Dear Shayla,

Thanks for sending these wonderful Lifeletters.  I always enjoy them.  I thought you might like this description of the ego by Baba Hari Dass:

“ The Self is the sovereign;
nature is its kingdom;
mind and intellect are ministers;
and ego is the governor,
which rules for its own self-interest.”

Love,
Michael

Dear Shayla,
re: ‘The ego is like a mini-corporation, driven by its own addictions..’
In support of your original letter, I thought this was an excellent sentence. Since all human behaviour rests on the ego, to transform large negative-impact corporations, we should be looking at our own addictions. We vote to add to their power every time we open our wallet in their direction.
I take your friend’s point that there are good corporations, but, heck, the bad ones have such huge negative impact this needs naming and addressing.
Perhaps there should be another word created for ‘good corporations.’
Kaia

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Dear readers and friends:

As soon as I sent out my lifeletter today, I realized there was one sentence I wanted to change: ‘The ego is like a mini-corporation, driven by its own addictions..’ My use of the word corporation was a generalization, and therefore a distortion of the way things actually are. I want to make it very clear that there are some wonderful corporations on our planet.

One of my readers, Trevor Giles, noticed the same thing. A copy of his email is below.

Shayla,

Thanks for this. I really enjoy these. I did want to make a comment about the following line “every ego is a mini-corporation, driven by its own addictions, endlessly moving away from the feeling at the core”.

I hear a lot of less than positive comments from people in Nelson about
“corporations” and the comment above seems to fall into that category. I really wish we could all move away from this idea that corporations are souless empty creatures. Corporations are two things. The first being a taxation structure on paper and the second being a collection of people with a common business goal.

I will not delve into the taxation issue except to say that there is no such thing as a tax write-off that did not cost money in some shape or form and that for a corporation to not pay any taxes simply meant they did not make any money or that they lost money in a previous year.

As for the collection of people, this is what makes or breaks a Corporation. No different than it makes or breaks a church, a non-profit society, or any other collection of individuals with a common goal, business or not. There are many Corporations that have very deep souls and are very in touch with their people, their world, and their customers, and their core ideals. Take Patagonia, the clothing maker and the many other positive examples that exist. I believe it is not fair to broad brush Corporations in the manner above.

Corporations are typically a reflection of their leadership and the people who ultimately work for them, no different than the Catholic Church is a function of its Leader and its preists. There are always good and bad examples of every form of organization. That is just the nature of the world.

Respectfully,

Trevor Giles

Please print this lifeletter if you can. It is meant to be held in your hand.

Enough

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

Until now.

(David Whyte)

These days it seems to me that this tiny word ‘enough’ is like a mantra, a power packed seed syllable, a doorway into another universe, if we are willing to contemplate and work with it. A while ago I was talking to my daughter about the endless greed and destruction of the global corporations. “What’s driving them?” I asked her. “How come a billion dollars isn’t enough?”

“Don’t you get it?” she said. (Thank you Coco) “It’s an addiction. When is there enough cocaine? Enough alcohol? Enough sugar?”

Those bright cool moments of clarity. How sweet they are, and how they continue to blossom and deepen. Since then I’ve realized that every ego is a mini-corporation, driven by its own addictions, endlessly moving away from the feeling at the core: “I’m not enough. This moment is not enough. Something is missing.”

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