Saniel Bonder

Beyond the Triple Bottom Line: Introducing Multidimensional Money™ and The Whole-Being Currency Exchange Index™, Part One

We’ve plunged, stumbled, and limped our way through the various crashes and burns — and earthquakes, wars, hurricanes and floods — of 2008. Now here we go into 2009, with dire predictions that “the worst is yet to come” from just about every quarter.

I noticed that the most read article of the year in “Financial Times” was Alan Greenspan’s mild acknowledgment, back in February, that “We will never have a perfect model of risk.” Greenspan’s point was that we don’t have the tools for accurately predicting the emotional, human glitch factors that contribute so profoundly to financial and economic events.

I remember first reading that piece. You could almost feel the grand financial wizard pulling on his collar, getting a little flustered, fumbling for words. He all but admitted his and his kind’s near-total cluelessness about the primal emotional dynamics that govern so much of what we call “the market.” He wasn’t comfortable. In fact, he was out of both his league and his depth, and he knew it even if he couldn’t bring himself to say so.

Much later in the year, of course, a humbled Greenspan made stunning admissions about his and other financial leaders’ failures. And we’ve heard a few grumbling complaints about how the big bankers who gambled away a giant chunk of the world’s asset values have failed to mutter so much as a contrite apology. But none of those in the circles of great power have, to this day, begun to acknowledge the actual extent of their liabilities. The great stewards of economic and financial power remain essentially mystified about how to steadily cultivate and ensure such intangibles as confidence and trust — categories that have no obviously measurable bottom lines.

The problem with these people is not just that they don’t know certain very important things that could tremendously inform how they discharge their responsibilities in both hard and easy times.

The problem is not that they are ignorant of WHAT they should know, though that’s true.

The real problem is, they don’t know THAT they don’t know what they don’t know.

They don’t acknowledge and therefore cannot possibly comprehend even the real existence of whole domains of human knowledge, practice, and adeptship that people with their particular responsibilities really must know in this 21^st century, and be quite skilled at.

One of the cornerstones of Good Business International, courtesy of our founders Monika Mitchell Ressler and Peter Ressler, is a recognition that good business necessarily adheres to the principles of what’s called “The Triple Bottom Line.” This way of viewing and doing business holds that the financial bottom line that most corporations worship above all else is not a sufficient criterion for true success.

Rather, along with “Profits” we must establish and meet criteria for discharging optimal responsibilities to “People” and our “Planet” as well.

“People” criteria include how we conduct our relations with staff, consultants, vendors, creditors, customers, our local and virtual communities, and ultimately everyone, in addition to the traditionally favored, if not only, parties considered for a strictly financial bottom line: shareholders, investors, executives, and corporate partners.

“Planet” criteria include principles of green sustainability on all levels. These must include our companies’ ways of managing practical reverence for life and stewardship of the biosphere itself as well as details of concrete, measurable phenomena such as our carbon footprints.

To many forward-looking people today, there’s no question that the ideals of “The Triple Bottom Line” must become standard-practice operating principles and protocols in the global economy. I think a significant number of this and the next generation’s great financiers and business people will have to become living exponents of the Triple Bottom Line in their own daily lives as well as in their professional capacities.

Yet many people also feel that something more will be required of at least many among our future financial and business leaders. They contend that those leaders will need to cultivate a still more profound understanding of human nature and potential than it will take to produce steady good results in all three categories of the Triple Bottom Line — no mean accomplishment itself.

Why? Because the Triple Bottom Line orientation tends to remain focused on externals. Certainly, it’s a great step forward to add external markers for carbon footprints and green sustainability, and financial responsibility to people other than executives and shareholders. But such outward adjustments are not enough.

As superb new perspectives such as those of Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute propose, today and henceforward our leaders on all fronts need both knowledge about and advanced personal development in inner, subtler dimensions of our total personal and collective reality. This kind of knowledge and development is traditionally revered as “wisdom.” It includes and counterweights a leader’s necessary outward, practical, “real-world” knowledge, experience, and expertise.

Otherwise, as recently, mega-financial and mega-economic kingpins are free to be spiritual, emotional, and even moral and ethical neophytes or, frankly, ignoramuses — not only enabling but encouraging and personally getting obscenely rich off other people’s similar imbalances and lusts.

To add our contribution to the new, balanced, and integrative wisdom that is becoming possible and necessary today, my wife-partner Linda and I offer approaches we’ve developed in our own work. In the portion of our teachings we call “The Force of Destiny,” we include an inclusive, esoteric as well as practical way of gauging our participation in “the business of living.” (I have also included a summary presentation of this material in a forthcoming program we mention in my bio here on this site, “Wealth Without* Guilt™.”)

This way of gauging how we’re doing in our total business of living is called “The Whole-Being Currency Exchange Index™.” It’s a practical approach to managing and assessing our participation in life itself in the simultaneously inward and outward totality we describe as “Multidimensional Money™.”

I’ll present this in more detail in coming posts. For now, just to whet your appetite, here are a few paragraphs from the manual of Linda’s and my “Force of Destiny Collection Program Materials.” I’ve edited them a bit for presentation here:

“The ‘bottom line’ of the principle of Multidimensional Money is our practical management of actual money in life. But its larger significance includes, to use a beautiful Native American phrase, our connection to, and management of every kind of exchange with, ‘all our relations.’ When we approach the arena of money with personal integrity and spiritual discipline and dignity, it becomes a naturally sacred realm. As does all of life! This takes real work. It requires active willingness to heal what I call ‘the Spirit/Money split,’ which afflicts nearly everybody, rich, poor, or in between. As we do that work effectively, money ceases to carry implications of sin and evil, ‘filthy lucre.’ It becomes synonymous with sacred exchange. …

“There is no such thing as true mastery of Multidimensional Money in sheer bottom-line terms. Multidimensional Money has no such category as a ‘sheer bottom-line.’ Its true mastery requires attention as well to some top lines, middle lines, and all kinds of curves too, backgrounds and foregrounds. It’s full of fractal sub-universes and fraught with paradox and Mystery.

“Some of these contributions we can make to a whole-being understanding and practice of ‘money as all relatedness,’ therefore, are esoteric secrets. Even if they were shouted from the rooftop of the whole world, no one would automatically understand them. These qualities of comprehension and mastery of the multidimensional reality of money are only becoming available in our time. And these secrets are emerging into our reach only on the basis, really, of the deep healing of ‘the Spirit/Matter split’ that is itself only becoming possible in our time. (And of which the Spirit/Money split is a nearly universal expression.)

“‘Currency’ is a beautiful word to play with. It’s neatly linked to a particular, cash-in-hand meaning of the word ‘change.’ Not comprehending that a multidimensional currency exchange is always happening in each and all of our relations guarantees that we will continue to struggle and suffer at a very fundamental level in each and all of our relations. Therefore, it is crucial first to recognize that all exchanges have value and content at every level, or in every dimension, of Being. They reach from the most ‘bottom-line’ physical and also financial levels (even if no actual money changes hands—a beautiful phrase itself: ‘actual money changes hands’) to the most transcendental. From the most personal and human to the most impersonal, cosmic, and transcendental.”

I’m not suggesting that every businessperson, money manager or financier must become a profoundly integrated mystic sage who has healed his or her own Spirit/Matter and Spirit/Money splits to an unprecedented degree. I am suggesting that, for the stewardship of the Triple Bottom Line to achieve the prominence it must in our world — so much is at stake, this is so necessary — well, yes, at least some of our emerging masters of business, finance and economics must do just that. They must become just such profoundly integrated mystic sages, with their human, practical, bottom-line feet all the more firmly on true ground.

The Alan Greenspans of the coming generations will need this kind of training. At the very least, they’ll need consultation from other people who are adept practitioners of the sciences and arts of Multidimensional Money™, Whole-Being Currency Exchange™, or approaches very like them called by whatever names stick best.

Otherwise, we can count on repeating Great Recessions like this one or worse sometime, and probably again and again. The people to whom we entrust national and global financial-economic leadership must be masters of multidimensional currency exchange, or mentored by others who are such masters, or in short order we’ll be rolling the dice once more toward the next great crashes and burns.

© Saniel Bonder 2009. All rights reserved.  

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About Saniel: Harvard educated “destiny-empowerment” expert, Saniel is author of the forthcoming audio series, "Wealth Without Guilt," the provocative "White-Hot Yoga of the Heart," and many other books and programs. He hails from Sonoma, California where his unique blend of intellectual curiosity and spiritual wisdom is honed and nurtured. Saniel co-writes and co-teaches with his wife, Linda. Together they travel and teach “materiality and spirit” workshops throughout the US and internationally. His website is http://heartgazing.com/spiritmoney.