Highlights and snippets from my notes on: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Trungpa, 1973)

What is “ego”?

“Ego” is the “self” or “I” which is conscious of our own existence. To be “ego-centric” or have a “large ego” is to have an exaggerated sense of self-worth, acting in a way which holds oneself in higher importance than others (selfishness).

What is “spiritual materialism”?

“Spiritual materialism” is a distorted view of spirituality where spirituality is used to boost egocentrism; someone who falls into spiritual materialism believes that he/she is developing themselves spiritually, but is actually strengthening their ego through spiritual techniques. This is related to spiritual pride, which is more like self-righteousness under the guise of religion. A simple example is the belief that one is “holier than others”, and thus more important that others.

The movie Idiocracy (2006), featuring a hellscape of stupid people, ultimately serves the ego of the viewer because they set themselves apart from and above the society which exists in the movie – similarly to how David Foster Wallace explains how TV viewers in America view themselves as “above” and not “apart of” mainstream society, while actively participating in its exact culture of TV and consumerism in “E Unibus Pluram”. Idiocracy is commonly referenced when making fun of mainstream society on the internet, while also being extremely ironic to reference, since watching an hour and a half of that movie sets one deeply as a part of the group of mainstream viewers with an interest in cheap, stupid entertainment.

Notes

Contents

0. A Quote to Start
1. Key Points
2. Intro
3. Spiritual Materialism
4. Surrendering
5. The Guru
6. Initiation
7. Self-Deception
8. The Hard Way
9. The Open Way
10. Sense of Humor
11. The Development of Ego
12. The Six Realms
13. The Four Noble Truths
14. The Bodhisattva Path
15. Shunyata
16. Prajna and Compassion
17. Tantra

A Quote

In the book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, the author, Chogyam Trungpa, emphasizes how it becomes easy to study and collect an assortment of philosophies, books, texts and ideas, but difficult to focus on one and develop ourselves by applying its wisdom. Instead, we may find ourselves treating it as simply another object in our collection or bookshelf. He calls such a collection an “antique shop” which becomes a “junk shop” as more and more antiques fill the space; I’m going to call this whole psychological effect “junkyardism”. Trungpa is writing about spirituality, but the main theme resonates well across how we choose to spend our time and energy in general.

He writes,

It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego. This means stepping out of ego’s constant desire for a higher, more spiritual, more transcendental version of knowledge, religion, virtue, judgment, comfort or whatever it is that the particular ego is seeking. One must step out of spiritual materialism. If we do not step out of spiritual materialism, if we in fact practice it, then we may eventually find ourselves possessed of a huge collection of spiritual paths. We may feel these spiritual collections to be very precious. We have studied so much. We may have studied Western philosophy or [Eastern] philosophy, practiced yoga or perhaps have studied under dozens of great masters. We have achieved and we have learned. We believe that we have accumulated a hoard of knowledge. And yet, having gone through all this, there is still something to give up. It is extremely mysterious! How could this happen? Impossible! But unfortunately it is so. Our vast collections of knowledge and experience are just part of ego’s display, part of the grandiose quality of ego. We display them to the world and, in so doing, reassure ourselves that we exist, safe and secure, as “spiritual” people.

But we have simply created a shop, an antique shop. We could be specializing in [Eastern] antiques or medieval Christian antiques or antiques from some other civilization or time, but we are, nonetheless, running a shop. Before we filled our shop with so many things the room was beautiful: white-washed walls and a very simple floor with a bright lamp burning in the ceiling. There was one object of art in the middle of the room and it was beautiful. Everyone who came appreciated its beauty, including ourselves.

But we were not satisfied and we thought, “Since this one object makes my room so beautiful, if I get more antiques, my room will be even more beautiful.” so we began to collect, and the end result was chaos.

We searched the world over for beautiful objects – India, Japan, many different countries. And each time we found an antique, because we were dealing with only one object at a time, we saw it as beautiful and thought it would be beautiful in our shop. But when we brought the object home and put it there, it became just another addition to our junky collection. The beauty of the object did not radiate out any more, because it was surrounded by so many other beautiful things. It did not mean anything anymore. Instead of a room full of beautiful antiques we created a junk shop!

Proper shopping does not entail collecting a lot of information or beauty, but it involves fully appreciating each individual object. This is very important. If you really appreciate an object of beauty, then you completely identify with it and forget yourself. It is like seeing a very interesting, fascinating movie and forgetting that you are the audience. At that moment there is no world: your whole being is that scene of that movie. It is that kind of identification, complete involvement with one thing. Did we actually taste it and chew it and swallow it properly, that one object of beauty, that one spiritual teaching? Or did we merely regard it as a part of our vast and growing collection?

I place so much emphasis on this point because I know that all of us have come to the teachings and practice of meditation not to make a lot of money, but because we genuinely want to learn, want to develop ourselves. But, if we regard knowledge as an antique, as “ancient wisdom” to be collected, then we are on the wrong path.

– Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism pg.15-17, 1973

What Buddhism attempts to teach, in a nutshell:

• Becoming down-to-earth – become more grounded and experience “nowness” (living in the present moment) more regularly
• All you need is your mind – make internal changes to your brain, with the material of the brain (nothing more) for a perspective shift (“removing the obstacles in your head set up by ego”).
• No memorizing antique knowledge or mystical scriptures – the teachings are meant to be applied for a unique personal experience
• No conquering or hierarchical thinking – the idea is to transcend destructive tendencies and let go, in a controlled way, of categorization like hierarchies or form (race, gender, etc.), so that we can experience the naked quality of life without our preconceptions (which are fickle and generally wrong)
• Anti-materialist – working against the spiritual junkyard
• Trusting yourself to be open and not feel the need to defend your ego at every turn

See also my notes on the whole book below.

“Have you even tried being happy?” – Ben

Key Points

Some key points I love:

• Enlightenment is about removing the barriers in your brain to let it shine through, it’s not about external additions to the brain, it’s about real change using the material already there – Buddhist teachings are meant to be experienced personally – enlightenment doesn’t have hierarchies – as you continue along the path, you become more grounded and down to earth.
• Spirituality is not a fight between good/evil, because a battle between “this” and “that” is still just the ego asserting itself and trying to set its territory – involvement in worshipping deity is just ego assertion of bigger/smaller power
• Our main suffering in life is the struggle in maintaining and enhancing our image of ourself, an image which is particularly transient, yet we want it to be solidified, so we constantly grasp at doing so, and it continuously slips out of our reach – this is the struggle of ego – feel like we have to watch ourselves/check ourselves to fit our own mold – meditation allows gaps in this suffering, we can observe our mind patterns and recognize that we are living in a state of paranoia
• We have this confused perspective of duality – we feel like there is someone conscious inside of us, that is separate from the world, when this is not true: we are literally the world itself, there is no separation
• “Spiritual junkyard” can end up forming if we just collect philosophies / studies of texts and never apply them, just let our ego think that we are wise – never working to experience real spirituality is a function of our ego recognizing that doing so would eliminate it, so it’s threatened by this (obviously)
• To be completely open requires trusting yourself – if you really make friends with yourself, you wouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes all the time
• We project our version of things onto what is there in the world, and we become immersed in our world of conceptions and categories. We read into meanings that we created, which the world doesn’t actually have. Our preconceptions about the world are a form of security, and we must drop the need to feel secure in every moment in order to see the world “as it is”, and accept it.

INTRO

• spiritual materialism: distorted view of spirituality wherein the ego gets boosted from undertaken spiritual techniques, instead of the techniques building real spirituality
• enlightenment is not about building an awakened state of mind – it is about using the current material of the mind, not adding something to it – “burning out the confusions which obstruct the awakened state of mind”
• man’s main confusion: “sense of self which seems to him to be continuous and solid” – when thought/event/emotion happens, we feel a sense of someone being conscious of what it happening. We take our confused view as real because we are so engrossed/absorbed in it.
• this sense of self is transitory and discontinuous, but we feel like it is solid, and we struggle to maintain and enhance it.
• “the struggle to maintain the sense of a solid, continuous self is the action of ego”
• “no need to struggle to be free; the absence of struggle is freedom” – Buddahood is this “egoless” state
• enlightenment is not an upwards/hierarchical movement, it is lateral and downwards – it strengthens and deepens the roots of our existence; we come down to earth

SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM

• teachings are not passed down / along as information / like an antique. Teacher uses teachings to inspire next student, student becomes enlightened. It is a real, individual, personal experience which gets passed down.
• You are not trying to replicate/imitate the teacher.
• don’t collect a hoard of knowledge, apply yourself to experience the teaching!
• “spiritual collections are a function of the ego soothing itself/protecting itself” – “look I have so much knowledge / such diversity in my studies of texts, philosophies, ideas, etc.” – but I have never worked to experience spirituality, because that threatens the very existence of the ego – “spiritual junkyard”

SURRENDERING

• opening completely; acknowledging rugged/shocking aspects of our ego
• we may find our own self-hatred as an occupation for our minds, and feel like we lose something/like a piece is being taken from us by surrendering, so we resist (Are people addicted to the entertainment of self-awareness? (see pg140))
• self-evaluation is ego tendency born out of lack of confidence in ourselves – not knowing that we can afford to open
• don’t take refuge in worship of higher power/deities of any kind - this is just our ego assessment of bigger/smaller - surrendering has nothing to do with being elevated or feeling higher/profound, we don’t have to classify ourselves
• “acknowledge our fundamental richness instead of bemoaning the imagined poverty of our existence”

THE GURU

• give up trying to impress the teacher / stop trying to take notes / receive “secret doctrine”, one must go through life experiences, not just theoretical readings
• teachings become a part of you if you experience them
• “impulse of searching for something is, in itself, a hang-up”
• “when we first experience true ordinariness, it is something very extraordinarily ordinary…” eventually this wears away and we can relax seeing things as they are – ordinariness as in being present in real-time without ego’s paranoia / us watching ourselves

INITIATION

• do not try to prove you have joined the “side of right” … give up trying to be something special – viewing enlightenment as something sacred means we have evaluated it, so it will fade away
• commit yourself to opening completely, not creating a mask/facade; drop the idea of securing yourself entirely, don’t want to evaluate at all
• mind is overcrowded with info and defense mechanisms of the ego – when we finally give up struggling to figure out what to think, we have space to make progress
• the fear itself of losing openness/egoless state once we are there is ego itself in action

SELF-DECEPTION

• ego is always trying to achieve spirituality
• viewing enlightenment as external to ourselves will make it not last; do not try to capture the experience, or risk evaluating it and having it disappear
• if we regard the experience as valuable, then it becomes separate from us
• to have the experience now, give up the evaluation of how wonderful it was; drop searching, drop trying to prove yourself
• do not let the mind create the “I” and “this” ie, “I am doing this, I am experiencing this” – eliminate the “I” or “this”, and both fall – “take away the watcher/observer, and the whole structure falls apart” – the bureaucracy of the ego falls
• the watcher is not efficient enough to perform the function of being present – meditation is

THE HARD WAY

• one must be willing to unmask, to stand alone
• do not take on attitude of heroism (forced austerity, etc.)
• do not imitate the spiritual path(s)
• give up hope of receiving something in return
• committing to the spiritual path is painful (for ego)
• “written teachings are always open to the interpretation of ego” – need to experience them
• do not attempt to unravel the past - it just involves us in a struggle in the present – be able to accept the present moment as it is
• “…involving yourself with the heroic way adds layers/skins to your personality because you think you have achieved something… to your surprise, later you realized something else is needed – you have to remove the layers”

THE OPEN WAY

• first experience self-deception
• don’t try to prove anything, don’t try too hard – give up speed and aggression of searching – there is no “big deal” about your state of mind
• develop compassion for ourselves; meditation becomes act of trusting yourself, continual act of making friends with yourself, trust in yourself allows you to dance with life
• without developing compassion we would remain in ego’s desire of improving ourselves/achieving imagined goals (and suffering or becoming egotistical from failing/succeeding)
• “When a person develops real compassion, he is uncertain whether he is being generous to others or to himself because compassion is environmental generosity without direction, without ‘for me’ and without ‘for them’”.
• compassion is “ultimate attitude of wealth”, and anti-poverty attitude, a war on want, “it is the attitude that one is born fundamentally rich, rather than one must become rich”
• Main theme of the open way is to begin by abandoning the basic struggle of ego… to be completely open, to have absolute trust in yourself (to abandon ego), is real compassion and love.
• can’t force love – “if your love is moving with the same speed and drive of other people’s hatred, then something appears to be wrong”
• we are too involved with trying to prove something – this stems from ego’s paranoia and feelings of poverty – constantly have to check that we did things “correctly”
• don’t have to constantly manage ourselves
• Situations themselves are profound enough to be regarded as knowledge – they don’t need secondary source of info/analysis – reinforcement is provided by situation itself – situation itself demands the type of response
• fear comes from uncertainty, uncertainty related to distrust in yourself, feeling inadequate to handle situation in front of you – world reflects your uncertainty back to you
• Tibetan word for wisdom is “yeshe” – means “primordial intelligence”
• If you really make friends with yourself, you wouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes all the time – unoriginated trust in yourself – no beginning of this trust – beginningless primordial situation

SENSE OF HUMOR

• NO! I am part of some church so I must be solemn.. NO!
• do not observe yourself unnecessarily – it’s not “big brother”, it is “big me”! – this is death, in the sense of no further creativity, limited, rigid life
• “If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war” – talking about how religious texts tell us to fight against “bad”/“dark side”, and therefore they involve us in a battlefield, which is not sacred. – great teachings are expected to transcend simple-mindedness fighting of two sides / fighting in general
• regarding path to spirituality as a battlefield implies relative-ness (relativity?) of liberation – how much light we have created / territory conquered – battle between “this” and “that” – (still just the ego asserting itself)
• have sense of humor to see both poles of situation as they really are. trying to make something super serious becomes funny
• don’t place value on meditation

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EGO

• we project our version of things onto what is there –> hallucinating/dreaming –> we become immersed in a world we created, with conflicting values, opinions, categories – we read into meanings that we created, which the world doesn’t actually have. This distorted state of mind is where we start our path.
• reaching out and feeling the qualities of “other”, reassures us that we exist. “If I can feel that out there, then I must be here”
• when we don’t know the relationship between “that” and “this” when we perceive something in the world, we feel for our ground (of categorization) (instead of accepting that we have created our own categories/judgement projections that are not real, and just relaxing in the moment without a category to hold onto to judge whatever is in front of us)

THE SIX REALMS

• cyclical ego-driven rise and fall
• intellect of the Human Realm gives us the possibility to escape the cycle, possibility to question the solidity of the worlds one experiences
• laugh through the conceptualized world, discover that by not fighting the walls, they are penetrable
• realize that the world was never outside of yourself, it was your own dualistic attitude/mind state that created the problem – being able to see this allows us to laugh at it, and see how to overcome it (via meditation, which allows gaps in the mind’s chaos, so we can see other angles/aspects to our own situation)

THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS

1. The truth of suffering – the mind constantly spinning; constant search for something more; always trying to fill the gap – enjoy pleasure? become afraid to lose it.. in pain? want to escape it – one becomes irritated of just being “me”
2. The truth of the origin of suffering – continual struggle to maintain and enhance ourselves to satisfy our ego – cannot improve ourselves through struggle, can’t “fight” the ego, it will just usurp the drama for itself
3. The truth of the goal – “non-striving” – drop effort to secure and solidify ourselves – “letting go” is not enough, we must “let be”
4. The truth of the path – meditation; not an attempt to enter trance state – instead, want to transcend to non-dualistic life; don’t become dogmatic/solemn/introverted about it – work with present moment, not idealized future moments/future attainment of idealized goal – techniques will eventually be given up, they are just a tool to step out of ego – whole meditation practice should be based on the relationship between you and “nowness” – see nowness of every moment

THE BODHISATTVA PATH

• “see pattern of our fantasies rather than being immersed in them”
• let be and allow a gap / waiting for next communication, instead of filling that mental space with ego/analysis of what just happened/checking yourself
• don’t possess the “letting be” as belonging to you/as your creation; “open, let be and disown”
• transcendental – whole idea is to see through our limited notions/conceptions/ “warfare mentality” of this vs. that, don’t manufacture a version of what we see and take that to judge it/reject it, etc.… be completely open, not watching ourselves at all, don’t expect anything in return – conduct yourself like walking elephant – slow, surely, steadily - steps are solid and definite
• transmutation of ego into discriminating knowledge – accurate knowledge of seeing everything as it is
• seeing things as they are requires a leap that’s only possible without leaping from anywhere – seeing things in contrast to / from a viewpoint of another spot, implies relativity / us viewing ourselves from somewhere else – can only see things as they really are in the midst of nowhere - like “one cannot taste his own tongue” – cross the bridge to realize we were there all along, very paradoxical

SHUNYATA

• shunyata – perceiving things literally – absence of concepts/forms, absence of duality and conceptualization – “clarity which transcends conceptual padding and unnecessary confusions” – no more fascination with object nor being involved as a subject – what remains is opens pace, the absence of the this-and-that dichotomy
• “Form is that which is, before we project our concepts onto it – it is the original state of “what is here””
• evaluations of form are created in our minds after seeing things
• BUT, emptiness is also form - to see things as empty clothes them in a concept – form comes back!
• “form is no other than emptiness; emptiness is no other than form” – don’t need to find profundity – looking for philosophical meaning to life is a way of justifying ourselves – come down to earth and see things as they are
• reality/“experiencing reality” implies separation between experiencer and experience
• have to “learn in order to unlearn” the absence of ego – to get to the point where we don’t see the mind or thought derived from the mind
• don’t need to worry about understanding the patterns of the future – live in now

PRAJNA AND COMPASSION

• preconceptions are a form of security
• next stage is to give up ambition to see form as empty
• “true compassion is ruthless, from ego’s point of view because it does not consider ego’s drive to maintain itself. it is “crazy wisdom””
• point of meditation isn’t to be honest/good person to maintain our ego, it is to become compassionate and wise fundamentally, open and relating to the world as it is
• Love generally takes 2 forms: babying someone (holding them), or someone babying us (jumping into their lap) (also institution/organization could baby us/us baby it, etc.) – “either we would like to control the excitement or become a part of it” – but there is another option: be as you are, do not reduce yourself to a baby nor demand someone leap into your lap
• this removes emotional/philosophical/psychological interpretation, and opens communication and space without playing any games/ without territorial limitations, “be an adult as you are, while still maintaining a childlike quality”
• sometimes when we say “I love you”, we are hoping to lure someone into our territory/onto our side - “proselytizing” love - suspicious - controlling
• no audience involved, no “me” and “them”, no relative notions of giving/receiving
• “If you can afford to be what you are, then you do not need the ‘insurance policy’ of trying to be a good person, a pious person, a compassionate person.”
• there is danger that ruthless compassion ends up being the releasal of aggression – one must work on their path a lot before completely opening
• opening to yourself without fooling yourself is important, otherwise compassion will just be another pattern for the ego to take hold of

TANTRA

• complete absence of conceptualization, added with an awareness of the energies/brilliance of everyday things; direct, naked experience without any forms/preconceptions, no veil between “him” and “that”
• tantric tradition doesn’t even speak of going beyond ego because that’s too dualistic – tantra is more refined, past that point
• tantra means “continuity” – involves something more than simply going beyond uality, more than non-dualistic understanding – ability to see the “non-dualisticness” – “emptiness is emptiness – it is not empty simply because form is also form”
• tantric wisdom brings nirvana into samsara
• life flows around you, don’t have to force results – this is mandala principle
• “mandala depicted as circle which revolves around center –> signifies that everything around you becomes a part of your awareness, the whole sphere expressing the vivid reality of life”
• the higher our spirituality, the more we come down to earth
• meditation steps/path: penetrate neurotic thought pattern/fringe of ego –> see through complexity of thought-process and meaningfullness of concepts/conceptualization –> create space between “this” and “that” –> create direct link with life experience
• transmutation of emotions into a particular wisdom or aspect of the awakened mind
• transmutation happens with the understanding of shunyata and then sudden discovery of energy – you realize you don’t have to abandon everything, you can transform your energy/emotions – don’t need to supress them, but transform
• if we become involved with the fascination and satisfaction of energy, we cannot transmute it
• we have never actually experienced our emotions, only experienced in terms of ‘me and my emotion’, where me is a central governing structure – we have to feel emotions and their living quality instead of feeling them/experiencing them as being separate from us
• when we act out hatred/desire/other emotions on physical level, we are trying to escape from these emotions, just like trying to repress them
• we think that fighting expresses anger, bu tit is an escape, a release rather than experiencing the emotion as it is
• “when a person actually understands that he is in a state of paranoia, then that implies an underlying deep subconscious understanding of the other side, some feeling of the other aspect of it in his mind” – the other side where he would not be paranoid – “then he has to really take the leap”
• leap is beyond words to describe – have to put yourself willingly in the situation and surrender
• see naked quality of emotions without preconceptions – once you can do this, you are ready to leap
• “It is with our emotions that we create demons and gods” – clinging to the notions of “good” and “bad” – subjugating/taking hold of demons is transmuting emotions – accept things as they are

END