Category: Leadership

Life is Pure Existence

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bhagavada Gita, Bliss, consciousness, Creative Writing, Enlightenment, Friends, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Love, meditation, Moksha, Positive Psychology, Positivity, Sef-awareness, self-development, spirituality, Transcendental Meditation, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga, Yoga Sutras

Life is pure existence. It is pure consciousness at the bottom of the V in V-theory of Transcendence (Figure below). The top of the V is the dynamic manifestations of life. These manifestations arise and transform and disappear at different time frames. Human beings appear at the ~ 80-year time frame. Other entities appear at longer or shorter time frames. Trees last 100s of years. Bacteria last just a few days. Longer life span is not a sign of greater intelligence or success. Attachment to this human body and its perpetuation is the ultimate mithya or illusion. We should detach from our human body (and near and dear ones’ bodies etc.) as it goes through its cycle of maturing and dissolving.

So, what are we to do with our individual short gross physical bodily existence? Doing is manifesting. We can create things and situations but should not be attached to those manifestations. Objects such as houses and cars and jewelry are a very low life form. The higher life form is that which is free from illusions and boundaries and is intent on accomplishing its assigned task of manifesting ever greater reality. Our hearts should be open to receiving guidance from higher life forms, or from pure life itself. We should be aware of our own divine powers and be a channel for creation as the time and situation demands.

Why do we manifest gross physical forms? Why do we take pleasure in creating such low-level toy forms? Why are we attached to these less significant creations? The answer may lie in social conditioning and legal structures. Such attachments provide a handle to any powerful evolved entity to manipulate us. Why do we fall for such manipulations? Some call ii God’s lila or divine play. It sometimes takes up to fag end of the individual human life span to realize the futility of attachments to manifestations. The young are mostly unable to learn this lesson from the elders. For the young, these toys are seductive. That is just the way it is!

There is enormous seduction of numbers, words, and language. Everything important should be measurable and comparable. By dividing, discretizing, and abstracting everything into tokens, the intellect allows the creation of new toys with ease, especially using machines and more recently Artificial Intelligence. Analog processes such as feelings vanish. Hearts close to what one does not already know. Awe and wonder vanish from awareness. The notion of an open divine unbounded invincible self seems ludicrous. This continues till some misfortune such as cancer or pandemics strikes and breaks that spell. Then the wisdom shines, and life appears valuable for its own sake!  

Be the god we are

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Love, meditation, Moksha, Music and Poetry, Nature, Quantum Computing, self-development, spirituality, Sustainability, Transformation, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga

Some day everyone will be able to see the god in themselves. Channels will open for god to act through them. Then they will become net exporters of happiness. Till then they will plod on in a desert view of life.  No one else can save anyone. Just turn on the light, and see that the riches of the kingdom are all within ourselves. A gu-ru helps drive away the darkness by turning of the light. Thus there is an infinite gratitude to them for providing the man-tra to roo the goo (make the darkness run away).  Thus also the saying: guru bin gyan kahan.  A most famous couplet says: whose feet should I touch if the guru and god are both standing on front of us? We should touch the feet of the guru because they help find the path to god. 

Read this over and over till the fever / fear breaks.  Western philosophy and psychology were born as reaction to the totalitarian vise of the Catholic Church on social and spiritual life. Throwing out Christ along with the church from western life has created a most devastating crisis of meaning in life.  The reduction ad infinitum to the ‘me and my’ as the sole domain of one’s Self is a mirage. Separation is a myth, says Ssdhguru. Western psychology is foundation-less, says Maharishi. 

Three quantum physicists won the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics for proving that there is no reality.  Some authors call Consciousness as the mother of all capital. That is an indirect compliment from the economic world to the real foundation of life. There is no ‘Me’.  Commercial forces will continue to do their magic of selling fool’s gold. Wisdom traditions of the East are a powerful antidote to the godless meaningless commercial world of the primacy of ‘individual’, realizing that the notion of an indivisible individual is a mirage that too will dissolve into a universal field just as the notion of an atom dissolved into a unitary Schrodinger’s quantum equation. Now there is another Nobel Prize for explicitly stating that there is no reality.

This is cause for celebration.  We have a serious responsibility to not take ourselves too seriously, quips Maharishi.  Just let the mind settle and it becomes consciousness. मन becomes आत्मन। Consciousness is everywhere, so it knows everything, and that makes it omnipotent and invincible. Its manifestation is unpredictable, uncertain and probabilistic.  Franklin quipped that the only two certainties as death and taxes. Let’s accept both equally. Let god flow freely through ourselves while we are still having this earthly manifestation.  We are just this moment. Have fun in this moment!

Thanks for reading. Comments are welcome 🙏

I am Inspired ….

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Enlightenment, Friends, Happiness, Leadership, Love, Maharishi Vastu, Mahatma Gandhi, Moksha, MUM, Positive Psychology, Positivity, Sef-awareness, self-development, spirituality, Sustainability, Veda, Vedic Technology, Yoga Sutras

Inspiration is more important than motivation. The former pulls while the latter provides a reason. That is what set me thinking about who or what inspired me. So, I listed some of my major inspirations in life, and what they meant.

I was inspired … 

  • By my paternal uncle who was a terror and yet  jolly as President of our ethnic community in our native town in India, and who said that I could achieve anything 
  • By my maternal uncle who was an excellent teacher always suggesting do what you like 
  • By my father for his disciplined hard work, unshakable confidence, work ethic,  commitment to excellence and financial prowess 
  • By Mahatma Gandhi whose life inspired the whole country of India, and whose thoughts were lofty and  formed a central component of Indian Administrative service exams
  • By Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for his ability to see the unmanifest Vedas and make enlightenment accessible through a great movement and a Vedic university
  • By Swami Ramdev for the size of his ambition fearlessness and boldness in bringing well being at all levels 
  • By my friend and IITD / IIM classmate the perfect student and gentleman now at Harvard 
  • By my friend and IITD classmate the magical perfect student who did Ph.D. at Stanford 
  • By my friend and IITD / IIMA  classmate and free soul who did Ph.D. at MIT and is a great seeker and social reformer and entrepreneur 
  • By my mom for her deep investment in and ferocious defense of her children, and great tolerance 

I am also inspired …

  • By my colleague and mentor at MIU who is here to pursue moksha and which made me get it 
  • By my colleague and mentor who is the foremost  researcher on collective consciousness and led me to organize international conference on consciousness based leadership and management 
  • By my students who said that they loved my data analytics course and for whom I wrote the data analytics book that is globally #1 recommended book 
  • By my student and colleague who is ultra-blissful and does soft thinking and is a trail blazer
  • By Vastu architecture for its ability to create de-stressing and high creativity 
  • By my bold and beautiful wife who is unafraid and a creative entrepreneur 
  • By my beautiful daughter who is a fanstastic English editor, and holistic health practitioner and communicator
  • By my other beautiful daughter who is a smart engineer and a great packer 
  • By my brother who knew about group dynamics, yoga, and Vipassana way before me and which all I spontaneously followed into. 
  • By my book club community especially its founder and coordinator who is a cool, creative and compassionate architect.

Question for you: What inspired you in life? What continues to inspire you?

Do you inspire yourself? Do you inspire others? Chances are that you are proud of some of your own accomplishments. And they probably inspire many people close to you!

Quantum reality is dynamic

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, Business, Enlightenment, Leadership, meditation, Quantum Computing, self-development, Transcendence, Transcendental Meditation, Vedic Technology, world peace

Quantum theory has been around for over 100 years. There is a great degree of misunderstanding about it. Quantum-everything has been bandied around in popular literature. In particular, quantum leadership is a concept that is receiving some attention. So what is quantum reality and how would a leader relate to it?

Quantum reality is dynamic. Mathematically, it is formalized as a holistic universal wave-function of momentum. It is called a wave function because its argument is a hyper dimensional wave, using complex numbers. A wave-particle is a momentum that has its value distributed across all possibilities in a hyper dimensional space. From our lived objective perspective, quantum reality suffers from an acute measurement problem. Our sense organs are woefully inadequate instruments for perceiving and describing quantum realty in simple static terms in space-time boxes. The full hyper planar formalism of a wave-particle can be reduced into the results of the two slit measurement experiment of photons in a 2-dimensional plane, where the hyper planes can add up or cancel each other depending upon being in phase or out of phase. Quantum wave-function can be approximated to a simpler Gaussian function, which represents the Bell curve or the normal curve, that is a function with all possibilities with unequal probabilities, that is what passes for our common objective experience.

Expectations of quantum mechanics have never been contradicted. One simply has to accept the non-local holistic character of a wave function. However, the act of measurement makes the holistic character of the wave function manifest, in the sense that the particle always shows up in just one place.   The wavelike character must be maintained until we choose to ‘perform a measurement’, and then we can suddenly revert to a particle like description. When a measurement is performed, the state collapses to something local and specific. The particle like aspects show up during measurement while the wave like aspects show up between measurements. The measurement of a particle’s momentum would constitute just as good a measurement of its position. However, momentum states are unrealizable idealizations. 

We have to think of the entire wave as being one particle. The entire wave function is just one thing. The different parts of the wave cannot be thought of as local disturbances. Wave functions have a strongly non-local character. The wave function is needed to explain the wave part of the wave-particle duality. The Schrodinger equation of wave function is unitary. It undergoes the dual processes of unitary evolution (U) and non deterministic Reduction (R). U can be considered the ‘underlying truth’ whereas R is some sort of approximation, illusion, or convenience. This reduction process R is also referred to as ‘quantum uncertainty’.

(The source of the above information is the The Road to Reality: A complete guide to the laws of the universe, by Roger Penrose (p 507-530) in the section on Quantum Reality.)

From a psychological perspective, that emphasis the role of fineness of perception of dynamic connections in the great oneness. It is about managers and leaders developing great tolerance of uncertainty, ambiguity, and volatility. Maharishi would say that being able to perceive the unitary nature of reality would bring invincibility to the leaders, and their organizations and nations. Unitary perception is a blissful state that one achieves by transcending the surface reality of appearances. This can be easily achieved by Transcendental Meditation and other techniques of transcendence.

Maharishi International University (MIU): Epicenter of Peace

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Health, Leadership, meditation, MUM, Nature, Positivity, Sef-awareness, self-development, spirituality, Sustainability, Transcendence, Transcendental Meditation, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga, Yoga Sutras

MIU’s Global Country of World Peace is a beautiful organization that embodies what we are:  peace-loving citizens of the world, who are not divided by political or governmental surface levels of difference. As Maharishi said: What we put our attention on grows stronger. We are coming together and experiencing that field of life which is the field of unity consciousness – the unified field of natural law. Vedic technologies of consciousness, that operate from this deepest level of natural law, are a million times are more powerful than nuclear technologies.

MIU launched an Institute for Permanent Peace (IPP) this month, for applying a scientifically validated Vedic approach to creating an environment for permanent world peace. It is urgently needed to mitigate an existential risk from local wars evolving into an uncontrollable global conflagration. The purpose can be achieved by the sustained group practice of Vedic technologies, including Transcendental Meditation™ and TM-Sidhis, to create coherence in global collective consciousness.  The square root of 1% of any population—about 10,000 for the world– practicing these technologies in a group is sufficient to form a lighthouse of peace and prosperity for the whole world. Over 50 demonstrations and 23 scientific published studies have documented the benefits of large group practice of TM and its related advanced techniques on society as a whole. In every case, this approach produced marked reductions in crime, social violence, terrorism, and war, and increased peace and positivity in society.

IPP is proposing the creation of a permanent coherence-creating group comprised of 10,000 specially- trained Vedic experts to perform yoga and yagya. Results will be measured and monitored by an independent board of scientists.  Global celebrities have expressed support for the project. IPP broke ground on a project to create Vastu housing for thousands of such Vedic experts to live on MIU’s campus in Fairfield, Iowa. 

Meeting with India’s finest actor Anupam Kher

Noted filmmaker David Lynch, founder of an international charity that has brought Transcendental Meditation to more than one million under-resourced children worldwide, has issued a challenge to the world’s philanthropists: use a fraction of your wealth to establish large groups of advanced peace-creating Vedic experts in Ukraine and other critical hotspots, and leave a legacy of world peace that will last for generations.  https://davidlynch.gusp.org/

Capabilities we must develop in 21st century business schools

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, Business, Creative Writing, Happiness, Leadership, meditation, Positive Psychology, Positivity, self-development, Transcendence, Transcendental Meditation, Transformation, Vedic Technology

The world in changing exponentially. We are all students now, and forever. Perhaps the most important meta-skill is to learn how and what to learn. Business schools need to develop the capabilities of the heart that will make the students ready for productive and fulfilling work in the 21st century. They need to prepare students for creating the likes of Uber and such companies that work in an era of abundance, which is very different from the earlier era of persistent material shortages.  The young as well as more mature business student need to be able to feel and articulate their deep sense of purpose, and to be able to flourish through a non-ending stream of transformations.

The required capabilities are Confidence, Creativity, Collaboration, and Courage.

  • Confidence means being able to holistically know oneself, the desires and expertise, well enough to stand for one’s words, decisions, and actions. Confidence has been the most important thing to work well, even in the last century, though technical knowledge has also become progressively important.
  • Creativity means thinking outside the box, beyond what has been done in the past. It also means helping others find novel solutions to the problems they face, and helping people grow. One needs to be open to continuous learning and admitting errors of mis-perceptions or ignorance,
  • Collaboration means teamwork, asking for help, not being focused much on course grades and comparative markers, and keeping one’s ego in check. One needs to take complete ownership of the work or the project, along with the team.
  • Courage is an attribute of the soul, and means the ability to function despite adversity and fear. It includes resilience, grit, determination, and the practice of discipline in the face or uncertainty and ambiguity. It means taking ownership of one’s life and purpose through thick and thin.

The way to develop these skills is through group exercises, projects, travels, celebrations, paid internships, and the like. These are not communicated through words, even though we are using words here to communicate these ideas. These exercises should be graded in an appreciative manner, with rich positive, timely feedback from a nurturing teacher / mentor.  

These capabilities may however be underdeveloped during the earlier years of schooling. The grade schools work on a process model, leaving little room for digressions and diversions to account for different ways of learning and different life goals. Just like schools have different course streams for science or commerce or arts students, and just as there are special education systems for the learning impaired, so also there should be different ways of teaching students of different kinds.  As Einstein said, teaching a monkey to swim, and a fish to climb trees would not be productive or fulfilling. The race to get admissions into desirable and prestigious colleges is intense and can have major impact on the quality of future life. Admission into the top colleges like Harvard can be very beneficial in many ways. However, the rat race to prepare for that single objective may rob all sense of joy in the formative years of the students.

Development of consciousness through regular practice of contemplation and reflection, such as Transcendental meditation, may help prepare the heart for developing these capabilities throughout life.

International Conference on Consciousness-Based Leadership and Management – summary report

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Ayurveda, Bhagavada Gita, Bliss, Business, Climate change, consciousness, Happiness, Health, Leadership, MUM, Music and Poetry, Positive Psychology, Quantum Computing, Sef-awareness, spirituality, Sustainability, Technology, Transcendence, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga

Maharishi International University (Fairfield, Iowa, USA) organized a three-day International Conference on Consciousness-Based Leadership and Management, from May 21-23 2021, for mapping the path to Oneness and a flourishing humanity. The event was co-sponsored by the International Academy of Management through its Management, Spirituality and Religion (MSR) interest group. More than 1100 attendees from almost 400 cities around the world registered for the event. The event had 90+ speakers including Dr Tony Nader, Dr Robert Quinn, Dr. Subhash Kak, Dr. Anil Gupta, and other reputed professors from top institutions from the US, India, UK, Germany, Europe, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Indonesia, Equador, South Africa, and more. They also represented a wide range of fields including Management, Leadership, Music, Medicine, Computer Science, Quantum physics, Vedas, Ayurveda, Arts, Psychology, Consciousness, Sustainability, and more. They participated in 15 sessions of integral conversations and research presentations of 90 minutes each over three days. Our feedback surveys showed consistently high ratings and comments. Every session aimed to produce one or two principles towards a flourishing humanity.  We sincerely thank our board of advisors, which included Drs. Chris Laszlo, Judi Neal, Sharda Nandram, Satinder Dhiman, Kathryn Pavlovich, and Cathy DuBois, for their guidance and counsel in making this event a great success. We also wish to thank all the speaker and presenters for being a part of this journey.

There is a great demand for videos for replays and we have been working on editing them and making them available. Here is a wonderful playlist called Consciousness-Based leadership @ MIU, comprising of seven keynote and panel conversations, each of which is about 60-90 minutes long. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs4GvULvBU44jIFWP4IaDCXb61lgLMk3Y

Here is a brief summary of the videos. The opening keynote conversation with Dr. Tony Nader lays out how consciousness is primary, which is a new paradigm with increasingly greater explanatory power. Then there is the transcendental keynote conversation where they lay out the benefits of transcendence, its neuroscience, and the path ahead.  Then there is the quantum and technological conversation where we discuss how quantum world leads us to different ways of leading and organizing, from an unboundarized and uncontainerized view of ourselves as the field of consciousness. Then there is the organizational cultural conversation where we discuss positive scholarship away from deficit and towards flourishing, and from workplace spirituality to global consciousness, as the organizing metaphors.  Then there is the panel conversation on Dialogic approaches where we begin with asserting that our words have more power than we think, in bringing about a harmonious world.  Then there is the panel conversation on the future of management education, where we agreed that the future is consciousness-based education, based on empathy and fairness and justice.  Then there is a panel on Vedic approaches to Oneness, beginning with Bhagavad Gita, and including other traditions towards unboundedness and self-transformation.

In addition, Here is the play list of about 25 pre-recorded short (7-8 minute each) research presentations by the authors themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io4mRLsEMjg&list=PLs4GvULvBU44ng3DX6qbDegNsS9lzzCCm

 Would appreciate if you could enjoy these videos, and post your comments.

Wish you a blissful and flourishing life!

Anil Maheshwari, Conference Organizer and Co-Chair

We are more than we think

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Love, meditation, Moksha, Music and Poetry, Nature, Positive Psychology, Positivity, Sef-awareness, self-development, Sustainability, Transcendental Meditation, Transformation, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga, Yoga Sutras

Our thinking is limited to things one can think about. Some of those things are sense objects and some are mental objects. Our perceptions and feelings are difficult to think about. Our being is beyond thinking. 

We know more than we can tell. That is tacit knowledge. Our words have more power than we think. These could be words spoken with others or with oneself. This is our latent power. 

We exist in more ways than we can tell: The body, the mind, the intellect, the spirit, the soul. We are the unbounded Brahman.  At some level of thinking all these things vanish. We become no-thing. No-thing is actually everything. But there is no way to think about everything.

We have more than we know. We have all the laws of nature within us. We exist in conformance with, and are the manifestation, of all the laws of nature. We permeate every part of every galaxy. 

We are beyond qualities, beyond names, beyond words, beyond language. We transcend and include all of those. We are silence in dynamism, wholeness in motion. We are naturally blissful, like the earth is grassfull and the sky is starfull. 

We are naturally full, or fullness, or wholeness. We just need to be aware of it at every moment. We are a wave flowing and rising and falling. Particle wise, we are at best a little boat that rises and ebbs with the waves. The life force naturally flows through us in its own rhythm.

As Pascal said, the Heart has its reasons, that Reason has no knowledge of. Nurture your own heart. Be with those that nurture your heart. Let your heart swell with joy. Share the joy with the others. And you will get 10x in return. And the whole world will be one big happy family!

High Consciousness Leader and Manager

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, Business, Climate change, consciousness, Happiness, Health, Leadership, meditation, MUM, Positive Psychology, Sef-awareness, self-development, spirituality, Sustainability, Transcendence, Vedic Technology, world peace

High Consciousness Manager:  through Transcendence and Development of Consciousness

Spring is in the air, and that means time to experience the beauty of the flourishing environment as we wake up from winter. What things are fresh in your mind?

Grand challenges facing the world require a higher level of consciousness to experience and operate from a level of total inter-connectedness of life. Business organizations are undergoing revolutionary changes from exponential development of technologies of production distribution and consumption. Managers need to adapt to Artificial Intelligence systems that have been doubling in capacity every 3-6 months. Managers need to evolve rapidly to engage with the opportunities and threats posed by this rapidly evolving socio-technical environment. They need to develop the capabilities of empathizing and synergizing, visioning and transforming. Managers need to rapidly unlearn self-limiting beliefs and tap into their own unbounded potential and that of their teams. 

In essence, managers need to develop a higher level of consciousness, beyond that of the superficial and the observable. They need to learn to transcend their ordinary states of consciousness (waking, dreaming and sleeping) and access the higher states of consciousness where one can experience the pure unbounded Self, the source of infinite potential, within oneself. Our V-theory of Transcendence models a wide range of techniques to transcend surface reality. Research has shown that through transcendence, individuals can experience expanded awareness, along with creativity and bliss for more effective action and well-being.  The ability to raise consciousness around themselves will be a key role for the new manager. Research has also shown that transcendence by groups can create coherence in collective consciousness. This may be key to development of pro social and environmental behaviors towards Oneness and Flourishing in the world. 

We are organizing a conference on Consciousness-Based Leadership and Management to bring together diverse perspectives for Oneness and a flourishing world. We welcome you to join almost 100 academics and globally renowned speakers in this incredible 3-day AOM-MSR-cosponsored leadership event, focused on  Mapping the Path to a Flourishing Humanity. Be a part of conversation while creating meaningful connections with other global leaders.  Sign up for the conference for FREE today: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/international-conference-on-consciousness-based-leadership-and-management-tickets-139942478721

#leadership #consciousness #management #flourishing

Quantum Sciences, Consciousness, and Manager

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bhagavada Gita, Bliss, Creative Writing, Enlightenment, Happiness, Leadership, meditation, Quantum Computing, Sef-awareness, self-development, spirituality, Transcendence, Transcendental Meditation, Transformation, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace

Quantum sciences are an all-inclusive way of knowing the self-referral world at various levels of discrete quanta with different observable properties at different levels of granularity and aggregation. Nanoscopic reality at near absolute zero levels of temperatures exhibits multiple modes such as a wave and a particle, which is different from the solid reality perceived at a human scale, which is again different at the cosmic level where super large black holes create singularity fields that collapse space-time and light. The unified field of all the laws of the universe manifested in the interconnectedness and the confusing nature of all existence, can however be experienced by human beings in their own selves as pure consciousness.

Consciousness is all there is. It is the knower, the known and the process of knowing. Mass and energy, solid and vibrations, are all interchangeable manifestations of this consciousness. Through techniques of meditation, by settling the mind enough to exclude all the human scale objects, Vedic seers have been able to cognize the multidimensional truth about existence as pure vibrations. Major quantum scientists such as Schrodinger, Oppenheimer, Planck, Heisenberg, Bohm and more have suggested and acceded to the idea of this Vedic unified reality. These Vedic cognitions have an unfolding quality, in that consciousness can be known at increasingly granular levels of detail and manifestation.

Human managers can be different levels of consciousness from the ordinary waking state of consciousness to transcendental and unified non-dual states of consciousness. Knowledge is structured in consciousness; and knowledge is different in different states of consciousness. Effective managers of people will likely need to have a higher state of consciousness from where they can perceive a higher moral reality of a team or an organization. The accumulated human knowledge can also be abstracted to be manifested in non-human information-processing systems such as computers or gene editors. Artificial Intelligence systems can learn from human interactions and develop abilities to achieve human levels and beyond. Increasingly robotic systems are being deployed in organizations to accomplish a range of functions and activities. Human beings at higher states of consciousness may also experience quantum empathy as a useful construct to potentially experience total interconnectedness even with strangers at a distance. To build on Einstein’s famous phrase, action at a distance may be blissful, not necessarily spooky!