Q: What does ‘surrender to God’ really mean?
A: It means to surrender control and the secret satisfactions of the ego’s positionalities. Turn only to love and to God as the source of life and joy. This choice is available in every instant. When finally chosen, the reward is great. By invitation, spiritual awareness illuminates the way. The key is willingness.
Author: Veritas Administration
Just ‘Be’
Q: What else is to be surrendered besides the ego’s secret payoffs?
A: One has to see through the mind’s illusion that it knows anything. This is called humility and has the value of opening the door for realizations, revelations, and intuitive knowingness.
The mind searches for meaning and is therefore circuitous in that it can reach only its own definitions of meaning. In Reality, nothing has any meaning for it has no attributes to be discerned. Everything merely exists as it was created – complete and perfect. Everything fulfills its purpose by merely being what it is. Everything is the fulfillment of its own essence and potentiality. The only ‘requirement’ for anything that exists is to just ‘be’. Its destiny under the conditions of any given moment is already completely fulfilled. Therefore, that which it is represents the completion of all past possibility up to that very moment; everything is the way it is supposed to be. As essence fulfilling its potentiality, it is witnessed by a corresponding level of consciousness. In any nanosecond of observation, nothing is actually changing. What are changing are the position of the witness and the point of observation. Change is merely a process of sequential perception.
Life can be pictured as a series of stop frames, like the flicker pads of childhood. This poses the conundrum: Is it the world that is moving or the mind that is moving?
Contemplation
The task that confronts the spiritual student, devotee, or aspirant is how to actualize conceptual spiritual information into subjective, experiential reality. Thus arises the necessity for application of practices and techniques that evolve progressively into that process whereby the potential becomes the actual. In addition to devotional prayer and authenticated sources of truth, there are the major, basic, time-honored avenues of meditation and contemplation, the efficacy of which is increased by intention and devotion.
… Contemplation allows inferences and general principles to formulate spontaneously because it facilitates discernment of essence rather than the specifics of linear logic. A benefit of contemplative comprehension is revelation of meaning and significance.
Whereas meditation generally involves removal from the world and its activities, contemplation is a simple style of relating to both inner and outer experiences of life, which permits participation but in a detached manner. Intentional doingness is focused on result, whereas contemplation is related to effortless unfolding. One could say purposeful thinking is quite ‘yang’ in character, whereas contemplation is very ‘yin’. It facilitates the surrender and letting go of attractions, aversions, and all forms of wantingness or neediness.
… Whereas the goal of the ego/mind is primarily to do, act, acquire, or perform, the intention of contemplation is to ‘become’. … Devotional contemplation is a way or style of being in the world whereby one’s life becomes a prayer.
… replacing instinct-based emotionality with spiritually based comprehension.
From Reality, Spirituality and Modern Man, p. 291-293
Devotion as a Way of Life
Worship is recontextualized by devotion. It is not done for the benefit of the worshipper or the imaginary benefit to God, but instead, it is merely an acknowledgement of Reality. It is aligned with gratitude for the gift of awareness/consciousness as the Reality of the Knower/Self. It is by virtue of the truth of the Reality of Divinity that the Reality of Divinity can be realized (apperceived and comprehended), which results in gratitude for the capacity for the recognition. Thus, devotion is not the same as piety, nor is it a mood, but instead it is a way of life and a way of being with oneself, God, and the world.
Divinity emanates as consciousness/awareness, which sources Creation in its expression as the emergence of existence. The conditions implied by the term ‘beingness’, ‘existence’, ‘awareness’, or ‘consciousness’ are without subject or object and devoid of causal qualities. The Nonlinear is therefore a field of Infinite Power by which manifestation emerges as the consequence of potentiality, which itself is an expression of Creation. Within that which is perceived is the Unseen as the Source of All that Exists.
The Impact of the Media
Discernment of reality and truth has always been problematic to the human mind, whether it was aware of it or not (i.e., the subject of epistemology). The process is now made even more difficult by the overall impact of the media, the effect of which is both subtle and unconscious as well as visible and apparent. The most obvious influence of the media is by virtue of the selection itself, as well as the time devoted to its reporting, all of which are enhanced on television by visual as well as musical pictorial additions. Emotional and political distortions and dramatizations add to the editing impact reinforced by the sequence and style of presentation. … The overall impact of the media is the production of a ‘virtual reality’ that includes distorted values.
While the modern, sophisticated viewer is subliminally aware of the foregoing, persons of lower levels of consciousness are not so aware and, like children, they tend to believe fiction is truth and live in an “alternate reality”… Thus, falsehood dominates the thinking and reality testing of the majority of people in today’s world. As the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels observed, if a lie is told frequently enough, it is eventually believed to be factual (a virtual reality) because the population lacks the capacity to discern truth from falsehood.”
