Spiritual bypassing

The only way out is through.

You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

In Transformation, the Jungian therapist Robert A. Johnson talks about three levels of consciousness: two-, three- and four-dimensional man. I think — if brought up-to-date, translating “man" into person etc. — that this can be quite a useful concept. It's certainly helping to illuminate some of the more frustrating aspects of my current experience.

Two-dimensional man is primitive, simple, naïve. And happy. Frolicking in the garden of Eden without a care in the world. There are very few two-dimensional men (people) now. A nice example is Peter Sellers' character Chance the gardener in Being There. Also some members of traditional cultures who have very little contact with the outside world. Two-dimensional people are able to live with the same quality of simplicity that we usually associate with animals, spontaneously experiencing their full range of emotions, uncensored, open, honest, straightforward, living in the present moment.

Three-dimensional man has knowledge and technology, he thinks about the past and the future, he has science and philosophy and politics and culture. And he is anxious and unhappy, disconnected from nature and from himself, from his instinct, his sex, his emotions, and his power. Almost all of us live like this, including many who claim not to.

Four-dimensional man is enlightened, able to hold, encompass, transcend all the complexity and subtlety of the modern world, but unburdened of the anxiety. Able to live simply, happily. The path there is long and difficult, painful: self-actualisation, spiritual growth, self-knowledge, transcendence.

None of us is happy in the three-dimensional world. We all want a way out. We crave the simplicity, the happiness, the sense of oneness with nature, the fulfilment, the honesty, the open-heartedness that is shared by the two-dimensional and four-dimensional. But we can't seem to find it.

Many seek to go back to the two-dimensional. Back to nature, embracing traditional cultures, ceremonies, dancing, ritual, drugs, free love. Renouncing the modern world. Getting caught up in cults and conspiracies. Rejecting “consensus reality" while uncritically joining in the groupthink of their tribe. Denouncing technology while glued to their mobile phones. Railing against mainstream medicine while walking around with bionic hips and knees.

I think this is a form of spiritual bypassing. It doesn't work. The myths are right. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Once you've opened Pandora's box, you can't stuff everything back in and close it again. Once you've tasted the fruit, you're forever cast out of the garden.

I believe the only way out is through. Therapy, meditation, deep group work. Maybe psychedelics? Parts work, that started with inner child work, but has expanded to embrace more different inner parts, and is now sometimes called internal family systems. Bring all the parts together. Unify them. Reject nothing. Have the strength, subtlety, empathy, and wisdom to hold the contradictions, to encompass them. And the same in the outside world, in our relationships with other people, and with “the system". Purity is an illusion, unattainable. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and so on.

Maybe Descartes set this all back a few hundred years with the whole mind-body duality thing? By living in our heads, ignoring and neglecting our bodies, we've developed technology with no soul. Cold. Based on limited thinking, ignoring wider context. I started to write “functional" here, but it's not even that, it's purely focussed on short-term profit. And look where all that has gotten us: a planet in conflict, on the verge of destruction, war among humans and war against nature. Population explosion, pollution, inequality, suffering, imbalance, destruction... But is technology itself the problem here?

I'm convinced, more and more, that this isn't an either-or situation. It's not about head vs heart. We need both. Working together. I like the idea of the dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Here the thesis is two-dimensional man: nature, body, heart, simplicity. The antithesis is three-dimensional man: science, technology, anxiety and dissociation, split off from nature, the pendulum swinging too far. And the transcendent synthesis we're looking for is four-dimensional man: head, heart and body working together, in harmony internally, and with nature, and with each other.

I was away last weekend at the first seminar of the 18-month Living Tantra training with Jan Day and Frieder Fischer. I had two profound experiences in the morning meditations.

On the second morning, during the quiet part of the meditation, my thoughts drifted off into thinking about one of my current fascinations, the arrangement of the scales in pine cones, how the Fibonacci numbers emerge almost magically. And then I realised I'd drifted off into thinking and immediately started to beat myself up about being bad at meditation, too easily distracted, wasting my time... And then I had a moment, a revelation. This “thinking” came from my free child, from his sense of wonder, curiosity, excitement. He was reminding me of his existence, and demanding not to be forgotten, left behind. This aspect of my inner child definitely lives in my head, in thoughts, theories, mathematics, science... but he's also in my body and my heart, in that sense of wonder, fascination, delight. For my own personal journey, I absolutely need to bring that part along.

And more generally, it's not thinking that's the problem, it's thinking divorced from feeling. It's the economist whose theories only consider money, divorced from the human and natural context. It's the pursuit of short-term profit. It's the scientist or technologist who ignores everything except a reductionist focus on one tiny detail. It's single-minded obsession, goal-orientation.

On the final morning, during the progression upward through the chakras, when we reached the third eye, the eyebrow centre, the guiding words talked about connecting with the world, nature and other people, sending my light out and receiving the universe's energy back in. And I suddenly had a crystal clear vision of a world in harmony. People living in small settlements surrounded by, interwoven with nature and technology, all interconnected. I saw our planet turning, the sun, planets, stars, and galaxies... and I saw a village and nearby a clearing in the forest, and a huge oak tree, and under it a naked woman with long brown hair dancing. And I looked into her eyes and I saw the galaxies again, the entire universe. In harmony.