Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Chögyam Trungpa argues that the ego co-opts spiritual practice the same way it co-opts everything else — turning meditation into achievement, compassion into identity, and enlightenment into the ultimate self-improvement project. The 'spiritual materialism' he names is the mind's ability to absorb any framework, even one designed to dismantle the ego, as another way to build it up.

Trungpa's central insight is that the ego will use any tool — including the tool meant to dismantle it — to reinforce itself. For a founder, this is a warning about how personal growth, company culture, and even 'self-improvement' can become performances that serve the ego rather than genuine change. Jobs read this alongside Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind as part of the Buddhist study he took up at Reed, and its argument about the ego's cunning is visible in his later discipline of saying no to good ideas: focus is not a tactic but a practice of seeing through one's own rationalisations.

Walter Isaacson's biography names Trungpa's book as one of the small set of Eastern texts Jobs worked through with Daniel Kottke, and it belongs to a cluster of books — Suzuki, Yogananda, Ram Dass — that installed a decision-making filter based on stripping away, not accumulating. For founders building products, the lesson is that the hardest thing to cut is not a feature but the story you tell yourself about why the feature matters.