Leading Through the Wisdom of the Heart

What do we mean when we speak of leadership? It can depend on the focus and context of our thought: current leadership, a specific leader, respected leaders, feared leaders, enlightened leaders, or the leadership we wish for. There are so many possible layers of thought that can reduce or expand our ideas of leadership. The more enlightened leadership we seek in these troubles times is emerging from the forefront of humanity’s evolutionary progression. The new leaders now coming into prominence are changing how we think of leadership. They are inspiring new expectations that bring with them a realisation of our own power to create the way into a new and better world – together.

As humanity awakens to the greater truths that are becoming clearer around the world, we see a new type of leadership emerging against the backdrop of an old and fast-fading model. New leaders emerge from the people’s growing desire for the humanely compassionate values of justice, fairness, equality, inclusiveness and mutual respect and appreciation. Underpinning these values is the realisation of the common essence we share as human beings in a world whose life supports us all. The old model arose from a smaller sense of identity based on individual supremacy at the expense of all else; the emerging new model serves to lift everyone into a shared vision.

This new type of leadership is based on shared responsibility, the seeds of which have been growing and flowering through the expanding aid agencies and volunteer groups around the world who have become integral to the governance of all nations, especially in supporting the most vulnerable. Many aid organisations, such as the United Nations agencies, are now critically essential in areas of extreme hardship. This signifies a growing shift of responsibility from a concentration within a controlling political elite to a free heart-response from the people, from control by power to responsibility shared by all. It also indicates a shift to soul identity: from identification with the little individual self – be that person, group, faction or nation – to identification with the whole. This is the seismic shift in human identity through which we are now living.

And so, we expand out of the ideas of the passing Piscean age into a new Aquarian understanding in which leadership becomes a shared responsibility for a common purpose. Individuals may be the visible representatives, but they are equally part of a group sharing the responsibility for the common good and the care of all. They embody a new consciousness and a new human identity. And we can recognise them when we see through the eyes of that new identity, the eyes of the soul. New groups have been quietly working with this shared consciousness of the soul. In her book, Journey of a Lifetime, Merle Stubbs recorded the group experience:

It is fully understood in such a group that leadership emerges and is not achieved by a process of nomination, appointment or self-promotion. A true leader is comfortable taking a back seat when necessary so that everyone’s capacity is incorporated and nothing is wasted. A true leader does not promote self but the work. A true leader makes sure that tasks are covered by those capable and not by those seeking position or status.

We see the new group work in operation when everyone in the group takes responsibility, when no one is possessive of the work or any aspect of it. And yet it is also important that those who know what they are doing, know what is needed, who have understanding, a fine discrimination and all those valuable soul qualities, take up positions. And we know that when we are truly working in this manner then everything comes together and into place by the attractive nature of the energies we emanate and those energies thus evoked that come to our aid – to the aid of the work. [Journey of a Lifetime, Chapter 4, page 60]

What is being wrought out through group experience everywhere will eventually become the new civilisation with leadership arising through the light of understanding, the wisdom of the heart. The Tibetan Master foretells the times we are approaching:

…disciples and initiates will be the real Builders of the new world, of the new civilisation; they will assume leadership in most countries and take high office in all departments of human life. This they will do by the free choice of the people and by virtue of their advanced and proven merit. By this means, gradually the Hierarchy will take over the control upon the physical plane—subjectively as well as objectively—of the direction of human affairs. This direction will be in virtue of their known and approved capacity and will not involve the imposition of any hierarchical control or authority; it will simply signify the free recognition by free people of certain spiritual qualities and effective activities which they believe signify that these men are adequate to the demanded job, and whom they therefore choose as directing agents in the new and coming world. Freedom of choice under the authority of a spiritual livingness which demonstrates competency will be distinctive of the attitude of the general public. Men will be put into high office and into positions of power not because they are disciples or initiates, but because they are wise and intelligent servants of the public, with an internal awareness, a deeply religious and inclusive consciousness, and a well-trained mind with an obedient brain. [The Externalisation of the Hierarchy, page 572]

With the shift towards the new civilisation, the most enlightened leader, the Christ, will emerge. If our ideas of leadership are no longer conditioned by past expectations, we may recognise Him and so help open the way to the new world. The Tibetan Master reminds us that old expectations must be dispelled in preparation:

All this will not come as the result of some proclamation or some stupendous planetary event which will force human beings everywhere to say: Lo! He is there! Lo! Here are the signs of His divinity! for that would evoke only antagonism and laughter, resistance or fanatical credulity. It will come as a recognition of potency in leadership, through dynamic but logical changes in world affairs, and through action taken by the masses of the people from the depths of their own consciousness. [The Externalisation of the Hierarchy, page 600]

And:

He may reappear in a totally unexpected guise; who is to say whether He will come as a politician, an economist, a leader of the people (arising from the midst of them), a scientist or an artist? [The Reappearance of Christ, page 17]

May we be open to a vastly new experience when the enlightened everywhere lead the way, and we build the new world together.