Feed RSS delle pubblicazioni di uniese.it

Qualitative Economy

ESE — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:00:00 +0000

A mere act of attention due to self-observation, may change your inner state, your position in yourself, and get you into a better position in life.

You know a lot about being in the wrong or right place in life, but very little about being in the wrong or right place inside yourself.

But remember! The internal is the very cause and so much more important than the external.
You cannot expect to make the right decisions when you are in the wrong place internally, when your level of attention is zero.

When you are in a bad, narrow, evil place internally, the world that you yourself project becomes colder, denser, thicker, heavier.

A quantitative economy is based on calculation, programs, plans and mathematics; and mathematics cannot deal with qualities, but only with quantities. If you live in a merely quantitative universe, nothing is possible for you - neither change, nor transformation, because transformation is a question of quality.

Life can be transformed only by changing your dream - that is, by turning something lower into something higher.

An ordinary man, a machine-man is a function of the nature-machine, guided by nature and obedient to nature.

A man of School starts to work in a different direction, turning upside down his own vision.
A man of integrity, a fully understanding being, contains life, and through his revealed Will can move mountains in the world of events.

An ordinary man sees everything as opposites - a higher level of integrity sees all sides of a question simultaneously.

In a qualitative economy, the amount of efforts is useless in comparison with the quality of efforts.
Your position and role in life is determined by the quality of your own being.

Prof. Stefano E. D'Anna
(from The School for Gods)

Love yourself inside

ESE — Tue, 18 May 2010 23:00:00 +0000

An ordinary man only apparently loves himself and wishes himself good health, prosperity and well-being. If he could observe and know his inner self, he would hear within, a constant chant of negative thoughts and worries, the recital of a prayer of misfortune in the expectation of terrible events, however probable or improbable.

Self-sabotage
Among the things I have learned from the Dreamer, which I have narrated in my Book “The School for Gods”, one of the most amazing is the unveiling of the existence in the ordinary man of a shadowy second nature which manifests itself as a self-destructive attitude, and an irresistible urge to damage and finally eliminate oneself. He called it self-sabotage. It can be considered the dominant psychological feature of the old humanity, though the official science has not yet understood the planetary extention of this phenomenon.
Self-sabotage is the effect of a fragmented psychology that in most people manifests in a sense of guilt and a constant feeling of uncertainty and failure; man becomes victim of the song of sorrow he sings inside, and of the flow of negative imagination and destructive thoughts ceaselessly echoing inside him.
People live too often and for too long outside of themselves, lost in identification with the world, and thereby enlarging the distance from the real part of themselves. The anguish you feel is the most reliable signal that you have forgotten - hypnotized by the imagination of the world as a separate reality external to yourself.
As a consequence, an ordinary man secretely thinks of his death as the solution to all his troubles, and unconsciously tries to accelerate his physical departure. Homo sapiens has reduced itself to a suicidal species finding in drugs, smoking, alcohol, unhealthy diet, and above all, negative emotions, its terrifying menu or list of options for perpetrating one’s elimination. If we would try to stop them, and oppose their project of death, they would not see us as rescuers or benefactors. On the contrary, such an attempt would turn them into mortal enemies, and in the end would only postpone their self-sabotage.» The School for Gods. Sinedie. 2010.

Love Yourself
The remedy is: love yourself inside; love yourself unceasingly. It means to be in contact with the most real part of yourself. It means achieving and living a state of victory, of grace, and of understanding - a state of innocence. This word comes from the Latin root innocent which means not-nocere ‘not + to hurt’. Innocent in its true meaning is then the quality of a man who is not harming himself, who is not devoted to the favourite planetary occupation of self-sabotage.
For unprepared people, loving oneself inside looks like quite a boring condition, in which it seems that nothing happens and excitement is missing, compared to the state of apprehension and constant turmoil in which ordinary men live. For a man, however, who remains lucid and firm in loving himself inside, everything is punctual, and even the confusion of the world – that anarchy where everything is apparently rebelling and trying to escape from composing itself into a unity - appears to be a movement of fusion, towards a higher level of integrity.

Stop damaging yourself
Most people believe that the world as it is does not work and cannot go ahead without their intervention, and so try to bring solutions to the others, thinking to resolve their problems, and to heal their illnesses. Their vanity makes them believe that they, themselves are healed and ready to help others. In reality, he who has not defeated the lie within himself, he who is unaware of the self-sabotage that continually goes on within him, cannot do anything for anyone. The only thing you can really do to help the world is to wake up from your nightmare and stop damaging yourself. We meet a beggar and we feel compelled to help him, or anyone in need, for the sake of our unconscious fear that we could find ourselves in that condition and the hope that we could find help. Our fear, however, is creating the object of our fear. While you think of this eventuality you are already laying the grounds for this very thing to happen. Your mere thought has already put you there. In the moment in which you are giving aid, you find yourself covered in his rags, and begging in his place. You tell yourself, “I’ll never be in that state of need!”.

Behind the smokescreen of philanthropy
Let’s open our eyes to the falseness hiding behind altruism and most forms of charity fostered by institutions that live off people’s sense of guilt. Most humanitarian organizations only exist to perpetuate themselves. They specialise in obtaining funds and gathering resources which they then misspend and squander, barely managing to even support themselves. If you lift the smokescreen surrounding philanthropy in its every form, you might discover that behind the suffragists and the Salvation Armies, behind medical and pharmaceutical aid and the distribution of food, hides the most atrocious organized crime and the worst acts against man. In reality, help creates the need for help, in an endless vicious circle. Every day the army of humanitarians, altruists and philantropists grows, and all the evils that they pretend to fight extend and become more acute. Poverty and famine have never been so widespread. Working on the effects and never tackling the cause, they only feed themselves, their pockets, and their vanity. Poverty is a mental illness. Death is only in our heart. If we could recognize this, we would revolutionize the very concept of charity. Only the ‘dream’ can change poverty into prosperity, and difficulties into understanding. A man, a corporation, a nation who dreams is never poor - can never be poor. He who has defeated the lie and self-sabotage in himself, who loves himself inside, has not to look for any external help. He is the solution and has the power of doing for himself, and because of it, for the world and for others.

The world needs your change
Think how much vulgarity and emotional debris is eliminated through this realization. Guilt, victim consciousness, and false love for others are all swept away at once, together with all the philanthropic organizations and humanitarian organizations founded on false altruism.

The world doesn't need your help, but desperately, your change.

Do you think this can make us cynical and mean? A person who loves himself inside cannot be cynical or mean towards others. When you have won inside, you are the healing of all and everything. Doing for yourself, through your innocence, you are bringing the greatest possible help for the world.
Loving yourself is the only thing to do, and the only activity to overcome inner fragmentation; it is the only way to regain our oneness. Loving ourselves inside is the fusion of all the scattered particles of our Being into one single entity. We call this achievement Integrity.

The tingling, vibrating sensation
In order to give to others we have first to know how to give to ourselves.

To give I have to have; to have I have to be.

He who has not achieved a state of wholeness is a man in need, is truly poor, and cannot give anything to anybody.
When we were little children we used to wake up with a sensation of joy - the feeling of our integrity and the feeling of being complete. Nothing was missing. Adults have long forgotten that ecstasy in their body, but when you start to love yourself you can feel it again as a tingling, vibrating sensation under your skin. A leader knows that he has to wait for this physical signal before any decision is made, and before any action is taken. A leader knows the golden law of economy: I have because I give; I give because I am. Giving is above all self-giving - the donation of one’s being. I give what I am. Through loving himself, he gains the power to give to others what really matters and what they really need: his fearlessness, courage, commitment, and his sense of safety.

The Economics of Immortality

ESE — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Conference hosted by the European Commission, Bruxelles, 8 October 2009

Thanks to the President of EuReform, Steven Colin for inviting me, to EC for hosting this conference and to Daniela Terrile for organizing it. The idea to schedule it at lunch time is congruent with my purpose to give you food for thought. Before starting, let me state in advance that I am not here as the Rector of the European School of Economics or as the writer of “The School for Gods.” I came to join you - your association - for the common purpose of raising the effectiveness of the European Commission - a body so important and vital for Europe - and for bringing to you the results of our research.
I know beforehand that after expounding them, you will find it hard to accept most of the crucial findings of my studies and of the fundamental ideas and principles that they are based on. But let me pose to you a question: who among you can state that he has discovered an amazing idea throughout the entire course of his life? Who has ever come across something so outstanding that you could cry out “I have never heard such a thing before”?

Thinking is Destiny
Interesting is not enough... What I am asking is if you have ever met an amazing, baffling, disconcerting, shocking idea… something so powerful that it turns your mind upside down, something contrary to common sense, adverse to reason, opposite to anything you had believed so far. To give you an idea: “Love your enemy”, just the prospect that we could love enemies, is what we can call an amazing, subversive idea. And 2.000 years later this lofty paradox continues to keep all its disruptive potential. The belief encapsulated in the motto: Homo faber est suae quisque fortunae (every man is the artisan of his own fortune) is another majestic idea, one of the main psychological pillars on which the Roman empire was built. The philosophy of a man, of a corporation, or of an entire nation, their ideas and values, determine their success and account for their longevity.
Before we reach the age of 20 we have already built a complete system of deep convictions and beliefs. Hence, we can spend our entire life never meeting one idea which clashes with our mental schemes, or one of those ideas that can move mountains. Quite soon in our life we become impenetrable to any evidence or even to minor affirmations that could vaguely contrast with our old set of beliefs and consolidated ideas. Ordinary humanity seems to be condemned to think alike and to use the same set of thoughts forever - from cradle to grave. Thinking is destiny means that we will never be able to change our destiny, neither as society nor as individuals, without changing our thinking. Hence, we find the need for revolutionary ideas. Original, innovative, unconventional ideas are the most strategic resource for the future of the species. They are the engine of our evolution and of our economy.
Mankind can change its destiny. In order to do that we have to change our psychology, the hypnotic world-story rooted in our system of convictions and beliefs. Do not get worried! I haven’t the slightest concern with needing to convince you, neither any hope to change even the least of your thoughts. But an individual can make these changes for himself. One among you may be ready to change his vision, and therefore his life and the reality for thousands of people. Just one of you, if I am lucky, will make it worth my journey to have come here.

Japan: A Textbook case
I could say that I am a repentant, reformed economist. I stopped believing in economics long ago, since the time I found out that so many important phenomena cannot be explained by it.
Let’s look at the case of the global crisis that the world is facing.
Economists do not know how to face the global crisis, and economics has shown itself to be far from a science. The reason is that this crisis is not financial or economic. It is a crisis of values and has its source in the scarcity of real leaders, a shortage of committed, visionary men and women. A textbook case is that of modern Japan, and the difficulty of economics to find a convincing explanation for its prodigious economic growth. Japan lost two wars. The Second World War culminated with its defeat and the destruction of two main towns by atomic bombs. Japan is extremely overpopulated, speaks an impossible language, and is in the middle of nowhere. They were just emerging from a medieval culture. To top it all, Japan does not have any natural resources whatsoever. How could it become the second most powerful economy in the world? We might be very interested in understanding how it was possible. Is there any economist who can give us such an explanation? If we could discover the secret of Japan’s development we could solve the problem of any developing country. Ironically, we could ask them: are you in need of everything? Have you any resources at all? Have you just come out of the destruction caused by conflicts or are you half shattered by a civil war? If your answer is yes, then you are in the best condition to become an affluent country, a most powerful economy. It is hardly credible, is it?

Economy is a Way of Thinking
The first conclusion that we have reached is that the way we think, our psychology, is a most relevant factor of our economy... Thinking is destiny… Financial destiny as well…. But this has not always been the conviction of the economists. As matter of fact, economics has started as a pure discipline believing that the explanation of the economic facts can be found in the economy itself. This way of thinking we could call a tautology (it is a difficult word used to say - that is stupid). Let me then establish a first, general proposition of my theory.
Economy is a way of thinking, a reflection of the Being.
We cannot understand the growth of Japan if we do not know and understand its culture and traditions, from the culture of rice to the samurai tradition. We cannot understand why Japan developed so quickly, and why its social cohesion is so strong, without knowing the strength and weight of its system of values, the quality and breadth of its moral principles, and without entering into the roots of its culture and the deepness of Confucianism, which nourishes it. Confucianism is not a religion, it is a philosophy of life which works as a strong social glue.
Confucianism, which they imported from China, gave Japan its ethic DNA. Approaching the modern age, the original patrimony made up of the six main virtues recommended by K’ung Fu Tzu (Confucius) was reduced to five: Justice (i), Ceremony (li), Knowledge (chih), Faith (hsin) and Loyalty (chung). In this mutation of its ethic DNA, the sixth virtue, Compassion/Benevolence (Jen), was in time completely abandoned and Loyalty grew in importance until it assumed the position of being the central virtue in the modern Japanese system of ethics. This mutation in the invisible has moved mountains in the world of economics - demonstrating that the economy of a country is a reflection of its way of feeling and thinking, in one word, of its Being.
The system of values, the quality of thinking is the cause and the economy is the effect.

Visibilia ex Invisibilibus
This is the motto of the European School of Economics. It means that the visible is produced by the invisible.
The wealth of a nation, the economic destiny of a country, of an organization, of an individual, cannot be explained by economics. There is something in the invisibility of a country, of an organization, of a man, which explains and accounts for what we can observe in their life over time. The level of prosperity a country can achieve is equal to the quality of its system of values and above all its capacity to produce emotionally healthy individuals, visionaries, and pragmatic dreamers.

A planetary belief
If there is a unifying idea, a ritual common to the entire planet, we can find it on the first day of lessons in any school or faculty of economics. In the universities of different countries, in different cultures, at any latitude, it is possible to observe a very extraordinary thing. From the University La Sapienza in Rome, Stanford in California or the London School of Economics, even down to the smallest college on this planet, they all open the academic year in the same way. If you think about it, it sounds really incredible. It is a phenomenon which I can only call ´collective hypnotism´; in any faculty of economics you could hear the same speech made more or less with these words: “Dear students, on this planet, resources are limited, and we have to deal with this condition of scarcity. Economics is the fine art of coping with limited resources”. It is like saying: Dear students, you are here to learn how to become criminals. If resources are limited we have to find a way to grab all that we can before the others do so. And if I am stronger, smarter and greedier, I will get the resources and will leave you without.” The idea of scarcity in economics is one and the same thing with the justification of criminality and human exploitation. If resources are limited, individuals and countries must devote themselves to plunder and robbery if they want to survive.
I know just one school of economics that dares to offer to its students an opposite vision: “Resources are not limited; man is limited”. The planet is bountiful in the extreme, a cornucopia overflowing with all a man’s heart desires. In such a universe it is impossible to fear scarcity. It is not resources that are limited, but man who projects his own limitations onto the external world and causes his unconscious propensity toward scarcity to take on a concrete form.
(The School for Gods - ESE Publishing, 2009).

To Have more you have to Be more
Let me pose to you a question: if you had a company, would you give resources to irresponsible people - people without joy, without commitment, without love for their work? Would you give a powerful car to your son who just learned how to drive? This is the condition of mankind. 99.9% of humanity is made of people without the level of responsibility to deserve more resources. We already have too much for what we can handle. To have more we have to be more. For this we need schools of Being. We have to have schools of responsibility capable of increasing our capacity to be more, so that we can handle more wealth and power, or we cannot have more wealth and power. There is no animal in nature that can have the strength of a lion, if it does not have the habits and the ethics of a lion. The lion eats once a week. He never assaults or kills a pregnant prey. He is a very sober predator. That is why he can have such power.
Who decided that Iran cannot have the atomic bomb? Why are they not entitled to be a nuclear super-power? Italy has it; even North Korea has it. Why should it be denied to Iran? The reason is that we cannot trust their capacity to control such power - the power to possess weapons that could devastate the planet. We could tell them more or less what we would say to our own teenager son. “You cannot have the keys to the house yet. One day when you grow up and you show signs of maturity, we will give you the keys. We will give you the car. We will give you some money to manage”. This metaphor illustrates the condition of the planet. Whoever is the God we believe in, Jehovah, Buddha or Allah, obviously He doesn’t trust us beyond a limit. So, there are resources, innumerable and great inventions, and incredible solutions ready to defeat evils and illnesses, but we cannot have them yet, as our state of being is not at that level. We have to grow. And we do not know how to grow. To grow is like organizing an escape from Allenwood or Fort Dix penitentiaries. We cannot do it in two, in ten, or all of us together. Only the single person, only a determined individual can make it. He needs a map and an escape plan. He also needs an organization and somebody who has done it before him. He needs a School - a School of Being.

The Individual and the Mass
The leading spirits, and great individuals, have always had a recurrently fierce, violent opposition from the masses. Have you been in Piazza dei Fiori, in Rome? Have you seen the tall monument there? Yes, it is a monument to Giordano Bruno! Looking at it you could say: how nice, they have erected this imposing monument in this beautiful square to honour the memory of one of the forerunners of modern thinking, together with Galileo, Copernicus and many other free spirits of that age. You would think that it is evidence of gratitude for his intelligence and the courage of an innovator - to his pioneer spirit. But why was it erected in just that place? To no avail you would explore the base of the monument. Nowhere will you find it written: “Here is where we killed the guy; this is the exact place where we burned him.” Another scientist of that time - you know Galileo Galilei - was tortured and then put under house arrest for his theories, and he saved his life only by abjuring and denying them. Almost 500 years ago a man came up with a revolutionary idea, an idea that nobody had demonstrated scientifically before him. He decided to announce his discovery in a treatise which he entitled: De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. We are in 1543. This scientist is Niccol� Copernico. His book is now considered the birth cry of the modern age. He realized that it was impossible for his theory to be accepted. The discovery that the Earth is not at the centre of the Universe, and that the Sun does not go around the Earth, but rather that the Earth goes around the Sun, was simply too much to bear. So, in expounding and demonstrating his theory he took two precautions: one, he dedicated his book to the Pope, Paolo III. The second precaution was to publish it posthumously, after his death, just to be on the safe side.
I am aware that the ideas that I am bringing here, to you, are more revolutionary and subversive than the heliocentric theory announced in the XVI century. Really, Copernico’s scientific discovery did not affect our lives that much, if 500 years later we still say: the sun rises, the sun goes down. But to discover that there is a vertical dimension to the flat world of economics, to find that the slightest elevation of our being and thinking, can move mountains in the world of events, create wealth and solve millennia old problems, can change our personal life and the future of humanity forever.

One Idea can Change the World
From the ancient economy based on slavery, and then on to the feudal economy based on serfdom, until the modern rational capitalism and the new global economy, turning points in the history of economics have always been the result of psychological revolutions and the products of immense shocks in mankind’s vision of the world. If we only knew how to trigger the next psychological revolution, what idea could blow up our mental schemes and change our way of thinking beyond a point of no return...
The economy is a reflection of the Being. Resources are not limited. To have more we have to be more. Thinking is Destiny. These ideas possess a built-in fragment of eternity. It is enough to summon such vast and courageous ideas to bring unimaginable solutions. The biggest limit that we bring hidden in our being, engraved in our psychology, in each cell of our body, is the idea that death is ineluctable - that we are prisoners sentenced to death and hopelessly waiting on death row. This idea is at the root of our every constriction - shackling our creativity. If thinking is destiny, how can we bring a radical change to our thinking? How can we instigate a revolution in our system of beliefs and elevate economics from being a pseudoscience devoted to the petty management of limited resources – hence, a predatory, criminal activity - to a planetary system of production and distribution of limitless, infinite wealth?
Now is the time to tell you something more about the title of this conversation: The Economics of Immortality. What does it mean - immortality? Why do we talk of immortality in a conference about economics?
Let me pose to you a question. When did you last pronounce the word ¨immortality¨? When did you last utter the word ¨infinity¨? Or, ¨timelessness¨? Or, ¨eternity¨? When was it? Most likely, it was in a perfume shop. “Give me a little bottle of Eternity; give me Love Forever; give me Immensity”. Then, once we have bought the perfume, we forget. We hardly utter these words more than a few times in a lifetime. Why? Because, they are extremely powerful words. They are engaging to the point that just to utter them will produce a change in our reality. What does immortality mean? It means something very simple. It means the absence of death. If there is no death, there is immortality. Why do we need to bring in this concept in economics?

Dreaming the Impossible
We had impossible dreams before. Our civilisation was built on impossible dreams... from Columbus’ idea to go west in order to find east, to the project of cutting the Suez channel. or creating from scratch a brand new capital in Brazil’s tropical rainforest, in 41 months. The myth of Icarus announced that man one day would fly! It was dreamed in Crete thousands of years ago. How many would have believed in this dream? We had to wait for the Wright Brothers for the first human flight in 1903, but we made it. What is the next impossible dream - impossible even to bear? What is the idea that is so bold and powerful as to produce the kind of shocks, the turning upside-down of our psychology, which have always preceded and created a quantum jump in the economy? The idea that death is not ineluctable, that it can be overcome! Physical immortality is the new frontier of human dreaming - the incredible thought which requires an immense strength just to be conceived. For innumerable years we have accepted death as our destiny. For millennia we have resigned ourselves to the idea that life is limited. By accepting this mental limit, everything else has consequently met a limitation in our existence. Resources, creativity, and wealth have been thought of as limited. It is like looking at the world with the eyes of a frog and complaining over the view.

A turning point in our civilization is to start to believe that death is not necessary, and not even ethical. This revolution in our thinking - removing death from our psychology, as the limit of all limits - will produce the greatest revolution in the economy - even in the planetary system of production and distribution of wealth, and in the very concept of how to build and how to measure the real affluence of a nation.

The economics of immortality
Until now, all economic systems have dealt with survival - with peoples' basic needs: food, shelter, clothing and reproduction. From this point of view, the economics of Neanderthals and the economics of a modern complex society are essentially the same.
The new economics of the coming decades deal no longer with survival or how to keep people alive for a few decades, but with immortality. New technologies and resources aim at the indefinite extension of each human life. This is the beginning of a twenty-first century economics of immortality.
All existing ideologies of left and right are outdated and obsolete. Powerful forces coming from the individual and not from the mass are steadily rescripting the fundamentals of life. You as an individual are called to create, through your dream, a new humanity and redesign within yourself a new economics and a brand new epoch.

The School for Gods
In the most crucial time of my life, I met a remarkable man who in my Book I named the Dreamer. His ideas turned my beliefs, my vision of the world, upside-down and changed my destiny. One day He told me about an ancient manuscript which centuries earlier had disappeared - apparently swallowed by the quicksand of time. He asked me to find it. Though reluctant, I put myself on the track of this legendary book of which I only knew the title and the fact that it had been written by a monk-warrior, a bizarre figure of a philosopher, called Lupelius, born in Ireland one thousand years ago. He had created a School based on the belief that death is not ineluctable, it can be overcome, as it is just the fruit of mankind’s negative imagination. According to Lupelius, death is no more than a superstition, the bad habit of a hypnotized humanity. Using original methods and his unique principles, he prepared a new race of unbeatable warriors. So, for many long months I travelled to any corner of the world looking for it, led by the crazy idea that the Book still existed and that I could find it. Finally, when I had almost lost any hope, in the ancient library of Yeveran, in Armenia, I found it. The manuscript was written in a mixture of vernacular English and Latin and was untitled. I was the only one who knew its original title: The School for Gods. I commissioned a perfect reproduction of it to take with me as a gift for the Dreamer and started studying, avidly soaking up Lupelius’ ideas.

Vision and reality are one and the same thing
Soon I realized why the Dreamer had asked me to find the manuscript of Lupelius. I was meeting with a patrimony of ideas of immense value. Here I got the powerful idea that in order to evolve, economy has to abandon obsolete beliefs, and old mental schemes. The conviction that death can be overcome meant the overthrow of all limits and the start of a psychological revolution capable of sweeping away the old, mental barriers and triggering a new world economy.
We need to draw a vertical dimension to the flat world of traditional economy, to conceive a third dimension capable of unimaginably expanding our capacity to create wealth and distribute it. The idea of immortality is an idea vertical to the plane of a bi-dimensional, ordinary thinking - a dramatic raising of our vision.
Vision and reality are one and the same thing. The larger our vision, the richer our reality.

It’s possible to change our destiny, to eliminate poverty, misery, and scarcity, but to do that we have to change man’s psychology and the hypnotic world’s story rooted in his system of convictions and beliefs. We must change the dream. Only individuals can do that. That is why a school is needed, a school of Being, potent enough to bring a planetary revolution in education, and to overturn teaching programs and methods, and exalting the vision. This is the scientific path on which we, at the European School of Economics, have set forth, and in which we believe.
Traditional education, the schools and universities we know, cannot teach the young to free themselves from conflictual thinking, prejudices and obsolete ideas, nor teach how to dare to dream the impossible, to upset any mental limit and any inner stockade, and to cultivate in themselves an indomitable passion for greatness. In order to do that, we must nourish our students with the idea of immortality, striking down the preconception that death is invincible.
The economy is a reflection of the Being. One fragment of eternity is enough to summon vast and courageous ideas, and unimaginable solutions. The conviction that death is something unavoidable is what limits us; it is at the root of our every constriction, shackling our creativity. All that we need is the idea of immortality, keeping that principle present in our own lives, and thereby freeing ourselves from the captivity of time.

Death: the world leading industry
What we call reality is only the reflection of our dreams, the mirror of our states of being. The world is such because we are such. It applies to the world economy as well. The mind of man is conflictual, his logic functions by means of contrasting concepts, and his reason is armed. This is why we know only a survival-based economy and have allowed death to become the planet’s leading industry, and the architrave that sustains the wealth of nations. From arms manufacturing to environmental pollution, from pharmaceutical production to organized crime, men and nations are serving the economy of conflict, and the economy of disaster. All of humanity is on the payroll of death.
I think that this conference should have taken place last year, in March 2008. We would celebrate forty years since Robert Kennedy delivered his speech at Kansas University. It would have been very instructive for this anniversary to read his words and to discover that forty years later we are still there, wondering about economic progress and what to do to enhance economy, to transform it from its very roots to face the planetary emergencies. Let me read the conclusive lines:

"We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the Gross National Product. For the Gross National Product includes air pollution, and ambulances to clear our highways from carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads.... It includes... the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children. And if the Gross National Product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials... the Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America -- except whether we are proud to be Americans."

So many years later, we cannot continue to measure economy the way we have done so far. Moreover we cannot continue to have a survival-based - disaster-based economy.
The same food industry which could be thought of as the furthest thing from the economy of disaster, on the other hand, is an integral part of it through food adulteration and poisoning. The business of death borders on the food industry as it is also revealed by the fact that food multinationals like Kraft Jacobs Suchard and Barilla are totally, or largely owned by corporations like Philip Morris (tobacco) and Swiss Oerlikon Buhrle (missiles and armour-plated cars). The same applies to the health industry, when we find out that within one of the largest corporations, General Electric, the products and services of the Health Division live side-by-side with the production of a wide range of systems and technologies for combat aircraft, military transport, helicopters and land vehicles for the world’s armed forces.

Beyond GDP: The A-Mors Index
Last November 2007, the conference Beyond GDP has indicated the need for better, and more complete parameters than GDP, gross domestic product, to measure the progress of societies and make comparative analysis among economies. The European Commission is studying indicators to take into account other aspects of a nation’s wealth, like education, health and social and environmental achievement. A program of the United Nations has elaborated a human development index (HDI) to integrate the GDP with the aim to tell more about the real state of wealth of an economy.
Our intent is to contribute to this international effort and to this large stream of ideas and studies, with the proposal of an index that is more than just an integration of existing or future parameters, but an enlargement of the vision. At the European School of Economics we have made intensive research to discover that which is the punctum dolens of the world economy. There, a more attentive, aware humanity will drive the needle of its will, as in acupuncture, and produce an intentional change in the pilaster that still sustains the wealth of nations and the perennial source of it: death.
Our research started from the undestanding of the true meaning of a most widely used (and abused) word: love. We could not find a satisfactory definition, until we were enlightened by the etymology of the Italian word amore and its Latin derivation: ‘a-mors’, which means absence of death.
The proposal coming from The European School of Economics, unheard of so far, is to elaborate a most important index, a parameter capable of measuring the degree of a-mors of societies and economies of the world. Or, if you like, how much advanced economies are based on the business of poverty, conflicts, criminality and all activities pretending to fight them, including medicine and fake philanthropy. And, as with General Electric, where we can know from the official balance sheet the turnover and profits coming from healthcare and lighting, and those coming from military production, we support the development of an index capable of measuring how much an economy relies on death and social disasters to produce its wealth.
This awareness will facilitate the redesign of a new economy, the epochal passage from a disaster-based capitalism and short-sighted economic system dealing with survival, to a limitless, abundant economics of immortality.

Prof. Stefano E. D'Anna

The Others (Article for Tempo)

ESE — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

THE OTHERS
All that you always wanted to know about the others and nobody ever told you.
Instructions on how to handle the others, what are they all about and what are they for.
by Stefano E. D’Anna

The others are you.
This article is continuing the reasoning and the train of thoughts started in the January’s issue with my article on “Solitude”. Solitude and others are a most interesting polarity of our lives. They are a most crucial dichotomy, like light and darkness, fear and love, life and death. If there is one, there cannot be the other.
No school, no parent or mentor, no teacher or university taught us what is the meaning of the others, what are the others all about and for what reason they are there. Moreover nobody gave us instructions on how to ‘use’ them - to handle them.
The others are your reflex in the world and whoever you meet is a flitting image of you captured by a mirror. As matter of fact you can only meet yourself. Anyone you meet is yourself. If you are aware of this, anybody you encounter is an officiant Pythia, the sibyl or priestess of the Oracle at Delphi, capable to telling with pitiless precision who you are, and what your destiny is. In a few minutes you can discover yourself, know yourself, and also know everything about the other. Whomever you encounter, you can know his or her destiny, and the destiny of any other who is like-minded. The more you know yourself, the more the external world and the ‘others’ become an open book for you.

The internal gap
Among the things I have learned from the Dreamer, which I have narrated in my Book “The School for Gods”, one of the most amazing is the unveiling of this: whoever you meet, beyond the surface, beyond the thin layer of what you are discussing, that encounter is measuring, registering an internal distance, the gap existing between you and yourself. This is the real and most profitable outcome of encountering the others.
Shortening the gap, bridging this distance in yourself, you will see the multiplicity of the world reduced and the others go down in number till they gradually fade away, disappearing from your life, like tools which are no longer needed, when the work is done.
The more you are separated from yourself, the more this space must be filled with others, stuffed with casualness, with a multitude of adversities, with a crowd of events, most of which are unpleasant. The more you fill the inner gap the less the world intrudes between you and yourself.
Without this understanding men meet each other in a somnambulistic state, troubled by worries, clouded by doubts and fears and lost in daily discord. They meet so as to pursue objectives and insignificant, external advantages, instead of taking from the encounter the only real, durable profit: to eliminate one’s mediocrity and lies, and conquer oneself. No matter how much people devote themselves to doing, to discussing business or making apparently important decisions, from an evolved man’s point of view, they appear to be little more than uncivilized individuals busy negotiating and haggling over glass beads, bric-a-brac and trash.
It is you who gives significance to events, who creates the people crowding your life. You are responsible for their moral and human quality, their actions and reactions, their understanding. It is in your power to illuminate them or to switch them off, for a second or for a life time. You can speed them up or you can slow them down. You can keep them or let them go. The world is an appendix, a game of lights and shadows where people exist and things happen only because you are.
For a real man, meeting others is only a stratagem to know oneself, to discover one’s own incompleteness and heal it.

The others are your being made visible
The others are mirrors reflecting our image. The others are our being made visible, our psychology materialized. In fact, depending on the state of being that you are in, others reflect your doubts, your uncertainties, your sorrow and fears or they reflect your state of independence, wellbeing and certainty. This realization will allow us to encounter a stable, clean and harmonious world if we live corresponding states of being. The others are projections of our states of Being. When certain states disappear from inside, certain events and certain people disappear from our lives. For a humanity that is unprepared to encounter a respectful, balanced, bright world there could only be an entry into a world of negativity and boredom.
An incomplete person cannot bear to be by himself, to enjoy his own company. His incompleteness, his guiltiness urges him to always look for others to meet, in a constant state of expectation, perpetually waiting for something to happen. Solitude, a state in which to cultivate elevation of one’s Being, is boring for unready people because it goes towards silence and leads to an absence of events, circumstances and gripping, absorbing emotions… and above all, an absence of others. You need to prepare for perfection or it arrives like a shadow, fear, threat. Unprepared people would suffocate with boredom. They would see unity of being and stillness as idleness and immobility. Realizing himself to be the solely responsible for his own world, an ordinary man would feel strangled and crushed. He prefers to believe that he is part of the creation, part of the shadows, in a world made by others, rather than to accept the responsibility of being the Maker of his destiny - because the state of being the Dreamer, the Creator is too powerful.
The life of a dreamer will not accept even a single atom of uncertainty. Understand this and you will either give yourself up to sleep with its justifying, complaining, and accusing or you will dedicate yourself to your evolution - to your improvement.

Others are time
Turn to yourself. This must be our discipline.
Realize that there nothing out there. There is nobody to ask, nobody who can tell you the way to go. When you realize that there is nothing that the others can do for you, you are free. Free to finally fetch from yourself, from your uniqueness, from your originality.
On the contrary, ordinary people long to be with others, they incessantly search for company. A man goes out to a restaurant, to the cinema, to the disco, just for one reason: to encounter others. And each time he returns home with a sense of defeat. The reason is that others are himself in time, others are time. They are the past that haunts him. The victory is to be one without otherness. People get married to avoid being alone, in the attempt to overcome their loneliness, and to find happiness in the other. But two incomplete human beings clinging to one another deceive themselves into thinking that they can complete each other, that together they can form a whole. But the result of the union of two incomplete people is incompleteness squared.
Ordinary people, and especially the young, are unaware that happiness is an inner matter. It can only be the intentional choice of this very instant and cannot be in time; it cannot happen with another person. It is impossible. Only you, in absence of time, returning to the source, regaining your unity, can be happy. Integrity doesn’t have plurality. Integrity cannot be achieved in two or three. Just like one cannot be healthy in two or in three. If you lower your level of integrity, of truth, of happiness, the world fragments, and becomes a kaleidoscope. Innocence is a return to integrity - a rewinding. The closer you are to integrity, the less you rely on others, the less you need others, until for your nature, there is no alternative to your solitude; it becomes a blessing state that you can pursue and hold constant in the middle of a crowd, or in the uproar of a bazaar.

The Portable Paradise
Timelessness makes life tremendously easy. Liberate yourself from time. Liberate yourself from the hypnotic need for others. Train yourself to have a paradise inside - a portable paradise. There is no role, friend, relationship, that can make you live in paradise. Only you, yourself can do it. No marriage, no music, no drugs, no sex can give you paradise or happiness. No politics, no religion, no priest, no master or guru can do it – no one outside of yourself.

The Music of Life (Article for Tempo)

ESE — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

You are the song you sing. Your music shapes your existence and anything you see, touch and feel.
There is a human mass that sings a chant of sorrow and projects a world on the edge of a precipice.
There are individuals who sing a chant of love and victory. The vastness of their music shapes destinies and societies, and profoundly affects the roots of the human spirit.

Are you ready to conduct a very interesting experiment? Can you accept being both the scientist of this experiment and at the same time the guinea pig? Well! Just pick out one of your days. Select any day of your life. Look carefully through it. Explore any detail of it. Notice the words you say. Classify them. Single out those you say more often… Scan the feelings you experience. Classify them. Single out the most frequent ones… Look at your thoughts. Classify them. Single out the most persistent ones, those that appear with a higher frequency.
Just as one cell, the smallest unit of life, contains the biological information of your entire organism, so, if your search is sincere and you really want to know about yourself, any one of your days can tell you all about you. That tiny segment of your existence is the epitome, the very synthesis of your life and knows your destiny, buried under thick layers of lies. It is like having the Delphic Oracle at hand. At your disposal. When you want it, if you want it.

We are monotonous beings
In all likelihood, such a search will make us realize that our words, thoughts, and feelings, are recurring; we just repeat them mechanically, day after day, over and over. We may discover that as a whole we are a quite monotonous being. Pick out the physical sensations you experience in a day. If you pay a bit of attention, you will realise that there is nothing new in what you sense. Moreover this search will make us aware of our mechanical nature. It will take our breath away at the terrifying discovery that our ‘machine’ is already programmed to feel those sensations, to experience those emotions, to have those thoughts, to pronounce those words. Like a musical instrument that vibrates at a given frequency, and can emit only that sound, we are occupying only a very narrow bandwidth in the infinity of possible keys, vibrations, and sounds.

What song are you singing?
You will realise that every day you sing the same song and that the external world, what you call reality, does nothing but obey to that rhythm, that sound, that vibration. A man's reality, his ability to do and therefore to have, his degree of happiness as well as his financial destiny, perfectly corresponds to his ‘rate of vibration’. The world is more or less narrow, more or less large according to the wideness of our song. "What song are you singing?" is the same as questioning yourself about your destiny.
When you are able to listen to it, when you are more careful with the notes you utter, you will be able to notice it’s mono-tony. If you will realize this, then you will also find the will and the ability to widen the narrow pentagram in which you are living.
Like a piano, that with respect to other instruments has such a breadth of octaves to occupy two pentagrams, so there are men who have a wider expressive range than do others. There exist men who play music that spans three, four, five pentagrams… because their "dream" is too wide to be contained in the narrow bandwidth that suffices for the rest of mankind. Two men conduct business between them because of a fusion of rhythms, a consistency of sounds… an harmony. And a firm takes over another firm for the width of its music; a civilisation conquers another civilisation and absorbs it for the vastness of its chant, the width of octaves, the quality of sounds, the richness, and the power of its music.

It is easier to move a mountain
Notice how difficult it is to change even a single word of your everyday vocabulary, an accent, a pet phrase; notice the impossibility of changing an attitude, a reaction, of breaking a routine, of going outside of the mechanical repetitiveness of gestures, or of sounds. Just imagine what it could mean to transform a thought, to change an emotion…
Notice inside you the impossibility of catching a new idea, to accept it… to dive into the invisible, to think something original, to dream something apparently impossible… to play a single note outside of the pentagram in which you were driven to live. You will realise that it is easier to move a mountain.
Every intentional effort, even the smallest, made to modify a repetitive action, a mechanical reaction or to break a habit, is a victory over our monotony, the tripping up of repetitive habits and recurrences of our life.
You will realise that the aging, the process of progressive stiffening of your life started long ago, and though you may be young, soon you will no longer be able to reverse it. Rich men and tramps, politicians and employees, Nobel prize winners and ordinary people - everyone carries around his own song. Everybody is locked in self-created prisons of roles, sealed in bubbles of negative emotions, embalmed in their own habits. The greater part of mankind obeys a programme set at birth, reaffirmed in childhood by parents who can do nothing but transmit the song which they in their turn received from their parents; and reinforced in schools and universities where they learn a hypnotic music taught by bad musicians, tedious teachers, and prophets of misfortune.
Throughout the millennia, the traditions of wisdom have devised and transmitted every kind of ‘trick’ to contrast with the rigidity and repetitiveness towards which men inevitably tend. Genuflections towards Mecca five times a day, the fasting ritual of Ramadan in the ninth month of the Islamic lunar year; indeed, the current rituals of every religious tradition, could all be characterized as ‘tripping’ mechanical behaviours. Their function is to nourish mankind’s drowsy intelligence and latent understanding, by the interruption of routine; pushing men to deviate from the rut of deep-rooted habits.

Like a jammed gramophone
There are grandiose musicians, visionary individuals who sweep through the pentagrams of existence, who create and catch their music from immensity, from above, and there is a human mass resigned to their sad and flickering existence, men and women similar to a jammed gramophone repeating their whining, mournful theme learned since childhood and never modified. Their life is an elementary, basic song played by pressing few keys with just a finger.
If we bothered to pay the slightest attention to our movements, we would discover how mechanical and repetitive our lives are. Every morning we set out with scrupulous rigour on a series of actions which are always the same: we get out of bed with the same foot, we start shaving from the same side, we clean our teeth repeating the same number of movements, in the same fashion, and always with the same facial expression. We have settled habits; we express received ideas with the same gestures, words and inflections we have always used. Even our emotions are predictable, like conditioned reflexes of the soul. In the ordinary man, the will is buried. His behaviour is the reflection of a mechanical intelligence and could be studied more profitably by sciences like ethology or robotics than by psychology.
Once he has understood this, a man can have no other aim in life but to escape from this narrow bandwidth where all mankind is kept prisoner - to escape from his own music's monotony and poverty. There is no greater project, no holier war than contrasting one’s limits and raising one’s own chant.
The cast out of Eden of Adam and Eve, the original sin, the paradise lost doesn’t occur once upon a time but every moment that humanity raises a chant of fear and sorrow and keeps singing it over and over. The world is such because you are such.

Change your music
This hellish song springing from a black hole in man’s soul, accounts for the all the conflicts, poverty, criminality and any moral and material disease of the planet, including humanity’s millenary curse of aging, getting sick and dying.
If you want to change your reality, change your music, and devote yourself to widening your ‘dream’. The dream is the most real thing there is. It is the dream that creates reality. And only the dream can rescue us out of this tight position of Being, out of our chant's monotony that becomes pain in our bodies, fear in our feelings and doubt in our minds.
One day our being will be so wide to be able to listen not only to our, but also to others' songs… the sounds others utter… the profoundness and the height of their octaves… their notes' colour, timbre, rhythm. When we are ready to stand up to the responsibility of this truth, we will find out that humanity thinks and feels negatively; it sings a song of misfortune, of sorrow, of doubt and fear. The whole world is in your head, like the music you play, the song you sing inside. And your fate is recorded like in the grooves of an LP.

Dream a beautiful dream
If you study yourself, if you observe yourself, you will know more about yourself and day-by-day you will be able to broaden your dream, creating and singing a new melody. Every day you will realize more and more that ‘the dream’ is more real than our illusion of acting in life.
Through dreaming you will create relationships, solve problems, and enter inaccessible worlds. You will learn how to dive into the invisible. Reality will follow, and will take the shape and dimension of your dream. Knowing ourselves is discovering that man is alone in the universe, solely responsible for anything happening to him. Life is as you dream it. Your song shapes your existence. You can live in paradise or in hell. It is up to you. Have the courage to dream a beautiful dream. Have the courage to sing a unique melody, outside of the chorus, like a solitary bird. Be an individual and conquer all that is possible to conquer… inside your head.

Prof. Stefano D'Anna

Timelessness (Article for Tempo)

ESE — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Man is the bridge between time and Timelessness,
between nothingness and eternity.

TIMELESSNESS
Every moment is an act of creation… every instant is new.
There’s never been a moment before, or a moment after… nor will there ever be! All that you see and all that you don’t, is created in this very moment… Everything happens Now, in the infinity of this eternal instant.

Our existence runs along two parallel tracks: ‘events’ which are the sequence of facts and circumstances that come towards us in time, and ‘states’, the impulses of our spirit, moods and emotions which are timeless and arise within us, mostly unperceived, when not unconscious.

A man’s personal history is therefore composed horizontally of outer events and vertically of inner states, or states of Being. However, people usually think about their life and talk about it as if it were only made up of external events occurring in time. In reality, the quality of a person’s external life depends upon the quality of his states of mind which occur in absence of time.

Man’s existence is made up of outer events but more so, of inner circumstances, emotions and thoughts. We are a sort of rope-walker suspended between time and timelessness, between nothingness and eternity.
We think of ourselves as time creature, swimming in an ocean of time, but in reality all that really counts in a man, his ideas, thoughts, feelings, aspirations, belong to a timeless world. We are timeless Beings, mainly made of invisibility.

And because we are time worshippers, we let our entire life slip away knowing nothing about the power that our states of mind have in determining the events and circumstances of our lives. Visibilia ex invisibilibus, which is the motto of The European School of Economics, reminds that all that is visible in our life, all that we see and touch, what we call reality, comes from our invisibility, ideas and dreams.

One day, probably soon, robots and intelligent machines will be able to think and even laugh, but they will never be able to dream. Dreaming is the most human of all activities. Our unique, exclusive feature is not thinking but dreaming. To the point that Descartes’ aphorism Cogito ergo sum - I think, therefore I am - could well be changed into Somnio ergo sum - I Dream, therefore I am. I am my dream. And dreaming is the only possibility to experience Timelessness. Dreaming can only happen in absence of time.

That is why real dreamers have always been so few. The ordinary man, immersed in time, with his existence running on one track, does not have the freedom to dream, he blindly obeys a hypnotic description of existence and is moved by the invisible strings of his mechanicalness and negative emotions. He has forgotten his uniqueness, his true nature as creator because he does not have access to himself. He does not know himself!

Modern societies are proud of their scientific achievements and technologies. The mail from East Coast to California that by pony express took weeks to be delivered, today travels at electronic speed, and we can fly or communicate to the extreme edge of the earth. But this has not brought us a victory on time. On the contrary we are more anxious then ever, pressed and frustrated by the passing time. It is because we have thought that we could win this mortal match against time ‘out’ of us. We have identified progress with speed, with greater capacities to produce, consume and also destroy, but we do not know how to win time ‘inside’ us, how to compress it in our Being, to brake out of its prison conquering ourselves. The true speed of a man is in the absence of time.

No school, no university, no mentor has told us anything about Timelessness, about the power of being still and aware, in a world where time is left out, as shoes out of the mosque. If you navigate on the web you will find out that Timelessness is just in music, in the lyrics of pop songs, as Eternity you can only find on the label of a nice little bottle in a perfume shop. The only exception is the integrity and timeless seminar of the European School of Economics. Simply because this School believes that The Dream is the most real thing there is and that economy and business are the Art of Dreaming.

Ordinary people go in the world to see what happens, what’s there waiting for them, always in search of an external solution to their innumerable, endless problems. A man of integrity knows that there is no solution out there. In the dungeon of the ordinary existence, in the labyrinth of time there are no exits, by definition. Nothing is solved in time. The planetary evils, conflicts, famine, poverty, criminality, have never found a solution through millennia. In silence and stillness, when we reach a state of fullness, of certainty, of unity of Being - that we call integrity – we have not to look for solutions, we are the solution. In Timelessness, victory comes before fighting and solutions are there before problems.

We need schools of Being where the pursuit of Timelessness is the real teaching, that is the elimination of unpleasant emotions, negative imagination, doubts and fear. Timelessness is a state of integrity, of self-fulfilment sealed off to the world and to time - without letting even a single atom of negativity penetrate it.

In Timelessness we realize that inner states and outer events are one and the same thing, illusorily separated by time. When we get rid of this illusion, and we lift the courtain of time, we can see that there is no distinction between what is external and what is internal. Events are nothing but the materialization of our inner states in time-space. Men’s emotional states are in reality events seeking an opportunity to happen and become visible. Inwardly, every instant is a shop that opens and closes, and at every moment one gains and loses. Every moment is a success or a failure. Everything takes place Now, in this eternal instant. In the instant, which is the only real time we have, by managing our thoughts, being aware of our emotions, we can take control of our existence and set the direction of our destiny.

Time, the shock-absorber
Ancient Greeks tried a titanic undertaking. For the first time in the history of mankind they conceived the impossible, they dreamt of a civilization capable to defeat time through art, beauty, harmony, philosophy, theatre, the cure of the body... the Art of Dreaming. Not only they never had much interest in measuring time, but they created the myth of the most horrible of all Gods, the God of Time Cronos, devouring his own children. It was a warning-myth: “Watch out! If you are a child of time, you will be devoured by time”.

If time is only a description, a collective hypnotism, an imaginary, nonexistent dimension, and men of integrity can win it and live in timelessness, how is it possible that it rules all our lives? The answer is that time is a shock absorber. For an unprepared humanity, absence of time is the scariest thing there is. Let’s imagine to eliminate time from the planet, just for a brief experiment, and to compress the last few dozens of years in one instant. We would see the killers of Martin Luther King with their guns still smoking voting for Barack Obama as President of the United States and, expanding the experiment, we could see people building a monument to Giordano Bruno, one of the pioneer of the modern age, in Piazza dei Fiori in Rome, in the same spot where they executed him.

Time is a smoky screen protecting us from the vision of what we are not ready to accept yet. Without the providential shock-absorber of time, facing its psychological fragmentation and inconsistency, humanity would be driven to insanity.

Time is a filter
Whatever is lacking of unity, anything fragmented, has a short life and stops by time. As a matter of fact organizations die young. Their average span of life is no more then 12 to 14 years. The largest corporations very rarely overcome their 40th birthday. The same applies to products, nations and civilizations. Their level of integrity decides the length of their lifespan. Timelessness and integrity are one and the same thing. An immortal company can only be created by an immortal founder. Whatever has long life has built in atoms of eternity.

Victory on time is victory on fear.
Ferlessness is the condition of the warrior, of the hero, the state of a Dreamer. Induism, in its millenary wisdom has reached the same understanding. Baghavadgita, the Veda spiritual and philosophical masterpiece, which spread from India to China and Japan, influencing the buddist thought, points out ‘fearlessness’ as the first quality of a timeless hero, of a man of divine nature, an individual.

Behind every human achievement, at the origin of every intuition, of every scientific or social conquest, behind the world’s largest financial and industrial corporations, and all that is beautiful, useful, wealthy, there is invariably one man, an individual and his Dream. Only the individual can nurture positive feelings like love, optimism and gratitude, the mass cannot. And only the individual can dream. The mass, lead hypnotically by a song of sorrow, a magma of negative emotions, lives immersed in the gelid liquid of fear, in a self-created prison of time where at best can nurture nightmares.

If just for few moments we could eliminate fear from our life and suspend time, we would find ourselves without banister, by the abyss of Now, facing the infinity of the instant. There, in that state, we could dream the most impossible dreams, and attract the most incredible solutions to heal our life and the planet. But fearlessness and Timelessness are so powerful that for an unready humanity they are scarier than fear itself. It would immediately find shelter in the memory of the past or in the imagination of the future; in personal history or in destiny. It would take refuge in time, go back to that familiar, reassuring state of sorrow and fear which keeps everything as it is. The world is such because you are such.

Pinocchio: the universal parable of man's destiny

ESE — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Benigni’s movie (Pinocchio) has missed an important point in Pinocchio’s fable: the dark and pitiless parable of man’s adventure. Behind its ironic and easy-going tones and its didacticisms, the puppet is actually the ferociously ironic caricature of an untruthful mankind, tyrannically moved by strings of casualness, negative emotions and the unhappiness of an inescapable fate. Hidden under the surface of this fable, there lies the biggest and boldest mystical text of all world literature: man’s initiatory trip from puppet, prey to its instincts, to a real man endowed with will. As a matter of fact, Pinocchio is the most widely read book after the Bible and the Koran.

A mystical text disguised as a fable
Although universal literature, from Aristofane to Beckett, is full of great novelists, perhaps there has never been one as intelligent, ironic or secluded as Carlo Lorenzini, alias Collodi.
It is true. We are a touchy and violent species. Over the centuries, whoever had to reveal some unpleasant truths or break some deeply-rooted prejudices, had to take some timely precautions. When Copernicus, for instance, wrote the “De Revolutionibus” in which he exposed his revolutionary discovery he took two precautions: a) he dedicated his work to the Pope, b) as a security measure, he published his book after his death!
Lorenzini also had to disguise the most terrible secret as a fable and pass for an author of nursery stories rather than one of the most scholarly anthropologists of our nature and human ethnology. One day a wiser, more aware mankind will recognize him as the man who knew how to pleasantly show us the cruel and terrible truth: humanity is made up of millions of puppets; we are bio-chemical marionettes, driven by invisible threads; we are incurable liars. Above all, he will be appreciated because he told us the truth and made us laugh at the misfortunes of the poor puppet, without having his book condemned at the stake. We are incapable of seeing how Pinocchio’s toughness and untruthful nature, along with his irresponsibility are the psychological stigmata of the sapiens species and the very roots of all our misfortunes.
The abandonment of his puppet dress and his transformation into a child is not a melancholic passage to normality or a cruel flight from the spell of childhood with its unbounded vitality. This is also Benigni’s interpretation. In fact, in the final scene we see Pinocchio followed by the puppet’s shadow that almost seems to be the spirit of his fantasy and original longing for life.
What a misunderstanding! In actual fact, Collodi presents us with the horror of a puppet-like sub-human moon-man who is influenced by everyone and everything. They are zombies who, through misadventure, sorrow, antagonism and disappointment, will one day enter a real humanity, sun-men who are proactive, responsible and shine in their own light.
By paraphrasing some words said by Caligula to his ministers, we could say: if Pinocchio is a puppet then we are men. However if Pinocchio is a man, then we are still men with a primitive conscious, larvae still encased in their pods waiting to break out and evolve.

A riddle to solve
There is an air of mystery about Pinocchio’s story, a riddle we would like to solve. Why did a writer such as Carlo Lorenzini, who throughout his carrier never rose above a Thouar or a Dazzi, suddenly produce an immortal story, an objective tale and a world-class masterpiece that had the unfathomable depth of an evangelical parable. How is it possible that a fable hastily cobbled together, perhaps reluctantly, with no clear plan, by a man who was probably defeated by personal and political disappointments could be considered an echo of a universal message and the mirror of all mankind? It’s a worrying thought. Why didn’t he sign it with his real name, like his other works, instead of choosing to use a “nom de plume”?

Wood shavings of our soul
These two questions can be made into one, in that there’s an explanation or better still an hypothesis that answers both of them. The hypothesis is that the text is both inspired and the result of a brainwave. The adventures of Pinocchio, the most widely read children’s book which has been translated throughout the world, in the guise of a children’s tale, conceals the greatest and most daring mystical text of all world literature.
In actual fact what we see in Pinocchio are the wood shavings of our lost soul. This explains why when we read Pinocchio the text appears to be real while the author remains an unnecessary hypothesis. His existence is superfluous like in the Old Testament and the Gospels. There’re holy books, but not holy authors. Carlo Lorenzini didn’t feel like signing a universal story, that was written in Heaven, it only had to be written down.

The awful secret
Benedetto once wrote that “the wood which Pinocchio is carved in is that of mankind”.
Out of all the fables ever written, Pinocchio is perhaps the most comprehensive and the most painfully truthful. It comfortably belongs to the “black fable” genre of Orwell and its ruthlessness is only be equalled by “Animal Farm”. It’s the transparent filter of a humanity cast adrift, that lives in fear and ignorance of its own identity.
The tale of Pinocchio’s adventures belongs to the art of mysteries: the art of revealing by concealing. The secret which has been under the noses of millions throughout the world for more than a century is awful. Pinocchio is the mirror image of a bio-chemical puppet which has become man as we know him to be. We are reluctant to recognise ourselves in the grotesque image of Collodi’s character, we loathe the idea of identifying ourselves with a speaking piece of wood, apparently alive, but in actual fact driven by external forces and terrible invisible strings. In the mirror we can see Pinocchio’s image, the embarrassing appendix of an informant, but just like Narcissus we refuse to recognise ourselves in that imagined reflection - we cannot see the woodenness of his being, his chronic and incurable deceit or his disloyalty.

The snare
Who knows if Collodi, wherever he may be, is laughing or crying at the millions of readers, the countless generations of children around the world who are rocked to sleep by the enchanted words and images of his fable, without even knowing its real nature: a dark and pitiless parable of the human condition. However from the very beginning, the storyteller Collodi, warns us that a snare awaits us and that we will uncover the deception only when it is too late - once we have crossed the threshold of the promised fairy-tale world that opens with the fateful words: “once upon a time…”
It is as if Lorenzini was compelled to warn us against his own deception, bound to an unlikely deontology, that takes us back to Cat and the Fox.
Once we’ve crossed the threshold of the nursery tale, the tacit agreement with the reader is immediately upset and we find ourselves in the presence of a gruesome fable, with its ruthless and sublime irony. Reading it, the book opens up a threatening, splendid and ephemeral world that begins with a disturbing absence. There is not a King. The place of the King figure has been taken by the mass which is a joyfully plebeian crowd. The eternal dialectics between mass and individual, between destination and destiny, emerge and this tears our world apart.

The victim is always guilty
Pinocchio is any piece of wood that belongs to the pile. It is stuff that is destined to be destroyed and burnt, but it also longs to live. In this transformation the antagonists, represented by the Cat and the Fox have a providential, religious, ideological and theological nature.
The world is a mirror. Through its events and in its symbolic language that are made up of circumstances and meetings, it constantly gives out signals, clues and indications. If Pinocchio ( the ordinary human being ) could read them , he would not be so busy sabotaging his own being, he would not make the wrong choice at the crossroads of life and neither would he reject experience, in specious collaboration with error and misunderstanding.
The Cat, cruel and simple and the Fox, ironic and savage are two poetic criminal figures.
The characters in Pinocchio’s world are nothing other than projections of our imagination, figures that thanks to our strong belief in them, have ended up by haunting our world. The Cat and the Fox stand out more than all the others, with their physical deformities, a symbol of a putrid conscience that is disguised with cunning.
A strict deontology compels them to warn the victim with a thousand signals, contradictions and slips. In short they can rob someone who is determined to be robbed. This is why, one day, in all the law courts of an advanced humanity, we shall read in very large letters: “the victim is always guilty”.

The gospel according to Pinocchio
The initial idea, the suspicion that this story conceals a parable of human destiny, a gospel, a timeless Bible is reinforced and gains ground bit by bit as we continue to read. Mastro Ciliegia, a carpenter, is the first character to appear. The father figure is called Geppetto, a nickname for Giuseppe. Geppetto is not a carpenter but he has tools to cut wood. It is more than a coincidence. As we continue we discover the story has an inexhaustible number of symbols, riddles and allegories, and that under the wrinkled and tough exterior, the most famous puppet conceals the man in search of himself.
What a conjurer and an illusionist Lorenzini-Collodi is to conceal the truth under everyone’s nose. Pinocchio is born from a carpenter called Giuseppe or Geppetto. On top of this, he has a yellow wig on his head, that looks like a poor and hot “polenta”, it is true, but it is also similar to the golden colour of an aureole. Therefore… why did we not understand that… Pinocchio is… is…
Any piece of wood, a man of the crowd, the real KING-individual, becomes real. The magical project of our advancement is encapsulated in that fable like a gospel about the transformation of a puppet into a real man, of a being without will driven by strings of fortuity and mechanisation, into a free man who is the master of his destiny.

The birth of Pinocchio
Pinocchio is a fairy-tale character, like other magical figures, he comes into the world in one of those dark periods, into one of those infernal circles. Like Jesus Christ, who comes into the world in a shed looked after by animal warmth, Pinocchio is born into misery, surrounded by misfortune, “on a bad night in winter” ( my old book of Pinocchio, an edition of 1958, says: “a hellishly bad night”) amid thunder and lightening.
So we have another clue that shows that the fable, in the guise of a popular picaresque story, is actually an initiatory journey, that begins with our coming into the world, into this “valley of tears”. The symbolism is just too obvious.
In our societies, so-called civil societies, life begins according to one of the most brutal rituals.

Welcome to hell
Childbirth is painful, we are welcomed by the operating theatre’s blinding lights, by the doctors’ excited voices and by our mother’s screams, then we are spanked and put down on a cold surface, so we can say that from the very beginning everything appears as though we were truly “welcomed to hell”. It does not take much for the child to accept the discipline of the masters of misfortune or the instructions that will convince him that he has arrived on a dark planet where you are born to die and you live to suffer. In a world that is a “valley of tears”. In fact, our first sensation on being born is that of a terrible fear of suffocating, of being overwhelmed and dying. From then on everything that appears familiar to us has this sweetish taste of fear.

The imprinting of pain
This is how we - who for nine months of growth ( but in actual fact for an age) have been aquatic creatures, kings of a universe that is lukewarm, dimly-lighted, silent and liquid - meet fear as our first feeling and from that moment on, like the imprinting of a goose, we follow her as if she were our real procreator. Fear and pain soon limit the possibilities in a man’s life; an unreal hypnotic space, in which a man feels safe as if between the huge walls of a bunker that is half refuge and half prison.
The whole life of an ordinary man seems to be controlled by this first moment, by the experience of that liquid fire that he has felt enter his lungs in that terrifying passage from aquatic being to an air-breathing creature.
Like the salmon that goes against the river’s current to return to where it was it was born, we have a long journey to make to overcome the trauma created at our birth and make our way home again in search of a lost paradise.

The Pinocchios of Johannesburg
There are other elements in the story that constantly draw a parallel, there is an analogical connection between Pinocchio’s adventures and our life. Pinocchio always has a thousand good intentions, he sets out with a kind of touching naivety, but then, he always diverts from his course so as to follow the easiest route, namely to lie whilst hoping to get off scot-free.
He gets so used to lying that he is no longer able to see the difference between true and false, right and wrong.
We’re like this. Official reports and media news are full of good intentions and are as unreal as Pinocchio’s. We’ve heard world leaders say these things, decade after decade, from Rio to Johannesburg. They are like the puppet on his first day at school, making false plans/promises about brotherhood and voicing concerns for the unfortunate, poor, starving and oppressed of the world.

The animal that lies
Pinocchio’s story reveals our weaknesses and our hypocrisy, which are still hidden even from ourselves, so used are we to the dynamics of falsehood. We tell lies to everyone around us because we think about our own personal interest. However, even worse than that, we lie to ourselves, every minute of every hour of every day of our life, climbing up castles of prejudices and illusions. Collodi’s invention of Pinocchio’s nose, brings an embarrassing discovery to our notice, he reveals our most disturbing psychological feature: the tendency to lie, first to ourselves, and then to others.
This is the point: we can get away scot-free with others, but we shall never be able to escape unscathed when confronted with our own conscience; this is a part of us that reads our inner self, and we are aware of it, so for us, there is no peace, no rest, just endless torment.

The cornerstone of research carried out by The European School of Economics, of which the Department of Sociology is a part, is the study of the individual and the discipline of self-observation or the study of ourselves.
The central element of this work is the study of lying.
Falsehood is a permanent state of the being, in which man has been “educated” throughout his life.
Man is a liar and only lies to himself. Poverty, war and sickness, which are part of the world’s events, are only the consequence of an inner struggle created by our lying that has enveloped us since birth, and the execution of a precise and monotonous script that we’ve brilliantly interpreted. The lie has become flesh. To leave the lie means to observe it and consequently to eradicate it.

Solitude (Article for Tempo)

ESE — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Close your eyes and feel your presence, enjoy your own company.
Search for solitude. This is the way a leader builds his integrity and acquires power.

We all tasted immortality. It was during the physical gestation, when for nine months (but in fact for an endless time) we have been aquatic, dreaming beings, floating in the amniotic liquid. And while for zoological beings this is the only gestation, necessary and sufficient ‘to come to this world’, for human beings this physical gestation is followed by an age of development, a sort of long psychological gestation, which continues until the age of 18-20. Therefore the news I am giving to the youngest of you is that you were not born around 1990, but as complete beings, you are having birth now, in 2010.

And just now, like Narcissus, you are looking at yourself in the mirror of the world and no parent or teacher, no school or university, has prepared you to recognise your image in what you touch and see around you.
Up to now you have been in the shell, family has protected you. Now you are starting to bare your own reflection in the world, and the image in front of you is not always pleasant. You start to experience the first disappointments, the first misfortunes, some accidents, sentimental delusions, apparent problems… And not recognising them as the reflection of your being, you have already got used to complain, to blame and accuse others, to hide, to lie, to feel sorry for yourselves. These are the clear signs that you are becoming part of the dark sea of adulthood. Adult has not a very nice etymon. It comes from adulteration. We could say that an adult is an adulterated being, a child who has stopped dreaming. You are going to be hypnotised by a description, a tale of the external world, like 99.9% of grown-up people. You spend most of your time out of yourself, with others; and if occasionally you are alone, you are waiting for something to happen, a phone ringing, a person or event that can bring you life from the outside. Longing all the time for the company of others is like depending on a lung-machine for breathing. Following others, living in their shadow, imitating others and whatever is cool, trendy, makes your life banal.

Be ahead of fashion! Put it behind you. Be yourself… The others will be imitating you. To achieve this state of freedom, of independent thinking, you have to know yourself, you have to find out who you really are. It is necessary to reduce the hours that are spent in ordinary activities, working out of home, absorbed, immerged in the external world, and stay some time in solitude, alone with yourself. Spend more time being in your own company, free from any kind of conditioning. Do it intentionally if you wish to achieve a life rich in all senses.
For most people, and especially young people, to spend time alone is unbearable. They search for others to fill their solitude, they stuff their lives with engagements and events; their agendas are crammed of meetings and appointments. In the effort to escape from themselves, and the unbearable burden of a forced loneliness, they look for the crowd, they gather in its temples: cinemas, theatres, stadiums, they huddle in a group with others and they are at ease wherever they can feel the reassuring presence of the crowd.

Multiplicity of events and commitments, external circumstances, an unceasing flow of facts, of insignificant experiences, the constant presence of the others in our lives, are all indicators of the incapability of living in solitude. People do not like to spend time in their own company and when, obliged by circumstances, they happen to be alone, they turn on the TV, make a phone call, listen to music or look for the company of a book.
What I have learned from the Dreamer, and which I have narrated in The School for Gods, the incapacity of being alone, the compulsive need for others, are symptoms of a self-destructive inclination, although unconscious. People, especially youth, do not bear solitude because they don’t love themselves.

The inability to love themselves leads to a kind of self-sabotage that may come about in various guise, through harmful attitudes and habits, like smoking, assumption of drugs, abuse of alcohol, but also provoking apparently involuntary, unpredictable accidents… like the many casualties for road accidents that happen after leaving a party or a disco.

Solitude is fortitude. Solitude has to be felt as a friend. We need to learn how to feel good on our own, loving ourselves. The more we live in solitude the more occurrences disappear and number of people we meet shortens to make space for more intense encounters and more real events.

There is an internal time and an external time. Schools and universities should transfer to their students the intelligence that one must balance them, that we must dedicate to ourselves at least as much time as we dedicate to others and the external world. Differently, will be left without the oil in the lamp, with our being deprived of the ‘precious essence’.

When you are alone, you must learn how to live beautiful moments in a conscious, intentional, creative solitude if you do not want to live bad moments in a forced loneliness.
Anytime you can, take the opportunity to transform loneliness into precious time to enter into yourself, to practice the most fruitful of all activities: observing, studying, knowing yourself.
You should realize, and then explain to your children, that staying by yourself means to build yourself, to strengthen yourself. It is necessary to learn how to transform loneliness into creative solitude. Creative solitude means to have self-control, it means to master your emotions, to possess your inner world. Not comprehending this, people search for fulfilment and happiness in the outside world, they try to find certainty in the eyes of others. But the world, the outside reality is only a mirror. Things happen only because you are. There is nothing out there. Nothing at all. Also the people that you meet and believe they are real, are nothing but your reflections. In reality, you only meet yourself.

There is no greater adventure, no work more useful than that of encountering others and recognising them as projections of our thinking, our states of mind, our values.
One day you will realise that you are the Dreamer and not the dreamed, the Creator and not the creation, that everything is at your service. Then you will no longer be dependent.
Close your eyes and feel your presence, enjoy your own company. Search for solitude. This is the way a leader builds his integrity and acquires power: being with himself. He knows that power cannot come from the world, cannot be given to him by others.

Only a few ‘greats’ of history have arrived at feeling inside themselves this sense of vastness, knowing that they could not depend on others, that they could not ask anything of anyone.
A leaders is alone. He builds himself from the inside, in solitude. Alone with himself, in stillness and silence, he can catch a fragment of eternity to enlarge his thinking, to invite large, courageous ideas and solutions beyond imagination. There he finds the strength to take decisions that always go against existing ‘status quo’, common opinion and the convictions of others. His certainty comes from his integrity, the belief that everything depend on him and he can only rely on himself.

Solitude versus others, individual versus mass is a great argument that needs to be brought further and deeper. Others are you. Are you in time. Whoever you meet measures the distance that you have inside. The others are you distant from you. When they have too much significance in your life, is a worrying sign that soon or later you can be trapped. But this will be matter for my next article and I look forward to discussing it with you.

A Dream for Turkey (Article for Tempo)

ESE — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The invitation addressed to me from Tempo to dedicate a monthly article to the Turkish readers has been immediately accepted with enthusiasm as an opportunity to express my love for this Country and share some thoughts about how to lead Turkey to a greater and prosperous future. For this purpose I cannot rely upon my background as an economist and a sociologist, that would prove largely insufficient. For such a task I have to fetch from my encounter with the Dreamer, with His ideas and principles, and the unique experience of the years I have been with this extraordinary being.

I wish to all the readers of this article to meet the Dreamer. For me it happened in the most difficult time of my existence, when I couldn’t see a way out. He turned my life upside down. He inspired me to write a Book based on my apprenticeship with Him: The School for Gods, which has been translated in many languages and is a long-time best seller in Turkey. Real dreams are contagious and from Him I caught the Dream of a school for pragmatic dreamers, where one is told that happiness is economy, a Schools of Being to forge a new generation of visionary leaders with a sixth sense: intuition, and a seventh one: dreaming. Mass education cannot produce them. If the schools and the universities we know are for men, we need Schools for Gods.

The wealth of a nation doesn’t consist of its exports, industrial production capacity, plenty of natural resources, the discovery of oil fields or gold mines and diamond deposits. The real wealth of a nation is the quality of its system of values and above all its capacity to produce emotionally healthy individuals, who have eliminated from themselves any form of inner conflict and negative emotions. Change within society can only come through the personal effort of single individuals.

Behind every human achievement, at the origin of every intuition, of every scientific or social conquest, behind the world’s largest financial and industrial corporations, and all that is, beautiful, meaningfull, rich, there is invariably one man an individual and his dream. The life of an organization, of an entire civilization depends on the existence of visionaries, men and women, pragmatic dreamers, individuals. Without them no progress is possible.

The opportunity to express these ideas came from the invitation that I received to be a guest speaker from President Yavuz Canevy President of the Forum Istanbul 2023. The Forum was at its eighth edition and gathers each year 600 of its best brains with the objective to provide an answer to the most crucial question: what can bring Turkey to play a key role in the world’s human development and global economic progress by 2023, 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic.

As I expressed in my speech, the crisis that the world is facing has little to do with economy and finance. The economical and financial problems are not the cause. They could just be considered effects. What we are really facing is a crisis of values and scarcity of ethical, impeccable leaders.
The main obstacle against which the most ambitious projects shatter is not the lack of financing or material resources, but a shortage of committed men capable of approaching business as if they were serving a cause; with competence, efficiency, honesty, in one word, integrity. Men and women who dream and love; doubtless, fearless people capable of conceiving brave ideas and committing themselves to their realization.

It was then that a concrete Project for the future of Turkey was brought to conception and officially announced. I named it “A Dream for Turkey”.
To make this dream come true, and to have Turkey belonging by 2023 to the Bric’s emerging titans (Brazil, India and China), Turkey needs to prepare a new generation of leaders, men and women free of any ideology or superstition. They are the healthy cells of a new humanity and the real wealth of this nation and of the world. Mass education cannot create them. They need individual attention, they need to be forged one by one.

Too many times we use the word individual without understanding how deep and crucial is the meaning built in it. Individual has an ancient Latin etymology. It finds its origin in the word “individuum” which means indivisible, whole… like to say having integrity. Therefore we should call all ordinary people, marked by a conflictual psychology, with a divisive attitude, “dividual” and reserve the appellation of individual to the few among the few who have reached this special inner condition of unity of Being, that central quality of leadership which we call integrity.

I concluded, affirming the belief that to educate the luminous young leaders that Turkey needs, is not a matter of money, knowledge, power or social standing so much as the development in the youth of self-knowledge, the capacity to free themselves from negative emotions, prejudices and obsolete ideas, and cultivate in themselves an indomitable passion for greatness.

In the following few days, this idea achieved widespread consent by corporations, Foundations and business people, and turned immediately into a Project for founding special scholarships, and the creation of a new Institution, a research centre and not a university, and a unique educational program, to be an example to the world. Its mission is to educate a new generation of leaders, visionaries, pragmatic dreamers, independent creative thinkers, individuals. They will be the real wealth of this Nation.

In the spirit of gratitude for Turkey, The European School of Economics Foundation has given a concrete start to the programme founding the first fifty scholarships while further 50 are going to be founded by more donors by the end of this year. The first 100 students, the most talented and suitable for this program, will be selected among the applicants from mot of the Turkish universities, starting from the first day of 2010.

This is just the beginning of this beautiful, bold enterprise. “A Dream for Turkey – The Visionary Leadership Program” in 2010 will attract new donors to the Project and the scholarships will soon become hundreds. The education of pragmatic dreamers, to develop their potentiality studying in Turkey and in Europe, the production of precious people, will be the one Turkey will be most proud of. There is not a better news to announce to the youth and not a better wish to convey to turkey for a Happy, Rich, Dreameful New Year.

Prof. Stefano E. D’Anna

There are not solutions out there to choose from. YOU have to become the solution. This is a revolution, an overturning of thought in political and business leadership”. (The School for Gods)

TANRILAR OKULU
Mankind afflicted by poverty, conflicts and endless evils, can only be healed man by man, cell by cell… Ordinary Schools and Universities cannot do it. We need schools for visionary leaders, pragmatic dreamers, where to learn that happiness is economy, Schools of Being where to develop a sixth sense: intuition, and a seventh one: dreaming.