Materialism

When an advocate of the traditional worldview reproaches the notion of "materialism," he does so, not as do the pseudo-religious of the modern West--who in point of fact drape a modern mentality in religious guise, and who are either themselves unsure of what exactly they believe, or have thus far not been able to articulate it to a satisfactory degree--but because he finds fault with the very notion of "matter": that is, with the specifically Western and modern notion of "matter," which is inherently fraught with so many limitations that one wonders whether such individuals are at all able to see in color.

It is verily such a limited concept which would give rise to absurdities such as Cartesian dualism, which can more or less be said to be the philosophical origin that, through its far-reaching influence, contributed to the disintegration of metaphysical knowledge in the Christian tradition, aided in no small part by the nascent populist-oriented Christian sects of the Reformation, eager to substitute theories which they could mentally assimilate for that which which was beyond their understanding.

It comes as no surprise that once "matter" and "spirit" became conceptually discrete and thus separate categories that any knowledge of what was originally understood by Spirit would be forgotten, while the study of phenomena would give rise to all sorts of mechanistic ideas, to the ridiculous extent where material origins are now postulated for all of cosmic materiality.

We should hope that this has been a sufficient clarification regarding the scope of what we have been trying to express, and would like to thank the author of Materialism for inspiration through preliminary research on the subject, with our qualification, as always, that we should take care not to fall into the trap of that limitation called monism, but embrace the fullness that is succinctly expressed by what in English can only be translated as non-dualism, the subject of which is far beyond the scope of this short essay, and shall have to be treated at another time.