At the time of writing this intro the primary purpose of Zanshadtao is a consideration of spiritual bypassing; as Teal says “Spiritual bypassing is the cancer of the spiritual world”. Do we pay sufficient attention to bypassing? How is bypassing situated in the spiritual world? How important is this bypassing for wider humanity?
Early consideration of bypassing would see it as arising from the egos and shadow of spirituality. In other words, spiritual bypassing occurs when a spiritual seeker is not following their path. Ego is when a seeker would allow attachment to any event that arises – leading to the clingings of kilesa, upadanas or inappropriate attention to the 5 khandhas; the shadow would be egos that have not been made conscious and therefore not integrated. Why is it called spiritual bypassing? This needs investigating but on initial inspection it appears that bypassing is associated with the seeker avoiding daily life even though they are supposedly on the path – bypassing the path that is part of daily life for some form of spiritual indulgence eg jhanas for jhana sake. Zanshadtao connects path, bypassing and shadow.
There is a clear aspect of the spiritual world which impacts mainstream society – cults. People go off to join cults, and according to that mainstream find themselves in great difficulties. Out of the woodwork come mainstream cult rescuers many of whom appear to be conditioned mainstream apologists. Cults are concerned with breaking away from the mainstream trying to fulfil the faith vacuum LINK that is in our lives. Squeezing a cult victim back into mainstream life is trying to get the genie back into the bottle after it has been released. It is the exact opposite of Pandora’s box. Rather than Pandora releasing the world’s ills these seekers through their cults begin to release the world’s spiritual joys, however they can become victim to exploitation because the spiritual world is so barren. The issue for these seekers is not to find a way to squeeze them back into mainstream conditioning but finding a way of helping their spiritual awareness survive in the inimical conditioned world.
But to begin looking at cults zandtao will look at how the world is attempting to marginalise the truth of the teachings of Teal Swan into that of a cult. This again shows the faith vacuum for its ignorance.
Autonomy is a key theme throughout Zanshadtao, what is autonomy and how is connected to the path? In this zandtao will discuss how without autonomy do we have the strength to resist the egoic attractions discussed throughout Zanshadtao? Without autonomy how can we understand what is happening with various egos discussed? Without autonomy how can we see beyond idealisms that purport to be the path? With autonomy there is spiritual liberation so we being by looking at the autonomy of spiritual liberation with Michael B Beckwith unearthing the path’s fruits.
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