Spiritual Growth and Economic Growth: Conflict or Synergy?

Abstract

It is generally accepted that spiritual development makes us better human beings: people with spiritual values. Spiritually developed people are fundamentally different in terms of the values that guide them, experiencing happiness, not through sense-based pleasures, but through loving relationships. They seek the purpose of life, and they feel happy when they get close to its fulfilment. In psychology, spiritual growth is generally known as psychospiritual development, which can loosely be defined as the evolution of consciousness or consciousness development. It is an outcome of being disidentified with one’s body, thoughts, emotions, possessions, qualifications, occupation, appearance, achievements and failures and personality. Once all these false or superficial identifications are stripped away, our true identity will emerge. Then, we will discover who we really are and find our true self. Christians call this the soul and psychologists call this ‘the Self (Whitmore, 1997)’, ‘the subtle body’ (Schwartz-Salant, 1986), the ‘guidance self’ (Whitmount, 1987), ‘the higher self’ (Assagioli, 1975) and ‘the soul’ (Hillman, 1997) (cited in Rowan, 2005, p. 109).