Realize the Power in Repose (Remastered Classic Talk)

Surrender and the Path to Self-Perfection

While the desire to be perfect runs through the very fiber of our soul, how to fulfill the longing of this greater Love is a question few find the answer to, and here is why: The path to self-perfection weaves its secret way through the land of imperfection, where only the conscious awareness of where we actually are (in this land) changes forever where we stand.

Surrendering our will over to God cannot have an anticipated result, as in "I will do this -- and then -- you, my God, will do the right thing by me and take away my pain."

Such false surrender of self is born of the false belief that God makes deals. He does not.

Not only doesn't God make deals, but when we pretend to surrender ourselves to Him, our own unconscious ambition in this process produces not the freedom we seek, but only more pain. We truly surrender when we see there is no other recourse available to us apart from continuing to cling to our suffering, trying to cut yet another deal with life over what we have no power over.

Surrendering self has no power in it to "do" anything. Any anticipation in surrendering self proves the self is still looking for a way out of its pain. What we must see is that our pain, the very essence of the ache of self, is nothing more than the expressed composite effect of one's various desires we think of as being our "will." It is this willfulness, the inherent insistence in it that we have the life we want as and when we want it, that puts us into conflict with God's Will and the eternal Now in which this same Will is being expressed.

Surrender of self is not the beginning of something "better" to come; it does not set the stage for the gain of anything, but spells the end of that nature in ourselves that ever holds onto the hope of "saving" itself with what it can imagine. The abiding Peace (so often spoken of) that attends true surrender is the self having been "healed" of its own self-induced fractured state: a conflicted condition produced through the actions of (self's) desire to make itself whole.