Leadership in an uneasy age

As a leader, where are you walking? What is your purpose and how do you sense when you are acting on purpose?
Leadership isn't easy. It is more demanding than followership. By definition, you are charting unchartered territories, though others may have traversed similar terrains, and you may have traversed enough to know that there is always a way through, there just is.
As an amazing leader, you can sense the promised land. You know that the prmised land can be reached. As a spiritual leader, you know that the promised land is at hand. There is nowhere else to go but to find that you are already here. And as a teacher, you may enable others to experience that too. Hello, we have arrived.

Getting over death

If you are sitting comfortably, let's talk about death. While there's resistance to discussing death or even nodding to it's approach, not talking about it doesn't help.
Actually, one can't be sure consciousness does not continue beyond this lifetime. And as there is no point planning for nothing, the only eventuality worth planning for is the one where consciousness does indeed continue. What about that?
Buddhist belief that the mental-emotional state you are in after passing is very similar to the state you are in beforehand finds an echo in the Catholic absolution of sins. Move beyond what confines you: death is distinctly liberating. About as liberating as you can get.
The pain comes in not looking forward to it. Death involves moving beyond all fears, even those that have been clung to for a lifetime. And this would be true even for those who did not think there was anything to come.
However you look at it, this is the time to get your act together.

Change and the world changes with you

What if you could change yourself so that everything changes? It all looks the same. But it all feels different because you are different. Wouldn't that be absolutely amazing? And you know, you can do that. Going to a new place helps to do that. But you could change right where you are.
The only thing you can directly change is yourself. You have no other vehicle. Everything else changes because you have changed. Nothing can change when you don't.
So it has been said, be the change. And that is you: you are a swirling vortex of change. This is the path and there is no other way. Statis is not possible. Bye-bye Kansas.

The shadow and the life

The life you think you are having is but a shadow of the life you were born to lead, and your purpose is to come out of that shadow and into a fuller knowledge of yourself, which we will summarise as life in abundance. the way to know that glorious life is to experience it: there is no other way. Even though everyone's experience has subtle differences of trajectory: the way to experience it can now be made clear.
That way is not the provenance of any one religion or of atheism. It cannot be owned. It cannot be boxed without losing the essence of itself. It cannot be reduced to words, though they may point the way.
So let us start with some good news. The Good News is, the Good News is that you are not alone. You never were alone. There is one-who-walks-beside-you and that one-who-walks-beside-you was always beside you, is beside you now and will always be beside you, until the end of time.
This one beside you may apparently take many forms or remain formless. The form does not matter. But you can tune into this form in the here and now. There is absolutely nothing to prevent you from doing so, save the chimeras that even now are dissipating. Glory is all around you. You are glorious.