You can't have anything great without having this || Acharya Prashant, with XLRI (2021)

Questioner (Q): Is there a relationship between superconscious leadership and spirituality?

Acharya Prashant (AP): You see, between everything that is good in life and spirituality, there is bound to be a relationship. There can be nothing good in life without spirituality. So, if superconscious leadership is something that has goodness, then it is bound to be spiritual. But let not the word ‘spiritual’ evoke very traditional, conventional images in your mind. When I say the superconscious leader is bound to be spiritual, you need not think that he would enter a corporate office singing bhajans. Otherwise, usually, you equate spirituality with traditional religiosity. That is not the case.

Is it possible to be a great student without being spiritual? No. Is it possible to be a great politician without being spiritual? No. Is it possible to be a great judge sitting in the Supreme Court without being spiritual? No. Is it possible to be a great parent without being spiritual? Well, no. Is it possible to be anything good without being spiritual? Not at all, because you are at the center of everything that you do. If you are not alright, then how will your works, your actions, and your relationships be alright? Is it possible to be a good lover without being spiritual? No. A good mother? No. A good sister? No. Even a good scientist you cannot be if you are not spiritual.

Q: We see that, especially in the corporate world, post MBA, people run after money; that is the primary intention. So, there is an imbalance between spirituality and this kind of corporate rigor. How can we balance that?

AP: There is no need to balance. You can have as much money as is needed—but needed for what? That you must be clear about. If you have a great purpose in life and for that you want to earn money, please go ahead and earn more than your biggest imagination, no problem.

In what you have just asked is implicit an assumption that spirituality is indifferent towards money or even forbids earning money. That is not at all the case. Money is a resource. You use that resource towards something, right? Money is like a gas cylinder, let’s say. But if you don’t know what to cook and how to cook, and you accumulate forty-five gas cylinders in your kitchen, what are you doing? You are just inviting probably a huge explosion, aren’t you?

So, what are you cooking in the first place? Please, tell me. Before you accumulate those forty-five gas cylinders, what do you propose to cook? People do not know what to cook; all they have is a lot of LPG in their bank accounts. How will that help them? And to make things worse, even those gas cylinders are accumulated using very dubious ways, let’s say, in the black market, or you go and pinch a cylinder from your neighbor, or some poor rickshaw-puller is there on the road carrying five cylinders, and you slap him and take away the cylinders. And using all these things all your life, you have not even paid the cylinder tax; you have cheated on the government also, right? And you have accumulated all this stuff. Now, what will you do with all this?

Firstly, the means of accumulation made you very, very sick internally; you wasted your life accumulating that thing. Secondly, now that the stuff is indeed getting accumulated, you know nothing about food. You don’t know what is healthy for you, you don’t know what to cook, and you have nobody to serve your dishes to because you never had the time for meaningful relationships. So, even if you cook a lot with those cylinders, who do you share your meals with?

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