Will Keepin’s Principles of
Spiritual Leadership Adapted from a presentation at Schumacher College, Totnes, England by Will Keepin of
the Satyana Institute, Boulder, Colorado, this provisional set of “principles of spiritual leadership”
provide the beginning of a collective inquiry into how we can apply spiritual
teachings and wisdom in the work of global citizen game changers.
The first principle is that the motivation underlying our
activism for social change must be transformed from anger and despair to
compassion and love. This is a major challenge for the environmental movement,
for example. It is not to deny the legitimacy of noble anger or outrage at
injustice of any kind. Rather, we seek to work for love, rather than against
evil. We need to adopt compassion and love as our foundational intention, and
do whatever inner work is required to implement this intention. Even if our
outward actions remain the same, there is a major difference in results if our
underlying intention supports love rather than defeating evil. The Dalai Lama
says, "A positive future can never emerge from the mind of anger and
despair."
The second principle is a classical spiritual tenet, though
challenging to practice. It is the principle of nonattachment to outcome. To
the extent that we are attached to the results of our work, we rise and fall
with our success and failures, which is a path to burnout. Failures are
inevitable, and successes are not the deepest purpose of our work. This
requires a deepening of faith in the intrinsic value of our work-beyond the
concrete results. To the extent that our actions are rooted in pure intention,
they have a reverberation far beyond the concrete results of the actions
themselves. As Gandhi emphasized, "The victory is in the
doing," not the outcome.
The third principle is that your integrity is your
protection. The idea here is that if your work has integrity that will tend to
protect you from negative circumstances. For example, there are practices for
making yourself invisible to the negative energy that comes toward you in
adversarial situations. It's a kind of psychic aikido, where you internally
step out of the way of negative energy, and you make yourself energetically
transparent so it passes right through you. But this only works if your work is
rooted in integrity.
The fourth principle is related to the third: the need for
unified integrity in both means and ends. Integrity in means cultivates
integrity in the fruit of one's work; you cannot achieve a noble goal using
ignoble means. Some participants in our workshops engage regularly in political
debates, testimony, and hearings. We have them experimenting with consciousness
techniques for transmuting challenging energy into compassion and love-right
there in the hearing room. Early indications are that this is helpful in
defusing charged psychological situations, and reducing tension in heated
debates.
The fifth principle is don't
demonize your adversaries. People respond to arrogance with their own
arrogance, which leads to polarization. The ideal is to constantly entertain
alternative points of view so that you move from arrogance to inquiry, and you
then have no need to demonize your opponents. This is hard to do, as we often
feel very certain about what we think we know, and the injustices we see. As
John Stuart Mill said, "In all forms of human debate, both parties tend to
be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny." Going into
an adversarial situation, we can be aware of the correctness of what we are
affirming, but there is usually a kernel of truth-however small-in what is
being affirmed by our opponent. We need to be especially mindful about what we
deny, because this is often where our blind spots will be.
The sixth principle is to love thy enemy. Or if you can't do
that, at least have compassion for them. This means moving from an
"us-them" consciousness to a "we" consciousness. It means
recognizing that I am the logger: when I write these principles of spiritual
activism and publish them in this newsletter, I give the command to the logger
to fell the trees, to produce the pulp, to produce this paper so that I can
publish these spiritual principles about how best to save the trees. It is
seeing the full circle of our interconnected complicity, and discovering all
the problems of humanity in our own hearts and our own lives. We are not exempt
and we are not different. The "them" that we speak of is also us. The
practice of loving our adversaries is obviously challenging in situations with
people whose views and methodologies are radically opposed to ours, but that is
where the real growth occurs.
The seventh and eighth principles are a bit contradictory.
The seventh is that your work is for the world rather than for you. We serve on
behalf of others and not for our own satisfaction or benefit. We're sowing
seeds for a cherished vision to become a future reality, and our fulfillment
comes from the privilege of being able to do this work. This is the traditional
understanding of selfless service.
But then the eighth principle is that selfless service is a
myth. Because in truly serving others, we are also served.
In giving we receive. This is important to recognize as well, so we don't fall
into the trap of pretentious service to others' needs and develop a false sense
of selflessness or martyrdom.
The ninth principle
is do not insulate yourself from the pain of the
world. We must allow our hearts to be broken-broken open-by the pain of the
world. As that happens, as we let that pain in, we become the vehicles for
transformation. If we block the pain, we are actually preventing our own
participation in the world's attempt to heal itself.
As we allow our hearts to break open, the pain that comes is the medicine by
which the Earth heals itself, and we become the agents of that healing. This is
a vital principle that is quite alien to our usual Western ways of thinking.
The tenth principle is what you attend to, you become. If
you constantly attend to battles, you become embattled. On the other hand, if
you constantly give love, you become loving. We must choose wisely what we
attend to, because it shapes and defines us deeply. The eleventh principle is
to rely on faith. This is not some Pollyannaish naiveté, as many
"realists" would interpret it. Rather it entails cultivating a deep
trust in the unknown, recognizing the presence of "higher" or
"divine" forces at work that we can trust completely without knowing
their precise agendas or workings. It means invoking something beyond the traditional
scientific worldview. It implies that there are invisible forces that we can
draw upon and engage, firstly by knowing they are there; secondly, by asking or
yearning for them to support us-or more precisely, asking them to allow us to
serve on their behalf. Faith is understood not as blind adherence to any set of
beliefs, but as a knowing from experience and intuition about intrinsic
universal principles beyond our direct observation, and relying upon these
principles, whatever they are, to support us in creating what we aspire to
create. This actually brings great relief when we realize it really isn't up to
us to figure out all the steps to manifest our unfolding vision, because we are
participants in a larger cosmic will. Nevertheless, it is our job to discover
what our unique gift isour unique role-and for each
person to give their gift as skillfully and generously as possible, while
trusting that the rest will all work itself out.
Finally, the twelfth
principle is that love creates the form. As Stephen Levine says, "The
heart crosses the abyss that the mind creates." It is the mind that gives
rise to the apparent fragmentation of the world, while the heart can operate at
depths unknown to the mind. So, if we begin imagining with our hearts, and work from a place of yearning as well as
thinking, then we develop an unprecedented effectiveness that is beyond our
normal ways of understanding because it doesn't have to do with thinking. When
we bring the fullness of our humanity to our leadership, we can be far more effective
in creating the future we want. In closing, we are urgently called to action in
two distinct capacities: to serve as hospice workers to a dying culture, and to
serve as midwives to an emerging culture. These two tasks are required
simultaneously; they call upon us to move through the world with an open
heart-meaning we are present for the grief and the pain-as we experiment with
new visions and forms for the future. Both are needed. The key is to root our
actions in both intelligence and compassion-a balance of head and heart that
combines the finest human qualities in our leadership for cultural
transformation.