Resistance

'....until he sees that absolutely everything he does is resistance, he will secretly continue to move away, to grasp, to seek, and thus to totally prevent the discovery. He will move away without realising he is moving away. If he doesn’t see that all his actions are resistances, he will still believe that there is some move he can make to get to unity consciousness. Until he sees that everything he does is nothing but a moving away, he will simply continue to move away. He will think that he has a choice, an alternative, something to do, some way out. And so he continues to make a move – a move which is always away – and thus a move which erects a barrier to unity consciousness which was not there to begin with.

But at the very point he sees that everything he does is a resistance, a looking away and a moving away, then he has no choice but to surrender. He cannot however, try to do this, or try not to! We have seen that this doesn’t work at all, for both tries are just more moving-away. Rather, it happens itself, spontaneously, when he sees nothing he can do, or not do, will work, because unity is always already the case. The very seeing of the resistance is the dissolution of the resistance, an acknowledgement of the prior unity.

Once this primal resistance begins to dissolve, one’s separate self dissolves with it. For it is not that you, on the one hand, see your moving away , on the other. It might start this way, with you as a separate self seeing the resistance as an activity of yours. But as you begin to see that everything that you do is a resistance, you start to see that even your feeling of being a separate self ‘in here’ is also nothing but a resistance. When you feel yourself, all you feel is a tiny inner tension, a subtle contraction, a subtle moving away. The feeling of self and the feeling of moving away are one and the same. But as this becomes obvious, there are no longer two different feelings here, no longer an experience on one hand and having an experience on the other hand, but only one, single, all-pervasive feeling – the feeling of resistance. You don’t feel this resistance, you are this feeling of resistance. The feeling of self condenses into the feeling of resistance, and both dissolve.

Thus, to the extent this primal resistance dissolves, your separation from the world also dissolves. There spontaneously comes a deep and total surrender of resistance, of the unwillingness to gaze upon the present in all its forms, and thus a dissolution of the boundary you erected between inside and outside. When you no longer are resisting present experience, you no longer have a motive to separate yourself from it. The world and the self return as one single experience, not two different ones.....

 Further, when we are no longer moving away from experience, experience no longer seems to move past us. To no longer resist the present is to see that there is nothing but the present – no beginning, no end, nothing behind it, nothing in front of it. When the past of memory and the future of anticipation are both seen to be present facts, then the slats to this present collapse. The boundaries around this moment fall into this moment, with nowhere else to go. Said an old Zen master,

My self of long ago,

In nature non-existent:

Nowhere to go when dead,

Nothing at all.

Ref:

Wilber, K. (1979).No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth. Boulder: Shambala.