I use the term "Postmaterialism" as a convenient label for any social, cultural, and/or spiritual, individual and/or collective, evolutionary development beyond, or rejecting, both materialism in the phislophical reductionistic sense (and its counterpart, exoteric, literalist religion), and materialism in the sense of soul-destroying and ecologically unsustainable consumerism, superficiality, and monolithic capitalism.
Individually, postmaterialistic consciousness can be defined physically, emotionally, and mentally, although these are three interrelated perspectives on the same thing, not three separate things.
Physically it corresponds to conscious evolution or evolutionary or secular spirituality, which means taking progress into our own hands, rather than follwing narcissistic greed, hierarchically authoritarianism, and the destructive pattern of naked ape politics and competiveness.
Emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, it means is moving beyond ego-shadow (I-It) duality to empathic (I-Thou) wholeness.
And as far as mental worldviews and understanding goes, it equally reiects both the consensus paradigm of secular materialism, agnosticism, reductionism, and relativism (modernity) and institutionalized religion. At the same time it is not yet at the level of gnosis. So on the one hand it is no longer really exoteric and yet it isn't quite esoteric; although on the other hand if esoteric is equated with gnosis, and exoteric with lack of gnosis, then it is still very much exoteric. Indeed my feelings when encountering this material and these subcultures is that they are exoteric, but a wholesome and socially and ecologically sustainable exoteric.
Socially, culturally, and collectively, the challenge at present is to attain a post-materialistic society (sometimes called integral society, rising culture, etc). I do not believe it is possible for humanity as a whole to attain gnosis or a gnostic society at this stage; indeed there has never been a collectively gnostic or esoteric society on Earth, although maybe the ancient Egyptians and traditional Tibetan society came closest, but even there gnosis was mixed up with mythological thinking, politics, ignorance, duality, etc.
In contrast to the standard idea of gradual evolutionary progress (Theosophy, Wilberian Integralism, etc), I do not consider that a purely gnostic society will ever happen. Instead what I envisage is a radical collective Divinization, and this will have a backward effect of gnosticising a proportion of the population. This seems to be what Sri Aurobindo is also talking about to some extent, when he refers to a ladder of degrees of consciousness from the mental to the Supramental (in The Life Divine, need to find the page ref).
Also, some preliminary ideas I wrote for setting up an "alternative alternative" community (actually gnostic-postmaterialist, rather than standard postmaterialist) here in Australia, very little progress (probably the population is too small for there to be enough like-minded individuals)
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