29. Spiritual Materialism

It’s a common experience, certainly in the beginning of meditation practice, and even well along the way, to adopt various affectations of spiritual life. In an Eastern context, people might wear beads or wear their hair in certain ways, growing it long or cutting it short. They might change their names or do other things that are symbolic of having found a new path in life. People begin quite literally wearing their beliefs on their sleeves, and in doing this they begin building a new identity. Now some of this might be innocent, fun, and even useful. It can be a reminder to practice. But there’s a deeper error that tends to crop up here, which the Tibetan teacher Chokyam Trunkpa Rinpoche referred to as spiritual materialism, for all his faults, and he had many, many faults. Trunkpa was a very insightful teacher. His basic point was that if the goal is to recognize the wisdom of emptiness, and to decondition one’s attachment to self, adopting a new spiritual identity is a trap, and in some ways it’s less honest and more insidious than the conventional ways that people seek to shore up their identities. It’s one thing to be negatively egocentric, to be ambitious in all the usual ways, to want money or fame or beauty or awards or all of these things, to be proud of one’s worldly accomplishments and social status. All of this is pretty much as it seems. There’s a basic honesty to being an egomaniac. It’s another thing to be pretending to be above such mundane pursuits, when all the while your ego is finding a new foothold for self aggrandizement in spiritual life. The project of becoming spiritual, becoming a good meditator, and of identifying with a new set of beliefs, perhaps viewing oneself as part of a lineage, becoming a Buddhist, say. All of this can become the same old game of putting fuel on the fire of self-regard, all the while pretending to be playing a different game entirely. So it can be less honest and even more difficult to transcend this form of self-involvement. It’s like the kernel of pride and judgment of others that can form under the guise of humility. If you pay attention, you’ll find spiritual people who luxuriate in their awareness of their own flaws, all the while subtly using this professed self-awareness to raise their status. It’s as though they’re perpetually saying, I’m much more aware of my flaws than you are aware of your own. It’s possible to take pride in one’s humility. The ego is very clever. It will use anything you give it as fuel. And this notion of spiritual materialism extends to the practice of meditation. Let’s say you get very concentrated and begin having intense experiences when you practice. Experiences of bliss and clarity, discursive thought might cease altogether, and thereafter you might tell yourself and perhaps other people the story of your spiritual progress. And this can happen after taking psychedelics, too. This story, this story of changes in your experience, and the feeling of satisfaction that can grow around it, the sense of becoming someone in this domain, all of it is total bullshit. I’m not saying one can’t change, of course, and I’m not saying one shouldn’t discuss one’s experiences in meditation. As I’ve said elsewhere in Waking Up, I think the traditional taboos around discussing one’s personal experience in practice are really unhelpful. They let people stay confused about the path for much longer than they need to be, but they exist for a reason as a safeguard against spiritual pride. But the truth is, we can walk this tightrope, we can be honest about our experience, and we can recognize the pitfall of developing a spiritual identity.