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Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters ReviewYeah, that's a cliche, but after reading this book it will feel like the most true thing you have ever heard.
I have been reading and enjoying Robert Augustus Masters' newest book, "Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters." I'm reading a Kindle version on my iTouch and my Kindle, so I find myself highlighting whole pages that I want to share.
I can't post the whole book here. Yet I cannot recommend this book strongly enough - if you want to be fully integrated as a human being, get the most from your spiritual practice, and/or go deeper in your psychotherapy, you MUST get this book and read it, slowly and let it sink in.
Of all the people who talk about an integral spirituality and psychology, Masters is the only one I really see walking the talk. His books are not filled with abstract theory, they are practical guides to becoming more authentic, more integrated, and more whole.
Masters gives us an overview of the many varied ways we engage in spiritual bypassing in the first 7 chapters. When we get to chapter 8, "What Generates Spiritual Bypassing?", the answer he gives is perfectly obvious - pain - and yet all the ways we seek to escape the pain generally just make it worse. We seldom look into our pain and seek to heal it - we often try to bypass it and spirituality is often a great way - in our minds - to do it.
In my opinion, this book will become as important as Chogyam Trungpa's "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism," which they publisher mentions as well (see above).
This book is so clear and so true that one wonders how no one else has ever written this. Here are a few short quotes:
"Instead of trying to get beyond our personal history, we need to learn to relate to it with as much clarity and compassion as possible, so that it serves rather than obstructs our healing and awakening. This also means relating in similar fashion to our tendency to spiritually bypass, casting a lucid, caring eye upon the part of us who buys into us." (Location 225)
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"When we remain outside or removed from our fear, we are trapped by it, but when we actually do get inside, cultivating intimacy with it, we are no longer trapped by it, discovering--and not just intellectually--that it is but darkly contracted energy, a knotted-up vitality that can be freed when we become intimate with it." (Location 337)
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"Real shadow work does not leave us intact; it is not some neat and tidy process but rather an inherently messy one, as vital and unpredictably alive as birth. The ass it kicks is the one upon which you are sitting; the pain it brings up is the pain we've been fleeing most of our life; the psychoemotional breakdowns it catalyzes are the precursors to hugely relevant breakthroughs; the doors it opens are doors that have shown up year after year in our dreams, awaiting our entry. Real shadow work not only breaks us down but also breaks us open, turning frozen yesterday into fluid now." (Location 635)
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Those are from the first few chapters - there are wise quotes like these on nearly every page. I could offer lots of other quotes, especially from the chapters on shadow work (hint: 1-2-3 shadow work ain't real shadow work), blind compassion, false transcendence, magical thinking, sex, shame, and so much more.
One of the more important sections in the book is the chapter on "magical thinking." So much of what passes for "spirituality" is simply magical thinking (and spiritual materialism) all dressed up in new language. The so-called "law of attraction" is a prime example that Masters takes on, revealing the childish thinking behind the pseudo-spirituality.
Most importantly, he is not condescending - we all engage in spiritual bypass from time to time. The trick is learning to recognize and limit it's ability to keep us isolated from ourselves. In the end, that's exactly what happens. If we do not get to know our pain and our wounding, our fears and our hatreds, then we are never fully ourselves, we are two-dimensional beings casting a large shadow.
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