EXPAND THE BEING THROUGH SURRENDER.
Travel towards all existence via trust, enter into all things and people via love.
DEDICATED TO LAURA TORRABADELLA. In general, women inspire me tremendously to write. Laura is one of the people who squeezes my consciousness the most whenever she has any doubts. Whenever she wants to investigate something, she becomes the most incisive and sharp being I know. This shows that the supposed superficiality that many people manage at an operative level due to having to perform multiple tasks hides tremendous potential related to the excavating towards the roots and the origins of things. This article can demonstrate the possibility we have to go deeper.
Everything that we become, we must be inside and out, in a complete, integral and total way. A superficial person needs to be so on the outside and inside to truly be so. The functioning of superficiality differs in the two dimensions where it manifests: The I (on the outside) and the Self (on the inside), are two parts of the external, and which are specially designed to interact and communicate with each other, creating a more or less translucent appearance that separates them, a thin veil that divides two very different natures.
The ‘I’ functions as a protective shell; what is of value inside needs a safe in order to protect it. Camouflage is very useful to the true power that inhabits a human being. Therefore, potentiality must be covered by a double layer of illusion. That double layered superficiality of the ‘I’ – the being which conceals the potential for depth. That is, that the most powerful desire of your soul is to dive deep, to explore what seems inaccessible. In the depth, which is beyond the Being, is the Non-Being, which is absolute emptiness, silence and loneliness in a state of observation. This is the realm of consciousness. From that transcendent space, we can enter to investigate how the ‘I’ and the Self work in an intimate bond with love and trust, because from there we will get the clues that will lead us to SURRENDER.
LET’S DIVE IN:
The Self and the ‘I’ have points in common that are intimately related to potentiality. The Self is internal, the ‘I’ is external. Beyond both is potentiality, and beyond potentiality is power. The ‘I’ is the illusory home of the Being, the ‘I’ contains the Self, protects it, but also competes and emulates certain qualities of the internal, even trying to show out what is inside. But it doesn’t allow what is internal to come out because it would lose it’s protagnism.
There is something of that inside on the surface, a slight trace. But in a light, diluted way, which serves to function in an operative way and interact with the environment. That is why the ego does not want to lose its false power by displaying signs of the essential, because this would lead to its sudden death. The ‘I’ needs to exist as if it were the owner, the only thing, the beginning and the end. And from there submit the Being.
Deep down, the ‘I’ and the Being are united and guided by love, as everything is, but the ‘I’ distrusts the Self. That is to say, it is possible to love and distrust at the same time, and this happens to many people. But you can’t trust and not love. It is the difference between the internal and the external, between the power of the Being and the false power of the ‘I’. When the Being trusts, it can go through everything, but in order to express that devastating trust that explodes from within it is necessary for the ‘I’ to dissolve through love, then the door opens for surrender to occur.
In this sense, I consider that love is the great trap for the opening of the self, because it needs to be accepted, loved, comprehended, admired, so the ‘I’ acquires a mask of amorousness and closeness to manipulate and catch the attention of others, but the ‘I’ cannot love unconditionally because it will always place conditions that protect and defend it. To not love is to preserve the integrity of the ‘I’, while to not trust is to prevent the Self from expressing itself.
I could risk myself by affirming that the ‘I’ “needs” to love while the Self needs to trust. The power of the ‘I’ dies by loving and the power of the Self is revived by trusting. Actually, the right word is not NEED, but I must use it to comprehend that both the ‘I’ and the Self operate as if they were energies with their own personality. It is like saying that the experience that occurs inside is trust, and what happens outside is love. If the ‘I’ loves, it dissolves and allows trust to come from within. If the Self trusts, then the ‘I’ moves aside, because it cannot contain such an expansive energy. Therefore, it also dissolves, or rather it explodes when trust comes out.
Said from another perspective, trust is directed inwards because it needs to develop in an intimate and private environment, and when it reaches the depths it becomes love. Meanwhile love is directed outwards because its development needs space and freedom to expand. Love is trust installed deep inside as an engine of tremendous creative power, and trust is love fired outwards creating multiple ways of flourishing. They are the same thing in different directions. That come and go nourishing the soul of the wonderful experience of existing.
In the processes of healing or self-improvement, we can see that there are people who have difficulties related to entry or exit, in other words, with receiving or giving. Having difficulty with giving or receiving is just a symptom, deep down there are deep causes. One of those roots that can help you comprehend this complex situation, which almost all of us experience and suffer, is related to the breakdown of the valve that regulates the entry and exit of everything, but in essence of love and trust.
If there is difficulty with the exit or giving it is because trust has not yet entered. If there is a problem with the entrance or receiving it is because love has not yet gone out. In other words, those who do not want to or can not receive is because they don’t know love, and those who still can’t go out or give is because they don’t yet know trust. Most of us are affected by both limitations because the valve does not work well. It has been damaged by the process of perceptions we have had as children.
When a child feels that they are trusted, love comes to their heart, and when they feel that they are loved because they are accepted and looked at with happiness, trust enters their heart. But, in addition to the fact that there is a complementarity between both types of register of love and trust, there is also a priority order, which, if altered, can damage that valve of which I speak.
In principle we could affirm that the first thing is love. It is the most important thing that a human being can experience. To such an extent that if we all experienced it, all the wars in the world would end. “Interrupted love” refers to that. That at some point, when we are just a baby, we feel that we are no longer loved or that we no longer feel the love we felt being in the womb, when we experience life. In addition, in subsequent years, there is a distortion in what love is and the compatible way of expressing it. Caring, overprotecting, buying things, etc. These are not love. That is where the distorted idea of love is born. That is why the central problem is in the absence of authentic love since we were born. Parents swear they love, and it may be so, but children do not perceive it in the way they need to, so it is as if they had not been loved.
Trust is an unmistakable imprint. When you trust there is no way to perceive anything else because trust is internal, it is not directed outward, but from the outside you can feel it when it is directed to oneself. It is penetrating when someone trusts you, it goes straight through your heart. It creates a deep imprint. That’s what I call the first trace of love, when you are trusted. But if someone loves you, you never know if it is authentic love, this is because usually the one it is the ‘I’ who loves, or who knows who it is: Interests? Sexual desire? Expectations? The need to be loved? Love takes many forms because it is prostituted and adapts to whatever is necessary in order to achieve what the ‘I’ wants. While trust is unmistakable, making a false copy is almost impossible, because there is no one I can trust even for any benefit in return. It is possible to emulate love, but not trust. That is why I affirm that if we trust our children we will be offering them, in addition to trust, the genuine experience of love.
Love is the highest experience within false power. If you go through it, when you cross the frontier of love, trust may arise. Then you are no longer under the law of the need for love, but under the law of power, since love has been transformed into something else. Until the moment when love is going to manifest itself, it is a system of interconnection and unconscious connectivity, but when it comes out through an ‘I’ that loses power in the process, it begins to transmute itself into trust.
From that moment on, trust takes care of everything, since trust is a transformation of love, while love is trust transformed outward. For me the secret is that first there is the exit and then the entrance. That is, first you love, then you trust. IT IS THE GREAT SECRET OF SURRENDER: I open myself to love another and for the other to love me, and then trust in the core of my Being will inevitably arise. Only love can give us what, at the beginning, could not be trust, and Only trust can return us the love we have not been able to experience.
In practice, and I mean in many cases that I know, when you love without knowing what love is (which is logical by the way), what you love is a certain way you have to be loved, you don’t love who loves you, you love the Way you are loved. That way of loving with which we are opening ourselves to love is TRUST.
Alberto José Varela
