ChaiTea2TaiChi

How important is spirituality in your life?

Spirituality is a two edged sword for me. Over the years I have explored Yoga, Zen Meditation, Tai Chi, Mayan Astrology, Lakota and Andean Mystical Traditions, Santo Daime and even the Free Jazz spiritual Tradition presented by the American Saint John Coltrane as paths to insight and ‘enlightenment’.

Yesterday I posted on my ‘blog website’ Radical Creativity Coach about the challenges of spiritual materialism. The prompt was still up this morning so I decided to follow it up with an update to ‘chaitea2taichi’ -Podcast. The reasons being on the one hand that I have not published a Podcast in over a year and secondly that this question is really one of the central themes that this Podcast was meant to explore.

I revisited the great book ‘Cutting through Spiritual Materialism’ by the Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa to find a fitting quotation for yesterday’s blog post. And in doing so, I decided that it was a good time to read the whole book again.

In my archives I have three unpublished Podcast episodes. One of the reasons I held them back was that at the time I recorded them, America went from being a feudalist-corporate pretend-meritocracy to what seems to be an outright fascist dictatorship.

Suddenly I felt like publishing podcasts encouraging people to fight for their right to religious and spiritual practices, taking advantage of opportunities such as the rise of artificial intelligence and hyper-connectivity and exploring cryptocurrencies as a possibility for global financial equality was putting my resident status in the United States at risk. So I held back three episodes that I had recorded within three weeks around November of 2024.

Enlightenment is a state of complete awareness, of accepting the world around d you as is, of taking personal and societal setbacks as growth opportunities and life lessons. I guess I was not ready.

After reading through half of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoches book yesterday and using my phones wonderful scanning feature to capture some of the most striking passages, I would like to share the thoughts that were bubbling to the surface of my subconscious in the process.

Let me start with his explanation of why the United States is such a fertile ground for religious and spiritual Charlatans and hustlers, cheaters and crooks in general.

Keep in mind that this book was first published 55 years ago, a couple of years before I was born and I believe these passages ring even more true today than they were back then.

In the 1970’s you had Bhagwan a Giru calling himself God, driving around in a Rolls Royce. Today you have televangelist preachers, all flavors of New Age mysticism, Manifestors of wealth, you name it.

Meanwhile, genuine spiritual paths such as the teachings of the Lakota, Diné, the Quechua speaking tribes of the Andes are either being repressed or amalgamated with Jungian Archetype mumbo jumbo and Tarot card reading fortune telling to create constructed mythologies serving the high priests of whatever church has the financial backing to convince the courts and DEA that their spirituality is the real deal.

The following section is a passage about the reasons for this development from the book “cutting through spiritual materialism”.

Q: Do you think spiritual materialism is a particularly American problem?

A: Whenever teachings come to a country from abroad, the problem of spiritual materialism is intensified. At the moment America is, without any doubt, fertile ground ready for the teachings. 

And because America is so fertile, seeking spirituality, it is possible for America to inspire charlatans. 

Charlatans would not choose to be charlatans unless they were inspired to do so. Otherwise, they would be bank robbers or bandits, inasmuch as they want to make money and become famous. Because America is looking so hard for spirituality, religion becomes an easy way to make money and achieve fame. So we see charlatans in the role of student, chela, as well as in the role of guru. I think America at this particular time is a very interesting ground.

The question arises of how one can find freedom from materialistic desires to attain a state of security that allows the type of freedom we see in ‘successful’ people whose material wealth is regarded as a sign that they have some sort of insight and have been ‘blessed by the gods’ rather than lucky idiots who were born I to wealth and ruthlessly exploited their financial advantage to accumulate material power and influence. Or more simply put, why it is so difficult to let go of the idea that saving up for a retreat or spiritual cleansing will create the environment where a seeker of truth and beauty can finally have a break through from their attachment.

Student: It seems that I cannot get away from trying to secure my ‘self’. What should I do?

Chögyam Trungpa: You want so much to be secure that the idea of trying to secure yourself has become a game, a big joke, and way of securing yourself. You are so concerned about watching yourself and watching yourself watching, and watching yourself watching yourself watching. It goes on and on and on. It is quite a common phenomenon.

What is really needed is for you to stop caring altogether, to completely drop the whole concern. The overlapping complications, building an extremely fine lie detector and a detector for the lie detector as well, such complicated structures have to be cleared away.

You try to secure yourself and, having achieved security, then you also attempt to secure that as well. Such fortifications could extend to an infinite empire. You might just own a tiny little castle, but the scope of your protection could extend to cover the entire earth. If you really want to secure yourself completely, there is literally no limit to the efforts you can make.

So it is necessary to drop altogether the idea of security and see the irony of your attempts to secure yourself, the irony of your overlapping structure of self-protection. You have to give up the watcher of the watcher of the watcher. In order to do this, one has to drop the first watcher, the intention of protection itself.

Finally I want to address the current state of world affairs. Americans are extremely afraid that their Empire is coming to an end. And for good reasons. It has already ended. People in Africa, China, South America and India do not see the current state of affairs as an end. They see a new beginning. A possible end to the structures of European colonialism. And last but not least, a final chapter in the cowboy-cultural, free-wheeling, highway robbery favoring American corporations to control markets worldwide . Enabled by a global military police state financed by working class people and profiting a select few corporate shareholders, an inbred (13 kids and counting) class of CEOs and a handful of crypto-bros.

So the difference in perspective is starting to become apparent. I recommend Jeffrey Sachs analysis and explanation of how we need to emphasize education and address climate change if we want to unite humanity on a global scale and overcome these stark differences. Some of us need to realize that a bicycle and solar panels are good enough. Some of us need to realize that to go back to nuclear power in order to access each others brownie recipe and mental health records through an all knowing network of super computers might be the tower of babble that will bankrupt what’s left of a very creative and productive society. So to sum it up once more:

Spiritual enlightenment is a form of ‘letting things be as they are…” whereas spiritual materialism is the belief that working harder, knowing more, accumulating more wealth will bring you the key to some heavenly kingdom. We all have a lot to let go of.



Student: I don’t know what nationality to bring up, but if we were Indians, for instance, you wouldn’t speak to us this way, would you? I mean, it’s because we are Americans and are so much into doing things that you have to speak to us this way.

If we were given to doing nothing, just sitting around, you wouldn’t speak to us like this.

Chögyam Trungpa: That is a very interesting point. I think the style in which the teachings are presented depends upon how much the audience is involved with the speed of materialism. America has achieved an extremely sophisticated level of physical materialism. However, the potential for being involved in this kind of speed is not limited to Americans, it is universal, world-wide.

If India reaches the stages of economic development that America has attained, where people have achieved and have become disillusioned with physical materialism, then they will be coming to listen to such a lecture. 

But at this time I do not think there would be an audience for this kind of lecture anywhere other than in the West, because people elsewhere are not yet tired enough of the speed of physical materialism. They are still saving money to buy bicycles on the way to automobiles.

I will continue this thread and summarize my thoughts as I finish working my way back through this wonderful book.

My struggle with spiritual materialism is far from over. My search for teachings is still somewhat neurotic. This very attempt to run a blog, a podcast and a YouTube channel to blast my notoriety out into the world , all at the same time, is one proof that I am still accumulating knowledge to show myself I am worthy.

But I am now walking my path. I see that accepting challenges for the sake of ‘letting things be as they are’ is the teaching of Marpa and Milarepa. To be enlightened you do not have to sit in a cave and become some kind of d of ascetic. But you are also unlikely to attain a state of ‘blissful acceptance’ by trying to fit the proverbial camel through a needles thread.

More on that in the next blog post. I might even feel encouraged to record another Podcast episode and release the ones already in the vault. Let them be as they are, they exist for reasons that are not for me to judge.

Thank you for reading, please like and subscribe, I will update this post with neat pictures and links later. For now I will get back to my book. Next chapter ‘self deception’ well if that’s not a practice I am too familiar with. I am so good at self deception, I’ve turned it into an art form 😉