THE SPIRITUAL ASPECT OF LEADERSHIP

Leaders who are spiritually awakened have a strength that is a communion of body, mind, heart, and soul. Their fortitude comes from love, imbued with a strength that is fragile, vulnerable, like a rose blossom or a dewdrop. Such leaders manifest the strength of life, not of death.

Their power is not one which kills, but that which creates; neither is it of violence, or aggression, but one that flows from compassion.

Leaders of this ilk radiate life, love, and laughter. Their laughter is . . . almost like a hurricane, a great storm of light, joy, and ecstasy. Not because they see life as perfect; in fact, they know that if something is perfect, it has to be dead; anything alive must be imperfect. Their aliveness is communicated through laughter, in a quest for their divinity, within their imperfections.

Where is the value in this for the modern-day corporate executive busy looking solemn?

Laughter that is genuine, not meant to harm, draws energy from the source within us, and spreads as a glow across our outer being. Energy starts flowing, urging laughter to gather momentum.

Laughter lulls one into a deep meditative state. Thinking stops. One cannot think and laugh at the same time. Being diametrically opposite functions, one is forced to choose: laugh, or think. If thinking steals its way in, the laughter is compromised; it lags behind.

This is a case of ‘crippled laughter’.

Laughter at full throttle causes the mind to suddenly disappear. It is the mantra* of joy, and can help a leader become an incarnation of our essential Godliness. The manifold pathways issuing forth from meditation practices are an endeavour to get into the state of no-mind—laughter is an ideal highway to that oasis of tranquillity.

Glimpses into the state of no-mind open up fresh vistas for the leader to sense a vast ‘amness’, a dropping of the ‘I’, a marshalling of the ‘we’, where leader and followers merge into a symphony of spirits.

* In Sanskrit, manas means ‘mind’ and tra means ‘to free’. So a mantra is a combination of transcendental sounds that free our minds from the anxieties of living in the material world.

The mantras are holy hymns, poetic expressions of revealed truth. They are in the form of symbols or seed-words or combinations of a few meaningful words, carrying with them certain sounds and vibrations—specific ones for specific needs.

Mantra has come from manana, which means ‘reflection’. The component tra indicates its ability to save the person who reflects upon it for a sufficiently long time.

Mantra means that which, when we repeatedly meditate upon it, saves us from our lower nature. I offer laughter as the mantra of supreme eloquence, through the agency of no-mind, expressed by the spiritually awakened leader.

NOTE: Some examples of leadership with the above qualities: Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, The Buddha, Bodhidharma, Jesus Christ, The Prophet Mohammed, Lao Tzu.

[Excerpted from the 'Leadership, Learning & Laughter' edition of The Braindancer Series of bookazines by Dilip Mukerjea. All the images in this post are the intellectual property of Dilip Mukerjea.]