當冥想成了商業化產品
摘錄自：天下雜誌 經濟學人電子報 2013/11/22
2013-11-18 Web only 作者：經濟學人
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| 圖片來源：flickr.com/photos/spirit-fire/ |
西方資本主義開始向東方神祕主義‧尋求解方。佛教強調的「正念」（mindfulness），也就是暫時脫離日常活動，進行放鬆與冥想練習，逐漸為歐美企業所採用。
谷歌在內部開設了「尋找自己」的課程，非常受到員工的歡迎，因此公司後來又開設了基礎課程，例如「管理自我能量」，谷哥甚至為了讓員工可以進行「行走冥想」的活動，特地建造了一座迷宮。eBay在公司內也設有冥想室，室內擺放有枕頭和花卉。推特和臉書也不落人後，推特的合夥創辦人之一伊凡‧威廉斯（Evan Williams）在他的新創公司Obvious Corporation 內，會固定進行冥想活動。
這股正念熱潮不僅限於矽谷，許多知名企業家也都加入了這股熱潮。例如，梅鐸曾在自己的推特上寫說喜歡冥思靜坐；基金管理公司PIMCO的創辦人比爾‧葛羅斯（Bill Gross）以及最大避險基金公司Bridgewater Associates的創辦人瑞‧達里歐（Ray Dalio），也都有冥想的習慣。
正念風潮的興起，起源自1960年代的反文化運動，為當時的西方資本主義注入了一股波希米亞風，包括維京、班傑瑞以及蘋果等企業，也在此時成立。蘋果的創辦人之一賈伯斯年輕時便曾到印度靈修，日後他也時常提到，禪的思想如何影響蘋果產品的設計。然而，近來正念風潮的快速發展，主要歸功於3大因素。
第一是無所不在的連結。如今人們的生活被電子產品包圍，不僅造成感官的過度負荷，更嚴重干擾了悠閒時間，而且持續地惡性循環，正念讓人們可以短暫脫離無時無刻的連結。
第二個原因是，過度強調物質追求，導致企業醜聞持續爆發，正念強調的是追求物質以外的成功。
第三個原因是，靜觀風潮本身，已經成了一門賺錢的好生意，甚至有許多商學院，也紛紛開設相關課程。
正念冥想究竟有沒有效果？有些證據顯示，部分正念技巧確實可帶來心理與生理的好處。根據杜克大學醫學院的研究，一星期做一小時的瑜伽，可以有效減輕員工的壓力，平均一年為企業省下2,000美元的健康保險費用。雖然有人質疑，美國安泰人壽公司贊助了相關的研究，因為他們正促銷瑜伽和其他正念技巧，作為健康保險計劃的一部分。不過，對於時常處於高壓的現代人來說，靜坐和放鬆確實能有助於消除壓力。
然而，當今正念風潮最大的問題在於，它成了自助勵志運動的一部分。一堆所謂的大師不斷強調「冥想的競爭優勢」，許多人甚至將正念冥想視為成功的法門之一，完全失去了正念最原始的初衷。（吳凱琳譯）
©The Economist Newspaper Limited 2013
The Economist
Schumpeter
The mindfulness business
By The Economist
From The Economist
Published: November 18, 2013
Nov 16th 2013 |From the print edition
Western capitalism is looking for
inspiration in eastern mysticism.
IN HIS 1905 book, "The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", Max Weber credited the Protestant
ethic with giving rise to capitalism. Now it sometimes seems as if it is the
Buddhist ethic that is keeping capitalism going. The Protestants stressed
rational calculation and self-restraint. The Buddhists stress the importance of
"mindfulness"—taking time out from the hurly-burly of daily activities
to relax and meditate. In today's corporate world you are more likely to hear
about mindfulness than self-restraint.
Google offers an internal course called
"search inside yourself" that has proved so popular that the company
has created entry-level versions such as "neural self-hacking" and
"managing your energy". The search giant has also built a labyrinth
for walking meditation. EBay has meditation rooms equipped with pillows and
flowers. Twitter and Facebook are doing all they can to stay ahead in the
mindfulness race. Evan Williams, one of Twitter's founders, has introduced
regular meditation sessions in his new venture, the Obvious Corporation, a
start-up incubator and investment vehicle.
The fashion is not confined to Silicon
Valley: the mindfulness movement can be found in every corner of the corporate
world. Rupert Murdoch has a well-developed bullshit detector. But earlier this
year he tweeted about his interest in transcendental meditation (which he said
"everyone recommends"). Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates and Bill
Gross of PIMCO are two of the biggest names in the money-management business,
and both are regular meditators. Mr Dalio says it has had more impact on his
success than anything else.
What got the mindfulness wagon rolling
was the 1960s counter-culture, which injected a shot of bohemianism into the
bloodstream of capitalism: witness the rise of companies such as Virgin, Ben
& Jerry's and Apple, whose co-founder, Steve Jobs, had visited India on a
meditation break as a young man, and who often talked about how Zen had
influenced the design of his products. But three things are making the wheels
roll ever faster.
The most obvious is omni-connectivity.
The constant pinging of electronic devices is driving many people to the end of
their tether. Electronic devices not only overload the senses and invade
leisure time. They feed on themselves: the more people tweet the more they are
rewarded with followers and retweets. Mindfulness provides a good excuse to
unplug and chill out—or "disconnect to connect", as mindfulness
advocates put it. A second reason is the rat race. The single-minded pursuit of
material success has produced an epidemic of corporate scandals and a
widespread feeling of angst. Mindfulness emphasises that there is more to
success than material prosperity. The third is that selling mindfulness has
become a business in its own right.
The movement has a growing, and
strikingly eclectic, cohort of gurus. Chade-Meng Tan of Google, who glories in
the job title of "jolly good fellow", is the inspiration behind
"search inside yourself". Soren Gordhamer, a yoga and meditation
instructor, and an enthusiastic tweeter, founded Wisdom 2.0, a popular series
of mindfulness conferences. Bill George, a former boss of Medtronic, a
medical-equipment company, and a board member at Goldman Sachs, is introducing
mindfulness at Harvard Business School in an attempt to develop leaders who are
"self-aware and self-compassionate".
Many other business schools are
embracing mindfulness. Jeremy Hunter of the Drucker management school at
Claremont university teaches it to his students, as does Ben Bryant at
Switzerland's IMD. Donde Plowman of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's
business school has even tried to quantify the mindfulness of management
schools themselves. The flow of wisdom is not one-way: Keisuke Matsumoto, a
Japanese Buddhist monk, took an MBA at the Indian School of Business in
Hyderabad and is now applying its lessons to revitalise temples back home.
As for its exploitation as a business,
Arianna Huffington runs a mindfulness conference, a "GPS for the
soul" app and a mindfulness corner of her Huffington Post. Chip Wilson,
the boss of lululemon, a seller of yoga gear, has set up a website, whil.com,
that urges people to turn off their brains for 60 seconds by visualising a dot.
("Power down, power up, and power forward.")
A walk in the countryside
Does all this mindfulness do any good?
There is a body of evidence that suggests that some of its techniques can
provide significant psychological and physiological benefits. The Duke
University School of Medicine has produced research that shows that, in
America, an hour of yoga a week reduces stress levels in employees by a third
and cuts health-care costs by an average of $2,000 a year. Cynics might point
to the evidence that a walk in the countryside has similar benefits. They might
also worry that Aetna, an insurer which wants to sell yoga and other
mindfulness techniques as part of its health plans, is sponsoring some of the
research that supports them. But it seems not unreasonable to suppose that, in
a world of constant stress and distraction, simply sitting still and relaxing
for a while might do you some good.
The biggest problem with mindfulness is
that it is becoming part of the self-help movement—and hence part of the
disease that it is supposed to cure. Gurus talk about "the competitive
advantage of meditation". Pupils come to see it as a way to get ahead in
life. And the point of the whole exercise is lost. What has parading around in
pricey lululemon outfits got to do with the Buddhist ethic of non-attachment to
material goods? And what has staring at a computer-generated dot got to do with
the ancient art of meditation? Western capitalism seems to be doing rather more
to change eastern religion than eastern religion is doing to change Western
capitalism.
©The Economist Newspaper Limited 2013
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