"There are only two things in
the world:
nothing,
and semantics."
...
"Spiritual bypassing is a tendency to use spiritual ideas and
practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues,
psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks."
... John Welwood
I am indebted to Paige Rose PhD who contributed material for this
conversation.
In a recent, intimate conversation with a whip-smart friend of mine
(who, by the way, just happens to not be
a graduate
of
Werner's work),
he touted the notion of what's become known as "spiritual bypassing".
He wasn't
voting
for it or against it or saying it was a bad thing or a good thing, and
nor was he recommending I deploy it or not. He was simply describing it
as a technique people use in dealing with life, sometimes
intentionally, often unintentionally.
I was intrigued. I got exactly that to which he was referring even
though I had never heard the term "spiritual bypassing" before. In a
broad sense, we could characterize what "spiritual bypassing" comes
down to, by considering moving into
a monastery
or a convent to bypass what there is to deal with or confront in the
day-to-day ordinariness of being human - quite literally, by escaping
into the spiritual / sacred in order to bypass dealing with the
profane.
Is there an
authentic
move into
a monastery
or a convent? Yes. It would be so that I could dedicate myself to,
expand, and discover my full relationship with
God.
Is there an
inauthentic
move into
a monastery
or a convent? Yes. It would be when I say I'm moving into
a monastery
or a convent to expand and discover my full relationship with
God
when what I'm really doing is escaping into the spiritual
/ sacred in order to bypass dealing with the profane.
Moving into
a monastery
or a convent
inauthentically,
is a literal example of spiritual bypassing. But it doesn't have to
involve moving anywhere at all. The simple act of avoiding / changing
the subject when a conversation turns to the tough issues of what we
encounter in the day-to-day ordinariness of being human, then
justifying avoiding them by making them seem less important than larger
so-called "spiritual" issues in life, is also an example of spiritual
bypassing. Escaping to
a monastery
or a convent, or simply avoiding the human issues of life by deeming
them unimportant and trivial when stacked up against the higher,
spiritual calling in life and therefore justifying avoiding them, is
inauthentic
by implication. That's the case against spiritual
bypassing.
And so: are there situations in which spiritual bypassing is useful? Is
spiritual bypassing ever
authentic?
Can I ever argue instead the case for spiritual bypassing
authentically?
The answer may come down to a matter of semantics. If I speak of
differentiating between
inauthentic
spiritual bypassing as opposed to
authentic
spiritual bypassing, and you interject with "Wait, that's just
semantics
Laurence!"
then
listen,
I've got news for you: it's all semantics. So consider
these semantics: if we loosely equate who we really are
(the context
of our lives) with the idea of "spirit", and if we loosely equate what
there is to deal with in the day-to-day ordinariness of being human
(the content of our lives) with the profane, a transformed
way of dealing with the profane emerges: it's to be
the context
for our lives instead. In being
the context,
we really have choice. It's only the content of our lives that's on
full automatic.
That's the semantics of this. If we let spirit equate to
context,
and if we let what there is to deal with or confront in the day-to-day
ordinariness of being human equate to content, then spiritual bypassing
(being
the context
rather than the content) is smart, very smart - not to
mention
authentic.
That's the case for spiritual bypassing. If there's no
possibility of being
context
/ if
context
itself is just another content, then spiritual bypassing is always
inauthentic.
