The Canon / Living / Buddhism
Living · 1973
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
Tibetan YogasCutting Through Spiritual Materialism names and diagnoses a now-essential concept: the ego's habit of co-opting spiritual practice, attainments, and insights as new possessions. Its central claim is that collecting experiences, credentials, and states is merely another form of acquisitiveness that fortifies the very self-image practice is meant to dissolve.
Against this, the book teaches a path of fearless, unadorned awareness, a "basic sanity" that refuses to use spirituality as comfort or self-enhancement. The argument turns spiritual ambition back on itself, exposing how the longing for elevated states becomes the subtlest trap.
Drawn from Tibetan Kagyu and Nyingma transmission, the work functions as an internal critic within its tradition. Its warning that wanting spiritual experience to deliver acquisitions is precisely the error provides the sharpest corrective to manifestation, high-vibration, and consciousness-creates-reality teaching, checking the use of inner work to reinforce the ego.
In its words
Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naively. There are numerous sidetracks which lead to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques.
According to the Buddhist tradition, the spiritual path is the process of cutting through our confusion, of uncovering the awakened state of mind. When the awakened state of mind is crowded in by ego and its attendant paranoia, it takes on the character of an underlying instinct.
The point of meditation is not merely to be an honest or good person in the conventional sense, trying only to maintain our security. We must begin to become compassionate and wise in the fundamental sense, open and relating to the world as it is.
The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.
It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego.
The ideas it carries
Practices it teaches
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism — the self-honesty check
This is Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's single most influential teaching, and the reason he is the indispensable internal critic of the entire mind-power lineage.
Lineage
The author
Chogyam Trungpa RinpocheSpiritual materialism critique; basic sanity
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