ACCEPTANCE OF THE NOW

 

You mentioned “surrender” a few times. I don’t like that idea. It

sounds somewhat fatalistic. If we always accept the way things are,

we are not going to make any effort to improve them. It seems to me

what progress is all about, both in our personal lives and collectively,

is not to accept the limitations of the present but to strive to go

beyond them and create something better. If we hadn’t done this, we

would still be living in caves. How do you reconcile surrender with

changing things and getting things done?

To some people, surrender may have negative connotations, implying

defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of life, becoming

lethargic, and so on. True surrender, however, is something entirely

different. It does not mean to passively put up with whatever

situation you find yourself in and to do nothing about it. Nor does it

mean to cease making plans or initiating positive action.

Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than

opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience

the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present

moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish

inner resistance to what is. Inner resistance is to say “no” to what is,

through mental judgment and emotional negativity. It becomes

particularly pronounced when things “go wrong,” which means that

there is a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of your

mind and what is. That is the pain gap. If you have lived long enough,

you will know that things “go wrong” quite often. It is precisely at

those times that surrender needs to be practiced if you want to

eliminate pain and sorrow from your life. Acceptance of what is

immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects

you with Being. Resistance is the mind.

Surrender is a purely inner phenomenon. It does not mean that on the

outer level you cannot take action and change the situation. In fact, it

is not the overall situation that you need to accept when you

surrender, but just the tiny segment called the Now.

For example, if you were stuck in the mud somewhere, you wouldn’t

say: “Okay, I resign myself to being stuck in the mud.” Resignation is

not surrender. You don’t need to accept an undesirable or unpleasant

life situation. Nor do you need to deceive yourself and say that there

is nothing wrong with being stuck in the mud. No. You recognize fully

that you want to get out of it. You then narrow your attention down to

the present moment without mentally labeling it in any way. This

means that there is no judgment of the Now. Therefore, there is no

resistance, no emotional negativity. You accept the “isness” of this

moment. Then you take action and do all that you can to get out of

the mud. Such action I call positive action. It is far more effective than

negative action, which arises out of anger, despair, or frustration.

Until you achieve the desired result, you continue to practice

surrender by refraining from labeling the Now.

Let me give you a visual analogy to illustrate the point I am making.

You are walking along a path at night, surrounded by a thick fog. But

you have a powerful flashlight that cuts through the fog and creates a

narrow, clear space in front of you. The fog is your life situation, which

includes past and future; the flashlight is your conscious presence; the

clear space is the Now.

Non-surrender hardens your psychological form, the shell of the ego,

and so creates a strong sense of separateness. The world around you

and people in particular come to be perceived as threatening. The

unconscious compulsion to destroy others through judgment arises, as

does the need to compete and dominate. Even nature becomes your

enemy and your perceptions and interpretations are governed by fear.

The mental disease that we call paranoia is only a slightly more acute

form of this normal but dysfunctional state of consciousness.

Not only your psychological form but also your physical form — your

body — becomes hard and rigid through resistance. Tension arises in

different parts of the body, and the body as a whole contracts. The

free flow of life energy through the body, which is essential for its

healthy functioning, is greatly restricted. Bodywork and certain forms

of physical therapy can be helpful in restoring this flow, but unless you

practice surrender in your everyday life, those things can only give

temporary symptom relief since the cause — the resistance pattern —

has not been dissolved.

There is something within you that remains unaffected by the

transient circumstances that make up your life situation, and only

through surrender do you have access to it. It is your life, your very

Being — which exists eternally in the timeless realm of the present.

Finding this life is “the one thing that is needed” that Jesus talked

about.

If you find your life situation unsatisfactory or even intolerable, it is

only by surrendering first that you can break the unconscious

resistance pattern that perpetuates that situation.

Surrender is perfectly compatible with taking action, initiating change,

or achieving goals. But in the surrendered state a totally different

energy, a different quality, flows into your doing. Surrender

reconnects you with the source-energy of Being, and if your doing is

infused with Being, it becomes a joyful celebration of life energy that

takes you more deeply into the Now. Through nonresistance, the

quality of your consciousness and, therefore, the quality of whatever

you are doing or creating is enhanced immeasurably. The results will

then look after themselves and reflect that quality. We could call this

surrendered action. It is not work as we have known it for thousands

of years. As more humans awaken, the word work is going to

disappear from our vocabulary, and perhaps a new word will be

created to replace it.

It is the quality of your consciousness at this moment that is the main

determinant of what kind of future you will experience, so to

surrender is the most important thing you can do to bring about

positive change. Any action you take is secondary. No truly positive

action can arise out of an unsurrendered state of consciousness.

I can see that if I am in a situation that is unpleasant or unsatisfactory

and I completely accept the moment as it is, there will be no suffering

or unhappiness. I will have risen above it. But I still can’t quite see

where the energy or motivation for taking action and bringing about

change would come from if there isn’t a certain amount of

dissatisfaction.

In the state of surrender, you see very clearly what needs to be done,

and you take action, doing one thing at a time and focusing on one

thing at a time. Learn from nature: See how everything gets

accomplished and how the miracle of life unfolds without

dissatisfaction or unhappiness. That’s why Jesus said: “Look at the

lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin.”

If your overall situation is unsatisfactory or unpleasant, separate out

this instant and surrender to what is. That’s the flashlight cutting

through the fog. Your state of consciousness then ceases to be

controlled by external conditions. You are no longer coming from

reaction and resistance.

Then look at the specifics of the situation. Ask yourself, “Is there

anything I can do to change the situation, improve it, or remove

myself from it?” If so, you take appropriate action. Focus not on the

one hundred things that you will or may have to do at some future

time but on the one thing that you can do now. This doesn’t mean you

should not do any planning. It may well be that planning is the one

thing you can do now. But make sure you don’t start to run “mental

movies,” project yourself into the future, and so lose the Now. Any

action you take may not bear fruit immediately. Until it does — do not

resist what is. If there is no action you can take, and you cannot

remove yourself from the situation either, then use the situation to

make you go more deeply into surrender, more deeply into the Now,

more deeply into Being. When you enter this timeless dimension of

the present, change often comes about in strange ways without the

need for a great deal of doing on your part. Life becomes helpful and

cooperative. If inner factors such as fear, guilt, or inertia prevented

you from taking action, they will dissolve in the light of your conscious

presence.

Do not confuse surrender with an attitude of “I can’t be bothered

anymore” or “I just don’t care anymore.” If you look at it closely, you

will find that such an attitude is tainted with negativity in the form of

hidden resentment and so is not surrender at all but masked

resistance. As you surrender, direct your attention inward to check if

there is any trace of resistance left inside you. Be very alert when you

do so; otherwise, a pocket of resistance may continue to hide in some

dark corner in the form of a thought or an unacknowledged emotion.