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#4167 - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
"If you must begin, then go all the way,
because if you begin and quit,
the unfinished business you have
left behind begins to haunt
you all the time."
~Trungpa Rinpoche
posted to Daily Dharma by Amrita Nadi
by Alan Larus
http://www.ferryfee.com/Bluesky/Beautys_way.htm
http://www.ferryfee.com/Bluesky/Down_in_the_river.htm
http://www.ferryfee.com/Bluesky/To_Victory.html
The following is excerpted
from Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality
Disconnects Us from What Really Matters, by Robert Augustus
Masters,
available from North Atlantic Books.
Avoidance in Holy Drag: An Introduction to Spiritual Bypassing
Spiritual bypassing, a term first
coined by psychologist John Welwood in
1984, is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid
dealing with our
painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs. It
is much more
common than we might think and, in fact, is so pervasive as to go
largely
unnoticed, except in its more obvious extremes.
Part of the reason for this is that
we tend not to have very much tolerance,
either personally or collectively, for facing, entering, and
working through our
pain, strongly preferring pain-numbing "solutions,"
regardless of how much
suffering such "remedies" may catalyze. Because this
preference has so deeply
and thoroughly infiltrated our culture that it has become all but
normalized,
spiritual bypassing fits almost seamlessly into our collective
habit of turning
away from what is painful, as a kind of higher analgesic with
seemingly minimal
side effects. It is a spiritualized strategy not only for
avoiding pain but also
for legitimizing such avoidance, in ways ranging from the
blatantly obvious to
the extremely subtle.
Spiritual bypassing is a very
persistent shadow of spirituality, manifesting in
many forms, often without being acknowledged as such. Aspects of
spiritual
bypassing include exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and
repression,
overemphasis on the positive, anger-phobia, blind or overly
tolerant compassion,
weak or too porous boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive
intelligence
often being far ahead of emotional and moral intelligence),
debilitating
judgment about one's negativity or shadow side, devaluation of
the personal
relative to the spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a
higher level of
being.
The explosion of interest in
spirituality since the mid-1960s, especially
Eastern spirituality, has been accompanied by a corresponding
interest and
immersion in spiritual bypassing -- which has, however, not very
often been
named, let alone viewed, as such. It has been easier to frame
spiritual
bypassing as a religion -- transcending, spiritually advanced
practice or
perspective, especially in the fast-food spirituality epitomized
by faddish
phenomena like The Secret. Some of the more glaringly facile
features, such as
drive-through servings of reheated wisdom like "Don't take
it personally" or
"Whatever bothers you about someone is really only about
you" or "It's all
just an illusion," are available for consumption and
parroting by just about
anyone.
Happily, the honeymoon with false or superficial notions of
spirituality is
starting to wane. Enough bubbles have been burst; enough
spiritual teachers,
Eastern and Western, have been caught with pants or halo down;
enough cults
have come and gone; enough time has been spent with spiritual
baubles,
credentials, energy transmissions, and gurucentrism to sense
deeper treasures.
But valuable as the desire for a more authentic spirituality is,
such change will
not occur on any significant scale and really take root until
spiritual bypassing
is outgrown, and that is not as easy as it might sound, for it
asks that we cease
turning away from our pain, numbing ourselves, and expecting
spirituality to
make us feel better.
True spirituality is not a high,
not a rush, not an altered state. It has been fine
to romance it for a while, but our times call for something far
more real,
grounded, and responsible; something radically alive and
naturally integral;
something that shakes us to our very core until we stop treating
spiritual
deepening as something to dabble in here and there. Authentic
spirituality is
not some little flicker or buzz of knowingness, not a psychedelic
blast-through
or a mellow hanging-out on some exalted plane of consciousness,
not a bubble of
immunity, but a vast fire of liberation, an exquisitely fitting
crucible and
sanctuary, providing both heat and light for the healing and
awakening we need.
Most of the time when we're
immersed in spiritual bypassing, we like the light
but not the heat. And when we're caught up in the grosser forms
of spiritual
bypassing, we'd usually much rather theorize about the frontiers
of
consciousness than actually go there, suppressing the fire rather
than breathing
it even more alive, espousing the ideal of unconditional love but
not permitting
love to show up in its more challenging, personal dimensions. To
do so would be
too hot, too scary, and too out-of-control, bringing things to
the surface that
we have long disowned or suppressed.
But if we really want the light, we
cannot afford to flee the heat. As Victor
Frankl said, "What gives light must endure burning."
And being with the fire's
heat doesn't just mean sitting with the difficult stuff in
meditation, but also
going into it, trekking to its core, facing and entering and
getting intimate with
whatever is there, however scary or traumatic or sad or raw.
We have had quite an affair with
Eastern spiritual pathways, but now it is time
to go deeper. We must do this not only to get more intimate with
the essence of
these wisdom traditions beyond ritual and belief and dogma but
also to make
room for the healthy evolution, not just the necessary
Westernization, of these
traditions so that their presentation ceases encouraging
spiritual bypassing
(however indirectly) and, in fact, consciously and actively
ceases giving it soil
to flower. These changes won't happen to any significant degree,
however,
unless we work in-depth and integratively with our physical,
emotional,
psychological, spiritual, and social dimensions to generate an
everdeeper sense
of wholeness, vitality, and basic sanity.
full article: http://www.realitysandwich.com/spiritual_bypassing