The Practice of Undoing: Why Real Growth Means Abandoning Self-Improvement When every solution reinforces the problem, transformation requires surrendering to love
by Michael Lamonaca, 22 December 2025
We’ve gamified meditation, monetized mindfulness, and optimized spiritual practice—then wonder why enlightenment remains out of reach. The contradiction isn’t accidental. Every technique designed to manage anxiety, every framework promising inner peace, every app quantifying spiritual progress does the same thing: it strengthens the ego’s control while claiming to transcend it. Modern self-improvement doesn’t dissolve the barrier between you and ultimate reality. It perfects the barrier. Because the barrier is fear, and fear is the ego’s language. What spiritual traditions actually teach—and what contemporary wellness culture systematically avoids—is that the only path to genuine freedom requires surrendering fear entirely and recognizing that love is the only reality that exists.
The architecture of spiritual bypassing operates through misdirection. Meditation teaches you to observe thoughts without judgment. Mindfulness helps you stay present with difficult emotions. Therapy gives you frameworks to understand your patterns. Each practice assumes the same thing: that you are a self managing internal experiences, and better management equals spiritual progress. But this keeps you operating within the ego’s domain. The ego is fear—fear of not being enough, fear of losing control, fear of being unloved. Every technique that helps you manage fear more skillfully reinforces the illusion that fear is real and must be managed. It never asks the deeper question: what if fear is the only illusion, and love is the only truth?
This distinction is everything. When you feel jealous of someone’s success, modern mindfulness says: observe the jealousy without judgment, notice where you feel it in your body, let it pass without acting on it. This is ego management disguised as spiritual practice. You’re still treating jealousy as a real experience happening to a real you. The practice of undoing goes deeper: jealousy is your ego responding from fear—fear that you’re not enough, fear that their success diminishes you. But what if you recognized the immense beauty already within you? What if you saw that their success doesn’t threaten you because love isn’t scarce? The moment you shift from fear to love, jealousy transforms into compassion—for them and for yourself. You forgive yourself for the fear, you surrender the whole experience to ultimate reality, and the miracle happens: your perception changes. The jealousy dissolves not because you managed it better but because you recognized it was never real. Only love is real.
The economic structure of wellness culture cannot accommodate this truth. Markets can monetize endless self-improvement because improvement implies a broken self requiring fixes. But you cannot monetize the recognition that nothing is broken—that fear is illusion and love is already complete within you. Meditation apps sell you better anxiety management. Therapy sells you deeper self-understanding. Spiritual retreats sell you transformative experiences. None of them sell you the truth that would end their business model: stop trying to improve the ego. Surrender it entirely. Choose love over fear in every moment, and watch the ego dissolve on its own.
Observe how people interact with their suffering through the lens of control. Someone experiences anxiety and immediately reaches for a technique: breathing exercises, cognitive reframing, progressive muscle relaxation. Each method reinforces the ego’s central claim: “I am in danger and must protect myself through better management.” But anxiety is fear, and fear is the ego’s voice. The ego exists to protect a self it believes is separate, vulnerable, and under constant threat. Every coping mechanism strengthens this false belief. You become more skilled at managing fear without ever questioning whether fear reflects reality.
Spiritual traditions across centuries converge on a different answer: fear is the illusion, love is the truth, and the practice isn’t management but surrender. When anxiety arises, the question isn’t “how do I reduce this feeling?” but “am I choosing fear or love right now?” Anxiety says: the future is threatening, you must control outcomes, you are not safe. Love says: you are already whole, you are already safe, ultimate reality holds everything. The shift from fear to love doesn’t happen through technique. It happens through recognition and choice. You see the fear, you recognize it as ego, you choose love instead, and you surrender the outcome to something larger than ego control.
This isn’t positive thinking or spiritual bypassing. It’s the difference between rearranging furniture in a burning house and walking out the door. Modern psychology gives you better furniture arrangements. It helps you understand why you’re anxious, where the anxiety comes from, how to tolerate it more effectively. But it never questions whether the house is actually on fire. It assumes fear is a valid response to real threats that require better management. Spiritual practice says: the house was never burning. Fear invented the fire to justify its own existence.
Historical parallels reveal the pattern across traditions. Christian mysticism describes this as surrendering personal will to divine grace—not improving yourself but recognizing that the small self (ego, fear) was always an obstacle to the larger truth (love, God). Meister Eckhart didn’t develop better prayer techniques. He experienced the complete dissolution of separation between self and God. The transformation wasn’t gradual improvement. It was sudden recognition that love is the ground of being and fear is the illusion obscuring it.
Buddhism approaches the same truth through different language. Suffering arises from attachment, and attachment is the ego’s fear-driven attempt to control impermanence. You suffer not because life is inherently painful but because you keep trying to make permanent what is temporary, keep trying to protect a self that doesn’t exist as a solid entity. The practice isn’t better management of suffering. It’s recognizing that the one who suffers is a temporary pattern of fear mistaking itself for ultimate reality. When you see through the illusion, suffering doesn’t need to be managed—it simply dissolves.
Even contemporary neuroscience accidentally reveals this structure. Studies on psychedelic experiences show that when the default mode network—the brain regions generating self-referential thinking—temporarily shuts down, people report ego dissolution accompanied by feelings of universal love and interconnection. The experience isn’t “I feel more loving.” It’s “I recognize that love is what I am, what everything is, and fear was the temporary illusion blocking that recognition.” The therapeutic benefit isn’t from gaining new insights to manage fear better. It’s from temporarily experiencing reality without the ego’s fear-based filter.
Competing frameworks interpret this truth through their own limitations. Modern psychology treats ego dissolution as a therapeutic tool—a useful temporary state for gaining perspective, not a recognition of permanent truth. The clinical model assumes a healthy ego is the goal, and spiritual experiences are valuable only insofar as they strengthen ego function. This preserves the treatment relationship, the mental health industry, and the entire economic structure built on fear management. If psychologists told clients “your ego is fear, love is reality, surrender the ego entirely,” there would be no need for ongoing therapy. So the truth gets repackaged: “You had a profound experience that can help you develop healthier coping mechanisms.”
Spiritual traditions make the opposite claim: ego dissolution isn’t a tool for improving the ego. It’s the recognition that what you thought was you (the ego, the fear) was always an illusion, and what you actually are (love, consciousness, God) was always real but obscured. The shift isn’t improvement. It’s awakening from a dream. You don’t become a better person through spiritual practice. You recognize that the person you thought needed improvement never existed—only love exists, temporarily forgetting itself through identification with fear.
Neuroscience offers a materialist interpretation: self is an evolutionary adaptation that becomes maladaptive in modern environments. Our ancestors needed strong ego boundaries to survive immediate physical threats. But contemporary life contains mostly abstract, social, or self-generated threats that don’t require ego defense. The constant reinforcement of fear-based ego creates chronic suffering in the absence of real danger. This view acknowledges the problem but stops short of the spiritual claim: it’s not that ego is maladaptive in modern contexts. It’s that ego was always an illusion, and love was always the only reality.
Verification of these claims requires direct experience, not intellectual argument. You cannot think your way from fear to love because thinking is the ego’s tool for maintaining control. You cannot prove that love is ultimate reality through logic because logic operates within the ego’s framework of subject and object, self and other, threat and safety. This is why spiritual traditions emphasize practice over philosophy. The truth of “only love is real” isn’t discovered through better reasoning. It’s recognized when you choose love over fear in a specific moment and watch reality shift in response.
Consider someone struggling with resentment toward a family member. Modern therapy explores the roots of the resentment—childhood wounds, unmet needs, communication patterns. The goal is understanding and better boundaries, which means a more skillfully defended ego. But the practice of undoing asks: is resentment real, or is it fear wearing a different mask? You resent them because you fear they don’t value you, or fear you’re trapped by obligation, or fear acknowledging your own role in the dynamic. Every thread of resentment traces back to fear. And fear is the ego protecting itself.
The shift happens when you choose love instead. Not romantic love or even necessarily liking them—but recognizing the shared reality beneath the ego conflict. They’re operating from fear too. Their behavior that triggers your resentment comes from their own ego trying to survive. When you see this clearly, compassion arises naturally—not as something you force but as what remains when fear dissolves. You forgive yourself for holding resentment because you recognize it came from fear, not from your true nature. You surrender the whole situation to ultimate reality—to love, to God, to whatever language points at the truth beyond ego—and the miracle completes itself. Your perception shifts. The resentment dissolves not because you managed it better but because you stopped choosing fear.
Consequences of this recognition extend beyond individual psychology. A culture built on fear generates specific structures. If you believe you are a separate self in competition with other separate selves, then every interaction becomes threat assessment. Your success requires my failure. Your happiness diminishes mine. Politics becomes tribal warfare. Economics becomes zero-sum competition. Relationships become negotiations between defended positions. The entire social order reinforces ego because ego generates the anxiety that drives consumption, the insecurity that drives status competition, the fear that drives political tribalism.
This is why meditation apps and mindfulness programs integrate so smoothly into corporate culture. They don’t threaten the system—they optimize it. They help workers manage fear more efficiently so they can be more productive within fear-based structures. Google offers meditation rooms not because they want employees to dissolve their egos but because calmer egos are more effective egos. The practice becomes another tool for fear management, another way to perfect the illusion rather than see through it.
The radical alternative threatens everything. If people recognized that fear is illusion and love is reality, if they actually practiced choosing love over fear in every moment, the entire structure of consumer capitalism would collapse. You cannot advertise to someone who knows they’re already complete. You cannot generate status anxiety in someone who recognizes that worth isn’t scarce. You cannot create political tribalism in someone who sees beyond the ego boundary between self and other. A society built on love rather than fear would be unrecognizable—not because it would be perfect but because the organizing principle would be completely different.
This doesn’t mean ignoring material inequality or structural violence. It means recognizing that solutions built on fear-based frameworks ultimately reinforce the problem. Progressive activism often operates from fear: fear of oppression, fear of losing ground, fear that the other side will win. Conservative politics operates from fear: fear of change, fear of loss, fear that traditional structures will collapse. Both sides strengthen ego boundaries—just around different identity groups. But ego boundaries are fear boundaries. And fear is the illusion.
The practice of undoing suggests a different approach: address material harm while operating from love rather than fear. This means seeing the oppressor as someone operating from their own fear-based ego, which doesn’t excuse their actions but changes how you respond. It means building structures based on recognition of shared reality rather than defense of separate interests. It means acknowledging that you cannot end conflict between egos by creating stronger egos—you end conflict by helping people recognize that the boundary between self and other was always fear’s invention, never love’s truth.
The path forward requires abandoning the path. This is the final paradox spiritual traditions describe: you cannot achieve surrender through effort because effort is the ego’s tool. You cannot practice your way to love through fear-based techniques. The shift from fear to love doesn’t happen through accumulation but through recognition and choice. In every moment, you’re already choosing—fear or love, ego or truth, illusion or reality. Modern self-improvement tries to make you better at choosing fear. It gives you more skillful ways to protect the ego, manage threats, control outcomes. The practice of undoing says: stop trying to choose fear more effectively. Start choosing love instead.
This choice is available right now. When anxiety arises, you can ask “how do I manage this fear?” or you can ask “am I choosing fear or love?” When jealousy appears, you can practice mindful observation of the emotion or you can recognize the fear beneath it and choose to see the beauty within yourself that makes jealousy impossible. When resentment takes hold, you can explore its psychological roots or you can see it as fear wearing a mask and choose compassion instead. Each choice either reinforces the ego’s fear-based illusion or weakens it through recognition that love is what’s real.
The practice isn’t complicated but it’s not easy, because the ego will use every tool—including spiritual tools—to maintain control. It will turn “choosing love” into another achievement, another way to be a better spiritual person, another form of fear-based self-improvement. The only antidote is surrender. You recognize the fear, you choose love, and you hand the outcome to ultimate reality.
What does this actually look like? You’re sitting in traffic, late for an appointment, feeling the familiar tightness in your chest. Your ego immediately offers options: snap at your wife sitting next to you, honk aggressively at the car ahead, spiral into self-criticism about poor time management. Each option projects the pain outward or inward while keeping you trapped in fear. Surrender looks different. You notice the pain. You feel compassion for yourself feeling this way right now. You forgive yourself for the anger and tightness instead of acting it out or suppressing it. And you ask—God, Love, ultimate reality, whatever language works—to dissolve this mental pain. You’re not controlling the outcome. You’re not measuring whether it works. You’re simply choosing to hand the suffering to something larger than ego and trusting that this choice matters even when the traffic doesn’t move.
This isn’t instant transformation. Choosing love once doesn’t make you enlightened. It’s practice—meaning repetition over time, meaning you’ll choose fear ten more times today before you remember to choose love again. The shift happens gradually. First you become aware that two realities exist: ego operating from fear, and love as ultimate truth. Then you practice choosing love more often. Some days you’ll catch yourself in fear quickly. Other days you’ll realize hours later that you’ve been operating from ego the entire time. This is normal. The practice isn’t perfection. It’s increasing immersion in love rather than fear, which happens through thousands of small choices, not one dramatic awakening. You don’t measure progress. You don’t optimize the practice. You simply choose love over fear in this moment, then this moment, then this moment, and trust that truth reveals itself not through your effort but through your willingness to stop choosing illusion.
Modern culture cannot easily accommodate this because it would dissolve the entire apparatus of optimization, achievement, and progress that defines contemporary life. But the evidence mounts regardless. Anxiety and depression rates climb despite unprecedented access to mental health resources. The more we treat consciousness as a problem requiring better management, the more suffering increases. This suggests the framework itself is wrong. Not its application—its foundation. We’re perfecting techniques for managing fear when fear itself is the only problem worth addressing. And fear doesn’t need better management. It needs recognition as illusion and replacement with what was always true.
The crisis isn’t that modern life generates anxiety—it’s that we keep strengthening the ego through spiritual practices instead of surrendering to the love that dissolves ego entirely.
Tags: Spirituality, Self-Improvement, Ego Dissolution, Love, Fear, Mindfulness, Meditation, Mental Health, Consciousness, Spiritual Practice