Do any of you feel spirituality is linked to your socialism or vice versa? Do you practice things like meditation or fasting? Do you reject materialism? Is this an ongoing personal development or something you feel you've attained to a degree you're happy with?
Curious peoples thoughts on this.
You're giving me the impression you think I mean Spiritualism, which is more to do with ghosts and astral planes and that shit. Spirituality is more concerning with the human soul as an abstract concept and a construct of various aspects of our being. What you've described is an understanding of your place in the universe, so that's would be considered a spiritual thing to reflect on and come to these conclusions.
I googled spirituality vs religion and saw some nice images that layed out the differences. For me spirituality is an individual's experience understanding metaphysics, where I religion is a group's understanding of metaphysics.
Most any reading you do will be have some sort of religious or metaphysical aspect
Peace Is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh is really good though. It's a very short and simple book but has a very powerful perspective on how to refocused your energy away from negativity.
The only thing I can add to this is I feel fasting is really important. Food has a wicked control over western society and conquering that is an incredibly important thing for socialism and socialists. Speaking as a former chubby child this has been very crucial to my own development and I do at least a 12 hour fast every day, but sometimes as much as 18 hours.
I keep spiritual and material things separate, but that's mostly just a side effect of me being a very material minded person. I see politics entirely materialistically (and always have, which is why it seems inevitable that I would become a Marxist). Despite the fact that I keep becoming more and more spiritual over time, I'm skeptical of spiritual things because I instinctively see things as bullshit if I don't see how they relate to the material world. The link between spirituality and the material world is a pretty weak one, so the link between poltitics and spirituality is also very weak.
As a result of this skepticism combined with the fact I'm still a rather spiritual person, (I don't even know if that is the right way to describe that) spiritual and material things are very seprated. I have a lot of trouble talking about spirituality because as soon as I start talking too much I slip into a material mindset and spiritual stuff then seems too fuzzy to talk about. I don't even know how I would define spirituality because of this.
I haven't read much in the way of spiritual stuff either because of this, it all seems like kooky bullshit, and I have trouble relating it with my experiences.
Edit: Oh, I didn't answer your questions. I meditate regularly, usually daily, in an unplanned way. Fasting makes thinking about spiritual things much easier, and also it's the easiest way to lose weight in my experience, so I used to do it often. I haven't much recently but I should. I am definitely working on my spirituality, it's something I feel I have just started touching and it seems important and worthwhile.
I don't know how in depth you want but my spirituality absolutely informs my political beliefs, which arent socialism but more anarcho communist because I believe that we are the same person.
a being outside of space and time fractured itself into innumerable facets, each facet is incarnated into a time locked conciousness to experience simulated reality so that experience can be relayed back upon demise.
So in that framework I will fight endlessly for an improved life experience for every single person, which can be achieved under a communist lens and by no others.
I meditate and occasionally fast but for how it feels physically not for some elusive spiritual means, I pray only to myself and make effort to channel energy inward or to pursuits that I believe will endeavour towards a more equitable society. I find sending energy to externalized deities to be foolish and wasteful. I find materialism and spirituality wholly enmeshed and though my personal experiences have found that spells/rituals/energy aspected by my intent to have manifested in a material sense in a way that was a clear sign to me that those two things are entwined.
My journey will continue onto my death where a final ritual powered by my death throes will propel me outside of the simulation.I've also read alot of occultism books so happy to answer any questions, or make suggestions but so many books are tainted by a religious connotation but imo the base concepts are valid.
Imo one of the best is: Awakening the Energy Body: From Shamanism to Bioenergetics Book by Ken Eagle Feather
I also genuinely think we're all the same being, and our differences are largely analagous to the differences between neighboring cells in a fungal colony, or a plant leaf. After a period of psy use that I hope to continue at some point, I came to the unshakable conclusion that you, me, humanity and all life on Earth are all just distant tendrils of the same eternal biosphere. What is a living body but a million intersecting biochemical processes coalescing into a mass of self-regulating tissues? What is an ecosystem but the same thing?
We have no idea where consciousness originates, and our own view of the concept is naturally human-centric. Would we recognize a sentient alien being for what it is? We don't even know how schools of fish move and react in perfect synchronicity. Who's to say that the pine forests and tubeworm-grown geothermal vents of the world don't have some kind of spirit?
Well said comrade! If you havnt read on animism and the over soul you may get something from researching that!
Do any of you feel spirituality is linked to your socialism or vice versa?
No, but socialism helped me better understand my percieved lack of spirituality.
Do you practice things like meditation or fasting?
Yes, I meditate and I have been intermittent fasting for almost 5 years now.
Do you reject materialism?
No.
Is this an ongoing personal development or something you feel you’ve attained to a degree you’re happy with?
Ongoing. According to my personal philosophy it is silly to look at anything and assume it's reached its final form. There is a continual synthesis of what was and what is to create the idea of "material conditions" needed to examine what is to be done and what will be.
It seems to me that "spirituality" is where you exhaust your psychic energy and how much you vent off (to use Cushvlog terms.) "Religion" is the practice of using a hierarchical structure to guide that psychic energy in a particular direction. Many ostensibly non-spiritual people may be truthful in saying they don't believe in organized religion; though there is still a big other out there that influences their material world in a godlike fashion. That may be man itself, the government, the markets, conspiratorial thinking, social expectations, peer perception, etc. I believe all people are "spiritual" in that they pour out emotional energy at the alter of "the big other" in some fashion.
Dialectical materialism and yoga are sort of the same thing for me. Yoga is basically dialectical materialism for our bodies.
I meditate for short spans when my adhd traps me in a web of executive dysfunction and weed doesn't work. I'd like to get more into it though.
