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.
For example, we can surrender to the reason of another, the arguments of another, or even to the desires of the another by agreeing to renounce what we are attached to for the pleasure of the other.
In this sense we often speak of surrendering as a legally binding end to armed conflict or war. Recognising that the military forces of an adversary cannot be beaten the losing party surrenders its sovereignty to the victorious party.
Or, when put under arrest by the police we surrender to their authority or to the orders of other public authorities. In these cases we give up control of our individual will, our freedom, our choices, even our bodies.
What is common to all these ways of surrendering is that they refer to material surrender. In all these cases surrendering means giving away something of material value. What is surrendered belongs to the material world and will always remain there. Whether we are surrendering control over our body or sovereignty over the body political, whether we are giving away a concrete object, we are renouncing something that has meaning only on the material plane.
Surrender in the spiritual sense does not involve giving up something of material value, but rather giving up something immaterial.
There is nothing exotic or uncommon in speaking of surrender in spiritual terms. In virtually all religious or spiritual practices we speak of surrendering to God or to higher forces. In such contexts we say that we surrender to things we do not understand, to ideas that lie beyond our reach, to experiences that have no relation to what we have known before. We give ourselves to someone or something we do not know. We accept—without knowing anything about it—a future course that is beyond our control because beyond our knowledge.
Giving up control lies at the heart of spiritual surrender. But there is a deeper mystery that governs it. Spiritual surrender means not only renouncing control, but renouncing the reasons for control. Through surrender we not only seek to give up control of the course of our lives to some higher form of life. We also give up that control because we no longer want it. We not only give up control, we give up the desire for control.
For many of us, spiritual surrender follows on from some inner realisation that the means we have been using to steer the ship of our lives has not taken us to a place we want to be. We have arrived at a point where we wish to entrust control to someone or something else, to another, higher power. And yet this no ship’s captain is not one that we can choose, for then we would only be continuing our path of self-control.
Strangely, our ideal situation of surrender would to not have the choice of surrender, some kind of automatic surrender. The only authentic surrender is the one we don’t choose, the one we cannot control. The only true surrender is automatic surrender, surrender that choses itself, that guides itself, when, where and by what means.
We surrender both our control and our control of control.