Absorption Into the Divine

There is only one key to being absorbed into the Divine — and only one key in spirituality — and that is surrender.

The true essence of surrender is the surrendering of our will, and the greatest act of our free will is to surrender it. We all have the choice to surrender, but when we decide to make that choice is a critical point in our spiritual freedom. Make it early, make it late, but make it. We make it not because we are forced to, but because we celebrate the opportunity to give our life back to God. I believe that the joyous offering of ourselves back into our Source is the highest expression of free will.

Tantric tradition discusses the progression of our spiritual life in terms of the means of practice, called upāyas. The highest is śāmbhavopāya, which is the path of awareness, the path of will, and the path of Śiva. A concise way of combining these elements is that it is the path of Śiva’s will to express His own innate awareness in us, through us, and as us. Why wouldn’t we surrender to that?

Surrender is Not Just on the Cushion

We cannot surrender conditionally, in one part of our lives but not in another. We often function from very apparent stubborn expressions of the will to control, but many of our actions and thoughts are more subtle. We must understand that pure Divine Will is expressing Its own abundance, fullness, and the joy of that fullness, and we get back to God by expressing the same qualities in our lives. This cannot be a lovely Hallmark Card sentiment — it must be an expressed reality, in all dimensions or aspects of our life.

It’s not enough to sit in meditation and say, “God take me,” or even, without such an overt statement, simply surrender in the hope that we will be absorbed by God. We cannot just have an exalted experience, complete with angels flying, but then open our eyes and not express that same clarity as we engage our life. In truth, God’s will is expressing our life in every moment, but because we haven’t surrendered our will, we don’t experience that or fully express it.

The problem is that although the greatest act of our free will is to surrender it, that intention triggers a seemingly infinite list of what we don’t want to surrender. Those are exactly the things we’re offering back, but our resistance expresses itself as the need to establish a set of conditions. Spiritual life is not a negotiation with God; it is the surrendering to God — allowing the will of God to express His essential abundance and freedom in our lives. Therefore, to not surrender our will is to deny God’s purpose.

Aligning Our Will with God’s Will

If you can’t immediately say, “Do with me as You please,” then at least find a place in yourself in which you are willing to begin to align your will with God’s will. Surrender your perpetual need to control and at least affirm, “Okay, God, you and I are going to express freedom.” This is a far more exalted and effective choice of how we use our will than the opposite. Our willfulness is usually based on the misunderstanding that we are separate from God, which is an expression of dualistic thinking. We get stuck in the idea, “It’s my will and I’ll do what I want with it.” So by trying to at least align our will with God’s, we move toward His ultimate will, the desire to express freedom.

We’re moving into a state in which we can experience that we are part of divine will. Then, we can finally surrender the not-so-subtle and yet very subtle constraint on our consciousness that keeps us stuck in separation — in the belief that all the diversity in life is separate from God and separate from everything else He created. Asking, “May my will be Thy will,” will draw forth everything in you that doesn’t want to surrender. That’s part of the tapasyā, the fire of sādhana. As my teacher Rudi expressed it, “Kuṇḍalinī is the burning of lesser things.” It is the burning of misunderstanding and of anything that obscures higher awareness. All sādhana is the perpetual uncovering of dualistic consciousness so that a higher truth can be revealed: that everything is happening in that one infinite unbounded field of awareness. Even our individual experience or misunderstanding of separation is happening within that pure oneness.

Penetrating Through the Veils of Duality

The reason surrender is the key to spiritual freedom is that it is the device for moving through the veils of duality: “I am the doer, I am different, and I am separate.” Surrender must be the offering within each of those veils because, due to them, the divine will to express freedom turns into a sense of incompleteness in us. It is the sense that, “If I am separate and different, I need to do something to fill a void inside.” When we talk about free will, and the feeling, “I must do this,” or, “I must have that,” it’s about our sense of doership — that we must do something to fulfill us, which turns into a endless cycle of neediness. To penetrate through that, we don’t stop doing, but begin to act from a place of pure understanding in ourselves. It’s always only God who is doing, and when we know that, we rest in a state of unconditional joy.

We may be afraid to surrender doership because on a deep level we don’t trust God. I believe that doubt is the most insidious of all human misunderstandings. We doubt God’s will, and even with the felt sense of Presence, there’s still this whiff of doubt about whether God can handle our life, even though He seems to be handling the cosmos pretty well! Surrender that doubt and let yourself be absorbed into the Divine. That’s how you come to know the pure intelligence of God’s will.

Surrender is an internal capacity and an external expression. That means it must be a living reality. Surrender is the key, but it’s never what we think we have to surrender that we have to surrender. The only thing we need to surrender is separation. And the wonderfully subtle thing that you can ponder is that, ultimately, it’s not you who’s surrendering separation, but Śiva surrendering His own separation. We keep surrendering until only God remains and no one is left to pray, “May Thy will be done.”