Q-spiracy (Part I): Why Your Spiritual Friends Went Down the Rabbit Hole
Note: Part II is here.
In this essay, and its sequels, I attempt to connect the dots for why far-left New Age spiritual and fundamental religious folk end up supporting and taking on dangerous, far-right conspiracy theories. To do this, we first have to understand some dynamics of New Age spirituality, especially a pernicious form of spirituality called “spiritual bypassing.”
But before we explore spiritual bypassing, my position is not that all New Agers ascribe to QAnon or Covid denialism. Nor am I am I saying that all adherents to inaccurate beliefs are spiritually bypassing and unconsciously reacting to pain and trauma. I propose that many do, to any degree this makes sense. Also note: the word irony appears frequently in this writing: because irony is the result of projecting what we deny, and the mainstay of bypassers.
Spiritual Bypassing
Spiritual bypassing means to adopt unevidenced or lofty, supernatural beliefs to avoid or deny difficult emotions, communications, relationships, and other challenging aspects of everyday life. Psychologist Robert Masters has written the best essay on this subject that I know, if you want to explore this diabolical dynamic further.
As a result of bypassing, pain is repressed, spreading and building power inside oneself through denial. It is prone to explosion and passive aggressive violence. And these days, as it explodes on the public scene, it manifests as violent information and actions. Non-violent protests are actually demonstrations of integrated, emotionally intelligent and justified outrage — the opposite of bypassing.
A spiritual bypasser flees into the imagination and to other imagined “dimensions” as a refuge from the tribulations of everyday life (often inaccurately hijacking quantum physics and conspiracy theories to propel them there). I, and other like Dr. Masters, propose that this split from earthly life often occurs in light of past trauma and its attendant pain. While bypassing provides immediate relief, it is an unsustainable coping mechanism and eventually begets more suffering until we reckon with it.
New Age spirituality is the primary social movement that champions such bypassing, leading to an ungrounded, reality-divorced orientation. Fundamental religious beliefs operate similarly, sharing the same pattern of magical thinking, and create similar, unlivable institutions.
Fear of Fear Begets Violence and Chaos
Conspiracy thinking bears the same blueprint as New Age spiritual bypassing. Both employ a poor use of the imagination. Drinking the far-right conspiracy Kool-Aid, therefore, follows the same thinking pattern as spiritual bypassing; it is an unevidenced, magical thinking, fear-based, sell-out. Its goals are to avoid reality, to feel special and belong to a special in-group (tribalism), to act out shadow drama distractions, and to avoid feeling constrained or limited (because they already feel limited from unreckoned pain?).
Ironically, spiritual bypassers, Covid-deniers, and conspiracy theorists all denounce fear . . . of actual threats. They invest themselves in false threats. (Note: conspiracy theories that turned out to be actual conspiracies are by definition no longer conspiracy theories.) In the process, conspiracy theorists fear their own fear. After all, their orientation is based in a fear of being embodied and consciously in touch with actual difficulty. They are an unconscious lot, preaching consciousness — sorta like ignorant people calling out others for being ignorant, sheeple calling others sheeple, pots calling kettles black.
The fearing of fear is an especially dangerous dynamic because the key purpose of fear is to alert us to danger and direct us to right action. It’s an embodied, evolutionary survival adaption. It also activates our fight or flight system, which triggers trauma reflexes. No wonder anyone with unhealed wounds wants to avoid fear and fight or flight. When we fear our fear we don’t act on what would save us — thus the many Covid tragedies, right wing militia groups, and white supremacist violences all increase suffering and chaos. This is tragic irony.
Bypassing and its conspiracy thinking creates a split, a duality between body and mind, energy and matter, imagination and reality. Ironically, spiritual folks believe they have transcended duality by escaping into the alleged non-duality of spiritual consciousness. The great depth psychologist Carl Jung was aware of this denialist trap and its dangerous divorce from reality and escape from being fully human. He therefore referred to enlightenment not as “imagining figures of light” but as “making the dark conscious.” Jung spoke precisely of integrating darkness (the pains of earthly life) and light (the goodness and grace of humanity) as a cure for spiritual bypassing and the dangerous split it creates. He encouraged facing pain and difficulty, being transformed by them, and not escaping into a spiritual imagination of light.
The moment we significantly deny our pain, we create the split between dark and light which perpetuates duality, and eventually causes violence.
Ironically, New Agers believe they are whole in “unity consciousness,” when in reality most have split themselves and abandoned intellectual and emotional honesty. This is what Dr. Masters means when he calls spiritual bypassing “Avoidance in Holy Drag.”
Note: Please be patient with the next few paragraphs, if at first they seem confusing. Comprehension will reward in spades!
Tragic Irony
If we don’t get through our fear of fear, we never get to the core, primary fear. For example, consider a Covid denier who boldly exclaims, “I won’t live in fear of the virus.” In this they deny a healthy fear of the virus. They are so embroiled in fending off their healthy fear, they never get to be intimate with what actually fearing the virus feels like. Their primary fear (as opposed to the secondary fear of that fear) has remained only unconscious and speculated about in knee-jerk fashion, in reaction to the virus threat.
As a result, they never get to experience what sustainably working with a fear of the virus is like. They only imagine this experience of healthy fear to be horrible, per their the dreaded bane of “living in fear” or of being a “fear monger.” In reality, and ironically, they live in fear and they fear-monger . . . against sane fear and general wellness. :(
Said another way: a denier’s conclusion as to what fearing the virus must be like is derived from their imagination of what that fear must be like. But a fear-denier never gets close enough to their fear to find out — because, I hunch, that fear reminds and triggers past traumas they have buried and couldn’t work through. Current fear triggers their old trauma. So, their false courage is actually a fear of fear, PTSD reaction parading as courage. It’s a reaction based on emotional reasoning instead of emotional intelligence. The former knee-jerks in reaction; the latter pauses, examines the fear, and works with it. I further discuss the dynamics of fear intelligence here.
I suspect Q-supporters engage a similar dynamic: they are motivated to delusion as a fear reaction to facing deeper, primary fears. They believe something scary outside themselves as a surrogate for a much more personal, intimate fear they dare not get close to. As a result, their trauma and fear rule them. This is ironic because they preach no fear, yet they fear what doesn’t exist.
Bypassers, deniers, and conspiracists bash fear to avoid being re-traumatized. Ironically, however, they unconsciously engage in acting out their re-traumatization. The result is burying their fear and trauma (again) and adopting (I use this word because I suspect they are not fooled as much as they need something to defend themselves with) a bunch of nonsense conspiracy theories which are not intellectually or emotionally honest because they were cooked up as knee-jerk reactions to avoid being honest, to avoid sensible, reality-based, good science measures to protect ourselves and reduce needless suffering. But because this primary fear has been disavowed (avoided), we are experiencing widespread unnecessary suffering. And it all began as a flight from reality, a knee-jerk reaction to the scary face of fear—an impulsive conclusion based on the initial feeling of the threat without waiting for that feeling to lessen, as fear does when we sit with it.
Tragic irony is the reliable result of unconscious shadow dynamics because one projects what they secretly harbor in fear.
In this sense, we can see the current unraveling of our world harkening back to an original a) inability or unwillingness to deal with trauma and pain (which I argue also precipitates other traumas such as racism, climate crisis, and even fascism) and b) a lack of wisdom for how to interface with fear.
A Cure
A solution for this clusterfuck is to view the onset of collective crises like Covid or QAnon as an opportunity, a healthy challenge to a) build solidarity with other humans in confronting and working wisely and compassionately with fear and suffering b) heal through the past wounding that a current crisis triggers, as opposed to railing against this discomfort with bravado and conspiracy theories c) build sustainable, sensible resources for foundational resilience in the face of all manner of trauma, personal and collective, because there will be more, and d) create a groundswell movement to build a sane and resourced society that deals with its darkness before we go extinct as a species.
You and I, and virtually anybody with sufficient support, can begin this process now.
All this means deciding to face the dark in ourselves and in the world. We don’t try to conquer it with subjugation, but embrace, integrate, and transform through it, as Jung suggested. And sometimes, yes, when violence threatens too much we must fight it face on, outwardly. This way, we cease being afraid of our fears, or at least become courageous enough to wade through our fear of fear, until we get to the heart of our primary fear and can then work skillfully with that fear. This path nips the problem in the bud and appreciates and respects the power of fear to save rather than needlessly maim.
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
