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.

There are several places in our daily lives where resistance patterns such as anger, hatred, anxiety, and indifference have the opportunity to play themselves out in short order. Perhaps there is no more fertile place of resistance than the arena of politics. Not surprisingly, politics can generate massive resistance because opinions can be very threatening, especially when some egos have the power to act on their opinions while other egos feel powerless. Rather than being about compromise, political situations are usually about attachment. The deeply egoic attitude of “I’m right, you’re wrong” can color so much political discourse, yet it is nothing other than attachment in action. Attachment blinds us to the potential for any kind of appropriate response. Just take any of the issues associated with human rights: racial or ethnic discrimination, gender issues, child labor, gay marriage, or any other that you may find interesting. Regardless of our political sensibilities, communication rooted in defending an attached position will only ever perpetuate the cycle of craving and resistance. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t resist those attached to denying human beings their dignity. Studying our own attachments, however, allows us to bring deeper consciousness to our political voices so that any “resistance” is informed by the openness and caring supported by fearlessness, rather than the closure and anger brought on by fear. In this place of non-resistance, we see that what we do or say may, or may not, make much of a difference, but we engage ourselves anyway. From non-resistance, we find that our protests aren’t diminished. Rather they can compassionately contribute to waking others up. From non-resistance, we see that we do not have to “put on the cloak of nonviolence,” as Gandhi says, in order “to cover impotence.” From non-resistance, we expose ourselves, and others, to the behavioral irony of angrily and divisively supporting policies that oppose divisiveness.

As another example of resistance, in today’s global religious culture, we find major attachments to division and resistance not only between groups of people but perhaps, more importantly, between people and their sense of God. Most churches do not operate from a place of interconnection with the Divine, but they rather have a tradition of relating to both God and each other from a hierarchical place of separation. Most traditions tend to view God as something apart from what we experience each moment as ourselves. We pray to God rather than living as a conscious expression of Him. And yet, for many, to recognize ourselves as expressions of all that is holy is considered blasphemy. In truth, seeing ourselves as separate from God in any way indicates that our ego, either singularly or collectively, is at work. Churches, mosques, temples, and all the other traditional organizations that fixate, codify, and dogmatize their ideology will only impede an Awakening, since their work centers itself around the convictions and attachments of the ego. These convictions lead to absolute certitude, and certitude eventually leads to violence. As such, if a government or religion decides to identify itself with a system of institutional separation it will only generate more clinging and, in turn, more resistance, more anger, and more suffering, for more people. And yet, this is exactly the situation that the world seems to be in: people are forced to commit themselves to a stunted spirituality or to nothing in particular. In either case, we feel less connected to each other and ourselves, while our spiritual landscape becomes more and more barren.

It surprises me in my discussions with people how their spiritual lives seem to reflect a felt sense of this frustration. The places they worshipped as youngsters seem irrelevant to the way they live in today’s world. And yet they yearn for some type of shared spiritual connection.

“What should the Pope care if my gay cousin is allowed to marry?” one of my students recently asked. “And why is it that because I’m a woman, I can’t be a priest in the church where I was raised? For that matter, why can’t priests marry? Does God make distinctions like this, or do men make them in order to stay in control?”

Her points were powerful. Where was the inclusiveness? This applies to all traditions, Buddhism as well. Any faith that tries to separate Spirit’s inherently inclusive quality from its practitioners will deny them an authentic Awakening to the Truth beyond name and form. This is because these organizations still cling to spiritual expressions that are limited by egoic attachment rather than opened by conscious expressions of the Infinite. Unless we awaken to this perpetual disconnect as well as its causes, we may be in for a rough time in the years ahead. The stakes are exceptionally high. This is perhaps the most important reason to walk an authentic spiritual path, one that opens us to Spirit, as opposed to one that separates us from it. Doing so allows for our relationship to Spirit to mature, thus breaking the hold that has made this relationship so irrelevant for so many, for so long.

The teachings of Christ, Mohammed, the Buddha, and all the other great sages, it should be noted, are not the problem. The problem arises when countless spiritual and religious practices and doctrines, as well as many contemporary psychological perspectives, advocate separation between person and Infinite and therefore work to support the position of the ego as being an end in itself. But ego and its relationship to everything, including its own interpretation of Spirit, is the major impediment to Enlightenment. Despite this challenge, we can take the next step when we open our being to that which transcends our most basic delusion of separation and our most basic patterns of resistance. If we can study our tendencies to hold fast to personal ideas, opinions, and faiths that best represent a fixed “us” positioned against a fixed “them,” we might be able to offer something to each other that deepens whatever faith or non-faith we currently practice. From the perspective of the Divine, there is both difference and sameness, yet there is no resistance to either. Regardless of our politics or our religion, we can act from this place of internal unity that brings together our difference and sameness. An external unity can’t help but follow.

To bring this back to practice, we can enter into stillness with the recognition that we are all divine manifestations of the Infinite and that none of us is separate from anything else. As our spiritual center of gravity shifts to meet this profound Knowing that is beyond clinging and resistance, we discover that kindness, rather than fear, anger or dogma, has the opportunity to flow as effortlessly as the all-encompassing compassion and grace from which everything originates. However, if we do not endeavor to walk the tightrope between these conventional and Ultimate truths of life through the daily practice of stillness, we will remain trapped by our delusions and a sense of separation. Until we can experience, Know, and center our activity from a spacious heart and mind, all relationships will only be egoic negotiations that, again, keep us from the radiant and ever-present awareness of Spirit that is both the source and destination of positively everything.

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