A good analogy to the effortlessness of the surrender we are discussing is spending years practicing how to swing a golf club, and then reaching a point one day when you swing the club and it is completely effortless. Likewise, initially, you have to exert great effort to be present with yourself: You have to remind yourself continually to feel your body and remember yourself. The more you work at it, the easier it becomes, until you reach a point when the remembering happens by itself. So there is a place for effort, and the deeper your practice becomes, the less effort there will be. – Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas, ch. 13
True will is actually nothing but complete surrender to what is experienced in this moment. From the perspective of the adult, true will is complete surrender of what is usually called “will,” and so is functionally the opposite. True will does not involve surrender to another person, but to yourself, to life, to your experience, to the truth of now. Surrender to the truth of now does not mean that you see what is happening and don’t care. That’s not surrender. Surrender means complete willingness to be with your experience, including your emotional reactions, whether they are pleasurable or frustrated. You are steadfast with the truth. – Diamond Heart Book Two: The Freedom to Be, ch. 8
I realize that by totally welcoming its objective emptiness, the individual self has surrendered its existence into the mysterious depths of the absolute. The emptiness of the self, which I have experienced on many levels as various kinds of insufficiency, and which I have just been feeling as poverty, reveals itself as the complete lightness and freedom of the black crystalline truth. The poverty is nothing but the inexhaustible void, which I have misunderstood by experiencing it through the lie of my independent existence and capacity. As I, the individual self, accept my poverty and relinquish my hold, I in effect accept and embrace the complete voidness of the absolute. Here, I recognize that I am the absolute depth of Being, the source of all plenums.
The infinity of silence is what remains: luminous stillness, absolute transparency, and indescribable intimacy. – Luminous Night’s Journey: An Autobiographical Fragment, Ch. 8
Surrendering to the Holy Will is freedom because then you are not placing any constraints, preferences, or conditions upon reality. Everything that happens is fine with you. This degree of surrender must happen at all levels. It cannot be a superficial surrender based on an idea of what is spiritually correct. You can’t simply say to yourself, “I surrender to this,” while in your heart you wish something else were happening, thereby rejecting your present experience. True surrender means not seeking or efforting. It means totally flowing with the unfolding of reality, “going with the flow,” as we used to say in the sixties. It means surrendering to God’s will, the flow of the Universal Mind. Whatever He wills is completely welcomed without resistance, without judgment, and without preference. – Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas, Ch. 13