Toward 20.20 Vision:
Spirituality as the Fourth Bottom Line
Socially responsible investing, conscious capitalism, the triple bottom line and the evolving social capital markets have all been critical movements towards a more sustainable, integrated, just and holistic paradigm of business. They have changed the world in significant ways.
But they are not enough.
We have two eyes. Meister Eckhart says that one focuses on the outward and one on the inward. The social capital and socially responsible investment movements have been envisioned with an eye toward the external world. They have acknowledged and addressed that the way we do business and how we invest effects the world in which we live. With this eye, they envisioned the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit.
Now it is time for the inward eye to open, to awake to the possibilities of what it sees, what it knows. Without this inward eye, whatever we do will be incomplete, not fully whole. Without infusing our good doing with our sacred being, we will never attain what is fully possible, will be relegated to the lesser victory of change rather than the immensity of transformation. To achieve the radical transformation of economy and ecology that is needed now, we must adopt Spirituality as the fourth bottom line in business and investing.
We have to go soon. As Anne Lammott says, "In a hundred years, all new people." Knowing that, how do we bring our full humanity to bear in what we are doing, in how we are being? Just modeling the capital markets to fund clean tech and fair trade isn't going to do it. It's a step. It's great work. It matters. But it's change and not transformation.
Joseph Campbell said “When we talk about the world’s problems, we are barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.” We have to look within and ask ourselves what it means to be here. It is the question we cannot refuse to answer if we want to be fully human. Good work is not enough. Unless we are doing good work in a radically sacred way, we might as well go home.
We don’t want to use words like “sacred,” “love,” “intuition” in the quantifiable, mechanistic, linear world of business and finance, even in the social capital markets, where it strikes me as an even more heartbreaking and jarring omission. There, we have gone too far in trying to model the capital markets, which strikes me as akin to looking to FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina as a model for developing a new emergency response system.
If we leave the depth of our selves, our souls, our knowing, our hearts, the magnitude of who we are and the gift and grace and utter astonishment of being here, at the doorstep on the threshold of change, then anything we do, any venture, any investment decision, any business, will be as if from lesser angels. If we are not engaging our selves at this deepest level in the board room and the investment meeting, we are missing the point of being here. We are missing the whole show. And there isn’t another one.
When we disregard the invisible world, we fail to acknowledge the firmament from which everything sprouted, we fail to see and fully use the creative, sacred side of ourselves. We are only half awake. One eye is still closed. When we open it, we change everything. It isn’t a little thing, this eye opening. It isn’t the difference between a good view and a very good view. It is the difference between a better world and the astonishingly beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
What we can measure is too small for us. We make big decisions every day based on how we feel about things, situations, people. Yet somehow we forget that when it comes to investing and business. There we want to trust only facts, figures, numbers, data. Those are indispensable but they are not everything. As a culture we have moved away from trusting the wisdom of the invisible and unquantifiable, from ourselves and from our interconnectedness with everything, from relationship. We have found ourselves caught in the inexorable undertow, pulled away from the circular to the linear, the sacred to the profane, from community to the self, the unknowable to the certain, from partnership to dominion and from mystery to mastery. The consequences have been disastrous, for our inner and outer worlds. Both landscapes are ravaged.
This is nowhere more true than in finance and economics, where we continue to bow down to data even when it produces nonsensical results like an increase in GDP from the Exxon Valdez disaster or unimaginable riches from the continuing global collapse. There were margins and metrics galore in the CDO and mortgage-backed securities market; had anyone asked themselves if what they were doing “felt” right, we would not be in this mess. But we are. We are faced with a convergence now of opportunity and imperative to include both metrics and “mystery,” in finance, to emerge from this narrow band of knowing into a wide open field of possibility.
Sometimes the devil really is in the details, or rather the insistence on them above all else. There is a Buddhist tale that Satan and God were on a walk. God stops and picks up a piece of paper. Satan says, "What's that God?" God says, "Truth." Satan says, "Let me organize it for you." Sometimes truth just “is” and we don’t need data to tell us so. It is when we are presented with data that contradict are own deeply felt truths, that we often make decisions that we regret and do not serve us.
It comes down to how we want to live, to go about the wildly difficult task of being authentically human, present to our lives and aware of our interconnectedness with everything. Investing and business can be a visible expression of the sacred, the spiritual longings within us to connect with our fellow beings and somehow, some way, make a difference. The sacred nature of our work cannot be an afterthought, something that we open ourselves up to at spiritual retreats and close ourselves off to at the office or when we invest.
Humans are not simple; the problems we are trying to solve aren’t simple. It is critical that we, in this still nascent space, bring our full selves to bear in the colossally beautiful and complicated world in which we are living. We must open both of our eyes. When we do, it will change everything.
