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Resistance

Resistance Against Being With Yourself
When you are resisting, you are basically resisting yourself. It is a kind of self-resistance. Instead of being with yourself, you are resisting being with yourself. Instead of being yourself, you are resisting being yourself. That is what it means to resist our True Nature. The ego experience, which is by its nature not an experience of simply being ourselves, implies resistance to being. The moment we take the posture of ego, of identification with our history, it implies resistance. There is no such thing as ego with no resistance, and the ultimate resistance is the resistance to simply being, the resistance to our True Nature. And that’s because ego is always trying to do one thing or another, and True Nature isn't doing anything. It just is. It is nature. It is luminous presence.
The Unfolding Now, p. 36   •  discuss »
Resistance is Futile
When we are pushing against our experience, fighting it off, it doesn't have the opportunity or the space to be itself. And if it doesn't have the chance to be itself, it doesn't have the chance to unfold. And if it doesn't have the chance to unfold, it doesn't have the opportunity to reveal its nature. So it continues to be whatever manifestation initially arose. In other words, resisting something is one good way to preserve it in the form that we experienced it to begin with. We resist, hoping to get rid of it, but what we are actually doing is encapsulating it and keeping it in its original form or expression. So, as you see, resistance is futile! Everything that initially appears to have its own identity, its own reality, at some point will be absorbed again into the indivisible unity of True Nature.
The Unfolding Now, p. 39   •  discuss »
Hardening Ourselves
Resistance is an active mode of inner coercion that reflects or overlaps with a more passive form of inner manipulation—our defensiveness. As with defense, resistance frequently implies a need to protect ourselves. Sometimes we resist because we don’t like what we are experiencing; we’d prefer something else, so we judge what actually is. Perhaps we are angry at what is happening in us. Or we are tired of it. But much of the time, we resist because we feel we need to protect ourselves. And protection is the basic motivation for putting up inner defenses. When we perceive a real danger or threat, or when we imagine one, we tend to harden ourselves for self-protection. But by hardening ourselves, we are not only thickening our consciousness, we are also making it stiff and solid, and it becomes impossible to experience that delicacy, that gentleness and intimacy, of being ourselves. That hardening reaction—building a wall of protection and separation—which becomes an impediment against finding where we are, is the ego’s basic mode of defense. Ego is based mainly on defenses—defending itself against dangers—inner and outer, imaginary and real. Ego does not really exist without its defenses.
The Unfolding Now, p. 47   •  discuss »

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