SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM: CROSS-TRADITION COMPASION

Spiritual Materialism: Cross-Tradition Comparison Handout

Core Question Across Traditions

Is spirituality being used to dissolve the ego—or to sanctify it?

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1. Tibetan Buddhism

Key voice: Chögyam Trungpa

Risk

• Turning meditation, insight, or compassion into identity

• “I am awakened / beyond attachment”

Corrective

• Radical self-honesty

• Cutting through ego at increasingly subtle levels

• Ordinary mind, no special status

Test

Does practice reduce self-importance—or refine it?

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2. Zen Buddhism

Key figures: Dōgen, Hakuin

Risk

• Attachment to enlightenment experiences (kenshō)

• “I have seen the truth”

Corrective

• Continuous practice after awakening

• “Before enlightenment: chop wood. After enlightenment: chop wood.”

Test

Has awakening made daily life simpler—or grander?

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3. Sufism (Islamic Mysticism)

Key voice: Jalāl ad-Dīn Rumi

Risk

• Spiritual intoxication becoming pride

• Mistaking ecstasy for union with God

Corrective

• Fanāʾ (annihilation of the self)

• Humility before the Divine

• Love that erases the self, not polishes it

Test

Is love dissolving the “I”—or glorifying it?

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4. Indigenous Spiritual Traditions

(Pan-American, Australian, Arctic, Amazonian examples)

Risk

• Ritual removed from land, elders, and obligation

• Ceremony as personal “healing product”

Corrective

• Spirituality inseparable from:

  • community

  • land

  • ancestry

  • ethical responsibility

Test

Does ceremony increase service to the people—or focus on the self?

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5. Christian Mysticism

Key voices: Meister Eckhart, St John of the Cross

Risk

• Pride in holiness

• Moral or ascetic superiority

Corrective

• The “dark night”

• Surrender, unknowing, humility

• Grace rather than achievement

Test

Has faith softened judgment—or intensified it?

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Shared Warning Signs (All Traditions)

• Spiritual language used to avoid pain or accountability

• Hierarchies of “advanced” vs “unenlightened”

• Identity built around purity, insight, or awakening

• Loss of compassion for ordinary human struggle

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Shared Markers of Authentic Practice

• Humility

• Ethical responsibility

• Greater tolerance for ambiguity

• Deepened compassion for self and others

• Less need to be special

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Unifying Diagnostic Question

Is this path helping me escape reality—or meet it more fully?

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Bottom Line

Across traditions, spiritual materialism is the same error in different clothing:

the ego survives by becoming sacred.

True spirituality makes us less defended, less certain, and more human.

TO MY IRANIAN FRIENDS AND LOVERS , YOU ARE IN MY HEART AND MIND 

SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM ... THE VISION OF THE MINDLESS MURDERERS OF THE IRANIAN PEOPLE

Spiritual materialism is a concept introduced and most clearly articulated by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, especially in his book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.

At its core, the term describes the tendency to use spirituality as a way of strengthening the ego rather than dismantling it.

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1. The core idea (in plain terms)

Instead of collecting money, status, or possessions, we begin to collect:

• spiritual experiences

• spiritual identities

• spiritual knowledge

• spiritual purity

We turn spirituality into another form of acquisition.

The ego survives by changing costumes.

When material success no longer satisfies, it puts on robes.

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2. How it shows up in real life

Spiritual materialism is subtle and often socially rewarded.

a) Identity inflation

• “I am more conscious than others.”

• “I meditate, therefore I am evolved.”

• “I am beyond politics / beyond anger / beyond attachment.”

Spiritual language becomes a shield against self-examination.

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b) Experience collecting

• Chasing peak states: bliss, visions, awakenings.

• Measuring progress by intensity rather than honesty.

• Becoming dependent on retreats, ceremonies, plant medicines, or gurus.

The question quietly shifts from “Am I seeing clearly?” to

“Am I having impressive experiences?”

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c) Moral superiority

• Using compassion as a weapon: “You are not there yet.”

• Using non-attachment to avoid responsibility.

• Using forgiveness to bypass accountability.

This is sometimes called spiritual bypassing, a close cousin of spiritual materialism.

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3. Why Trungpa considered it dangerous

According to Trungpa, spiritual materialism is dangerous because:

• It preserves the ego at a deeper, harder-to-detect level

• It makes self-deception feel like wisdom

• It creates hierarchies of “advanced” vs “unenlightened” people

• It blocks genuine transformation

The ego becomes sacred, and therefore untouchable.

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4. What 

authentic

 spirituality looks like (by contrast)

In Trungpa’s framing, genuine spiritual practice is often:

• Uncomfortable rather than pleasant

• Humbling rather than empowering

• Ordinary rather than dramatic

• Ethical rather than performative

Signs you may be cutting through spiritual materialism:

• Increased tolerance for uncertainty

• Greater emotional responsibility

• Less need to be seen as special

• More tenderness toward your own contradictions

If spirituality makes you less human, something has gone wrong.

If it makes you more human, it is probably working.

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5. Clinical & anthropological lens (relevant to your work)

From a medical-anthropological perspective (especially in Indigenous and contemplative contexts):

• Spiritual materialism often appears when ritual is detached from community obligation

• Healing traditions become consumer products

• Suffering is reframed as “failure to evolve” rather than a shared human condition

This is particularly visible when ancient practices are transplanted into hyper-individualistic societies.

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6. A simple diagnostic question

A useful self-check (from Trungpa’s lineage):

“Is my practice helping me avoid reality — or meet it more fully?”

If spirituality is being used to:

• avoid grief

• bypass anger

• deny injustice

• anesthetize pain

…it may be functioning as materialism in sacred clothing.

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7. Final thought

Spiritual materialism does not mean spiritual practice is wrong.

It means the ego is extraordinarily adaptive.

True practice does not decorate the self.

It disassembles it — slowly, compassionately, and without applause.

TO MY IRANIAN FRIENDS AND LOVERS ..I LOVE YOU 

COLOURS BEFORE DAWN : NOTES ON METAPHOR OF OUR LIVES

Colours Before Dawn: Notes from a Medico-Anthropologist

In Japanese, the names of colours do not merely describe a spectrum. They encode time, emotion, and transition—states of being rather than shades on a palette. Each colour marks a moment that exists briefly, then disappears.

GYŌAN is the profound darkness just before the first light of dawn.

SHINONOME-IRO, the faint illumination of eastern clouds as night loosens its grip.

AKEBONO-IRO, the sky at the instant the sun begins to rise.

ASAGI, a pale blue-green—crisp, cool, like morning air before speech begins.

These are not colours meant to be held. They are moments to be witnessed.

Then come the greens—the colours of life persisting quietly.

UGUISU-IRO, the olive green of a bush warbler concealed within bamboo shadows.

MOEGI, the vibrant yellow-green of spring leaves just beginning to emerge.

TOKIWA-IRO, the deep, unchanging green of pine trees—the colour of permanence in a changing world.

Once one begins to see these differences, the world expands. It becomes infinite not through abundance, but through attention.

I have been fortunate to witness fragments of this planet in its extremities and intimacies: the Marshall Islands after a tsunami; the three Tokelau Islands; Rapa Nui; Ushuaia at the southern edge of the Americas; Ivalo in northern Lapland; Cochin. These places live within me not as coordinates, but as people—friends whose lives continue quietly, resiliently, smiling through ordinary days.

Anthropology, like medicine, teaches that deprivation rarely eliminates life—it rearranges it.

When colours are prohibited—use anything in your life as a metaphor—humans do what they have always done: they create infinite variations within the narrow palette permitted to them. This is how cultures survive constraint. This is how dignity persists.

For me, GYŌAN has become a metaphor for our beloved Iran today—the darkness before first light. A friend once remarked that observing constant transformation, rather than resisting it, can be deeply grounding. I hold onto that thought.

I live, in many ways, as a metaphorical homeless person—moving between places, languages, systems, and worlds. What steadies me is not permanence, but observation: change unfolding rapidly, transiently, yet forming its own equilibrium. From this comes calm. Mindfulness. Peace. And compassion—towards myself, and towards others navigating their own narrow spectrums.

This, perhaps, is the quiet work of medico-anthropology: to witness transitions, to sit with impermanence, and to recognise life even when its colours are muted.

Shalom

IRAN, SILENCE AND WAITING

Iran, Silence, and Waiting

With the sudden and complete cessation of the internet, Iran has fallen into a silence heavier than distance itself. Overnight, I found myself cut off from friends—people whose voices had become part of my daily intellectual and emotional landscape.

One of the reasons I joined HelloTalk was not language practice in the narrow sense, but encounter. I wanted to befriend Iranian intellectuals, to learn from them, and to engage with the layered history of their country and the extraordinary depth of its literature. In the West, Omar Khayyam is often quoted and Rumi widely celebrated, sometimes stripped of context. Those who know Iran more deeply understand that these figures are only the visible peaks of a vast cultural terrain. Iran continues to produce poetry, philosophy, cinema, and art—often under conditions of profound constraint.

Until recently, my friends inside Iran were thoughtful and generous correspondents. Messages arrived daily—reflections on literature, society, family life, and the quiet strategies of endurance people develop under pressure. Since the protests intensified, that correspondence has vanished—not gradually, but completely.

I have known this silence before. And so, once again, I wait.

Waiting is not passive. It is a form of solidarity when action is impossible, and a reminder of asymmetry: that while I wait in comfort, others endure fear, loss, and uncertainty.

My heart is with the thousands of Iranians who have lost a family member—a child, an adolescent, a loved one—to violence and repression.

May the wishes, desires, and dreams of Iranians to live freely come to fruition—sooner rather than later, for them, and for all of us.

THINKING OF MY FRIENDS AND LOVERS IN THE LAND OF FARS

So much has changed in the span of days.

Of all that unfolds around me, the one realm still within my command is my own mind—my response, my interior weather.

Vipassana meditation brings me back to that place of quiet authority. It teaches me to observe, to let thoughts arise and pass without grasping, to return again and again to stillness. I think often of S. N. Goenka, that gentle Burmese teacher who carried this ancient practice across borders and generations, offering it freely, without ornament or dogma.

It is Friday night.

Two candles are lit before me. As midnight approaches, they continue to burn steadily—no wind, no tremor, no flicker. The flame stands upright, composed, almost deliberate.

I take my blood pressure: 119/72.

A respectable number. I smile quietly. It feels less like a clinical reading and more like a reflection of the calm that has settled inside me—a small physiological confirmation that the mind, when steadied, speaks to the body.

And from this stillness, my thoughts travel eastward.

I send my love to my friends—and to all those I have loved and never met—in the land of Fārs. May they know peace in their hearts, even when peace feels distant in their streets. May calm find them in moments of fear, and dignity remain intact when circumstances conspire against it.

Tonight, from far away, I hold them in quiet remembrance.

A steady flame.

An unspoken longing.

And a wish—for peace, for patience, for a gentler dawn.

Empathy, Compassion, and Respect for the Other

Empathy, Compassion, and Respect for the Other

In the span of a single week, events have unfolded with such density that one has the uneasy feeling that the political architecture of our planet has shifted—not through a dramatic collapse, but through a series of cracks that were already there, now widened.

Sham elections in Myanmar.

Maduro’s forced exit from Venezuela.

The slow, grinding approach of complete economic collapse in Cuba.

And in Iran, an ever-growing discontent—often whispered, sometimes coded, always courageous—expressed by people who still dare to hope that the ruling elite may one day join Assad in comfortable exile, far from the consequences of their decisions.

What links these events is not ideology or geography. It is the human cost.

Empathy and compassion

—for the Burmese

—for the Iranians

—for the Venezuelans

—for the Cubans

I write this not as a distant observer relying on news cycles or social media fragments. I hear voices—direct, unmediated, intelligent voices—from all four countries. These are not slogans or statistics; they are lived realities narrated by people who share one fundamental condition: they are governed by regimes that were not freely elected, are not accountable, and no longer represent the will or welfare of their populations.

Despite the cultural, linguistic, and historical differences between these societies, the complaints are strikingly similar:

the absence of adequate food,

the scarcity of essential medications,

the arrogance and indifference of bureaucracies,

and the constant, exhausting awareness of surveillance by state intelligence.

Anthropologically, this repetition is revealing. Different civilizational trajectories, yet the same political structures produce the same patterns of suffering. Authoritarianism, wherever it takes root, seems to erode dignity in predictable ways—by narrowing choice, criminalising dissent, and transforming everyday life into a series of careful calculations.

These four countries are close to my heart. I have lived in some, returned to others repeatedly, and with Iran I remain deeply connected—intellectually, culturally, emotionally—even if geography and politics keep me physically distant.

Empathy and compassion are not sentimental gestures; they are relational acts. They arise from proximity, from listening, from recognising the other not as an abstraction but as a mirror of one’s own vulnerability.

I am reminded of the Dalai Lama’s simple and disarming wisdom:

If you want to make others happy, be compassionate.

If you want to make yourself happy, be compassionate.

At this moment, I find myself enveloped in compassion—for friends, for interlocutors, for lovers of life and thought, in Burma, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. Compassion does not erase injustice, but it anchors resistance in humanity rather than hatred.

May the coming days bring good news as swiftly as the unsettling surprises of recent days have arrived.

The images 

Dalai Lama

Mathieu Ricard, a buddhist monk.French molecular scientist previously

Sadhguru

Jiddu Krishnamurty 

SN Goenka 

Pablo Neruda 

Wilma Mankiller, ex-chief of the Cherokee Nation

Claude Levi-Strauss

Michel Foucault 

ANTHROPOLOGICAL REFLECTION : MEDICINE WITHOUT WALLS

Anthropological Reflection: Medicine Without Walls

What these images record is not an anecdote, nor an exception. They document an everyday anthropology of care.

Anthropology reminds us that medicine is not born in clinics but in relationships. Long before hospitals, health circulated through food, listening, shared environments, and trust. The photographs move deliberately across these registers: plants carefully tended, water shared with other species, roads that connect camps to towns, food prepared by familiar hands, and finally bodies examined without ritual separation.

The alligator in still water is not a symbol; it is a reminder. Humans do not occupy these landscapes alone. Indigenous communities understand this intuitively: health is relational, ecological, and spatial. Illness does not begin at the cellular level—it begins when relationships fray, when food becomes abstract, when care is displaced into distant institutions.

The restaurant becomes a clinic not by declaration but by consent. No white coat is needed. The stethoscope appears only after conversation. The chef sits because he trusts. The waitress speaks because she is heard. This is medicine stripped of performance, returning to function.

Anthropology also teaches us that borders are administrative, not lived. The road from ancestral land to Marco Lake Drive is not a rupture but a gradient. Indigenous history, migrant labor, global music, handheld ECG devices, and tacos on ceramic plates coexist without contradiction. Modernity is not rejected here; it is domesticated.

These images resist spectacle. Nothing dramatic happens. And that is precisely the point.

Humanitarian medicine is often imagined as crisis work in distant lands. Yet here it unfolds quietly, locally, without banners or NGOs—simply by being present where life happens. This is not “informal medicine.” It is original medicine.

To practice medicine anthropologically is to recognize that care is not a service delivered, but a relationship sustained. Sometimes that relationship begins with coffee. Sometimes with tacos. Sometimes with silence.