Seven Essential Needs

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The Seven Essential Needs are the seven needs the Physical Unit is required to meet in order to grow, develop, and realize its full potential as a vehicle for Immortal Consciousness.

Notes

According to the LP, the Seven Essential Needs are:

  1. Physiological needs -- food, water, air, clothing, exercise, sex
  2. Safety and security needs -- safe home, safe spaces, secure finances. Safety includes the absence of assault of any kind, including physical assault (e.g., spanking), and emotional and psychological assault.
  3. Love needs -- unconditional support, acceptance, inclusion, being made to feel that we belong
  4. Truth/understanding needs  -- "Mommy, why is the sky blue?" "Daddy, why are you angry all the time?" We all have a biological drive to know and understand the world.
  5. Esteem/Power/Freedom[1] -- we all need to feel good about ourselves, and we all need to feel powerful and efficacious like  can create the world we want
  6. Need to Alignment with Highest Self - in Humanistic psychology, self-actualization[2]
  7. Need for Connection with Highest Self -- in Transpersonal Psychology, transcendence; in Christianity, Islamic, salvation; in Buddhism, enlightenment; etc.)

In order for a Physical Unit to grow up healthy and Connected, all these needs must be completely met.

Need for Connection

Underhilll says "Broadly speaking, I understand it to be the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order; whatever be the theological formula under which that order is understood."[3]


Einstein says... "There is a mystical drive in man to learn about his own existence...the dignity of man depends not on his membership in a church, but on his scrutinizing mind, his confidence in his intellect, his figuring things out for himself, and above all his respect for the laws of creation" (Hermanns, 1983: np)

Satisfaction of the seventh essential need - connection. "Only the experience of one's divinity in a non-ordinary state of consciousness can ever fulfill our deepest needs"[4]

Grof also notes that "Full satisfaction comes ultimately from the experience of...our own divinity, not the pursuit of material goals of any scope or kind [5].

Huxley (PP) notes that Totalitarian regimes exploit humanity's need for "unity" (read Connection) by "by means of a philosophy of political monism, according to which the state is God on earth, unification under the heel of the divine state is salvation, and all means to such unification, however intrinsically wicked, are right and may be used without scruple."

St. Teresa of Avila notes speaks of a need for actualization and connection suggesting that is "quenches thirst." "Oh, my Lord, if only one could be plunged so deeply into this living water that one’s life would end! Can that be? Yes: 34 this love and desire for God35 can increase so much that human nature is unable to bear it, and so there have been persons who have died of it."[6]

Further Reading

Lightning Path Workbook Two: Healing. Lightning Path Press. https://www.lightningpath.org/lp-curriculum/lp-workbooks/

Lightning Path Workbook Three: Connection. Lightning Path Press. https://www.lightningpath.org/lp-curriculum/lp-workbooks/

Footnotes

  1. Thanks to Egle for pointing out the centrality of freedom and its relevance as an essential need.
  2. The term self-actualization, originally coined by Kurt Goldstein, was picked up by Abraham Maslow. For Maslow, the need for self-actualization is the need to be creative, to express one’s essence and desire, and to do what one is “fitted for.” As he says, “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man [sic] can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization” (Maslow, 1943, pp. 382). This is all true, but in LP psychology we would understand self-actualization as actualization/expression of Self, with a capital "S".
  3. Adam, James. The Religious Teachers of Greece. Gifford Lectures. New Jersey: Reference Book Publishers, 1965. Emphasis added. https://www.giffordlectures.org/books/religious-teachers-greece.
  4. Laszlo, Ervin, Stanislav Grof, and Peter Russell. The Consciousness Revolution. Las Vegas: Elf Rock Productions, 1999. https://amzn.to/2TlOCmC. p. 67.
  5. Laszlo, Ervin, Stanislav Grof, and Peter Russell. The Consciousness Revolution. Las Vegas: Elf Rock Productions, 1999. https://amzn.to/2TlOCmC. p. 8.
  6. St. Teresa of Avila. The Way of Perfection. New York: Dover Publications, 2012. https://amzn.to/2Id75es.