More than a name, logo or "iconic" CEO, a brand is a place in the heart where employees, investors, suppliers--and Conscious Consumers--meet to tell a company's story, says brand guru Elsie Maio. "When brand reveals authenticity, values and humanity's drive towards consciousness, it's a powerful strategic advantage."

Welcome to the Dawn of Conscious Capitalism--a popular, decentralized, broad-based crusade to heal the excesses of capitalism with transcendent human values. Every day Conscious Capitalism wins new converts in the paneled boardrooms of global business.... Equally important, the actions millions of us take, "from the supermarket to the stock market," are drafting a more wholistic brand of free enterprise which will forever outshine the Chicago School--and win someone somewhere a brand-new Nobel Prize.

Spirituality is today's greatest megatrend, but where is it taking us? What's the future of our compelling interest in all things spiritual? To discover the answer, we must first clear up a common misunderstanding about the spiritual path.

Most of us harbor the belief--reenforced in the media--that a passion for the "inner life" takes us away from the world, rendering us self-obsessed, if not downright selfish.

Well, the truth is: it does. But only at first. During the journey's initial introspective chapter, many instinctively withdraw from the daily grind of modern life. Why? Because, seekers grow more sensitive and too much stress will overwhelm the fresh, emerging spiritual consciousness.

Often we detach in order to heal: as we fill with Spirit, we release a lot of old emotional baggage, find peace, discover a new inner voice--and that requires a fair amount of energy. When my own life-long spiritual journey intensified in 1994, I shut off the TV for two years and rarely read newspapers. Good-bye violence, cynicism, TV commercials. Hello silence, meditation and hearing myself think.

But later the spiral path of Spirit takes a different turn and we plunge into an exciting new phase: our return to the world. Now regenerated, we come back to society and service. That is exactly what millions of people--investors, consumers, managers--and the business leaders you'll meet in this chapter are up to--living their spirituality day-to-day.