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JA INA
JA LIVING IN IMPOSSIBLE TIMES
2015
가
178 Jain Education International 2010_03
Namaste -- in India when we meet and greet, we say namaste. Ram Dass described its meaning like this: I honor the place in you, where the entire universe resides. I honor the place of you of love, of light, of truth. I honor that place in you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us.
Nipun Mehta Gummage Auditorium, Phoenix Sep 4th, 2004
In the plane ride here, I had a book in my hand that one of my friends had heavily recommended the power of impossible thinking. The first chapter opened with one of the most remarkable facts I've encountered in the last year:
In May 1954, on an Oxford track, Bannister shattered this barrier, running the mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. Two months later, in Finland, Bannister's "miracle mile" was again broken by Australian rival John Landy, who achieved a time of 3 minutes 56 seconds. Within three years, 16 other runners had also broken this record.
So what happened in 1954? Everybody started taking steroids? Sudden growth spurt in human evolution? No. We broke through our mental barriers. Once someone breaks through, everyone thinks they can do it. And they indeed do.
Today, 50 years later, we still live in impossible times. If someone would've told me 20 years ago that the chief rival for a $500 billion company -- Microsoft -- is a loose knit group of software engineers, with no central office, working for free on a product called Linux, I would've said impossible. If someone would've told me the Encyclopedia Brittanica on my Uncle's shelf is quickly becoming a thing of the past. in face of Wikipedia an online encyclopedia that anyone can add to, update and access anytime - I would've said impossible. If I would've learned that Yahoo paid a billion dollar for a company like Geocities that had no real product, no innovation and practically zero revenue, I would've said impossible! If, twenty years ago, someone told me that MIT would start an OpenCourseWare project to give away all lectures, homeworks, solutions, readers, and even videos of all their lectures... for free, I would've said impossible.
Extending Jain Heritage in Western Environment
Yet impossible is possible. Seth Godin, a corporate commentator, has an interesting breakdown; he say the eighteenth century was about farming, 19th century was about factories and this new millennium is about ideas. And with ideas, there's an interesting paradox: the more you give away, the more it's worth. Even ten years ago, if someone told me that that business model of the new millennium is to give it way,
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