Economic activity in the world is as old as humanity. Beginning as a rudimentary activity, it has become more and more efficient, complex and finally disastrous to the planet today.

Until the inner well being is in place, organization of the outer world will continue to be haphazard. We must remember that we are spiritual well beings first and indulge in economic activity to exist in this world. As long as we force our will, instead of doing what is really needed, we will not prosper. In the coming years, economic leaders will be even more influential than the political leaders. It is important that they too work towards the inner well being of humanity-only then can we take control of our outer well being.

Spirituality too has been in the world as long as humanity has existed and the process too has evolved. While spirituality is about organizing your inner being, economics is about organizing your external situation. Cultures that created a balance between their inner well being and outer world did well during their times.

Today the constant buzzword heard is “sustainability”. True spirituality will only happen when people are peaceful and happy and you would think that would be a state in all affluent nations, but that is not so. Instead all economic activity you see in the world is desperate action. People have no concept of what they really need-from a simple matter like how much food they should put in their mouths to how much money or property do they really need. People just do not seem to know when to stop. They are running endlessly in pursuit of happiness.

Only when you are at peace within yourself will you handle economic activity in the way that is good not just for you but for everybody else.

Spirituality has never been as organized as economic activity. Whenever the spiritual processes have been organized it has ended up as religion. All religions on this planet have started as spiritual processes but in the form of religion spirituality has created more trouble.

Economics today is also in a state of dysfunction. Organized economics is supposed to create big opportunities and well being for everyone but the disparity between the rich and the poor is so huge today that it seems as if they are living on different planets.

So both spirituality and economics today do not have the right focus. Today we are not human beings with limitations. Technological advances have greatly empowered all of us, but has it made us happy? It doesn’t seem so.

There seems to be a renewed interest in spirituality, because while economically people have made such huge strides, the inner well being and happiness hasn’t followed. So suddenly there is a great interest in yoga. I hear about 200 million people are practicing yoga in India today and about 25 million people are doing so in the US. This kind of phenomenon hasn’t happened before, and that is because the economic progress has not brought inner well being with it.

Click here for a direct link to Sadhguru’s Keynote Address at TiEcon2007.

Sponsoring a student represents a unique opportunity to dramatically touch the life of a child. Through the Isha Vidhya scholarship program, each sponsor is matched with a student / students and receives updates on the student’s progress, as well as letters and photos. Sponsors can also write back and even visit their student(s) at the school. Over the years, sponsors can become involved in the life of their student(s) and watch as the children grows and blossoms. To find out more about sponsoring a child, please visit http://www.ishavidhya.org/scholarships

Two new Isha Vidhya fundraising initiatives have recently been launched. The annual Mumbai Marathon, to be held 18 January, presents an opportunity for people from across India and the world to come together in support of social change. This year, 125 dedicated Isha volunteers have signed up to run or walk in support of Isha Vidhya. There’s still time to pledge your support! Visit http://www.ishavidhya.org/marathon/ to find out more about the runners, the event, and to see how you can get involved.

Sadhguru recently offered a special opportunity for everyone, from all walks of life, from all corners of the earth, to make a profound difference in the life of another. The Skip-a-Meal program is an invitation for those having three or more meals a day to skip one meal each Wednesday and make a monthly contribution of the amount saved to the Isha Vidhya project. Whatever you would spend on your meal can help change the fate of a rural child. Beyond just the financial donation, skipping a meal each week gives an opportunity to feel a small amount of the hunger that so many millions of children daily experience. The amount saved for one meal a week may seem like a small contribution, but when thousands join together, we can create a huge impact in making quality education available in rural India. To join this initiative, please visit http://www.ishafoundation.org/skip-a-meal.

From the Isha Foundation December newsletter.

Some new research featured in the NYT on the gender gap contends counterintuitively that more traditional societies have smaller gender differences than modern ones.

For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

These findings are so counterintuitive that some researchers have argued they must be because of cross-cultural problems with the personality tests. But after crunching new data from 40,000 men and women on six continents, David P. Schmitt and his colleagues conclude that the trends are real. Dr. Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and the director of the International Sexuality Description Project, suggests that as wealthy modern societies level external barriers between women and men, some ancient internal differences are being revived.

The biggest changes recorded by the researchers involve the personalities of men, not women. Men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer countries seem more cautious and anxious, less assertive and less competitive than men in the most progressive and rich countries of Europe and North America.

Utterly fascinating. While I’m loathe to just take the latest study at face value, it certainly is thought-provoking–especially the bit about how the men differ. I can’t help but think of the white man’s burden: how the imperialists portrayed the colonised men as alternatively ‘effeminate’ (in India) or ‘lazy, savage beasts’ in Africa. Yet this research could be interpreted as saying that the imperialists were the brutes (as indeed I think they were)!

Personality is more complicated than height, of course, and Dr. Schmitt suggests it’s affected by not just the physical but also the social stresses in traditional agricultural societies. These villagers have had to adapt their personalities to rules, hierarchies and gender roles more constraining than those in modern Western countries — or in clans of hunter-gatherers.

“Humanity’s jaunt into monotheism, agriculturally based economies and the monopolization of power and resources by a few men was ‘unnatural’ in many ways,” Dr. Schmitt says, alluding to evidence that hunter-gatherers were relatively egalitarian. “In some ways modern progressive cultures are returning us psychologically to our hunter-gatherer roots,” he argues. “That means high sociopolitical gender equality over all, but with men and women expressing predisposed interests in different domains. Removing the stresses of traditional agricultural societies could allow men’s, and to a lesser extent women’s, more ‘natural’ personality traits to emerge.”

I can definitely agree that our current state of civilization is unnatural, but I guess I have a hard time seeing how ‘modern progressive cultures are returning us psychologically to our hunter-gatherer roots’. Well, certainly the jury’s out on any hard and fast conclusions, but I like the way the article finishes:

Things could get confusing if the personality gap widens further as the sexes become equal. But then, maybe it was that allure of the mysterious other that kept Mars and Venus together so long on the savanna.

Allure indeed…

For more, see Broadsheet’s take.