Chapter 10 - Management & Meditation
Day 19
For a good manager, it is important to be in the present moment with patience and poise. If you are intelligent, you may not be able to bear the lack of intelligence in others.
The management profession requires dealing with diverse situations and people. To be able to deal with them justly requires a sharp intellect, patience, endurance and presence of mind.
How can we develop patience? We have never been taught how to handle our mind. The tendency of the mind to be in the present moment needs to be cultivated and nurtured, so that one can develop patience and sharpness.
This can be done by attending to one's breath and by meditating. Breathing exercises help in improving our perception, observation and expression and this is vital for good management.
Every time you expect some perfection in other’s speech or action, you should take care not to lose the balance or perfection of your own mind and to pay close attention to your own inner feelings.
1. The Mind - We have never taken a close look at our minds. The faculty with which we hear and see is the mind. When you listen to someone, you may continually agree or disagree with what is being said.
It is your intellect which is doing this. And you remember what is being said because of your memory. There are seven levels to our existence : body, breath, mind, memory, intellect, ego and self.
When we get to know a little bit about each of these layers, there is a transformation. The sign of true success is the ability to smile at all times.
You are successful when you are compassionate, cultured and committed. Education needs to provide all these values. We should not see all these values as goals to be achieved in the next 5-10 years of our life, or in the next life.
Let us examine the mind for a moment. Suppose you want me to tell you something about management. And I tell you to go to a library where you will find hundreds of books on the topic.
Suppose I tell you that I am not a professor and have not gone to any management school. When you hear this, what will be your reaction? What will happen in your mind?
There will be a state of waiting. Waiting can lead to frustration or to meditation. When you are not waiting, your mind is usually racing with thoughts.
When your mind is waiting, your mind is stationary. Are you aware of what goes on in your mind when you interact with people - the inner dialogue you have with yourself?
Being aware of this is very important and helps to keep you healthy. We need to look closely at ourselves, our lives and the roles we are playing at any given time.
What we expect of others rarely matches how we behave in their situation. Let me give you a simple everyday example. You will not be totally comfortable when you are a guest in somebody's house.
You will tend to feel inhibited and uncomfortable. But when you have guests coming over to your house, you will not want them to feel uncomfortable.
You will want them to feel at home and be in complete harmony with their surroundings. Yet you will not feel the same way at somebody else's place. Why do we see ourselves differently from the way we see others?
2. Time For Reflection - We all need time for reflection. I think every human being needs to sit back for a little while and find that inner peace, everyday if possible.
When our mind is agitated or restless and when we are too active, we are not tapping the source that lies deep within us. That source is our intuition.
It gives us correct thoughts and confidence. So a few minutes of silence, a few minutes of reflecting on the truth, on our lives, would be extremely beneficial.
We need the clarity and awareness it brings. What are the ways and means to achieve that inner peace? We need to find an answer for this basic question that crowds our hearts and minds.
Observing that everything is changing, in our world, in our lives, in our society, will give us a clue that there is something that remains unchanged.
The reference point, by which we observe that things are changing, is something that is not changing in itself. And this non-changing aspect of our consciousness gives us enormous strength, courage and creativity.
A few minutes of experiencing that still aspect, deep within us all, energises our body, focuses our mind, frees our intellect from inhibitions, frees our memory from trauma and gives a joyful flavour to our disposition.
We are able to get in touch with the joy that we are seeking. It is not just enough to be able to experience responsibility or peace within us. We need to bring it out in the open in our society.
This can only be done by educating people in human values, by rejuvenating human values in society. A school or college student will usually have only 4-5 friends.
If they cannot be friendly with the 30-40 kids in their classrooms, how are they going to be friendly with the 6 billion people in the world?
Basic values such as friendliness, compassion, understanding and harmony in diversity need to be cultivated in schools, colleges and in every environment that an individual is exposed to.
Love is the very central force of human life and it overshadows all our stress. So the spiritual knowledge or education contained in human values will help an individual stand up to the demands of the day and help him manage all the problems he faces in daily life.
Man is at a crossroads today. Burdened by his many problems, he becomes violent or frustrated or he feels depressed or suicidal.
Knowledge about our inner spirit can bring freedom from this frustration and violence. The spirit is all about love, beauty and peace.
It transcends the boundaries of our acquired concepts, our imagination and our identities. A violence-free society, a disease-free body, a quiver-free breath, an-inhibition free intellect and a trauma-free memory - these are the birth right of every individual.
And as responsible citizens, we need to make our society and its component communities take this seriously. We need to make every individual take responsibility for himself and for the environment around.
4. Faculties Of Existence - We look at everything outside us but we ignore our own faculties. Just as there are various faculties for various departments in companies and institutions, so too are there many faculties we possess in life.
The first faculty is the body. You become aware of your body only when it aches. Did you know that pain is basically your body asking for attention?
At home, a child throws tantrums when he is not given attention. Your body behaves in a similar manner, it wouldn't throw tantrums if you paid regular attention to it.
Being aware of your body is a good thing and this is not just about food and exercise. Ancient people called this awareness Yoga Nidra.
To practise it, you need to lie down and turn your attention to each part of your body and regard it with love. No doubt, you may do it unconsciously, but doing it consciously is different.
The closest thing to you is your body. It is the first layer of your
existence. The second faculty is the breath. The breath is what makes the distinction between say, leather and skin. When you are not breathing, your body has no value.
It is this breath which gives you life. When we came into the world, the first act of our life was to take a breath, and then we cried. The last act of our life will be to breathe out and make others cry.
But we ignore this primordial function in our life. Our breath contains many secrets. Every emotion has a corresponding rhythm in your breath.
If you attend to your breath, your emotional disturbances can be removed. The third faculty is our mind, through which we perceive, see and taste.
Say there are some sounds in the background reaching your eardrums but your mind is elsewhere, you will not be able to hear these sounds. We know very little about our mind.
If you are paid 10 compliments and insulted once, what will you remember? The 10 compliments will fly away and you will treasure the one insult.
Our memory functions in a very funny manner. Your memory will hold on very tightly to anything that is of interest to you. You will always absorb something if you are deeply interested in it.
If you love astronomy, it will be easy to remember the various details involved, which others may find very trying. The fourth faculty is intellect. You continually form opinions on what you see or hear.
Something is happening in you, some sort of analysis and judgement - accepting, not accepting, questioning etc. All this is due to this particular faculty that is ever active in us.
The fifth faculty is ego. You are caught up in your ego trips so often. When you are happy, something in you expands. Ego brings with it happiness, creativity, shyness and sadness.
If you are shy and timid, it is because of your ego. Joy and pride too are an outcome of ego and so too, is sadness. There is ego behind every tear we shed.
We know very little about the function of the ego in our lives. But just imagine, a little knowledge about it would make us so strong. We wouldn't be so vulnerable then.
The sixth faculty is something that is perhaps not so clear to you. Sometimes, when you are very relaxed or when you are in love, you feel that there is more to life than what you see.
You sense that there is something more mysterious at play. It may happen when you are watching the sky, or reading the Gita, or watching TV, or taking a shower, or when you are sick with fever, or when a baby is born, or when you have fainted.
That faculty is self consciousness or the Atma. Sometimes, when you see young people, you feel as if you alone have not grown up while everyone else around you has.
You feel as if you have not changed but everything else around you has. This feeling is so precious. Unfortunately, you let it slip away and hardly take any notice of it.
Those few seconds would have given you so much peace and tranquillity. Meditation is a conscious experience of that aspect within you that enriches the other six layers.
Neither at home nor at school has anybody ever taught you how to deal with your mind and your emotions, or how to come out of the state of being depressed, angry, jealous or tense.
Nobody taught Thomas Edison how to make a light bulb. He did it on his own. If you learn something yourself, it feels great. Nobody taught me the Art of Living course.
But you should always be open to learning. If you don't learn from your own intuition, you should take advantage of someone else's intuition.
