 Before we begin, since this video is about material reality, we'd like to support you in your abundance by giving you a very special free abundance meditation. You'll find a link in the comments below to get it right now. And with that, please take a moment and ask yourself, does this sound familiar? The crown chakra is located at the top of the head and deals with pure cosmic energy and is blocked by earthly attachment. For starters, it should. It's from Avatar, the last airbender. And it's amazing. If you haven't seen it, you should totally go and watch Aang open his seven chakras. No question about it. But that little bit at the end is a confusing idea, isn't it? If there's one thing that most spiritual systems agree on, it's this idea that in order to achieve enlightenment, you need to renounce a material life and detach yourself from the world. But is that true? And what does it mean to live a life of anti-materialism? But more importantly, is it really needed to achieve a sense of enlightenment? Is it spiritually bad to have material possessions or to be even a little bit rooted in the material? I mean, let's face it, we're all watching this video with modern technology. And are we all spiritually doomed for it? Let's open this discussion with defining some stuff. Materialism can often have a lot of different meanings, and we've covered scientific materialism before on this channel. But for this episode, we're going to define materialism as a tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values. Basically, loving physical stuff and thinking it's so amazing that you neglect your emotional, mental and spiritual needs. Or find fulfillment solely in the physical pleasures. By contrast then, I guess you can think of spiritual values as anything relating to or affecting our soul or our truest essence. But really, we encourage you to come up with your own definition of what spirituality means to you. It's not usually just something non-physical. But for some people, maybe. A lot of modern spiritual practices talk about detachment, as if it's something to strive for. But I think sometimes a lot of people get confused on its actual meaning. The conventional definition is that if something is detached, it stands apart from something else. It exists in what philosophers would call an objective state. But there's a pretty big contradiction in that definition, don't you think? Almost every spiritual philosophy, in some way, contends that everything is connected or part of the universal mind, whole or God, God, God, God. So how can we detach then and separate ourselves from the physical aspect of consciousness if we are consciousness? Another way of looking at it is that people who claim you need to detach and be anti-materialistic to be spiritual often skip over the simple truth that everything in existence is a manifestation of consciousness. So by definition, doesn't that also mean that every material thing is, in a way, consciousness expressing itself? And if you were to detach yourself from that, you would be denying your own consciousness or soul that part of the experience, which would go against many other spiritual values. Perhaps what people mean when they talk about detachment is actually non-attachment. But not being attached to something doesn't necessarily mean that you're completely detached from it. You can experience an emotion and not act on it, but that doesn't mean you're disconnected from it, only that you're not influenced or triggered by it. Non-attachment then is when a person overcomes their attachment to desire for things, people or concepts of the world and can exist in a heightened perspective where they can influence things rather than things influencing them. And again, is it so bad to be attached? If you have a family or kids, you probably have some sense of connection and attachment to them. You want to take care of them, maybe even protect them, right? Is that wrong? Or at least, unspiritual? I mean, I guess Buddha abandoned his family, which must have been hard, but I mean hey, it worked out for him in the end. Also remember that a lot of these great spiritual texts that talk about detachment and enlightenment were written during previous ages. In other words, they're really freaking old. Anyone studying these texts can experience profound wisdom and compassion by learning what's within them, but we should remember that they were written during times when society was structured differently, morality was different, and physical pleasures like food and drink weren't always an abundant supply like we have today. On top of that, with all of the recent advances in science and our amazing technology, there isn't a single spiritual text that teaches us how to use the internet or computers for spiritual gain. But hint hint, you're doing it right now, just by watching this video. This is most often embodied in the Buddhist concepts of detachment as they emphasize it comes from a release of desire, which ultimately leads to a release from suffering. When Siddhartha went into the wilderness and meditated under a tree for all that time, you can't tell me that he didn't get hungry or need to pee at some point. These are biological needs that make our conscious experience real. So what's the truth here? Why is spirituality so often associated with anti-materialism? Mostly, this might come from the idea that physical pleasures are interpreted by and related to the ego, our sense of individual identity, which in turn shapes how we experience the physical world. Since many schools of spirituality teach that we are all part of a unity consciousness, it makes sense that anything that separates us from that oneness is seen as something to avoid, or as something going against our natural self. And since most of our physical life appeals to the ego, with our society being largely built around gratifying it, it does kinda make sense that materialism is equated with the ego and therefore seen as the enemy of spirituality. While almost every faith basically trashes the ego, like it's the black sheep of the spiritual family, we should remember that everything has its place in the universe and nothing happens by accident. To deny the purpose of the ego would be to deny yourself access to a physical existence, which after all, is one of the main reasons our soul chooses to incarnate into physical bodies at all. Don't get us wrong though, life is messy and sometimes things happen that block our energy pathways and we experience emotions that we'd rather not. We all get into fights, have breakups and fall over from time to time, but it's that whole range of emotion and experience that makes life for us so innately human. In other words, we are human because we feel things so deeply, and a lot of the time material objects facilitate those feelings as a medium. The only difference is to what extent you allow yourself to be controlled by those emotions and let it affect your experience. This also gets into the question of money. We can pretty much agree that having it for the sake of hoarding and greed is not the highest use of this energy, but seeing it as an energy flow and using it for the benefit of others may be a rather spiritual use of this energetic substance. Let me ask another question. Why do spiritual masters always seem to run away to the mountains or the wilderness to become enlightened? Why can't we become enlightened in the frozen food aisle at Walmart? I'm just saying, if I was going to be enlightened, why not do it in a place where you have access to a whole aisle of frozen pizza? Is that weird? Jokes aside, the question is what's so special about the mountains or caves or a temple if enlightenment supposedly comes from within? The answer to everything like this is probably, of course, distractions and discipline. Maybe there's a bit of Bruce Lipton's epigenetics in here too, where the environment actually plays a significant role in your own biological processes. Then again, perhaps it's more like, of course someone will become enlightened in the mountains when they have nothing better to do. Do you think it's possible to become enlightened in a city with trains and cars zooming past you every five minutes? Of course you could, but it would probably be a lot harder with so many physical distractions. But yeah, you should absolutely be able to do it. Perhaps the key to achieving a sense of detachment in the modern day then is to redefine how we consider detachment at all. It's not about retreating from the world to go inwards, as our sole duty with enlightenment is to teach and help the world transcend. Perhaps instead, we could see detachment as the act of striving for a balance between our physical existence and spiritual nature. Bringing the conversation back to money for a moment, basically everything costs money in our world today. By definition, if you want stuff, you kind of usually gotta have some money. So in turn, money is often equated with being the height of materialism. There's a general opinion in society that money is this materialistic force that somehow corrupts those who have it and turns us all into goblins trying to hoard gold. That somehow, once we get money, it takes our focus away from anything meaningful or heart-centered and transforms anything good within us into an attempt to make more money at all costs. Sometimes, people even say that it's the root of all evil, and certainly this might have been a factor in Buddha's mind when he ditched his family and his whole kingdom. This disharmonious relationship with money is explored in our spiritual money mastery course, which examines the relationship that we have with money in our society and completely flips it on its head, showing once and for all that having money and the physical stuff that comes along with it doesn't necessarily mean we can't act in accordance with our heart center. So check that out if you're interested. Ultimately, people usually see things like money as merely a tool to progress in life, and yet conversely, we also subtly see meditation as a tool to progress spiritually, sentiments which arguably have the same energy. This isn't really a bad thing, but we do seem to get attached to one experience or the other, when in reality, we could perceive both our physical lives and spiritual experiences as one unified experience called life. So to answer our original question, do you need to be anti-materialistic to be spiritual? At least for us right now, it feels to us that answer is not at all. Even the greatest gurus and sages of the past still ate and drank. In Greek mythology, the gods often had fancy golden tables in Olympus, stacked high with ambrosia to eat. And in ancient Egyptian myth, both and seashat were said to regularly drink some kind of white drops or liquid gold to retain their ascended state. Ancient Egyptian LSD? That sounds epic. I don't think that you can get more materialistic than literally drinking gold, but okay. FYI, we do not recommend you drink gold unless it's that special mono-atomic gold mixture which we'll probably do a video about in the future. Your doctor probably wouldn't be too happy of us. If we suggested you should melt down gold bars and shove it down your gullet, but I digress. The point is, regarding physical pleasures, let's be mindful of them, but maybe not swear them off completely? Even the Bhagavad Gita describes that the four goals of human life are doing one's duty, earning wealth, material and sensual enjoyment with your senses under control and attaining salvation. So if you want to indulge in physical pleasures, go ahead, do it. Experience something physical, something so moving and awe-inspiring that it inspires an emotion within you that could lead you to a spiritual revelation. You might even remember in our cannabis episode that it was through the enjoyment of cannabis that led to my first massive spiritual transcendent visionary awakening experience, which completely shifted how I perceived and used the medicine. Instead of thinking in terms of attaining a quantity of things, why not strive for less things but ones that are higher in quality or more valuable, like handmade clothes or eating food that took some extra time to make but is like a thousand times better for you than whatever else you might have been eating? The most important thing though is always to maintain that sense of balance. Experience everything the physical and spiritual worlds both have to offer, but don't get so caught up in one or the other that you forget that we belong in the center of both. You wanna have that cheesecake? Go for it, savor every mouthful, but maybe only have one slice and not like the entire thing. You wanna gain profound spiritual wisdom through meditation and detachment? Go for it, but remember, the point of wisdom is to be shared and experienced together, not to run away with it, to be hoarded by yourself, all alone in isolation at the top of the mountain. With that, we're curious what you think. How do you cope with materialistic pleasures and what role do you think physical experiences have to play in our spiritual journeys? Let us know in the comments below and don't forget to download the free abundance meditation in the comments below. We'll see you next time on Spirit Science. Toodles!