Cutting through spiritual materialism

Cutting through spiritual materialism necessarily has to begin with a clearcut distinction between true spirituality and pseudo-spirituality. This is to further say that there is a false form of spirituality that works to keep the average beginner from discovering spirituality.

But who has the wisdom to distinguish between authentic spirituality and spiritual materialism?  We might end up with a situation of the blind leading the blind which further might engender the worst kind of spiritual materialism.  But, in a way, this has already happened to some extent  

The Buddhist temple we attend might resemble a museum of Asian religious artifacts.  Everyone gets to wear robes and learn various rituals.  It is a kind of religious theatre.  We all get to be actors.  Our Zen center is the stage.  Our teacher and the staff help us with our problems, for example, how to cope with our depression or a roommate who is irresponsible or our lover that we believe is cheating on us.  Is this spirituality?  No, it is not.  It is spiritual materialism.  All this is in service to Mara the Evil One who represents our temporal, psychophysical body, including our culture of materialism.  Behaving this way will never lead us to nirvana or to the necessary insight into the luminous Mind.

We need to remind ourselves that the young Siddhartha renounced the material world as being the highest reality.  It cannot end our suffering.  It is only capable of deluding us into believing that pleasure somehow is capable of rubbing out suffering.  But it never does.  The history of mankind paints a rather dismal picture of mankind’s efforts to end suffering by way of pleasure.  This is because of our addiction to materialism and pseudo-spirituality which makes sure that real spirituality is kept in the wilderness, so to speak, away from public consciousness.

If Buddhism is going to thrive in the West, there needs to be a preliminary path, a path that helps us to break our addiction to spiritual materialism thus helping us to move closer to where Siddhartha was when he decided to leave his father's kingdom.

Comments

[Solon]

These petty acolytes of Mara. Bereft of the true dharma right before their very eyes and with nothing to lift their mind above and beyond their rotting bodies
of birth and death, they are already rattling their chains in hell, howling like caged wolves.

[QuoteDispenser]

“fucking flattery, success, money.
I just sit back and suck my thumb.”
― Ikkyu, Crow With No Mouth : Ikkyu : Fifteenth Century Zen Master