Leader Consciousness

I attended a lecture today on Leader Consciousness. It was an amazing lecture and I could relate to pretty much everything the Swamiji said. He said that our mind is clouded by past memories and they heavily influence our decisions. If we allow these so called 'engrams' to influence the decisions that our ego makes, stress results. Our mind is not in our control. When we wake up, we think about work; when we work, we think about relaxing in the evening and finally, when we are supposedly relaxing in the evening, our mind thinks about going to bed. In essence, the state of mind is pretty much the same, whatever activity we do. This is all because we have fully managed to allow our past memories and our subconscious mind to rule over the conscious mind. We associate past incidents, mostly unpleasant ones, to influence our future decisions. And inherently, this is bound to create bad consequences. He also said that accidents happen by invitation only. All the successful leaders out there have admitted and seem to have a common story - their success has been based on something beyond logic - intuition. How do you tap intuition - by allowing your mind to reach out for itself - by allowing your mind to have its own space. Your mind needs its space and freedom and your attention. If you starve your mind, stress results. This is what meditation is all about. He said that we don't even have to believe in it, but inevitably, this happens to be the only solution to all our miseries.
He also suggested a solution to get over our daily miseries and to tap our intuition which would later help in making better decisions: Set aside 20 minutes for yourself everyday and just allow your mind to wander freely. Continue doing this everyday, and it won't be long before your mind settles on something stable and doesn't wander anymore. At that stage, if you are physically present, you are also mentally present. You will begin to enjoy your life and tap into the new dimension.
I couldn't agree with this more :)

Few other things he said:

• Leadership is a state of the mind, not the status.
• If we struggled very hard and went through unpleasant experiences to become a leader, chances are that we'll naturally expect others to go through the same before we can allow them to grow up in their career.
• All successful leaders agree that they didn't get there by following a set of rules and something beyond logic was instrumental in their success
• "I am the boss of this house, I have my wife's permission to say so" :) He said this in relation to something....I forgot what it was.
• You must have experienced your intuitive feeling at least once so far...something like thinking about a person when opening the door and that person being there; thinking of somebody when the phone rings and the very same person answering the phone, etc. This definitely can't be classified as coincidence since more than 80% of the people in all his meditation camps seem to have experienced it.
• If we have experienced good things in the past, they naturally become a part of our subconscious mind and are automatically tapped whenever we are about to make a decision. The problem happens when the number of unpleasant memories is larger than that of positive ones. As humans, we inevitably tend to remember and dwell on the bad memories and subconsciously allow them to cloud our judgement.
• Smoking is an example, where our judgement is clouded by past memories. Everyone knows that smoking is injurious to health, still some people smoke, without giving it much thought. They remember how their bodies felt after they smoked and use that to "decide" to smoke now.
• Good experiences are like writing someting in flowing water - there are no marks; bad experiences are like writing on stone.