I have found that most people into awakening, enlightenment and non-duality see abundance as an egoic desire born of New Thought materialist spirituality – something for Oprah fans and not genuine spiritual seekers who attend satsangs and meditative retreats. Yet being abundant has more in common with the abundance of being than they realize.

The basis of genuine intention-manifesting techniques is abiding in the heart and in awareness, gratitude for everything in your life – good and bad, a non-judgmental perspective of your life circumstances, surrendering to Universe’s higher plan for you, and the understanding that abundance is non-dual such that it is always there but we inadvertently cut ourselves off from it.

Therefore, resonating with abundance is actually a form of spiritual surrender.

Surrender is also co-creation between what we want to experience in life and what the Universe wants us to experience in the moment. This is why the higher octave of intention-manifesting is co-creation through the law of affinity rather than attraction. It is a gift, not a power, born of sharing, not controlling; relating, not manipulating, such that it takes two – the personal and the Universal – to be holistically one.

Of course spiritual awakening and enlightenment is much more than resonating with abundance since it liberates us from misidentifying with the story of “I” rather than just improves its lot, i.e. it is more in line with self-transcendence than self-actualization.

But maybe nowadays the greater challenge is to surrender by reclaiming our lives in the world through co-creating with abundance rather than by sacrificing our earthly desires for spiritually materialistic ones. And if spiritual seekers are honest with themselves, they will see how their search for Oneness is basically the search for abundance in a spiritually sanitized form.

Yet Oneness is what it is because it is what is in that it is true to what is happening right now. It is simply co-creation between what we want to experience in life and what this moment wants us to experience. And when we open ourselves to the present there is a letting go of everything we hold ourselves to be, which brings with it an outpouring of joy and gratitude that anything exists at all.

And with this joy and gratitude comes a profound sense of grace, of being blessed, and a melting into a love so intimate yet transcendental that it is more familiar to us than the very self we take ourselves to be. This gratitude for life, exactly as it is, is the ground of abundance because everything is a gift given unconditionally through grace and love. It is also the ground of Oneness.

Love, abundance and Oneness are always here, but we have to start loving life unconditionally to receive their gifts. And the key to this is surrender.

Author's Bio: 

Mark H. Kelly has a background in applied physics, software development, and ESL teaching, although his real passion has always been spirituality.

Mark has spent several years on a spiritual odyssey traveling the world learning from traditional wisdom keepers and modern spiritual innovators. He is passionate about the modern renaissance of the life-affirming, full spectrum understanding of Oneness and enlightenment that he has come to know as holistic nonduality.

Mark is a contributing author in the best-selling book series "Adventures in Manifesting" in the edition exploring the power of Love and Oneness.