For me spiritual entities are just the new electricity, and there is no reason that one day this seemingly mystical realm can’t be qualitatively studied by scientific instruments we just don’t have access to at the moment. The lack of a scientific base means the waters are incredibly murky and riddled with individuals’ whacky projections and systemic conspiracies, even as someone with a shitload of experience I still can never tell for certain what is or isn’t classifiable. The organs we use in this world are ones we seldom have practice with.
It would be like having sight but spending your entire life blindfolded, and then on rare occasion getting incredibly drunk, taking off the blindfold in a randomly decided point on planet Earth for 5 minutes, and then trying to wake up the next day and trying to map out the things you saw. Did I see a whale or was that a schoolbus? Do I even have conceptions of “animal” or “automobile” that I can fully trust and go from there?
My spiritual experiences, some of them more extreme than others, have never been at odds with my political and material understanding. I just had a spiritual event with my fish that just died and to me it has some quantifiable aspects to it I can compare with previous events. Although, without measurements such as meters, liters, or volts, it is hard to put anything concrete down, it’s very loosey goosey. The only thing I will ever say with upmost confidence is that there is something “beyond the veil” of material reality and death and time and space that we don’t understand but which seems to have common motifs across a wide range of peer experience.
For example, TLDR I once spoke to a dead man via a medium. The medium said things ONLY I would have known, she could not have possibly guessed it, I mean hyperspecific things. On the surface, well, shit, it seems I had an experience with a dead person. But I am open to alternate theories. Maybe the dead speaking is impossible but reading minds isn’t, maybe she read my mind and the dead person was my imagined version of them and she simply went off of that. Maybe I have an extremely potent mental illness that I can turn on or off when I spiritually rile myself up and I completely hallucinated the entire thing. Maybe it was indeed the dead man, but maybe it was a spiritual predator emulating him to feed off of my energy, or maybe his half in “Heaven” is who I spoke to and his half in “Hell” is unreachable, or maybe half of him died when he died and some other half stayed alive and thus it’s not the full “him.” And maybe, just maybe, she’s the most skilled con artist of the century, she rolled perfect 20s 10x in a row, and just happened to GUESS details about my life and the dead person’s. How can I say for sure, when no basis of observing and analyzing this stuff is available? When the majority of the logically-minded don’t believe this stuff, and even the majority of people who do “believe in this stuff” don’t REALLY believe in this stuff?
To go full mask off. IMO? It gets deeper when combined with Marxism. I see class war as a struggle between God and the Devil. And IMO while I don’t expect comrades to believe this, I wish they could see this as a valuable narrative we could see to those who ARE seeking spiritual answers to political questions. To me, God is convergence, unity, oneness from which we left with the Big Bang. The Devil fears this, hates its inescapable eventuality, and runs away as fast as it can, delaying the inevitable. All of capitalism and fascism is leading to a moment of civilizational destruction, to nuke us back to bacteria and thus destroy the progress made towards communistic unity, a closer step to us being “God” again. “To live is to suffer” is real to the Devil. These entities are just egregores, or perhaps they are independently alive. I see humans as single-celled organisms with–compared to such entities–very little free will. We are possessed, we are being tugged in 100 different directions by 100 powerful gods with their own ideas of what they want Reality to be. We can only choose who we have a relationship with for our best benefit; we don’t truly have an option to be spiritually uninvolved, we are pawns of something greater either way. G&D are two sides of the same coin. It’s all the same. Fuck I have so much more to say than this.
I could most certainly talk about this shit forever so Ima stop right here lol.
Last statement: I am not one of the downvoters on the original post.
The trouble with this argument is that even though belief is primarily created through material conditions, it is undialectical to assume it will not come back to influence the material world. In reality, the many cynical and idiosyncratic spiritualities cultivated by capitalism in its pursuit of profit have fathered bastard children with the political economy, which are churches, cults, and conspiracy mongers which exist parasitically by scamming and even threatening the proletariat, and it is wishful thinking to assume them to be immediately sublated after socialism is established. Just like with the exclusively material remnants of the bourgeoisie, battle will have to be waged against them until all of their dangerous elements have been removed or until they have been organically supplanted by honest, socially benign forms of spirituality in their entirety.
For instance, the Catholic church has been very much a material force fighting strongly against progress to the point where it openly backed fascist governments in Germany, Italy and Spain, and influenced the Polish counterrevolution. Obviously this cannot mean we could prohibit actual believers to practice such a faith; but we must without compensation strip the churches of all the political privileges and material assets they have acquired and enjoyed under bourgeois and feudal rule and which go much beyond allowing for the freedom of worship and congregation, and we have to severely punish any officials who put their faith above the state; if not in the interest of believers whose faiths do not at present enjoy equal legal status, then at least in the interest of those who suffer most from such a colossal waste of resources.
That is because my comment was not meant to contradict your statement, but merely as a supplementary caveat that must be applied when transitioning from purely spiritual societies, insofar as these can be separated from the material sphere, to the concrete operation of political organisations which claim to, and to some degree do, represent the economic interests of their associated spiritual society.
Why do you think demons don’t exist? Wouldn’t it be logical to think that if Allah, angels, Iblis, and jinns exist; by extension is it such a reach to believe that Shayāṭīn exist?
I’m sorry if this is a simple question, as I’m not very knowledgeable on this topic from the Islamic perspective on it. I am not very spiritual and besides books and learning, most of my experience is with Christianity and Judaism.
Ah, I should clarify I do believe in shaitan but not the hollywood/christian/western versions of demons. Jinn have free choice just like us (humans). There are Jinn who choose to be disobedient to Allah (swt) and work for Iblis (Lucifer/Devil) and THOSE are called shaitan.
I’ll be honest with you guys:
Fun fact for you guys: Jinn are neither innately good or evil.
How do you collate this with Marxist theory, specifically dialectic materialism?
For me spiritual entities are just the new electricity, and there is no reason that one day this seemingly mystical realm can’t be qualitatively studied by scientific instruments we just don’t have access to at the moment. The lack of a scientific base means the waters are incredibly murky and riddled with individuals’ whacky projections and systemic conspiracies, even as someone with a shitload of experience I still can never tell for certain what is or isn’t classifiable. The organs we use in this world are ones we seldom have practice with.
It would be like having sight but spending your entire life blindfolded, and then on rare occasion getting incredibly drunk, taking off the blindfold in a randomly decided point on planet Earth for 5 minutes, and then trying to wake up the next day and trying to map out the things you saw. Did I see a whale or was that a schoolbus? Do I even have conceptions of “animal” or “automobile” that I can fully trust and go from there?
My spiritual experiences, some of them more extreme than others, have never been at odds with my political and material understanding. I just had a spiritual event with my fish that just died and to me it has some quantifiable aspects to it I can compare with previous events. Although, without measurements such as meters, liters, or volts, it is hard to put anything concrete down, it’s very loosey goosey. The only thing I will ever say with upmost confidence is that there is something “beyond the veil” of material reality and death and time and space that we don’t understand but which seems to have common motifs across a wide range of peer experience.
For example, TLDR I once spoke to a dead man via a medium. The medium said things ONLY I would have known, she could not have possibly guessed it, I mean hyperspecific things. On the surface, well, shit, it seems I had an experience with a dead person. But I am open to alternate theories. Maybe the dead speaking is impossible but reading minds isn’t, maybe she read my mind and the dead person was my imagined version of them and she simply went off of that. Maybe I have an extremely potent mental illness that I can turn on or off when I spiritually rile myself up and I completely hallucinated the entire thing. Maybe it was indeed the dead man, but maybe it was a spiritual predator emulating him to feed off of my energy, or maybe his half in “Heaven” is who I spoke to and his half in “Hell” is unreachable, or maybe half of him died when he died and some other half stayed alive and thus it’s not the full “him.” And maybe, just maybe, she’s the most skilled con artist of the century, she rolled perfect 20s 10x in a row, and just happened to GUESS details about my life and the dead person’s. How can I say for sure, when no basis of observing and analyzing this stuff is available? When the majority of the logically-minded don’t believe this stuff, and even the majority of people who do “believe in this stuff” don’t REALLY believe in this stuff?
To go full mask off. IMO? It gets deeper when combined with Marxism. I see class war as a struggle between God and the Devil. And IMO while I don’t expect comrades to believe this, I wish they could see this as a valuable narrative we could see to those who ARE seeking spiritual answers to political questions. To me, God is convergence, unity, oneness from which we left with the Big Bang. The Devil fears this, hates its inescapable eventuality, and runs away as fast as it can, delaying the inevitable. All of capitalism and fascism is leading to a moment of civilizational destruction, to nuke us back to bacteria and thus destroy the progress made towards communistic unity, a closer step to us being “God” again. “To live is to suffer” is real to the Devil. These entities are just egregores, or perhaps they are independently alive. I see humans as single-celled organisms with–compared to such entities–very little free will. We are possessed, we are being tugged in 100 different directions by 100 powerful gods with their own ideas of what they want Reality to be. We can only choose who we have a relationship with for our best benefit; we don’t truly have an option to be spiritually uninvolved, we are pawns of something greater either way. G&D are two sides of the same coin. It’s all the same. Fuck I have so much more to say than this.
I could most certainly talk about this shit forever so Ima stop right here lol.
Last statement: I am not one of the downvoters on the original post.
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Materialism specifically postulates priority of the material over the ideal. Religion tends to do the opposite
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I envy your ability to absorb so much theory, how do you do it 😭
The trouble with this argument is that even though belief is primarily created through material conditions, it is undialectical to assume it will not come back to influence the material world. In reality, the many cynical and idiosyncratic spiritualities cultivated by capitalism in its pursuit of profit have fathered bastard children with the political economy, which are churches, cults, and conspiracy mongers which exist parasitically by scamming and even threatening the proletariat, and it is wishful thinking to assume them to be immediately sublated after socialism is established. Just like with the exclusively material remnants of the bourgeoisie, battle will have to be waged against them until all of their dangerous elements have been removed or until they have been organically supplanted by honest, socially benign forms of spirituality in their entirety.
For instance, the Catholic church has been very much a material force fighting strongly against progress to the point where it openly backed fascist governments in Germany, Italy and Spain, and influenced the Polish counterrevolution. Obviously this cannot mean we could prohibit actual believers to practice such a faith; but we must without compensation strip the churches of all the political privileges and material assets they have acquired and enjoyed under bourgeois and feudal rule and which go much beyond allowing for the freedom of worship and congregation, and we have to severely punish any officials who put their faith above the state; if not in the interest of believers whose faiths do not at present enjoy equal legal status, then at least in the interest of those who suffer most from such a colossal waste of resources.
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That is because my comment was not meant to contradict your statement, but merely as a supplementary caveat that must be applied when transitioning from purely spiritual societies, insofar as these can be separated from the material sphere, to the concrete operation of political organisations which claim to, and to some degree do, represent the economic interests of their associated spiritual society.
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Very well said
Why do you think demons don’t exist? Wouldn’t it be logical to think that if Allah, angels, Iblis, and jinns exist; by extension is it such a reach to believe that Shayāṭīn exist?
I’m sorry if this is a simple question, as I’m not very knowledgeable on this topic from the Islamic perspective on it. I am not very spiritual and besides books and learning, most of my experience is with Christianity and Judaism.
Ah, I should clarify I do believe in shaitan but not the hollywood/christian/western versions of demons. Jinn have free choice just like us (humans). There are Jinn who choose to be disobedient to Allah (swt) and work for Iblis (Lucifer/Devil) and THOSE are called shaitan.
I only know what jinn are because the dude from subliminal jihad was on programmed to chill. (He was only mildly convincing to convert me into islam)
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