Bypassing spiritual bypass as a means of spiritual bypass

Spiritual bypass is a genuine phenomenon: it's possible to use individual recovery tools in isolation to pretend to be OK when you're not. This usually takes the form of repeating spiritual ideas in regurgitated (but undigested) form without dealing with one's actual problems.

This happens, but in my view it's rare.

It's also very easily avoidable by simply taking the Twelve Steps as outlined in the Big Book.

If one is honest in one's Step Four and Step Eight inventories, firstly about one's feelings and secondly about one's thinking and behaviour, bang goes the spiritual bypass. Simple, straightforward, and requiring only honesty and a systematic approach. It's really not a big deal.

Now, in attempting to avoid this, practitioners (usually people selling their books) will talk very solemnly about feelings, authenticity, shadow work, layers of onions (why not other vegetables? They have layers, too!), stages of recovery, and other mystifying things.

In my view, this contains a far more perilous trap: one where the emotions stemming from my delusional thinking are enthroned, where subjective emotions take the place of objective fact as the basis for reality, where the possibility of real recovery and healing is denied because 'authenticity' requires one to continue to be muddled, complex, 'affected', unresolved, and essentially broken, where the past and childhood, in particular, become the astrological predeterminers of one's present experience, where the centre of one's universe is not God and morality but self and emotion, where relativism takes the place of the absolute, where multiple techniques and professional philosophies are slathered onto the increasingly festering wound, where recovery becomes this never-ending journey as opposed to a transitional phase leading one to the meek and humble service of God, where emotional forensics take the place of spiritual principles, where language is co-opted and bastardised through misuse (just listen to people talking about 'working with energy'), where you can be anything but OK, because to be OK is to miss the point.

The solution is simple. Catalogue. Tell what you find. Forgive. Make amends. Pray. Meditate. Serve God. Detach from the material without denying it. Cleave to the spiritual. A few runs through the washing machine are required. Then regular maintenance.

The self is not important. What is important is God, and God's work, and surrendering to God for use by God for His purposes, not mine. Dissolution of self. Anonymity. Utter self-abandonment.