Surrender · “Let Go to Receive”
Behrend's Release of the Picture
Having formed the mental picture, deliberately stop arranging the means: set only the quality and direction of the desire, hand the ‘how’ to the Universal Creative Power, and rest in calm, non-strained expectancy without anxiety or excitement.
Once the picture is set, stop arranging the means. Decide only the quality and direction of what you want and let the details and channel take care of themselves. Drop strain and excitement; affirm the law once, then turn to daily life in calm expectation. When a small circumstance points the right way, act on it — but never try to force the route.
What it is
The second half of Behrend’s method, and the half most people skip. Once the mental picture is made, the work is to stop arranging the means. You determine only the quality and direction of what you want — “expansion in a certain direction, whether of health, wealth, or what not” — and then “let specific details take care of themselves.” Arranging the circumstances “is the work of Creative Power itself.
It will build its own forms of expression quite naturally, if you will allow it, and save you a great deal of needless anxiety.” This is Behrend’s distinctively Mental-Science form of surrender, and it differs from its neighbours.
Hawkins’ “letting go” releases a feeling; the Sedona Method releases wanting; Neville’s “order then wait” waits on an imaginal act’s “appointed hour.” Behrend releases the management of means to an impersonal “Originating Creative Principle” that is “the universal here and everlasting now” and “creates its own vehicles through which to operate.” She frames the failure mode precisely: trying “to compel the Power to work out your picture on the special lines that you think it should. would soon exhaust you and hinder the fulfillment of your purpose.”
The Method
- Make and hold the picture first. Release presupposes a clear picture already set.
- Set the quality, not the machinery. “You are making a mental picture for the purpose of determining the quality you are giving to the previously undifferentiated substance. rather than to arrange the specific circumstances for its manifestation.”
- Stop dictating the channel. Do not make fulfilment “contingent upon certain persons or conditions.” The result may arrive “through some other [channel] of whose existence you had no idea” — direction matters, not the route.
- Refuse strain and excitement. “Strenuous effort defeats your purpose, and suggests the consciousness of an adverse force to be fought against.” Troward (whom she quotes) cautions keeping “all excitement out of [your] minds in the first flush of realization.”
- Affirm the law, then rest. Behrend quotes Troward’s Edinburgh Lectures: “affirm that our knowledge of the Law is sufficient reason for a calm expectation of a corresponding result. We can then turn to the affairs of our daily life with the calm assurance that the initial conditions are either there already or will soon come into view.”
- Wait without digging it up. “If we do not at once see [the conditions], let us rest content with the knowledge that the spiritual prototype is already in existence and wait till some circumstance pointing in the desired direction begins to show itself.” (Sourcing note: from Your Invisible Power, Ch. IV and “Things to Remember” §5–7, with quoted material Behrend cites from Troward’s Edinburgh Lectures; the numbered structure is an attributed paraphrase.)
Source & Lineage
Genevieve Behrend, Your Invisible Power (1921), especially “Things to Remember in Using Your Thought Power” (points 5–7) and the long Troward quotation she reproduces from the Edinburgh Lectures chapter “Causes and Conditions.” It is the release-counterpart to her active picturing method, and the direct application of Troward’s “do not dig up the seed.”
Common refinements
Trying to compel the means. The headline error: forcing the Power “on the special lines that you think it should” work — exhausting and self-defeating.
- Re-opening the question. Checking “is it working?” re-impresses lack. Set it, then rest in “calm expectation.”
- Confusing release with passivity. When “some circumstance pointing in the desired direction begins to show itself,” you act on it. Release is non-interference with the means, not refusal to move.
- Excitement as a leak. Even joyful over-excitement “in the first flush of realization” is to be quieted into settled assurance.