Unlocking leadership potential through eastern inner science: a consciousness-based leadership approach towards human and planetary flourishing

Humanity faces existential challenges that require transformative responses in organisational leadership. Leaders’ minds are crucial to this transformation. The study uses insights from Eastern Inner Science, specifically the Unity in Duality view, as a resource to rethink leadership. It explores how leaders could use different minds and states of consciousness as pivotal inner levers to experience and act from an increasing sense of connectedness and unity (ontology), a lived experience of a more holistic knowing through intuition and wisdom (epistemology) and an increasing ability to care for the whole compassionately (axiology). Connecting to systems thinking, this study shows how these insights could support leaders in the transformation of their organisation’s structures and underlying paradigms. Finally, it explores applications and implications for leadership. The theoretical insights of this paper have the potential to contribute to a paradigm shift by adding new aspects to the discourse on consciousnessbased leadership.