“May I eliminate all evil thoughts
May I cultivate good actions
May I help save all living beings”

-The prayer recited while bathing the statue of the Buddha.

(I wrote this a while ago and had it in my drafts folder. I’ll publish it to keep at least a background level of controversy )

Sexual activity exists in perfection, as everything does.

“Becoming liberated does not necessitate losing one’s sensual activities. Sense activities continue even in the liberated stage. The difference is, however, that sense activities in liberation are accepted only in connection with Krishna consciousness, whereas sense activities in the conditioned stage are enacted for personal sense gratification.” Srimad Bhagavatam 3.15.31

“Heterosexuality” today (the cultural construction distinct from biological procreation) refers to a personal preference for a particular type of personal sense gratification. Devotees are not “heterosexuals”.

For service a man and woman form a stable socio-economic relationship and unite in order to produce offspring who are then brought up in a loving environment to become balanced, happy, spiritually conscious contributors to human society.

It is a service that involves sexual activity, not a sexual activity.

It’s a subtle but important distinction. Devotees do not oppose homosexuality out of personal preference for a different type of sense gratification as the people of this world do. We oppose sense gratification of any kind out of preference for divine service. That divine service is the natural order of the universe.

Whether it’s this bodily orifice or that one, same or different sex partner, if it’s not procreation in a spirit of service to the progeny and the Supreme Lord, all pervading and the creator of all living entities, then it’s not devotional service. It’s just trying to squeeze some kind of enjoyment out of your body and the body of another. The details are just that, details.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow Buddha’s birthday is being celebrated with a huge festival in Southbank. I’m taking some PTO this afternoon to take my son Prahlad, and to help out serving out at the Hare Krishna food stall there.

Prahlad is a big fan of Buddha. It was one of the first words he learnt, and he recognized statues of Buddha from a very early age.

I’m also writing a post about the Loft last night. Should be ready sometime in the next couple of days. I have to go to the festival again tomorrow to help, so I’ll be busy on my day off.

This week at Red Hat, where I work, we had a team building day. It wasn’t at the office, we went to the Brisbane Powerhouse, a performing arts center in the converted old Brisbane Power station.

The company world wide has doubled in size over the past financial year, and our office has more than doubled. We are going to have a team building day once every six months now to foster intra- and inter-team relations. In the normal course of work we deal with people who are functionally related with us, and have limited interaction with others in the office who work in different areas. Team building day is meant to help us build and deepen a wider network of relations within the office, and gain a more complete understanding of and appreciation for the people who work alongside us.

I had already left before this picture was taken (not everyone is in it). Even those who are present give an idea of the diversity of the office. Although we are in Australia, Australians are just another minority. Here you see people from Japan, Australia, China, Phillipines, Taiwan, France, Korea, United States, and Colombia. We also have team members from Brazil, Austria, Italy, and Germany. Our office does technical support in English, Japanese and Chinese, and we also do internationalization engineering, so we have translation teams and programmers.

I had to go back to the office to cover the second half of they day so that Wade could come. The first half that I did attend was great. We did the Keirsey personality test.

This is a personality test that has 70 or so questions that help to determine your psychological orientation along four diametric axes. The four axes are Extroversion / Introversion, Intuition / Sensing, Thinking / Feeling, Judgement / Perception.

When you index a person’s propensity between these two poles and get a composite profile of their tendency to a particular quadrant you can gain a idea of their general nature according to 16 archetypical temperaments.

We took the test, and I was surprised by the descriptions of the character analysis of the archetypical temperaments and how they related to myself, as detected by the test. It seemed very accurate. Even just the fact that a definite bias was evident as I was scoring the test lead me to believe that it could actually detect underlying patterns of character tendency or disposition.

When we all put our names up on a chart in the section that corresponded to our temperament it became even more apparent. Particular people are attracted to work in this industry, and particular temperaments gravitate to particular roles, both within the organization and within teams.

I got a copy of the test and we did it at home. Interestingly we have a wider spread at the Loft than we do at Red Hat. At the moment we have a small team, but it is very diverse, and it is interesting to see how the present team members have very complementary temperaments. No-one is the same, unlike the definite grouping that I observed at work.

A few years ago I developed a similar test based on the three modes of material nature, modelling it after one that a psychologist had done and published in Back to Godhead magazine. I think that this test is better however, because the test based in a superficial application of the description of the three modes given in the Gita doesn’t distinguish well between basic nature and temporary conditioning. I can see in myself how I have had a lifestyle in the tamo-guna and in the sattva-guna, but my temperament as identified by the Keirsey test has remained constant throughout that.

At the same time, as Srila Prabhupada explained in a famous conversation, the process of bhakti-yoga over a number of years has worked to allow that basic nature to be more clearly expressed, without interference from confusing conditions picked up circumstantially. When you know what you are all about and go with that, success will yours.

“By following his qualities of work, every man can become perfect. Now please hear from Me how this can be done.” Bhagavad-gita 18.45

Here is an interesting piece from the Keirsey website that talks about US presidents - leaders - who have had different temperaments. Anyone can be a leader - those with different temperaments will be stronger in one style of leadership than another.

Here is a photo from Sig Sig, Ecuador. Vrajadhama and I went out here for the market day before leaving the Cuenca / Azuay region to return to Guayaquil on our way to Peru.

This is the other cathedral facing onto Parque Calderon. Every day the steps of this cathedral are filled with persons selling all manner of religious paraphenalia. Vrajadhama bought me a Divino Nino (that n should have a squiggle over it, but my Spanish keyboard is at home) from there. There is a shop near the cathedral that sells paraphenalia for Divino Ninos. There are all different sizes, and they sell sets of clothes for them.

Here is the old cathedral. There are two cathedrals facing onto Parque Calderon, the central plaza of Cuenca. Since Vraja and I were there in 2001 Parque Calderon has undergone a total renovation. When we last visited there in 2003 it had been extensively remodelled into beautiful landscaped gardens. While we were there learning Spanish it was quite simple, and you could sit on the grass, which we sometimes did as we chanted. Now it is all landscaped gardens and you can only sit on the benches.

This is the Rio Tomebamba in Cuenca, Ecuador. I wrote a diary entry while I was there entitled: “Sita-pati’s Guide to River Washing”, but I can’t find it now. I watched the women washing their clothes in the river and laying them out to dry on the river bank each day, and thought I would give it a go.

It took quite a while, and I wasn’t very good at it, but it was peaceful and honest, purifying and pacifying.

Breast and lung cancer rates have doubled around the world over the last 30 years, a report shows.

Cancer Research UK said much of the growth was due to more people living longer - as cancer is a disease which usually affects older people.

But they said habits such as smoking and diet also had a significant effect.

One example is bowel cancer which used to be extremely rare in Japan. But as the Japanese increasingly eat a westernised diet, rates of the cancer increase.

Article here

Two Essential Principles of Leadership

1. There may be born leaders, but they are few and far between.

2. Leadership style, Leadership personality, and Leadership traits do not inherently exist. Leadership can, and must be learned.

Four Essential Characteristics of Leadership

1. The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.
2. A leader is not someone who is loved or admired. Popularity is not leadership - results are.
3. Leaders are highly visible, and set examples.
4. Leadership is not rank, privileges or money. It is responsibility.

Peter Drucker, The Leader of the Future: New Visions, Strategies, and Practices for the Next Era

Have you ever wondered why foreigners have trouble with the English language? Let’s face it. English is a crazy language. There is no egg in the eggplant, no ham in the hamburger. And neither pine nor apple in the pineapple. English muffins were not invented in England. French fries were not invented in France. We sometimes take English for granted, but if we examine its paradoxes we find that quicksand takes you down slowly, boxing rings are square. And a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. If writers write, how come fingers don’t fing? If the plural of tooth is teeth. Shouldn’t the plural of phone booth be phone beeth? If the teacher taught, why didn’t the preacher praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what the does a humanitarian eat? Why do people recite at a play, yet play at a recital? Park on driveways and drive on parkways?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language where a house can burn up as it burns down, and in which you fill in a form by filling it out and a bell is only heard once it goes! English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race (which of course isn’t a race at all). That is why when the stars are out they are visible, but when the lights are out they are invisible, and why it is that when I wind up my watch it starts, but when I wind up this observation, it ends.

(from my spam folder)

“The seeds of their failure lie in the way they think. They think that it is the nature of things that the people at the top do all the important thinking and the rest wield the screwdrivers. Our concept is that leadership is the art of mobilising and energising the intellectual and creative resources of all people at all levels of the organisation.”

-A Japanese industrialist speaking about Western Industry (quoted in Steven Covey, Principled-centered Leadership)

26 April 2005 - New Zealand

“As same-sex couples around the country today lodged their civil union applications their opponents appear to have accepted defeat.”

Full article on Stuff.

Time and tide wait for no man.

Camp: Cuenca / Sigsig, Ecuador
Dateline: April, 2001

Taking the bus is an interesting affair here. The first step is to get to the bus terminal. A local urban service bus will take you there for 14c.

We managed to get a ride with Madre Radharani to the terminal, so we avoided having to walk to a bus route and take a bus from there. After being dropped off we made our way to the aisle where the bus for Sigsig leaves from. On the way we were accosted by a drunk man who spent one night singing and salsa’ing in Harinam with us. He is a big friend of mine and can talk to me for hours, even though I can’t understand a word he says. A strategic “Si”, a smile and a nod of the head goes a long way, I’ve noticed. We held a conversation for about ten minutes, even though I couldn’t understand a thing he was saying. I used the opportunity to practice my lines. After a minute or two, one of the terminal security guards came over, checking out if he was a bum hassling some tourists.

Here at the terminal the security guards have the best profile. This guy had jet black skin, and was dressed totally in black, looking like a commando from the G.I. Joe series. He had a revolver in a holster with six more bullets on the outside, a bullet proof vest, and a long baton. After we embraced our friend and headed into the terminal we remained the centre of attention, dressed in our robes and wearing tilak on our faces.

Everywhere we go people stare at us. Some, recognising us, will greet us with “Hare Krishna” or just “Hare Hare!” We got to the bus and wrote our names on the sheet that the guy had, then got on board. The buses here are run by cooperatives, exactly how they function i don’t know, but they look like they buy their buses second hand from the States, and they usually are named after a date, as half of everything here, from streets to shops, is.

The way the bus works is that there are two people. One is the driver, who drives and pulls the chain that activates the horn. The other is a teenaged boy who opens the door, stows the gear, pulls people on board and collects the fares. The bus will stop anywhere. To get off, you call out “Gracias!” when you are where you want to go. To get on, you flag the bus down on the road and leap aboard as it slows down. The bus is constantly stopping to pick people up. The boy pulls them aboard and calls out “Vamos!” (Let’s go!) when they are half in. The driver then speeds back up. Everyone just packs in and sits or stands wherever they can. We always present a problem, as we are usually carrying bags and mrdangas when we travel, which are awkward. I mean - it’s packed, and people are coming on and off all the time.

When the bus gets going, someone starts up with a sales pitch. It’s usually biscuits, or manjar, dulce de leche, which is a burfi that you can buy in shops here. I can remember seeing somewhere that Srila Prabhupada said that anything made with milk is always pure. I hope so, because I have to admit that we’ve eaten some - and it was damned good! However, we’ve laid off after our spanish teacher taught us the word “las lombrices”. Las lombrices are these nice worms that live in your intestines and eat what you eat, growing up to seven metres in length!

They are endemic here, and you get them by eating things prepared or handled by a person who is infected and who doesn’t wash their hands (everyone here is at least a risk). The way to get rid of them is to fast for a day or so until they get hungry, then sit in (or over, my spanish isn’t that precise, and i hope i never have to find out) a bowl of hot milk and wait for them to poke their head out for a snack. When they do you grab ‘em and pull ‘em out. Our spanish teacher has had one, and there are rumours that one of the devotees here is da man!

The buses sometimes pass through a checkpoint. Policia in their grey striped urban camoflague combat fatigues flag the bus down. There are four of them, all wearing bullet proof vests and two toting automatic rifles. We constantly wonder why there is so much firepower and combat gear everywhere, from seguridad to policia. It is not unusual to see two policia riding a motorcycle, wearing combat helmets, the one on the back packing an M-16 or AK-47. I’m wondering where they sell these bullet proof vests….

People are always looking us, and are very attracted to the mrdanga. We are trying to get “Hare Krishna” painted on them, to increase the nectar. When we got to Chordeleg we got off the bus to look for a new bag for Vrajadhama. We had heard that Saturday was the big day in Chordeleg, so we were thinking about some Harinam action. We got off the bus into an empty street. The only thing missing were the tumbleweeds. Once the bus left, the street was silent. We sat down on a bench and opened a pack of plaintain chips before deciding what to do. The sky was overcast, and the white stone roading cast a bright glare. We looked around. There were plenty of shops, they were open, and they looked they were positioned for tourists. Most were selling “Joyeria” (Jewellery?) Plenty of 18K gold. I thought about buying some gold earrings to give to Param Satya, and considered that it was the thought that counted. After a while on the seat, Vrajadhama said: “I know, let’s wait for a break in the traffic and make a bolt for the other side of the road.”

We sauntered around the shops for a while and Vrajadhama got a nice new bag. Pretty much all the shops were selling exactly the same things. It was a quiet day in sleepy hollow in Chordeleg.

We grabbed the next bus onward and headed off, toward la finca del Hare Krishna, the Hare Krishna farm and temple. There is no temple in Cuenca. The temple is situated on a farm about an hour out of town by bus. The ride costs 80c each way. We rode to the farm and jumped off.

The farm is situated at the confluence of two rivers. The part of it on one side of the road is about two or three football fields. I don’t know how big the whole thing is, but this is the section being cultivated by Mrdanga das, who lives on the farm with his wife, Ana, and two young children, Gopal Govinda Shyamasundara and Krishna Shakti. The temple is a beautiful dome shaped building with two wooden ashrams upstairs.

I was immediately agitated on arrival, due to the tranquility of the place. “I work best in emergency situations,” i told Vrajadhama. “Wake me when there’s an emergency or a festival.” After a while I caught up with the speed of the place and took some time to study Espanola. Vrajadhama spent a couple of hours playing guitar in the temple room. The temple room is a beautiful marble laid room with golden neem carved deities of Gaura-Nityananda, two of the pentuple incarnation of god who started the modern Hare Krishna movement. Srila Prabhupada would say: “The impersonalists say that God is not a person, and in this incarnation God appears as five people at once, just to show them that without a doubt He is a person, and more of a person than they could even imagine!”

The farm and temple is “muy lindo”, a phrase that you hear often in conversations about it that means “very beautiful”. However, it is deserted. The devotees in town are too busy with their families and economic development to come out, and there is only one family living here now. There was an evening arati ceremony in the temple, that i missed, and we had dinner with Mrdanga. It consisted of the produce of the farm, including fresh bread cooked by Ana.

One other devotee, Bhakti-vilasa from Columbia (who met Emerson there for those of you that means anything to), was staying as well. He is helping Mrdanga and learning how to farm, as he has some land in Columbia that he wants to develop.

Afterwards we talked late into the night. It was very hard for me to understand what Mrdanga was saying, as he is Chilean, and I have only learned to decipher the native accent and dialect. However, he kept saying things like Krishna, Srimati Radharani, and Lord Caitanya, that reassured me, and I was happy to listen to him talk, and he was happy to talk. It must be lonely for him there, with no devotee association. It takes a lot of purity and simplicity to live in the simply environment of a Hare Krishna farm. This inner simplicity and calm is a byproduct of that which we are aiming for with our spiritual practice, love of God. This is in direct contrast with modern society with its emphasis on love of the body and all the temporary things in relation to it. The passionate, agitating music in the internet cafe that i am typing this in is a good example.

The next morning Vrajadhama got me up by getting up at 4:30am. I had woken up at 2am, but was too lazy to get up. We take turns at being the first up and thereby getting the other up, not by design, but by some mystical arrangement.

After showering and dressing, we went downstairs to perform our morning spiritual practice in the temple. We chanted japa, a form of meditation on the Holy Names of the Lord, for a couple of hours, then i read out loud from the Spanish version of Bhagavad-gita, until the program started at 7am.

There were four of us there: Vrajadhama, Bhakti-vilasa, Mrdanga, and myself. I lead the singing of the morning prayers, and Mrdanga performed the worship ceremony of the Deity.

Deity worship can be perceived as a weird thing in the West, which is predominantly Protestant Christian, if anything. It was the one thing that I had some resistance to when i became involved in the Hare Krishna movement. The old injunctions about “worshipping idols” went deep. However, people are rendering service in so many ways to so many things. Worshipping the television, giving their full and undivided attention to it, worshipping their car by washing it and pampering it.

The Lord is present everywhere, as everything is his energy. He is aware of everything. In this way, by rendering some service to him through his energy in such a way that the devotion is meant for him, he knows. He can see: “This is meant for me”, and he accepts it. In the Bhagavad-gita Krishna says, “If one offers me with love and devotion even a leaf, a fruit, a flower, or some water, i am pleased to accept it.” Anything is acceptable, as long as it is offered with love and devotion. Our love and devotion are the only things we have to offer to the Lord - everything else here is already his.

Here is Ecuador people do not have a cultural conditioning against Deity worship, in fact, quite the opposite is the case. Ecuador is very Catholic, and there are altars everywhere, even in the middle of a market selling meat there will be one with a statue of Jesus or mother Mary and candles burning there. There are roadside altars all along the road. When the bus passes them, passengers make the sign of the cross. I’m not a big fan of the statues of Jesus on the cross, with their vivid depiction of his wounds and suffering, but I am rather fond of a form I had not seen before, El Divino Nino, the divine child, Jesus as a child with blond hair, wearing a pink robe with his arms upraised in the air. He looks like a young Nimai, Lord Caitanya as a child. He is very beautiful and attractive.

After a breakfast that included Cedron tea (a local herb), pure honey and bread, all from the farm, Vrajadhama and I continued on to Sigsig. Apparently Sunday is the big market day, and we wanted to check the place out before we leave for Lima, Peru, via Guayaquil, next week.

We flagged down the bus and rode to Sigsig. The country side was lush and green, and we rode along a sharp drop to the river below. The buildings throughout the country side were a mix of uncompleted stone houses, made with the standard concrete bricks we have in the West, with people living in them already, and adobe huts that were in many cases deteriorating to reveal the wooden frames that constitute them.

OK, Sigsig. I’m going to have to cut it short here, as i am running out of time.

The place was packed, and everywhere we went we were the centre, and i mean the centre of attention. We walked into a large market and it was like the scene where the two guys walk into the bar and the record screeches to a halt and everyone turns to look at them. I have some realisations about this phenomena, but i’ll have to share them later.

We joked that it was Vrajadhama’s new bag, which was obviously for tourists only. “Man, do i feel like a freak show!” I said to Vrajadhama. “What about that guy over there on the tray, I bet he feels like a freak show.” I looked over and saw a whole pig steaming on a platter, one of just several we saw. We went over and looked at it and just laughed at the whole situation. “Smoking!” Vrajadhama said as steam rose from the pig’s mouth. I tried to imagine people in New Zealand buying a chunk of the side of one of these, and couldn’t really picture it. There was also a guy selling chicks from a big box of them on the side of the road. The place was packed.

Anyway, there is a little bit about the bus and the farm. Hope that everything is well with everyone in New Zealand, Australia, the U.S, and where ever else this is going.

God bless,

25th April 2005.

Monday night - 4 guests at the Loft, 5 staff members, including Prahlad.

Monday is a special night. It’s a later addition to the original three nights, and it is part of our layered product strategy. Marketed as “Deep Yoga”, it’s the “add-on sale”, the extra night that people will pick up when they are ready to get more into it. Less people, more personal attention. Great prasadam, as always.

90th anniversary of the landing of the ANZAC forces at Gallipoli. This year also marks:

The 108th anniversary of Srila Prabhupada’s appearance
The 60th anniversary of Back to Godhead magazine
My 32nd birthday anniversary
The 3rd anniversary of the appearance of my son, Prahlad Narasingha Wulf-Felix
My 8th year as a professional missionary
The 9th country I’ve worked in

Sunday at our regular team meeting we introduced a new section at the beginning: “Victories and Struggles”. Each person has 60 seconds to give a synopsis of their victories and struggles in the past week.

My victories this week:

Geoff sent me a program that analyzes the emails that we send out according to when people read them.
Pransevari dd sent me the transcription of another lecture from the Contemporary Urban Preaching series.

My struggles this week:

Missed mangal-arati twice.
Shuffled my rounds around over a couple of days before realigning them.

Here’s an mp3 (11MB, 12′25″) of a bhajan on Sunday night. There were more kirtans and bhajans, but the recorder was overdriving. Next time I will use my MZ-R50 minidisc recorder, which has a built-in compressor, along with the stereo mic. That way I can get a stereo recording with compression, which means volume level normalization - the quiet parts come out a little louder, and the loud parts come out quieter, so that it all fits, rather than be real quiet at the beginning and distorted at the end.

I’ll run the minidisc line out into the line in of the JNC SSF M3 mp3 recorder, and record using the line in encoder. This will allow me to get a 256kbps mp3 on the fly, in stereo and with compression. Booyakasha! =)

In the mornings I offer Srila Prabhupada his japa mala (chanting beads) before beginning my own chanting in the japa (mantra meditation) period.

The Vedas explain that our senses are not independent - they rely on external factors. For example, the sense of sight is ruled over by the sun. Without the sun, the sense of sight is useless. Even the lights that we use at night come from the sun. Energy from the sun is stored on earth in plants, water, wind, and then harnessed to produce electricity, which is then used to re-produce light.

The Sun and the Moon are described as the eyes of the Supreme, and it is explained that without His first seeing, we cannot see. By His seeing, we can see. So it is with our chanting - without Srila Prabhupada first chanting, we would never be able to chant. By his chanting we are able to chant. Because he has chanted, we can chant.

One of the most important and fundamental decisions a leader makes is the selection of his or her staff.

It’s about who first, then what

First of all, at a personal level, as a leader it’s primarily about who you are, then about what you do: an authentic leader focuses on transformation over technique. Building out from that, a leader’s staff is primarily about who they are and what they are all about, and then what they do.

So the selection of staff, or the “who” question, is one of the most significant decisions, one of the decisions that has the greatest impact on organisational success, that a leader makes. Choose your team members carefully, and look after them.

Establishing the character of the organisation

A leader is responsible for establishing the depth and nature of commitment that characterises the organisation through their selection of staff. In the language of Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great”, great leaders make sure they have the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus, and they make sure that the right people are sitting in the right places, before deciding where to drive to.

In building organisations from the ground up a leader can influence this process to a greater degree, but even when a leader inherits an organisation with an existing staff they can, and should influence this process.

Birds of feather

Teams should consist of persons of similar aspirations and inclinations. There is no point putting persons who want to move at one speed or in one direction in a team with persons who want to move at a faster or slower pace, or in a different direction. The result will simply be a dysfunctional and unproductive team with dissatisfied and frustrated members. It’s not good for the organisation or the individuals.

The best course of action is to group similar or complementary persons and create particular teams that will work on different projects, or to assign the teams different aspects of a larger project, in such a way that each team can effectively contribute to the organisational objectives whilst allowing the individuals who make up those teams to work according to their natures.

A leader will situate those persons who embody the qualities that will characterise the organisation closest to them. The converse is true, that the persons closest to the leader will characterise the organisation. In order to be effective, at some point a leader has to make a conscious decision: “What will characterise our organisation?” They have to then structure things to make this a reality. Leadership means influence. An effective leader shares his or her influence with those who embody the qualities that they wish to characterise the organisation.

A leader who knows what kind of person they are looking for is more likely to get the kind of person they need than a leader who doesn’t.

There is a distinction between effective and authentic leadership.

Authentic Leaders, Authentic Followers

Authentic leaders surround themselves with authentic followers. An authentic leader is not an authority unto him or herself. An authentic leader is a pure transmitter of vision. An authentic leader is aligned with a principle that is transcendent to themselves.

Authentic leaders therefore seek followers who are also aligned with this higher principle, rather than followers who are aligned with them personally. Authentic followers follow the leader because the leader is aligned with the higher principle, they do not follow the principle because the leader is aligned with it.

A leader generally surrounds him or herself with followers who are personally loyal to them, rather than to the principles they serve and embody, because of weak leadership character. They embody an insecure type of leadership that derives its strength from socially constructed values. In other words, they derive their strength by having followers, rather than by serving and embodying principles. While superficially it may not be immediately obvious, this fatal flaw in their character can become apparent at any given time with disastrous results. If they deviate from those principles, many of their followers will also deviate along with them.

An authentic leader, on the other hand, looks for people who are similarly or ideally more devoted to the principles that they serve and seek to embody, and surrounds themselves with these highly motivated and dedicated persons. Together they strive to move forward, and if the leader falters, they gain strength from the members of their team. If they deviate from the higher principle they serve, many of those following them will remain aligned with the higher principles, and the leader will have the opportunity to take advantage of this protection.

An authentic leader sees himself or herself as the servant of the people that they lead, and they seek to work closely with persons who embody the principles they serve.

Alignment with universal principles energises organisations

A powerful example of this is when Duryodhana and Arjuna were recruiting for their organisations prior to the battle of Kuruksetra. Duryodhana selected Krishna’s army, whereas Arjuna selected Krishna Himself. Duryodhana was interested in building up his own personal power, whereas Arjuna was dedicated to a higher principle, in this case embodied by Krishna Himself.

Principles are universal, just as, for example, the principle of transmigration of the soul is universal. It is not a religious dogma, an arbitrary declaration or belief. It is a self-evident, axiomatic natural and fundamental law of the universe, the nature of reality itself.

When we align ourselves with natural principles we harmonise with natural forces that energise our organisations.

“I know well the nature of this mission that I was assigned, it is not about honours, but about service.”

“Yo sé muy bien el carácter de ésta misión que se me asignó, no es acerca de reconocimientos, sinó acerca de servicio”

–Pope Bendict XVI

“This is a clear example of how customer feedback is driving our service offering”

- a leader in the company I work at, said during a meeting today