Surrender

By The Pathwork Guide

My beloved friends. The Light of the Eternal streams as a great blessing to all of you, and to all of your endeavors that are sanctified by your commitment to serve God and His magnificent evolutionary plan.

The hand of God can be recognized in many earthly manifestations. His presence can be keenly felt. It can be felt even when His presence is being blocked out by man who turns away from Him Who is always present. One of the earthly manifestations in which God's works, Divine Creativity, the Eternal Spirit, can be seen is nature. In nature you cannot help but marvel at the wisdom and the foresight manifest in every smallest detail so as to protect, to sustain, and to maintain every species. The abundance that all the created entities are being provided with, the beauty, and the richness speak clearly and eloquently about the fact that only the greatest of all imaginable Minds could have devised all the many systems that maintain life on earth.

It has also become clear to many human beings that the balance of nature is being disturbed through man's thoughtlessness and his greedy disposition. Indeed, awareness has recently grown in this area, and this is most important.

But there is also an aspect in nature that seems contradictory to Divine Love, an aspect that seems cruel. There exist destructive forces, such as storms, floods, and earthquakes. But when seen from another angle, then you will recognize that these manifestations are nothing but the necessary crises which every entity must go through in its process to re-establish inner harmony with Divine Law.

Other manifestations in nature fall into a different category. For example, one species may depend on another to maintain its life. One survives at the expense of the other. Thus you have predators and victims. Although the victims are always equipped with certain measures of defense so as to have what you may call a sporting chance, on a grand scale one species serves to sustain the other. These conditions contribute to maintain an overall balance. Yet this fact -- one animal killing another for its nourishment -- appears cruel and therefore seems to deny God's presence. Although animals can never indulge in the useless cruelty and destructiveness that human beings are capable of (precisely due to man's more evolved consciousness that can always channel itself into a direction of either good or evil), it does seem -- and, in a sense, it is -- tragic that an animal needs to endure pain and panic in order to serve the total life process.

Now I want you to understand that this manifestation reflects precisely humanity's overall state of consciousness, which is dualistic. In other words, it is a combination of good and evil. Man's belief system always contains this polarity. Since his total belief system creates his environment, the earth sphere reflects this polarity exactly. It can be observed in the most remote manifestations, which on the surface appear to have nothing whatever to do with man's state of consciousness. They seem given facts, created independently from man's beliefs, man's attitudes, man's feelings, and man's intentionalities. But this is never so. Every existing sphere, realm, or world, from the lowest to the highest, is always and totally a reflection of the overall state of consciousness of the beings who have congregared together. It has often been said that heaven and hell are nothing but states of consciousness. This is true in one sense. However, the same people who make this statement overlook the fact that states of consciousness create realities, surroundings, conditions, and environments.

If this world reflects the combination of both extremes that create this polarity, then there must be other worlds in which one side so overweighs the other that the polarity disappears. Spheres of evil -- hell -- would therefore manifest only pain, only fear, only suffering, and no beauty at all, while spheres of good -- heaven -- would not know any pain, any fear, and any suffering. Imagine a world in which the tiger and the deer lovingly befriend each other. In that world no animal needs the life of another to sustain its own life.

Art sometimes reflects this blissful world because the soul deeply knows of it and therefore longs to return to it. Thus painters, musicians, poets, and dancers give out a small measure of this complete world of bliss in which nothing ever dies or wilts; in which life gloriously finds forever new expressions without any break in consciousness that blots out the continuity of life. Those of you who are either ready for or who are close to this state of consciousness will experience such artistic expressions, or the beautiful expressions of nature, as intensely healing, as soothing, as encouraging -- and therefore as incredibly desirable. But to those who are still deeply submerged in the darkness, then such divine reminders and expressions are as painful as they are nourishing for the more enlightened spirits. This is why there is no light (no truth, no love, no divine reminder) in the spheres of hell. It cannot be borne. The entities who are there need to grow gradually into more evolved states until the light of these states can become a means to make further growth possible.

I am saying all this to you to make you realize once again that you inhabit an in-between sphere in which one side of the polarity does not exclude the other. This reflects exactly your state of mind. Perhaps you can best understand the state that cannot bear the light when you think back to a time when you were in the midst of fullness, of love, of light and of bliss, and yet your thoughts were drifting back to certain discomforts that you may have occasionally experienced. On the other hand, negativities, dissension, and destruction sometimes give you a certain negative pleasure and excitement. All light is unbearably painful for the beings in the lowest -- and therefore the darkest -- states of consciousness or worlds.

Why am I telling you this at this time? The emphasis on the coming work is clearly, as you could see from the last lecture, on overcoming, on transcending -- but perhaps first on thoroughly understanding -- duality. For this you must recognize the fact that your present sphere of life and of consciousness can only be a combination of what must also exist -- in other combinations and in different distributions -- on the total scale of consciousness. And if such variables exist at all, which it is reasonable to assume, then spheres of consciousness must also exist in which there is no duality -- either in the positive sense or in the negative sense. When the consciousness first meets the void, then the darkness is so great that a negative unity temporarily comes about. Only as the consciousness gradually expands does the other polarity appear on the horizon and creates duality. In that phase duality is already a movement in the evolutionary plan. Only when the consciousness reaches its total potential and becomes complete does the unity become totally positive. In that state there is no longer any pain, there is no longer any strain, there is no longer any conflict, there is no longer the dying of life, be it ever so temporary.

Now it is my task to hand you more tools to help you first to comprehend and then to overcome duality. In addition, to help you to see the pitfalls and the mental difficulties that assail the human mind in its present state. Duality always spells conflict and strain, in one way or another. In the last lecture I expounded on one specific aspect of this. In this lecture I shall broach another topic that is extremely important for all of you and that, when fully grasped, will aid you further in overcoming another aspect of the ever-present painful polarity against which you constantly battle.

You often use the word surrender. You sense that this word contains an important aspect of spiritual fulfillment. Yet there is also a great deal of confusion attached to this word. This is a confusion which needs to be explored. A human being who is incapable of surrendering cannot find his core. He cannot find his divine nature. He cannot love. He cannot learn. He cannot grow. Such an individual is stiff, defended, and closed up. The ability to surrender is an essential inner movement from which all good can flow.

You need to surrender to the will of God. Otherwise you will always remain attached to your very shortsighted selfwill, which produces pain and confusion. Surrender means a letting go of the self, a letting go of cherished ideas, a letting go of desires, a letting go of opinions -- all for the sake of truth. For God is truth.

You need to surrender to your own feelings. If you do not, then you will always impoverish yourself and you will shut out your feeling nature. In other words, you will become an automaton. You need to surrender to those whom you love. This means trusting them, giving them the benefit of the doubt, being willing to yield to them, provided this serves the cause of truth. You need to surrender to a teacher in any field in which you wish to learn. If this basic surrender is lacking, then no matter how much the teacher is capable and willing to give you, you can receive very little, if anything. This also applies to a spiritual teacher. If you constantly withold with distrust and with reservations, then you do not allow a most important dynamic to develop. You may assume that you can absorb mental knowledge from a teacher from whom you inwardly keep aloof. And this is true to a degree. But in true learning much more is involved than the outer mental processes. There is an inner, emotional, spiritual, involuntary level which must learn too. And on this level nothing can be absorbed unless you surrender to the teacher. This applies to the most mundane thing you wish to learn. A process that is learned merely as a mental deduction is not truly absorbed. It must become an inner reality in order to become your own. This is much more true of spiritual growth.

The refusal to surrender has to do with the lack of trust, with suspicion, and with fear. It is based on the misunderstanding that if you surrender, then you will lose your autonomy and your ability to make future decisions. The refusal to surrender creates an over-developed selfwill, which then takes its toll on the personality. The personality becomes truly impoverished. For the ability to surrender -- of giving over, of letting go -- is such a movement of fullness that enrichment must follow it by natural law. An over-developed selfwill always brings strife. You can see in your world that two selfwills clashing create war -- either on a small scale or on a big scale. If peace is to be made possible -- either between individuals or countries -- then a giving in, a yielding must occur.

Yet we cannot simply state that surrender is the key. It is never as simple as that. Should you surrender to a person who is truly untrustworthy? Should you give in in a situation that requires a fighting spirit in order to be in truth? The need to stand up and to fight for a good cause, the need to defend a right position, the need to assert justified claims is indispensable in a productive, healthy life. The need to discriminate when to trust and when not to is also indispensable. "And how am I to know?" you often ask.

A great confusion arises right here. There are few areas in human life where there is as much misunderstanding and as much displacement as in the case of false surrender and of false assertion. So how do you become aware of this important aspect of living? How can you avoid capitulation and resignation in the misunderstanding that you surrender. How can you avoid a stiff holding on when surrender would be more appropriate? Let us discuss some important keys that will eventually enable you to find this fine balance.

It is impossible for a dependent ego -- in other words, an ego that denies self-responsibility -- to surrender. In such a case surrender becomes a giving away of autonomy. This is why those who are secretly, and often unconsciously, most dependent -- in other words, those who crave for a perfect authority to take over -- are also the most defended against all yielding. The giving away of the self can occur only when the self is strong and healthy, because then the self grows even stronger and healthier as it goes through the act of giving itself away. So, when you find -- either in yourself or in others -- an inability to surrender, to trust, to give over, to yield, then look for the undercurrent of dependency and of the denial of genuine self-responsibility. The more rebellion -- in other words, the greater the show of "I must protect my autonomy so that I will never be told what to do" -- then the more desperate is the inner wish not to govern one's own life and not to be responsible for one's decisions and for their outcome.

When you choose a mate, a friend, a teacher, or someone with whom trust and at least some degree of surrender is necessary, how often are you blinded by wishful thinking? How often are you blinded by your selfwill that demands of the other person to be a certain way in order to accommodate some of your distorted desires and aims? Since a part of you knows this, then the distrust is, to a certain degree, justified, even if the person happens to deserve your trust in realistic terms. In other words, in order to trust and to give over, you need to be free, at least to a considerable degree, of unrealistic expectations of the person in question. Your gaze has to be clear and unpolluted by childish -- and therefore destructive -- motivations. When this is the case, then your intuition will function, your observations will be clear and reliable. Therefore, your channel will come through. You will know that the person you trust does not need to have ultimate perfection in order to warrant your trust. You will simply be able to yield where this is necessary.

Surrender does not mean that you give away forever your ability to adjudge, or your ability to make independent decisions, as man unconsciously believes. It may indicate a change of course, if that is appropriate. For life is in constant flux. Everything changes and everyone changes. Therefore there is no fixed guarantee that what is right today will be right tomorrow. The greater your ability to surrender in the right way, then the stronger you will find yourself becoming, and the clearer your vision will be.

At the present time many of you find yourselves in an interim stage in which your self is not yet complete and whole enough, and your vision is not objective enough to truly let go into a surrendering position. Yet without this inner attitude it is impossible to become a whole person. Therefore, it is imperative that you consciously and deliberately attempt to further your self-responsibility in every possible way -- in overt and subtle ways, as well as in inner and outer ways. At the same time, you need to pray -- equally consciously and deliberately -- to be able to trust those who deserve your trust, to follow their leadership, and to surrender your selfwill. This surrender of your selfwill is always an act toward God, for His will alone must replace your selfwill. But sometimes His will can function only through others before it can manifest itself directly through you. It is God's will that you surrender to the spiritual leadership that He has guided you to. It is God's will that you surrender to some of the most beautiful involuntary processes within yourself: your love feelings and your deepest intuition. In other words, it is God's will that you become capable of yielding, just as it is God's will that you become capable of fighting and of standing firm.

As you grow in your autonomy and in your self-creating, then you will clearly sense that there is no contradiction, no duality, in regard to surrendering AND standing firm. In fact, it will be clear to you that one presupposes the other and that one is not possible without the other.

Man's struggle in this respect is a tragic one. On the one hand he longs for a fulfillment that is indeed possible. In other words, that is not unrealistic, as he sometimes suspects. Yet he makes the fulfillment of this longing impossible by blocking the soul's natural inclination toward surrender. All truly good things can come only when you surrender to the greater forces in the universe, both within and without; only when you surrender to the Creator; only when you surrender to another human being; only when you surrender to being a follower.

Yet you also need to fight for these fulfillments by relinquishing your passivity and by relinquishing your irresponsibility in wanting an ideal authority to do it for you. You need to activate your positive aggression so as to never allow the dark forces within you to conquer you. These evil forces want to make you believe that it is all futile. They want to convince you to give in to their whisperings of hopelessness and of false surrender. There you must stand firm. You must realize the power that is imbedded in your thought processes, the power that is imbedded in your will, the power that is imbedded in your ability to choose faith over fear, the power that is imbedded in your ability to choose courage over cowardice. For nothing requires more courage than the belief in God's truth and your power to live it, and thus to demonstrate it to others.

There is a finely calibrated balance in regard to the active movement of the personality -- whether in action, in thought, or in attitude -- and the genuine surrender and giving over. Genuine surrender never weakens the personality, as man unconsciously believes. On the contrary, it makes the ego healthier and stronger. It enables you to be more autonomous and more active. Similarly, genuine positive activity and self-affirmation render you sufficiently strong and resilient that you cannot be afraid of letting go of the self, of giving over. In other words, of allowing yourself to flow with a new movement stemming from sources that as yet are unknown. As I said before, these forces may come from within you. They may mean either to risk following a teacher or to risk loving a mate. But this never means closing your eyes to reality. The contrary is true. You should always open all your faculties and observe in truth. That means without having a personal motivation or a stake to see either better or worse. For example, you may want to see the other person as more perfect than he actually is because you still wish to abdicate your self-responsibility, or because then you can justifiedly be disappointed and prove that you need to be always armored against any kind of yielding, against any kind of following, against any kind of movement of surrender. You may wish to see the other person as worse than he really is for the same reason. For then you can say: "No one should be trusted. Therefore I must always be on guard."

You all have surrendered in some areas, at least to some extent. Without having done this, then you would not experience whatever fulfillment and positive states you now enjoy. Whatever growth you have experienced on this Path is due to a considerable extent to having allowed yourself to trust this process, to having allowed yourself to trust your helper, to having allowed yourself to trust your leaders, to having allowed yourself to trust me. All of this has helped you to open up a little further and to give your trust to God. But this trust may not yet be complete. In other words, it may not yet encompass all the areas of your being. But to the degree it does exist, to that degree you are liberated, you are free, and you are strong. Therefore, you are self-confident.

So what I am saying here sounds like a paradox. Only when you give yourself over can you find your real strength and your true autonomy.

It is equally correct to state that all of you still withold a part of yourself from this movement of giving over completely. In other words, there remains a little corner of your soul that you hold in reserve. You protect it from this beautiful movement of merging with the All. The more of yourself you hold in reserve, the greater your problems will be -- and the more fear, the more pain, and the more conflicts must exist in your life. The irony is that you believe exactly the opposite. You believe that you are safe only when you hold yourself separate, suspicious, and stiff. The truth is that by your total surrender to God not only do you find true safety and real security, but you also become capable of surrendering to others if and when this is appropriate in your life. Only when you totally surrender to God is your channel clear enough to recognize truth from falsehood and to see who should and who should not be trusted and followed. You can then shed your selfhood in safety -- as your soul demands -- without the danger of losing yourself. Or perhaps I can state it differently: Only when you can lose yourself can you find a more complete and a more real you.

The ability to give yourself over -- in other words, to lose yourself -- is tantamount to being a healthy person and a whole person. The process is the following. First you must fully comprehend mentally the importance of surrender so that you will be motivated to set the further process in motion. Next, you must make the decision on the voluntary level. It is not difficult to see how you consciously and deliberately deny this movement. At first this conscious decision and this deliberate letting go of the self and giving over will seem frightening. But after you have summoned the courage to do it again and again, then you will discover the great safety and security that arises from it.

Then you will have to deal with your involuntary level that holds back this movement, even though your conscious self may not agree with this part of you. You may recognize the existence of this aspect only indirectly, by its manifestations rather than by a direct awareness. The usual honesty in self-search and the stamina to explore some of the less pleasant manifestations is required in order to recognize your hard core which witholds and which denies. This part of you needs to be approached differently from the conscious part. The conscious part can respond directly to your will direction. But the involuntary part does not respond directly to your will. What you need to do is to ask the Christ within you to make this change possible. Pray for help to change that part of yourself which does not respond directly to your positive intentionality, to your good will. Be fervent in your desire to unify all of you in every respect; in your desire of totally giving over to the Creator; in your desire to develop the ability to yield to other human beings. But realize that this part of you must lag behind at first. It cannot respond immediately. Often it holds on stubbornly, even though your conscious mind may not wish to do so. Therefore, you need patience, perseverance, and trust in the Lord's power to affect any change. Make room for a process within the greater process in which a hidden corner of your soul slowly -- in a slower motion -- catches up with the rest of you.

You have no idea how strong your spirit is. You constantly underestimate it. Consequently, you believe yourself to be much weaker and much more ineffectual than you actually are. Since you must experience according to your belief, then it is difficult to find out how strong you really are. You can create anything, for you have at your disposal all the divine, creative forces. And, of course, you do exactly that. Some of your creations are undesirable because they spring from your negative beliefs and from your distorted notions. My friends, if only you could see the immense power that lies in your thoughts, in your beliefs, in your attitudes, and in your desires!

The power of your living spirit still needs to be discovered by you. But there is a block to making this discovery. You often wallow in the notion that you are helpless. As a result, you consider yourself beaten down by adversity. Even the popular belief in God can contribute to the notion that you are helpless. Again, it is not contradictory to say that all the power is with God. He is the source of everything. However, this does not exclude the fact that you are powerful in your potentiality to unite with this power, to allow this power to flow through you -- in other words, to be receptive to it -- and then to become an active agent of this power. You are potentially a sort of relay station of the creative forces. You need first to know this and then to use this power wisely.

This block exists because the selfwill of the small, limited mind is often contradictory to the divine will and to the divine law. When you insistently hold on to your selfwill, then you actually become less powerful. Your creative forces are paralyzed.

You need to become aware of a part in you in which you do not want to be a fully grown, self-creating entity. You wish to be given to and you do not wish to have the responsibility for the creation of your own life. This, too, weakens you, though in a different way. But both these kinds of weakness are not inherent. In other words, they are unnecessary and they are artificially constructed by a false attitude and by ignorance. Once you awaken to your inherent possibility to create, to your inherent possibility to change, and to your inherent possibility to affect your soul substance, to affect other people, and to affect your surroundings, then you will know who you really are.

This awareness contains, among many other unifications of duality, the specific duality I discussed in this lecture: surrendering and standing firm; yielding and self-assertion; giving in and fighting -- for the good cause of truth.

As you grope for the fine line concerning when and how to express both these aspects of life, you will find that they are not two mutually exclusive alternatives. Not only is it true that both attitudes are necessary ingredients of life, but it is equally true that the ability to fully give over strengthens you to be in truth, and therefore to be able to fight for the truth. At the same time, your courage to fight for the truth objectively and to disregard your self-interest and your hidden agendas will give you sufficient strength to risk letting go and shedding all of yourself in whatever situation where this would be appropriate. You will create a harmonious automatic response that will be adequate and right according to the situation. But it requires a great deal of deliberate awareness, of groping, of trying, and of growing into this state until your responses can readjust themselves to their natural destiny. In other words, to the way they were originally meant to function.

Surrender amounts to a kind of inner, involuntary relaxation. But this involuntary process comes about gradually, as a result of a great deal of work on the outer or voluntary level. In other words, it seems to just happen. There is a phenomenon that some of you may know and that may serve as a helpful illustration. When people go through extreme states of pain, then there comes a point when the pain is no longer bearable. Then the fight against the pain is given up on the involuntary level. A total state of surrender to the pain -- transcending the conscious, volitional mind and will -- takes over. In that moment all the pain ceases and it transforms itself into ecstasy. This phenomenon is known to the devilish practitioners who commit torture on human beings for political or other power reasons. When they see this happen, then they stop their torture so as to get the victim back into a more normal state in which he begins to resist surrender all over again. The point here is to show you how everything can be transcended if the concept of surrender is properly understood and is then incorporated into the soul.

For the moment, just take in these thoughts and give them space and scope in your mind, my beloved friends. This will start a new process in which you enrich your personality with a new way of self-expression in which there is room for both firmness -- for standing up in self-affirmation -- and for the ability to surrender whenever and wherever this is an appropriate and fruitful attitude. The total surrender to God is always appropriate and always fruitful. The surrender of all of yourself to your feelings, to a leader, to a teacher, to a helper, to a mate, and to certain conditions is often a necessary movement without which you cannot complete yourself.

My dearest, most beloved friends. Know that you are blessed. Know that you are richly held in God's hands.You will know the strength of your spirit as a result of knowing your inherent connection with the Ultimate Source of All.

October 18, 1978