Destruction, Dissolution and Surrender
In the last message, I spoke about the process of destruction and the role it plays in your life. It is, as you can see, a spiritual process whose objective it is to cause you to see, to expand by way of contracting. The biggest barrier in dealing with destructive forces and life-changing events in your life is the issue of centering. It is extremely difficult to reside within your center in difficult times and extremely easy to fall prey to living on the periphery, in the chaos, in the fray of life.
As I have said before, the creation of a center creates an alignment not only of yourself but of all things in your cosmos. It is from this center that you must learn to approach difficulty, confusion, fear, and anxiety. In that center, you exist on two axes, two worlds, the horizontal, your daily life, and the vertical, your spiritual life. Because most people live a dominantly horizontal life, their lives are ruled by illusions and shadows of the past and the future. The horizontal is largely void of any true purpose and meaning, other than making money, having sex, gaining power, getting your desires, cravings, and needs met, and figuring out to survive. So, it’s no wonder that destruction is such a prominent event if not an outright necessity.
There is nothing accidental.
When you come upon forces of destruction in your life, when you find yourself going through difficult times, pain, loneliness, or whatever it may be, it is so important to understand that you have drawn these events to yourself as part of your evolutionary process, your spiritual process. I know this sounds ridiculous but there is nothing accidental. It doesn’t mean that you will understand why the event came to pass but you can train your mind to accept the blows of life through a greater knowledge versus mounting and exercising greater levels of resistance. Watching the news will afford you ample viewing time of the role of destruction in people’s lives. It happens every day. But destruction is not the only way to learn. The destruction process is harsh, down to the marrow of the bones harsh, upending, and being always unexpected, you are hardly ever prepared for it.
I have said before that the greatest ingredient of success is a failure. The prerequisite of spiritual knowledge is loss, grief, injustice, and a host of other conditions that you would much rather pass over but can’t. Of course, these are conditions of the mind and do not represent reality but it’s important to honor them for the role they play in your development. But as I said, there is an alternative to destruction, and that alternative is the process of dissolution. Destruction is the process of unconscious change and transformation. It is almost always tied to your addictions that you’re unwilling and unable to change. Even when you’re suddenly in the throes of destruction, you will try as hard as you can to hold on to the very things the process is trying to remove. Dissolution is the process of conscious change and transformation. It is almost always tied to a choice that you’re willing and courageous enough to evoke and discipline your way through.
In the same way that a tree sheds its leaves in preparation for the winter to move the sap to the center, the human being consciously chooses to shed old baggage in order to prepare for future growth and transformation. But this willingness to engage in dissolution can be firmly established on a spiritual foundation of aspiration, passion, and practice, making dissolution a much easier alternative to destruction.
But please understand that consciousness is not static and in fact, there’s nothing in the physical world that is static at all. Everything is energy! Everything is moving! You are energy! You are moving! The question is, where are you going? Your difficulties are enlarged when you operate out of your unconscious, superficial identity, founded upon your ego, which will require destruction to move forward versus operating out of your most conscious, true, a self which will dissolution versus destruction to move forward. But move forward you will, kicking, blaming, and screaming, focused on your outer world or with humility, certainty, and unity, focused on your inner world.
So, once again, if you want to keep living your life the way you always have, then please feel free to do so.
There’s nothing wrong with that choice and there is no judgment of it but because there is nothing in the universe that is static, you are going against the laws of evolution and destruction will be part of that process in order to advance growth in your life. But one way or another, you will move forward and you will grow. The alternative once again is dissolution.
Following my death experience in the destruction process from 1990-1993, I slowly but surely began to move away from destruction to dissolution. If there was one area in which I applied this understanding more frequently than any other of my life, it was in the realm of relationships. I was no longer willing to compromise myself by forcing myself to be in or around relationships that did not serve me and in which I did not serve them. I had a tendency to end relationships faster than I had been accustomed to. I did the best I could to consciously bring some of those relationships to an end. Conscious dissolution is so important because there are so many aspects of yourself that you need to let go of and it doesn’t matter how old you are. And if you ever get the feeling that you've dissolved everything you need to dissolve, trust me, you haven’t. Just ask your loved ones...they'll tell you.
Remember that you live in two worlds...the horizontal and the vertical. As a result, you have two minds. Your inferior, addicted, surface mind is concerned only with appearances, with its addictions to its mental, physical and emotional patterns. Your superior mind is not at all concerned with everyday matters but seeks the experiences of itself by using everything that happens in the material, physical world as a tool to get that experience. In other words, you have a personality that acts out your inferior mind. But you are no more your personality than you are the freckle at the end of your nose. But you do have to take responsibility for your personality and your inferior mind.
It is this mind that creates an insane life of drama, chaos, purposelessness, and meaninglessness. The external, material forms of your life are but unintended and unconscious outcomes of your unconscious mind. The life you are living is a deformation of who you really are and I say that you know this at some level. I know you know this. The real you lies hidden, patient, watching the process unfold without any concern at all. You can call this your soul, truth-consciousness, the Absolute, the Godhead, anything you want. Names don’t matter. But it is this mind that is most open to spiritual knowledge and a conscious life because that is the only thing that can satisfy it...the realization of itself in the physical, in the body and not in some other form of unworldliness like heaven or beyond.
Existence is aware of itself. In any case, the beyond, heaven is inside of you, not outside of you, not somewhere else. These two minds are always colliding and warring with one another. The need for the elimination of this division is not known by the unconscious mind. So, it goes about it, lifetime after lifetime, in a clumsy, tragic, snaillike fashion with destruction being the primary tool of forcing advancement. Of course, this is not tragic to truth-consciousness for the bliss of the journey is a remarkable experience since there is no duality, no right or wrong, only unity, and joy. And occasionally, in a moment here or there, you get a rarified glimpse of something greater, grander, something that resembles perfection. But the moment is quickly covered up with the old mind. And this is the problem that you don’t know how to solve, which is finding and living out the essence of who you are. The demands of your outer, everyday life are mathematically proportional to the level of consciousness that you have acquired. Pleasure, indifference, pain are experienced to the degree of consciousness that lies within you. Low consciousness, a lack of understanding of simple, fundamental spiritual truths about your life will minimize pleasure and maximize pain. Greater consciousness, even just a basic understanding of simple, fundamental spiritual truths about your life will maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Your mind, your body, and your emotional patterns will mimic and in time, become these responses.
Now, let’s make sure that you see this dilemma correctly. Let’s apply a fundamental spiritual truth that all is one. So, now, go back and unify pain and pleasure. They are the same thing for each seeks the same thing. Pain signals that this is not the way to it but it seeks the way to do it in order to realize joy and love and abundance and self-realization.
Now, unify the two...pain and pleasure. They are both serving you.
Now, be acutely aware of what you did to yourself, what you created, in order to bring about the pain.
Now, choose again and decide right now, it’s time for you to stop that particular behavior or way of thinking or it’s time to release this part of my past or this ancient, seething emotion that you may practice.
Now, at the level of your mind, begin right now and let go.
See an image in your mind of the synaptic connections to this part of yourself pulling away but as they pull away, they seek information as to what to do next, where to go next, where to connect to next. Well, go ahead, create a more conscious you, deliberately creating a new thought, having the courage to act out a loving emotion, and remind the old connections that it is no longer their duty to function in the old way. Tell them that it is their duty to: ___________. And that’s up to you. This is called dissolution. Destruction does it for you since you’re unwilling to do it yourself. Dissolution is evoked willingly, consciously, knowing that it’s time to change, and in going about your life in this manner, pain is minimized.
It is essential to understand that there are two forms of dissolution:
The easiest: The easiest is when you consciously choose to dissolve some part of your life that needs to be dissolved...it is happening at your convenience and timeframe...you're engaged in the dissolution process not because you should, not because you’re a bad person if you don’t, but because you have the courage to change.
The hardest: The hardest is when something happens to you out of the blue, something difficult, something that you weren’t expecting, something that can range from a mild sting to a psychological death experience, something that destroys a part of your life, and you consciously choose not to resist, to fight, to panic, to blame, but to embrace and participate in the dissolution process as best you can, as gracefully as you can. Now, this gets very interesting. Number 1, the easiest, doesn’t particularly require any vertical or spiritual understandings. But number 2 does. UNLESS you possessed a greater knowledge of the vertical in your life, it would be nearly impossible to engage in an unexpected event in your life that represents the mild sting or the psychological death experience.
And this brings up the issue of surrender. I want to be clear and state that this is not the same thing as prayer. Prayer as you probably learned it was asking for something because something happened to cause you to feel deprived, threatened, endangered in some way. In other words, you decided to be the one who decided what was best for you, what you needed, and what the outcomes should be. Surrender is absolute trust and confidence in God, in consciousness, in the Divine. Surrender is knowing that only the Divine knows what is best for you and that that is all you want. Surrender is not demanding anything, asking for nothing, not insisting on your own will but relying on the will of God, the Divine, accepting the will of God, being assured that she knows what she’s doing and that you don’t.
Surrender is teaching your emotions to be quiet and still, knowing that what happens next is supposed to happen, for nothing is accidental, and that you will accept s best you can the circumstances that befall you. Surrender is the surrender of one’s own will, mind, and emotions. Obviously, there are levels of surrender that imply the giving of everything one has or is to the Divine and while I don’t know if one can really say you have surrendered until you accomplish this, I also don’t think this is realistic to suggest to the average American.
As I have said, TruthSpring is about building bridges from the horizontal to the vertical, so we'll go one step at a time.
I know that as you make progress and sees the relationship between the act of surrender and the improved circumstances in your life, even though the initial acts of surrender may disguise the mind’s egoic desire or intention, disguised as an effort for its own gain, it is still at least a start and I think that’s great. It begins with, “I’m willing to let go, I'm willing to trust.” It’s highly likely that complete surrender is unlikely and if the day ever comes that I accomplish this in my life, I will inform the world about it. In the meantime, I remain a student of the work. Although I have made significant progress even in the last 10 years, I have a long ways to go to profess that level of expertise. I am willing to state that I am crazy and God is not.
Aurobindo said this of surrender:
“Surrender is not a thing that is done in a day. Themind has its ideas and it clings to them; the human vital resist surrender, for what it considerssurrender in the early stages is a doubtful kind of self-giving with a demand in it; the physical consciousness is like a stone in what it calls surrender is often no more than inertia. It is only thepsychic that knows how to surrender and the psychic is usually very much veiled in thebeginning. When the psychic awakes, it can bring a sudden and true surrender of the wholebeing, for the difficulty of the rest is rapidly dealt with and disappears. But until then, effort is indispensable.”
So, in dealing with the blows of life, dissolution is a conscious effort to release the mind’s reaction and resistance to the event in lieu of choosing a more positive mental, physical, and emotional response through the act of surrender.
Now, take this even deeper: if your efforts in dealing with a difficult event in your life are founded upon the act of surrender, then do you really need to be supported by others? The answer is no. You need no support because the support has already been given to you immediately upon surrendering the pain, the wound, the worry, to the Divine.
The more and more you practice, the more competent you become.
So, you can practice surrender at level #1, the easiest, by announcing at the start of your day, your willingness to accept to the best of your ability all things that occur during your day, at work, in your family, and to give them over to the Divine. All hurt, all of the past, all of the anxiety, all of it. This will build a reservoir of practice so that when something does come out of the blue, you will have the energy of surrender under your belt. Surrender is the practice of the great masters that have walked the earth. Surrender is highlighted all the way from the Vedic scriptures to the Bible and many other spiritual texts. Omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent, truth-consciousness.
The Bhavagad Gita states,
“I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve.”
If you will be sincere in your efforts, as best you can, aspire to know the truth, as best you can, reject all solutions that only drive you back to being the same as you were before, you will go through the destructive and overwhelming forces of life in spite of them.
When the satisfaction of your soul becomes more important to you than the satisfaction of your ego, you are beginning to create a spiritual existence which is the purpose that lies within your existence. Paul Brunton, the pen name of British author Raphael Hurst, said, "He who has once passed through the transforming experience of inward surrender can never again be the same man, his center of selfhood shifts, his circumference of outlook expands. When the divine presence becomes a settled thing in his heart, then he may confidently go ahead into whatever activity his will decides upon for he finds, at last, the secret of inspired action."
Remember that all of the pain and destruction that you experience in your life is the process of awakening in you. Once awakened, it becomes the path of your life. It is your greatest safety, your greatest defense against pain and destruction. As you make progress from being mercilessly exposed to the process of destruction and you adopt a more conscious, more willing, and more capable approach to dealing with your life through the process of dissolution, do not mistake surrender for giving up or giving in.
do not mistake surrender for giving up or giving in.
Be in alignment with your life and what you are trying to accomplish, knowing that you are safe, loved, and cared for.
It is through the vertical approach of conscious dissolution that you will learn to confront the forces of destruction in our horizontal life.
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