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.
How does first one to own something come to own it? Even more puzzling is the notion of owning an idea? The history of Western philosophy attempts answers to these questions. We are more interested in the question of what it means to give things away.
Assuming we can truly possess something, what does it mean to surrender it, to give it away another? And more importantly, is the essence of the gift in the thing or in the giving? Is it possible to surrender without surrendering something? Can we surrender nothing? Can we surrender by surrendering nothing?
Or to put it another way, is it even possible to live and yet not give? Isn’t it that by living we are surrendering, giving up something, spending something? Don’t we, in order to live at all, have to spend money, exert effort, give away resources, in order to even survive? We give up our money for food, clothing and shelter. In order to earn our money we give up our energy in the form of labor. We give in order to live.
Yet what about our spiritual sustenance, what do we give in order to live spiritually?
What about the nothingness inside us? Can we surrender that? What about the negativity, the hunger, the craving, the wanting? Can’t we surrender that part of us, give away negative energy that is tugging at us, causing us to hanker, to long, that power, large or small, that is nothingness itself. Doesn’t the emptiness have a power over us? That space of emptiness, the craving inside, the longing, the desiring, the wishing-to-be-filled, the place of non-existence inside us, the wanting, the waiting? This too can be renounced, surrendered, just like something whole and precious. And just like are relation to that priceless thing, we can cherish the nothingness, which becomes, in the surrendering, a rich thing of meaning.