 Everybody knows what spiritual bypass is. It could take several forms. One is to avoid emotional or interpersonal issues by spiritualizing it, or it could be to avoid political issues by making it something about spirituality, to take it into a comfortable realm where you meditate on it, where you philosophize about it. You turn it into some spiritual thing where you have maybe an illness of some sort, and you go into, well, it's all happening for a reason thereby avoiding the real impact and the real teaching of the illness. So that's spiritual bypass. Often it is a charge leveled against spiritual practitioners by political activists who are saying, hey, there's real problems out there. There's real work you could be doing in the world. And instead, you're on your yoga mat, on your meditation cushion, imagining that you're above it all. But actually, you're just bypassing the issues. And I think that that is an important point that also is not the full picture because it leaves out its counterpart, which I call political bypass. Political bypass, similarly, it avoids interpersonal issues. It avoids spiritual issues. It avoids issues of community. It even avoids other political issues by politicizing them. So you make it all about race, or you make it all about carbon footprint, or you say, well, this conflict that you're having, you're going to have to drop it because we're all working on such an important thing right now. Not that sometimes you shouldn't drop a conflict and get to the work at hand. But I've seen in many people where this political devotion consumes so much energy and attention that they leave unexamined and unhealed, really poisonous foundational issues. So you have activist organizations that exhibit the same horizontal bullying and the same abuses of power that any other organization has. But we can't pay attention to that because the cause that we're working on is so important. Ultimately, this division between the political and the spiritual is an illusion and that any poison at the foundation or any crack in the foundation is going to end up creating a structure that is unsound and the poison will come out ultimately in everything that that organization does. So I'm not saying, of course, to put a hold on the political until you've secured the foundation, but that all levels of healing need to proceed simultaneously. And that each each expression of our activism and our will to serve healing informs the others. So that in our work on a political level, internal contradictions and internal conflicts within oneself, within one's group, those come out. And if you weren't working on this issue, they might not even have a chance to come out. If you weren't devoted to something that you all care about a lot, then you can just sit around being nice to each other because there's not much at stake. But when there's something at stake, then, and you have to really devote yourself to it, then hidden weaknesses and hidden agendas and unconscious blind spots and things like that, they come out to the surface. And in order for the organization to take the next step of effectiveness, those have to be resolved one way or another and not papered over or bypassed politically. You know, in a lot of people, they have like a certain comfort level with a certain political issue and can hijack a group that might have another purpose by trying to turn it into this issue, issues that and again, the concept of a totalizing discourse comes up, issues that you can use as a lens to understand all of society, all of history through the lens of capitalism, through the lens of race, through the lens of carbon. These can be like this comfortable and powerful place for somebody who is fluent in that particular vocabulary. And it can be a way of exerting power over other people. Let's make it about this. And I'm not saying these things are not important. And I'm not saying that these lenses are not powerful and valid and illuminate things that we need to see. Absolutely. Absolutely. They bring truth to light. And none of them reveal all truth when they are used to bypass other political issues or to bypass interpersonal conflicts or internal conflicts. Then they no longer actually serve the cause of healing on a global level. They become creatures of the old story, creatures of domination, creatures of winning and losing. They become an instrument of a kind of backdoor totalitarianism. Yeah. And that's why I want to bring a little bit of awareness to political bypass alongside spiritual bypass.