Disarming Resistance

What is the particular activity of thinking and feeling that constitutes the separate self? We identify ourselves with thoughts, feelings, sensations, we seem to acquire their qualities, temporary and finite instead of being open, empty, vast, limitless. We seem to become a fragment and this fragment or this contracted self feels that it is incomplete, that it needs to be fulfilled by experience, and hence it lives in a state of seeking. And it feels vulnerable, and therefore it feels that it needs to protect its identity and therefore it lives in a state of resistance. a resistance that comes from the separate self or the ego always requires a storyline. It requires a process of thinking to support the resistance. If you find yourself resisting anything in your life now, or anything in your experience now, ask yourself, if I did not think about this experience, could the resistance stand?

A woman feels that everything she senses and perceives arises within her. She asks if anything she rejects or accepts about another person is really an aspect of herself.

A woman who was briefly brain dead shares that during that time she was empty of all experience and was pure being. When she came back, the world came back into existence and she knew the world arose within her. She asks if she can experience being the absolute while embodied.

A woman who had a near-death experience asks if an aspect of the individual soul remains after death.

A therapist asks Rupert how to help clients develop a stable ego that does not result in the belief in a separate self.