Spirituality and Capitalism

Songs to listen to:

Insane in the Brain - Cypress Hill

Solid Wall of Sound (feat. Busta Rhymes, Jack White & Elton John) - A Tribe Called Quest

6/1 - Shame

Butt-House Blondies - Ariel Pink

Sure Shot - Beastie Boys

3 Tha Hard Way - Bahamadia

3030 - Deltron 3030, Del The Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator, Kid Koala

When You Die - MGMT

It depends how you wanna look at it! Creating language between you and life that transcends time. Do it your way ;)

If everything exists in energetic potential, this means that we may selectively choose personal timelines that feel most aligned for us. It also means that we have the choice to communicate with past, present and future versions of ourselves in the now. What might this mentality do for group-think, collectivism and personal power?

If energy responds to consistency, and we choose to prioritise communication with our past selves/collectives rather than solely aligning with our future selves, we provide ourselves the unique opportunity to practice prescience (knowing something before it takes place). The best form of communication with life is listening. Perhaps also ritual work.

We may practice the ritual of asking ourselves in any and every situation, "what does this mean for me? And how can I inform/warn past-me about this so it doesn't happen again?". A significant miscommunication we must tackle when practicing this ritual is one which rightfully asks, "if we indeed reap what we sow - in other words - receive back what we emit energetically, does that mean that those born into suffering, those who've been dealt a bad hand, are deserving of it?"

So often, spiritualists are depicted as being naïve, privileged, and down-right out of touch. We must ask ourselves — who does this mentality serve? By engaging in this counter argument, we have to question it's implications.

We are all complicit in the narratives we spin and echo. Most especially when it comes to vulnerable and oppressed peoples.

And so I'd like to throw in my two cents here and say that there is nuance here, as with everything else when it comes to the Universe. I believe that silencing or de-legitimising people who work within the framework of Universal Law, (e.g. the principle of giving and receiving, dharma vs. karma, etc.) serves a Capitalist, neoliberal system.

If our main argument regarding suffering vs. flourishing is regarding systemic violence, then let's direct our attention there. Why are people born into suffering? Because our leaders who are supposed to serve us serve one capitalist ideal above all else - "work for it, regardless of your circumstance". So yes, under this model, we aren't all given a 'fair-go' as Aussies would say.

We may ask, "but why would the Universe, God, Life, allow this to happen if they/it were real?" And to that questions, many spiritualists and those who are practicing religion would provide an answer along the lines of, "because humans walking the earth have free-will". And so then the collective consciousness operating under Capitalist systems might argue, "so those who suffer choose to?" To which I say, absolutely not. I'll be the sacrifical lamb bridge-gapper here. It's time to point our fingers away from each other and back to those who are supposed to look after us but continue to point it back to us (neoliberalism).

When we look to the lessons of the Tarot, we learn that our words are swords. Our thoughts and our speech hold energetic significance, that we may not always necessarily sense, but it's always there. And words wound us and fester if we don't tackle them.

—

The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Frankfort, Wilson, Jacobsen, Irwin, 1946).

Chapter 1: Myth and Reality

page 4: 'Animism' - belief of natural phenomena being Spirit's doing.

"The ancients, like the modern savages, saw man always as part of society, and society as embedded in nature and dependent upon cosmic forces."

"For them nature and man did not stand in opposition and did not, therefore, have to be apprehended by different modes of cognition".

page 15: "Primitive thought naturally recognised the relationship of cause and effect, but it cannot recognise our view of an impersonal, mechanical, and lawlike functioning of causality. For we have moved far from the world of immediate experience in our search for true causes which will always produce the same effect under the same conditions".

page 18: "We must remember that mythopoeic thought does not require it's explanation to represent a continuous process. It accepts an initial situation and a final situation connected by no more than the conviction that the one came forth from the other".

"E.g. Ancient Egyptians/modern Maori's present relation between heaven and earth. (Heaven originally lay upon earth but was separated)."

—

New Scientist: How to Think about Reality

Chapter 1: What Is Reality?

page 15: "Reality may come down to mathematics, but mathematics comes down to nothing at all"