Works by
Robert Augustus Masters
(Writer)

Fiction

• Love Must Also Weep: A Novel Lucidly Intimate With Awakenings Alchemy (1990)

Non-fiction

• Spiritual Bypassing: How We Use Spiritual Practice to Avoid Our Difficulties (May 11, 2010 release)
  Spiritual bypassing—the use of spiritual beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs—is so pervasive that it goes largely unnoticed. The spiritual ideals of any tradition, whether Christian commandments or Buddhist precepts, can provide easy justification for practitioners to duck uncomfortable feelings in favor of more seemingly enlightened activity. When split off from fundamental psychological needs, such actions often do much more harm than good.
  
  While other authors have touched on the subject, this is the first book fully devoted to spiritual bypassing. In the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa’s landmark Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Spiritual Bypassing provides an in-depth look at the unresolved or ignored psychological issues often masked as spirituality, including self-judgment, excessive niceness, and emotional dissociation. A  longtime psychotherapist with an engaging writing style, Masters furthers the body of psychological insight into how we use (and abuse) religion in often unconscious ways. This book will hold particular appeal for those who grew up with an unstructured new-age spirituality now looking for a more mature spiritual practice, and for anyone seeking increased self-awareness and a more robust relationship with themselves and others.

• Meeting The Dragon: Ending Our Suffering By Entering Our Pain (Feb 18, 2009)
  Pain can be a real pain, and it can also be something altogether different, if we will but meet it, rather than turning away from it. In this his latest book, Robert Augustus Masters describes how to end our suffering by entering our pain, step by conscious step, finding ever-increasing freedom in so doing.
  
  Pain comes with Life, often inevitably so, and can serve Life if we do not turn it into suffering (meaning that we do not make a self-binding story out of it starring us in the victim role), but instead turn toward and enter it. And how do we do this? We name our pain; we turn toward it; we enter it; we get intimate with all of its qualities (its directionality, texture, temperature, color, density, shape), going into it until we reach its heart. Eventually we emerge; our pain may not be gone, but we now have a very different relationship with it, a relationship that serves our healing and awakening.
  
  The degree to which we turn our pain into suffering is the degree to which we obstruct our own healing. Suffering keeps pain in the dark. When we are busy suffering, we are without healthy detachment, being removed from the naked reality of our pain (our attention being far more focused on our storyline than on the nonconceptual rawness of our pain), but not removed in a way that permits us to focus more clearly on what is actually going on.
  
  To work effectively with our suffering, we need both to stand apart from its script (so as to more clearly bring it into focus), and to cease distancing ourselves from our pain. As we become more intimate with our pain, we find that we are less and less troubled by it, until our pain is but grace, however fierce. Meeting the Dragon is all about cultivating such intimacy.

• Transformation Through Intimacy: The Journey Toward Mature Monogamy (2007)
  Deeply effective comprehensive guidance for those who (1) want more loving, passionate and liberating intimate relationships; and (2) are ready to work through whatever is in the way. Immature monogamy entraps; mature monogamy liberates. This book is about making the journey toward mature monogamy, teaching that in a truly intimate relationship, freedom is found not from limitation, but through limitation.

• Divine Dynamite: Entering Awakening's Heartland (2006)
  Forty-nine essays that explore and illuminate the promises, perils, and terrain of the awakening process, providing steppingstones and navigational savvy for the inevitably slippery slopes of personal, transpersonal, and interpersonal evolution.

• The Anatomy & Evolution of Anger: An Integral Exploration (2006)
  A state-of-the-art, interdisciplinary study of anger and how to work with it, in personal, transpersonal, and interpersonal contexts. Anger's anatomy, function, and evolution -- from mere reactivity to wrathful compassion -- are explored in great detail, as are four approaches to working with anger: Anger-In, Anger-Out, Mindfully-Held Anger, and Heart-Anger.

• Darkness Shining Wild: An Odyssey to the Heart of Hell & Beyond: Meditations on Sanity, Suffering, Spirituality, and Liberation (2005)
  Darkness Shining Wild is an investigation of sanity, suffering, identity, death, and the far frontiers of spirituality, all constellated around the story of an extremely harrowing near-death experience. The hellish journey following that experience provides a jumping-off point for deep-diving reflections on topics ranging from the anatomy of dread to the relationship between madness and spirituality.
  
  The odyssey to the heart of hell and beyond that centers Darkness Shining Wild provides not a consoling cartography of the transpersonal, but rather a reality-unlocking tour of the everwild Mystery of Being, in which revelation supplants explanation.
  
  Darkness Shining Wild is especially suited for those who, having left the shores of the status quo, are discovering that the waters they are crossing have no obligation to remain benign or comfortable. It may also inspire those who, despite having done considerable psychospiritual work, nonetheless find themselves "sinking" into darkness. Darkness Shining Wild is dedicated to those whose longing to be truly free is stronger than their longing to be distracted from their suffering.

• Freedom Doesn't Mind Its Chains: Revisioning Sex, Body, Emotion, & Spirituality (2005)
  Freedom Doesn't Mind Its Chains has as its core theme the cultivation of intimacy with all that we are. Its approach is passionate, integral, and deep-cutting. And its topics? Sex, body, emotion, spirituality, choice, freedom. Its chapters range from the nature of choice to the anatomy of guilt to the raw basics of awakened sex.
  
  Freedom Doesn't Mind Its Chains is a travel companion for deep journeying, inviting us to bring everything, including our suffering, onto the dancefloor. No wallflowers. In dancing with it all, we enter, and enter with more than our intellect, that which we never really left, but only dreamt we did.

• Way of the Lover: The Awakening and Embodiment of the Full Human (1989, 1995)

• Roaming in Dreamland Hungry for Home (1992)

• Truth Cannot Be Rehearsed: Talks, Sessions and Essays About the Art of Being Fully Human (1991)