Sending Intentions to the Universe, or Changing the World?

Young comrades: that questioning spark in your eyes—determined not only to understand the world but also to change it—is the greatest power organizing our faith in the future.

We are here today to smash to pieces an insidious ideological encirclement you frequently encounter in university lecture halls, culture centers, or in the grip of social media algorithms. We will see that the "respectable" philosophies produced on the comfortable chairs of bourgeois academia and the "energy" marketing that appears in Instagram feeds are in fact fed by the same epistemological rot. Arming ourselves with that irreconcilable philosophical line Lenin fought for in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, we are splitting this mystical fog curtain of the modern world with the scalpel of dialectical materialism. If you are ready, let us take our places on the front.

Mental Clarity Is a Philosophical Front: An Epistemology Guide for Young Communists

Young comrades: capitalism's greatest success is to take from the masses it exploits the tools for correctly grasping the world. A mass whose consciousness has been muddied, whose bond with objective reality has been cut, begins to sanctify its own chains. Precisely for this reason epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) is for us not an abstract intellectual hobby to be consumed in study rooms, but a philosophical barricade rising in the middle of class struggle itself.

In Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Friedrich Engels posed philosophy's great basic question with clarity: What is the relation of spirit to nature, of thought to being? Which comes first? Does being determine consciousness, or does consciousness determine being?

No grey, middle-of-the-road, or conciliatory answer can be given to this question. The history of philosophy has been divided into two irreconcilable camps by the clear answers given to this question: Materialism and Idealism. Every bourgeois current that has until today tried to find a "third way" between these two camps, to build a bridge, has in the end sunk into the swamp of idealism.

The ruling class's academics and culture industry present classical idealism—stretching from Plato to Hegel—as a "respectable, systematic, and rational" intellectual summit, while belittling spiritualism (spiritism, mystical currents) in the street or on social media as "incoherent nonsense." Their aim is clear: to conceal the historical and class sins of idealism, to whitewash it.

Yet as Marxist philosophers our task is to expose this artificial distinction. Spiritualism is not idealism's cast-out stepchild; it is its direct product, reformatted in the language of popular culture and put on the market by late capitalism. Their epistemological roots are the same: both make matter dependent on consciousness, the objective world dependent on subjective perception. Against dialectics, both stand on the same reactionary front that condemns humanity to ignorance and fatalism.

From Bogdanov to Today: Mystical Escapes of Periods of Defeat

That this spiritual wave is so widespread among youth today is no historical accident. The historical-materialist method teaches us that in periods of social and political retreat, mysticism always rises again.

After the 1905 Russian Revolution was drowned in blood, a great wave of despair spread even in Bolshevik ranks. Figures such as Aleksandr Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky attempted to fuse Marxism with empirio-criticism and with a mystical sauce they called "God-building." They argued that rational science was not enough for socialism to reach the masses, and that a religious/spiritual enthusiasm had to be added to it.

Lenin saw this danger and, setting aside the party's everyday political work, shut himself in libraries for months. The result was the philosophical masterpiece Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. There, while ruthlessly criticizing Bogdanov and his circle, Lenin delivered this immortal warning:

"The smallest step back from materialism, every tiny concession that treats consciousness as independent of matter, inevitably flings you into the lap of fideism (that is, religious/mystical belief wearing a mask of scientificity)."

Those quantum sophistries, energy camps, and astrology shelters that youth face today in Turkey and the world are the twenty-first-century version of Bogdanovism. The heavy futurelessness and defeat psychology created by neoliberalism try to keep youth from changing the objective world and imprison them in an imaginary inner universe.

Ilyenkov and the Material Roots of the "Ideal"

Modern spiritualists and classical idealists frequently take refuge in this argument: "What about our thoughts, our values, our sense of justice? If these are not material, do they not come from a spiritual dimension?"

The strongest historical answer to this question was given by Evald Ilyenkov, genius of Soviet philosophy. In his work The Dialectics of the Ideal, Ilyenkov tore the concept of the ideal from the hands of the mystics. For Ilyenkov the "ideal" (that is, our thoughts, concepts, consciousness) is not a cosmic energy descending from the sky or a spiritual substance.

The ideal is the trace left in the material world by human labor and social practice.

A table is not merely a piece of wood (matter); it is the form of that wood transformed by human labor toward a social purpose (the embodiment of the ideal). Therefore the concepts in our minds are not frequencies of a universal spirit, but the reflection in our brains of humanity's thousands of years of collective productive practice. Spiritualism steals this magnificent creative power of human labor from the human and transfers it to "cosmic consciousness." This is epistemological theft in the full sense, and Marxist youth are obliged to expose this theft.

Lenin's Theory of Reflection: Consciousness Does Not Create the World; It Reflects the World

The basic claim of mystical currents (and of their philosophical ancestor, Berkeleian subjective idealism) is this: "Reality is your perception; whatever you believe with your heart is reality." That is, consciousness creates matter. The Theory of Reflection that Lenin gave to epistemology uproots this sophistry. Lenin established with clarity that:

• The material world exists objectively, independently of human consciousness. Even if we did not exist, the stars would continue to turn, atoms to move, and rivers to flow.

• Consciousness is a reflection of objective realities in the human brain. Our sensations and perceptions are instantaneous photographs that the external world forms in our brains.

• Reflection is not like a passive mirror, but an active process shaped inside practice. As the human changes the world, they reflect it more correctly and more deeply.

In this context, claims such as "drawing money from the quantum field by the power of thought" or "beating cancer by positive thinking" are the exact opposite of the theory of reflection. They are rituals of witchcraft claiming that the reflection in our brains (thought) can directly control the object reflected (matter). Reality moves not by what you feel about it, but by its own objective, dialectical laws.

Neoliberalism's New Opium: Yoga and Breath Camps in Turkey

In Maxim Gorky's immortal work Mother, we read that workers crushed under the heavy exploitation of Tsarist Russia, after going to church on Sundays and confessing their sins, threw themselves into taverns in the evenings and tried to forget that week's savage exploitation by drinking until they passed out. The ruling class of that period used traditional religion and alcohol as opiums to anesthetize the working class's anger and exhaustion.

So what has changed today, in the mid-2020s, in Turkey's metropolises? Where is the educated young generation directed—those exploited 50–60 hours a week in plaza offices, technoparks, advertising agencies, or the precarious service sector; left breathless in the grip of high inflation, the housing crisis, and futurelessness? They throw themselves into "yoga, breath, purification, and retreat camps" organized in isolated villages of the Aegean and the Mediterranean.

It is precisely at this point that we must bring dialectical materialism's class and epistemological tools of analysis into play: These camps and the spiritual discourses marketed in them are the most insidious, most organized industry of alienation produced by late capitalism and neoliberalism.

The conservative discourses of traditional religions can no longer produce consent among the secular, modern, and educated youth of the big cities. The ruling class has seen this vacuum very well and invented a brand-new opium that adapts flawlessly to neoliberalism's spirit—"individualist, secular, yet mystical." The name of this opium is spiritualism, and its reflection in Turkey is pure market cunning.

The Individualization of Systemic Guilt and "Reification"

The concept of reification that Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács deepened in History and Class Consciousness recounts how, under capitalism, human relations and social problems are turned into relations among things and inverted. Exactly this is applied in these spiritual camps: everything social and material is torn from its objective context by being turned into a psychological and cosmic "thing."

These practices tell youth this ideological lie:

"The cause of your poverty, unemployment, inability to make it to the end of the month, or the heavy depression you live is not the capitalist order of exploitation, your boss's greed for profit, or the economic crisis in the country; it is your low frequency, your closed chakras, your inability to exit scarcity consciousness, or your failure to breathe correctly."

This is the complete transfer of guilt from the system onto the individual's shoulders. If you are exploited and unhappy, the guilty party is not the bourgeoisie but your "inadequate inner journey." Thus the Marxist base–superstructure relation is completely inverted. The material world (the base) is declared the slave of an imaginary cosmic energy (the superstructure). Young comrades: this is subjective idealism in its most wretched form.

Capital's Absurd Irony: Purchased "Breath"

Looked at with a historical-materialist eye, the contradiction on the table is almost tragicomic. Capitalism, in plazas, factories, and offices, literally "cuts the breath" of youth. It condemns them to burnout syndrome and drags them into anxiety crises. Then the same capitalism demands as a weekend camp fee the equivalent of a worker's monthly wage and says: "We will teach you how to breathe correctly."

Even breathing—humanity's most basic biological activity—has been commodified. The bourgeoisie that holds ownership of the means of production has now also turned the human's control over their own body and their peace into a marketing object. These camps are centers for cooling the just, transformative, and destructive social anger that the exploited masses feel toward the system. Youth who ought to get angry, unionize, organize, and march to the barricades are forced to sit on mats, close their eyes, and send positive messages to the universe. A youth domesticated, anesthetized, and passivized by the lie of "inner peace" is far safer for capital than eyes that stare hard.

Soviet Psychology and Collective Labor vs. Spiritual Individualism

Against this danger we must recall the line pointed to by Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky and philosopher Evald Ilyenkov. The Soviet scientific tradition shows us that human consciousness and psychological health cannot be healed alone, by burning incense in an isolated room or at a camp. The human is a social being, and mental clarity can be built only inside an unalienated practice of collective labor and social solidarity.

The modern yoga and breath industry, by contrast, sanctifies hyper-individualism. The motto "Love yourself first, protect only your own energy, stay away from toxic people" is nothing but bourgeois morality that undermines class solidarity. The "toxic person" they mean is your class sibling who seeks their rights, complains of the order, and suffers! Through these camps neoliberalism feeds youth selfishness, banality, and closing their eyes to social pains as "enlightenment." Real enlightenment and mental relief are not in those false oases capital sells us; they are in organized struggle—where you grasp the material causes of exploitation and, standing shoulder to shoulder with your class siblings, show the will to change this order.

Guru Empires and Commodified Healing: Osho, Reiki, and Ayurveda

Young comrades: let us recall the concept of commodity fetishism that Karl Marx worked stitch by stitch in that famous first chapter of Volume One of Capital. Under capitalism, commodities cease to be merely objects that meet human needs; they appear as mysterious, mystical, and almost animated social powers. The modern spiritual industry is the most extreme, most abstracted stage of commodity fetishism. In this market it is no longer only physical objects that are packaged and lined up on shelves as exchange values; abstract concepts such as "enlightenment," "spiritual purification," "cosmic healing," and "peace" are packaged and lined up as exchange values directly.

Capitalism's greatest genius is to attempt to treat the existential crises, anxiety, and rot it itself creates with the mystical commodities it itself produces. When we pass the gurus, Reiki masters, and Ayurveda experts placed in popular culture's shop window through the filter of historical materialism, what confronts us is not "enlightenment" but a vast model of capital accumulation and an epistemological regression.

Osho and the Mystical Synthesis of Bourgeois Individualism

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho), turned into a global phenomenon from the beginning of the twenty-first century, is a prototypical belief entrepreneur who took Eastern mysticism and married it to the West's selfish, proprietary, and hedonistic bourgeois morality. Young comrades: do not be deceived by that false libertarian language Osho constructed in his texts and speeches. While Osho told the masses an egoist fairy tale of "self-realization," in the background he built a vast financial empire woven with armed guards in the Oregon deserts, immigration frauds, and crime networks reaching as far as bioterror attacks.

Epistemologically, Osho's philosophy is a radical provocation of subjective idealism. It preaches that the human should completely ignore the material and social reality outside themselves and focus only on their own inner desires and instantaneous experiences. In his philosophy, concepts such as class struggle, organization, or social justice are characterized as "traps of the ego" and rendered insignificant.

The 93 Rolls-Royces Osho accumulated in his garage are not a personal eccentricity or, as his disciples claim, "a show staged to demonstrate the meaninglessness of materialism." Those cars are the material basis of the philosophy he preached! Osho sold wealthy bourgeois this comfortable ease of conscience: "You can live as rich, exploitative, and luxurious as you like, and without carrying any social responsibility you can still reach the highest level of spiritual enlightenment." This is a perfect philosophical opium produced for the exploiting class.

Reiki, Ayurveda, and Epistemological Regression (Obscurantism)

To understand the present popularity of currents such as Reiki (transmission of universal life energy) and Ayurveda (the ancient Indian medical system), we must look at the structural crisis of the bourgeois health system. As capitalism liquidates the public health system and turns medicine into a profit door for pharmaceutical monopolies, broad masses have become unable to reach quality healthcare and have been driven into helplessness and alienation. On this ground of helplessness, spiritual charlatanries find a magnificent market under the name of "alternative healing."

The danger here is not only economic; it is also deeply epistemological. These currents tear humanity from science's rational and dialectical development and fling it back into a substantialist and animist premodern worldview in which supernatural powers reign.

• The Reiki Sophistry: It completely rejects the material, biological, and social causes of diseases. It ties every kind of illness—from cancer to depression—to the blockage of an invisible and unmeasurable cosmic energy ($Ki$ or $Prana$) in the body. Healing is then sought through a "tuned" master's hands moving over the patient (that is, through a witchcraft ritual with no material basis).

• The Commodification of Ayurveda: It takes some beneficial herbal practices that ancient peoples found through trial and error in historical processes and turns them into an elementary mysticism with universal element theories. While modern medicine examines the human body as a constantly changing material system in the dialectical interaction of organs and cells, Ayurveda divides the human into static "types" (Doshas) and mystifies them through cosmic balances.

In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin decoded how uncertainties and crises in the natural sciences were presented by idealists as the "disappearance of matter" and the "beginning of miracles." Today the defenders of Reiki and Ayurveda do exactly this. Taking as opportunity the areas medicine has not yet solved or the devastation created by the capitalist health system, they put dogma in the place of science and incense in the place of the laboratory.

The Soviet Health Tradition and the Path of Enlightenment

Young comrades: against this reactionary wave of mysticism we have a magnificent historical legacy in our hands: the Soviet model of medicine and public health. The Soviet health system founded after the October Revolution of 1917 under People's Commissar of Health Nikolai Semashko was the first in the world to seat healthcare entirely on a free, public, and scientific foundation.

In the early Soviet period an unrelenting cultural and scientific war was opened against obscurantist (anti-knowledge) practices such as religion-based healing, witchcraft, and faith-healing that had taken root for centuries in villages and the provinces. Soviet power sent to the villages not spiritual gurus but mobile laboratories, cinema wagons, modern medical doctors, and hygiene specialists. The masses were told in a dialectical-materialist language that diseases stemmed not from "bad energies" or "sins," but from bacteria, viruses, bad working conditions, and poverty.

That youth sitting in university seats and claiming to be enlightened seek healing in Reiki sessions or try to find existential prescriptions in Osho's books shows the dimensions of the intellectual rot capitalism has created. The human's physiological and psychological wholeness is not the mysterious dance of mystical substances; it is the dialectical result of evolutionary, biological, and social processes. Our task is to expose the charlatanry that seeks healing in cosmic energies, and to defend with resolve the material ground of science, medicine, and social struggles.

The Plunder of Science: Astrology and "Quantum" Charlatanry

Young comrades: Marxist epistemology's hardest war is fought not against open reactionary attacks coming from the front, but against the insidious bourgeois ideology that steals science's own concepts and tries to rot it from within. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx recounted how the natural sciences would in time integrate with the science of the human, and that the material base must also be the base of science. Today late capitalism, by manipulating the historical trust the masses feel toward science, puts the most primitive mystical sophistries on the market in "scientific" packaging.

The two fronts where this ideological plunder is lived most savagely are astrology and quantum mysticism. The bourgeois culture industry, by waging conceptual terror in these fields, tries to paralyze youth's capacity for rational thought.

The Dialectics of Celestial Bodies vs. Bourgeois Fatalism: Astronomy and Astrology

The fight between astronomy and astrology is not merely a clash of two different disciplines; it is the irreconcilable contradiction of materialism with the most primitive cosmic idealism.

• Astronomy examines the objective, measurable, and dialectical motion of matter, galaxies, stars, and atoms. It establishes that the universe is a vast material reality independent of the human.

• Astrology, by contrast, is a modern delirium of that old theological arrogance that puts the human at the center of the universe. It claims that the position of gas giants and star clusters trillions of kilometers away determines how a young person's job interview will go, their love life, or their character traits.

Epistemologically, astrology completely destroys real cause-and-effect relations in the material world. The causality it puts forward is false. No material, physical, or dialectical bond can be established between Mercury's retrograde motion and your computer breaking.

Class Function: Astrology produces a fatalist submission that takes youth out of being historical subjects and turns them into slaves of the stars. If a young comrade of ours, condemned to futurelessness, bills their unemployment not to the political power and the capitalists but to the Saturn cycle, the bourgeoisie has reached its aim. Astrological charts are modern shackles that prevent the formation of class consciousness.

Modern Physics and "Quantum" Charlatanry in Lenin's Analysis

Today the greatest charlatanry in the spiritual market is without doubt the plunder of the concept of "quantum." Personal-development gurus, energy experts, and healers take the mathematical theories that genius physicists such as Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, or Erwin Schrödinger built to explain the behavior of subatomic particles and turn them into nonsense such as "Create your reality with your mind, ask the universe for money, send positive frequencies to the quantum field."

To crack the epistemological code of this scandal we must return to Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. When the electron was discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, the bourgeois philosophers and physicists of the period panicked and cried: "Matter has disappeared! Only energy remains! So materialism has collapsed!" Lenin gave them this slap of an answer:

"What disappeared with the discovery of the electron is not matter; what disappeared is the limit of what we knew about the limits of matter. Matter is an epistemological category expressing objective reality that exists independently of human consciousness and that is given to us through our sensations."

What quantum mysticism does today is the twenty-first-century version of the "Machism" and subjective idealism that Lenin smashed to pieces in that period. By manipulating the probabilities and observer effect seen in the behavior of subatomic particles under the microscope, they claim that objective reality does not actually exist, that everything depends on the observer's (that is, consciousness's) intention. This is reactionary subjective idealism itself—George Berkeley's "To be is to be perceived."

In physics, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle explains with a clear mathematical formula the measurement limit between momentum and position.

This formula is an objective property of material particles in the microcosm; it does not mean, as spiritual merchants claim, "Reality is actually an illusion; whatever you believe becomes so." Uncertainty in a particle's position does not mean you can increase the money in your bank account by the power of thought! Tearing scientific concepts from their context and making them instruments of mystical magic is epistemological ignorance in the full sense and an operation to stupefy the masses.

Epistemological Vigilance Against Reactionism with a Scientific Sauce

Young comrades: bourgeois ideology uses the prestige of science but hates its materialist essence. For science speaks objective laws; dialectics whispers change and revolution. Sophistries such as astrology and quantum mysticism are intellectual traps designed to consume youth's revolutionary energy in unscientific labyrinths.

Our task is to decode this conceptual plunder. We will take quantum physics from the hands of the mystics and return it to the laboratories; we will take the universe from the hands of the astrologers and return it to the observatories. Our mental clarity is our strongest philosophical barricade against this unscientific assault of bourgeois ideology. Real enlightenment is not to sleep with quantum fairy tales, but to see the world and the system in all their nakedness with the sharp light of dialectical materialism!

What Youth Need Is Not Cosmic Light, but Scientific Clarity

Young comrades: those dim, cloudy, and comfortable waters that mysticism, spiritualism, and idealism place before us cannot emancipate humanity. While they anesthetize our consciousness with fairy tales of "cosmic light," "spiritual purification," and "universal peace," the material world continues to exist in all its ruthlessness—with its class exploitation, imperialist wars, and shattering reality. Those who close their eyes and send intentions to the universe find themselves, when they open their eyes, again among the gears of the same capitalist wheel.

Real enlightenment is not to sleep with spiritual illusions that hide the world behind mystical fogs; it is to see the world and the system in all their nakedness with the sharp light of dialectical and historical materialism, to grasp them, and to act in order to change them. What youth need is not the cosmic light of false oases, but the clarity of reason and science.

Radical Curiosity: Grasping Matters at the Root

While marketing spiritual currents, the bourgeois culture industry frequently abuses concepts such as "being curious," "being open-minded," or "seeking beyond the visible." By this means they steal youth's magnificent energy of search and discovery. Yet the curiosity these currents offer is false; it pushes the human into laziness and ready-made dogmas. Looking at star charts for character analysis or thinking about the frequency of chakras is not deep curiosity; it is an intellectual laziness fleeing the complexity of the objective world.

Engrave Karl Marx's immortal words in your mind like a manifesto:

"To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for the human, the root is the human themselves."

Real and revolutionary curiosity must be radical. It requires questioning the material world, nature, and society at the root.

• Question: Ask why you are burned out in a plaza not by looking at the position of the stars, but by looking at surplus-value exploitation and relations of production.

• Be Curious: Burn with desire to learn how nature works, the mathematical reality of quantum mechanics, the evolutionary dialectics of biology—not from the fabricated interpretations of spiritual charlatans, but from the objective data of laboratories, articles, and science.

Real open-mindedness is not believing every sophistry; it is kneeling before no dogma until truth is reached, doubting relentlessly, and researching.

Dialectical Method Against Bourgeois Positivism

Here we must underline a very critical philosophical distinction: our call to scientificity is not a call to the dry, soulless, and mechanical positivism of bourgeois academia that sees the world as consisting only of statistics and static data. Our call is to dialectical-materialist scientificity that grasps the world in constant motion, contradiction, and transformation.

A mechanical understanding of science can alienate the masses and push them into the lap of spiritual charlatans. Yet the dialectical method places science at the very center of life. Every new discovery in the natural sciences—from the mysteries of subatomic particles to the formation of galaxies, from the decoding of genetic codes to the secrets of the human brain—shows us what a magnificent, dynamic, and as-yet-undiscovered material richness the universe is. Scientific clarity does not tear the human from the universe; on the contrary, it proves that they are nature's most conscious material part—the only one that can change the world.

Taking the Stars Back from the Fortune-Tellers: Efremov's Cosmic Vision

The great Soviet scientist and science-fiction writer Ivan Efremov, in that magnificent work Andromeda Nebula, recounts the humanity of a communist future in which classes have disappeared and science and collective labor reign. In that future people do not look at the stars to read fortunes or destinies; they look at the stars as new material frontiers that human reason and labor will reach, as new laws of nature to be discovered. Efremov's heroes do not seek help from cosmic energies; they transform the universe through collective practice and scientific clarity.

This, young comrades, is our horizon! We must cleanse the sky of the lies of astrologers, and the earth of the lies of gurus and healers. We will take the stars back from the fortune-tellers, quantum physics from the charlatans.

Last Word on the Philosophical Barricade: Doubt and Act!

Even in the party's hardest years of defeat, Lenin never gave up fighting on the frontmost line of science and philosophy. As young communists, your task too is to be intellectual partisans against this mystical assault of bourgeois ideology.

Read, research, radically doubt every ready-made prescription, every spiritual consolation the bourgeois system offers you. Reject sending positive messages to the universe and seeking a passive inner peace on mats. Real peace and mental clarity are in organized praxis—where you grasp the material causes of exploitation, burn the fog curtain of ignorance with the torch of science, and rise to your feet shoulder to shoulder with your class siblings to change this obsolete order.

Strengthen your mental infrastructure with Marxism's scientific methodology. Do not abandon the intellectual front line; never stray from the compass of science and dialectical analysis!