Religions have the potential of offering us a much closer relationship with our spiritual nature, yet, more often than not, the doctrines used in most traditions act to reinforce separation between believers and non-believers. This doctrinal wedge is also exactly what separates any seeker from Spirit. Attaching to any sense of separation significantly diminishes our chances at living an Ultimate Life. Put simply, separation nourishes fear, and fear nourishes grasping, and grasping gives birth to fundamentalism. And fundamentalism, in all of its forms, offers every fearful ego a place, albeit a temporary one, to hide. For any of us who feel strongly about our spiritual practices or the practices of others, we should be careful not to get caught by the fires of fundamentalist passion, since, by definition, fundamentalism is merely grasping by another name. Instead, we should try to witness our experience of fear as it happens, and then participate in its intensification and its waning from a position of open curiosity and peace. Simply noticing our attachments to the things that we are afraid of losing helps us, and our various wisdom traditions, to evolve. If we continue to allow ourselves and our respective faiths to be governed by fear, we will continue to act as pawns in unnecessary spiritual wars, and religion will only continue to exacerbate personal and collective suffering.

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One of the most common ways that we feel resistance is anger. Anger is an intense and specific form of resistance to something that is presenting itself in a given moment. Hatred, on the other hand, is an even more deeply attached, and therefore intense, form of anger that is directed very specifically at something or someone. The root of both anger and hatred, as well as other resistance patterns such as anxiety and indifference, is fear. We will be dealing with the subject of fear much more extensively in the next chapter, but for now it is important to see that fear arises whenever the ego senses that it will be forced to do something it doesn’t want to do. There is nothing more threatening to the limited ego than the unlimited Infinite. As we’ve discussed, ego sees Infinity as always chaotic and unmanageable, something that it just can’t handle. So as the ego recognizes the actual and potential chaos in any situation, fear arises. Fear then can turn quickly into a resistance pattern. The more intense the fear, the greater will be the ego’s attachment to resistance.

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If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.

—St. John of the Cross

What is it like when force becomes the standard of conduct? The great attack the small, the strong plunder the weak, the many oppress the few, the cunning deceive the simple, the noble disdain the humble. The rich mock the poor, the young take from the old, and the states of the empire ruin each other.

—Ma Tzu

When we don’t want something that shows up in our lives, we typically do our best to resist it. This resistance can mean that we refuse to accept things that arise in our experience, or that we manipulate them, or that we fight against them, or that we even work to destroy any of the causes and conditions that might lead to anything we find undesirable. As we continue our climb, we begin to see that all of our resistance centers itself around a contracted, egoic intention of pushing away what is presenting itself and grasping at what is not presenting itself in order to either force or avoid a particular outcome. As with any form of grasping, this causes suffering.

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The body, mind, and soul are also seen as separate entities by the ego, even though they, like everything else, are actually aspects of the same Infinity. Body is our personally felt physical vessel of the infinity of Spirit in this world of form. Mind is our personally felt conceptual vessel of Spirit in this world of form. Soul is our personally felt sense of Spirit in this world of form. So body, mind, and soul are all actually personal attachments within the deeper context of a single, impersonal Spirit, in the same way that human faces are all essentially slight variations on a single, impersonal face. So a more complete picture might be to suggest that all things are simultaneously distinct and at the same time part of the deep singularity of the All.

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The more we become aware of ego’s activity, the less important its drama becomes. Climbing higher, we are reminded continually that the ego is rooted in self-concern rather than generosity. Seeing this for what it is allows for us to make increasingly selfless choices. In making deeply selfless decisions we take power from the ego, and then notice that the less power the ego has, the less that the drama being played out on the Stage of Mind matters. Rather than identifying with the actors on the Stage, we begin to notice that our essence is actually the audience of the charade. From here the Big Self, or the Witness, begins to unfold as an unattached awareness of our experience, and here we can then become more acutely aware of ego’s very subtle attempts at controlling what might otherwise be genuine spiritual realization.

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Unfortunately, none of us can truly give of ourselves as long as the ego is attached to any of our activity. This is because any activity sourced from the ego will always play itself out as a giving for the sake of getting something in return. The moment this happens, unity gives way to separation as a result of our craving for something other than what we already have. In other words, rather than giving freely from a place of deeply surrendered recognition that all things are a simple interconnected Oneness, ego turns the situation into a basic negotiation.

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Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.

—Carl Jung

The newer people, of this modern age, are more eager to amass than to realize.

—Rabindranath Tagore

Our unconscious habits develop from our inability to experience and accept things for what they truly are. We might, for instance, make ourselves coffee when we wake up each morning, but if this activity is merely a habit, we are unplugged from the miracle of the whole experience. Do we notice the weather outside in the morning? How about what it feels like inside our home? Are we aware of the sounds at play around us? The sound of the coffee dripping into the pot? The songs of the birds outside our window? Are we aware of the silence between the sounds? Can we truly notice the smell of what we’re pouring into our cup? Can we openly consider how the whole experience came to us in this moment? Do we feel gratitude for those who picked the beans? Gratitude for the sun and the rain that allowed them to grow? Can we taste all of this as we sip our hot morning drink? Are we truly thankful for this brand new day, guaranteed to be filled with mystery and possibility? Maybe we are. Then again, maybe we aren’t. Maybe we’d rather slog down the coffee in order to stave off the deep urge to get back into bed.

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If a man owns land, the land owns him.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

One does not err by perceiving, one errs by clinging; but knowing clinging itself as mind, it frees itself.

—Zen saying

As our climb up the Mountain of Spirit progresses, some things begin to stand out. First of all, we recognize how our small self works to keep its distance from the broader sense of the Infinite that we call the Big Self so that it can maintain a sense of control. Secondly, the higher we climb, the more we learn that simply watching our small self in action helps us to become aware of its mechanisms of attachment. These mechanisms show themselves as craving and resistance, both of which are simply two faces of the same coin we call grasping.

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