Towards a Spiritual Economics (Part 2 of 3)

(Intent Editor’s note: Towards a Spiritual Economics is divided into three posts. This first post describes the failure of capitalist economics. This post and the upcoming third post will delve into the outlines of why we need an economic theory grounded in more spiritual-based concepts.)

Our Redefined Higher needs and the Rudiments of a Spiritual economics

 The basic elements of the developing science within the primacy of consciousness are as follows:
 

•  Consciousness is the ground of all being
• The possibilities of consciousness are four-fold: material (which we sense); vital energy (which we feel, primarily through the chakras and secondarily through the brain); mental meaning (which we think)); and supramental discriminating contexts such as physical laws, contexts of meaning and feeling such as ethics and love and aesthetics (which we intuit).  The material is called gross and the others make up the subtle domain of our experience.
• When consciousness chooses from the possibilities the actual event of its experience (with physical, vital, mental, and supramental components), the physical has the opportunity of making representations of the subtle.  The physical is like computer hardware; the subtle is represented as software.
• Our capacity for making physical representation of the subtle evolves.  First, the capacity for making representations of the vital evolved through the evolution of life via more and more sophisticated organs to represent the living functions such as maintenance and reproduction.  Next the capacity of making more and more sophisticated representations of the mental evolved.  This is the stage of evolution we are in right now.
• Our capacity to represent the supramental has not evolved yet.  However, there is evolutionary pressure on us in this direction the primary reason some of us are attracted to spiritulity.

In this way, there must not only be urge to satisfy physical needs but also needs in all the other dimensions of our experience.  In addition to the satisfaction of physical needs, a spiritual economics must address:
 

• Satisfaction of emotional needs, positive emotions such as love, compassion, and satisfaction itself, both conditioned and  unconditioned.
• Pursuit of meaning, including the pursuit of new mental meaning which requires creativity.
•  Pursuit of spiritual and supramental (soul) needs such as altruism, love, and happiness.

 And in truth, this ladder of needs is not entirely hierarchical.  If one satisfies higher needs, the urge to satisfy lower needs actually decreases.  The opposite is also true.  If a lower need is satisfied, the demand for satisfying a higher need increases.  In this way, strategy for a more suited idealist economics than capitalism is to address all the needs simultaneously.

Whereas capitalism is an economics of physical well-being based on the satisfaction of our conditioned physical ego-needs, idealist or spiritual economics must be an economics of holistic well-being based on the satisfaction of both our (physical) ego needs and higher needs (pertaining to the exploration of the vital, mental, soul and spirit).
 

To be continued in Part 3.

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