I keep hearing from people in my life that spirituality is an essential part of living a meaningful existence. I hear the phrase “let go and let God” and “everything happens for a reason” used a lot as advice and comfort. However, I’m an atheist and a materialist. I don’t know how I could even be spiritual with those beliefs. At the same time, my life is not fulfilling despite the fact that I am not struggling financially. Moreover, I feel paralyzed when I try to get off my privileged ass and do even the bare minimum for socialist organizing because I realize that it goes directly against my labor aristocratic class interests. I feel like knowing that sticking my neck out and contributing to the real movement to change the present state of things is the morally correct thing to do isn’t enough to drive me.
In short, what is spirituality? Is it compatible with materialism? If so, how? And if spirituality is the wrong tree to bark up, how can I drive myself to do what is to be done?
Spirituality is coping with the everyday mundanity of your life and then pretending it’s something more than that
Spirituality is 8 hour long YouTube video essays about Lost.
This video might be a jumping off point (the entire channel is good, and some of his other videos touch on this). It’s a primer on atheism and how it’s a funky label, and defines some atheistic spiritual practices therein, and why they are still academically atheistic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfcwTiOGnig
I personally have found meditation, mindfulness, and a lot of activities that induce altered states used in mystic practices to be immensely rewarding to cultivate, and I feel like being atheistic and materialist is likely to prime you to shut off those avenues, but they cultivate control over your interior experience like nothing else, and a materialist should be able to slot that into their ontology just fine.
Imo, it’s really just how you frame and relate to your experience of existence. I’m a Buddhist. I’m not really strongly attached to my view with regard to the supernatural, you could say that it’s quite agnostic. Nonetheless, I found the teachings of Buddhism to make a lot of sense, and they helped me frame and relate to my existence in a way that I think is healthier than my previous framing, which was more of a purely philosophical material nihilism (which, itself, I found to be a healthier viewpoint than Christianity). I’m not saying be a Buddhist, that’s not the point. The point is that when I recognized that my beliefs weren’t helpful, I took the time to make peace with it, re-evaluate my position, and look for something that made more sense. If you think you could benefit from philosophy shopping, then make peace with the fact that your beliefs aren’t helping, and come to it with an open mind. If you find something that helps, it’s not stupid.
Moreover, I feel paralyzed when I try to get off my privileged ass and do even the bare minimum for socialist organizing because I realize that it goes directly against my labor aristocratic class interests. I feel like knowing that sticking my neck out and contributing to the real movement to change the present state of things is the morally correct thing to do isn’t enough to drive me.
Being generous in how I interpret this, I think probably getting to know poorer people might help. Even just researching testimonies about the suffering they go through in various aspects of life should stir something.
It sounds more like an executive functioning issue than a moral one from how you phrase it.
It sounds more like an executive functioning issue than a moral one from how you phrase it.
That is probably it. I think a very difficult to treat depression has taken the wind out of my sails to a point where it’s hard for me to be motivated co do anything I’m not already in the habit of doing.
For me, it’s kind of like love. Can love be reduced to purely biochemical processes? Of course. But we interact with it as a meaningful thing, informed through superstructural social relationships. Spirituality is a similar phenomenon, where the underlying processes are biochemical and informed by our evolutionary history, but play an important role in our psychology and lived experience. Getting more detailed than that gets tricky, because the language we use to describe it is socially constructed and shaped by the forces of historical materialism in complex ways
That makes sense to me. While I’ve not experienced love or spirituality, I can see how the capitalist superstructure corrupts those concepts in a way that both cheapens them and makes them harder to find.
You haven’t experienced love?
I have family members who love me and I appreciate them, but I can’t really feel the emotion.
