The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life's Perfection

by Mickey A. Singer

They were the result of my letting go of myself. Little by little, the fabric of my life was composed of the results of my surrender. I was becoming surrounded by a life that had been built for me, not by me. In my wildest dreams, however, I could never have imagined where this was going to lead me.

The Most Important Thing I Was Ever Asked to Do

It may have been acts of surrender that originally put me into those prison groups, but once I was there it was my heart and soul.

my heart center was learning to open. I was being taught how to serve. This is not something I would have come up with on my own. My whole being thought my path to self-realization was about meditation. Fortunately, life knew better, and she was starting to guide me away from myself through service to others.

The Call of a Living Master

What had started out as a very personal trip, life had managed to turn into a powerful spiritual experience. If that had been all that transpired from the visit, it would have been fantastic. But it was only just the beginning.

Baba Muktananda

Shaktipat

For years I had thought that a spiritual life was about spending every day in silence and solitude. I was now running around getting all this work done. Yet somehow I felt more open and more connected to the energy flow than ever before.

had surrendered just enough to where the flow of life was no longer something I chose to give in to—the flow had taken over my life. It had gone from subtly guiding me to running me.

decided that for this last day I would even let go of that concept and just surrender completely to the experience in front of me.

I was very deep in meditation. All outer sounds had ceased, as had my mental chatter. I was in a place I had never been before, deep inside my heart. I felt like my heart was a giant cave that was protecting me and loving me. I was completely entranced and at peace.

Gainesville Hosts a Guru

The Temple Is Built

The number of tasks life was giving me was out of control, but I was surrendering to it. My morning and evening meditations were my refuge. Throughout the day I took every opportunity to quiet myself and center within.

Before opening a door, any door, I would remember that I was walking through a door on this tiny planet in the vast emptiness of space. Fortunately, the energy flowing up to the point between my eyebrows helped me keep the focus of my attention there.

On my new path to awakening, life was no longer an obstacle to my growth. Life was now the battlefield on which I was to remain conscious enough to willingly permit my old self to be stripped away.

This temple sat on the planet Earth, a tiny ball spinning through the vast darkness of empty space. It spun around one star, of which there were billions in our galaxy alone. This temple was universal in its embrace of all the religions, and it was universal in its embrace of the universe itself. Thus it came to be called—Temple of the Universe.

Opening the Heart Chakra

Just as the powerful meditation in the forest had left a flow of energy always rising to the point between my eyebrows, so the touch of Amrit’s hand left a beautiful flow of energy always passing through my heart. It has been more than thirty-five years now and neither of these energy flows has ever subsided, not even for a moment. Sometimes they are stronger than other times, but they are always there. The simple touch of Amrit’s hand had permanently opened my heart chakra.

By now I was seeing a pattern. I was continuously being pushed headfirst into a life that centered on serving other people’s spiritual growth instead of my own. I never consciously would have decided to do this. I was not wise enough or selfless enough to make such a decision. It was simply the fact that I had resolved to surrender to life, and this is where life was taking me.

It seems as though life knew exactly what it was doing, and as usual, my mind knew nothing.

Get Thee to an Ashram

Though there was at least some internal resistance each step of the way, I just kept letting go. Sharing my place of solitude certainly wasn’t what I thought I wanted, but that’s because I didn’t understand that serving others is much higher than serving yourself.

I know perfectly well that I didn’t do it. The best I can say is that I let go of myself and allowed what was meant to be—to be.

A Company Is Born

I simply put my whole heart into whatever I was doing. There was no difference between teaching my classes at Santa Fe, meeting with people for morning and evening services at the Temple, running spiritual retreats, or doing a construction job. All these tasks had one thing in common: they had all been given to me by surrendering to life’s incomprehensible flow.

The Master Builder

When something is meant to be, it’s fascinating watching it unfold, one event after the other.

The perfection of the Universal Flow I had been surrendering to had taken care of the problem before I even knew there was one.

It’s a good thing I was following the energy and not leading it, because the Universal Plan was always much more expansive than my mind could imagine.

As her energy got intense, I began to quiet my breath and focus on my mantra. Even back then I used my work in the world as an opportunity to let go of myself and remain calmly centered.

Community Banking

The Ever-Expanding Temple of the Universe

Things like that just kept happening. I became deeply committed to serving the unfolding of that force. In fact, if you had asked me toward the end of 1978, I would have told you that I had surrendered my entire life to the Universal Flow, and it had taken over every moment. It taught me how to keep regular spiritual practices while working in the world and how to support others to do the same.

Metamorphosis of a Creature

From the Personal Self to the Personal Computer

My experiment with surrender had taught me to always be present in the current moment and do my best to not allow my personal preferences to make decisions for me. Instead, I allowed the reality of life to determine where I was going. It had certainly led me on a fantastic journey up to that point, and it was about to do something phenomenal with the next thirty years of my life.

Fortunately, I really loved helping people. I didn’t care if they were coming to me to learn how to still that voice in their head, to build them a house, or to write them a program—it was all the same to me. I passionately loved programming, and I loved getting to use that talent to help people.

My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself—because it was.

The Birth of The Medical Manager

Through all this, I had hardly changed my lifestyle. The money the businesses were earning got donated to the Temple to support land purchases and the expenses incurred serving the community. The perfection of how everything was unfolding was enough to silence the personal mind. It was around that time when I noticed that my mental concepts separating worldly and spiritual had finally dissolved. Everything began to appear as the miraculous perfection of the flow of life.

Now you see that the answer is simple: I didn’t do a thing except serve with all my heart and soul what life brought before me.

We are back to our earlier discussions of inspiration and where it comes from. Beethoven heard music and he wrote it down. Artists have creative visions and they manifest them.

Without realizing it, while I thought I was training him, it was really me who was getting trained on how to manage programmers. That was a skill I would definitely need in the near future. Turns out, I was destined to manage hundreds of highly skilled software developers.

The Early Programmers

Preparing for Launch

Perhaps now you can see why I have learned to so deeply honor the flow of life.

I had simply been following the flow. I hadn’t had any expectations, hopes, or dreams about anything. For many years now, I had just been putting one foot in front of the other serving whatever was put before me to the best of my ability.

The Forces of Natural Growth