Indian Ethos refers to the principles of self management and governance of society, entity or a system by wisdom as revealed and brought forth by the great scriptures like Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Srimad Bhagavatam, Panchatantra etc. This is even a part of the curriculum in various business schools and universities in India. A few of the ideas revealed by our ancient scriptures are as follows.

“Atmano mokshartham Jagat hitaya cha”
–Rig Veda

Literal translation of the above sloka would mean, “For the salvation of the individual self and for the well-being of all in the world”. The dictum has two messages. One is to seek salvation for one’s soul and the other is to address the issue of welfare of the world. The maxim/sloka stresses on personal or individual salvation before the welfare of the world.

The individual salvation in the sloka refers to the freedom from vagaries of the mind, turbulence of emotions, delusion, ignorance and above all freedom from fear. If you do not know how to swim, can you help a drowning person? Hence, your “self” comes first, i.e, your health, welfare, security etc. No matter how selfish this may sound to many of us, this is the only sensible course of action. We can see incompetent and power hungry leaders running companies, states, countries etc which can only be explained by the fact that the people who elect them are equally weak and not self liberated. So its time for self reflection. Before venturing upon “jagat hita” ,i.e, the welfare of the world, let us strive to attain total liberation from the bondage of mind and emotions.

“Atmana vindate viryam”
–Kena Upanishad

‘Atmana’ means ‘by one’s own nature’, ‘Vindate’ means ‘attains’, ‘Viryam’ means ‘strength or vitality’. The whole sentence put together would mean, by the knowledge of the soul or consciousness, an individual gets infinite energy.

When a bud blossoms it becomes a flower and there is the fragrance of the flower. It is the act of blossoming which causes the emergence of the scent contained in those petals of the flower. In the same way when consciousness blossoms and flowers through every sensual and psychological movement in your life, the vitality emerges out of that flower blossomed from being conscious. It has nothing to do with human thought or effort. Knowledge has no dynamism but awareness/consciousness has its own dynamism and therefore the word viryam is used. It cannot be affected by anything in the world like the emotions of pleasure, pain, agony, honour, humiliation etc.

“Yogah karmashu kaushalam, Samatvam yoga uchyate”
–Bhagavad Gita

“Samatvam Yoga Uchyate” – ‘Samatva’ means ‘balanced state’, ‘Uchyate’ means ‘said to be’. The whole sentence put together would mean, Yoga is a balanced state. Yoga is the science of training the mind to remain even in pleasure or pain, gain or loss, defeat or victory, success or failure, and be able to rise above them. This equanimity of mind is the ultimate objective of yoga.

“Yogah karmasu kaushalam” – ‘Karma’ means ‘action / behavior / any change in time and space’, ‘Kaushalam’ means ‘skill / efficiency / perfect or appropriate behavior’. Put together, the sentence would mean, Yoga is excellence in action or behavior. Yoga is the science of performing right actions in accordance with the universal Law of Karma. It is the science of selfless activities without the notion of being a doer and without seeking the fruits of the activities.

“Yadrishi bhavana yasya siddhir bhavati tadrishi”
–Panchatantra

It means, “Whatever are one’s thoughts, so will be the outcomes”. What we think, we become, and accordingly we succeed. But some people think that miracles seem to happen to a few people and not to others. However the truth is, people who have more trust end up getting better results. Go with trust since good thoughts lead to good and beneficial actions. Even if the results end up being bad, accept it as God’s will. One more point to note here is, since our thoughts are influenced by our surroundings, it is important to develop an environment that promotes the positive mindset in an individual.

“Arhayed dana manabhyam”
–Srimad Bhagavatam

‘Arhayet’ means ‘one should gain the favor’, “dana manabhyam” means ‘through charity and respect’. Put together the whole sloka would mean, through charitable gifts and attention, as well as through friendly behavior and by viewing all to be alike, one should gain the favor of the god.

The method of worshiping the individual soul is described here as either giving charitable gifts (i.e, dana offered to an inferior) or behaving in a friendly manner, free from any separatist outlook. One more word used here, mana, refers to respect offered to a superior to whom giving charity does not apply. If this concept is applied to work and life, there would be increased tolerance at home and reduced problems at work between employee and management.

“Tesham sukham shasvatam. Tesham shantih shasvati”
–Katha Upanishad

Infinite happiness and infinite peace comes to him who sees the self within and serves the self in all beings. This is the meaning of the entire sloka. Even though our outward appearances are different, each one of us is a wave coming out of the infinite ocean of consciousness, trying to manifest the infinite outside. Shri Rang Avadhoot Maharaj’s famous mantra of Paraspara devo bhava also delivers the same meaning ,i.e, “regard the other individual as a divine being”.

It is the service motive that makes this servant leadership a spiritual idea, for all true service comes from an understanding of the unity of creation. On servant leadership, the renowned Stephen R Covey gives a clear idea of its importance in this modern era, “We’ve got to produce more for less and with greater speed than we’ve ever done before. The only way to do that in a sustained way is through the empowerment of people. And the only way to get empowerment is through high-trust cultures and an empowerment philosophy that turns bosses into servants and coaches and structures and systems into nurturing institutionalized servant processes”.

“Parasparam bhaavayantah shreyah paramavaapsyatha”
–Bhagavad Gita

This sloka simply means, “By mutually making each other prosperous, you will attain the highest good”. Even the healthy social life is based on this principle ,i.e, the ‘help and nourish each other’ principle that will help all people to rise to the highest level.

Modern management practices agree that when two parties negotiate, the best outcome is one where both parties benefit, rather than one gaining and one losing. This outcome is known as a “win-win” situation. Lord Sri Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita reinforces this very same principle. He urges us to act in a spirit of harmony and cooperation with others whenever we undertake any action.

Further Reading :

• Wisdom of Vedanta for Self Development
• Importance of Karma Yoga in Today’s World
• Mind Management Basics
• Spiritual Intelligence : The Current Corporate World Trend
• Techniques to Tame the Monkey Mind

As per companies feedback who have provided spiritual training to their employees, claim that the workplace has become more relaxed, the workers more happy and the unit more cohesive. Hence we can say that Spiritual intelligence, leads to more balance in life and makes you a calmer person ready to deal with everyday pressures.

Let’s get to know about SQ, by making use of the tool of analogies as much as possible to understand some of the concepts in a better way.

Life & Purpose

• Once upon a time, there lived a cobbler in a large village and was the only cobbler in town, so he was responsible for repairing the boots of everybody else. However, he didn’t have time to repair his own boots. Over time, his boots began to deteriorate and fall apart and also his feet got blisters and he started to limp.After a few years, the cobbler’s feet was so injured that he could no longer work and no-one’s boots got repaired.As a consequence, soon the entire town started to limp in pain, all because the cobbler never took the time to repair his own boots.
  NOTE : If we want to make a difference to others, we should learn to make a difference to ourselves first. The purpose of life is to make a difference. But, the first principle of making a difference is to make a difference in our own life. Second is making a difference in the lives of those who are our closest ,i.e, family etc.Third comes the community or society.

• You would think that a more than 300-foot-tall tree would need deep roots, but that’s not the case at all with the Redwood trees. Redwood tree roots are very shallow, often only five or six feet deep. But they make up for it in width, sometimes extending up to 100 feet from the trunk. They thrive in thick groves, where the roots can intertwine and even fuse together. This gives them tremendous strength against the forces of nature. This way they can withstand high winds and raging floods.
  NOTE : It’s no wonder that redwoods have inspired the “organizational culture” model wherein critical key to survival and growth is teamwork. This  lesson is applicable not just to business but to our communities, each individual and nations as well. Like the redwoods, we cannot survive alone. People do need time alone, and space for individualism to be content and personally creative, but there are moments in a life that also needs friends and neighbors and groups of like-minded people. We need others to help us get past what we can’t do alone, i.e, to help us solve life problems, to share their strength in our times of need. I would say that this redwood kind of inter-reliance is needed for us all to survive and thrive.

• The experience of falling through the sky is unlike anything as skydivers say.It’s jumping out of an airplane two miles above earth- above the clouds- with a person on your back who, has a backpack on his back that encloses two life-saving mechanisms called parachutes.
  NOTE : Skydiving is the ultimate metaphor for how a person can live his life. When you’re already falling in the sky, why waste the experience thinking about what can go wrong instead of enjoying it? Same goes for life. When you’re living, why waste time thinking negatively instead of viewing everything in a positive light? Every second you live is a second closer to death OR Every second you live, you can adapt a positive outlook on your life and be much happier as a result.

Personality & Self development

• Sri Rama is hugely worshiped in India. He had continuous problems in his life: the worst kind of drama was happening, a completely disastrous life, but he remained balanced.
  NOTE : When nothing happens your way, are you still a beautiful human being? In case of Sri Rama, we bow down to – not his being a king or a god or whatever, but because the man remained free of the extreme drama that was continuously happening around him and still was fulfilling his duties to his best.

• When you plant a mango seed, for the first four, five years, nothing happens. You have to wait for years for a mango tree to bear fruits for the first time. It would be foolish to think after a couple of years, “Nothing happened, so I’m going to chop down the tree and throw it away.”
  NOTE : Here we learn about being responsible for our actions or emotions. In case of the Mango tree, intellectually we know we can get the fruits after a few years, so we nurture it. Similarly if we nurture our inner self to an extent that after a few years we can be in control of our inner emotions, the external influences being many can harm us little. Also as per Bhagavad gita – detachment is not that you own nothing, its that nothing owns you. People consumed by fame, jealously, pride, envy, greed leads them to disaster.

• A sculptor never works on a brittle marble stone which cannot take the hits of his tools to make a statue. He goes for the one which can take a varying level of hits to make a statue while the brittle one will be used for other purposes like making a tile.
  NOTE : One crumbled while the other didn’t under the sculptor’s tool, so obviously people admire the statue and step on the stone. One of the famous quotes “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known struggle, known suffering, known loss and have found their way out of those depths” reminds us of the same.

• Like a pencil, outer appearance or personality matters less than we probably think, while it’s the stuff on the inside or being genuine/sincere that matters the most.
  NOTE : The personality can impress but being sincere can inspire. No matter who you are, or what you may look like it is what is on the inside that matters the most.
  

• We live in a world where “the end justifies the means” has become an acceptable school of thought for far too many.Sales people over promise and under deliver, all in the name of making their quota for the month.CEOs overstate their projected earnings because they don’t want the board of directors to replace them. Players fix matches just to make fast cash and the list goes on.
  NOTE : Profit in dollars or power is temporary, but profit in a network of people who trust you as a person of integrity/character/values is forever. Let’s keep in mind that success will indeed come and go, but integrity is forever.

People

• How do you feel, if your boss criticizes your work, or tells you something you don’t like? How do you react, when a driver enters recklessly, and without signaling, into your lane, in front of your car? This kind of annoying situation happens at home, school, college, work, at the mall, on the street, and everywhere else.
  NOTE : Do not give the control of how you feel to someone else. One of Buddha’s teaching, “If you get struck by an arrow, do you then shoot another arrow into yourself?”. If we look at the way we move through the day, when something happens, when we have pain in our body, when somebody treats us in a way that feels disrespectful, when something goes wrong for someone we love, that’s the first arrow. Our mind and body goes into a reactivity that does not help to bring healing. We blame others, we blame ourselves. That’s the second arrow. Healing and Freedom come from non-proliferation of our thoughts. Non-proliferation means we have the wisdom in our lives to pause and re-arrive in the present moment and thus respond consciously.

• The age old story of the Hare and Tortoise has been told to children for many a generation. With the hare challenging the tortoise to a race, the hare shooting off, thinking he has time to nap and then the tortoise actually wins!
  BUT what if the story continued…
  Following the race, the hare was disappointed that If he had not taken things for granted then he would have definitely won the race. So he challenged the tortoise to another race, and the tortoise agreed.This time, the hare went all out and won the race by several miles.
  BUT that’s not the end of the tale…
  The tortoise thought about the race after they finished and realized that he could not possible win the way the race was currently set up. So the tortoise challenged the hare to another race, but on a different route.The hare agreed and so the hare sprinted off in his usual manner until he came to a very wide river.The finishing line was on the other side of this river and so the hare sat there wondering what to do while the tortoise swam across and reached the finishing line.
  BUT that still isn’t the end…
  By this point, the hare and the tortoise had become quite good friends and did some thinking together. They believed that the race could have been run much better AS A TEAM. So they ran the race again with the hare carrying the tortoise to the riverbank, the tortoise swimming across the river with the hare on his back and the hare carrying the tortoise to the finish, thus completing the race together.
  NOTE : It’s good to be individually brilliant and have individual skills and strengths, but it’s much better to bring these together. We also learn about the importance of being in the company of people who add value to your life rather than those who make you feel lower. As in the above example, the friendship added value to each other as both won, recognizing each other’s competencies.

• We all buy into a template in life – expensive clothing, gadgets, cars, big house, meeting deadlines etc, and this teaches us to live things; to make them our purpose in life. Also, people respect each other for what they own rather than their character and personality. By making things a priority humans will tend to do anything to get those objects which may include using people.
  NOTE : As per one of the famous quotes “Love people, not things. Use things, not people.” , The most valuable things are those that make our lives simpler so we have more time to connect to the people and experiences that truly matter, and lead a more deliberate life. Placing undo importance on material things weakens one’s ability to see the value of relationship, companionship or personality.

Happiness, Difficulties & Failures

• If you take a person out of his elements it is almost certain that you wouldn’t see the same person again, which is similar to taking Tendulkar out of cricket and putting him in chess and expecting him to do the same as in cricket. Also, you need to create an environment where you can thrive, which is similar to expecting fish in a river to live out of water which is never possible. Even in the corporate world, your boss/colleague will not provide the environment for you thrive in, it is you who need to work on yourself to make it happen. Also you need to recognize your energy which is aligned to the pressure it can take ,i.e, high pressure or low pressure task. Recognizing this frequency would also help you to thrive.
  NOTE : 3 E’s to ask yourself when things are not going your way, i.e , Element, Environment & Energy and align the situation accordingly.

• To many, happiness means having a lot of money, having high-end gadgets, having a big-shot job, achieving fame etc. But if we wait for all these things to happen we can never be happy because man wants more and more money, there is nothing like a perfect gadget or a perfect big-shot job or anything else for that matter. Happiness is not about perfection as attaining each of the above things completely is not possible. There is nothing like a perfect house, perfect job or a perfect phone but we can focus on having a good relationship and having a happy home, similarly we can work with passion and concentrate on improving our skillset to fit into the areas we love, and also with a normal phone we can have a happy and meaningful conversation with the people we love.
  NOTE : Don’t see life as a competition. It isn’t about being better than others. It is about being happy on your own terms. The key to happiness? Don’t strive for perfection as happiness is not dependent on that.
  

• During the WW2 period, A man and his family from Poland were brought into the concentration camp in Germany. In the Nazi camp, the family got separated and along with the other prisoners were put to hard work. The brutality of life inside the camps and the killing of increasing numbers of people made many people to think “Why is this happening to me”. But the man from Poland started asking a different question, “What can i learn from this and how can i move forward”. He started observing the pile of dead bodies and the trucks which used to pick them up, so he planned to lay down along with the pile of bodies one day and was carried away by the truck and dumped at a far away place from where he escaped to tell the story.
  NOTE :  A famous inspiring Mexican proverb “They Tried to Bury Us, They Didn’t Know We Were Seeds” , A seed is buried deep underground and it is rained upon and snowed upon but it knows it can grow and grows through. Keeping yourself attentive and asking the right questions can help you to get out of the worst situation which life can throw at you.
  

• A wise man sat in front of the audience and cracked a joke. Everybody laughs like crazy. After a moment, he cracked the same joke again. This time, less number of people laughed. He cracked the same joke again and again till there was no laughter in the crowd. Finally, the wise man told that audience “We don’t laugh on the same joke again, why do we cry on the same problem again” which is worth remembering.
  NOTE : The most pleasing thing is to smile.It increases our face value.Lets not bog down our minds with anxiety that is not allowing us to have a peace of mind. We don’t have control over what people do at our back, but what we do have control over is to smile. Any problem can be broken down into two steps whether we can do anything about it or not. In case yes, very good. If no, nothing to worry as there are no options left.

Changing the stories we tell ourselves, we can take situations to grain strength to grow, learn and change.

Our world rests on a pivot of IQ and cash but we also need SQ and life. We are very much focused on the measurement and development of an individual’s IQ and how this relates to him/her achieving financial success in life. This model has served a certain purpose and has propelled society into the 21st century but we desperately need to redefine our core skills for success. Even though IQ remains important, skills such as emotional intelligence (EQ) ,i.e, about feeling and also spiritual intelligence (SQ) are the skills we simply do not have enough of in society.

Credits:
Lectures of Spiritual Gurus like Gaur Gopal Das, Sadhguru, Jay Shetty and others