Surrender and Being Surrendered
Today’s Agenda:
•Lecture PPT
•Break
•Movie (The One)
Some Words on Third Inquiry
• The Plan is…
– Make sure complete the reading from Thirst for Wholeness 5,6,7,
11.
– Review today’s lecture and the past 2 lectures
• Complete readings In Spiritual Emergency: Jack Kornfield
“Obstacles and Vicissitudes in Spiritual Practice” (pgs 137 – 169)
and Paul Rebillot “The Heroes' Journey Ritualizing The Mystery.
What do these words mean to you
in...
• The context of addiction, mental illness,
and spirituality...
– Surrender
– Being Surrendered
Looking Into Surrender:
A U 2 Beginning
Surrender and Grof
• I did not do it willingly
“I watched and felt myself disappear. All at
once, the roles I played in the world, the
work I did, the illusions and the games and
the denials... The Shell of who I was, was
dying, slipping away. I could no longer hang
on. I was totally and unequivocally
defeated... I no longer had to pretend”.
Surrender and Grof
• Given a second chance (alcohol should
have killed me).
“The loving and available spiritual source I
had been blindly looking for all my life broke
through my defences and revealed itself to
me, not on a mountain top or some shrine, but
in a facility for the treatment of chemical
dependency. My recovery had begun”.
Many Facets of Surrender
• There are many ways to describe
surrender
•
•
•
•
•
Admitting defeat
Becoming powerless
Letting go
Hitting bottom
Dying while I am alive “ego death”
Ego Death as Surrender
• Re-emergence of 6th / 7th Chakra
– Bill Wilson co- founder of AA, describes ego
death as shattering of the ego.
– Most profound, difficult, and transformative
state their is.
– It is the destruction and metamorphosis of the
restricted ego or of limited self-definitions.
Letting God... or the Divine In
• Karlfried Graf Durckheim
on letting go:
“This letting-go, go of the ego ...
Means much more than relinquishing
all those objects to which during a
lifetime a man has become attached.
It entails the giving up of the entire life
pattern that has revolved around the
‘positions’ taken by the ego ... Only
when we have let go of those attitudes
wherein we rely solely upon what we
‘have, know, and can do,’ will their
arise a new consciousness in which
the creative dynamism of life is
contained”
Egocide, Not Suicide
• Ego-death does not mean the death of life
• What dies is the part of our identity that holds us to the
illusion of control – that we are separate from each other.
– Dying to our limitations
• However, when we surrender we might feel as though
every vestige of who we where is gone, and when we
emerge into our new life, it is like stepping into a fresh
world.
Leaving Las Vegas
• When “ego-suicide becomes a slow
suicide”
– Here is Nicholas cage embroiled in “his”
multitude of addictions.
Depression and Surrender
• What is Depression?
• What are we Depressed about?
– Surrendering into Depression “Jeff Fox”
The Elements of Grace:
How Does Surrender Happen?
• Do we surrender or does surrender
happen to us?
• The psychiatrist Gerald May calls it “the
active expression of God’s Love”
May on Grace
• Returning to Nelson (maybe).
• Flow of the source / spiritual ground as our defences
drop and liberation flows into us.
• Grace is not something we can strive toward through the
virtue or good works.
• We do not achieve it through virtue or good works, it is
not a cause or effect, but it also does not exist apart from
us.
Grace
• Grace like freedom, like our wholeness, are one in the same, but as
we grow in the world and develop an ego, and identity, and a mind,
we begin to ask questions of the garden of Eden so to speak.
• Along with a egoic mind that always wants more, or strives to have
what the neighbour has, and if we are confronted by blocks to
develop a sense of security in the world (trauma's, losses, wounds,
ect), we then further are tempted to see wholeness outside
ourselves and the world.
• Some of us may even turn to addiction, to feel the security, rush, or
escape that many objects of desire can offer.
Grace
• However, Grace never leaves us, because it exists
inside and outside the mind. It pervades the universe
and cannot be tainted, but somewhat forgotten.
• Hence:
• May states: “I think our failure is necessary, for it is in
failure and helplessness that we can be most honestly
turn to Grace.
Grace
• The question that might be posed then is: “it is possible for grace to
be just another object of addiction, something to be collected or
hoarded”
• But this kind of grasping can capture only an image of grace. Grace
itself cannot be possessed, it is eternally free.
• We can seek it and try to be open to it, but we cannot control it.
Grace and Addiction
• Addiction then, fills up the spaces within us,
spaces where grace might flow.
• But again, it is important to remember, however,
that it is not the objects of our addictions that are
to blame for filling up our hands and hearts; it is
our clinging to these objects, grasping for them,
becoming obsessed by them.
Grace: A Few Audio Stories...
Begin... Stop at 6:10 ... Skip to 12:20;
end at 21:26
Hitting Bottom & Surrender: Just the
Beginning
• The process of surrender offers a blueprint for continued
recovery and spiritual engagement, but it is only a
beginning...
“Not a means to an End”.
• Many deaths and rebirths follow in the course of our
lifetime, but if one understands surrender, we realize that
control and emersion in the egoic mind is fruitless.
• Life then is lived for life's sakes and problems are not
problems, but situations.
Adyashanti on Surrender...