Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

"Yeah, Chögyam Trungpa was obviously quite a controversial figure. But he taught in a way that was quite revolutionary at the time. I think within any religion or philosophy, generally people had always spoken in a serious way, a dry way. Trungpa cut through all of that. He would say it as it is, he would call people out and say, ‘that’s a load of nonsense.’ I like that. I think it was very bold, it was very brave, it reflected a new time and the spirit of the sixties, the seventies: something different was happening. I also felt he was calling out probably the biggest trap in the journey of self-discovery, that of spiritual materialism. Although it’s easy to say in the West that everything is great in the East . . . It’s not like that. But I do feel like in the West, as many of these traditions have come in, as they’ve landed and people have adopted them, it’s had less to do with going on a journey, giving up identity, and transforming the mind, and more to do with, ‘Oh, this looks nice, this is a bit different.’ You hear people say things like: ‘Oh, he’s a spiritual person,’ or ‘she’s spiritual’—but I don’t even know what that means. If we meditate in order to let go of labels, to let go of identity, the last thing we want to do is take on another label: of being ‘spiritual.’ We’re looking to let go of that kind of judgment. It’s not about becoming— it’s actually about stripping back, letting go of, and simply being . We can call it spiritual, but ultimately it’s about being present. It’s about being open, curious, kind, compassionate. If we do that, it doesn’t really matter what we call it, as long as we’re living that life. I feel like he gets to that point in a way that I haven’t seen, still to this day, in any other book. I actually don’t see them as separate. All of the teachings that I was fortunate enough to study in the past or study now, there’s no longer an idea of separation. I’m not sure why, but over time, it has become less thought-through, and more spontaneous. But I do feel that Trungpa was unusual in that way, that he had come from a deep tradition, in that he’d been a Buddhist monk for a long time, yet he was presenting it in quite a secular way. He wasn’t talking in the way Tibetan Buddhist masters have talked in the past. He was a little bit like, ‘I’m a regular guy, just living in the world.’ That was a real shift."