How in alignment are truth and business? If I am allowed to share a story -
When I was 11 years old an idea popped into my head for a useful online service (you will find if you need it, I'd rather not namedrop), so not having quite the confident ability in creating professional web sites I shared this idea with a friend who taught me to create web sites and shared some wisdom which actually helped inspire the idea "If you wish to create a popular web site, having a unique idea really helps. You know why Yahoo! is so popular? It was the first web site to do the service of its kind."
So thus, we got together - he did a lot of the work and according to later words exchanged in a rather emotional 'painful'-'body' conversation "he poured his heart and soul into it." The site began making decent profits and although our business partnership was a bit strained at times (he didn't tell me once about how money was pouring in and we didn't really have a clear organized plan for how money was to be divided). I also, at 15, was a bit greedy and eventually just blocked him out of the web site. I justified this as being "my idea," and simply changed all the passwords. Our relationship dwindled beforehand and we did not talk much on the phone. In fact, if I am to remember..he was a bit of an abusive friend beforehand ironically. In fact, he would refuse to give me the title of friend and one time he let me get beat up under his own eyes while laughing and telling me "why don't you defend yourself?" I suppose there was a deep lesson in that somewhere......but I was quite young for those lessons and it would have been nice to have someone really stick up for me.
Nonetheless, I am now 19 years old .. and I read a book of the Jungian nature called "Swamplands of the Soul" (I found the link through a members web site here). It described three various forms of guilt that people have, guilt as conditioning or 'defense against angst' as the author calls it, existential guilt as part of the human condition, and erm - well some other form of guilt that I can't recall at the moment. It said that for some guilt we should go ahead and symbolically recompense ... so yesterday I called him and now he wants full restitution for his few years of absence (which he values at a lot), as well as a 50:50 cut and the title of co-founder back. Quite needy and demanding? Indeed. Fair? Perhaps. But I have been working on the site for the past three years and ensuring its growth as per proper proportion. I told him how much the site made in the interest of truth and I feel that he is emotionally blackmailing me with all this. The Jungian book also talks that life is a spectacle of irony, and well I suppose that it is ironic that this recompense method .. simply caused me some conditioned guilt .. as perhaps guilt as defense against angst for perhaps being too pleasing and accommodating when I spoke to him on the phone yesterday. This conditioning will not last, I tell you. My emotional blackmail mechanism will not work against the cretins who choose to invoke it.
Nonetheless, I still see that truth is in alignment. For without truth, we would have unfair trade. "The Prophet" expresses this beautifully, written by Khahil Gibran:
Quote:
To you the earth yields her fruit, and you shall not want if you but know how to fill your hands.
It is in exchanging the gifts of the earth that you shall find abundance and be satisfied.
Yet unless the exchange be in love and kindly justice, it will but lead some to greed and others to hunger.
(few lines later)
And suffer not the barren-handed to take part in your transactions, who would sell their words for your labour.
To such men you should say,
"Come with us to the field, or go with our brothers to the sea and cast your net;
For the land and the sea shall be bountiful to you even as to us."
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The Prophet
To me, this reinvokes the true state of abundance. We should be abundant even to those who sell words for us. For there shall be abundance for all and perhaps it is not wise for me to discriminate as so. I love it. Let's horizontally integrate our web sites and provide good services for all, shall we not ?