Chade-Meng Tan: How Google Discovered Mindfulness [Transcript]
In dialogue with Walter Link on GlobalLeadership.TV
Meng
[00:00:00] There are very few qualities that you can trait that will improve every single aspect of life. Mindfulness which leads to mental and emotional health and fitness changes everything.
Walter Link
[00:00:25] Welcome to Global Leadership TV. My name is Walter Link. I’ve always been fascinated by the question of how we move from our many challenges into our full potential as individuals, organizations, and whole societies. In this television series I inquire with some of the most innovative leaders from around the world about how they manage to move from inspiration to real change. Please join us in this exploration because we all make a difference and we all can get better at it. Therefore, on our website, we not only show other dialogs and publications but also the kind of practices that these leaders and their organizations used to move from inspiration to real change.
INTRODUCTION TO MENG
[0:01:21] I met Meng at his home near Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. After teaching himself at a very young age how to program computers, he joined Google as employee #107, long before Google became the world’s defining tech companies. However, Meng’s impact reaches far beyond software engineering, to developing a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence program called Search Inside Yourself, that he taught to thousands of Google employees. In 2015 Meng left Google to dedicate himself to spreading his inner work approach to other global organizations as well as pursuing his core agenda, to co-create peace around the world.
[0:02:11] I first met Meng in the context of advising and training senior leaders of his Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. Please join me as I explore with Meng how to introduce the ancient wisdom of mindfulness into the fast-paced reality of modern business and society.
Meng
[0:02:41] Hello, my friend!
Walter Link
[00:02:42] Hello! Nice to be with you.
Meng
[0:02:43] Thank you.
THE MINDFULNESS INNOVATION: SEARCH INSIDE YOURSELF
Walter Link
[00:02:45] So, I want to start with asking you about your work at Google. Google of course is known, by now I think in the whole world for its extraordinary technological innovation and also for the way it changed our daily lives. And maybe less known is the culture that underlies this creative and innovative potential ,and maybe even less known is the Search Inside Yourself Program that you created in Google which brought mindfulness and emotional intelligence to thousands of Google employees, also called Googlers, and really had possibly a very important impact on this culture.[00:03:45] So, I wonder whether you can tell me a little bit about this program and also its impact as you observed it and also how it was measured.
Meng
[0:03:57] Search Inside Yourself is a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence program. It’s actually about cultivating emotional intelligence using mindfulness. So it’s not entirely accurate to think of it as a mindfulness program, it’s actually an EI program, at least when I created it that was the intention.[0:04:18] The motivation for creating Search Inside Yourself was actually this very simple small thing, which was, all I wanted to do was to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime. That was all. The motivation, so, on the critical conditions of world peace, the question I asked myself is, ‘How?’ And I figured it out – the way to do that is to scale inner peace, inner joy and compassion worldwide, because if we scale this worldwide we can have the conditiosn for world peace in one lifetime.
Question is – ‘how?’ And I figured it out, the way to do that is to align this peace, joy, compassion with success and profits. Because if we go around spreading peace, joy, compassion you will not stick, people will cheer and they go home, nothing changes.
However if we make it in such a way where we teach people to be successful, to be profitable, with peace, joy, compassion being the necessary and unavoidable side effect of that training, then you will spread, then with the conditions of world peace in our lifetimes. Question is – ‘how?’ And I figured it out. I figured out, the way to do it is to create a curriculum for emotional intelligence because EI is premarketed. Everybody knows EI is good for my career, good for profits. But nobody really knows how to create it at that time, in the early 2000s, and we knew people, the people who spend a lot of time cultivating training the mind, we know how to train the mind to create those specific qualities. And all we had to do, is to do that in the way where the goodness is unavoidable and what came out was Search Inside Yourself.
THE BUSINESS CASE FOR MINDFULNESS
Walter Link
[0:06:12] So what is the actual business case, the business data that you discovered within Google? And maybe you can also bring in the aspect of the culture of Google, this very innovative culture that is in a way behind the products and services we see.
Meng
[0:06:37] The business case, is that there are very few qualities that you can train that will improve every single aspect of life. And one example is physical health and fitness. If you improve your health and fitness, every single aspect of life improves, right? You’re happier, you’re more productive, you have fewer sick days and so on and so forth, you feel better and the whole enchilada. And from a company perspective the same is also true. If all your employees are healthy and fit, it also by aggregate benefits the companies in the same way. They’re more productive, they work better with each other and so on. You find the same effect in mindfulness because mindfulness is essentially training, is essentially the health and fitness for the mind.
HOW MINDFULNESS EMPOWERS LEADERSHIP, INNOVATION AND STRATEGY
Walter Link
[0:07:41] And of course what Search Inside Yourself says, is that you can also train mindfulness, in that mindfulness also is a quality that has this powerful over-reaching impact. Say more about that. Because I think many people know about physical fitness but they don’t necessarily understand why mindfulness has such an important impact.
Meng
[0:08:06] Yes, precisely. Thank you. In the same way that physical fitness changes everything, mindfulness, which leads to mental and emotional health and fitness, changes everything. Let me give you a few examples. One example in training mindfulness is to begin to develop the ability to calm the mind on demand, no matter what’s happening. And if you can do that, the first thing that happens is you become a better leader. If there’s a crisis, in a meeting room everybody is panicking. You alone have the ability to calm down your mind and think clearly and through your calmness people could see that you have the stability and then what happens is everybody will look at you and they feel that you’re the leader. Why? Because that is leadership. Part of leadership is the ability to think under fire and that ability is highly trainable with mindfulness.[0:09:06] So that’s already the first benefit, already compelling. Second thing is creativity which is a little bit surprising. And I sort of discovered this by accident. I’d be meditating a lot and a lot of time suddenly ideas have come up and at first it was very annoying. I was like, by a good idea my meditation will be interrupted! And then I realized something later. I realized that it is not a problem, but it’s a feature. Right? Which is that if you can bring a mind to a space that’s calm and clear, it increases a probability of good ideas coming up, and a few engineers who took my class in Search Inside Yourself in Google, they actually had that. They had problems that they didn’t know to solve and through meditation they figured out how to solve those problems. And one of them told me he got a promotion because of that.
[0:10:02] So for most of us who have to use creativity for a living, we know how to take a break, take a walk, take a shower or something. To rest, to calm down and think more creatively. But if you also have mindfulness and meditation in your repertoire, it works even better because that is the ability to bring the mind to a state that’s calm and clear.
So that’s the second benefit, creativity. Another benefit is resilience, emotional resilience which is when you practice mindfulness, your mind becomes calmer. You see things more clearly. What that does is that when bad things happen you are able to see it clearly and then therefore you have the ability to deal with issues strategically. For example, what I teach is doing in three steps.
The first step is just calming your mind. Just by calming the mind already you solve half the problem but that’s not enough. And then the second step is to deal with the affective aspect, dealing with the emotions in the body, seeing them for what they are and not getting swept up by them. And then the third step is the cognitive step, is to think about it with wisdom and compassion.
Think about the big picture, think about how this can help grow, how this can help relationship. But it has to be in this order because if you don’t, I mean, thinking of the big picture is the solution. But you can only do it after you deal with the emotionality and you can only do that after you calm the mind, and practicing mindfulness creates the ability for this process to happen. And of course it also reduces stress and it reduces number of sick days, so the whole enchilada, my friend.
GOOGLE & STANFORD: MEASURING THE IMPACT OF MINDFULNESS
Walter Link
[0:12:26] So, the way I understand the Google culture is that it’s very autonomous culture in which individuals can get together and they have an idea and they can just take an initiative. And when this initiative attracts enough others and becomes, you know, sizable, takes in a way critical mass then it can become a strategic project or you know aspect of the Google work. My understanding is in a certain way your program also it started out with some people experimenting and having good results, and then it became a very big program. Tell us something about what happened along that way. And also what kind of data you collected that, you know, helped it to become such an important aspect of the Google culture.
Meng
[0:13:29] You’re precisely right, that was precisely how we worked. We have a lot of autonomy. When I was an engineer we had this thing called 20% time which is we can spend 20% of our time doing whatever we want, solving whatever problem we want to solve. And so I figured I want to solve world peace. And then the whole spiel I talked about earlier how to do that. So I decided the curriculum for emotional intelligence which we jokingly called Search Inside Yourself because it was funny, and how do we – And of course I did not know how to do this at the time. And the way we solve problems in Google that we didn’t know how to solve – just get the world’s top experts in the room, hammer something out, try it out, whatever doesn’t work, go back and fix it, so launch and iterate.[0:14:18] So I got in Daniel Goleman, Mirabai Bush, and Norman Fischer at the time and later on, we added other people later but those are the initial people and we just hammered something out. And the first product kind of worked. The second one kind of worked less, but the third one was better and so on. And after like couple of iterations it became – it was very good. It was so good that in the third or fourth iteration people – there was a huge buzz. People talking about it. Everybody was telling their friends, ‘this thing changed my life.’ Which is why we had no problems getting new students. Every time, I remember even for a long time, every time we opened a class the class is filled up in 30 seconds. 30 seconds class is full. Because everybody heard from their friends it changed their lives, so they all like voluntarily participate in the class.
[0:15:13] So the measures we have – we have done a project. So the first measure we have is the course satisfaction. So are you happy you the class kind of thing. We have – I think we have either one of the highest, or the highest satisfaction score in all Google. Can’t remember exactly which one. That’s one. One piece of data.
The other piece of data we have is qualitative feedback. So the question we ask, ‘how does this change you and what will happen to you?’ A lot of people tell us, ‘this course changed our lives or changed my life.’ And to me, that is the highest – the highest feedback I can get, the best that changes your life, it can’t get better than that.
[0:16:05] Another thing we did, we did a study involving Stanford University to study the effects of this training and we did – I think, can’t remember how many, some dozens of psychological measures before and after. And what I remember is every single measure improved. So stress or perceived stress went down. Empathy went up and a couple of others, but every measure that we did–every psychometric measure improved.
THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF MINDFULNESS
Walter Link
[0:16:40] And that is of course also why the program is now very successfully introduced to high tech industry, but even to heavy industry around the world. So, you created the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which took this teaching beyond Google and to other companies. And I was talking with the director of mindfulness at SAP, the German software engineering company.
Meng
[0:17:11] Yes, Peter.
Walter Link
[0:17:13] Peter, exactly, and he was now talking not only within his company where there is a huge waiting list for people to participate in this program, but he is speaking even to the leaders of some of the big heavy industry engineering companies in Germany. And you know, that in other countries in the world also there is a similar success. So tell us a little bit about the story how this then went from Google to Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute and how this impact is now spreading.
Meng
[0:17:56] When I started this SIY, the goal was very clear. The goal was not to benefit Google, the goal was to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime. And I did it as an engineer in my 20% time. The class became so successful that eventually that the People Operations, which is our HR function, People Ops offered me a job to do this full time. And so I remember talking to the vice-president, the senior vice president, and I made it very clear to him. I said, look, this work is not about benefiting Google. This is about the world. World peace. If it’s about Google I’m not doing this, it’s just wasting my time.[0:18:41] And his response, to my surprise, was “of course.” He didn’t – he didn’t grudgingly say “whatever.” He was like, “Of course, it’s about benefiting the world.” And because he said that, I happily moved over to People Ops, and from day one onwards, we knew this is eventually going out because it is about world peace.
SCALING IMPACT: BEYOND GOOGLE TO GLOBAL INDUSTRIES
Walter Link
[0:19:02] And now of course you are taking this work to different kind of companies as we said not only, you know, high tech companies in other countries but also heavy industry and also in very different cultures in which maybe even the terminology of mindfulness and emotional intelligence may at first create a surprise or maybe even a resistance and yet you’re achieving also very high impact in these organizations. Tell us how, what you’re finding out there, what the data is, what the experiences are that you’re hearing from people and from companies.
Meng
[0:19:44] So to this work and to speaking to many, many people outside of Google and outside of Silicon Valley, I discovered how universal, how universally valid mindfulness is. So companies and industries and businesses don’t expect to be receptive. The Midwest, GM, the financial sector, the UN, Germany, they’re all very receptive. For example, it turns out GM, sorry not GM, Ford. Ford’s chairman, Bill is a meditator, has been meditating for 20 years.[0:20:30] In the financial sector, you’ll find this person called Ray Dalio. He runs the biggest hedge fund in the world, extremely successful, and he openly says that his meditation practice is one of the important factors of his success. I think he says the most important factor of his success. So, the question is why. And I think first and foremost is efficacy. This thing really works. And that’s why it is applicable everywhere and because it works so well I think what all that we needed was to be able to express it in a language that people understand. So, which is why I express in a language of signs, in the language of business and once we have the language nailed down and people try out for themselves, they are all set. As simple as that.
WE CAN EXERCISE MUSCLES OF MINDFULNESS
Walter Link
[0:21:46] There is another very interesting and maybe more surprising similarity and I think that you and I and other people who have been practicing mindfulness have discovered – that over time you are actually exercising another kind of muscle, the muscle of concentration, the muscle of sensitivity, the muscle of mindfulness. So, you in your book also make reference to that that there is actually a lot of similarity. Speak to that a little bit.
Meng
[0:22:21] When we bring attention to the breath, when it wanders away and briweng it back – every time we bring it back it’s like doing one bicep curl for the mind and for the brain. Specifically, I mean there are couple of areas, but specifically, the prefrontal cortex, the executive center of the of the brain, the part of brain that makes executive decisions and also regulates attention. So, if you bring back wandering attention a lot, this thing gets very strong over time and over time you get mastery over attention.
THE NEUROSCIENCE OF MINDFULNESS PRACTICE
Walter Link
[0:22:54] Besides exercise I think you bring in another aspect here that is also in a way making it much easier for modern people to accept and begin to practice mindfulness and that is also that our time now the ancient wisdom that was discovering realities through the science of mindfulness, is now being confirmed by experiments of western science that make it in a way easier for the western mind and even the global mind now to believe in these things and give them the benefit of the doubt. Say something more about the scientific aspect of Search Inside Yourself and more generally about the discoveries that are happening at this time in the fields of neuroscience and other sciences.
Meng
[0:23:56] In the history of science as relating to life, to human life, I can think of two examples where there was a seminal discovery that changed everything in the field of medicine. I think the seminal discovery was germ theory – the discovery that germs like bacteria and viruses are the causes of disease. And once we figured it out everything changed. And in the field of exercise the discovery was actually done in 1927 in Harvard.[0:24:30] The discovery was that the physically fit person is physiologically different from an unfit person. That the body is different and most importantly that you can do training, go from one to the other, so your body can change from unfit to fit with deliberate practice. I think those discovery changed everything. In this case of meditation and mindfulness the seminal discovery I think was the realization that the advanced meditator is neurologically different from a normal person.
[0:25:16] Examples: If we look at, for example, I think the really early brain studies of advanced meditator, and his name is Matthieu, he was the subject. Matthieu’s brain, his happiness measure. So you can measure happiness by measuring the left-right tilt of activation between left and right prefrontal cortex. His activation, if I remember correctly, was eight standard deviations from the mean. It was like the extreme end of happiness. Fascinating.
Matthieu can do things that were astonishing to a neuroscientist. For example, when he was asked to meditate on compassion, you see a spike in his brain activity. And I saw the chart and I was like, I don’t know what this means. I’m not a brain scientist.
[0:26:08] So I asked my friend who is a brain scientist. And he says, imagine an elephant charging at you, so imagine the fear coming from the elephant charging at you and the imagine the positive side of that experience, I mean the positive equivalent of that feeling. Imagine being able to bring that up on demand in one or two seconds. Matthew can do that. It was fascinating. I mean they have been talking about this like mastery of your mind, happiness, joy and we were like, ehh, I don’t know what that means, but now we can measure, you can see in the FMRI, that Matthew can do amazing things with his brain, bringing up extreme happiness in a matter of seconds.
A PROMEGA CASE STUDY: MINDFULNESS IMPACT IN 8 WEEKS
Walter Link
[0:27:18] So there is also an early study that was done in another high tech company called Promega.
Meng
[0:27:23] That’s right.
Walter Link
[0:27:24] Tell us about that.
Meng
[0:27:25] Yes. That study was published in 2003 and it could be the first study ever done of its kind in the high tech company. So these are not like graduate students, these are not Zen practitioners. These are normal people. People like you and I in the company doing that, coming to work and so on, right. So, they went to eight weeks of mindfulness training. And the result was – was astonishing. Couple of things happened to them. The first one expected finding is that the stress went down and not just went down, it was after a few weeks I think six months later it was measured again and it was at a new low. So they were able to sustain the lowest stress. So that’s the one finding.[0:28:13] The other finding was the flu. So, they were given the flu vaccine after – after the eight weeks of training versus a control group which didn’t go to mindfulness, also had the flu vaccine. And those who did mindfulness they responded better to the flu vaccine and they became more resistant to the flu. Just fascinating. The third thing that came out was that if you measure their brains they were happier, right? And I think the most astonishing thing about this study is that it took eight weeks. It wasn’t like eight years. And the other astonishing thing is these are normal Americans. These are not Zen people in a monastery. They are normal Americans in the workplace and it worked – it worked well for them.
HOW TO SCALE UP TO CREATE WORLD PEACE
Walter Link
[0:29:04] So now we have been speaking of how this program is impacting first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley and now spreading to companies in other sectors around the world.
Meng
[0:29:16] Yes.
Walter Link
[0:29:17] But your intention is to reach world peace.
Meng
[0:29:22] Yes.
Walter Link
[0:29:23] And of course that involves many people that are not working in companies that can not afford to pay for the fees that companies can afford to pay and it involves also big systems that haven’t necessarily opened into this kind of way of practicing. How are you intending to really take this to the scale that is your passion?
Meng
[0:29:57] There are two ways, there are two things we’re trying out. The first is technology. So, the obvious thing is an app. So we’re trying our app to see if that works. And of course the app is complemented by live teachers. So that’s the difference between our approach and most other approaches which is just an app. So, we can try this one. The other thing that is further down the pipeline which is not ready yet, is if you have a device to measure mindfulness. I think that will change everything. Something you can wear on the head as a head band and it knows whether – you can quantify mental and emotional states.[0:30:39] Then you can measure things for yourself. It’s like, Oh! Since I’ve practiced mindfulness for one week –it used to take me three seconds to get 30% calmness. Now I think I need only five seconds, something like that, you can quantify those. And because you quantify those it changes everything. So that’s one direction, the technology.
The other direction is people. The idea is that in order to tip into world peace, a billion people need to practice wisdom and compassion. And the billion people need to be guided by one million experts in wisdom and compassion. So the idea here is to eventually train one million experts and find ways to support them with a good life people. So these two things together hopefully will create the condition for world peace.
MENG’S PERSONAL JOURNEY: FROM MISERY TO HAPPINESS
Walter Link
[0:31:44] When you talk to people you have three standard questions you ask them. And one of them is for people to tell you their life story, because we now basically started the story with you creating this program. But there is a genesis to you growing up and you discovering mindfulness and going through your own practice and process. Tell us your story.
Meng
[0:32:18] My story, okay. Let me tell you my story. Once upon a time there was a happy and healthy and smart kid who grew up to be a well adjusted, joyful and successful adult, and that wasn’t me. I grew up miserable. So happiness was not something that came naturally to me. Happiness was something I had to learn and it was a good thing because it turns out I found out that happiness is a skill and the way it happened to me was – so I was miserable my whole life and so when I was growing up, couple of things happened which was kind of fascinating in their own right. Starting from my country, Singapore.[0:33:07] When I was born Singapore was a third world country, very poor. Unemployment was like 40% or something. Some ridiculously high number. By the time I turned 21, we were the first world country, it is one of the highest per capita incomes in the world in 21 years. One generation. My family followed a trajectory. When I was born my family didn’t have enough to eat three meals a day. By the time I was 21, we were rich. My own trajectory, when I was born I was – I used to be very smart. My IQ was measured at 156 and I taught myself to program a computer at 12. I won my first national programming award at 15. And so I’ve always been smart, but I was very unhappy. Not just unhappy I was miserable.
[0:34:04] So what changed for me was in 1991 just before I turned 21, about a month before I was 21, I listened to a talk by an American woman who became a Tibetan nun and her name is Venerable Sangye Khandro. And in her talk, in the middle of her talk, there was one sentence and the sentence was, she said, “it’s all about cultivating the mind.” And then, then I had my Oh! my God, I had that moment where suddenly everything in my life made sense. I understood everything. And I remember at the moment I say from this moment right here right now I’m a Buddhist and I’m going to learn meditation. And so I did that. One or two months after that I found a teacher and I learned meditation and then I discovered that I can learn to be happy.
[0:35:02] And then fast forward a few years later, I realized something. I realized that when I was young, by default I was miserable. If nothing’s happening I was miserable. Couple of years later, after a few years of meditation by default I was jolly. If nothing’s happening I’m happy. And so, I shifted from one extreme to the other extreme and I was like if I can do this, this useless person, if I can do this, everybody can do this. So that motivated me to want to make me accessible to the world so that we have the condition for world peace.
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: HOW MENG TRAINED HIS MIND
Walter Link
[0:36:03] And so what happened during these few years, you know, what’s the story behind the story. What happened that led you to this beautiful transformation from being this miserable young man to having a default of happiness.
Meng
[0:36:25] Most of it was practice, was the mindfulness. So first starting with calmness of mind. There’s a lot of internal turmoil and then once you can calm it down some large percentage of your time, quality of life is already improved. That’s one.
Second thing is clarity of mind and clarity there are couple of different aspects. One aspect is seeing that – seeing sources of joy everywhere. I just had water couple of minutes ago. I was thirsty, I had water and that moment was very joyful. It was – it’s a very thin slice of joy, it came and went in like one or two seconds and most of the time we just miss it.
[0:37:14] So part of mindfulness practice is being able to capture those moments and finding it everywhere. So that increases joy and thereby increases happiness.
Another aspect of clarity is noticing absence of things, for example right now what is absent is pain. I’m not in any physical pain. When I am in physical pain, I would be like ‘aah, I wish if I didn’t have this pain, I’d be so happy.’ When this pain goes away, I forget I will be happy but with mindfulness you forget less. So every now and then, you remind ourselves, Oh! my God I’m not in pain right now, I’m so happy. So that’s another level. And then on another level it is dealing with emotional pain.
[0:38:05] There is very powerful discovery if you do a lot of mindfulness and meditation in general, which is this discovery that my thoughts are not me, I am not my thoughts. You stop believing your thoughts and if you don’t do that, if you believe in your thoughts, if you continue on a downward spiral – I’m a horrible person, everything’s going badly, blah blah blah – and it becomes real, becomes reality. And once you realize my thoughts are not me, it’s like, suddenly you just calmly and clearly you look at those thoughts as they arise, as they fall, as they stay, they are just thoughts.
LEVELS OF MENG’S MINDFULNESS EXPERIENCE
Walter Link
[0:38:40] So who you then are is the mindfulness that can perceive the arising and ceasing of the thoughts and there are new thoughts and even new emotions and new physical sensations, they come and go and you remain in this awareness that you are actually this mindfulness, this awareness that can perceive.
Meng
[0:39:04] You’re right. And actually there are three levels of experience, the first level is just as you said, the thoughts and the sensations and the emotional feeling and I remain I. I am not all these things. That’s only a first level. The second level is you go deeper than that which is the realization that there is only the observer and the observer has no identity. And I can even describe it. It is actually fairly easy to describe. So sometimes when you dream, you sleep you dream, you are a different person, right? Your identity is different. So in this process as you force it and dream one identity is abandoned and the other identity arises. So I was – once I was in this meditation where my mind, while fully awake, went into that state.[0:40:01] When one identity was abandoned before the identity arises, there is a stage where there’s no identity. There was only the observer. And there’s no Meng, and that was freedom. Because most of all, a large percentage of our suffering comes from identity, comes from I, me, mine. So, realizing that identity is entirely mind made, suddenly you realize all this suffering, a lot of this is unnecessary. So, that is a second level. There is a third level that I have experienced and probably there is more but this is all I have is that there is only the observation and there is no observer. And this one is hard to verbalize.
[0:41:00] I can tell you a little bit and you may be familiar because you – you always listen to sounds, right? In your job you are very sensitive to sounds. So I was meditating, this time I was doing meditation on sound, and the difference between meditating on sound and meditating on a breath, is that sound is perceived by the mind to be not embodied. So, when you are doing a breath, the mind says it is this body. But the sound mind says it’s external and when that was happening suddenly the sense of self disappeared and there was no self. There is no observer. And then the moment after that a sense of observer arise to recognize there was observer in the previous movement. And that went on for a while. And the realization that even the observer is entirely created by the mind and that is freedom.
MENG ASKS ABOUT WALTER’S STORY
[0:42:25] I know you’ve been doing a lot of inner practice yourself, Walter, and so what is your insight on identity, non-identity and how it relates to your work and to the world?
Walter Link
[0:42:37] I think for me also like in your story, I had a story of personal healing and development. But my story was also strongly impacted by the context in which I grew up which was Germany waking up to the Holocaust and waking up to the destructiveness of the Second World War but also the destructiveness of the environmental crisis and kind of the question about how do we deal with this not only on a meta level of politics and economics and so forth, which I was very interested and I studied and worked in but also what does that have to do with me personally, right?[0:43:31] That I discovered at a certain point. At first I couldn’t really let all this difficulty come so close. It was safer to deal with it intellectually, at a distance of thinking about it and discussing it. So, what I was therefore interested in was to discover in a way in me like what needed to open up, what needed to change. And maybe a simple way of saying that is to really find my deep humanity. If you were using Buddhist terminology you might say, the deep compassion, the deep clarity that’s possible, so that I can see the world for how alive it is and that I can try to live in this world in a way where I don’t create harm but where I start to contribute to healing.
[0:44:33] And next to my business life this was kind of like for you the wake-up call of wanting to really serve humanity and the question of how to do that. So in my work for example with communities in which there is a lot of strife, civil war or other kind of political polarization or contrarian ideas, how can we open up our awareness to see others as human beings to really recognize and the living being of nature and to find them technological and business and political solutions that somehow allow us to live that full humanity.
CO-CREATING A GLOBAL MOVEMENT
Meng
[0:45:25] One more question for you my dear friend. How do I help you save the world?
Walter Link
[0:45:31] I think what we are doing together with as many others as we are co-creating a field of awareness and a field of experience and application where a very kind of materialist civilization recognizes that there is great value to the kind of work we are offering in the world and kind of view develops through experiential means not just through theoretical understanding a different view on what’s important in life, what we want and also what’s possible. Because I think many people, yes, they want happiness, they want peace. They want sustainability, they want different conditions for themselves, their children, their friends, the world, but they somehow think it’s not possible, it can’t be integrated.[0:46:32] We can’t have an economy that is also sustainable. We can’t have success and be happy and so I think in the first level we are already collaborating and you are already helping me by what you are doing because you are opening up the awareness of many people to that.
I think the second level is to, as I said, learn from each other’s approaches and see how they can benefit each other. And thirdly also I think this being together and having this mutual support, however closely we collaborate on a day to day basis, just to know that there is another person who does this work and who doesn’t think that this is too ambitious.
Meng
[0:47:31] Somebody as crazy as I am.
THE POWER OF HUMOUR AND NON-ATTACHMENT
Walter Link
[0:47:34] Exactly, you know, and this is actually just your response brings up the last question I have for you which is I think it’s very freeing and delighting that you bring in a lot of humour in the way you do your work and also you are present in this interview. So say something about the importance of humour that you display so naturally.
Meng
[0:48:09] As a teacher there is a saying among wisdom teachers which is that when they open their mouth to laugh this is when you can put in the pills of wisdom. Which is why Buddhist teachers tend to be a funny lot, partly because I mean when you practice meditation you become lighter inside and then the humor just comes out naturally and partly because it’s encouraged in this field because you want to be funny, so people laugh and then you can put wisdom pills in all their mouths as they are laughing. So for me it’s both. Doing big things for the world, it is important to realize that we own the effort, but we do not own the outcome. Success is not in my hand. What is in my hand is effort.[0:49:04] Success is depending on what you believe in, in the hands of universe or in the hands of God. So therefore the only way to do this work is to have only expectation on effort and no expectation on success. And the only way to do that that I know of, is to preserve my sense of humour. And so that’s why I’m funny because if I’m not funny I can’t do this.
Walter Link
[0:49:33] On our website www.globalacademy.media, you will find additional footage, other dialogues with innovation leaders from around the world and also the hands-on practices that help them and their organizations to move from inspiration to real change.