Growth Online

Where Things Stand


Interview

In this interview Roy Posner, president of Growth Online, muses on various topics, from the art of spirit-oriented writing to original thinking to life response to the emergence of mentality and spirit in life. Created May 2008.  (under development)

 

Pt. 1: On the Art of Writing and Thinking


Growth Online: Welcome to the Growth Online interview series. It has been quite a while.

RP: Thank you. Yes, I believe it has been over two years.

Growth Online: You have done quite a bit of writing in recent years. All those articles at Growth Online, the 150+ essays in your bi-weekly column 'A New Way of Living', and now your pending book on Life Response.

RP: Yes, it has come in torrents the last few years.

Growth Online: Is that what you think of yourself as -- as a writer.

You know I don't really think of myself as a writer. I feel that I am more of a researcher, an integrator. I am also a thinker, an explorer of the truths of things -- of ideas and principles of life. I guess that would make me more like Darwin than Dumas.

Growth Online: Was writing then something you ever wanted to do?

When I was in my 20s, I thought about being a magazine journalist. You know, research a topic, and then write about it for a major magazine. For example, I did some detailed research on Solar energy at Temple University when I was a young man, and hoped to turn it into an article and sell it to a major journal, perhaps in the emerging new age community or even an Atlantic Journal.

Growth Online: What happened?

RP: I never got around to it; mainly because I was never that interested in pursuing that as a career path. In fact, what really overwhelmed me at Temple during my stay that week was a presentation of amazingly beautiful and inspiring lithographs of William Blake. I felt a distinct pleasure just looking at them. At a visceral level, I related to his mystic drawings.

And so, magazines writing seemed so prosaic and mundane when compared to the wonders of life, of spiritual like I was coming upon during that time. The next thing I knew I was headed out to California to join the new age! Though I had considered going to Journalism school at Berkeley, instead I painted houses, and wondered where life would take me. A little over a year later I fell into the arms of individuals at the leading edge of the Aurobindian movement, and thereby discovered my life's work and cause.

Growth Online: So having such experiences was primary, and writing secondary?

RP: Actually, at that time I had no idea what to do with my life until that fateful day when I found out about my Aurobindian friends in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. I was subconsciously looking for a way to apply my Mother/Sri Aurobindo ideals in a practical way, and they provided it. Writing was way back in my mind. In fact, as a result of that life-changing meeting, I went into business for many years, which became linked to computers, and that has remained constant. Growth Online was and is an outlet of all of the insights I have had along the way.

(pause) Actually, I never felt all that comfortable as a writer, until recently. I could always teach, I have been an instructor for nearly two decades, but I didn't develop that real flare for writing until lately -- probably in the last two or three years.

Now I am somewhat startled how beautiful and meaningful some of the paragraphs of mine turn out to be.  I wonder to myself did I really write that? Where did THAT come from? When I read something from more than several years ago, it feels somewhat hallow. There is no real beauty of expression. The ideas don't jump out at you quite the they they do now. Still even now they are only tiny sprouts of genius amidst a forest of mediocrity.

Growth Online: Mediocrity?

RP: The ideas are not mediocre; they are often profound. It’s just their expression too often does not match the meaning. At least for me; for my own high standards.

In any case, I believe I am improving. In some areas, rapidly so. And that only happens by constantly writing and rewriting. Hammering out paragraphs until they turn into pure gold. Once you have the knowledge behind the statement or circumstance, it is just a matter of letting go and allowing the expression to form a glowing shell that makes it readable and enjoyable.  When you get it in that form, then you know that you are making a contribution to others.

Growth Online: Do you think you are an original thinker?

RP: If by that you mean someone who creates thoughts and insights that have never existed in the world before -- sort of an avatar of insight -- then I would say mostly no. I am pretty much just synthesizing the wisdom of Sri Aurobindo, The Mother, and Karmayogi into presentable ideas that the average person can understand. My friend Garry Jacobs of Mothers' Service Society, who is perhaps the main disciple of Karmayogi, is doing the same. In one sense, my whole career in the last twenty years is to present complex concepts in simple form, whether in training work or at Growth Online, or in the book I am writing on Life Response. I remember several times a friend of mine in college would day: "So Roy, are you making the synthesis." I never quite knew what he meant, though now that idea very much resonates with me.

(pause) Occasionally I am able to come up with an original idea -- practical, spiritual, or both. More often than not, it comes by synthesizing several other ideas -- either as a logical expression of something new, or as an intuition that comes then or later on in a flash. Then I often sit down and expand on the thought in various directions, In those very far between, but ever-narrowing moments, I do some original thinking. But it is evanescent, short-lived, and sporadic -- although it is happening happening with ever-greater frequency.

Karmayogi is in my mind the greatest original thinker of the modern age -- i.e. from the passing of Sri Aurobindo until now. Nothing I have seen from other writers, thinkers, spiritual teachers come even close in my opinion. He has written over a thousand articles on every facet of life, with startling originality, in which every precepts is integrated with every others. There has never been anything on earth quite like it before. (see www.karmayogi.net)

Imagine if you were a genius in 100 field of life -- from literature to science to social development to the profoundest and freshest insights of the spirit, and combined that it into one single individual, who is expressing cross-discipline insights through impossibly original thought. That would be him. There has never ever been anything like it on earth.

Because his insights are infinite expressing multi-discipline genius, it is enough to merely organize, synthesize, and absorb that knowledge. If I just express a few tidbits of what he says, I am satisfied. When I have the occasion to extrapolate a bit, I am engaged in a tiny bit of original thinking.

Growth Online: So give me an example of an original idea of your own?

RP: (laughing) Yes, you are challenging me a bit here because there are really so few; and yet I constantly express a mountain of ideas that people have never heard of or experienced, which, as I said come, from these two avatars of spiritual knowledge.

(pause) One interesting ideas I had, and bear with me this is a little complicated, is how the essential spiritual qualities of the divine -- peace, power, oneness, wisdom, delight, love, etc -- express through specific personal values in life. So the notion of believing in "cooperation" and "integration" of activities in business reflect in part the essential spiritual quality of "Oneness", as well as that of Love. Thus, any personal, business, or social value can be seen as expressing essential cosmic, or rather Divine principles.

Growth Online: What good would that serve?

RP: Well if you were in business, then you can see which of the cosmic principles you are lacking in, and then apply the practical values to make your company more whole and thus successful. For example, if there you have devised that there seems to be a lack of harmony and oneness, then you can devise values strategies to make that happen, such as greater communication and integration between departments, or applying the value of respect for the individual in the company by say more seriously encouraging and adopting policies that bring in the ideas of lower level employees. The same approach can be done for any organization, in government, even in society as a whole.

Or we could look at it the other way around and see that as a result of certain missing or lacking corporate values, the overall level of any of the spiritual dimensions of Oneness, Love, Delight, Knowledge, Creativity, or Power are missing. Then we can work to correct these by implementing appropriate lower level values through a strategic plan.

So I guess this is but example of something that I have devised; that is somewhat original, although the idea of values and spiritual determinants has really come down to me through my association with Mother's Service Society, Karmayogi, Garry Jacobs, Robert Macfarlane, Sri Aurobindo, The Mother, Tom Peters and elsewhere! So the insight is synthetical, and is to that degree somewhat original.

(pause) I become more fully original when I apply their First Principles to the things I am familiar with in the practical life -- such as the Internet, or current affairs, or things happening in my own life, without and within. When you experience something unique and relate it back to their original principles, then if you are creative, you can express a truly original idea, or through a poetic-like form that evokes a sense of creativity and originality.

(pauses) You know my teacher Karmayogi (aka T. Natarajan) urges us to write creatively in this way. My good friend and associate Garry Jacobs has established a new web site called Human Science that attempts to tie all of Sri Aurobindo's Karmayogi's knowledge together and apply it in every field of life. But the thing that is interesting, is that they want others to contribute their original articles relative to these profound ideas about the workings of life. As a result, even newer perceptions or rather extensions of those perceptions, or both come out of the experience. Thus Human Science, though a fount of profound knowledge about the workings of life, itself aspires to be a self-creating and growing entity; a knowledge base that is continually evolving itself; a springboard of original thinking.

Growth Online: Is the Human Science site then different than Growth Online?

RP: It's a very good question. Perhaps we can say that Growth Online is a site that allows people to come in from any direction and discover truths about life and the spirit. Human Science is an attempt to gather and extend all of the knowledge of Karmayogi -- often expressed through the writings of Garry Jacobs, myself, and other -- and turn it into a living entity that is growing in order to create even greater, more practical knowledge that meets the needs of a changing world.

Growth Online: Is it then competition for Growth Online?

RP: Well, you know the Internet is vast, infinite-like, just as the universe is. There must be thousands of sites seriously devoted to personal and spiritual growth, plus tens of thousands of others on the intellectual fringe. Human Science is in one sense what a good part of my life is about; taking Sri Aurobindo's and Karmayogi's ideas, see it in the modern context, and extend it endlessly so it becomes practical for daily living. It is a fantastic concept that I embrace in full. If you are interested in extending the wisdom of the earth by all means go to Human Science. At Growth Online, I am interpreting a lot of that knowledge in my own terms.

Pt. 2: Life Response, the Spiritual Path


 Growth Online: Perhaps the thing you are most known for is 'Life Response" -- i.e. invoking sudden good fortune. Any thing you would like to share with us in that domain?

RP: well it has been one of the adventures of my life. For several years I was having an ongoing discussion with Karmayogi on this subject and other matters. He was essentially providing me with knowledge directly, so I could grow out of my Ignorance. Along the way he wrote a series of papers on Life Response. Actually he had written endlessly on the concept for decades, from endless angles in the literally thousands of article he wrote. Well, one day I made the decision that I was going to research the topic myself. And so in 2001 I began to do just that by gathering together several hundred life response incidents where people, including myself, had the experience.

Then a year or two later after I had gathered hundreds of incidents and evaluated them from a number of perspectives, I decided to finally go ahead and write a book on the subject. It is an undertaking that occupies me till this day. In fact September 2008 will mark five years I have been writing the book; eight years if you include the research phase.

(pause) Actually, when I think about it, most of the articles at Growth Online contain the underlying theme of how to evoke sudden good fortune. In my articles Grow by Giving, the Power of Attitudes, and dozens more, I suggest that when you take to these qualities in higher order, sudden good fortune will suddenly descend on you. I have done the same in explaining the methods of attracting such "instantaneous miraculousness" in the way you handle money, in the way you plan for the future, in the manner you organize yourself, including your level of cleanliness and orderliness, and in many other areas of life I have written about. nearly every contains one or several references to real world experiences of people who followed the principles contained in the article and thereby instantly attracted a response from life -- often in the form of more money, more sales, sudden opportunities, negative circumstance overcome, love in another suddenly found, and so on.

The bottom line is that when we move to a higher consciousness, in any way, life tends to instantly respond on its own with positive benefit.

So that has been my focus and fixation these last few years. Along with of course the spiritual dimensions of life; i.e. spiritual experience, spiritual growth, and the spiritual Reality. Even there it relates to life response, because when I open to the spiritual Force before undertaking any activity, life immediately responds.

Growth Online: So it is also a spiritual path, not just the magic of making positive things magically come your way.

RP: The magic of life response IS the spiritual path. You shift your orientation inward, make the necessary inner adjustment, and sudden good fortune rushes in your direction. Any movement inward that instantly changes the outer condition is not just psychological but spiritual as well. If you open yourself to the divine Force that is pressing down on earth, and evoke an overwhelming response then that is also obviously a spiritual movement.

Thus, a movement within to the depths of our being where we discover silence and eventually our true selves and soul, and an opening tot he Force "Above" are both spiritual movements that evoke the instantaneous miraculousness of a life response outcome.

Growth Online: These are profound ideas, but are they your own; or are they from the tradition?

(pause) You know the expression “instantaneous miraculousness”, that describes the workings of a life response outcome, is a term that comes from Sri Aurobindo, as he wrote in The Life Divine, his greatest work, and his Synthesis of Yoga. It is fundamental to his spiritual outlook. That is, we want to evolve our being to become harbingers of a new spiritual life, of a divine life on earth. One of the results of making that effort is that we see that we can move the outer life from within. That through moments of consciousness we become masters of the outer life, so that it responds on demand to our inner aspiration and change of consciousness. That is one of the essential aspects of New Spiritual Man that will emerge in this and ensuing centuries. He can sit on the top of a mountain or in a cave or in a cubicle of one's office, and change the conditions of life thousands of miles away or across town simply by aspiring for something and putting the spiritual force on that intent. If our aspiration is true, sincere, as well as intense, life will immediately begin to move in the direction we intended. In that way, we can change the circumstances in our own lives, in our company or in the world.

After all The Mother and Sri Aurobindo often practiced this technique with vast, unprecedented results.

Growth Online: How so?

RP: When the Germans were marching across Europe, and were about to put the final dagger in the continent by invading England, Sri Aurobindo evoked a fog which enabled the English troops to retreat to Dunkirk, which in essence saved her, and changed the tide of the war. He also put the Force behind Winston Churchill when no one believed in, causing the entire country, actually the entire world to rally behind him. You could say therefore that Sri Aurobindo through his inner movements of consciousness won WWII for us through agents like Churchill.

I had a similar experience in ending the energy crisis in California several years back. And I know dozens of others who have had similar affect on their environment. They are merely tapping into the power of intention suffused with the infinite energy and power of the spiritual Force. It releases powerful energies that then move out into the field of life and align with positive conditions. That is Life Response in action.

Growth Online: So any of us can do it?

RP: Yes. All we have to do is want something to come about. Intensely aspire for it. Offer it tot he spiritual Force and have faith in its action. Life will bring it sooner or later; more often than not much sooner!

Growth Online: So when would you use it; on what occasion?

RP: For almost anything. For something you really want to occur, such as increase in profits and sales; or for your daughter's marriage. Or it can be for an important meeting about to take place. Or for any of the daily activities in our lives. It can even be applied to overcoming current problems, or in helping along current issues or projects. When you focus intently on them within and offer it tot he Spirit, life immediately starts moving in your favor.

Growth Online: So this inner power really changes things, the possibilities, the human condition and landscape, doesn't it?

RP: I'll say! It alters the very fabric by which we live our lives. We live it from within outward; instead of the other way around. The more we want to accomplish, the less we resort to outer action on its own, and the more we orient to accomplish in life inwardly. We are able to move anything in the universe from within ourselves. That is certainly a radically different approach than how we currently operate. It is essentially the approach of the new spiritual-oriented individual of the future.

Pt. 3: Emerging True Mentality in Life

Growth Online: To change the focus for a minute, what do you think about events in the world? Any thoughts in that area?

RP: There are so many things to say of course. From my perspective everyone is rushing around feverishly, but few have an idea of what the purpose of the whole thing is all about.

Growth Online: What IS it all about?

RP: it's about discovery, fulfillment, and, ultimately, delight. They all tie together.

Growth Online: How so?

RP: First of all delight is what we are ultimately here for. For the average person that means getting what you want so you are satisfied. That's happiness that is transient and disappears as fast as it disappears. Watch any great film or read any great novel and you will see that life is an up and down roller coaster of happiness and pain. That is not the delight I am thinking of.

Growth Online: Which is?

RP: The delight of the discovery of our higher nature. When we discover something new in the world it brings us joy and delight. When we discover who we truly are, including our higher consciousness, our spiritual basis, the feeling of the Divine presence within, we discover Ultimate delight.

It is that ultimate delight that cause the divine to extended itself into a universe of forms. When we discover our higher nature we fulfill the intent of the Divine in creating this world. It wanted to extend its static delight into an endless variety of forms in the universe that could experience dynamic delight. When we discover who we are we experience that dynamic delight.

(pause) So the first thing I notice is that people are running around intensely, seeking pleasures and relationships, and careers, and families, and never, or rarely coming in contact with the Delight I am referring to. They rarely seek to discover their higher nature. Only crisis forces them to do so.

Even for society itself, there is no universal value of finding one's true essence. There is religion, and that helps in giving a moral sense or a brief insight into the spirit, but the customs and rituals and morality clauses cut off the spirit at the pass. Their is no social value of spiritual growth in the society. there is the value of freedom, and even individual fulfillment, but there is no universal value of seeking our highest nature. There is the value of finding fulfillment, but that usually means the ordinary things like family, children, money, sex, power, and so forth. Not that these do not serve a purpose, they absolutely do. But those are means, not ends. There are few social influences on society that propagate spiritual fulfillment as an end. Spirituality is for most people a way to relate to the Divine so we get what we want. That is not the life of spiritual growth and transformation. That is using the Divine to serve our lower nature.

So what I look for is the progress that is taking place in society to move us slowly towards an end of valuing spiritual growth, human perfection, and the evolution of life on earth.

There are a few signs.

Growth Online: Such as?

RP: Man is becoming more mental. He is beginning to be driven more by his mind, by pure thought and possibilities than just his own personal vital needs and desires.

Growth Online: Oh really?

RP: I mean that he is slowly beginning to look at life as a philosopher might. He is now more able to look around and say: What is going on  in the world. Who am I? What are my potentials. He still may be leading the same life he has led for tens of thousands of years, but now he is in a better position to ask these questions, and take small but significant steps in that direction. Before he was too preoccupied with survival. Or he was too willing to follow the social herd and not think for himself.

Having said this I should also point out that man does us his mind to devise ways to further his vital, desirous interests. So though Man is thinking much more logically and rationally, more holistically, thus truly entering his mental stage of development, the Mind is not yet used for such pure thought-filled aspirations, but instead uses his thought processes to fulfill his own individual vital needs.

And yet he is moving slowly towards that point where he can engage in pure thinking so that he understands life, so that he creates wonders in life, so that he uses his mind to become that which he chooses to become based on this higher understanding of his human potential.

(to be continued)

 

 


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