One of the exercises I have in my Creativity and Personal Mastery (CPM) is The Other Centered Universe exercise. Can you remember some time in your life when somebody did something so unexpected and kind that it uplifted you and made you feel good the whole day? When I was a kid, my parents bought me a helium balloon. I was told to slip the loop on the string over my wrist. I was so entranced by the way it bobbed that I forgot. And, sure enough, I stumbled and let go of my hold and the balloon rose up and up and disappeared.
I started wailing. The balloon seller saw it and immediately gave me another and tied it to my wrist himself. My parents tried to pay him, but he waved it away. “He is like my own son,” he said. “His joy is my joy. How can I take payment for this.” I thanked him tremulously and there is still a warm glow when I remember that incident.
The Other Centered Universe exercise requires you to do something, each day, to make someone’s day. Carefully, with intent, perform a Random Act of Kindness that leaves someone all aglow.
A senior entertainment executive was in my Creativity and Personal Mastery (CPM) class at London Business School. He lived in Brussels and took the Eurostar to come to the class. He remembered that he was supposed to report on what he had done as part of The Other Centered Universe exercise and he had not done it.
When he alighted at St. Pancras, he noticed a cluster of school children counting coins and unsure if they had enough between them to pay for the train ride. Quietly he went to the counter, paid for all of them and told the clerk to call them and give them the tickets. Then he stood a little distance off and watched the children discover their impossible good fortune: the astonishment, the disbelief, the delight, the looking about for someone to thank and finding no one.
“Professor Rao, I haven’t felt this good in years,” he said in class.
Why should you live in an other-centered universe rather than a me-centered one? I could give you elevated reasons, and they are true, but here is the plain one: a me-centered universe makes your life mediocre. That is simply how it works, and you will feel the mediocrity in your own bones long before you can argue your way to it.
Now, my sharper students — and I have taught a great many sharp students — pounce here. “But Professor Rao, your executive did his good deed in order to feel good. He bought those tickets for himself. It is still all about him.”
Yes, I tell them. Of course it is. That is exactly how you begin. The good feeling is the training wheels. You use training wheels while you are learning to ride; you do not despise them, and you do not refuse to climb on the bicycle until you can balance without them. In time the wheels come off. You arrive at a place where you are other-centered not because it feels good, but because it has become the natural and inevitable expression of the person you have become — and it is there, past the training wheels, that the deepest joy is waiting.
Ram Dass told a story I cherish. When he released an album of his teachings on records, priced at six dollars — his bare cost — his father, a railroad president and a hard-headed attorney, was scandalized. Charge twelve, he said; make a profit; these are strangers. Ram Dass asked him whether, in all the years he had given his own brother Henry free legal advice, he had ever once sent him a bill. Of course not, his father said — Henry is family. “Then,” said Ram Dass, “show me who is not Uncle Henry, and I will gladly charge him double.” His consciousness had simply expanded until there were no outsiders left to exploit. As another teacher put it: whatever you do to the least among them, you do to me.
I am often confronted, when I speak of a benevolent universe, with the obvious objection. How dare you call it benevolent — what of Gaza, of Ukraine, of the drowning and the starving? Once, in Mauritius, before a polished audience, a woman put it to me with a thin, insincere smile, certain she had me: would my teaching console a Bangladeshi farmer whose fields had flooded, whose cattle had drowned, whose children had died? I did not let her stand on that ground, because she had built it out of nothing. She had invented a sufferer, projected onto him a despair she did not herself feel, and was using his imagined ruin to win a debating point in a comfortable room. I told her that only that farmer has the right to ask that question. She did not. And neither, I will gently suggest, do you — about anyone but yourself.
So do not intellectualize on behalf of strangers. Turn instead to the one life you are entitled to examine, which is your own, and ask honestly: has the universe, in fact, been good to me? Has it given me, again and again, precisely what I needed in order to grow — including much that I did not want and would never have chosen, and whose value I saw only years later? Look, and you will find that it has.
And when you truly see it, you will not have to manufacture gratitude. It will rise in you of its own accord, unbidden, the way water finds its level. That is the universe itself handing you your ticket at the window, already paid for — and then stepping quietly back to watch you discover it.
Peace!
