Spiritual Intellectualism

A teacher can cause inadvertent harm by simply parroting texts, reciting complex philosophies and passing down lineages without grounding students in the raw messy reality of daily life. 🙂

This creates an illusion of Dharma, because it looks and sounds holy, but doesn’t actually encourage compassion and empathy in personal communications – just intellectual conflict.

The illusion arises when people collect high-level empowerments, memorise complex Sanskrit or Tibetan terms, debate intricate philosophy and, as a result, feel spiritually advanced.

(This the same as photo-realistic painting – it’s very clever and very beautiful, but it says nothing except how clever the artist is.)

Such an approach manifests as spiritual materialism as it turns a path of inner transformation into an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time.

Confidence is the satisfaction of tried and tested.
Only then do we know and can be helpful to others.

That’s what happiness is.