In Reply to: Re: good point posted by An SG on June 22, 2004 at 14:10:06:
"Spiritual materialism" is not an idea original to me. It comes from a very famous treatise called "Cutting through spiritual materialism" by Chogyam Trungpa, John Baker & Marvin Casper. You can order the book from Amazon.com.
I was first introduced to the ideas published in this book in the mid to late 70s--in the years immediately after leaving the COG--by a teacher who went on to found the Naropa Institute. It helped me quite a lot in getting a more balanced perspective on striving for perfection (yieldedness, obedience, heroic virtue), supernatural gifts (dreams, visions, prophesies, etc), spiritual rewards (crowns, thrones, kingdoms), or "merit" as it is called in the Buddhist tradition.