Body Is The Tasty Testing Ground Proof Pt 5 —Spiritual By-Passing Defined:

More Premature Elations and Raw Gout Subtleties

Arte mural de la ciudad de Oaxaca. Musica: Cullah — I Don’t Mind It.

This essay is stand alone and doesn’t require reading the previous ones.

It continues from:

Body Is The Tasty Testing Ground Proof Pt 4 — Snoopy and the Coyote:

No Gout About It, Outing An A-Listed Health Myth And Other Premature Elations

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The Pain In The Foot Of Being ‘Mindfully’ On The Cloud 9 Healing Energising Diet

I’m on cloud nine! Okay, okay, in my mind I think I’m cloud nine because I am able to ignore those other pesky somatic reminders in my life that all is not well in body-ville today. My body is still stiff and uncomfortable. Sitting with a stooped back in cross-legged meditation with head-high knees on a stack of pillows is for me an act of overcoming the pain of a dull spike being steadily pushed through my right thigh. And as directed I concentrated on feeling the pain in order to let it go. And I looked to understand that the intractable nature of that pain is the opportunity to be now. Really? Okay… I guess. And, at that time, that leg discomfort was being well ‘balanced’ by a hot poker being pushed into the spine of my kyphotic back low between my shoulder blades.

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(The extreme discomfort in my right leg moved to my left thigh in 2020 and by the end of 2022 that had disappeared. It has only been in the last six months or so that the back discomfort during meditation has seen significant reduction. In normal day-to-day activity I have no discomfort there. In early 2020 I was gifted with a peculiar and very uncomfortable right hip that no alt-practice was able to address well until late last year. Since then a combination of energy healing and a variety of mind-body ‘cleansing’ practices have seen it, as of this writing, almost disappear even though it has enjoyed playing hide and seek a little with me over the years.)

And in the span of eighteen months or so around this time I managed to snap ‘something’ in my right thigh — it sounded and felt like some kind of over extended rubber band breaking. It didn’t seem to exacerbate or ameliorate the meditation spike in my leg. In a yoga-warm up I hurt my right knee because I egoistically wanted to impress my beautiful (and unbalanced) yoga teacher — the damage was bad enough to shock my reiki healer and it took about eighteen months to heal. Somehow, while washing the kitchen floor and mindfully practicing yoga squats, I tore the ACL in my left knee with an audible crack. And lots of pain. After weeks of struggling to ignore the increasing discomfort in my right shoulder and neck, they were to be put off no longer: one day they both locked up solid on my way to a teaching interview. So much so it was difficult to drive. About that muscular lock-up later I learned from my chiropractor that that seizure was, chiropractically, because the kyphotic curve in my back was so severe that my doing shavasana, corpse pose, was pinching my spinal column in my neck. ‘Don’t lay on your back without a pillow, ever!’ my chiropractor cautioned. And for the next eight years I didn’t. Beginning in 2022 that became less consistent and now a non-issue as my back is almost straight. 

As you can see I was definitely being mind-full by coping with or tolerating or elevating pain as some kind of spiritual trial. A modern asceticism? Thus it was that I had every mindful reason to be the coyote doing the Snoopy Dance by my singularity of focus on the somatic changes the change of diet had given me. Well, except for the wrecked right knee, torn ACL in the left knee, and some thigh ligament or tendon damages in my right thigh, spinal problems, neck problems, extreme pain when sitting in meditation, shoulder problems and … Well. You get the idea.

And yet! At the same time with that change of diet I had experienced a huge upgrade in the quality of my life! Really indescribable. Simply wow skin, improved eyes, elimination of ear wax and nasty pimples, and the total removal of daily, in the afternoon, abject moribund exhaustion. And so all of these physical pluses that I experienced I embraced as … what? A kind of confirmation that I had discovered a physical nirvana, a focused or singular health-truth. What I would now describe as a ’truth-trap’. As it was, at the time, these somatic pluses — fully embraced — and the minuses — discarded as irrelevant aberrations or some kind of maybe to be welcomed ascetic bonus or opportunity — gave me yet another great example of how delusion worked for me. I was able to do the Snoopy Dance because of physical health improvements and those very improvements had given me a kind of coyote-style green light to hurt my body and to be spiritually blind to what those discomforts meant about being in spiritual by-pass.

Garden Terrace Nagasaki Hotel & Resort Kengo Kuma and Old Farm House Merged.  Music: Paul Simon — One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor.

I would say that the diet opened a tangible door into one room, a big one, of my body as a multi-roomed temple as soul. And as long as I was happy there, the rest of the body was allowed to fall into disrepair when I wasn’t actually blindly smashing it. Before going through that door I had imagined spirituality as something outside of that temple that would, maybe, repair/heal it without getting onto those clean ‘spiritual’ hands the muck and mire that comprise the nitty gritty of physical life. Very much like my father, who’d read about the spiritual importance of touching the earth and so started a garden. And it was in that garden that I felt overwhelming rage and resentment because I was quickly forced to do his garden work because he wouldn’t or couldn’t make time to do it himself.

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Spiritual By-Passing: ‘What Is It?’ Yoshiko Asked And ‘It Is Too Vague To Be Meaningful’ I Read Once

In the above I express what seems to me to be a most painfully clear somatic expression of what being actively in a state of spiritual by-pass is: while I was being mind-full to a fault with my daily yoga and breath, meditation and dietary practices that have transformed my life, I was concomitantly seriously hurting my body. Nothing vague about that except not being able to see it or make the connection. In the first essay in this series,

body is the tasty testing ground proof, pt 1:

how now to know how the body is true beyond the need for truth or believe?

I explored how that was made manifest with my grossly ignored attack on my teeth. And, with hindsight, I realise that leaning back in a dental chair facing my self-inflicted dental destruction had allowed me, or even given me a kind of permission, to extend and/or expand my somatic by-pass because with that (constricted) awareness I could point to my missing teeth and say, with a kind of smug ruefulness, ‘that was bad and I’m so much more spiritually wise now!’ Yeah, right, because that nearly hubristic masochistic idiocy gave me maya enough to keep me gleefully continuing to break my body in a variety of ways.

At its core, I’ve come to understand that ‘spiritual by-pass’ is denial of our bodily reality. It is to ignore and/or denigrate the somatic expression and the wise interactive-communications of body with physical life. Our body is the medium and our messaging. Our communications of yes, no or maybe, are the demarcation points of our spiritual by-pass.

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Okay, Not Just The Body: It Is Also The Triggering Others Who We Can Claim Are The Real Baddies!

Initially I thought that the above had done a lovely job of making clear and complete what my experience of spiritual by-passing is. It is tangibly what addiction expert and yogi Tommy Rosen defines as addictive behaviour: the continuation of practices or actions that we know are hurting us in some way, and yet we continue to do them.

As I’ve written elsewhere, in 2016 I became aware that I was living within the buzzing destructive drone-frequency of addiction. Of course, since I then knew that, that meant I had cleared my self of the problem! [Headshake.] Nope. And thus comes a kind of introductory or perhaps complementary definition to the above of ‘spiritual by-pass’: the use of addictive behaviours to calm or assuage the base-levels of anxiety we are choosing not to see, ie, to by-pass. Addiction, addictive behaviours and thinking, I now realise, are perhaps the most common form of spiritual by-pass. Not all addictive behaviours are directly destructive to the body — although I suspect it is commonly abused in all addictions — such as addiction to technology, sex and relationships (co-dependency). ‘Don’t be too sure that co-dependency doesn’t kill people’ Rosen once gently cautioned a substance abuser who had condemned co-dependency as just a mind problem.

And with this, and a recent example of a friend’s health struggles, one of the key ways to know that we are in some kind of spiritual by-pass is with being triggered into some kind of over-the-top irrational reaction or behaviour. Oddly enough, and in ostensible contradiction, the ‘crazy over-the-top’ stuff can show itself in very subtle ways. Bellow I share two examples of that. And because the first one has a subtle genesis it requires some explication: ‘From A Trigger-Stack Very High, Two Trigger Tales Pointing To Evidence Of Spiritual By-Passing’.

Tigger and Pooh. Music: Jesca Hoop — Animal Kingdom Chaotic

One:

In 2014 I discovered yoga and would later that year discover breath with Sudarshan Kriya. I had begun to feel joy at life for the first time. And with just the yoga I had learned to remain equanimous in the face of my now ex’s increasing irrationality and extreme, perhaps even, bi-polar emotional-psychological swings and her increased physical disabilities that had her in a wheelchair for most of the time. That, equanimity in the face of adversity from the spouse, was surely a ‘true’ sign of some kind of spirituality!

That summer, a few weeks before I did the breath course, she broke her ankle and two days later she hobbled down long hospital aisles on foot because hospital wheelchairs were dirty and she didn’t want her wheel chair contaminated by a hospital. It was a very long six hour day of waiting, initially in emergency and then for x-rays and then for the ankle specialist to view the x-rays. She wasn’t allowed to eat and being diabetic this was a bit problematic. After the specialist viewed the x-ray he deemed surgery unnecessary which required the cast that had been put on to be removed to be replaced by a walking style. While waiting for the replacement cast she had been given the okay to eat something. Toast with butter was the request. Sounded easy.

I had spent those six hours mostly standing in hospital aisles or waiting rooms. I thought at the time that I was in total calmness despite some of her odd OCD driven requirements, which, beyond the OCD stuff, included some unusual circumstances and events in emergency and x-rays and casting place that day: a police presence to accompany a shooting victim who got to jump the x-ray and the casting place lines and the screaming distress of someone who sounded insane in emergency.

My equanimity was to be revealed as by-pass when, by odd circumstances and a service rep’s ignorance, I wound up standing in lines for 45 minutes in two different queues three separate times to eventually get a toasted bagel because regular toast wasn’t available in the afternoon. (Really? Anyway.) At the end of my third line was the same person who had misdirected me into the other queue in order to get the toast. Likely she didn’t know that the ‘kitchen’ at the end of the line she had me go to stopped selling toast after 1pm. It was the rep at the end of line two who suggested that I could get a toasted bagel from the first line that I’d stood in. Wow! I was still calm though!

I offered the rep at the end of line one the unsolicited information that the other line stops selling toast after 1pm and that she could offer toasted bagels when someone like me asked for toast. My helpful suggestion was met with an odd kind of dismissive anger. She had no interest in letting me help her or for her to help someone else. That triggered me into near rage. All my hours of smug calmness had been a shell over an unconscious shadow that I hadn’t looked at. That is by-pass. My actions during the day had been only superficially appropriate to the circumstances and I couldn’t see that because I was in by-pass to my lack of real equanimity. My being triggered pointed to my by-pass of something.

Two:

The other subtle, and much more recent example, was in 2022 when Yoshiko and I had a long series of absolutely bizarre disservice events at an AirBnB in Mexico. Our first really bad experience after many stays. In this case our contact, a woman who likely caught covid during our extended stay, managed to play her female weakness on my co-dependency energy that had me, basically, obsequiously simpering in my old doormat ways in an effort to accommodate the failed services and her health — which among a half dozen things included having the power cut off on Friday afternoon by the electrical company for lack of payment. Her failure to act on my ‘complaint’ of no power meant at least three days with no power over the weekend. Yoshiko looked at me and, with very clear language, slapped me awake enough to see that I had fallen into co-dependency-fawning as being spiritually kind. Spiritual by-pass. Again, blind inappropriate action triggered by the landlord’s actions that ‘played’ me.

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Where’s The Gout? Before I Get There, My Last Pass And My Introduction To Spiritual By-Pass

When I began to answer Yoshiko’s question and the expressed concern about the vagueness of spiritual by-pass I dug into my memory to find when I heard the phrase for the first time. I think I first remember hearing ‘spiritual by-pass’, in a way that resonated anyway, from Buddhist-yogic scholar, teacher and critic Michael Stone in 2023. At that time his usage of the phrase connected many dots that had been dancing around in my head like disjointed disco dancers. So I listened to him again. He said it very casually as a concluding comment to his observation that the New Age idea around ‘everything is one’ is basically psychotic. At the time, and again this time, his short talk that concluded with the phrase rang some real bells and overlaid and connected somatic dots for me. To my surprise, at the time, he cites both Patañjali and Gautama stating that the body is the expression of enlightenment (my paraphrase). And at that time that had aligned with my growing realisation over the previous four years. He concludes the body-as-spirt by stating that spiritual by-passing is a New Age style denial of the reality of ego and body as part and parcel of human enlightened spiritual life as distinct individuals:

~36:22 … When you practice yoga,[Patañjali says,] and you are not identifying with everything that moves through your awareness, then the one who is seeing and feeling and thinking and breathing and listening and acting and working, abides in their own self form. This is a disappointment for those who are into spirituality. Because what he is supposed to say in that sentence is that when you are not identified with everything that moves through your life, you have an awakening and you become God and you become connected to all the virgins and you suddenly become one with everything and you can be vegan forever and you are awake, menopause ends and migraine headaches end and you are one with everything. And that’s not what Patañjali says. It’s not what he says. He says then you abide in your form. But … What! Abide in my form? I’m trying to get [free from it] — the reason why I came here was because of [all the shitty problems with] my form.

Satiptthana; Yoga Suttras; Michael Stone. Music: Danger Mouse with Daniele Lupi - Two Against One.

And he says you get to abide in this? For most of us, I don’t want to abide in this. I came to this practice because I want to get out of this. I want to be free from this. And Patañjali says “No.” That your ego, and your idiosyncrasies, your addictions and everything you think of as me, you fully enter that and you fully embody that and that is why you start with your body. And the goal is to abide fully in your body. And in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta the Buddha’s teachings on mindfulness, he says the same thing. To be in the body as a body. Nowhere does he say you leave your body. Nowhere does Patañjali say you get rid of your ego. 

[It is for us] to fully embrace this story-telling mechanism that gets us into so much trouble and then gets us out of trouble. You don’t want to walk out onto the street and be one with the street car. Because you’ll get run over. We’re not one, completely. When I eat breakfast your stomach does not get filled up. We’re separate. When I pick my nose your nose doesn’t … And I don’t want you to pick my nose. There is a place where I end and you start. And though that is linguistic and conceptual and relative, it exists. And for Patañjali we embrace that. We don’t get rid of it. And the more we practice the more our ego becomes porous. Where we watch it operating from moment-to-moment doing its ridiculous inflated and deflated activities and we embrace it. And then you become one with your ego, which is not even yours, actually. And then you see what your life is. Cancer is not my life. Anger is not my life. The years I spent in prison are not my life. The years I’ve been institutionalised are not my life. Well, yes it is. All of that is your life. To be one with all these parts of our lives that we don’t want to be one with.

And there’s this current fad, that maybe started in the 50s, to get rid of your ego. And that is a kind of fragmentation and scapegoating, that nowadays we call spiritual by-passing. Where you don’t fully … abide in and embody your whole life. (“Whatever is Needed September 12, 2010”; my emphasis and small edits.)

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Synchronicity Interlude

I took a break from writing to cook and eat. Before I started I decided to follow a link a friend replied to today to a friend’s yesterday email with the subject ‘Interesting’. So, double interesting and I hoped that it would be an audio something that I could listen to while I was in the kitchen and eating. I went to it. Two and a half hours! Too long. And at the same time because it was Alfa Vedic, two particularly interesting and very upbeat deep seekers, I decided to give it a start. The guest, Steve Falconer of Spacebusters, explores how the roots of Egyptian pharaohs and mythology and from that Judaism and Christianity are all structured from ancient Irish metaphysical traditions and names/language. I thought this would be of particular interest to both Jasun (of Children of Job substack) and Tereza Corragio (Third Paradigm substack) who are both looking to decipher what really is going on in the Bible. And it is yet another remarkable something that opens up yet more curiosity-appealing rabbit holes. Soft synchronicity number one is that shortly before I started the podcast I’d picked up The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels who is also looking at the ‘hidden’ roots of the Bible, although not nearly as deeply as Falconer.

Number two is a strong synchronicity and is why I made the effort to transcribe from the presentation and to interrupt my essay with more words.

Steve Falconer and Mike Winner. Music: The Proclaimers - Beautiful Truth.

~43:46 [SF:] Jerusalem, is not an historical place, it’s the perfect spiritual body, which the ego or the self, is trying to build up. Matt and I talked about this on our podcast the other day. A lot of people are trying to get rid of their — they’re following this eastern bs mysticism about getting rid of the self and ego. But the self is the mind of god. You need the ego. Like this is how you start to figure all this stuff out.

~46:31 [LB:] Just to reiterate this [experience of life] is not mystical stuff. It’s an electrical system and we need to be very grounded in our understanding and use of it. [MW:] I was just going to say it is also a physiologically — eh, it’s all physiological. Of course the body matters. We’re talking the white is the cerebral spinal fluid, that comes down to our sacrum and back up in a wave like form down our spine. So it’s literally anatomy, too, we’re talking about. This is a physiological process, that is related to as well. The body matters! Very much so. (Alfa Vedic “In All Thy Getting, Get Thee Knowledge w/ Steve Falconer”. My emphasis.)

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Arte mural de la ciudad de Oaxaca (edited). Musica: Of Monsters and Men — Little Talks.

It Has Come To This, Has It? A Definition Is Born

Spiritual by-pass is for the ego to become attached to some kind of partial or erroneous spiritual ‘truth’ that manages to deny the realities of being physically alive in this moment and/or to deny or to be blind to the metaphysical and/or unconscious shadow elements that have, like a strange attractor, kept us repeating patterns of behaviours of thought, words and/or actions that are, or that become, destructive to ourselves and/or others and that keep us from changing those behaviours. More simply, spiritual by-pass is to abdicate our absolute personal responsibility of choice in all aspects of our somatic lives, our thoughts, words, and actions, and to blame others for the destructive elements we are experiencing.

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Finally! The Gout Came Back: I Thought It Was A Goner, And The Gout Came Back

Richard Feynman. Music: Philip Glass & Ravi Shankar — Meetings Along the Edge.

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts… The experts who are leading you may be wrong… I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television -- words, books, and so on -- are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science. —Richard Feynman (My emphasis.)

It turns out that I had once again leapt with both feet — with one of them again gouty — into premature elation. A couple months after the butter solution, which was to have greased my way to gout-as-memory forever, simply was not the end of the schtick. So, the gout came back and once again I began digging into the world wide web. And, with a slightly less vigorously expressed premature elation-glee, found that for some people increasing oatmeal, flax seed and flax seed oil helped flush out those molecular javelins by assisting the kidneys in clearing the uric acid. 

It worked! In a week or two, the significant increase of oatmeal and flax seed as oil and seed, did the trick. Gone gone and I breathed a sigh of quiet joy. I kept my elation muted and walked without limping once again.

And it was in this particular interregnum of gout that I actively developed muscle testing all food and liquids before ingesting them.

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“Truth walks with a limp; but she always arrives.” Old Spanish saying cited by Dr. Jane Ruby in conversation with Sasha Latypova.

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A Few Months Later, Now To No Surprise, The Gout Came Back

At that point I decided to go to an expert. I had my first visit with a naturopath intern at the naturopathic school not far from where I lived.

This was one of the great health experiences in my life! I was told that no diagnosis or prescriptions or practices would be discussed until the third visit. The first visit, my health history, was scheduled to be 90 minutes and wound up being 120 minutes because the doctor was interested in my stories around diet and gout. The following week, visit number two, the physical, was scheduled for and lasted an hour. Wow! The fine fine details of that physical were astonishing. And puts anything in an allopathic md’s practices to total shame.

Week three. What is the diagnosis and path to health? She confessed to being puzzled about the gout and was impressed by my efforts and research. All were accurate and so the gout was a real puzzle. Her first suggestion was that I was to stop eating all raw vegetables. (I hope that hasn’t triggered any raw vegan readers.) Why?

The body has layers of complexity that include a priority of acids to remove from the body. By order of the most toxic the kidneys remove oxalic acid, lactic acid and finally uric acid. So, the acids in vegetables are the most toxic and are in greatest abundance when uncooked. Lactic acid is associated with exercise. That created an interesting ‘aha’ moment for me because gout attacks are known to happen after strenuous exercise. And when I had gone to an MD in the early gout days, I was asked if I had recently done an unusual amount of strenuous physical exercise.

‘Eat only cooked vegetables and do not eat under any circumstances spinach, parsley or rhubarb, cooked or not. They are too high in oxalic acid.’ Interesting. I’ve not ever liked any of those foods except under certain circumstances. Well, parsley never, and spinach only in spanakopita, an infrequent treat. Rhubarb had been a rare ‘treat’, when cooked in a pie or made into a condiment. So no problem.

As a very late independent confirmation of that, late last year a podcast by Paul Saladino came into my purview, a ‘random’ YouTube option, most of which I ignore: “Oxalates Are Ruining Your Health With Sally Norton”. I didn’t ignore this one because the subject was a small synchronicity in my life at the time. I didn’t know either name in the title, although as I watched I began to vaguely remember that I had seen Saladino with Dr. Mercola in 2022, I think. I found Saladino interesting and obviously healthy and he advocates for meat to be present in a healthy diet. And I smile at that because my body still does not want meat at all — I test every few months. So he is not my dietary god-guru, simply an interesting and knowledgeable source of dietary questioning of all those absolutist dietary gods and goddesses who love to shrilly pummel us with their singular divine truths. “One dietary deity law for lion and the ox is oppression and illness.” For a deeper dive on oxalates and other vegetable toxins read Toxic Superfoods by Norton.) [An aside: as an amusing side note here is a very short video on the importance of oxalic acid as industrial cleaning agent in various ways that includes its use in metallurgy as a precipitating agent. ‘Uncovering the Power of Oxalic Acid’.]

And in another of those multi-year synchronicities, in early 2019, a little more than two years after my encounter with the naturopathic doctor, I visited a vaidya, an Ayurvedic doctor. That was equally fascinating and completely different. And, astonishingly she recommended that I eat only cooked vegetables and to avoid spinach, and green cabbage. Wow! My body rejected green cabbage as soon as I had started actively muscle testing in 2016.

Back to the naturopath. She also recommended I consider ingesting a good quality fish oil in order to increase the presence of omega-3 fatty acids in my diet. She spoke respectfully, being aware of my being a vegetarian and also of my muscle testing process for food. Since I’m not morally invested in being vegetarian, instead I’m following the spiritual soul-wisdom of my body, I asked her if she had some I could test with my soul-body. She did and I tested ‘yes.’ And so for about two years I included fish oil in my diet until my body refused it in 2018.

And my body continued to feel better and better, even with the problems of painful meditation and only marginal improvements in my flexibility. There were tiny ones! And those kept me on the slow and steady path of daily practice and steady improvements in mind and body.

And I was sure, now, as sure as the pains in my body during meditation, that the gout was gone for good.

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Beware of Premature Elation, Because, OMG, The Gout Came Back!

I’m trapped in a seven day intense yoga retreat with 1100 people and the gout comes back. I meet my gout and Ganesha. Read here:

Body Is The Tasty Testing Ground Proof Pt 6 — I Bow to A Bypass Arrow

It Ends in An Egoistic Rabbit Hole and Ganesha's Encounter with Lazy Gout

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Song of the essay

Ry Cooder — Shrinking Man.

Lyrics

Verse 1]
Well, it's a change in the ocean, change in the sea
Woke up one morning was a change in me
I put on my pants, my pants fell down
Well, I put on my shoes and they fell off too
I looked in the mirror was nothin' to see
That's how it goes when you're a shrinking man like me

[Chorus 1]
Worried man with a worried song
Shrinking man ain't gonna be here long

[Verse 2]
Well, sometimes I worry 'bout clothes, shrinking man's gotta look good sometime
Don't need no sweatshop child puttin' shoes on my feet this time
Chained to a sewing machine, down in hell where the sun don't shine
Look as good as you can, but please don't rob your fellow man

[Refrain 2]
Shrinking man, shrinking man
Nobody was worried 'bout a shrinking man

[Verse 3]
Sometimes I worry 'bout food 'cause a shrinking man's got to eat right sometime
I don't need much and I don't pay no starvation wage
To poor folks out on the poison ground, you don't rob the land
When you're just a little old shrinking man

[Chorus 3]
Shrinking man
Nobody was worried 'bout a shrinking man
Worried man with a worried song
Shrinking man ain't gonna be here long

[Verse 4]
Sometimes I worry 'bout prayer 'cause a shrinking man better be a prayin' man
Once I had a dream that was working, I had good ideas, I made big plans
Now I'm just like a leaf in the wind that's blowing, I hope King Jesus can understand

[Chorus 3]
Shrinking man, shrinking man
Nobody was worried 'bout a shrinking man
Worried man, a worried song
Shrinking man ain't gonna be here long