(This video is not the MIT conference the book talks about. It is just a clip from another talk the Dalai Lama was giving regarding the Meaning of Life. It's not exactly the same message, but it's still relevant, if anyone was interested.)
"What is the Dalai Lama doing at MIT? He's here for the "Investigating the Mind conference—a two-day gabfest about what science can learn from Buddhism and what Buddhism can learn from science." (Pink, p 220) Spirituality and science are coinciding more than ever now. The Dalai Lama is getting together with scientists to stay current on what scientists are finding out about the brain. In turn, scientists are doing the opposite, by studying spirituality's impact on the brain. They are doing this by having monks being put into MRI machines to study various aspects of their brains, such as attention and emotion.
"As the well-known molecular biologist Eric Lander told the crowd, science is merely one way to understand the world. Across many different realms, there's a growing recognition that spirituality—not religion, necessarily, but the more broadly defined concern for the meaning and purpose of life—is a fundamental part of the human condition. Indeed, our capacity for faith—again, not religion per se, but the belief in something larger than ourselves—may be wired into our brains. Perhaps not surprisingly, this wiring seems to run through the brain's right hemisphere." (Pink, p 221) This offers more proof that the world is becoming more right brain oriented. Right brain vs. left brain argument aside, a desire for spirituality exists in all of us, and religion is just one way that people try to fulfill that desire. Spirituality is all part of an even larger quest to find meaning within our lives. Many people turn to trying to work towards something larger than themselves because it gives them a greater sense of purpose, and provides them with that meaning.
"At the very least, we ought to take spirituality seriously because of its demonstrated ability to improve our lives—something that might be even more valuable when so many of us have satisfied(and oversatisfied) our material needs. For instance, some of the maladies of modern life—stress, heart disease and so on—can be allayed by attending to the spirit. People who pray regularly have been shown to have lower blood pressure on average, than those who don't, according to research at Duke University....This is tricky and controversial territory—in part because so many charlatans have invoked the power of God to heal the infirm. If you depend on spirituality alone to battle cancer or to mend broken bones, you deserve the disastrous results that will follow. But a whole-minded approach—L-Directed reason combined with R-Directed spirit—can be effective. As I noted in chapter 3, more than half of American medical schools now have courses in spirituality and health." (Pink, p 222-223) Having proven, enhanced benefits in health is another advantage to allowing spirituality into your life. This isn't to suggest you should expect yourself to magically heal because of it, but as Pink says, a healthy mixture will work well. A recurring theme in this book seems to be the medical analogy with all of the themes. It has been discussed multiple times in the discussion board posts as well, so there's not much else to say. However, spirituality is starting to make its way into hospitals, and more and more patients are curious about it. "According to Newsweek, "72 percent of Americans say they would welcome a conversation with their physician about faith."" (Pink, p 223) Even people that aren't generally religious eventually start to enter that quest for a deeper meaning. "One other field that has begun to take spirituality more seriously is business...After interviewing nearly one hundred executives about spirituality in the workplace, they reached some surprising conclusions. Most of the executives defined spirituality in much the same way—not as religion, but as "the basic desire to find purpose and meaning in one's life." Yet the executives were so understandably concerned that the language of spirit in the workplace would offend their religiously diverse employees that they scrubbed their vocabulary of all such talk. Meanwhile, Mitroff and Denton discovered, the employees were hungering to bring their spiritual values(and thus their whole person rather than one compartment of themselves) to work, but didn't feel comfortable doing so...Mitroff and Denton also found that companies that acknowledged spiritual values and aligned them with company goals outperformed those that did not. In other words, letting spirituality into the workplace didn't distract organizations from their goals. It often helped them reach those goals." (Pink, p 223-224) Religion is often a touchy topic for a lot of people, since opinions and views can be very strong regarding the matter. However, when taking the universal concept of spirituality, you remove the differing opinions and possible tension that could result from bringing it into the workplace. It's this universal concept that can make a business's employees feel more at ease, and even improve your business, as a whole, when introduced. "As more companies grasp this idea, we are likely to see a rise in spirit in business—a growing demand from individuals for workplaces that offer meaning as well as money. According to one recent U.S. survey, more than three out of five adults believe a greater sense of spirituality would improve their own workplace." (Pink, p 224) Employees have spoken their mind about it via surveys, and the results have shown that spirituality has a positive impact on business. It is becoming more apparent as time goes on that welcoming spirituality into the workplace can become an added benefit instead of being that taboo topic that no one dares to bring up.
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