The mode of goodness obviously sounds like the best doesn’t it? The mode of goodness is the most rare. Unfortunately it is not the mode that affects us the most because we’ve almost eliminated it from our lives.
Nature is in the mode of goodness. When you go into nature you feel a certain influence. You feel more calm and peaceful, beauty is all around and that beauty inspires you. All the agitations and so on subside; they are reduced due to this influence. It is just automatic, if you just walk to a park in the middle of the city, it’s a different world inside the park.
It is interesting that Japan has the highest stress level of any country in the world. They work, I mean these guys they are just crazy, they just work and it kills them. They even have a word in the Japanese vocabulary, this word means “died by work”, “death by work”. One word means “death by work”. What happened to him? Death by work.
Of course this is not a good thing, these big companies started seeing they’ve got a big problem – Toyota, Sony, etc. So they went to some scientists and asked what are we going to do about this? People are dying and productivity is not as good.
They started doing research. They took subjects and wired them up with electrodes to the brain, the blood pressure and the heart rate to measure stress levels. They completed all these tests and then they took them to take a walk in nature for 45 minutes to 1 hour and took the tests again. All these problems were greatly reduced, “Aha, we have a better solution here.”
So they actually developed this system, called “nature bathing”. The companies then set up “nature bathing” courses. Ok, you go and sit by this waterfall for 15 minutes, you sit and lean up against this tree for 10 minutes and you lay down in this meadow and look at the sky for 5 minutes. Yes, they have this course and as a result this whole problem is much better.
Many of these big companies require their workers to do this every day, once or twice a day during work. You stop work, you do this, come back to work, productivity increases, less funerals to go to and everything is better. Why, because of the influence of the mode of goodness, that’s all.