What is behind the fear of unwanted change? The uninvestigated mind says that I'm going to sustain a loss: "he's going away," "the business is slipping," etc. The fear of loss is connected in our mind with the image of what had previously given us the feeling of succeeding. So now here's reality, and it's pretty different than our image of what should be, and we'd rather live with the image than look at reality. But the fact of the matter is, we can see clearly now that something "bad" has happened to us and there is this sense of loss.
Why is that loss so traumatic to us? Because that loss, if it's real, means that we're going to have to literally reorient ourselves to life. That's why we don't want the loss. It's because the present relationship that we have imagined defines us in our world. We are defined by our relationships, and if a relationship starts to change, the way we're defined in life and the way we know ourselves starts to change. And we don't want that. We don't want anything we have imagined to be real to show us that it's not, because the super-structure of our self as it stands is rooted in this imagined life from which we derive these feelings of security as we imagine ourselves in it.
So, the problem is that behind this sense of loss, behind the fear of it, and then the resentment that originally comes up, is the recognition that "I'm going to have to change. I can't be me." There is immense resistance to the change that seeming loss produces, and we will live in conditions where we compromise ourselves to keep the imagined success in place rather than go through what we must.
What is at the root of this refusal to reorient our lives, to let this change take place? We're actually setting ourselves against the whole reason for being alive.
In our present minds, we think the reason to be alive is to succeed, but the more we imagine it, the more fearful we become, and the more fearful we become because of ideas and images and people in our lives which we say have to remain in place, the more we resist change in them. The more we resist change, the more static we become as human beings.
Unlike every other creature on this earth, you and I are created to be reoriented, to be changed, to go through transformations which, if we accept them, if we allow those changes to take place, automatically put us into a new relationship with a different order of life.