A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (27 page)

At the very least, we ought to take spirituality seriously because of its demonstrated ability to improve our lives—something that might be even more valuable when so many of us have satisfied (and oversatisfied) our material needs. For instance, some of the maladies of modern life—stress, heart disease, and so on—can be allayed by attending to the spirit. People who pray regularly have been shown to have lower blood pressure, on average, than those who don’t, according to research at Duke University. Johns Hopkins researchers have found that attending religious services cut people’s risk of death from heart disease, suicide, and some cancers. Other research has found that women to whom life’s meaning and purpose was central had higher levels of the types of cells that attack viruses and some kinds of cancer cells. Still other studies have found that the belief that life has some higher purpose can buffer people from heart disease. According to a study at Dartmouth College, one predictor of survival among open-heart patients was how much patients relied on faith and prayer. People who go to church (or synagogue or a mosque) regularly also seem to live longer than those who don’t—even controlling for a host of biological and behavioral variables.
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This is tricky and controversial territory—in part because so many charlatans have invoked the power of God to heal the infirm. If you depend on spirituality alone to battle cancer or to mend broken bones, you deserve the disastrous results that will follow. But a whole-minded approach—L-Directed reason combined with R-Directed spirit—can be effective. As I noted in Chapter 3, more than half of American medical schools now have courses in spirituality and health. According to
Newsweek,
“72 percent of Americans say they would welcome a conversation with their physician about faith.”
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That’s one reason some doctors have even begun taking “spiritual histories” of patients—asking them whether they seek solace in religion, whether they’re part of a community of faith, and whether they see a deeper meaning in their lives. It can be a delicate topic, of course. But as Duke University’s Dr. Harold Koenig told
Religion News Service,
“We’re at the place we were 20 years ago when doctors were asked to take a sexual history.” Koenig estimates that between 5 and 10 percent of U.S. physicians take some form of spiritual history.
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Like narrative medicine, this merging of spirit and health is part of a more sweeping trend in medicine to treat each patient as a whole person rather than as a receptacle for a particular illness.

One other field that has begun to take spirituality more seriously is business. If the Conceptual Age is flowering with postmaterialist values and deepening our “meaning want,” it makes sense that the phenomenon would take root in the place where many of us spend most of our waking hours.

Five years ago, Ian Mitroff, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, and Elizabeth Denton, a consultant, published a report called
A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America.
After interviewing nearly one hundred executives about spirituality in the workplace, they reached some surprising conclusions. Most of the executives defined spirituality in much the same way—not as religion, but as “the basic desire to find purpose and meaning in one’s life.” Yet, the executives were so understandably concerned that the language of spirit in the workplace would offend their religiously diverse employees that they scrubbed their vocabulary of all such talk. Meanwhile, Mitroff and Denton discovered, the employees were hungering to bring their spiritual values (and thus their whole person rather than one compartment of themselves) to work, but didn’t feel comfortable doing so. Read this report and you can almost picture a river of meaning and purpose being dammed outside of corporate headquarters. But here’s the kicker: if that spiritual tide had been released, the companies might have been better off. Mitroff and Denton also found that companies that acknowledged spiritual values and aligned them with company goals outperformed those that did not. In other words, letting spirituality into the workplace didn’t distract organizations from their goals. It often helped them reach those goals.

As more companies grasp this idea, we are likely to see a rise in spirit
in
business—a growing demand from individuals for workplaces that offer meaning as well as money. According to one recent U.S. survey, more than three out of five adults believe a greater sense of spirituality would improve their own workplace. Likewise, 70 percent of respondents to British think tank Roffey Park’s annual management survey said they wanted their working lives to be more meaningful. And in the last few years groups such as the Association for Spirit at Work and events such as the annual international Spirit in Business Conference have emerged.

We’ll also see a continued rise in spirit
as
business—commercial ventures that help a meaning-seeking population slake its craving for transcendence. Recall the candle industry of Chapter 2. Or think about the proliferation of yoga studios, evangelical bookstores, and “green” products from the Toyota Prius to the cosmetics of the Body Shop. Rich Karlgaard, the savvy publisher of
Forbes,
says this is the next cycle of business. First came the quality revolution of the 1990s. Then came what Karlgaard calls “the cheap revolution,” which dramatically reduced the cost of goods and allowed people around the world to have cell phones and Internet access. “So what’s next?” he asks. “Meaning. Purpose. Deep life experience. Use whatever word or phrase you like, but know that consumer desire for these qualities is on the rise. Remember your Abraham Maslow and your Viktor Frankl. Bet your business on it.”
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Taking Happiness Seriously

“Happiness,” Viktor Frankl wrote, “cannot be pursued; it must ensue.” But from what does it ensue? That question has vexed humankind since a humankind was around to be vexed. But now the field of psychology has begun to provide some answers—thanks largely to the work of Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the “positive psychology” movement.

For most of its history, academic psychology focused on everything
except
happiness. It studied disease, disorder, and dysfunction, and largely ignored what made people satisfied and fulfilled. But when Seligman took the helm of the American Psychological Association in 1998, he slowly began guiding the ship of psych in a new direction. Seligman’s research, as well as that of many other scientists who have turned their attention to satisfaction and well-being, has begun to unlock the secrets of what makes people happy—and to encourage the wider world to take happiness seriously.

“You’re not going to find the meaning of life hidden under a rock written by someone else. You’ll only find it by giving meaning to life from inside yourself.”

—DR. ROBERT FIRESTONE,

author and

psychotherapist

According to Seligman, happiness derives from a mix of factors. Part of it depends on biology. We’re all born with a relatively fixed natural range of well-being imprinted on our genes. Some of us tilt toward the gloomy end of the spectrum, others toward the cheery end. But all of us can learn how to reach the upper portions of our individual range—where happiness can ensue. Among the things that contribute to happiness, according to Seligman, are engaging in satisfying work, avoiding negative events and emotions, being married, and having a rich social network. Also important are gratitude, forgiveness, and optimism. (What doesn’t seem to matter much at all, according to the research, are making more money, getting lots of education, or living in a pleasant climate.)

Marshalling these elements can help create what Seligman calls the “Pleasant Life”—a life full of positive emotions about the past, present, and future. But the Pleasant Life is only one rung on the hedonic ladder. At a higher level is what Seligman calls the “Good Life”—in which you use your “signature strengths” (what you’re great at) to achieve gratification in the main areas of your life. This can turn work from what Studs Terkel called “a Monday to Friday sort of dying” into a calling. “A calling is the most satisfying form of work because, as gratification, it is done for its own sake rather than for the material benefits it brings,” says Seligman. “Enjoying the resulting state of flow on the job will soon, I predict, overtake material reward as the principal reason for working.” The Good Life is good for business, too. “More happiness causes more productivity and higher income,” Seligman writes. There’s even an emerging school of management thought built around the tenets of positive psychology.

But the Good Life is not the ultimate. “There’s a third form of happiness that is ineluctably pursued by humans, and that’s the pursuit of meaning . . . knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying them in the service of something larger than you are,” Seligman says.
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Going beyond the self in this fashion is not much different from what those meditating nuns and monks were doing. And as rising prosperity and abundance allow more people to engage in this pursuit, and as more of us summon the will to do so, Meaning will move to the center of our lives and our consciousness.

T
HE BESTSELLING
business book of the last decade has been a thin little volume with a strange title.
Who Moved My Cheese?
is a business fable that has sold millions of copies around the world. The book tells the tale of Hem and Haw, two mouselike critters who live in a maze and love cheese. One day, after years of finding their cheese in the same place, Hem and Haw awaken to find their precious cheddar gone. Somebody, yes, has moved their cheese. Hem and Haw react differently to this discovery. Hem, the whiny mouseling, wants to wait until somebody puts the cheese back. Haw, the anxious but realistic mouseling, wants to venture into the maze to discover new cheese. In the end, Haw convinces Hem that they should take action to solve their problem rather than wait for the solution magically to appear. And the micelings live happily ever after (or at least until their cheese moves again). The moral of the story is that change is inevitable, and when it happens, the wisest response is not to wail or whine but to suck it up and deal with it.

I don’t disagree with the message of
Who Moved My Cheese?
but I do take issue with the metaphor. In the Conceptual Age, Asia and automation may constantly be moving our cheese, so to speak. But in an age of abundance, we’re no longer in a maze. Today the more appropriate metaphor for our times is the labyrinth.

Mazes and labyrinths are often lumped together in the popular imagination, but they differ in important ways. A maze is a series of compartmentalized and confusing paths, most of which lead to dead ends. When you enter, your objective is to escape—as quickly as you can. A labyrinth is a spiral walking course. When you enter, your goal is to follow the path to the center, stop, turn around, and walk back out—all at whatever pace you choose. Mazes are analytic puzzles to be solved; labyrinths are a form of moving meditation. Mazes can be disorienting; labyrinths can be centering. You can get lost in a maze; you can lose yourself in a labyrinth. Mazes engage the left brain; labyrinths free the right brain.

There are now more than 4,000 public and private labyrinths in the United States. They are surging in popularity for many of the reasons I’ve discussed in this chapter and in the rest of this book. “In an age when many Americans are looking beyond the church pulpit for spiritual experience and solace, a growing number have rediscovered the labyrinth as a path to prayer, introspection, and emotional healing,” reports.
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You can find them everywhere: in downtown squares in Switzerland; village greens in England; public parks from Indiana to Washington state to Denmark; universities in northern California; jails in southern California; and at houses of worship such as Riverside Church in Manhattan, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Methodist churches in Albany, a Unitarian church in San Jose, and a synagogue in Houston.
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Labyrinths are also showing up at hospitals and other medical facilities—like the one in the photo on page 229 at the Bayview Medical Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

This labyrinth, which I walked one morning not too long ago, is composed of four-inch by four-inch brick squares. Eight concentric circles, formed from similarly sized white squares, orbit a center space that’s roughly two feet in diameter. Along the outer edge a few squares have single words stamped onto them:
Create. Faith. Wisdom. Believe.
Visitors often choose one of these words, and then repeat it, like a mantra in meditation, as they circle to the center. I began my labyrinth walk by heading left and walking through the first ring. As I looked around, I saw a few Medical Center buildings on one side and a parking lot on the other. Nothing transcendent about this. It felt as if I was simply walking in a circle. So I started again. To avoid distractions, I looked down. I focused my sight on the two curving lines that formed the outline of my path, and I began walking—as slowly as I possibly could. The lines curled around me. And after a while it felt a bit like driving on a long empty road. I didn’t have to pay much attention, so my mind slipped to a different place—and that had an unexpected calming effect. The experience, perhaps not surprisingly, was similar to the drawing course of Chapter 6 and the laughing club of Chapter 8. It jammed my powers of L-Directed Thinking. “A labyrinth is an escape for the right brain,” says David Tolzman, who designed and built the Johns Hopkins labyrinth. “As the left brain engages in the logical progression of walking the path, the right brain is free to think creatively.”