Rest in Peace
Apr. 5th, 2026 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brenainnThe last 14 months have been one heck of a ride, especially the last few months of it.
The most significant part of that experience, for the purposes of this post, starts last Fall. I began hearing spirits speak to me when I visited the grave of my spirit guide. That was preceded by subtler communications from spirits in other places, though at first they were so quiet I didn’t even realize what they were until much later. These days, the communications are anything but subtle. And the additional experiences I’ve had recently have finally shredded what little materialist philosophical views I was still clinging to.
That’s really the point of this short post. I’m not here to recount all my experiences with spirits or everything they’ve taught me (much of which they’ve made clear I should keep to myself). No, this is more like an obituary.
It’s an obituary for the old me: the materialist atheist who used to routinely mock religion and the divine. When I look back on him now, I realize he stuck around a lot longer than I thought. Even when I was exploring different religious paths (like Catholicism and Mormonism) he was still the one behind the wheel. Religion and spirituality were just a feel-good layer draped over his worldview, where nothing truly beyond the natural was ever allowed to exist.
Christ appeared to his followers after the crucifixion? Grief-induced hallucination but meaningful ones, so sure, I’ll go to church.
Ganesha’s statues drank the milk offerings in the ’90s? There must be a natural explanation, but it was personally meaningful to the devotees, so I’ll allow myself some warm fuzzy feelings about it.
A vivid dream where a deceased friend or relative delivers a message? Just their influence echoing in my subconscious in a purely natural, “scientific” way.
And on and on it went.
What I’m getting at is this: though I consciously stopped calling myself an atheist and a materialist a long time ago, it wasn’t until the last 14 months or so that the deep, subconscious grip of all that early cultural conditioning finally loosened and died.
The funny part? Our materialist society practices its own kind of materialist magic. Its never-ending propaganda for scientism and all its offspring works like a spell: it changes consciousness in accordance with will, but with the explicit purpose of suppressing any experience of the truly non-natural spiritual powers that exist out there.
So I can now say with the weight of growing experiences over the past 14 months, and especially the last two or three, that the materialist spell over my mind has finally been broken. The old atheist materialist me has died a long-overdue death. When I look back at that guy now, I don’t even recognize him anymore.
Rest in peace, old me.
The most significant part of that experience, for the purposes of this post, starts last Fall. I began hearing spirits speak to me when I visited the grave of my spirit guide. That was preceded by subtler communications from spirits in other places, though at first they were so quiet I didn’t even realize what they were until much later. These days, the communications are anything but subtle. And the additional experiences I’ve had recently have finally shredded what little materialist philosophical views I was still clinging to.
That’s really the point of this short post. I’m not here to recount all my experiences with spirits or everything they’ve taught me (much of which they’ve made clear I should keep to myself). No, this is more like an obituary.
It’s an obituary for the old me: the materialist atheist who used to routinely mock religion and the divine. When I look back on him now, I realize he stuck around a lot longer than I thought. Even when I was exploring different religious paths (like Catholicism and Mormonism) he was still the one behind the wheel. Religion and spirituality were just a feel-good layer draped over his worldview, where nothing truly beyond the natural was ever allowed to exist.
Christ appeared to his followers after the crucifixion? Grief-induced hallucination but meaningful ones, so sure, I’ll go to church.
Ganesha’s statues drank the milk offerings in the ’90s? There must be a natural explanation, but it was personally meaningful to the devotees, so I’ll allow myself some warm fuzzy feelings about it.
A vivid dream where a deceased friend or relative delivers a message? Just their influence echoing in my subconscious in a purely natural, “scientific” way.
And on and on it went.
What I’m getting at is this: though I consciously stopped calling myself an atheist and a materialist a long time ago, it wasn’t until the last 14 months or so that the deep, subconscious grip of all that early cultural conditioning finally loosened and died.
The funny part? Our materialist society practices its own kind of materialist magic. Its never-ending propaganda for scientism and all its offspring works like a spell: it changes consciousness in accordance with will, but with the explicit purpose of suppressing any experience of the truly non-natural spiritual powers that exist out there.
So I can now say with the weight of growing experiences over the past 14 months, and especially the last two or three, that the materialist spell over my mind has finally been broken. The old atheist materialist me has died a long-overdue death. When I look back at that guy now, I don’t even recognize him anymore.
Rest in peace, old me.
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