Sharing as the Creed of Material Spirituality
Allen Butcher:
“As human beings, our nature includes both physical and spiritual aspects. Each person must find for themselves their own balance of material and of spiritual values, and from the understanding of that authenticity then find or create a circle of friends or community expressing that balance.
Material spirituality affirms the intent of making our material lives consistent with our spiritual ideals. Through affirming the parallel culture we may support individuals and communities in finding their own balance of private and common property ownership through economic diversity, and both immanence and transcendence in spiritual expression through religious pluralism. These expressions of balance represent the variety of hues and shades of color in the rainbow of material spirituality.
Living the values of material spirituality affirms a personal responsibility for self, society and nature, by finding a balance between our material needs and wants and our spiritual ideals, such that the two support the practice of rational altruism in the parallel culture.
In order to present the concept of material spirituality in a graphical manner the following symbolic elements are included: The SCALES is an ancient symbol for justice and law, and represents the need for balance in many aspects of our culture. The scales balances the GLOBE or WORLD, suggesting the material universe, against the RADIANT EYE within a TRIANGLE, the symbol (used on the dollar bill) often representing awareness, spirituality, intuition (immanence), revelation (transcendence) or divine inspiration or providence. Balancing the world against the radiant-eye-within-triangle symbol suggests that materialism and spirituality must be integrated. The TRIANGLE itself integrates both stability (geometry) and change (math & science) suggesting that even as the characteristics of a thing change with time, its basic nature remains unchanged. The CIRCLE of the globe represents the cycles of nature and of life, and again the balance of stability and change, as through cycles even as things change they remain the same, or continually return to similar states. The INFINITY symbol represents time, and being the base of the symbol, suggests that time-based economics serves as the foundation of a lifestyle affirming the ideals of MATERIAL SPIRITUALITY. These ideals also represent the balance of POSITIVE LAW, or human-made laws, with NATURAL LAW, as they affirm our desire to respect in our material lives the immanent and/or transcendent values of love, peace, justice, nurturance and harmony.
The ideals of material spirituality can certainly be expressed in various spiritual and religious traditions, and looking at the timeline of communitarian movements elsewhere on this website we can see that many have.”
Source: www.culturemagic.org/MaterialSpirituality.html
