The Act of Surrender

– Artwork: Niki Bowers

The Wild Reed’s 2024 Advent series continues with a second excerpt from Sufism: Transformation of the Heart by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. (For the first installment of this series and an explanation for why I chose this book, click here.)

________________

We have to make every effort [to renouce the ego], but without [the Beloved’s] grace all our efforts would be useless because we would still be caught in the ego. There comes the time when we have to give up even the desire to progress, even the desire to get closer to Him whom we love. We have to surrender every effort in order to be taken by God to God. In the words of Abu al-Hassan al-Kharaqāni: “He who says he has attained God, has not; while he who says he has been taken to God has indeed attained union with God.”

What we most want we cannot find, but we have to seek with every effort until we surrender. Then in the act of surrender we create an inner space for the Beloved to reveal Himself. We die to our own desire, even the desire for Truth, and then Truth reveals Itself. The eye of the heart opens and we see that there is nothing other than God.

The process of dying is a slow and gradual work. Slowly the ego dies as attachments and conditioning fall away. With each little death a veil falls away and the horizon of the Self expands. After these moments of expansion there is usually a period of contraction as we integrate our new-found awareness, learn to live with a wider perspective. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the focus of our awareness shifts from the ego to the Self. As this happens the rate of expansion, the speed of the journey, intensifies. Faster and faster we flow with the currents of love which carry us Home.

The dissolution of the ego unites us with the Self. What was always present but hidden comes to the surface. The all-knowing and all-seeing Substance within the heart permeates consciousness with its presence. We continue to live our ordinary, everyday life, but we begin to feel that it is included within something greater, something which does not belong to the mind or the personality. When He wills we can have access to this other dimension within us. The ego cannot reach the Self, but once we learn to surrender, the Self can reach us. The ego and the mind instinctively step aside and we are in the presence of what is eternal.

. . . To be surrendered to God is to give oneself into unknowingness, into a space beyond thought or form. His presence then comes into our life in many forms – as a companion, as inner guidance, as a sweetness suddenly felt. And underneath all His manifestations is a deepening communion with what can never be manifest, with an emptiness, a nothingness, “the dark silence in which all lovers lose themselves.”* This silence is the real Home of the mystic, where we inwardly abide with God.

In this inner silence, love reveals its secret potency, an unending expansion of the heart.

– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Excerpted from Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart
The Golden Sufi Center, 1995
pp. 144-145

NEXT:
The Journey Home

* The Blessed John Ruysbroeck, quoted by F. C. Happold in Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology, p. 293.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Held in the Presence of God
• I Surrender to You
• The Sufi Way
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Don’t Go Back to Sleep
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Inayat Khan
• Inayat Khan and the Heart of Sufism
• Inayat Khan: “There Must Be Balance”
• Inayat Khan on the Art of Selflessness
• Jesus and the Art of Letting Go
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• The Soul’s Beloved
• The Gorgeous One
• Resting in the Presence of the Beloved
• A Sacred Journey, a Pilgrim Path
• Finding Balance in the Presence of the Beloved
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• You Are My Goal, Beloved One
• Be In My Mind, Beloved One
• Your Peace Is With Me, Beloved One
• Beloved and Antlered
• Meeting (and Embodying) the Lover God
• Prayer of the Week – October 28, 2013
• Neil Douglas-Klotz: Quote of the Day – December 29, 2011
• Advent: Renewing Our Connection to the Sacred
• Advent Questions for These Times of Challenge and Change
• Advent Thoughts
• A Threshold Season
• A New Beginning
• Advent: The Season of Blessed Paradox
• An Advent Prayer
• Advent: A “ChristoPagan” Perspective
• Guidelines for the Advent of a Universal Mysticism: An Introduction | Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
• Active Waiting: A Radical Attitude Toward Life
• Bismillah
• Cultivating Stillness
• Thoughts on Transformation | II | III
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

Opening image: “Short Days, Long Shadows” by Niki Bowers.