[still being editted]
Recently on my YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/pyrrho314) I have decided to move from my epistemological system, which I have named relativistic skepticism, which I began in my early teens, to my spiritual theory, which I have named "Material Spirituality" and "Spiritual Materialism". This change has generated a reaction that I can really only characterize as panic among a certain subset of those I converse with online. My channel is not a lecture channel, it's not a exposition of answers, but is a conversation where I share my thoughts on a given topic. Still, my own ideas have a momentum, they come from somewhere, and they are headed somewhere, and this comes across as opinion and can be interpreted as answers. Nevertheless, I seek conversation on the topics they raise, and entertain the thoughts of others as much, perhaps more, than I offer exposition on my own. Nevertheless over the first six years of my channel I consciously decided I would focus on my epistemology, a system compatible with embodied cognition, a system compatible with ancient pyrrhonism (thus my chosen handle), and it is a system about which I would have to admit a rigid adherence. The flexibility I require is built into the system, and the data upon which it operates is perceptions, a flow of which, which to me is the most basic definition of nature... our flow of perceptions is really the most tangible a definition for "nature" that there is, and everything beyond that is interpretation, which is to say, everything is interpretation. Calling it a flow, is interpretation. Assumptions as to it's source are interpretation.
This is not to degrade it, all knowledge is representational, it's all interpretation, there is nothing direct.
But the panic does surprise me. To my way of thinking my approach is demystifying. I expect it will be like other feelings, that any metaphysical implications will be revealed as more chemical, more evolutionary... the feeling that "she is the one" will be revealed as the DNA's plan to have us procreate, as a lie told so thoroughly that it may be truth, it may be lie, the DNA does not "care"... to use the metaphor of intentional DNA as convenient shorthand. The feeling of lust, and all it's complexity, revealed as something emerging from the cycle of evolution, as necesary to drive procreation.
In this vein it has seemed to me the starting point is "spiritual experiences". What are they? When reported by others, what are they? But more importantly, when I have an experience I consider "spiritual", what characterizes it. It seems any type of experience can seem this way. On the surface, something full of power and grandeur can seem spiritual, but often it can be something very small. It feels like understanding, there is confidence to it. But I have cautioned, feelings are not as they seem in this view, they are motivation, they are beyond lie, truth and lie have little to do with it... no more than an animal feeling "I can escape" really can escape... that feeling motivates the attempt to escape, without which, it certainly won't, without any guarantee that they really can.
I have used the metaphor of the feeling of hunger, which I think most of us recognize as the motivational feeling that helps ensure we eat, obtain nutrition, with which to survive, but which also can undermine nutrition as it fixates on unhealthy foods, or how, in sight of a food whose flavor we favor, hunger will arise when the food is not nutritious and we are already well fed.
To me none of this is particularly flattering to the feeling of spirituality, except that there are many that are not satisfied that we might remove the deification of "spirit", and insist that it be demeaned. To me, the notion that by shunning the meaning of this feeling we can overcome it is futile. Doesn't everyone know that a feeling that is shunned gains more power, just as the passive aggressive become more poisonous and destructive in their soul than the active aggressive... burying sexual urges leads to sexual deviance, as with catholic priests so afflicted, and does not overcome it but makes it unhealthy and destructive.
Fear is also a feeling and it is not rational, thus, it cannot be understood as a rational urge, and it prefers to try shunning anyway, which is why fear must be understood first of all. The only way to overcome fear is not to deny it, not to shun it, lest it try to have every other feeling ignored and shunned, ironically to no avail.
This theory of mine is a didactic theory about how one can find out what their spiritual urges are urging them to do. It is a tangible theory, reducing it from the interpretations that come after, to the direct feeling and a study of the experiences that occur simultaneous, as all feelings in the past have been reduced to a truer impact. To understand love is not to believe it's pretty illusions, but it does require listening to it. There may be lie to it, but you will not love someone that you cannot feel love toward. To have a good relationship with one's hunger cannot come from ignoring it, but by acknowledging it, working with it, understanding when it is spurious, when the feeling is pomped by a hunger for hunger, by some other desire that has turned hunger into it's servant.
I think by this investigation one can have a healthy relationship with the spiritual feeling, which had been turned by many against itself and put in service of our enslavement. Two things are immediately clear to me. One, people fear this, and none more so than those that see themselves as beyond spirituality. Two, people lack introspective eyes, they cannot discern two different feelings, they cannot recognize, with a long gaze inward that in some case another feeling stood behind the one they thought they felt. They cannot discriminate shades of feelings just like the unlearned eye cannot discriminate similar shades, blue from cyan.
