Learning from a Challenge

The America's Giving Challenge ended yesterday, with the cause TPRF: Food for People coming in second place out of almost 8,000 Causes entered, and raising about $250,000 from thousands of small contributions in less than 15 days. I had the opportunity to be a part of organizing this remarkable effort. After this experience, I have never appreciated Maharaji more. On its own small scale, the process helped me to recognize another of his qualities worthy of passionate admiration.

The Challenge did not follow the usual fundraising campaign template. It was about the number of donations, not the amount, and the rules allowed one daily donation from each contributor. Most of us, including TPRF supporters, have received many fundraising requests. The familiar pattern is an appeal for one contribution that should be as large as possible, or perhaps a commitment to regular monthly support. This Challenge presented something completely different and very unfamiliar.

People tend to see what they expect to see. Breaking through a familiar pattern to convey a new idea takes time, patience, and persistence, even with one person. We wanted to reach thousands. At first, there were moments when I wanted to shout at people, to shake them and say, "Don't you get it?!" But shouting and shaking is not effective. It's about that patient, persistent effort, and about hundreds and thousands of individual realizations, each happening in its own time, in its own way.

Through every channel we had, we kept up a continuous stream of messages that conveyed the same information in different ways, always trying to be positive and encouraging, and often with a light touch. As the campaign went on, the lights went on, one by one, for more and more people, and the daily support built steadily, to the point where we had well over 2,000 individual contributions on the last day, and a remarkable overall achievement of second place.

When I thought about this, I remembered that Maharaji has said something very similar about efforts to convey his message -- that he tells us the same thing, again and again, but keeps finding different ways to say it, so that we can, individually and in our own time, begin to really get the message.

I know how difficult it was for me to overcome my own impatience, and to keep channeling the passion I felt about the potential of this Challenge into patient, positive effort. How challenging must it be for Maharaji, who must also want to shake us sometimes, to channel his passion for the human potential that he sees into the patient, persistent effort he has been making for so many years? Somehow he does it, never losing the passion, the kindness, and the hope that people will understand more and more of what he has to say.

No one sees more clearly than he does, that the only thing that really matters is the understanding of individual human beings, which comes about one by one. No one understands better than he does how one drop after another can become a mighty river. I got a glimpse of this in the achievement of the Challenge that has helped me see just a little more of the vision behind what he is doing. That little bit I've seen makes me proud to count myself as one of his passionate admirers. We had so much fun, we did so much good, with the united effort of a few thousand people over a few days to make one little contribution every day. How much fun, and how much good, does he envision for our human potential? It's something I can learn more about every day, and I hope I live long enough to learn a lot more.