Welcome. I wanted to do this vlog on a subject that is central to my vlogging: materialism. There is both a cultural aspect to this and a personal one.
This isa very materialistic time in our culture. Materialism expresses a couple of different but related ideas. One is the valuing of material possessions: a big house,; fancy car; lots of expensive appliances; designer clothes etc. The second meaning is that the totality of life is material, what can be observed with our senses and there is nothing beyond that. Both of these meanings express a spiritual poverty, while I'd argue that material possessions are not in themselves a sure indicator of spirituality poverty, excess attachment to them certainly is. Many Christians might want to deny it, but the Jesus of the Gospels references to material possessions are generally entirely negative, he asked followers to leave all possessions behind them, this attitude to material possessions is quite common in eastern religions too. It is interesting that while a lot of religious folk can still take quite seriously their rejection of icons, they seldom have the same fervour in rejection of material possessions.
This is the idea that the whole of existence is material has I think an experiential aspect to it and is the cultural norm of the modern era and now more so than any time in history. Why this is the case is difficult to say.
David Bentley Hart in his new book Roland by Moonlight, based on imaginery conversations with his dog Roland writes:
There was a time, again, when your kind was much better able to see the gods—the angels, deified mortals, spirits, fairies, what have you—than now you are. Not because there was a stabler and more open causeway between the two hemispheres of your brains or anything like that, but because there was a wider, more richly populated open causeway between your souls and the cosmos. And those gods—or what have you—were also mirrors of what you are, as spiritual beings, there above. ... that they came more easily into full sensuous manifestation so long as human beings were in a state of what Barfield called ‘original participation.’ Unlike him, however, I don’t believe that your kind’s estrangement from that original, more vividly theophanic world is simply a temporary stage—a kind of probationary process—on the way to a post-critical ‘final participation.’ It would be nice to imagine that that’s the case, but I fear that the reality will be one of continuing, deepening estrangement..."
In Vedantic terms we say we're in the Kali Yuga the lowest most material of the 4 ages. It is interesting his reference to Barfield here. While I find the general outline of the changes to consciousness that have happened across the historical period, fit with his account of our move away from original participation, the idea of final participation is an untested idea. It doesn't seem like Barfield himself attained to such a state, it could be argued that Steiner did, I don't think so, his autobiography showed that he had spiritual sight from a young age it was not something he created through a certain type of thinking and there is no evidence that he was able to guide his followers into such an experience. The Antroposophical movement has so far not ushered in a new post material age or even really subculture.
There are obviously serious philosophical problems with materialism. There are certainly plenty of intelligent people that have expended a lot of time into shoring up it's arguments. But for me they always come across as special pleading. The most consistent philosophical position seems to me to be Richard Dawkins view of humans as lumbering robots, our thoughts and consciousness are a by product of our biological processes. The physical activity in our brains produces thoughts. That strikes me as the clearest most consistent materialistic philosophy. I don't know that this is the predominant philosophical position, and materialism is assumed as the default position for most people it doesn't necessarily rest upon a clearly expressed philosophy. But what also seems obvious about this is that no one including Richard Dawkins would act in a way consistant with thinking it's true. Thinking is a direct experience and our thoughts are guided by the nature of their content, they are associative, reason or inclination based. We judge them qualitatively, not as givens through a mindless biological process.
But here I'm not so much exploring the philosophical foundations of spiritual or materialist thought but reflecting on how I see it playing out in our culture, through a few examples that have struck me recently.
First example is seeing Rupert Sheldrake reference that he had been included in a spiritual 100 list for 2021 as being one of the 100 most influential living spiritual figures in the world. My initial thought was that's quite nice, Rupert probably deserves that he has done pretty significant work in creating experiments for psychic phenomena or non material action at a distance and his theory of morphic resonnance is an interesting one in exploring form in living organisms, something that DNA research hasn't been able to do. So I went to the list and I'll put a link to it in the description, I see that the Pope and the Dalai Llama were there as you would expect, but then I see that it includes David Attenborough, Sam Harris & Neil de Grasse Tyson who aren't spiritual at all.
So then I looked at the criteria:
They need to be alive and have made a unique and spiritual contribution on a global scale fair enough but criteria 3
3) The person is frequently googled, appears in Nielsen Data, has a Wikipedia page, and is actively talked about throughout the Internet. By taking into account the amount of times that a person is googled or how many times their Wikipedia profile is viewed, the list gains a highly democratic and transparent parameter.
So here we have what is ostensibly a spiritual list and the criteria is quantitative, how many times googled, has a wikipedia page, spirituality is qualitative. This strikes me as an excellent example of just how pervassive materialism is now, a list dedicated to the idea of spiritually influentiual people has a bunch of people in it who are not spiritual and it has quantititve parameters for choosing them. oh my!
Next point I have seen some articles and watched the Netflix documentary on Near Death Experiences which I find fascinating and that we are seeing these is a good thing. Near Death experiences are when people usually as a result of an accident or medical emergency experience usually a time when there body experiences death, their pulse and brain activity flatlines and during that time they have an experience of leaving their body. These experiences feel very real, in fact they feel more real than life here a greater sense of awareness, they also lose their fear of death and in most instances the idea of returning to life on earth is not an attractive one as they feel like they have gone home. This is an experience by Dr Mary Neal excerpted material from her book Heaven and back, she spent 30 minutes submerged in rapids after a kayaking accident.
At the moment my body was released and began to tumble, I felt a “pop' It felt as if I had finally shaken off my heavy outer layer, freeing my soul. I rose up and out of the river, and when my soul broke through the surface of the water, I encountered a group of fifteen to twenty souls (human spirits sent by God), who greeted me with the most overwhelming joy I have ever experienced and could ever imagine. It was joy at an unadulterated core level. ... Their brilliance was both blinding and invigorating. We did not speak, per se, using our mouth, but easily communicated in a very pure form. ... My arrival was joyously celebrated and a feeling of absolute love was palpable as these spiritual beings and I hugged, danced, and greeted each other. The intensity, depth, and purity of these feelings and sensations were far greater than I could ever describe with words and far greater than anything I have experienced on earth. ..God's world is exponentially more colorful and intense. It was as though I was experiencing an explosion of love and joy in their absolute, unadulterated essence. ..it is impossible for me to adequately describe what I saw and what I felt. When I try to recount my experiences now, the description feels very pale. I feel as though I am trying to describe a three-dimensional experience while living in a two-dimensional world. The appropriate words, descriptions, and concepts don't even exist in our current language. ...My companions and I began to glide along a path, and I knew that I was going home. My eternal home. We were returning to God and we were all very excited.
Our vocabulary is just not rich enough to describe the experience in a way that is understandable. Perhaps this is why Jesus often spoke in parables. I felt my soul being pulled toward the entry and, as I approached, I physically absorbed its radiance and felt the pure, complete, and utterly unconditional absolute love that emanated from the hall. It was the most beautiful and alluring thing I had ever seen or experienced.
Mary describes the sense of going home and liken's God's world to a 3 dimensional world and this one only 2 Dimensional, she has a sense of completion and wholeness that we don't have here, and religious language keeps coming into her account because of course it is a religious experience, but when we strip our culture of religious language we lose even what tools we have to communicate this kind of experience.
Another thing that fascinated me about the Netflix documentary was how those returning here often felt alienated from those around them, one woman spoke of the difficulty she had coming back as she said "I find it hard to even talk to my husband...what i used to know is not what i know now...It's so hard when everybody else's point of view hasn't changed"our language does not seem fit for expressing what happened to them and in an article on Near Death Experiences it had this sentence:
"These kind of theories put Greyson on wobbly ground among neuroscientists, who mostly agree the mind to be a product of the brain."
This is an expression of not just scientific but cultural orthodoxy and it is completely inimical to the what they have just experienced. They have had an experience that has revealed something about their own nature, that there is a greater and more loving reality, that we survive the death of our body and this is flatly rejected. This is a severe impediment to understanding and experiencing who and what we really are, I would also say that the "spirit" of art can't truly survive in such a paradigm.
At the start I mentioned the spiritual list, which has a number of Spiritual not religious types on it at the end I'll talk about materialism in religion not spiritual types. This is a good quote from CS Lewis:
..if Fundamentalism means accepting as a point of faith at the outset the proposition ‘Every statement in the Bible is completely true in the literal, historical sense’. That would break down at once on the parables... St. Jerome said that the whole Mosaic account of creation was done ‘after the method of a popular poet’. Of course I believe the composition, presentation, and selection for inclusion in the Bible, of all books to have been guided by the Holy Ghost. But I think he meant us to have sacred myth and sacred fiction as well as sacred history.
George MacDonald applauds those those "who want to find out what the Bible really means" we must dive into meaning and explore it, the meaning doesn't sit on the page of the Bible.
No comments:
Post a Comment