A friend of mine, the pastor of a Presbyterian church, told me that a lot of people say that they want to go to heaven. Except, he noticed wryly, no one wanted to die.

It's the same with surrender. No one wants to give anything away. We love our individuality, our independence, our willfulness. And so we love the very source of our pain and ignorance. Isn't this odd?

Surrender means to give up false ideas for the sake of the true. It does not imply deprivation, but rather devotion. Devotion means to love what is true.

Each time we let a false idea go, we experience a tiny death. This is the real instant of surrender; the moment that the ego dreads is in this moment of the death of wrong understanding. Sufi Sam said that we don't like solutions which interfere with our concepts. We are so closely related to our beliefs that when they are about to die, we feel as though we are about to die. We want to go to heaven, but we don't want to die. We want to feed our delusions with vitamins and minerals and all kinds of supplements for eternal life.

One belief that we have a hard time letting go of is that the world is a material place. It is a physical world, but it is so in relation to our sense organs and mind. With a keen eye, however, we can see that this "physical" world is an undulating ocean of consciousness, of light masquerading as matter.

I remember a talk that Muktananda gave in 1979. He said that when the world is seen through the lens of conventional thinking, we see men and women and a thousand other forms and objects. But when the world is seen through the telescope of the Self, there is only scintillating consciousness.

These telescopes are given out at the door to heaven, and heaven is right here where we all live, if we will let die what must die in order to know this.