A Less Obvious Problem: Spirituality As Bypass
A longer read, by Serenity Tedesco
Life is suffering. Existence is bondage to bodily experiences of emotion, excrement, illness, pain, and death. Dharmic spirituality posits this fundamental reality of suffering as inherent to our very being. The importance of this teaching is apparent in its scriptural placement; it is the Buddha’s First Noble Truth and the first line of the Sāṃkhya Karika. These traditions begin with the premise of suffering as it is the nature of reality itself. Evidence of this wisdom is observable in our life by simply witnessing our fluctuating mind and by stepping out into society. Suffering has many expressions; ubiquitous today are the COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, sexual violence, police killings of unarmed Black men, human trafficking, environmental destruction, systemic racism, misogyny, animal cruelty, murder of transgender peoples, political unrest, and white supremacy. There was a nationwide, collective eruption of anger after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. This was expressed through strident demands for social justice, protests, riots, and militarized police force to suppress them.
Nobody wants to suffer and everyone wants happiness. Sensitive, inquisitive people run away from conventional society and toward spirituality for solace. Spirituality is sold as a solution for discomfort, anger, and sadness. Enlightenment, the effervescent outcome of spiritual practice, is highly desirable for practitioners who seek peace of mind. It promises to eliminate suffering in the mind-body-soul for a permanent state of peace, love, and happiness. Practitioners from all faith traditions are motivated to cultivate a sense of goodness within themselves, unlike what is apparent in the human environment. This has resulted in an insidious effect of spirituality used as a bypass for emotions and experiences deemed as “negative.”
A study of anger, as an example of “negative emotion,” reveals more clues on the spiritual practitioners’ tendency for bypass. Anger is popularly known as one of the seven deadly sins. Spiritual bypass of anger is understandable to some degree; within the Dharma traditions, anger (dveṣa) is an addiction (kleśa). It is one of the three root poisons (viṣa) along with greed and delusion, which fuel suffering in saṃsāra. Anger suppression is often taught as a spiritual teaching to achieve acceptance into heaven and higher states of being. It is depicted as a trait of the antagonist, rather than the protagonist in popular storytelling. This is especially true for the spiritual community, which tends to avoid anger believing it to be “bad” or “taboo,” despite references to its aptness in the Bhagavad Gita and other various scriptures. Spiritual liberation and anger are treated as antipodal opposites without our conscious awareness.
Clinical psychologist John Welwood describes spiritual bypass in his book, Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation, published in 1984. He wrote,
Starting in the 1970s, I began to perceive a disturbing tendency among many members of spiritual communities. Although many spiritual practitioners were doing good work on themselves, I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual practice to bypass or avoid dealing with certain personal or emotional ‘unfinished business.’ This desire to find release from the earthly structures that seem to entrap us—the structures of karma, conditioning, body, form, matter, personality— has been a central motive in the spiritual search for thousands of years. So there is often a tendency to use spiritual practice to try to rise above our emotional and personal issues—all those messy, unresolved matters that weigh us down. I call this tendency to avoid or prematurely transcend basic human needs, feelings, and developmental tasks spiritual bypassing.
Spiritual bypass effectively creates the illusion of transcendence. It naively sweeps our shadows – those “messy, unresolved matters” that make us uncomfortable – under the rug. It stores the causes and conditions of suffering out of sight. In the darkness, these hidden parts of ourselves take on different forms and appearances. They become a source for the persistent continuation of cyclical suffering, fed by the habits of ego. As a result, spirituality itself becomes an obstacle for liberation. Practices meant for inner transformation become less effective. Yes, anger is an obstacle for liberation, but avoiding it can also lead to emotional blockages that limit our spiritual progress toward enlightenment. Practice requires radical honesty and understanding of our humanity.
Suffering is an unavoidable teacher on the path. It offers wisdom in its nuances. Even anger can serve as a beacon that brings light to injustice, the causes of suffering, and our direct contributions to its perpetuation. Spiritual bypass isn’t simply avoiding our own suffering; it is also the neglect of pain felt by other sentient beings. We must be mindful of how spirituality can easily be manipulated by the ego to turn our gaze from suffering.
Hidden History of Spiritual Bypass
This phenomena of spirituality used as bypass is not personal or new. It extends into power dynamics found throughout history in capitalism, societies, religious organizations, and governments to turn the gaze from systemic suffering. In fact, the modern culture of spiritual bypass has historical roots shaped by colonial oppressive tactics to subdue an entire class of warrior sadhus.
When the British first landed in India, they encountered a variety of yogis – not just the romanticized, peaceful, unconditional loving kind we imagine today. Naga yogi warriors were described as a “terrifying force” who were loud, unstoppably tenacious, experts in martial arts combat, drank the blood of their enemies, and wielded weapons like swords, arrows, cakras (a disc-shaped weapon), and eventually guns. They traveled in large, swift droves together and conducted business with conquerors and laypeople alike.
In the West, people assume yoga to be peaceful because of Gandhi’s discourse on ahimsa and non-violent revolution without knowledge of Hindu scriptures or the existence of warrior sadhus. These ascetic warriors have a long history in India that goes further back than the Moghul period. Kings and yogis worked together to conquer lands and rule. In these texts, princes were often initiated as yogis, and pursued a life of kingship and spiritual renunciation. Spiritual practitioners have a long history of engaging in the material world of economics, war, kingdoms, and oppression in India and beyond.
British manipulation of Indian laws, demilitarization of these yogi warriors, criminalization of yogis by John Hastings of the British East India Tea Company stifled and made the angry ascetic invisible. It was a strategic, political move to strip yogis of their power, influence, and threat to the British regime. Scholar William Pinch writes,
The Company needed a modern sadhu: a priestly monk unconcerned with worldly power and given over to religious contemplation and prayer. In retrospect, it can be argued that with the gradual removal of armed monks from territories controlled by the Company in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, north Indian monasticism turned inward, away from worldly martial pursuits and toward more aesthetic, devotional, and literary accomplishments.
The British adapted the less threatening indigenous ideal of the non-violent ascetic from Dharmic traditions as a manipulative tool to erase the warrior ascetic and subdue the masses. The orientalist image of the docile, gentle yogi became romanticized by the West as a fixed quality of “goodness” and the spiritual identity over time. Warrior sadhus disappeared into history, away from the popular Western understanding of yoga. Negative emotions, like the anger of warrior sadhus of the past, became perceived as uncivilized, barbaric, and non-spiritual. The ideas that emerged from this history linger on through spiritual bypassing and emotional suppression.
Spiritual Bypassing in Modernity
Modern spiritual culture and technological advances have also influenced and encouraged spiritual bypassing. I’ll provide several examples of phenomena that contribute to spiritual bypass in modernity: 1) “woke” is trendy, 2) “good vibes only,” 3) the spiritual ego, 4) white fragility, 5) the information age, 6) neo-liberal capitalism, and 7) the disintegration of the guru-student relationship.
“Woke” is slang terminology to describe elevated awareness; a person that is “woke” is an individual that knows truth, speaks on the nature of reality, or is knowledgeable of profound spiritual concepts or social issues. Merriam-Webster added “woke” as an entry in 2017, due to its prevalence on social media. “Woke” is short for “awake,” as in, “I was sleeping and now I’m awake.”
According to search data collected by Google, the usage of “woke” has grown exponentially, as shown in the following graph.
