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.