“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
— Pema Chödrön
The way we resist change personally and in our own lives is a subject worthy of deep exploration, and there are ample resources out there. We often wrestle with how to change ourselves. So, we’re going to take this question in a different direction.
Why do we resist others changing? We would have to change, too. So we resist their change with our ego, because we are afraid of what might come up from our shadows. Our own masks, equilibria, and perspectives about our position and value in a social context.
What’s really going on? A part of you and I is saying, “No, I don’t want them to change.” And there are reasons you and I have for it.
We say we believe people can change. But deep down, we often don’t. It can be easy to resist. So, when it matters, when it costs us, it’s easier for us not to change than to allow the idea of someone else we know changing.
I’m not speaking of an evil, isolated, or unique situation, but rather human resistance to a change of our inner narratives and perceptions about others. This element rides beneath the subconscious current of daily and familiar life, but it can be spotted, and its lingering residue remains a barrier to authentic growth and healing. This can appear at work, in families, in intimate relationships, in churches, and most definitely on either side of the political divide.
We doubt others can change and refuse to give them a chance. It’s easier to keep our fingers pointed than to change postures out of fear of having to change. We like our assumptions and cognitive ease. In other words, if we’re convinced other people are more wrong than we are, we assume we are acceptably right. Not all the time…but enough you and I know it’s a thing. It’s in part because people have been stubborn and selfish, and don’t like to change. People like to maintain their kingdoms, schedules, and brand. On top of that, change usually requires at least admitting through behavior that someone was right, or that we were at least “wrong” in how we were behaving before.
The Death We’re Avoiding
We fear change because it feels like death—because change is, in a sense, the death of what was. We take something old, repurpose and refashion it into something new. This is the essence of creation, and it always implies “destruction.” To go from one phase to another, no matter what that “phase” is, implies an old phase has to die for a new phase to exist and live in the next moment: concept to completed work, woman to mother, child to parent, addiction to sobriety, immaturity to maturity, a business rebrand or leadership change, visitor to member, employee to boss, married to divorced. In truth, change is just natural, normal. We know and live through this. And yet, we try to avoid it.
Humanity loves our predictability and routines, the narratives and norms we can understand and keep within our management. It’s easier, cognitively and socially, to “go with the flow,” which, ironically, is the opposite of the Way, or the Dao, that disciples of the Son of Man & Maitreya are invited into. We like to maintain our personal perception of control and status in regard to those in our social contexts.
In The Son of Man & Its Mystical Awakening, we spend time exploring René Girard’s mimetic theory and how communities tend to fall into scapegoating to offset their internal psychological tension. It’s a way to give someone to hate and be angry with, while taking the attention off the shadow that the power dynamics cast. It’s blame shifting and appeasement, not authenticity and acceptance. It’s about protecting what’s “mine” from others, and feeling self-justified about it. It’s a lot of triangulation, and not a lot of truth.
“The crowd doesn’t know it’s scared. It only knows it’s angry. And it will justify the anger with moral claims—but beneath those claims is a fear too hard to name. A fear of powerlessness, of shame, of being seen. It’s easier to kill a scapegoat than confront the lie.”
— The Son of Man & Its Mystic Awakening
This same dynamic, first covered by Girard in the 1960s, has been understood and applied in surprising and now evidence-based models, like Leadership and Self-Deception, that use a “box” of self-justification to explain the same phenomenon but on an individual level, and how that leads to collusion in relationships and the workplace. It’s an international best seller, for a damn-good reason.
Mark Manson, in Everything Is F*cked, puts it this way: “Our minds strive for psychological equilibrium. We feel a need to believe that our values, our behaviors, and our environment are all aligned. When they’re not, we suffer.” So, we build these internal and social equilibria, not because they’re right, but because they feel safe. Change—even good change—disrupts that fragile balance. And the devil we know is usually what we prefer.
If you can trace the threads and the movements of this kind of logic, it’s us running away from insecurity and mortality, from experiencing something we’re afraid of. It’s about being unsure of our mortality and goodness. It’s about letting go of power and control. Risk is always about such things.
Love Without Tools
So, stay with me, and here is my hand to hold: we’re going to discuss something difficult, uncomfortable, and something I’m chief among sinners of.
Often, we don’t love as well, or as much, as we think and say we do. Or, we don’t know how to love as well as we could. We’ve been given the wrong tools and language, or we’ve hurt others a lot. We’ve had our own cacophony of stories, of people and nuance, of broken black and whites, of veiled intentions, of mistakes, and things we’ve invested too much into. We’ve all been given a set of cards we didn’t negotiate and forced to play a game with changing rules and no endgame in sight.
From the 1900s to the 50s, to the 80s, and then to 2000, all the way up through now: your history had to go through some dramatic shifts in Western history, and you and I are dealing with the culmination of all of that. Despite it being 2025, it really hasn’t been that long since globalization started, and a lot has happened in that time. I’d imagine that in your family’s and personal stories and histories, whatever your traditions and opinions are, there is a lot for anyone out there to process. The Noosphere (the stories and worlds we were born into as children without knowing anything else) for any person today has an interesting and inter-woven history.
“Children who were loved for their performance, not their presence, grow up unable to trust love that isn’t earned. They become adults addicted to managing perception, not receiving connection.”
— The Drama of the Gifted Child
This long human struggle has, in many ways, been about us trying to convince ourselves that we are, in fact, loved, valuable, and justified in existing. And, the silly thing is, we can have all three, and already do. You are existing, you are valuable, and you are loved. We just wanted someone else to also be able to believe it with us. We are all human and want life, love, and truth. It’s just that shame is a beast of a demon.
Change, confession, and the healing process aren’t always clean or work out perfectly, but it is worth it. The alternative is just more of the same. Your children do want to love you, and your parents do want to love you. Your neighbors are also children and parents, as are the people we vote and post against. You are capable and worthy of love, and of truth, and of hope, and of goodness. You are loving, and already capable of being love.
The Water Is Rising
Phrases like “the times we’re in” and “everything is changing so fast” keep popping up around me. I’m no longer wondering if it’s just me. We feel doom and change all around us.
But the real thing, the real problem, is that all of “this” is making us aware of the fact that we have to change ourselves. And it’s been a long time coming. Change is not only possible, it is natural. It is something we are. Creation is destruction: from pigments to canvas and seed to harvest. We are more like trees than we are emperors, and we’ve been isolated, reduced, and scapegoated on so many sides that we’ve all got lost in the mix.
“Only when we become aware of the unconscious forces shaping us can we integrate them and become whole. This confrontation is often experienced as death—but it is the death of illusion, not the self.”
— Carl Jung
We can all change. We all need to. It’s a God-given right and a glorious thing. It can be a fun thing…sometimes. And we’ll learn about wisdom, and where we don’t need to just change for change’s sake, and how to be antifragile, integrated, authentic, resilient, mature, child-like, and full of life, truth, and love. We can get there, individually and as communities. And if that be so, then we can also as a nation and a globe.
“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
— 2 Chronicles 7:14
It’s Time to Die (Well)
It will just take some people picking up their crosses (not Jesus’—look it up), following Him, and dying to self (Matthew 16:24-26). The harvest is ripe, and not in just some po-dunk backwater Samaritan village, but in your backyard, city, family, and in your own soul and life. The Living Water has spread and proliferated throughout our global and distracted Western technocratic society. The Kingdom of God has gone into all nations, and the Word has gone forth and is having its effect. The work from Acts has continued over the last 2000 years (Acts 17:26-27). It is already in all corners, and Jesus has touched every Westerner (most even “accept” His divinity and message, having no problem with His lordship, but with Christian’s egos). The mystical awakening and coming of the Son of Man are here: staring back at you in every face and reflection.
Keep your head up, sink your roots deep, and lift your branches high: be you, follow the Way, and go through it. You’ll be there on the other side—just not the same you.
Be with those going through IT, too. This is a way of life. This is discipleship. This is sanctification. This is integration. This is awakening. This is a community, and the Bride is taking center stage. The wedding feast is at hand. This is God becoming among us. Walk with such people and be grateful to experience such moments of Christ breaking through.
It’s going to be a crazy 20–40 years, but hold on. We’ve all got this. It’s simple, like AA likes to say: “You just have to change everything.“
“In my end is my beginning.”
— T.S. Eliot
