INKtalks

Simon Lewis: One Year Post-INK

Feb 29th, 2012 4 Comments

To quote from my Introduction to Rise and Shine, I wrote it, “…with the information I used to achieve my recovery, in order to share the knowledge that I wish someone had given me.”

But after publication of my inspirational memoir, and as is true with most new books, there was almost no publicity for it. Connie Martinson, member of the National Book Critics Circle and host of Connie Martinson Talks Books on local public television, recognized its merit and interviewed me. There was praise on a couple of blogs and newspaper websites. But my goal for Rise and Shine—to reach and inspire people with the possibilities of our minds, bodies and souls—fast faded before the reality that I had little access to media or the Internet, beyond websites I might create but few would find. The barriers seemed insurmountable, my book and its message of hope destined for obscurity.

Then, Lakshmi Pratury read my book, and came to LA to meet me for a lunch I’ll never forget. She enthusiastically invited me to the INK Conference, to talk about the role that technology played in my recovery, to show science-based treatments designed to yield measurable and repeatable results, that are not widely known or available.

With Lakshmi’s invitation, everything changes, bringing my ideas to a world forum for the first time. TED honors my INK talk with upload to TED.com, and Deepak Chopra invites me to his Foundation’s Sages and Scientists Symposium, with first reactions from children:

Dear Simon, I really enjoyed your talk! I am really inspired. I learned so much. Thank you so much! K. (Age 13)

And adults alike:

Please keep telling your story. It transforms all of us! T.

Almost two hundred comments post from the TED Community, with volunteers translating my talk into many languages, and hundreds of thousands finding it at TED.com, the INK Community, and Internet sites around the world.

Because knowledge in the medical world tends not to flow but instead pools around centers of excellence, and because I wrote Rise and Shine to release some of that information, INK and TED’s online audience inspire me to create a unique book website to illustrate some of its technologies and ideas: to add to the information in my talk and my book.

To build the site, I work with clinicians and others, who generously provide annotated 3-D reconstructions and PowerPoint presentations about our brains, our teeth and jaws, our pelvis and feet, to show the power and beauty of technology to those in search of the hidden path to self-knowledge.

It’s because of INK and TED that people can find my website, and thousands now browse it from every continent, and state in the USA.

More support, and a chance to interact directly with people with questions about my ideas, comes when TED enables me to offer an online Conversation on my topic, How do we make the most of our Consciousness?

This is scheduled for two hours and extends for two days because so many participate, from countries including India, the USA, South Korea and China. A TED viewer and reader of Rise and Shine is inspired to rise at 2:00 AM in Singapore to participate.

Another viewer and reader recommends my book to a journalist, to whom I give more materials and interviews for The Atavist, so I can use that online magazine’s multimedia capabilities in combination with my talk and book, to communicate aspects of consciousness from multiple perspectives.

Following this, I’m interviewed on National Public Radio’s Snap Judgment and KCRW’s Unfictional and The Business, available on SoundCloud or my website.

Simon Lewis with a fan from Malaysia

Simon Lewis in a handmade, pure silk batik shirt from Malaysia

Word continues to spread. A viewer of my INK talk on TED, and then reader of Rise and Shine, flies from his home in Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles to ask questions about my book and discuss a speaking tour in the Far East, for he feels its ideas are so relevant in Malaysia.

Another reader in Switzerland who found Rise and Shine only because of my talk at INK and TED is so interested by my book’s ideas that he just posted seven chosen paragraphs from it to a support forum of which he’s a member for their discussion, and wishes I would visit to speak and answer questions.

In another INK and TED connection, LA Philharmonic first violin and TED Senior Fellow Robert Vijay Gupta who presented at INK2011, feels so passionately about Rise and Shine and its message of hope about music and the mind that he donates a beautiful performance at my most recent Book Talk at Westwood Library.

Simon Lewis with a reader at the Westwood Library (photo: Maya Dinan)

INK2011 Speaker Robert Gupta plays at the book talk in Westwood (photo: Maya Dinan)

I’ve come to understand that we have the tools to develop a coherent program that optimizes learning from infancy to old age, and at this Book Talk I shared my goal to start a nonprofit to conduct a long-term international study, to explore new approaches to the processes of learning, to see how many in society may benefit from treatments and protocols I describe in Rise and Shine, that changed my mind and changed my life.

It’s been a busy first year since INK. My quest to give people more ideas beyond my talk continues. It’s a challenge each day to find advocates to continue my efforts to reach people, and the support of the INK and TED Community over the last year—including this blog—makes a world of difference. I feel so very fortunate to be offered these chances, on this journey that began with my book about a single shared moment in my life, and that continues through the INK and TED Community around the world.

Thank you all.

By Simon Lewis, INK2010 Speaker and author of Rise and Shine

Los Angeles

To share comments about Rise and Shine, please visit its Amazon page or Barnes & Noble page.

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It’s all about the PEOPLE

Dec 29th, 2010 Leave a comment

What do you do when curtains come down on a great show? There is sadness that it’s all over too soon. You comfort yourself you will be there again and get back to life and living, carrying those little ‘soul-uplifting’ moments with you forever. There is so much and more. And we are not talking about the year that will just pass us by.

When we took our bow on the last day of the first-ever INK Conference, in association with TED, this December 12, we felt all of the above, resolving at the same time to come back better and stronger.

It is now more than 10 days since we sat mesmerized listening to so many untold stories, tapped to the beats of beautiful music, or shed a few quiet tears hearing about loss and redemption, love and longing — all on the INK stage. In such a context, distance, as they say, makes one look back on things with a fonder heart. The out-of-moment state as opposed to the in-the-moment one. And the one thing that stands out about an experience like INK is the people who populate it.

The people who tell a story, share an idea, show a new way to look at an old idea – all those up on the stage. Then there are people who make up the audience — the banker, the singer, the entrepreneur, the CEO, the scientist, the artist, the conference junkie, the industrialist, the novelist and the list can go on. These are people who also have their own incredible stories to tell, and could well be sharing the limelight. There’s no way then of dividing INK people into separate categories – some who only talk and some who only listen.

As an INK attendee remarked on the second day, “One will get to hear the Speaker Talks once they are online anyway, but what I am looking forward to at INK is meeting so many people from such diverse backgrounds.”

Rekha Menon, executive director at Accenture and an INK attendee, called the INK experience “INK-credible” and termed it as her “Brain feed.”

A student volunteer at INK was not just a student studying to get a degree, she was an entrepreneur as well.  Sitting under the warm sun with the breeze determined to keep blowing away the empty water bottles from the table, Min Xuan Lee was having a quiet lunch on the last day of INK with her other volunteer friends, happy that all the running around in her role, was worth it. She talked about ‘Playmoolah’ (‘The best ‘real’ way to teach children about money’) which she has co-founded. “We teach little children to value money and how saving is important,” she shared animatedly.

While reviewing his INK experience, attendee Nicholas Foo, who is an assistant manager at the Singapore Tourist Board, wrote in his blog, “I had the fortune of hanging out with the world’s youngest headmaster, a 14-year-old computer animator and a child prodigy. And then I look at myself, all 25 years of it, and asked myself, what have I done and what am I going to do? It was these same 2 questions I stuck on my hostel wall whilst in university. Nearly everyone there (at INK), even those in the audience, had created or started something or another; a social enterprise, a company, an NGO…I’ve started nothing more than a blog.”

Nicholas is just being humble. He can any day make a very good stand-up artiste, as was witnessed by many on the second evening dinner. Nicholas took up the challenge of giving a five minute talk in an Indian accent, and the entire gathering at the amphitheatre was in splits.

Most people at INK carried more than one kind of business card. The businessman who also paints, the scientist who aspires to be a novelist, the writer who runs marathons…you get the drift.

As a news report in a daily put it, “It (INK) also made for interesting people-watching.” True, yet not the whole truth. True, because there were interesting people you could exchange more than a polite hello with during breaks, with say someone like Ralph Simon, founder of the first mobile ring tone company.  Yet not the whole truth. Because at INK it is difficult to just be a curious bystander. You cannot leave it without carrying away a part of it with you. INK is like a campfire site to gather around, listen and exchange stories that make our lives richer and more vibrant.

Dipti Nair