Spiritual Vs Material

On Experience - Article #1

There is a dichotomy that exists in our minds which differentiates two important aspects of personal life: materiality and spirituality. In common culture, these two represent a polarity—a way of identifying ourselves. Some see themselves as more spiritual, others as more material, and many somewhere in between.

The meaning of these words—spiritual and material—is mostly unclear. This doesn’t disturb most people, because the purpose of such labels is rarely functional; it’s identification. We say, “I’m spiritual.” We say, “I’m material.” It feels satisfying. Yet defining ourselves is not the same as understanding what that something truly is, and over time the meanings become diluted.

Without a clear understanding of what these words mean, the dichotomy serves less as guidance and more as a way of preserving self-identification. We solidify our preferred image of ourselves and others and, through that, secure a sense of either belonging or superiority. We are either part of a group—or consciously separate and elevate ourselves from one.

Spiritual and material, though overused as concepts, do actualy point to something real beyond the game of defining ourselves through contrasting labels. What they point to is not a set of values, beliefs, or appearances. Rather it is a way of relating to experience. A spiritual person differs from a material person not by clothing, ritual, or belief, but by something more fundamental: the internalization of experience rather than the externalization of it.

It’s a simple inquiry really : Do you relate to experience as something that happens to you—or as something that happens from you? This question alone reveals the subtle distinction between those drawn to spiritual pursuits and those drawn to material ones. The purely material person is bound to only see experience as something that descends upon them or that he can acquire. Either way, experience comes from the outside. It is extrenally sourced. The spiritual, on the other hand, carves a path to a different discovery—one in which experience is no longer externally sourced, bur rather arises from within.

And here, the initial dichotomy begins to make sense. No longer do we need to stay in the abstract, and no longer do we need to assume that is someone dresses a certain way they are spiritual, and if another has acquired wealth, that they are material. Now we can undersand that external symbols are actually arbitrary at best.

If we say that the material person desires things, then we ask ourselves, what are things, and what are things for ? A car. A house. Prestige. Power. Money. Fine clothing. Good food. All are objects of meaterial desire because they generate the experiences we long for. The material person also knows there are elements that when they are lacking generate unwanted experiences—struggle, poverty, pain. The result is that the material person either has or wishes he had the power to arrange the world, to seize it, to bend it to his will, so that he may achieve the experiences he desires, and evade the ones he rejects. He aims to arrange the world so he can feel victorious. he desires control so that he can experience fulfillment and pleasure.

The spiritual reality is the inverse of this. From a worldview in which experience is governed by external events—meaning it happens to us when certain stimuli occur—the spiritual begins to discover a kind of experience that is not initiated externally but emerges from within. What turns the material into the spiritual is not a belief, or lack of material goods. It is the discovery and understanding that there is a very expansive reality in which experience is not, and cannot be externally sourced.

The material person knows how to source willpower, intellect, and ingenuity from within himself. He can generate effort. Insight. Creativity. But what he cannot source within himself is experience. His access to experience remains secondary, mediated by circumstance. He must change the world because the world, in his view, holds all the levers to the experiences he desires. He is like a pilot in a cockpit, manipulating controls and gauges, trying to create the right conditions—the right scene—for the right feelings to occur. And even if he succeeds—even if he feels the ecstasy of victory—the nature of experience remains the same. Fundamentally, it is externally sourced. He influences the world, and then the world offers him the experience he desired. The experience, good as it is, remains externalized.

The diligence of the spiritual act on the other hand, does not lie in its capacity to express will. Will only creates experience indirectly, by moving the levers of the external world. The true diligence of the spiritual act is the patience required to come into direct contact with experience—not as a secondary effect, but as the most primary and intimate act of self-creation. This possibility—to come into direct contact with the creation of experience itself—is the true draw of what we call spirituality. It is the movement from separation to unity. From experience as something that happens to us, to experience as something that happens from us.

If we can understand this important distinction, and realize how the only difference between spiritual and material is how expereince is sources, then we can also understand how spiritual materialism is born. Where things can look spiritual but actually are not.

Genuine spirituality does not seeks to acquire an experience. The moment we seek to acquire any particular experience, we reinforce the separation we are trying to dissolve. Any experience pursued as something for me to acquire becomes once again something that happens to me. If we begin to pursue spiritual experience we are creating for ourselves another form of externalization. We might call the experiences spiritual, and initially they might seem as such, but eventually they belong to the material reality, which is our relationship to experience. Anything we pursue we see as outside of ourselves and as something that happens, or will happen to us. In this simple definition, there is no confusion. Long term pursuit is a material act.

To encounter experience as arising from within frees us from this entire pattern—from the need to manipulate outer conditions in order to feel whole. Once an experience arises independently from within, it no longer depends on external levers or circumstances. It becomes self-generated and therefore free. And once we come to know an internally generated experience that is independent of the external world, we find ourselves in an entirely new position: the center point of experience shifts from ‘person’ to something that is not the person which is life itself. We exist because we have experiences, but once our relationship to experiences changes from something that happens to me, to something that happens from me, then inevitably with that our sense of self begins the process of migration. With that a stage of metamorphosis begins.

This move—from experience being something that happens to us to something that arises from us—is a migration from destination-oriented psychology to a source-oriented one. As long as experience is externally sourced, we must seek it in the world, which means the world must be a certain way—a destination—for the experience to happen. Once we find ourselves able to originate experience, then we are the source of it. There is no demand on the world. We no longer have such an urgency to influence and create the world—instead we are learning to influence and create ourselves.

And this is the main idea of spirituality. We learn to not try to extract experience from the world, but rather from deep within our own being.