Oh, how this expression is misapplied. And, oh, how the presumption is made in the face of disagreement by people who call themselves spiritual that a spiritual bypass is occurring.
Definition: Spiritual bypassing is when people use spiritual ideas and practices to avoid facing difficult emotional issues, psychological wounds, or unfinished developmental tasks.
It can be a way to protect oneself from harm or to promote harmony between people, but it doesn’t actually resolve the issue. Instead, it glosses over a problem, leaving it to fester without any true resolution.
Wisdom-based intelligence, which is rooted in both compassion and equanimity, is anything but
a spiritual bypass. It is a hard-earned, unflinching examination of topics and comes to the only conclusion one can come to after exhausting the karma experientially that would drive us to hate, to consume, and to ignore.
Robert Thurman says it best: “If you understood the nature of interdependence then you would fear hate far more than you would fear death.”
You would fear the contamination of even a drop of hostility in your heart for any reason.
Consider for a moment the people you find hateful, the whole lot of them:
from sexists,
to abusers,
to serial killers,
to dogmatists,
to those you consider to be like Hitler.
(Which, by the way, is pure ignorance and an assault on the experience that exists in the
cell of every Jew, unless the person you are referring to committed actual genocide.)
The greatest defense with anyone hateful is to not get infected by what makes them hateful, to not become the people you consider the enemy, even if it is backed by righteous cause.
Does this mean you remain passive and impotent?
No! Anything but! People who are rooted in the true nature of interdependence operate from a different system of order: They do not operate from hate or fear, any kind of hate or any kind of fear.
They operate from the desire to end suffering, the causes of suffering, & help others get out of suffering.
It is real, immediate, action-based compassion. And it gets results. Why? Because you are
not based in ignorance.