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I first heard the term Spiritual Bypassing about a decade ago. It’s a phrase that I think combines high utility with a certain catchiness. Sometimes I’m spiritual bypassing – avoiding a rawness of emotion through subscribing to certain beliefs about life. You may relate to the term as well.
Here are a few examples of spiritual bypassing.
- Being attracted to a spiritual path (perhaps Buddhism) because of an underlying discomfort with being strongly emotional.
- Using something that we read in an Eckharte Tolle book to avoid the feelings coming up in a relationship. (It’s all oneness, babe.)
- Believing that we’re superior to others because of our spiritual beliefs or spiritual status.
All three are ways that we can defend ourselves from emotions that we are uncomfortable with feeling. I think protecting ourselves is okay. But spiritual bypassing is done unconsciously. We’re unaware that we using these beliefs for defensive purposes.
But it also seems clear to me these days that Spiritual Bypassing is only one half of the story. The other half is what I would term Anthropo-Narcissism – the deeply entrenched belief in a personal self that is experiencing life and receiving from the world. And the denial of a selfless reality.
We are brought up to anthropomorphise our world. It’s a culturally-imbued learned behaviour. We see ourselves as human. We see others as human. When something comes along that we don’t understand, in order to engage with it, we need to render it into either a human or something that humans can grasp.
Culturally-learned anthropomorphism embeds itself in very deep. Life most definitely appears to be happening to me – some observing human entity located behind my eyes. This is me. It’s likely the thing that I most believe to be real. Other concepts I will let go of, if necessary. But not that.
And, of course, this learning of the “I” perspective absolutely has utility. Let me list a few of the benefits.
- It creates a sense of psychological wholeness, helping all of the machine-like subprocesses that actually comprise us to function well.
- Treating each other in a humanistic way keeps society together, functional and stops us degenerating into brutal animality.
- Finally, it helps to open our heart centre, enabling us to become deeply present with one another and to experience a sense of healing.
So it is most certainly the case that believing in a personal “I” has immense value and utility. Yet, at the same time, even the most basic impartial investigation will reveal the notion of an experiencing self to be hopelessly flawed. Anyone who’s spent any time in the philosophy scene, or the spiritual scene, or the cognitive science scene, or who has undertaken self-inquiry will know – it’s merely a useful belief. It’s not real, not by any of the standards by which we typically call something “real.” It has neither substance, nor does it leave any kind of trace of its presence.
My personal “I” is merely the output of a program running in the hardware of my brain. That’s all it is. Imagine if my mobile phone, one morning, were to inform me that it actually was Uber, or Gmail. Would I say, cool, no worries? No. I would, gently but firmly, remind it that actually it’s just a processing board with electronic modules attached.
And the negative side of running this “I” program is the self-feeding, the narcissism – trying to fill ourselves up with the attention of others. A difficult task because so many of us are these days trying to do it.
Or, perhaps worse than the self-feeding, pretending not to be narcissistic and posturing about how much we care about others and are fighting narcissism – trying to score a few points off the narcissists. And thereby digging ourselves even deeper into the illusion.
So, what to make of all this? How should we orientate ourselves in the world if we wish to neither be a spiritual bypasser nor an anthropo-narcissist?
What I have learned is to look down both paths. This gives life a dialectical edge. Am I spiritual bypassing? Now, in this moment? Am I avoiding an underlying feeling by convincing myself that such-and-such a thing is real? Or am I clinging to my sense of selfhood, desperate to get some attention? Incapable of letting go?
I think that being human is a like a rabbit-hole. We cannot reduce it to concepts. We cannot find the bottom of it. We can only enter the chasm and try to keep breathing and feeling our body. And hopefully discover somewhere that our life is better for the journey.
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Amour Fou 