Spirituality in the Leadership
In the last five thousand years, spiritual leaders like the Buddha have shaped society, but true societal change requires a shift in leadership. With the rise of technology and global threats, Sadhguru argues that spiritual wisdom—rooted in love, compassi
IN THE LASTfive thousand years, we have produced incredible yogis of enormous power and capability in this country. And yet, you have not even heard of most of them. All of them made a tremendous difference to the small groups of people around them and in terms of spiritual well-being, everything that needed to be done was done.
Still, when it comes to social realities and transforming social situations, Gautama the Buddha sticks out. It is not that he was more enlightened than anybody else. No. Then why did this one man cause such a big wave that is still on? Because Emperor Ashoka and his family became his disciples, the whole mechanism of the empire became an instrument to spread a spiritual process.
Spiritual capability is one thing, social reality is another thing. If you want something to happen in the world, if you sit here and meditate, your quality will definitely change and because of that, the world's quality will change. But if you want something to happen in your lifetime, if you wish for some dramatic change in the world, something about leadership must change
Right now, whether it is political, military, or economic leadership, they are only thinking of conquest. Everybody is trying to conquer somebody. Today, technology empowers all kinds of fools. Anybody can become powerful with just a laptop in his hand. You don’t need guns. With just one instrument you can become super powerful if you just know how to use it.
When this is the technological reality, some shift must happen in the leadership. If you do not strive for it, the whole world will pay in a very big way and we are already paying. If you look at the climate change that is happening and the projections that are being made, if you look at the way things are developing, smaller countries are going for world-destroying arms. It will not be long before people who are using fire bombs will have nuclear bombs, and you cannot control them by force forever.
If a spiritual element enters into the leadership – political, economic, or otherwise – on the planet, then the need for war could be taken away to a large extent. It may not be an absolute insurance but it could ensure to a large extent that the world is not run on somebody’s ideology, belief system, or holy book, but rather on the simple sense of what is needed for humanity to exist here. If the world ran out of human intelligence, love, and compassion, the need for war could be taken away to a large extent.
It is time we understand that unless a spiritual element enters into people, the need for endless conquest is always there. As long as it is there, war is just a question of consequence and opportunity.
By Sadhguru, ranked among the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author. Sadhguru was conferred the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India in 2017, the highest annual civilian award, accorded for exceptional and distinguished services
