Efficiency informed by spirit

The use of the word efficiency is starting to appear everywhere. This week I came across three examples: Harvard University Professor Marc Hauser writing for The American Scientist in its September 2009 special issue on ‘Understanding origins’ referred in his article on ‘The origins of the mind’ to human beings as “exchanging information in a primitive and inefficient  …manner”.  In The Guardian Weekly (09/10/09) Margaret Talbot concluded a two page article titled, “Can popping pills make you smarter?” by saying, “Neuroenhancers don’t offer freedom. Rather they facilitate a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity.” In that article she also referred to an “efficiency obsessed blackberry equipped office culture where work never really ends.” Further on in this same issue of the Guardian weekly in a review of David Owen’s  book “Green metropolis” the reviewer, Jonathan Yardley , stated “The environmental model that Manhattan offers – live smaller, live closer, drive less – is an invaluable template for efficiently arranging a growing global population in a time of shrinking access to a broad range of natural resources..”

In all these cases efficiency is presented as a private and public economic good.  Yet we have three different contexts none of which appear to have a moral or spiritual aspect to them except maybe in the latter case, although even in this case efficiency is framed as merely responding to a shortage of natural resources.  One could reasonably assume if there was no shortage there would be no motive to change.

Let’s do a ‘what if’ scenario – What if we apply a moral or spiritual imperative to efficiency in each case?  What is the right thing to do in each case so that consciousness itself and therefore culture evolves?  To do this we have to transcend our personal and cultural conditioning and become a liberated vehicle for the evolution of consciousness.  That is to see oneself as a spiritual being in a material form. A liberated human being in this context would express the following qualities:  authenticity, integrity, transparency, simplicity, creativity, and an absence of personal self interest as the primary motive for decision making.  Acting in the world and expressing these qualities would bring into emergence a deeper care for life itself.  In the three cases above human actions of exchanging information, performing cognitive tasks, and designing human population settlement patterns and forms would lead to potentially radically different outcomes.

 In the first case, what if we strove to be authentic and transparent in all our communications and exchanges?   This would reduce, at the least, the time we spend on issues related to personal self image, being a victim and would free us up to be more trusting and more fully available to create something new together.  Relationships with people would dramatically change – we would start dealing authentically with what is really motivating us at the most fundamental level to act.  In this way we would stop wasting time and in the process grow as human beings.  A spirit base efficiency in communications would begin to emerge between people and could be continuously developed. This efficiency has no end.  In this regard we would have included the materialist qualities of efficiency and also at the same time seamlessly transcended them to a higher level of human development and purpose for being.

It is very interesting that in the second case economic efficiency is seen as being the opposite of freedom.  In traditional or evolutionary spiritual teachings, and in the poetry of William Wordsworth, this has always been the case.  From my own direct experience of spirit as self, in meditation or engagement with like-minded people committed to spiritual evolution, freedom is both a position you take in relationship to all experience, and a quality of the experience of the deepest part of the self.

In the third case efficiency is defined as a public good through which population settlement patterns are changed to minimise the use of natural resources that are in increasingly short supply. However Manhattan’s settlement pattern was not consciously created or motivated by any concern for future natural resource shortages. Today it stands as a model settlement when judged in this context. A settlement pattern informed by a spritual efficiency would be guided by what is required in the built form to nourish the infinite evolution of consciousness and therefore culture itself. 

Another reference to efficiency encountered this week was the efficient market theory that purports that prices in the market are true or right in that they reflect perfect information and knowledge for and by all market participants.  This is the basis on which anything that emerges in the market, like asset price explosions, is treated as sacred by the most powerful private and public institutions. This is why the US Federal Reserve refused to act to impede the asset (housing) bubble and financial derivatives mania over the years from 2004 to 2007. Academic theory provides three levels for this theory:  strong (market always right), moderate (market mostly right) or weak (market sometimes right).  What happens to the belief that markets are efficient when we investigate it from the perspective of spirit?