A small group of excited children arrived at Pink House, their eyes sparkling with anticipation. "Do you have ice cream for us?" they asked eagerly. With a twinkle in our eye, we replied, "We do, but only if you bring all your sisters, brothers, and friends."

The children, their faces lighting up with excitement, scattered in all directions, rounding up their siblings and playmates. Soon, a bustling crowd gathered at Pink House, each child eager to claim their ice cream reward.

"Did you bring everyone?" we asked, a mischievous grin spreading across our faces. A chorus of excited voices confirmed that some friends were still on their way. "Well, let's wait for them!" we replied, the anticipation building.

As the last straggler arrived, the air was filled with excitement. One by one, each child received a delicious ice cream cone, their joy palpable. The once quiet afternoon at Pink House was now a symphony of laughter, chatter, and the occasional ice cream drip.

This simple act of kindness sparked a tradition that continues to bring joy to countless children at Pink House on Bohol island!

Trusteeship — questions from my students and my answers

 Q. Can you explain how the idea of trusteeship can function in a practical way in our very imperfect world? It seems to me that everywhere people look to their own interest so that there must be policies that redistribute wealth and income to fight that tendency.

A. When you talk about 'a practical way' do you not assume that the fundamental nature of our economic organization can not change?

Q. I don't see any evidence that there is a natural progression towards sharing so I say that the redistribution must take place by the use of rules and regulations.

A. And yet we can not begin to talk about a new way of living or organizing ourselves until we do two things. Firstly, we must accept that our old ways of thinking have not worked and will not work in the future. Secondly, we must accept that each of us must go through a period of intense soul-searching, that society itself must go through such an intense period of soul-searching. What will result from that is a very different way of being and living and thinking about things.

Q. You do not accept the evidence of what is as the basis of the formulation of your new policies.

A. Not only that, I do not accept that the way things are are a reflection of human proclivities let alone human potential. The fact is that the reality that you point to me is the result of a profound splitting of the human being. When people are no longer whole their organization, their foundations, their very lives are no longer whole. What is simply points to the fact that we are split. Surely that can not be the basis of understanding wholeness.

Q. Would trusteeship, the idea that each may earn what they want to as well as keep it as long as they don't believe that they own that wealth but accept that they are simply trustees of that wealth provide a solid and sustainable basis to our economics?

A. Which economics are you talking about? If you plan to simply tack on this idea of trusteeship to all your other ideas such as self-interest, survival of the fittest, and so on that would be no firm basis for trusteeship.

Q. Then what is needed? What about human rights?

A. What is needed is a complete reinvention of the human being in its original and natural form as someone who is deeply connected to his inner voice, inter-relates meaningfully with others based on tenderness and duty rather than demanding of rights, and strives to be whole in all spheres of life. Such a renewed human being will be aware of many of his or her God-given talents, develop them fully with the cooperation of others, in turn helping others to realize themselves. The rights that you are talking about come about as a result of an integrated, whole life. They are not the starting point.

Q. Can this change happen in our lifetime?

A. It can happen in the blink of an eye. Right now, right this moment pledge to be kind, pledge to be whole, to live and work for universal oneness. Let go of fear, do your work, and don't always be looking to see if your rewards are on their way. Do this now and your life changes now! If you assert that life changes only when the results, the rewards come, you misunderstand the purpose of life. In Gandhiji's words, ours is simply to "do or die," and as the bhagavad gita says, "you are entitled to your work but not to the fruits of the work."

Return to joy & laughter—ICE CREAM @ PINK HOUSE :)

 “I have never tasted ice cream. I guess ice cream is one of those things that are beyond imagination.” —Anne of Green Gables, 1908.

November 18 2022 is the third anniversary of Pink House. Our theme this year is a return to joy and laughter—with ICE CREAM! We plan to celebrate Christmas at Pink House with an ice cream party around the Pink House koi meditation pond and on the street just outside Pink House for kids of all ages! Many children in our midst, like Anne a hundred years ago, have yet to taste ice cream.

We are planning a gigantic ice cream street party for the neighborhood kids. We will celebrate the end of lockdowns, a return to school, and a return of basketball with ICE CREAM, cup cakes and other treats! We invite you all to become part of the Pink House Third Anniversary story!

Pink House on Bohol island, Philippines, is our home, community store, meditation center / guest-house, with our public koi meditation pond acting as a community hub with the idea of visitors and locals mingling in this mix.

We never ‘contract out’ work. All work is performed by family members who are paid living wages and live with us, eat with us, and relax & laugh with us at the end of each long working day.

What your support means to us

Your donation means so much to us! It will help us continue our dream of Pink House into its fourth year of existence! Like Anne from the childhood classic Anne of Green Gables, many children in our midst have yet to taste ice cream—your support will make that which is “beyond imagination” a tasty, lived possibility!

Our gratitude for your support

We are so excited for you to participate in our Pink House dream in absolutely any way you can. We would truly be very grateful for your support!

Pink House is an experiment in integration; an experiment in creating interrelationships and a return to reciprocity.

We invite all ice cream lovers—the entire community of neighbors and all of you into our Pink House fold!

November 18 2022 is the third anniversary of Pink House. We invite you all to become part of the Pink House Third Anniversary story!

THANK YOU FOR HELPING US CONTINUE OUR PINK HOUSE DREAM INTO ANOTHER YEAR!

PS: Belle, the Pink House Siberian Husky, recommends the Orange Popsicle ;) (video testimony below)

Simple Traditions

 Simple Traditions at Pink House

#1: Commensalism—When we eat at the large round wooden dinner tables at Pink House we practice commensalism, that is, sharing a meal together with no phones or other distractions at the table. 

Commensalism, derived from the Latin commensalis, means sharing a meal together with the emphasis on human togetherness and interaction (co together; mensa table)

Abhay and Jane

Pink House Second Anniversary

Site of the future first free Children’s Book Library located next to the koi meditation pond within the Pink House complex. 

Dear friends and supporters of Pink House,

Our second anniversary campaign is now underway. 

As always, we set no dollar goal nor minimums. 

After restoring the roof (Typhoon Rai blew whole sections of it miles away) we will use the rest of the funds raised to start building the first Children’s Book Library on our island. This free public library is to be located next to the koi meditation pond within the Pink House complex. 

We see each of your contributions as true blessings sent to us most often from thousands of miles away! 

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!

Abhay and Jane

Pink House

Philippines

December 2021

https://gofund.me/4a691d94

Christmas = home

“All time, past, present and future, is contained in the now." I heard the philosopher J. Krishnamurti say these words in Bombay in 1985. They were to be among his last words. Soon after, he was dead.

If we acknowledge that time is circular rather than linear, we can allow Tolstoy's wise hermit from The Three Questions (1903) to explain Krishnamurti’s beautiful, enigmatic words thus: "Remember then: there is only one time that is important - Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power."

Gandhi expressed the same idea as “means are the ends.” In other words, the why is contained in the how.

In answering the how we automatically answer the why.

However, pursuing the why, as we have in the West for the last two hundred and fifty years, makes us lose sight of the how. When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western Civilization he replied that it would be a good idea.

In Dickens’ great story, the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future take Ebenezer Scrooge on journeys through time and space. These journeys are journeys into Scrooge’s own life, past, present, and future. A journey into consciousness.

When Scrooge’s travels are over, it is Christmas day.

I spent the last four Christmases in the Philippines, a deeply religious traditional society. After Krista died I threw myself into community-building activities at Pink House out on our island. Each Christmas in the Philippines reminded me that all I knew was how, and that if I followed the how the why would be contained in it. 

How we celebrate Christmas (or any religious holiday) is far more important than why we do so. Christmas (or any religious holiday) Is recognized by our consciousness as home. 

Wishing all my friends near and far a happy and enlightening Christmas. May you all make it home. 

Christmas 2021

Understanding Pink House

 Dear friends of Pink House

Pink House is a lifelong and personal project of decolonization from the heart.

The four-hundred year old legacy of economics is the breaking down of reciprocal (human-animal) relationships and their replacement with market (impersonal-material) relationships. Our dream for Pink House is to disrupt market relationships and rebuild reciprocity in our community of five-hundred households. 

To this end, Pink House is a decolonized public space. Our public koi meditation pond attracts neighbors of all ages to come together and contemplate the growing koi—silver, gold, black, orange, and white. Our planned yoga and meditation center would expand the public space inwards into our own home as we share living space, a ‘dirty’ kitchen, and eventually rooms that will act as guesthouse rooms for international visitors sharing our vision and values. 

Pink Store, which is a part of Pink House, is a decolonized community convenience store. We have replaced the maximum-profit mandate of economics with the idea of subsistence-profit, which we define as just enough to ‘buy our rice,’ i.e. to live and love by. As the pandemic rages on, Pink Store has implemented Rice Now—a policy of giving rice to any neighbor who asks for it. 

Abhay

Pink House

Bohol island

Philippines

30 April 2021

Pink House First Anniversary

 “Pink House on Bohol island, Philippines, is our home, community store, future yoga & meditation center / guest-house, with our public koi meditation pond acting as a community hub with the idea of visitors and locals mingling in this mix.”

“We never ‘contract out’ work. All work is performed by family members who are paid living wages and live with us, eat with us, and relax & laugh with us at the end of each long working day.”

“November 18 2020 is the first anniversary of Pink House. We invite you all to become part of the Pink House First Anniversary story!”

Backstory: loss and renewal

I am an Indian-American writer, performer, Gandhian economist, yoga/meditation teacher for over thirty years. 

After twenty-seven years of marriage I lost my beloved wife Krista to cancer but a year later I found my new soul mate. 

When Krista died I moved to Bohol, a small and beautiful island in the Philippines that Krista and I had discovered together and fallen in love with. After a while I met Jane, a young woman from the island and a single mother. Together, we dreamed up a new dream which we call Pink House! 

What is Pink House?

Last year Jane and I bought an old house together with a small community store located within the house. Our home, Pink House, is in our dreams also an international yoga & meditation center of which I am the Master. 

Our plan was to buy the house, open a community store, and create a guest-house / yoga & meditation center with a koi pond as a community hub with the idea of visitors and locals mingling in this mix. We’ve already accomplished many of these goals! 

Pink House has been our home for a year now. During this first year we’ve opened Pink Store, our community store serving over five-hundred neighbors. Our koi meditation pond is open and attracts both children and adults who love to contemplate the growing koi, silver, orange, pink, & black, in the pond.

We are amazed and grateful that we’ve come this far!

Who will benefit from this campaign?

Your donations will be paid directly to us (into my bank account in the US) and will help us realize the completion of our Pink House dreams (detailed below). 

What will the funds be used for?

As we look forward to our second year in Pink House we need your help! Our next project is making the house more livable and getting the old house ready to become a guest-house / yoga & meditation center by fixing the roof, repairing the community kitchen and refurbishing five bedrooms badly in need of repair. 

How soon are the funds needed and when will they be spent?

The funds are needed by the end of this year (to make plans and hire workers) and will be used in the first and second quarters of 2021 in the following order:

Store roof (leaking badly)

House roof (also leaking badly)

Yoga & Meditation roof deck (wooden floor is rotten) 

Bedroom 1-2 (flooring, walls, windows)

Bedroom 3-4 (flooring, walls, windows)

Bedroom 5 (flooring, walls, windows)

Repair the community kitchen (wood-burning stove, chimney, ceiling) 

A small diesel truck for store and guest-house use

With the money raised by this campaign we will work our way down the list as far as the funds raised will allow us. We never ‘contract out’ work. All work is performed by family members who are paid living wages and live with us, eat with us, and relax & laugh with us at the end of each long working day. 

What this support means to us

Your donation will help us continue our dream of Pink House into its second year of existence as we realize key elements (both new and old) of our shared dream:

New elements:

An East-West community yoga & meditation center with me serving as its first Master

Guesthouse for visitors (local and international) to the yoga & meditation center

Old elements renewed:

A roof for our home and store that no longer leaks

Pleasant rooms equipped with simple comforts

A yoga & meditation roof deck strong enough to sustain use by visitors and locals

A working community kitchen

Our gratitude for your support

We are so very  excited for you to participate in our Pink House dream in absolutely any way you can. We would truly be very grateful for your support! 

There is no dollar minimum and we have absolutely no dollar goal in mind!

Instead, this campaign is conducted in the spirit of creating a Pink House ‘intentional community’ inclusive of everyone near and far, of everyone regardless of race, gender, or national origin. 

In this spirit all donations, however small or large, are gratefully accepted as blessings!

The Pandemic

The Pandemic has caused hardship and massive unemployment in our community and so it is even more important for us to keep Pink Store open and our prices low so that neighbors can afford essentials. For example, one of our regulars is a young mother who told us that she needed diapers for her baby on a day when we were closed (we had a funeral to attend) and went to all the other stores in the neighborhood. They all charge as much for a single diaper as we charge for an entire packet of twelve (a 12-pack)! She was so relieved to see us open the next day.  We also have a steady stream of visitors to the koi meditation pond who find great enjoyment and renewal of spirit from being in a peaceful, healing space that is free and open to the public. 

As the community emerges from the Pandemic we are eager to repair or replace the leaking roof and open our yoga & meditation center / attached guest-house as further ways of healing the mind, body & spirit of locals and international visitors alike. 

Pink House is an experiment in integration; an experiment in creating interrelationships between the dense and the subtle. 

Commerce, the most material and hence the densest of human activities, relates in the ancient Indian yogic tradition of my ancestors with red, the first chakra or energy point. Red is energy, pure and undiluted. It is the material building block of a society. 

We see Pink Store as the spiritual incarnation of commerce—truly a community convenience store, with everything from rice to milk, pencils to razor blades, and of course, our bestseller—ice cream! Being the only vendor of ice cream in the neighborhood means that we are visited at all hours of the day by happy families with laughing children, and sell out as soon as we replenish our stock. 

While Pink Store relates to the lowest, densest chakras, or energy points, in the ancient yogic traditions, the public koi meditation pond and our future yoga & meditation center (as well as guest-house) at Pink House relates to the highest, most subtle chakras: silver, purple, pink, and violet, that in the yogic tradition correspond to the highest states of consciousness. Yoga & meditation, in my background and tradition, are the oldest forms of relationship-builders in the realm of the subtle. They are my offering of love to the world. 

By combining an affordable community convenience store and a yoga & meditation center under one roof, Pink House is an experiment in integration; an experiment in creating interrelationships between the dense and the subtle leading to shanti, or peace, one loving-healing relationship at a time. 

We invite all ice cream and koi fish pond lovers—the entire community of neighbors and all of you into our Pink House fold!

November 18 2020 is the first anniversary of Pink House. We invite you all to become part of the Pink House First Anniversary story!

THANK YOU FOR HELPING US CONTINUE OUR PINK HOUSE DREAM INTO YEAR TWO!

ICE CREAM!

 As for Pink House, this year Jane and I used our savings meant for Christmas presents for each other and our family and friends to host a great ice cream giveaway at midnight Christmas Eve and it was truly beautiful. 

Jane opened the store at midnight and asked the throng of kids outside, “Who wants ice cream?” 

All the kids froze midplay as in the children's game. 

"For free."

I can honestly report that for three whole seconds the kids' bodies stayed frozen while their faces changed from lack of comprehension to disbelief to utter joy for I was watching them from the Pink House terrace and gesturing a hearty invitation to them. 

And then the mad rush was a pleasure to behold! 

Soon the street was full of lauging kids (and we soon invited the eager-faced grown-up ‘kids-at-heart’ who were watching) squeaking loudly to their friends up and down the hills, "iiiice cream!!!!"

Abhay

Wealth and illth

 

Dear friends

In the realm of economics the only distinction that matters is between that which is used and that which is not used. What is used is wealth. What is not used is negative wealth, or what John Ruskin called illth. 

One of the reasons we find ourselves in a world that is in crisis is because the world's illth, the unused portion of the stuff of the world far outweighs what is actually used. 

Today illth, or negative wealth, far outweighs wealth itself and creates an ever increasing burden on life. 

None of the traditional distinctions between necessities and luxuries, capital and consumption goods, small and big scale of operations address this essential matter raised by Ruskin. All that matters is that everything we have we must use. 

Gandhi said, "If you use it you should keep it." And it follows from that that if you don't use it you should give it away. All the illth or negative wealth of the world can turn into wealth simply by people keeping what they use and giving everything else away. 

Contrary to a key tenet of modern economics, freedom is not the ability to consume and hoard freely. True freedom is net wealth, or

True Freedom = Wealth minus Illth

True freedom is in using everything that we own and giving away what we don't use, or

Hoarding = 0

One of my student projects in my economics classes involved making an inventory of all the wealth and illth that the student possessed and after due thought organizing a giveaway of their illth. 

My students uniformly reported feeling lighter and happier with their purposeful actions, and their illth went back into circulation, turning into wealth. 

Wealth, like blood, is of no use until it circulates. 

Abhay

Pink House

Bohol island

Philippines