The Lion and the Thief

This week two questions came to the column, one a day, and they were the same question wearing two coats. The first asked how we use spiritual language, practice, or calm to avoid the feelings we would rather not feel. The second asked where that avoidance lives in our days, and what it is quietly sparing us from.

Two cards answered. First the Page of Swords: a young woman standing on a high ridge, her eyes lifted into the clouds, her sword resting point down. Then the Seven of Swords: a woman with her head bowed, slipping away with an armful of swords held tight against her chest.

And in between, as it happened, we were making Strength's talking clip.

I want to set these three side by side, because together they draw a line I have been trying to find words for. It is the line between taming and bypassing. From a distance the two look alike. Both are calm. Both are quiet. Only one of them is alive.

THE WORD FOR IT

The psychotherapist John Welwood gave the thing a name in the early 1980s: spiritual bypassing. He meant the use of spiritual ideas and practices to step around unfinished emotional business instead of through it. He was watching it happen in his own Buddhist community, and, he admitted, in himself: practitioners who had sat for years and still came upon what he called "a deep reservoir of sorrow or helplessness" they had never let themselves feel. The name stuck because everyone who heard it recognized someone. Usually themselves.

Jung had said the same thing decades earlier, more bluntly. One does not become enlightened, he wrote, by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

And Gurdjieff had a word for the machinery. He called it buffers: the soft partitions we build inside ourselves so that we never have to feel two contradictory things at once. A buffer does not remove the contradiction. It only stops the collision. Someone with buffers sleeps well. That is the trouble.

THE PAGE WHO LOOKS UP

Look at the Page of Swords again. She is young and bright and genuinely curious. Her word is Jijñāsā, the wish to know. Nothing about her is false. But her eyes are in the clouds, and her sword, the instrument of discernment, rests with its point in the ground she is not looking at.

This is the first face of bypassing, and it is an innocent one. It is the mind that has found a beautiful vocabulary and fallen in love with it. Anger becomes ego. Grief becomes attachment. Fear becomes low vibration. Every word sounds wise. And every word is a way of naming the feeling instead of having it, the way a map of a forest is a way of not getting your feet wet.

The Page is not lying. She simply has not yet looked down.

THE THIEF

The Seven of Swords has looked down, and decided not to stay.

She is older, and she knows exactly what she is carrying. Her head is bowed and turned aside. The swords are hugged to her chest, over the heart, like armour, and she is leaving quietly so that no one, least of all herself, will hear her go. Her word is Māyā, deception. Our deck calls her the internal thief of awareness.

This is the second face of bypassing, and it is not innocent, though it is not malicious either. It is theft, but the only person robbed is the thief. What she is stealing are her own truths, the hard, edged things that only an honest meeting with a raw feeling can give. She takes the calm and leaves the feeling behind. She is very good at it. That is the trouble.

When I edited the short spoken script that went out with her daily question, I changed one word. The draft asked why she was not picking the swords up. But she has picked them up. She is holding them as close as anything can be held. The question is why she is carrying them away instead of turning to face them.

THE LION

And then there is Strength.

A woman, eyes closed, rests her forehead against the brow of a lion. Her hand is gentle at his jaw. Her word is Ahiṃsā, non-violence, and with it comes Dama, mastery of the senses through gentle discipline, not force.

She is calm too. Her eyes are shut, like a meditator's. If you saw only her face you might mistake her for the Page in her clouds, or the thief in her quiet. But look at where she is. She is not above the wild thing, and she is not walking away from it. She is touching it. Her stillness is not a partition between herself and the beast. It is the way she stays close enough to feel its breath.

When we made her talking clip, Bob, who builds this deck with me, watched it moving and said something I had not been able to see in the still frames. The lion, he said, is subtly quite alive, and listening.

That is the whole difference. A bypassed feeling goes still because it has been left behind. A tamed one stays alive, because it has been met. The lion in Strength is not conquered and not asleep. He is attending. He has chosen to stay.

WHAT TAMING ASKS

So here is the line, as plainly as I can draw it.

Bypassing reaches for calm as a destination. Taming reaches for calm as a way of staying present. Bypassing names the feeling so it will not have to feel it. Taming feels it first and names it after. Bypassing gets quieter over time and more brittle. Taming gets quieter over time and more alive.

The test is not whether you are peaceful. The thief is peaceful. The test is whether the wild thing in you is still there, still warm, still breathing against your forehead. If your peace required you to leave it in another room, it is not peace. It is a buffer with good manners.

None of this asks you to give up the spiritual words. The Page is right to love them. It asks you to look down from the clouds, to turn and face what you are carrying, and to put your hand, gently, on the jaw of the thing you were afraid of.

You may find, as Bob found with the lion, that it has been listening the whole time.