Strange as it seems, thinking too much of ourselves, rather than not enough, is a big part of our problem with life – a major cause of the fear and anxiety that assail us when the unexpected happens.
We think we should be able to make everything turn out the way we want it to and when something upsets our fantasy of being in total control of the outside world, it unhinges us. We put more pressure on ourselves, try harder and harder and end up working against ourselves.
The power of surrender
Essentially, surrender means giving up your belief in your own omnipotence and turning over control of the outcome of a situation to the limitless energy animating the entire universe, call it what you will. You’re not giving up control over yourself, only over the outcome; you’re actually gaining control over yourself by adjusting your thoughts and actions according to circumstances, ultimately helping you to reach the outcome you desire. You’re like the driver of a car with a battery that’s gone dead. You can’t restart it yourself, no matter what you do. You turn the key in the ignition and pump the gas a dozen times and nothing happens. You’re late for an important appointment, so you bang your fists on the dashboard in frustration and curse and scream – still nothing. Finally, you give up and call the AA and a man comes in a truck. He attaches wires from his live battery to your dead one, gives you a jump start and you’re off and running. Not that the AA man is God, but you get the idea. You recognise that you need to ask for help and then you accept it.
How does the dynamic of surrender work? It follows another law of the spiritual world, of which our physical world is only a tiny, fractional, part, limited by time and space and our five senses. When we remove from our situation all the negativity - all our fears, doubts, anxieties, anger, recriminations and sadness - we open up a space for the positive energy of the universe to come in and give us a new lease on life. Carl Gustav Carur, an eighteenth-century German doctor, scientist, philosopher and painter, did a moonlit seascape that is perfectly serene yet glowing with energy at the same time and wrote about it in a letter: ‘When man, sensing the immense significance of nature, feels his own insignificance and feeling himself to be in God, enters into His infinity and abandons his individual existence, then his surrender is a gain rather than loss.’
The ‘Field of Answered Prayers’
That’s the crux of the matter – giving up the idea that you alone hold the keys to your own salvation, a terribly heavy burden, and reconnecting with the infinite field of positive energy from which we all came. I think of that endless positive energy as the ‘Field of Answered Prayers’, where all possibilities exist, including whatever it is you’re fervently hoping will happen – recovery from an illness, getting over the loss of a loved one, having a happy family life, finding a great job, meeting a soul mate, achieving financial security, the attainment of some longed-for personal goal.
Once you connect to this positive energy field by surrendering the idea of your own omnipotence in the face of its awesome power, you attain an altered state of consciousness. Answers to your prayers beyond anything you could have imagined start to come into your life. You hear of an experimental medical treatment that works or you meet someone through a fluke and fall in love. Perhaps a job opportunity you never would have anticipated opens up or you have a flash of insight that completely turns your life around.
Our problem is our cultural conditioning. From childhood on we’ve been indoctrinated with the myth of the super-independent person as a hero – self-reliance is glorified and the person who relies on faith in the metaphysical world, the world beyond our five senses, is seen as looking for a ‘crutch’. As a result, surrender has become synonymous with giving in or giving up. Through no fault of our own we’ve become so in love with the notion of our own grandiosity that it often takes a catastrophe to bring us to our knees. We pray and pray and as soon as the worst has passed, we say, ‘Okay, God, I can take it from here.’ We go back to our old ways, thinking we’re God instead of teaming up with God – and we revert to being a victim when our supposed omnipotence fails us. Once again, we’re at the mercy of outside events to bring us down or buoy us up instead of maintaining that continual balance between serenity and energy that Carur captured in his painting.
How can we stay connected?
How can you connect and stay connected to the Field of Answered Prayers when something happens that fills you with feelings of helplessness and despair? You need to break out of the claustrophobic box of self-involvement – your pain, your expectations, your fears, your frustrations - and offer love and support to other people who need help. Instead of closing yourself off from your family and friends because you’re so preoccupied with your own troubles, give even more of yourself to them and try volunteering to help strangers, too. ‘How can you ask me to help others when I’m in so much pain myself?’ I hear you protesting. But helping others is not as altruistic as it sounds. It’s unselfish and at the same time a very selfish thing to do, the kind of compassionate response that gratifies the soul and gives you a feeling of satisfaction inside. When you help reduce the suffering of others, you reduce your own pain, too.
Thinking only of yourself makes your problems seem worse than they are, as if you’re looking at them through a magnifying glass. You become all-consumed with them, dwell on them day and night, to the point where you can’t relate to the other people in your life, much less connect with a metaphysical power that you can’t even see. Your mind can only hold so much. The more space your ego occupies, the less room there is for your soul. To put it another way, the more you experience yourself, the less you experience something magnificent within yourself.
Please don’t think I’m trying to minimise the seriousness of your troubles or the legitimate suffering they’re causing you. On the contrary, I learned that certain events in life are too big to try to handle alone and how valuable it is to acknowledge our powerlessness to deal with them in comparison with the infinite power of the universe. Being full of ourselves disconnects us from that power and puts the weight of the world on our own shoulders. As soon as we admit our powerlessness to make the sun come up in the morning and go down at night and turn ‘fixing’ what will happen over to some perceived entity greater than ourselves, we experience an enormous feeling of liberation. It’s the freedom from the limitations of the self. The goal in life is not to know yourself but to know your soul.
From What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger, copyright 2002 by Maxine Schnall, published in the UK in 2003 by Michael Joseph.
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