We have 4 stages and hierarchies to wisdom: Followers, Leaders, Elders and Ancestors. To progress and live the authenticity of each, we must broaden our hearts and live love.Caritas.This is the great energy that can always make us progress from one level of wisdom to the other. For Followers to progress towards leadership, they must practice what I call 'eucharia', i.e gratitude. This spirit of gratitude which enables the Follower to be humble and obedient is what propels him to move to the 2nd hierarchy. A truly gratuitous mind is humble and is willing to obey and abide by the precepts of the Leader. He stoops to conquer.The more a Follower practices this, the more his advancement to the next stage of Leadership proceeds smoothly.
Leadership is the next stage, it demands more discipline and responsibility. To exercise Leadership effectively one must practice what I call 'letting go'.'Letting go' is poverty. This spirit is contrary to avarice, which basically consists of a desire for an acknowledgement of the goods done . The ideal society would be one in which Followers learn to give thanks and Leaders learn to let go(Leaders must have enough 'absorbers' to take lots of 'shits')then each party can easily move to next stage as required. Albeit, life's experience shows that the bulk of ills in our society arises from frictions between this two groups. But paradoxically, it is such friction , from the lassitude of one party, and the grasping of responsibility from the other party that facilitates advancement to the next stage.For instance , if the leader does not let go and the Follower persists in graciousness, the trial makes him advance towards being a more authentic Leader than the Leader who completely looses touch about the meaning of Leadership. Or otherwise if Followers turn ingrates and the Leader does not take things personal and 'let go', he quickly advances to the next stage which is Eldership.
Now, authentic Followers get inspiration from authentic Leaders, while authentic Leaders get inspiration from authentic Elders, that is the way it works, it is an hierachial stuff, the more one is surrounded by authentic people from the top hierarchies the easier one learns and one progresses authentically to the next stage, if one misses this authenticity, there is a cycle of ignorance, thus falsehood which only ends in nihilism persists. Authenticity of each stage demands responsibility of Love, and these are quite rare.
If the first two stages are rare, the next stage of Eldership is even more rare and vague for modern man. Through much stress and poverty and letting go, a Leader finally arrives at being an Elder. Elders take their cues and energy from the past, they arrive more at mysticism and take their cues from the 'dead'(the dead are actually those that should be called living, because they effect a greater force than we think) An Elder knows that events in the world gets directed from the other world.Authentic Elders are often silent.Elders generally employ the energy of memory because,for them,they know that memory is reality, the past is the only energy for the future. Not all Elders follow after truth and the great temptation in this stage is to apply memory towards falsehood, this demands lesser energy, whereas to think truth in order to effect positivity in life requires much discipline and energy. An authentic Elder knows that falsehood always lead to nihilism, and truth is that which only matters, a lot of Elders miss out -despite all- at this point. The temptation to relax the head and compromise on the demands of memories weighs just too much and they give up. An Elder acts little, speaks little but know much because he derives his wisdom from memory, for authentic elder, memory is not memory, but in fact, reality. He is mute and is inactive , because he sees that much of life's results does not come from human efforts but from memory, from the life beyond, the land of the spirit. What abundant wisdom one can gain from Elders, but if authentic Followers and Leaders are rare , far far rarer are authentic Elders, they struggle, a lot of them give up on truth. Few people are able to be persistently thankful, humble and obedient to become Leaders, and fewer people are able to 'let go' to become Elders, and far fewer Elders can face the stress of holding unto the force of truth through memory without compromising, and if this could be done, that is when one arrives at the last stage which is called Ancestors.
When Elders become committed to memory, they become their thoughts and this becomes what I call legacy. Very very few Elders attain Ancestors alive, but they already know better, that being alive or dead is very irrelevant, authentic Elders even crave for death to be able to work more effectively.They see that the so called dead are truly those alive. It's something else whether they are committed to truth or not. A society is a reflection of the kind of legacy left by its Ancestors. Ancestors are legacy, and it is this Legacy that Elders spend their entire lives remembering, because that is the protagonism of the world , the case of being an Ancestor is that of a life which becomes perpetually eventful proportional to the rate at which it is able to sustain truth, what a wasted life it is, that which is not lived for the truth, yet authentic Ancestors are rare my friend.Ancestors had often entered the easier part to narcissism which only ends in nihilism, thus posterity suffer, and Ancestors suffer so much because of this because they bear no fruit, what is the point of being an Ancestor if one does not leave a good legacy,if one does nothing for posterity, if one does not become fruitful. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and looses the meaning of himself!
When people are disciplined enough to move from authentic Follower-ship, to authentic Leadership, to authentic Elder-ship to authentic Ancestor-ship.Their is visible progress in the society. It takes discipline, but a discipline helped only by faith. A single authentic person can effect goodness which overcomes and covers the evils of a many. Charity covers a multitude of sins!One with God is a majority. And I want to say, let us remember the dead, the grave sin of this age is the neglect of our dead.We neglect the dead because Elders -good or bad-are lacking. Mediocrity looms. Let us be committed to our ancestors and use their goodness, it helps them and us.
So what shall we do then? it is a long hazardous road, and those truly wise know that the only path worth coveting is the Follower-ship path,authentic Follower ship is that which I can advice that we hustle for, the path of gratitude, obedience and humility, the Lord will bring us to the other stages if we only work at Follower ship.
