In a very practical sense, how do you surrender spiritually?

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There are two ways to develop spiritually, you can develop your capacity for surrender, or you can work on your conscious responsiveness. They work hand in hand to take you to the next level of growth.

I’ve shared my spiritual map, it starts with having spiritual experiences, then continues to an awakening, then to enlightenment, and then finally to mythic experience. Read previous answers if curious.

Responsiveness and surrender are part of the level before you get to experiencing. Without the ability to surrender, you’ll never be able to let go enough to have a spiritual experience. Without working on perceptive responsiveness, you’ll never push yourself hard enough to develop the capacity to have them. It’s a push-pull mechanism, a tug-of-war you need to learn how to master before spirituality can begin to have meaning to you.

The first thing to realize is that nothing that you do, none of your ‘accomplishments’ are concrete, they only exist to provide meaning for you in life. And meaning for you in life only exists to help you find yourself. To realize this and act accordingly is surrender. To push yourself through pointlessless anyway works your perceptive responsiveness, one way to think of it is as discipline.

You can look at it as all surrender, in that you use surrender to push yourself towards pointless activity, or you can look at it as accomplishment, where you live more in the moment for the juice of success, and so subordinate surrender to accomplishment. Neither way is better, there is only the way that’s more suited to you.

You can abstract over both of them as direction. Whether surrendering or working hard, you’re moving in a singular direction, and the more you harmonize your surrendering activity and your hardworking activity, remember you must do both, the more they move in a coordinated direction and the closer that gets to provoking spiritual experiences.

The experiences will adopt the flavor of the experiences that got you there, which will hopefully reflect your personality, but actually it only rarely does this. Spiritual experiences, created by the mundane experiences that led up to them, only serve to get your head above water so you can see that the direction you were swimming wasn’t a bad one. You need to keep swimming to finally get out of the water so you can walk, walking being far less effort than swimming.

So if all you have in the beginning is weird musty books with a very specific kind of meditation on something totally weird, surrender is getting over yourself and doing it anyway until the activity itself can reveal its secrets to you. You can, as I did, learn decades later about all the funny oddities regarding that particular form. Only after awakening does your spiritual journey really start reflecting you as a person and what you want and need. Until then it’s a matter of putting in the work, and to force yourself to do that, we call that skill surrender.