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Happiness, Reality, and Leadership
November 10, 2008
The last article, on Happiness, implied that inner happiness will soon manifest itself in reality. It is part of human nature to reveal our happiness, and this is why ritual transcends the personal to become social. The symbols we discover for our own benefit will eventually be tried out by the people around us, whether they are family, friends, business partners or even complete strangers.
The attractiveness our personal happiness makes us into leaders, so we need some awareness of what this means.
Our private rituals become group phenomena because the qualiadelic experience draws like-minded people into our rituals. The law of attraction is at work here, but what is more important is that we are consciously ritualing. We recognize when we have entered a ritual and we know what to expect.
Ritualing comes as naturally to us as speaking, and, like speaking, if we practice and study it, we attain a certain power. It is a power, not just to evolve personally, but to evolve communally as well. We must become leaders.
As a leader we do not tell others what to do. Nor can we persuade others with mere words or stories. If we want to engage our communities, we must create moments -- ritual frameworks -- within which they can express themselves. We must wish share the qualiadelic experience with them, and they must desire to share it with us.
In today's world we no longer have public speakers, we have public performers, authorities who lead by drawing us into their rituals. They make us part of the dream state of reality by letting us express our order of things together with theirs.
The greatest leaders have always created moments in which people have found that they held interests in common. For it is what we hold in common that creates equality between us; it is with our shared big pictures that we transcend all differences. King Arthur's knights were not equals in strength, temperament, or in other capacities; but they shared ideals and they sat, symbolically, at a round table, as equals. King Arthur was their leader, but not their authority -- they were all authorities, having each earned his own through the rituals of knighthood and the deeds of chivalry.
Today's leaders are finding, too, that they have leadership but no authority, and they must create round tables. The polls, the people, the pundits have the authority, and the only way for a leader to lead is to invite their communities through ritualing.
A leader can only hope to steer the direction and momentum of the community with symbolic gestures, by adding his or her own spin to the symbols that the rest of us create.
We may not have a natural talent for ritualing any more than for public speaking, but every one of us has a natural desire, or a need, to be drawn into rituals.
Leaders don't have to create the need, but merely the outlets and the moments for expression. We can create the frameworks for ritual, or, at least learn to recognize that the frameworks for ritual already exist and are waiting to be used. This is the meaning of recognizing opportunities.
Be Qualiadelic. Be Conscious. Change the Routine.
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