I am fortunate to have come across this person in my life and had the privilege of personally interacting with him for a brief period of time. He was an Aeronautical Engineer and MBA who studied and worked in Canada and returned to Bangalore to dedicate his life to spiritual practice and teaching healthy living for the welfare of people. I am talking about my spiritual guru late Shri Rishi Prabhakar (popularly known as Guruji). He strongly believed in "rishi/sage" system of life which existed in India during the ancient vedic period of time, as the perfect 'way of leading life' for human beings. Our ancient sages were truth (knowledge) seekers rather than wealth(pleasure) seekers and this is exactly what differentiates human beings from other animals at a broader level.
He always used to say "Leadership is action in freedom". I remember sharing this comment on a discussion at Harvard Business Review blog on a topic "Management is (still) not Leadership". One of the reader rightly added another line to make it apt to differentiate between Leadership and Management as below:
"Leadership is action in freedom. Management is working within set boundaries".
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There are few life time lessons that I learnt from my Guruji, which I would like to share:
1. Leadership is action in freedom. One should act with freedom of choice, should not be influenced or bound by others. Whatever one thinks right from his heart, he should do it. Try to be useful to others, wherever you are and whatever you do. He always used to say, you can attend any number of 'leadership' courses, but unless and until you adopt this mindset, you will never become a leader and you will always remain a 'follower'. Leadership doesn't come by title, it comes by attitude. A Managing Director of a company may be a 'follower' whereas the peon working in his company could be a 'great leader'. It all depends on one's attitude towards life. This is the underlying principle in Robin Sharma's famous book "The Leader who had no Title".
2. "Everything is OK" and "Nothing Matters". In summary, you cannot influence or control each and every person's behaviour or a situation. It is better to accept as it is and do your act. This is precisely the teaching of Bhagawat Geeta, when SriKrishna preaches Arjuna in the war field to do his duty (karma or dharma) without expecting any result out of it, with the help of a sanskrit shloka (verse) "Karmanye Vaadikaraste, Maphaleshu Kadachana"
The situations you come across in life doesn't really matter in the long run. If you have a mindset (by the way, there is a great book written by Carol Dewitt on "Mindset") not to give too much of importance to anything in life, which really relieves you from all types of stress. 'Death' is the only certain thing (the real 'truth') which is bound to happen in our life and nobody wants to even think about it, rather they get concerned with silly day to day matters (illusions), which in the long run doesn't really matter. I do not want to elaborate any further here; if a reader is interested he should listen to Guruji's discourses on these two topics, which covers the gist of all his teachings. Recently, I found a good saying which summarises this point "Be who you are and say what you feel; because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind" - what a profound statement! This is what is the conclusion reached in the most famous self-help book "I am OK, You are OK" by Thomas Harris.
3.Guruji emphasised on eating maximum of raw food (vegetables, fruits, nuts etc) and avoid cooked food, which in itself can cure lots of present generation life style diseases like diabetes, hypertension, arthritis etc. To see the results yourself practically, you can try to eat 100% raw food for a continuous ten days period. (I will write about this process in detail in my later article). The best food one can have is "nothing" i.e., fasting (I will talk about the importance of fasting in yet another article). I would like to conclude this point with the help of an ancient Ayurvedic proverb: "If diet is wrong, medicine is of no use, If diet is correct, medicine is of no need".
4. Pranayaama (conscious breathing) technique can bring your body and mind under control and eliminate all kinds of stress. Pranayaama energises the body by eliminating lethargy. Even a simple brisk walking is nothing but Pranayaama, wherein your body is taking in lot of oxygen to help you with your brisk walk. You just need to be conscious of this to achieve the benefits. No wonder, walking is considered to be the best exercise! Pranayama is a very simple but very powerful technique which I will explain in a different article. By nature, human being is lazy or prefer to be lazy. In fact, all scientific inventions are motivated with an object to make life easy. However, pranayaama helps a person to have 'mind over body' rather than "body over mind".
5. Last but most important learning is 'meditation' through which one can attain "joyfulness". If raw food cleans up our body, pranayaama brings balance and control over our body, meditation would bring control over our mind. Meditation is the act of doing 'nothing'. Just sit comfortably in a quite place and close your eyes in the morning for 15 minutes and let go off all thoughts which come to your mind (preferably after bath, even better if you could complete few rounds of pranayaama techniques before meditation). To quote Bhagawan Rajaneesh (Osho) "Meditation makes you innocent, it makes you childlike. In that state, miracles are possible. That state is pure magic."
If one follows the above five principles, he should be able to lead a happy life. After all, being happy for no reason makes you a 'sage'/'rishi'.
I would like to end this article here with these five points. My Guruji had this habit of mentioning only five points on any topic, so that it gets registered in the minds of listeners. I hope, I have done justice by covering my learnings from him in these five points. Once again, Thank you Guruji and I sincerely pray for your soul to rest in peace!
