When you think of materialism, think of anything that has to do with matter. Anything such as a house being important, a car being important, clothes being important, even our body. Compared to when we think of spiritualism which is talking about our mind and heart development. It's absolutely true that a lot of materialism will interfere with your spiritual growth because there are aspects of materialism that can increase your greed. Buy a new house, it's bigger than the old one. Buy a new car it's better than your last one. Get a new this, get a new that. Get yourself into debt, it's easy.
Materialism is largely about buying, wanting, having, wanting more. Mine is better than yours. Keeping up with the Jones syndrome. Materialism. They need a new car, so I want a new car, they need a new this, so I want that, too. Very much tied into materialism, is greed. However, it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't have to be that way. You can still use material things and you don't have to have greed with it. Common sense and compassion can help. How many pairs of shoes do you actually need?
Some of you may remember, maybe twenty, thirty years ago, the Phillippines had a dictator and his wife had over a thousand pairs of shoes. Is this insane or what? How many pairs of shoes do you have? How many shirts, how many pants, how much material stuff do you actually have, compared to how much you actually need.
There is an interesting thing about this. I have about 24 shirts. Phh.. a Dharma-teacher has 24 shirts! This sounds like a lot of shirts. And it doesn't even include my undershirts that I need in the winter. When you first think about that, it sounds like a lot of shirts, right? Personally, I don't need at any one time, 24 shirts. But I have about eight shirts that I travel with. I also have about eight good white shirts, and tanned shirts that I need at Wat Kow Tahm so that I present myself nicely for the retreats. And all of my old white shirts that are beat up, are my work shirts at Wat Kow Tahm. In between retreats when I am working, I wear the the old white shirts which again are about eight. And whenever I have to buy a new white shirt, the assistants get my old white shirts. So in fact, at any one particular time I have eight shirts which I don't feel is too much, but 24 sounds like a lot, right?
I'm giving you this as an example that even though that might sound like a lot, I use them for different purposes and in that way when I think about having eight shirts, this doesn't sound like a lot.
So when you think of materialism, it is about using things that are of material nature. Can you use them wisely so that you don't use them too much? Can you help the planet reduce some of its waste problem that is so prevalent these days? There are almost seven billion people on this planet. When I was born there was maybe three billion people. It's almost horrifying to imagine how much material stuff has to be produced to take care of almost twice as many people to when I was born. What's it going to be like in another 50 years? So using materials isn't the big problem, how much we use, how much we get carried away, and the greed that comes with it of wanting, wanting, wanting, that is a problem.