TE: What kind of hazard does this present?
JW: Trying to move beyond our psychological and emotional issues by
sidestepping them is dangerous. It sets up a debilitating split between the
buddha and the human within us. And it leads to a conceptual, one-sided kind of
spirituality where one pole of life is elevated at the expense of its opposite:
Absolute truth is favored over relative truth, the impersonal over the personal,
emptiness over form, transcendence over embodiment, and detachment over
feeling. One might, for example, try to practice nonattachment by dismissing
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one’s need for love, but this only drives the need underground, so that it often
becomes unconsciously acted out in covert and possibly harmful ways instead.