Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge.
Today I speak with Patricia Aburdene. Patricia is one of the world’s leading social forecasters and the author of the book and Sounds True Audio program of the same name, Megatrends 2010.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Patricia and I spoke about the rise of conscious capitalism, living your spiritual values at work, and what she calls, “the spiritual transformation of capitalism.”
Here’s my conversation with Patricia Aburdene.
Tami Simon: Patricia, here you are the Megatrends writer, and one of the great things is that the Megatrends books that you’ve written, you can then look back and see if [the] predictions you made [and] if the trends that you’ve spotted were actually true or not. So here we have the book Megatrends 2010, and we’re halfway through the year 2010. What do you think? The trends that you identified, are they real? Have they happened?
Patricia Aburdene: Well, Megatrends 2010 was primarily about one megatrend, which was the rise of conscious capitalism. And in the book I talk about seven different trends that together constitute conscious capitalism. I have to say that if you were to look at the newspaper for the first half of 2010 and 2009 and back into 2008, I could understand if you might have a fair amount of skepticism, as the financial world was brought to its knees by the subprime crisis and the credit derivatives and all the rest. You might have a fair amount of skepticism toward my theory.
But I think what’s happening is this: conscious capitalism is absolutely rising, but it is a very different trend from the parallel and contradictory trend of the fall of unconscious capitalism. So as millions and millions of people around the world expand their consciousness, what we’re finding is that for a critical mass of humanity, our financial structures remain bonded to the unconscious past, and we actually—as we expand our consciousness, we are accelerating the demise of unconscious capitalism.
So we’re right on track, as paradoxical as that might sound. And the conscious companies that have come forward with an agenda beyond just making money—an agenda to contribute something to the world, to honor all of their constituents—are the ones that are faring the best today in a relatively adverse financial climate. So yes, I think we’re on target.
TS: When I look at it—and granted, this isn’t looking at statistics—it seems to me that the rise of conscious capitalism is more like a mini-trend than a megatrend in terms of the numbers of people who are part of such a movement and who care about it. First of all, just what makes something a megatrend versus a mini-trend?
PA: Well, a megatrend is a direction in which we’re moving in a society. It could be a political direction, economic, technological, demographic, even spiritual. And I think conscious capitalism, in the case of conscious capitalism, it contains all of those labels; it’s a matrix of many different kinds of forces that come together around the notion of the revitalization of business. And so I do think it’s a megatrend.
A megatrend doesn’t have to be so large that we’re hit over the head with it. In many cases, a megatrend develops slowly and gradually, and it’s below the radar, so that it’s just below mass consciousness. And as it accelerates and gains traction, if you have some warning, if you have some sense that this is coming and you’ve adjusted yourself, adjusted yourself to maximize it, you’re set and you’re positioned well to take advantage of this megatrend just as it hits mainstream consciousness.
And if the number of conscious companies might not be as many as you perceive it to be—and I would actually disagree with that. I think that ten years ago when Amy Domini, the founder of Domini Social Investments, went through the S&P [Standard’s & Poor] 500 to examine companies that met her criteria for social responsibility, about half of them succeeded. So I actually think that there are hundreds of Fortune 500 companies who in fact do practice some aspect of conscious capitalism.
So getting back to finishing up the definition of a megatrend: slow to develop; once in place almost impossible to turn around. And so if you know that megatrend is coming, you have a strategic advantage.
TS: When is the megatrend of conscious capitalism going to rise to a level where we can say, “It’s here”?
PA: I think we can say that it’s here now. I think that with people growing increasingly discouraged by unconscious capitalism, the need for conscious capitalism is on everyone’s mind. We literally know—I mean, the word “sustainable” is perhaps most associated with the environmentalist movement, but boy, if we never needed evidence that finance needs to be sustainable, [that] it needs to be built on a firm footing, it’s now. Everywhere that we look in the newspaper are the ramifications, the unconscious ramifications, because people chose not to be conscious of it. I’m not using the term “unconscious capitalism” as a judgmental term; I’m using it as a term of definition. When you choose not to be conscious of the ramifications of your actions, that’s unconsciousness by definition.
What it’s going to mean to us [is that] we can’t continue on this path of unconscious capitalism. So the need for conscious capitalism and the desire to look around and find the example, and the compass to find what it needs to look like, [are] truly there. So I think you can say conscious capitalism is here. Is it on Wall Street? No, not yet. Is it in most of the S&P 500? I would argue yes, more than 50 percent. More than when Amy Domini looked at it.
TS: You know, I think most people have an intuitive sense of what unconscious capitalism is, but how do you define conscious capitalism, and what [are] the criteria that you use?
PA: Well, I think there are basically three criteria that define a conscious capitalist. First of all, they are committed to the stakeholder model of business. That is to say, they certainly honor shareholders as well. But they honor all the stakeholders—the shareholders, the investors—[that’s] very important. But so are the employees extremely important. So are the customers; if you don’t have a customer, you don’t have a business. If you don’t have great relationships with your suppliers, they might not be there for you when you need them. The community you live in is important, and ultimately the planet as a whole and certainly the environment. So they’re committed to all the constituents and all the stakeholders, not just the shareholders. I think [in] traditional capitalism, shareholders are first and foremost, first among all else. So that’s the first factor.
The second factor is that conscious capitalists, while they may very much look forward to having profits, earning profits, they want to earn them by having a purpose that is larger than simply making money. Maybe they want to make a difference in the world, or maybe they just want to create a fantastic product that their customers like so much that they stand in line to buy it. That’s a purpose, even though it might not be a highfalutin purpose. So they have a purpose that’s beyond making money.
And finally, they have a time horizon that is longer than [that of] most businesses. They look at things in a long-term way, not quarter to quarter. [That’s] the Wall Street mentality: “We’ve gotta make money this quarter or they’ll sell our stock if we don’t,” “We’ve gotta make money by any means necessary.” And that’s what gotten us into so much trouble, from the dot.com crash through the subprime crash and all of the rest.
TS: Now, you made an interesting comment early in our conversation, that from your research, businesses that are committed to [being] conscious-capitalist businesses, according to the criteria you’ve just laid out, actually perform better.
PA: Yeah!
TS: What are the statistics to back that up?
PA: Well, there’s been a host of studies, actually, that back that up. I mean, it started with the global consulting firm Towers Perrin, which studied companies that excel at stakeholder relationships. This was over a fifteen-year period, so again this is that longer time-horizon. They studied twenty-five companies; these were companies like Coca-Cola, Southwest Airlines, Procter & Gamble. And over that period, these companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 126 percent.
More recently, there’s a fantastic study—it’s in the book Firms of Endearment—and it studied twenty-eight conscious capitalists. This was over a ten-year period, and they discovered—these findings are so extraordinary. I mean, you really definitely need to be able to point to the research studies to back this up! These twenty-eight conscious-capitalist companies during this ten-year period, their stock rose 1100 percent, whereas the S&P 500, the stock rose 100 percent. So they beat the S&P 500 by elevenfold. Extraordinary!
TS: Now, you know I started Sounds True twenty-five years ago, and there was nothing in my awareness that said, “If we live according to these values, we’ll be more profitable and more successful.” That wasn’t important to me. What was important to me was to simply have a life that I could live. And yet it seems like the kinds of statistics that you’re sharing here could potentially be very compelling to other businesspeople, who perhaps might be thinking, “I’m only going to do this if it guarantees a greater return.”
PA: Well, of course you can never guarantee a greater return—I mean, to be fair. You know, everything’s about our mind-set, our belief systems. If you have a belief system that says you’ve got to be a son of a gun to succeed in business—you know, fifty years ago, thirty years ago, maybe that was right. I don’t know. But I know that today it’s not right. That today the evidence shows that if you have a higher purpose, if you honor the stakeholder model, you have at least an equal playing field—at the very least and probably much more—to be successful. And I agree with you: that could be very inspiring to people, and I think it’s great.
And when you talked about you and Sounds True, I mean, you had a mission, you had a purpose, which was to deliver the messages of the teachers that you recorded—and that you then created audio products for—to people so that they could grow as human beings. I mean, that’s a purpose, and that purpose, has it not been absolutely essential to your success all the way?
TS: Yeah. What do you think it is about businesses that are committed to conscious capitalism that helps them perform better in the marketplace?
PA: There is something that I didn’t write about in Megatrends 2010 that is a really important part of my new business book—I’m actually writing two books now, a book for individuals, and a book for businesses!—and that is the notion of employee engagement.
We’ve had this notion of the heroic, charismatic CEO who parachutes into the company, waves a magic wand—that is to say, cuts ten thousand jobs, does a high-profile merger that’s going to be hard to impossible to execute—and becomes the hero of the day and stock goes up on Wall Street and blah, blah, blah. But I’m finding lots of evidence that that just doesn’t work anymore. First of all, there was a story in The Wall Street Journal that massive job cuts lead to reduced profits and revenues for up to nine years after a recession. We’re questioning these things. We’re questioning this notion [and discovering] that if you’re a public company, of course—and in this particular case we’re talking about larger public companies—acquisitions and mergers actually destroy shareholder wealth.
Meanwhile, there’s the little mini-trend of employee engagement. Towers Perrin studied 360,000 employees from many, many different companies, obviously, but also countries, and discovered that the companies where people were engaged created 19 percent more profit. And in fact, where people were disengaged and apathetic about work, profit levels dramatically fell.
And so I think one thing, one way that we can attempt to analyze the continued financial success of conscious capitalism is that it inspires people. It inspires people! And your profits are being created by the people who work at your company. Yeah, you know, you can do a fancy acquisition to juice up the quarterly profits, but that stuff doesn’t last. What lasts is people being inspired, and there are all these—you know, we talk about spirituality in business. You know, Tami, it’s—there are all these invisible, invisible factors, you know, which I think you and I might consider somewhat spiritual factors: How motivated are the people in a company? How ethical is the company? How creative and connected to universal consciousness is the R & D department? I mean, all of these so-called invisible factors play an enormous role in the success of a company.
And you know, we’re talking about conscious capitalism; my brand of conscious capitalism always involves the spiritual part, the consciousness of people. Some people think of conscious capitalism as merely social responsibility. That’s inadequate, to my mind, to describe the complexity of the matrix in which social responsibility is an enormously important factor. But so is the genius of human consciousness. Every great product that’s ever been created, from a Herman Miller Aeron chair, to an Apple iPad, to a Tata Nano car, it all came through human consciousness. And that’s the aspect of the spiritual part of business, for me anyway.
TS: Well, the final section of Megatrends 2010 is about the spiritual transformation of capitalism. So what do you mean by that, first of all? What is the spiritual transformation of capitalism?
PA: It’s this notion of the invisible factors, as I’ve talked about. It’s this notion that we humans are growing our consciousness at an amazing level, a planetary level, all over the world. And somehow we need a financial system to match our growing consciousness. So rather than continuing to bang our head against a stone wall—and look at the financial debacle of unconscious capitalism—we need to infuse our financial system and our corporations with the level of consciousness to which we have evolved. And that’s why capitalism needs to transform into conscious capitalism. And as it does—and as you know, I believe it is happening every single day, that we face some of that really negative news as that happens—capitalism will have been spiritually transformed by the consciousness, by the spirituality of its followers.
How can spirituality possibly be compatible with business? I have a very simple answer: because people inhabit the businesses! And you know, you can’t draw a line in the sand and say, “OK, you have to be a robot in this corporation.” Oh, they’ve tried; God knows they’ve tried since the industrial revolution. But it just doesn’t work. People live their values wherever they are, be that at the checkout counter or in the meditation room.
TS: It seems, though, that there’s this collective belief—and I say that because I feel it in myself as well—that says, “If you want to make money, don’t really bring all those spiritual values with you. That’s fine to express that in your free time. But if you want to make money, you’d better not be the nice guy. Nice guys finish last.” And yet here you are, you’re presenting an alternate perspective that says, “Actually, companies that honor all of their stakeholders and have a sense of a real purpose actually fare better in the marketplace.” But what I’m pointing to is this collective belief, still this kind of collective belief, that if you’re going to be successful in business, you’d better be able to go down to the mat and win the negotiation! Something like that . . .
PA: That’s a recipe for absolute disaster in business, in my opinion. Yes, it is part of our collective belief system. You’ve identified it perfectly. And yet there’s a whole spiritual tradition that talks about prosperity consciousness, that talks about how your positive thoughts and your positive emotions and your generous deeds are exactly what attracts success to you. And you think of it— I believe we’re watching [this] with the cartoon of what you just described in Wall Street. Those are the people who’ve got to win the negotiation, [the people] that growl, and they use that hostility and that anger to fuel the fires of their notion of success. And yet, we’re watching that whole thing kind of crash and burn.
Citigroup, for example, made billions and billions and billions in profit during the heyday of the subprime-mortgage crisis and the credit derivatives and all the rest of that. And then the tide turned. They didn’t do anything really different. The tide turned; the environment became inhospitable to those kinds of financial manipulations, and they proceeded to lose every billion that they had earned over a, probably about eighteen-to-twenty-four-month period. Wiped out. I mean, that’s the definition of unsustainable financial activity.
And so for me, any kind of financial activity that’s born of the kind of ultracompetitive “screw somebody else before they screw you” philosophy is doomed to failure. So, it’s still around; there’s no question. But the conscious capitalists that we know of on the S&P 500, the kind of corporate good guys that everybody knows about, the Googles of the world, the Costcos of the world—Costco’s a great example. We’ve got one right down the road from us where we’re sitting right now! You know, they beat Walmart at their own game, and Walmart’s coming around a bit in terms of the environment, but they still haven’t set any records on their labor policies. Costco from the very beginning has been this benevolent company, and they have fared very, very well. I mean, long-term I think their business will probably surpass Walmart’s in terms of profitability and in terms of viability, because it’s based on goodwill.
If encouraged, I could come up with many more different case studies that illustrate that our belief systems are out of kilter with modern business realities. That good guys do finish first—when they have sound business principles! You know, you can’t just be a good guy who’s just a dummy and hasn’t mastered the basics of business. But I think that that goodwill is the invisible consciousness that literally transforms into greater success and profit, and sustainable success—[there’s a] big difference between sustainable profit, sustainable success, and the unsustainable variety.
TS: Um-hmm. Now in this section on the spiritual transformation of capitalism, one of the calls, if you will, a kind of clarion call that you put out, is that we need to melt the firewall between personal and organizational spirit. And I think this is a really interesting point. I was just talking to somebody here who works at Sounds True, and we were talking about his personal love life and stuff. And he’s saying, “I’m finally willing to be forward when I date women about what a spiritual cat I am. And I haven’t really wanted to talk about it.” And I said, “You know, coming forward with our spirituality is a kind of coming out of the closet.”
PA: Absolutely.
TS: And so here we’re talking about someone who works at Sounds True, and we’re talking about it in the context of his love life. But back to the topic of coming forward in business, coming forward and saying, “My spiritual values are what matter the most to me,” this firewall does exist. I think people think, “This is not appropriate in a business environment.” So how do we melt the firewall? How do individuals do it? People who may be listening to this who aren’t at the C-level, [who] aren’t CEOs or aren’t COOs of companies, what can they do?
PA: I think that if you don’t feel comfortable talking about your spiritual values, that’s perfectly fine, because there’s something that you can do that is a heck of a lot more powerful than that. And that is living them by example. And that actually reminds me of another chapter, called “Leading from the Middle.” Because people say, “Well, how can you possibly lead from the middle if you’re just a middle manager and you don’t have any power, or [you’re not] a team leader or whatever?” You lead by your moral authority. You lead by the informal authority that you hold—that is to say, the respect that your peers hold for you—so that you can live your spiritual values. You can live your just plain human values. And it’s a more powerful message.
And you may find that if you do live them, [that if] people live a kind of generous spirit, a kind of kindness to your co-workers, a sense of justice, you might find them asking you about it, and then maybe you’ll feel more comfortable talking about it if they ask you.
TS: Can you give a specific example of how someone in a business cultivates this kind of informal authority?
PA: I don’t know that you can cultivate it. I think that your peers grant it to you when you live your truth in business, when you espouse your values in business. People just respect you; they respect you as a leader without— Formal authority is the job title: “You’re the VP of sales” or “You’re the CEO” or whatever you are. Informal authority is, “Everybody goes to Suzie whenever there’s a problem, because she’s the one who seems to have a good relationship with everybody and she can sort it all out.”
So you live your strengths. You live your abilities at work. And you live your spiritual values at work. And that’s how you merit it; that’s how you come to merit the approval of your peers, the respect of your peers.
TS: So when you say “to melt the firewall,” you’re not necessarily saying that people suddenly start talking about spirituality while they’re at work. You’re saying something different.
PA: For some people. I think plenty of people actually do simply talk about their spirituality at work more and more. You know, people share about their personal life at work: “What are you going to do this weekend?” “Oh, I’m going to this meditation seminar Saturday morning, then I’m going to the lake in the afternoon.” These kinds of conversations probably do take place in the most mundane business establishments around.
It’s a question of what somebody feels comfortable with. Some people will want to talk about their spirituality, or sometimes you meet somebody and you just know. This is especially [true] among women; they say something. Don’t you think people kind of psyche each other out, like drop a little hint and see if the person follows up? And then the next thing you know, you go, “Oh, you read that book, too? You liked Eckhart Tolle, too? You read his book?” That kind of thing happens, too. But there are some people who don’t feel comfortable talking about that, and you should always do what you feel comfortable with.
One of my favorite companies is my bank, Wainwright Bank in Washington, D.C. And this is a company that is—half of their loan portfolio, commercial loan portfolio, goes to nonprofits. And they’ve never had one default. I mean, people would think, “Oh, that’s not going to be good for business.” They’ve never had one default from this company. And they are very big on social justice; they’re very big on gay rights, for example. But their president said to me, “You know, we don’t make a big deal about it. And we certainly don’t force—some people don’t want to talk about gay rights. And if they don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. But that’s what we do in this company, and we don’t force anybody else to talk about it, or to march in a parade or anything else. It’s a quiet way of dealing with things.”
TS: So I want to make sure I understand what you mean by the spiritual transformation of capitalism. Is what you’re saying that we take the kind of consciousness that’s growing in the culture about our collective unity, about our shared fate, and we insist that our economic system be coherent with that?
PA: Only if we want to prosper. Because what we’re seeing with the financial crises that are happening more and more frequently—we’re not supposed to have three meltdowns in a decade. I mean, we’re supposed to have maybe one meltdown in a decade. The financial crises are coming more and more rapidly: the dot.com crisis, the accounting-scandals crisis, of course the subprime crisis, and before that the savings-and-loan crisis. They’re happening with greater and greater frequency because the financial system is running out of—gosh, I just got the word “trust.” I mean, we the people, we make these arrangements. We’re the powerful ones. There’s no business out there that has the Rules of Business. We make it all up. We the people make it all up.
And so if as our consciousness grows, we—I wouldn’t so much say we have to demand that it be reflected in our financial institutions. More like we need to accept the responsibility of knowing that we want our financial arrangements—which are after all ultimately human arrangements, they’re not just numbers. They’re human arrangements; they’re agreements and levels of trust between human beings. If we want to prosper, our financial system has got to reflect our consciousness. So I guess my answer is yes! [Laughs.] After hemming and hawing a bit, I guess my answer is yes!
TS: OK, right. So I imagine someone listening, and they say, “Yes, I want the financial institutions and the economy that I participate in to reflect the values of my consciousness.” I could imagine someone saying, “I don’t feel very empowered to do that. I can go to work and be an internal authority within the business that people look up to, but how much impact am I really making? And what else can I do?”
PA: Another belief-system question. You know, you may not feel very empowered, but you are empowered. You are empowered as a consumer. You are empowered as an investor. You are empowered as a manager in a company. But let’s go through those each quickly.
Consumers constitute 70 percent of the U.S. GDP [gross domestic product]. Your spending power determines collectively which companies succeed and which companies fail. As an investor, you have the right and the good fortune to be able to choose which companies you want to invest in, be they in single-stock investments or in mutual funds. You can choose to be a socially responsible investor. You can say, “I’m only going to put my money in companies I really believe in; companies who I want to see succeed.” And just as we talked about those conscious capitalists whose stock increases, last year—2009, which was the first really good year for the stock market in many a moon—two-thirds of the socially responsible mutual funds beat the S&P 500, which is the industry standard. Now, the S&P 500 gained 28.8 percent last year, so it didn’t just sit around and deliver 8 percent or something; it delivered a very, very good return. So two-thirds of the socially responsible mutual funds beat the S&P 500. That is a pretty good argument that by making a stand as an investor, you won’t simply be being a good guy, you’ll be doing well financially as well.
More and more of those consumers who contribute to the GNP [gross national product] take their values shopping. They take values like health and sustainability, social justice, [and] spirituality with them to the stores when they buy things. And so they’re looking for products that manifest and represent the values that they hold dear to them. So their heart and their pocketbook are in alignment. So I would say it may be an old belief system, but it’s time to set that belief system to rest, [the belief] that you’re not empowered to change the financial system. You’re changing it with every time—every monetary transaction that you engage in is an opportunity for you to vote for consciousness in business.
TS: So it seems to me that if the spiritual transformation of capitalism is going to be successful—and as you’ve said, we’re only going to prosper if it is—that people who are connected and committed to their own expansive consciousness, their consciousness of our collective unity, need to make this crossing of the bridge, if you will, to say that, “I’m going to impact and I have an impact on the economic system. And I am empowered, and I don’t believe things like ‘Nice guys finish last in business’ while I go off and pray for goodness in my life in other ways.” Somehow there’s some kind of bridge that has to be crossed.
PA: Tami, I have devoted the last decade of my life to building that bridge, and that’s what Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism and, more importantly, my audio version for Sounds True—which is like, there I am talking about it, and telling my stories and telling my lessons—that’s what it’s all about for me. And I hope that some of the people who are listening to us will investigate the audio that I did for Sounds True. That’s what it’s all about for me; that’s my life’s mission. And I’m going on to do two more books that aim to continue that mission forward. So yeah, it means a lot to me.
TS: I want to make sure that the bridge is clearly articulated, because really it seems like you can approach the bridge from either side. So the one side, which we’ve talked about, is getting traditional corporations to see and recognize the value of the stakeholder model and a longer-term time horizon and things like that. So part of the bridge is getting traditional businesses [on board]. But then the other part—and this is what I’m really intrigued by in this conversation—is getting people who are committed to their own consciousness increasing to see that they have an impact in business.
PA: So important; absolutely right, absolutely right. It is a bridge that can be approached from two sides, and both of those parts are equally important. And in fact, in my life I have always been confronted with publishers, for example, who say, “Well, Patricia, you can either write a business book or you can write a book for individuals.” And I’ve always been like, “No!” But because they’re both so important to this kind of transformation, it takes both.
And luckily, we’ve got hundreds of brand-name companies that aren’t perfect, but that are truly embodying conscious capitalism in a way, and successfully. And we have millions of people who are committed to this spiritual journey, who very much— You and I, I think, would—it’s just as you expressed so beautifully: to inspire them to see that these mind-sets can be put aside, they can be retired. And that it’s your God-given right, if you will, to experience your power in business and to experience positive financial return, and retire these old beliefs and concepts that just don’t serve us anymore.
TS: It seems like on the spirituality side of the bridge, moving toward “I can have an impact on the economy,” that one additional belief system is the idea that if you’re really committed to spirituality, then you can’t really make too much money. Like, making money is for the greedy people, and “If I make too much money, then I’m hurting other people” or something like that. What do you have to say about that?
PA: I actually think that it’s gone in a curious opposite direction. That some elements have distorted aspects of prosperity consciousness—prosperity consciousness is in a big revival today. And that it’s been marketed as some kind get-rich-quick scheme, that you just have to sit around and the law of attraction will connect you to enormous amounts of wealth. And that many people have bought property at the peak of the subprime crisis and all of the real-estate expansion that went on then, and have fallen flat on their face.
And so both of these things are important. First of all, you most certainly are limiting yourself to a very small life if you believe that it’s not good to have money. And I actually think that while those belief systems remain, that gradually, slowly, more and more people accept that if you want to have beauty, if you want to have joy— I was very wealthy personally at one point in my life. The best part of being wealthy was not the stuff I had; [for instance,] I had an extremely beautiful home that was in Architectural Digest. The most wonderful part of being wealthy when I was, was never having to worry about money. That accelerated my love of life: I could have more fun, I could be more joyful, I could be generous with my friends, I could be surrounded by beauty. It was a wonderful, wonderful blessing to have.
So anyway, I invite anybody who has those negative feelings about money to do some inquiry and to explore those possibilities just so they can bring more joy and happiness into their life. It’s not about the stuff.
TS: It seems to me like what you’re talking about here are two different kinds of distortions that you see happening in the “spiritual community at large.” One is this, we could just call it poverty consciousness, which I think you just addressed. But then the other was this weird prosperity—
PA: Distorted prosperity consciousness.
TS: So what is, just in a nutshell, what is distorted prosperity consciousness in your view, and what is a kind of healthy, genuine, “I want to have the kind of financial freedom that you just described”? What’s the difference?
PA: I think that the distorted brand of prosperity consciousness is when—a lot of it stems from not being willing to look at your own shadow. A lot of spiritual people—well, you actually described it really well, [a lot of them] project all of the greed onto the rich people, and don’t want to accept the fact that it’s an aspect of the human condition. And so while many people who are in poverty consciousness are never going to be attracted to prosperity consciousness, some are and some do. And they fail to examine the shadow element that’s in all of us, and project it onto the rich people. And lo and behold, they get caught up in the real-estate scams, the con men. I think that spiritual people and religious people sometimes don’t want to look at the shadow, and that can lead them into great trouble. And also a lot of spiritual people just—a much simpler factor is a lot of spiritual people just aren’t sophisticated about money.
TS: Now, Patricia, just as a final question, here you are, you’re the Megatrends lady. You predicted the rise of conscious capitalism. It sounds like you think that’s going to keep rising and become a more apparent megatrend.
PA: It’s going to become mainstream business.
TS: What else do you see?
PA: You know, Tami, I have to say, this megatrend has got me in its hands. I mean, the next two books that I’m going to be writing [continue] in this same journey, so I must say, this is the one I like to focus on. People say, “Well, shouldn’t you apply all of this to education or some other thing?” And I’m like, “I’ve kind of got it for business. I kind of, like, love this story. It’s a story I don’t want to give up; I want to explore it.” [Then they say,] “Oh, well, actually—hmm!—you’ve got me there.”
Once I finish these next two books, I want to write about spirituality. And a lot of people have written about the seasons of the year as the seasons of our lives, but they haven’t really done it from the Celtic and the feminine tradition. And so I want to write about the seasons of the year taking into account not just spring, summer, winter, and fall, but the subtle things like winter solstice and Candlemas and spring equinox and Beltane, and how all of these energies represent cycles of our life.
So yes, after business I am going to follow the great Hindu tradition and go in my later years—should I ever grow mature and old—go quite and full into spirituality.
TS: Does that mean that you’re leaving the megatrends behind, or is it that you see this delving-into-spirituality as a megatrend itself?
PA: The latter.
TS: Wonderful. I’ve been speaking with Patricia Aburdene. She is the author of the book Megatrends 2010, and the Sounds True audio program that accompanies the book and shares with you the main, key themes in Megatrends 2010, the year that we’re in. Thank you for being with us, Patricia.
PA: My pleasure, Tami. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you. You always come up with the best questions!
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
