Question: If you had $100 billion to give away, how would you spend it?
Deepak Chopra: If I had $100 billion to give away, I would spend it in creating immediately a network of people in the world that would engage in personal transformation, in collective transformation, and in creative problem solving to solve the four major areas in our world that need to be immediately healed: the environment, social injustice, conflict resolution, and poverty, which is the cause of so many other problems, including diseases.
I think I would use the $100 billion to create a worldwide net of consciousness much more than the Internet. It would be a net where I would be able to harness the collective creativity for problem solving.
There is already great data in the fact that if you put a few people together in the room and you give them a problem, if they’re not specialists they will solve it. If they’re specialists, their minds will never go out of the box.
So this is the opportune moment to harness the collective caring and the collective creativity, and recognize that human development is much more important than development in the classical sense. So no longer pouring money into, you know, solving one problem at a time.
We seen it in medicine. As soon as you treat one disease, something else pops up. You have to create balance in the total mind-body system, and establish that integration between body, mind, soul and spirit.
And I think $100 billion could be used to just focus on one idea. And that idea is well being of the individual; well being emotionally; well being of our relationships; well being of our businesses; well being of our economy; well being of our ecosystem; and well being of the world at large. It’s a broad term, but all it means is restoring balance.
If you can think of all the ways that we can harness the collective intelligence and the collective compassion; and one of the ways to do that, by the way, is through story telling. There is nothing more transformational than storytelling. So I would create a huge information network which would take everything into account: educational institutions, entertainment, music, news networks, information technologies, the Internet, and saturate this network and these technologies with stories that have the power to transform us.
Recorded on: Aug 17, 2007
Discuss
Judd Larson on September 5, 2008, 10:23 PM
I agree with Deepak's ideas however some of those problems are intertwined such as poverty and ecology. Undoing poverty in today's world typically creates more consumers, that hurt our ecology. Also damaged environments cause even more poverty when resources dwindle. I believe that the first step to solving the poverty problem is to solve our energy dilemma and to manage our wastes better, creating resources from them.
If I had $100 billion dollars to spend, I would first tackle the environmental problems; first and foremost, the renewable energy dilemma. I would do this by amassing teams of experts and non-experts (for outside-the-box thinking) and pay them well to solve these problems. They would be responsible for more than just writing a report, they would actually be charged with making commercial solutions. They (the teams) would also have full ownership of their ideas. I would also include within these teams overlooked inventors that had great potential ideas but never found the means to bring their ideas to fruition because their ideas were seen as too economically risky. We need to partake in this type of risky business if we are going to solve these problems, before these problems become too large and pervasive.
Judd Larson on September 6, 2008, 2:23 AM
I agree with Deepak’s ideas however some of those problems are intertwined such as poverty and ecology. Undoing poverty in today’s world typically creates more consumers, that hurt our ecology. Also damaged environments cause even more poverty when resources dwindle. I believe that the first step to solving the poverty problem is to solve our energy dilemma and to manage our wastes better, creating resources from them.
If I had $100 billion dollars to spend, I would first tackle the environmental problems; first and foremost, the renewable energy dilemma. I would do this by amassing teams of experts and non-experts (for outside-the-box thinking) and pay them well to solve these problems. They would be responsible for more than just writing a report, they would actually be charged with making commercial solutions. They (the teams) would also have full ownership of their ideas. I would also include within these teams overlooked inventors that had great potential ideas but never found the means to bring their ideas to fruition because their ideas were seen as too economically risky. We need to partake in this type of risky business if we are going to solve these problems, before these problems become too large and pervasive.
George Epstein on January 13, 2009, 9:44 PM
I would bake the world’s biggest cookie and eat it all by myself in front of diabetic children.
Cheryl Binstock on June 6, 2009, 1:22 PM
True transformation and heaking of a deep and REAL kind is the sort of thing, on a grand scale, that would automatically address poverty and over-consumption, I think…
The belief; there is “not enough” is not a healthy attitude and is one that requires a transformation. People over-consume as a result of such thinking – at least it seems to me.
That or people are truly so feeble minded they actually believe every marketing gimmick out there and are programmed to consume!
IMHO – Heal thyself and heal the world! ;-)
PS: Deepak – I have hope you’ll get your hands on that $1B and and you’ll put it to good use in transformation and healing modalities!
Cheryl Binstock on June 6, 2009, 1:24 PM
And(oops!) if you get the $100B – even better!!!!! ;-)
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