Spiritual Materialism
October 21, 2023

Close your eyes and focus all your attention right here. Be with the breath coming in, the breath going out. As for any thoughts that would pull you someplace else, you can just let them go. If they want to go there, they can go, but you don’t have to go with them. You can maintain your frame of reference right here.

And invest your energy right here. Keep trying to come back and create this breath to be a good place to be. You can make it longer, shorter, deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter, broad, narrow. See what kind of breathing feels good now. The more time you give to this, the more you’re going to get results. The mind will tend more and more in the direction where you’ve invested your energy, invested your time.

The Buddha talks about gaining inner wealth. Sometimes we get the idea that spiritual materialism is a bad thing. Well, the Buddha wasn’t part of that bandwagon. He said you do want to develop good qualities in the mind—hold on to them, cherish them. Because if you don’t build good qualities here, you go investing your time and energy outside. Wherever you invest your time and energy, that becomes a magnet that pulls you in that direction.

So if you invest your time and energy in things, your mind gets pulled into things. You invest it in status, it gets pulled into status. Invest it in trying to get a good opinion of yourself spread around the world, well, you’re investing all your time, and you’re going to be pulled into peoples’ minds trying to figure out what other people want, what other people like. You become a slave to the areas where you’re being pulled.

It’s like having a magnet that pulls you out. And those are not safe places to be. Any wealth that’s outside is dangerous, because it’s open to all kinds of attacks, open, all kinds of fires and floods. And it leaves you open to those things, too. Whereas the wealth that you build inside in terms of your conviction, your healthy sense of shame and compunction, your virtue, your generosity, your learning, your discernment: These are things that fires and floods can’t touch; nobody else can harm; nobody else can take away. It’s the kind of wealth that’s safe.

And it’s going to be safe for you all the way through this lifetime and through the process of going to another lifetime. You’ll have all your goods here inside with you, and your mind won’t be pulled in the magnetic field of the things you’ve left behind outside. That way, you’re a lot safer. So develop the wealth that’s safe. Invest your time here. And if they accuse you of being a spiritual materialist, that’s fine, because you’ve got good materials here inside: something you really can depend on.