The Transformation Process in Business
A Research Reading by Penney Peirce
Conducted by Sylvia Wynn-Lindeman, October 1990
I’m going to bounce off this other reading you did with Herman Maynard from DuPont. In reviewing it, I see that in almost all the issues he brought to you, you saw a process of going from the individuated perspective to more personal identification with everything as yourself, which is a tough process. And therefore, from competition, power-garnering, painful, negative kinds of behaviors to more respect, more love, more valuing, and realizing that when you value the other you are valuing yourself as part of the whole system. I also see a common thread, when you talk about what will happen before this shift takes place, that there’s a bottoming-out realization that the sytems we’ve been using aren’t really working. And just like with individuals healing some aspect of themselves, you bottom out and then you’re free to find the truth, pursue growth, and become all you can be. So let’s talk about that general process first.
In order for us to really understand this process, we have to bring back to mind a model I’ve used in my training, The Creation Cycle. It’s a simple triangle, where the top point on the triangle is the Being or Spirit. And then coming down the right side is Doing or the Mind. Then finally, Having or the Body, is the third point. So it goes Be, Do, Have, or Spirit, Mind, Body. Most people aren’t too aware of the first leg between Being and Doing, which is about inspiration and motivation and how we suddenly get an idea and move toward action. Doing is the Mind, thoughts create motive and action. That’s the second leg. Through action, then, you achieve results, which is the third point, Having.
At the point where we have physical results, usually people turn around and go backwards into more Doing and thinking. They’re afraid to let go at that point and move into what they consider to be emptiness, or the Void — which is Being again. They do not complete the circle around the triangle. When you begin the cycle, you’re full of energy and enthusiasm. You then act, and at the end of the arc, you’ve run out of ideas, energy, and motivation — you have form and it’s over. The next step is to let go. But since you’re on empty, you see through the filter of emptiness and the next step looks like the Void.
Ironically letting go also is also the return to Spirit. People who’ve been very materially-oriented often go so far as to identify emptiness with Evil. And certainly, very conservative systems and religious systems feel that letting go and going into the unknown IS the Devil, rather than simply seeing it as the feminine or yin part of our nature where we are recharged.
So the big problem here is that people are afraid to let go, and they are attached to what they have. Instead of pausing to sense what wants to happen next, they turn around and go back and do the same thing again, or they do more, or do it better or differently so they can keep feeling secure. Life becomes about preservation, fortification, constant Do-Have, Do-Have, Do-Have, on that one bottom line of the triangle.
So we become addicted, then, to Doing — the Mental, and Having — the Physical. It’s very mechanical. Inspiration has been lost. The true purpose or reason for living is not consciously remembered. We’re at a point in our culture where you can see this happening. People with status quo values and beliefs in materialism are constantly trying to do more, make more money, have all the things advertised through the media. They’ve identified themselves with their mental or physical prowess, or with their image or possessions. This stops the flow of energy that wants to continue around the triangle.
But you cannot stop it. People who try will experience the dissolution of their security to some extent. They will be unable to achieve the same results. Will power will no longer carry them. Rugged individualism will not work. The only way to get the energy and flow back is to go into Being to rejuvenate and find new creative inspiration.
And so, this is where some of the destructive personal stuff comes up in organizations, because of the Do-Have addiction. There is an avoidance of stopping. What worked before MUST work again! It develops into control games and dominator-victim behaviors. There are no mechanisms in place to help people let go, relax, take inventory, enjoy the fulfillment, and go with the flow back into the nonphysical realms to become inspired again. Instead we start inventing things to do, often TO each other. Pettiness arises. We’re irritable, bored, unmotivated. We get sick, we make excuses not to come to work.
Exactly.
When you’re in an addictive process, there is a need to preserve physical security and avoid imagined emptiness, which is associated with pain. So there’s a lot of fruitless activity. And a lot of will, control, protection, defending, and fortification. There’s no awareness of the fact that there is higher consciousness, that there is cohesiveness or connectedness among things. Without Being, you can’t feel the underlying spiritual energy, or subtle etheric energy. There’s no ability to go into the sensitivity that allows one to know intuitively.
There is going to have to be a shift from linear thinking and problem-solving, and only the analytical, only the goal-setting, into an intuitive, holographic, field-orientation. Into the sense that there is a field between things and the field itself is alive and doing a lot of the work. It takes pressure off the personal will of each individual when you realize that there’s an aura around you and that aura or energy field is conscious and connected to everything else and part of an ongoing process. It is relaying to you exactly what you need to know to do what you want and need to do next.
We’re moving out of goal-orientation, which is form — goals are things — into process-orientation, which is not about things, but experience. Experience is about Being. There will be enlightened people of both genders who enter corporations now, who have this spiritual awareness, people who’ve been on a spiritual quest in their own lives, who will start to bring this wholeness back in. It’s called the “feminization” of the corporation or of organizations because it has to do with this field-orientation, with radiant knowing rather than laser-beam awareness. This is about feminine energy, not necessarily the feminine gender.
Problem-solving will be done in the future by teams of women and men who have learned to shift consciously into intuitive knowing. It’s not that we will replace the analytical, but we need to add on the intuitive, so that both ways of knowing and working in the world exist side-by-side, so that there is the flow of the feminine/yin into the masculine/yang and vice versa, so that things complete themselves and the circle around the triangle moves constantly and smoothly.
Now, back on the triangle, to move into the Being, you have to stop the attachment to Having. Which means you have to stop the orientation toward the past. You must enter the present moment, let go, and that is the immediate entry into the Being. As you let go and STOP, and sink into the silence or into Presence, and don’t use your linear mind, you start to become aware intuitively. And as you become aware, that’s the sign that you’re filling up again. As you fill up again, you become “mysteriously” re-inspired, new ideas arise, new lights flash, and there is a new sense of what needs to be done, what wants to be done, and what’s appropriate, and then you move back into action. All effortlessly. What was once seen as the Void becomes the Fullness.
So the team-building process is going to be more “Let’s have some light in the room, let’s think about the richness of who we are and what we’re all about . . . ”
It’ll be about centering. And of course, there will be techniques that are brought into corporations, so meetings can be run in a way that’s more like meditation. So that before anything linear is done, there is a way of merging into the collective body of awareness/ body of knowledge of all of the group members, so they can access more appropriate guidance that affects a larger group of people. The group awareness, the synthesis of minds, will become much more predominant. And then, problem-solving will come “magically” out of that. Not in an effortful, linear, extracting way, but through grace, fun, and willingness to be in the moment without preconceived ideas. That’s direct knowing.
Let’s go a back a minute. People are stuck at the Having and Doing place. This is on the individual level, all across the world?
Yes. People in their individual lives will find that anywhere they are attached to personal identities like “I’m good because I’m a mother, because I’m a hard worker, because I’m handsome, because I make a lot of money” — those are limitations of identity. Those must be suspended, or the meaningfulness must be made unmeaningful, the association of the two things must be disassociated, so ideas can circulate freely and form new meanings. People are now waking up — their minds notice that something’s missing. Suddenly they consider a new idea that pops into their head. If they don’t listen to their inner self, to these little promptings, they will have something dramatic happen in their external world.
Any time you’re not present, consciously living your own truth, feeling spacy or empty, someone will be drawn in to find out where you are, to poke on you until you show up. This invasion is a symbol for people who aren’t occupying themselves fully. Challenges now point to the part of each of us that’s unconscious because of spiritual absenteeism. Confrontations are really a way to help us wake up. Either we open and grow or fight to stay closed and comfortable in the old ways and ideas. If we fight to maintain the old ways, life closes in, restricting us to our self-made boundaries. We must then live within that restricted reality.
Luckily, there are just as many people who are having the “aha’s”, the realizations, the clarifications, as the ones who are hitting the wall. And there will be a critical mass of people who will shift suddenly into enlightened action fairly soon. A natural awareness of fellowship and the collective mind is occurring in these people. Therefore, you’re seeing the physical manifestations of networks, as the first stage of the awareness of true fellowship. Groups will start to connect with groups, and knowledge will be exchanged. There will be cooperation, sharing. There’s going to be international sharing like you’ve never believed possible before.
There will be lots of exchanges. At the same time, there is this seemingly negative thing going on on the surface. But underneath, quietly, come all the bonds. The love, the cooperation, will start to sneak into corporations, because there are going to be many corporate leaders who are interested in these exchanges. In fact, business exchanges will be one of the main ways that cultural exchange will take place. Funding will come from corporations more than governments. So the positive part of the process will be evidenced at the organizational and national levels and yet simultaneously, there’s a grassroots movement where more individuals are interested in psychology, clearing themselves, talking about spiritual ideas, and creating computer networks, satellite networks and so forth.
We need faith in the process. This planet is going to become enlightened. What that means is that the energy on this planet will go through a “radioactive” phase where it will just suddenly < pshoo! > increase. And that is the result of the joining of individual minds into the collective consciousness, or what de Chardin calls the “noosphere,” the collective human awareness. We are co-creating each other and our world. None of us is alone here. And yet we are individuals. So what’s coming is a grounded, conscious, physical knowledge of fellowship. As that happens, the energy that is able to pass through the physical plane is enhanced hundreds of thousands of times. And so, the kinds of thoughts that will come into the group mind will be incredible. New technologies will develop overnight. There will be a renaissance that is incredibly speedy. It’s like going into hyperspace.
Of course, some of the Atlantean souls are coming in and bringing technology, but this time they’re going to do it in a more enlightened manner.
That’s right. And, not to sound flaky here, but the extraterrestrial, or what I would call the intergalactic groups of beings, are very much present in the mental plane — they are around us, around the earth. And they are merging closer and closer through the emotional plane. They’re learning to drop down through the feeling body and we’re learning to raise our energy up through intuitive sensitivity, so that we will be able to merge and interconnect with them, telepathically. We will literally be able to have dialogues with them. We may meet them in dreams, or through group meditations. Though it sounds like science fiction, these “collaborations” will produce new technologies for the world.
But we can’t see them, because they’re such a high vibration . . .
Not yet. We’re still too individualistic. As we accept collectivity, they will become visible, or “real” to us. Some of the things that scientific in this high-vibrational way, that materialistic people now call “airy-fairy,” will become the technologies of tomorrow.
OK, this is a lot of theory. But this gives some idea of how the positive side of the cycle is building up. Remember that the people who are attached to Doing and Having are going to have to go through the part of the process where they have to stop. And that process will be happening big-time now in organizations, nations, and internationally.
This has been demonstrated by the recent rush of hostile takeovers and people losing their jobs.
Right, and so those companies for which both sides have had attachment to the Having, Doing — they learn through these processes to let go. They have to collapse, as one would collapse into a common pool. When you can’t be individuated in the old way, you can’t hold yourself up, you have to dissolve.
And so what’s also happening economically is that the United States is no longer the “world’s greatest economic power, aren’t we hot.” Do you see that we’re going to have to have, necessarily, a crash for this country, or are we speeding along towards enlightenment, economically?
The image I have is a group of bottles floating in the ocean, and the bottles are connected by strings, and the waves are coming, and some bottles go up, some go down, some go up, and others go down.
So those are different industries?
Yes, or different nations. The economies of the different nations. No one nation’s economy will be allowed to be up all the time. There will be a sense of waves coming and going. This is the model in every arena now — an adjustment of the fluidity of things, so the energy buildups can be equalized out.
And how value is distributed through the whole. As the others come up, they will be allowed to give, to have their say, to be seen more. And the ones who go down have to learn to stop controlling, to receive the benefits of what others have to give, not what they think they need.
Which explains some of the trade agreements that don’t work.
Right. Yet, watch the thrashing around that these egos do when the economies start to shift. When they try and force things back up, it’ll be like going into quicksand.
Let’s look at how organizations are designed; the model through which we connect interpersonally. Currently, it is fairly hierarchical. And I like the way you describe the future form as “holographic.” So, tell me how that transition occurs.
Conscious people will come into corporations as consultants and as employees who have knowledge about the new paradigm, teamwork in collectives, and how to catalyze new procedures. Many of the CEOs will become exhausted — they’re trying to do it alone when the reality of the world is not an alone, individualistic reality anymore. It is a group reality where all tasks are shared, and the other people actually support you. In the coming reality, your co-workers want you to be happy and healthy so that you can give the things you are good at, so their jobs will be easier and more fun.
My sense is that the new consciousness won’t so much come right away from within the corporation, but will be brought in through consultants and people who can facilitate group experiences. It also will be brought in through individual therapists; I feel that the function of psychology is going to enter the corporation in a bigger way. Individuals are going to need to have therapy and they won’t go out and get it in on their own, outside of work, so it’ll have to come through work.
And if you’re talking to a psychologist/consultant who is there, ostensibly, to work on management issues but you end up talking about your own psychological issues, who cares, as long as you can heal?
Right. These new consultants are healers. Their function is really like a shaman or visionary, a facilitator of the group mind/group heart experience. It’s a new category of career. Also, education within the corporation will be much more common, so we’ll see a new category of consultants who are high level teachers.
So the precipitation of that move from the hierarchical to the holographic way of doing business internally doesn’t have to be a crash. It can be people like you and me out there planting the seeds of thought; at every opportunity introducing this experience of the “field.”
Yes. In management teams, people who are vying for power or secretly manipulating to preserve themselves, who are coming out of denial and fear, have to be able to understand how to make the transition to cooperative group involvement. If they can’t open up and share themselves, and receive, eventually they will be released from the company. Where now they are tolerated, in the near future that kind of personality will be a liability. I don’t see there being a place for people with a “cowboy” mentality. It will be a destructive influence to the group functioning. That’s not to say that originality will be squelched in any way.
Also, I feel like the emphasis on the psychological process will extend to helping people with their home lives, so they see that the home life is related to the business life. People need to be happy, they need to have their needs met. They need to be listened to and validated for their performance and for who they are, and they need feedback. It’s all like raising a child successfully. Corporations have to do that with their employees. They have to do the personal, human stuff. Otherwise, people will sabotage it at every step.
Because that’s how they’re acting out their other problems . . .
Yes. We have to get out of the punishment mentality, break the old denial and addictive patterns and substitute real reward, acknowledgement, respect, and let people find their best area of expertise, helping them move and grow, and promote them enthusiastically. We need to encourage them to help train and teach the others who come in after them, so they get a sense of heart about themselves and what they can give. So, everybody in some way must take responsibility for other people they work with.
Let’s move to the gender issue in the business world. There’s been a lot of doing and getting among women, in terms of “If I do this I get this promotion, if I do this I get this visibility.” We’re experiencing a backlash against women for the progress they’ve made. What’s happening here?
In general, women in corporations are functioning on the same model as the men: Do-Have, Do-Have. They have to play the game, to compete. So men and women are in this together, adhering to the same beliefs. It will take outsiders coming in, men AND women, to introduce the new consciousness and experience.
And yet, remember, as the old system starts to die, people get agitated, complain about how uncomfortable they are, and they want to project blame on something, or someone — usually on whatever scares them the most. The men project against the women and the women blame the men, or young people project against the old people. Some people drop out through illness, some people are just marking time. You’ll see as many varieties of escapism as you can think of. Attack is one of the oldest forms of escapism.
Eventually, women will gain more respect as they embody their own unique kind of knowing and problem-solving. The intuitive, interconnected, field awareness is the coming thing, and women will be the teachers of this. So, things will soften as corporate leaders grasp the value of what to date has been relatively invisible to them. So yes, you might say there’s a backlash right now — it is the intensification of resistance as the corporate ego tries to preserve its old identity. There’s going to be a lot of scrapping, a lot of exhaustion. But remember that there are revelation points all along the way. The process will proceed to the point where the critical mass catalyzes into form and people will change quickly.
What can those of us do who might be able to play a precipitous role in resolving some of these imbalances?
Always talk about the third unifying context, rather than the two polar extremes. If you come in as a woman into a group of men, or as an intuitive to a group of sensates, talk first about what’s beyond men and women, what’s outside personal perceptual preferences — that we’re human beings, that there is a universal energy, universal principles, a universal process underway that affects ALL people. Or that each man and woman has male and female energies within them. Everything contains everything else. Go outside the comfort zone to get people to understand what they already have. What will happen, though, as you start to stretch into that new realm, is that the stuff that has been denied will start to come up.
You mean the hostilities?
All the fears. Which come out as blaming and anger, stonewalling, or escapist tendencies like denials, addictions to old beliefs, or trying to get rid of the irritating influence. Those will have to be dealt with by special kinds of therapists and consultants. Corporate therapists who can work this out individually and in team and group processes.
What I see happening, too, in the businesses I work with is that there’s a widening between the strata; it used to be upper, middle, lower. Now the distance between middle and lower is greater. There’s more ignorance, more impoverishment. And contrasted to that lowest level are the elite, who have had it made for so long that they have time to study other interests. The widening cultural strata concerns me. How do we achieve a realignment?
This is partly why the educational function within corporations will become more prominent. It feels like there will be vocational schools, or corporations will have their own in-house training programs, and attitudinal training programs, basically having to reshape the attitudes of people, to show them that this is a different environment than the home or family they grew up in. There has to be therapy and education.
People in the Do-Have addiction see polarities. Their perception is on self-protection and polarizing with others they feel afraid of. People in fear have a greater perception of divisiveness. So there is a growing perception of division, fragmentation, isolation just in the nature of the transformation process itself. Luckily this is a temporary phase. And luckily, the people who are starting to find a fellowship experience will be active on all levels. They’ll be multi-dimensional. They will find little difference in rank or class. They’ll be down there with their shirt-sleeves rolled up working with people, they’ll be empowering people, fluidly moving through the organization.
The key here is that attention has to be taken away from the outside world, back into the authenticity and genuineness of the inner self, so that whatever comes out of that self is trusted, revered, and respected, by the person it is coming through. And that spills over into the organization being a clear materialization of its cocreators. Respect is key. I need to respect my employees, knowing that they will give what they can. As soon as they learn something more, they will move into that level. If you belittle that, or think the worst of people, you limit them to that level. So employers have to start truly respecting the people they employ and designing systems that will elicit more uninhibted self-expression so those people can learn to trust themselves. That’s why they’re not doing a good job — they don’t respect themselves, because they don’t feel themselves.
Let’s talk about the environment. How about the plants, minerals, water, air, animals. It sounds again like the field consciousness, how we need to realize that all of these are ourselves, as well.
As we learn to bring our mind down into the body, to have mind/body merger, finding that the cells are actually a collective consciousness, that the body is part of a collective consciousness of all other bodies, we come into an awareness that consciousness is actually embodied IN the physical plane, not outside resisting it, but actually merged into it. This is happening now in many people. It’s allowing the mind to become one with the physical.
We will feel the physical world, literally, to be our own personal, expanded body. At that point we can travel mentally throughout physical forms with no difficulty. We will know what the rainforests do, because we’ll feel it in our lungs. We’ll know the pain of a species going extinct. We’ll take it all personally. And yet, we won’t think of the physical world as a place of suffering, but just as another materialization of our great self.
As we merge into the physical plane, the mind becomes illumined and can conduct what I call diamond light, which is the clear awareness of Being, Spirit, and collective consciousness, without any agendas, fear, darkness, or ignorance. We’ll know how fast problems can be solved by changing the way we hold our thoughts. And the whole physical plane will start to change. My bet is it will actually mutate in various ways.
The trees will be the first thing to gain attention. The next will probably be a purification of water systems. I feel there will be food shortages and people are going to be moving more toward liquid foods. Not totally, but it will be more a common practice to be taking more meals in liquid form. So in addition to clean water, there will be plant sources that will be used — natural, organic, energized, crystalline plant substances that lend themselves very nicely as liquid foods. New foodstuffs will be developed, cocreated internationally, and new farming techniques. So this would come through commercial need for supplying the world with food, because of shortages and perhaps famine or drought conditions.
How about a summary statement about this process?
I suggest that it starts humbly, that the process of change really does begin within each person. If you are an agent of change, you need to stay aware of these truths and principles within your own life. Keep centering, doing the work. And when you move into involvement with relationship and organization, keep practicing the same thing there. Don’t let the “other” orientation or the outward orientation seduce you into the habitual, negative or shallow thought-forms that so many people hold in common. Watch for the blind spots, the attachments, the limitation and punishment mentality, and all the petty thinking. Remind people of what’s really true.
One of the first things to do is educate key people in corporations about this process. When they see the full picture, the key people will recognize it and be excited. Like “Now we can finally do something.” There has to first be a definition for the mind. Then there can be systems and techniques worked out to implement the transformation bit by bit. It will happen from the top down and the bottom up simultaneously, and truthfully the process encompasses such complexity that it is not fully comprehensible by the human mind.
The transformation is the handiwork of the greater collective consciousness. That’s the third point on the triangle, the context that unites body and mind, the third force. And that sense of trust of moving into the third force, or the top of the triangle, has to be a daily part of life. I’m talking about spirituality as part of the creative process and it has to be taught as such. It’s not religion. We’re talking about the intuitive process. We must teach organizations about the practical value of intuition, or direct knowing. We must show them that there is a very real underlying reality, a matrix, out of which physical results come. If they work directly with the matrix, many things will change — like the amount of time and effort it takes to materialize results.
It strikes me that a good entré is because we do give such a high priority to the individual, that it’s going to be highly productive for each person to discover the higher self.
Yes. To respect and raise each individual to their highest capacity is key. And we need to educate leaders that the process acts within individuals AND the system at the same time. What’s intriguing is to grasp the form the process takes at each level of focus and design educational programs and techniques for each level. We’re not negating the individual but we can’t raise the individual up beyond its importance. The individual needs an experience of group. Team process will be one of the most important education areas. Most people crave an experience of healthy family, and the corporation is where this experience can be worked out — ironically. And after that experience takes hold, we’ll experience a real renaissance of global innovation and the rising of many small businesses in contrast to mega-corporations.
