The knowledge of the Spirit is the true secret of creativity, leadership and happiness. It is spiritual intelligence that makes an ordinary person a genius. When a genius loses his spiritual intelligence, he becomes quite ordinary.
If integrity is considered a virtue, it may be because most people lack integrity. Also, as only a few succeed in their pursuits, some may link failure with a lack of integrity. But this is not fully true. When you reason it out, you might conclude that honest people are more likely to fail and the dishonest rise faster.
The mystery of the world is revealed only to the person who can look upon the material world with his physical eyes and simultaneously has the spiritual vision necessary to see the unseen spiritual world. One who knows both Matter and Spirit is thus the true knower, and is a spiritually intelligent being.
As per the Indian philosophy of the Upanishads, the source of evil is one’s ego-sense –Ahankara—which differentiates oneself from the other selves. A person, who visualizes himself independent of others, tries to guard or please himself at the cost of others. Evil is thus the tendency of a person to live a life that is not ‘in harmony’ with the rest of the world, but ‘in opposition’ to it or at best ‘in indifference’ to it. The good is to discover the unity in the diversity of ‘all selves’ and beings. Once unity in diversity is realized, every being becomes our own self and good deeds follow automatically
It is said in the Upanishads: ‘I am the Universe.’ If you ask a hundred people as to how they find the world, they are all likely to give different answers. For some, the world is beautiful and the people are good, while for others, the world is extremely bad, and the people are treacherous and sinful. Why the same world is different for different people? It is so, because the outer world is the projection of our inner world. Therefore, the only way to improve the world outside is to improve the world within. While we may not have any control over the outside world, we can change our world within and thus change the world outside.
The purpose of evil is to complement the good. If there is no hatred in this world, there can’t be any love too. While love is a positive emotion, hatred is a negative emotion. Yet the feeling of love can’t exist in a person without invoking hatred. The more you are capable of loving, the more you are capable of hating, since the source of love and hatred is the same – passion. A man without passion can experience neither love nor hatred.
Everything in this world seems to be created in pairs. If there is a man, there is a woman—in almost equal numbers. In the same way, there is pleasure with pain, love with hatred, wisdom with ignorance, passion with repulsion, ecstasy with depression, and so on. The world seems to have been divided into two attributes—good and evil. Even God seems to be divided--God Himself and His counterpart—the Devil.
The key to a good life is to balance the good and evil rather than trying to get rid of all evils because if you get rid of all your evils, you would also lose all your desire and ability to do good. In other words, you become neutral like neutron and become useless for the self and the society.
People falling in love for one reason may fall out of love due to another reason. However, if faith or trust is the basis of love, it does not break easily. Often people use all their reasoning to understand each other and even live together for years to satisfy themselves that they are in love. However, marriages based on such logical love, the love based on reason, do not last long. Quite to the contrary, marriages where the partners do not even know each other, survive for life—being based on mutual trust and faith.
All great leaders are known to have faith. They first develop faith in themselves, which means they connect their body, mind and intellect with their soul. They also connect their soul with the Universal Soul where all souls of the world are connected with each other. Leadership is thus a spiritual quality that comes from faith and trust.
The most interesting aspect of leadership is that it cannot be predicted. All great leaders had been quite ordinary in their early years. It was only when they became leaders that people started recognising them as leaders.It is difficult to identify specific qualities that make a leader. However, when leaders emerge, people are inclined to point out their leadership qualities. Yet, when other people imbibe the same qualities and try to imitate the actions of their leaders, they may fail.
Academically brilliant persons usually make excellent managers and bureaucrats as they can efficiently implement the vision of the government or world leaders by following the prescribed methods. However, they may prove to be poor leaders, for they may not have taken the pain to understand the world on their own, and hence, cannot contribute any new thought or line of action to tackle new problems.
A leader is one who chooses the interest of his followers over his personal ignominy. He can beg, steal and even snatch for the followers. He suffers individual loss for the sake of the gain of his followers. That makes him a leader whom people follow because they themselves do not have the courage to do so. People do not mind if someone else does all the dirty jobs for them while they can enjoy the fruits without getting their own hands dirty.
Hatred is very powerful. It can overpower love. When a man burns in the fire of hatred, he cannot feel any love, and is willing to destroy his enemy even if it kills him. It is amazing to note that a leader who may be driven to act against another in hatred, may be showered with love in the process. People who share his hatred may love him for rising up to the challenge.
A leader must take responsibility for all his actions and not blame anyone for his problems. The follower, on the other hand, is always in search of a scapegoat or a miracle worker who can solve his problems. That is why leaders and followers complement each other. A leader is one who is willing to take on responsibility of not only his own failures but also that of his followers.
The very meaning of a leader is that people must follow him. If no one follows, you cannot be a leader even if you are the most intelligent, powerful and wealthy person in the world. Interestingly, you cannot become powerful or wealthy unless you are a leader. Further, anyone who acquires wealth or power automatically becomes a leader as people tend to follow such people.
The knowledge of the worker is often called ‘skill’, for it requires manual dexterity and training. The knowledge of the manager is ‘academic’ as it can be taught in colleges and universities. However, the knowledge of the leader is ‘creative’ which can generally not be taught, and must come from within.
A leader is one who travels the path carved out by him, and he ‘leads’ himself onward on that path. If his path is good and his goals are desirable, many more may follow him in their desire to achieve the same goal. Hence, followership is the effect of leadership and not its cause.
A leader is generally not more virtuous than most ordinary people. The opposite is usually true. Because people are reluctant to be led by those perceived as evil, a leader expertly creates a façade, behind which he hides all that may appear dirty. This is a difficult art where the leader has to wear two masks, one in public and the other in private—and no one should see the true face of a leader.
The actions of a leader are always criticised by scholars as well as common men. A scholar has no obligation to produce result, so he is free to rebuke leaders for not sticking to noble means. Common men envy leaders their position and power, thus feeling happy in vilifying them to pull them down to their own levels.
A true leader is responsible for his followers who have reposed their faith in his leadership. If an ordinary man fails, it is a personal failure. But when a leader fails, he shatters the entire ideologies, principles and morale of all those who followed him. The impact is much bigger and stakes are higher.
Love can be simply stated to be the desire of the human being to integrate oneself with other selves in such a way that one starts feeling the pain and pleasure of another person as if of one’s own. Hatred can be defined as just the opposite – to derive pleasure in the pain of others, while feeling unhappy seeing others happy
If people have faith, peace prevails among them. There is no logic for peace. In fact, peace is the most illogical thing in this world. If we see inequality, injustice and poverty around the world, often we think—‘why people don’t fight for their rights?’ Peace is a miracle, which defies all logic. Political leaders are clever and they destroy peace by inventing logic that creates hatred. Even in war, the logic put forward by both the sides are totally contradictory, and both the sides feel that they are right.
Every faith has logic even though people after developing faith forget the logic behind the faith. There is a strong logic behind the creation of religion—the greatest symbol of human faith—that has provided a common code of conduct and belief, and brought millions or even billions of people together. Religion has benefited man even materialistically, as it reduced the conflict between individuals and ushered in a long era of peace and prosperity.