The Transcendent Power of Surrender

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” – Jesus, John 8:32

The universe has been around for 13.8 billion years, and the forces of life have been generating outcomes without our personal involvement or control. These ongoing, ever-active forces of design and manifestation began before we were born and will continue after we die.

While we can readily see and admit that the nature of life is the constancy of change, most of us still carry this unconscious impulse to act as overlords in the happenings in our life, somehow managing to convince ourselves that we can bend life according to our preferences. We do this out of the belief that getting life to match our expectations is the only viable recipe for peace and happiness.

As author, Michael Singer, points out in the Surrender Experiment, “We are not responsible for even the tiniest fraction of what is manifesting around us. Nonetheless, we walk around constantly trying to control and determine what will happen in our lives. No wonder there’s so much tension, anxiety, and fear.”

While it is true that we can exert our personal will to affect some of the outcomes in this life, the underlying need to align what happens with our personal idea of what should be happening puts us in constant conflict with life’s unfolding and keeps us on edge, fearful, and apprehensive. Not the way of peace and happiness by any means.

Once again, the wise way, that leads to an ultimate sense of well-being, equanimity, and deep happiness is to turn our attention from the outer appearances and take refuge in the truth. What is truth? Truth has been defined as that which doesn’t change.

So, what is true about you and me. What of you doesn’t change? Certainly, your body changes, as many of us have convincing evidence at our current mature age. We know that our minds, attitudes, beliefs, views, and thoughts are all in a constant state of flux. Further, we can change our names, our careers, our relationships, even our gender. So, if none of these aspects of what we take ourselves to be are the truth of us, then what is? What we are is so essential, so basic, so foundational, that we overlook it. It is existence itself. Not what we are, but that we are! And the knowing of your own existence is the experience of pure consciousness, the inner knowing that you are. Awareness, without an object, is the purest form of Truth. It is non-dual, it is Oneness expressing through the mind as “I am.” Not I am this or I am that, but simply, “I am.”

Jesus proclaimed, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” As a fully awakened, self-realized being, his reference to “I am” was a purely spiritual reference to his true identity, not the character, not the man called Jesus. It was Jesus anchored in this knowing that enabled him to be with all manner of difficult circumstances and remain centered in peace and equanimity. It was the remembering of his divine unchanging essence that allowed him to move from, “take this cup from me,” to “Thy will be done.” This was Jesus relinquishing the need for life to unfold in a particular way to match his preferences (as humanly understandable as this was under the circumstances) and yield to the forces of life’s unfolding, and not be diminished by it. In fact, it might be said that this reversal of attitude was spiritual mastery in which the appearance of a tragedy, became transmuted to reveal the overcoming power of Life eternal.

As you sit with a difficult situation, ask yourself, what if anything can I do to change this. Make a change if you will. But if not, sit with this lesson from Jesus’ Gethsemane experience, and ask that you be shown what came to Jesus at that moment, this deep sense of “I am.” Let the transcendence of that knowing allow you to take your hands off the wheel of life’s unfolding and be at peace with the knowing that who and what you truly are is invulnerable to change and safe in Being.

Peace and blessings,

Rev. Larry