Everything you thought you knew about spirituality is wrong
Positive vibes only, spiritual gangster, and love is my religion are just some of the modern mantras used all over the internet. Blame social media or the 2012 pole shift when the Mayan calendar ended. Whatever the reason, never before have people needed to broadcast and validate their spirituality like today. Let’s find out why everything you thought you knew about spirituality is wrong.
“We must surrender our hopes and expectations, as well as our fears, and march directly into disappointment, work with disappointment, go into it and make it our way of life, which is a very hard thing to do.
Disappointment is a good sign of basic intelligence.” -Author Chogyam Trungpa from Cutting through spiritual materialism
The scientific studies on the positive effect of meditation are vast and universally accepted. Primary Schools and prisons are using meditation to calm anxiety and to aid mental health. Yoga is receiving the same amount of attention, even if more so from women. However, twenty years ago, neither of these spiritual practices was widely integrated into society like today.Â
Cutting through material spiritualism can be purchased HERE
Every city seems to have a yoga studio or people carrying yoga mats to do a class at the park. But what does this all mean? Why do we post pictures of us sitting under a tree or doing yoga poses? What is the benefit of appearing “spiritual”? And this is when we realize Author Chogyam Trungpa’s classic book should be in every household.
Trungpa’s cutting through spiritual materialism is a Buddhist book as much as it is a GPS guide for enlightenment. This book is not only life-changing but should also be a reference throughout one’s life. There wasn’t a single page of the 243-page book that wasn’t highlighted for notes.
CTSM is prophetic in the sense that it was written 50 years ago and highlights the red flags of spirituality today. For instance in the forward Trungpa states;
“People were naive about the many pitfalls possible on any path. Spiritual awakening is not a happy-go-lucky endeavor. The path of truth is profound, and so are the obstacles and possibilities for self-deception.”
Too often, self-help gurus and spiritualists attempt to portray a forced positive aura that often seems disingenuous. This lack of transparency often is missed by the followers, because the focus on the external and tangible is where they were taught to accredit true spirituality. Trungpa continue in the forward on deprogramming the mind;
“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.
So it is not a matter of building up the awakened state of mind but rather burning out the confusion which obstructs it. In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment”
Essentially being “woke” is realizing how sleep we are, admitting how much we were wrong. All of this sounds utterly contrary to most of the spiritualist we see on social media. Perhaps social media is adding to our confusion more than we’d like to admit if it affects our mental health.
A few poses, some vegan food, and to the world were on the path. Yet this is all spiritual materialism. Just as many want to portray a happy outgoing social life on social media the same goes for spirituality.
But what about traditional religion? Trungpa cuts through the material spiritual materialism of blind faith as well, in the first chapter titled Material Spiritualism.
“Blind faith has no inspiration. It is very naive. It is not creative though not exactly destructive. It is not creative because your faith and yourself have never made any connection, any communication. You just blindly accepted the whole belief, very naively.”
Lastly, a large portion of the book is QA. In the spiritual materialism chapter Trungpa address what guides a person on their path?
“Actually, there does not seem to be any particular guidance. In fact, if someone is guiding you, that is suspicious because you are relying on something external. Being fully what you are in yourself becomes guidance.
Looking for external answers and for someone or something to save us doesn’t address the deprogramming of our ego. Trungpa touches on turning spirituality into a desire. Maybe now you can see why everything you thought you knew about spirituality is wrong.
“One remains trapped in the desire to improve oneself, the desire to achieve imagined goals. If we feel that we cannot achieve our goal, we suffer despair and the self-torture of unfulfilled ambition.
In conclusion, if you made it this far, you owe it to yourself to purchase this book. During quarantine and pandemic, this is no better reading to soothe your mind practically and spiritually that I’ve come across. No matter your faith, belief, or even understanding of Buddhist philosophy, this book will help you. But first, you must understand why everything you thought you knew about spirituality is wrong.
Sidenote-Author Chogyam Trungpa of the book cutting through material spiritualism has penned a timeless classic. Although released in the 1970s the content is more relevant than ever before. There aren’t enough words for me to type about the author to give him a proper introduction without getting off track from the book. You can find more information on him here, and this will not be the last review of one of his books, either.