Mondragon Part I

Notes on a visit to the Mondragon worker-owner cooperative system, by David & Lila Tresemer, September 2012 (www.MountainSeas.com.au and www.DavidAndLilaTresemer.com), PART I

These notes are intended as helpful for those considering alternate forms of shaping social initiatives in the world – how people work together to make something.

First off, credit is due to Georgia Kelly, leader of the Praxis Peace Institute in Sonoma, for putting together several groups of people to tour the facilities in Mondragon, Spain. We were on her fifth tour with 16 other people. She has done more than anyone to introduce the Mondragon principles and techniques to the West.

The question is: How can people come together to create a viable business that cares for the quadruple bottom line of a venture. These items are NOT in order of preference as they are all important.

1.     1. The success of the venture that awards those who set up the venture (the inventors/designers/entrepreneurs, who become the owners and stockholders) – OWNERS

2.     2. The care of the lives of the people who work there to make the products or services that go into the world (the workers) – WORKERS

3.     3. The care of the customer so that they receive something of high quality and safety – CUSTOMERS

4.     4. The care for the environment from which materials are taken to make the products and services, and to which materials are returned when the product has been used up (and also when there is waste in the process of manufacturing) – ENIVRONMENT

In our naiveté, Lila and I had assumed that forward thinking people would include all of those considerations, including others:

·      * good health through regular exercise such as yoga or morning eurythmy or Tai Chi

·      * an emphasis on participatory sports rather than on spectator sports

·     *  health through attention to nutrition including an emphasis on organic food free of pesticides and GMOs

·     *  a sense of the spiritual connections to the abundant earth and heavens that supports all of our activities

·      * gratitude for life expressed through ceremonies of the seasons

·      * and so on.

·      * One more: an ideal pictured by Rudolf Steiner about central Europe in the 19^th century – workers who at night practice the violin and join together in little ensembles for the sheer joy of music.

None of these are part of the Mondragon system or the culture of the area. These enlightened positions are as rare as elsewhere, with a bit more in the health area that we discuss further below. Indeed, the quadruple bottom line is not operative in ways that one can find elsewhere. The place where Mondragon puts its entire attention is on #2, and on smoothing the age-old tension between #1 and #2. Yes, they pay attention to #3, as any company desiring longevity would do, and to #4, as many companies do, but it’s not at the top of their list. They succeed in not valuing only #1 which is tearing the USA apart. They succeed in supporting actual human beings who do the work - #2. Well done for that.

In regular capitalist ventures, the emphasis has come to be more and more on profit, even at the cost of longevity of the initiative. The managers are made into owners through bonuses of stock options (the privilege to buy a stock at a specified low price) awarded to them by the Board of Directors (made up of high-level managers of other companies). Their efforts are to raise the price of the stock through whatever means available, often at the expense of #2, #3, and #4. Then they “exercise the option,” buying low and instantly selling high. At the largest corporations, the Chief Executive Officers earn in income many hundreds of times more than the lowest-paid line-workers. The salaries and the bonuses of cash and stock options have been gutting companies. The workers have been laid off and, as the experts say, “these jobs are not coming back.”

Consider a very different model. The 120 Mondragon cooperatives in several different business areas employ approximately 100,000 people. Each cooperative is run by a committee made of the workers. As they all stand to gain or lose by the decisions of the committee, the workers – whether management or line-workers – vote in the best interest of all. One person one vote. Managers make no more than 6 times what the line-worker makes.

And here is the unusual aspect of their model. Their highest goal in the above list of the quadruple bottom line is #2. Their job is to maintain employment for all of their members. Even if the company votes to take a pay cut across the board – workers and managers alike.

More story, and increasing details, in Part II.

Christ-Sophia - who or what are they?

Lila and David are offering a workshop:

Christ-Sophia Creation Myth, August 24, Friday, 5:30 PM to August 26, Sunday, 2:30 PM. Description and explanation below. To sign up, or for more information, contact Lila at LilaPlays - AT - gmail.com. $320 includes five meals and two nights accommodation.

Christ-Sophia Creation Myth
Lila and David are offering a sleep-over – an Exploration – from August 24 to 26 to create a short-term residential community with this theme. The title begs certain questions:
• Who or what is Christ?
• Who or what is Sophia?
• What is creation?
• What is myth?
Because of the many misunderstandings about these terms, we’d like to speak briefly about what they mean. We’ll start at the end and work backwards.
• What is myth?
The notion of myth has gotten a bad reputation lately as something visioned, something promised, yet false. According to the modern view, it’s an illusion. However, we see myth working in a different plane – it’s something that never happened, but is happening all the time. We will explore this conundrum more closely in our Exploration.
• What is creation?
“Where you are going” requires an understanding of “where you came from.” What is your origin? And the bigger question: Where do people originate? Where does the world originate?
• Who or what is Sophia?
Greek for feminine wisdom, we will explore the being and reality of Sophia. For this, our location surrounded by Nature at MorningStar house will be very helpful.
• Who or what is Christ?
For most people this is the most challenging term. Christianity, especially fundamentalist Christianity, has claimed exclusive privilege to answer this question. We disagree. To us, Christ cannot be defined so easily, and cannot be confined to a historical story (of Jesus) nor to quotes from the Christian Bible. More accessibly, Christ means light, and love – and we will work together in our Exploration to rediscover the meanings of those words too. This Exploration has nothing to do with convincing you of a particular dogma about Christ, but rather of re-opening routes of genuine personal experience to that being.
Our methods include living together because we will find that in the small actions of life await abundant opportunities to experience the Christ-Sophia Creation. We will read and enact aspects of the Gnostic Creation Story; we will create together direct experience (i.e.‘gnostic’) in Nature, with the Being of Sophia, and with the StarFire energy of Christos.  The key to this Time is that each of us creates the Seed of Anthropos (the Possible Human) through the balanced communion of Christ-Sophia within.

Venus Eclipse Video ~ How to Harness these Beautiful Energies!

Please Share This Video ~ and Enjoy this Venus Transit / Eclipse!

Meeting the Venus Eclipse of the Sun

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Meeting the Venus Eclipse of the Sun

There are ways to meet the opportunities of this event, methods that are valuable all the time, but especially now. I have written about this in my Venus Eclipse book, but here I give a summary. If it’s too brief, go to the book. The summary of the summary comes in step #5 below.

1.     All of our pictures of the world are powered by energy. Giordano Bruno termed these “erotic phantasms.” Eros – passion, desire, Venus! – motivate and energize phantasms – pictures of this-is-the-way-it-is, dreams, visualizations, ideas....

2.     Eros/Venus will be stimulated and made turbulent by the eclipse on June 5/6 (the exact time is less important as we are in this rare celestial event – by anticipation – right now, and will be for some months.) That restless eros will seek new images to empower.

3.     Marketers, especially of technological gadgets, have used and will use this undirected eros. Going-with-the-flow on your part accepts that the world will be imagined by corporate marketers.

4.     You can use that energy too by creating pictures of the ideal for yourself and for the world – not vague woo-woo pictures but rather very specific and detailed pictures of anything that arouses your interest.

5.     For example, with the situation at Fukushima still teetering on the edge of its largest explosion, you could imagine a that the explosion does not happen, that heroic scientists work out how to remove the fuels to a safe place, and that all species develop a capacity to learn from and transform radioactivity. In terms of the mythic images in the VenusEclipse book, this means envisioning the taming of the divine fire-bird to subdue its expressions on the earth.

6.     If you cannot go to new pictures – if the world as it you perceive it holds you in its thrall, then you can focus on that picture of how-things-are each night before sleeping. Look closely at the details, and hold it in your mind, for just a few minutes. Spiritual beings will take it up through the night and in the morning (or in a few days) you will have an insight about how to penetrate even the most difficult problems.

7.     In any case, take this opportunity to cultivate your relationship to ideals. Those imaginations will focus your desire – the restless eros of this time – in ways that will be healthy for you and for everyone else.

A good time to play Bach
A personal report on house concert near Hobart by Gotthard Killian on cello for a Bach cello suite and Danae Killian for Bach’s Goldberg Variations:
I was buoyed up by joy in many places, finding the complexities like tiny hallways down which I wandered – by force of the music and, of course, choosing to follow that force. So many notes and phrases were unexpected, taking me into new places that I had not forseen. This live music was most exhilarating. What remains with me are not notes or tones – there were too many of them – but rather intervals, no, more accurately the feeling of intervals, and of certain places along the route where I knew that I was being led not to the obvious but to the new. Afterwards, Danae mentioned to me that Bach cannot be seen as a child of his time, being even more modern than today, and I could see in this music why she would say this. I found out also that she plays the Goldberg variations every morning upon waking! When at the very end of the Goldberg variations, Gotthard joined with his cello, it gave a most touching picture of conversation, and it helped to pull me back from the hallways in the cosmos – it must have been the Saturn sphere – indeed, the Saturn of the concert lay exactly square to the Neptune at Bach’s death, and the Saturn at Bach’s death lay exactly square to the Neptune of the concert, showing a similarity of outer planets reaching into the Saturn sphere. Bach’s Death-Mercury was exactly opposite to the place of Mercury in the heavens at the concert, indicating a line of communication open to portray what Bach intended in his life. Overseeing all was the location of Jupiter at Bach’s death, in the middle of the Ram, exactly overhead, at the same location as the Sun at the Resurrection. From this we note themes, and opportunities, for a transmission through composer and through musician of spiritual realities.

Evolving relations to the stars.
I am finishing a new look for a new website on star wisdom. That is very exciting. It always takes far longer to do these things.... We've been at it two years.... And during that time everything has gotten better.
The newest is Tea with Your Mentor. I will explain that in a few days.
This post was merely to say that I've been working very hard, and we have something coming soon that will be a pleasure to everyone!

Mind-Body-Spirit Festival

I thought you might be interested in a recent experience that we’ve had: We decided to promote our new book, One-Two-ONE, and the DVD, Couple’s Illumination, both about relationships, by taking a tiny booth (7 feet by 7 feet) at a large public trade fair — huge showroom, ceilings 40 feet high, 120 booths, a special room with 50 psychics at 50 square tables (with a chair for the client – the line formed quickly each morning to sign up for these readings of all sorts), clairvoyants with microphones on one of three stages, purveyors of fine chocolate, aura jewelry, exercise equipment, etc., all sorts of loosely connected things and services, also Scientology and aura photographs! Over four days, 17,000+ people came through. It was exhausting and fascinating to watch all the different kinds of people. We put up a sign that said “Free Brief Relationship Tune-Up,” and had dozens of people come in for this little exercise (“In Whose Name”) from our book – totally fun, and we think very useful to many. We met some great people, and in the end, we don’t think we’ll ever do that again. Our two back-ups got sick, so we were there all day every day. We might help out with such a venture in the future, but not do it all day every day. We gave two talks on two different stages, well attended, and that felt positive.
On another note, we are singing a lot – in a 40-person come-one-come-all choir that sings some simple stuff (Beatles, even Cole Porter) as well as some complicated four-part pieces, also in a nine-person a capella group with much more complicated material, and Lila and I are singing together duets with our music teacher. So we sing to the mountain, who is our tutor for this life-stage.
Lila is writing as am I, one of the means whereby we open to the creativity flowing so freely here.