Previously, I wrote about Offering it Back, then Offering Back Everything.
When we shift from being a “me” that wants to control into recognizing ourselves as wholeness, we can directly experience the benefits of offering everything that arises in life back to source. Our benefits, our achievements, our challenges – we can offer everything back.
If you allow the flow of life, everything arises from source to help you heal, grow, or resolve. Curving it back to source continues the process. This amplifies the benefits and supports resolving what is completing.
Where do you offer it back to? Source. Where is that for you? The experience of the location of source evolves. At first it may seem deep within in an abstract place. But over time it both expands and moves to the surface. We find ourselves immersed in and surrounded by source.
This means source is everywhere. We can offer everything back to anywhere and everywhere.
Some of us have a preference to offer back to a symbol of our source such as a form of the Divine, or to a person such as one’s mate or teacher. Some will have a deep sense of source within. And so on. Go with your experience.
Davidya
Thank you for writing about offering back. I have been practicing this as well and have found it quite powerful. 🙂
You’re welcome, Lorey. Dorothy Rowe gave it language.
A confirmation as well for me and a greater understanding of the breath and depth and it’s benefits. Began in 2012, but not using nearly enough, lol. Seeing/experiencing the mechanics is much more fruitful all around. 🙂
🙂 Allow it to unfold as it does. We don’t want to try and control it. The idea of articles like this is just to make it more conscious.
David, I first heard of you several weeks ago with the last BATGAP interview, and have been deeply enjoying your book and blog since. Thank you so much. Such a deep look in a no-nonsense package. I love it.
Thanks, Scott. Welcome.
If we aren’t awake would this exercise be “mood making”?
Hi Carl
I talked about approaches in the first article (first link above), like the example Maharishi gave. The key is transcending so we learn to allow. When we’re not claiming everything as mine, we can offer it back freely.
But yes, I didn’t talk about mood making. This is where we make a story about our actions. “I am doing the right thing.” This comes with a fake emotion we can call making a mood. “See how grateful I am?” But it’s all just a me posturing. There is no letting go so all we offer is a bit of performance.
As we disentangle from these personal identifications and learn to surrender, We can begin to truly offer it back.
Yes, it does become much easier after awakening. But even there, it still depends on letting go. People can let go enough to shift but still have lots of entanglements to work through. This depends on how much work they did prior.
Thee are also lots of people who can let go very effectively but have not yet released the core identification that triggers awakening.
So we can say this can be a matter of degree. And it can take practice. Some areas of life we might be very free in. Others, more contracted.
A sublime horizon (for most of us)…
“All our actions, all our efforts, even our sins and stumblings and sufferings and struggles are obscurely or consciously, known to us and seen or else unknown and in a disguise, governed in their last result by the One. All is turned towards him in his numberless forms and offered through them to the single Omnipresence.
. . .
Every moment and every movement of our being is to be resolved into a continuous and a devoted self-giving to the Eternal. All our actions, not less the smallest and most ordinary and trifling than the greatest and most uncommon and noble, must be performed as consecrated acts. Our individualised nature must live in the single consciousness of an inner and outer movement dedicated to Something that is beyond us and greater than our ego. No matter what the gift or to whom it is presented by us, there must be a consciousness in the act that we are presenting it to the one divine Being in all beings. Our commonest or most grossly material actions must assume this sublimated character; when we eat, we should be conscious that we are giving our food to that Presence in us; it must be a sacred offering in a temple and the sense of a mere physical need or self-gratification must pass away from us. In any great labour, in any high discipline, in any difficult or noble enterprise, whether undertaken for ourselves, for others or for the race, it will no longer be possible to stop short at the idea of the race, of ourselves or of others. The thing we are doing must be consciously offered as a sacrifice of works, not to these, but either through them or directly to the One Godhead; the Divine Inhabitant who was hidden by these figures must be no longer hidden but ever present to our soul, our mind, our sense. The workings and results of our acts must be put in the hands of that One in the feeling that that Presence is the Infinite and Most High by whom alone our labour and our aspiration are possible. For in his being all takes place; for him all labour and aspiration are taken from us by Nature and offered on his altar. Even in those things in which Nature is herself very plainly the worker and we only the witnesses of her working and its containers and supporters, there should be the same constant memory and insistent consciousness of a work and of its divine Master. Our very inspiration and respiration, our very heart-beats can and must be made conscious in us as the living rhythm of the universal sacrifice.
…
It is evident, to begin with, that, even if such a discipline is begun without devotion, it leads straight and inevitably towards the highest devotion possible; for it must deepen naturally into the completest adoration imaginable, the most profound God-love.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga
I read your previous post but I am still not clear about what thoughts or actions are associated with “offering it back”. Can you offer an example.
Hi Rob
For example it’s used in Dorothy Rowe’s Healing Algorithm. (Scroll about half way down)
https://davidya.ca/2018/10/13/the-healing-algorithm/
But more completely, it’s all thoughts and actions. When we offer everything back to source, we increase the power of our thoughts and actions. We also shift from seeing them as “mine.”
As we step into the flow of life, this because automatic. But sometimes we need a little prod to break old habits.
Thank you for the quick response David. In either description the word “offering” is used without definition, leaving one to interpret it in the usual sense of the word. That is still confusing. The algorithm mentions “offering it to the silence”. That implies duality. Are you talking about an act of imagination or visualization, perhaps even is a lower state of savikalpa samadhi? In the silence i have known there is no-thing to give or to receive. I am still confused. Is “offering everything” another way of describing surrender?
Good point, Rob.
Dorothy usually talks from a Self Realization perspective where the absolute and relative are distinct, a duality, 2 fullnesses. (Some nondualists ignore the world as an illusion and call this oneness.)
Add in refined perception, and you recognize that all this arises from That and returns to That. That’s what this article is talking about, as mentioned.
No, not visualization. When life is experienced as flow, you can direct the flow with attention. You can have it go out into the world or you can loop it (offer it) back to source. This amplifies it.
And yes, surrender is another way to talk about this. 🙂
This isn’t something to try and figure out with the mind. Mind will just get in the way. It’s an approach to your direct experience. This is why Dorothy offers videos to walk you through it.
Got it. Thanks. OM
a little tip on Om. 🙂
https://davidya.ca/2015/02/07/the-one-true-sound/
Thank you, David. Yes: this really, really works☺
You’re welcome, Tomek