By pitting yourself against what is, you are acting according to the delusion that you have a separate will and that you can have your own way, different from what is happening. This is one of the principles of ego: that you have a separate will and that you have choice. Even when you believe that you are helpless and can’t do things, there is the implicit belief that if it weren’t for your helplessness, you could have your own way. From this egoic perspective, it seems obvious that you need to tinker with things, both inwardly and outwardly. This manifests externally as manipulating other people to make them conform to how you think they need to be for you, and internally as constantly evaluating your experience to see whether it is “right” or not, and trying to change it if it doesn’t match your ideas of how you think it should be. “What state am I in? Oh, no! I’m being reactive—that’s no good—I should be just being. Now I’m being. Good, good. I should stabilize that,” and so on, as if it were up to you to make your state become this or that. If you contemplate your experience, you will see this constant activity. The moment you are identified with your ego, you are involved in this activity of trying to make yourself feel better, and not scared or unhappy or empty. All ego defenses are based on this principle of changing your experience to make it conform to how you think it should be. – Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas, ch. 13
As long as you see the world as separate from God or devoid of Essence, you cannot really recognize, experience, or embody your essential nature in a permanent way. We are not something separate from the world—the sense of separation is only a mental construct—and so it is impossible to recognize the fundamental nature of one without seeing that of the other. When we see through this dichotomy, when we perceive beyond our world representation, we see that the physical world has a reality that is similar to our essential nature in the sense of its presence and consciousness, and we perceive that world to be perfect and good. We see, in other words, that the physical world is made out of conscious, loving presence, and this recognition underlies the sense of basic trust. – Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas, ch. 8
With the assumption of separateness come the issues of giving and receiving, loving and being loved, having and acquiring, and all of that. All these things which are the causes of people’s problems are based on the assumption that we have a circumference.
If you have no circumference, all these concerns go. Then you do not say, “I want you to love me.” “I want you to love me” means there is a person here, and that person over there is going to love this person here. But there isn’t that boundary; there is only one, there is only a oneness. In that unity, what could it mean that you want someone to love you? What could it mean that you are going to love someone? What does it mean that you are going to give anything to anyone? What does it mean that you are going to get anything from the universe? You are the universe. The experience of oneness is not like all of humanity are all one and we know it in some deep place. No, the experience of oneness includes everything: all that you see, all that your senses are capable of perceiving. This is the world of appearance, the creation. – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, Ch. 6
The soul’s increasing realization of her essential nature spontaneously puts pressure on this structure of separating boundaries, illuminating it and causing the soul to feel an exaggeration of the sense of separateness. One of the ways this inner pressure manifests is that the soul begins to feel constricted, even though she is deeply in touch with her essential nature. She feels limited in a way that causes existential suffering. She longs to be completely essential; she yearns to melt into the sweet juices of essence; but whatever she does, whatever practice she engages in, whatever attitude she takes, nothing works. She feels trapped inside her own skin while she strongly intuits, and frequently knows from direct experience, that her real condition is complete release and total marriage to her beloved, the truth of essence. She is filled with tears and deep sadness for not being in the carefree condition that she knows is her potential, and pained with the anguish of separateness from what she deeply loves.
At this point the soul may reach depths of despair about ever being released from the trap of isolation; whatever inner efforts she makes only dig her deeper into this dilemma. Eventually she begins to see the futility of doing anything to free herself, even the spiritual practices of meditation, prayer, concentration, contemplation, inquiry, attention, and so on. Whatever she does is her own individual action, exercising her own will and intention, and it is becoming clear that this is an expression of the dilemma itself. It is all based on her own individual desire. To desire is to be the individual she is, to long and yearn for her freedom is to be the same limited person, and it is this individual that does the spiritual practices and works on herself. This separate person is, in fact, the same individual who wants to surrender, and because she wants to surrender she cannot; for by wanting it she is being the individual who turns out to be inseparable from the separating boundaries of ego. – The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, Ch. 17