Jeff Russell

That's a good point on the baggage from the religion of progress. I remember when I first read JMG's "The Next 10 Billion Years", I found the points he made about it intellectually compelling, but emotionally depressing. As you said, it took a while to let go of the idea that material life is steadily getting better, and admitting otherwise would be the admission of our failure as a species. For me, it was made a lot easier when I found other things (like spiritual and religious practice) that gave me the sense of purpose I was looking for in much stronger doses and in a way far less reliant on what society/politics/technology could make happen.

That's also interesting about "immature" souls, I hadn't thought about that consciously while writing. Instead, my goal was to be as helpful as I could to as wide a range of "willing to try something new" as I could manage. Obviously, there will be large swathes of folks who don't even bother with these kinds of existential questions (or not consciously, anyway), lots who are comfortable with more mainstream answers, and some amount who are proudly secure in skeptical materialism.

Your contention that skeptical materialism might be what folks with a moderately developed mental sheath find their way into would also jive with the idea of the "initiation of the nadir", which I think comes from Fortune. The idea is that a soul has to get all the way down to the nadir of the material plane in its involution before it can begin its evolution back up. Adamantly believing that the material world is all there is and closing yourself off to what the wider cosmos might offer sounds like it would be one way to qualify for that.