Spiritual Atheist by Jankel Nick Seneca

Author:Jankel, Nick Seneca
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Switch On Books
Published: 2018-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9: Wisdom and Enlightenment: Becoming A Spiritual Atheist

There I was, having just turned thirty, a supposed business success… and I was a wreck. I decided that I needed to do whatever it would take to heal myself once and for all. That meant dealing with the seemingly endless shame and pain of thinking myself to be a fat, ugly, unlovable guy; the social anxiety I felt as I walked into every party or meeting; the damaged relationship templates that tanked my capacity as a leader and lover; and the gnawing physical agony in my muscles. I wanted to make sure I would never have a breakdown forced upon me again, nor be at the mercy of unconscious forces that could jeopardize my relationships, my work, and my health.

I had two guides toward the light at the end of the tunnel: anguish and yearning. They usually are available to us all to move us forward toward our own transformation and so, freedom. For me, the pain was full-blown fibromyalgia (including fatigue and irritable bowel syndrome) and the chronic depression, and anxiety that had been troubling me since my youth. The yearning was to find my way to a life philosophy, and a reliable set of tools and practices, that could provide me with an emotional safe haven and a lodestone of meaning to guide me onward.

Conventional atheism had taken me far, enabling me to escape from the outdated rules of religion, become more scientific in my outlook and recognize the desire for power-knowledge that hides behind so many claims to truth. However, something was clearly still missing, I reasoned, because otherwise I would not be in the mess I was in. I recalled one of the life-changing insights of my time studying philosophy: epistemological rupture or breakthroughs happen when we examine our assumptions and ask ourselves whether they’re still helping us thrive.

By systematically questioning everything I thought I knew, I realized that I had fallen for the materialist paradigm—as it manifests in science, technology, and business—without fully understanding the central assumptions it rests upon. Plato called such assumptions “noble lies”. The foundational noble lie at the heart of materialism is that we are separate entities from the material world around us. This leads us to feel like we are lonely, lack some things and are fearful of others. On the separation between I as a scientist and It as an object, the rational knowledge, technologies, and businesses that help us live such long, yet often unhappy and unfulfilled lives, have been built.

Materialism has us see the world through a lens that has been fully disenchanted from faith and magical thinking. Materialism seeks to dismiss spirituality as weird and Woo Woo while elevating the rational as the only truth in town. This anti-wisdom stance, requires us to downgrade our subjective, emotional experiences in favor of dispassionate, rational objectivity. We must switch off our empathy and compassion in order to be ‘scientific’, ‘business-like’, and ‘man up’.

The logical conclusion of this materialist worldview is that the universe is empty of meaning, consciousness and love.

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