The Art of Surrender

Know Thyself

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. ―Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

As the soul makes its journey through the physical realm, it longs to reconnect to its source: the Divine. Our task as humans is to align ourselves with our true nature and the truth of the universe. Disconnection from the Divine is at the root of all the suffering we experience during our lifetime. By learning to reconnect with and surrender to the Divine, we give ourselves the gift of true happiness and well-being. We begin this journey by skillfully harnessing our innate curiosity in order to understand our individual and collective plight as human selves. In this chapter, we’ll explore the nature of the self, the self’s quest for Source, and the importance of truth, consciousness, and self-awareness throughout the journey. The Human Struggle to Understand the Self

The self is one of the Divine’s mysteries. People have spent millennia trying to figure it out. From the time of the great Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato to modern-day psychiatrists and psychologists such as Carl Jung, the self has been a fascinating subject. Such fascination has inspired decades of literature and research on the subject. The effort has been driven by the natural human need to learn and understand, and through that exploration we did indeed learn much about ourselves that we didn’t know before.

However, the search has at times been deeply misguided. It has stemmed from the belief that if only we could figure ourselves out, we would be able to control our lives. We tend to feel that once something comes into our awareness and understanding, it is within our power to manipulate and control it. Our hope in understanding the self is that by grasping its boundaries, we will be able to work with it. We will achieve happiness and realize our own heartfelt desires. We may even find peace of mind and live happily ever after.

Truly, though, the self does not need to be defined. It is too vast to be fully defined and understood by any of us, including philosophers, psychiatrists, and psychologists. Our duty lies not in controlling our lives but in being able to sit within ourselves and develop a deeper understanding of the self’s desires, its vision, and its ability to create good in the world. There is a future story that wants to be told through your life. This story needs to be listened to, and when you do listen, life takes on a different meaning. You begin to move in unity with your purpose. The one song that you sing touches other lives as they hear its rhythms. Your role is to be the guide of your own self, to be the one who takes care of yourself and clears the path for your own goodness to be birthed into the world. We all carry good inside of us, but have we actually listened to it? Have we sought to know what it is that we want to express though our uniqueness? It may be something we are already doing, or it may be something we are just discovering about ourselves. The self is the place where change begins, where you map out your needs and desires and seek to have them manifested. The self has the ability to live a life of peace and harmony. That ability can only be activated once the self has cultivated the conditions that will allow it to thrive. These conditions come from understanding the three primary soul needs: to find and connect to Source, to find ways of being, and to express its uniqueness. When we attend to the soul’s needs, we come full circle to a place where we add life to this planet. We become active participants in the overall ecosystem of the universe.

The Peril of Disconnection Clearly the self, our individuation, is an entity that has certain qualities that make it unique, including curiosity, the tendency to evolve, and the wish to act on its environment. The self is like a wild horse. If you let it run in unfocused directions, it may end up destroying you, yet if you train it to see the path ahead and move in that direction, it can lead you to where you want to go.

Looking back at the history of humanity, we can see that what we have created in the world around us, the exterior, is a reflection of the undisciplined self, the untamed horse within us. Where we are living, developmentally and evolutionarily as a species, is a natural representation of who we are as modern-day humans. Our world is a reflection of our hopes, dreams, desires, greed, pride, prejudice, and the myriad qualities of the human collective. The world we live in has come into being through our God-given right to choose. We made the decision to land on the moon, and nothing could stop us from achieving it. We decided to launch satellites and space shuttles to explore new depths of the universe, and we were uninhibited.

With our willpower, and by our choosing, we started wars and decimated each other and the planet with nuclear bombs. We are exhausting the Earth’s natural resources while literally gushing oil into the oceans and emitting noxious gases into the air. Without awareness and discipline, the self may drift away from its Source. We slowly come to live in what is essentially a state of disconnection from our natural gifts and curiosities. We miss the opportunity to give a deeper and more real meaning to our lives and our existence on earth as spiritual beings. We live in a state of fundamental denial as technology progresses and our lives become ever more separate from nature, which, we forget, is our biological home. Many people connect and pray to the Divine only at times of crisis; we have taken a path of selective spirituality.