In 2013, there was an awesome event in New York organized by Kristina Kincaid, Lesley Freeman, and Michael Ellsberg. The event took place and was hosted in the beautiful Manhattan downtown apartment of Jose and Carmen Arozamena. The evening began with a private interview of John and Marc for an article on Forbes, talking about the important interface between their two books, Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey and Your Unique Self by Dr. Marc Gafni. In the interview, specific focus was given to an idea that John and Marc have developed together: the Unique Self of a corporation.

The second part of the evening was a public conversation between Marc and John, masterfully facilitated by Michael Ellsberg and followed by an invitation-only dialogue with twenty-five convened millennial leaders. John Mackey is the Board Co-Chair of the Center for Integral Wisdom and Chairman and CEO of Whole Foods Market. And he is a fearless leader in the great calling for the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. The dialogue was filmed, and we hope you will enjoy it here.

Stream the first 10 minutes of the video here:

To watch the whole video, click here>>>

Richard Barrett's long awaited book The Metrics of Human Consciousness has just been released on amazon.

This book has been a major CIW Think Tank project of last year.

From the Foreword by Dr. Marc Gafni, Co-Founder and Director, Center for Integral Wisdom and Dr. Zachary Stein, Academic Director, Center for Integral Wisdom:

The genesis of this book dates back to the time when Richard met Marc at a conference on Conscious Capitalism, held at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California in 2012. Richard was at the conference to present a paper on measuring the consciousness of leaders and organizations. Marc was at the conference to present a paper on the concept of the Unique Self. Very quickly, the conversation between the two of them turned to developing a metric for measuring the consciousness of the Unique Self.

After the conference Marc broadened the conversion with Richard to involve Zak Stein, the Academic Director of the Center for Integral Wisdom, and Ken Wilber, on of the co-founders of the Center. After several conversations, we (Marc and Zak) asked Richard to begin to explore the possibility of constructing a Unique Self metric. Richard accepted the challenge and joined the board of the Center as senior scholar. This books represents the first output of this exercise.

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Richard Barrett offers us an exciting new direction for measuring consciousness. He has proven that the insights these measures bring can significantly improve our individual, organisational and societal performance. The work of the Barrett Values Centre stands as a testament to what can be achieved by seriously applying ourselves to the measurement of conscious.

Part of the ongoing conversation on these topics was this beautiful dialogue between Ken Wilber, Richard Barrett and Marc Gafni on the nature and necessity of Personal and Societal Transformation:

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by Marc Gafni

We live in an entrepreneurial universe. The nature of the universe is that it seeks higher and higher levels of connection and integration. Through these higher levels of connection and integration the universe creates deeper and deeper value propositions. The essential movement of the universe is toward higher and higher levels of recognition, mutuality, union and integration. What this means is, the universe in its core structure is entrepreneurial.

Quarks come together and merge their private interests to form a corporation called an atom. Atoms come together and merge their assets to form a larger meta-structure, a corporation if you will, called a molecule. Molecules come together and merge their diverse talents and unique strengths to form a complex molecule. And one can trace all the way up the evolutionary chain this entrepreneurial force which is the very Eros of reality of itself. One could fairly say that we live in entrepreneurial universe.

The nature of entrepreneurship is characterized by the irreducible uniqueness of each of the parts. Each agent in the grand synthesis of Universal evolution is irreducibly unique. That unique part is attracted, allured to a unique receptor, and in their merging, in their coming together new and higher values are formed. This is the essential process of evolution itself.[Read more…]

By Marc Gafni

There is a parallel between the emergence of business and the emergence of self is both fascinating and highly instructive in understanding the narrative of conscious capitalism. Both the evolution of self and the evolution of business go through five core stages, which in large measure parallel each other. These five stages unfold in the historical emergence of the self and business even as they may also unfold in the life of the individual person or business. This highly conceptual account is necessarily quite simplified. Nevertheless, this framework is offered as a way of looking at conscious capitalism that adds to the discussion.

Level One:

At the first level, both the self and business begin in what we might call a pre–personal stage. At this stage, both form their identity in relation to the large context that holds them. In the pre-modern period, the idea of an independent business which served it’s own prosperity did not exist. Nor was there a notion of self as a self-justifying unit. For example the king (or queen) or the church formed the corporation in the Middle Ages. The corporation served the interests of the king and church. It did not have independent capital or will. Rather, it was defined in relationship to state or church. The individual was in the same situation. He was a subject of the king and vassal of the church.

The word self did not yet exist in the dictionary. A person’s definition was first and primarily as a loyal subject of king or obedient adherent of the church. The profits of the corporation enriched the king’s coffers. The king and state had the arbitrary right to seize the wealth of the corporation. New initiatives were capitalized by church and not by the investment banking firms. The modern notion of private capital did not yet exist. In the same vein, the assets and even the life of the individual are owned by the king (or queen). The subject is actually obligated to give up their life for church and crown.

Level Two:

At Level Two both the self and business emerge from the shadow of king and church and evolve into their own independent identity. Self emerges from the pre-personal to the personal stage. As the Renaissance dawns on Europe, the word ‘self’ appears in the dictionary. The separate independent self has emerged as a self- justifying unit. Self fulfillment begins to makes sense as a term. The self seeks to fulfill not the will of the crown or the dictates of the religion, but rather to fulfill itself. In the Renaissance and in the Romantic Movement that follows it, the rule-based Neo-Classicism of church and monarchy are replaced by intoxication with the individual. The individual’s destiny, journey and life become self-evidently valuable in the eyes of society and of the individual himself.

At the same time, business emerges as a self-justifying activity, which seeks its own fulfillment. As the post-Renaissance and Romantic writers are extolling the virtues of the independent individual guided by his own voice, Adam Smith is writing about the invisible hand of the market which self-regulates and guides the market place towards its own fulfillment. The corporation’s charter is no longer to profit the Crown or Church. The corporation serves itself, which is constituted by its owners or shareholders. The healthy corporation serves the financial interest of the shareholders. The healthy ego of the self serves the productivity and happiness of the individual self. The self –interest of the individual is to promote the survival and flourishing of the individual. The independent separate self and the independent separate business have emerged and their creative force is unleashed in the world.

Level Three:

At the third level, shadow elements of the individual and business emerge and give legitimate cause for concern. The self of the individual person and the individual business show signs of pathology. Instead of realizing the healthy differentiation with the larger defining environments of Church and King, self and business begin to disassociate from the their larger contexts. Self begins to slide into a selfish obsession with self. Healthy self-interest becomes narcissistic as the person fixates at an ego-centric stage of development and is only able to feel genuine empathy for himself or those necessary for his survival or flourishing. All others become objects to his subjects. He sees the others as a means to his end. Filling the ego’s greed becomes the primary human need. The individual begins to worship at the altar of his own self-gratification, and the things that gratify him are only the ego enhancers, which support the reification of the individual.

A similar process takes place in business. The healthy business becomes greedy. The robbers barons of the American expansion become the new archetype of business. Corporate greed emerges as a motive force in the public sector. Along with this, the narrative of the ‘evil corporation’ is born, which indicts the idea of business itself. Both the individual and business begin to be defined in terms of their shadow. Both are seen as only serving the financial enrichment of shareholders or separate self. Both are seen as being willing to oppress and exploit other for the sake of self. The selfish individual and the selfish business become fixed givens in the mental furniture and life worlds of modernity.

Level Four:

At level four various strategies are developed to deconstruct the ego of the individual person and the individual business. As a result of the excesses of both produced by greed as described above, the self validating person and business are demonized as the sources of personal and social evil. Theories are introduced, old and new, which support the complete undermining of the personal self and shareholder driven business.

Two well-known phenomena which give example to this level, but which is rarely seen from this vantage would be socialism and classical enlightenment. Both demonize the self, of business and the person, as being lost in a dangerous delusion of separation and independence. The independent business is said ignores the larger context of stakeholders in its actions and moves only to satisfy it’s own most pressing needs for gratification. The separate self becomes lost in the grasping of the ego for transitory fulfillment. It seeks to fill the shallowest needs for power and status, which are disconnected from genuine realization or achievement. Classical enlightenment sees liberation from the suffering inflicted by the go in the realization of no self. No- Self in most enlightenment teaching is the new consciousness of reality which involves the letting go of the illusion of being a separate self and realizing that one is an inextricable part of the whole. In no self you realize that you are not separate, either from god, nature, or any of the larger contexts of society. This is the movement from what we have called separate self to what we will now term True Self. The total number of true selves in the world is One. This is a clear movement beyond the limited experience of separate self into a larger field of consciousness in which the separate self is effectively deconstructed.

In a different expression of this same movement religions and governments enact rigorous regulations, which serve to at least curtail the greedy excesses of separate self and direct the energy of the separate self to what are seen to be more noble and exalted ends. In the world of economic exchanges and business the separate self-business, which serves its own ends and the ends of its shareholders, is targeted by Marxism as the core source of evil. Marx suggests that only the introduction of some form of socialism, which is business’s version of no self, will save the world from the evils of the corporation.

Level Five:

The evolutionary emergence of level five is form pathology to mythology. At the fifth level the movement is from the pathology of the self, both of business and the person, to the mythology of the individual person and business. At this level of consciousness we witness the evolutionary emergence of the Unique Self and the unique business.

At the level of true self one self-experience is as being an inextricable part of the seamless coat of the universe. At the level of Unique Self you realize that the coat of the universe in which you are a part is seamless but not featureless. You are a unique feature of essence even as you are not separate from essence in any way. You life in a deep realization of your larger context in the larger schema of reality. You are not apart but a part of all that is. However you realize that you are a unique part of all that is. You are a unique expression of essence. You are the personal face of essence. This is not the personal at the level of separate self. Separate self does not have a felt experience of being an indivisible part of essence.

Unique Self is obviously part of essence and just an obviously an utterly irreducible and unique expression of essence. Unique Self realizes that she has Unique Gifts to live and give that are not merely creative forms of expression but are sorely needed by all that is. Unique Self is true self-seeing through a unique set of eyes. Unique Self has a unique perspective on the world, which creates a new space of insight, which creates new possibilities and new knowing. In fact one might accurately say that True Self plus perspective = Unique Self. The same is true of the unique business.

The Unique Business has a unique perspective on the world, which creates its ability to give Unique Gifts. The Unique business does not superficially imitate competitors but rather turns inwards and outwards to self understand its own unique gifts of service or goods to the market places. The sense of that Unique Gift is the essential energy that guides and directs the business. The Unique business cultivates it’s particular set of eyes to gain unique insight into the market place and the customer which yield new opportunities to give is unique gifts in ways which serves the highest interests of all parties involved. The marketplaces feel the signature uniqueness of the business and reward it with the kind of attention and loyalty, which creates prosperity.

Just like Unique Self naturally realizes his or her larger context so does Unique Business.

For that reason precisely the unique business moves from a shareholder model to a stakeholder model. Unique Business understands that it is naturally constituted not only by investor shareholders but also by a host of other essential stakeholders, which are part of the larger eco system of the business. These stakeholders include employees, vendors and suppliers, families of employees, vendors and suppliers, communities that hold and interface with the business, and even include the environment and future generations. All are part of the true context in which the business needs to both survive and thrive.

Unique Self and Unique Business are each evolutionary emergents, which are just now being recognized. Each are aligned with the unique evolutionary impulse that lives in them as them and through them. Each are sources of iconic evolutionary creativity which creates greater and greater depths of compassion, love and value.

The seminal work on Conscious Capitalism was written by CIW Board Chair John Mackey and Executive Board Member Prof. Raj Sisodia.

At once a bold defense and reimagining of capitalism and a blueprint for a new system for doing business, Conscious Capitalism is for anyone hoping to build a more cooperative, humane, and positive future.

Whole Foods Market cofounder John Mackey and professor and Conscious Capitalism, Inc. cofounder Raj Sisodia argue that both business and capitalism are inherently good, and they use some of today’s best-known and most successful companies to illustrate their point. From Southwest Airlines, UPS, and Tata to Costco, Panera, Google, the Container Store, and Amazon, today’s organizations are creating value for all stakeholders—including customers, employees, suppliers, investors, society, and the environment.

Read this book and you’ll better understand how four specific tenets—higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious leadership, and conscious culture and management—can help build strong businesses, move capitalism closer to its highest potential, and foster a more positive environment for all of us.

The Conscious Capitalism Movement

Most movements have their iconic images or foundation stories: For the civil rights movement it could be Rosa Parks on a bus, or the Selma march; for the human potentials movement, it’s surely Esalen. Adam Smith’s pin factory provides an image for the advantages to be gained from economies of scale enabled by capitalism. For the new movement known as conscious capitalism, the foundation story has to be the great flood on Memorial Day, 1981.

Whole Foods had been in existence for just eight months in one store on Lamar Avenue in Austin when a hundred year flood sank the store under eight feet of water. After eight months of modest success, the store, under-capitalized but thriving, was wiped out, all of the inventory and equipment destroyed.

Then an amazing series of events unfolded.

Read the whole article in the Esalen eZine Volume I >>>

Welcome to Conscious Capitalism

This section of the Conscious Entrepreneur portal is influenced by John Mackey’s and Raj Sisodia’s great book on Conscious Capitalism. John and Raj cite Marc Gafni twice in ways which capture why Conscious Capitalism is so important to the Center for Integral Wisdom.

The paragraphs below are some brief excerpts from Marc’s citations in the book (transcribed and summarized from his welcome message):

We are powerfully re-visioning the role of business in society. Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other force in history, and it’s done so through voluntary exchange rather than coercion.

Communism tried to do so by coercive means and ended up killing millions of people in the process. By ameliorating poverty, the values in the Great Traditions are enacted and a gateway opens for growth. It opens a gateway for human beings to grow morally, socially, spiritually.

Now, for the first time in history, business is awakening to itself for the first time in history, bringing more community, mutuality, and profit by engaging everyone in the system. By becoming conscious, business can create more community and mutuality and paradoxically more profit by engaging everyone in the system.

Narratives are the stories that infuse our lives with meaning. The true narrative of business is creating places for people to build relationships and transform society. The majority of people work through some form of business, but the narrative is that it’s manipulative and corrupt. Therefore most people experience themselves as furthering greed and exploitative.

What happens when people experience themselves that way? They become that way.

By changing the narrative, people will realize they are part of the force of positive transformation in history, they change. Through conscious capitalism, the economic driver of society becomes a potent force for the evolution of the Good, True, Beautiful.

Power is a quality of essence; it is gorgeous. Corporations offer opportunities for moving beyond first-level consciousness and allow us to talk about genuine esteem and self-actualization.

In this new evolutionary emergent, business awakens to its potential when capitalism moves beyond its many corruptions and shadows. Conscious capitalism articulates a vision to make corporations into great cathedrals of spirit in our time.

Workshop on Conscious Capitalism

In 2014, Ken Wilber and Marc Gafni held a workshop on Conscious Capitalism at Nyenrode Business University. 

Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber (on skype), and Prof. Dr. Paul de Blot explored the following questions:

• What are the three core principles of running a conscious capitalist business?
• What is the difference between the shareholder model and the stakeholder model and why it matters?
• Why is it essential for the success of a company that the company is able to identify its Unique self?
• What are the three reasons that changing the perception of business in the modern world is essential to the success of business?
• Why is the evolution of business from unconscious to conscious capitalism essential to the financial bottom line of a company?

To stream the three seminal talks by Ken Wilber, Marc Gafni and Prof. Paul de Blot, click here>>>

Watch the workshop here: