One of the great gifts of the past century has been the widespread availability of spiritual teachings. Ideas about awakening, liberation, and the nature of reality that were once accessible only within dedicated lineages can now be found with a few keystrokes.

That accessibility has transformed countless lives. It has also revealed an unexpected challenge.

Psychologist John Welwood coined the term spiritual bypassing to describe the tendency to use spiritual ideas or practices to sidestep unresolved emotions, developmental work, or difficult aspects of our humanity. Rather than deepening our relationship with reality, spirituality can sometimes be used to turn away from it.

Most of us have seen it. Perhaps we’ve even recognized it in ourselves.

We speak about unconditional love while constantly evaluating how much to love someone based on how well they meet our expectations for how they should love us. We reassure ourselves that “everything happens for a reason” rather than allowing ourselves to fully experience grief or anger. We proclaim “it is as it is” instead of addressing what is really bothering us.

When spiritual ideas become overlays on reality, the result is a subtle but profound disconnect from what is actually here. Something becomes incoherent. Beautiful spiritual ideas can become part of a fabricated reality that quietly separates us from reality itself. 

When people are first introduced to Mutual Awakening, they sometimes wonder whether it falls into the same trap. The qualities that emerge through origination point contact can sound too good to be true. It can appear as though we are inviting people into an imagined utopia or encouraging them to leave behind the difficult realities of ordinary life.

We see this arise most directly in the practice itself. Sometimes people try to protect their partner from something in their personal field that they are experiencing. They imagine that bringing only the light into the space is somehow more loving than bringing what is actually here.

This is where we continually return people to one of the foundations of Mutual Awakening.

Our origination point contact occurs in the Real.

Mutual Awakening is not an attempt to rise above our humanity or transcend the realities of our lives. It is a practice of becoming increasingly available to reality itself. As shared unity deepens, we become less interested in maintaining a particular image of ourselves and more interested in participating in what is actually unfolding.

 

One of the profound gifts of shared unity is that it allows us to enter the Real together. The Real isn’t relational. Shared unity is the evolutionary condition that allows us to participate in the Real together. Alone, each of us experiences only a partial reality.

In separation, we each live inside a highly developed subjective world. Our perceptions are shaped by our history, assumptions, fears, preferences, and hopes. We naturally assume that the world we experience is reality itself because it is the only world we know.

Shared unity opens another possibility. Rather than remaining within separate subjective realities, we begin to participate in the Real together. There is less separating us from reality itself. We begin looking from the same place rather than simply looking at one another from separate worlds, and the Real becomes increasingly apparent.

One of the gifts of stepping more deeply into co-directing the Evolutionary Collective with Sherry Pae has been how naturally we’ve found ourselves inside our commitment to being in the Real together. 

Recently, we found ourselves inside one of those moments where something difficult surfaced. Neither of us tried to make the other wrong. Neither of us rushed to explain ourselves or protect an image of who we were. We simply stayed with what was actually there.

What struck me afterward wasn’t that we found a resolution. It was the extraordinary quality of love that held it. The spondic field of love we share is larger than either of our personal reactions. Within that field, being on the same side isn’t something we have to remember or work toward. It is simply the reality we are already inside. Because of that, reality itself is welcome. Nothing has to be hidden. Nothing has to be defended. Nothing has to become part of a fixed identity. Instead, we remain available to an unfolding where something deeper can reveal itself.

This points to one of the profound purposes of transparency within Mutual Awakening. Transparency is not an end in itself. It is not self-disclosure for its own sake. It removes what prevents reality from continuing to unfold.

Whenever we defend an image, maintain a position, or hide behind a spiritual identity, something stops moving. The evolutionary impulse meets resistance because something in us has become unavailable. Evolution doesn’t move through our ideas, our intentions, or even our goodness. It moves through reality.

The more available we become to the Real together, the more available we become to evolution itself.

Reality is alive. As we become increasingly available to the Real, it continually reveals possibilities that cannot emerge while we are defending identities or taking refuge in comforting spiritual ideas.

If humanity is to evolve beyond separation, we will need environments that continually bring us into deeper contact with the Real rather than farther away from it.

Mutual Awakening is ultimately a practice of becoming increasingly available to the Real. As we do, we become increasingly available to one another and to evolution itself.