Haidt has shown that corporate leaders who engage in self-sacrificing behaviour and elicit “elevation” in their employees, also yield greater influence among their employees — who become more committed and in turn may act with more compassion in the workplace. Indeed, compassion is contagious. Social scientists James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Chris Christakis of Harvard demonstrated that helping is contagious: acts of generosity and kindness beget more generosity in a chain reaction of goodness. You may have seen one of the news reports about chain reactions that occur when someone pays for the toll of the driver behind them at a highway tollbooth. People keep the generous behaviour going for hours; our acts of compassion uplift others and make them happy. We may not know it, but by uplifting others, we are also helping ourselves; research by Fowler and Christakis has shown that happiness spreads and that if the people around us are happy, we, in turn, become happier.”
These are not acts of the ego nor our brain that so many have identified ourselves with, again and again; we are not our thoughts. I define brain as that thing between our ears, the grey matter, and its main job is to produce thoughts and the master controller of the nervous system that sits atop the spine and under our skull. If this paper’s author was Marvin Oka (behavioural modelling expert), he would tell you that we actually have three brains — our head brain, heart brain and gut brain. I also agree with his views and arguments; nonetheless, it is more important for this paper to focus on the “missing element” — soul.
Spiritual teacher Eckart Tolle teaches the importance of knowing the main aspects of the ego and how they operate in the individual as well as in the collective. He said it is important because of two reasons: 1) Unless we know the basic mechanics behind the workings of the ego, we won’t recognise it, and it will trick us into identifying with it again and again. What he meant is that the ego will take us over, like an imposter pretending to be us. 2) The act of recognising the ego is one of the ways in which awakening happens. When we recognise the unconsciousness in us, that which makes the recognition possible is the arising consciousness, is awakening. He also said that it is not to fight against the ego and win, just as we cannot fight against darkness (shadows). The light of consciousness is all that is necessary because … he said “You are the light.”
In recent years, we see an influx of ancient Eastern wisdom teachings, and a continuous growing number of followers of traditional religion who are able to let go of identification with form, dogma, and rigid belief systems and discover the original depth that is hidden within their own spiritual tradition at the same time as they discover the depth within themselves.
