The Programs to Fulfil Basic Human Aspirations

Our basic aspirations are happiness and prosperity. To achieve them we continuously involve in various activities and accumulating various things. But unfortunately, we are not able to fulfil our aspirations. The reason is that we don’t know what we really need to fulfil our requirements and their correct priority. 

Basic Requirements for Fulfilling the Aspirations

The basic requirements for fulfilling the aspirations of every human being are:

• Right Understanding: This refers to higher order human skills – the need to learn and utilize our intelligence most effectively.
• Good Relationships: This refers to the interpersonal relationships that a person builds in his or her life – at home, at the workplace and in society.
• Physical Facilities: This includes the physiological needs of individuals and indicates the necessities as well as the comforts of life.

We can say that these requirements are patterned on the lines of the hierarchy of needs. Abraham Maslow has given the concept of the hierarchy of needs. According to him there are five needs which can be placed in a hierarchy depending on which needs a person initially strives to fulfill. The lowest needs are the physiological needs. Once these are fulfilled, they are followed by safety and security needs. These are followed by social needs. The next level of needs relates to the person’s need for self-esteem. The highest order need relates to the need of self-actualization and will only become important if all the other needs are fulfilled.

We can verify this by a set of proposals.

• “Physical facilities are necessary for human beings.”
• “Physical facilities are necessary for human beings and they are necessary for animals.”
• “Physical facilities are necessary and complete for animals, while they are necessary but not complete for humans.”

For Animals: Animals need physical things to survive, mainly to take care of their body.

For Humans: While physical facilities are necessary for human beings, they are not complete by themselves to fulfil our needs. Our needs are more than just physical facilities; Besides physical facilities, we want relationship.

By relationship, we mean the relationship we have with other people, or human beings; father, mother, brother and sisters, our friends, our teachers; we desire good relationships with all of them.

We Want

In Relationship: Mutual Fulfilment: If there is a problem in relationship, we feel uneasy, it bothers us. Even if we are interacting with someone, and something we said or did offends them, it makes us uneasy; i.e. we want mutual fulfilment in relationship.

In Physical Facilities: Prosperity in Us, Enrichment in Nature: Prosperity means the feeling of having or being able to have more physical facilities than is needed. If we don’t have the feeling of prosperity, we will exploit others. Similarly, as we interact with nature for our various physical needs, either exploit nature or enrich it. But our natural acceptance is that we want to live in harmony with nature.

What is Our State Today in Relationship?

We are unable to have fulfilling relationships all the time: in family, outside family, and as a society – in the world at large.

In Physical Facilities

We want to feel prosperous, but end up working only for accumulation of wealth. We want to enrich nature, but are exploiting it, destroying it.

Why we are in This State? – Living with Wrong Assumptions

We seem to be interacting with lots of people, we keep getting ourselves into troubles in our relationships. This issue is basically because we assume something about relationships, and then we go on to live them on the basis of this assumption. But if our assumption is false, then we end up in problems.

Similarly, we have assumed that accumulation of wealth is the only thing we need and the rest shall be taken care of. We have also made numerous assumptions about our interaction with nature, that we can exploit nature, that nature is present solely of our consumption and so on and so forth. These are incorrect assumptions.

What is the Outcome of the Misconception?

• At the level of individual– Rising problems of depression, anxiety, suicides, stress, insecurity, increasing health problems, lack of confidence and conviction etc. 
• At the level of family– Breaking up of joint families, mistrust and disharmony in relationships, divorce, generation gap, dowry deaths, neglect of older people etc.
• At the level of society– Growing incidences of terrorism, violence, communalism, racial and ethnic struggle, corruption, adulteration, sex-crimes exploitation, wars between nations, proliferation of lethal weapons etc.
• At the level of nature– Global warming, weather imbalances, depletion of mineral and energy resources, deforestation, soil degradation etc.

All the problems are a direct outcome of an incorrect understanding, our wrong notion about happiness and prosperity and their continuity – this is an issue for serious exploration.

What is the Solution? – The Need for Right Understanding

In order to resolve the issues in human relationships, we need to understand them first, and this would come from ‘right understanding of relationship’.

Similarly, in order to be prosperous and to enrich nature, we need to have the ‘right understanding’. The ‘right understanding’ will enable us to work out our requirements for physical facilities and hence correctly distinguish the difference between wealth and prosperity. With nature as well, we need to understand the harmony in nature, and how we can complement this harmony.

Two Categories of Persons

Presently, as we look around, we find most of the people in the following two categories:

1. Those who do not have physical facilities/ wealth and feel unhappy and deprived.
   SVDD – Sadhan Viheen Dukhi Daridra – Materially deficient Unhappy and deprived.
2. Those that have physical facilities / wealth and feel unhappy and deprived.
   SSDD – Sadhan Sampann Dukhi Daridra – Materially affluent - Unhappy and still deprived (not so prosperous) While the natural acceptance of all human beings is to be: 
3. Having physical facilities and feeling happy and prosperous
   SSSS – Sadhan Sampann Sukhi Samriddha – Materially adequate – Happy and prosperous.

Our Program

Understanding and live in harmony at all levels of living

1. Right understanding
2. Relationships
3. Physical facilities

Our state of happiness or unhappiness depends on the above three aspects. If we have right understanding, then we can be happy in ourselves and we do not have the right understanding, then we have problems. Thus, our happiness depends on the fulfilment of these three basic requirements.

Our State Today

There is conflict/contradiction in our thoughts or living at most of these levels of existence, we are unable to naturally accept our own thoughts and living. These problems are basically because of lack of right understanding. We do not even understand ourselves properly. What we need how much of it do we need, what we value – we have not understood this properly.

Human Consciousness and Animal Consciousness

Giving all priorities to physical facilities only or to live solely on the basis of physical facilities, may be termed as ‘Animal consciousness’

• For animal, physical facility is necessary as well as complete – whereas for human beings it is necessary but not complete.
• Working only for physical facilities is living with Animal Consciousness.
• Working for right understanding as the first priority followed by relationship and physical facilities implies living with Human Consciousness.
• There is a need for transformation from Animal Consciousness to Human Consciousness. It can be accomplished only by working for right understanding as the first priority.
• This transformation from Animal Consciousness to Human Consciousness forms the basis for human values and values-based living. This is the prime objective of the present course.