Finding an “Awareness Mentor“.

This isn’t a new model. The same system extends back at least to the Middle Ages, and when Hollywood uses the term “craft guild” today, as applied to highly skilled workers on the set of a movie, a medieval term continues to survive. The apprenticeship system was still in place a few decades ago for training architects and lawyers.

My conception of mentoring isn’t about career boosting or learning a skill — not exactly. I believe that there are intangible skills that are not taught so much as assimilated.  In India, a guru is a kind of “awareness mentor,” one might say. The same was true for the circle of well-born Athenian youths who hung around Socrates. In a way it’s too bad that loaded words like guru and disciple are used to describe this kind of mentoring. In reality there’s something so valuable about having an awareness mentor that wider recognition needs to be paid.

Everyone owes some portion of their consciousness to other people — parents, teachers, friends — who had a formative influence somewhere along the line. Perhaps we are designed to absorb awareness like a sponge. But the process is so subtle that we don’t see what’s really happening all the time. Awareness expands while you think you’re doing something else. So every mentoring relationship has a consciousness component. I believe this should be the major component.

A prime example unfortunately comes from the negative side. The 2007-2008 economic crash was rooted in distorted consciousness, the famous combination of ambition, greed, and recklessness popularly labeled as “master of the universe.” The worst exemplars of the Gordon Gecko “Greed is good” paradigm found themselves running the store. Newcomers to the craft of trading wanted to be like these people, and they still do. Graduates of the best colleges continue to flock to Wall Street in hopes of making so much money that they can walk away from work at age 25 or so.

Since public shame is meaningless in this context and punishment for their misdeeds has been negligible, an entire generation of bankers, brokers, and traders is in serious need of an awareness mentor. Only by exposure to another level of consciousness can lessons be learned on the inside. But we don’t have to single out Wall Street Society. In general, from CEOs to union leaders, from politicians in Washington to sports heroes, there is a lack of the qualities of inspiration, character, higher vision, common humanity, compassion, forgiveness, and even simple truthfulness.

These qualities aren’t imparted by sermons. They are assimilated by contact with a person who possesses them, and the more direct the contact, the more lasting the influence. I feel a mixture of pride and embarrassment from the tribute paid to my tweets by Rachel Roy, but to be candid, the credit doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the system of awareness mentors that I grew up with and passionately believe in. 

DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists.  TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Dr. Chopra #40 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Coming soon in November 2018: Super Genes and Quantum Healing

This article was originally pubished by Linkedin