Vor Zone: One's Journey to the Magic Land of Fulfillment

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Chapter One

Emotions Versus Feelings

In this time of chaos and turmoil in the world, where man’s inhumanity to man seems to be overcoming the better angels of our nature, it might seem as though evil truly is triumphing.

We are hostile and judgmental, narrow-minded and tribal, and seem to be easily succumbing to an us vs. them mentality. These attitudes may make us popular within our own echo chambers, but they cause deep divides between people, resulting in dissonance, conflict, resentments and ill feelings.

For a light example, let’s recall the Looney Tunes cartoon series depicting the Roadrunner and his eternal nemesis, Wiley E. Coyote, or Bugs Bunny and his constant foe, Yosemite Sam. Their adventures (and misadventures) contain lots of lessons for us.

Despite his best efforts (and the best equipment Acme Corporation can provide), Wiley E. Coyote always comes up short in his complex plans to capture the Road Runner. Some quick, beep-beeps and the Roadrunner is safe and sound, having thwarted the craftily laid plans of Wiley E.

The same is also always true of Yosemite Sam and Bugs Bunny. Not only does Bugs constantly foil Yosemite’s plans, (usually resulting in Yosemite getting a face full of gunpowder), but does so with a smile, a wisecrack and enough time leftover to enjoy a carrot.

Why does it seem that things always go easily for Bugs and the Roadrunner and so terribly wrong for Yosemite and Wiley E.? The former is going with the flow and the latter is facing all the opposition a salmon feels when it is swimming upstream.

The same could be said of the current state of much of humanity. We have come to honor and enshrine such collectively accepted tenets of thought and human behavior as extreme hubris (where we believe we can say anything to anyone at any time, with no respect, diplomacy or empathy for one another); ferocious competition (where all that matters is survival of the fittest); victimization (we believe we cannot control what is happening to us and use that as an excuse to do nothing and beat ourselves up); scarcity (a fear that there is not enough for all of us—whether that references enough money, possessions or power and not deserving youth, health, longevity, happiness and love); and Newtonian physical laws (wherein we are merely chemical reactions and that’s it — no thoughts, no vibrations—just bits of flotsam in a sea of reactions --chemical reactions and processes controlled by our DNA).

In this perpetual rat race, we have entered into, the majority of our human population remains tottering dangerously on the edge of a precipice, while only a small percentage of us actually thrive. In my example, Wiley E. and Yosemite Sam constantly remain in an incessant survival mode (like most of humanity), expending their energy in crafting sneaky traps for their adversary, doing so with no success and ending up having hurt themselves over and over again.

When those of us in business, for example, spend our precious time, mental energy and creative imaginations trying to beat our competitors or chase the Almighty Buck or wring the last ounce of work out of burnt-out employees, we are not better than Wiley E. Coyote or Yosemite Sam and our ultimate outcomes will be no different than theirs.

So how can we reverse those outcomes and end up with less stress ourselves, happier and healthier human beings, employees and bigger profits? By understanding some basic elements of what makes all of us, as humans, tick.

First off, most of us live in a world of feelings and react to those feelings, rather than controlling our feelings and thereby our situations. Since we are walking around banging into things (and people) without so much as the slightest understanding of why we are doing what we are doing, we tend to allow a lot of unexamined feelings to pop up, take root within us, and pop-up again or remain submerged/anchored/unnoticed and ever growing in the deep unconscious. For most of us, much of these feelings which translate to patterns are negative. We find ourselves ungrateful, envious, hungry, greedy, impatient, irritable, frustrated and, inevitably, burnt out. By allowing such feelings to occupy our minds, we have, (as do Wiley E. Coyote and Yosemite Sam,) beaten ourselves down.

Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner allow their opponents’ forceful energies to defeat them, turning all the negative energy directed at them back on to those who first sent it their way. That is true power—the power one gains while not struggling, but instead bending like a reed in the wind, in harmony with the universe, transcending the temptations and striving to better the world around them. The person who understands this will, like our cartoon heroes, thrive, prosper and live to thrive another day.

Let’s look at some examples of captains of industry who employed such understanding in their own careers:

Warren Buffet — the Wizard of Wall Street — is one of the richest men in the world, yet no one would accuse him of being a corporate raider, slashing and burning companies to squeeze the money out, trampling people along the way. Buffet is known for being a slow and steady investor, happy to offer free advice to all who ask and he still contentedly lives in the same modest Midwestern home he has had for decades.

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, didn’t so much fight their competitors; rather they won the minds and hearts (not to mention taste buds) of millions of customers, despite an inauspicious beginning. The company started in a Vermont gas station and grew into a fabulous American success story. Not only did they churn out great ice-cream, but did so while supporting small farmers and others in their community, as well as creatively backing non-GMO ingredients, fair trade, the Children’s Defense fund movement and many environmental causes.

In his all-too-short tenure as US Attorney for the Southern District (that which encompasses New York City and all its movers and shakers, including the lions of Wall Street), Preet Bharara used his office for the good of the people, not the powerful.

His work stood as a shining example for what it means to be a public servant with integrity, one who steers his actions by a moral compass. Through the cases he pursued, Bharara held fair and public trials and rid the marketplace of inside-traders, boiler-room fraudsters and other conmen. He said of the convictions that the people of New York deserve better and he fought on spotlighting violence against prisoners on Riker’s Island and demanded (and got) long prison sentences for would-be terrorists. While doing so, he reminded everyone that democracy only works when all of us… take up the cause of reform… and insist that our leaders serve the public good.

It is such people, living beacons of integrity, who help forge the path and keep the rest of us on the straight and narrow. By their efforts, they call forth the best in all of us. ¹

Such scruples also transformed the civil service of Singapore under the moral leadership of Lee Kuan Yew who saw it as his mission to eradicate corruption in government and empowered the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) to go after the big takers in the upper echelons of Singapore’s government.

Yew was no babe in the woods. He knew how the world worked, with under-the-table payments and graft, but he was determined to pursue what he called a clean wage meaning public officers’ salaries stayed competitive and transparent. No more would there be hidden perks for serving the public.

Yong Ying-I, Permanent Secretary for Public Service Division, said of Yew, who died in 2015:

We (the Public Service) take great pride today in being clean and capable, effective and exceptional. We probably take for granted the policies and practices, ethos and values, that shaped these outcomes. Many of our core policies were shaped by Mr. Lee…

As Yew said, "You should give of your best in the service of our people… It is in our interest to show that…there can be an honest and efficient government, which works through an efficient administration in the interests of our people. If we do not do our best, then we only have ourselves to blame when the people lose faith. Leaders must be prepared for such scrutiny to keep the system clean. We have to keep our own house clean. No one else can do it for us.²

With the help of these measures and Lee Kuan Yew’s honesty and moral leadership, the Service has developed a reputation for integrity, and Singapore has been ranked consistently as one of the least corrupt nations of the world.³

Another transcendental leader left us in 2013. Inventor and engineer Amar Bose who, as MIT professor and CEO of the namesake company he built, advanced discoveries in acoustics. His curiosity led him to push even further when faced with an obstacle and making more money was never the desired result — though he made plenty of it. It is what he did with that money that made him extraordinary.

With estimated sales of $1.7 billion, Bose ploughed most of that profit back into R&D, something Bose would have been unable to do had he gone the more predictable (and profitable) path of taking his company public, I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by MBAs, he said in an interview with Tom Clynes for Popular Science.⁴ But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before.

He shared his insatiable curiosity with his students as MIT as well, though not in conventional ways. Bose wanted to teach his students to question and think. Teaching, he said, has never been a priority at MIT; it’s mostly lip service. With a few very notable exceptions, the priorities are writing papers and making tenure. There were professors who had an enormous influence on me, but it wasn’t in the subjects they taught. The benefit came through conversations in which they conveyed their way of thinking. That was what I wanted to give to my students: I wanted to teach thought, not formulas.

He became a faculty legend at MIT. Bose’s engineering classes—one was described as Life 101 by a student course-review guide—ultimately drew mathematicians, physicists, biologists and students from all disciplines at the university.

William R. Brody, now the president of Johns Hopkins University, took Bose’s class as an undergraduate in 1962. He would walk into a lecture to 350 students, and you could hear a pin drop, Brody recalled. He commanded a lot of respect, because of the force of his intellect and his total dedication to the students. His class gave me the courage to tackle high-risk problems; it equipped me with the problem-solving skills I needed to be successful in several careers. Amar Bose taught me how to think.

The future, Bose famously told his students, isn’t in solving the problems to which we already know the answers. It’s in learning how to work through the problems you’ll experience in life, in any subject.

As Clynes wrote, The value of Amar Bose—and by extension, his company—isn’t so much in the things he has invented, but in the sense of possibility he inspires. Bose reminds us that we could all afford to be much more skyward-looking, far-fetched and curious, and that we could all believe more strongly in our own potential to create.

Bose was more than just a brilliant innovator and professor, he was a visionary and one with added to the betterment of the world through his integrity and morality. When he died, he left the majority of the stock of Bose Corporation to MIT, where he had found an intellectual and spiritual home. MIT President Susan Hockfield remarked, upon receiving the gift, "Amar Bose gives us a great gift today, but he also serves as a superb example for MIT graduates who yearn to cut their own path…His insatiable curiosity propelled remarkable research, both at MIT and within the company he founded. Dr. Bose has always been more concerned about the next two decades than about the next two