This article is a comment to the article linked here:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-of-spiritual-narcissism/
You can buy a Porsche GT4 and drive it around your neighborhood, parking it in front of your favorite cafe and showing off. Annoying your fellow people with the loud exhaust and also making them jealous. Than, self-assured and self- satisfied, you take it back home in your garage. Feeling good about yourself. You can do that.
Or, you can take it to a race track or a lonely mountain road and drive it. Until your hands start sweating, your puls racing and you loose the ability to think because in order to drive this beast, you must focus. This is just-driving. And so, one could say, you are honoring the way how well engineers and car designers build this thing. That’s this cars purpose, you could say. But yeah, you can show off at the cafe with it too.
With spirituality, Yoga and meditation, even Buddhism, it has been the same for a while now: the path of Yoga as a whole, always included meditation. There is no true yoga without meditation. It’s not about your asanas and how well your body is build.
“Yoga is not a work-out, it is a work-in.” (source: Unknown).
It is per design a “Wake-Up-Business”, but it’s (ab)used these days as a “FeelGood-LookGood-BeHealthy-GetMoreDone” gymnastic routine. Sure. You can do that. But be warned, that you might fall into a trap that is even harder to escape than before you started making the initial “innocent mistake”.
Direction matters. Always.
For all beings.
(the article linked on top quotes the Tibetan-Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa a lot. His book “Cutting through spiritual materialism” was first published in the US in 1973(!), and it has been a classic among buddhist practitioners every since. In it he made clear what is going to happen, if the West separates the teachings from their initial inner direction)
