What is it that makes this work so impossibly difficult? I suspect it's the fact that our very humanity is invested in our break from the Earth and our aspirations to Heaven – to immortality – to getting somewhere forever stable and peaceful. What taiji reveals to us is that as soon as we break from the Earth we break from everything real and are thereby forced to retreat into self – into fantasy and ego – into ideas and ideals. Our idea of Heaven is then as a place where this self can comfortably endure, rather than a place where there is no room for self.