YOU HAVE ONLY TO SURRENDER

The more you understand water, the more difficult you will find it to deny the existence of a god

Masaru Emoto

Ice crystals have no way to prevent their metamorphosis into water, just as water has no way to resist its evaporation into salt and minerals.

These processes cannot withstand the power of the sun, nor would they want to. Ice crystals and water have no will of their own. What end would that serve but to stand in the way of a perfect process? Who would do this?

As without, so within

In the natural world you see around you, there is no resisting the power of the sun, the giver of life. Every obstruction melts before it like ice yielding into water, which washes away to sink gratefully into earth, or evaporate into minerals and salt, be drunk by animals, used by creatures, or stored in clouds to reappear as rain.

At no point does any part of creation cry out with fear at what is coming next, or self doubt as to whether it is up to the task assigned to it. Creation is enabled in the perfection of surrender.

Surrender is knowing that only love is in charge, no one else. Surrender is knowing there can be no bad outcomes, only resplendent ones that your mind cannot yet picture. Surrender is having no will of one’s own.

An ice crystal never worries that it cannot find its rightful place in a snowflake.

Can you imagine the misshapen lump that would result if each ice crystal in a snowflake were free to decide what it would become? Could the molecules of water ever imagine the wonders of the living water they would form? Of course not. Ice crystals, water molecules, and indeed all of nature long for the sun of organizing intelligence.

You, as a part of creation, are no different. You long for the sun of your organizing intelligence.

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

Marcus Aurelius

MAKE YOUR OWN MOSAIC

You can picture the attributes you choose as tiles in a mosaic, as large, small, resplendent, glowing and beautiful as you desire.

You are free to make your own mosaic. Indeed, without your own freely chosen mosaic, all of your efforts to date must be haphazardly random. Sometimes you get it right and feel good about life, but more often you miss the mark.

To “miss the mark” is the original idea of sin. The result of missing the mark is feeling wrong, vaguely unhappy, anxious and off kilter.

You will know this feeling well.

Can you imagine

Can you imagine the life you could have, were you to turn every part of you in the same direction? You wouldn’t be pulled this way and that, riven by a false sense of duty to some old idol you accepted in the past: family harmony, not rocking the boat, being useful, whatever it may have been.

You will have your own worn out idols.

Were every part of you to turn in the same direction, you would stop having conflicting goals, each one pulling against another, preventing you from doing anything.

What if

What if you instead took time and consciousness to make your own mosaic. Begin with one tile. What attribute would you most like to have in your life right now? You will know what this is. We proceed by contrast. The drowning man has no problem identifying air as his number one need. The thirsty desire nothing else but water.

What is your heart’s desire?

What is your greatest need right now? What do you want above all? Indulge yourself. What do you wish for and lament the absence of? What is your heart’s desire and ease?

Select that as the first tile of your mosaic. Lay it upon the altar of your heart. Worship it, call it by name, thank it for being there. Realize that , because you have consciously invited it in, there it must always stay, gently increasing, drawing more of itself to you by law of attraction.

Make your wish

Thank You, Intimacy, for being in my heart. Now I will never again think, nor be thought of, apart from you, the merging of two into one. From now on, we go by one name.

Thank You, Joy, for being in my heart. Now I have a place to always be acquainted with you, Joy. Increase your presence within me.

Thank You, Intuition, for dwelling within me. I would have been lost so many times without You. Thank You for all you have done to guide me. Teach me gently what it is to always listen to You first. Let me remember:

I am not a body, I am free. I have the Voice which God has given me, and this is all my mind obeys

Lesson 199, Workbook

A Course in Miracles

I hear the Voice

You are welcome to make your mosaic as large as you like. Visit it often. You will quickly notice how much more one-pointed, deft, sure and effective you have become.

LAYING TRACKS

When I want to practice a piece of music, I play it slowly, with deliberate attention paid to each note, that it be right.

I play the music the way I would always prefer to play it thereafter, with every note in place.

I call this process laying tracks.

I am laying tracks for the railroad of all that I want to express and channel with this music, and I want to lay the tracks exactly right and perfectly, so that I will never have to pay attention to these tracks again.

There are two different processes here. There is the process of laying tracks, which means painstakingly teaching your body this music. It is necessary to take time at this so that your body learns everything correctly. This process feels like work, and brain science shows it also enlarges the capacity of the brain. Of course – you are forming new neural pathways.

So that is one process, the work of painstaking practice that requires your constant attention.

Then there is the quite different process of performing, which can be for any size audience, including oneself. Now you are allowing yourself to feel the music, to love its beauty and allow joy to course through you.

At this moment, you have miles of safe, sound track wired in neurally, thanks to your practice of the first process. You are freed of the worry of making mistakes, of getting anything wrong.

Let life imitate music

An idea that holds true in music practice will find more universal applicability. Let life imitate music, as well as it can.

What is the spiritual equivalent of laying tracks? What is the essential, slow practice we must undertake, if we are at all serious about advancing, about changing ourselves and our present situations?

Do you desire change?

What is the track you must lay, in order to assume that perfect version of yourself, that fully realized, noblest incarnation?

Build in your heart the attributes you want to see manifest in your life.

Do not worry too much about specific situations. You often get carried away, depressed and distracted by situations. You are in the ocean of possibilities. It keeps shifting. Decide where you want to go, and then strike out for it, just as you would if you were in the real ocean. No waves can alter your course.

Two dolphins in a glassy blue sea, one diving, the other swimming.

No waves can alter your course

Build in your heart the attributes you want to see manifest in your life. It is for each one to decide what is most important.

When you decide upon an attribute that you want, give it a place in your heart, enshrine it on an altar there, with lilies, in peace and gratitude and love. Keep coming back to visit it, say its name, thank it for being there. Do this as often as you think of it, every day.

A black and white butterfly alighting on a pure white star flower.

Visit your altar often

Tenderness, thank you for your presence in my heart. May you grow and increase and draw more to yourself. May you always be within me, and me within you. Now that you are in my heart, Tenderness, I can never more think, nor be thought of, without You.

Thank You.

This is laying tracks

THINK ON THESE THINGS

I do not have to get involved on any human level with shauris. Shauris are made by recognizing a wrong idea and then embroidering upon it with rumination, which is a constant return of the thought to a wrong idea.

When there is an idea you cannot let go of, when there is a negative something, perhaps a fear, that your mind keeps returning to, once you have embraced the possibility that something could be wrong, you are so frightened by it that you cannot put it by. Over and over again your body reacts to it, manufacturing fear receptors like an octopus spraying ink.

Think again

To interrupt any part of this process is to circumvent all of it, so let us begin with the physical. Begin with four breaths. Inhale for a slow count of four, hold the breath for a slow count of five, exhale so gently that a candle flame before your lips would not flicker, for a count of nine.

If there is noise or distraction, take care to tune it out. Welcome the opportunity to exercise your ignoring muscle.

I hereby delete all causes of stress from my experience.

I realize that by focusing on them endlessly as I do, I am giving them all the life that they have.

Let me now, by my deliberate intent, deny these familiar causes of distress any of my attention.

I realize that this is an endeavor that will require some of my conscious attention, before I can relegate it into habit.

So let me now turn the light of my holy, dispassionate attention onto each cause of stress that materializes before me today like a black crow alighting in my path.

Let me dismiss anger and fear as mere interference, so I can regard each cause as an outside observer, and be amazed at their puny, misshapen aspect, and amazed that anyone could possibly be afraid of such a tiny, broken, puffed-up thing.

And as I reduce each cause of fear to dust, I open a channel for new, helpful information to come in.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

So let us send out all our fears, let us consciously dismantle them, dismiss them forever. Do this each time one occurs to you. Show the universe what you are about.

Finally, brothers, whatever things are true, whatever things are honorable, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue, and if there is any praise, think on these things

Paul’s letter to the Philippians, 4:8

ESSENTIALS OF PRACTICE

It is always good to master essentials before going on to higher levels. If you move on to higher levels without mastering essentials, your work and creations will be randomly mosaic: here a flash of brilliance, there some solid workmanship, but the whole hampered by a lack of basics, causing a weakening, leading to a loss of credibility, a non-reliance in your product, your output.

Essentials are basics are key

We lose no time in reinforcing the basics, as much as we may think we are beyond them. But this is precisely how we advance, in music as in life, by consciously practicing the most basic exercises, by drastically reducing tempo, by lovingly examining the minutiae.

It is not the quantity of the practice you indulge in but the quality of attention that you bring to it. When you slow the music down extremely, when you are paying attention to every note, only then do you notice how uneven in texture and length all the notes are. But once having been made aware of this anomaly, you correct it easily. It is just a matter of knowing where the anomaly is.

And all it took for you to see the anomaly was exaggerated attention to detail.

Can you see how this might apply to all of life, let us say your work, your creations, what you love and want to see prosper? This is all of your life.

Can you see how exaggerated attention to detail might also make you more accomplished, effective, deft, sure, and pleasing in every way?

What might this heightened attention to detail look like?

Become present in every moment. This is exactly what it would feel like if you came from outer space, newly arrived with no previous beliefs or scripts. Of course, the very first thing you would do would be to observe.

Observe silence

As much as you can, as often as you can, and more than you are now.

You may feel comfortable where you are now. You may have achieved a balance between what you will and will not acknowledge, making unconscious all the thoughts that make you afraid.

Unconscious, afraid, who needs either?

Remind yourself you just arrived here yesterday and are trying to learn all you can. You observe.

At the same time, you have a mantra, an inner lode star, something you live by, a sine qua non, without which nothing, a compass that always guides you. Otherwise, it would be too easy to lose your way; there are many distractions.

Let me have no other desire than to do good

FAULTS OF OTHERS

It is easy to see the faults of others

When I am noticing the faults of others, when I am mentally blaming someone for any of my pet peeves: they don’t listen, they’re only interested in themselves and so on, it bores me to write of these worthless little tools…, but when I am engaged in this, it is only my way of defining myself as better than they are. I am setting them up to be the opposite of myself.

To say they are self-centered means I think I am not. To say they are inconsiderate means I think I am not. To say they are small means I think I am not. To say they are misguided means I think I am not.

But how can this be? Does my pointing out their failings, even if only to myself, make me better than those failings? Or does it turn me into a scold for observing them? After all, when you are engaging in battle with someone, you can be no more than at that level. Engaging in battle with. Not better than.

Engaged in battle with, not better than

And is it really possible to attain to altruism, magnitude and perfect inward direction, by means of contact with their dull, paltry, mean opposites? Do you learn to become altruistic by observing the failures of others? Do you learn to scale the heights by keeping your sight on the ground?

Of course not. And this brings me back to my original false premise: that it is a worthwhile use of time to observe the faults of others. I must have thought it was to have spent so much time on it, but it turns out to have been false. Paying any attention at all to the faults of others is, after all, paying attention to faults. And why would you? Why would you deliberately keep your gaze trained on the ground?

Why do you notice the speck in your brother’s eye, but pay no attention to the plank in your own?

Matthew 7:3

How long have you been paying attention to the faults of others? And what has this been but an attempt to define yourself? Yes, you want to aspire to great and greater things, of course, but this is not done by dwelling on faults. If you want to see a situation more clearly, take the pronouns out of it. Dwelling on faults, yours or mine, is dwelling on faults.

Instead, take a moment to think what you might like your dwelling to be. Think of your dwelling as the ground of your being. And the background and foreground, the walls, the floor, everything that defines your life and being.

I would like the walls and floor of my dwelling to be peace. There is no more to wish for than peace. Peace both presupposes and paves the way for every other blessing: love, joy, comfort, security, ease of mind…none of these could exist where peace were not.

Let Me Maximize You

Transformational change: the least you need to know