Every leader needs support, and no support is more powerful than that provided by the soul. It offers a continuous stream of small and large gifts from the mystery. This is the work of synchronicity, the unseen intelligence that puts you in the right place at the right time. The first six letters of L-E-A-D-E-R-S gave you the preparedness for a leap in awareness, the leap that allows you to live from the level of your soul. Here miracles are normal. Invisible powers come to your aid. They make your vision a certainty.
Successful visionaries expect miracles because they trust in constant support from the soul. It is a natural and easy way to live. You allow your true self to unfold; then you can open the same path to those you lead and serve.
As we will see, synchronicity is never accidental; it has a purpose. It validates that your motive is true. It proves that your trust in the soul is well placed. As your awareness expands, you will receive messages from the soul that are unmistakable. All you need to do is to open yourself up and receive them.
This final aspect of leadership is more mysterious than the others. Successful leaders can all look back at small miracles in their lives, but successful visionaries look back at major miracles. A small miracle involves a stroke of luck, or being in the right place at the right time. A major miracle is very different. The impossible turns into a certainty, and higher guidance intervenes and alters the course of your life. The soul can create miracles for anyone; the limitations are in ourselves. Remove those limitations, and nothing will ever be the same again.
Leading from the soul involves having the kind of support that is hidden from most people. This doesn’t mean trying to get God on your side. God is on everyone’s side, because God is how we conceive of the infinite power that organizes creation. If the soul is your link to this power, it can arrange any event in time and space. The term for such arranged events is synchronicity. The basic definition, “a meaningful coincidence,” really isn’t adequate to describe what happens. Coincidences link two unlikely happenings—for example, two strangers meet and have the same last name, or went to the same schools. Synchronicity, on the other hand, alters events to bring in more meaning. Two people meet, and one has the answer to a problem the other hasn’t been able to solve, and in the process a tiny seed of an idea is given an enormous opportunity to grow. A personal dream is suddenly given the chance to become reality.
When leaders are asked why they are outstanding successes, they reply using good luck more often than any other phrase—they realize that they have led exceptional lives but have no model to explain it. Synchronicity is the right model. It describes a fundamental process in the universe. Your body depends upon unimaginable synchronicity. Out of one hundred billion brain cells, each looks out for its own food, air, and water, as a paramecium or amoeba looks out for itself in a green pond on a mild summer day. Yet somehow brain cells act in perfect coordination. Every thought is an exquisitely choreographed dance.
Billions of neurons are coordinating in order for you to read this sentence. No visible system connects them. Synchronicity has created a major miracle on an almost invisible scale. If it were to occur on a large scale, it would be as if every person on earth said the same sentence at the same moment without planning it in advance. Coincidence cannot come close to describing what is happening here.
At truly synchronous moments, the universe is embracing you, and you see who you really are. The real you is not separate and isolated. The world you experience is not random but one where events are constantly being shuffled to bring you the best result possible. Leaders are expected to produce results, so it’s not surprising that the greatest leaders share the secret of synchronicity. They rely on invisible powers to come to their aid. Your personal vision needs the same support, and you can learn to cultivate it. Miracles in your life indicate that you have a strong connection to your soul. Regard them as sudden leaps in your evolution. Once you expect synchronicity to be there when it is needed, it will be. Then you can pass the benefit on to everyone around you.
To maximize your access to the miraculous, you can take practical steps. If you follow them, you can become a successful visionary, the goal that gives this book its reason for being.
Regard synchronicity as normal.
Look for the hidden message.
Go where you are guided.
Be here in the present.
Understand the harmony of contained conflicts.
Encourage unity; discourage divisions.
Align yourself with a new belief: “I am the world.”
As you can see, some of these steps are internal; they involve changing your old beliefs and expectations. Others are external; they involve how you act in the world and relate to others.
Your first step is to reverse any belief that synchronicity is abnormal. Without it life couldn’t exist. Ecology is exquisitely coordinated. A cat put inside a sealed jar will die from lack of oxygen. A fern put into a sealed jar will die from lack of carbon dioxide. But put them together, and they will survive. On a planetary scale, this delicate interdependence goes far beyond mere survival: Nature provides a setting for all species to thrive and evolve. You are part of the same stream of life. You were designed to thrive and evolve in the ecology that surrounds and enmeshes you. Many would say that the events of a lifetime are random. Certainly in the materialist worldview randomness dominates: intelligence is a secondary accident that somehow produced the human brain through trial and error. If you accept this worldview, of course you would regard synchronicity as no more than a small example of an intriguing coincidence.
Despite accidents and chance, however, in our everyday experience, we rely on awareness, wherever it comes from. Theory is one thing; practice is another. Our lives mean something. We don’t have to claim that a higher power is at work; it’s much simpler to say that intelligence exists everywhere. Think about a synchronous event in your life, when you met a stranger who turned out to play a very significant role. If pure chance were at work, the odds would be millions to one. It is simpler—and according to the principle of Occam’s razor therefore more logical—to say that the meeting was meant to be, that a guiding intelligence is working invisibly, shaping the event to serve a purpose. In the world’s wisdom traditions, this explanation extends to a person’s whole life. Successful visionaries adopt this belief because it has proved valid in their own lives.
Visionaries feel connected to a larger purpose.
They experience a dream coming true.
They have prayed and received an answer.
They sense that their lives are deeply meaningful.
They feel guided from within.
They rely upon significant synchronicity.
They walk the path that was destined for them.
You don’t have to convince yourself that these things are true. They become true, easily and naturally, as consciousness expands. In fact they become commonplace. Synchronicity isn’t a form of divine favoritism that puts a few privileged people ahead of the rest of us. Everyone is totally and equally supported from the level of the soul.
If your soul is sending you messages at this moment, you need to receive them. This is no different from having a conversation with someone. If you ignore what the other person says, the dialogue comes to an end. In most lives, dialogue with the soul is very tenuous and shaky. Being able to receive the soul’s messages makes a real difference, but the difference is easier to describe by what is absent than by what is present.
You don’t feel uncared for and unloved.
You aren’t isolated and alone.
Your actions aren’t dictated by habit and random impulses.
Your existence has stopped being a riddle.
You are not a victim.
I could have used the positive form of each statement (“You feel cared for and loved,” “Your existence becomes meaningful,” etc.), but I want to emphasize the problems that have gone away. There are moments when changes are so easy to see, they can’t be missed. The first day you recover from a cold, you can’t help but notice that you aren’t stuffed up and achy anymore. But over time this contrast disappears. The same is true spiritually. You may suddenly notice that you no longer feel lonely or misunderstood or unsafe in the world, if those were once problems for you. But most of the time there is simply a flow of connections that feels unremarkable.
“Look for the hidden message” means taking a moment to notice the negative things that have slipped away: fear, uncertainty, threat, anger, resentment, envy, struggle, external obstacles, inner voices that criticize and judge you, traumatic memories, toxic relationships, guilt, and shame. It’s a long list, and most of us rarely dwell on it. As your awareness expands, however, you will notice that items on the list will steadily fade away, and your life will be more smoothly and easily knit together. That is a sign that you are in true dialogue with the soul.
Once the dialogue with your soul is set up, it leads somewhere. It guides you on your path. But if your guide is silent, how do you know if you are heeding it? The clearest indication is that your ego no longer dominates your thinking. We’ve discussed the ego in Chapter Five; contrasting its focus on “I, me, and mine” with transpersonal values, where the perspective is “us.” As awareness expands, your ego’s role becomes more and more that of the observer. Less and less will it make demands that you must heed.
The soul’s guidance doesn’t come in the form of instructions, such as “Don’t be so selfish” or “Think about other people more.” Being silent, the soul works differently—it makes old habits less satisfying. The sensation is like walking on solid ground that suddenly stops supporting you. Someone might make you angry, for example, but instead of going off on them and feeling justified in your anger, you find that the feeling of anger just evaporates. Guidance is the gradual melting away of ego and all its familiar responses: anger, fear, resentment, jealousy, and the constant need to compare yourself to others.
You can see yourself being guided in the following stages:
1. Being stuck: I am used to acting this way. It fits who I am. The situation calls for me to react this way. What’s the problem? I don’t have one.
2. First doubts: My reaction doesn’t feel quite right. I have twinges of guilt. It’s as if I can’t help myself, but I wish I could.
3. Self-questioning: I need to stop reacting this way. It’s pointless; it no longer feels right. If I am ever going to change, these old habits have to go.
4. Seeking change: I catch myself reacting and do my best to stop. Others know I want to change, and they help and encourage me. I notice people who don’t react the way I do. I want to be like them.
5. Finding change: I have more control over my reactions. I have learned how to let go. I get no satisfaction from the way I used to behave. I don’t even recognize the person I used to be.
6. Reintegration: I’m new. There are traces of my old reactions, but they barely influence me. I don’t think about who I used to be. I am clear about who I am and happy with the person I see inside.
Although synchronicity is experienced privately and subjectively, being familiar with these six stages of personal change is very useful to any leader. As a leader, your role is to motivate change, so you need to recognize its symptoms. People rarely have a sudden epiphany that causes them, Scrooge-like, to exchange the very bad for the very good. In real life, Scrooge flirts with being nicer and less stingy, takes small steps in a new direction, and often backslides. But change is occurring. As a leader, you can encourage it every step of the way by noticing and being sympathetic. Look upon yourself as midwife to a fragile birth. Express your appreciation at the smallest signs of the new as it emerges.
In recent years the power of now has become a favorite spiritual topic. Being present has an undeniable appeal. Joy and happiness can only occur right this moment. If you dwell on past joys and wish for future happiness, they are not yours now. But the present is tricky. By definition, now lasts only a split second before it turns into the past.
There are instances when people experience being totally present. Their existence becomes free of all burdens. An inner illumination fills everything they see. The mundane is transformed into the extraordinary, the dull into the brilliant. At the same time, however, they feel a disturbing loss of balance. The present moment can feel a lot like freefall. There’s no rope to hang on to connecting past, present, and future. Nothing is certain anymore.
Therefore it’s better to adapt to the present by stages. Your soul is always in the present, so it’s not the now that you must seize. It cannot be seized anyway. Respect the part of you that wants to cling to the familiar. Encourage the part that wants to be open to the new. Here’s another way to enter into the process:
• Be centered. If you notice that you have lost your center, pause and return there.
• Remain open to your surroundings—let information and impressions flow in freely.
• If you find yourself saying or doing what you habitually do, catch yourself. Pause and stand back. It’s okay not to react. Leave an open space for something new.
• Appreciate the present moment. Notice what is nourishing about it. Take a moment to really look at the people you are with.
• If judgment, anger, or anxiety starts to color your mood, don’t resist. Tell the negative feeling that you will pay attention to it later. Follow up your promise by contacting the feeling again to see if it still needs to be dealt with.
• Expect the best. Look for positive signals in the situation. These signals may come from other people, but they can also be simply a good feeling in the air. Ask that good feeling to come in and uplift you.
• Don’t open doors to the past. Nostalgia and reliving old times can be pleasant, but the bad parts about the past are given entry at the same time. If old memories come to you, look at them and let them be what they are, but don’t do anything active with them.
By meditating and remaining centered, you will get glimpses of the present quite soon. The more you expand your awareness, the more naturally you will be present without effort. One of the most obvious signs is that you feel lighter physically, but any experience of being carefree, safe, welcomed, filled with light, uplifted, or inspired is a gift from the present moment. In time these moments will merge into a continual experience. When that happens, the now will be your home forever.
The soul doesn’t engage in conflict. When you feel pulled to defend your notion of right and wrong, you can certainly keep it and achieve some beneficial things. There are many wrongs to confront in this world. But you won’t be acting from the soul. Spiritually, the way to deal with the eternal war between light and dark, right and wrong, creation and destruction is to go beyond the battle.
When this happens, you see that explicit enemies are implicit allies: neither side can exist without the other. There is no good to fight for unless someone else is made to be bad or wrong. I know that this is a difficult shift; we can all think of horrors that seem absolute and must be defeated. But let go of moral arguments for a moment, and regard how Nature works. When two animals are predator and prey, like the lion and the gazelle, life encloses them in the same circle. When a rose blooms, it is paired with molds that turn the dead blossoms into compost. Mold isn’t beautiful; decomposition stinks, unlike the fragrance of a rose. Yet without the other, neither can exist. To go beyond good and evil is simply to see the larger whole that embraces opposites. Wholeness contains conflicts, but they serve the greater good by keeping creation and destruction in balance.
One reason we can miss the opportunities that the soul provides is that we shut out experience in advance, labeling certain things as unacceptable. For peaceful people it is unacceptable to use force. For self-contained people it is unacceptable to lose control of one’s emotions. If you look at your own value system, you can make a personal list of “what I will never do.” Take a moment and make such a list. Once you’ve finished, realize this: you are tied to the things you resist. The tie is unconscious but still powerful. What if you had an abusive parent and grew up swearing to yourself that you would never inflict the kind of harm you suffered through? Yes, you would consciously become a better person, but unconsciously you would have defined yourself through your abuser, limiting your freedom to experience everything.
Resist a moral interpretation. I’m not saying that you should choose to abuse others, not at all. Rather, look at the closed compartments that need to be open. For example, many children of abuse find it very hard to trust anyone after they grow up; trust is a closed compartment. Others find it hard to show compassion for “bad” people; still others adopt rigid codes of behavior that they impose on themselves and others. When the soul brings messages of compassion, openness, and nonjudgment, the person shuts them out because they don’t fit her fixed beliefs. There is resistance instead of receptivity.
This is understandable, but in terms of synchronicity, compartmentalizing your mind is very limiting. Now you receive only what is acceptable. And if you already know what is good and bad in advance, you have no real need for a soul. You have no intention of growing beyond your fixed belief system. But the soul is all about growing. To be receptive to the harmony of contained conflicts, practice the following steps:
• Take the long view. Try to see how the worst things in your past benefited you. Have faith that setbacks in the present will also benefit you down the road.
• Realize that everyone is defined by his level of consciousness. What looks easy to change from your perspective looks binding from his.
• Accept that everyone is doing the best she can from her level of awareness. This can be difficult when others are doing things you strongly disapprove of. But you can come closer to acceptance if you add a second point: no matter how badly people are behaving, they, too, have souls, which means that at some level they yearn for positive change.
• Investigate in depth how Nature balances creation and destruction. Gestation, birth, growth, maturity, and decay exist at every level of the cosmos. Instead of attaching yourself only to one aspect of this cycle, resolve to embrace it all. This is how your soul views reality.
• On a behavioral level, fight the good fight if it calls out to you, but resist becoming a polarizing force. Whatever it takes, see some good in your adversary. Show respect, and bend over backward to negotiate before the fight begins. Avoid relationships with people who can see good only in their position. Anyone who vilifies the other side is creating enemies, which is ultimately more destructive than anything else. You may be victorious, but your enemies will persist after the conflict is over.
In the section on team building, we discussed the value of negotiating differences so that the group doesn’t splinter. Now we have to look deeper. You have taken on the part of leading from the soul because you are on a personal journey, the journey to higher consciousness. As seen by the soul, your vision will ultimately be fulfilled only when you reach enlightenment. Enlightenment is about the reconciliation of opposites. Unity replaces differences; wholeness becomes a living reality. At that point everything human will be part of you.
Knowing that this is the end point of your journey, act as if you have already arrived. Be a force for bringing opposites together. Opposites begin with you yourself. They find voice in some typical responses:
I have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other.
I feel ambivalent. I can’t commit.
Some days I love the person I’m with. Other days there’s no love at all.
I swing between self-esteem and feeling unworthy.
Am I real or a fraud? I’m afraid that somebody is going to see through me one day and expose me.
I’m grown up, but I still feel as helpless as a child.
If others love me, why do I feel so lonely?
These are the beliefs of someone who is divided against himself. Self-division gets projected outward. It’s impossible to truly accept others when you have serious doubts about yourself. This is one of the few hard-and-fast rules about spirituality. Behind it lies a larger truth: you can give only what you have to give. If you don’t have self-esteem, you can’t find worth in others. The same is true for love, compassion, and forgiveness. All will be yours to give once you apply them to yourself.
Society doesn’t teach us how to grow spiritually, and therefore most people get stuck in the endless games that opposites play. Most leaders, in fact, are trapped in divisiveness because it serves them. They foster winners instead of losers. They want more for “us” and less for “them.” They identify rivals to beat, market shares to grab, weak companies to gobble up, and areas where no concession is possible.
Here, leading from the soul is simple: if you have to tear somebody down in order to feel bigger, don’t do it. Seek positive reasons to build up your situation without needing an adversary. Heal your own divisions, and you will radiate a sense of worth that has no need to tear down anyone else. The soul’s motto is “I am enough,” and as your awareness expands, you will become enough. From that point on, you will exhibit the generosity and compassion for the fallen that is a hallmark of the greatest visionaries.
Here too you can live the goal before you reach it. None of us were raised to believe that we were the world. The statement sounds almost unintelligible. Even the ego would blush at such a gross exaggeration. But saying “I am the world” is actually humble. It’s your acknowledgment that you are a thread in the tapestry of life. Just as the complete code of DNA is enclosed in every cell, you contain every aspect of consciousness. What the world is made of, so it is with you. You leave nothing out except by choice. There are many such choices, however, and we’ve all made them.
Every label you identify with excludes something else: my race, my gender, my nationality, my education, my status. Each label is one thing, but in possessing that one thing, you push away many other things: all other races, nationalities, education levels, social roles, and people of the opposite gender. Labels are defensive. It’s no accident that they allow you to reject everything that is “not me.” Life feels much safer when you draw a circle around your identity and don’t step outside it.
There are two types of leaders, then: those who defend the circle and those who look beyond it. The first stance is much easier to adopt; people are usually insecure without defenses, so the tighter their circle is, the better they feel. The second role belongs to the visionary. It speaks to a deeper yearning. Inside, we all know that human beings are one. The same joy and suffering infuse every life. This knowledge is something we try to shut out, but we cannot fully turn it away because being human comes from the soul. To insist that the outside world is “not me” is unreal. No matter how tightly you draw your family, tribe, race, or nationality around you, the result is not greater safety but isolation and illusion.
Real freedom lies outside the circle. It’s the people you never expected to bond with, the viewpoints that are completely different from your own, and the ideas you never considered that will liberate you. We speak of meeting needs, both yours and the group’s. But needs are only stepping-stones to one goal: liberating the spirit within. “I am the world” affirms that your real nature is spirit. It speaks of wanting to experience everything. If you align yourself with this deep yearning, you will be guided by the soul every day of your life. Nothing can stand in your way when you drop the foolish notion that you must accept boundaries. By nature you are unbounded.
At journey’s end you will be whole. All the inner divisions that gave rise to doubt and conflict will be healed. So what good does it do to postpone that day? The unknown is a magnet drawing you closer to liberation. When you look for the next horizon, you are reaching for a new place inside yourself. Each new place whispers that the soul is near, until one day you merge with it, and then your being and the eternal Being are one.
Synchronicity is normal once you remove the obstacles that block it. Today you can do that by divesting yourself of labels. When you say “I am X,” you are labeling yourself. The more strongly you identify with any label, the more closed off you will be. You will miss all kinds of experiences that fall into the category of “not me,” which in reality are just not your label, which is a very different thing. In the absence of labels, you will be much more comfortable with everyone and everything. “All of this is me” is the ideal way to live. To divest yourself of labels, here are some suggestions:
• Instead of being labeled by your name, give anonymously to a good cause.
• Instead of being labeled by your race, volunteer for a cause that helps minority members.
• Instead of being labeled by gender, join a group that aids battered women or provides shelter for homeless men.
• Instead of being labeled by your job, spend some time doing a job that is much lower on the prestige scale.
• Instead of being labeled by your money, go to the poorest part of town and volunteer there.
Many of these suggestions qualify as good works, but primarily they are intended to take you beyond a narrow sense of who you are. If you carry your labels with you, no matter where you go you will be constrained by them. So approach these suggestions with the intent of becoming part of the scene, engaging at the level of shared spirit. Measure your success by ridding yourself of labels, which also divests others of theirs. Does that seem to be happening?
A leader should aspire to be the soul of the group. You can attain this goal in any group once you see the soul in everyone else. In the phrase “all men are created equal,” the verb is in the present tense. It’s not that all men (and women) “were created equal.” Creation happens at every moment. Life refreshes and renews us. If you allow this process to touch you deeply, you won’t need labels of any kind. To be a wave on the ocean of life will be glorious enough.