| I need to completely surrender control to my spiritual guide at my heart. It is like I transform myself into a puppet which he controls. It is almost like I make myself an inanimate object, like a car or a robot, but he is the one controlling me. He is the life within me. The goal is to have my every action be his. I need to completely abandon any self-will. I have no agenda other than to surrender myself to him. He then takes over and uses me to liberate all beings. |
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| There is a difference between ‘surrendering control to the guru’ and ‘doing nothing.’ I am engaging in an action, and the action is to create the conditions so that I hand over control to him. I am not handing over control to my delusions and letting them run wild. When my delusions are functioning, I am their puppet. I need to create a stillness within me, a stillness of my delusions and ordinary mind, so that he may take over. I must ‘maintain’ the stillness on an on-going basis, which requires tremendous mindfulness in every moment. |
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| To surrender control to my guru, internally, I must do the following: |
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| 1. I need to actively align my motivation with his. His motivation is to liberate all beings. To accomplish this, his motivation is to forge me into a Buddha so that I may be an instrument of his peace. I need to make active within my own mind this same wish. |
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| 2. I need to abandon my own plans and agenda. I let him decide what I do next, what I need to work on, etc. I adopt a mind of adventure, ready to see what he has in store next for me. |
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| 3. I must make and maintain my ordinary mind completely still. My ordinary mind creates interference and it also takes over. When my ordinary mind is manifest, it takes control of me and does deluded things with me. If it is in control, how can my guru be in control? |
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| 4. In an active way, I must wish him to work through me. Depending on the circumstance, I make requests such as ‘reveal to me what I need to do now’, ‘what should I understand from this situation?’, ‘please speak through me, fill me with your words’, ‘what do you want me to do?’, ‘what next?’, etc. |
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| We need to dissolve the guru into our heart, and completely surrender to him. Our goal is to become his puppet. “My only wish is for you to take over completely my life.” We abandon any independent self-will, and surrender ourselves completely to his control. He takes over, and controls us like a puppet. To effectively do this, we need to: |
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| 1. Make our ordinary mind completely still. |
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| 2. Abandon any independent self-will or plan or agenda of what we think is best, and instead surrender completely to him. |
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| 3. With deep faith, wish for him to take control of us and to do with us what he wishes. |
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| 4. Most importantly, we need to align our motivation with his. One effective way to do this is to generate simply the wish to serve him, to help him accomplish his wishes. We become his servant. What does he wish for? He wishes for us to improve our qualifications so that we can be of greater and greater benefit to living beings, eventually being able to guide them to enlightenment. |
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| I need to become like an Avatar, and GSBH is the one controlling me. I am a tool to be handed over to the guru so that he can do with me what he wishes, use me in the best possible way. I need to not only surrender myself in this life, but I need to surrender all my future lives so that from this time forward, he is in control. |
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| When we start our practices or sadhanas, we are starting from the space of our ordinary self. With the refuge contemplations, we become aware of the fact that our mind is under the control of the devil of our ordinary mind and it will drag us to hell from which there is no escape. We then visualize the guru, who seems like an ‘other’ but is actually our true self. We then wish to draw closer to and come under the influence of our guru so that he may deliver us to the pure land. Our sense of I is currently indistinguishable from our ordinary mind. We think they are one and the same. This is an aspect of our self-grasping ignorance. We fail to make the distinction between our I, which is a mere name a label which is not the problem, and our ordinary mind, which is its current basis of imputation. We think we ARE our ordinary mind. We need to break this identification, and long to and make effort to transfer our sense of I to the guru’s mind, which is in reality our pure mind. Then, through our tantric practice, we dissolve the guru into our heart, into our root mind, and train in identifying with his mind as our own until we feel this to be our living experience. We then must familarize ourselves with this experience again and again over a long period of time, both in meditation and outside of it, until it feels to be us more than our old ordinary self. We will come to relate to this purity as ourselves, who we are. Then, when we fall back into our ordinary self, we will think, ‘this is not me, this is not who I am.’ |
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| We are currently trapped in the spell of our ordinary mind, and we must wish to break free. We do so by allowing ourselves to be drawn to the guru, staying focused on his voice, his wisdom, and applying effort to move towards him. We need to turn our back on our negativity and delusions. We need to leave them behind. We can do this by confessing them, acknowledging them as misguided and wrong and deceptive and taking us in the wrong direction combined with wishing to now turn towards the light of our guru. |
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| I need to completely submit myself to my guru at my heart. I need to want for him to completely take over and I do whatever he says without questions, with total faith, like a good soldier. We submit internally, not externally. My guru wants to take me to the pure land, but to get there I have to allow him to take me there. I do not have the power to get there on my own, I need to be taken there by him. I need to have deep experience of submission and doing exactly what he says without hesitation and allowing him to completely take over. If I have this experience, then at the time of my death I dissolve him into my heart, I generate the pure wish to go to the pure land, and then I submit myself to him requesting, ‘please take me to the pure land.’ As long as I am trying to retain even a slight degree of control by my ordinary self, I can’t get there. I need to renounce the control of my ordinary self completely and surrender it completely to my guru. Since my ordinary self is a false self fabricated by my distorted and deluded mind, to hold on to its control is, paradoxically, what leaves me uncontrolled. It tricks me into thinking my freedom depends on it retaining control, but by holding on to such control I reinforce and feed that which makes my mind uncontrolled in the first place. The point is if I am going to be able to completely surrender myself to the guru to take me to the pure land at the time of my death, I need deep experience of doing this during my life. Retaining control with my ordinary self, believing this is what makes me free, is actually what makes me a slave to my deluded mind and what leaves me out of control. |
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| Externally, we surrend ourselves completely to Dorje Shugden that he arrange whatever needs to be. Internally, we surrend ourselves completely to our guru at our heart, to use us as his avatar in this world, to guide us, to act through us, to reveal to us what we need to do, to teach us, etc. |
Kadampa Working Dad 
It’s interesting, even after many, many years of practicing this there is still a big battle for control. Intellectually i know that i must let my pure self, my guru, act through me and so on but it is still challenging. Usually in times of big grasping it is easier or big decisions i am reminded to rely on the inner guide.
Reliance using this practice creates pure karma, out with samsara because it comes from a pure source. Blending/merging with this enlightened mind is immensely purifying because it changes the basis of ‘I’. This though hammers self-cherishing and grasping so there can be a lot of resistance to even contemplating it, let alone practicing it daily.
I wrote a very similar post where i found myself attacking my real self, it’s like i see Vajrasattva as a torturer, being afraid of that power that immense light and love. People would naturally feel that if they met a Buddha it would be wonderful, but i reckon many people would turn away from it. I guess this is why BUddhas don’t go around telling everyone who they really are. Purity can reveal who we really are and that is sometimes not how we usually see ourself. This is another reason why we also train in the emptiness of the guru-deity.
Apparently, the same happens in the Bardo where enlightened beings appear and they frighten the untrained mind because of their pure illumination. This can be likened in Tantra to us experiencing the harsh appearances in the charnel grounds. When we die, we will see all sorts of frightening visions yet we realise their empty nature. Joy! Sorry to hijack the post!