Shekar Kapur asks Sadhguru how spiritual leaders can contribute to eliminating violence in society, and especially to impact leaders. Sadhguru explains that a leader is someone who can impact the lives of millions of people. When such a responsibility is placed upon a person, a spiritual process is essential. Spiritual process does not mean a religion he explains. Spirituality means you are a inclusive process, not an exclusive entity.

Full Transcript:

Shekhar Kapur: many spiritual leaders are working towards creating a peaceful world bringing down violence. What steps have you taken in that direction? Do you think you can impact the leaders of the warring nations and bring about peace using your spiritual teachings or methods?
Sadhguru: See, there are conflicts which have been hanging upon the planet for decades for the same reasons. Different types of conflicts have happened. The spiritual leaders or spiritual process essentially focus on… focuses on bringing peacefulness and blissfulness to an individual human being. So when I say an individual human being, it does not matter who he is, whether he is a leader of a nation or a business leader or a… just a man on the street or whatever it is, it works for every human being. So definitely spiritual process has to touch everybody, particularly people who are in positions of responsibility and power because they can make a huge difference for lots of people because they… When you’re a leader… When you’re a leader of a nation or even these days large businesses, every thought, every emotion, every action that you generate is impacting millions of people. Just the very thought that you generate is impacting people in so many different ways.

When such a responsibility has been placed in your hands it's extremely important the leaders of nations, large business corporations, they must take these steps to ensure as to how they are within themselves, what kind of beings are they. Some work has to be done upon themselves because every thought and emotion that they generate is impacting millions of people. When such a privilege has been given to you, if you just think something is going to happen to million people, it's extremely important that you conduct this privilege in a responsible manner, and you can only conduct this responsibly if there is a spiritual process within you. When I say a spiritual process, maybe not everybody understands what I’m… you know, what it means. So one way of putting it is, there is a certain sense of inclusiveness that you’re not an exclusive entity, you are an inclusive process and this inclusiveness if it does not arise and you have the nec… you have a certain level of power in your hands, then definitely it will lead to various kinds of conflicts; there’s no question about that.

So, we have worked with millions of people, we have worked in the prisons in… you know, it's mandatory now in all the central prisons in South India and there are various other things we are doing to make this happen. Definitely we have also tried to work with very major leaders; particularly I have focused upon the business leaders because 100 years ago if you looked at this world, military leadership was the most powerful leadership. In the last 100 years it has evolved into a situation where democratically elected leaders, political leaders, are the most powerful people, but that is going to change. That’s already beginning to change and it's going to change very rapidly in the next 10 to 15 years. You will see in the future the economic leaders are going to be the most important people. Seeing this, I have started working with economic leaders individually on certain levels and we have definitely made a difference in the way they make their decisions, the way they conduct their businesses – this is being done, but this is being done very discreetly because it is not something that needs to be handled in public.