Summary From Awakin Talks With Navin Amarasuriya
ServiceSpace
--Jignasha Pandya
22 minute read
May 31, 2021

 


Last weekend we had the privilege of hosting Awakin Talks with Navin Amarasuriya.

As a child Navin wanted to be an animator, in his young adulthood he cycled across the east coast on his bicycle in the United States and the country of East Timor and in adulthood he became one of the fifth generation owner of a Singporian luxury brand B P de silva group and a few years ago he left his formal operational role there to travel bit on the uncharted territory of an inner path. And, today many know him as the Chief International Officer at the Contentment Foundation which is an educational non-profit. But beyond these roles and responsibilities what really strikes about Navin is kind of this disarming quality of seeking truth, that he embodies in the way he shows up in the world and to people around him.

In conversation with Audrey Lin and Parag Shah below is a summary of the call.

Question: What was your childhood like, some early influences that influenced, inspired you to do what you are doing now?

  • I was a kid who always loved stories. If we think of it, every organization we ascribe to, every spiritual tradition we ascribe to, every nation is simply a story which we believe. By the virtue of different explorations or stories we believe we live in different worlds. So, from a young age always drawn to stories and storytelling as a unifying force.
  • I have loved storytelling and photography since I was young and they offered a window into the world. Single photos can be extremely powerful as well like the young sailor kissing a nurse after WWII, or the monk who set himself on fire in protest in the Vietnam war.
  • Stories were a way for me to escape in my teenage and early 20’s. Even the long motorcycle or bicycle rides were a kind of escape for me from the idea of who I had to be. As I have gotten older I realize stories are to be created. It is very important to see what story you tell yourself, they define our lives. And so decide how that story points to the north star.


Question: How did you escape the fantasy world of story and realized that stories are kind of real and creates our future?
  • It is really when you get to know that an organization is a story / a narrative that a leader can express that people connect to. And, that is a very powerful skill that (you) can use for tremendous positive force in the world but it can also be used to divide people.
  • A time when stories became malleable for me and I could bend stories was when I first started getting interested in meditation and especially after longer retreats.I started to realize that all of these stories I was telling myself were really stories. The immense gravity of these stories is that there are some stories that I am trapped in but I am still repeating these cycles and patterns.
  • In piecing together the 150 years of my family business story, I realized that historians shape the world not history. If someone looks at it after 50 years a lot of it was interpretation or extrapolation. The saying that history is written by the victors is so true because the people in power have the asynchronous ability to shape the narrative in the world we live in. Even stories around money and wealth are shaped by people in power.
  • So, unpacking of stories is important for me not only at an internal level but also at the systems level.

Question: What are the stories you tell yourself about your family business? You live a very examined life. How did you search for meaning and contentment in your business? And, how did your business influence your search for meaning and contentment?
  • We begin from the point of view that capitalism as an idea of political economy has become the predominant way we distribute resources around the world. And, there is no competing narrative that exists at this point. It is simply a tool. It is neither good nor evil. However, the nature of capitalism to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few is something that we are starting to see the consequences now.
  • Being part of fairly successful companies, thanks to my father's and ancestors' efforts over the last 150 years, I am a beneficiary of that in a very profound way. But at the same time when you really look deeply at the cost of operations of any company they go below the surface of simply raw material and labor. There are externalities, unintended consequences of this concentration of capital that has existed since the beginning of capitalism and even when there were competing ideas of how resources should be distributed 100 - 120 years ago. There were these criticisms that were never really addressed. The cost of it is kind of debt and the debt is that we are mortgaging our future for the present.
  • How can I think to be a part of a multigenerational family business when in reality due to the environmental impact of my operations, I am in a way contributing towards increasing greenhouse gas emissions or depleting resources?
  • Conventional argument that always comes up is that in the future technology will be invented to solve all these problems. Or, even now a big shareholder revolt is happening in oil companies where shareholders are demanding that they transition into renewables. But when you study it deeply you realize that human beings have a tendency to magnify the gains and efficiency with more demand. If you look at Singapore the poorest people who live in our society are better than kings 200 years ago. However, the human desire has increased ideally exponentially as well.
  • A seamstress 100 years ago could produce three dresses a day. Today we have the technology to produce 300 dresses a day. So, does this mean that a seamstress can go home after making three dresses in a day? No, she will have to produce 300 dresses a day, when before three was enough.
  • In a way we will always be chasing this tail unless we can really explore desire and the difference between needs and wants.
  • We cannot harness the fruits of social responsibility or better usage of resources because if human greed rises in proportion or increases over our efficiency gains then we will always be chasing that we will never arrive at. This intrinsically links to the psychology of contentment.

Question: How and when did the pivotal turn from business happen to what you are doing now?
  • The businessman Navin was self medicated. The clear way to block what I was doing in business was to ignore it. It’s like the ostrich that puts his head in the sand. I did not value my friends at that time. I did not value self cultivation.
  • All that changed with a near death accident where I spilled cyanide which is a neurotoxin on my hand during a gold purification process at work. When I was in the hospital getting the blood test done on the concentration, I had this immense desire to the park opposite the hospital. As I was walking in the park, I asked myself that if this was my last day on earth would I be happy with what I have done so far. The answer was a very strong ‘no’.
  • Though our company has become more environmentally friendly, in my mind it could not reconcile that we are mortgaging the future for the present. It led me to this profound insight that it led me to leave. But I did not know where to go. A month later I submitted my resignation.
  • Having a near death experience is such a profound gift from the universe to understand what is really important.
  • In the buddhist tradition there is a particular meditation practice called Maranasati which is a meditation on the mindfulness of death. The reason why monks do this is that when they do this object meditation, they then understand why life is so precious. And it allows them to filter what is important and what is not.
  • The beauty of contemplating death is that it is an ultimate filter to understand our own decisions.

Question: What advice will you give people who are holding similar questions about their livelihood and work?
  • There are different causes and conditions that arise in our lives. For some people they may have to support their family, for some they may have a mortgage to pay for their parents house. I do not get anything from my family business since I left and that is fine because I am very happy to rent a room with my wife.
  • The one question to really ask is what is the difference between a need and a want. It is not an easy question to unpack.

Question: You left your role without any clear plan for your next step. In this field of not-knowing, how did you determine what path you wanted to take? What was your compass to navigate that uncertainty?
  • I will not recommend this, but there is an old Chinese anecdote about a General who is trying to invade a particular island province. This general was aware that there have been three previously unsuccessful attempts to invade this island. So, this time he said we will do it again but this time we will burn the boats. Burning the boats meant that the soldiers were on the island and there was only one way to go back home. And, so I feel, sometimes letting go is the way to learn.
  • When I first started to ride the bicycle I had training wheels. I liked them. A day came when my father actually removed the training wheels. I fell down and I also got injured, but then 20 years later I rode across a few continents. Unless you take the action to let go, you can remain imprisoned in the comfort of remaining numb.
  • Higher the burn rate you have in your life, it is more difficult to let go. Different people have different burn rates. For some people if they go place to place they need to take a cab, there is no way they could take a bus. For some people it is only a bus may be a cab if they can afford it. For others they can go places to places by walking. With those three options. All three have different cost structures. The way to freedom is to find creative ways to reduce your wants.
  • A lot of time people see renunciation as a dirty word, but renunciation simply means spending more time on things that really matter to you. There is beauty in a bit of discomfort sometimes. And if we can make a game of how much lighter we can live, we have more flexibility with the choices we make. Imagine climbing a mountain with a very heavy backpack, now imagine taking out a very thick book you had in that bag. The people I have seen who are most bold, introspective and giving are the ones who have the most light backpack.
  • There is a fine line between asceticism that is completely to live without a backpack and having the right amount. The right amount changes for who you are and what you need.
  • In every economy economists would consider a dotted line which would be the poverty line. And, this line will be different for different countries. But no one ever identifies an abundance line. And if we do not identify our abundance line, we will become a victim of our endless desire.

Question: What is your abundance line?
  • Having an abundance line helps us reveal the nature of our desires. I still desire things beyond the abundance line but I know what my abundance line is and so it is not a very big challenge to let it go. Also, for me to locate my abundance line and finding creative ways to reduce it is fun.

Question: While in business or even NGO work, there is a structure and a sense of solidity, but the inner path in a way is about dropping all solidities. How did you navigate that or what kind of things anchored you, were there any guide posts, or people that inspired you?

  • They say that if you see beauty in anyone you are probably looking at the light of their teachers. If I am anything today, it is because I have had incredible teachers on the way.
  • My grandmother whom I saw doing meditation when I was very young. And, I remember going up to her and saying, why are you sitting for so long, it seems stupid. (laughs …). Little did I know the path before me.
  • Matthieu Ricard he was a French Geneticist. He was working on a Nobel Prize research when he went to the mountains of the Himalayas and became an anonymous Tibetan monk for 30 years. And, when the Dalai Lama decided to create this dialogue between the scientific community and monastics, that was very special because he was the bridge between contemplative practice and philosophy and the scientific world. They showed the efficacy of how the mind and heart could be cultivated. For me, I have not been a spiritual or religious person. But the way they express these timeless and universal ideas through the language of science is something I resonated with.
  • There are people who float around us and give us a window to be a little bit kinder and wise. It is true that everyone can be our teacher, it only requires curiosity and virtue (whatever virtue means to you).
  • One of the reasons I feel wisdom traditions are sidelined as compared to modern economic progress, is because we haven’t considered that motivation can come from different places. If we look at the world we live in now, it is very extrinsically motivated. But the beauty of contemplative practices, spirituality and pure science is that it comes from the space of a child like curiosity. So, if we can change the orientation of pursuit of one to get something from the outside to gently look at what there is inside and kind of play with it like a little toy. Life becomes really fun.

Question: Can you share a little bit about your journey with Contentment Foundation.
  • A lot of my friends in the business world find it funny that I moved from luxury to contentment. (Laughs …). In an odd way the luxury good industry taught me a lot. It taught me the importance of studying excess. A great teacher of mine said that if you want to know whether you want to advance in a career or industry, look at the people at the top of the industry. Get to know them personally and then see if you really want to be there.
  • One thing about the luxury industry is that it does allow craft like goldsmith, silversmith etc. However the challenge is that the luxury good industry today is driven more by lifestyle rather than craft. One needs to explore what truly gives you pleasure. Example of a healthy way to consume luxury - There is a doctor in Singapore, who has always loved nice cars. In 1992 he saved up enough money to buy a Porsche. Switching to 2020, the Porsche museum in Germany realized that the car he bought was extremely valuable. At that time the company could not keep it as it was losing money and had to give it to him. Now they have offered to buy it back at fifty or sixty times more than what they sold for. He has driven this car for 30 years and now the museum wants to buy it. And, he did not sell it and I asked him why and he said, ‘I like it for what it is and I do not need anything more, and there is no price that can replace that’. And, so here is someone who has found a very healthy way to relate to what he owns.
  • The idea of contentment is not asceticism, it is not to give up everything you own and live in the mountains, but how we relate to what we have.
  • While beginning to do some work on SEL for schools in South East Asia, I came across the Contentment Foundation. While most curriculums around worked with children, Contentment worked with adults. Here, they said that cultivation of self practice is more important to do any work with students. To this day, I find the work very meaningful and am grateful for it.
  • The World Economic Forum has recently done a report on skills of the future. One of the big summaries of their work is that it is less and less important how much you know, but more and more important is how we react to change. Reacting to change is not something that modern education models very well because of its linear nature.
  • We have a curriculum which is the four pillars of well being. First pillar is around attention & mindfulness - mindfulness is simply the cultivation of the muscle of attention and placing that attention in a relaxed way on an object for an extended period of time. And as you build this muscle more you will realize that they able to make better long term decisions. The next muscle we build is that of community. We realise that there is an inner emotional landscape that we can feel into and therefore we can do that for others. And, this is a prerequisite for empathy. Usually the people who are very cruel or mean usually do not have the ability or the sense to connect with this inner community. With empathy we can start to cultivate compassion. The third pillar is around curiosity, which helps us reshape and relook at narratives that are dividing. We can really choose to grow collectively as a human race or perish altogether, the choice is ours. The final is the pillar of contentment that balances all the other three, because if we are always in the mindset of improving yourselves, we are never able to cultivate unconditional self acceptance with who we are. It is like the guitar string, too tight it snaps, too loose no sound.
  • Life is always this balance between self improvement and self love. With unconditional self acceptance the question that very naturally arises is, what can I give. So, once you discover the abundance line for yourself, you might discover that you may have something more than you need and you can use to serve other people.
  • All of this is long term work. Cultivate curiosity, because that will give you the endurance to practice this work for a lifetime. And through the practice of life the benefits will come as a byproduct.

Question: You really nurture the garden of this ecology of education, how do you go about sowing the seeds and allow them to bloom whenever they do and really operate in that way?

  • Here, we really encourage people to work on changing / improving habits. B J Fogg talks about this extensively, in his push ups experiment. Like we asked the teachers to take 30 seconds of silence before they start to teach and eventually it becomes a practice where they start a meeting with a minute of silence. If you look at the letters in SILENCE you can rearrange and change it to LISTEN. So, even with your students, through silence, they are being heard more by you as a teacher. So, it need not be world changing and or you need to go and sit in a cave. All you need to do is just a few minutes of silence everyday.
  • We encourage schools to find little gaps in the day where you can practice empathy, compassion, silence and mindfulness and overtime the muscle will grow.

Question: Any personal habits or skill you are working on or have worked on in the past?
  • Oh! That is so easy because I am working on it. I have a very bad habit of using my phone at night. I am trying not to look at the screen after 9:00 PM. So, I track the days that I don’t use my phone after 9:00 PM and that is actually very low. That is usually my way of unwinding but I am trying to change a hardwired habit. I usually have late night calls with American schools. So I am kind of balancing that with self acceptance since the Contentment Foundation is going through incredible growth.
  • I have changed my exercise habit and have accomplished learning Japanese. My wife is Japanese and her parents do not speak English. So, everyday 15 minutes of learning Japanese. So, let’s say I do it 300 days a year, it is 75 hours of Japanese in a year, 750 hours in 10 years. It all adds up overtime.

Audience Questions:
Question: What’s your perspective on businesses that take advantage of the profitable opportunities they have been given and they give back the profits to the community?
  • It is what a lot of businesses are doing now, the challenge comes when the profits are being built on externalities that are not being covered. For many years oil companies had csr initiatives mainly to build better community relationships, but the fundamental premise of that business was to try and make a comfortable operating environment for an oil based economy. So, what is the challenge there? More than businesses giving back profit to the society, the companies that I tend to respect are the ones that advocate for better standards and practices of regulatory rules that government put in place or industry wide initiatives to improve standards. One company like that is Patagonia, they have walked the talk and made their supply chain completely transparent. I am a little skeptical of companies that give away only money, it can come from a good place, but is it solving systemic issues, would be my question? Even in my business managers would suggest giving a gift to some person. In the end it would be important to see what is the intention behind that.

Question: Is there a destination to this (personal) journey, is there anything that you are still seeking that eludes you?

  • The destination is right here. Nowhere to go but here. This is the only real destination that is there right? The future is a dream the past is already gone. What else is there but here. In the process we can choose to fight where we or try and change where we are. There is a lot that can be seen is in our control and a lot that is not in out control. My personal philosophy is leaning more towards (the thought) that there is less control in life then we think. The only real way you can dance with life is to change the way we subjectively experience where we are right now.

Question: If you can share any aha moments in your life?
  • I have a really close friend who used to be a zen monk. One of the things he taught me was - the reason why philosophy’s have branched out over history and you can think about it from Abrahamic religions where they have Judaism, Christianity, Islam or Buddhism into theravada, mahayana, vajrayana and of course the galaxy of anceint Indian wisdom and all over the world - because there are different people who have different tendencies to respond to different ways of a problem or an idea being expressed. The aha moment in life arose when there was a teacher who explained this ancient wisdom in a way to me that I could understand.
  • I think it is a combination of seeking teachers and allowing teachers to arrive. And, always staying curious about people who are wiser than you. To try and capture the wisdom of people who are wiser and much older and really who have done much of self work.
  • So, as a general principle if you can find a teacher whose ideas are resonating with you, whose ideas you test and they seem to hold true then it can be a very powerful force in life.

Question: You say that you are not a religious or a spiritual person, but you have explored a lot of teachings. Can you share more.
  • There is a poem that influences my thinking a lot with this question. It is an old Japanese poem, ‘the monkey points at the moon’.
The monkey is pointing at the moon pointing very vigorously. But if only the monkey would let go of the branch he would end up falling into the dark pool of water and realise the moon was above him all along.
  • It is his idea that all written language, all ideas that you are hearing coming out of my mouth now are approximations to what truth is. If a hundred people see this, hundred people will have an idea of what is true. And, the only way to experience this truth is to let go of the branch. And this is the importance of cultivating practices in some of the lineages.
  • When I was young my grandmother used to bring me to the temple and I used to walk around a tree, give offerings. I didn't really like it, I was chanting in a language I did not know and did not really understand what was going on. I never got a good explanation of why that was. But now I understand that this chanting was really training and orienting it towards virtue. In a way it is a neuro linguistic programming of the mind.
  • Like the monkey is letting go of the branch if we can let go of the ideas of our own lineages and really dive into the teachings as deeply as we can, a beautiful thing happens, there is no division in these teachings. In way it is more about what you see, what is the beauty that arises in Islam, in Christianity, beauty of the Bhagawad Gita, Taoism, Aristotle. And, you realise that all of these wise people in history are singing the same song. And you can start to listen to the music that comes together and to me that is really beautiful.

Question: Love is a universal wisdom. What has been the role of love and deeper wisdom in your activism work. It is not easy to generate love even when you do not agree with the action or conduct of that person. How do you cultivate a sense of selfless love in the work you do, in the impact you want to make?
  • I think it is important to unpack an idea that is universal but is false. That is the idea of the survival of the fittest. Darwin by the way never said that. In a chapter in his book the ‘Origin of species’, he had a whole chapter dedicated to how even though human beings were not the strongest, they were never the fastest, because they could communicate with each other in the most primitive ways, and because most importantly they cared for each other, they were able to build ideas and work that could transcend generations. So, a baboon or a chimpanzee could serve only its current generation, once it dies there is nothing next generation inherits but human being have this ability to learn from the past. And if you boil down to the single reason humanity has thrived, I do not think it is conflict, I do not think it was motivated because of resource acquisition, I feel it was because of love. And because generations of people who planted trees, in whose shade they never sat.
  • The role of cultivation of love at least in my personal journey, starts with cultivating love for oneself. And, it is not an easy practice to do, because when I first heard of this idea, I thought it was a bit narcissistic, I wondered if it was really self serving, like why should I love myself? But loving yourself is a prerequisite to unconditional acceptance and in a way. If there is something I cannot accept about the other is because it is the same thing I cannot accept the same quality about myself. And, I think this is a lifetime of work that I need to go through.
  • Love is the force that roots humanity. And, is not only a given it needs to be cultivated, even in the way we see and even in the way we do. There are many different practices of love that can be explored in the psychological and wisdom traditions. But I did encourage people to keep practicing.

Question: In your work with the contentment foundation what is the timeframe as far as working with teachers is concerned?
  • You can always learn the tools in about 6 - 8 weeks. But we always say that you cannot think of this as an 8 week program. 8 weeks is when the beginning of the practice starts. And typically we see schools take 1 - 2 years to root this work in their schools.

Question: I volunteer with an alternative learning space in a village in Gujarat, India. How do we create an environment for understanding contentment and the abundance line as a way of life in a place where children come from economically vulnerable backgrounds? And, the narratives that they are continuously fed, thanks to the TV and internet that money is the only redeemer.
  • Money is an important force in the world, but the headless pursuit of money can be destructive. And, to balance the beauty they see with money, it is also important to balance the opposing force as well. People in pursuit of money cause immense amounts of suffering as well. I think the best thing you can do to kids to support them is to give them the total view. I really hope that their circumstances in life improve and we all want that. Just like the way we are talking about the abundance line, maybe showing the dark side of the headless pursuit of money which comes sometimes at the cost of families, societies has to also be discussed in order for the kids to make a balanced decision on what they want to do.

Question: Does the standardised way of teaching virtues have the same repercussions as the formal education and chasing numeracy and literacy has done? How do you make sure you do not fall into the same trap of the similar system?
  • This is an important question we ask ourselves at the foundation everytime. When we were working with less schools this wasn’t a question, we had more time to know the people and really practice with them deeply. But as we grow, this is the challenge we are facing. One idea I have found powerful is the difference between intellectual understanding and experiential understanding. We are trying to make this work as experiential as possible.

Question: How can we at Servicespace support you?

I am very grateful to receive such an offer. It is ironic that I run operations for contentment foundation in eight countries and we are growing and all that. But in my heart I know that I do the work I can and the rest is not up to me. So, the best thing that all of you could offer me is if you discover practices that you resonate with and spend time and energy to cultivate them and to try and build a community of people to cultivate together, which is something that you are already doing. So I guess that is where the work is. We can only change ourselves.

 

Posted by Jignasha Pandya on May 31, 2021