Surrender · “Let Go to Receive”
The Receptive Attitude
Deliberately stop straining and ‘doing,’ and take a calm, trustful, receptive posture in which deeper wisdom, strength, and healing can be felt to inflow — distinct from active affirmation or willed concentration.
Stop straining. The deeper power “never intrudes” and won’t come “if our thought is too active” — so drop the effort and trust instead. “All it asks is receptive listening”: become quietly open and absorb, like a plant in sunlight. When pain, fatigue, or a hard feeling rises and you’re bracing against it, “let it come” — relax the grip and let nature finish its work. Hold this trustful, restful openness as a standing attitude. (Adjunct, not a cure — keep your care.)
What it is
For Dresser, the attitude you take matters more than any technique — and the master attitude of the inner life is receptivity. It is the deliberate decision to stop generating, willing, and straining, and instead become quietly open, trustful, and non-resistant, so that something deeper — wisdom, strength, calm, the body’s own healing — can come through.
He states the core almost as a rule: “All it asks is receptive listening.” What makes Dresser’s receptivity distinctive is its sharp opposition to effort. The Spirit, the deeper power, “never intrudes”; over-active thought and anxious willing actually block it: “It will not come if we doubt, if we fear, or — note this especially — if our thought is too active.” And on the physical side he gives the receptive attitude its most concrete form in the instruction “let it come” — relaxing the grip of resistance and letting nature’s restorative power do its work. This is surrender-and-receive, not affirm-and-command.
The Method
Faithful to Dresser (The Power of Silence, “The Immanent God,” “The Meaning of Suffering”):
- Notice the strain — and drop it. Receptivity begins where willing leaves off. Dresser’s recurring caution is against being “too active,” against “nerving” oneself, “straining after ideals.” The first act is simply to stop trying so hard.
- Take the trustful posture. Replace doubt and fear with calm confidence: “it comes, we hardly know how, if we trust.” Trust “as the lost hunter trusts his horse in the forest” — confidence without management.
- Listen, don’t manufacture. “All it asks is receptive listening.” You are not producing an answer or a state; you are becoming open enough to receive one. Absorb, in his image, “as the plant absorbs from the sunlight.”
- In trouble or pain, “let it come.” Dresser’s vivid case: a woman in severe pain who had been “nerving herself to endure” was told the suffering was worsened by resistance — “let it come.” She “relaxed mentally, and surrendered the hold by which she had tried to endure the pain, became quiet, and fell asleep.” Stop bracing; let the restorative process complete.
- Hold it as a standing attitude. Receptivity is not only for the still hour. Dresser frames the whole spiritual life as “calling for trustful co-operation and restfulness on our part” — a posture carried into ordinary living. (Sourcing note: quoted phrases — “receptive listening,” “too active,” “let it come,” “relaxed mentally, and surrendered the hold,” “trustful co-operation and restfulness” — are Dresser’s own words; the structure is an attributed reconstruction.)
Source & Lineage
Horatio Dresser (1866–1954), New Thought’s historian and editor of The Quimby Manuscripts, inherited the receptive ideal from the Quimby–Evans mind-cure and from his mother Annetta Dresser, whose work with the sick he explicitly credits for the “let it come” interpretation of suffering. Contrast (don’t duplicate):
- Evans’s interior receptivity frames receptivity as Swedenborgian influx with a fourfold formula (“tranquil desire, passive receptivity, unresisting willingness, serene trust”). Dresser’s is the plainer, philosopher’s version — “receptive listening,” “let it come” — without the Swedenborgian scaffolding.
- Trine’s receptive silence pairs receptivity with an active realizing affirmation of inflow. Dresser’s receptivity is purely non-active — its whole point is that affirming/willing “too actively” blocks reception.
- Hawkins’s Letting Go and the Sedona Method release a specific feeling in the body. Dresser’s is broader: a standing trustful openness to a deeper power, with “let it come” as its in-the-moment form.
- Hooponopono / “cleaning” uses phrases to clear and hand over. Dresser uses no formula at all — only the attitude.
Common refinements
Trying to be receptive. The contradiction at the centre of the practice: effort defeats it. “Too active” thought blocks reception; let go of the trying itself.
- Receptivity as passivity toward real problems. Dresser means trustful co-operation, not inaction. “Let it come” applies to resistance and bracing — not to neglecting treatment, conflict, or responsibility.
- Waiting for fireworks. Reception is quiet — a settling, a softening, a fresh thought — not a spectacle.
- Refinement: enter it from the still hour; use “let it come” specifically when you catch yourself bracing against pain, fatigue, or a hard feeling.