📖Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

p.3 Spiritual materialism—using spirituality techniques to feed ego → Spiritual Materialism

p.5 lords of materialism

• lord of form: wanting physical comfort, security, and pleasure

• lord of speech: comforting intellectualizing

• lord of mind: tendency of consciousness to maintain awareness of itself

p.19 when following spirituality, you must let the first impulse die down. At some stage, it becomes tedious and monotonous and that is a good sign

p.67 when we consider something valuable, we make it external to us

p.78 We think our path is spiritual because it is literally against the flow of what we used to be, but it is merely the way of false heroism, and the only one who is heroic in this way is ego.

p.101

Okay, proclaim it [love], do it, spend your money, but what about the speed and aggression behind what you are doing? Why do you have to push us into the acceptance of your love?

p.210

But true compassion is ruthless, from ego’s point of view, because it does not consider ego’s drive to maintain itself. It is “crazy wisdom.” It is totally wise, but it is crazy as well, because it does not relate to ego’s literal and simple-minded attempts to secure its own comfort.

p.213

If you can afford to be what you are, then you do not need the “insurance policy” of trying to be a good person, a pious person, a compassionate person.