Reviewing a Biography of Each of Us: The Ghost in Near-Death Experiences Presses for Self-Management to Enjoy Work, Life and Society

By Roy Bhikharie

Reviewing a Biography of Each of Us explores the ethics of todays worldwide business culture and investigates how overseeing a business demands a focus on self-knowledge and work/life synergy as a basis for achieving increased productivity, job satisfaction, and personal fulfillment among all workers.

Roy Bhikharie utilizes his diverse expertise as a psychologist and business counselor as he shares seven strategic principles that will help anyone unlock their full potential. Bhikharie includes lessons detailing specific methods to manage business demands, practical exercises, and an environmental survey that assists in achieving profitable and trusting relationships, ultimately building a foundation for long-lasting life balance. Specific examples are provided as Bhikharie delves into specific topics such as:

Effective workplace practices that promote matching business demands and competencies;
Ways to stimulate intuitive ideas and eliminate job stress to gain dedication;
How to look for and seize opportunities;

Progress in leadership, management and strategy has not ceased the increase in job stress, corruption, and distrust within corporations. This guidebook implies a new way of thinking that will encourage business leaders to contemplate changing a top-down, bottom-up business methodology to one that helps all workers realize their true abilities, improve relationships, and successfully manage job or business demands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 24, 2009
• ISBN: 9780595612840

Roy Bhikharie

Roy I. Bhikharie, PhD Roy I. Bhikharie was born in Suriname, South America, which is a country with a multicultural society. He was raised Catholic, went to a Moravian primary school, and attended a public secondary school in science subjects. In addition, he was nourished in an environment characterized by Hinduism, Islam, and mysticism. Thanks to his loving upbringing, the exposure to these seemingly different beliefs was not disturbing. He has worked as a psychologist, corporate executive, and personal/business counselor. After completing an internship at the Psychiatric Center Suriname, he was appointed a psychologist. Next, he was employed by a Flourmill (De Molen) annex Animal Feed Mill (VESU) as chief executive. During this period, he also served inter alia as Chairman of the Manufacturers Association Suriname (ASFA) and President of the Association for Good Governance and Liberalization (ABBL). After this period, he started a new career as management consultant for Deloitte & Touche Suriname. Furthermore, he has published six books on different topics. He is an independent researcher, an external thesis supervisor at ADEK University of Suriname (Social Sciences), and Deputy President of the United Nations Association Suriname. His research interest includes politics, economics, the interaction of paradigms and psychological health, metaphysics, and the relationship between spirituality and quantum physics. For the interaction of paradigms and psychological health, see http://www.wfuna.org/news/wfuna-hosts-two-successful-workshops-at-un-dpingo-conference and http://www.imperialjournals.com/index.php/IJIR/article/view/187t

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Copyright © 2009 Roy Bhikharie. All rights reserved.

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iUniverse rev. date: 2/19/09

Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

OUR COMMON INTERACTIVE FACULTIES AND THEIR USES

CHAPTER 2

SELF-AWARENESS IN THE WORKPLACE

CHAPTER 3

EGO: PERSONAL AND CORPORATE PSYCHO-SYNTHESIS

CHAPTER 4

INTUITION AND SLEEP-DREAM: PERSONAL AND CORPORATE RESILIENCE

CHAPTER 5

THE UNCONSCIOUS AND DEATH: INSIDE-OUT AND OUTSIDE-IN THINKING

CHAPTER 6

SPIRITUALITY: ENVIRONMENTAL FIT

CHAPTER 7

THE GURU WITHIN EACH OF US: THE PENETRALIUM OF SELF

CHAPTER 8

HIGH-PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX I

GLOBAL ISSUES: POVERTY FACTS AND STATISTICS

APPENDIX II

A STATEMENT ON MENTAL HEALTH FROM THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF MENTAL HEALTH

APPENDIX III

MAJOR RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD

(RANKED BY NUMBER OF ADHERENTS)

REFERENCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Preface

In general, we have a tendency to personify businesses, markets, and other kinds of organizations as autonomous things, often unaware that they owe their existences to people like you and me. Everything, from ideation to planning, producing, marketing, and consuming, is within the human domain. For example, the price of financial capital, being fixed by supply and demand, is nothing less than the result of consumer behavior. Thus, business growth is contingent upon inspiring consumer trust, which in turn is a matter of inspiring employees to increase productivity in order to earn that trust. Inspiration depends on the extent to which our skills and talents and our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs and aspirations are substantiated.

Wealthy persons often remark that money is not everything and that in striving for wealth they neglect certain needs or desires. They are disclosing a lack of self-actualization. Other people complain about falling short of the money necessary to realize their dreams. In both cases, the need for inner and outer rewards is prominent. This necessitates integrating material and nonmaterial needs and aspirations, or balancing mind and matter self-satisfactorily. Imbalances in these respects could lead to serious psychological complications (see page 4).

Inspiring employees to increase productivity implies matching business demands and competencies (skills, preferences, and attitudes) with productive and equitable workplace practices. If each of us, employed by a business or otherwise, could be satisfied with his or her job, pay, and other working conditions (a cornerstone of self-actualization—see Epilogue, page 119), businesses would enjoy better performance at lowered labor costs.

This would benefit society as well. By realizing their full potential, and consequently their empathic capacity (see page xiv), employees would be less likely to risk unnecessary health hazards such as child abuse, exploitation of women, polluting the environment, selling unsafe products, or other unethical behaviors. Instead, self-actualizing through raising productivity serves the interests of all parties concerned. Productivity specifically covers competency development and consumer trust (soft economic aspects) and profitability (the hard economic aspect).

That brings us to the objective of this book: connecting the self-actualization of employees with managing business demands to balance soft and hard economic factors resiliently. In other words, this book aims to explain how to strike this balance of immaterial and material components―work-life synergy. Striking this balance reviews the process of reflecting on, analyzing, making sense of, reframing and/or changing our self and work-life experience self-satisfactorily, which is basically a biography of each of us.

Humanizing businesses in order to profit may not be a new idea (except from the viewpoint, I describe―see Introduction, pages xiii-xviii), but it still sounds like a fairy tale, partly due to cultural differences and partly to the illicit dependency of politics and science on businesses.

The impact of the latter on society should not be underestimated. The global economy is exploited by commerce, trade liberalization, and economic growth for the purpose of narrow corporate interests, neglecting the production and distribution of all resources essential to life; big corporations play a key role in ruling the majority of economies in the world,* and many governments surrender their power and behave like puppets, ignoring acumen and foresight. Thus, businesses finance politics and science, expecting to be paid back later with unfair favors and creating vicious circles of favoritism and unfairness.

Throughout history, humankind has used capital, politics, science, technology, and even religion to wield power, subconsciously hoping to find some form of self-fulfillment or happiness. Basically, it is this desperate fight between mind and matter that is the major force behind corporate abuse, job stress, corruption, (mental) health complaints due to problems at work, and inequity and disparity in general; nevertheless, the cutthroat competition for superiority still continues.

This duality of mind and matter leads to a lack of self-actualization and distorts the authentic self-worth of a great many people, inflicting self-alienation, damaging the capacity to empathize genuinely and to connect with others, and resulting in indifference to societal trust.

As a consequence, extremism, climate change, extreme poverty, child pornography, cyber terrorism, and wars, among other things, have become a part of our everyday reality.

The problem is how to shift our paradigm to enable us to practice what we think is good for our self and righteousness, and how do we clear our mind or become open-minded to trust our judgment of what is good for our self and righteousness in a way that dignifies perceptual and cultural differences in order to enable work-life synergy for everyone?

This viewpoint, as explicated in the Introduction and examined in greater detail throughout the book, on personal, business, empathic, moral, and profitable leadership addresses the underlying paradigm in presenting a culture-free remedy, creating work-life synergy and inherently extending this to society, thus adding meaning and joy to our work, lives and society at large.

Roy Bhikharie

September 2008

* Korten, David C. When Corporations Rule the World. Bloomfield: Kumarian Press, 2001.

Jones, Geoffrey. Restoring a Global Economy, 1950-80, Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Lodge, George and Craig Wilson. A Corporate Solution to Global Poverty: How Multinationals Can Help the Poor and Invigorate Their Own Legitimacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Introduction

In contrast to the idea of multilateralism, the world’s population still diverges economically, culturally, and morally. Thanks to the effort of many nations, some people live longer and enjoy luxury as never before. At the same time, the great majority suffers from extreme poverty (see Appendix I). A quarter of humanity lives without electricity, one billion people have no access to safe drinking water, two and a half billion lack proper sanitation, and over three billion earn less than 2.50 American dollars per day. Every second child is born in poverty, and a billion people entered the twenty-first century unable to read a book or sign their names. The more we preach, the more striking the inequity and disparity appear.

Businesses are largely to blame; they create their own so-called codes of ethics to withstand competition, thereby infecting the consciences, aspirations, and empathic capacity of employees and society and robbing them of the true joy in their lives (see Preface). Working conditions are the key source of job stress and (mental) health complaints (as referenced on page 80). In developing countries, the paternalistic culture (see page 15) of governments has a similar impact.

To explain how to restore the joy in life, I first aim to disentangle the paradigm that upholds the present status quo and explain self-actualization by outlining and substantiating several common interactive faculties as separate and integrative. These faculties are awareness, ego, intuition, sleep-dream, unconsciousness, death, and spirituality.

In substantiating these faculties, seven strategic principles of self-actualization are inferred to promote self-management. In this process, we detect our callings and fulfill our potential. This leads to our overcoming inner conflicts, mistaken identities, and mental blocks such as psychological biases, goal-fixation, and limiting our potential growth due to the idea of death.

This angle and approach is corroborated by considering several observations. After near-death experiences, some patients reported a clear awareness during out-of-body experiences, in which perception, cognitive functioning, emotion, sense of identity, or memory from early childhood occurred independently from the normal body-linked waking consciousness: 100% life-reviews of every thought, deed, and how they made others feel—not fragmented and random memories but in sequential order, heightening empathy and intuition overtime (as referenced and discussed on page 6). (These phenomena I qualify as the ghost in near-death experiences.) Consequently, the free, self-conscious, and willful integrative function of our ego, as explicated throughout this book, becomes of paramount importance to promoting self-management, including emotional integration, which in turn develops our empathic and intuitive capacity—inner growth.

Also, profiting from this cognitive process, while taking into account productive and nonproductive human factors and workplace practices, eleven main lessons in managing business demands are validated. These lessons seek to realize employees’ vocation or calling, establish the purpose and identity of the business, raise productivity, and build mutual and societal trust. This trust can build the organizational confidence needed to exploit the market in a socially responsible manner, laying the foundation for resiliently balancing soft and hard economic factors—in other words, to create work-life synergy.

If we fall short of self-actualization by lack of self-management—thus, experience lack of self-fulfillment—how can we be expected to be optimally productive and empathize? Without self-fulfillment, and thus without genuine empathy, it is difficult to accommodate customers competitively in a socially responsible manner, among other things, and to enable work-life synergy and best compete.

The ghost in near-death experiences learns how vital proper self-management is to integrate our self for inner growth. This capacitates our ability to clear our minds, stimulate empathy and intuition, unfold our potentials, realize our callings, offer good leadership, stimulate productivity, and through these, to achieve self-fulfillment, and mutual and societal trust, thus adding meaning and joy to our work, lives, and society. (See the quote of the Convention of the Americas on Human Rights on page 119, that vocational training does not only contribute to the shaping of decent work but it is educationally a formative

Reviews for Reviewing a Biography of Each of Us

[roybhikharie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book allows anyone to re-interpret the past to profit, changing your knowledge, emotional reactions, and desires, and mastering the art of resilience. Linking the conclusions to managing business demands, stimulates productivity, and enables a paradigm shift to establish work-life synergy, allowing graceful detachment when the time comes.