but there's a lot of other you know examples right and
how many but how many different cultures uh for that for the uh housing project or,
let's start with housing and then in general okay so the the first few um.
Projects alone in the housing were about
each time about 10 to 15 countries and um
we got up to about 20 20 countries and i think our biggest group was about 200
people at once and that was this was another challenging one they landed in
Ahmedabad the day that the Godhra incident took place.
Are you familiar with that? Yeah, the Ghotra incident, do you know about that, Paul? Please explain.
This was when, it is a very controversial thing, this is when a train got burnt
out that was having Hindu pilgrims.
Supported by the Muslims, and then the Hindus attacked the Muslims in the state
of Gujarat, and thousands were killed in civil unrest.
I mean, they were lynched, and it was like, really, it was a bloodbath,
and it was a communal fight between the Hindus and the Muslims in the state of Gujarat.
Very, very, very, very, very difficult.
And that took place as the Japanese students and other people from around the
world were on the airplanes to land right in ground zero.
So we hid for three days in the city and then we drove to that place where we
were building the houses.
And it was scary in the beginning, but what happened,
these everybody wanted to come they they
said even if you had told me before we got on the airplane we still wanted
to come right and then very hard work but
they they bonded with the local people
and they learned a traditional dance and then actually when the when the governor
of the state came who was now the prime minister they before him and amma was
our inspiration he um they about 150 students were doing a traditional dance
in the traditional dress and that was the the thing that made them so happy.
Right. Because what I want to get to is individual difference and cultural difference.
That's why I want to look a little bit at the number. In this whole process that you now describe.
How many individual failures are there that people just drop out of the process,
they cannot keep up, they cannot adhere?
What's your dropout? Yeah, I'm not so high.
Actually, there was one woman who came after the tsunami in 2004.
She came for rebuilding houses in the southeast of India where the tidal wave hit, the tsunami hit.
And she came to this site once.
And then she just never came again. And it was too hot for her.
And I didn't know, but she had a psychological problem that she didn't notify us about.
And she wasn't taking her medicine.
That might not help.
Yeah, yeah. And there are some problems like that.
But usually, oh, another problem, I'll tell you, sharing a failure,
is that in Kune one year, I didn't pay enough attention to the kitchen conditions.
And dozens of people got food poisoning. And every day we were taking three
or four people to the hospital for IV.
But some of those same people came again.
They really like it. Right. Not food poisoning.
But that's interesting, right?
Because it shows that there's a generic process here that seems to work.
But now do you see any cultural differences there? Because you have people from
dozens of different countries. Oh, yeah. Does that affect the process?
It makes it more complex, for sure.
And I and the others who are helping make it go forward, either from the foreign
side or from the local side.
We all understand that we have to make some adjustments of our own without burdening other people.
And we have to sometimes talk
individually with people who are having a problem sometimes having a big group
discussion about certain factors that need to be addressed whether it's a foreign
issue or a domestic issue and so there's sacrifice I would say is involved to make things.
Right because it means you have to spend more
energy more time you know and sometimes you
know it's really hard to be one of the leaders because you don't get a lot of
sleep you know you sometimes don't get food and you're walking long distances
it's over 30 degrees celsius right so yeah it's without without wanting to tempt
you to to let's say make racial stereotypes or cultural stereotypes,
What are the main dimensions on which you see this variability?
You could, for instance, imagine that people from certain cultures have not
really been trained in speaking up, while in other cultures they speak up too much.
So what are the main dimensions you see there in these cultural differences
in the context of collaboration?
Collaboration um i it depends on
where i am because i've done
it in so many countries that i i basically
go by the culture of that country because it
it's the safest way i find because look we're doing it here in australia or
fiji or papua new guinea this is their country let's all try to adapt to their
culture and then it's easier to get people to collaborate in that because they realize that,
well, no, this is not US, this is not France,
it's not UK or something like that. So it makes more sense.
And that then also requires that I have to understand that culture,
or whoever else is coordinating.
Like in Papua New Guinea, I had the country director for or the CHI,
Clinton Health Access Initiative.
And then he was very helpful in bridging that gap. So I was a newcomer to that country.
So you give me the solution, right?
Because in some sense you're saying, well, we built in a reference,
a cultural reference, and that's where we are. That's the host culture.
Yeah. But the first question is, what is the variability across the different
cultures that you have identified?
Because apparently, you need
to ground it, right? You need to put a reference in order to overcome it.
Yeah. I find that it's somewhat due to the nation of origin of that person,
but I find it's kind of more personality, really.
There are very fastidious Indians, and there are some careless Japanese people,
but not not as many as there are I would say like careless Americans because I'm from America.
I have a question that kind of rides
off on that question because I was gonna if I can
just interrupt so I know a lot of the talk has been
about goals right common goals and things like that but I
was just wondering and it's kind of related to what Paul just
asked you people you have one
common goal like say building a house is a goal and but
I find that even something as tangible as building a house the
way that people understand the goal can be very different and
so i was wondering if that that has a cultural element to
it or not just like what paul is asking right what is
the variable thing is how and you were saying it's more of an
individual thing and not necessarily a cultural thing but
even in terms of understanding the goal is it do do
all people of one culture understand the goal in a
certain way from a different cult group is there
a cultural aspect to understanding the goal i definitely
i i'm but i'm not
so sure i i think the
personal perspective is what actually determines the final experience of the
person but my my experience is also that people come in with some preconceived
notions about what's going to happen through this collaboration.
And that's definitely a cultural thing that they're coming, you know,
like, I don't know, like a US, somebody who's a, actually, I'll give you an
example of a guy from Australia.
He was working in the road transportation department in Australia,
in Adelaide, and he has built so many roads.
So he's got it in, he's an engineer and he's just looking at it from that perspective.
All right, we're going to make a road and everything.
No, but, uh, but when he got there, he realized that, you know,
a lot of it is just digging holes, you know, with your own two hands and that
the rock is in Gujarat after the earthquake and the ground is so hard that you only get blisters.
You don't get, you can't dig hardly at all.
And, and another guy from France, he broke his pinky finger on the first day
and, and And he had to decide whether he was going to keep lifting,
you know, these hollow blocks or just take it easy.
And he kept doing it. There's a guy named Tejas.
So they kind of continued their participation while leaving their expectations aside. side.
And then one thing I've noticed about people is that conclusion of that two
weeks or three weeks, however long it is, that is the most important part for them, the closure.
And that determines a lot of their experience. They come with certain expectations
and ideas and fantasies about how it's going to go.
But then at the end, just seeing that
family occupy that house for the the first time and
everybody crying or the children's looking so
happy with their new rooms when they were living in a
shack until then you know that's that then they forget about all those ideas
and they just feel so satisfied that they could even come so and that part is
not such a cultural thing it's just your humanity that makes you realize that
that's what i feel right Right.
So how do you deal with dissent in that process then?
So for instance, if you break your pinky finger, you might also at some point
say, or at the moment this happens, you're in pain, like, look, sorry, that's it.
I'm going home. But so dissent is of course, because people will be exhausted and tired.
How is dissent now managed?
We don't push anybody. If they want to leave, we do everything we can to help them.
It is challenging, some of these things, being in a disaster area.
In fact, I was sort of recalled from the ground zero in 2011 in the Japanese triple disaster.
Disaster um i i went there with the idea that i i wanted to stay there a long
time and and help but i was the only person that had to go back because i had had a surgery earlier,
and the board of directors said there's too much radiation so you have to come
back i was a little sad about that but i felt they have my best interest in
mind so a little bit of dissent in my mind but all these things whether you're
the one had that is forced to go home or you're the The one who wants to go home,
we have to be practical and rational.
Right. So, Shanta, we looked now at your experience with also very concrete
projects. We have examples.
Yeah. In your own career, you also went to offers a training school,
you said earlier, where they will train you in a very specific way to manage human collaboration.
Operation, which might be actually rather different in how you have been doing it.
So could you maybe highlight a little bit?
The difference yeah i i think i i didn't
uh explain it properly perhaps but i was accepted but i ended up taking that
job in japan and okay so you didn't really participate in that you know i've
trained myself for it but i ended up getting going to boot camp in an ashram okay exactly,
all right so but actually that was a really
good lesson too by the way okay why was
that a good lesson um because actually there
was a lot of work i mean those days we didn't hire any any uh workers to do
the work so we were the ones doing the concrete and carrying everything and
the girls would also do it too
you know so so girls here means adult women you know not not child labor,
i don't understand right so so and and the idea is that you know we have to be flexible
because the work is very strenuous and
you if somebody needs to take a break
you just let them because that's the that's the
way it is and also sometimes the work changes we'll take a big pile of wood
and move it somewhere and then you realize that no it's not supposed to be there
where it's supposed to be somewhere else and and really it's um it's all about
flexibility here because things change in a setting like this. Right.
So to make it now a transition, so you did convert, right?
And you joined an ashram and you follow Amma.
And in some sense, you could look at this dedication now to also a religious
framework as also a way to structure human collaboration, right?
But if you want, there are principles also in this religious commitment that
structure the way in which people can collaborate.
So could you elaborate on that a bit? Very good point.
Very good point. Yeah, I mean, if it were not for that background,
that foundation that we are working upon,
a lot of other things could be going on that would not necessarily be condemned in another setting.
So, I mean, it is foregone conclusion that we have to value certain things.
And and if if someone just um completely
ignores some of those values then it's pretty much you know clear that he's
in the wrong and then we can call him on it um so it would be things like patience
humility forgiveness i mean typical uh spiritual qualities that all the faiths would
probably would respect and and
then also compassion and you
know I think these qualities and many
others also are willing to to adjust to
other people when they when needed this is like
the I guess you would call the lubrication for
that machine of collaboration in in this setting And I find that really the
concrete results are a tangible edifice that is built on the foundation of all
these values, the intangibles.
And without that foundation of the intangibles, I don't see how I could have
done any of these things. Mm-hmm.
I mean, I didn't do it. Everybody else did it. But could we elaborate this a
little bit? Because now we have the intangibles.
The intangibles are values that are also grounded in a religious framework.
Is there some structure to that? Because you listed a few, like generosity, humility, and so on.
But is there some structure to that? Is there, let's say, an absolute ground
zero value that it has to start with, and you build the others on top of that,
for instance. Do you see some structure to that?
Yeah, it would have to be selflessness, I would say.
And that comes from a deeper quality or state, which would be love,
unconditional love, which everybody wants, but typically they don't want to give it to people.
So it's a challenge to evoke that emotion or that flow within ourselves so that we can be selfless.
It doesn't come selflessness doesn't just come by
chance right so that is probably the core principle in my mind and so the core
principle is love and from love comes selflessness yeah right but now these
other values um like you mentioned generosity humility how do you related,
to that very good question
okay so um the to
back up a little bit in the indian philosophy the
the core principle is really um non-duality so
it means that there's only one in this
it sounds kind of you know um pokey you know but the idea is that if there is
a divine power somewhere That means it's everywhere and it's we are that also
that's the concept So so that means that if you if there's no duality then that
that means you just like you Value your own life.
You should value everybody else's life exactly the same way because of that
oneness So from that is where that that real love comes because it's not a dualistic
love It's it's a monistic one and and from that the idea is that compassion arises.
Because just like you, if you cut your finger, you're going to treat that,
whether it's the left hand or the right hand.
So like that, whether it's your pain or somebody else's pain,
you treat it the same way. That would be the compassion.
And so from compassion, you find this selflessness.
Because like the mother has compassion for the baby, the baby needs a lot of
attention or has to stay up all night. The mother will stay up all night.
That's how the selflessness comes from compassion.
And then from selflessness really comes all the other qualities,
I would say. Right. You know, humility, patience, and so on.
Now, but so that raises an interesting question for the discussion on collaboration, right?
Because now in collaboration, we have to set goals.
Sure. Now ego comes in because you could argue that goals are on many occasions
articulated through ego.
Ego because some ego is going
to say this has to happen yeah yeah so
so if you dial down ego and we
go to love and and selflessness we might
rise in the goals that collaboration can achieve so how do you see that that
potential contradiction it's uh where is the contradiction again please I was
thinking you really hit the nail on the head,
but then I didn't get the... But that's why I said potential.
Potential. The point is the ego might shape goals.
It's ego that says we need a village here and not there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? But then to actually make that happen,
we need collaboration. Now we've got to dial down ego.
Right. I, well, I think.
One of the ways is to not participate in it.
You know, if someone else is having that problem, then, you know,
Amma has given an example like we can flow like water instead of trying to,
you know, if there's an obstacle,
you don't have to try to break it and destroy it. You just flow around it.
I'll give you an example. Again, I have so many stories from the housing project.
We were unloading bricks from a truck,
a lorry, and Kerala is the state where we've done a lot of it,
and Kerala is a mostly communistic government,
and the Communist Party,
I mean, I don't know a whole lot about communism.
But it doesn't seem to be like the original.
It's just a lot of striking and and you
know they they will try to uh stop traffic
and all that so what they did the local union
came and told us that we have to pay
them even though we're unloading the
the bricks ourselves they said you're taking our
money so you have to pay us for it and uh
and and then we just didn't listen to them
we just kept unloading and but we didn't fight with them either
and we just they they had their goals
we had our goals and uh we didn't
ask them to help us or anything but we kind of
flowed around that issue so that we didn't have any conflict it's not within
the same collaboration but if there are people who are having a temper tantrum
or something during a project there's always a way to flow around that and not
try to um scold them or control them,
or criticize them.
Just let them calm down on their own.
Go ahead. Sorry, I interrupted you.
No, I was saying we try not to react to that. It's a dead end.
The ego level is a dead end for all of us.
What I'm looking for here is what are the costs to the approach you take.
Because in some sense, also the examples you give, in some sense,
the collaborative process is a reactive one.
There's a disaster somewhere. There's someone who doesn't have a house.
So the world is dictating the goals to you.
And now you respond based on love and compassion. Yeah.
But I could say, but as humans, as humankind, we also need to set proactive
goals that are purely future-oriented, where we say, look, we're going to have ecological collapse.
And if we don't take measures now, even though that's also a reactive one,
but the more we project ourselves in the future, the more we have to become proactive.
And then maybe to flow around the problems is limiting.
I think that maybe it's a slight clarification we can do here.
I think the goal doesn't necessarily come from, which is I kind of typed out
in the chat, the goal probably doesn't necessarily come from ego,
but the drive to achieve a goal probably comes,
you have to have some ego to actually to work towards a goal.
A goal can come from compassion.
Somebody is homeless, they need a home. So then the goal is to build a home for a person.
There's no ego necessarily in the goal. but for example
for you to be involved in that probably does have
some levels of ego i mean this is what
i would think i don't know i know but the funny the point is i'm looking for
the limitations of the definitions that we have on the table right and and one
potential limitation i see here is that goals are in some sense given to you
by how the world is is evolving.
So then the question would be, is there really no role for ego in this whole process?
And if there is a role for ego, how is that managed?
So I'm not excluding the possibility that goals can be set in different ways
or that actually has no role.
But I want to really try to be as precise about it as we can be.
Like if we talk about proactive goal setting, can the collective do that purely
driven by selflessness?
Yes, I can say, if it's okay, were you going to say something more, Dr. Bhavani?
No? Okay. So I can give you a brief failure story and an up and coming project.
Project so uh just before corona
or uh covid struck i was
trying to rally up a lot of support for us
to grow our own vegetables in chicago ashram
ashram or the center there and uh because we have a lot of land and and and
ama has told us to grow our own food we have to be self-sufficient so i i was
getting everybody out there and i was putting on my boots and you know work
clothes and going out there and trying to set an example.
In retrospect, I think there was some ego of the leader role,
you know, the white knight who comes in and saves the day, you know,
which that's the, I don't like that attitude, but sometimes it may creep in every once in a while.
And at that time, we were all fired up.
But the problem was, you know, at that time, I could have given a little more
consideration, I would say, to the age of all the people and myself.
And I actually hurt my knee because I overexerted in the process of trying to
get everybody motivated.
And it was a little too much heavy on the leadership side.
Could have been not so bold and pushy. So that one we lost.
Couldn't harvest everything that we had put in the ground it's very challenging,
but the next project that we have coming up now is extremely full of a lot of foresight which is,
a project uh about um
research scientific research about the efficacy of a lot of um herbs which we've
been growing there different Western Indian Chinese etc and use those,
scientific findings to improve those and we're going to grow them all there
and then they're going to be made into two medicines and then they will also be
applied to wellness on site and
also getting those approved by the FDA in America or something like that.
So this is a very farsighted vision that has come up in recent days.
And we're very happy that we are on that path because it is not like a reactive
one so much. It's an example of a rather novel and a forward-looking collaboration.
Right.
Okay, so...
If you now look at the domain of collaboration and the way you shape it within
the context of the processes where you're active, what do you see as the most
critical challenges right now?
Yeah, I was thinking about that earlier because the challenges tend to be,
one would be like a myopic approach.
You know, looking at things from a short-term standpoint,
not really looking like you're saying for the future and just running the collaboration
in a way that produces some short-term success.
But in the long term, it's going to affect the collaborators and the growth
of that whole process. So that was an example of it.
Then in that year when we had to take the Japanese students out in the middle
of the night, that was definitely a myopic approach.
That's one example. Another thing is, with youth, an example from youth activities,
in one place, I was with the coordinators for the youth summit that year.
And it was a bunch of, I mean, I'm middle-aged now, so I'm not criticizing that,
but it was a bunch of middle-aged leaders imposing their wisdom on the youth.
And there was no empowerment going on there.
I feel that disempowerment is a big challenge because if you're top-heavy on
the leadership, that can really discourage the motivation of the people.
Other things are, like I said, the white knight approach can be very destructive
sometimes. It doesn't get people working together.
The lone wolf approach also, I think, is dangerous too. and.
Yeah, like holistic approach, I feel is really critical for all these things.
I'm looking at it for multiple layers of benefit, like kind of like biomimicry,
you know, approaches, so where we can get multiple results from one action.
Uh so they so the opposite would be the atomistic approach the non-holistic approach um so,
yeah i i we had a failure like that
in japan once a few years ago when i was
still living there we we wanted to have everybody
grow a very potent um indian
sacred herb called tulasi or tulsi and we we got everybody excited about it
but we didn't really take into account the climate there the climatological
challenges there and what happened was people who tried to grow them were sad
when they died in the winter and so it was it was not a very holistic approach,
right yeah and another one other point that comes to my mind is that you know
um some people are When they look at the collaborations,
they analyze micro points too much, and they lose track of the macro vision.
So the macrocosm is what gives meaning to the microcosm, really, in a way.
Because if you're forgetting what the macro vision is, then there's no point
in talking about all the details because you're not going to achieve it.
Sometimes that happens i find and then some
people are really nitpicky about little things and they lose track
of the macro vision right finger
pointing is another problem that happened at the at the hospital uh site everybody
was pointing saying it was his fault her fault why everything is delayed instead
of trying to put together the you know uh what microsoft project the software,
yeah so i was trying to fill
in 1500 tasks in that in that
uh but there's a 1500 bed 1500 tasks
there and all i got initially was just
finger pointing and there's there's no of
these predecessor relationships coming out nobody
wants to talk about what the option you know the real
issues are and so that took a long time to you know hack my way through the
jungle all of that right so these are a few examples in my experience right
well that that that's a really um good list but with the finger pointing how
do you overcome finger pointing.
Um i what i did i mean it was my first time trying to do something like that i said you know,
that's fine all right he may be completely the
worst person in the whole world whatever it is you please
just tell me what you're trying to do if it
were if it were a perfect world what would you want
to do and then they start telling me you know because they
get excited they they kind of regain their vision you
know when they're focused on somebody else being the
bad guy they lose track of what their goal is their you
know their end game so to speak and then they start
when they can talk about their professional specialty and and share what they
really want to do then i can note that down and i say how long will that take
you what has to happen before that and what has to happen before that and then
i finally got everybody's information and then they thought I thought it was
going to be ready at the end of the year,
and I told them, what you're telling me, all the data you gave me is told it's
going to be not ready until next spring.
And it wasn't ready until the spring. Right.
But we calculated it properly because they cooperated or collaborated.
Yeah. Okay. So now, did we learn anything from the COVID period we're in now?
Like that collaboration yeah yeah a lot of it um a lot of mistakes of course you know,
um it's it seems to be arrogance for
us to understand the mode the modus operandi
of covid you know it's we
thought we knew what we were doing and all that was a
good lesson about human ego and the
fact that I mean what I learned is some
of it is metaphysical I guess you could say is that I believe
it's the total mass of all the coronavirus on the planet is like one gram or
something supposedly and and it's basically controlling everybody on the planet
that little one gram of something and it shows how powerful subtle things are you know you could
take a huge bomb,
and you still wouldn't stop the whole world.
But something very subtle can be very powerful. That's one thing about life in general.
Did we lose him?
Hopefully he will come back. Yeah.
But why don't you ask him about this definition of ego from Amo?
Yeah, no, it actually goes well with his Tulasi story also.
Yeah, I could. I also didn't know how much time we have.
Yeah, that's up to Shanta, right? But it looks like he's frozen in time now. So we have forever.
It's interesting what he was talking about in terms of, let me text him on WhatsApp.
What he was talking about in terms of the thing about putting that,
it's like reorientation towards your goal that help people come back.
So this keeps on coming up. Yeah.
Does collaboration never happen without a goal?
Paul? I think it's absolutely at the heart of it. There must be a common goal.
Right. It cannot happen without it, right? I'm just wondering,
have you ever come across even one?
He just texted me. One example that it happens without a goal?
No, I don't think we would speak of collaboration in that case.
Then it can be cooperative.
He's trying to join Mac again. Maybe you have to let him in?
Yeah, but I don't see him yet. I'm ready to click the button,
but he has to appear first.
I'm asking to restart soon. No problem.
How much of collaboration also depends on respect and just making small changes
to what your worldview is and somebody else's worldview.
If you are trying to accomplish something as opposed to somebody else that you're
trying to bring on board.
I think that's a very essential aspect of actually converging, right? Oh, sorry.
Yeah, Shanta, I'm sorry.
My fault, I think. but but i understand
you you try to give us a signal like okay this has
been enough so no no i can
talk about this all night don't worry okay great so now look we we will not
we will not hold you up uh much longer but um so then a more sort of open question
here is also do you believe humans,
humanity on this planet will ever be able to establish sustainable collaboration.
Music.
I'm a bit of an oddball on that, I think. If I speak my mind freely,
I feel that if we want nature to collaborate with us, we have to collaborate with her.
And and and basically it seems to me that what's happening now in the world is uh a.
Sort of a reaction from nature teaching us how
to to rectify our course to you know because we're kind of we're not on a wonderful
course at this point doesn't seem like a fold over we can do it we could be
doing a lot better um and so mother nature seems to be leading us in that way
so if If we don't figure it out ourselves,
I have confidence that Mother Nature, being our mother, will guide us the right
way and show us where we really should be focusing.
Like how people felt early on
in the in the now if everybody's kind of tired but
where they learned a lot early on like how how you
can have a good life and a and a fulfilled life
and a and you can have contentment even amidst this
if you just change your perception so so
i think we're going to be if we don't
create sustainable or
we if we don't achieve sustainable collaboration now we can expect more lessons
life lessons from from mother nature and and as the results of our own doings
as well so when we start learning from those experiences,
I think we'll be on the way to a sustainable collaboration.
But are you optimistic that we will be able to learn from those lessons?
Yes, because I mean, I see nature as my mother.
So I think the mother knows what the child needs and the mother will keep giving
those lessons until the child really gets it.
She's very patient also. But in your answer, a lot of suffering also is implied then.
It could be. It's up to us how much suffering has to be experienced.
Mm-hmm, yeah.
So, Bhavani, do you have another question or observation to share?
Because then I will move to our last question.
No, it's okay. Go ahead. Are you sure?
Yeah, it's okay. Okay. So, Shantan, but if you could change one thing in humans,
to make them better collaborators and also, in some sense, save their own existence
on this planet and save the planet,
what's the one thing you would change um.
In one of the scriptures of India, there is a saying that by nature,
the mind is facing outwards.
I mean, you could probably call it extrovert. Is that what we say in English?
Um i i don't
propose to rewrite the whole you know
story about man but and humans but
um i think it would
be if we want to have a sustainable collaboration and if we want to have a better
world then a little more self-reflection built into the human being would go
a long ways Because I think a lot of our failures come from the lack of self-reflection. Right.
Swami Shantan Nandanda Puri, thank you very much for this conversation.
Thank you so much for being patient with me with all my wild ideas.
No, but what's really interesting and puzzles me tremendously is this juxtaposition
of the tangibles and the intangibles, right?
Because it also means, in some sense, in your model of collaboration,
you really critically built on the ability of the mind, this extrovert mind,
to impose an interpretation on reality.
To give meaning and value to the tangibles. That building a house actually stands
for something much more profound.
So where does that ability come from? Is that learned or is that just given?
Also the idea of the one, right? To identify with the one, which goes through
the history of ideas from the old traditions till now. Yeah.
Where is this coming from?
I think it is innate. I mean, you know, that's my field of life.
I'm in that already, so it's not fair to say that.
But my experience also confirms it in many ways.
I mean, it's really, I don't know how to explain it.
It's beyond words when you're finished with
a project like that and you've got the person
who flew thousands of miles just to
do something that was very difficult to help somebody and then
you know when they're saying farewell it the
the tears are so profound and i
i can just remember one example that what i couldn't stop crying myself there
were there was the recipient of the house and there was a japanese girl who
was uh the the leader of one of the groups and she was representing her group saying
farewell they sang a japanese song to the
to that people like a very sort of sad song
like saying goodbye um it's a traditional japanese
song and and then just hearing the
the the tune and the lyrics even though they couldn't understand what they meant
the woman started crying something touched her and the japanese woman who was
standing in front of her she took um that woman's They both had like a towel
around their neck, like you do in hot places when you're working.
And she took that woman's towel and she started wiping her eyes.
They're wiping the tears from her eyes.
And when she started doing that, the woman who was wiping her tears started crying.
And then the woman who was crying took her towel and wiped her tears.
And then I started crying, but nobody wiped my tears.
But I mean, I'll never forget that. Every time I remember it, I just get that emotion.
And there's no reason why I should. It's just part of our humanity.
And the feeling of and there was another guy on that same uh year he was a karate master.
Really the tough real tough guy you know and he
was kind of showing off his strength and everything and i would i was looking
at him every day when i would go to his site and i was like when is this guy
going to just kind of be a real human being you know and it was the last day
his house was uh it was a widow named Lakshmi.
She was maybe almost 70.
And her house, if you could call it that, if you just were to tap it,
it would fall over. I can show you a photo. It's really sad.
And then somehow he got so attached to this woman because every time they would
come in the morning, she didn't have anything to offer them,
but she would run around, well, as much as a 70-year-old lady can.
She was scurrying around the neighborhood to gather water, a little bit of coffee
grounds and sugar so she could serve them some, what we call,
well, in English would be black coffee.
She would make that for them and give it to them. And they knew that she didn't
have anything, but she was going around and getting it from everybody every day.
And so he got so attached to her when we were saying goodbye,
he just completely collapsed.
And he was whimpering like a dog, you know, like a little baby.
And his friends had to pick him up. He was so emotional.
And so if someone like that can experience those feelings of the heart, I think anybody can.
Yeah, but these are really meaningful examples because it means that the wish of humans, the drive,
the unconscious drive to bond with other humans, yeah
it's also yes love this love dimension you meant
you you mentioned earlier is really then
the foundation that we also collaborate and
accept each other's idiosyncrasies yeah
there's no other way i mean the best example that that we can really get is
that of a mother and a child because the baby is inside of her you know it is
oneness really um but then Then somehow duality takes place.
The baby comes out and then it's duality. But still for the mother,
it's still part of her emotionally.
So if we could all feel that way about everybody, think how different the world would be.
But are you implying that if you want cultural development and economic development
is sort of pulling us away from.
From this intrinsic, more open-minded, love-oriented, selfless, collaborative state?
I don't think it necessarily has to be that way.
I don't propose to be a historian,
but there are traditions and there are all these historical accounts of better times in old days.
I like to feel that human beings are a little more humane in the old ancient
times, not like 500 years, like thousands of years ago.
And I think every country has their version of that sort of the golden years of that country.
And I think that in those days, even though the technology was not the same
that we had, they had their own version of that.
And they were growing, and they were prospering, and they weren't hurting other people.
Of course, it changed at one point, and it became darker at times.
But I still believe that that is possible.
It is possible to advance as a country, as a society, and as a people without
the negative side effects.
And the key to that is going to be, from an administrative standpoint,
it would be holism. holism, which is a holistic perspective and then philosophically as well.
Well, thank you very much. That was extremely insightful.
Hi, you listened to one of our podcasts in the series on collaboration produced
by the Ernst Trommel Forum and the Conversion Science Network.
You can find more episodes on our website.