Are You Bargaining With God?

Is this you? Are you bargaining with God? Are you haggling to keep your identity, your treasured thoughts and beliefs? “I want freedom, peace and love, but I don’t want to lose my treasured identity. I’ve worked too hard to develop it, protect it and improve it. Can’t I have both? Can’t my ego awaken?” The answer is simple. No.  This is the bargaining we do that keeps us asleep, that keeps us suffering.

When I speak about surrender, I’ve had students actually say, “Please don’t use that word. I hate that word.” Of course you do. The ego hates that word. Spiritual surrender means total surrender. There are no halfway measures that work. And it means complete surrender of the ego. That’s what awakening really is, a complete surrender of the sense of being a unique separate self. A complete surrender of everything, of you, of the world, of all your ideas and beliefs about God, of everything.

This is what God is trying to sell you: the freedom, peace, love and bliss of Truth. God is trying to sell you God. Not the God of your beliefs, but actually God, the real deal. And God is also trying to get you to realize that you are not separate from this, not separate from anything, even God. There is no separation here except in your mind.

And this is what your bargaining is about. You’re trying to hold on to this limited sense of a separate self and all the suffering that you know comes along with it even if it means you lose out on Nirvana, Heaven, your True Infinite Self, God and freedom from all suffering. What kind of a bargain is that? Are you nuts? No, really? How long are you going to believe those thoughts that tell you the ego can figure it out, the ego can know God, the ego can find a way to awaken and be free of suffering? How has it worked so far? You can study every spiritual book in existence and it’s not going to get you any closer.

What it takes is surrender, complete surrender. This is what God is telling you. This is what your True Infinite Self is telling you. This is what Truth is telling you. Yet you prefer to listen to the voice of the ego again because it’s telling you you don’t have to surrender. It’s telling you surrender is a very bad idea. It’s telling you, you would be nothing without the ego.

Keep bargaining if you want to. Keep haggling. Keep listening to this inner voice of the ego. Keep believing that the price of surrender is just too steep a price to pay for Paradise, for Truth, for God. It’s up to you.