Students' search for what's right/wrong and the role I play in facilitating this search are two issues that are central to both my teaching and how I share my research on spiritual leadership in the graduate MS Management and Leadership program I coordinate here at Tarleton. Courses where I raise the issue of clear right/wrong in terms of personal leadership include a dedicated seminar on organizational transformation through spiritual leadership and select modules in my organizational behavior, organizational analysis and design, organizational change and development, and ethics and responsibilities of leadership courses.
Ultimately for me, questions concerning what's right/wrong wrong boil down to one's moral principles and the spiritual values that underlie them. Therefore answering this question is central to the spiritual journey we all take, either consciously or unconsciously. The fact that your students are even asking these questions indicates some willingness to seek consciousness in their spiritual journey.
I. The first thing I do with students is use three slides to drive home the distinction between religion and spirituality made by the Dali Lama.:
1. Religion is concerned with faith in the claims of one faith tradition or another, an aspect of which is the acceptance of some form of heaven or nirvana.
Connected with this are religious teachings or dogma, ritual prayer, and so on.
Spirituality is concerned with those spiritual values and qualities of the human spirit-such as love and compassion, patience tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of wholeness and harmony-which bring happiness to both self and others.
2. The common bridge between spirituality and religion is Altruistic love – regard or devotion to the interests of others.
In religion this is manifested through the golden rule which is common to all major religions.
3 From this perspective, spirituality is necessary for religion but religion is not necessary for spirituality.
II. Then I introduce our spiritual leadership model (http://www.tarleton.edu/~fry/SLTPalgraveFINAL.pdf).
Figure 1: Causal Model of Spiritual Leadership (Fry, 2003, 2005, 2007)
The search for the answers to what's right/wrong then becomes a spiritual journey with the model as a guide to transcend one's self through love and service (more on this in Mark Kriger and my latest piece that's in press at Human Relations (http://www.iispiritualleadership.com/SLTBeingCentHumRelFinal.PDF ) . I believe this journey is central to all the world's major religious and spiritual traditions.
From this perspective questions concerning absolute right/wrong take a back seat to the unfolding of the journey itself, which is an inner journey to find one's own "Truth."
I also share our work on spiritual well-being that advocates a universal set of values (also espoused by all the major religions and spiritual traditions) that science has begun to show positively predicts positive human health and psychological well-being (See http://www.tarleton.edu/~fry/SLTEthics.pdf and http://www.iispiritualleadership.com/index_files/resources.htm).
And I make it clear this is at the heart of my spiritual journey and religious beliefs and practices.
III. In regards to perennialism, if this comes up I resort to the continuum of god as a higher power from our 2003 LQ piece (pps. 706-707; http://www.tarleton.edu/~fry/SLTTheory.pdf) on spiritual
leadership below.
The quest for spiritual well-being, for calling (a vision of life's purpose and meaning) and membership (a community where one is understood and appreciated), is also at the heart of and reflects a common human quest to seek to know and do the will of God, the ideal intention of which underlies all historic ideas of God:
The quest for God is the quest for an ideal Source of Help and Object of
Devotion: a being so much greater, more enduring, and more worthy than
ourselves that we may confidently lean on it for support and unreservedly give
ourselves to its service (Horton, 1950, p. 4-5).
Horton (1950) placed conceptions of God as a Higher Power (See Figure 3) on a continuum from atheism (there is no God; one has no sense of calling or membership; all is evil, hopeless and rooted in sorrow, distress, despair and calamity) to complete pantheism (everything is God; all is good and rooted in joy, peace, serenity). For Horton (1950) as well as our purposes here in developing a theory of spiritual leadership, complete atheism implies that there is no Higher Power other than one's self and, literally, no sense of spiritual survival and thus nothing worth living for. In this definition there are few real atheists. According to Horton (1950) unless someone believes in some Higher Power, whether it be family, friends, a work organization, Science and Technology, or destruction of ones existing social order for some envisioned future one (e.g. the Communist Revolution), there is no path in life left except for death through conscious or unconscious suicide.
Atheism Humanism Monotheism Theopantism Pantheism
|--------------------------------|---------------------|---------------------------------|
Despair Hopeful Striving All is Divine
Hopelessness Christianity, Judaism, (Mother Nature)
Islam
Fig 3. Conceptions of God as a Higher Power
The first step along the continuum away from atheism lies in the absorption of nature into an orderly human social system. Examples are families and tribes, secular and religious profit and nonprofit organizations, and the religions of Japan and China where the Emperor is conceived to be descended from God and form a personal link " between his earthly subjects, who owe filial piety to him, and his heavenly relatives, to whom he pays the same respect (Horton, 1950, p.3)". The twentieth century views on the Communist State of Russia and the Nationalist Socialist State of Hitler's Germany as humanistic systems differ from these humanist religions only in omitting respect to Heaven.
On the other end of the continuum lie the polytheistic religions with their bewildering multitude of deified natural Gods – sacred stones and mountains; ruling chiefs and kings; the sun, moon, and stars; rain and lightning; and the ancestors and heroes of the tribe. In pantheistic religions – Zeus in ancient Greece and Brahma in India – certain Gods begin to emerge into special prominence into one Supreme Deity. The people of ancient Egypt, who organized, managed, and led one of the greatest projects in history, the construction of the great pyramids, worshiped hundreds of gods and goddesses that ruled over all aspects of life and death. From Horton's (1950) perspective, those who call themselves atheists or agnostics and yet place trust and faith in science and technology and thus eschew a supreme being and life after death are actually worshiping an objective or nature-based pantheistic God
Both humanistic and pantheistic conceptions of God, upon the scrutiny of philosophic inquiry, tend to converge toward the center of Horton's continuum to form a unity in the thought of God called ethical monotheism, which Christianity shares with Judaism, and Islam:
Ethical Monotheism, often called theism for short, differs from pantheism and
humanism in that it thinks of man and nature as both dependent on God their
Creator, and thinks of God as engaged in purposive combat with evil tendencies
in the world (Horton, 1950, p.4).
Thus the God of theism is neither the Sum Total of Reality as in pantheism, nor the Upholder of the Established Order, as in Oriental humanism. The nature of the theistic God is defined in terms of ethical character, values, and purpose through principles of Justice and/or Redemptive Love. In Ethical Monotheism these principles have already established the basic structure of the world at present and are still actively at work in it for its radical transformation and improvement.
Huston Smith, in, The World's Religions (1992), can be used to build upon Horton's 1950 work through the fact that every religion has some version of the Golden Rule. Smith (1992) adds specificity to the values of Ethical Monotheism in noting that all religions espouse the virtues of humility, charity, veracity, and vision. Thus, spiritual leaders seek spiritual well-being whether in humanistic systems (organizations) or in seeking a theistic God's Will through a visioning process and through living and abiding in these cardinal values in daily social interaction. In other words, spiritual well-being is found in pursuit of a vision of service to others through humility as having the capacity to regard oneself as one, but not more than one; through charity, or altruistic love, as considering one's neighbor to be as fully as you are; and, through veracity which goes beyond basic truth-telling to having the capacity to see things exactly as they are, freed from subjective distortions.
The conclusion I have reached is that, ultimately, questions concerning right/wrong can only be answered on our spiritual journey from moment-to-moment as we seek to live in the eternal present.
All this usually leaves my students with more questions than answers, which is exactly where I want them to be.