Where Do We Go From Maslow: On the Need For More Complexity in Our Conception of Basic Needs

I have been thinking lately on allocation.

The ways in which we distribute ourselves into interchangeable modes of being and activity interspersed within a cyclical continuum of connections both visible and invisible.

Spirit presents new ways of understanding and relating to long-held perceptions of established words, phrases, and concepts.

Spirit is the only source that can provide us with that which is truly new and only the truly new can guide us safely and accurately within the evolutionary process.

These realizations on allocation arose from otherwise ordinary experiences in my life and in recent sessions with clients.

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The most common questions I receive pertain to the process of placing oneself in a position that will precipitate greater creative freedom in the form life is taking.

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It’s helpful here to work with symbols and practices closer to the mundane.

There are many, maybe too many, analogies which liken chess to life.

Though it is true that one move can and often does change the odds and all else with it, the issue herein lies in the topology, the files and ranks, the linearity with which we have learned to enclose the entire conception of the game.

In the same way Byung-Chul Han speaks of the loss of our ability to organize in a political sense In the Swarm, I aim to speak of the way it has impacted our ability to allocate in a personal sense.

And furthermore, how the latter is a pre-requisite, a matter of physical therapy if you will— the only way to reverse the odds of total atrophy in the case of the former.

The act of organizing implies allocating, but you cannot allocate anything successfully without a workable understanding of what you are organizing, where, and for what purpose.

If you were to store all of your toiletries in the kitchen, then the resources required to perform activities in the washroom begin to appear lacking due to lack of visibility.

Consequently, the process of obtaining these resources will in fact be unnecessarily difficult.

Yet, this is precisely what I’m seeing in many different ways across the board.

Relationships— surely the only appropriate choice if one is looking for what can be applied to all of life as all of life is entirely a matter, or a game if you prefer, of relationship.

Let us say for example that you are a person who often enjoys thinking and conversing about art. This is especially applicable given there is a specific school or artist in the case of this example. And let us say that your immediate family, nor your partner, nor any of your friends genuinely enjoy thinking or conversing about this subject.

In situations relative to these people, you might have noticed that when you movethe conversation into a space where art or this specific interest in art is the subject, you are often left feeling unsatisfied, unstimulated, disappointed, or to put it bluntly, blocked, the fact of the matter being that the mutual interest is simply not there. Checkmate, the game has ended.

Your resources, tangible and intangible, then again appear lacking. Not only the resources inherent in your need for the presence of art in your life, but also the emotional resources inherent in the connection with your immediate family, your partner, and your friends.

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To the point, we must prioritize first the acquisition, and subsequently the allocation, of that which allows us to meet our most basic needs, to put these in their proper place.

In the case of basic needs, that place is always where we can easily find them.

This is fundamental to one’s quality of life and intrinsically related to elevating it.

Our cultural disposition to grossly over-estimate the value of thinking two moves ahead leaves us neglecting the basic principles of what moves us, always has, and always will.

We are effectively replacing the definitively human process of meeting our needs predicated on connection with overly-intellectualized, nearing on computational strategies predicated on winning.

With this, we build our lives on a fallacious foundation full of dangerous implications: believing the answer, the solution, or the end is the spirit of the process.

These implications will, if unaddressed, inevitably lead to a level of spiritual poverty of an unprecedented magnitude.

The most obvious place to begin is the only place to begin and therefore the most remedial: within each individual.

I am calling for a radical reframe of the ways in which we regard and classify basic human needs.

If we hold Maslow’s hierarchy as a universal point of agreement, then someday we may all agree that evolving from here means seeking our specific, uniquely personal, ever-changing desires within each level, following them precisely, and respecting them to the degree that we place them equally to a basic human need.

Precision is the new spirituality.

We cannot know intellectually, nor in the biblical sense, what we do not meet and vice versa.

How will we collectively come to know the relationship between consumption of food and all else that enters our awareness— if we do not take steps as individuals toward a new standard for what we require to truly live?

Yours In All,

nyo