Going Deeper Through Surrender
It is solely by penetrating into the source of all life that we really understand Unity. Otherwise, we will always be trying to understand universal awareness through a limited lens. In terms of our practice, this means we must be willing to surrender our limited perspective about the very viewpoint we function from.
The totality of every experience of life and death on earth is still a very thin band, relative to the realm of manifest Consciousness. From God’s perspective, earth is a speck on a speck on a speck! Only we insist on overinflating our experiences—evaluating whether the minutia of life is good or bad—when the highest reality is that all of life is an expression of the Divine’s choice to manifest for the sheer joy of it.
If everything unfolds for that one simple purpose of expressing joy, then everything that unfolds is contained within that purpose. We think we are born, live, do, and die, and therefore have control over life. But who has control over when they are born or die? Only a person who is free from the cycle of birth and death has any choice in those matters, and if we don’t have control over those two things, we probably don’t have much control over what happens in between.
What we can control is our capacity to be aware. When we talk about opening and growing, it is in the context of using our free will to follow either the expansion or contraction of Consciousness. We can choose not to grow. Isn’t that interesting? Even within the one Divine Will, which is to create the expansion of the joy of Consciousness, we have the power to accept or reject the Grace that is offered to us.
Grace continually rains down on us, but if we don’t confer Grace on God, then His Grace can’t reach us. The extraordinary power of the ego is that it can reject the unlimited.
Offering Ourselves to God
God created this world, and we have our own world that we get to create within it. Everything has perfection within itself, but when we don’t perceive on that level we can get contracted over something and label it “bad.” All of life is here to teach us about our limited understanding.
The perfect contraction is the very thing that frees us from our misunderstanding. Even our fears have profound value if we get beyond going around in circles with them. We can choose to penetrate beneath the surface and recognize the source of our fear, and then the source of the next level of fear. We have to get beyond our understanding and beliefs about our world. It is only in the surrendering of those things that some deeper truth reveals itself.
You can think of each level of awareness as having a steel barrier above and below it, and what happens within that level just bounces like a ball between the top and bottom. Every level of life is real, but each has a ceiling and a floor of consciousness within it. Surrender is the only means of penetrating through those boundaries—and that is why surrender is the key to freedom.
Dimensions of Surrender
We must surrender our experience of separateness, of being different, and, most importantly, the sense that we are doing. All of us can perhaps conceptually conceive that “I am not separate, and I am not different,” but very few can really understand, “I am not doing anything.” The first step to experiencing not doing is to say, “God, do it for me.” Offer yourself into that. Ask, “God, show me my life,” and mean it—and then, when something immediately shows up that doesn’t happen to look the way we think God ought to have designed it, surrender again. Ask and ye shall receive. But don’t have a checklist in hand.
Don’t ask, “Please give me my life and make sure it includes this, and this, and this, and I am sure you must have a returns policy.” There is nothing happening in our lives that is not happening from within us. We have to fully engage in that unfolding, and the first step is to create a horizontal flow with our life instead of rejecting it.
As we begin to create this flow, we are establishing a give and a take, reabsorbing our experience back into ourselves, refining it, and hopefully then projecting out a higher experience. That flow is an engagement with the power of Consciousness to create, to express. The life that is manifest on the screen of our consciousness is now expressed from a deeper state of awareness.
Everything that happens in our life is an expression of perfection, of Ĺšiva’s desire to make Himself bigger, just for the fun of it. In the process of manifesting the universe, He probably has a pretty good flow with it, and because of that, has even more energy to create. Ask that you may be complete. Ask, “May my will be Your will.” It would be incredibly powerful if that was your mantra, instead of, “God give me this . . . God give me that . . . God free me from what I don’t like in my life.”
From my experience, the highest expression of our will is to surrender it. How prepared are you to surrender your will? How do you think this would affect your experience? Just be careful, however, that when you offer yourself to God’s will, you are not also perpetuating the subtle thought, “. . . and if I do that, then life is going to be exactly the way I want it to be.”
If we wish to truly surrender, we have to trust God. In reality, Ĺšiva is already doing everything, not even through us but as us. It is only being caught in the veil of separation that makes us think we are in charge, and the veils are extremely subtle. Even our wish to grow must ultimately be surrendered, because at some point we have to let go of the idea that it is we who are doing the wishing. It is only God doing the wishing.