Notes and articles tagged with “surrender”
Filed under Notes on 26. August 2007 » [2]
What we are all looking for, in one way or another, is freedom from limitation. Freedom from the world; being able to do whatever you want, free from anything on the external level that could make you uncomfortable or limit your movement in any way.
The easy answer to this of course is money. And recognition perhaps, fame, celebrity, universal approval, but first and foremost we think that financial independence is the key to becoming free of the world. And in a way it’s true; with unlimited funds you could arrange your external situation in a way that is relatively limitless, on that level.
But this is the big misunderstanding. It is true that we want freedom from the world, but we make the mistake of looking for freedom exclusively on the external level. We think that freedom from the world of form can be achieved on the level of form, and that overcoming worldly limitations is to conquer them on the external level. And this is certainly what we are taught to believe, that one can achieve freedom from the world through external means.
What we are not told, however, is that freedom from the world has nothing to do with anything on the level of form at all. Being externally free of limitation can give the illusion of what we are seeking, for a little while, but the real salvation and what we are actually looking for is inner freedom from external limitations. Real freedom from the world is to be in a state of inner non-attachment to it, and this does not require anything in particular of your external situation. You don’t need to change anything on the level of form in order to become free of it.
And in fact, being faced with severe limitations on the level of form is for many people the key to freedom. Paradoxically, somebody who is completely free from limitations on the external level is much less likely to find real freedom from the world than someone who is neck-deep in worldly challenges. You are much more likely to find freedom in prison than a five star hotel.
When you realize this, you may even begin to feel grateful for the limitations in your life situation. They offer an opportunity for you to align yourself with what is, and keep you from getting pulled into the illusion that one can find fulfillment on the level of form. If all the worldly desires of the ego are met, it is very difficult not to get lost and completely identified with it. But when the ego is met with things not working out, the world not respecting its plans and ambitions, you are given an opportunity to go beyond the illusion of ego.
And what more could you want from the world? Indeed, we could see this as the only real purpose of the world of form; to present you with challenges and limitations so that you can overcome them. If you expect something other than that from the world, like fulfillment and salvation, you will suffer. But if you see the world of form for what it is, a teaching device of sorts, you become free of it without needing anything to be different from how it is right now, in the present moment.
Filed under Notes on 22. July 2007 »
For a long time I’ve been attracted to the idea of not speaking, of simply giving up talking completely. Becoming mute. In this way, I imagine that it would be easier to stay centered and at peace, and to not get sucked into the conditioned ways of perception and behavior that seem to be kept going in such a large part by incessant talking. The conditioning perpetuates itself in the mind through compulsive thinking, mostly repetitive and unnecessary but absolutely vital for the ego to maintain its momentum. This compulsive thinking can manifest outwardly in constant talking and chatter, which means that people will try to keep the dialogue going either by talking to themselves in the head or by talking to someone else, regardless of whether or not anything needs to be said.
Now, I’m not suggesting that everyone should start behaving like robots and talk to each other for utilitarian purposes only. Not at all. Most people enjoy talking, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. What we are looking at here does not necessarily mean that we need to stop talking, but rather that we investigate where the words are coming from.
Ironically enough I’m having a hard time finding the words for this, but it has to do with the concept of non-doing and the difference between a thought that comes as a result of an act of thinking, and a thought that comes from somewhere else, often described as intuition. Another way of seeing it is to split the mind into higher mind and lower mind, the higher being the realm of inspiration, intuition and creativity, while the lower is home to conditioning, compulsive thinking and the ego.
As talking is little more than outwardly expressing verbalized thoughts, the same split of higher and lower mind applies. Sometimes you speak through the conditioned mind, and sometimes speaking simply happens without you having to make an effort. It is the same with thinking or taking action; there is a great difference between an action that happens intuitively and an action that arises from personal effort.
When I contemplate the possibility of ceasing to speak, what I really mean is to cease speaking from the level of conditioning. To let go of the act of speaking and simply allow words to come if and when they are needed. This means among other things that you no longer prepare what you are going to say, but rest assured that whatever comes spontaneously and from intuition is going to be far better and more appropriate than what you could ever muster with effort and preparation.
It is an approach that has much deeper implications and goes far beyond talking alone, but applying it in this one area of doing will have a direct effect on how you do everything else. The idea of non-action is, as I take it to be, to stop acting on behalf of the person and instead surrendering to the will of God or, if you don’t like that word, giving yourself up to the service of life itself.
Talking (and consequently thinking) is a great area to experiment with this idea of non-action, and the simple practice of not making an effort to talk can reap great benefits in other areas of your life as well.
Filed under Notes on 19. July 2007 » [7]
There is a Japanese video game I remember from a while back, called We Love Katamari, where the objective is, if I recall correctly, to roll an adhesive ball through a stage attempting to pick up everything that will stick to it. So at the end of a level you will want to have accumulated as many objects as possible onto the ball; basically, the bigger the ball of stuff the better.
Sounds familiar? It should, because this closely resembles the game of life. Not real life, of course, but the illusory game of gain and loss that one plays as the personal self. A game where accumulating more and more forms is the only objective, almost regardless of what those forms actually are. More is better.
The personal self, then, is like a ball of junk. It identifies with form, and the built-in survival mechanism cares about nothing other than accumulating more and more things. If I am the sum of the things in my ball of junk, then maintaining and preferably growing that ball is crucial to my survival. In this game, the ultimate objective is to accumulate enough things onto the ball of junk so that you can finally retire from the game. Arriving or making it in the game is to have gained a ball of junk large and substantial enough to sustain you for the rest of your life.
Now, let’s imagine that the core of this ball is illuminated. The light shining from the core is life, or God, or your true Self, whatever you want to call it. It is the essence of life itself, and it is you. When a human being is born, there is little or no junk stuck to the ball and so the light shines through very easily. Look into the eyes of a 1yr old baby and you see radiant light, but fast forward 40 years when that baby is a fast track corporate executive with a stock portfolio and twelve meetings before noon — the light may be there, but most likely it has dimmed considerably over years and years of covering it up with junk. There may be glimpses here and there, a glint or two during a game of golf or whatever, but not much.
The spiritual path is the shedding of this accumulation of junk. And it’s simple; letting go of things is technically easier than picking them up. But it is as difficult as it is simple, because our conditioning teaches us that gaining is good and losing is bad. And that our survival depends on having a sufficient inventory of objects. If you have an object in your hand, dropping it is technically easier than picking up another one, but the difficulty lies in having been told that “whatever you do, don’t drop that object. If you run out of objects, you die.” And so even if simply letting go of the object is the key to liberation, we decide to hold onto it just in case, and then maybe pick up another one just to be safe.
These objects are not necessarily material objects, like luxury items or property of some kind; ultimately it always comes down to the thought form associated with the material object, and so accumulating junk is not limited to what you see on the surface. Your ball of junk may not have sports cars and jewelry, but instead of those things you may have accumulated thought forms and images of how sophisticated and advanced you are for not having sports cars and jewelry. Instead of identifying with the car, you identify with being someone who has gone beyond needing to identify with cars. Which of course implies that you are a greater person because of it.
Seeing this distinction between a material object and the thought form associated with it is fundamental in learning how to let go of the junk. It is not an exercise in selling all your material belongings and renouncing your name — the surface manifestation is secondary, but the important thing is to let go of attachment and identification with the thought forms.
The ball of junk is not populated with material things, but with thoughts about material things. And so in this shedding of junk, what you are actually letting go of are conditioned thoughts and beliefs.
Letting go of the junk is simple, and the only thing keeping you from it is the conditioned habit of giving more value to the junk than that which it obscures, namely life itself.
Filed under Notes on 22. March 2007 » [3]
Have you ever felt exhausted from just being yourself? And by yourself, in this case, I mean the mind made personal self, the story based me. Some people have more capacity for role playing than others, but in my case, as with many others that have come to the spiritual path, I can’t keep it up for long without becoming literally exhausted. It takes so much effort for me to play along in the usually surface driven, banter infested world of the mind made self, that I’ve been forced to find a way out of it.
And I’m going to guess that since you are reading this, you are being forced to find a way out of this as well. Maybe not in the exact same way, but a common element in those that seek spiritual teaching is that their mind made selves have become too heavy for them to carry. It’s like you’re wearing a metal exoskeleton, something like a knight’s suit of armor, that you keep adding to by picking up bits of scrap and gluing them on — an ego is nothing more than a pile of concepts that you identify with, and the bigger and more complicated that pile gets the heavier it is to carry.
Good metaphor? I’m picturing everyone walking around like fully clad knights, all *clank clonk* and rusty as they drag themselves around all day long. Very much an external manifestation of what it feels like when you have a heavy sense of self, stuck in your own story and unable to move freely. Which is why it is such an amazing relief to be free of it, even if only for a moment.
When you experience a glimpse of freedom from that heavy personal self, one word to describe it is that you feel a sudden lightness. A sense of freedom that is even felt in a physical sense; in fact, it feels a lot like shedding a clunky old metal suit. All of a sudden being able to move and breathe with ease, much like a cat, or a bird, neither of which live life through a conceptual sense of self. Or like a child, which is something we can all relate to. I’ve even experienced this strange sense of feeling like I was seeing the world through the eyes of myself as a child, if that makes any sense. Almost like a flashback to a time when everything seemed new.
And although it may sound like fairy tale talk, we really can live and experience life as we did when we were children (or as if we were cats), a life in which being yourself is easy. And the key to this, or at least one way of putting it, is to become free of identification with the mind made sense of self. When you believe that your self is that bundle of thoughts in the mind, being yourself becomes hard work. But when your self is realized as the one self, God, life, source, emptiness, stillness, then being yourself is as simple as breathing.
Filed under Notes on 18. March 2007 »
One of the most powerful spiritual practices, taught in many different forms throughout the ages, is surrender to limitations. Jesus on the cross is the archetypal image of this, and the lives of everyone born into this world will be full of limitations in one form or the other. We could even say that limitation is the very purpose of the world of form, and that it is only here to give us challenges so that we can surrender and discover that which is beyond form.
More often than not, spiritual awakening comes about through surrender to these limitations, often severe ones, such as life threatening diseases, paralysis, loss of some kind — you are more likely to become enlightened through losing everything you have than winning millions of dollars in the lottery, for example.
And in this practice of allowing what is, of surrendering to whatever arises in the moment, be it a thought, an emotion, a person, a situation, or whatever, there is an obstacle that can easily go unnoticed and sabotage your practice. This obstacle is in the form of a little voice that comes in and says yes, I will surrender to what is but let’s get out of this situation first. This is the voice that tells you that saying yes to what is sounds good, but only after you get out of this job, lose weight, move someplace quiet, etc. That when you’ve just figured out this one last thing, just a little bit more, then you will finally be able to surrender. The voice is usually subconscious, and if it were conscious and obvious to you then it’d be seen for what it is instantly, namely resistance arising from the ego.
There is a simple pointer I heard of that deals with this little obstacle, a mantra that says ‘this, too’ and applies to whatever arises in the present moment. So when something happens, you can meet it with this mantra and thus prevent the ego from sneaking in its own mantra which is always ‘everything but this.’ It is a way of seeing that everything is part of what you need to surrender to. Every challenge that arises is there for you to go beyond it, and realizing this can accelerate the process of awakening quite a bit.
So whatever happens, see that this, too, is part of your spiritual practice. Include everything.
Filed under Notes on 3. March 2007 » [3]
During one of his later talks, J. Krishnamurti said to his audience, some of whom had been following him for over a decade and not yet grasped the essence of his teaching: “You want to know my secret? I don’t mind what happens.”
Simple as that. Not minding what happens.
When you don’t mind what happens, we could say that you have seen that nothing can change except the surface layer of your experience. Things may go well or go wrong, according to the judgment of the world, but none of it can really affect you; in other words, none of it has the power to disturb your peace. Not minding what happens is to have gone beyond the world, a state of being in the world but not of it as the saying goes.
You can still prefer certain things and attempt to make situations work out, but you will have a deep knowing that none of it really matters. It is a game of form, something to be honored and played with, but the outcome of which matters only in a relative sense. In the same way as you can experience a videogame: it does matter whether or not your character gets injured or killed, but not absolutely. You enjoy playing, but what happens in the game doesn’t effect you all that deeply.
Nothing important can happen in the future, because all that is important has always been and always will be. Nothing can happen in the future that makes you more than you are right now, and neither can anything happen in the future that makes you less than you are now.
Nothing can be added, and nothing can be taken away. When you realize this, you will no longer mind what happens.
Filed under Notes on 23. February 2007 » [4]
Usually when thinking of non-action, we associate it with simply not doing anything. Sitting around and not lifting a finger. But this is not necessarily so, as I’ve just discovered. Non-action can in fact contain plenty of action, strange as it may seem, and the understanding of this hit me when I read the following verses from the Bhagavad Gita:
The man who has seen the truth
thinks, “I am not the doer”
at all times — when he sees, hears, touches,
when he smells, eats, walks, sleeps, breathes.
...
Calmly renouncing all actions,
the embodied Self dwells at ease
as lord of the nine-gated city,
not acting, not causing action.
It does not create the means
of action, or the action itself,
or the union of result and action:
all these arise from Nature.
The essence of non-action is simply to allow action to flow through you, not attempting to control it yourself. Which means that instead of action arising from conceptual thinking, it comes out of being itself. Clear, appropriate, and free of ego.
Normal action is usually tainted with all sorts of evaluations, conscious and unconscious, and tends to be in service of the conceptual sense of self. Which means that action more often than not carries some kind of agenda, a self-serving motivation that is there to some extent whether obvious or not. And what’s more, action that comes out of the ego identified state of mind is always seen as a mere means to an end. Nothing is enjoyed as an end in itself, because there is always something more important in the future.
When action arises out of intuition, directly from the flow of life itself, it is imbued with a sense of quality and care. Even the smallest of actions. You begin to move with lightness and grace, and every action that is allowed to flow through you is then in the service of being.
Non-action is then not defined by the lack of action, but rather the motivating force behind it. Although it will probably be the case that with non-action, life on the external level will slow down. It is able to move quickly when needed, but when you have gotten to a point where intuition initiates most of your actions your life will take form in a much slower rhythm than is the norm for action arising out of the normal state of consciousness. Life becomes effortless, playful, slower, and whatever action you take will be much more effective than otherwise.
In a way, we could say that when you embrace non-action, you will never have to do anything ever again. Everything that needs doing will be done through you, and you then become the observer of what happens. I recommend taking a walk to witness how this works — as you are walking along, notice how your legs are simply moving by themselves. You are not making decisions through conceptual thinking to move one foot in front of the other: it just happens. And you can then be an observer of it (with the emphasis on it; it breathes, it moves, it takes action).
So relax, switch to the autopilot of divinity and know that you will never need to do anything ever again.
Filed under Notes on 17. February 2007 » [12]
I’ve been going through a bit of turmoil today, unease coming in seemingly from nowhere to slap me around a bit. And as this is an ongoing practice, with these old conditioned thoughts and beliefs coming up in waves again and again, I have certain methods that I use to process them. Writing in my journal, taking walks, reading books, and constantly observing and questioning the thoughts that go through the mind. And don’t think that it's nearly as elegant as it may sound; it is a backwards stumble in the dark, at best. But this is how it works, and usually after a certain amount of suffering I have a realization. Always the same, ultimately, but gradually the realization becomes deeper and deeper.
As I remember Wayne Dyer saying in one of his talks, that “when you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice. And when you are squeezed, whatever is in there is what comes out.” I’m sure he said it more elegantly, but the point is that when you are challenged, in other words when the world gives you a squeeze, whatever you have inside will come out. If you have repressed anger, it will come out in one form or the other. Maybe in a sudden flash of energy, or maybe in a slow, painful seepage (yummy metaphors here). In any case, whatever is left in you of pain and attachment to form will be beaten out of you by the challenges of the world. Or we could say that the world will keep pushing your buttons until it gets the combination right and everything blows up and disintegrates.
After hours of journaling, walking, reading, listening, etc., I finally came to a peaceful realization, during my walk, about a certain thing I had been clinging to. Generally speaking, it was the realization that I had to let go of future and thus to let go of attachment to thoughts, plans, and beliefs. To be at peace with not knowing what will happen, and to give myself up completely. Not minding what happens, as Krishnamurti put it. And as I said, this is nothing new. We’ve all read about letting go of future — this is all I ever write about, really. But it is one thing to grasp it on a conceptual level and quite another to have a deep realization, to know it as opposed to merely knowing about it. It’s amazing how resilient the mind is in clinging to its attachments and thoughts about the future, and until you really feel that you do not mind what happens there is an attachment somewhere whether you realize it or not.
Shortly after having had this realization, or rather after having entered the beginning of that realization — it is still going on slowly as I write this — I reached for my little pocket version of the Tao Te Ching and begun reading immediately where I opened it:
A good traveler has no fixed plans
and is not intent upon arriving.
A good artist lets his intuition
lead him wherever it wants.
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts
and keeps his mind open to what is.
What a beautiful thing it is to have no fixed plans, and to be free of the illusion of future. Not in a way that you cannot do anything, or have plans on a superficial level, but rather seeing that whatever plans you may have are utterly unimportant compared to the reality of life itself. That whatever thoughts you have about any situation could not possibly be more right than life, which is a realization that brings with it a sense of humility and gratitude. Humility that then replaces the old arrogance of believing that your thoughts and perceptions are superior to reality itself.
And when you see this, there is no need for clinging to future anymore. No need for having to figure anything out, simply because you see that it is all illusion anyway. Every thought you have about the future is nonsense.
Isn’t that great?
Filed under Articles on 13. December 2006 » [2]
I was out walking the other night, Chopin playing in my headphones and a crisp sort of winter stillness in the air. And despite the peaceful ambiance I was experiencing a hangover after a bit of binge-thinking earlier that day. The sort of thought trajectory that starts out when something great happens and opens up a flood of positive thinking; a thought stream that then gathers momentum and ultimately turns negative, as all unattended thought does eventually when left to proliferate
Everyday Wonderland is a weblog on the subject of spiritual awakening, creativity, enthusiasm, inspiration, and generally everything having to do with the higher levels of human consciousness. The author is Helgi Páll Einarsson, 24 years old and currently living in Iceland. He likes books in the morning, making things, and taking long walks.