A new kind of economics

During most of this year, I've worked with my father, Puran Bair, on an exciting new frontier of meditation, applying the method of Heart Rhythm Meditation to understanding -- and influencing -- the economy. We're writing a book called "The Heart of the Economy", which examines the spiritual principles behind the global marketplace.

Our goal is to understand the economy as a whole, in its entirety, embracing all aspects of the economy, leaving out nothing. The problem with this is that economic theory is far too limited to include all facets of the economy. Every economic theory proceeds by identifying economic or social phenomena to explain, and by positing cause and effect relationships. All theories share this feature; it’s what makes theory valuable. Theory is by its nature a generalization, and hence a simplification, of reality. Reality is messy, contradictory, and complicated. Theory is relatively neat and straightforward. Yet every theory has its limitations, failures, and omissions; adherence to one theory often creates areas of blindness, as a theory naturally focuses your attention on only one portion of the complex whole.

Economic theory is, of course, a product of the human mind. While we have the greatest respect for the mind and its creations, we must recognize that the mind has its limits. A brilliant thinker may be able to understand how a few variables exercise an effect on a particular cause, but what if the causes are themselves effects of other causes? What if there are thousands -- or millions -- of causes, each one continually changing as it interacts with other causes and effects? What if many of these are difficult to measure, or unobservable? What if the acts of observation and theorization are themselves causes, which then interact with the millions of others? This is the situation with any complex system such as a modern economy -- indeed, almost anything worth studying will involve these issues of complexity, perception, change, and contradiction.

Practioners of a theory generally deal with this by admitting the theory is incomplete, focusing on the parts of the complex system where practitioners feel the theory is on solid footing, ignoring limitations of the theory, or calling for more research to better understand areas that are weak. Of course, new research opens up new problems; new theories arise, which focus on new issues, asking different questions, or focusing on a different set of cause and effect relationships, and hence deriving different conclusions about the same phenomena. Adherents of each theory then do battle, attacking other theories while defending their own.

We seek a different approach. We don’t want to be limited by any particular theory; we want to draw upon the whole of economic theory, as well as the lived experience of the billions of beings who co-create the economy each moment. We want to embrace all and exclude nothing. This is where the science of economics ends and the science of mysticism begins.

Since the mind is too limited to include all causes, all interactions, all experiences that relate to the economy, we must use a different faculty: the heart. By ‘heart’ we mean the essence, the vital core of our being, without which we cannot exist. The heart is the center of feeling, the key to our physical existence, and the seat of our individuality. The heart contains all the feeling that there is. The deeper you go into the heart, the fewer boundaries and restrictions there are, the fewer words and labels there are attached to emotions, until you arrive at a vast pool of pure emotion, which contains every feeling in its ultimate state: perfect, infinite, and timeless. You discover that your own heart contains much more than you’ve experienced, yet you feel it all. The heart is breathtaking in its glory, sublime in its sensitivity, powerful and dynamic in its enthusiasm and motivation, profound in sympathy and compassion, and tender in the love it gives. Exploring the dimensions of the heart is the greatest of human explorations.

The heart can hold the contradiction that the mind cannot, for feeling is itself contradictory; love is joy intermingled with sorrow, pain, exhaltation, passion, and so many other feelings it would be pointless to list them all. Our approach is the use the heart to perceive, understand, and ultimately influence the economy. In the webcourse, “The Heart of the Economy”, we taught this application of the method of HRM for the first time. Basically, it involves taking into your heart the whole economy, concentrating on the economy intently until you achieve the state of contemplation, where your heart has become the economy itself. What a quantum leap it is to go from concentrating on the economy, to actually becoming the economy -- it completely confounds the mind. Yet there is more, much more -- for it is possible to feel in the economy its own true nature: balanced harmony. By identifying with the unbounded harmony that is the essential nature of the economy, you enter meditation, not on the economy, but as the economy. As you deepen the experience, you find that you can begin to embody the infinite harmony, manifesting it wherever your consciousness rests. Ultimately, you find that there is no difference between you, the economy, and the limitless harmony; your being encompasses all in the state of unity.

We see economics as, in the broadest sense, any effort to understand the complexity of the economy. Assimilating this experience led us to the conviction that a kind of economics exists which encompasses the full range of human experience, what we call the ‘Five Stages of Consciousness with Heart Rhythm Meditation’. This kind of economics is a completely new way of understanding the economy, one which is inclusive enough to contain all economic theories, all of humanity's experience, all our hopes, dreams, emotions, and ideals: an economics felt deeply in the heart, which then rises to illuminate the mind.