The difference between the material and the spiritual world

The vedic scriptures tell us there is a spiritual world and a material world. We currently live in the material world, which is about as big as one quarter of the whole creation, the rest or three quarters of the whole creation is made up of the spiritual world.

That is the main categorization and everything we in the material world know is material, since the spiritual world is unreachable and not understandable for material souls, this means even the heavens and the hells all exist in the material world.

The key difference between the material and the spiritual world is found in the mind-set of the souls living in it, the materialistic souls have the mind-set of serving themselves or maya/illusion and the spiritual souls have the mind set to serve the highest personality of god/the whole creation.

Material = Egoistic/Illusion/False

Spiritual = Altruistic/Reality/True

I set being egoistic here as equal to being in illusion, since you cannot really be egoistic, since the whole creation is a whole thing and the souls are not separated from it. The vedic scriptures often use the metaphor that the material souls are trying to water the leaves  (themselves) of the tree (the whole creation/god) while in reality the roots of the tree (god) have to be watered to achieve the best result. That is why being materialistic is called being in maya/illusion, since ultimatively it does not work. The materialistic world was created by god to give the souls with materialistic wishes the possibility to play gods themselves, even though they are not god. For that god has created the material body with the senses and the soul is forced to serve his own body (himself), even thoug the body is not his true self, again thats why it is called maya/illusion. The living soul cannot escape the fact, that it is always bound and not totally free, in the material world, it serves god and in the material world it serves his senses (maya/illusion). A soul cannot really rule over another soul, that is why the souls have been given material bodies, which they identify as, so the materialistic wishes of ruling over others can be fulfilled. A spiritual soul however has no desire to rule over others or over nature, since it knows its true position in the creation and that everything is owned and controlled by god.

To determine if a person is materialistic one has to watch the mind-set, if the person is not in servitude to god, that person is materialistic and all his actions are also materialistic.

The vedic scriptures recommend to abandon materialistic actions alltogether.