To state it simply, we need to be clear about the benefits of mindfulness and the limits.
In time, the corporate world will move onto the “next big thing” to get excited about as a way to avoid to any kind of authentic programme to Search Inside Yourself (SIY) – to use the ironic expression of Google who long ago sold its soul for profit and the maximisation of market share with its motto “Don’t be evil” used to encourage investors to put their money into a wholesome business.
Google offer one prime example of confirming the limits to its application of mindfulness.
Google informs us that more than 1000 employees have engaged in its SIY training programme with its emphasis on mindfulness, happiness and productivity.
Has Google, itself, actually engaged in Search Inside Yourself? Activists have been telling Google to SIY year after year with no obvious response.
For example:
Google needs to realise that it is an “evil” to collaborate with the “evils” of crude pornography and sensational violence by hosting countless numbers of such websites on its search engines.
Google permits access to the crudest pornography, obscene violence and manipulative gambling casinos without any questioning of the morality of such daily endorsements.
Google could end online censorship in China in a matter of days as Google has the technical know-how to enable citizens of China to have access to information denied to them by the Chinese government.
The CEO of Google and its executive body resist taking seriously its own mindfulness/awareness courses of SIY except as a very superficial level rather than SIY into the very DNA of the business, its ethics and its goals.
The genuine SIY includes
Search Inside Yourself (SIY) means that a corporation, including Google, looks at the working conditions and treatment of its workers and human rights issues in China, India, Bangladesh, Africa and elsewhere.
Search Inside Yourself (SIY) leads to wisdom and compassion not just being in the moment without judging.
Search Inside Yourself means that corporations allow independent officers to investigate any factory anywhere in the world to file reports on such matters as:
- accommodation
- capacity of workers to support their families
- danger of pollutants
- health
- hourly rates
- number of hours per week
- safety
- treatment by bosses and management of workers
- wages of workers
- working conditions
SIY means to stop the avoidance of paying taxes that need to support the poor.
SIY means certain corporations need to explain in detail the years of co-operation with governments for surveillance of citizens worldwide.
SIY means being open about the environmental impact of production and the cost to the Earth of exploiting of resources.
SIY means inquiry into the obsession with profits, obsession with market share and the swallowing up of small companies to ensure a stranglehold of a few huge corporations.
CEO’s and managers run these huge work camps in poor nations, devoid of unions, to make their products. These corporations keep wages of workers as low as possible and hours as long as possible so gadgets can be bought in the West like a packet of biscuits.
These corporations deny access to the investigative media to report on these brutal work camps for poor individuals and families desperate to earn some crumbs for survival.
Is it any wonder that there have been suicides in some of these factories?
Rather than listen to the desperate pleas of workers for a wage increase from £1.12 per hour and better working conditions, Apple Inc., for example, put up large nets in some of its Chinese sweat shop factories to stop more workers committing suicide by jumping off the factory roof.
It would take a worker more than two months wages to be able to afford a cheap i-Pad.
The issue of Search Inside Yourself is far too important to be left in the hands of corporate bosses and wealthy promoters of mindfulness whose lives are far removed from the suffering and hardship of millions of people worldwide.
MAY ALL ENGAGE IN AN AUTHENTIC SIY
MAY ALL CORPORATIONS ENGAGE IN AN AUTHENTIC SIY
MAY ALL BEINGS LIVE WITH WISDOM AND COMPASSION