How To Discover the Surrendered State, with David R Hawkins

The mechanism of surrender is a sure way to total fulfilment. We are not at peace when we make effort; effort brings guilt, envy, resentment, and vulnerability to criticism. Imagine using surrender instead of effort?

Small self vs big Self. The small self is attached to familiar pain. There’s no catch on the big Self; it’s everything we want. The Self of the teacher is the Self of the student, so being in the teacher’s presence reveals the next step. 

We can only start where we are. If we fool ourselves about where we are the way takes longer. We start with accepting our negativity and smallness, so that we can transcend it. 

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All problems are healed by the Self. By surrender we experience the Self. Therefore surrender resolves all problems. 

 

Letting go is the most effective technique for overcoming the obstacles to Enlightenment. It is too simple to be appreciated. Letting go frees emotional attachments, healing suffering and psychosomatic disorders, quiets thinking, relieves the need for escapism, increases energy, improves functioning, improves relationships, decreases conflict, allows vocational goals to be more easily achieved, replaces intellectualism with intuitive knowingness, grows the personality, uncovers creative and psychic abilities, increases independence, happiness, peace, joy, awareness. Letting go can be silently done through daily life. 

The nature of thinking is relief, so it occurs automatically in the presence of the teacher.

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Thinking is held in place by the accumulated pressure of feelings. Feeling organises thoughts and memory. This is the Gray-LaViolette theory. 

Being surrendered means spontaneity, freedom to give to others, experience of the basic nature of the universe which is love, peace, and joy. 

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3 major ways of handling feelings: suppress/repress, express, and escape. 

Suppression is conscious, we are stoic or don’t want to be bothered. We don’t know what to do with feelings. Guilt and fear repress feelings through denial and projection: denial blocks maturation; projection creates enemies. 

Expression releases pressure so the remainder can be suppressed. Expressing feelings doesn’t free you from feelings. Expressing expands negative feelings, then suppresses the remainder. Freud: instead of expressing negativity, neutralise, sublimate, socialise and channel the feeling constructively into love, work, and creativity. 

Escape diverts. Discomfit with silence. Need for stimuli. Fear of being alone. Escape takes enormous energy. Escape halts spiritual growth, and brings illness. Escape blocks trust and love. 

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Stress-proneness depends on how much stress is already present within to be triggered by a stimulus, not by what happens out there. We see in the world what we have repressed. Shame sees punishment. Apathy sees poverty. Guilt sees evil. Fear sees threat. Anger sees enemies. Pride sees xxxx. 

Events don’t cause emotions. Repressed feelings seek an outlet using events as triggers. We are like pressure cookers.  XXX

The mechanism: be aware, let it arise, stay with it, let it run its course, let go of wanting it to be different, let go of doing anything about it. Let the feeling be there and let out the energy behind it. Be aware of resistance, fear, condemnation, moralising, judgement AS feeling and let them arise, run their course, and let their energies out. 

The key to letting go: resistance keeps the feeling going. Focus on letting go of resistance first. Presume there is fear and guilt over having negative feelings: a fear of fear, guilt over guilt. Ignore all thoughts: focus on the feeling itself. Letting go undoes the ego, which resists; “forgets”, escapes, vents, acts out. Solution: let go of feelings about letting go. Allow and be with the resistance. I am willing to let go. I am willing to accept and be with my feelings. If the thought arises “this isn’t working” that’s a sign of real progress! All thoughts are resistance: don’t think about letting go: just let go. Let go during good times because the teacher says it gets better. When you feel stuck, surrender to the feeling of being stuck, letting go of the stuckness in bits and pieces. Undeservingness and wantingness are forms of resistance too. We tend to discount inner progress, forgetting the very technique that brought about the change. Transcendence is easy, and goals become elevated automatically, the impossible possible, so accepting the resistance will try to save face by ridiculing and criticising a higher state is vital. Criticism and disparagement of letting go is resistance. Higher levels of functioning become easy, possible, so decide NOW to let go of resisting higher levels of functioning. “I decide to let go of all blocks to happiness, success, health, acceptance, love and peace!” This is the natural state. Ask yourself, Is there any negative thought, doubt, or feelings about my ability to let go? Let them come up, accept them, and let them go. 

In summary, resistance is key to letting go, because it tends to keep negative feelings going. Common forms of resistance are guilt about having negative feelings, criticism, skepticism, undeservingness, wantingness, discounting, ridiculing, saving face, "forgetting" to let go, "feeling stuck", and venting.

I decide to let go of all blocks to happiness, success, health, acceptance, love and peace!

Result of letting go:  it’s okay if it happens, it’s okay if it doesn’t, I don’t need it for my happiness. No attachment remains. Success!

Stacks: sometimes feelings return or continue.

Transcendence: when something is fully surrendered it disappears as if it had never existed. We often don’t realise it is gone. Others notice first. Often we feel like it’s not working. 

What for? The body: humans most fear losing the capacity to experience life through the body. Select a life goal and ask “What for?” - a simple way to become conscious of the underlying emotional goal of survival. “What for?” reveals insecurity, unhappiness, and lack of fulfilment driving goals. All goals aim to overcome fear and achieve happiness. 

All life emits energy, positive or negative. Courage shifts energy from positive to negative. Letting go moves us from negative to positive. The fastest way to move up is by telling the truth to ourselves and others. 

Awareness increases rapidly by observing feelings, rather than thoughts, without any intention of doing anything about them. Recurring thoughts and feelings are written down and worked with directly later. 

When stuck, ask “What is the basic feeling that I’ve been ignoring?” 

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Moving through catastrophe quickly. Consciously use suppression, expression, escape, surrender of smaller aspects, recontextualisation with a positive meaning and uplifting significance.

A fourth way to move through catastrophe: surrender the smaller aspects first. As trivia is surrendered, the main event becomes less oppressive. Surrendering on trivia works because surrendering on one emotion surrenders on them all at the same time. 

After a catastrophic overwhelm, examine the suppressed portion of the emotion so it no longer does harm unconsciously. 

Past life crises are still unresolved, and have disabled us in those areas of life. Is it worth paying the cost? Letting go gives us a way to handle residuals. 

Create a different context for the past: a different attitude to past difficulty or trauma. Acknowledge the hidden gift in difficulty and trauma. Viktor Frankl: emotional events are healed when a new meaning is placed around them. The last human freedom: one’s choice of attitude towards circumstances. Every life experience contains a hidden lesson, gift, healing, or blessing. Jung: the unconscious brings about traumatic events in order to make us whole, and the shadow allows us to feel empathy and compassion for the human condition. A crisis makes us more human, compassionate, and wise.

Fear of life is really fear of emotions. When we master our feelings, life becomes uninhibited and opens up. 

Every life experience is an opportunity to go up or down. The confrontation is: do we curl up in a ball and escape down, or do we rise up to life? 

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Enhancing positive feelings: exercise: a negative feeling is present, what is the positive opposite? Let go of resisting the positive. This exercise locates our inner greatness, the Self. Contact with the Self transcends the world. 

The most powerful survival tool is the state of lovingness. 

Sir John Eccles: the brain is not the mind: the mind controls the brain. Brain is like a receiving station for radio waves. Voluntary movements don’t come from the motor cortex but from the intention to move stimulating the motor cortex. The mind effects the brain. 

Disease proneness: Do I hold fear thoughts about my health? Do I get excited about a new disease being reported? Am I curious about disease in myself and others? Do I believe the environment and food cause disease? Do I believe in family diseases? Do I watch accidents, hospital TV, violent TV? Do I suffer guilt, anger, condemnation, judgement, resentment, hopelessness? Am I concerned with status over relationships? Do I worry about insurance? 

Tell yourself, “I am only subject to what I hold in thought. I cancel the belief in X and I am free.”

Conscious use of surrender is the most effective stress relief. 

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Problem solving:  Letting go solves problems rapidly. Let go of the feelings behind the question. Let go of resisting the energy of the question. Ignore looking for answers or thinking about the problem. When we are fully surrender on all components, the answer appears. Thinking through scenarios is fear. Wise solutions arise in a clear and surrendered space. Long standing problems are solved by surrender with lightning speed. Exercise: take several problems, describe the search for answers, stop searching! Now, examine the underlying feelings in the search and let that go. 

We are capable of far more love and happiness than we can imagine. 

Letting go undoes neuroticism. Therapy improves balance while letting go eliminates it altogether. 

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Health. Preoccupation with the body drain energy. “I am an Infinite Being, not subject to disease, danger, or threat.” or whatever mental program. Letting go shifts from identification as body to stewardship of body. Only the mind experiences the body. One the mind experiences sensations. There’s no need to defend the body. Power lies in the mind. People respond not to the body but to the inner attitude, the energy state, the level of awareness. Focus on the level of consciousness, not the physical body, to bring rapid results. Health automatically results from letting go on guilt and resistance to health and wellbeing. Guilt sees punishment and accidents. Forgiveness sees safety and health. 

Wealth the unconscious brings us what it thinks we deserve. A small guilty self brings poverty. Look at what money means. Does it stand for security, power, glamor, sex, competition, worth, value, esteem? Exercise: write the heading Money, and list all its meanings. Write does the feelings associated with each meaning and begin to surrender on each negative feeling and attitude. Money is just a tool to achieve positive feelings. We can achieve positive feelings directly. Money then takes on a new higher meaning. We must become conscious of what money means to us emotionally so we are not being run by it. When we re-own the power that we gave to money, and see it as our own power, we are free of concern and attachment. It is very common for people who let go to suddenly come into abundance. They become nonchalant about money, because one transcends what one has mastered. 

Happiness. One conflict can ruin a day. Why? Because we feel separate, alone, small and weak. Because of inner chaos, we must remain unconscious. We frantically do anything to avoid facing the feeling of inner emptiness. Letting go de-glamorises the world and returns power to the student.

Relationships. Common human love is primarily attachment, dependence, and possessiveness. All emotions toward others express the belief that we are incomplete in ourselves and must use others to feel good. Most relationship happens in our head. 

Relationships: Anger, criticism, judgement aims to punish others and make them sorry, and instead triggers anger in them. To handle anger, admit and accept these punishment fantasies, accept that these feelings and thoughts affect others whether expressed or not, and when we let go, often they also change. We must clean up our act: write down what you would not want others to know about you and begin to surrender it. People mirror back our negative feelings. Anger makes us vulnerable to attack psychically, and when we shift into a higher energy pattern we create a protective shield energetically. To really affect other people, really love them, then their anger will boomerang back upon them and not effect us. Hate is conquered by love, that is the eternal law. 

Relationships: Guilt. Wish for self punishment and to be punished. Inner guilt comes back at at us as criticism and invalidation. Letting go of guilt heals others criticising and attacking us. Presume the other person is conscious and aware of our inner thoughts and feelings.

Relationships, Apathy and Grief. Aim is to summon help. Effect is to drive others away. 

Relationships, Fear: inhibition aims to escape from threat. Effect is to draw the thing we fear to us. To heal fear, look at the worst possible scenario and let go of the feelings that arouses. Look at the feeling aroused by the worst possible scenario and ask “What is it based in?” Pride, anger, shame, guilt? When you identify the basis of the fear and the fear surrenders.

Relationships, Pride: expressed as neatness, punctuality, good personhood, workaholism, politeness, moral superiority. Pride also expresses as arrogance, vanity, and prejudice. Pride aims to win power and overcome inner smallness. Pride seeks to manipulate God to take our side. When we let go of wanting to be liked, we are liked. When we let go of pride’s manipulation of others, we find they respect us. Pride puts oneself down, flatters, defers, and self-effaces to influence others. False humility acts small to get respect, and gets disrespected. 

All negative emotions in relationship are forms of fear. Fear of losing, helplessness, abandonment, and lack. 

Exercise: pick a person who doesn’t like you, and ask “How would I react if I were the other person and knew what my inner feelings and thoughts really were?” The answer explains the other person’s behavior. 

To surrender a feeling in relationship easily, look at what the feeling is trying to accomplish? 

Reciprocal positive feelings bring about success in life.

How to clarify relationships: assume the other person is aware of your inner thoughts and feelings. How would you react to those inner thoughts and feelings if you were them? What purpose do those inner thoughts and feelings aim at? Let them all go and let go of resisting positive feelings. Now, how would you react if you were them to the positive feelings? Now, watch their behavior change. Sometimes karma keeps them stuck, so surrender on that. 

Emotions are really subtle attempts to force others. Emotions are attempts to impose our will on them, which they unconsciously resist. Instead, lovingly picture  the best possible outcome, a true win-win. Be non-attached and let go of all resistance and negativity. 

Relationships, sex: letting go expands sensory experience. If one breathes slowly and deeply, smiling instead of grimacing, the fear will become conscious and can be surrendered. Sex loses compulsion, one becomes free to indulge or not in sex or orgasm. A shift from wanting to sharing. Using letting go, go into all the negative emotions about myself and intimacy, allowing the feelings to come up one by one. Sex reflects level of consciousness: letting go expands sex and makes it more gratifying and not necessary. When we seek to give instead of get all our own needs are automatically fulfilled. 

Work: Feels limit or extend talents and abilities. Feelings set the quantity and quality of success and failure. How do feelings free up our ability for success? Positive feelings result in success, negative in failure. Negative feelings start the thinking “I can’t”, and arise when we dislike what we see, feel, think, remember. Comparison to others when holding suppressed feelings can lead to envy: undo it by facing the resistance to feeling underlying feelings: fear, desire, anger, shame, guilt. These feelings to seek success block the recognition we seek. Negative feelings cost us happiness and success. The cheap little satisfaction of blaming others for our lack of success, and the sympathy we get, is an excuse.  Negative feelings are replaced by loving what we do, delighting in my and others success, and boundless energy to excel. Positive feelings mean “I can”. Nothing need happen to get positive feelings; they flow naturally when negative feelings are surrendered. When the clouds are removed, the sun shines forth. By surrendering negative feelings, automatically inspiration creates success. Inspiration automatically follows surrender of negative belief and self-limitation. Tamas, Rajas, Sattva: in inertia, decisions don’t stick because of apathy, grief, and fear; in effort, performance is uneven, self-centred and win-lose because of desire, anger, and pride; in peace, decisions based in courage, acceptance, and love create inspiration, connection, concentration, and win-win contexts. Peace at work leads to greatness. We meet everyone’s needs and our own needs are automatically fulfilled. If we cannot see a win-win solution, then we have un-surrendered inner feelings blocking it. As soon as we totally surrender to a situation, the impossible becomes possible. Let go of negative feelings because you want something higher, peace, harmony, and getting the job done. It’s like rearranging the furniture or a bathroom break to shift from negative to positive.

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Basic Concepts, a review: thoughts have energy and form. Thoughts and feelings control the body and can heal it. Healing results from surrendered negative emotions plus a thought that gives it specific form. When a feeling is let go, all connected thoughts disappear. We surrender by allowing resistance to be there and accepting, looking at, observing, and letting it be. It runs out in due time. Start surrender by letting go feelings about feelings. Surrender feelings by acknowledging the payoff. Ignore thoughts as resistance. Steadfastly surrender all the time. Surrender rather than express negative feelings. Surrender resistance and skepticism to positive feelings. Let go of negative, share positive. Notice letting go brings a subtle lighter feeling. Letting go of desire clears a way for it to happen. Let go by osmosis in the aura of those who have what I want. Let go by associating with spiritual people. Accept that people know your inner state. De-label physical disorders and stick with specific body sensations. De-label feelings and let go the energy behind them. 

All negativity is associated with guilt about having it in the first place. Forgiveness alleviates guilt. Surrender and forgiveness work together. When we feel we should be doing something else, that’s guilt. We accept media enemies, that’s guilt. 

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Healing vision - most vision is simply escapism. We see only what we need to see. It takes about six weeks. We see with the mind, not with eyeballs. 

Self-healing within is activated by continual surrender. 

Whether God exists or not, we all have feelings about the idea of God that need to be dealt with. 

In meditation when the feeling behind a series of thoughts is located and surrender, the whole series instantly stops. An extremely silent state of meditation is possible in daily life through letting go. 

Affirmations increase in power by surrendering the “yeah but” obstacles to the affirmation.

Step three surrenders wilfulness, the basis of the ego, and is almost the same as letting go. 

If problems persist, surrender on a karmic pattern. Ask for more of it. 

Both frigidity and impotence are behavioural statements “I can’t resisting joy, love, and aliveness, usually caused by repressed guilt, fear, and anger.

I am free to not surrender. It’s my choice. One part of the mind believes that holding on will magically bring about a desired end, while another part of awareness knows that you are free to let go. 

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Enlightenment. Surrender wanting to control everything as it arises. “That there’s a good and a bad, a desirable and an undesirable; that’s all in the mind. In Reality, the sun shines and then the clouds come; the rain falls and the grass grows up and dies; the stock market goes up and down; age comes and goes; people arise and leave… By surrendering to whatever is cycling up, it eventually disappears. You disappear it by choosing to be one with it and refusing to want to change it as it arises… The one or two things you hide behind probably represent a stack. That’s why you’re hanging on to them.”