This is the second conversation in the Mystery and Materialism series between myself and Eoin. He kicks things off by summing up his position from the last chat as stating a case for the importance of spirituality despite how uncool it is. My angle was to try to dispel existing antagonisms between spiritualism and materialism, despite the inherent ones existing because of traditional and new-age religions. In the previous episode I discussed spirituality in terms of human essence. Eoin advances here his explanation of spirituality as mystery with the illustration of water, gas and ice, all of which are different states of H2O. While these are distinct from one another, as H2O they experience a fourth distinction but one we do not so much. It remains all-encompassing despite the various states we find it in, as god might be to body, mind and spirit. Eoin situates this in the material by claiming we are doing ourselves a disservice by neglecting spirit, blocking our access to more free creativity, for instance, through our society’s heavy emphasis on body and mind. He raises the case of emotions, and how a greater recognition and understanding of them has led to the improvement in the human experience. The neglected field of spirit, he argues, could develop similarly, but is, and has been, too easily exploited and corrupted. I equate this tendency with the outsourcing of a tool or service, whereby traditionally we let priests lead heavily in our spirituality. Since then this arrangement has been in decline with no real uptake in a robust alternative, one shoddy alternative being new-age religions, and then their subsequent commodification. I then suggest that the happiness industry is a further cynical development of these principles, leading us toward even further individuated consumer-based trends, not only making up for this historic deficit, but also the material social deficit due to our increasing precarity under late-stage capitalism. Eoin contextualizes the need for an authentic spirituality, beyond these existing instances, with the principle of mystery – of death and loss and other challenges. He argues that attending to one’s spirit helps rationalize the outcomes of these moments, helping make sense of them in a bigger-picture sense, where a sort of poetry to the chaos or meaninglessness of life may come to be recognized. I posit the material context alongside this by recalling from the previous chat the idea that capitalism fundamentally determines social relations, and that its impact is negative regardless of one’s class. This, to my mind, eroded our spirit, but Eoin highlighted this was human spirit, and posited mystery as something that remained, which begged a further spiritual attention. In response to this I argue for an attention to the human spirit alone, that surely meaning through social relations is sufficient for life, that on one’s death bed, there could be satisfaction in having had fruitful social relations. I recognize the impact of mystery, but still feels that if an individual is doing their best in terms of social relations and bringing meaning to their life and attending to how they might feel about themselves on their death bed, then mystery doesn’t need to come to bare so much. Eoin recognizes the death-bed analogy as being a sufficient way to attend to the spirit, but I remind him that its attending to the human spirit, something, still, that can be radically rectified not so much through attention to spirit, but by turning back the capitalist mode of production. I extend the emphasis then by stating that if I found myself sufficient in the social and material (material because that is barrier to sufficiency in the social), then I would be defiant to ‘god’, whatever form it took; that in terms of any spiritual laws or tendencies we might recognize, as long as that socio-material base was met, they would not matter. Eoin’s response is that its still basically a new field, and reverts back to the advances in recognizing the importance of emotionality, arguing that more exploration down this line will lead to better outcomes and understandings of the human condition. Finally I suggest possibly that both post-capitalist socialization and the field of spirituality yet to be explored might amount to the same thing. Eoin emphasizes he’s not talking about a need to recognize ‘god’, but the field of spirituality, in which those social relations fall. To be continued…