Spiritual crisis

Difficult as it may seem to swallow, the current crisis may be seen as salutory. As spirituals, perhaps it is less difficult for us to assume this. The current situation, without wishing to sound peremptory, is to be ascribed primarily, and is a reflection of, the workings of the 'hungry ghosts' in our system.

Britain has been the worst affected by this turn of events. This has widely been attributed to its astronomical levels of borrowing and public spending. Now, the Bank of England has literally printed, out of nowhere, £75bn to 'inject' into the economy, to boost trade and provide immediate alleviation to the situation. The thinking behind this is naturally that circulating money into the economy will incite consumer spending and get customers back onto the streets engaging in their beloved pastime (and this just applies to the UK) - shopping.

I don't know what specifically demarcates the UK as uniquely implicated in this débâcle, and I do not want to lapse into generic comments, other than to say this is a most sad situation directly reflective of the inner deficiency and striving that characterises so much of modern behaviour.

My main thesis is this, and this is why the current situation may be thought of as cautionary: the economy, to use Ken Wilber's parlance, is the domain of the Lower Right quadrant, in that it is the reflection of the institutions and systems that govern a social order, namely the lower left, composed of individuals engaging together in a participative culture.

It follows therefore that LR occasions are a DIRECT reflection of our interior values, collectively referred to as the lower left, but which are also the reflection of a sizeable number of individuals coming together to form a coherent whole (the Upper Left).

Hence the economy is our fault. It is our situation. We created it. Only we can get out of it. As spirituals, it behoves us to 'profit' by this occasion, as it were, to get our own inner houses in order and observe very carefully our reactions to situations, people, places and events and regard outer phenomena as merely (and not in a literal sense viz. The Secret, of course) reflections of and extensions of our behaviour (UR) and hence our values (UL and, collectively, LL).

Adversity often heralds times of spiritual growth, rather than merely portending decay. Decay indeed is not a 'negative' value, and indeed what would it mean to be a negative value? A larger perspective, offered to us by the Taoists, holds this to be merely the vagaries of yin/yang, immutable laws in the Universe, which it behoves us to Be One With.

Hence these times offer us occasions to further our spiritual practice, deepen it, and not shrink back into self-contraction, regression, and so forth.

Some reflections - comments welcome.

Update 25/3 -

Allow me to augment the foregoing with a few quotes I happened to stumble upon whilst reading Gordon Brown's speech to the EU Parliament:

- As we have discovered to our cost, the problem of unbridled free markets in an unsupervised marketplace is that they reduce all relationships to transactions, all intentions to self interest, all sense of value to consumer choices, all sense of worth to a price tag.

Whew! It took you long enough to figure it out, Mr Brown, and it illustrates my thesis of how this turn of events really is a lesson in morality.

- A good society needs a strong sense of values. Not values that spring from the market, but the values we bring to it. Values of honesty, responsibility, fairness, hard work. Values that come not from markets; but instead from the heart.

Amazing what can be learned from just one financial crisis...

- [We need] every continent [to] the changes in [their] own banking systems that will open the path to shared prosperity once again
-  every country [to] participate and  cooperate in setting global standards for financial regulation
- every continent [to] inject the resources into their economy needed to secure economic growth and jobs

Ditto.