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Many 'spiritual teachings' are ascetic: they ask us to draw our interest away from the world, imply that poverty is a sign of holiness, talk about destroying the 'ego', make us indifferent to joy and sorrow, praise a kind of holy 'calm' above all. This is kind if summed-up in the image of the voluptuous woman as enemy of spirituality: the Whore of Babylon etc.
Yet, through the millennia, people have carried on enjoying beautiful clothes, love-making, objects d'art and all sensual things. However, we seem to live in a world of extreme materialism: a world of hoarding without beauty, of greed without the ability to enjoy.
Mostly, our cultural thinking splits into religious-ascetic and the heedlessly materialistic. Or that's how it looks at first. But, are we really 'materialists'; do we live in an overpoweringly sensual world? The answer is clear: especially in the traditionally Protestant cultures of England and America, we live in a world of fantasy, of ciphers.
The most blatant sign of this is, of course, the rule of money, on its way to becoming pure data. Materially-speaking, we are on our way to becoming a mere bank-account. Also, the profound ugliness of our art and architecture, and the fact that its partisans (unlike the public at large) no longer have any concept of art or beauty. It is seldom challenged that art should be conceptual, should 'say something' (however stupid). Likewise, the fashion-world seems more intent on 'saying something' than on beauty.
No, we live in a world of ciphers, maintained by our 'heads'; a world of 'data'.
The most poignant illustration of this is the ruining of sex in the media. Anyone of sensitivity finds the increasingly-blatant pornography which advertising rubs in our face as profoundly unerotic as could be. This is because it is so blatantly external: breasts, legs, revealing garments, panting, formulaic orgasms. Looking at the media's understanding of sex, it would be easy to think that a malicious, sci-fi computer with no understanding of love, but a desire to enslave humans, was churning out cliched images to beat us into submission, and make us want want want... to pay pay pay.
Pictures of food instead of food; sanitisation instead of mucky reality. Ciphers.
We need an antidote to this mechanical-materialism. But not asceticism, which is after all a colluder in it, if it springs from the hate of life. The only answer is the true materialism. And this is the real impetus of feminism and ecology.
Unfortunately, it's not so easy. Many people just drown in insane sensualism, which is always forced (your body knows when to stop), or create fantasies of a 'benevolent mother', as if all were well with the world; or become fake-tantrists, infecting their minds with their ill, commercially-produced lusts.
The rock-bottom question is this: is there a 'spiritual way' which doesn't have an ultimately forced, ascetic effect? Apparently not: we have to make some kind of effort. Yet, this effort could be artistic.
The key is: the emotions. The emotions are the seat of magic, that element which is traditionally coerced and manipulated in the schools of magic, where the emotional realm of magic and imagination degenerates into technique.
Occultism in our time puts great emphasis on the emotions, and the less conscious parts of our being, on humanity's relationship to nature... indeed, on the inner child and the less rational, more emotional parts in general. For they are our life, and it will not do to exploit them for the purposes of 'magic'.
Of course, this is only part of it; the totally-sensual life is hopeless. It is in any case impossible, as life itself wakes us up and makes us think of mortality and higher things.
To understand the relationship between the emotions and their overall role in human spiritual and cultural life is the unsolved enigma of Western civilisation.