August 09, 2026

What Enlightenment Undoes

Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.

Chögyam Trungpa was a Tibetan lama who fled the Chinese invasion of Tibet and later brought Buddhist teaching to a West hungry for spiritual experience, often using practice to polish a sense of self rather than question it. In Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism he coined that phrase to describe how meditation, insight, even compassion can be co-opted by the ego as trophies. This line cuts against that habit: real awakening does not crown the self, it exposes the self as a construction with nothing solid to crown. Eastern traditions teach Non-Self this way, not as erasing a person but as noticing that the sense of a fixed 'me' was always a process, assembled moment to moment. Practice becomes the steady work of loosening that grip rather than reinforcing it, especially in the very moments we feel proudest of our progress.

A principle of Eastern Wisdom: Non-Self →