In my early 30s, I was doing something goofy in public that I thought was really cool, and someone called me a Sensitive New Age Guy.
The comment cut and caused soul-searching.
I manned-up more in the following years.
I haven’t heard the term SNAG in awhile, but an allied concept, the “spiritual bypasser” now makes the rounds. It means you’re avoiding life responsibilities of work and relationship by falsely “giving it all up to God.”
Anyone—Sensitive or Insensitive, New Age, or Old Age—can avoid heroic engagement in the world.
That said, this morning—while immersed in the heroism of the long-avoided mopping of my apartment—all the while delaying my morning yoga practice—I felt I was doing the opposite. I felt I was “worldly bypassing.”
The most heroic non-avoider of our new Yoga Nation is Gandhi. (I think we overlook America’s Martin Luther King because he wasn’t Hindu and he didn’t do the whole gamut of yogi things that Gandhi did on his way to changing the world—avoid meat, live in an Ashram, consistently cite the Bhagavad Gita, etc.). Andrew Harvey’s concept of “Sacred Activism”—mostly championed by women in the yoga universe—e.g. Seane Corn, Shiva Rea, Sharon Gannon—is an expression of this Gandhian ideal. Harvey says,
Mahatma GhandiWhen the deepest and most grounded spiritual vision is married to a practical and pragmatic drive to transform all existing political, economic, and social institutions, a holy force—the power of wisdom, and love in action—is born.
This force I define as Sacred Activism.
Harvey’s ideal wasn’t yet articulated when I was a boy, but concepts like it colored my youth.
As I’ve said in other posts, my mother & father were both minsters, and the values of M. L. King (more than Gandhi) were very alive in my childhood home. I turned seven the year he was killed. King and other Christian Religious radicals were my boyhood heroes: The anti-war Catholic priests, Philip and Daniel Berrigan—who poured blood on nuclear warheads; the Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin who fought for gay rights; and the leftist theologians Richard and Rheinhold Niebuhr, who argued for a socially responsible nation.
Despite my family history, when I “got Buddhism” at the age of 25, meditation became more important than any worldly activity.
That year, I took up a long period of “spiritual bypassing.”
Spiritual bypassing is a valid career option in India, so I had good company. The parivrajaka, the wandering yogi, has doubled down on the possibility that Realization results from dodging worldly action.
The philosophy of the Yoga Sutra can give us some guidance as to how to more intelligently orient our activity in the world. It divides Reality into spiritual and worldly realms—called Purusha and Prakriti. The realization of Purusha is the goal of the sramana, the yogi striver—a total spiritual bypasser—who seeks Enlightenment and has “tuned in, turned on and dropped out.” On the other hand, the brahmana–the good everyday citizen who is still caught in the world’s whirring wheels—keeps his floors mopped. If he’s got a “bypass,” it is of the worldly kind.
I was tempted to completely embrace a sramana path, but didn’t do it. But the pull persists. For most of us, the pulls toward worldly action and spiritual practice stay in conflict.
In the Samkhya philosophy of the Yoga Sutras, Purusha, the realm of pure awareness, and Prakriti, the realm of action, remain eternally unresolved. The spiritual and worldly interact, but there is no holy One.
The Material and the Spiritual won’t be reconciled by a collapsing universe or three Bethlehem wise men galloping to a cineplex to watch Apocalypse Now.
We will feel the pull toward life’s contrary possibilities eternally.
The good news is this contrariness is dynamic.
It keeps us restless, provoked and alive.
I think I’m a queer duck in this equation, to use an old term. Even before my epiphany when I was 25, my boyhood saw me rolling my eyes up into my head for hours or resting at the bottom of swimming pools as long as I could, watching my mind get quiet while holding my breath.
I tend toward spiritual not worldly bypass, but I think most folks bypass the spiritual more than the worldly. America ain’t no Nepal. Our ascetic ideal is expressed through the work ethic and—unlike India—a train ride to realization won’t easily be bankrolled by street side begging. Society feels no obligation to the freelancer sramana.
In American Democracy, the obligation to be active in politics is more universal than any pull to meditate. But if you’re in the yoga game, you are called to marry the aims of meditation and action. Activism is part of the work of self-transformation—even if you think meditation is enough.
It can be painful to intertwine action and self transformation, but—like childbirth or chaturangas, or getting out of bed in the morning—it’s a pain we’re made to endure, and it makes our inner and outer action potent. “Spiritual Bypassing” should be criticized because it is not whole.
Like Camus, we say the infinity of pushing our own personal rock uphill is a happy dilemma.
We feel pain on both sides of the equation—pushing into the world, or pushing toward the self. We are both angel and animal, and we ride the life’s train in opposite directions.
“Spiritual Bypass” dodges transformation of the worldly “I.”
“Worldly bypass” dodges realization of the Spiritual “I.”
Sacred Activism tries to dodge these dodges.
About the time the Sutras were composed (200 CE),the Bhagavad Gita was, too. And here we get a nice formula—one championed by Gandhi (who read the Gita constantly). It allows us to be “worldly,” but get spiritual goods, too.
The BG’s description of Karma Yoga—acting in the world but giving the benefits to God—foreshadows “Sacred Activism.” Karma Yoga accommodates our divided nature.
Meditation is usually called an otherworldly occupation, but when “the most grounded spiritual vision is married to a pragmatic drive”— to use Harvey’s formulation—meditative goals come to worldly action.
Karma yoga and Sacred Activism are methods to change ourselves as we change the real world.
Kierkegaard said, “purity of heart is to will one thing.” In Sacred Activism, even as we fight for variegated goals, we fight for the singular transformation of the spirit.
The Gita says, “Whoever works selflessly combines renunciation and activity. Right action is really renunciation.” (6:1-2) .
This tack avoids either bypass. It swims consciously with Purusha and Prakriti.
Sacred Activism and Karma Yoga are methods for pushing the rock of the world forward and staying whole. Devoted to this game plan, life’s pain is re-purposed and we, the human “animal-angel ,“ ride one bus toward divergent destinations.
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Editor: Kate Bartolotta
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