"Lessons in Spiritual Economics from the Bhagavad-gita: Understanding and Solving the Economic Problem" (Dhanesvara Das)

Some extracts from

"Lessons in Spiritual Economics from the Bhagavad-gita:
Understanding and Solving the Economic Problem"
(Dhanesvara Das)

p72

Three possible sources of the inner voice:

1. Intelligence / to discriminate between that which is desirable or undesirable on the basis of one's -long-term interests
2. Mind / to determine what is desirable or undesirable based on sense gratification
3. Soul / its actual desire is to find the ever-fresh source of his satisfaction in his original transcendental state

In order to determine "who" is speaking, introspection is required - we must examine the thought according to these criteria. Training to distinguish between the voices of consciousnes is the purpose of the practise of yoga.

• Does it ask for sense gratification? If so, that is the voice of the mind. 
• Does it encourage one to think about one's long-term welfare? Then that is the voice of intelligence. 

Of course these voices may conflict with each other; The cartoon of such moral dilemmas depicts an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other: "do it", "no, don't do it", "yes, do it"... And the battle rages. The devil and angel represent the mind and the intelligence respectively.

p133

Gustavus Myers: "The perfect slave thinks he's free."

p210

We may ask how the International Communist experiment, an exercise in exploitation (tamo-guna), ended without a violent revolution that should be expected by the influence of tamo-guna. The answer in my humble opinion is that the 70-year experiment between the capitalist model and the communist one demonstrated that far more can be squeezed out of people if they think the are free, and are given unrestricted sense gratification.

p227

Corporations are an illusion of modern society because they have no existence in fact. They are a fiction agreed by those who hold power ; the rest of us merrily go along with the established order as we do with the other fictions.
In his essay The Grunch of Giants, futurist Buckminster Fuller explains: "Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys - legally enacted game-playing - agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and all of its unwitting members."
Given the nature and purpose of the corporation it is one of the pillars of the economics of atheism. If the idea of atheism is is to forget God, to allow us to think of ourselves as God, that is, to be a law unto ourselves, then the creation of corporations can be seen as an effort of people to act as if they were God.

p243

Modern money is called debt money because it is borrowed into existence; There is a very important feature of this money system that is often overlooked, and that is that although the money that is loaned is created by the loan, the interest that will be paid on that loan is not. This has significant implications: there is not now, nor will there ever be, enough money in existence to fully pay off the debt created.
Another important aspect of this system is that banks continually siphon money out of the economy through interest payments. If for any reason banks stop making new loans but continue to receive payment on old loans as agreed, the money supply increasingly dries up.

p276

Those who are not demonic have a connection with the Lord which is called conscience by which He guides us. Those who avoid being conscious of their wrongdoing are choosing to ignore and deny the guidance of the supersoul, until finally they can no longer hear the "inner voice". Having no conscience they have no moral compass, no discernment between right and wrong, good or bad, what to do and what not to do. Their standard of behavior is to simply please themselves...

p282

Being an aspect of the absolute truth the jiva is inherently free from the duality of good and evil. However, when the jiva enters this material world he creates the duality that he experiences by his subjective enjoyment of the material energies, and in the process becomes subjected to that same duality.

p285

The Vedas enumerate 8,400,000 species of life, and among these 400,000 are counted as human beings. These divisions are not based simply on a particular bodily form as biologists distinguish species, but are also dinstinctions of consciousness. These human species are characterized by superior consciousness to animals and specifically by the fact that human beings have free will. They are free to make choices based on understanding and intelligence and are not controlled by instinct as are the animals. A living being is assigned a particular type of body according to this consciousness, and within the human species these can range from divine to demonic.

p299

E.F. Schumacher: "The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction."

p302

Vaclav Havel: "In today's multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies - it must be rooted in self-transcendence:
Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe.
Transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world.
Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction."

p308

If we ask what the economic problem is from the perspective of just about anybody or anything on the planet the answer is the same: crippled human consciousness conditioned by extreme passion and ignorance that cannot go beyond personal sense gratification and limitless possession in an attempt to increase the sense of "I and mine", all the while leaving the person, the soul, unsatisfied and unfulfilled.

p312

Greg Braden teaches that effective prayer acknowledges in the present what we ask for in the future. "... To effect change in our world, we are invited to first have the feelings of the change having happened."

p320

The chanting of the Hare Krishna maha-mantra can raise everyone from the depths of passion and ignorance to the quality of goodness and beyond. It is a song of love, and this love song is what will save the world.
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BOOK itself:
https://www.academia.edu/6715172/Lessons_in_Spiritual_Economics_From_the_Bhagavad-gita_Part_One_Understanding_and_Solving_the_Economic_Problem
MORE INFO
http://www.spiritual-economics.com/spiritual-economics/