Materialism exists in many forms. Let me first give you a description of what I mean with materialism. Materialism is a view or way of life that denies or is ignorant of the reality of the spiritual world. This is a broad definition.
Some major forms of materialist views or ways of life are: most forms of social science and technology, the major portion of the money-making world, the ideology and practice of communist systems. I only have mentioned here some very apparent and recently known examples of materialism. In the past there have been many philosophers with a materialist view of life. In the present there are many people who practice a life without spiritual content, even though they often adhere to religious organizations.
How did materialism come about? When you believe that the spiritual world is a reality, that the Creator exist, that spiritual values are the higher ones in life, then how can it be that so many people are not aware of the spiritual reality? I have done much research into this question and came to a few conclusions which I want to present to you.
The first conclusion is made from the viewpoint of the spiritual development of the individual people. We can often observe this in the life of individuals, but what takes place in the present did also happen to many people in the past. Many children are still quite much aware of the reality of the spiritual world. They see spirits, sense spiritual changes. Of course, they usually don’t really know that what they experience is spiritual.
When children grow up on Earth, they often lose this ability to relate to the spiritual world. How does this happen? Children can come under the influence of the world around them that doesn’t believe in the spiritual reality. But there also is another aspect to this. In a normal spiritual development, we have to learn to deal with the spiritual reality. The spiritual reality can be confusing. There exist many entities there that want to control people and often try to give us wrong ideas. When you are having spiritual experiences which are confusing and disturbing, you naturally tend to shut yourself off for this. When someone cannot deal with the spiritual reality in a meaningful and progressive way, then a logical response is to shut off for it.
Usually the confusing about the spiritual reality begins when people let themselves be tempted by materialist values. To get dominated by physical desires and to get first confused and then ignorant to the spiritual reality usually go hand in hand.
Something like this has happened too many of our ancestors. They could not deal with the spiritual reality in an orderly and beneficial manner and they began to deny the spiritual reality and focus on the material world instead. They also understood the world in a materialist manner and their ideas grew into philosophies and traditions which they passed on to their children.
The fall from being spiritually open to becoming more physically oriented is something I have often observed in the lives of people around me. It is a very tragic and painful development, usually not experienced as such by the victims themselves, but when seen from the viewpoint of a mentor who is going to advise someone to develop spiritually.
The other viewpoint to understand how materialism developed is from the viewpoint of the spiritual world. Think of the practice of communism or that of materialism powers in the past such as the Roman Empire. In such kind of political systems there always is a leader or sometimes a group of leaders which dictatorial powers over the people. People with a spiritual view on life are free people. They have love for others and respect the individuality of each other person. Such kind of people cannot be easily controlled from above said powers. Materialist political systems have been set up from the spiritual world. Although they externally profess a materialist ideology, at the centre of such power structure the leaders are controlled from the spiritual world. These spiritual forces are tying to get power over the world and they use dictatorial leaders to reach their goals. In the ideology supporting such a materialist reign, God is denied and in sense even the real spiritual rulers behind the scene are denied as well.
Materialism always is coming out from spiritual realms that deny God, deny the essence of love, deny the individual divine value of each person. Also many forms of today’s world religions have degraded to a kind of materialism. Even though many adherers of such religions speak about God, they don’t feel God as a reality in their lives. The word “God” is just a term in their philosophical concept of the world. When religion degrades to this level, political leaders belonging to such religions might become similar in thinking and practice as leaders in materialist and aggressive empires of past and present. The human race is currently surpassing these ideas of being materialism as the Golden Age approaches. Consciousness is shifting in a new direction. We are going to see the ideology focus on spiritual essence once again as if we're being born again in to the childhood frame of mind.