Living a Surrendered Life
What potential lies within us, untapped and untried? What dreams lie unrealized? What do we not know about ourselves? I suspect that the unknown potential within us would speak volumes about us if we let it speak. How can we live our lives so that we begin to bring forward to consciousness the untapped treasure within?
What is it that stands between us and our own true selves? Why is it so hard to access the Self beyond the ego self? Aren’t we talking about the soul? What is the soul’s music for us? What is its tie to living fully? And what does God have to do with this? Here is the thesis of this blog: we need God to complete ourselves. We are too close to the problem—the flack that stands between us and our true selves, so we need God to complete us, to bring us to the selves s/he created us each to be.
The contents of that flack today are cultural denial of the importance of God, our living out of our small, egoic selves, our own self-protections arising from trauma and pain that we have experienced, and the culture’s grip on us. We must find a way to escape from the small-minded way we think about ourselves in order to unleash that potential within. And here is why God is so important in this process: God created us with a mix of talents and, yes, even deficits that are needed on the world’s stage when we are able to access them, but in addition God knows the roadmap for how to connect with our created self.
Our culture is a largely unconscious expression of the minds of all of us who live in America. The group mind evolves at a subconscious level, largely unseen unless someone starts to reflect on the cultural norms. We live as independently as we can consciously, but we miss the subtleties of the culture’s grip on us.
The truth is so simple really: we already live surrendered lives! We surrendered to our small selves and to the culture long before as children. We unconsciously pledged our allegiance to our families and our culture before we could think critically.
The idea of a surrendered life is such an anathema to us independent, American citizens of the 21st C. It’s a strange and totally foreign concept, we think. But I submit that we already live surrendered lives, we surrendered to the cultural norms when you were a young child. Long before you could reason you adopted the standards of your family and of the culture and buried your knowledge of the soul.
Of course the culture is not static. Here are three examples of how the cultural thinking has changed over time. It is my hope that you will see how unconscious we are of the culture’s influence on us and how we need to step out from under its influence in our lives so that we can bring forward the potential within us.
1.Take the thin and beautiful standard for women today. Fifty years ago that idea held no sway. Marilyn Monroe was the epitome of what a woman should be in the 1950’s. She was beautiful and sexy and a size 14! Not a size 2!
2. Or take the concept of a millionaire, It used to be that a millionaire had over a million dollars in assets. Today, in our early presidential campaign days, it’s being defined as the income someone has.
3. In the 1950’s everyone I knew was a Christian or Jew or if they weren’t, they didn’t talk about not going to church. Most people were in church on any given Sunday. Today about 19% of Americans are active church members. God is not held in high esteem now in the culture.
But God holds the key. God not only knows the roadmap to our true selves, but it is in our relationship with and faithfulness to God that the Spirit of God transforms us over time into our truer, more connected selves. We can’t do it alone, because we are too close to the situation within and so attached to the inner voices of culture and family that we can’t hear the subtle murmurings of the true self.
Be aware that the church is a culture, too, that greatly influences us and defines who we can be. Cleave to the relationship with God as your primary source, not the church. If the relationship is dynamic and flowing both ways, your true self will be revealed. So get with God. See what happens. You’ll be amazed.