What we Don’t See

Jean Delville, Dante drinking the water of the Lethe

Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead of emotional and moral intelligence), debilitating judgment about one’s negativity or shadow elements, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being.

…It has been easier to frame spiritual bypassing as a religion-transcending, spiritually advanced practice/perspective, especially in the facile fast-food spirituality that infects our times. Many of the features of this, such as its drive-through servings of reheated wisdom like “Don’t take it personally” or “Whatever bothers you about someone is really only about you” or “It’s all just an illusion,” are available for consumption and parroting by just about anyone.

…teachers have been caught with pants or halo down…

— Robert Augustus Masters

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“Talk to me when you’re older. Talk to me when you’re forty, and I assure you that what will most disturb you, most occupy your mind and your writing, many of your waking hours, will be the willful and consistent cruelty of people against those whom they cannot understand or control or…