Has anyone ever suggested you might be 'spiritual bypassing'? Or perhaps you've come to that conclusion yourself and experienced that awful penny dropping moment when you realise your apparent spirituality is not quite what it seems or how you'd like it to be seen. There you were luxuriating in your wisdom and spiritual correctness and the next moment your fine apparel is seen for what it is- a complete delusion, a sham, the emperors new clothes. It can feel incredibly exposing, and shamemaking. Just when you were feeling so accomplished, and pleased with yourself you're rumbled.
Robert Augustus Masters book on the pitfalls of spirituality and how a pseudo spirituality can be used to avoid what really matters in life should be required reading for anyone interested in the spiritual life. This easy to read, interesting book invites us to take a hard yet compassionate look at our spiritual life, and may be of particular interest to anyone like myself who try to combine a spiritual practice and spiritual outlook with work in the helping professions that includes both the personal and transpersonal. I've been thinking of these issues a lot recently in relation to how I promote my psychotherapy practice, my website, leaflet and this blog. How to be authentic? How to convey an interest in the spiritual without falsely representing it. How to be real.
In each chapter of his book Masters, an Intuitive Integral Psychotherapist, investigates a different bypass we can take on the spiritual journey including: blind compassion; a neurotic tolerance that is unhelpful to the self and others (Chogyam Trungpa described this with Zen-like directness verging on the harsh as idiot compassion, and this book covers similar territory to his 'Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism' but it is written from more a psychotherapy perspective, although I think Masters could have placed more emphasis on spiritual bypassing as a conditioned response and defence against suffering, something that is done for a reason and shouldn't be attacked, but understood and worked through); ignoring the shadow; disowning and problematising anger (Masters is critical of 'Buddhist elders like Thich Nhat Than' and 'New age positivity pushers' for discouraging the direct expression of anger); quick spiritual fixes and high speed recipes for enlightenment; magical thinking and superstition; the ways we use sex, and being spiritually gullible and vulnerable to cult control and manipulation.
Masters argues spirituality is 'not an escape from life's difficulties' but 'a way of embracing and illuminating them.' He also describes something called the 'soul's embrace' which is 'both panoramic and particular, touching the universal without neglecting the personal and interpersonal'. I was reminded of something a psychotherapist once said to me when I was expressing blind faith in the power of the universe:
'Trust in the universe and tie up your camels?'
