TF: So you’re saying that spiritual bypassing not only corrupts our dharma practice, it
also blocks our personal ripening?
JW: Yes. One way it blocks ripening is through making spiritual teachings into
prescriptions about what you should do, how you should think, how you should
speak, how you should feel. Then our spiritual practice becomes taken over by
what I call “the spiritual superego”— the voice that whispers “shoulds” in our
ear. This is a big obstacle to ripening, because it feeds our sense of deficiency.
One Indian teacher, Swami Prajnanpad, whose work I admire, said that
“idealism is an act of violence.” Trying to live up to an ideal instead of being
authentically where you are can become a form of inner violence if it splits you in
two and pits one side against the other. When we use spiritual practice to “be
good” and to ward off an underlying sense of deficiency or unworthiness, then it
turns into a sort of crusade.