Lissa Rankin: Deconstructing "Reality Is an Illusion" & "Accepting What Is"

Over the many years of healing my heart, unburdening and transforming layers of generational and cultural pain and trauma, and awakening from my addictions and ignorance and delusions, I have tried on different religious and spiritual beliefs and practices. Ultimately, over time, I have come to recognize within myself both what has led to spiritual bypassing and also what has increasingly empowered me to embody my wholeness as a human being. And I am profoundly grateful for all that has empowered me to live with ever evolving and growing whole-heartedness.

There are many teachings which I have found on my spiritual journey which hold some truth while also distracting and leading us away from greater wisdom, compassion, and love. Today I can recognize that many different religious and spiritual practices can perpetuate the disassociation from the wisdom of our hearts. As I've written before, in my perspective and experience, it therefore also doesn't matter how many times we humans meditate or profess to practice the dharma, how many times we attend church and pray and profess to follow the teachings of Jesus, how many times we participate in sweat lodges and Native American Sun Dances and other ceremonies and rituals and prayers, how many 12 Step meetings we go to and how often we work the Steps and work with our sponsors, how many times and ways that we worship the Goddess or New Age spirituality or any other religious or spiritual traditions — if we neglect our deepest pain, we are abandoning core parts of our hurting hearts. And this is what we pay a huge price for emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, and in all of our relationships — most especially with ourselves and those we love.

I say all of this with humility and compassion. It is a courageous endeavor to embrace and embody these greater spiritual truths in how it is that we live our lives. My experience is that this journey ultimately empowers us to recognize and hold the truths of "no self" — because we are part of the greater whole of all that is — and the inner Self which is the sacred core of who we are. It is so important that we move towards embodying our wholeness as human beings without bypassing the wisdom of our hearts.

This path of awakening is certainly a lifetime journey. And this is why I appreciate and respect those such as Lissa Rankin and the wisdom and hard earned lessons that she offers us all. May we human beings embrace teachings which heal and open our hearts. May the spiritual teachers and teachings we encounter and turn to be grounded in wisdom, compassion, kindness, empathy, and love — and nothing less. 🙏💜Molly

Image credit KevinIncredible.com & SAND website

Deconstructing "Reality Is an Illusion" 

& "Accepting What Is"

I laughed my ass off when I first read Mariana Caplan’s essay The Problem With Zen Boyfriends—because I had dated those guys and I knew exactly what she was talking about. Mariana is a therapist who specializes in helping those with spiritual abuse, so she has an insider’s lens on both non-dual teachings and a trauma-informed understanding of why people behave as bizarrely as they sometimes do in spiritual circles. Mariana starts off by giving many examples of men with obviously avoidant attachment disguised as enlightenment. She writes:

“Jivan was a living example of such a situation. The first night was all right, as far as Zen boyfriends go. I enjoyed hearing of his adventures over a cappuccino, only occasionally irritated by his references to having “seen through the nature of reality” or having “become one with everything.” Of course, by early evening he needed space, but that was to be expected.

The next day, however, as we walked in Muir woods, he tried to do his spiritual number on me. To explain his spiritual approach in two sentences, nonduality is based on the tacit recognition of the oneness, or “non-separation,” of all things. It means that “I” don’t exist separately from you or any other animate or inanimate being or thing: all is one. However, there is a big difference between being able to spew these words (as I just did), and living as one who abides eternally in the truth of this reality.

“Jivan, if we are going to hang out together, I need to feel like you’re really here with me and not always so detached,” I opened the floor.

“But who is the ‘you’ who wants to hang out with the ‘me’?”

“I am the me and you are the you!”

“There is no difference, so we can never really be apart or together; it’s all the same.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“But who do you think is the ‘me’ that is full of shit?”

“I think it is you!”

“Who’s getting angry?”

“I’m getting angry.”

“Look into my eyes, what do you see?”

“You.”

“Look more deeply. Now what do you see?”

“I see a lonely man who thinks he’s enlightened.”

Extremely frustrated and teary-eyed, I walked away and sat on a log by the stream trying to figure out why it was so important to me to try to get through to him.

“Why did you come all the way over here to cry?” he sat down beside me, fully believing in his own innocence.

I looked at him with that end-of-the-relationship look in my eye. “Because there is no one there to hold me if I cry, and I’d just as soon cry alone than cry with nobody.”

Notice the one-upsmanship in this exchange, the grandiosity of this Zen boyfriend, the not-so-subtle cruelty, the way he undermines her and treats her vulnerability with contempt. If that isn’t a perfect example of intimacy avoidance, avoidant attachment, and a shocking lack of empathy dressed up in holy drag, I don’t know what is. It’s patriarchal narcissism masquerading as oneness.

If your spirituality is making you mean, you might want to question it.

It made me think of a conversation I overheard at the Science & Non-Duality (SAND) conference a decade ago. A couple was processing their relationship woes with an old white guy, one of the non-dual spiritual teacher keynote speakers. The male in the couple complained that his female partner wasn’t “spiritual” enough, by which he meant that she was “caught up in her ego,” expressed emotions, held him to account when he upset her, and didn’t radiate dispassionate equanimity when she got diagnosed with breast cancer. He judged that she was choosing fear over love, not Zen enough, and refused to spend hours meditating with him.

She, on the other hand, argued that he lacked empathy for what she was going through with her cancer. He was refusing to go to her oncologist with her and wouldn’t just hold space for her when she was tearful about the possibility of dying. Any time she expressed emotions about losing her breasts and her brush with mortality, he berated her for not meditating enough and being all caught up in her ego.

I listened in horror as this non-dual teacher ganged up with her boyfriend to give her a word salad lecture about how her cancer was an illusion and her fear was getting in the way of her enlightenment. When the spiritual bros then walked away together, leaving her crying, I risked being intrusive by asking if she needed a hug and a listening ear. She nodded and accepted my hug.

“It’s All An Illusion”

In this ongoing LOVE BIGGER series deconstructing various harmful spiritual beliefs, I want to dissect the popular non-dual assertion that reality is an illusion and that suffering arises primarily because we resist what is. Variations of this teaching appear throughout Advaita Vedanta, contemporary non-dual spirituality, and many New Age circles.

Please go here for the original article: https://lissarankinmd.substack.com/p/deconstructing-reality-is-an-illusion