My Spiritual Evolution

Materialism, the theory that only matter exists, emerged around 2,500 years ago in India and Greece, partly as a response to religious dogmatism. Over the past two centuries, this relatively new worldview has itself become dogmatic, increasingly dismissing the older spiritual ontologies – which assert the existence of an immaterial reality that is more fundamental than the material one – as superstitious and unscientific.

I was born into American materialism in the 1980s. My Taiwanese parents weren’t religious or openly spiritual. When I was three, strapped into a child seat in my parents’ car, I repeatedly cried, ‘I don’t want to die!’ after my dad braked hard to avert an accident. At three, I seem to view death as a painful transition to a lonely oblivion – a belief I’d likely absorbed from TV. My parents didn’t mention death to me until I was six, when my mom’s dad died.

My mom and I flew to Taiwan for the funeral. A large black moth, which had appeared the day my grandfather died, was resting on his coffin above his head. It stayed there for seven days, until the burial, when I carried the then-dead moth in a box to the cemetery. In my thirties, my mom told me her dad had worshiped the Daoist deity Xuánwǔ, and that the moth was a rare species known to gather at the deity’s temple every year around the deity’s birthday. ‘There are many supernatural things we cannot explain,’ said my mom in an email about this.

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