Leaders Who Flip Around Backwards Thinking Can Heal The World
Ego-centered thinking tells us change is “out there” and we’re relatively fixed “in here” but the illusion of separation creates suffering and can’t possibly be true. Flip that around and we heal separation both inside and out.
By Ginny Whitelaw
Originally published on Forbes.com on October 1st, 2024
Image by Primipil, Getty Images.
A friend wrote to me from Israel yesterday. She went there to do peace work and, in the midst of an intimate Israeli-Palestinian gathering for peace, the skies filled with war planes taking off. How can we bring healing to this part of the world, she asked. Or to Ukraine? Or Sudan? Or to any number of places where violence and fear prevail? Even here in the United States, there is talk of violence and disaster if the coming election does not go this way or that. Meanwhile, the climate clock keeps ticking toward irreversible tipping points, AI keeps racing toward an unrecognizable future, and we keep living and working wildly out of sync with nature, grabbing for ourselves what we need and perhaps what we can.
It’s almost as if we think we’re separate.
Indeed, that is the illusion underwriting all of these tumultuous conditions. We think we are separate from one another, separate from nature, separate from this whole messy picture. We may even want to separate ourselves further from thinking about it: everything is churning “out there” while we remain relatively unchanging “in here.” The illusion is natural; it comes with having an ego, which all healthy human beings have and need to keep them alive. But our mistake is thinking our ego boundary defines who we are and we miss our profound interconnectedness. In our illusory, egocentric thinking we get everything backwards, creating or playing into suffering to get our needs met. We find life and death struggles everywhere, from fighting wars against people, to fighting illnesses or fighting competitors in the marketplace. Strategies arising from egocentric thinking will only perpetuate the turmoil. Leaders who flip around this backward thinking can develop strategies that heal.
This practice of flipping around backwards thinking is at the heart of Zen Leadership because Zen trains the body to see through illusion. The result is a radical reframe in our sense of self from egocentric to cosmocentric; from a particular self-in-a skin trying to make its way and difference in the world to being the whole picture with a particular body that can co-create with reality and be the difference that’s needed. We go from being “a drop in the ocean,” as the poet, Rumi, would say, to being “the ocean in a drop.”
Science as well points to the fallacy of our conventional, egocentric thinking. Even though it may appear that the world is changing “out there” while “I” am a relatively fixed self “in here,” biology and physics show us there is no way this can be true. No form in the natural world is unchanging, much less a biological form like us that can only exist by metabolizing energy. Moreover, quantum physics shows us that every moment of perception is an interaction—a resonance—between consciousness and a field that particularizes a reality. Resonance is a relationship, which is to vibrate with. It is both a universal principle of change and highly specific. Not everything vibrates with everything else but is tuned by what it can sense and be changed by. Just as an AM radio antenna doesn’t pick up (i.e., vibrate with) FM frequencies, so our ears don’t hear light.
Every one of our senses operates through resonance. Our sense organs vibrate with specific forms of energy or matter (with matter being but a dense form of energy) and set off a chain reaction that turns into information, interpretation, actions and so forth. Our eyes are tuned to light frequencies; our ears resonate with lower frequency sound waves, we have taste buds that light up with the denser form of salt and so forth. Even senses and higher order thinking that we don’t name, such as sensing the “vibe” of a relationship, knowing the right time to act or being inspired by nature are based in resonance.
When resonance happens, like waves coming together on water, both are changed. It would be physically impossible for us to sense things without being changed by them. Among the changes they generate “in” us is our subjective experience of the world. Put another way: by resonating with collective fields of energy we have antenna for and participate in, we bring a temporary subjective world into being. Each and every one of us is creating our reality and changing the field by what we resonate with.
What this flipped view offers us is a boundaryless sense of who we are. We are both matter and energy, both in our skin and not in our skin, both creating a subjective experience and feeding the field from which others draw their subjective experiences. Our physical bodies are not the limits of our self, but rather antenna for boundaryless dynamic interaction with what physics would call the quantum field, what Jung labeled as the collective unconscious and Buddhism would call universal Mind.
What this means for leadership is far-reaching. For starters, putting ourselves in service of the whole picture—since we are also that whole picture—is not an act of altruism, but the most natural orientation in the world. The ego that we once considered the center of our existence is recast into a supporting role that helps integrate our experience and keep us alive, yet by no means is the sum total of who we are. In seeing both its usefulness and limitations, we can increasingly see through the ego, rather than be bound by its conditioning. In leadership, this might show up as a flip from certainty to curiosity, from knowing to creativity or from arrogance to sincere listening.
Settling into this cosmocentric sense of self changes the way leaders approach opportunities and challenges. For example, in the discovery phase of a project we recognize there is no privileged perspective or all-knowing interpretation of the field of possibility, so we cultivate and honor diversity (rather than tolerate it) to get the broadest possible information. In working through conflicting perspectives and inevitable paradoxes in decision making, we don’t get stuck in one-sided points of view but look to how we can use differences like the poles of a battery to power a greater good. In launching a project into the world, we accept that we don’t get to control outcomes, but we do get to control the sincerity of our effort and the quality of feedback we gather to see where our efforts are resonating or need adjusting. Feel how different these approaches are from the warmongering produced by egocentric thinking. These are strategies that heal.
But perhaps the most valuable corollary to this flipped around leadership perspective is that we know: to change the world, we change ourselves. Imagining a desired future we want to bring into the present, the question becomes: how do we need to change as receivers/transmitters in the field in order that our subjective experience of the world matches that future? For example, who are we working with in that desired future whom we’re not working with now? How do we spend time differently? What do we know that we don’t know now? Each inquiry can show us how we need to change and may trigger adjustments. If we can’t match the “us” of that future, that future is not possible. Inasmuch as we do match it, we bring it into now both for ourselves and others.
Discovering how we need to change as leaders to be healing is exactly what brings healing into the world.
Ginny Whitelaw is the Founder and CEO of the Institute for Zen Leadership.
