The following is taken from an article channeled by Eva Pierrakos as dictated by her Pathwork guide. It is not based on Sufism, but is another example of the truth found in many other paths. This is about surrender, a necessary component if you want to do any spiritual walking.
Surrender
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, 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 truly learn; and he cannot grow. Such an individual is very stiff, defended, and closed. 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 self, of cherished ideas, desires, opinions – all for the sake of truth. For God is truth.
You also need to surrender to your own feelings. If you do not, you will always impoverish yourself and shut out your feeling nature. You become an automaton. You need to surrender to those whom you love. This means trusting, giving the benefit of the doubt, being willing to yield if this serves the cause of truth. You surely need to surrender to a teacher, in any field you wish to learn. If basic surrender is lacking, no matter how much the teacher is capable and willing to give you, you can receive very little, if anything. This indeed applies also to a spiritual teacher. If you constantly withhold with distrust and reservations, 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. How much more is this true of spiritual growth.
The refusal to surrender has to do with lack of trust, with suspicion, with fear, and with the misunderstanding that if you surrender, you lose your autonomy and your ability to make future decisions. The personality becomes truly impoverished. For the ability to surrender is such a movement of fullness, of giving over, of letting go, that enrichment must follow it by a natural law. Over-developed selfwill always brings strife. You can see in your world that two self-wills clashing create war – on a small scale or a big scale. If peace is made possible – again, between individuals or countries – 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 a situation that requires a fighting spirit in order to be in truth? The need to stand up and fight for a good cause, to defend a right position, 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 much misunderstanding and displacement as in the case of false surrender and false assertion. So, how do you become more aware of this so important aspect of living? How can you avoid capitulation and resignation in the misunderstanding that you surrender. How can you avoid a falsely stiff holding, when surrender would be more appropriate? Let us discuss here a few important keys that will eventually enable you to find this fine balance.
It is quite impossible for a dependent 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, often unconsciously, most dependent, those who crave a “perfect” authority to take over, are also the most defended against all yielding. They vaguely sense that the giving away of 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, my friends, I say to you: when you find in yourself or others an inability to surrender, to trust, to give over, to yield, look for the undercurrent of dependency and denial of genuine self-responsibility. The more rebellion, the greater show of “I must protect my autonomy so that I will never be told what to do,” the more desperate is the inner wish not to govern one’s own life, not to be made responsible for decisions and their outcome.
When you choose a mate, a friend, a teacher, someone with whom trust and at least some degree of surrender is necessary, how often are you blinded by wishful thinking? By the 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 know this, the distrust is to a certain degree, justified, even if the person happens to deserve the trust in realistic terms. In other words, in order to trust and give over, you need to be free, at least to a considerable degree, of unrealistic expectations towards the person in question. Your gaze has to be clear and unpolluted by childish or destructive motivations. When this is the case, your intuition will function; your observations will be clear and reliable; your channel will come through. You will know that the person you trust does not need ultimate perfection in order to warrant your trust. You will simply be able to yield where this is necessary.
Surrender never means that you give away forever your ability to adjudge, to make independent decisions; it may perhaps indicate a change of course, if that is appropriate. For life is in constant flux: everything and everyone changes, and there is no fixed guarantee that what is right today will be right tomorrow. The greater your ability to surrender in the right way, the stronger you find yourself becoming, and the clearer your visions are.
At the present time, many of you find yourselves in an interim stage in which the self is not yet complete and whole enough, and vision is not objective enough, to truly let go into a surrendering position. Yet without this inner attitude it is quite impossible to become a whole person. It is therefore imperative that you very concisely attempt to further self-responsibility in every possible way – in overt and subtle, 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 selfwill is always an act toward God, for His will alind must replace your selfwill. But sometimes His will can function only through others before it can manifest directly through you. It is God’s will that you surrender to some of the most beautiful involuntary processes within yourself: your love feelings, for instance, and your deepest intuitions. It is God’s will that you become capable of yielding, as it is His will that you become capable of fighting and standing firm.
As you grow in true autonomy and self-creating, you will sense very clearly that there is no contradiction, no duality, in regard to surrendering and standing firm. In fact, it will be clear to you that one presupposed the other, that one is not possible without the other.
There is a tragedy in man’s struggle. He longs so deeply for a fulfillment that is indeed possible, that is not, as he sometimes suspects, unrealistic. 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, within and without; to the Creator, to another human being; to being a follower.
Yet you also need to fight for these fulfillments by relinquishing your passivity, your irresponsibility in wanting an “ideal” authority to do it all for you. You need active, positive aggression to never, never allow the dark forces within you to conquer you; to make you believe that it is all futile; to convince you to give in to their whisperings of hopelessness and false surrender. There, you must stand firm and realize the power embedded in your thought processes, in your will, in your ability to choose faith over fear, courage over cowardice. For what requires more courage than the belief in God’s truth and your power to live and demonstrate it?
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. It enables you to be more autonomous and active. Similarly, genuine positive activity and self-affirmation renders you sufficiently strong and resilient so that you cannot be afraid of letting go of self; of giving over, of allowing yourself to flow with a new movement stemming from sources that are as yet unknown. These forces, as I mentioned before, may come from within you; they may mean to risk following a teacher, or loving a mate. this never means, closing your eyes to reality. Quite the contrary. You should always open all your faculties and observe in truth, without a personal motivation to see either better or worse. You may want to see the other person as more perfect because you still with to abdicate self-responsibility, or because you can then justifiedly be disappointed and prove that you need to be always armored against any kind of yielding, following or movement of surrender. You may wish to see the other person as worse for the same reason. Then you can say:”No one should be trusted, I must always be on guard.”
You have all surrendered in some areas to some extent. Without this, 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, at least in part, to trust this process, your helper, your leaders, me. All of this may not encompass all areas of your being. But whatever degree it does exist, you are liberated, free, strong, and self-confident.
So what I am saying here sounds indeed like a great paradox. Only when you give yourself over can you find your real strength and autonomy.
It is equally correct to state that all of you still withhold a part of yourself from this movement of completely giving over. There always remains a little corner of your soul that you hold in reserve: you “protect” it form this beautiful movement of merging with the All. The more you hold in reserve, the greater the problems will be, and the more fear, pain, and conflict 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 total surrender to God you not only find safety and 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; to see who should and who should not be trusted and followed. You can 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 real you.
The ability to give yourself over, to lose yourself, is tantamount to being a healthy and whole person. The process is the following: First you must mentally fully comprehend 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, quite consciously and deliberately, deny this movement. This conscious decision and deliberate letting go of self and giving over will first seem frightening, but after you have summoned up the courage to do it again and again, you will discover the great safety and security that arises from it.
Then you will have to deal with involuntary levels that hold back this movement, even though your conscious self may not at all agree with this part of you. You may first recognize the existence of this aspect only indirectly, by manifestations rather than by direct awareness. The usual honesty in self-search and the stamina to explore some of the less pleasant manifestations is required before you will recognize the hard core that withholds and denies. This part of you needs to be approached somewhat differently from the conscious part. The conscious part can respond directly to your will direction. But the involuntary, hidden part does not respond directly to your will. What you need to do is to ask the Christ within to make this change possible. Pray for that part of yourself that does not directly respond to your positive intentionality and good will. Be fervent on the conscious level in your desire to unify all of you in every respect; also in wanting a total giving over to the Creator and an ability to yield to other human beings. But realize that this part of you must at first lag behind, as it were. It cannot respond immediately. It often stubbornly holds on, even though your conscious mind may not with to do so. 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 catches up with the rest of you in a slower motion.
You have no idea how strong your own spirit is. You constantly underestimate it and believe yourself to be much weaker and much more ineffectual than you actually are. Since you must experience according to your belief, it is difficult to find out how strong you really are. You can create anything, for you all have divine, creative forces at your disposal. And, of course, you do exactly that. Some of your creations are as we know, undesirable, springing from negative beliefs, and distorted notions. If you could only see the immense power that lies in your thoughts, in your attitudes, and in your desires!
The power of your own living spirit still needs to be discovered. There is a block to this discovery. You often wallow in 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. On the other hand, this by no means excludes the fact that you are powerful in your potentiality to unite with this power, to allow this power to flow through you, to be receptive to it, and then become an active agent of this power. You are potentially a sort of relay station of creative forces, if only you knew this and used it wisely.
The block exists on the one hand because the selfwill of the small, limited mind is often contradictory to divine will and law. When you insistently hold on to your selfwill, you actually become less powerful. Your creative forces are paralyzed.
On the other hand, there is a part in you which you do not want to be fully grown, self-creating entity. You wish to be given to and not have the responsibility for your life creation. This, too, weakens you in a different way. But both these kinds of weaknesses are not inherent. They are unnecessary and artificially constructed by a false attitude and by ignorance. Once you awaken to your inherent possibilities to create, to change, to affect your own soul substance, other people, and your own surroundings, 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 and self-assertion; giving in and fighting – for the good cause of truth.
As you grope for the fine line 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 both attitudes are necessary ingredients of life, but it is equally true that the ability to fully give over strengthens you to fight for and in truth. Conversely, the courage to fight for truth objectively and to disregard self-interest and hidden agendas will give you sufficient strength to risk letting go and shedding all of yourself in whatever situation. But it requires a great deal of deliberate awareness and groping, trying, growing into this state, until your responses can readjust themselves to their natural destiny, the way they were originally meant to function.
Surrender amounts to a certain kind of inner, involuntary relaxation. The involuntary process comes about gradually as a result of much voluntary work on the outer level. 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, there comes a point when it is no longer bearable. The the fight against 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 pain ceases and transforms 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, they stop their torture so as to get the victim back into a more normal state in which he begins all over again to resist surrender. The point here is to show you how everything can be transcended if the concept of surrender is properly understood and 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 new ways of self-expression in which there is no room for firmness, for standing in self-attitude. Surrender to God, is always appropriate and fruitful. Surrender of all yourself and your feelings to a leader, a teacher, a helper, a mate, and to certain conditions is often a necessary movement without which you cannot complete yourself.
My dearest, most beloved friends. You are so blessed, so richly held in God’s hands. Know the strength of your spirit as a result of knowing your connection with the Ultimate Source of All.
The Guide – by Eva Pierrakos