This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Class 2 of 2: “Spiritual Bypassing: What It Is and How to Work with It” with David Chernikoff. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by David Chernikoff at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
I’d like to pick up on my comments from last week at this point in regard to this topic of spiritual bypassing. Just briefly, I’d like to review what I talked about last week to highlight some of what I see to be the key points in that discussion, also for some of you who might not have attended that first meeting or watched the recording yet.
The definition that I gave of spiritual bypassing is the place I’d like to start. This was a comment made in Robert Masters’ book on spiritual bypassing, and he was reflecting on his understanding of John Welwood’s work in the field. The definition being: spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, our unresolved wounds, and our unmet developmental needs.
One of the key points I made last week that I’d like to emphasize again today is that this is a normal part of the process of spiritual development. This is not understood to be something that should not be happening, and it’s not some kind of evidence that we’re not practicing appropriately or that we’re not good human beings. When we notice ourselves occasionally getting caught up in these processes referred to as forms of spiritual bypassing, the wiser way to look at this is to see the bypassing that we notice in our own lives and in our own spiritual paths as part of the curriculum for awakening. These are tendencies and inclinations of the ego to preserve itself as primary in regard to our consciousness and our understanding of who and what we are. They’re related very clearly to what in Western psychology we would call defense mechanisms, among other things.
Last week I talked about five different kinds of spiritual bypassing. Very briefly, I talked about what I called unity consciousness, which has an awakened dimension of understanding and represents one of the most profound kinds of experiences we can have as human beings because it’s related to our innate capacity for self-transcendence. At the same time, when it becomes spiritual bypassing, there’s a naive and distorted understanding of what unity consciousness means, and it’s not understood in relation to the fact that true spiritual maturity requires us to develop on two levels simultaneously: one being what’s called the relative level in Buddhist and other contemplative teachings, and the other being the absolute level. Rather than actually developing on both levels, when unity consciousness becomes a form of spiritual bypassing, it’s an attempt to leapfrog over the human dimension of who we are—the wounds and the unhealed parts of ourselves and the personality work that we need to do in order to authentically experience ourselves as something more than a human personality in a body, even though that in and of itself is quite sacred and beautiful.
Secondly, last week I talked about what I called exaggerated detachment, a kind of enforced calm in which what we’re actually doing is suppressing our feelings and desensitizing ourselves in the name of appearing to be equanimous, like our teacher in some cases. This is a misunderstanding of what true equanimity is because, in the case of true equanimity, there’s an allowing for the full range of human experience and an ability to sit in the center, like being in the center of a hurricane, and being in a place of calm and presence because one isn’t identified with all of the emotional ups and downs that are occurring.
Related to this, and thirdly, I talked about a form of spiritual bypassing that involves an overemphasis on the positive and an aversion to the negative. This is a kind of black-and-white thinking in which we see certain emotions and states of mind and heart as positive, such as compassion and generosity and loving-kindness, and we see other states like anger or resentment or bitterness or sadness as “negative” emotions. This is rather than recognizing that all of these experiences, the full spectrum of experience, is inherent in being alive as a human being. We then come to understand our task as human beings who want to wake up as being to develop a wise relationship to whatever arises, however painful or joyful it might be. That lends itself to a more authentic equanimity in regard to the previous form of spiritual bypassing.
I also spoke about what I called a diluted notion of compassion, in which we’re not actually present and intuitive enough to see what’s actually needed in a situation. At which point, we have a tendency to project our own needs to be a helper into the situation rather than seeing clearly what’s needed. Sometimes we help too much, or sometimes we have naive ideas that are not accurate and wise in relation to what real compassion looks like. Last week I talked about there being a full spectrum of behavioral options associated with the realm of wise compassion, from simple presence and being fully present with another person so as to communicate a kind of acceptance of every aspect of that person, and on the other end, a kind of directive compassion, telling someone what to do.
I remember when I was teaching in the graduate psychology program at Naropa University for many years, the inclination on the part of most students in the program was to “give people a lot of space” and not tell people what to do. This had a certain element of wisdom in it because in some cases, and this is what Carl Rogers’ work was all about for those of you familiar with psychology, sometimes that’s a beautiful way to be with another person. On the other hand, if someone’s in a psychiatric crisis, for example, it’s highly appropriate to say, “This is what you need to do. We need to get in touch with your sister who you’re close to, see if you can stay at her house tonight, and get you connected to your psychiatrist so we can see about adjusting your medication.” Something of that sort, right? It’s a very directive and necessary way to be in that particular circumstance. So, notions of compassion and how to actualize a wise understanding of compassion is what we’re looking for when we move through the spiritual bypassing dimension.
And the last form of bypassing I talked about last week I called poor boundaries. This has to do with the tendency, as I said last week, for those of us who grew up really needing and desiring approval, particularly in our families of origin. We tend to want to please everyone and everything. We tend to say yes in some situations when we’re asked to do something when on some deeper level we really don’t want to do it. We tend to override our own needs and what’s healthy for us in some cases, and we’re unable to express what I would call honest yeses and nos when it comes to interpersonal relationships or working in an organization.
So those were the five forms that we talked about last week, to refresh our memory and also to give us once again a felt sense of what this spiritual bypassing is all about beyond the level of concept.
Let me read you a very brief case example from John Welwood’s book, Toward a Psychology of Awakening. He writes:
“A client of mine who was desperate about her marriage had gone to a spiritual teacher for advice. He advised her not to be so angry with her husband, but to be a compassionate friend instead.” This was certainly sound spiritual advice. Compassion is a higher truth than anger. When we rest in the absolute nature of mind, pure open awareness, we discover compassion as the very core of our nature. From that perspective, feeling angry about being hurt only separates us from our true nature.
Yet the teacher who gave this woman this advice did not consider her relative situation—that she was someone who had swallowed her anger all of her life. Her father had been abusive and would slap her and send her to her room whenever she showed any anger about the way he treated her. So she learned to suppress her anger and always tried to please others and “be a good girl” instead. When the teacher advised her to feel compassion rather than anger, she felt relieved because this fit right in with her defenses. Since anger was terrifying and threatening to her, she used the teaching on compassion for spiritual bypassing, for refusing to deal with her anger or the message it contained. Yet, this only increased her sense of frustration and powerlessness in her marriage.
As her therapist, taking account of her relative psychology, my aim was to help her acknowledge her anger and relate to it more fully. As a spiritual practitioner, I was also mindful that anger is ultimately empty, a wave arising in the ocean of consciousness without any solidity or inherent meaning. Yet, while that understanding may be true in the absolute sense and be valuable for helping dissolve attachment to anger, it was not useful for this woman at this time. Instead, she needed to learn to pay more attention to her anger in order to move beyond a habitual pattern of self-suppression, to discover her inner strength and power, and to relate to her husband in a more active and assertive way.
So, that’s one practical example of what we’re talking about here. Because I worked for many years as a psychotherapist and a meditation teacher, this is a long-standing interest of mine here in the West, because in so many cases, certain kinds of folks come to spiritual practice with the kinds of confusions associated with these issues of spiritual bypassing.
So what I’d like to do today, just to give you a kind of preview, is talk about a few more forms of spiritual bypassing that we commonly see. That will not make our list exhaustive because there are many forms of this kind of issue that show up. Still, I’d like to look at a few more so that we have a good overview of some of the most common forms of spiritual bypassing. And then I’d like to flip the coin over and look at what happens when we move beyond spiritual bypassing to the higher levels of integration and wholeness that are possible for us as human beings.
Let’s look at some of these other forms. Another one that comes into play could be described as uneven development. If you think of us as human beings who live on multiple levels of experience—the intellectual, the physical, the psycho-emotional, and the spiritual—what sometimes happens in some situations is that a person can become very highly developed on one level while not well-developed on another level. This is particularly problematic when the level upon which the person is very highly developed is the spiritual level, and when what’s lacking would be what Dan Goleman called emotional intelligence or some other form of psycho-emotional integration.
I think a lot of us are painfully aware of how many scandals we’ve seen in the Western spiritual communities over many years. Frequently, what comes into play in these kinds of situations, although not always, is that a teacher in the early days who grew up in a monastic setting—in the case of Tibet, for example—sometimes when someone was recognized as a tulku1, a lama who had been a previous teacher in an earlier birth according to that system, a child would be taken from their parents at, say, the age of two, taken off to a monastery, and raised by monastic men. From an early age, they were taught very profound and esoteric Tibetan teachings that are extremely powerful. In many cases, that child would go on one or oftentimes two three-year retreats as part of their training as a tulku, as an incarnate lama. That’s really wonderful in a spiritual culture like Tibet.
What happens though when the Chinese force many, many Tibetans out of Tibet? They escape to places like India and Nepal and eventually begin to teach Western students, coming to the West here in the US and other parts of Western Europe. Well, the cultural contexts are radically different. If I take a person like that and I put them in a role in which many students are coming to them with unresolved wounds from their childhood in search of the unconditional love that they didn’t sufficiently experience in their early lives, there’s going to be a tremendous tendency for people to project a kind of perfectionism onto that person, which is very hard to field. Fielding transference is a necessary skill for a teacher.
What happens when that person who’s had little or no experience in the realm of intimacy or sexuality is approached by someone who’s attracted to them? Unfortunately, we’ve seen many of these scandals in the years that I’ve been involved with practice, either in relation to sexuality or in relation to finances or power. And this is not a judgment or a condemnation; it’s a heartbreak because it’s rooted in a kind of confusion, uneven development of the kind that I’m talking about here.
What is particularly sad is because the news cycle in our country works the way it does, when there have been scandals in spiritual and religious communities, it’s all over the news. Because that’s the way yellow journalism works. On the other hand, what’s rarely if ever talked about is all the beautiful things that go on in healthy relationships between spiritual teachers and their students. Those are not newsworthy items, unfortunately. So the world at large gets an impression that’s really quite skewed and inaccurate, in terms of the fact that people come away thinking almost every spiritual community is riddled with scandals of the kind that we hear about from time to time.
So when we talk about uneven development, we’re talking about recognizing that emotional intelligence, communication skills, and all the different kinds of things that enable us to be effective with peer interpersonal relationships are a necessary part of a leadership role for a spiritual teacher. This is another way in which this kind of spiritual bypassing has shown up over the years that’s been particularly painful for those of us who have been in the scene for a number of decades.
Related to this, there’s another form of spiritual bypassing that I would call spiritual pride. That is, there’s a kind of dualistic thinking that people new to the spiritual life incline toward, in which the “worldly life” and the “spiritual life” are seen in a very black and white manner. The understanding is somehow from this perspective that it’s better to live in an ashram or live in retreat or “renounce the world” in service to becoming enlightened, rather than seeing the world as the vehicle for that process.
This is what gave rise a number of years back to what I would call the engaged spirituality movement. A lot of us here in the West recognized that we wanted our spirituality to be something we could integrate with our family lives, with our jobs in the world, with our political views and activities, and other aspects of our lives. I know when I first got involved with the teachings in the early 70s and I became brahmacharya2 as a celibate training as a yoga teacher, there was no small amount of spiritual pride lurking in my consciousness and that of other people. Somehow there was this belief that it was a higher way to live to renounce the world and escape from it, which of course is a problematic view on a lot of levels.
What’s needed, of course, is a kind of integration. I have nothing against folks who want to become a monk or a nun or make some other kind of commitment to a spiritual life that feels appropriate for them. That’s beautiful. That’s integrity and authenticity. But so often in this kind of spiritual bypassing, what’s actually happening is a kind of posturing. Someone develops a self-image and a belief that it’s a higher way to live, and what’s actually happening is it’s the ego, because of its low self-esteem, is compensating in a particular way and misusing the spiritual beliefs and teachings. It’s as if the ego is trying to heal its wounds by raising itself up above other people. And yet almost inevitably, that part of the process is unconscious.
Realistically, when we turn toward the deeper truth of who we are and what we’re all about, we become much kinder in relation to ourselves. We become less perfectionistic, which is what happens with spiritual pride, as if somehow we’re going to be completely perfect when we get to the end of the road. And we become able to embrace a kind of lightness of being, so that we’re not so heavy-handed and so serious and so somber about our lives in general and our spiritual practices as well.
Here’s a couple of examples of people who have worked with this integration process in this regard. Some of you have heard me share this one before from the writer Annie Lamott, a wonderful teacher and writer familiar to some of you who’s been very committed to her Christian practice for many years and really has an ability to share her personal experiences in a way that touched the universal. She writes:
“Sometimes faith looks like myopia. I don’t see everyone’s fault so clearly as I used to, let alone my own. The God of my later years is not interested in my pores or cellulite and hopes that I will stop noticing yours. My vision has blessedly blurred. This is a great advantage when you’re trying to live more spiritually, more expansively, more like Zorba the Greek and less like the church lady. For instance, when I sit here on my bed now writing on my iPad, the top roll of my tummy sometimes creeps over onto the screen and starts typing away. In the old days, upon noticing this unsought collaboration, I would have decided to start a new diet or possibly to end my life. Now, I think to myself, who knows, maybe it’s got something interesting to add.”
Imagine being that kind in relation to yourself, that playful. About 20 years ago, Sharon Salzberg, a friend familiar to many of you, came here to Boulder to what we then called Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center outside of Fort Collins up in the mountains. She had a very large turnout for her retreat, so she invited me and a couple of other people to assist at the retreat. At one point, because we were sharing an apartment on the land up there, she shared with me a reading that someone had texted to her about his meditation practice. And here again, you can see this lightness of being and this lack of self-importance that really brings a kind of fresh air to the whole process. This fellow sent this email to Sharon, and she read it to me, and I said, “I just have to have a copy of that.” It’s called “Ways I Have Been a Bad Meditator.”
“I have thought about eating a piece of dark chocolate. I’ve wondered whether I left the oven on. I’ve looked at my watch before the meditation bell rang. I’ve thought about kissing the woman sitting on the cushion to my left. I’ve thought about shushing the heavy-breathing man on the cushion on my right. I have wanted the teacher to notice how well I’m meditating. I’ve missed my old girlfriend. I’ve remembered why I broke up with my old girlfriend. I’ve wondered if living in the moment means I don’t have to put money into a retirement account.” This last one is my favorite: “I’ve imagined going to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize in meditation.”
Okay. So, that’s the way to offset spiritual pride. It’s wonderful to feel good about being engaged with authentic spiritual teachings because we recognize it’s a blessing to have them in our lives. But we don’t want that to disguise any kind of subtle perfectionism rooted in a superego that has totally unrealistic expectations that torture us. And it’s easy to develop a spiritual superego of just that kind.
The other thing I want to talk about this morning is one particular emotion that Westerners often struggle mightily with in regard to the path of spiritual awakening, and that’s the experience of anger. In order to understand why anger is such a challenge for us who practice spiritual teachings, Buddhist and otherwise, here in the West, one thing that’s really helpful to understand is the vocabulary problem that comes into play.
There’s a wonderful book that I recommend to those of you who want to look more deeply at the issue I’m about to talk about. It’s called Buddhist Practice on Western Ground by a teacher named Harvey Aronson. Aronson is a really interesting teacher for a number of reasons. First of all, he’s a licensed psychotherapist. Second of all, he’s highly trained in insight meditation and the Theravada tradition. Thirdly, he’s highly trained in Tibetan practice. And fourthly, he’s a translator, so he really understands these words and their roots and what they’re intended to mean.
In this book, he talks about some words that commonly create problems for Westerners because they’re not wisely understood. One example is the word ego. There’s a great chapter in the book called “Ego, Ego on the Wall, What is Ego After All?” If you think about it, the word ego is used in a wide variety of ways in our culture. If I’m a Freudian analyst, the word ego is used in a very specific context related to the word id and the word superego. On the other hand, the word ego is often used by Asian and Western teachers to talk about the small self, the relative self that each of us is, our body and our personality, and it’s distinguished from our Buddha nature or our true self. On another level, the word ego is used on the street to mean egotistical. If I say, “Frank has a really big ego,” that’s not a compliment.
Likewise, a word like attachment, which is oftentimes in translation the second noble truth—the cause of suffering—literally the word translates as thirst. However, if you look at English translations, one of the translations is attachment, another is clinging of mind, another is craving. However, if you look at the field of developmental psychology, attachment, rather than being a negative and a cause for suffering, is considered absolutely central in terms of the bonding that we have as children with our caregivers. A child who cannot attach to a caregiver is said to have an attachment disorder, an illness. So, here’s a word that’s being used in very different ways.
So how does this apply to anger and how does it generate confusion? This was so helpful to me as someone who mightily tried to manage my anger much of my early life in practice. What Aronson pointed out is that in Asia, when teachers talk about anger, what they’re talking about is aggression, not just feeling angry feelings but acting them out and wishing harm on another. So anger includes in it acting aggressively. For that reason, I noticed with my Tibetan teachers when I lived in Nepal and when I studied in India, when they talked about not getting angry, they talked about it on the level of fire and brimstone. They would say things like how terrible your rebirth would be if you ever expressed anger.
Well, think about that in relation to the example of the woman in therapy with John Welwood at the beginning of this talk. She needed to learn how to deal with her anger in a wise and skillful way. Now, here in the West, we talk about anger as an emotional state. It’s a feeling we get when we don’t get what we want, or we get what we don’t want, or we’re frustrated in some way, or in some cases because we feel moral outrage. We can distinguish anger as an emotion from anger as aggressive action.
In order to have healthy interpersonal relationships and relationships with the world, we need to set boundaries. If someone speaks to me abusively, for example, I may very well need to say to them, “I’m not willing to engage with you unless you speak to me in a different manner.” Now, I might understand as a practitioner that that person’s abusive behavior is rooted in their own suffering, pain, and confusion. So, I can set that healthy boundary and still have some compassion in my heart and still say, “I’m not willing to relate to you.” That’s a healthy expression of my anger. People like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi were very angry about what was going on in the world, and what they did with that anger was they channeled it into amazing activity that helped improve the state of the world.
So how does this apply to us as people moving through our lives treading the spiritual path? In one of the books I mentioned last week, Spiritual Bypassing by Robert Masters, he talks about four different ways to work with anger as a practitioner. Some are unskillful and some are more skillful.
Anger In: In Gestalt therapy, this is called retroflection, where we turn our anger on ourselves. I had a tendency to do this when I was young because I grew up in a household where there was no permission whatsoever to express anger. Anger in, as a lot of us perhaps know, leads to depression for many people. It leads to the kind of negative self-talk where we turn our anger back on ourselves. So clearly, that’s not a skillful way to work with it.
Anger Out: This is the flip side of anger in, and it’s acting it out impulsively. The first people work I ever did as an undergraduate student volunteer was at a prison in New Orleans. That prison was filled with people who had this problem of anger out. They acted out their feelings first and then experienced the consequences of how inappropriate that action was later.
Mindful Anger: When I first studied Western psychology, the way in which emotions were presented to me was either/or: either you suppressed an emotion or you expressed an emotion. When I came to understand mindfulness, I could see there was a third option. I can be mindful that I’m angry. I can notice the tension in my throat or my hands or my chest. I can notice the self-talk of what I’d like to say to my boss when they’ve criticized a piece of work that I’ve done, perhaps unfairly. I start by being mindful, and I don’t have to do anything at that point. I’m not directing it in, and I’m not acting it out. I’m just aware that I’m angry. This involves what in Buddhist teachings is called sampajañña, which is usually translated as clear comprehension. In that moment of mindfulness, I can see what’s going on inside of me, I can see the situation that I’m in, and I can make an intuitive evaluation of the appropriate way to deal with that anger in that circumstance.
Heart Anger: Tibetans call this vajra anger. This is a fully embodied anger in which sometimes it’s appropriate to be angry, and sometimes the situation requires that. If someone came up to me and my wife and daughter while we were walking down the street and threatened us, I would feel probably frightened and angry. And if that anger was necessary to defend myself and my family, I would act on it. It would be an appropriate thing to do in that particular circumstance.
You can see how there’s a movement toward greater integration here. The first two aspects, anger in and anger out, are primarily unconscious. These are what we call in Buddhist training habitual patterns. Then we come into the realm of mindfulness. However, Masters pointed out that the kind of folks who come to a lot of meditation communities tend to be conflict-avoidant and uncomfortable with anger. So he noted that there’s a tendency for people who think they’re practicing mindful anger to actually be suppressing it in many cases. Those of us who are uncomfortable with conflict need to be really honest in examining what’s happening when we’re being mindful of our anger.
So what happens when we start to work with spiritual bypassing? We start to identify it in our practice and our life. We normalize it, not judge ourselves for its presence, but recognize that it’s part of the curriculum of spiritual awakening, not a mistake. And then we start to move beyond it. We start to move toward a greater degree of wholeness or integration in who we are and how we move through the world.
John Welwood talked about this beautifully. He asked if psychological and spiritual work must work in different directions, or could they be compatible, even powerful allies? And as you might surmise, he believed they could be powerful allies. I’ve seen that in my own personal life and in my own work with other people.
What happens when they are in good alignment? Well, there’s a way in which we tap into our innate human capacity for transcending the small self. Here’s one from Pema Chödrön’s book, The Places That Scare You:
“A young woman wrote to me about finding herself in a small town in the Middle East, surrounded by people jeering, yelling, and threatening to throw stones at her and her friends because they were Americans.” Of course, she was terrified. And what happened to her is interesting. “Suddenly she identified with every person throughout history who had ever been scorned and hated.” See the movement from the personal to the transpersonal. “She understood what it was like to be despised for any reason: ethnic group, racial background, sexual preference, or gender. Something cracked wide open and she stood in the shoes of millions of oppressed people and saw with a new perspective. She even understood her shared humanity with those who hated her. This sense of connection, of belonging to the same family, is bodhicitta3.”
Here she was, a very human person feeling isolated, and a set of circumstances allowed her to move beyond her sense of small self, without rejecting it but including it, to a sense of being one with reality itself, not separate from the people who were threatening her life.
The other example that I think is so beautiful is from a book by Roshi Joan Halifax called Being with Dying, in which she captures this same kind of movement. This is what she said:
“When my mother died, I received one of the hardest and most precious teachings of my entire life. I realized that I only had this one chance to grieve her death. I felt like I had a choice. On the one hand, I could be a so-called ‘good Buddhist,’ accept impermanence, and let go of my mother with great dignity.” There’s the tendency to bypass. “The other alternative was to scour my heart out with honest sorrow. I chose to scour. After her death, I went to the desert with photographs of her and letters she had written my father after I was born. Settling under a rocky ledge, I sank back into shadows of sorrow. When your mother dies, so does the womb that gave birth to you. I felt that my back was uncovered and exposed even as I pressed it into cold, hard rock. Later I walked the Himalayas with a friend who had recently lost his mother too. The autumn rains washed down the mountains and streamed our wet faces. When my friend and I arrived in Kathmandu, the lamas there offered to perform a Tibetan ceremony for my mother. They instructed me not to cry, but to be at peace. By this time, I felt ready to hear their words, and I did not have to force myself to stop mourning. When I let myself drop all the way through to the bottom, I found that my mother had become an ancestor. As I finally released her, she became part of me. And my sadness became part of the river of grief that pulses deep inside us, hidden from view, but informing our lives at every turn.”
You can see she felt the temptation to leapfrog over this deep grief. At the same time, she had the wisdom to practice what we talked about last week, which was turning toward what was happening rather than being aversive to it. And in that process of fully embracing her humanity and her grief and her loss, she tapped into that innate transcendent capacity for knowing ourselves on the level of ultimate reality.
The key word here from my perspective when we talk about working with spiritual bypassing is this notion of integration. We want to own and acknowledge all of the vulnerability and frailty and uncertainty of our humanity and our quirks and personality patterns resulting from our unique karmic history, and recognize the inherent sacredness of that. At the same time, we want to recognize that that’s a subset of something much, much vaster, whether we call that the ultimate mystery or our Buddha nature or our true nature or our Christ consciousness. That also is what we embrace in the process of waking up, in such a way that that vaster dimension of our self begins to infuse our human personality and body and express itself through us as we move through the world.
I’ll close this talk with the words of Pema Chödrön, who I mentioned earlier and really is such a beautiful example of the kind of embodiment that I talked about, in terms of having her feet fully grounded on the earth. I love how earthy her teaching style is, at the same time that she recognizes this expansive, ineffable dimension of who and what we are that my friend and mentor Father Thomas Keating called the ultimate mystery. This is Pema’s vision of awakening in a healthy way as we move through and beyond spiritual bypassing:
“Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain. We leave our attachments and our worldliness behind and slowly make our way to the top. At the peak, we have transcended all pain. The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all the others behind. Our drunken brother, our schizophrenic sister, our tormented animals and friends. Their suffering continues unrelieved by our personal escape.
In the process of discovering our true nature, the journey goes down, not up. It’s as if the mountain pointed toward the center of the earth instead of reaching into the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we lean toward the turbulence and the doubt. We jump into it. We slide into it. We tiptoe into it. We move toward it however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain. And we try not to push it all away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we will let it be as it is at our own pace. Without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom, we discover water, the healing water of compassion. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.”
(The following is a partial transcript of the Q&A session, edited for clarity.)
Question: I’m having some questions about the interconnection between psychology and spiritual life. Is it possible to have a spiritual life without a metaphysical or conceptual idea of the spirit? When the Buddha says, “I teach suffering and the end of suffering, and that’s it,” he doesn’t talk about spirituality. It’s a big question for me how to knit these things together.
Answer: I think it’s an important question because it revolves around the understanding we have of the word “spiritual.” The word is used in a wide variety of ways. It brings to mind an experience I had at Naropa in 1975. I took a course from a Buddhist scholar who surveyed all the different schools of Buddhist philosophy. In the last class, a man on sabbatical from a university back east asked, “What about Buddhism is spiritual?”
The teacher, John Baker, thought about it and said, “Well, in a technical sense, nothing.” He said the word “spiritual” comes from the Latin spiritus, which is usually translated as “breath,” and it’s most often associated with the Abrahamic traditions. He said, “If I had to summarize what Buddhism is all about, I’d say that it’s about learning to appreciate the world as it is.”
So, what does that mean about the word “spiritual”? I also studied with a Jungian teacher, Dr. Ira Progoff. Someone asked him, “What does spirituality mean for you?” And he said, “Oh, for me, spirituality involves the deepest level of meaning in a person’s life.” And that’s where I connect with it. It’s not particular to a belief system or a conceptual map. It’s related to the fact that we as humans are meaning-makers. It’s that search for meaning that I associate with it. So I think you’re free to discard it if it’s not useful to you as a concept, or to define it in a way that works for you and supports your particular unfolding and deepening of wisdom and love.
Question: I have to tell you about my grocery store experience. Years ago, I was grieving. My younger sister had died, and I was very heavily into grieving. I had to go to the grocery store, and I was walking around, and suddenly I looked at all the other people in the grocery store and I realized all of them, too, had lost someone. It was a very interesting experience because I felt very connected to them in a very compassionate way. And then I thought about all the people in the world who have lost someone and expanded the compassion. I think that’s what you were talking about with a transcendent experience.
Answer: Yes, that’s very similar to what that young woman in the Middle East experienced. It’s also related to a classical Tibetan practice called Tonglen4, where you intentionally extend beyond your own personal grief and you choose to open your heart to others who are grieving. You kind of move out in concentric circles. It’s a “both/and,” if you will. This is related to what I heard Ram Dass say many years ago: from a spiritual standpoint, suffering is functional. One of its functions is that it becomes a gateway to compassion for other people. It’s not an accident, for example, that the people who are most effective at helping someone newly diagnosed with breast cancer are breast cancer survivors. All of us suffer in particular ways that give us an affinity for that kind of suffering when we experience it in other people.
Question: To help us wake up more often in our daily lives in becoming more aware of when spiritual bypassing might be arising, do you have a gatha5 or mental noting cue that could help us?
Answer: The principle that is shared by the best psychotherapeutic systems and the best spiritual systems is that awareness precedes choice. If I’m not aware, I’m on autopilot. A gatha is a recitation taught by Thich Nhat Hanh that you recite very briefly before an activity to help you become attentive. For example, the way I typically start my day before I get out of bed is I recite a gatha: “Waking up this morning, I smile. 24 brand new hours are before me. I vow to be fully awake in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.” And then I open my eyes. It’s about setting that intention from the very beginning. There’s a book called Present Moment, Wonderful Moment with gathas for all sorts of daily activities.
Let’s go inside for a couple of minutes or so and let go of all the concepts and words, since there’s not going to be an exam on this one. Trust that what you need from this course will be available to you when you need it. So let’s drop down from the mind to the heart. You can do this with your eyes open or closed. Let’s come back to what the Tibetans call profound simplicity for a moment, realizing the miracle of our aliveness, which is so simple and direct on one level, and so profound and mysterious and unknowable on another.
Take a nice deep breath into your heart center at the center of your chest, as if you could breathe in and out through that area. Recognize that across many great wisdom traditions, this place in our hearts is said to be the place in which we can be separated from our sense of separateness. This is the place of unity consciousness, where we honor the source that connects us all, the life force that we all share, and the incredible multiplicity of forms in which the source expresses itself.
Rest here briefly without any agenda, without being anyone who needs to fix anything in your life or in the world. Rest in what a colleague calls simple presence.
We’ll close with an ancient Buddhist blessing called the Pratanu Mudana6:
Just as water flowing in the streams and rivers fills the ocean, thus may all your moments of goodness touch and benefit all beings, those here now and those gone before.
May all of your wishes be soon fulfilled as completely as the moon on a full moon night, as successfully as from the wish-fulfilling gem.
May all dangers be averted. May all disease leave you. May no obstacles come across your way, and may you enjoy happiness and long life.
May those who are always respectful, honoring the way of the elders, prosper in the four blessings of old age, beauty, happiness, and strength.
May it be so.
Tulku: A Tibetan Buddhist term for a reincarnate custodian of a specific lineage of teachings, who is recognized and trained from a young age. ↩
Brahmacharya: A Sanskrit term that refers to a lifestyle characterized by sexual continence or celibacy, often undertaken for spiritual purposes. ↩
Bodhicitta: A Sanskrit term in Mahayana Buddhism that translates to “enlightenment-mind” or “the mind of awakening.” It is the compassionate aspiration to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. ↩
Tonglen: A Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice, which means “giving and taking” or “sending and receiving.” It involves visualizing taking in the suffering of others on the in-breath and sending out happiness and relief on the out-breath. ↩
Gatha: A short verse or poem, often recited in Zen and other Buddhist traditions to bring mindfulness to everyday activities. ↩
Pratanu Mudana: A Pali term for a traditional Buddhist blessing and dedication of merit, expressing wishes for well-being, fulfillment, and prosperity for all. ↩