Material man

When the human soul draws back from the material things of the world and tries to go into deeper things; when man conquers his spirit which has somehow become concretized and materialized, and he understands that he is thereby going to be destroyed and to be reduced almost into mere matter, and turns his face away from matter — then begins renunciation, then begins real spiritual growth.
The human soul has to understand and realize that it has been his spirit, and not matter, which will go on through eternity, and that this conjunction of it with matter is and can be only for a time. You will learn the lesson of renunciation through your own experience of nature. Man as a sentient being has the harshest of all renunciations to go through, as he has to realize from the very first that the whole of this solid-looking nature is all an illusion. He has to understand that all this is a kind of manifestation of power in nature belonging to the soul. He has to know from the very start that all knowledge and all experience are in the soul and not in the intellect. So he has at once and by the sheer force of rational reasoning let go, he lets them vanish and tries to stand alone!Mythology or spirituality only illuminate the way and remove distortions from the mind and facilitate valid perceptions.We have to traverse the path and sift through the dense and convoluted explanations to arrive at what is called the shift in consciousness from selfishness and separation to positive and goodness, not out of fear, but because we desire it from our heart.True love of nature no longer exists because the artisan level of reality is gone forever. It is a virtual world of Xerox symbols, virtual landscapes, soulless streets of tall glass buildings, a solitary wild flower which survived the onslaught sways merrily, quite unsure of its place in the visual diary of everyday life in a metro