askchapo

Spirituality is coping with the everyday mundanity of your life and then pretending it's something more than that

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

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.

this might not be answering your question here but I think it is very possible to engage in some kind of organized religion if you find it meaningful and safe to belong in that kind of community and explore that kind of ritual even as an atheist. that is probably the easiest way to get at spirituality though i am sure there are people around here that would like to vouch for some modern non-religious spirituality

i wouldn't actually want to opine [too much more deeply] about what spirituality is because ultimately that should be something you answer for yourself (whether through firsthand experience or some sort of intellection). if you wanted to explore it yourself you could take too many mushrooms or get too high on weed which is the first thing i did right before doing a search for "weed as an entheogen" on english wikipedia

compatible with materialism?? this reminds me of being a teen and being hammered with "richard dawkins (b slur)" and this question of religion being compatible with science, which like.. science isn't trying to replace community and ritual and its also not immediately ready to help you navigate difficult things. long way of saying I do not think you need to make spirituality adversarial to any historical or present analysis of material conditions. if you want to introduce one into your life, you shouldn't let it interfere with your other efforts

hope this was constructive

edit: to make this slightly more appropriate i would share that i too have basically spent my whole life looking at the universe and existence with what i assumed was an atheist perspective, but once i started to interrogate certain assumptions in my worldview i found i had a few very irrational faith arguments that were pretty fundamental to me. didn't change the broad strokes, which still felt to me as very atheist, but it helped me understand how to engage with spirituality and religion meaningfully in my actual life. if you spent some time with yourself (maybe after smoking way too much weed) and looked at some of your presuppositions about how the world works you might find some of these weird little inconsistencies in your personal philosophy. maybe you change them, maybe you don't -- if the latter, you're pointing in the direction of Spirituality Town my friend

edit: edit again because this is a mess i hope mom doesnt see

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.

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.

Spirituality really simply is just a self affirming itself. Thats it. When you take spiritual damage it means somebody or something is damaging ur ability to affirm that you deserve to be here.

Also stop intellectualizing ur demobilization and just do something. You dont even have enough praxis to make claims like "realizing something goes against ur labor aristocratic class interest". You will seeiously feel better by organizing and learning to affirm the self by contributing to something without expecting a direct benefit.

I was once described as a "spiritual athiest" for believing in a connection between myself and the universe around me. As I move through life I take and I give or, if you prefer, I am influenced from and I am influence by the world around me. While I am alive I have some choice in how to shape those interactions. When I die, the last of me is released from this consciousness and returned to the universe. All without any form of supreme being.

The only "higher power" I believe in is the ineffable rules that ties the universe together, and those rules don't care about me as an individual. I act and the rules respond, void of any conscious thought.

That type of thinking doesn't really drive or motivate me beyond informing my decions in choosing a path to a destination or deciding that a destination is not worth the journey.

If you are not driven or motivated to continue your pusuits then it might be time to move on to something else. You tried something and it is not right for you at this time. Learn and grow from the experience to help find future interests. Maybe you come back to it later or maybe you don't.

We exist for such a brief moment and, in the end, it doesn't really matter to the universe what we do so uou might as well spend your time trying to focus on what makes your journey the best one for you.

The most convincing description of spirituality I ever read was that "it's how you see yourself in connection with your world, in abstract".

There is a big pitfall of essentialism/determinism in the attitude that "everything happens for a [coherent] reason", and it's hard to get people over that.

Spirituality in the atheistic sense is just how you process of the objective meaninglessness and ephemerality of your existence and everything you create. Different atheistic responses to this range from nihilism to existentialism to enmeshing yourself in a collective project to build something that will outlast you. Death, the permanent cessation of conscious experience, is undeniably horrifying to an atheist and how you use its inevitability to inform your life choices can be thought of as being spiritual.

I recommend this book:

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-tao-of-physics-an-exploration-of-the-parallels-between-modern-physics-and-eastern-mysticism_fritjof-capra/263838/

Book Overview " Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both." -- Fritjof Capra, Ph.D.Their paths to the truth could not be more different-- but the amazing thing is that, in their own ways, the mystics and the scientists are discovering the same truths about our world. In non-technical language, with no complex mathematics or formulae, this thought-provoking program explores the main concepts and theories of modern physics, the revelations coming from particle accelerators and laboratories-- and compares them with the ancient tenets of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. In the process, we gain a clear and fascinating picture of how such seemingly disparate areas of thought are ultimately quests for the same kind of understanding.

It's religion minus the dogma. Still requires a suspension of disbelief though.

Im a gambler at heart. I try to fix the dice of fate anyway I can. Sometimes that means prayer to old gods.

against my labor aristocratic class interests

What about bringing about socialism will harm you?