Spiritual bypassing is when you use spiritual ideas of nonduality, “I am God”, I am Source, everything is Emptiness, to dissasociate yourself from the physical world, rather than embracing it fully.
Spiritual bypassing uses spiritual ideas as a way to avoid looking at what’s true.
The philospher Ken Wilber describes this particular kind of neurosis as “transcending without including.”
The path of spiritual growth involves a never-ending process of transcending experiences (going beyond them, zooming out, seeing through their illusory nature) while also including and embracing them.
Here are examples of transcending without including (a.k.a. “spiritual bypassing) that are easy to come across in today’s popular spiritual circles:
1. “I can heal my disease by simply using my mind. I don’t need to change my diet.”
While mindset plays a vitally important role in your body health (a calm mind prevents excess stress hormones from being released into the body, thereby lessing the toxic load that your liver has to process while giving your adrenals much-needed space to rest and recharge), that doesn’t mean we can completely ignore diet.
It is common in spiritual circles to demonize all “outer solutions” as being lesser than “inner solutions.”
We think to ourselves “if I was truly a spiritual person, I wouldn’t have to engage with the outer world at all.”
But when we embody genuine spirituality, which involves a healthy transcendence and also inclusion of the outer world, we realize that a Higher Source can intelligently guide us towards an “outer solution.”
Perhaps you are visualizing healing your chronic illness symptom (Joe Dispenza style) and then 20 minutes later somebody sends you an article from the Medical Medium, giving you clear instructions for how to make celery juice so that you can flush your liver of toxins and ultimately heal your illness.
A spiritual bypass would look like “I don’t need outer solutions! I have all the answers within!”
And so, you continue your visualizations and eventually get sicker and sicker.
A healthy spiritual person uses all resources available to them.
If you are drowning in the sea, and a ship comes by to save you, you should get on the ship. Rejoice in the knowledge that inner and outer are not different. The ship is a manifestation of God in in the same way that your focusing on “I Am” is.
2. I don’t have trauma.
Although it is very possible for spiritual people to get stuck in endless cycles of “healing.” That doesn’t mean that trauma doesn’t exist, and shouldn’t be worked through.
I’ve heard so-called “spiritual teachers” telling their students that they should simply dis-identify with their trauma-responses. Knowing that they are the Source/Creator of their reality.
While, this is a good first-step, we are failing to include after we transcend.
The next step would be to really sit with your trauma-responses. In a kind and loving way. Creating a safe space in your mind and heart through some sort of meditation practice that allows this trauma to unfold itself gently. We can love and honor our mental neuroses as beauitful and inherently good. When we meet them openly, we give ourselves a powerful opportunity to develop deeper wisdom and compassion for ourselves, and perhaps even for others.
3. I don’t need to worry about making money in a healthy way.
Someone that I know was worried about their stock performing poorly (they’re a day-trader). When I questioned them about why they’re trading stocks at all, their response was: “I already share so much love and light with the world that the Universe rewards me through the stock market.”
While this mindset is certainly endearing, it comes off as a bit ungrounded.
Regardless of what beliefs you decide to create for yourself around money, that doesn’t change the core principles of money-making.
You can say to yourself that the universe supports you. You can even say it one hundred times. Still, that doesn’t mean that you can get around the fact that the best and most fair way to make money is to offer a valuable product or service to the marketplace.
Instead of trying to invent your own beliefs about how the universe rewards you with money, it might be better to use that mental energy to learn the principles of effective business.
In Wallace D. Wattles book The Science Of Getting Rich, he points out that your wealth will to come to you along the “established channels” that have already been proven.
A job such as day-trading, although it might be better than selling drugs or weapons, still does not qualify as “right livelihood.” “Right livelihood” means that you generate money by actually offering valuable service for others.
Trading stocks in an attempt to “beat” the other traders provides zero value to society, and is simply a selfish attempt for you to leech money into your bank account.
It takes time, effort, and strategy to build a right livelihood for yourself. I recommend embracing this challange, rather than avoiding it through mental gymnastics.
Alright, I hope that this helped you to gain a deeper understanding of spiritual bypassing.
Just because you say “I am Source,” that doesn’t mean you can ignore the laws of the physical world!
Sincerely,
Adam
