Notes for a Computer Program on Personal Accomplishment

The aim of this programme is to help the individual know where he is on a scale of self-improvement and give him the hope that he can reach his goal through this.

   Whether that desired result is achievable or not will be seen if any one around you responds positively and feels the programme helps. That is an acid test.

• A description of accomplishment that explains to the individual any of his accomplishments precisely is a helpful starting point.

• E.g. one accomplishes a work for which he has the energy, skill, capacity, motivation and a compelling necessity from outside or inside. If one of them is missing, he may accomplish or not. But when all of them are present, he can accomplish and he does not have the option of not accomplishing it because there is a compulsion.

• An external compulsion releases the least energy but he still accomplishes it; however, results will be minimal. An inner compulsion yields maximum.
• The inner compulsion can be physical, vital or mental. Physical accomplishes the least, mental accomplishes the most, but there is accomplishment. It never fails.
• He who fails to accomplish the least drops out of the social stratum he is now in.
• He who accomplishes the most qualifies to move to the next higher level of accomplishment.
• Those who have taken a degree, secured a job will find their own experiences confirmed by the above observations.
• Each time he has secured a promotion, he knew he has accomplished the most in his previous job.
• When he has not accomplished at the maximum level, he will know he was lacking in one of these requirements of energy ..... necessity.
• As accomplishment is explained with its maximum and minimum reach, its components of energy, skill, capacity, motivation, compulsion external and internal must be explained. There is a minimum for each below which it hurts the accomplishment or cancels it. There is a maximum for each above which it can enrich the accomplishment generally.
• The above would comprise a bare but full outline of accomplishments with their components.
• The above suffices to start a programme. Beyond this there is no end of expansion as each of the three planes and each of the 9 stages permit to be analysed into either 3 or 9 levels within an amplitude of maximum and minimum terms.
• All truisms of life will have their own significance with a particular reference to individuals.

   Tom Peters has accomplished. Tom touched a deep chord of national aspiration of destroying the establishment which has released infinite power. Had he tried to accomplish in life commensurate with the energies he has released, he would have been a meteor and faded away quickly after rising to the sky. He has accomplished in life to the point of successfully working in MacKinsey. He kept his goal of achievement to the level of his earlier achievement in MacKinsey for which he has all the skills, capacities, motivations. Now that he has released nationwide appreciation and that has raised his energy sky high, he let that energy flow through the old framework of his. This is the secret of his success. This is like Coca Cola's multiplying horizontally all over the globe or Sears expanding. They exhibited the common sense that helped them preserve the model or frame of earlier accomplishment.

   The list of 12 inspirations is fairly complete though any number can be added. The purpose is not to have a longer list but to make the list fully relevant.*

   Inspiration No. 1 can be rewritten as organisation accomplishes. Corollary for strength can be extended to skill, capacity, ability, talent, i.e. skill is a measure of strength in any act (corollary).

   Do not attempt important acts when skill is not complete (strategy).

   No. 2  --  Inner determines outer

a) Our current situation is a reflection of our inner condition.

Change the attitude to change the circumstances.

Inner or outer exists at 10 or 12 levels. The preceding stage is inner for each stage and the succeeding stage is the outer. 9 is inner for 10 and 11 is outer for the tenth stage. A list of all such stages must be given. In the 9 stages one can say each stage has the succeeding outer and preceding inner. The physical mind is 3. The vital mind (4) is its inner and mental vital of (2) is its outer. Society, psychology, biology are 3 successive stages. Society is the outermost. If a social attitude fails, taking a psychological attitude (of conscience) it will succeed. If that fails, take a biological attitude. It is sure to succeed. In a transaction right formal manners (social) succeed. When they fail, move to a psychological attitude of pleasing him. It works. In cases where it fails, take a biological attitude of venting your anger on him. He yields.

   Change your attitude from bad to good, it turns failure to success. [The opposite is also true. It is a description of Non-Being. We shall not deal with it here].

2 a.  Change the inner attitude to change the circumstances.

            Explain ‘inner attitude', ‘change'

            Give a double column of inner and outer attitudes.

            Similarly give two columns of before and after change.

E.g.      

Power of a decision

• (1) Decision that is well within the four corners of energy, skill, capacity, interest, knowledge always succeeds. (This covers physical, vital, mental).
• (2) There is a horizontal line and a vertical line intersecting. The horizontal line is average (what I always call the LINE. The vertical line divides the good and bad. A decision can be good or bad or above the line or below the line. When it is above the line and is good, it is sure to succeed. Measure of success can be indicated by + while failure is -. Thus, ++ is sure success, - - is sure failure, while + - is one that is successful in the beginning but will be a failure in the end; + - + is the other way around. Whether a decision is + - or - + depends on the strength and weakness of goodness as well as the capacity to be above average.

                                                                               Above average

c) Silent Will

   Power of speaking softly

It is true that silent will works. It is also true that shouting accomplishes. As a side reference to be looked up if one needs explanation there must be an article on Silent Will which explains the following points:

• will accomplishes what knowledge knows. The maximum is determined by knowledge and the strength of will.
• will rises in strength in the measure it integrates with knowledge, i.e. it is not a crude will that is blind but a will that knows what it is trying to accomplish.
• In a scale of 1 to 10, as the will rises, so its accomplishment rises. As the integration of the will rises, so does its accomplishment.
• It can accomplish beyond the scale of 10, beyond its scope by becoming Silent.
• Up to the point of 10, the more you shout the more you accomplish. Cruder the better.
• What is the accomplishment of the will beyond its domain?
• Scale of 1 to 10 covers the area of operation. Silence exerts itself beyond.
• Silent will achieves in regions unexpected, beyond thought and its imagination.
• Will and Silent will can be subdivided into 10 parts and each graded, explained and illustrated through an example. You must collect these examples. Likewise all these 12 inspirations can make additionally or optionally available, extra explanations, principles in operation, graded intensities and examples above and below the line. For decision-making a whole new programme covering a wide spectrum may be needed. Here an abridged version can be given. Decision-making can traverse the 9 stages on the physical vital mental scale. Its expression can be horizontally taken to various sectors.

3. Practical concept of Infinity

   Basic Idea:  Anything becomes a resource by our mind making it a resource. Our mind is capable of infinite ideas.  So the resources can become infinite.

‘Megatrends' says that 10 million NRIs earn $341 million equal to India's GDP. NRIs earning capacity is 100-fold because the US commercial atmosphere makes it possible. This is an external atmosphere. When NRIs are in India they work with 10% of their efficiency in USA. That 10% efficiency in this atmosphere gets a $100 monthly pay. Can they bring themselves to work in India as they work in USA? I mean in their earnestness. Then what will happen? It is true that Indian infrastructure does not permit them to earn a US salary here. BUT the Indian commercial atmosphere for an entrepreneur who is willing to work like a NRI in USA, offers NO barriers. This is an inner resource to which the externals respond as a continuous sequence of luck. The NRI can earn in India 100 times more than in USA. Also he can earn for the country. The NRI responds in USA to social pressure for efficiency. Changing the external response to internal response, he can evoke an Infinite opportunity from the externals in India which he cannot hope for in USA.

   The inner attitude can become infinite and make the outer circumstance infinite. The attitude that relies on the outer will be finite.

4. Power of Faith

   Explain that faith is of three levels, even 9 levels.

   Mental faith works through the vital and body. Vital faith works more readily while the physical faith gives instantaneous results. E.g. if you believe a friend will come (mental), a letter will come from him that he would come in 2 days. The same, if vital faith, news would come that he is in town and will meet you soon this evening. Physical faith means, when you lift your head he will enter the room.

   This movement from mental to vital to physical can be from 1 to 2 to 3 or from 1 to 4 to 7. The latter is more powerful.

5. Life cycles and repetition: What is required is observation. Cycles for luck, promotion, travel, change of town (location), even reading the next book, receiving visitors, phone calls and every activity is measured by a cycle. As the biological clock in the body works in spite of your moving to another time zone, there is an energy clock or Life clock or accomplishment clock in you. Anyone who can see it in his life can know how to be at the right time. Expanding to other areas, he can be the right man at the right place too. Observation being right, the cycles will be amazingly precise.

An all-round observation will show as things change in you, the cycles change but the pattern is precisely the same.

6. Power of Organisation:

          This section must be written in such a way that what emerges is the power of human organisation in general. The general organisation must spell out the types in such a fashion that the particular fits in very well.

         What is human organisation?

         Human activities can be graded as,

a) simple routine acts, b) complex or serious routine acts; c) acts of first time;

d) important acts; e) acts that are serious for one's career or family.

Dissection of all acts will reveal the same pattern. What will differ is the energy, concentration, attention, capacity, execution. This list according to the act has various combinations of physical vital mental aspects. First we have to define the act and its organisation and allot the various intensities to differing acts and check whether our organisation of energy is true at least for ourselves. That is the beginning. Once it passes that test, we can build on that foundation any super structure.

   On the side for this entry, there must be articles, explanations, examples of energy, skill, ability, capacity, talent (taken through 3 levels) and systems, co-operation, co-ordination, correspondence, values, etc.

7. Man accomplishes whatever he wants

   Accomplishment, choice (conscious and unconscious), relation between them, relation of accomplishment with organisation must be explained. Here the clue is at the end of all our explanations, our own past must answer to this description and precisely.

8. Complete Act

9. Grow by giving

Growth is by organisation, effort and the energising of them both. How does giving make you grow?  Only the excess is given. Those who generate and constantly generate excess consciousness can give. An attitude of giving generates excess consciousness. In the scale of energy or capacity that accomplishes, the bottom is energy. It passes through skill, capacity. Capacity is a condition of organised energy. (Life grows by consciousness and consciousness grows by organisation). Organised energy is energy that is aware, i.e. consciousness. To give consciousness to others means to offer to another all the very best you have. Happiness is an outgoing energy. You give by an outgoing movement. In simple terms you work all your life and create your best to be given away to another which raises your consciousness. Gandhiji did it. He gave away the highest post at his disposal. Mother and Sri Aurobindo worked all their lives and offered the results to others. A mother does it.

   In any work when the occasion comes to receive the result, give it to another. It makes you grow.

10. Effort increases capacity

   It is true in the physical. Interest increases the capacity in the vital. In the mind capacity is increased by comprehension. If you are physical take efforts, if vital increase interest, if mental try to understand better. You are all. Therefore efforts in the physical parts of the work, interest in the vital parts and greater comprehension will increase capacity.

11. Omens and coincidences

Life response is a knowledge. Should one have the knowledge in such a fashion as to move life, it is "Mind mastering senses." This programme, at the end, can offer that mastery. One has to be observant and know the subtle nature of things, viz., water is emotion, lotus is consciousness, peacock is victory. We have enough to start with. All rules can be commissioned once the initial grasp is there.

12. You can make life respond

   You can do so when you know the rules. To start with you need to observe events that arose as a Life Response and see the combination of forces. That is a good beginning.  

  Self-Assessment Survey

• Classification as extrovert, introvert will not help you design this programme.
• Growth-oriented survey: this is extensive, wide, for our purposes may appear to be incomprehensible, though this is THE survey we should undertake. The seven dimensions represent as follows:

By growth we mean the total human worth of the person must rise. All these 7 dimensions are part of such a growth. Two problems arise: The reader will not be able to relate his own situation meaningfully, and to assess HUMAN WORTH  we need a standard against which we can evaluate the individual.  Certain general confusions will arise because,

• Very intelligent men may be non-achievers.
• The same achievement can be QUANTITATIVELY arrived at by more than one route, especially a positive and a negative route.
• Dull people may be popular.
• Crooks may accomplish what honest intelligent men may attempt and fail at.
• There is no KNOWN definition of human worth as there is in less defined fields such as social worth, psychological worth, monetary worth, achievement in health, family values etc. Even here any scale will serve us up to 90% beyond which it will desert us.
• Human worth or human value is not a common socially comprehensible concept. If chosen, not many can agree upon any single definition.
• Qualitative achievement when reduced to quantitative measurement loses direction or definition.
• Measurable values or worth are not fully acceptable or commendable aspects. Monetary worth or psychological value can be defined to a certain extent and helped to foster. Monetary worth is certainly measurable but may be frowned upon even by those who really covet it. Psychological worth can also be defined and helped to achieve up to a certain extent but it will clash at some points with conscience.
• Compromise is inevitable.
• Suppose our AIM is to define an individual under a few captions NOT relating one to the other, ignoring other dimensions we can construct a scale for part of his personality and say the rest belongs to his ‘higher' part. The social individual when abstracted from his wider spiritual personality can be measured in his social personality for his monetary worth and be helped to raise his worth 10 times. We must then agree that the rest of his personality belongs to his BEING or SPIRIT into which this programme cannot go. Similarly man's psychological worth (understood a his capacity to be HAPPY in the family, society and with himself) can be assessed and helped to grow ten-fold. Even here if we take this personality under three different heads and evaluate each (completely unrelated to the other) separately the strategies will emerge in clear focus. In this case too we must proclaim that we are for a very narrow purpose dealing with a tiny part of MAN and the rest is now not our concern. We have to settle for certain measurable programmes where we can handle meaningfully the individual. Under this head are Monetary worth, (Family happiness, socially happy individual, Inner happiness), Psychological value.
• Assuming you get a complete hold of the contours of these scales, in future we can think whether a wider scale can be constructed. We certainly cannot start with any of them now.
• Try these 21 questions with people you know fairly closely and if it falls into any pattern that is discernible, we can still give it a try.
• The ISSUE is confounded with confusion because man exists at three levels of which we have sub-divided into 3. But in society man is seen as MAN as a whole. His achievements or basic worth is assessed on appearance and as it touches the person who evaluates.
• I chose MONEY because it is measurable, not arguable, and very desirable to many including those who profess to despise it. Happiness is palpable and is unmistakable and everyone seeks it in one form or another, though fixed standards are unavailable.

Chart of Dimension, Aspects, Positive Factor, Negative Factor

         This chart as I said earlier is well-conceived and can evaluate people on 7 dimensions. Evaluate yourself on it and see whether it truly reflects the situation. Or you evaluate a few others and see whether it reflects what is otherwise understood with common sense. The difficulties arise from a few causes.

• 1. An objective scale often confirms common sense evaluation. It also in a few cases contradicts or differs from such evaluation.
• 2. There is no central criterion against which one is evaluated.
• 3. A social cipher, if he has extraordinary capacity for visions, will have a difficulty in joining both aspects to arrive at a final score because score on different dimensions are on different criteria. There is no central criterion against which each dimension realistically reduces itself.
• 4. Suppose we overlook this anomaly, still the final scores at self-evaluation and the goal to which he wants to go may raise a confusion. The scale may evaluate a useless person (in his own opinion) high, rendering the evaluation meaningless.

There are two ways of validating the scale.   1) Evaluate a few people on this scale yourself and 2) Ask them to evaluate themselves. If  both broadly tally, it is right. Or, if evaluation of several people by themselves on this scale - in spite of your different opinion and his lack of satisfaction - really helps them improve, the scale passes the test. Let us put this to full test without refusing it out of hand.

Sample Questions:

   A valid list of questions.

  Let us see how it figures in use.

Evaluating Responses

   Your own doubts on working out indices based on a matrix reflect my doubts.

Explanations

   This is THE strength of the programme.

Strategies

   Doubts here are because of basic ambiguities such as i) selfishness is low on values, but ii) on accomplishment selfish people will score high generally. A realistic central reference is lacking.  

Links to Module 2

  Try what you say with full open-mindedness.

   The other scale to which there will be a good response will be the scale of Accomplishment. Here too the gross distortion will arise because values get mixed. Tom Peters is a great achiever. Any one who values politeness will score him zero creating total confusion. Bad people, insincere ones, people capable of betrayal, crooks, lazy ones often succeed, are popular, are even taken as models.

   As values and achievement are disparate aspects, evaluation that is integral cannot be attempted.

   Accomplishment will serve our purpose, again, if we subdivide that head as Material, Social , Psychological (vital), monetary, conscientious accomplishments. Then the value in each head can be assessed to satisfaction. King George V was a kleptomaniac. He occupied a throne. It defies an evaluation. Drucker is a high achiever. He calls a questioner "stupid" which scores him a zero on manners. From the world conference he offers a suggestion which makes a fool of himself. Nehru is a world leader. His assessment of China made him dismiss his best friend from the cabinet. These things happen when they stray out of their domain of success. So, assessment within ONE plane of action is realistic.

   Accomplishments also have another dimension of an unexpected consequence:

• 1) Theoretically there can be people who, having striven all their lives to earn, despise their success because they really despise being money-laden.
• 2) Having been after a man or woman for years, after marriage it turns out to be a fiasco.
• 3) Freedom fighters in India regret the offshoot of goondaraj.

These things happen because the AIM is not INTEGRAL . Partial aims may lead to other partial goals unwelcome.

Tenth Insight

   An unparalleled accomplishment. It is at the level of sensation. The truth is,

  It is a true great accomplishment at the sensational level.

  People can mistake sensation to be spiritual.

  Really sensational people will feel a reward.

  True seekers will perceive an early disappointment.

  After 5 or 7 years of successful growth their movement will be composed of people like the Hare Krishna movement.

   Things go wrong because sensation is mistaken for spirituality. Suppose Life Response can be presented with that art, the result will be as phenomenal. Life Response is a mental knowledge. Redfield's technique is sensational. To find the link between mind and senses is one's role. It is a far greater achievement being one of combining two planes.

Present evaluation of mine of your efforts:

• It is the most significant move of both of you since 1970.
• Initially, you may land in a great confusion and frustration.
• Initial success is not ruled out, but possibilities are slender.
• Success or failure initially, you are in for a grand finale.
• The greatest outcome will be both of you discovering your inner potential.
• A greater result will be a movement where man can discover himself.
• If more is to come, it is our friends in US and India discovering themselves fully.
• The key lies in objectivity, perseverance and willingness to accept the result of one's own discovery. 

1)To know a little more of potentiality is left unutilised inspires; 2) within limits outer determines the inner; 3) knowledge that things expand gives power to expand; 4) shouting accomplishes as Silent will in its own context; 5) self-confidence achieves; 6) observing the cycles helps you to be present at the right time; 7) Power of system, sub-system, co-ordinating two acts; 8) Organisation kills; 9) the Complete Act has its version at each of the 9 levels; 10) Growth within the plane demands taking; 11) Capacity at one level helps in taking effort at the next higher level; 12) Follow the life response for greater accomplishment.