Surrender:
The Essential Attitude in Your Spiritual Growth
By Masaru Kato

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There is a way that leads you to enlightenment, where you experience deep happiness, quietness, and fulfillment. That is surrender. David Hawkins, the author of Power vs. Force, states, “[To reach enlightenment, one has to] surrender personal will at every moment.” Here, I am trying to elaborate on what surrender is and why it works.

     Surrender in a spiritual context does not mean “loss” or “defeat.” It is much more like “let go” or “no resistance.” Surrender is to release or to soften your internal force that makes you hold on to something. It is to loosen your attachment to your possessions, social status, pride, goals, image, ideas, thoughts, etc.

     Let us clarify surrender by arguing the common misunderstandings about it. The first is: “Desire is wrong. Thus, I should not have any desire.” Wanting, desiring, or wishing something is not wrong in itself. But if you are firmly and tightly clinging to something, then it becomes a problem. Surrender casts a light on your internal “force” that makes you to hold on to a thing. As an analogy, imagine you are grabbing a toy in your dog’s mouth and your dog is biting it hard to hold on to it. The toy will not be released until the dog softens its jaw. Surrender is about the softening, not about the toy.

     Take another example. If you wish to be a professional singer, this dream in itself is nothing wrong. The question is how you relate to this dream, and how you invest your energy into it. If you are fixated on this dream, not realizing that you do not have a singing voice that attracts many people, and become blind to other options in your life, then spending all of your time and money on this dream will make your life futile.

     The second misunderstanding is: “I should accept everything, even if it is hard to accept.” Surrender is not necessarily asking you to tolerate intolerable things. It is lessening the emotional magnitude around a certain hardship (job loss, divorce, etc.). It is not the attempt to eliminate the hardship itself. In contrast, accepting the hardship is a mentally and emotionally painful process. To swallow it, your mind makes up a painful line of reasoning like “My husband left me because I was not lovable to him.”

     Why is surrender so important for your spiritual growth? Enlightenment is, in some sense, integrating your mind with the deepest source of your being, which is referred to as Soul, Higher Self, True Self, or Source. When you are operating by this spiritual ground, from which your awareness emerged, all suffering will disappear because you will find you are supported by the infinite potential. This integration can hardly happen when the ego is clutching at many things to preserve itself. Energetically speaking, the ego is extending its self-protective force all over your conscious field, like a spider that spreads its web to capture its prey. If your conscious field is occupied by such a self-protective vibration, the blissful vibration of Soul cannot enter your space. When your space is filled with spider webs; no one can get in, or wants to. You need to soften that rigidity of your ego to let your Soul in.

     As you relax yourself to de-energize the force of rigidity within you, the rest of the process will be taken care of by the wisdom or energy coming from Source. You need to trust Source, even though it is a faceless, timeless, and shapeless reality. As you soften up the rigidity, little by little, you will experience deep peacefulness and quietness provided by Source. The ego is reluctant at the beginning of this process, because it appears, in the eyes of the ego, that it will be swallowed by something greater than itself. As you experience peace more and more, day by day, the ego starts to relax and trust the process. The Soul and your ego will gradually be merged. Then, as you surrender enough, you will be lifted into the Unity Consciousness by the wind of your Soul, where you are with the supreme joy, being melted in the blazing pure white Light. Surrender, then, is a very gentle approach of doing nothing, fighting nothing, and resisting nothing. You wait for the ego to concede its captain seat of control over you to your Soul.

     The key question is, “What do I need to surrender?” The answer is you need to surrender everything you can think of. Surrender is to release the energetic rigidity in you, and by doing so, to give more space, softness, and flexibility to your conscious field, so that Soul can come in. Rigidity emerges when you feel that something is absolutely necessary for you, or when you feel that something must be avoided. You need to surrender both something you want (cash, loving relationship, admiration from someone) and something you do not want (illness, loneliness, debt).

     You might argue, “Wait a minute! If my spiritual goal is to surrender everything, what’s the point? My life will be meaningless!” This concern springs from the confusion of surrender in the spiritual context with the actual physical attempt to give up. For instance, in order to surrender your attachment to money, you do not need to actually throw your wallet into a river. Surrender is an imaginary, symbolic process; it has nothing to do with giving up actual, tangible and real possession of something. Wholeheartedly release the emotional or mental glue-like force, as if you were actually giving up something you hold on to. So, you give up nothing in physical reality.

     However, for this reason, surrender is very difficult. From your mind’s perspective, the process of surrendering appears so real, although it is actually not. The mind is not so good at differentiating physical reality from imaginary and symbolic reality (in the middle of the dream of seeing your girl friend, she is real for you). Therefore, your ego often resists surrendering, especially at the advanced stage of your spiritual growth, when you are required to surrender some core aspects of yourself, your identities such as nationality, cultural background, name, job, etc. This effort is necessary to transcend your ego. In this process, you imaginarily become no one, nothing, or void. It is obviously not the actual death. However, this process appears to your mind as if you cease to exist, therefore, it terrifies your ego. Many spiritual seekers stop evolving beyond this point, encountering the amazingly strong resistance from the ego, even though the peak experience is just one step ahead.

     In spite of the difficulties discussed above, surrender is worth the challenge. The more you surrender, the more you are fulfilled. The more you unguard yourself, the safer you feel. By surrendering your identities, you will become one person, with body, mind, soul, and spirit being integrated. All of the above descriptions about surrender are coming from my actual experience in my quest for enlightenment. I am sure everyone can attain it, if you have a little bit of courage to open yourself to the beauty and mystery of the Unknown. Surrendering to the Unknown appears as if you are jumping off the cliff without a parachute, trusting the invisible force of Source will rescue you. If you have enough braveness, the rest of the process is easy and automatic. All you need to do is to trust Source, deeply relax yourself, and allow the process to take care of itself. It is all up to Source.

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Masaru Kato is an energy healer and a spiritual teacher, offering transformational workshops throughout the year. You can reach him at 847-989-4261, or info@atmanwellbeing.com. Please check his web site at www.atmanwellbeing.com.

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