Robert Augustus Masters, PhD, is a relationship expert, an integral
psychotherapist, and a psychospiritual guide and trainer, with a
doctorate in psychology. He is the cofounder, with his wife Diane,
of the Masters Center for Transformation (MCT), a school featuring
relationally rooted psychospiritual work devoted to deep healing
and fully embodied awakening. He is also the author of many books
(includingTransformation Through Intimacy, Spiritual Bypassing,
Emotional Intimacy,andTo Be a Man) and an audio program-Knowing
Your Shadow.
His uniquely integral, intuitive work, which he developed over the
past thirty-seven years, dynamically blends the psychological and
physical with the spiritual, emphasizing full-blooded embodiment,
authenticity, emotional openness and literacy, deep shadow work,
and the develop-ment of relational maturity. He lives and works
with his wife in Ashland, Oregon.
http-//robert-masters.com
"This is a wonderfully significant and important book, and is
highly recommended. Its contents are truly mandatory for this day
and age."
—Ken Wilber, author of The Integral Vision
"This timely and penetrating analysis of spirituality’s shadow
provides a much-needed counterpoint for those who tend to get
blinded by its light."
—Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism without Beliefs
"There is much wisdom and good information in this book. Robert
joins a growing number of wise teachers who understand that the
personal and the universal must be combined to bring true and
genuine spiritual awakening."
—Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart and After the Ecstasy,
the Laundry
"Traversing the muddy waters of contemporary spirituality requires
a willingness to meet its seen and unseen challenges with ruthless
self-honesty and keen discernment. Robert addresses 'the many faces
of spiritual bypassing' with intellectual rigor, hard-earned
insight, and emotional intelligence. It is a lucid, well-written,
and practical guide for both new and seasoned practitioners on the
spiritual path."
—Mariana Caplan, PhD, author of Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating
Discernment on the Spiritual Path and Halfway Up the Mountain: the
Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment
"Robert Masters has given us a great gift—a tremendously useful
guide to examining our tendencies to spiritual bypassing, clearly
the most comprehensive and accessible treatment available on this
crucial topic. His work is a great contribution to the ongoing
integration of psychotherapy and spiritual practice, and to our
understanding of the meaning of spiritual maturity."
—Donald Rothberg, PhD, author of The Engaged Spiritual Life
"In Spiritual Bypassing, Robert Masters eloquently reminds us of
something we have unknowingly misplaced on our spiritual journeys:
Mother Earth. In our efforts to bypass our earthly challenges, we
have disconnected from the Ground of our very being, seeking our
wholeness on a pogo stick to the stars. In poignant and clarifying
language, Robert calls us back home, confronting us with our
avoidance, inviting us to find our spirituality in the heart/depths
of our humanness. In an era where detachment models for
spirituality are becoming dangerously prevalent, his inclusive
message is of profound importance. It may not appeal to the part of
us that wants the path to be easy, but it will speak loudly to the
part of us that longs for the truth. I recommend it
wholeheartedly."
—Jeff Brown, author of Soulshaping
"In Spiritual Bypassing, Robert Augustus Masters offers a wake-up
call—more of a shout—to those of us who have unwittingly fallen
prey to all manner of promising and seductive antidotes to our pain
and suffering in the form of detached spiritual teachings and New
Age magical thinking. The book is a sobering and powerful reminder
that our present embodiment, in all its flawed, messy humanness,
cannot be conveniently sidestepped, and so invites us inward to a
face-to-face encounter and embrace with the raw truth of who we
really are. Masters’ unique and at times disarming prose style
blends a poetic sensibility with a surprising stark clarity that
points us to 'What Really Matters.'"
—Eliezer Sobel, author of The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist’s
Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics, and Other
Consciousness-Raising Experiments
"There is much hard-won wisdom in this work. Spiritual Bypassing is
a detailed, point-by-point description of how so-called
spirituality can be used by some to actually avoid individuation,
adulthood, and the daimonic. When Carl Jung noted that “neurosis is
always a substitute for legitimate suffering,” he hinted that,
especially for the Western psyche, spiritual practice itself can be
just such a sneaky neurosis. This insightful, firm, confrontive yet
compassionate book promotes and encourages the complementary
marriage of spiritual practice and psychotherapy, recognizing that
they are—and, at best, have always been—basically two integrally
related sides of the same existential coin: The most profound
psychotherapy is essentially spiritual; and the deepest spiritual
quest includes some depth psychology. Neither approach can be
excluded on the unpredictable path toward selfhood. But even the
powerful fusion of spirituality and psychotherapy cannot offer
transcendent perfection. Selfhood or spiritual enlightenment is
never about escaping or distorting inner or outer reality to serve
our egos, but requires lovingly accepting and embracing reality as
it is and on its own terms."
—Stephen Diamond, PhD, author of Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic:
The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity
"Uncompromising and truth-telling, this book is an antidote to
spiritual obesity. What emerges is the call to psychological
clarity as essential to the mature spiritual life. Here is
soul-fuel for those who would enter the road less traveled—the
deeply examined life as part of spiritual practice."
—Jean Houston, PhD, author of A Mythic Life
"The escape act and forms of denial and self-delusion that Robert
Masters diagnoses as 'spiritual bypassing' have been with us for
millennia — perhaps since our early ancestors first discovered
psycho-spiritual experiences that seemed to relieve the pressures
of living and dying. But the syndrome has become endemic in our
frothy age of virtual everything — so we are all blessed by the
appearance of this diamond of a book. Here a priest of our true
wellness has distilled the blood, sweat, and tears of his decades
of fervent triage work in trenches of bypassing into essences of
truly healing wisdom. Every spiritual practitioner would do well to
study Spiritual Bypassing again and again. So would every one of us
who presume to teach any spirituality at all. Thankfully, it's as
much compassionate antidote as prophetic critique. May it be put to
grateful use as long as the illness it treats continues to
ravage human bodies, souls, and lives."
—Saniel Bonder, founder, Waking Down in Mutuality, and author of
Healing the Spirit/Matter Split and Waking Down
“Spiritual Bypassing casts a critical eye on our deeply entrenched
misuse of spirituality… Masters provides a framework for how to
deal with and integrate ‘negative’ emotions such as anger, fear,
hate and judgment into a more authentic way of living. While most
self-help books these days seem to simply tell you to ‘just be more
positive,’ ‘avoid negativity’ or ‘have more compassion,’ Masters
suggests a method where we can simultaneously choose to be
compassionate while also still choosing to acknowledge our
heartfelt anger—without expressing it with excessive aggression or
repressing it through denial or other practices that might numb our
real feelings... Spiritual Bypassing is a must read for anyone who
is looking for a more integrated spirituality, authentic
relationship with themselves and others, and practical methods for
dealing with unresolved wounds.”
—Spiritual Media Blog
“In my opinion, [Spiritual Bypassing] will become as important as
Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism… Masters
seems to be, based on his writings, one of the most important minds
working in integral psychotherapy.”
—Integral Options Café
“Spiritual Bypassing is an exceptionally well-written book that is
endorsed by big-time authors such as, Jack Kornfield, Jean Houston,
and Ken Wilber. Let's support (and challenge) ourselves and others
who can no longer see for themselves when they are blinded by the
light.”
—New Consciousness Review
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