The Spiritual Path of Surrender

One of the most enigmatic concepts in life is that of “surrender.” The object of nearly every aspirant’s pursuit, surrender is THE key to union with The Beloved. Ironically, it is also that to which the greatest resistance is shown.

Understanding Surrender

By Louix Dor Dempriey

Many people falsely believe that surrender is an action. It is more a state of being, the “result” of the right use of will and purely-motivated actions. In short, it is achieved through obedience to Divine will. Surrender is an ongoing process, not something you do only once. Therefore, rather than giving a word or phrase to define surrender, it is much more effective for Me to share some of the distortions in the human consciousness which prevent surrender from happening, along with a proper course of action for ones to take.

I will begin by giving you the solution: Rather than trying to fit God conveniently into your life or your ‘week-at-a-glance’ calendar, fit your entire life and existence into God’s. You are a subset of God; God is not a subset of you. You are a physical extension of God, a manifested aspect of the entire Godhead. In other words, God is the brain of the co-creative relationship you two have, and you are the hand. Does the hand tell the brain what to do? Of course not. The brain directs the hand. And so defines the created and intended relationship between God and all His children.

“You and I are one. You are part of Me. You wove into form, to fulfill My plan on this planet, as part of Me. We do not function apart. Your job, when you incarnate, is to remember that. Do whatever it takes to come to the realization that you are an extension of Me, an appendage. You do not have a separate mind. You do not have a separate will. You do not have separate desires—you never did. Those are demons and illusions that you have given yourself permission to have, to justify your feelings that you are separate from Me.”

You might say to Me that this is so obvious and trite; however, if that were true, then why is there all this talk about (the illusion of) “free” will? “I can do whatever I want because God gave me the gift of free will.” Well, first off, let us dispense with the poetry. “Free” will is no more than “separate” will. It is a Divine dispensation, for the expressed duration of our living in the experience of separation from God, whereby we are given the freedom to use the full power of God any way we like. What a gift! What humanity has forgotten is that God gave us that power/choice to use as a homing device. Paradoxically, most everyone uses free will to travel further from God. How? By using it to gratify the senses. Why? To numb the pain of feeling separate from God.

Desire is the cause of all suffering.

What is imperative to expose here is the source of all human wants and needs. Desire is the great disease of a separate consciousness. It is the cause of all suffering and the very essence of Separation. To desire anything, you must inherently believe that you are separate from the object of your desire and that you actually need the said object of desire. How, then, does one achieve the state of surrender? Let go of all desires. Give them back to God. To be truly surrendered can only mean to be truly desireless.

Every cell that is occupied by the self is one less cell that can be occupied by God.

If you are trying to fit God’s plan into yours, you will always be unfulfilled in life. God already knows all your needs—even before you do. It behooves God to continuously provide for all your soul’s needs since you are responsible for manifesting God’s will on Earth and then caring for these creations of Love. God would never keep anything from you. God wants you to have everything. God placed all the wonders and riches on this planet for you to enjoy. Earth was created as a playground for the gods. Awareness of, and trust in, this truth is all that is needed to allow God to use you as an instrument. Every dream God has for you, God is doing everything to bring to you. The real question is, “What are you doing to allow that dream to manifest?”

Somehow, along the way, a belief came about that God created the bounty of the material plane as an instrument of torture. Distorted religious teachings about renunciation and poverty as spiritual ideals only served to add to this discordant thought-form. People corroborate their distorted beliefs by observing and misquoting the lives and teachings of ones such as the Buddha or Mother Teresa. These great ones did not preach the need for poverty. Their message was about detachment. Many confuse renunciation for poverty. Renouncing the material plane is no more than a vehicle for attaining the highly evolved state of detachment. Renunciation is a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself. It also happens to be a very successful vehicle. Once a consciousness lives in that state, then the pleasures of the material world take on a whole new meaning and experience. It is from the place of not needing them that God’s material gifts can truly be enjoyed.

There are the many who cry out, “Yes, but what about my dream?” To this I say: Whence do you think your dreams came? In order for you to even have a dream, God had to have that dream first, because God put the dream in you. Why not let God care for God’s dream, living and growing inside of you? I can promise you this: The most fantastic and grandiose dream you have harbored for your life is the size of a breadcrumb compared to the smallest of God’s dreams for you. The limitations within the human consciousness cannot fathom what can only be conceived through a Mind and Heart (i.e. God’s) wielding the infinite capacity to love. Furthermore, you can never fully realize and live God’s dream for you until you relinquish your own dreams for yourself. Many think and claim that they have, but this is just one more self-delusion of which people convince themselves, to justify the continued pursuit of sense-gratification in order to numb the pain of feeling separate from God—even if now under the guise of “devotion” and “surrender.” Since human beings are run by desire, isn’t it wiser to entrust your dream into the hands of the One whose entire existence and power is devoted to serving you and revealing your divine magnificence?

What I am describing is the ultimate win/win combination. Anything you give up (which God and your soul need you to have) will automatically come back to you, albeit in an even more free and beautiful way. Why, then, are people so attached to their dreams and desires? The answer is simple: a lack of faith. You cling to your desires and dreams out of fear that, without them—and your efforts to protect them—you will have nothing. Society helps by polluting our minds with axioms such as, “kill or be killed,” “survival of the fittest,” “look out for Number One,” etc.

Why do so many dreams not manifest? Lack of trust in God. Why do so many people distrust God? Because they feel that God has not manifested (what they think are) their dreams. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? God came first—and must come first, always and everywhere. There is a third reason why so many dreams do not manifest (the first two being lack of trust in God to fulfill His dream in you, and the fact that many “dreams” are sourced by selfish desire instead of by the will of God). The third reason is that few come to the altar of God with an empty chalice; instead, they come with chalices filled with attachments, expectations, demands, and personal agendas. How can God possibly fill your chalice with riches of mind, body, and soul if your chalice is already full? You must come naked to the altar of your Lord in order to truly receive your divine inheritance. Release all your desires, terms, and conditions. How can God serve you if you have Him all bound and gagged by all the conditions you place upon how, when, and where He must provide for you.

God cannot serve the one who is content in serving himself.

Speaking of agendas and perpetrations, it is time I expose one of the most subtle and insidious of them all. What most cannot see, and refuse to admit to themselves, is that they come to God as the “lender of last resort.” What I mean by that is: Most come to God only after they have tried every other conceivable means of achieving and fulfilling their own personal desires. Only when they have failed to get what they want, and finally give up, do many then see God as an option to consider. In other words, many finally turn to God so that they can get what they want. Few are they who come to God simply to luxuriate in His company, to feel the touch of His embrace, His gaze of adoration, asking nothing in return, wanting nothing… Fortunately, because of God’s infinite and unconditional love for us, God does not care how we come, only that we come.

There is an even more dangerous attachment than “attachment to personal desire” and that is “attachment to prophecy and Revelation.” The temptation to get attached to prophecy is huge: “But Mother Mary said…,” “My Guru said…,” “Four different psychics said…,” “It is in my astrology chart”… the list goes on and on. Without even knowing it, you begin aching, hankering, and waiting for “it” to happen. Beneath these attachments is the belief that something outside of you will bring you fulfillment. Dwelling on the past and attaching to the future are two of the main preoccupations of ones who will do anything to avoid being “present.”

Every seed of God’s will needs to be planted in the physical plane. Revelations are seeds planted in you, which then begin to gestate and grow. And they will initiate you because the mind attaches to them and starts interpreting them. When God gives you a Revelation, receive it and drink it in with gratitude. Take it into every part of your being, and then give it back to God. Trust that it is inside you now, growing. It will do what it needs to do. Avoid any temptation to hold onto it or make something out of it. God gives you His dreams to be their steward, not their owner. Accepting this truth gifts you with a sense of inner peace, born of detachment. By surrendering to the ebb and flow of Creation, you are instantly in union with God.

Silence, the Bodymind and Zen

It is God’s plan… Let God worry about it.

Why is there such an all-pervasive resistance to surrender? There are many fears, lessons, and layers through which one must pass. It is a lifelong process. However, at the very core level of human existence lies the single, greatest fear: the loss of identity. Given a voice, this deep, unconscious fear speaks: “If I give back every single piece of me, down to the very last thread connecting me to the earth, then I will not exist. There will be none of me left. I will not even know who I am. I will have nothing to call my own. I will have no reason, no purpose. I will just be a blob, a void – like wallpaper.” It is that thread to any sense of personal identity to which a consciousness clings most.

In actuality, there is some validity to this fear. You will eventually lose what you have always known to be your identity. However, the identity of which you are letting go, the one to which you have become so attached, is the one which was formed by all the many parts of your separate self, your inauthentic self. It is understandable that you became attached to them. The distorted ego-personality was all you knew. The resistance to letting go is so great because most are only looking at half of the equation. Once that identity has been dissolved, what remains is not “nothing”; it is, instead, your Divine Self—your divinity—radiant and whole. It is more than a fair trade. Surrendering your life and very existence unto God, to receive His dream for you is equivalent to trading in a piece of coal for a flawless diamond.

This gets to the core of it all. What I am speaking about is the “surrender’s surrender.” How far will you go for God? Would you give up, as Abraham did, your firstborn son? Would you give up your dream for a house—or a lover—if you knew that it was fulfilling God’s wish and was endearing you to God? Would you give up your life itself, as Jesus did? God says, “Do this for Me. That is all I ask, and so many blessings will shower upon humanity and yourself by so doing. Will you do this for Me?” Very easy it is for ones to say “yes” while sitting in church or in a prayer circle, but how about when theory becomes reality? Divesting ourselves of all the conditions we place upon serving God brings us into deeper and deeper states of surrender.

True power is accessed through surrender.

The more you surrender the personal will, the personal desires, the sense-gratifying, selfish needs and wants, the more your divine power and God’s divine power take hold of you in absolutely astounding ways. The key is to ache for God—to feel, know, and become more of God—inside and outside of you, with absolutely no conditions or expectations placed upon Him. Next is to accept, with joy, whatever that looks like in your life and however that might manifest. Ultimately, it is to serve and obey, without question, in true faith and devotion, and with a heart filled with gratitude for the privilege and honor, it is to be entrusted with manifesting God’s plan on Earth.

What is Surrender? “Here but for the grace of God stand I. Use me according to Thy will.”

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You will also enjoy 7 Ways to Let GO of Little EGO and Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: The Ancient Path of The Mystic

This article was originally published on 25 September 2013