9. The simple, effective structure of village life should be encouraged through decentralization of congested urban areas and the implementation of agricultural life.

The overall principle governing human life and civilization, from the spiritual viewpoint, is simplicity. Material needs can be summed up in four categories: eating, sleeping, mating and defending. To satisfy these needs in the most basic fashion, thus liberating time and energy for the quest of spiritual realization, is the goal of Vedic organizational schemes. This is a goal obviously determined by the understanding that it is realization of God—complete absorption in the eternal, transcendental pastimes of love of Krishna—which is the ultimate and actual fulfillment of life.

The brilliant success of the capitalist economic system in the West—especially in the U. S. offers a useful contrast to this Vedic system. The industrial development of the West has served the purpose of liberating great quantities of time, but because of a basically materialistic concept of life, the people of the western nations have so far failed to develop any positive principle or meaning to existence, as the rampant nihilism exhibited in the young seems to demonstrate. What is required now—and quite desperately required—is this positive recognition of the supremacy of God, and of the unrivalled importance of the quest for realization of God as the essential business of human life. And we need quite rationally and pragmatically—words chosen deliberately—to dare to construct a new, far more spiritual world civilization to serve these highest interests of man.