Beyond Matter

A Materialist View

Our culture is dominated by a belief system which in its own way is just as dogmatic and irrational as a religious paradigm. This is the belief system of materialism, which holds that matter is the only thing that exists, and that anything that appears to be non-physical - such as the mind, our thoughts, consciousness or even life itself - is physical in origin, or can be explained in physical terms.

It’s often assumed that we only have two choices in how we see the world: a ‘scientific’ materialist view or a religious one. Either you believe in heaven and hell, or you believe that there is no life after death. Either God created all life forms, or they evolved accidentally through random mutations and natural selection. But there is a third alternative world-view: a spiritual approach that transcends both conventional science and religion and explains many of the riddles that neither of them can answer.

Panspiritism - “All is Spirit”

This is an approach that I call panspiritism -literally, ‘all is spirit’. Panspiritism suggests that the fundamental reality of the universe is not matter, but spirit. Spirit pervades all living beings, and all non-living things, so that they are always interconnected. You could compare it to fundamental forces like gravity and electromagnetism, which aren’t caused or produced by anything - they simply are. But spirit is even more fundamental than these forces because it preceded the universe. The universe - with all of its material particles and forces and laws - is an expression of spirit. Spirituality isn't often thought of in an ‘explanatory’ context.

Most people believe that it’s the role of science to explain how the world works. But the simple notion that there is a fundamental spirit which is ever-present and in everything has great explanatory power.