February 12 , 2008

REMEMBERING TO REMEMBER

There is a deeper awakening, neither blinded by light nor invested in keeping darkness in the shadows, an awakening that with exquisitely resonant insistence nibbles at the far corners of our knowingness and spiritual certainties, synesthetically hinting at dimensions of being out of imagination's reach yet nonetheless still accessible, dimensions which are simultaneously radically other and as organically familiar as the softly yielding feel of our pillow as we slide away into deep sleep.

The knocking on the door is always there, infiltrating the noisy bustle and clutter that usually occupies our everyday mind. The message is simple: Remember to remember. But remember what ? Forget the what, at least for now. Attune yourself to what appears to be out of sight, out of range, out of hearing, out of touch, out of mind. So much of a deeper life is a matter of fine-tuning. Don't think about this. Derail your train of thought. It's as if you've just begun to awaken from a cozy nap, with the room full of sunlight yet not so sunny, and you, caught mid-yawn, have no idea whatsoever of where you are, or when you are, or what you are, but there nevertheless is an intensely vivid, sharply unsettling sensation racing through you, leaving you too undone to be effectively buttoned up. You are unavoidably hyperaware of your mortality, feeling it right to your marrow, and you are blazingly alive, subtly shaking in the sheer enormity and meaning-transcending implications of it all. You could be adrift on an unknown sea, or crouching in a thunderously wet jungle night, or lying broken on a battlefield or lonely bed or silvery emptiness, even as you start to recognize where you physically are.

And so with considerable relief you let the familiar invade you, occupy and colonize and compartmentalize you, not noticing how surreal it really is, how dreamlike, how consolingly deadening. The process of selfing is now locked in, and you are now busy being a somebody, no matter how hard you may be trying to be nobody in your spiritual ambition, and no matter how often you lose your I.D. in your dreams. There is abundant omission in your mission to be who you think you are. Still, something radically other is palpably afoot, still with you, hovering in the background that you know, in your secret heart, can at any moment become foreground, making of you a clearing for the Unsurpassable Deep that is ever nearing, ever showing up as you.

There is comfort and plenty of undeniable utility in being colonized by the familiar, so that the waking-state dream which we don't view as a dream can continue. And so proceeds incarnation's fleshdance.

There is a deeper awakening, one that establishes itself, with more than enough help from our environment, both outer and inner, as we dismantle our anesthetizing headquarters and self-making automaticities, letting go of our bearings to enough of a degree to find deeper bearings, remembering that we actually know the way by heart, even when we cannot see or hear or move. Ours is then a geography of resurfacing continents, wild green uprisings, cascading lava, alien skies, barely remembered faces and embraces that pull, pull, and pull some more at us with an ache that links us up with a significance before which all else pales.

We then look up as if for the first time, even as we look down at our disappearing ground, starlight our witness and crumbling foothold, gravity and terrifyingly ecstatic luminosity making us up over and over and over, until we are at home with the whole hyperbole-transcending Reality of it all, wherein nothing is familiar and everything is recognized, about which nothing can be said that makes any genuine sense, even as we go on with our daily necessities with as much care as possible, remembering to remember that there is no such thing as an insignificant act. It is to this, at once infinite sky and infinite ground and infinite appearances, that we, in all our finiteness, are invited. It is a life-giving annihilation and reappearance, a dying into the life we were born to live, a leap that provides us with what we need to truly live and love and evolve.

February 14 , 2008

SPIRITUAL BYPASSING

Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual beliefs and/or practices to “rise above” or otherwise avoid dealing in any significant depth with our unresolved wounds and related emotional and behavioral problems. It perhaps most commonly can be seen in the minimizing or superficializing or outright negation of our “negativity,” and in the taking of impersonal or prematurely transpersonal stands on personal concerns.

Spiritual bypassing is a dehumanizing practice, however much it may talk about light and love and compassion. It is the headquarters of the talking school of spirituality. As much as it goes on and on about transcending egoity, it is little more than spiritualized egoity referring to itself as “I” — it's no surprise that spiritual bypassing is especially common in spiritual paths that treat ego as something to eradicate (rather than as something to illuminate and integrate).

The greater the pain of our unresolved wounds, the greater are the odds that we — if we are invested in being “spiritual” or in being seen as “spiritual” — will manifest some form of compensatory self-inflation (however humble its robes), whether it be metaphysical grandiosity (“You created your past, including all that childhood abuse, so just let go of it”) or self-proclaimed transcendence of personal issues, perhaps gazing with conceptual compassion upon those less evolved persons who insist on digging around in and trying to “work” with their pain (instead of simply going beyond it).

This is spiritual bypassing in its grosser form, wherein spiritual practice and attainment is used to avoid directly dealing with — and unguardedly feeling — the raw reality of suffering. Here, the apparent “shoulds” and apparent altitude of spirituality are employed to keep us dissociated or otherwise removed from our pain, especially the pain resulting from the more troubling times of our past.

Many, many get stranded here, assuming that if they are not feeling better from their spiritual practices, then all they need to do is go more deeply into such practices; if this fails, their tendency then is to blame themselves, even as they resolutely cling to the demands and expectation of their spiritual path. Unpleasant though their falling short spiritually may be, at least they don't have to directly deal with their core pain.

More unfortunate than these are those who do “succeed” at spiritual bypassing, not only consistently avoiding their core pain, but also finding a relatively steady comfort and pleasure in their spiritual practices. I say “unfortunate” because they, given their degree of satisfaction, are less likely than those who aren't doing so well at spiritual bypassing to take the plunge into working directly and deeply with their wounds.

In spiritual bypassing, psychotherapy is generally relegated to something for the seriously neurotic, something that at best only strengthens the very egoity that spirituality is supposed to eradicate. Devotees of spiritual bypassing are blind to the spiritual dimension of good psychotherapy, psychotherapy that is integrally-informed, and not just in theory. Spiritual teachers who don't support their students in doing some psychotherapy — perhaps because they themselves are all but clueless about it and its benefits — are doing their students a disservice, overemphasizing the importance of doing spiritual practice.

Spiritual bypassing keeps us stuck at a “higher” level that is really only higher in a merely conceptual sense; it's as if we're taking up residence on Floor 5 without having passed through Floors 2, 3, or 4. We've crystallized at Floor 5 and have all the right furniture and accoutrements for that level, while the floors below us deteriorate due to the lack of our attention and presence. Only when Floors 2, 3, and 4 — unexplored and unoccupied — reach the point of undeniable disintegration, do we start to realize that we're on very unstable ground, at which point we hopefully get off our bypass and get back on track, however painful or humiliating that may be.

When transcendence of our personal history takes precedence over intimacy with our personal history, spiritual bypassing is inevitable.

And spiritual bypassing does not always look like spiritual bypassing. For example, if someone asks us — in our teacherly role or position — about a difficulty they are having bringing together their spiritual practice with the demand of their intimate relationship, and we only give them a “Big Picture” answer, waxing eloquently about the finite and the infinite, etcetera, then we are engaged in spiritual bypassing, no matter how articulate and precise our answer may be, for we are, however inadvertently, avoiding dealing directly and relevantly with their personal pain. Yes, our questioner may benefit somewhat from the overview we are presenting, but they are not getting anything suitably personal from us. (The point is not to not give a Big Picture answer, but if we are to give it, to do so in intimate conjunction with a psychologically attuned, personally relevant answer.)

In spiritual bypassing, conceptual spirituality often masquerades as real spirituality. And conceptual spirituality can be very comforting, very safe, very easy to trot out, very easy to use to rationalize our removal, especially emotionally, from the more difficult aspects of life. In spiritual bypassing, compassion typically takes form as a proclamation or statement of intention, rather than as a living act, delivered in much the same spirit as flat-voiced military personnel and newscasters talking with professional detachment and disembodied rationality about civilian casualties or how many “troops” were killed in the past month. Here we have numbness (and numbness to our numbness), dissociation, emotional disconnection and desiccation, normalized and made respectable by the authority typically given to such speakers.

The emotional distance that spiritual bypassing provides makes it very attractive to those who crave or make a virtue out of such distance.

The unwillingness or inability to authentically connect with our childlike aspects (our innocence, vulnerability, prerational openness, etcetera), the unwillingness or inability to feel real compassion for the child in us, makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for us to truly touch and heartfully connect with the child in others, so that we tend to stay mired in superficial, far from vulnerable stances with others who are actively working with and through old childhood wounds, even when such work is clearly non-regressive and healing and potently integrative.

Most, if not almost all, meditative practices can be used for spiritual bypassing, their “shoulds” (real or not) infecting us level upon level. Of particular note are meditative practices that tranquilize, rather than illuminate, the mind. They can be very misleading, despite their undeniable calming and relaxing effects. Providing greater calm and relaxation is not necessarily always a good thing, however; some who find such effects through meditative tranquilizing may simply be rendered even more effective in their harmful behavior or work. Tranquilizers, meditative and otherwise, simply numb us, and if we have any investment in being numb, we may be “drawn” to meditative practices that teach and make a virtue out of sedating us. Other meditative practices may also, of course, be used to distract us from our pain and difficulties, but so long as we are consciously and skilfully turning toward our pain and difficulties (so that we're close enough to them to effectively work with them), we will be less and less seducible by spiritual bypassing's strategies.

Spiritual bypassing is more common than we might think; in fact, most practitioners of spiritual disciplines have probably done some spiritual bypassing, especially when they were craving some distance from their everyday psychoemotional difficulties. So let us cast a keenly compassionate eye upon the us who bought into, and still may buy into, spiritual bypassing and the compensatory removal and metaphysical playpens which constitute it.

Moving toward our pain — at the right pace — may not feel good, but is necessary if we are to move through our pain, so that it serves rather than hinders us. Spiritual bypassing is not something to eradicate, but rather something to outgrow . Let us treat it as such, recognizing that real spirituality is not an escape, but rather an arrival.