JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES, Volume 4, Number 3, 2010©2010 University of Phoenix

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MICHAEL JONES

THE MARRIAGE OF LOGOS AND MYTHOS:

TRANSFORMING LEADERSHIP

This article argues that His Holiness the Dalai Lamaspeaks not only to different functions or disciplines ofleadership but also to the interrelatedness of a twofoldconsciousness: mythos and logos. This twofold consciousness—the reuniting of the inner vision of themythic world with the brightly illuminated world oflogos—is where the inner world and outer world of leadership meet. It is in this overlap that a new imag-inal worldview of leadership is possible, one that takesfull account not only of the processes, issues, and styleof leadership but also of the deep parallels between lead-ership and the mythic imagination.

This article also argues that reengaging the mythicimagination gives rise to a new perception of the com-mons, a possibility space that holds the potential to re-unite a twofold consciousness. Viewing the commonsfrom both mythic and logic perspectives can contrib-ute to the overall health and well-being of the commu-nity of the whole. Such a worldview perspectivetransforms leadership from one rooted exclusively in aWestern scientific tradition to one open to wisdom fromthe past.

Incorporating MythosAround the world, a consensus is growing on the needfor a more holistic, transparent, and interdependent wayto steward societal progress. It speaks of a desire for lead-ership that is focused on more than just economic in-dicators such as GNP. Instead, it is transformativeleadership that takes into account the full range of con-cerns, diversity, and potential of the community. It speaks to a need to incorporate mythos and themythic imagination into leadership for learning andchange.

In November 2009, more than 100 leaders in health,sociocultural, and public administration; the aboriginalcommunity; students; and many others in the Simcoe/Muskoka region north of Toronto, Canada, met for aconference. Through the day, they engaged in generativeconversation to explore what needs to be present in ourcommunities that would contribute to the well-beingof all citizens.

Unique to this gathering was the introduction ofmusic, art, time in nature, storytelling, seeded dialogue,small-table and large-circle conversations, and personal

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I think in the past, maybe, different sectors carried on more or less independently. Now today. . . everything is interdependent, interrelated. That’s the reality. Under these circumstances, itfalls on us to work together.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

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reflection. This shifted the focus from a more broadlyunderstood strategic-planning and priority-setting per-spective to a more challenging and life-enhancing pro-cess. It gave people time and space to come into themoment, to listen, reflect, and speak from the heart andengage the questions that mattered most to their com-munities. In this respect, the day offered a new andemergent model for community partnerships and col-laborations that nurtured a spirit of empathy and com-passion. It brought into being the kind of interdependentworld His Holiness the Dali Lama foresaw. It also raisedsome specific questions: What are the places and spacesin our community where we experience the greatestsense of aliveness, vitality, and significance? When wethink about the relationship of our built environment,the health of our population, and community well-being, what really matters? To build the ground for ourfuture, what do we want to conserve, and what needs tochange?

The Transformative Power of Musicand StoryAs the day unfolded, many noticed that the pace of theirspeaking slowed. There was more space between thesentences and the listening seemed more focused. Par-ticipants frequently paused to find just the right word,and there was almost a lyrical quality in how they spoke.It was as if the group were enfolded in a field of energynot unlike what I experienced in my relationship withaudience in piano concerts. When this occurred, I didnot know if I was playing or was being played. This samelife force was enveloping the group. Were they speak-ing, or being spoken? The learning community shiftedinto a parallel universe where everything seemed morevital, animate, and alive. Their voices resonated with agenerative force as they reached across their differencesand connected with a unifying force of life itself.

Part of what accounted for this shift in the tone ofconversation was improvised piano music. Music cre-ated from out of the moment is a precise and organic ar-ticulation of what is resonating in the room itself. Thisknowingness of music—of sensing the deep current ofhuman feeling and experience—challenges our de-pendence on logical analysis and empirical evidence asthe only basis for knowing what we know. Music transcends

the ego. It reaches into the deep self and expresses ahuman emotion that comes out of the felt experiencewhere words cannot go. In our busy, time-bound, andrational world, music awakens us to a deeper mythicrealm. It reconnects us to the experience of faith, reve-lation, beauty, mystery, harmony, stillness, and the joyful experience of time out of time itself. Most im-portant, it contributes to creating a learning field that isspacious, slow, integrative, and whole.

Another part is the power of listening to stories ofplace. The morning opened with a presentation bySherry Lawson, a widely admired local native storyteller.Her first words to the group were, “I want to tell you astory of how my ancestors spoke to me through the gravestone of ‘my gran’ in the cemetery one day.” Inthe narrative of her community, every place is a meet-ing place; their community is woven into the fabric ofthe land. It is sustained in the mythic story of Mnjikan-ing, the home of the Chippewa First Nations and theland on which the conference was held. “You are on sa-cred ground,” she reminded us. “When you are on In-dian land, you need to learn together in Indian ways.”

Over the centuries, Mnjikaning was the uniting nar-rative joining together the diversity of tribes and cul-tures of all peoples. This included the European settlerswho came much later. It is not only heard in theirvoices; it is also felt in the gentleness of the soil and car-ried in the wind, the water, the light, and the sky.

When Sherry introduced the power of her story,everyone listened and the veneer of our day-to-day iden-tities dropped away. We were no longer students, nurses,politicians, accountants. Our voices were no longer sim-ply trying to inform. Instead, our stories carried thepower to transform our worldview as we sought to ex-press the truth of our experience forming on our tongueas we spoke. For a moment we were tapping into thosedeep core archetypal energies that have defined ourplace in the world for thousands of years—healers, war-riors, magicians, enchanters, weavers, shamans, vision-aries. In stepping out from the norm, we took up thethread of our ancestral place on earth, one that has beenlong forgotten and needs to be remembered again.

What we were touching was the forgotten domain ofmythos, a deep matrix of connectivity, an aboriginalDreamtime where we become part of the ongoing creation story of the world. The Dreamtime elevates

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our field of attention. It is a threshold space that existsboth now and in the future. In the Dreamtime, we startwith nothing, and from this emptiness our voices be-come song—songs that help us sing our world into ex-istence and in so doing bring our future into being. Sothe rhythm and cadence I was hearing in the voices thatmorning may have been the Dreaming, a language ofthe imagination that lifts up our gaze to sense a possi-ble future, which cannot yet be clearly seen or under-stood.

Restoring the Health of theCommonsIn the context of a Western worldview, a parallel socialspace may be found in the commons. The commons isa possibility space, a thread of fellowship and collectiveawareness that has been with us through the fullness oftime. Whether it is the front porch, the village green,or the musicians’ open stage, the commons is a spaceof kenosis, the Greek word for the emptying of oneself,the suspension of certainty, and the practice of a disci-plined unknowing. Wherever and whenever people aregathered, the commons is a power, like the Dreaming,a space that is potentially there, but only potentially,and not always and not forever.

Wherever we go, we are the commons. It is the spacebetween us that forms whenever we meet. It is the spaceof reciprocity in which we existed and thrived for thou-sands of years as we confronted the daily mystery of auniverse we could not grasp. The commons was thespace of appearance in which we shared the ecstatic ex-perience of what it meant to be fully alive to the life ofthe imagination as expressed through stories poetry,dreams, conversation, and song. This intimate corre-spondence with our social and more-than-human worldfilled us with a profound joy. It was what made us fullyhuman. It was the unfathomable wonder of being fully present to the mystery of an invisible world that ex-isted side by side with the hard difficulties and chal-lenging demands of our day-to-day reality.

One of the unfortunate realities of today is that al-though the commons is always with us, we seldom seeit. The rational and objective nature of our mind oftenblinds us to the deeply subjective world that lies in thespaces between the notes. The success of early cultureswas that these spaces were their world. What could not

be seen or understood was not considered a threat oradversary, but a gift. And because it was a gift, it meantthat taking from the world always involved the ritual ofgiving back. As a result, we coexisted in partnershipwith one another in a spirit of true reciprocity—astance of open, curious, creative, and respectful en-gagement nurtured in a perpetual state of profoundequanimity.

The German philosopher Hannah Arendt expressedthis spirit of the enchantment of the world:

It was the function of the commons over the ages to

make a home for magnifying the spirit of the other,

of letting no deed or word be offered without witness.

To act in this way was to ensure that those who par-

ticipated were subject to everlasting remembrance by

those whose lives they had touched [Arendt, 1958,

p. 197].

The shift in our worldview to seeing our environ-ment as a resource quickly led to the gradual disen-chantment of our world, and with this the permissionto take from the commons without restraint. Howeverinnocent these gestures may have been at the outset,they quickly escalated into an acquisitional attitude thathas come at great cost.

Once enlivened in this world of wonder, our sensessoon atrophied. Our eyes were no longer able to pene-trate the veil to witness and participate in the richly an-imate world that lay behind. We were inducted into aworld in which a fear-based structure of beliefsgrounded in perfection and the quest for absolute truthbecame dominant. This isolated us from the diversityof other worldviews as we strived to bring all of life’sunruly elements under our direct control. Our worldbecame a battleground centered on a fear that no mat-ter how efficient we tried to be, where there was onceabundance there was now scarcity. As our world spunround faster and faster, we realized that despite our ef-forts there was not enough to go around.

For many today, the absence of the commons is asource of indefinable, but palpable, unrest. It is like a hunger for which we can find no cause or cure. In anenvironment where the commons is no longer there tobe served, every new technological invention and socialmovement of humankind leans toward celebrating pri-vate preference, and so comes further atrophy of thequality of our public life.

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Aspects of the Mythic ImaginationThere are four aspects of the mythic imagination thatmay help restore the life of the commons and create anew center of being in our relations between the worldand us. Together they reflect the timeless learning jour-ney to bring our future into being and to transform ourmechanistic view of the world into one that is moretransformative, organic, and whole:

1. A call to stewardship, a time to appreciate our own giftsand uniqueness and to listen to others and our own heartto discover what life is calling us to do

2. A call to enchantment, the attention we bring to beautyand wonderment that enables us to see the extraordinaryin the ordinary and in so doing also find fertile groundwhere our gifts may take root and grow

3. A call to grace, the ability to see our world from manyangles and in so doing weave together many new possi-bilities in a spirit of generosity, detachment, perspective,and novelty

4. A call to voice, the capacity for personal self-expressionthat not only informs but also transforms how we thinkand see and serves as the source of abundance, blessing,wholeness, affirmation, order, integration, and new life

Reawakening a TwofoldConsciousnessFor many people, the legacy from the industrial age hasbeen like a tsunami that has swept away the footingsthat kept them connected to their deepest wisdom andtrue nature. Karen Armstrong (2009) writes that inmost preindustrial cultures

there were two recognized ways of thinking, speak-

ing and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them

mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither

was considered superior to the other. They were not in

conflict but complementary (Armstrong, 2009, p. xi).

Logos was the voice of reason and mythos the lan-guage of our felt life together.

With the rise of the industrial economy, we foundourselves in a world out of balance. Scientific logosquickly rose to dominance and the mythic life fell into disrepute. Languages, cultures, stories, landscapes,

ancient gifts, and wisdom have been but a few of thegreatest tragic losses of the commons. With the loss ofthe mythic life, we no longer had access to the grace of ekstasis—of stepping out from the norm and allow-ing life to live through us so that we may experience theecstasy of our intimate connection to a more enchantedand more than human world. The gift of this inner re-ality of mythos cannot be retrieved if our worldview islegitimized only in the context of a rational, orderly,and scientific life.

ConclusionThe poet Gerard De Nerval once wrote, “When yougather to plan, the universe is not there.” For the uni-verse to be there, we will need to direct our thinking toreengaging mythos and linking it to logos. This entailsshifting our attention from a sole focus on discrete ob-jects, things, fixed boundaries, and categories to agreater awareness of processes, energy, transformation,and flow. It is through the collective eye of the com-mons and our interdependence with one another thatHis Holiness the Dali Lama envisioned that we are ableto see the mythic dimension of the world and give re-newed life to a twofold consciousness again.

All this presents a new worldview for the leader/artistthat transforms leadership. It connects the richness ofthe mythic past to the mythic present, as a place notjust to return to but to grow out from. Leadership fromthis perspective creates a new marriage between mythosand logos; in so doing it links ancient wisdom and mod-ern thought and thinks them together again.

ReferencesArendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago: University ofChicago.

Armstrong, K. (2009). The case for God. New York: Knopf.

Michael Jones is a leadership consultant, writer, pianist-composer, and the author of Artful Leadership:Awakening the Commons of the Imagination (Trafford,2006). He holds an M.A. in adult learning from theUniversity of Toronto. He can be reached through his Website (www.pianoscapes.com).