Corporate "Mindfulness".

Discuss the application of the Dharma to situations of social, political, environmental and economic suffering and injustice.
shaunc
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by shaunc »

I think it would be hard to combine business and Buddhism. The 3 poisons of Buddhism are greed, hatred and delusion. In business greed is looked at as a good thing. If memory serves me correctly the neo-nazi that shot an astronomical amount of youths at a camp in Europe practised mindfulness and many sportsmen/women practice meditation. Although there is a lot of benefits to both of these practices it's not true that Buddhism has some sort of monopoly on them.
dreambow
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by dreambow »

You've heard of corporate responsibility...that's for the shareholders only!
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Manju
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by Manju »

How sad:
https://www.academia.edu/25482900/WHAT_ ... _OF_STRESS

Title:
WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT? MINDFULNESS IN THE MOMENT OF STRESS

:popcorn: Well, mindfulness is NOT enlightenment...,
so many pages written on the wrong topic but..... a step in the right direction and this is what counts IMHO.

shaunc wrote ``I think it would be hard to combine business and Buddhism.```

It is extremely hard but it has to be done.
Nothing else counts.

Manju
DGA
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by DGA »

Manju wrote:How sad:
https://www.academia.edu/25482900/WHAT_ ... _OF_STRESS

Title:
WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT? MINDFULNESS IN THE MOMENT OF STRESS

:popcorn: Well, mindfulness is NOT enlightenment...,
so many pages written on the wrong topic but..... a step in the right direction and this is what counts IMHO.
I'm the author of that dissertation. My point is that "mindfulness" per Kabat-Zinn, Kornfield, Brach et al is in continuity from the European Enlightenment, and not from the Buddhist traditions that mindfulness discourse relies on to legitimize itself. I also probe some of the consequences of this. Hence, all those pages. Put differently, the "mindfulness" of the corporate seminar or stress-relief clinic is not the same practice as the "mindfulness" of the Buddhist center, even though Buddhists are called upon and sometimes volunteer to participate in the corporate mindfulness trip (for their own reasons).

Sad from what perspective?
daelm
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by daelm »

Johnny Dangerous wrote:I didn say they were 'creating drones', that's a strawman if I ever heard one. What I was saying is that many large companies are employing mindfulness to (among other things) invrease productivity...that is simply true, not conspiracies, and IMO it is, or could be contrary to the purpose of mindfulness in a dharmic sense.
even if you determined this was a bad thing, how would you stop it? as someone upstream said "that ship has sailed".



d
daelm
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by daelm »

DGA wrote:
Manju wrote:How sad:
https://www.academia.edu/25482900/WHAT_ ... _OF_STRESS

Title:
WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT? MINDFULNESS IN THE MOMENT OF STRESS

:popcorn: Well, mindfulness is NOT enlightenment...,
so many pages written on the wrong topic but..... a step in the right direction and this is what counts IMHO.
I'm the author of that dissertation. My point is that "mindfulness" per Kabat-Zinn, Kornfield, Brach et al is in continuity from the European Enlightenment, and not from the Buddhist traditions that mindfulness discourse relies on to legitimize itself. I also probe some of the consequences of this. Hence, all those pages. Put differently, the "mindfulness" of the corporate seminar or stress-relief clinic is not the same practice as the "mindfulness" of the Buddhist center, even though Buddhists are called upon and sometimes volunteer to participate in the corporate mindfulness trip (for their own reasons).

Sad from what perspective?

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DGA
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by DGA »

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Yeah, something like that.
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Manju
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by Manju »

I'm the author of that dissertation.
Was not aware of that, sorry.
Would have chosen my words more carefully if I had known it.

Nothing deserves more respect than effort combined with the right motivation.

What is European Enlightenment ?
Did not hear of it yet.

Everything I am saying is from the perspective of the Buddhist teachings.

I admire Kabat-Zinn and his work but always wondered what exactly he is mindful about.
Mindfulness is a tool after all.

I am sure this was discussed many times in depth on this forum.

So, to summarize:
IMO corporate seminar or stress-relief clinic mindfulness training is great, wonderful, a real progress.

From the perspective of what Buddha tried to bring across to us ....... it is still nothing but a small step in the right direction.
Hence the profound sadness.

Manju
DGA
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by DGA »

Manju wrote:
I'm the author of that dissertation.
Was not aware of that, sorry.
Would have chosen my words more carefully if I had known it.

Nothing deserves more respect than effort combined with the right motivation.

What is European Enlightenment ?
Did not hear of it yet.

Everything I am saying is from the perspective of the Buddhist teachings.

I admire Kabat-Zinn and his work but always wondered what exactly he is mindful about.
Mindfulness is a tool after all.

I am sure this was discussed many times in depth on this forum.

So, to summarize:
IMO corporate seminar or stress-relief clinic mindfulness training is great, wonderful, a real progress.

From the perspective of what Buddha tried to bring across to us ....... it is still nothing but a small step in the right direction.
Hence the profound sadness.

Manju
Hi Manju,

Here's the conceptual point of departure for the dissertation, which answers your question regarding the European Enlightenment.

http://philosophy.eserver.org/foucault/ ... nment.html

I'm skeptical regarding mindfulness seminars and stress-relief programs for many reasons. however...

The one ray of optimism I find and that I emphasize throughout the dissertation is that people who attend such seminars and programs are in some way exposed to Buddhist figures such as Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Mattieu Ricard, and indirectly Chogyam Trungpa, and most importantly the content of their books. That's why I don't feel sad about it at all. If having Kabat-Zinn come to your workplace can lead you a careful study of, say, Thich Nhat Hanh, then I call that a success.

By the way, I don't mind if people have critical things to say about these ideas, or just disagree. That's OK with me. :cheers:
daelm
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by daelm »

DGA wrote:I'm really interested in what it makes possible, though. Does it get people thinking about important issues that are not even directly Buddhist just by association, such as environmental and social justice? I think it can.

One of the things that made the present mess possible, in my opinion, was the erasure of the left as a producer of credible critique globally. Even if you disagree with leftists, and I think most DW people probably do to some extent or another, you have to admit that dissenting voices have value in making any society function well. What happens to leftist discourse against globalization and environmental exploitation? It becomes refracted through Buddhist discourse ("Buddhist economics") and then taken up by association with the mindfulness situation.

That's the contradiction of "mindfulness," or one contradiction of it: it's completely compensatory (it gives one the means to accommodate oneself to the moment and thus reproduce it, rather than liberate oneself and others from it, or change it), but it also has some traces that are potentially emancipatory. That's why I find it so interesting as an academic (my day job).

haven't read your dissertation, but thought to ask something - the "mindfulness-for-x" movement seems to be distinguished by its abstraction of technique from the epistemological and soteriological context that gives that technique meaning. i've often thought about the drivers for that. there are a few things that are obvious - the value we place on technocracy inclines us to privilege technique at the expense of context, for example. so too does the cultural weight in America of a naive notion of "pragmatism", itself enshrined as a kind of willful stupidity - "don't confuse me with all yer learnin', just show me how to do a thing". etc.

i wondered, aside from the obvious, whether the transmission of Zen and specifically the way it occurred, had also been a contributing factor. what i mean is, as was mentioned on another thread, the principal contributors to that transmission, people like D.T. Suzuki, Hakuun Yasutani and a host of others had already accomplished that abstraction of meditation from context, in order to justify Japanese war crimes and before that to justify Japanese aggression.

do you think that the transmission of Zen by them perhaps laid some of the foundation that makes the current "mindfulness-for-x" movement easier?




d
DGA
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by DGA »

daelm wrote:
DGA wrote:I'm really interested in what it makes possible, though. Does it get people thinking about important issues that are not even directly Buddhist just by association, such as environmental and social justice? I think it can.

One of the things that made the present mess possible, in my opinion, was the erasure of the left as a producer of credible critique globally. Even if you disagree with leftists, and I think most DW people probably do to some extent or another, you have to admit that dissenting voices have value in making any society function well. What happens to leftist discourse against globalization and environmental exploitation? It becomes refracted through Buddhist discourse ("Buddhist economics") and then taken up by association with the mindfulness situation.

That's the contradiction of "mindfulness," or one contradiction of it: it's completely compensatory (it gives one the means to accommodate oneself to the moment and thus reproduce it, rather than liberate oneself and others from it, or change it), but it also has some traces that are potentially emancipatory. That's why I find it so interesting as an academic (my day job).

haven't read your dissertation, but thought to ask something - the "mindfulness-for-x" movement seems to be distinguished by its abstraction of technique from the epistemological and soteriological context that gives that technique meaning. i've often thought about the drivers for that. there are a few things that are obvious - the value we place on technocracy inclines us to privilege technique at the expense of context, for example. so too does the cultural weight in America of a naive notion of "pragmatism", itself enshrined as a kind of willful stupidity - "don't confuse me with all yer learnin', just show me how to do a thing". etc.

i wondered, aside from the obvious, whether the transmission of Zen and specifically the way it occurred, had also been a contributing factor. what i mean is, as was mentioned on another thread, the principal contributors to that transmission, people like D.T. Suzuki, Hakuun Yasutani and a host of others had already accomplished that abstraction of meditation from context, in order to justify Japanese war crimes and before that to justify Japanese aggression.

do you think that the transmission of Zen by them perhaps laid some of the foundation that makes the current "mindfulness-for-x" movement easier?




d
That's an excellent question. here's how I understand it.

1. mindfulness has been mobilized as a technique by a specific rationale that offers its own tacit and sometimes explicit epistemological contexts. This is a weird mashup of Hans Selye, CG Jung, positive psychology, baby-boomer wishful thinking, post-imperialist assumptions about East and West, and management protocols in the postindustrial workplace. That's the soteriological context in which mindfulness is mobilized. It is not without a religious content. Rather, it makes a kind of universalist religion out of the detritus of its historical moment. This is why, among other things, reading a Kornfield book or a Brach book is like reading a pastiche of inspirational quotations. What is the logic of that ecology of texts--what holds it together? A pretense to universalism that has a specific historical origin. In the diss, I call this "the religion of capitalism." Not a pleasant shorthand, but there it is.

2. There's a lot of universalist aspiration in mid-20th century Zen transmission, and also a tendency toward stripping away the "cultural trappings" of Zen practice to get to the REAL Buddhist practice, which is seated meditation. (of course this "stripping away" imperative is itself a cultural trapping, as is the emphasis on seated meditation, as is the universalism...) So yes, there is a historical precedent for contemporary mindfulness in the Zen of the beat years, say. More to the point, this is what normative Buddhism seems like in the US during the formative years of those who would go on to develop therapeutic mindfulness (Goleman, Kabat-Zinn, et al). I touch on this only briefly in the diss because I was pressured to make a lot of cuts (this thing used to be a lot longer)... long story.

http://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?t=15575

http://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?t=10853
daelm
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by daelm »

DGA wrote:....transmission, and also a tendency toward stripping away the "cultural trappings" of Zen practice to get to the REAL Buddhist practice, which is seated meditation. (of course this "stripping away" imperative is itself a cultural trapping, as is the emphasis on seated meditation, as is the universalism...) So yes, there is a historical precedent for contemporary mindfulness in the Zen of the beat years, say. More to the point, this is what normative Buddhism seems like in the US during the formative years of those who would go on to develop therapeutic mindfulness (Goleman, Kabat-Zinn, et al).
this is what i was inclined towards. in the broader argument about cultural trappings in general, the attempt to identify and remove these tends to get framed as a "western" thrust, whereas in the early transmission of Zen, it was largely not on the side of the "Westerners". both explicitly and implicitly, the latter seeming necessary to sanitise some of the Japanese teachers' positions, the separation between the technique and the moral/epistemological framework was presented by Japanese teachers. in fact, generalising, in Zen, "western" teachers had to almost rediscover and re-integrate the context of Buddhism, and that has led to a flowering anew.

the foundational premise that they received though, via Suzuki and others, was that the only authority that was valid, was that accrued by "sitting". from the point of view of their teachers, that premise was the necessary pre-requisite for claiming that war in the Emperor's name was the highest compassion a Buddhist could undertake. you still get echoes of this in contemporary Zen students, who state that "book-learning" etc is wrong or inferior or second-best to unthinking, unlearned kensho, earned while sitting, which is the layman's version of the Mahakasyapa flower story. this, even though Zen/Chan has produced more wirtten material than any other tradition.
Last edited by daelm on Thu Sep 15, 2016 3:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
daelm
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by daelm »

daelm wrote:
DGA wrote:....transmission, and also a tendency toward stripping away the "cultural trappings" of Zen practice to get to the REAL Buddhist practice, which is seated meditation. (of course this "stripping away" imperative is itself a cultural trapping, as is the emphasis on seated meditation, as is the universalism...) So yes, there is a historical precedent for contemporary mindfulness in the Zen of the beat years, say. More to the point, this is what normative Buddhism seems like in the US during the formative years of those who would go on to develop therapeutic mindfulness (Goleman, Kabat-Zinn, et al).
this is what i was inclined towards. in the broader argument about cultural trappings in general, the attempt to remove thise tends to get framed as a "western" thrust, whereas in the early transmission of Zen, it was largely not on the side of the "Westerners". both explicitly and implicitly, the latter seeming necessary to sanitise some of the Japanese teachers' positions, the separation between the technique and the moral/epistemological framework was presented by Japanese teachers. in fact, generalising, in Zen, "western" teachers had to almost rediscover and re-integrate the context of Buddhism, and that has led to a flowering anew.

the foundational premise that they received though, via Suzuki and others, was that the only authority that was valid, was that accrued by "sitting". from the point of view of their teachers, that premise was the necessary pre-requisite for claiming that war in the Emperor's name was the highest compassion a Buddhist could undertake. you still get echoes of this in contemporary Zen students, who state that "book-learning" etc is wrong or inferior or second-best to unthinking, unlearned kensho, earned while sitting, which is the layman's version of the Mahakasyapa flower story. this, even though Zen/Chan has produced more wirtten material than any other tradition.
essentially, i have wondered whether this separation at the start made it easier for a range of other cultural forces to adopt the technique and re-purpose it.



d
DGA
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by DGA »

daelm wrote:
DGA wrote:....transmission, and also a tendency toward stripping away the "cultural trappings" of Zen practice to get to the REAL Buddhist practice, which is seated meditation. (of course this "stripping away" imperative is itself a cultural trapping, as is the emphasis on seated meditation, as is the universalism...) So yes, there is a historical precedent for contemporary mindfulness in the Zen of the beat years, say. More to the point, this is what normative Buddhism seems like in the US during the formative years of those who would go on to develop therapeutic mindfulness (Goleman, Kabat-Zinn, et al).
this is what i was inclined towards. in the broader argument about cultural trappings in general, it tends to get framed as a "western" thrust, whereas ion the early transmission of Zen, it was largely not. both explicitly and implicitly, the latter seeming necessary to sanitise some of the Japanese teachers' positions, the separation between the technique and the moral/epistemological framework was presented by Japanese teachers. in fact, generalising, in Zen, "western" teachers had to almost rediscover and re-integrate it. the foundational premise that they received was that the only authority that was valid, was that accrued by "sitting". from the point of view of their teachers, that premise was the necessary pre-requisite for claiming that war in the Emperor's name was the highest compassion a Buddhist could undertake. you still get echoes of this in contemporary Zen students, who state that "book-learning" etc is wrong or inferior or second-best to unthinking, unlearned kensho, earned while sitting, which is the layman's version of the Mahakasyapa flower story. this, even though Zen/Chan has produced more wirtten material than any other tradition.
Yes, Japanese teachers of the Meiji period and after, when "Westernizing" was the imperative. It's a semi-colonial logic at work there. If the modernizing West represented the present, and traditional Asia was the past (in the present), then the needful thing was to bring Buddhist practice and Japanese culture into the present, the now, in order to gain stature as a world power. This is a curious obverse to the generalization of meditation as a lay practice in Burma, which was a Burmese nationalist movement against British colonial power. It follows the same temporal logic (assuming the European center represents the present, and the Asian periphery lives to the present in a backward past), and enacts a similar outcome, but along a different path.
daelm
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by daelm »

daelm wrote:
daelm wrote:
DGA wrote:....transmission, and also a tendency toward stripping away the "cultural trappings" of Zen practice to get to the REAL Buddhist practice, which is seated meditation. (of course this "stripping away" imperative is itself a cultural trapping, as is the emphasis on seated meditation, as is the universalism...) So yes, there is a historical precedent for contemporary mindfulness in the Zen of the beat years, say. More to the point, this is what normative Buddhism seems like in the US during the formative years of those who would go on to develop therapeutic mindfulness (Goleman, Kabat-Zinn, et al).
this is what i was inclined towards. in the broader argument about cultural trappings in general, the attempt to remove thise tends to get framed as a "western" thrust, whereas in the early transmission of Zen, it was largely not on the side of the "Westerners". both explicitly and implicitly, the latter seeming necessary to sanitise some of the Japanese teachers' positions, the separation between the technique and the moral/epistemological framework was presented by Japanese teachers. in fact, generalising, in Zen, "western" teachers had to almost rediscover and re-integrate the context of Buddhism, and that has led to a flowering anew.

the foundational premise that they received though, via Suzuki and others, was that the only authority that was valid, was that accrued by "sitting". from the point of view of their teachers, that premise was the necessary pre-requisite for claiming that war in the Emperor's name was the highest compassion a Buddhist could undertake. you still get echoes of this in contemporary Zen students, who state that "book-learning" etc is wrong or inferior or second-best to unthinking, unlearned kensho, earned while sitting, which is the layman's version of the Mahakasyapa flower story. this, even though Zen/Chan has produced more wirtten material than any other tradition.
essentially, i have wondered whether this separation at the start made it easier for a range of other cultural forces to adopt the technique and re-purpose it.



d
reason i ask is that the "m-as-x" movement is significantly different to orthodox dharma in one key respect: properly contextualised, orthodox dharma is triage, not improvement, while all versions of the "m-as-x" movement are effectively optimisation. that makes sense, if, at the same time as a number of self-improvement themes are arising in the culture, a technique can be included shorn of its original context.



d
DGA
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by DGA »

daelm wrote:
essentially, i have wondered whether this separation at the start made it easier for a range of other cultural forces to adopt the technique and re-purpose it.
sure, but that assumes that corporate mindfulness is an adapted Buddhist technique. I'm not so confident it is, even though some of its advocates think it is. Why do I say this? I think mindfulness as stress relief emerged as a novel technique in response to the generalization of stress as a diagnostic category. it's a new disease; techniques emerged to address it, such as biofeedback and the relaxation response and the rest in the 1970s, which include techniques that are MBSR in all but name. enter "mindfulness," which was named by a psychologist entirely ignorant of Buddhism (Ellen Langer) just by observing stressed out people trying to attend to the emergence of novelty in time.

So your idea works at the discursive level, and there's some continuity there in the stories that are told about mindfulness by its advocates, but the Western Buddhist narrative of mindfulness has some holes in it when you look at the archive of therapeutic interventions of the time.
DGA
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by DGA »

daelm wrote:[

reason i ask is that the "m-as-x" movement is significantly different to orthodox dharma in one key respect: properly contextualised, orthodox dharma is triage, not improvement, while all versions of the "m-as-x" movement are effectively optimisation. that makes sense, if, at the same time as a number of self-improvement themes are arising in the culture, a technique can be included shorn of its original context.
Yes, I think that holds up. This is why mindfulness seems like it makes sense in the same category as a bunch of other completely unrelated practices, such as hatha yoga, martial arts, rolfing, and the rest as just another arrow in the quiver of generalized wellness.
daelm
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by daelm »

DGA wrote:/quote]

Yes, Japanese teachers of the Meiji period and after, when "Westernizing" was the imperative. It's a semi-colonial logic at work there. If the modernizing West represented the present, and traditional Asia was the past (in the present), then the needful thing was to bring Buddhist practice and Japanese culture into the present, the now, in order to gain stature as a world power. This is a curious obverse to the generalization of meditation as a lay practice in Burma, which was a Burmese nationalist movement against British colonial power. It follows the same temporal logic (assuming the European center represents the present, and the Asian periphery lives to the present in a backward past), and enacts a similar outcome, but along a different path.
this is a nice way of treating it. the "black ships" effect. basically. i think, with a lot of colonial studies, it's hard for us to really understand the impact that steel and power and the like had. and converts that that presumed modernity, like all converts, would have been evangelical.



d
daelm
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by daelm »

DGA wrote:
daelm wrote:[

reason i ask is that the "m-as-x" movement is significantly different to orthodox dharma in one key respect: properly contextualised, orthodox dharma is triage, not improvement, while all versions of the "m-as-x" movement are effectively optimisation. that makes sense, if, at the same time as a number of self-improvement themes are arising in the culture, a technique can be included shorn of its original context.
Yes, I think that holds up. This is why mindfulness seems like it makes sense in the same category as a bunch of other completely unrelated practices, such as hatha yoga, martial arts, rolfing, and the rest as just another arrow in the quiver of generalized wellness.
exactly! technique divorced from context.


d
daelm
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Re: Corporate "Mindfulness".

Post by daelm »

daelm wrote:
DGA wrote:
daelm wrote:[

reason i ask is that the "m-as-x" movement is significantly different to orthodox dharma in one key respect: properly contextualised, orthodox dharma is triage, not improvement, while all versions of the "m-as-x" movement are effectively optimisation. that makes sense, if, at the same time as a number of self-improvement themes are arising in the culture, a technique can be included shorn of its original context.
Yes, I think that holds up. This is why mindfulness seems like it makes sense in the same category as a bunch of other completely unrelated practices, such as hatha yoga, martial arts, rolfing, and the rest as just another arrow in the quiver of generalized wellness.
exactly! technique divorced from context.


d

and context would have accrued, from the Napoleon Hill school of life that manifests today as things like "The Secret".


d
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