surrender

In this last episode, in the series on attitudes, I'm going to talk about surrender.

The spiritual path leads inevitably to a state of surrender. Of course, we often resist this. For most of us, surrender has negative connotations. Especially for the masculine ego, surrender is failure. Surrender is an acknowledgement that we have no power, no control, that we are the mercy of existence. Whatever happens to us, happens on the whim of god. It's the ultimate defeat in a way. And yet, the spiritual path takes us to that place inexorably. There's no way to avoid it.

Of course, there is resistance to this surrender. And that's the ego. Our ego wants to feel in control. It wants to feel self empowered. And yet, in the end, all of that is an illusion. And the spiritual journey takes us to a space where we see illusions are illusions.

So surrender is, whether we liked it or not, our destiny, once we've set foot on the spiritual path. And surrender, in the end, can be felt in a positive way. It's positive in a couple of senses. One is that it's truthful. We've seen that we are not in control of things. We've surrendered to existence because, in fact, we have always been surrendered to existence. We've just been denying it and living under illusions. So surrender is a truthful state of being. But it's also positive in another sense.

As we journey through life, we can begin to see life from our broader perspective. The twists and turns and unlikely happenstances. We can see how things that we expected to be negative had a positive effect as well, and vice versa. So slowly we can come to trust existence.

And surrendering in this way, surrendering to existence, is a great relaxation. It feels like we're being held, looked after, by existence. It takes a lot of weight off our shoulders. We can afford to relax.

So surrender is felt as a positive thing, as long as we're not bound up in this egoic way, with being in control, with being self important, with feeling powerful. Each of us does have a natural power, but it's not a power over other people, or even a power over the situation. It's a power in itself, the power of being. It feels good, this power. It feels vital and alive. It feels grounded and solid. But it doesn't need to be in control of things. It doesn't need to dominate. It doesn't need to dominate other people. It doesn't need to dominate the world. It doesn't even need to dominate the situation, the moment. We can afford to surrender to the moment.

And that surrender is a feminine space. It's a space of receptivity. And that's how we really feel the moment. That's how we really meet the rest of life, in this receptive space of surrender.

So surrender, being in a state of surrender, is beautiful in this spiritual sense. And as I've said, it's inevitable anyway. As with the other attitudes, though, we can encourage it. We can practice a little at surrendering. And there are many ways to do this.

One example is to start making decisions by tossing a coin. Instead of deciding with your mind what you're going to have for lunch, simply toss a coin and let the coin decide. You've handed over the decision making to the coin, which is existence, of course. That's one example of a way to practice surrendering.

Another thing we can do is to pay attention to situations where we're feeling frustrated and disempowered. We want to be in control, but we're not. And just accepting that, realising the truth of that, and making a positive effort to surrender to the moment. This is basically acceptance, which we looked at in a previous episode. And surrender and acceptance are very closely related. For me, surrender is going a step further than acceptance. It's an even deeper let go into existence, a more profound surrendering of the sense of a separate self, especially with regard to this feeling of being in control of things. In the end, we are not in control. So let's acknowledge that and live with an attitude of surrender.