No matter your religious background, or your culture, the single most powerful practice for bringing you closer to God and the truth is surrender. It innoculates you against too strong of an ego, and it makes possible communication from the higher self, something spoken of by Indian adepts and hinted at by early Christians like Paul and mystics who would emerge in later centuries.

Aboriginal cultures also express the importance of surrender in order to become more truth centered. If you read the accounts of medicine men or healers amongs the Lakota, for instance, you can see very quickly how surrender plays a central role in the lives of these holy people. Fools Crow, a well known healer amongst the Oglala Lakota, was often heard saying as a prayer “make me a hollow bone.” What this means is for the Source of all life to find a way through him, and by being “hollow” or humbled before the Great Mystery, he would be better able to work the will of this higher power. It is also the same expression in Christianity as “thy will be done” or the idea that miracle healings are the work of the creator not the individual. “Thee, not me.”

We often can’t see how these traditions are similar in critical aspects to each other. Names might be different, the lingo might seem confusing or unclear to our ears, but at its core there are important similarities. I mention these other traditions in order to point out how important doing this surrender is. It is absolutely critical to bow down, to humble yourself, to surrender your will and ego in order to know the truth of the Source of all life (and your life, too). I always saw this as like being in a kitchen cooking. There was this amazing chef that was there, and I soon learned to stop trying to involve myself, to no longer think I had to run the show. I watched, learned, and miracles came into my life as I continually learned to be more and more humble, surrendered. Another aspect of this work was expressed by the Zen master Taisen Deshimuru who said in essence, when in this deep contemplation, you open your hand (your grip on the known, the ego impulse to grasp) and all the sands of the deserts flow through them. But try to grasp them and all you have is a little grit. The part of you that becomes the chanbel of the godhead is not the same part that grasps. The geasping part in us, I think, is the most undeveloped part of us. It is like a new bud, a new flower. It has no business trying to send roots down into the earth to anchor the tree (in truth). It should bud and open and meet the new world. It has a long way to go to become a tree. But that bud will find seeds that grow out of its opening. It serves a purpose, but its growth takes a long time before it can grasp what is now a mystery. This is I think how we grow up. God is near, it is even within us, and very much wants us to be aware of it. For me, it was my supreme teacher….but in order to grasp it, I must surrender, to allow it to take up residence in my life. In the process, my life slowly changes, ripening into wonder and greatness (which is an inheritance from the creator).

When inner work (meditation, prayer, etc.) leads to the arousal of greater energetic awareness, prana or life force, the role of surrender becomes much more important. Without surrender, a person can experience many disturbances from too strong energy which is trying to resolve old traumas and issues as a way of helping to keep balance in the body’s system. When you accept the importance of surrender, you allow the ego to defocus itself which makes it less active over time (like many things, practice or persistent work or repetition helps to reshape us—the purpose if yoga for instance = “to yoke”). Over time the ego moves to a subordinate position, which makes it possible to feel the greater breadth possible God gave to us in our consciousness. Ego though has many ideas and most are very limited in their nature, and surrender helps to soften the grip of ego enough for new states to be known and integrated into daily life. Maybe over a lifetime, and doing this work, this part of ego matures a little?

The point is not to bring something from faraway, but to be that faraway as well as to be what is here in the present while remaining in surrender. Then happiness can emerge as the energies of enlightenment calm down as peace takes the wheel.

I experienced a great deal of pain until I learned the art of surrender. I didn’t even think it was all driven by ego, but it was. In truth, I was so green to all of this. I would have been helped so much by the knowledge held by many gurus of India. In my case, the paramatman (higher self, primordial soul) forbade it. This was for its own purpose for the work I need to do here, but what it did was it meant I found the truth on my own, which meant that I was able to see the other traditions in existance that also have this understanding. The point was to reconcieve directly the experience of awakening and how certain traditions concerned themselves with it (and in my case, how an early Christian sect had one of the most sophiticated understandings of the phenomenon of embodiment in the tradition – the so-called Gnostics).

This surrender is an acknowledgement that the self and the body are vehicles for something greater to manifest itself in you. Your small self bows to the larger being that is the soul, and by extension, also the source of all life, all knowledge. This surrender brings peace. It is no longer complicated. It is simple.

The ego in one life is itself like a child, only having had no more than a century’s worth of experience before it passes into immateriality. Compare this with the soul which has known many embodiments or incarnations, and perhaps you can understand how outclassed your present personality and its ego is in the face of eternity. By learning surrender, you will learn at the feet of the most loving of all masters, Brahma, God, The Great Mystery because by bowing down you also open up to the truth as it is.