Hello and welcome back!
If you haven’t already done so, I highly recommend you read Part One of this post before diving into part two below.
Now let’s look at how spiritual materialism became so popular, and how we may want to question it’s validity/how it’s serving us.
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Where Did Spiritual Materialism Come From?
All of us are having a unique experience of ‘self’ as well as of the world and this leads to all sorts of different perspectives and drives that bring us into connection and conflict with one another.
With all of this, we can see that there is a very real, very consistent pattern in the human species to seek to understand the world around us, to seek some form of control via that understanding - and a lot of this comes down to again, wanting to feel good and wanting to have pleasure.
For some of us, this leads us to spiritualizing the mundane aspects of life. For some of us it leads us to a place of being deeply unsatisfied with the physical reality - searching for something deeper, more meaningful and more purposeful than just feeling good due to physical safety/abundance.
This is where I think a lot of people find that the ‘divide’ exists in our current spiritual landscape.
On the one hand, we do have a lot of people who are sort of ‘trapped’ if you will, in a state of spiritual materialism.
There has pretty much always been a form of spirituality that humans participate in that is centered around procuring as much abundance and power for the self as possible.
Which to be honest, if we take a step back, is pretty understandable given the fact that for a very, very long time survival on this planet was EXTREMELY difficult.
There was a long period of time where having enough, being safe, knowing you were going to be able to spread your seed and survive another day wasn’t at all a foregone conclusion.
Rather, it was something that people had to fight for every single day.
We also had a poor understanding of how reality worked, and thus came up with a lot of stories about why certain people were born with certain aptitudes vs. others, why crops died, why weather did what it did - because we were trying to understand the patterns so that we could predict them and thus have a better chance of surviving within them. To survive was a pretty tough dance - and our meaning making minds were busy projecting ourselves out onto the Universe/nature/world around us - creating all sorts of stories about our goodness/behavior and the seeming effects it was having on whether or not we were blessed with what we needed or cursed with antagonism.
Spiritual materialism was an honest evolution for us - we projected our wants, desires and cravings out onto the Universe at large, and started to believe that the ‘reasons’ we were getting what we needed/not getting what we needed were based on a sort of all knowing/all pervasive authority figure that was watching our behavior and judging it based on how pleasing it was to them - and rewarding or punishing us in equal measure.
We have been trying to figure out what the ‘right way’ to ‘serve’ the spirits we believed were controlling the outcomes of our lives is for as long as we’ve been alive - and this is where the roots of our ‘spiritual materialism’ find themselves - in our desire to survive and in our believe that what was happening around us was based on our behavior - that childhood perspective we’ve talked so much about in this work. As children it would have appeared to us that our caregivers had access to all things, knew all things and could provide all things for us. It would have appeared to us that the only reason they cared for or didn’t care for us was due to our behavior either being pleasing or displeasing to them. It would have appeared to us that the way to control our pain and pleasure and the way to get our needs met was to be as pleasing as possible to those who controlled our access - and we then took this view of reality and projected it out onto larger reality.
We believed that if we could just act right, we would get all that we wanted and needed. So we started to spiritualize getting our needs met in this way - those who were truly ‘good’ were the ones who were blessed and those who were ‘bad’ were the ones who didn’t get what they needed to survive and thrive. We believed the ill, the poor, the unfortunate in any way were ‘cursed’ or somehow flawed and we started inventing all sorts of narratives about past lives, karma, life lessons and so on to try to ‘explain’ why we were suffering - as well as why some seemed to be blessed with so much more than they needed.
This idea that those who were truly loved by ‘God’ or whatever we believed to be the governing force of the universe were the ones who had the most success in life and that those who were not doing the right things were the ones suffering again is pretty much as old as time. This has been a justification used to explain why it was ok that certain people/families/groups of people hoarded more for themselves at the expense of their communities. It has been used as a tool to justify ‘the divine right to rule’ and all of the ways that we humans have created systems of inequality. It’s been used to explain the natural imbalances that exist among us - the fact that we will never have equality in our capacity to be well and to have our needs met because of SO MANY factors that are out of our control.
Spiritual Materialism Has Also Been A Manipulation Tool
Spiritualizing abundance has been a manipulation tactic in our current culture for a long time as well.
There was a period of time where it was taught that the more you could humble yourself, sacrifice your wants and needs, go without and have less than the ‘holier’ you were - and again this was a tool to convince people that the manufactured inequality of modern society was a virtuous thing. It was a way of convincing people to accept and even self promote systems where all the wealth, access and privilege was hoarded at the top while everyone else in society was exploited - convincing people that their exploitation was a form of holy sacrifice was a great tool to keep people from asking for their fair share of the pie.
Then eventually this narrative flipped as people began to want more for themselves despite the promises that their sacrifices would get them into heaven - and as it became obvious that having *some* distribution of wealth down from the top tiers of society would create better CUSTOMERS who were willing to buy more things, was of benefit to those who ran the economy - and thus we started to be told that the more you had, the more you were being ‘blessed’.
This came with the same foundations that there HAS to be a whole lower class of people who are NOT getting what they need being demonized and blamed for their lack - so that there can be enough for those at the top to continue to hoard and so that those at the bottom can continue to be exploited without society rising up and rebelling. So long as we can be convinced that those at the bottom of society deserve to be there, and that we can be convinced that if we want to have enough we must ‘play by the rules’ of culture and that in so doing we are ‘good’ and thus deserve to have what we have - we will have a system that perpetually rewards the people at the top VIA exploiting the labor and lives of those at the bottom - and it will mean that we all see this as ‘how things should be.’
This is still our narrative to this day. That those who are rich and abundant deserve to be, because they are ‘better people’ than those who don’t have enough.
This is where we see a lot of spiritual materialism manifesting today. The whole idea that you can ‘manifest’ riches and abundance via being a ‘good person’/raising your vibration/holding positive thoughts/holding positive projections and so on, is all based on this fundamental projection that the governing force of the universe is watching us, and rewarding us each based on our personal merit. It erases the idea of systems, and makes everything about our individual selves - causing us to believe that if we don't have enough this is a sign of a moral failure.
This again causes us to never look at or question the systems we are living in - looking into the TRUE causes of why some people have so much more than they need while others are forced to go without - and the fact that it is all tied into our sense of self worth means that we are deeply triggered by it.
Our society is set up in a way that we are made to be in a constant state of insecurity - that we are feeling like we aren’t going to be safe, there isn’t going to be enough, that we must keep up with trends and that if we don’t we will be rejected and thus left on our own. We are deeply triggered by the idea that we are going to be left out/behind, and this too is used as a tool to keep us perpetually consuming and producing more than we actually want and need - because we’ve been trained to see our worth as being directly impacted by what we have and what we do.
We then add meaning and purpose to this whole unfolding by spiritualizing it. Telling ourselves that our work is our ‘purpose’ and that having a lot means that we are doing life right. We are also deeply indoctrinated into the idea that luxury, wealth and abundance are the KEYS to happiness and fulfillment - and in some ways they totally are. In some ways we have to recognize that a basic level of safety, opportunity and provision really DOES lead to a life where we are going to feel better, and where we are going to be able to explore the deeper parts of our humanity beyond just surviving and getting by - but at the same time we are also living in a culture that is so devoid of any true meaning and connection to expression, community and those deeper aspects of self that if we can be convinced that the yearning that we all have to have theses things is in fact caused by our lack of LUXURY - we will be able to be manipulated into believing that if we work harder, consume more and become more popular within the system that this will solve our existential dread. It’s true to a degree, and that existential dread/longing for a deeper meaning is there, and *some* of it can be soothed by things - but not all of it. But we are told that ALL of it can be and that’s part of our issue.
Again, this comes from a deeply innocent place - we want to feel safe, we want to feel like we’re going to be included, we want to feel like we’re going to get our needs met - and we live in a culture that has told us over and over again that this all comes to us via the avenue of being ‘good’ and fitting into culture - a culture that is totally imbalance and based on exploitation of the many for the sake of the few.
We make meaning out of it because this is our natural tendency as human beings. We spiritualize it - making the idea of manifesting wealth and power a purpose or higher calling - and this reinforces the whole thing.
This is where a lot of people find and take issue with our current spirituality.
Many people see this as being incredibly superficial and outside of what real spirituality is and should be - and I think we can have empathy for both perspectives if we can take a step back and see it all for what it is.
Those who are spiritualizing the acquisition of material success are doing so because they have been deeply indoctrinated by our culture and because our natural tendencies to see things the way we do has been exploited.
There is so much manufactured and ACTUAL discontent in our world - that it makes sense that people are going to be spiritualizing and making meaning out of whether or not we are getting our basic needs met, as well as spiritualizing ‘abundance.’
With this we also have to recognize that both the manufactured injustice of our culture that rewards some and punishes others based on things as simple as where and to whom you were born, as well as the natural injustice of illness, mental health issues, lack of resources where one was born, lack of ability to function or thrive in society all leads to pain and we are ALWAYS going to want an explanation for this. When we don’t have an obvious way of taking control of a situation we want to change, we are going to be susceptible to magical thinking and explanations that make it sounds like if we just perfect ourselves or pray or serve in the right way that we will be delivered from the suffering we see no other way out of - and this too can lead to spiritual materialism.
Life is hard and complex, we want simple and easy to understand solutions, we are projecting our childhood view of reality out onto the world and we are being manipulated to believe that the answer to all of our problems is wealth and luxury - so it is it any wonder that we have a entire spiritual industry based on how to magically accumulate wealth and success via navel gazing and attempting to ‘perfect’ the self so that we will be rewarded with more?
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Let’s take a break here, and come back next week to talk about spiritual self improvement and how THIS can be a slippery slope of always striving, never arriving.
<3
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