This seemed the perfect follow-up to Part 1:
So long as we cling, we are bound. …
Spirituality is experienced, first, as Release. … In the experience of Release … the fundamental truth of mutuality holds. Thus it is that we can experience release only if we have released—only if we have let go. We do not find Release by letting go, for that would still involve the manipulative attempt to control. When we truly release, when we really let go, we abdicate control, and it is this surrender of control that is so terrifying. …
What blocks Release more than anything else is the refusal to “let go” that comes from the demand for security, for certainty, for assured results. Release, like spirituality, requires risk. …
“Letting go” involves a breaking down of resistance to reality, a surrender of the demands for certitude; it can be pictured as a letting fall of fetter, a shucking of bonds of fear and possessiveness now experienced as no longer binding. … But—the chains cannot drop if we have become so attached to them that we fear being without them. … The deeper release, then, is of our attachment to the chains that bind us. …
The attempt to control the future and the demand to be in charge of everything in our lives sentences us to a daily existence obsessed with life-numbing worry.
A Zen Comics saying helps us to laugh at our pretensions by standing one of life’s classic assumptions on its head:
I feel so much better since I gave up hope.
from the spirituality of imperfection by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham