Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

This book covers a series of talks given in Boulder Colorado in the fall of 1971 and spring of 1972. These talks first describe the various ways in which people involve themselves with spiritual materialism, the many forms of self-deception in to which aspirants may fall. After the tour of sidetracks along the way, the broad outlines of the true spiritual path are discussed by Chögyam Trungpa. He states that the heart of the confusion is that man has a sense of self which seems to him to be continuous and solid. When a thought or event or emotion occurs, there is a sense of someone being conscious of what is happening. You sense that you are reading these words. This sense of self is actually a transitory, discontinuous event, which in our confusion seems to be quite solid and continuous. Experience continually threatens to reveal our transitoriness to us, so we continually struggle to cover up any possibility of discovering our real condition. This struggle to maintain the sense of solid continuous self is the action of the ego. It is the dissatisfaction which accompanies ego's struggle that inspires us to examine what we are doing. He describes the functioning of the ego through a Tibetan Buddhism metaphor, known as "The three lords of materialism": the "Lord of Form", the "Lord of Speech, and the "Lord of Mind." For sure a life altering read. [via]