Just back from one of the rarely interesting Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club events. I was due to renew my membership today, but declined, because it does not pay off for attending two or three events a year. And to be completely frank, with spring finally reaching this city, I had a nap in our neighborhood park right afterwards. Bumming. What a relief after that draining push it, be fabulous, be great, we are awesome, business executive talk of pointing at a deer and calling it a horse | 指鹿为马, i.e. Chinese for lying somebody straight into the face and trying to convince of an objective non-truth.
 
About 50 people wait for lunch in one of Azul’s separated dining rooms on 376 Wukang Rd, which was known during colonial times as Ferguson Lane. The large number of participants indicates that this is a special event. Jane Sun, CEO of Ctrip | 携程, the world’s largest online travel agency, which can be rightly dubbed the Taobao of the travel industry, is scheduled to speak about Key Trends in China’s Travel Industry. As she takes over the mic from the SFCC moderator, we are presented with a Chinese Melania Trump, a face as young as a spring peach, elegant but substantial make up, only a wrinkled neck giving away her real age, which I guess is around 50.
 
Jane is dressed completely in white and we will learn that she trains her slim body on various city marathons, annually on Shanghai’s – a great choice to extend one’s life span. And a long breath is what this woman needed to become Ctrip’s first CEO, who is not member of the founding Quattro, and female on top of this. Jane tells us that she was born in China, but studied and lived in the US for twenty years and loves both countries. I continue to be cynical, because I have heard it not only once: the worst things grow out of US capitalism and Chinese totalitarianism.
 
The currently most valuable online travel agency has an army of 33.000 employees with an average age below 25. Its market value was USD 300 mio at its IPO in the year 2000 and exceeds now USD 30 billion. Each of its five business units have their own CEO and CFO and are evaluated like the entire enterprise at Wall Street according to tough KPIs, driving innovation and motivating its work force to perform in permanent excellence. I think I know those lines form Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. Jane tells us that only booking.com and expedia are larger travel industry players, but limit their services to accommodation and air tickets respectively. Ctrip though goes for everything and offers 30 different products with the objective of being a travel one stop shop for its customers. What a paradox …
 
65% of the domestic online travel market are already under Ctrip’s control and currently roughly 25% of its revenue comes from Chinese travelers going abroad, compared to zero when Jane joined the company ten years ago. 8000 software engineers and Ctrip’s alliance with its largest shareholder Baidu secure that these market shares will increase until monopoly status is attained. Ctrip is on a safe path to indeed turn into the Taobao of the global travel industry. Now why is that? Because of a great management or macro economic frame conditions or both?
 
Jane is a woman who appears to be friendly, but I am left with a feeling that I don't want to get into a conflict with her; although writing this piece might actually get me there. She is a tough bitch, a tiger mum who explains us that her business units are tiger babies. If it was her focusing on Ctrip’s operations for ten years before she was promoted to serve as CEO, one can assume that the company’s management follows Confucian style army drill and US capitalist employee extortion strategies. She tells us e.g. that employees are not allowed to answer customers with 15 words if 10 words are sufficient, because … now listen closely … our customer’s time is precious to us … and of course we also have to control our operation costs. Imagine yourself how much time employees are given to take a dump. That’s probably why Jane’s talk emphasizes that Ctrip’s employees who mostly hail from the relatively poor provinces of Anhui and Henan receive a lot of social benefits.
 
Jane’s focus on marketing Ctrip to the audience as an outstandingly social employer and travel giant driven by world peace causes her to forget the event title. Since she mentions not even with a single word key trends of the Chinese travel industry, the first question from the audience during the Q&A section asks exactly this. We are being told that Chinese travel now increasingly abroad to South Korea, Japan and South East Asia. Travels to Europe have declined in favor of the US due to recent terrorist attacks. Well, I knew that much. She then ignores the second – smart - question, if the domestic political situation plays into the hands of the travel industry by jumping into her obvious favorite subject: high end sales.
 
Now, I don't want to be cynical all along, but you know, when a lady in her early 50s speaks to you nicely but stiffly about her company’s mission and explains to you on a few simple powerpoint slides “What does the world need?” and then gives you in her sweet voice the answer “World peace” and continues “What do we feel passionate about?” and again provides the answer “Bringing people together”, then asks “What are we good at?” while the next answer cascades onto the screen “Linking the world” and finally ends her messianic sermon with the claim that Ctrip’s mission is to bridge the East and the West, I get goose bumps when her body language and facial expression changes significantly when she starts to brag about Ctrip customers spending USD 2k minimum per day on their Hawaii trips and limited edition USD 200k travel packages being sold within only 70 seconds. Her eyes shine. From the far other end of the room I have the impression both the white of her teeth and the red of her lips grows infinitely while she smiles excitedly. Ah… that’s what this deer is about.
 
Let’s be realistic. Ctrip rides the macro economic wave of a nation not only having become rich enough to turn into a consumer society, but also rich enough to take time off and travel. And its not any nation, it's the world’s most numerous nation which is in PPP the world’s largest economy. It is also a nation which is run by a government which does not allow international competition and has more or less banned foreign travel agencies from its market. Hence, Ctrip enjoys like it’s largest shareholder Baidu political protection to grow without international competition into a colossus, a colossus which thrives on the psychology of travel as a compensation behavior for limited domestic freedom; a colossus which thrives on modern slavery to develop its products; a colossus which knows everything about his customers.
 
All of the above is part of what state controlled capitalism facilitates and although I would wish for different conditions it is the following thought which worries me more. The American culture critic Neil Postman wrote in 1985 a book titled Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business and claimed that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell's work 1984, where they were oppressed by state control.
 
Jane Sun tells us that travelling helps people to understand each other better. And she is absolutely right about that. Chinese are most likely as a society －  there are surely many individual exception －  where the US was as a society about a 100 years ago, when Mark Twain wrote: Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. So maybe Jane is right when she quotes a Chinese proverb: It's better to travel 10000 miles than to 10000 books.
 
I have looked up that proverb and found that 读万卷书，行万里路 literally translated means Read 10000 books and walk 10000 miles and could be loosely translated to Learn as much as you can and go as far as possible. It’s a reminder to strive for more, not a preference for travel over reading, which would constitute a heresy in Confucian China. I interpret moreover a preference for the truly investigative and contemplative journey over blind group pressured travel packages. But Jane’s new use reflects where the modern Chinese society is heading to: the same consumerist amusement addiction of which Western societies suffer since a few decades, but combined with Orwellian cyber-Leninism.
 
Jane’s presentation in general, but her subtle twist of the original meaning of that Chinese proverb in particular raises the question which responsibility such powerful conglomerations like Ctrip have in our modern world. She tells us that Ctrip tracks every move of its customers and recommends according to prior purchase behavior similar and additional products accordingly. With Baidu as its largest shareholder I am pretty sure that Ctrip runs similar algorithms like Facebook or Google which have been recently in a brilliant Guardian article revealed to be absolutely misguiding and quite often devilishly leading to an utterly wrong decision whether that may be a political opinion or a purchase click. When I point this out, Jane replies that she recognizes this risk, but Ctrip does not deal with such delicate political questions, it sells only beautiful places and historical sites. Again a broad innocent smile with much tooth white and inflated lip red.
 
Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr pointed out that Google’s search algorithms reflect virtually nothing but the popularity of websites based on the number of search inquiry. There is nothing that checks whether any of the recommendations are actually true or good or beautiful or have any other value. Google is search. It's the verb, to Google. Its what we all do, all the time, whenever we want to know anything. We google it. Its mission as a company, the one-line overview that has informed the company since its foundation and is still the banner headline on its corporate website today, is to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. Well, whatever Baidu has as its mission, the organization of information or world peace, it does the same as Google; it is as a matter of fact a modelled after Google.
 
Cadwalladr points out that not only Google, but also Facebook and, indeed, the general Internet culture itself operates like an echo chamber which satiates our appetite for pleasant lies and reassuring falsehoods and has become the defining challenge of the 21st century. Jews are evil. Woman are evil. Muslims need to be eradicated. And Hitler? Let’s google it. Was Hitler bad? Cadwalladr types. Google’s top result: 10 reasons why Hitler was one of the good guys. She clicks on the link: He never wanted to kill any Jews.

Now just think for a second without me actually doing Cadwalladr’s experiment on Baidu, what search results we would get from there if we were to ask: Are Japanese evil? Should China kick America’s ass? Is Mongolia an integral part of China? With decades of focusing on foreign enemies to create domestic unity reflected in the propaganda poster art, China is poised to use the Internet’s echo chambers for its regime’s ultimate and necessary objective to maintain social unity. American philosopher Ken Wilber explained recently that US postmodernism negates truth and values and explained that this madness has led to Trump being put in office; a clear sign of collective regression into ethnocentrism triggered by the failure of the postmodern political leadership personified in Hilary Clinton to integrate all layers of US society. China can look back on centuries of crafting narratives which suit the ruling dynasty but are far from the historical truth and at least since the cultural revolution opportunism has permeated the mainstream culture despite many Chinese living their private lives by high ethical standards. I get the impression that the West and China are converging in their moral nihilism. What Wilber calls a post truth world and what is currently described in the West as alternative facts or pleasant lies has a strong overlap with the Chinese tradition of pointing at a deer and calling it a horse.

Wolfgang Uchatius published 2013 shortly before the German national elections a long essay in the weekly Die Zeit titled Should I Vote or Shop? He describes therein that the opinions of German political parties on major social, economic and political questions clearly converge with only the far left being a genuine alternative to the moderate social democrats, Christian conservatives, liberals and greens. He concludes that German citizens have lost their democratic rights to this indiscernibility of political movements and are left with making purchase decisions. I read a similar analysis on political opinions of democrat and republican contenders for the 2016 US presidential elections, which concluded that only Bernie Sanders is a genuine alternative for the US electorate; all others represent roughly the same values and opinions. We also know that the most populous nation in the world, China, is ruled since 1949 by a one-party system, which de lege concentrates all political opinion in one organization only. Again, with some realistic cynicism, we could argue that we witness a convergence of global political systems, and consequently the collapse of individual political rights in Western democracies. In accordance with Wolfgang Uchatius’ analysis, we must conclude that citizenship is a dying singular concept, which gives rise to the plurality of customership. 21st century mankind is vested with the political powers of what and how to consume.

Consumer Empowerment
 
I therefore strongly believe that all the social movements which were born during the Age of Enlightenment like anti-slavery, women rights, political freedom et cetera have to give way to a single new movement, which is consumer empowerment, i.e. enabling the individual to make sound consumption decisions. I don't want to repeat here what others have already said perfectly well; read Steven Rosenbaum writing on a definition of consumer empowerment in Forbes. But I want to emphasize that this is a unique opportunity for mankind to put the differences of political systems aside and unite in the idea of forging a sound future through qualitatively better and most likely quantitatively less consumption.
 
When Marx called in the 19th century on the proletarians to unite against the capitalists he failed to recognize the dynamics of human psychology. Marxism got perverted by man putting power over purpose. It might well be that a 21st century call on consumers to unite against manufacturers of goods and providers of services fails because of the same dynamics which are innate to man’s psyche; but considering that we have truly entered a global arena, at least in terms of trade, the game board has changed significantly and the power of national regimes are limited beyond recognition. Henceforth the 19th century antagonists of the proletarian movement have shifted from an alliance between capitalists and nationalist regimes to a more or less clearly defined number of conglomerations which manufacture and distribute the goods and services which we consume.
 
The consumer is therefore left with two choices which do not exclude each other. Firstly, he can reduce his external consumption and shift towards internal consumption, i.e. produce as much as possible himself and trade within small local communities. This concept, I believe, does only work for self-sustainable farming, but wont satisfy human needs beyond nutrition. Secondly, he needs to learn more about the true costs of products purchased externally. Since, I rarely think either black or white, it is very likely that we have to take both choices simultaneously: Reduce consumption and empower the consumer. I focus here on the latter.
 
So what needs to be done to empower the consumer? How can a single person make sense of the myriads of products available on the market? The key words here are transparency, accountability and social responsibility, and all three of them, I believe are questions of ethical behavior which can hardly be executed or enforced by legal mechanisms, but must be trained through a culture of genuine empathy. 1. The true costs of products and services being offered must be made transparent. 2. Manufacturers and service providers must be accountable. 3. Consumers, manufacturers and service providers must act socially responsible.
 
Now, this thought brings me back to Jane Sun and her pep talk on China’s most social employer Ctrip. I asked her yet another question in regard to Ctrip’s actions to obtain world peace by reducing environmental pollution. She acknowledged again the relevance of my question, and – seriously – responded that Ctrip customers can donate their loyalty points to environment protection causes. I don't want to be too hard on rising Chinese MNO’s, because they basically go through an entrepreneurial life cycle which is comparable to the gold rush of American conglomerates after WWI. Chinese didn’t have more than a century to learn that not short term profit, but long term sustainability should be the desired business objective. And truth be told, most Western companies still haven’t. But it is the economic might and the velocity with which China rises, the protectionist isolation of its market, the support of its new global players by a cyberleninist government and the sheer scale of economy of all things happening within the domestic market which have much more effect on humanity at large than anything else we have ever seen, that makes it a paramount task to make Chinese leading entrepreneurs aware of their responsibility to be transparent, accountable and socially responsible.

Scold me for my carbon footprint if you want to or simply accept the facts which you can also watch in the documentary Before the Flood. I just returned from a holiday on Bali and was horrified to see the environmental degradation there. Bali has like most other small islands basically no native industry and most goods have to be transported to the island. The local infrastructure is poor and lacks above all state of the art sewage systems and liquid and solid waste treatment facilities. The tropical rain flushes garbage of whatever consistence left on the roads and on uncontained waste dumps into the sea which literally looks like a huge toilet. We were told that there is only one unspoiled beach left on the far West of the island, and the number of Chinese tourists on Bali is steeply increasing. A recent seminar on Cheung Chau | 长洲岛, one of Hong Kong’s smaller islands, which is a favorite weekend getaway for the close by urbanites, showed a similar picture. The South Korean owner of a Philippine diving school warned me already back in 2011 to avoid dive sites where Chinese tour groups show up. They come in packs of 30 to 50 divers instead of usually five to ten and coral reefs are quickly destroyed because many divers believe to have the right to break off a souvenir.
 
Jane is well aware of such developments. Probably referring to the incident of a Chinese tourist vandalizing the most inner hall of the 3500 year old Egyptian temple in Luxor which went viral on weibo in 2013, or the Hong Kong uproar of comparing mainland Chinese tourist flocking to the citystate like a swarm of locusts. She explains that this is just the adolescent period of a young travel nation, “There were times when Americans were also considered annoying and preposterous tourists who have no respect for local culture and customs, but all this has changed and so it will for Chinese tourists once they have grown into mature travelers.” Jane is absolutely right, and it would be wrong to blame Chinese in general for a few individuals who misbehave. But since even Western consumers haven’t been given the tools to consume mindfully, it is – again considering the economy of scale and China’s rapid development – paramount to start with consumer education asap.

Jane though is excited about massive and mindless consumption as her body language reveals while bragging about customer spending on Hawaii and luxury travel package sales shows. And both Ctrip and Baidu seem to be absolutely ignorant to the responsibility they have to teach Chinese consumers making better external purchase decisions. I can’t highlight the relevance of mindful consuming enough in a country with the most convenient B2C platforms and delivery services. Companies like Ctrip which employ 8000 software engineers to reach their sales targets could also employ some designers like Tristan Harris who think deeply how software can increase long term well being not short term profit. They could, just some thoughts off the top of my head, add carbon footprint indicators next to the travel package choices or give a pole position listing to airlines which do not serve junk food in plastic packaging on the plane, but nutritious and tasty meals before and after the take off in airport cafeterias.
 
There are surely lots of great ideas out there on how to reduce mindless consumption, but it takes a clear and genuine yes from power people like Jane Sun to implement such ideas. 21st century consumers can unite like 19th century proletarians, but it will be a long and painful path to induce real change, because human psychology has remained unchanged. If the CEO’s in today’s multinational megabusinesses continue to be corrupted by power and forget over this selfish attitude their responsibility to act on behalf of the greater good, then I believe there is little hope for radical change. It is Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Taobao & Co., the tech giants which control the flow of bits and bytes and the large retailers like German Aldi, Japanese Lawson or US Walmart, which control the flow of goods, which have to change from channeling to consumers economically profitable information and products - and thus most often outspoken madness; to channel knowledge – and truth - which increases individual and general well-being. Jane’s pointing at a deer and calling it a horse during that SFCC lunch was a sad display of being deeply enthralled in the former.
 
Follow up reading:

• Daniel Goleman: A Mindful Consumer Can Help Change the World in The Mindfulness Revolution
• Good Guide: an iPhone app started by an independent group at the University of California-Berkeley which aggregates 200 databases and compares 60.000-plus consumer items.
  

Migration in the widest sense is a change from A to B or probably in our digital world better from 0 to 1, whether in substance (e.g. solid to gas), space (e.g. home to office) or spirit (e.g. conventional to post-conventional consciousness); all these forms of change happen on the same trajectory: time, which in the perception of some thinkers is just an illusion; but the essence of time is then again a completely different story.

In March 2016, I participated in an odd event under the title: break, change, departure. It was a three-day retreat for Christian, German men on a remote Hong Kong island in a Don Bosco cloister. Having emotionally denounced my Christian confession at age 16 while still in catholic boarding school, where Christian faith was practiced without proper reflection on the basis of coercion only, I had been traumatically conditioned to circumnavigate such kind of conventions.
 
Raised in a Christian culture and rejecting it early, I tend to perceive religious communities nowadays as systems within society at large. Rejection or even labelling the entirety of such communities as wrong, would put me into the same mindset as some fervent adherents of such religions: exclusion instead of integration. I therefore try to use them as platforms from which one can navigate into social realms, that open up new perspectives upon the other and oneself.
 
However, having myself labelled both, as native Austrian not German and not Christian by confession, it took me a considerable mental effort to sign up and effectively attend that retreat. My gut feeling told me though, that despite the setting, this was the thing to do at that specific moment. The title itself radiated some magical attraction, because I felt that a period of fundamental change was lying ahead in my own professional trajectory.
 
In hindsight, I acknowledge that this retreat-seminar prepared me for a major transition, which could be described as a migration in both physical and spiritual dimensions; and without doubt, I am truly grateful for having been part of it; if not for anything else, then for the simple realization that a considerable part of myself is both Christian and German - the latter was even confirmed by the Genographics DNA test, which I recommend dearly.
 
Labelling oneself deprives us from experiencing the complete spectrum of our identity and insofar it is a destructive mindset which falls short of taping into the potential available; the same is true for labelling others, colleagues, strangers & migrants, in regard to the potential interaction with them. My interaction with German Christian men produced some refreshingly new friendships and gave me valuable feedback about until then unknown layers of my own identity.
 
What I want to share here are my general reflections on the varieties of migration, which were triggered by the lectures and conversations of that weekend; and moreover the specific burden modern man has to cope with a world of accelerated change and infinitely increased information. This year, there is a quite personal connection to the issue at hand. Some might remember last year’s CNY mail about the psychological phenomenon of mid life crisis. I concluded that we might take a sabbatical in the foreseeable future as a preventive strategy to avoid MLC. What I did not know: I should be relieved of my duties as Fronius China Managing Director only two months later and would be rewarded for more than five toilsome but extremely educative years with a 14-months sabbatical.
 
Since May 2016 I spend my days full time writing on personal and organizational development in a Chinese context; and I struck a deal with my HQ to draft a corporate training course based on Chade Meng-Tan’s Search Inside Yourself bestseller to finance this period. Not everything was smooth about this deal, and I had to digest some emotional scars during the first weeks of my new found freedom, but in hindsight I am grateful for this opportunity to grow and transform without having to worry about an income.
 
In terms of my professional future a wide spectrum of opportunities opened up, and I am still in the process of figuring out what I will do after the sabbatical oscillating between doubt and faith. I noticed, too, that there is a correlation between security and interest. The higher my interest in a specific career, the less in particular financial security it provides. Erich Fromm might have been right by saying that the quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.

Migration and Meaning.
You might also remember that I made last year extensive reference to Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, where he writes: For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, as personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. If only pleasure is sought after, genuine and lasting happiness can’t ensue. I concluded then: If all psychological discontentment is rooted in stagnation, so it must be for midlife crisis. There are probably many more reasons why midlife crisis kicks in, but assuming that our children leaving us alone with ourselves -and thus again inducing a change in our identity at a much later stage in our life- is a main source of suffering, we are advised to embrace this period of transition. If we have experienced growth when becoming parents by surrendering to something larger than ourselves, it seems to be a wise approach to do the same once again by e.g. signing up to a non-profit initiative or adding purpose to our jobs.

It is telling that I sit today at my desk somewhere in the south of Ubud on the Indonesian island of Bali. I would have never thought to come here one day, since Indonesia as such was until recently not on my list of preferred travel destinations. But I know Bali very well from a brilliant TED talk by designer Stefan Sagmeister who spent here one of his 12 month long sabbaticals which he takes every seven years. It was that talk which planted a few years ago the idea into my head that I really need to take off some substantial time from the rat race I was caught up in and figure out what really matters.
Sagmeister proposes a fundamental change in lifestyle design. He explains that we generally spend 25 years of our life in education, 40 in work and if things go smooth another 15 in retirement and suggests to take five years out of retirement and distribute those years evenly over the duration of our work life. He argues that it is better to devote every seven years of work, rather one year to oneself than 15 years of retirement to one’s grand children. But what he suggests is not an egoistic undertaking, but an encounter with one’s creativity and the connection of the self with the creative ground; a contemplative adventure which reveals what really matters.
Meaning and Passion.
 
In particular, when we are not anymore driven by urgent economic needs, instilling purpose to our lives, can turn though into quite a tricky task. How do we actually find our purpose and how does one surrender to something larger than oneself as Frankl insinuates? I happened to run into a brief article by Scott Wilhite on the Soul-Quieting Power of Purpose, in which he refers to a TEDx talk by Adam Leipzig. Film producer Leipzig claims that one only has to answer five simple questions to figure out one’s purpose:
 

1. Who are you?
2. What do you love to do?
3. Who do you do it for?
4. For the people you do it for: What do those people want or need?
5. And what did those people get out of it? How did they change as a result?

The interesting part here is that only the first two questions are about ourselves, the other three are about somebody else. So far, so good. Leipzig’s talk has though like so many other talks on finding one’s purpose a fundamental flaw. His second question is not what do you do? it’s what do you love to do? Now, tell me, if you don’t know what you love to do, if you do not feel what you are passionate about, because you are not passionate about anything, how can you possibly answer the other questions? you might not even be able to answer who you are. That’s probably why many readers including myself perceive authors like Robin Sharma who wrote, that the secret of happiness is simple: find out what you truly love to do and then direct all of your energy towards it, as superficial new age evangelists.
This fundamental flaw is related to the assumption that all people can genuinely love have passion. Loving is though a competence which is instilled into human beings mainly by being loved during early childhood which they then learn by simple imitation and reciprocity. It can also be learned at a later stage as e.g. Erich Fromm pointed out in The Art of Loving, but like all learning is then a much harder subject to get good grades in: you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.[1] Love is ideally instilled into our bodies and then finds its way over our minds into our activities and professions.[2] It was Jung, who implied that loving as a competence is the source for creativity by writing that The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves. Those amongst us, who have never properly developed this practical-physical competence, because it first had to be instilled as a theoretical concept into their minds, won’t be able to answer Leipzig’s questions nor will they be able to find their purpose by this method.
I see though a deep truth in the quote at the end of Wilhite’s article, because it points at the second source of how we can figure out our life’s purpose: Never give up on something you can’t go a day without thinking about. Those who have not been fortunate enough to learn the competence of loving early in their lives have another source for identifying their purpose apart from their waking dream: their innermost trauma. Andrew Solomon describes that it takes quite an arduous journey of self-transformation to unlock the positive energy of trauma. Some take it deliberately like Ellen MacArthur who chose to go on a solo around the world sail to understand her calling; others are brutally pushed into it like Ismael Nazario who had to spend years in prison and 300 days in solitary confinement. Only those who take it, can answer the questions Did you live? Did you love? Did you matter? at the end of their days with yes. This yes corresponds with what Erickson called ego integrity and is opposed to despair if one fails to integrate his life’s thoughts and deeds into his personality from a retrospective POV. 
Migration and Community.
 
We were a group of roughly 25 men back then in March 2016, aged 35 to 60, and despite our different educational and social backgrounds we all had two things in common: we were German native speakers and we worked and lived in China since several years. It was this common ground, which made us attend this retreat in the first place, but it was also this common ground which streamlined our psychological horizon. The challenges of migration in the widest sense, from employment into retirement, childhood into adolescence or from one job to another, come in an international setting usually with a plethora of other issues one has to deal with, most commonly it involves a change of location. I could sense from the discussions that all these weekend monks were facing the one or other transition in their own specific way: with joyful anticipation, doubt, regret, anxiety or even fear. However, we all met that weekend to strengthen our faith.
 
The secluded setting of the Don Bosco cloister contributed substantially to the entire experience, but probably the community which grew rapidly amongst complete strangers, who have a common purpose for a few days, was even more important. Two priests who guided us as facilitators – that’s how you would have to call them in new speak - did a great job within their own religious and cultural framework. They provided a daily routine, which gave all participants a clear structure to enjoy the retreat and made it easy to get to know each other. Joint meals were concluded with washing the dishes in an open air kitchen. We would convene in one of the chapels for a short worship after breakfast and dinner. In between the meals, we had every day three 2 hour workshops with an impulse talk as starting point and an open discussion following en suite. There still was time left for a stroll or run around the island once a day. The weekend felt like a light, but well packed rucksack, one is happy to carry.  
 
It is surprising that such retreats are not organized by psychologists or non-religious facilitators respectively. But then, maybe they are, its just me not knowing of them. I sense though, not only within myself but for humanity at large, a need to be guided in phases of transition, in particular in a world of accelerated change. Such guidance can’t be really provided in weekly religious assemblies of people who do not have the time to focus on neither the now nor their life’s horizon. Neither can psychotherapists in weekly one hour sessions provide transformative counselling; quite on the contrary does much therapy turn into just another ego centered routine, which lacks the collective experience.
 
I do also believe that traditional confessions loose their adherents in economically advanced societies, because their shepherds lack relevant knowledge. In times of neurology, neurological biochemistry, positive psychology et cetera, I am convinced that faith has its place in our lives, but it needs to be supplemented with the scientific discoveries of the past two centuries, in particular of the past five decades. Podcasts like Waking Up with Sam Harris, a neurologist by training and declared pagan or the philosopher Alain de Botton’s School of Life, cater to this modern, post-conventional audience, but they do so only virtually.  
 
Transcending our individual livelihoods, we witness a transformation at a much larger scale brought upon us by means of accelerating technological progress. The globalization and cybernation of our societies has a similar if not even more radical impact on our work and live than the invention of electricity. Against this backdrop man is constantly challenged to reinvent himself. Old patterns of behavior and thought are largely obsolete, and naturally man looks for new identification figures who can show us the path ahead.
 
I mostly had troubles with clergyman of whatever confession, because they tend to stick to their scriptures like nationalists to their turf and won’t accept different perspectives. Considering that religions are nothing but aspects of regional cultures, developed in the shape of a mindset of certain peoples, they usually fail to encompass all that is and thus also fail to give answers to an increasing number of polyglot cosmopolites. As we move towards a universal consciousness our shepherds have to upgrade their hard and soft skills, if they don’t want to be left behind by their flock. The year 2000 movie Keeping the Faith intrigued me deeply, not so much because of the picante ménage à trois between a catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi and their joint childhood girlfriend, but because of their progressive sermons and humorous, but passionate customer care. There is no schism between science and theology, they need to merge and modern priests ought to be a mixture between a scientology officer, a Sufi mystic and a molecular engineer. But who can be such a wizard?
 
Individuals, even polymaths are limited to certain competences. That’s why there is a special value in community, where several individuals can pool their competences of neurological astuteness, focused pragmatism, molecular precision, cogent rhetoric and icebreaking humor, if they are bound by some spell of mutual benevolence and gratitude to experience a few hours together in the pursuit of collective learning. It is after all collective learning, not the single wizard, which defines humanity.
  
I enjoyed it therefore to listen to layman from different walks of life during the official sessions of that weekend; to learn about their personal views on subjects of change, transformation and development. It became also apparent that the time in between the official program was an equally important part of that weekend, where against the backdrop of a structured convention spontaneous encounters happened, which have in my memory an equally lucid place. Only the platform of the community can enable such spontaneous and often cathartic encounters, where the roles of teacher and student, of giver and taker are in constant flow. The planned meeting with a single friend, a paid therapist, the HR manager or a man of God in the confession cabin can rarely catalyze such moments. We need to be open to the mind at large, as Aldous Huxley put it, to engage in such encounters, albeit not through the intake of psychedelics, but through the submission to community with others. Somehow man gets ever more connected through technology, but simultaneously alienated and isolated in the physical world.   
 
Thinking about the relevance of community makes me recall an essay by Siri Hustvedt, which she titled Freud’s Playground. She describes Freund’s concept of the space between people, where people spontaneously interact like on a Tummelplatz, the German word for a fair-like playground, and cites Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, a 20th century Yuval Harari, who published 1938 homo ludens, where he argues that all culture is a form of play. Two people can play combative games like chess or go, but they can’t participate in the complexities of games with several participants. A chess player might be able to memorize hundreds of tactical move clusters, but wouldn’t be able to predict the next move of several unknown participants. That’s why both trust and faith can be better learned in communities; and that’s why one or two people are not enough to constitute a culture.
 
Highly individualized and highly regulated cybernetic societies reduce the opportunities to truly engage in communities, they destroy the playgrounds on which the creative minds play with the objects they love, or, if one wants to put it like Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness: they convert organic into mechanistic cultures which deprive us of the ability to love. Hustvedt therefore rightly agrees with the philosopher Martin Buber, who said that psychological illnesses do grow up between people, not within them. It’s the in between, where our cultures blossom or whiter.  
 
Migrants and Fugitives.
 
A fellow weekend monk mentioned during one of the workshops a FAZ interview with the psychotherapist Wielant Machleidt who analyzed the psychological challenges of fugitives during the “European” migration crisis. He rightly describes the entire human life as one long migration; and we remember last year’s detailed explanation how the developmental psychologists Erik and Jane Erickson identify eight phases of psychosocial crisis from birth to death. Machleidt concludes that fugitives who have to integrate into a host society undergo a second adolescence, which he calls cultural adolescence. It is a phase which requires the individual to detach itself from the parent surrogate of the originating state and society to form a new identity defined by both the originating and the host society.
 
Jung would have called the process of taking a step back from one’s own cultural conditioning individuation and would have welcomed additional opportunities which help the individual to develop its self out of an undifferentiated unconscious; he would have probably prescribed some kind of fugitive experience to quite a number of his patients, if not to 20th century European society at large. I am not oblivious to the important difference between deliberately moving out of one’s comfort zone to explore new physical, intellectual and spiritual horizons and being literally evicted from one’s home, but I agree with Machleidt that we need to change our integration policies and build them on the premise that such experiences harbor an enormous potential for the individual to grow. It is the host society’s job to harvest this potential by taking over the responsibility of a new parent surrogate, which provides not only shelter but also structure and limitations.

That weekend I looked into the circle of participants after most of them had shared their personal situation and I wondered how much their situations did resemble a real war zone fugitive; all of them had spent several years abroad and both, culture and reverse culture shock, must have led to a cultural adolescence in different forms of intensity. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs popped up before my mental eye and I mixed it with the difficulty scale of alpine mountain climbing. A young Syrian man, e.g. who arrives exhausted in Germany without relatives would be a stage 8+ migrant, but could probably three months later be classified as stage 5+ migrant, if he has been provided with basic amenities and was reunited with a family member or has found new friends.
 
Most of the men I saw though in that room would have been classified between stage 2 and 5: none of them was forcefully pushed out of his chosen habitat. Nevertheless, there were severe differences between single employees of large MNOs who played with the thought of leaving China because of air pollution (stage 8.5 need) and obnoxious superiors (stage 6 need) and would be able to get a safe and well paid job in some other unit of the same company back in Europe; and a single entrepreneur who on top of all other consideration seriously considers to pack up his family after a failed start up and to move forward into an uncertain and undecided future of unknown location and vocation. Personal conditions look different from inside out. They surely do, but I was wondering why some of the participants had to strengthen their faith considering their snug and fat lives. My guess is that status and reputation plays at a certain stage in our lives an exponentially important role aggravating our doubt over the future and its challenges.  If you have nothing, there is nothing to loose, but if you have something, our quest for security and conformity to preserve what we have, deprives us from being and growing even further. So we start to doubt. Fromm was indeed a smart motherfucker. Conformity is, without doubt, the surest path to mediocrity,  boredom and depression.
 
It was then not surprising that a look at the probably most industrialized and capitalized society on this planet, the United States, reveals that suicide rates are particularly high amongst white Caucasian males. The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention published in April 2016 the report of a long term study of suicide. It states that in 2014, the age-adjusted rate for males (20.7) was more than three times that for females (5.8). The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention claims that 7 out of 10 suicides in 2014 were committed by white men. One can not help but to be reminded of the 2010 movie Company Men, which shows how the self-esteem movement paired with a capitalist system drives in particular white middle aged men into marginalization and depression.
 
Suicide is only the tip of an iceberg of mental illness, but in my understanding the most important indicator of a culture’s sanity. Beneath, much less visible are stress, burn out syndrome, alcohol and drug abuse, paranoia, psychosis and the epidemic of gnawing self doubt. The doubt of the self translates directly into a lack of faith in God, because after all, God is not some mythical creature, but a force that lives within each one of us; whether we are conscious of that force or not is irrelevant. A few months ago I read at the door of the Rudolf Steiner library in Switzerland a quote of the Baroque physician and poet Angelus Silesius, which perfectly describes how this self doubt is identical with lack of faith:
 
Behold, where are you bound? Heaven is within.
Searching God without, again and again you’re missing him.
 
The disability activist Caroline Casey talks about her very personal story of finding that freedom within. Being legally blind since birth, but only finding out at age 17, she fights her disability until she has a breakdown at age 28 in her then position as global management consultant at Accenture. The philosopher Eckhart Tolle writes in A New Earth, that people with heavy pain-bodies usually have a better chance to awaken spiritually than those with a relatively light one. Whereas some of them do remain trapped in their heavy pain-bodies, many others reach a point where they cannot live with their unhappiness any longer, and so their motivation to awaken becomes strong. Pretending to see in a predominantly visual world must have been a daily pain beyond measure fore Caroline. But most of us suffer only from average pain and are thus trapped by the psychology of group pressure within capitalist consumer societies. We go with the flow, because it takes too much effort to move out of our comfort zones and might on top of that sever some of our closest relationships.

Late last year I spent a few weeks in Australia and was utterly disappointed in what I found; prompting me to write a 12000-plus word essay on Expectations of and Deliveries in Down Under. I conclude there, that ‘It might be over simplified, because I haven’t seen much of this vast country, but I have traversed the area which is home to about three quarters of the Australian population. Thus I believe that my impressions can be generalized to the society at large: Australia is a nation which thrives on the exploitation of natural and human resources to such a degree that its affluence hampers technological innovation and cultural progress. It is in its essence a shockingly backward pleasure society.’ A pleasure society which does neither give time, space nor an attitude for suffering. 
Transformation and Suffering.
 
My natural resentment against Australia’s pleasure culture helped me to understand first hand what psychologist Seligman meant with the destructive force of the self-esteem movement, when he wrote 1990 that in the 1960s the emblematic children’s book was The Little Engine That Could. It is about doing well in the world, about persisting and therefore overcoming obstacles. Now many children’s books are about feeling good, having high self-esteem, and exuding confidence. Australia is all about that and I felt as if Australian’s at large – individual exceptions put aside – are a nation in narcissistic regression to satisfy these needs of the self; they lack identification figures of what constitutes a mature adult, someone who cares about more than himself like the local community, domesticated and wild life stock or how individual decisions impact the global environment; simply somebody who acts responsibly and is willing to put himself in second place.
 
It would be interesting to analyze in depth how the self esteem movement transformed the original story of The Little Engine That Could into the Starlight Express, where instead of one engine fighting against himself to overcome interior obstacles, various engines compete to become the fastest engine in the world. One reason is without question based on Rev W. Awdry's refusal to give Andrew Lloyd Webber permission to us the characters of his Railway Series books for a musical adaptation. But a deeper and probably less known reason is to be found in our collective unconscious which underwent a massive transformation - starting with the rise of postmodernism of the 1960s - from individuals striving for the greater good by cooperating in unity to individuals striving for their own good by competing against each other.
 
Australia also helped me to understand what Frankl wrote 1984 about the three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. He said that the first is by creating a work or by doing a deed; the second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love. Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph. Frankl’s main proponent in the US, Edith Weisskopf-Joelson, expressed hope that logotherapy may help to counteract certain unhealthy trends in the present-day culture of the United States, where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading so that he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.
 
With reference to earlier elaborations on rising suicide rates, widespread depression, pandemic boredom and other mental health issues like burnout syndrome or ADHD in affluent societies, it seems as if we are meant to diverge some traffic to that third avenue on which one arrives at meaning in life. Suffering has lost its appeal since WWII and people don’t want to suffer, they push suffering away and instead of facing it, they engage in a plethora of compensation behaviors from shopping sprees to drug abuse. I feel though that it is a safe vehicle to not only personal growth but also to personal transformation, because it is through the gates of suffering that we enter fast forward the realm of compassion and kindness.
 
Transformation and Compassion.
 
If you would ask me about my religious inclinations, I would tell you that I consider myself a Taoist with strong Buddhist features who sees lots of value in adhering to some if not too much Confucian structures in everyday life. Its exactly in my religious outlook that I am more Chinese than most of my chosen fellow country man. But it shall be explained to the reader who does not share my interest in religion and spirituality, that none of these three schools of thought are in a narrow definition a religion, i.e. a concept which teaches the existence of a superhuman all powerful being which is separated from us, but rather philosophies which teach the human being how to live better and more harmonious lives. Interestingly, I have found recently a layer in my identity which is clearly is Christian, but I had to first understand the central role of compassion through Buddhism, to realize that it is also Christianity’s central message wrapped into lots of unattractive suffering.
 
How much more was I able to relate to a prince who felt suffering in this world and turned into a saint by recognizing how to master his mind and open his heart without being stoned by angry Jews and nailed to a wooden cross. How much more could I relate to Buddhism as a school of thought, an ancient form of positive psychology which reduces suffering, than to a carpenter’s son whose blood stained groin cloth turned into a flag for crusades, inquisition and an increase of suffering. Yet another piece in the puzzle of Christianity fell in place during this year’s Hong Kong retreat under the title “Faith and Doubt”.
 
What does it mean to be Christian? Let me start with a negative definition: Being a Christian is not related to exterior realities like the condition of the church or the behavior of its officials. And let me follow up with a positive definition: Being a Christian means to genuinely love your neighbor, to not judge him based on prejudice, but to guide him onto the path of purification and reformation to God’s infinite love. All those who have turned their back upon Christianity during the last decades were – like myself – enthralled in an exterior reality with which they were not anymore able to identify themselves with. But the genuine Christian perceives his connection to God as an inner reality, which he lives through his love of the fellow human being in every moment of thought, word and deed.
 
Christ and Buddha arrived at the same conclusion which can be understood as the very bottom line of their teachings: God is a reality which we can most clearly perceive through compassion with our fellow human beings, which reduces suffering. Christianity has enshrined this insight in the second great commandment: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. But it is Buddhism, which teaches a more refined concept of Karuṇā (compassion) being one of four attitudes learned on man’s spiritual path towards enlightenment. The other three are loving kindness (Pāli: mettā), sympathetic joy (mudita) and equanimity (upekkha). I still struggle to understand why these fundamental and simple insights have been perverted by power driven institutions into complex and repulsive doctrines.
 
Transformation and Lent.
 
Miriam Webster’s dictionary defines Lent (in the Christian Church) as the period preceding Easter, which is devoted to fasting, abstinence, and penitence in commemoration of Christ's fasting in the wilderness. In the Western Church it runs from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday, and so includes forty weekdays. In March 2017 I at Bishop Lei’s Hotel in Hong Kong and read from the screens these lines about Lent:
 
Lent is the road leading from slavery to freedom, from suffering to joy, from death to life. Lent is the time for saying no. No to the spiritual asphyxia born out of the pollution caused by indifference, by thinking that other's people's lives are not my concern. Lent is the time to make room in our life for all the good things that we are able to do. Lent is the time of remembering what we would be if God had closed his doors on us. Lent is the time to start breathing again. it is the time of turning through the breath of God our dust into humanity. Lent is the time of compassion. It is the time to set aside everything that isolates, enclosed and paralyzes us. Lent is a path: it leads to the triumph of mercy over all that would crush us or reduce us to something not worthy of the dignity to be called God's children.
 
These lines and my deliberate choice to refrain from alcohol, sugar, nicotine and other drugs for the duration of lent made me understand why Christianity wraps its central teaching of compassion into a thick layer of suffering. Its because suffering helps us to grow beyond imagination; the pain of the sufferer is the only road sign required on our path; and it is a road sign which we put up ourselves. If we do not volunteer to suffer, to deprive ourselves from behaviors, things and people we have grown accustomed to, we fail to grow and fail to realize our potential. Lent is an opportunity to volunteer.
 
Life is a journey, a migration, a transformation towards God. It's a journey which leads inside not outside or rather our external conditions in the material world reflect our inner conditions in the spiritual world. Time is the subjective reality on which we travel, in permanently self destructive mode, we shorten our lifespan suffering, in consistent creative mode we extend it, enjoying ourselves in shining for others. But without the possibility to suffer properly we are deprived of making leaps of enlightenment propelled by the pain of sudden realizations and are dragged into a swamp like Pachinko mode of amusing ourselves to death.

Transformation. Location. Destination.
 
Some time ago I published an essay on LinkedIn titled Why I Want to Leave China and Why I Don't, which I had written back in 2014, then convincing myself to stay in this rollercoaster country. It was quite well received and shortly afterwards, I got an email by an acquaintance containing a peculiar differentiation of man which I want to share here in all brevity.
 
There are three main reasons for everyone to be somewhere: 1. You are here because you are born here, the majority of your family lives here, you own some land or house here, and therefore you have a solid legitimate reason to be here no matter what your political instincts, religious tendencies or sexual interests are. Let’s call them H(ome) guys 2. You came here in search for a new opportunity, disguised as adventure, love affair, search for gold or money or cultural novelty. Let’s call them S(earch) guys 3. You didn’t want to be here, but you had to flee from something, somebody or somewhere and you just stranded here, and you anyhow didn’t know where to go exactly. Let’s call them F(light) guys.
 
The mail continues that most places are quite a mixture of these 3 groups, but the composition varies greatly and makes a huge difference to the general attitude of the local society. Shanghai’s majority belongs to the S group, followed by H and no visible F group. European cities differ tremendously with a way higher H group and a perceived huge F group. I don’t know why but one’s comfort is increased if you belong the biggest group, so in Shanghai you definitely find it initially exciting to be part of a huge S group. But S people leaving, you wonder if you will eventually become a member of the H group, but it doesn’t take long to realize that this will not happen in your generation, probably though in the next; but if this we don’t know.
 
The above differentiation makes a lot of sense, and I largely agree with the author, but it lacks a very important perspective, because it describes only the reasons for our whereabouts in the physical world and takes this description as its foundation to explain our choice of location. I have come to the conclusion that, yes, many people put considerations within the physical world above everything, but in the last extent it is our outlook on in the spiritual realm which defines where we are and were head to. I therefore differentiate nowadays two sort of people: those who have found a spiritual home, no matter where they are and what they do; and those who have not. The Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin formulated this perception cogently as such: The Marxist contradiction between worker and capitalist is obsolete; its not a class struggle, but the spirit of evolution, which separates humanity into two parties. Here are these who perceive our planet as a comfy living room; and there are those who perceive Earth as a developing organism. Here the spirit of Bourgeoisie, there mankind’s actual proletarians.
 
These proletarians or migrant workers, as I call them, can belong to the above mentioned H and F group. They might have stable families, own posh houses and devote years of effort to building communities and sharing values. They might nevertheless at certain stages in their lives be classified as member of the flight group, in particular during the years which Jung attributed to the process of individuation. Peeling off cultural conditioning and developing a true self often involves physical detachment from one’s originating society. That’s why Mark Twain wrote early in the 20th century about his fellow US country men: Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. These migrant workers never belong though to the ever growing S group which tries to find something in the material realm that can only be found in the spiritual and from there be mirrored into our daily lives.
 
I have myself always differentiated amongst foreigners in China between culture nerds, spiritual mystics and economic opportunist and have noticed that since the WFC the latter form a clear and increasing majority; but I have to concede that there are many more migrant workers amongst all three of these groups than I would find in a comparable sample back home. Most of these people move out of their comfort zone and strive for a new horizon. When I look at those who return to their originating societies or move on from China to another country, I see that all these rather rigid categorizations can’t encompass the reality of a human life which is always – if one permits - in transformation. I believe therefore that all categorizations must be read in the light of human development psychology, in particular Erickson’s stages of psychosocial development which I explained last year and Loevinger’s  stages of ego development.

Many of our friends leave China because their search years have come to an end and because they want to truly melt into a society which they can call their home; others have given up their single life style and now form part of a larger organism, a family, and are as such simply overwhelmed by the challenges one encounters in China’s urban parenthood.
When my wife and me discuss lately reasons for leaving China top results are related to our children. Their socialization and exposure to my native culture; a better and better value education; interaction with “green” nature. But we, too, have a desire to simplify our lives and leave despite its convenience this stressful urban environment.
 
If one is not predestined to move on to a place where relatives or second homes have to be taken care of, I have noticed that the decision process can turn for some into a real odyssey. A friend of mine made a list with 140 different items which are important to him and his family respectively, including as simple items as sausages he likes to eat and beer brands he likes to drink, as well as more complex items like schools with specific curricula or certain health insurance schemes. He then weighted the items and evaluated on basis of that list several destinations. This rationally engineered decision process, which reminded me very much of data strategist Amy Webb, who did the same thing for finding her husband, helped him to pick the top scoring country and move there. Evaluation pending.
 
Another friend of mine collects since a substantial while data on potential destinations, where properly researched and crowd sourced information about costs of daily living, taxation, visa and financial requirements, health care, safety, education, environment, climate, political and social stability et cetera is maintained. He shared with me a few of the websites[i] which are being used by a growing species of global nomads; all of them most likely to be categorized firstly, S and secondly, Bourgeois; and a minority which truly wants to grow but can’t find the resources for this growth within and thus follows life style design idols like Tim Ferris, who perceive the planet as a global playground and their life as a vessel to be filled with excitement. This friend’s decision is still pending.
 
Transformation and Transformer.
 
My two friends prompted me to question the necessity to make such lists or mine for respective data, because it felt like the infamous search for the needle in a haystack. What if there was another, easier though not less sophisticated path to firstly, recognize the right timing for a transformation and secondly, the right destination. What if I could spare myself all the ruminations about where to go and what to do and save myself the tedious time of comparing online data? And would all this rationalized information lead to any good result?  If I am lucky it can, but I wouldn’t count on it.
 
The culture critic Neil Postman argued in 1990 – what would he say as of 2017? - that our society relies too heavily on information to fix our problems, especially the fundamental problems of human philosophy and survival, that information, ever since the printing press, has become a burden and garbage instead of a rare blessing […] what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of chaos […] matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems […] Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it […] the tie between information and action has been severed.
 
I believe that in an era of digital deluge more and more people feel overwhelmed by both the information and the life style choices available; I at least did until not too long ago. It came as a timely relief to listen to two talks on our 2016 Hong Kong retreat, which made me drop Six Sigma change management and instilled a new attitude towards the uncertainty coming. One speaker elaborated on his understanding of sin and differentiated between mortal sin, i.e. something evil being done on purpose, and general sin, i.e. not being receptive for God’s signal. He compared living in general sin with a TV program which can’t be watched due to interference and asked how we can tune our TV reception for a clear divine transmission. I was surprised to hear such an analogy in a Christian setting, but found clear parallels to Taoist and Buddist teaching which answers that question with atonement exercises, that is e.g. taichi and meditation. After all it is the search inside which brings salvation or as the Chinese say: 回头是岸。 

The second speaker elaborated on Abraham’s Departure from slavery in ancient Egypt to freedom in the promised land of Canaan and used it as a fable on the most important ingredient for success in any complex undertaking, that is trust. But trust in what? the atheist wondered. From a psychological point of view, trust in oneself. From a theological point of view, trust in God. In a dualist perspective these are two separate realities; in a monist perspective both POVs are two sides of the same coin.
One could add in the financial times we live in yet the economic perspective, which was described by Adam Smith as the invisible hand, i.e. his notion that individuals' efforts to pursue their own interests may frequently benefit society more than if their actions were directly intending to benefit society. The father of capitalism sanctifying self-love over selfishness as a law inherent to economy.  
 
What I took though from both talks was a reference to God being the transformer who makes the neurotic hoarding of information obsolete because he transmits his message to those who listen in the required moment and probably more importantly with better knowledge of our needs and the needs of the world than ourselves. The talks made me yet again think of the Japanese concept of ikigai, which I found in a beautiful diagram which I couldn’t make sense of rationally. But it made perfect sense once I recalled the Zen paradigm of a student asking his master: How do I attain Zen? The master answers: Pour me some more tea and I will show you. But master, the disciple replies, your cup is already full. Just do it, the master urges him. The disciple does as he is told, and the brew spills all over the table. In this moment the student attains Zen as he realizes that in order to become enlightened his mind must be empty. The same is true for wisdom, i.e. making the right decisions in the right moment. If both our cerebral as well as our gastric convolutions are congested with information garbage and junk food, it is no surprise that we can’t receive a strong signal.

Teleological Transformation.
 
Another friend told me not too long ago, that even if we receive a strong signal, we confine ourselves to a small purpose because we are afraid of the purpose God assigns to us; and rightly so, he says: see, what e.g. Jesus got from fulfilling his duty. Our fear of death is ultimately in our own way. He is probably right, because the fear of death is surely underneath all our fears; but who says that God wants you to be stoned and crucified? It is this outlook on life which Christianity popularized; but it is our tendency to get entrenched in avoidable suffering, and the narcissistic self-esteem movement which negates the ability to bear real suffering that makes it so difficult to grow towards self-love and towards God simultaneously.
 
Nelson Mandela, who sat for years in prison confinement could have probably just hanged himself or giving up upon him like many of Viktor Frankl’s concentration camp inmates did, but he never lost his hope, lived till age 95 and produced these deeply moving words instead, which clearly show that beyond our fears there hides teleological transformation, i.e. clear direction and guidance which comes from deep within.
 
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. anifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
 
Franz Kafka on the other hand, the early 20th century prodigy writer, who produced beautifully crafted works like The Process and The Castle, lost all hope. His spiritual and physical decay is left to us as part of his literary legacy in The Metamorphosis; the novella portrays in my humble opinion Kafka’s own dreams of being transformed from man to insect; recurring nightmares of a highly sensitive person, who stayed in the self chosen confinements of a legal day job with a Prague based insurer, instead of growing towards the light and transforming into something better, e.g. using his wordsmithing talents to convey the message of light instead of darkness to his readership. Kafka died at age 40 from tuberculosis.
 
The legendary Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi whom we know from his parable of comparing man with a butterfly described this metamorphosis from outside in rather than from inside out: When people are asleep, their spirits wander off; when they are awake, their bodies are like an open door, so that everything they touch becomes an entanglement. Day after day they use their minds to stir up trouble; they become boastful, sneaky, secretive. They are consumed with anxiety over trivial matters but remain arrogantly oblivious to the things truly worth fearing. Their words fly from their mouths like crossbow bolts, so sure are they that they know right from wrong. They cling to their positions as though they had sworn an oath, so sure are they of victory. Their gradual decline is like autumn fading into winter – this is how they dwindle day by day. They drown in what they do – you cannot make them turn back. They begin to suffocate, as though sealed up in a box – this is how they decline into senility. And as their minds approach death, nothing can cause them to turn back toward the light.

Robert Bly’s Iron John, which I recently devoured, is about unearthing the hairy man in our postmodern douchebag identities; a part of ourselves which we have lost during and because of the industrial revolution, the separation of labor and the subsequent destruction of sacred social entities like the extended family. Ken Wilber’s Trump and the Posttruth World is about exactly the same issue, but from a collective perspective. Wilber explains that it is the aperspecival madness of the postmodernist elite, which neglects its prior states of amber and orange consciousness that put Trump into power. 
 
Its mostly the same people who attend the mythopoetic workshops which Bly initiated in the 1990s who have voted for Trump: disenfranchised white Americans; the squeezed middle class, which has lost in the course of globalization not only jobs but also identity and self-worth. Bly argues for embracing the hairy being, i.e. our animal nature, within; Wilber argues for the embracing of our own evolutionary truths, the amber and orange truths of a collective past which dates back to stories like Iron John, which was most likely written in a pre-Semitic era, i.e. probably more than three millennia ago. We might have partially evolved into postmodernist intellectuals, but we remain animals and as such Iron John stays our all reality as much as the amber and orange epochs stay a reality not only as our evolutionary past and partial truth, but as a slippery slope each one of us can go down every moment of mindlessness.
 
Wilber packs his vast and broad thinking into the new and sometimes alien terminology  (aspectival madness is only one of many neologisms) and novel orthography (like posttruth, leadingedge or metatheory) of the his integral metatheory’s framework. Bly uses the poetry and prose of myths, sagas and fairy tales to show us, what we have lost, to become what we are and why we suffer as we do. Both authors share a common message: let kindness and inclusion heal individual and collective scars. Let us heal in community, instead of suffering in lofty isolation.
 
Wilber explains Trump’s rise to power essentially by describing two dynamics: the increasing aperspectival madness of green, which is stuck in nihilism and narcissism; and the ethnocentric force of amber which feels itself ignored by green. There is though a third dynamic, which I am surprised that Wilber does not even mention with one word: the rise of China, which explains to a large extent both 1. the disenfranchisement of the American middle class being ditched more and more into a growing lower and lower middle class by the merciless breakers of the liberal US labor market and the indifference of America’s elite; 2. the resurgence of ethnocentric amber as an answer to the threats of globalization most clearly identified in the loss of America's leading hegemonic role. 
 
Henry Kissinger did a marvelous job to describe in World Order exactly the latter dynamic using the sleek terminology of a seasoned diplomat. He draws striking parallels between the rise of Germany before WWI and the resulting change in the balance of powers and the rise of China as a new player in the competition for global hegemony. I genuinely believe that one can not fully comprehend the course of evolution without understanding China's history, present conditions and envisioned scenarios for its own future; and although it amounts to heresy to criticize Wilber's broad thinking, I blame him of a US-centric POV.
 
The leading edge of evolution has in my opinion left the US and will not return, neither through a healing green - a completely irrational thought, because green can not heal on its own terms in a political multi-party system which is poised to create a we vs. them attitude, a fight for resources and voters with the consequence that an integral view can never be attained for reasons of political system failure - nor by evolving into turquoise for the same reasons, in particular though, because the US would have to leapfrog evolution from having regressed to amber-orange to a far away turquoise. A recent talk titled Calexit showed another scenario for the US: California’s pull out from the United States of America; an ethnocentric split of progressive and wealthy Californians from the mainly conservative rest of America (ok, apart from the Northern East Coast). California in the foot steps of Cataluña, which wants to split from the less progressive and less wealthy rest of Spain since eons ago.
 
Quite on the contrary there is a genuine chance that the political one party system of the PRC must evolve from its current amber-orange state of ethnocentric excellence and profit seeking into an orange world-centric outlook, which would - lucky China - at the present moment - coincide with the Chinese elite's self understanding of China being - again as most of the last two and a half millennia - the gravitational center of humanity; and from there in could continue its fast track evolution (serious China watchers won’t be surprised) to a non ideological integral turquoise, which truly embraces more than only it's own truth, simply because the Chinese mind never believed in absolute truths and could therefore not fall victim to postmodernity’s nihilism; and most importantly because the Chinese one party system provides a political arena, which is trained since 1949 to accommodate different fractions within one decisive power aggregate, and thus is because of its system's structure poised to move towards the next stage, the leading edge of evolution.
 
But even if China will not manage to take over the leading edge I would bet my money rather on Germany than the US. Germany per se, and Europe in general has already a larger fraction of its population on the integral consciousness level than the US and would therefore and because it did yet not suffer from a collective regression to amber-orange, find it easier to reach the magical threshold of 10%, which is according to Wilber required to tip the consciousness of a society at large. 
 
It is also in the case of Germany important to note the systemic frame conditions. Contrary to China and the US, Germany is not a superpower with no real rival in its vicinity. Germany is surrounded by similar sized nations, itself threatened by the rise of a powerful Turkey and a KGB led Russia, and recalls from two bitterly lost WWs that it can not take the route of ethnocentric amber once again. Germany is therefore on track to take over a responsible leadership role not only for Europe, but probablz for the world at large. 
 
The Brits have unconsciously felt that the center of gravity has shifted from Western Europe to Central Eastern Europe, from Brussels-London-Paris (let’s be frank here: Bonn was never a serious contender) to Brussels-Berlin-Warsaw and have therefore, hurt in their imperialistic self understanding, decided to leave a holarchical, to date only commercial empire, which is now steered from the geographical continental center of Europe, not from the periphery of a group of islands. With triggering Art 50 of the EU constitution Great Britain has vaulted itself off evolution's leading edge. It showed preference for exclusion over inclusion and this behavior violated the basic rule of growth holarchies (another of Wilber’s ingenious neologisms): accept and integrate earlier stages of evolution; don't cling on to ethnocentric amber-orange if the general tendency points already towards integrative turquoise.
 
Again, it is Kissinger who brilliantly explains in World Order that it was the primary interest of French foreign policy, the main political power on continental Europe, for over 300 years to keep the German speaking territories between Denmark and the North of Italy apart; because since Cardinal Richelieu the French knew all too well that a unification of the strongly split Germanic kingdoms would create a political entity which would surpass all others in economic might and could multiply that might with its geostrategic position.  Germany has failed twice to achieve this goal by force; the EU has bestowed upon the German speaking lands though for the first time in history a peaceful unification within the larger unification of up to date 28 European nations, and the EU member states have therefore – unconsciously – put Germany into leadership. It is this time though not a leadership which it takes by force, but by assignment. And this is, what I think, the true self-correction of evolution.
 
Evolution and Education
 
In any case, if humanity intends to support evolution’s natural growth, rather than continue to obstruct the creative ground individually or collectively, it must reform its education systems, and Wilber has recognized this fundamental system flaw like nobody else. He writes that as the boomers [generation born between 1946 and 1964] themselves began taking over education in this country, and significantly shifting it so that it emphasized, first and foremost, a movement not of "teaching the truth" - because there is no truth" - but instead promoted "selfesteem". And what they discovered - as a Time Magazine cover story reported - is that promoting selfesteem, without anchoring it on actual accomplishments, simply ends up in increasing narcissism. Deeply egocentric and ethnocentric interior worldviews must be fully understood and addressed - through, among many other things, a deliberately developmental education. 
 
Wilber explains that the role of the leading edge of evolution is to define an effective education and provide, indeed, actual leadership. In particular, in a world of aperspectival madness it can be leadership alone that provides a way forward - real leadership stares into the face of a notruth, nodirection, novalues world and says: it is simply not true that there is no truth; there is most definitely truth, and it lies in this direction; and it is so radiantly genuine and attractive as it provides a believable path into an uncertain future, that it galvanizes vast numbers to follow it forward.
 
The leadership of genuine growth must then take up this responsibility and start its value based work with education combining in its first action towards growth the two most important tasks of a leading edge leadership at once:  firstly, reform education based on the integral metatheory with a full shift from a focus on teaching the notruths of the material world to teaching the truth of mankind’s spiritual community, a shift from the AQAL right side quadrants to the left side quadrants, a shift from forcing information into a child's brain (that is the orange education model of the industrial revolution which wants all children to become diligent engineers and scientist to help build a strong nation) to teach children first and foremost the left quadrants wisdom through increased interpersonal amplified social interaction and integration; and then, secondly, based on that help them discover their unique talents and gifts in order to tap into their fullest potential whether this is as a scientist or engineer to build our Earth into our common home beyond imagination or as an artisan, gardener, craftsman, artist, nurse, teacher or caretaker to increase the Good, the True and the Beautiful -  of which we have yet not enough.
 
Ken Wilber thus answers probably the world's foremost teacher's question about the future of education. Ken Robinson recently said that there is a climate crisis, a crisis of natural resources, but there is also a human resources crisis, a crisis in education. I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives getting on with it. They get no great pleasure from what they do. They endure it rather than enjoy it, and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else. If you said, "Don't do this anymore," they'd wonder what you're talking about. It isn't what they do, it's who they are. They say, "But this is me, you know. It would be foolish to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self." And it's not true of enough people. In fact, on the contrary, I think it's still true of a minority of people. And I think there are many possible explanations for it. And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine education would be the way that happens, but too often, it's not. Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it's not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model. What we need -- and the word's been used many times in the past few days -- is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else.
 
I paraphrase what I have said many times before: the degradation of our physical world reflects the state of our spiritual world. We first have to clean our minds and bodies in order to build an environment which nurtures not only humans but all living things. This cathartic process is reflected by shifting our educational focus from the right side quadrants to the left side quadrants.  In teaching kindness and compassion as the first and foremost social skill, in letting children experience that they usually find their calling and joy only by serving the larger good, not by giving in to narcissistic desires, in shifting our education focus in line with developmental psychology at least during primary years from the top left quadrant to the bottom left quadrant and only during secondary years, once a child has developed a  personality permeated with kindness, back to the right and the top quadrants, we can build the future which we all hope for.