Category: On surrender

Material and spiritual surrender


Surrender is understood as a kind of giving, of giving in, or giving up. When we surrender we give something to another, we yield or renounce it. Something that is ours becomes the possession of someone else. Two actors vie for custody or control of something that cannot be shared, something that must be renounced by one, to the advantage of the other. 

Our most immediate experience of surrender is a material one. We voluntarily agree to surrender a material possession to an other who claims a right to it. We recognise this right and surrender the possession. This right might be legal, political, social, moral, or demands it by threat or actual violence to give them. A similar act of surrender sometimes takes place a without our consent. Threatened with violence or other forms of coercion we may surrender our possessions to others against our will.  
Continue reading →

Surrendering nothing

Somehow we aren’t able to think about surrender without thinking about things. Surrendering is always the thought for surrendering something, some thing, of dispensing with something, of renouncing something, of letting go of something that we possess. It inevitably refers to some property we hold, an to which we feel some kind of natural or acquired right . It might be a material thing, what we commonly call ‘private property’, a book or bicycle or a house. Or it might be a non-material thing, an idea or a thought which invented or are the originator of and to which we therefore have a similar kind of right.

This way of thinking about ‘private property’ is distinctly Western in its origins, even if it has spread to become a global norm. Its most puzzling feature is the problem of its origin.

Continue reading →

Surrendering pride

Verse 1

In the first of his Teachings for the mind, Śrīla Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmī instructs us to give up our pride. 

Giving up our pride is a special kind of surrender. In the West we are taught the importance of pride. We are taught that in order to be successful in life we must take pleasure in ourselves, be satisfied with our selves. Those who succeed, we are raised to understand, are those who have esteem for themselves, those who value themselves, who find satisfaction in themselves, those who are able to care for themselves and, ultimately, love themselves. 

Self-pleasure, self-satisfaction, self-care, self-love: these are all precious qualities. Why then do the the saint admonish us to surrender them?

Continue reading →

What is generosity?

We are awash in generosity. And yet it can neither be taught nor learned, neither given nor taken. Being generous is never just being something. Nor is it just doing something, least of all just giving. Olives give olive oil, and yet they know nothing of generosity. It’s because generosity, when it is anything, is not one thing, but two. Generosity is only meaningful when it teeters between being the generous quality of a person, the heart and soul of someone, one soul, who gives, and the singular quality of a generous gift. Giver and gift, soul and thing, feeling and object.

Continue reading →

Love is everything

Love is the ultimate surrender.

We all seek to love and be loved. It is the deepest need and and at the same time the deepest desire we have. This essential truth cries out to us from every aspect of our lives, from the way we relate to our children and our parents, to our relation with our neighbours and friends, to the interactions with colleagues. In all of these relations, the shape and power of love are making themselves felt. To say that ‘love is everything’ is not understating this experience we have at every instant of our day, every moment we think a thought, every we breath we take, everything we do. 

Read more

The longing we feel

In the love that is objectless and subjectless, there is no ego that loves, and no thing that is loved. This longing we feel, this suspicion in hearts, this sliver in our minds, is the hint of longing on its way to us, longing that is growing, longing that will see the light of day. 

Yet it is by longing for material things that we resist the divine longing, standing intentionally, or perhaps intuitionally in the way, Of course we want to feel that weak signal of divinity, for that is what lies behind every moment of pleasure we have. All the aesthetic sources of pleasure—beauty, fragrance, taste, sensation—are also clues to the inner longing for the divine beauty.

Read more

Fear of surrender

To resist is to stand against something. And this experience of standing against, of standing for or standing up for is so ancient, so deep in us, that we cannot recall when it was not part of us.  A child is born into a moment of surrender for which no surrender was necessary. Where there is a self, there is a standing-against, standing against being, standing against the world. Even the infant’s first convulsive motions are reflex of unarticulated struggle to not fall back into pure existence, to exist, to express to live. 

Read more

Desire to surrender

Every child recognises the push and pull of desire in its simplest form: I want the thing I do not possess. But my desire is not only connected to the object of my desire. It is also woven into the thought that I do not want to desire. I want this desire to end. I want the longing to be over. It’s not the thing I want, whatever it may be, so much as to put an end to wanting it. I want it to be mine, I want to be one with it, I want this feeling of wanting to dissolve into my unity with the thing, so that there will be no more wanting, no more longing, no more desire, no more separation. 

Continue reading →