The Ephemeral Pleasures of Materialism

Nothing survives death. Let me rephrase that - no thing survives death. The human organism is a thing. It serves as a container for the soul - which is not a thing. By 'thing', I mean something that can be weighed and measured and empirically defined. The soul, or to use preferred terminology - consciousness - is immaterial.

If you don't believe in the soul, you are all container, all thing, all matter, and therefore death stands as a finality. If you don't believe in the soul, the process of ageing beyond your physical best-by date must be terrifying. "It's all downhill from here."

But if you feel the presence of consciousness as something above and beyond the corporeal construct of proteins and cells and double helixes, then the ageing process is something you don't need to rage at. Indeed, I embrace it for the additional spiritual wisdom that lifelong learning brings.

Entropy is balanced by growing complexity, driven by biological evolution. But there's also spiritual evolution, something we cannot measure, only intuit. And so, while entropy is trying to drag all matter down to a random mess of atoms randomly bumping around, I would posit that a cosmos filled with source consciousness is the purpose that drives the evolving complexity of the unfolding of the universe.

God, the Purpose, the Reason, the Destination, the Goal, God the Infinitely Long Road from Zero to One - I see God as a journey as well as an end-state, not as the God whom we humans have historically tended to anthropomorphise. That God has become a straw man, one that rationalism found it easy to knock over.

Since the Enlightenment, religions which once had total monopoly over our human spirituality have been pushed back by the materialist-reductionist steamroller. We have been seduced by matter, the instant gratification offered by technology. So we have come to abandon the spiritual, we have come to reject notions of the metaphysical as mere woo-woo. Meanwhile, religions' controlling behaviour has made them easy to reject in favour of convenience and pleasure. But out went the baby (our conscious experience, our spiritual existence), along with the bathwater (dogma, commandments, ritual etc).

Attempts to empirically prove that the supernatural or paranormal co-exists with the material are dismissed as pseudoscience, and yet we kind of intuit that there's also a metaphysical reality. We have come to expect evidence, hard evidence, before we'll buy into an idea to weave into our worldview. I feel no need to seek scientific confirmation of my consciousness via machines trying to detect extra-sensory perception.

{ Flashback: Leamington Spa railway station, 1979/80. Just thought I'd drop that qualia memory event into this post as it happened. } 

But back to the topic. In the absence of that hard evidence, we have bought into the materialist paradigm and the materialist values with which it has replaced spirituality. 

"There's nothing spiritual in our lives - so just focus on making money and buying things." This nicely meshes with our innate status hierarchy - the more money you have, the more things you have, the more you can prove to all and sundry that you are better than them - higher up the ladder. "It's a competitive world/Everything counts in large amounts." 

Materialism makes us do more - but as I wrote the other day, not necessarily things that need doing. Stepping out of the hamster wheel allows us to see beyond the false pleasures that materialism brings. We can now catch sight of the true values that the spiritual approach brings. Better mental health and a less despoiled environment to name but two tangible benefits.

"All things must pass, all things must pass away"

Things, yes - consciousness, no. Your consciousness was, is, and will be. As long as you are aware of it!

This time last year:
W-wa Zachodnia modernisation - a long way to go
(Passing through today: still a long way to go)

This time two years ago:

The Wilderness and the Garden 

This time three years ago:
Back in Aviation Valley

This time four years ago:
My flight to Rzeszów - delayed

This time seven years ago:
English as she is used in Europe

This time eight years ago:
Where asphalt is needed - Nowy Podolszyn to Zgorzala

This time 13 years ago:
I cycle to work along the cyclepath along ul. Rosoła

This time 15 years ago:
First apple