Q-SPIRACY (PART II): Why Our Spiritual Friends Went Down the Rabbit Hole
Part I is here
I began this series discussing spiritual bypassing and how it leads to conspiracy thinking. In essence, spiritual bypassing is escaping into the imagination of false beliefs to escape pain and to create an alternate, feel-good reality.
The cost of spiritual bypassing is everything, everything for which, at the end of the day, we care about — everything earthy, embodied, nurturing, and sacred (vs. the ethereal “divine”). For bypassers, “consciousness” and “other realms” are precious; for non-bypassers everything grounded and workaday is sacred. The rub is that earthiness and ordinary humanness include — require, actually — dealing honestly and squarely with pain and suffering. This is perhaps why our New Age spiritual friends disappear when we suffer a hardship or loss and need support — they can’t show up for the pain they’ve avoided, denied, or plain old been unable to tend to in themselves.
As mentioned in Part I, irony is the result of bypassing and conspiracy thinking . . . because unreckoned pain is neglected and thereby projected and displaced onto others. To halt needless suffering we have to dig into our beliefs and the hurts that propelled us to them.
Spiritual bypassing, ironically, is a flee from love in the name of love. Conspiracy thinking follows the same pattern of spiritual bypassing: an escape from what is more likely true in the name of claiming unquestionable “truth.” The former is a scientifically literate, critically considered, and evidenced stance that is truly open to changing its mind, while the latter is based in a rigid, fanatical, unevidenced assertion of personal truth. This dynamic brings up the crucial distinction between subjective and objective truths, intellectual and emotional honesty, which you can read more about here.
In bypassing, a show of courage — bravado, actually — is used to defend against a fear of fear and to assert being “awake.” It manifests as the Q-illusion of “saving the children” while promoting institutions and creating ripe conditions that don’t care about children: separating them from their parents, subjecting them to abusive and inhumane living conditions, locking them in cages, and ignoring the horrors of real pedophilia.
While spiritual bypassing ultimately creates suffering, some folks dissociate from their bodies because they genuinely aren’t able to deal with trauma, often because they don’t know how to stay present and/or because they don’t have the resources. Compassion is therefore a most reasonable response to this genuine inability. Many, however, have a choice in response to pain. They may just not know how or understand why it’s crucial to engage with difficult emotions to live a sane, meaningful life. Others just seem to be willfully ignorant, egotistical, and plain old lazy and afraid to do the tough work of healing to become integrated, grounded, and genuinely caring.
Entrainment
The more one escapes into spiritual imagination, the more the brain gets used to escaping. Its default becomes an ungrounded, fantastical reality, like Alice’s proverbial rabbit hole. Neural pathways for disembodied imagination become engrained, like a tire spinning in place and creating an entrenched groove. Neural repetition of this kind is a kind of entrainment, a learned and reinforced behavior ingrained through repetition.
Critical thinking is grounded, connected-to-reality thinking and an antidote to disembodied, imaginative escape. To defend against being suckered into conspiracy theories, and willfully diving in, we can entrain ourselves to be grounded thinkers, through which we can also glean the lies, inconsistencies, and hypocrisies of conspiracy theory. The more we practice critical thinking, the more we can undo ungrounded, fantastical thinking; we entrain our brains to embodied life, to reality. That is, if we have the heart for it.
Beyond Critical Thinking
Because conspiracy theories are so outlandish and falsifiable with just a little bit of logic and fact-checking, it begs us to look more deeply into why they are so pervasively believed.
If it were a matter of just thinking differently, many more would likely jump off the Q-train and the anti-masking crusade. As I mention in Part I of this series, there is more to it than just changing the way we think. We have to ask why many, who do have the needed modicum of intelligence to know better, don’t choose to think and believe differently. Lack of education and knowledge can factor in. Beyond this, being a grounded thinker means we have to engage with ordinary, embodied reality wherein we are emotionally honest, which means to identify our emotions, feel them, and to be aware we are feeling them.
When we are intellectually and emotionally honest and “come back into our bodies” we discover why we left, why we escaped in the first place: pain. The escape into the imagination is an escape from pain. Spiritual bypassers do so for salvation, to feel better in an alternate reality where they believe they can “create their own reality” where “it’s all good” and where “everything happens for a reason.”
Similar is true for Covid deniers and conspiracy theorists. Covid deniers may not want to believe the severity of the pandemic not because it’s a factual hoax, as they assert, but because they (secretly) can’t emotionally handle it. It may trigger past trauma. In the present, a pandemic is scary and portends an unsafe world that threatens one’s comforts, way of life, and coping mechanisms for unreckoned pain.
In the face of widespread, warranted, and healthy fear around the pandemic and the rise of authoritarianism, bypassers and conspiracy adherents easily jump ship to Q-spiracy via their robust networks of entrained escapist thinking. It’s easier, and more comforting, to believe that a far-removed, satan-worshipping, deep state of just a few elites like Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey are raping and drinking the blood of kidnapped children in pursuit of the “fountain of youth” than it is to face the actual toxic, systemic horrors of pedophilia, racism, power corruption, white supremacy, and environmental collapse.
Conspiracy theories also offer a false sense of control to be “in the know,” assuaging the anxiety of reality and a collapsing world. But telling ourselves comforting fairy tales as adults is selfish and puts real children at risk.
Here’s the sinister manipulation of Q-spiracy: it employs the awful, known crime of sex-trafficking children to emotionally appeal to the unwitting and easily manipulable. Once they are hooked in a way they can handle—a sort of unconscious and inverse Faustian bargain and escape from believing a worse option in reality — they are more liable to believe the leap of faith into unreal imagination: it’s Hilary, Oprah, Soros, and Gates . . . and Don Trump—an actual rapist, racist, child abuser, misogynist, and ecocidal monster—will save us from them. If this isn’t a conspiracy made in Russia, I don’t know what is!
Q-spiracy relies on victims’ emotionally generated fear reaction, and provides false beliefs, to exploit and thereby weaponize trauma wounds into propagating conspiracy theories that hurt everyone.
Falling for Q-spiracy hinges on a denial of scary emotions common to trauma, more than a lack of critical thinking. Because one has denied their difficult emotions, they become more emotionally manipulable—because someone unafraid, or at least more afraid, to grieve, to be genuinely outraged, and to feel healthy fear doesn’t need to escape reality. They have also learned, as I have learned through grief work and healing trauma, that the way out is through, not up, over and supposedly, beyond.
One has to have the emotional mettle to face scary reality to think critically through it, which dismantles the defenses of spiritual bypassing, exposing oneself to painful, and deeply fulfilling, reality. This is why challenging a conspiracy thinker’s beliefs — or anyone in denial and defending against deeper hurt — threatens to expose the fear and wounding beneath the beliefs, which emotions they can’t handle facing, so they react in anger, a defensive push to fend off feeling the fear and pain underneath.
When everyday reality strikes a blow, we have a choice to be with the pain and work through it, or to try to escape it. Facing the pain leads to healing and a better life for all. Ignoring the pain leads to shadow, projection, and needless suffering. Conspiracy theories, conspiracy apologists, and New Age beliefs all have in common creating an alternate reality to avoid facing what is. These escapes are a reaction to fear, not the result of fear itself. So demonizing fear — “don’t live in fear” or “that’s fear-based” — is off the mark and perpetuates emotional ignorance, which perpetuates more unhelpful fear and needless pain.
How we respond and work with fear is what matters, not the experience of fear itself.
In essence, healthy, helpful fear needs to be obeyed; unhelpful fear (including a fear of helpful fear) needs to be challenged. Witch-hunting fear because one is secretly afraid of feeling fear perpetuates chaos. Read more about fear intelligence here, or a shorter version here, or an entire chapter on working with fear and anxiety in Climate Cure.
As children we often didn’t have the choice to healthily cope in the moment because we weren’t supported in processing painful experiences; so, we escaped however we could. This is understandable and even adaptive, for children. But as adults, we have the opportunity to learn new tricks, to grow into wisdom and compassion, if we are curious and don’t merely revert to knee-jerk coping strategies from the past. With opportunity comes responsibility to grow and heal, and to be a grounded, honest contributors to the welfare of others.
No Escape
Bypassers can maintain a denial of embodied reality for some time, until the shit gets real and they are faced with fear they can’t run away from, or not so easily. The Covid pandemic is such a pervasive fear. So is the fascistic rise of Donald Trump and his GOP and white supremacist base. These are all personal and collective traumas, and if a New Ager has entrained themselves to deal with past trauma and difficulty by escaping through spiritual bypassing, it’s an easy hop onto the conspiracy bandwagon. These neural pathways are entrained, primed and ready, for imaginative escape . . . because conspiracy theories bear the same blueprint as spiritual bypassing (as do many religious doctrines).
For New Agers, conspiracy theory is spiritual bypassing.
Conspiracy theories therefore become an easy go-to from facing the trauma and difficulty of Covid and political corruption (and any other overwhelming, fear-inducing events such as climate crisis). Other avenues of escape from reality to justify an alternate reality include pseudoscience or outright lies, such as: misrepresented and low Covid death rates (while failing to acknowledge and account for the protracted suffering in those who don’t die and for their loved ones), dishonestly criticizing lockdown, equating Covid with the flu or cold, citing specious studies that masks don’t help prevent spread (they may actually confer immunity, according to new research), that HCQ is a Covid cure (this idea seems to have finally died, ahhhh), buying into plandemic documentaries, witch-hunting fear, and any other means to avoid facing ordinary, painful, yet beautiful reality (and everything else that is tender, vulnerable, and sacred).
If it’s not obvious, learning how to think critically and especially becoming emotionally intelligent are best defenses against conspiracy theories, as well as shutting them down at their source, which is not always easy or possible. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole: smack one down, another pops up. So getting to the root of what causes people to believe and making mental and emotional health resources more available to all is key to justice of every kind.
Part III will dive more into Q-dynamics, Pizzagate, symbolism and numerology, key distinctions between physical and emotional pain, as well as metaphorical and literal death in an attempt to unwind and heal through the conspiracy craze.
Jack Adam Weber, L.Ac., is a licensed Chinese medicine clinician, climate activist, organic farmer, and celebrated poet. He just-released book is Climate Cure: Heal Yourself to Heal the Planet, also available at Amazon.
