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 Robert Augustus Masters
Robert Augustus Masters, Ph.D., is the author of 11 books (including Transformation Through Intimacy and Spiritual Bypassing), a highly experienced psychotherapist (and trainer of psychotherapists) with a doctorate in Psychology, and a teacher of spiritual deepening. His uniquely integral, intuitive work (developed over the past 32 years) dynamically blends the psychological and physical with the spiritual, emphasizing full-blooded embodiment, authenticity, emotional openness and literacy, deep shadow work, and the development of relational maturity.
Ken Wilber is the most widely translated academic writer in America, with 25 books translated into some 30 foreign languages. Wilber is an internationally acknowledged leader and the preeminent scholar of the Integral stage of human development, which continues to gather momentum around the world. His many books, all of which are still in print, can be found at Amazon.com. Ken Wilber is the founder of Integral Institute, Inc., the co-founder of Integral Life, Inc., and the Senior Fellow of Integral Life Spiritual Center.
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Have you ever:
- Used spirituality as a sort of escape from reality, or as a way to avoid some painful aspect of your life?
- Let yourself get taken advantage of or walked all over in the name of blind compassion?
- Allowed your understanding of ultimate reality to help you avoid or push away your anger, believing such negative emotions to be "lower" or "less spiritual" than your enlightened ideals?
- Used spiritual (or integral) terminology to relabel your own shadows, paving over the potholes in your own personality?
If you are being completely honest with yourself, odds are you would answer "yes" to one or more of these questions. It might be difficult to admit--in fact it might be so subtle and so insidious it's difficult to even see. But don't worry: you are not alone. In fact, we would be hard pressed to name a single teacher or practitioner who hasn't fallen into similar traps at one time or another. Fortunately, we have people like Robert Augustus Masters and Ken Wilber to help us recognize, confront, and embrace these flickering shadows of spiritual bypassing--offering us a path from from self-deception to self-liberation, from idiot compassion to enlightened action, from effete escapism to the moment-to-moment enactment of infinite and boundless love.
About Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us From What Really Matters by Robert Augustus Masters
Spiritual bypassing—the use of spiritual beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs—is so pervasive that it goes largely unnoticed. The spiritual ideals of any tradition, whether Christian commandments or Buddhist precepts, can provide easy justification for practitioners to duck uncomfortable feelings in favor of more seemingly enlightened activity. When split off from fundamental psychological needs, such actions often do much more harm than good.
While other authors have touched on the subject, this is the first book fully devoted to spiritual bypassing. In the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa's landmark Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Spiritual Bypassing provides an in-depth look at the unresolved or ignored psychological issues often masked as spirituality, including self-judgment, excessive niceness, and emotional dissociation. A longtime psychotherapist with an engaging writing style, Masters furthers the body of psychological insight into how we use (and abuse) religion in often unconscious ways. This book will hold particular appeal for those who grew up with an unstructured new-age spirituality now looking for a more mature spiritual practice, and for anyone seeking increased self-awareness and a more robust relationship with themselves and others.
 "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
"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
“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
Purchase now.
Images by John Inglis
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