Ethical Issues in Governance: A Cross-Cultural HRD Model

Dr. Prem Saran,I.A.S.
Commissioner & Secy to the Govt. Assam
Administrative Reforms and Training Dept, Dispur

Dr. Prem Saran, I.A.S.

Prolegomena. According to renowned Indologists like Agehananda Bharati and Robert Thurman, it is yoga in its broadest sense, both in its Hindu and cognate Buddhist forms, that constitutes the greatest contribution of the Indian subcontinent to the world civilization. For it modally represents the distinctive Indic episteme, which is increasingly drawing scholarly interest in a globalising world, given its potential ramifications in many contemporary fields of application. For instance, as I argued in a well-received paper during a recent international conference in New Delhi, such traditional Indic knowledge systems can provide a powerful ecological model for land resource management and rural upliftment too (Saran, 2000a).

    Another example from my own research is what I shall, for the sake of convenience and brevity, simply call “Saran’s Model”. My article elaborating it is actually titled “Right Brain Management: Need of the Hour”, and it was recently published in the Journal of the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances of the Government of India (Saran 2000b). The Model has by now been successfully used by a number of State Governments to train their senior IAS, IPS, and other officers; it has also been similarly tested on senior officials working in major public sector enterprises. So much so that I am currently proposing to prepare a CD-ROM version of it at the Administrative Staff College of India, where I am shortly expecting to conduct a training program for private and public sector managers.
   
    Given that my Model is based on over two decades of original cross-cultural academic and professional work, as I indicate below, I am convinced that it can also be easily used to address the problem of ethical issues in governance. In what follows therefore, I shall present my arguments in two Sections. In Section I, I first outline the broad Indological and Cultural-Anthropological parameters of my Model, after which I adumbrate its philosophical and pragmatic bases. Then I expatiate on its utility for the purposes of Stress Control, Creativity, and Rightbrain Management, by laying it out as a do-it-yourself technique that is performed in three stages, namely relaxing the body, relaxing the mind, and auto-programming. Thereafter, I round out my arguments by situating my Model within the context of current mainstream research in the Behavioural Sciences. Finally, in Section II, I explicate how my generic model can be also be fruitfully applied to serve the specific ends of ethical governance.

(I). Saran’s HRD Model.

Introduction. After Roger Sperry’s Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the special modes of functioning of the human rightbrain, there has been much research interest in finding ways of systematically tapping its vast potential. This interest has inevitably spilled over into the field of Management theory and practice too, especially in the area of Human Resource Management. This paper is a cross-disciplinary effort in that direction, being in fact an elaboration of a presentation made at the 30th National Convention of the “Indian Society for Training and Development”, which was held in Calcutta from 19th –20th January,2000. The general theme of that Convention was “Training for Transformation”, and my paper therein focussed on the use of traditional and highly sophisticated Indic methods of rightbrain – tapping, for the contemporary and down-to-earth purpose of Human Resource Development.

    The model described here is based on the author’s multidisciplinary professional background: as a technocrat (i.e. as a Chemical Engineer, and MBA from the Indian Institute of Mangement Calcutta, with specialization in Human Resource Development), as an Indologist-cum-Cultural Anthropologist (with graduate degrees from the Universities of Pennsylvania and California), and as a public administrator with over 22 years of experience in the Indian Administrative Service. It is also a cross-cultural model, using elements from both the Indic and Western universes of discourse.In other words, in today’s globalizing scenario, the model thus has a potentially substantial audience that is both Indian and Western, for it draws on highly effective Indic techniques of self-awareness, fine-tuned with findings from the latest research in the Behavioral Sciences. Moreover, the model has been already tested successfully, on subjects in India as well as in the USA, as already stated above.

Indic Cultural Background.The model is informed by a naunced knowledge of four core themes in the Indic civilization. This was acquired during a year’s Ph.D. field research conducted in Nepal on the subject of South Asian Tantrism, in which the author is a traditional initiate and an international expert. (Cf. my “Tantra: Hedonism in Indian Culture”, D.K. Printworld, 2nd edition, 1998; and my “Yoga, Bhoga, and Ardhanariswara”, which is currently being processed for possible publication by Oxford University Press)

    First, unlike the atomistic personality structure of the modern West, South Asian personhood is “porous”. For it is “holonic”, to use Arthur Koestler’s term: everything in nature is a “holon”, i.e. a whole that is in turn a part of other wholes. This holistic psycho-cultural understanding is crossculturally much more accurate than the Western, as Western anthropologists like Melford Spiro and Malcolm Crick have themselves shown. That is in fact partly why well-known transpersonally -oriented psychologists like Robert Assaagioli and Abraham Maslow have significantly enriched their work by the use of perspectives from Indic and related meditative traditions.

    Secondly, as opposed to the Judeo-Christian worldview of the Western civilization, with its distinctive and almost pathological Protestant work-ethic, the South Asian cultural ethos is more playful. This is indicated by the salience of the Indic cosmogony of “lila” , which views the creation of the cosmos as bring due to the (erotic) sport of the “divine”. This cultural syndrome has very positive and humanistic practical effects, because it makes for a more relaxed and healthier attitude towards life.

    Thirdly, and this is intimately concerned with the previous theme, there is the Indic cultural salience of the pleasure-principle. This is quite clearly evinced by the pan-South Asian persistence of the Tantric cult, with
its foregrounding of a balanced hedonism in order to attain the altered state of ‘samadhi’, which is the pan-Indic term for the mystical experience of union with the ground of being. This sophisticated appreciation of the role of Eros in human life also happens to resonate with Freud’s realization, towards the end of his life, that the libido is naught but the life-force.

    Finally, as against the androcentric, Judeo-Christian metaphysical and therefore socio-cultural biases of Western culture, Indic philosophy and culture are pervasively imbued with the ancient bipolar ideology of Samkhya with its characteristic and basic attitude of gender-mutuality/-complementarity. This can perhaps be related with the Jungian speculations about the anima and animus, which allude to the psycho-spiritual basis of the relationship between the sexes. At any rate, it is this equi-gendered view of reality that underlies the centuries-old yogic technique of Kundalini-visualization, to which we now turn.

Kundalini-Visualization as HRD Technique. To put it briefly, the core of my Model is a radically simplified version of the traditional Kundalini technique of bipolar yogic visualization. It basically consists of the following three stages. Initially, the body is relaxed by using a process of autogenic visualization. Then the mind is put into an “altered state” by visualizing an “inner body”, within which is a fine tube running down its center from its anal region to the crown of the head ; thereafter, by visually directing the attention up the tube, from its bottom end to its top, a deep hypnogogic state is achieved. Finally, in this state of deep relaxation, one programs oneself to achieve desired goals, whether personal or organisational.

    The effectiveness of any tool or technique depends on how simple it is, as Edward de Bono has pointed out. The technique above is both simple and extremely effective, as is brought home to me whenever I use it in training courses for hardboiled professionals, such as senior IAS and IPS Officers. For within minutes, worldly-wise subjects such as these are enabled to enter a profound meditative state, within which they can then be very easily taught to become better managers and leaders. That is to say, this technique can be profitably used for bottomline organizational objectives, through the synergic achievement of optimal Stress Control, enhanced Creativity, and a balanced Rightbrain-Management style, as I indicate below.

Stress Control.There are about 2 dozen schools of yoga in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. And the eminent French Indologist Louis Renou has aptly characterized these Indic techniques of meditation as a “discipline of the unconscious”. To use contemporary terms, such techniques can help one to get out of one’s normal leftbrain mode of consciousness, which constitutes merely the iceberg’s tip of one’s mental capacities. One can thereby learn to systematically access the vast submerged and untapped potentials of the rightbrain. In other words, by regular practice of such rightbrain-manifesting states of meditative absorption, and thus of deep relaxation, one can effectively release the bulk of one’s accumulated stresses. One can then increasingly operate at optimal stress levels, and as a result significantly bootstrap one’s own performance.

Creativity. According to many experts, individual creativity depends essentially on the ability to make novel conceptual associations, whereby one is then able to generate innovative ideas. This is a process that is eminently facilitated by such techniques of rightbrain-tapping, which enable one to bypass the routine functioning style of the leftbrain mode, and enter the visual mode of the rightbrain. This latter holistic mode permits one to make the imaginative leaps that constitute what de Bono calls ”lateral thinking”. The creative ideas that are thus generated can subsequently be critically evaluated for their practicality and feasibility, by using the logical activity of the leftbrain. The net result is that one begins to learn to operate in the whole-brain manner of the most effective CEOs and other top organizational leaders, as Harry Alder has shown.

Rightbrain Management. According to management writers like Edward de Bono and Harry Mintzberg, even the well-known management schools are unable to produce the kind of managers that today’s society needs. In Alder’s diagnosis, the main reason for this is that management-training programs are almost entirely leftbrain-oriented. For they focus mainly on the over-valued skills of critical analysis, sadly neglecting the powerful rightbrain modes. And even more to the point, Alder found that most of the top British CEO’s he studied had actually learned to access their rightbrain capacities, and to trust the resultant outputs. There is thus a definite trend towards the “right brain manager”, who values this style of “creative management”, as Gareth Morgan terms it.

The Technique. My rightbrain-tapping technique is now described below, in the following four sections. I first outline its three successive phases, namely (A) The progressive relaxation of one’s body, which is followed by (B) The progressive achievement of a deeply relaxed but alert mental state, in which (C) one then programs oneself in order to accomplish one’s goals. Then, in the section (D), I make some useful points for its effective practice.

(A) Relaxing the Body.
1. Lie comfortably on your back. Close your eyes. Take three deep breaths imagining that you are exhaling all your worries and tensions with each out-breath, and inhaling deep feelings of relaxation and peacefulness, with each in-breath.
2. Direct your attention to your feet. Imagine that they are becoming warm, as through steeped in warm water, with currents of warmth flowing through them. They gradually become very pleasantly relaxed and heavy.
3. Repeat these with your legs, thighs, hips, lower and upper back, shoulders, hands, wrists, lower arms, upper arms, chest, stomach, abdomen. Progressively your feeling of relaxation deepens … heavy and warm….
4. Now imagine the same with your neck, back of head, scalp, forehead, eyes and eyeballs. Let your mouth open slightly, with your tongue lying limp inside, then your jaws, chin and throat get relaxed. Now you are in a state of very deep relaxation … heaviness and warmth …
5. Next imagine you are going down in an elevator, 20 floors downwards. As you count each passing floor, you are more totally relaxed. At the 20th floor, when the elevator doors open, you find yourself in a beautiful scene: perhaps a garden, a mountain vale, or a solitary beach … some place where you have been before. And you recall those earlier feelings of being at peace with yourself, with nature, and the entire Universe ….

(B) Relaxing the Mind.

You find yourself lying there in that relaxing place, and you now begin to imagine a fine tube inside you, extending from the bottom of your body to the crown of your head. You imagine that there is a fluid inside the tube, rising up slowly. At the bottom of the tube the fluid is red; midway to your navel, orange; navel, yellow; heart-region, green; throat, blue; forehead, indigo; crown, violet.

    Finally, when the fluid reaches the crown of your head, it fountains out through a very fine hole there. It covers and bathes you entire body, and your very being, with a feeling of peace, total calm, and contentment. You feel as through you have become an inert doll made of salt, which has been dipped into the sea, so that you fully melt and become one with the surrounding ocean ….




(C) Auto-Programming.

1. Imagine now a blackboard in your mind, on which you write the syllable “Kleeng”. You also say this to yourself mentally. If your mind wanders, as it will, let it do so … when you remember the sound again, just repeat it some more, for as long as you wish, until you feel that your mind is calm and relaxed….
2. On the blackboard of your mind you then begin to write a brief, positively - worded affirmation about your goals: “I easily achieve (whatever your goal is)”….You also say the affirmation to yourself. And you visualize in detail that your goal is already achieved ... and your friends and other people are congratulating you….
3. Now you gradually end your meditation, counting backwards from 20 to 0. As you pass 10 and also at 5, you tell yourself that you wake up feeling relaxed and alert: “I rise feeling energetic and confident….” . And you then go about your daily activities, feeling progressively better each time you practice the technique.

(D) Points to Be Noted

1. Practice improves the effect: do it twice a day for 15 to 20 minutes, just after waking in the morning, and just before sleeping at night, and if possible, a third time at midday.
2. The colors in the tube are the rainbow colors “VIBGYOR”, in reverse.
3. While visualizing, it is not important to have your images picture – perfect: it is the feeling of vividness that causes the effects of relaxation, not the perfectness of the imagery.
4. You will be able to use the syllable “Kleeng” as a key word, or mnemonic, anytime during your daily round, and it will trigger off your feelings of confidence and relaxation.

Modern Perspectives on the Model. To sum up Section I on the generic form of Saran’s HRD Model, it will be useful to refine our understanding of its Indic parameters, by viewing it from some interesting and relevant contemporary perspectives. We may start with Abraham Maslow’s studies of “peak experience”, which are also cognate with those states of consciousness that Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi calls “flow”. In such rightbrain states, one finds oneself functioning optimally precisely because one is so absorbed in what one is experiencing or doing, and is thus unselfconscious and oblivious of oneself. Both these wellknown researchers have also made explicit comparisons of these states with yogic experiences of meditative absorption.

    Moreover, by putting one increasingly in touch with one’s own internal resources, such “psychedelic” or “mind-manifesting” procedures generate the positive mindset that Martin Seligman calls “learned optimism”. This reinforces those positive feedback loops that synergize learning and growth, both in individuals and organizations. And that in turn generates the high need-achievement described by McClelland, thereby reinforcing the motivation required to fuel the Maslowian drive toward self actualization and creativity. It is therefore not surprising that Alder’s top business leaders are so dependent for their success on their constant recource to the pleasurable, freewheeling modes of rightbrain thinking.

    Finally, in this global age of resurgent interest in non-Western modes of knowledge and praxis, it is only apt that Japanese, Chinese and Indian ideas should begin increasingly to cross-fertilize the field of management too. We thus have the Japanese philosophy of kaizen (or “continuous improvement”), and the Chinese “Tao of Leadership”. And from Indian management theorists, we have S.K.Chakravorty’s “Management by Values”, and Debasis Chatterjee’s concept of “Leading Consciously”.

    The latter was in fact recently cited by Harvard Business School as one of 15 “thought leaders” who have made salient contributions to leadership theory and practice. For Chatterjee’s model takes the “rightbrain manager” onto the next turn of the spiral, where she comes face to face with the ultimate human need, as theorized by Maslow. This is the universal spiritual need for “transcendence”, which holistically subsumes all the other needs in Maslow’s hierarchy. At that stage, management and public administration begin to get transmuted from a vocation into an avocation, with the concomitant optimization of the pragmatic benefits that can accrue to both individual and society.

    The above Model, based on the traditional Indic technique of kundalini-visualization, can thus provide the basic tool for just such a radical and humanistic transformation. In other words, it constitutes a cross-culturally valid and powerful model of whole-brain functioning, and therefore of Human Resource Development in its broadest sense. That is, it can clearly bring out and synergize the human side of organizational enterprises, whether in the field of public governance or elsewhere. And that brings us to Section II, where we are now ready to examine how my HRD Model can be applied in the domain of ethical governance.

(II) Ethical Issues in Governance and Saran’s HRD Model.

There are basically two core sets of issues involved when we consider the question of ethics in governance, and these are content and praxis. The former relates to the “what”, and the latter to the ”how-to”, of inculcating ethical behaviour in public administration. As for the first aspect of the matter, namely the ethical content of governance, it is quite well-known to all of us. For it is an explicit and integral part of socialization in most societies, especially among modernized groups such as government servants. Thus, given the sheer amount of “musterbation”—to borrow a term from cognitive psychology for the plethora of societal “musts” and “must-nots”-- that we are exposed to in the family and in school, we all know quite well what we should and should not do ! And broadly speaking, we may therefore say that our first issue boils down to the contribution that one can and should make to society, as a systemic part of it.

Unfortunately, however, all this moral cathechization must fall on deaf ears, for it seems to be rather ineffective, since the problem of ethical governance has been around for a long time and simply refuses to go away. Since it remains so extremely intractable, one has perforce to wonder whether we have after all been barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps instead of concentrating solely on the hortative (and the related legal-cum-punitive) aspect of the question, it would be more profitable to zoom in somewhat more intensely on the second set of issues.

I shall therefore focus on the praxis aspect of the matter: how can an ethical mindset be effectively inculcated among government employees ? Further, I shall also assume that my target group comprises the members of the higher All India Services (such as the Indian Administrative Service), since they are such an important and visible part of our system of governance. Nevertheless, it may be noted too that my line of argument can be extended easily to the lower-level functionaries also….

To begin with, since my basic approach in this paper has been to try and apply traditional Indic knowledge systems to modern contexts and problems, let us now very briefly see what these have to offer as regards our problem of ethics in governance. Thus, for one thing, if we take a look at the various Buddhist traditions, we can see that the whole complex and sophisticated edifice of Buddhist philosophy and orthopraxis has been constructed on an ethical base. This is constituted by the foundational moral precepts that form the eightfold path. And one of these basic moral principles is the emphasis on right livelihood, which clearly implies that the successful ascent to the final goal of enlightenment is contingent on this very issue of ethics in the workplace!

Again, in the cognate Hindu tradition, the ultimate spiritual experience of meditative absorption of samadhi is characterized as sat-cit-ananda (i.e. “being-consciousness-bliss”), or alternatively as satyam-shivam-sundaram (i.e. “truth-goodness-beauty”). By combining the two postulates, and rephrasing them in more contemporary terminology, one may justifiably describe the mystical or enlightenment experience as a hedonistic-aesthetic experience, as my own mentor the wellknown Indologist-cum-Anthropologist Pofessor/Swami Agehananda Bharati put it. That is to say, the supremely good can also be perceived as being pleasurable and beautiful.

Further, to rephrase this convergence in modern psychological, rather than in sectarian religio-philosophical terms, one may conveniently take recourse to Maslow’s theory of motivation (Maslow: 2000). In line with his strong belief in the innate goodness of human beings, he viewed the higher needs from his famous hierarchy of needs as being “determinative” or dominant (ibid, p. xxi). According to him therefore, the self-actualized person displays a “spontaneous” sense of morality (p. 132), by virtue of the intersection of the moral imperative with the universal human “metaneed” (p.66) for spiritual “transcendence” . For him or her then, it becomes quite possible to say “duty is pleasure” (p.60).
   
    Such a ‘hedonistic altruism’ (p. 162) can thus well become the basis for a practical ethics of governance. And this can be easily operationalized by using Saran’s Model of rightbrain-tapping, which can be used to tap into the inherent human need to be good. The motivation for this can come from the pleasure-principle, since the pleasure that one derives from doing good would reinforce the inchoate drive to be moral. Such a hedonistic ethics can thereby help to transmute one’s vocation into an avocation, so that one’s career becomes the medium through which one is enabled to make one’s own individual contribution to society. For after all, the good person is simply one who has come to terms with oneself , and is therefore at ease with oneself and society (Saran: 1998).

    The mechanics for this ethical transformation is potentially quite simple, namely the use of my visualization technique to reach a deep level of pleasurable relaxation. In that state, one uses guided-imagery to envisage situations in which one performs good actions, and also imagines the satisfaction that one gets from such behaviour. One also uses positive affirmations while in that receptive state of hypnogogic relaxation, in order to condition oneself increasingly to behave in the desired ethical manner, say: “I act ethically, and contribute to society”. In short, my generic HRD Model can provide an effective way to address the problematics of ethical governance. And with the widespread use of Information Technology in governance, the practicality of the Model can indeed be strategically enhanced by propagating it through CD-ROMs and so on.

Conclusion. In sum, the question of ethical governance will have to be posed and answered in a more innovative and creative manner than has hitherto been done . We will moreover have to do this by focussing on the how-to (i.e. praxis) aspect of the matter, instead of solely on the what (i.e. content ). We can do this by using the new learning modes that are now coming into vogue, such as my generic Model of Rightbrain Management . For the Model is based on Indological inputs, finetuned with contemporary data from the social sciences, and so it can be used also for the specialized axiological purpose of addressing the ethical issues in governance.

Such an approach would meet the requirements of what Robert Sternberg, IBM Professor of Psychology at Yale University, calls “successful intelligence”, this being in turn comprised of analytical, creative , and practical intelligence. As we have noted, the above Model meets the needs of all these three kinds of intelligence. For it analytically brings out the content of our problem syndrome, then it creatively uses the contemporary learning mode of rightbrain-tapping, to practically achieve the successful auto-programming of ethical behaviour. Only then can we realistically hope to gradually transform our system of governance, by progressively overcoming the cynical mindset that blinkers most public functionaries.


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