Do People underinvest in spiritual activities?- continued from previous article

To explain why people might be underinvesting in their spiritual growth and even contributing less than optimally to spiritual activities, we will now increasingly use terms used in "common economic and non economic" usage to convey the certain features of spiritual growth. We have in the previous post referred to spiritual growth as an investment where in "output" begins to flow after a certain period of activity or investment of effort. Without delving too deeply in to what constitutes "spiritual development" , it can be agreed that based on study of major faiths, there is certain final " Goal" to be attained at the end of the process,( known by different names in differnet faiths). Secondly again from the study of well established and widely practiced faiths and literature available on them, we can say that " time of Final Goal" cannot be predicted and is most defintely unknown to the aspirant and finally while there are positive "by products" of the practices, the process of growth towards the goal fromthe point of view of aspirant represents a flattish curve which at or closer to the time of " Final Goal" becomes steeper and steeper thus the spirtual growth curve may look almost like a "L" which has been rotated left on its axis.Finally and partly related to the above, as in "market for second hand cars" (See George Akerlof's book Market for Lemons"), there is asymetric information between buyer and seller about condition of second hand cars ( Buyer doubts car's true value and suspects seller is hiding facts). In case of second hand cars either market for second hand cars collapses or second cars sell for price below their true value .What is the parallel between the above example and our subject?. While there is no "seller" in our subject when we are dealing genuine Spiritual Masters, it is true that Masters know much more than followers when in two distinct ways (1) they know the true value of the methods, and the Final Goal neither of which they can convey fully to the aspirants (2) referring to our previous left rotated L shaped growth curve , it can be said that true growth of aspirants is known to Masters /Teachers which again they cannot fully convey to aspirtants generally. So aspirants for a long time do not know the "true benefits" of the process they may be undergoing through most of the process until the time " they have got in the car and driven it ". Putting it all togther we can summarise the following about the spiritual growth generally ( though there may be and are exceptions to this)a. Spiritual growth is high risk investment from the point of aspirant since unlike material investment, neither "work in progress" is visible nor the final time or true value or taste of the Final Goal is knownb. there is asymetric information betwene the Master and the disciple about the true value of the service being provided by the Teacher/ master/Guru.Hence to the extent people will generally 'Pay" or "invest" on perceived value of the service and on risks associated with the Final Product we can conclude that there may be significant underinvestment in spiritual development.From the above we can also conclude that as people beome more and more closer to the Goal with more "by products" to support their faith in initial and past investments they will increasingly invest more resources in such activity. A second conclusion is that people may be donating more as they grow but here adjustment needs to be made for other factors that might impinge on their ability to donate

To be continued: In the next article we will consider another major reason for sub optimal investment in spiritual growth

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