Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Synopsis

The Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa calls attention to the commonest pitfall to which every aspirant on the spiritual path falls prey: what he calls spiritual materialism. "The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use," he says, "even spirituality." The universal tendency is to see spirituality as a process of self-improvement—the impulse to develop and refine the ego when the ego is, by nature, essentially empty.