What goes around comes around – assume accountability

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
advancement. Thank you. There is something which is alien to the mainstream modern consciousness.
In fact many modern and even pre-modern thinkers have appreciated the explanatory potential of karma. In fact one of the oldest and most respected scholars of ancient India, Sir William Jones who was a pioneering Sanskritist and who was the founder of the Asiatic society in Bengal. He says that I am no Hindu but the Hindu doctrine concerning a future state but I hold the Hindu doctrine concerning a future state to be incomparably more rational, more pious and more likely to determine from vice than the horrid opinions inculcated by the Christians on punishment without end.
Similarly W. Sovereign Sir Mohan is a famous author in his book The Razor’s Edge. He also states, talks about the future life and reincarnation and karma and he says if the evils we suffer are the results of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that in this one we strive toward virtue, our future lives will be less afflicted. The Bhagavad Gita itself states that the understanding of karma is not very easy.
So 4.16 the Gita states that this is the verse. What is karma? What is the karma? Even the wise are bewildered about this but I will explain it to you now. So now how does all this apply to leadership? Now leadership functions foundationally on trust to the extent that the leaders earn the trust of their subordinates of their team members then they can work together.
Trust is the glue that binds together the leaders and the subordinates as a cohesive and effective team. Now some initial attraction may bring followers, bring subordinates. The leader has some flair, some flamboyance, some charisma that may attract people but that won’t retain them if core integrity is lacking.
So what inspires trust is integrity. So integrity of course means that there is correlation, coincidence between our words and our actions, correspondence between our words and our actions. We do what we speak and we speak what we do.
And essentially integrity comes from it is equivalent to ethics. Ethics are what are essential for a person to act with integrity and what militates against integrity is the desire for quick pleasure. The temptation to sacrifice principle for pleasure is ever present in life and this temptation is all the more for leaders because leaders have more influence, more power than others.
So they may think that I have the contacts, I have the influence, I have the power by which I can pull off some tricky things. I can do some ethical things and get away with it. Now if the leaders do this and the leaders compromise their ethics then that can lead to major crisis in society.
The last recession that the world experienced it all began in an ethical shortfall. The managers and the leaders in the banking industry in America they gave loans which were not secure and which they knew were not secure because they wanted to make some quick money that led to the American subprime crisis and thereafter that snowballed into a global economic meltdown. So now that’s just one example but when people lack ethics then they create problems for themselves and others and the greater the influence of those people who lack ethics the greater the harmful influence of that.
So now how does one get the call for how does one inspire oneself to be ethical or how can leaders get the impetus as I said they have the temptation sacrifice pleasure, sacrifice principle for pleasure but and if they think that we can get away that we are not accountable if we are just clever enough, if we are just cunning enough or whatever the word we use specifically to describe our actions, our unethical actions the point is that as long as they think that they can get away they will always be tempted to do it. So assume accountability that is the tenet of karma. Now the word karma has entered the mainstream intellectual mainstream intellectual jargon language today media but then it is entered primarily as a casual term to be bandied around but it is essentially a consequential principle.
So what do we mean by this? Now actually speaking is karma just some we may get the question, this question always illumine when we hear about karma is this some idea thought up by some people who wanted to somehow pursue some order in an inherently disorderly world that could be possible but then if it were just a thought up concept then why does the essential underlying principle in karma underlie all of human thinking and especially all of leadership thinking how does karma underlie leadership thinking? Karma if we just put aside all metaphysical connotations what it essentially says is the correlation between action and reaction action produces reaction and reaction is caused by some action. So now this correlation between action and consequence is something that we assume in our day-to-day life and leaders assume in their day-to-day evaluations if a team member is performing poorly then the leaders naturally enquire if the output performance is poor how much is the input effort is the team member not working competently is not working hard enough so naturally we assume there is a correlation between the input in terms of the effort and the output in terms of the performance and if this assumption of the correlation between effort and result would not be there then no performance appraisal system could work when leaders do appraisals for their team members they can fire or retain or promote or felicitate a team member now on what basis do they do that? yes they see the results but there is also the understanding the results are coming from endeavours so now of course it is true that sometimes say despite the best endeavours certain results may not come out that means say a marketing executive may work very hard and try to market a product but if the whole economy is down at that time there may not be any takers for that product despite the best efforts so the point is there are extraneous considerations that may block or delay the connection of the endeavour to the result now of course the marketing agent will get some experience will learn grit and determination and whatever experience and skills have been learned and qualities have been internalised they will help in future marketing so definitely it is not a loss but performance appraisal systems which are sophisticated considers extraneous factors also while doing appraisal so karma is a sophisticated performance appraisal system and it expands the arena from action to action reaction beyond this one lifetime to lives before this and to lives after this and in this way it actually helps us understand how action and reaction do have a correlation always now moving forward if we look at the word karma now the word karma has as I said entered into the mainstream English in the last few decades last several decades ago but the concept is there even in intellectual thought in fact all human thought in the biblical tradition it is put as as you sow so shall you reap now our actions produce reaction this is the succinct way of phrasing karma now the Gita describes that the intricacies of karma are quite difficult to understand gahana karmanogati gahana is very dark and dense difficult to penetrate so it’s not very easy to understand so moving forward let’s so now karma itself is a dense subject I will focus we’ll focus here on just some preliminary questions because analysing karma exhaustively is not the purpose of the discussion we are primarily trying to gain a basic understanding of karma so that we can explore its bearing on leadership so is there a logical basis for karma yes let’s look at two points first first is that all of nature obeys laws in fact the whole of science has progressed on the assumption that there are there is order in nature Newton saw the fruit falling and what did he do after that now he assumed on seeing the fruit falling there must be some reason why it falls there must be some pattern and there may be some law so science has progressed first on the assumption of an orderly universe orderly universe and thereafter the subsequent discerning of that order and as scientists study the universe more and more they are finding more and more order more and more magnificent order at various levels and even then some studies in science reveal things that are disorderly still there is some kind of order even within that and scientists continue the research to find out what that order would be so that means two things over we are talking about first is that nature itself behaves according to laws and the human intelligence progresses by assuming that nature doesn’t work arbitrarily nature works in a law bound way in a coherent causal way and then we try to find that causal connection which underlies the working of nature so now what Gita wisdom tells us is that this causal principle extends not just to physical things but also to living beings so as per the current understanding of the laws of nature the laws apply to things but the Bhagavad Gita wisdom explains that it applies to consciousness and interactions also so the way we act, our actions produce reactions and reactions can happen at many different levels and those reactions can rebound on us in many different ways and all that comes under the broad rubric of concept of karma so essentially when we start exploring the concept of karma we are doing the same things that have led to scientific progress we assume that there is a law under nature there is a law in nature and that we need to discern and understand that law so if all of nature obeys laws from microscopic to macroscopic level why should our actions not be under law so Gita wisdom tells us that we are also under laws and this law, the law of karma is inexorable and impartial it’s just like gravity it doesn’t depend on belief so if a person doesn’t believe in the law of gravity and jumps from a 10 story building that belief or disbelief won’t make any difference to the fate the person will be under consequences so similarly law of karma is also impartial and inexorable it will bring consequences whether people believe or don’t believe in it now moving forward another way we could look at is the training system so this we have discussed briefly in our talk about, mention about appraisal but once we understand that the as we have discussed in earlier sessions universe is like a university and that there is a cosmic teacher supreme lord god who is the teacher over here then we understand the universe is like a training system it’s a university and just as parents or teachers when the children obey and do good things the parents give some good rewards and if the children are naughty and irresponsible the parents punish, same way teachers do that and god is supreme parent, supreme teacher he would not do the same thing so the reactions that we get which are negative they are the way to train us to avoid negative actions for which these reactions have come and the good results that we get they are the reactions to our good actions and they are meant to encourage us to continue those good actions and to increase those good actions so that means as the laws of nature we infer from science and the training system we infer from normal human experience and this way these are concurrent threads of thought which point towards karma so now of course when we talk about training system one question comes up that we see rewards coming we see punishments coming and we see in this life if a student is punished there is a reason for the punishment but we don’t see within our observation such things happening all the time sometimes there are people who are criminals they seem to be prospering and people who are virtuous they sometimes get sidelined so where do those reactions go why don’t we see karma in action that way well the basic principle of cause and effect we do see in action all the time now if I see a friend and I see the friend’s hand is burned I ask immediately what happened it means I am assuming that the burning of the hand is the effect and that effect has a cause we in our normal dealings implicitly assume the principle of cause-reaction correlation of karma essentially now we also understand that cause and consequence action and reaction can be separated by different time durations so for example if in the morning a patient calls a doctor and says doctor my stomach is upset doctor may well ask what did you eat last night that is a reaction which comes after a few hours if I put my hand in fire the reaction comes immediately if I overeat late at night the reaction comes after maybe 6 or 8 hours now a middle-aged man goes to doctor, doctor’s x-ray and says that you have got lung cancer doctor may ask at what age did you start smoking so there the smoking may have started in teenage and the reaction may have come after 20 years so even in this life we see that the action-reaction correlation may be separated by different time durations so every action that we do is like a seed and just as in nature different seeds fructify after different time durations similarly different actions be a reaction after different times, grains fructify after few months mango tree may fructify after several years different actions fructify after different time durations and some actions may fructify beyond this life also and some reactions we are getting now may have originated before this life also so this is illustrated in the Mahabharata of which the Bhagavad Gita is a part now Dhritarashtra was a blind emperor who had 100 sons and he lost all his 100 sons in the Kurukshetra war now of course the sons died because of their own misdeed they got a karmic reaction for that but Dhritarashtra asked later on Krishna the question that I got 100 sons and all of them died why? so Krishna replied 50 lifetimes ago you were a hunter and in that life as a hunter you were trying to shoot a bird and then you in a fit of rage went and saw the nest so many eggs and birds mercilessly slashed and smashed and crushed all of them and there were actually 100 lives that you took that way and as a reaction to that your 100 sons have died Dhritarashtra became defensive and then he asked ok but why did it take 50 lifetimes for me to get this reaction and Krishna replied actually you needed 50 lives to do punya, to do good karma by which you could have enough karma to have 100 sons in one lifetime and in this lifetime you had that karma to get 100 sons and then because of that bad karma you lost your 100 sons so different reactions to come may require various factors which may take their own time to come multiple factors determine when reactions will come the essential point is that action does produce reaction and reaction does come from action that’s karma basically now at this point we may get the question all this is just a belief what is the proof for all this firstly if we want to go into proof then what is the proof that the whole principle of karma is false is there any way we can disprove it in fact if we look at our day to day behaviour we look at science everywhere we assume causal connection so are you going to deny causal connection itself entirely now we can say that ok but I can see the causal connection acting I can see the cause producing effect that’s why I accept it in science and I can see cause producing effect in in say normal training system and things like that but what about over here I don’t see it why should I believe it yes we may not be able to see it but there are so many things we don’t see in science also but we accept those things so as we advance in knowledge actually we learn to move from perceivable things to imperceivable unperceivable principles Newton saw the fruit falling and he moved towards the imperceivable law of gravity gravity itself is invisible intangible concept now in its effects we can see it but not in we can’t perceive the law in and of itself we can’t perceive gravity as a concept itself directly so again moving forward yes even if we have safe argument saying that it’s a belief rejecting it is also a belief disbelief is also a belief then we have to choose which belief makes the best sense which belief helps us to get the best results so now let’s see which belief is the most empowering for us to live in life now all of us get different starting conditions in life so for example some of us may have may be born in very poor families some of us in middle class families some of us in tremendously rich families so now if we consider life to be a cricket match then it’s like one team has a score of 0 and another team starts with a score of 200 wonder what is this why this partiality why is one team getting a poor score and another team getting a high score right in the beginning itself we consider this odd and then we beg the question why is it like this so and there could be different answers if we saw a score like that in a match we would think there are three possibilities one is that actually let’s look at what possibilities might be there that ok the scoreboard is malfunctioning it just functions by chance and use any arbitrary number that comes about the other option could be that actually the scorekeeper is biassed is also arbitrary or biassed and has just decided to favour a particular team and that’s why that team has been given a score of 200 isn’t it so now which of these would make sense actually in the same way these are two options that we have when we see life’s inequities so why are some people poor and some people wealthy let’s say that it’s by chance that’s the materialistic atheistic world view which holds that life is just like a cosmic lottery some people are lucky some are unlucky if you’re lucky good if you’re unlucky bad luck what can you do just accept it and this is actually a doctrine of helplessness and hopelessness those who are victims are just victims helpless and those who are well situated even they are always insecure sometimes my lottery luck may run out anytime and also it runs to our sense of justice to our sense of the way normally we see life working cause and effect correlation so now this is chance that’s the doctrine the other doctrine could be or we could call it divine caprice divine caprice means that god will zip this way so this is the belief of most of the Abrahamic religions most of the major denominations of the Abrahamic religions namely Christianity, Islam and Judaism and they hold that they take the same situation and add god to the mix and they say that these are these vary varieties some people are poor and some people are wealthy because this is arranged by god to test us and to help us grow well even if we accept the idea that god is testing us the question comes up why does god test different people differently if everyone were poor everyone were wealthy that would be ok and there is a test for everyone but suppose in an exam some students get a very easy paper and some students get a difficult paper naturally we will not be questioning the principle that the teacher is taking exam but we will definitely question the principle why is the teacher testing differentially why is the teacher testing partially like this similarly this makes the question why does god give more difficult test to some people and less difficult test to others so now usually the Abrahamic religions answer this question by giving some variant of the platitude that actually god’s justice is different from ours now those who are hurt by life’s iniquities for them such a reply doesn’t sound like a sensible explanation at all it seems just some wordplay to get god off the hook and also we cannot deny the sting of truth in their retort and they say that ok god’s justice may be different from ours but it should be different in terms of being better than ours not worse than ours so even we wouldn’t test students discriminating like this why would god so actually many people when they are asked to have faith in such an arbitrary god they baulk and many of them even take the logical next step and embrace atheism rather than believing a capricious god better to believe capricious chance and that’s how so many people millions of thoughtful people have embraced atheism given their choices it’s understandable but it’s uninformed because there is a third choice and that third choice is multi-life progression what it means is that actually that one team has a score of 200 other team has a score of 0 that’s because this is the second innings of the match and the first innings one team had got a lead of 200 so similarly the Gita Oldview explains that wherever we are right now is a result of our past lifetimes our past innings and whatever we have done in the past innings comes to us some people are wealthy some people are poor that’s because those people who are wealthy have put more runs in their karmic score in the previous lifetime and those who are poor have put less runs in their karmic score that means the wealthy people have done more good karma the poor people have done less good karma and that’s why they have these results and the important point is that wherever we are we can do good karma we can score and we can improve our position so this reincarnation based world view actually incorporates the integrates the inequity of this world and the concept of a just God into one coherent whole a systematic world view that answers the heart’s deepest questions so now further actually this is also individually and socially empowering individually when we understand wherever I may be right now from where I am if I choose right if I act right I will grow I will move forward so no matter how bleak my present is I have the power to create a bright future because we have the we determine the choices that we make and then we get the consequences when we make the right choices we can get good consequences and that way we can move forward in life and in this way it’s individually empowering and it’s also socially empowering why because it transforms the social model from conflict to cooperation it redefines our view of the world from a jungle to a university a jungle means what actually a jungle is a place where animals compete and kill so that they can get what they want university is where students study so that they all grow and they graduate similarly the idea that if we think this is the only life that we have and we aren’t short of living is all that we get and we have to grab as much as possible for enjoyment then naturally we compete with others but if we understand we are in a multi-lifetime progression and our goal is to attain spiritual evolution, spiritual perfection then we choose actions more thoughtfully more prudently actually more ethically so we see others not as competitors but as co-travellers with us so if someone so leaders can see their subordinates those who are say in lesser positions than them may be less endowed than in different ways not as potential threats who may assert me they see them as fellow students yes I may be in a junior college and they may be in secondary now but I was also where they are now and they deserve my help not my criticism and similarly subordinates can see their leaders by their studies they have gone up and wherever they are they have earned their place there and if I study I can also go there so rather than envying them I can learn from them and move forward in my life so in this way we bring about a model of cooperation of sharing and caring instead of grabbing and fighting and it can actually revolutionise in a positive sense and it can bring a new fresh sense of camaraderie and cooperation within a team and we understand that we are all progressing towards the same journey now when we understand reincarnation based world then we understand that we are actually always accountable and understanding the philosophy of karma brings intellectual muscle to the call we understand that actually by being ethical I am doing good to myself not just so that I can avoid getting caught but it’s so that I can grow as a person I can grow spiritually so now we will not get carried away when we see some people who may be having economic prosperity despite having ethical bankruptcy what we understand is that if we compromise our ethics then we may get some externals but we will lose our internals we will lose our integrity, we will lose our spirituality we will lose the substance of our character that which defines us, that which makes us who we are yes, we may get caught and our reputation may also be ruined but even if that doesn’t happen even before that our character will be wounded every time we compromise you know we will be growing whenever we choose the path of least resistance and succumb to the urge for pleasure at the cost of principle we weaken ourselves we morph into dwarfs we become weaker versions of ourselves and we stunt our growth and we promote our dwarfing so we hurt ourselves more than we hurt others and of course we may hurt others also so on the other hand when we understand that actually I act properly then I grow, I evolve as a human being the fabric, the substance of my character improves and that will help me in the long run so this long term world view can motivate leaders even when they are going against stuff so the Gita talks about three kinds of karma that is karma, vikarma and akarma now the complex concept to keep it simple here, karma refers to ethical actions vikarma refers to unethical actions and akarma refers to not an action but actions that bring no reactions this essentially refers to spiritual actions actions done in a mood of service and contribution service to the divine and contribution to society so for leaders the Gita offers a vision of leadership as stewardship that leaders are caretakers of the resources which originally belong to God and by using them judiciously in the service of God for the contribution to society then they not only do good karma but actually they go beyond karma they attain liberation they attain life’s lasting success fulfilment so once we understand the philosophy of karma once we assume accountability then it inspires us to close the doors to ethical shortcuts and once those doors are closed rather than looking for loopholes in the system to exploit we actually let our energy and creativity flow forth undistracted and uninterrupted on the path of honest performance and leaders who are thus inspired and motivated by an understanding not just of the principle of karma that is the rule of law but beyond that with a vision of love that they are all a part of one family and that they are contributors they are caretakers in this family then their creativity and energy can flow out of that love and such leaders can make a tremendous positive impact not just in their own lives not just for their teams but for the world at large