AWAKENING AND SURRENDER
Surrender comes when you no longer ask,
“Why is this happening to me?”1
ECKHART TOLLE
Awakening and surrender are always holding hands, dancing as a single movement, whether we speak of sleeping and waking in our daily life, the birth and death of the body, or awakening to the deepest Truth of who we are and dying to the illusion of what we are not. Spiritual egos love the idea of awakening, but not the idea of surrender. Neither awakening nor surrender can be accomplished by an illusory ego, even a spiritual ego. Living awake is living open to the moment and surrendering into its reality, the truth of now. This is not a passive way of living, but one that sees life from its perspective of wholeness—both the emptiness of its Source and the fullness of its infinite expressions. Surrender is simply yielding to rather than opposing the unfolding flow of life, opening fully to what is here now. It is in the absence of resistance that we experience the Presence that flows from the Heart of Awareness.
AWAKENING FROM AND SURRENDERING TO THE ABSOLUTE
Every morning, when we awaken from nighttime dreaming and from dreamless sleep, the feeling “I am” appears, and with it we begin to put on our identity clothing. Yet in deep, dreamless sleep, there is no perception of a self, a world, an “other,” or a god. We do not know if we are a man or a woman, Asian or Hispanic, married or single, parent or child. We do not know what we believe or even that we “exist.” In other words, our mind has temporarily disappeared in the Absolute dimension, and in the morning we awaken from our rest in the Absolute. If we dream, something in us may remember a dream we had while sleeping. What remembers? Were you there? What was there? Every night, we surrender our daytime wakefulness into sleep. We usually are happy if we can fall asleep quickly; it is generally something we look forward to. Consciousness appears to go to sleep, but what is Awake does not. Mind has been surrendered into essence.
When we are born, we awaken from a dark, wet world in utero, where we lived with the steady beat of our mother’s heart and the sloshing sounds of amniotic fluid as we moved about. We enter into a bright world of air rather than water, of the unmuffled sounds of voices, traffic, planes, music boxes, the wind blowing, people speaking to us—not through the medium of fluid, but through air. Our life in form takes another leap into consciousness.
When the body dies, we must surrender everything we have held on to—the life we called our own, the friends or family that may surround us, all of our possessions, our hopes for what we thought we wanted to accomplish or enjoy, everything we thought we were. At this point, there is no choice. Death will happen; we will be surrendered to the experience whether we want to surrender to it or not. We begin life surrendering the familiar warmth and wetness for a bold new world. We die surrendering whatever we cannot take with us, and we awaken to whatever continues. If, before the transformation called “death” of the body, we have discovered that our essential being is unborn and thus is undying, we know that is what continues. The Mystery that manifested as form is the same Mystery that continues with or without form.
WE SURRENDER OUR ILLUSORY SELF, NOT OUR AUTHENTICITY
When we speak of surrender, we are not talking about surrendering what is authentic in ourselves, nor are we talking about becoming submissive in our human relationships; we are talking about surrender of the illusory self. Surrender is a word fraught with associations with weakness, passivity, defeat, and vulnerability—all things that egos want to avoid. But when we realize that we have never had a moment’s breath, feeling, thought, or experience apart from the Spirit that animates our body-mind or the Awareness in which all is experienced or known, we realize we have never actually had a separate “self” to surrender! This recognition is very humbling to the ego, which has imagined it has been in control. As the egoic “self,” we have certainly had the perception of choice and have perceived the exercise of “will,” yet life’s causes and conditions have moved us moment to moment. As the Self, the Heart of Awareness, we are infinite potential. When we take a seat in our true Self, there is a power, presence, and authority within our Self. We feel it, sense it, and this allows us to be authentic, to live with integrity, to be real. To live in Truth is not about fixing an illusory “self.”
CHOICE POINTS
In egoic life, there are very few real choices, because our conditioned mind is operating unconsciously. As we are learning to live from a deeper, truer dimension of ourselves, however, there are choice points, points at which something in us sees the arising of the illusion of separation, blame, judgment, or self-induced suffering. These choice points require consciousness. Do we follow thoughts or emotions, believing these experiences are “truth,” or do we return to zero, willing to be still in the midst of the moment? The stillness within us is not refusing our thoughts or feelings, but neither does it give our anxieties any real ground to stand on. In fact, when we are in touch with our open heart, we may feel love for our worrying mind. We have the opportunity time and again to remain steadfast, still, silent, open, and awake to what is arising—not strategizing about how to get rid of something, not simply discharging it, but willing to see it all the way through. We appear to have choice points many times each day. If we get caught up in a philosophical stance regarding “Who chooses?” we will miss the opportunity to inquire more deeply, to experience more thoroughly and more lovingly the moment we are in.
There comes a time when we experience choiceless awareness and choiceless action, but this comes about only when we are more devoted to the Heart of Awareness than to life looking a certain way. Life looks the way it looks in any given moment; our response can come from any dimension of our Being—conditioned mind, conditioned emotions, a defended heart, the energetic body, or the deepest dimension of openheartedness and nonseparation. To awaken to What Is is to surrender to its truth and to see and respond to the moment from the light within us. When life presents a choice point and we do not get bogged down in philosophical debate, we can choose to invite conscious light to shine in the darkness, in the moments of contraction, negativity, fear, and unconscious resistance. If we want our frozen concepts or conditioned reactions and judgments warmed, thawed, and melted by the sun—the Heart of Awareness—we turn to face the sun. We are no longer defending against the reality of what is here now.
LIFE WITHOUT A WHY
The wind blows where it will,
and you hear the sound of it,
but you do not know whence it comes
or whither it goes; so it is
with everyone who is born of the Spirit.2
JOHN 3:8
Our mind is always searching for an answer to “Why?” This is fine for science, technology, an automobile engine that has stopped running, a cake that has failed to rise, or countless other things in one’s daily functioning. But the mind trying to discover why life is moving this way and not that way will eventually become frustrated. Life simply moves; Truth moves within us, and it does not tell us why it is moving as it does. It just moves. This way of living does not give the mind any particular place to reside except in the experience of Now.
Whenever I see a leaf floating on water or being blown by the wind, my heart is deeply touched. For me, these images have come to represent the life of surrender—to Truth, to the Divine, to life. The leaf does not ask why the wind is blowing in one direction and not the other. It does not worry about its destination. A life lived in harmony with reality does not refuse the moment-to-moment unfolding of life. One legend holds that the aimless flight of a dry leaf was supposed to have been the immediate, apparent cause of Lao-Tzu’s sudden illumination. He saw that his very effort to see into his true nature was what had obscured his seeing.3
A leaf floating on the wind,
without time,
without worry,
without a destination.
True surrender.4
In awakened living, we open to the “what” and become less and less engaged in the “why.” The floating leaf is content to be moved by the wind. It is a different way of living once you know you are “being lived,” yet You are what is living you, dreaming you, intimate with you, and loving you. You realize you are both the Ocean of Awareness and the movement of its waves, the emptiness of Spirit and the fullness of expression—including your human expression.
SURRENDER IS NOT RESIGNATION
To the ego, surrender to what is is often misinterpreted as resignation. Relinquishing inner resistance, saying yes to the present moment, is not the same as resignation, which carries judgment and emotional negativity. Nor is surrender a passive stance toward life. To yield to the moment as it actually is allows us to be moved by the deeper dimension of our Being that is freed to move with compassion, intelligence, and wisdom. We can say no, when necessary, from love rather than resistance or conditioned reactivity; we can take action; we can respond sensitively and wisely. We surrender our allegiance to the false god of ego and are opened to responding rather than reacting. As identification with conditioned mind is seen more clearly and dismantled by truth, we realize that there is no psychological self to uphold, no separate “self” to promote or protect, no separate “doer.” In this realization, there is great freedom.
DOING WITHOUT A “DOER”
Living without identifying as a separate “doer” does not mean being passive. Ego is the leaf, but You are the wind, moving your unique expression of reality. The experience or action of the moment is free to be as it is without egoic thought needing to control, defend, or will anything. Although it might appear to an observer that there is a “someone” doing all of these things, the inner experience is that Life—your life—is simply happening, an appearance in the Heart of Awareness, which is what you truly are.
Indeed, as “doing” happens without a “doer,” the mind can remain open to the moment that appears and to whatever is to happen next. With regard to future decisions, the attitude is, “It will be interesting to see what happens.” There is no sense that ego needs to control the creation of a moment or the outcome of one’s life, yet this way of living does not feel passive or uninvolved. In not imagining you are separate from the moment of your living, you are more completely and intimately involved than when the mind is continually thinking, judging, interpreting, or worrying. But the involvement is not a personal one that imagines there is a “right” way or a “wrong” way for the moment to turn out. It is simply what it is, and you are not separate from its actions, including the ones that appear in yourself.
Likewise, a surrendered life does not feel passive because in the absence of a feared outcome, the mind is more relaxed in the midst of whatever expressions appear in the moment. Life is not “mine,” nor is it “other” than mine. Absolute and relative cannot be separated. There might be a boldness of expression or gentle tenderness; there might be laughter, tears, or silence; there is freedom to experience the moment exactly as it is. When ego’s illusion of control is surrendered to our deeper knowing, we trust the flow that is here today, aware that it might change tomorrow. We realize that what is awake is equally awake in both the “hellish” moments of our lives and the “heavenly” ones.
RIGHT VIEW, RIGHT ACTION
When the sense of doer-ship falls away, there is simply the experiencing of things being just what they are, accepted in the openness in which they are appearing or disappearing. Action arises spontaneously when we are responding to life from wholeness. An innate wisdom is present beyond our conditioned mind’s view of right/wrong or good/bad. For example, say you encounter a beggar on the street. The beggar is your Self, but your limited mind does not know what is the most compassionate action to take in this particular situation. Whether you give or do not give, the action arises from the spontaneous action of wisdom and compassion in the moment. You are moved from a deeper, truer understanding of things than what appears from conditioning, than what you think you should or should not do in that situation. Regardless of the action of giving or not giving, you may find yourself experiencing love for this expression of your Self.
The mind would like to have rules of conduct for every situation. And there are religions that try to oblige. Having an ethical, compassionate perspective is part of the practice of any tradition (or any healthy upbringing), and rightly so. However, the fact of the matter is that one can never know what is right for every situation every time. So how can you decide ahead of time what the right action is for a moment that has not yet happened? “Right action,” from a Buddhist perspective, comes from “right view,” but right view is not an idea, ideology, or egoic point of view. It is, rather, the true viewing from what is timelessly awake, aware, and whole. It arises from the insight we have into reality. Love and wise action can have many faces. Love can nourish and protect; it can push out of the nest; it can give what is needed; it can take away what is not needed.
Doing happens without a separate “doer.” Thoughts appear, but there is no separate “thinker.” Ego’s identification with separateness is so embedded that it does not seem possible that that which drives the wildflowers to bloom in springtime, the ant to search for food, birds to know migration patterns, the cow to have a calf, or the newborn baby to cry when it is hungry could possibly be the consciousness, energy, and motivating force behind the actions of an adult human being.
A woman in a group I facilitate once told us about a profound shift that happened while walking her dog up a steep hill. She was noticing the aches and pains of her aging body, wondering if she was too old for this, when out of the blue a question arose in her: “Am I the walker, or is walking simply happening?” Immediately, when the idea of being the “walker” slipped away, walking continued up the hill, but with total ease. She was astounded at the difference in experience. As we sat together, we continued to explore: “Am I the sitter, or is sitting simply happening?” You might ask yourself right now, “Am I the reader, or is reading simply happening?”
EGO’S ARGUMENT THAT NOTHING WOULD GET DONE
Egoic thought imagines that nothing would get done in a life in which one did not consider herself the “doer.” “But I have a family to feed!” “I must make money to pay my rent!” “I can’t take just any old job; I need to care about what I am doing and where!” “Who would be responsible for my work [or kids, health, et cetera] if I weren’t doing it?” The mind of separation can become quite adamant in its view that nothing would get done if “it” weren’t planning it and worrying about it, doing it and evaluating it. It becomes quite adept at arguing for its continued separate identity.
When the sense of separation ends, however, it is seen that no “one” has ever been a separate “doer,” “thinker,” “parent,” “worker,” “scientist,” “teacher,” “starving child,” “saint,” or “sinner.” That which lives as itself is living as yourself this very moment, only you cannot imagine such a thing, because if it were true, you think you or your life would look some other way. Does it ever occur to you that the action of your life—that which motivates you, energizes you, and makes your life’s choices—might be the very Being Consciousness that the ego imagines it is separate from? Could you imagine that it might be our sense of separation that creates most of our suffering and not life’s unfolding as it does? Can you imagine that the so-called ego is itself a mere shadow of that which you seek? We do not even question our autonomy, except when life presents a situation over which we have no control and in the face of which we feel helpless. Then we use that situation to provide ammunition for our judgments that we, life, or God are not what we all are “supposed” to be.
The ego mind imagines life would fall apart if it weren’t in charge. Yet everything that needs to happen continues to happen. In the midst of life, however it appears, you are free—free to let it be what it is, free to respond in ways that seem appropriate in the moment, free from the whole long list of “if onlys” you have carried around for so long. You are free to be yourself without self-consciousness for maybe the first time since you were a small child. There is an acceptance of whatever conditioning the body-mind may continue to have, as well as the willingness to investigate what is actually true. This is the freedom that comes from trusting the movement of the whole. It is a freedom that is free even from freedom.