Lecture 4, Part 10 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I think you can bypass the mundane with anything, really. Can people do it because they’re drunk on Jesus too? Too drunk to recognize their family problems? And they do it with theory, abstracting everything away.

CTT: My wife and I are reading a biography of Einstein. When things weren’t going well, he really got into his theoretical work. I know about going on an “intellectual drunk” like that. It’s a wonderful way of getting away from the realities of the mundane world. But of course, they’re still there waiting for you, and the people you got away from by thinking yourself away from them are now pissed off at you because you didn’t pay any attention.

(Laughter)

Student: Can you do that mindfully sometimes though? Knowing that you’re not doing it all the time, but knowing that okay, right now I just really want to be intellectual, so I’m going to go…

CTT: Yes. I think the general rule in the mindfulness tradition is not that “At every moment I must be perfectly enlightened and deal with everything in the optimal way,” but to be mindful of what you’re doing. And sometimes that may involve recognizing “This situation drives me absolutely bonkers and bananas and I’m going to kill somebody if I don’t distract myself for a minute! So, damn it I’m going to concentrate on my breathing and not on what that son of a bitch over there is saying to me. Or go watch a movie!” Yep. It’s not as if there’s any one behavior or internal strategy that is the optimal thing for all situations. And, of course, one of the virtues of mindfulness is that you get to know yourself better. When you do have to use a less than mindful, but effective, distraction or happiness inducing technique, you could probably use it more effectively.

Student: Do you think they work in the long term if you don’t have any of those sort of work that you’re doing?

CTT: Do which work? The –

Student: Like psychological work, or like therapy. I mean, say that you get really angry when people disagree with you, so I have to distract myself every single time I get angry. But I do that knowing that I’m going to get angry if I don’t stop myself. But do you think that works in the long term if you don’t have some other sort of practice combined?

CTT: No. I don’t think it does. Well, I mean it might work in the sense that you don’t kill anybody, so you don’t go to jail, but you do get ulcers.

Student: Yeah.

CTT: Or at least that used to be the fashionable theory that anger gave you ulcers. I don't know if that’s true anymore, but there’s a level of behavioral suppression of stuff that will get you in trouble. Even if it may be psychologically stirred up and boiling inside, that’s much better than acting out in a way that gets you into really bad trouble. But then you want to go further and not just boil inside, but you want to get at the psychological source and begin to change it.

Now the mindfulness traditions would claim that the practice of mindfulness is all you need. No, no, I shouldn’t say all. It’s the main thing you need to eventually recognize those sources and change them. That eventually you’ll have insights into your personality that will let you change some of the more psychological things, but eventually you’ll have the more important insights as to who you really are, which will make the big change. I don’t want to use the words “all you need” because they’ll always put this in context.

Buddhism is an eight-fold path. Meditation is one part of that, but you’ve got to have right livelihood, you know? If you make your living making landmines designed to blow up children, you’re not creating very good karma. And your actions toward other people have to be decent because they have consequences, which will again have psychological effects.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Lecture 4, Part 9 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: Is that where the subpersonalities come in? And do we maybe need to acknowledge it and then let it go? I wonder.

Student: So you have to be somebody before you can be nobody?

Student: Yeah. I remember you were talking about that.

CTT: Yeah. You have to be somebody before you can be nobody. Jack Engler, a Buddhist meditation teacher and psychotherapist, is famous for being the first one to say that, I think. Disidentification is a tricky process because it can be used in a very pathological way. You can use disidentification to basically distance yourself from your human feelings and attain a kind of peacefulness that way, but at the cost of impoverishing your life. Didn’t I talk about John Lilly a couple of classes ago?

Student: Yeah.

CTT: He was a famous psychiatrist whose brother or something died when he was a kid, and he was so upset for several days, and then he vowed he’d never feel an emotion again. And he managed to pull it off for the next 30 or 40 years of his life, without realizing how much he’d lost. The whole spiritual path can be used that way. The spiritual path can be a very effective psychological defensive mechanism.

It’s an attitude of “I’m not going to quarrel with you. I’m at a higher spiritual level. I don’t concern myself with mere Earthly disagreements like that.”

This is something you always have to watch out for in yourself as well as in the clients you’ll have. I was talking with somebody today about spiritual bypass as a defense mechanism. Everybody mentions it now, but apparently there’s not much actually written about it.

But it’s so easy to use spirituality as a way to not deal with your ordinary psychological problems. Now that doesn’t mean, at the extreme, that you must be an absolutely, perfectly psychologically functioning person before you dare to spend a moment on anything spiritual. But I think it does mean that if you’ve got significant psychological problems, you’ve got to be real careful about not using spirituality to bypass them. It’s commonly done but it doesn’t work.

Student: How would somebody go about doing that? Using spirituality to bypass. I can’t even imagine having to do that.

CTT: One example that came up quite prominently during the hippie era – you folks are probably too young to remember hippies, but…

(Laughter)

CTT: Most of them, well I can’t say most, a lot of them, lived by basically sponging off other people and didn’t feel in the least guilty about it because they were, they believed, pursuing love and enlightenment. They weren’t going to get trapped in earning a living, which would support a corrupt society anyway. And hey, in one way that’s true, but it’s also a wonderful rationalization for just sponging off people instead of taking responsibility for yourself.

I can see Buddhism misapplied that way too. One way of looking at Buddhism is it’s the ultimate way of being cool, right? Nothing fazes me! Nobody can get to me! I don’t have any suffering! Well, that’s because you’ve stifled all the feelings that might arise within you. You’ve stifled them either by some kind of active suppression process or by a distraction process.

Let me elaborate that. I was thinking about that earlier today. If you’re in a situation that makes you unhappy and you want to be happy, what do you do? Well one thing you might do is to change the actual reality of the situation so it makes you happy. It’s too cold in the room. You turn the heater on. It gets warmer.

But a lot of times we’re in situations where we can’t really change the external situation. So if the external situation is making us unhappy, and it’s just going to go on for some long period of time, we will suffer. But we can do something about our reaction. Remember that equation, suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance?

S = P x R

You can do something to reduce the suffering. One way is some sort of distraction technique. Here’s the pathological use of concentrative meditation. The situation bothers you. You concentrate so strongly on neutral sensations, like your breathing, you don’t notice the situation at all. So it doesn’t bother you.

Your life situation is poor, getting worse. You can’t get a job. You don’t have any friends. You don’t feel good about yourself. Concentrative meditation. Get into these abstracted states where you’re beyond any kind of suffering. Ahh!.

You come back out of a meditative state. All these things that make you suffer are still there. Damn! Pee quickly, have a bite to eat, and go back into meditation again. And maybe, if you’re lucky, you can spend your whole life meditating. Maybe you can join a monastery or a nunnery or an ashram, or somebody else will take care of all the physical stuff and you get to spend all your time meditating; distracting yourself. So in that sense, meditation can be a distraction, a spiritual bypass.

I think this is one of the reasons why the Buddha thought that concentrative meditation, for all that it was an incredible technique, wasn’t a complete technique for enlightenment. If you can distract yourself, you can simply take all your attention and put it somewhere else so there’s none left over to go into the suffering thing.

You can have specific techniques for dealing with what bothers you, and this is where Western knowledge of psychopathology becomes valuable.

Remembering our arms and legs now.

All we know about classical defense mechanisms; repression, sublimation, rationalization, things like that; these are also ways of dealing with suffering. But again, like using concentrative meditation as a spiritual bypass, they don’t solve the problems. They provide you with a temporary happiness, but they don’t solve the root core of the problem.

So this discussion started from pointing out that spiritual techniques like concentrative meditation can be an incredible accomplishment to get into these jhanas, states, to get into these incredibly abstracted concentrative states. But while you may rationalize that you’re working on your spiritual development, it may actually in fact be a kind of spiritual bypass, be a way of trying to not have to deal with the real life problems that you’re not very happy with.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Lecture 4, Part 7 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

[Sorry this was delayed in posting, I was on retreat last week]

CTT: Now I say that with a little trepidation, because I’m thinking of some of the spiritual literature that seems to say that thinking is bad. Period. That thinking is always an illusory state separating you from the oneness of everything. I have a hard time with that point of view, especially when I hear it from prominent foreign teachers who put down all sorts of thinking, but who all got here on jet planes, which were created by disciplined thinking to the nth degree. It seems a little unrealistic.

There is an implication in some of the spiritual literature that if you really could live completely in the present, be enlightened, that some form of extra sensory perception (ESP) would take over and you’d always know the right thing no matter what. I’m open to the possibility — but I wouldn’t advise anybody to depend on it. I think it would be a good idea to make sure you have enough gas in the tank of your car before you start driving out across the desert, even though that’s thinking and it’s not quite in the here and now. So there’s a balance here, okay?

For we who have been so caught up in thinking so much of the time, with so little control over the compulsivity of the thinking, we have to work to become mindful of the present. We have to learn that kind of skill, but it doesn’t mean that is the only way to live life. Unless some of those spiritual teachers are right and I just don’t get it — which is a possibility, but who knows?

Student: I would support some of those other teachers by maintaining that thinking is an activity that takes one away from the presence and, to use your example, thinking –

CTT: The “presence” or the “present?”

Student: The present. Sorry.

CTT: Okay. Makes a difference.

Student: Yes. There are presents in the present, I think, but that’s another discussion. Your discussion about thinking, that one might get involved in the fabrics; that to me is the mind taking over a present state, where judgments have taken precedence to the validity of the conversation taking place.

CTT: Remember arms and legs.

Student: So that, to me, is a subtle way that the mind gets in and actually processes thoughts about an experience which is happening more through a bodily interaction with the world, or a sensory or sensuous interaction with the world, rather than a cognitive or thoughtful interaction with the world. And so, to me, that’s where the thinking is. The thinking is about the past. It’s something that’s happened or been experienced, even if it’s very recent. And that’s why I think that thinking is de-emphasized and that the actual present experience is more one of sensing.

CTT: Well, yeah. When you’re learning how to be in the present, you have to de-emphasize the thinking. I’m just talking about when it seems to be elevated to an absolute category of “Come to the present and never think again and you’ll be enlightened,” that’s what I have my doubts about. Of course I’ve never been there, so who knows…

Student: I think maybe it would work, assuming that everybody else is doing it too.

CTT: I don’t want the people who design the next airplane I’m on to not think!

(Laughter)

CTT: Now how many of you have read any of the Carlos Castaneda books? (A few hands go up) Hardly anybody?

Student: Talked about them a lot.

Student: Yeah.

Student: Haven’t read them.

CTT: What an amazing world I’ve grown up in. To think that today's spiritual seekers haven't read Castaneda's books! (Laughter) Well back when don Juan, Castaneda’s teacher, was the hottest thing on the spiritual circuit, he shocked some people, given what Castaneda had already written in his books. Don Juan had done so much work with Castaneda, trying to get him to not think in specific situations but to experience something. Then at one point don Juan came out and talked about how wonderful the ability to think rationally is, and how rare it is! That actually makes a great deal of psychological sense, because we do think.

I have to tell you a wonderful joke I heard today. “I used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body and then I realized who was thinking that.”

(Laughter)

We think we spend a lot of our time logically thinking about things, but actually much of that apparent rationality is rationalization. We’ve had emotional reactions to things if we like or dislike them and our mind conveniently makes up apparent reasons to justify the particular emotion.

To actually be able to indulge in purely logical thinking about something is probably one of the highest gifts human beings have — and rarely use. And to know when that rationality has actually turned into rationalization is another gift that’s really important, because then you can treat it differently.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Observation reveals…

My mind has scenario generators and there’s practically always one running, either as thoughts (verbal talk/words to myself) or imagery.

The imagery is easy to see as I drift toward sleep, but, while less intense in terms of perceptibility, seem to be there all the time I’m awake.

There’s internally generated imagery, i.e., I don’t know why the particular image/dreamlet should come up at that time, there’s imagery generated by previous imagery or talk of body feelings, and there’s constant imagery in response to sensory input.  I hear a sound, e.g., and even if I don’t consciously want it, a faint visual image of what the object making that sound probably is occurs, and it’s accurately, spatially located in a usually implicit visual map of the space around me.  Like my perceptual processes are getting an image ready if I need it, perhaps to speed other info retrieval in connection with it.

If I’m not exerting some intention to organize my talk and image so they have a goal in mind, they wander all over the place.

If their content were analyzed, I’m sure they would be only partially random or of unknown provenance.  Generally they would reflect my usual personality and concerns, a kind of statistical distribution of “me.”  So I’m not just a random generator, but the lawfulness is hard to see sometimes – why in the world am I thinking about X?

So what is the “I,” the “me” behind this?  I automatically label all this stuff “my” experience, but that’s not just a post hoc intellectual thought, it “feels” like “me” in some hard-to-define sense.

So what might survive death?  A variegated collection of memories held together by intention?  In my alive state, my body must hold a lot of “me” together, as well as habitual and transient intentions?  The body as concretized intentions?

Funny, will, intention are the big things missing from modern psychology.

If intention can hold my current body, thoughts and feelings together, could sufficient intention “possess” a complex computer and organize it into a living, conscious being?

I’m going to go to sleep soon, that means I stop exerting specific intent to be “me,” to be organized, to be anything in particular, and the images will increase, the dreamlets start, and I’m gone….

To be continued some day….

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,

Lecture 4, Part 10 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I wanted to say something about peace, because I did this experiment. Tom was talking about, “If you’re in a state of peace, then doesn’t life get boring?” You’re not pissed – peace.

(Laughter)

You can go and have a piss if you want.

(Laughter)

So I did this experiment where I tried doing really slow, deep breathing all day, from when I woke up till I went to bed, and I realized from the effect of that that what it does is – it’s like your emotions affect your breathing and your breathing affects your emotions. So if you breathe with that particular breath, you feel that emotion.

I found that that breath is the breath of peace. It’s very, very slow, and very smooth, and very consistent. And it’s the breath of peace, so I moved into the state of being in peace. No matter what happened, no matter what I was doing, I felt peace. And it was amazing. It was like everything happens like a gift, and I just felt very content and very peaceful.

And then I thought, why not do this every day? And one of the thoughts that came was, well, if I do that, then I won’t really be alive, because I will just be feeling peace all the time.

But then I realized that peace is like an emotion that contains all the other emotions. So when I’m stuck in anger, I’m in anger. And when there is anger, or when I’m in sadness, I’m in sadness, and really know sadness. But peace contains anger and sadness and all the other emotions, because the effortless way to peace is acceptance of everything, including all these other emotions.

And so even though you don’t get lost in anger, or lost in sadness, or lost in jealousy, instead of peace, I can understand and fully empathize with those states, and so I can kind of act angry in an authentic way. I can be angry without being lost in anger, when I’m in a state of peace.

CTT: I think one of the things you’re illustrating also is that the word “peace” is kind of broad gauge and probably contains several different things within it, some of which are desirable and some of which are not.

So for instance, suppose you are a reckless driver. You know, you move over between lanes too fast, speed too fast, and so forth. I could make you a better driver by tinkering with your engine so most of the cylinders didn’t fire and you could only creep along at five miles an hour. You wouldn’t be very reckless at five miles an hour. Or let the air out of your tires, or something like that. That’s a kind of peace you can get by forcing your whole system into a slow mode or a defective mode, and I think some of the tranquilizing drugs do that in a way, too. Just turn the whole system down.

But in the long run, I’d rather teach you to be a better driver than have to disable your car that way. This is a hint – the spirituality of the future will be couched in analogies about cars, for that’s where our real souls are! None of these chariots like in the Hindu scriptures!

(Laughter)

Maybe motorcycles for some people!

Student: I’m not sure if you’re implying that the practice was like taking a drug. To me, it seemed like the result was the same as if I’d done a lot of Vipassana, basically. But the thing is, it was ethical in that I had to effortly concentrate on doing that breath in order to obtain that state, whereas I would imagine after a lot of Vipassana, then I would both breathe in that way and I would experience that state without having to actually do it consciously.

CTT: You wouldn’t do Vipassana that way.

Student: No, no. I mean the result of having done Vipassana. Because I would have no – because Vipassana would result in me having more automatic peace, because I would have integrated more of Vipassana.

CTT: This is tricky here. Okay? The goal of Vipassana is not peace. Or at least if it is a goal, it’s a way-long-term, “let it happen by itself” kind of thing. You can do meditative exercises to induce the peace directly, such as long slow breathing, or something like that. That’s a very powerful procedure, actually.

But you don’t want the peace with a price of ignorance. You could wear blinders when you drove, and that way you wouldn’t feel threatened by those people who zoom up on the side of you. But you really better know when those people are zooming up in case you need to take evasive sort of action.

You don’t want to cut out your capacity to respond with feelings like fear or anxiety and the like. You want to keep from being irrationally carried away by them.

Let’s say somebody would say something to you that could be taken as insulting. Gurdjieff would say that a person who was really normal would have a flash of anger or fear. You got the message – maybe this person is being aggressive toward me – and you could now act intelligently on that message, but you didn’t have to keep dwelling on the message.

But what happens in most people is that when an emotion like that is induced, it triggers off related memories. It starts distorting your perception, and you start seeing this person doing other things that are obviously aggressive signs, when in fact they’re not, and it reminds you of all those people who ever picked on you anyway, and it wasn’t fair, and someday you’ll blow up the whole world, and blah blah blah.

We get into these emotional loops as a result of something that only lasts a fraction of a second, a lot of times. That’s the emotional system, or the bodily system, or the intellectual system running away with itself instead of giving a mindful response to what’s actually there. Stay in touch with what actually is. And then if you need to make a decision about it, you need to make a decision.

So you don’t want to cut that sensitivity out, but the peace comes as a side effect of not “going away,” of not cocooning yourself in dullness or ignorance.

Student: And it’s because you have these negative emotions very briefly, and then you go back to peace, and so then you don’t spend a long time in this stuck emotion.

CTT: I think most spiritual systems would say our actual, natural, resting state is peaceful. They might not want to say peace with a big capital P and an ecstatic connotation, but a kind of calm, open – peaceful is the word that keeps coming to mind – state.

It’s when these other things start…. I mean, an indication now might be how often is it that somebody said something hurtful to you in the morning and it ruined your whole day? You just spend the whole day going over it and over it. Not that it got you anywhere except to make you more agitated.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,

Lecture 4, Part 13 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

[Note my postings may be irregular for the next few weeks as I'm going camping...]

Student: So what is the hallmark of a good spiritual teacher?

CTT: Wow!

Student: Sitting full lotus for three years!

Student: With a bottle of whiskey in one hand, you can do it in two!

(Laughter)

Student: “Drink, or you won’t be enlightened.”

(Laughter)

CTT: We would agree, I think, that places like Stanford or Harvard or something like that are first class universities. How do we make that judgment? Do we make it by the devotees who hang around the professors?

Student: By how often they are mentioned in U.S. News & World Report.

(Laughter)

CTT: Oh. Okay. No.

(Laughter)

That’s one way to do it, right? But I think the real criteria is that you judge them by their graduates. A lot of people who’ve accomplished a lot in the world have gone to universities like that, so we think they’re good universities. And yeah, there are things like how fancy the buildings and labs are, and scholarships. And that’s nice, but the ultimate test is the graduates.

I think that’s the ultimate test you need to apply to spiritual teachers. How many graduates do they produce and how much do their graduates give to the world?

Now at one extreme, you might have some spiritual teacher who never have any graduates. Everybody hangs around as a devotee and looks blissed out.

(Laughter)

I guess that’s all right, but they’re not going to get my ranking as a top teacher.

And on the other hand, you have some where the only people who ever leave a particular spiritual group are the ones who get thrown out. Does that make you think of a cult or something like that, or maybe because they genuinely weren’t suitable?

And on the third hand, there are teachers who’ve had students who’ve ended up being teachers or otherwise made contributions themselves and we think pretty highly of that. But we don’t do that in any systematic kind of way.

So you know Swami Yogananda gave rise to… I don't know if I have the succession right. Let’s say, famous Yogi No. 1 had a student, who was famous Yogi No. 2, to be more generic about it. But it’s not like there are clear records kept. Maybe this was 1 in 100,000 students. The only one who was worth anything. Maybe it was 1 out of every 10 who actually became a very effective teacher who helped people, or something like that.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,

Lecture 4, Part 9 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I think you can bypass the mundane with anything, really. Can people do it because they’re drunk on Jesus too? Too drunk to recognize their family problems? And they do it with theory, abstracting everything away.

CTT: My wife and I are reading a biography of Einstein. When things weren’t going well, he really got into his theoretical work. I know about intellectual drunks like that. It’s a wonderful way of getting away from the realities of the mundane world. But of course, they’re still there waiting for you, and the people you got away from by thinking yourself away from them are now pissed off at you because you didn’t pay any attention.

(Laughter)

Student: Can you do that mindfully sometimes though? Knowing that you’re not doing it all the time, but knowing that okay, right now I just really want to be intellectual, so I’m going to go…

CTT: Yes. I think the general rule in the mindfulness tradition is not that “At every moment I must be perfectly enlightened and deal with everything in the optimal way,” but to be mindful of what you’re doing. And sometimes that may involve recognizing “This situation drives me absolutely bonkers and bananas and I’m going to kill somebody if I don’t distract myself for a minute! So, damn it I’m going to concentrate on my breathing and not on what that son of a bitch over there is saying to me. Or go watch a movie!” Yep. It’s not as if there’s any one behavior or internal strategy that is the optimal thing for all situations. And, of course, one of the virtues of mindfulness is that you get to know yourself better. When you do have to use a less than mindful, but effective, distraction or happiness inducing technique, you could probably use it more effectively.

Student: Do you think they work in the long term if you don’t have any of those sort of work that you’re doing?

CTT: Do which work? The –

Student: Like psychological work, or like therapy. I mean, say that you get really angry when people disagree with you, so I have to distract myself every single time I get angry. But I do that knowing that I’m going to get angry if I don’t stop myself. But do you think that works in the long term if you don’t have some other sort of practice combined?

CTT: No. I don’t think it does. Well, I mean it might work in the sense that you don’t kill anybody, so you don’t go to jail, but you do get ulcers.

Student: Yeah.

CTT: Or at least that used to be the fashionable theory that anger gave you ulcers. I don't know if that’s true anymore, but there’s a level of behavioral suppression of stuff that will get you in trouble. Even if it may be psychologically stirred up and boiling inside, that’s much better than acting out in a way that gets you into really bad trouble. But then you want to go further and not just boil inside, but you want to get at the psychological source and begin to change it.

Now the mindfulness traditions would claim that the practice of mindfulness is all you need. No, no, I shouldn’t say all. It’s the main thing you need to eventually recognize those sources and change them. That eventually you’ll have insights into your personality that will let you change some of the more maladaptive psychological things, but eventually you’ll have the more important insights as to who you really are, which will make the big change. I don’t want to use the words “all you need” because they’ll always put this in context.

Buddhism is an eight-fold path. Meditation is one part of that, but you’ve got to have right livelihood, you know? If you make your living making land mines designed to blow up children, you’re not creating very good karma. And your actions toward other people have to be decent because they have consequences, which will again have psychological effects.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,

Lecture 4, Part 8 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: Is that where the subpersonalities come in? And do we maybe need to acknowledge it and then let it go? I wonder.

Student: So you have to be somebody before you can be nobody?

Student: Yeah. I remember you were talking about that.

CTT: Yeah. You have to be somebody before you can be nobody. Jack Engler, a Buddhist meditation teacher and psychotherapist, is famous for being the first one to say that, I think. Disidentification is a tricky process because it can be used in a very pathological way. You can use disidentification to basically distance yourself from your human feelings and attain a kind of peacefulness that way, but at the cost of impoverishing your life. Didn’t I talk about John Lilly a couple of classes ago?

Student: Yeah.

CTT: He was a famous psychiatrist whose brother or something died when he was a kid, and he was so upset for several days, and then he vowed he’d never feel an emotion again. And he managed to pull it off for the next 30 or 40 years of his life, without realizing how much he’d lost. The whole spiritual path can be used that way. The spiritual path can be a very effective psychological defensive mechanism.

It’s an attitude of “I’m not going to quarrel with you. I’m at a higher spiritual level. I don’t concern myself with mere Earthly disagreements like that.”

This is something you always have to watch out for in yourself as well as in the clients you’ll have. I was talking with somebody today about spiritual bypass as a defense mechanism. Everybody mentions it now, but apparently there’s not much actually written about it.

But it’s so easy to use spirituality as a way to not deal with your ordinary psychological problems. Now that doesn’t mean, at the extreme, that you must be an absolutely, perfectly psychologically functioning person before you dare to spend a moment on anything spiritual. But I think it does mean that if you’ve got significant psychological problems, you’ve got to be real careful about not using spirituality to bypass them. It’s commonly attempted, but it doesn’t work.

Student: How would somebody go about doing that? Using spirituality to bypass. I can’t even imagine having to do that.

CTT: One example that came up quite prominently during the hippie era – you folks are probably too young to remember hippies, but…

(Laughter)

CTT: Most of them, well I can’t say most, a lot of them lived by basically sponging off other people and didn’t feel in the least guilty about it because they were pursuing love and enlightenment. They weren’t going to get trapped in earning a living, which would support a corrupt society anyway. And hey, in one way that’s true, but it’s also a wonderful rationalization for just sponging off people instead of taking responsibility for yourself.

I can see Buddhism misapplied that way too. One way of looking at Buddhism is it’s the ultimate way of being cool, right? Nothing fazes me! Nobody can get to me! I don’t have any suffering! Well, that’s because you’ve stifled all the feelings that might arise within you. You’ve stifled them either by some kind of active suppression process or by a distraction process.

Let me elaborate that. I was thinking about that earlier today. If you’re in a situation that makes you unhappy and you want to be happy, what do you do? Well one thing you might do is to change the actual reality of the situation so it makes you happy. It’s too cold in the room. You turn the heater on. It gets warmer.

But a lot of times we’re in situations where we can’t really change the external situation. So the external situation is making us unhappy, it’s just going to go on for some long period of time. But we can do something about our reaction. Remember that equation, suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance? .

S = PxR

You can do something to reduce the suffering

One way is some sort of distraction technique. Here’s the pathological use of concentrative meditation. The situation bothers you. You concentrate so strongly on neutral sensations, like your breathing, you don’t notice the situation at all. So it doesn’t bother you.

Your life situation is poor, getting worse. You can’t get a job. You don’t have any friends. You don’t feel good about yourself. Concentrative meditation. Get into these abstracted states where you’re beyond any kind of suffering. Ahh!.

You come back out of a meditative state. All these things that make you suffer are still there. Damn! Pee quickly, have a bite to eat, and go back into meditation again. And maybe, if you’re lucky, you can spend your whole life meditating. Maybe you can join a monastery or a nunnery, or somebody else will take care of all the physical stuff and you get to spend all your time meditating; distracting yourself. So in that sense, meditation can be a distraction.

I think this is one of the reasons why the Buddha thought that concentrative meditation, for all that it was an incredible technique, wasn’t a complete technique for enlightenment. If you can distract yourself, you can simply take all your attention and put it somewhere else so there’s none left over to go into the suffering thing.

You need to have specific techniques for dealing with what bothers you, and this is where Western knowledge of psychopathology becomes valuable.

Remembering our arms and legs now. [for readers coming late to this series, the occasional reminder to students to remember their arms and legs is to remind them of the principle technique they have been taught to be more present, more here-and-now, and to practice that technique. Being more here and now helps keep these discussions more real, more concerned with reality, rather than just intellectual exercises]

All we know about classical defense mechanisms; repression, sublimation, rationalization, things like that; these are also ways of dealing with suffering. But again, they don’t solve the problems. They provide you with a temporary happiness, but they don’t solve the root problem, the core of the problem.

So this discussion started from pointing out that spiritual techniques like concentrative meditation can be an incredible accomplishment to get into these jhanas, concentrative states, to get into these incredibly abstracted states. But while you may rationalize that you’re working on your spiritual development, it may actually in fact be a kind of spiritual bypass, be a way of trying to not have to deal with the real life problems that you’re not very happy with.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites