The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life's Perfection

by Mickey A. Singer

Each of us actually believes that things should be the way we want them, instead of being the natural result of all the forces of creation.

Am I better off making up an alternate reality in my mind and then fighting with reality to make it be my way, or am I better off letting go of what I want and serving the same forces of reality that managed to create the entire perfection of the universe around me? This experiment would not be about dropping out of life; it would be about leaping into life to live in a place where we are no longer controlled by our personal fears and desires.

When I finally did open my mouth to say something, what I said was: “Have you ever noticed that there’s this voice talking inside your head?” Ronnie looked at me a little weird, and then a spark lit in his eyes. He said, “Yes, I see what you’re talking about—mine never shuts up!”

Before I drove off, they all surrounded my van to say good-bye. I had lived in silence and solitude with no human contact for almost a month—now I was a celebrity. How did this happen? To me there was no doubt about how it happened—I had let go of myself and something very special had followed. I was willing to face loneliness and fear and not grab for relief. Yet something happened on its own, without my doing it or even asking for it. The seeds of a great experiment were being planted. Was it possible that life had more to give us than we could ever take for ourselves?

I would eventually learn that everything in life has something to teach you and that it is all for your growth.

I clearly remember deciding that from now on if life was unfolding in a certain way, and the only reason I was resisting it was because of a personal preference, I would let go of my preference and let life be in charge.

What would happen to me if I just inwardly surrendered my resistance and let the flow of life be in charge? The rules of the experiment were very simple: If life brought events in front of me, I would treat them as if they came to take me beyond myself. If my personal self complained, I would use each opportunity to simply let him go and surrender to what life was presenting me. This was the birth of what I came to call “the surrender experiment,” and I was totally prepared to see where it would take me.

It was clear to me that I had not done these things—they had happened to me. In fact, if I had not let go of my initial mental resistance, none of them could have happened. I had gone through most of my life thinking I knew what was good for me, but life itself seemed to know better. I was now going to test that presumption of nonrandomness to the max. I was willing to roll the dice and let the flow of life be in charge.

Eventually she got bold enough to ask if she could join me for meditation on Sunday mornings, just for an hour. I clearly remember granting her request solely because the voice in my head was so resistant to it.

My path to true freedom was subtler than simply requiring a tighter grip. Something much wiser than me had reached into my psyche that night and rearranged my entire relationship with myself. I no longer saw the lower aspect of myself, with all his personal issues and melodramas, as the enemy that had to be destroyed. I looked at him now with a new understanding. I needed to use all these disturbed personal energies for my ascent. It was perfectly clear to me that since he was the problem, he was also the solution. I actually felt a tinge of compassion toward that struggling person within me. I would later come to learn that the Bhagavad Gita says that one should raise the self with Self, not trample down the self. I had been trampling down my personal self in the name of getting free from his humanness. I now needed to learn how to raise those energies up to assist me on the journey.

Once this cathartic release had run its course, I realized something I will never forget: that scared, troubled person in there whom I had been watching and judging was indeed a person. The psyche is a person with feelings and thoughts, hopes, fears, and dreams. He is not to be locked in a room and constantly told to shut up. There are much more constructive ways to deal with these disturbed, self-centered energies. Unfortunately, I had to learn this the hard way—through experience.

I wasn’t working on the house for Sandy, or for myself; the flow of life had placed me in this situation. It was during the building of Sandy’s cabin that I first started the ritual of offering my work up to the invisible force that was guiding me. I was not in charge, yet life continued to unfold as if it knew just what it was doing. I would serve that force. Call it what you want—God, Christ, Spirit. These were no longer just names of something to believe in. The events that were pulling me through life were tangible and real to me. Inwardly, I began to offer everything I did up to the Universal Force.

The words just flowed out. There was no prior thinking involved. The first session laid out the road map of what we were going to do in the class, just as though a curriculum had been decided beforehand. It was similar to when I was writing that economics paper in my van in the woods. Except this time, I was watching a continuous stream of inspiration turning into a powerful lecture. I was not doing any of this—I was just aware of it. As the semester progressed, this kept happening class after class. I was amazed by what was being taught in these classes. It was as though all the knowledge from my schooling, plus all that I had learned through introspective meditation and the relentless watching of the voice, was being woven together into a cohesive whole.

As it turned out, the finished document had an unexpected destiny of its own. A professor on my doctoral committee had a publisher contact me, and within a year, my dissertation was published under the title The Search for Truth. Thirty-five years later, that book still sells copies every month on Amazon—a fitting tribute to the acts of surrender that brought it into this world. What is important from all this is that if I had listened to my own mind, none of this would have happened. By following the flow of life, instead of my own preferences, I was now a carpenter, a teacher, and a published author.

Little by little, the items in the temple began to represent all religions, all saints, and all masters. As its roof rafters stretched up toward the sky, the temple also belonged to those whose religion was the reality of the Infinite. 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.

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.