Charity… since childhood, this is a word I only whispered in my inner cloister.

Charity… The original radiance of this word has been dulled by the patina of time and by the encroachment of merchant ideology. Charity… he who asks for it must be a needy person. He who gives charity is a powerful person, a member of the bourgeois, someone well installed in conventional society, someone who is in a position to give –not without patronizing– which legitimizes his/her power or existential posture. As a person from France, my original culture carries in its collective memory the cliché of the good deeds, or the bourgeois in their Sunday best giving to the beggars after church.

Charity… is this word buried forever? If so, we deprive ourselves of a treasure bursting with meaning, filled with history. The light and wisdom that were put in this word bursts to our eyes as soon as we break through the encroachment. In its original sense, caritas is the putting into practice and action of a state of absolute love. This is the love that is no longer directed towards a particular being or thing, this is the love that irradiates, that shines everywhere around, with no distinction, no direction. The manifestation of such love into acts is charity. There we give, there we receive, in the big chain of service that we offer to one another. In that place we are far from the merchant economy, locked as it is in its immediate reciprocity dogma (“if you don’t have what I need in return, I won’t give you what I have“). In the charity economy, we give everything we can give, and we receive what we need. No need for symmetry or immediacy. What is essential is to give in a state of love, with no condition, and to receive the same way.

Today I no longer whisper this word, instead I can proclaim it in full measure, with exhilaration… It blossoms to the surface of my consciousness just like a waterlily coming from the depths.

Charity… it is through charity that I give today, and through charity that I learn how to receive.

Giving is easy. I have skills, knowledge, health, will, lot’s of things to offer. At least this is what others tell me.

Receiving is where I have much to learn. Not emotionally or spiritually anymore, but practically.

Indeed, receiving in a state of charity confronts me with many obstacles, both imposed on me by society on the one hand, and coming from within me on the other. 

Here are some societal questions to start with:

- How is it possible to live a charity based life today in a society that has chased it away?
- How am I going to be able to build relationships and provide service that are neither considered as charity (as understood in the modern degraded sense), nor as dependency, nor as patronage, nor as philanthropy?
- How can I lay this social contract –live a charity based life– in a clear manner? How can it be well communicated?

The gift economy is our natural social contract, the one we have practiced in small communities since the dawn of time, starting with the family. The charity economy is the transposition of gift economy to the cosmic level, with no limit of time, number and space. In “Old Europe” where I live, solidarity is dying because of over-institutionalization. As far as I know, the contemporary social contract does not include provisions that we can live from charity. Receiving inevitably has something to do with profit (a sale, a salary, an inheritance, a annuity, dividends), or with being assisted… Because of scarce money, our societies don’t leave space for spontaneous offering, simple, without claim. We have to declare, subscribe, tax, justify, fill in forms… Isn’t it ironic, by the way, to see how much commercial exchange is deregulated, which leads to social and humanitarian catastrophes, whereas solidarity and donations are bounded by heavy, costly and blocking control mechanisms? Throughout history, however, collectives have always supported their shamans, their healers, their priests, their monks, their doctors by means of charity. But I am none of these. I am part of no church, I carry no spiritual or political ideology, I have none of these tags that reassure, and this adds spice to my situation. If I were a monk, no one would ask questions. People feel confused about me, and I understand them.

So how, in this context, do I not condemn myself to marginalization and being at-risk?

It is a fact that, these past months, my horizon has shifted to be very nearby. Some would call it a precarious life-style. Early in September for instance, it happened that I had almost nothing left to eat. This was an ironic situation as everything else around me was pure wealth: I was living in a beautiful house in Provence for which one year of rent has been offered, by charity, so I could work calmly and have a space for my little boy. Wealth because I was surrounded by high-quality electronic hardware to work on my current projects, wealth because my work permanently puts me in touch with magnificent human beings, wealth because I was in full health and full motion. And yet, there I was with almost nothing to eat, with a wallet as empty as the shopping basket. Support arrived just at the right moment, in its perfection, by the path of the heart. Wonderful people gave to me. Why? Certainly not because they were feeding the indigent –as a reminder I chose my current situation, it is not the result of an accident. These people gave to me because, in their experience, I could then continue my work in the great chain of service. In the end, it is this simple. Do ut des, I give so you can give, says this beautiful latin expression. Charity is a big chain.

Each time these situations of apparent precariousness have shown up, fear has never gone through me, not for a single moment. There have been no sleepless nights.

Fear left me a long time ago. This is an opportunity to awaken another ancient word: providence. From latin providentia — foresight. Providence implies direct knowing, beyond the reductive beams of the intellect, that everything is just, everything is in its right place, and that everything will happen in its right time. Providence is the universal mechanism upon which a being, if he/she is in a state of grace, therefore in service, will receive support in return. The being knows it. In order for providence to operate, one has to completely, fully, joyfully surrender, with no restriction, to the laws of the Universe. The let go has to be complete. Here, another ancient Christian notion, the one of sacrifice, is important. It’s yet another word that has been quite depreciated by modernity. Its etymology reveals that its original meaning is “to make sacred” (from latin sacrificium, of sacer facere). Once one has completely offered himself/herself to this Universal Principle –give it the name you want– each moment of life is lived like a present. A pure state of grace, as grace feeds grace. So I guess you can see that: providence is my main ally.

So far in this post, I have explored questions related to society as well as those about my inner attitudes. The next step is still missing: how, in a pragmatic way, can the transition towards a charity based life be done, while my feet are still bogged down in the swamp of the market economy?

In order to complete the transition, I have yet to release myself from what still binds me to my past economic and material life. I still have some family furniture at the storage warehouse that I have to pass on to my little boy and his mom. You would think I could just complete that, but actually there are entanglements. I still owe money to the storage warehouse. Until that debt is settled I can’t get access so I can’t clear this situation. I still have other things to pay from the past, mostly some old administrative stuff. No need for details here, but the truth is that during this first phase of my transition towards my new life, I have accumulated debts. I have not yet completely achieved the process of dispossession. In part this is due to a lack of time, as I was already giving priority to service. Or maybe I haven’t been radical enough? Everything that still ties me to the old, even if it’s not a lot, continues to cost enough to put me in debt. Nothing big, a few thousand euros. But when one has ceased to chase scarce money, small amounts begin to take proportions they didn’t have before… I still have to play a little bit inside this old economy so that, in the coming months, I can finally live fully a day by day life, debt-free, with what the universe and the heart of humans want to give me. Then I can pursue the migration towards free currencies. Free currencies have nothing incompatible with charity, although it is counter intuitive and against what most people believe (they only project onto the new what they know from the old).

As for the house in which I lived during these past 11 months, unless there is a last minute change, I am leaving it in the next 2 weeks. Indeed it has been a marvelous gift, however it was a transition space, just like the rest. Whatever places of living that will accommodate me in the future, I want them to be the expression of a clear contract, the one of charity. I don’t want to settle for a rent, even if it is offered. I want to honor the space where I live, support its evolution, help it enrich itself in the most profound sense, with the persons that are linked to it, be they owners or neighbors. I’m tickled that some of my close relationships have recently told me that a monastery would be the ideal place, as I have been thinking about this possibility for a long time. Truly, it is silence, support and concentration that I need. But which monastery would be ready to welcome a person like me with the project I carry? What spiritual place would want to contribute to the service I have chosen? Not to mention that my work requires some infrastructure: a good internet connection, a space to film, some organizational support… in short an environment that might not be very compatible with a contemplative space. But who knows?

That’s it for the short overview about receiving. As far as giving is concerned, it’s much simpler.

My objective for 2012 is to make readable and understandable all my years of research and discoveries on collective intelligence. All the work on free currencies is part of it of course. Beyond a classical writing work, I have made a more ambitious goal for myself, also a more efficient one I think. It consists in creating between 80 and 100 short videos, each of them between 6, 12 and 18 minutes, depending on the topic. Each video will share one aspect, one peculiar theme of collective intelligence and/or free currencies, in the context of CIRI: holopticism, object-links, asymmetrical economies, language of flows, streamscapes, experience economy, cultural creatives, semiotic pheromones… many fascinating topics. Each time we want to dig in deeper, then new videos will be made. This idea came to me as a question after my TEDx conference in Paris in January 2011: can one make TED conferences from home? Is it possible to offer at least the same quality, with lots of added-value for those who watch, all home made, without jumping on a stage, with no TV crew? I have worked a lot on this concept these past months, the path seems wide open today.

My deepest wish for 2012 is to be able to create all this content, and to offer it. The final gamble? Transform the free currencies vision into a global movement that nothing can stop. Megalomaniac? Maybe. Nevertheless this is always the way big changes happen: with a small group of people who believe in it. Remembering all the conference rooms where I spoke these past years, I can see that people are just waiting for one thing: to free themselves from the dependency they have to money so they can build societies based on mutualism and not only competition. This is perfectly feasible today. It is time for this vision and this path to be widely and clearly shared. The rest will flow naturally.

CREDITS:

Photo: Shelley Mags
Music: The Strange Case of Benjamin Button – Alexandre Desplat

For our friends who may not yet know, Fernanda and I are investing a lot of time, effort, and love in Centifolia 2011, a congress that will bring together players from the perfumery and cosmetics industries October 19-21 in Grasse, the perfume capital of the world.

Gosh, what could we possibly be doing at such an event?

We are setting up collective intelligence springboards to help the perfume/cosmetics industries change. What’s the objective? The “perfect product.” The methodology? Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. I won’t repeat here everything that is already spelled out on the site. We also created a Facebook group: “From Cosmetics to Cosmethics.”

Centifolia is an event unlike any other of its kind. First, participants will hear high-quality “Ninja Speakers” who will present in accordance with the TED conference rules. This is the “Be Inspired” phase. Then, via World Cafés, we will maximize and expand the collective intelligence present among the event participants. These are the “Imagine” and “Co-create” phases. Lastly, we will invite the collective intelligence present everywhere in the world, meaning the holomidal collective intelligence, and do so using social media. Social media are light years away from the consciousness of most companies, though are already proving critical to the markets of tomorrow.

People are accustomed to colorless conferences, all “business as usual,” keynote speakers with their slides bristling with bullet-points, lunches where we’re confined to sitting with those we already know (and we miss the others), tedious post-lunch presentations that turn into naps in the auditorium in early afternoon…Centifolia 2011 will have none of this, which is a true break, one that will turn us toward radical innovation (as opposed to incremental innovation). Participants are sure to have great fun seeing how enormous the potential of collective intelligence really is for those who are committed to revealing it, unearthing a beautiful treasure of innovation and intellectual capital.

As for us, the CIRI founders, it is a construct, a completely new format we are creating. Of course, there will be mistakes, things to improve, lessons to learn…but beyond the event that is Centifolia, we are moving toward a perfectly replicable format for any other industrial or economic sector. So I hope, with all my heart, that as many people as possible will understand the unique event opportunity that we are giving one another with this creation.

So there is one question that consistently crops up: Centifolia is a unique space for innovation through collective intelligence…How do we promote and talk about this adventure we’re offering?

To say it or write it is not enough to really understand it. How can we help the people we’re inviting understand BEFORE the event what they can only truly grasp DURING the event? It’s not merely that we want to fill the meeting rooms for the sake of filling them; to me, it’s just a matter of getting the right information to the right people.

So all suggestions are welcome.

Meanwhile, for my friends who are reading me here, please spread the word. Word of mouth is what will make the difference.

Below is an email we sent to our networks. You might find it useful should you choose to relay this information to others.
________________________________________
 
Dear Mr. Ms. XXX,

Did you know that any smart phone today can read the barcode of a product and give you an immediate qualitative, environmental, and social rating? You can also see, in real time, what your friends in your social networks have purchased or panned, and provide your own opinion. Today, social media, together with new mobility, can exalt or destroy a product and its brand. Sometimes within a few days. Markets are becoming conscious.

A product carries and conveys a world vision, one that was part of its genesis and manufacture. To buy a product (an ingredient, a service, a finished product) is to subscribe to this vision. To buy is to vote.

That changes everything. “Business as usual” has had its day. This is good news, for the conscious markets that are now emerging bear within them extraordinary opportunities! What if we gathered together to understand these opportunities, to see them, and to seize them?

This is the objective of Centifolia 2011.

As you can clearly see, Centifolia 2011 not just any ordinary congress! Outstanding speakers will share their visions (http://centifolia-grasse.net/eng/the-topics-2). We will use collective intelligence techniques that are entertaining, innovative, enjoyable, and unexpected. We will bring forth the most innovative visions and strategies ever to be. Together, we will create resource equity in opportunities, resources open to all.

Not only you will encounter people, ideas, and plans that you won’t see anywhere else, but you will savor a unique, unforgettable experience. There’s no doubt about it: Centifolia will not be “business as usual”!

And what will make this congress even more exceptional? Your participation. Register now!

We do hope to see you soon!

Catherine Peyreaud
Organizer of Centifolia
 
PS: don’t hesitate to come support us on our Facebook page!

I wholeheartedly recommend this excellent 4 parts documentary called “Meltdown” from Al Jazeera. Part one is below. It explains with many details how the top finance lords have deployed their most subtle and vicious art as predators that eventually lead to the 1988 crash. No need to be a Nobel Prize economist to understand the systemic outcomes of this giant casino, and how decisions of a few men who where never elected sent millions of others into the streets. Common sense is enough to get the picture. 

In this first episode, we follow four men who brought down the global economy: a billionaire mortgage-seller who fooled millions; a high-rolling banker with a fatal weakness; a ferocious Wall Street predator; and the power behind the throne during Bush presidency. This documentary reminds us some harsh truths:

• Any financial speculation is an exercise that disconnects the currency from the real economy. It ALWAYS leads, someday or another, to a disaster.
• It is one among many examples of what I call legal crime, an idea that I will develop further in my future work on collective intelligence. It illustrates the divergence we often see between the moral line and the legal line, which leads to “what is legal is immoral, and what is immoral is legal“.
• In the end it is always the people who pays the bill. People is this naive, ignorant, trusting, working collective body in which power vampires sink their teeth into until it turns dry. Neither people thrown out of their house nor the millions of Chinese workers thrown out of their factories will contradict this.

But we must not stop here. Sharks exist only because they have a hunting territory that feeds them. It’s a whole social, cultural and political system that provides them with a space to hunt. Pointing at the sharks and incriminating them as the only cause for blood shed is an epistemological and moral mistake.

Epistemological mistake? A classic one, indeed. When we accuse a part of the system to be the unique cause of imbalance of the whole system, we trap ourselves in a reductionist vision that leads to a world view that is as dangerous as the one being condemned. More: we perpetuate the system by polarizing it even more. This is what I call “symbiotic polarization” in collective intelligence, where every side self-legitimates itself in its rights and its actions by accusing the other side. It creates a very stable system that has very little capacity to evolve. It is always the fault of a Bush, Gaddafi, Hitler, Staline, Richard Fuld Jr. (former CEO of Lehman Brothers), some boss here or tyran there… It just shows how the founding mechanisms of pyramidal collective intelligence are not understood. It is that, thanks to chains of command and transfers of responsibility, most people are giving up their sovereignty and moral responsibility, be they at the top of the bottom of the pyramid.

Moral mistake too, when we lambaste the big predators and other power animals of the human zoo. Credulous money savers, ignorant consumers, everyone of us in various degree is responsible for a cog in this huge social machine, no matter how small is this cog. Building a deep understanding of how different forms of collective intelligence work and inter-operate is essential. It allows us to take responsibility and anticipate most of today’s planetary catastrophes that we are witnesses or victims of. The 2008 tragedy was easy to anticipate, as this was not a incidental cause but a structural one, when failure is designed into the system. Then you just need to extrapolate.

Of course it’s not easy to acquire some hindsight on why these big human earthquakes happen. First because their forecasting comes through what we call weak signals. It is when the situation shifts in an imperceptible manner, step by step. The signal is too weak for the mind to become aware of it and to get a sense that something is cooking, that the situation has shifted to another place.  Humanity is completely disarmed in regards to weak signals. We need to develop individual capacities to observe these weak signals, and listen to those who have built some expertise on them. The other challenge for acquiring some hindsight capacities is that schools, in the society of pyramidal collective intelligence, are designed to domesticate the young Human. These schools produce either docile or ferocious people, ignorant and naive in both cases. Both sheep and predators obey to the same logics of pyramidal collective intelligence, each of them perpetuate it in their own way. Not many people step out of such an enveloping and pervasive matrix of culture and beliefs. Conquering individual sovereignty requires lot’s of efforts and some long deserts to cross.

Nevertheless I remain very optimistic for different reasons. First, I see so many people awakening everywhere, young ones and old ones. Sociology does reflect this evolution by measuring how value systems evolve. Second because civil society is today granted with communityware that allow decentralized and distributed circulation of ideas and know-how. Indeed this is not enough yet. We still miss more powerful tools that allow synchronization of actions. By this I mean local and global actions, richer and more complex than a call for a street contest. Actions in the collective mean economy. Economy means currencies. Not money, as this is such a poor archaic language based on scarcity ideologies. I mean free currencies.

Sooo, well… I must continue my work ceaselessly, so that free currencies move from a seed to a global movement that nothing can stop.

A friend of mine wrote me this morning: “My school just cut off two positions that were necessary to pursue the deployment of our project. I was supposed to hire these two persons but the context is bad and the management is opposed to any hiring! Even though I have faith, I start to feel doubts in regards to my future and in pursuing this project“.

What project? A pedagogy in which students build their journey themselves. They are self-taught, they learn within a nutritive environment composed of devoted and passionate facilitators. In this place students develop themselves in an integral way, they open their intuitive and emotional intelligence as well as their mental-rational intelligence. All this with Web 2.0, social media, mobility, relationship, humility and self-exploration.

But, hey, no more budget… Have we heard this story somewhere before?

Let’s face it. The vision and the project carried by my friend deeply challenge the very founding principles of today’s teaching institutions. Schools and universities are an obsolete model, a 19th century industrial world view that sees humans as “containers” on an assembly line in which knowledge can be pored in a massive, reproductible way. It is not random that the universe of teaching is built with words such as “programs”, “departments”, “sections”, “levels”, “grades”, “evaluations”, “certificates”, etc. A mechanical, mineral, deterministic, predictive ontology that doesn’t leave much space for natural dynamics of life, for organic and chaordic growth.

Therefore it is through a series of “accidents” or Freudian slips –tied or cut budgets, fears, beliefs, laws and regulations, gossips, scarcity of time, the Peter Principle to name a few– that a pyramidal collective intelligence body rejects everything that can endanger it. These parapraxis operate like antibodies. Their function is to eliminate innovative evolutionary projects and visions, to discredit or discourage them, and eventually eradicate everything that threatens the deep structure of the collective body. It is useless to incriminate such or such leader who’s blocking things. He/she will tell you that he/she is obliged to do so because of his/her function or because of the ideology that he/she is a voice for.  Nothing personal, of course… He/She is exists only because of the system that gave him/her some power, a system that has to be seen as a whole. He/she. Beyond all these obstacles, here and there, tiny pioneering cells remain, get inter-connected, coordinate, build new capacities in holomidal collective intelligence, and keep opening the path for the great mutation. These dynamics are well known and well identified in collective intelligence. Whoever evolves in these pyramidal CI contexts should be familiar with these principles. It leads to less deception and more efficient strategies.

Evolution plays at the edge of ecosystems, at the far boundaries of the old and the whispers of the new. These are turbulent areas filled with conflicts and a few fertile spots, often brutal spaces in which pioneers have to blindly trust the evolutionary forces that go through them and liven them up. There the only thing that can be trusted is the transcendent experience, this Ariadne’s thread to follow in the depths of the labyrinth, providing guidance within when everything outside is an evidence of impossibility.

I feel deep gratitude for my friend — and all my other pioneer friends — for the devotion they carry, for these battles they experience inside these old collective bodies (companies, schools, administrations, governments…) lead by pyramidal collective intelligence and its related scarcity economy. 

Let’s meditate. Let inner stillness operate our journey. Let evolutionary forces inspire us, they are filled with compassion and patience. Just like water, they carve rocks.

This morning a person joined TheTransitioner online community and wrote in her profile that for her sharing was more important than exchanging.

I couldn’t agree more with her. Sharing is much more than exchanging. It raises a core collective intelligence question: how can we build large economies that are NOT just about exchanging (market economy), but mostly based on sharing? This leads to a very technical challenge about how we track flows in order to:

1. be aware of them because we see them: it is awareness that helps us make informed and sovereign decisions
2. balance them at large scales:

A few words on point 2: contrarily to a common belief that says ‘when you love you don’t count”, it is important to count, more precisely to account. Too often accounting is tied to scarcity and greediness. This is wrong. Accounting is the way to track our flows, our energies, our resources, and therefore manage them in a way everyone can be sustainable. Accounting is a very natural and universal part of reality that exists everywhere in nature. All life around us uses some ways to account in order to regulate via feedback loops. Our hormonal system is a good example.

How do we track flows at a large scale? How do we become fractal so that small scale and large scales work the same way?

This is the heart of our R&D work now at CIRI — the Collective Intelligence Research Institute.

I would like you to meet an extraordinary and exceptional person. In every aspects of her life she manifests with light. Her name is Viviane-Josée Restieau.

Viviane is a great, extraordinary artist. I consider her to be one of the most enlightened artists of our time (we can say so!), one of these artists that History will probably remember a posteriori, as our epoch is yet not fully ready to welcome her. So much light and consciousness manifest through her work that sometimes we see some people having the diaphragm of their soul shut down. They invoke a vague excuse about personal taste, or no sensitivity, or anything else. However the art that manifests through Viviane is universal. It’s made with pigments of light and vibrations that seat inside every being. This art belongs to no culture, no artistic canon, no fashion, no epoch, no belief system. It transcends everything, it is universal, it is the universe. No surprise that kids show immediate sensitiveness, neither they have been trapped inside cultural cages nor they have been separated from themselves yet. The diaphragm of their souls remains wide open.

Viviane is a very simple person, with a chubby, smooth-skinned face. Her big blue eyes filled with love and candor stare at you right in the depth of your soul. Just like some children can do. Let’s not be mistaken: around her child stare many springs have curled up (I won’t reveal her age, that’s up to her to say) giving birth to a timeless wisdom, rooted in the ground while leaves are fed with light. Viviane IS light, she IS her full own creation. No need to be sophisticated or scholar when the spring of life is here, so simple and pristine.

Viviane is my sister of light. An inexhaustible of joy, love, laughter and simple presence. Together we travel across invisible worlds, way beyond the senses. We visit source-spaces, we admire the arabesques and akashic vibrations that make our souls dance. Nothing is more real than these spaces. What we name “reality” then reveals its deception and drops its finery. It becomes a big farce that makes us laugh out loud.

I could endlessly continue to talk about Viviane. But now I would rather let you discover her by yourself and, who knows, maybe meet her someday. The good news is she does an exhibition no later than tomorrow (this post being published June 16, 2011).

If you want to visit her, if you want to enter in her maison-lumière (house of light), hidden in some anonymous street in Montreuil in Paris’ suburb, don’t go there lightly. Don’t come to consume her work and her sweet presence. Prepare yourself before. Make it a pilgrim. Offer it to yourself and to the universe. Deserve it. Deserve Viviane. One you have crossed her door, take your shoes off, don’t bring the pollution of the city. You enter in a sacred place, in a sanctuary. Enjoy the beauty of her little fairy garden where the heart of the maison-lumière beats. Open your soul, let the paintings operate, deep inside yourself, where pre-birth memories seat.

When you leave, be grateful. Leave an offering, a gift, something that allows the place and Viviane to live, to continue offer their fruits. Indeed, as a gift and unconditional love giver, Viviane never wanted to sell herself or get corrupted in the market economy. A work belongs to everyone. The creations you will see belong to you. Take good care of them, take good care of Viviane. Be with her just like you would be with the beautiful majestic tree in your garden. It gives you its fruits, unconditionally, be as generous in return.

Wishing you a wonderful trip.

———————–

Here’s Viviane’s official website (in French): Lumière des Mondes

———————–

For Centifolia 2011, we are selecting a panel of 10 world-class keynote speakers who will inspire most of the decision makers in the perfume and cosmetics industry. Their talk will be in a TED format: sharp, short, concise, mind blowing, and very very very viral.

Please read all details below, and if you want to be part of the journey, please contact me.

This is going to be fun and challenging!

So, what’s so special about the Centifolia 2011 event?

We want to help decision makers in the perfume/cosmetics industry see that making a “perfect product” is possible.

What is a perfect product? A product that is True, Good and Beautiful.

• It is True, because it does what it says it does
• It is Good, because it serves everyone as well as our planet and the environment
• It is Beautiful, because it invites joy, creativity and happiness

As “I” meets “We” markets become conscious. Centifolia 2011 is an invitation to explore the extraordinary opportunities that arise when truth, goodness and beauty are what makes a product successful. Meeting these opportunities requires new ways to harvest and nurture the immense collective intelligence that will be present in Centifolia for 2 ½ days. New ways to meet in a room, new ways for speakers to share their ideas, new ways to connect to the world, before, during and after the event. These things will make this event fun and challenging!

This is the reason why we want to invite world class keynote speakers who have an inspiring experience to share. We would rather have 3 great unique speakers at their best than 20 boring or mild ones.

Are you one of these Ninja speakers?

Here are the reasons why you may qualify:

• You like to serve, share, inspire because you love what you do and you are good at it
  
• You speak fluent English
• Your passion and expertise can inspire the cosmetics/perfume people to evolve towards more beauty, more goodness, more truth

So your passion may appear in one of more of these 3 fields:

• Beauty: you may have created something so beautiful, so creative, so unique, that it can be very contagious. Or you know specific ways to make people inspired and creative.
• Goodness: what you do is good for you as well as for others and/or for the environment.
• Truth: you have the experience that sharing truth and being radically transparent with your employees, partners and market is the best way to create sustainable business.

You don’t necessarily need to be yourself part of the cosmetics or perfume industry, as long as you can help this sector evolve by seeing new opportunities. We will try to balance 50/50 with professionals in the industry and people coming from other sectors.

Although this is not a TED event, you will speak almost like in TED events

• You have a very short slot of time: 15-18 minutes
• You share your personal story as well as the universal aspects of your discipline
• You share one mind blowing idea that inspires
• You speak from direct experience. No abstract theories or opinions.
• Your emotional intelligence is as important as your rational intelligence
• You come with the energy of service and sharing

Here are the official TED commandments that inspire us (here’s a French Translation as this is tough English):

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Skae of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee

In order to make this event a unique experience, you will be coached by a professional team — Ideas On Stage, they are just great people. They will help you share the best of your best. You take it as a unique opportunity to grow and improve your work, even if you are already a renown experienced keynote Ninja.

So, that’s it! Fun and challenging. If you feel this might be for you, I hope you will give a serious consideration to it!

Speaking at TEDx Paris has been a challenge for me. How is it possible to share the free currencies vision in 12 minutes? TED even asks for much more. It’s not just about concepts and views, we have to allow emotional intelligence, balance the right and left brain, share about the personal journey…  Whatever the outcome would be, this was a wonderful invitation to grow, refine my expression, help me find unknown paths inside myself. An initiatory journey that I took joyfully, surrounded and coached by the wonderful founders of TEDx Paris. Their feedback was always accurate and benevolent.

I had to carefully select what I should say and not say. Each milestone in the discourse had to be timed and carefully weighted, while not being spoken by heart, but from the heart.

It came obvious that:

• I shouldn’t try to explain free currencies, but rather drop small seeds of curiosity. If these seeds are the right ones, then people know that what they hear is important, even if the rational mind doesn’t understand the whole thing. Something more profound, more important, reaches a deeper inner knowing, often unconscious, but universally present in each human being.
• I had to go beyond complementary currencies to reach free currencies, even if 95% of the audience wouldn’t follow me there.

This last point requires an explanation.

People usually understand complementary currencies well enough. There are several reasons to this… First, as the name suggests, complementary currencies “complement” our monetary system, therefore we remain in the same paradigm even though the idea of using other units to account our exchanges is huge quantum and emotional leap for many people. Furthermore, in their paradigm, free currencies remain monolithic –one currency at a time– and tied to the conventional market economy (immediate reciprocity/symmetry: I give you something, you give me currency in return). Given that the market economy is the only thing people know since childhood, this is the only reference point, anything else is abstract.

Free currencies are plural. They work by constellations, they are not only made to exchange things, they are not exclusively tied to market economies, they bind flows of wealth together to build upward spirals. In short, if one hasn’t really played with free currencies, this is as meaningless as the Internet was for the large public back in the early 90′s. In these times, no conference could have helped understand today’s reality. Same thing with free currencies, this is only after trying them out that people realize how obvious and simple it is. So, the paradigm shift is in free currencies, not in complementary currencies, this was the final destination for the TEDx conference. 12 minutes to reach this top was a risky experience. I took the risk to have a good part of the room not following me, to be too abstract, theoretical and incomplete. But I hope this conference would allow some seeds to find fertile soil. I think it did.

So here we are…

Almost 2 weeks later I continue to receive lot’s of feedback. First because TEDx Paris 2011 gave the talkers a high visibility in the media. I receive lot’s of emails from individuals who want to understand better or take action, and from companies that would like to work with me on this project, or from medias for an interview.

Nevertheless I do have mixed feelings in regards to my talk. But here’s the gift: I know how to do better next time.

I am going to work on it these next months.

Thanks again to TEDx organizers, and to all the volunteers who joyfully gave their time and energy.

Last September 2010 my dear friend and brother Eric Harris-Braun wrote a wonderful post on his blog called “A story about expressive capacity“, which I strongly recommend that anyone interested in the economic shift should read. Thanks Eric for this wonderful post!

Another story we may want to link to the one written by Eric is the 100% isomorphism between feudal power on the land and feudal power on money. The feudalism based on land has moved to feudalism on money. The idea I want to stress here is not much political or sociological, but ontological.

If we place ourselves in the shoes (if they had some) of a serf or peasant of the 9th-15th centuries, land was inseparable from a lord (more precisely the lords-vassals-fiefs order). In the inner subjective reality, land+lord were a unit that the mind was not able to separate. Land had the nature of the lord, the lord had the nature of the land. Dissociating them required a complete leap of mind that challenged the cosmic and social order. And even if the land and the lord were mentally separated, so what? What’s after? The ontological separation is the first step, but then the mind is asked to imagine and build a whole new functional universe that works, that’s the second step — the big one. Only a few visionaries have such capacities, then they have to deal with everyone’s incredulity and inertia.

I guess we face the same challenge today with money. Wealth is undifferentiated from money, the same way land was undifferentiated from a lord. Both pairs wealth-money, land-lord share the same ontological bond. When we say “someone is wealthy”, it means this person has lot’s of money, which indirectly ties this person with the current monetary feudal system. My feeling is most (r)evolutions begin when consciousness starts to decouple some of these pairs.

“Complementary currencies” are the first step people make when they decouple money and wealth. The current monetary order is so pervasive that it doesn’t leave space for the mind to rebuild a whole new order. Consciousness needs a long, long journey before it can create a whole new world that is not “alternative” or “complementary” to the existing one, but a pure creation. Right now we are still in the first step of unbinding wealth and money. Even if we do it in the mental level, the practical aspect is still very very challenging.

Even “free currencies” still keep us attached to the old paradigm of seeing human societies as market places, whereas we now need to seem them as conscious living systems in which subjective reality is as important as objective flows.

That’s why I love the verb “to weal”. “Let me weal you”, or “let’s weal” will mean let’s build, measure, acknowledge, exchange, trade, experience, shine wealth together, without ontological strings tied to a centralized proprietary monopolistic technology.

Sooo, thanks Eric, your post wealed me!