Materialism

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.

I wanted to show that the encroachment of materialism isn't just a matter for atheists, it has encroached into those who regard themselves as spiritual and religious. What can we do? Well we can do some easy things like avoiding some of the materialist metaphors, say "I don't think that way" rather than "My Brain isn't wired that way" But develop our spiritual practice and the acts of human kindness and compassion and for those whgo love reading, read the spiritual classics and meditate deeply upon them.

Thank you.

Notes:

https://www.watkinsmagazine.com/watkins-spiritual-list-for-2021

Vedanta blog

We currently live in a very connected world, on youtube we have people from Aotearoa New Zealand, The United States, the UK, Australia, Japan, France, Germany Europe, China, India and elsewhere. We can speak directly to one another and being universal is our reality. We have to acknowledge this universality. I think dialogue is relatively easy and while there are cultural differences there is a shared space for dialogue probably moreso than any time in recorded history and likely we're more culturally homogenous.

I have done a lot of vlogs on Christian writers but now I want to venture into Hinduism, Vedanta, the spiritual traditions of Bharat or India. However you want to refer to it. I'll use the term Vedanta from now on. This has a personal connection for me. I grew up in a secular household, both my parents grew up in Anglican  households, but our family had moved away from wider family, we didn't attend church and I didn't even know people that were strongly religious, even now I don't know that many although there are two operating churches in the town where I live but they're hardly flourishing. Growing up I wasn't drawn to Christianity, although Tolkien's fiction had a strong influence on me. It was reallyVedanta that was first real to me and it was through that any appreciation of Christian spirituality was born in me. In cultural terms it interesting for me to trace Vedanta in recent history. The Theosophists spoke of Vedanta and while I find Blavatsky an interesting figure I  don't find their writings very clear or illuminating.

There are number of significant modern Vedantic figures: Ramana Maharshi, Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, Paramahansa Yogananda, Sri Aurobindo and Prabhupada. The English writer Arthur Osborne wrote as number of books on Ramana Maharshi as well as one on Shirdi Sai Baba and Paul Brunton claimed Ramana Maharshi was his guru in his pretty popular book a search in Secret India. Sri Ramakrsihna came figuratively to the West through his key devotee Swami Vivekananda who attended the first world parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and the story of his going there is an interesting one as he represented India there but he came with no formal accreditation as was required and hadn't realised he needed it, but through certain interesting events it all worked out and he was probably the most momentous speaker there and he spent quite a while in the United States and established Vedanta centres there. 

Vivekananda interestingly emphasised how there is truth in all religions and used the quote from the Bhagavad Gita: "As different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their waters in the sea, so, Oh Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

Not that long afterwards in 1920 Paramahansa Yogananda came to the United States and for the most part lived there for the rest of his life establishing the Self Realisation Fellowship, he like Vivekanada arrived with little money and no contacts. Yogananda wrote the hugely influential book Autobiography of a Yogi. His tradition, the teachings through the line of his gurus was called Kriya Yoga. Yogananda has made his place in popular culture,his line of Gurus were included in the figures on the Beatles classic Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Interestingly my family has a nice tie into this album that dates back earlier than Vivekananda's visit to the US  back to 1856. Pablo Fanque who is featured in the song "Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite" toured New Zealand, 

George Harrison who was responsible for Yogananda appearing on the Beatles cover used to have piles of copies of the Autobiography of Yogi which he would give away to his friends and acquaintences. The mahaguru at the start of Yogananda's lineage Babaji is celebrated in song on the Supertramp album Even in the Quietest moments which had a real appeal to me, the brother of one of my school friends had a copy of this album. I think George Harrison's song Dear One is about Yogananda. I was also from a young age a fan of the group Yes and their album Tales from Topographic Oceans was based on a footnote from Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. The singer from Yes: Jon Anderson has as his guru someone called Mother Aubrey who had as her spiritual ideal Ramakrishna. 

When I was about 30 years old I read Autobiography of a Yogi, I don't know that i was aware of the Beatles, Yes or Supertramp connections. I was interested in reading spiritual books but spirituality didn't really live for me, it felt like there was something of an abyss between me and spirit/God. This book changed that, Yogananda seemed to have and be able to convey having a living, personal and easy relationship with God. This came to me at a time when I desperately needed it, I was suffering from depression and  alienation from the spirit which was becoming intolerable. 

Some decades later I was initiated into Kriya Yoga by Swami Samapanananda now about 10 years ago and i have twice had spiritual retreats with the current Guru Paramahansa Prajnananandaji. The tradition luckily for a lover of reading like myself has a healthy literature. Prajnananandaji has written a lot of books, Yogananda too, his brother disciple Satyananda wrote a set of Biographies of the masters, Prajnanananda's guru Hariharananda wrote a number too. Yogananda's guru Sri Yukteswar wrote one called Holy Science and Prajnanada wrote a commentary on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali based on the interepretations of that scripture by Sri Yuktesars's guru Lahiri Mahasya.

I'll make a few general comments about Vedanta, now one of the things i believe about religion generally is that it didn't used to be considered as a set of beliefs it was descriptive of actual experiences and could not be abstracted from other realms of life. Really only since modern times especially from the end of the middle ages the concept of the secular has opened up and we have come to conceive of religion as a set of beliefs and as something that could be abstracted from other realms of life. 

I'll now outline some key Vedantic concepts and practices: Dharma, Bhakti, Seva, Satsang, Dhyāna & Jnana. Your Dharma, is your path and could be translated as right conduct, speaking truthfully, compassion, we live with the Gunas or qualities: Thamas, Rajas and Sathwa or sloth, anger and Purity the first two are negative qualities but even the last  must eventually be transcended. Bhakti is devotion, prayer and devotional singing. Seva is service to others particularly the poor. Satsang is good company ,get togethers with other devotees. Dhyana or Meditiation is a practice and in Kriya yoga with initiation we are taught a specific mediation practice. And Jnana is wisdom, the study of the scriptures but more importantly the relisation of them and none of these are really seperate from one another. For instance in Jnana we are to realise our true nature is divine and in Seva or service to others we are acting on this by recognising the divinity in others, much like when Jesus said "what you do unto the least of these you do unto me."

David Bentley Hart wrote an excellent book the Experience of God, which compared the concept of God from Christianity the God of Classical Theism to that of Islam and the Vedantic conception of Sat Chit Ananda, or Being Consciousness Bliss. If God is essentially the same in these traditions then the metaphor of different paths to the one destination seems appropriate. 

I certainly make no claims to be a wonderful exemplar and atheists often point to less than perfect behaviour of religious people as hypocrasy and while that may sometimes be the case , often it is not. Religion is for the imperfect accepting teachings does not immediately mean you can fully live up to them. hypocracy is when you complain of the behaviour of others what you do yourself. 

I want to finish off by coming back to the start of this, I think we are now in a time when we can no longer ignore the fact that there are various religious traditions, also it may be that sincere practitioners of disparate traditions may find more in common than with many practitioners of those supposed to be within their own faith.