Stages of surrender

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Surrender seems to happen in stages. As you become ready to let go of what you thought was safe before, it falls away as if it had never been. You are free, only you’re not free yet. You are always free, so why do we say you are not free yet? You are only as free as you allow yourself to be in experience, and your effort to confine yourself seems to fall away in stages. Your experiences still reflect limit to you to the extent that you still want it and believe that it is safe.

Right before you release the control of your separate self over what you see as an area of your life, you feel acutely the sting of trying to control anything as a separate self. This is good. You do not have infinite patience with unbearable pain. Once it becomes apparent that pain is intense, you want it to end, so you surrender to what is here and always painless. As you go along, you do not require such intense or dramatic experiences of pain to know that you want to let go of limit. A brief and intense blip can be enough.

You surrender into your actual and shared Self, so you are just relaxing into what you Are. What you Are is what everyone and everything you call else always is, so you are always supremely safe. If you are supremely safe, then all are always supremely safe.

At each stage of surrender, you begin to see the other guy as your Self. As you go along, you trust in the other guy more and more because you are trusting in our shared being. If there is nothing to criticize about the other guy, then there is certainly nothing to criticize about you. But you do see something to criticize in the other guy. Good. Because this is the key to your undoing. Whatever you see to criticize in the other guy is what is left of your self-hatred. Give thanks that the ping of tuning into self-hatred is so obvious. Here you Are, with You, in whatever form you appear. You are loved forever. Facts.

A Self can’t be hated. A shared, joined, unified Self is only love and can only be love forever. Facts. You can always rest here in facts. They make a very comfortable place to relax.

Acknowledgment here that the voice changes from that of my light friends to Jesus. I can see how they are the same.

In A Course in Miracles, I offer to substitute for your ego. Imagine being a teacher tired of working. You call in and request Jesus as your substitute. Eventually, you can see that everyone you call other has done the same thing. This is how this experience ends. Jesus looking at Jesus waving at Jesus. Self looking at Self waving at Self. Hello! You are loved, and you are loved forever.

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