Surrender
”the only function of mind, the only ‘act of will’, that is appropriate is complete surrender. not that any act of will is possible, not that there is any person to make such an act, not that there is any such thing as human will; just that at least surrender is not inconsistent with the non-existence of the entity. the mind, of course, resists."
- David Carse, Author of "Perfect, Brilliant, Stillness" (from a letter posted online)
What is surrender? It's letting go of the false idea that you are in control of things.
Typically we carry around ideas about almost everything in our lives - ideas about how they should go in the form of hopes, fears, or expectations. These expectations are very rarely met, or at least not met in the way we had hoped, and this causes us to be dissatisfied with their results. When things go differently than our fixed ideas, we have the tendency to hold them even more tightly, try to make them fit our expectations even harder. Eventually, they become rolled into other unrelated situations in our lives. This creates even greater unhappiness, and suffering.
We call these attachments (to what we wish had happened or want to happen) or aversions (to what we wish hadn't happened or don't want to happen).
By learning to meditate, we can use this valuable tool to watch our bodies and minds as they create these attachments and aversions. We can eventually stop them as they are created, or see ourselves grasping them in these situations in our lives and let them go. We can also look into our body and see how it reacts up when we think about these situations and our attachment to them, and let that tension melt by relaxing our body, and our mind.
As we work with these events we start to work through the backlog of our fixed ideas, liberating them one by one, and freeing our mind from their tyranny. Each realization is a small victory.
- David Carse, Author of "Perfect, Brilliant, Stillness" (from a letter posted online)
What is surrender? It's letting go of the false idea that you are in control of things.
Typically we carry around ideas about almost everything in our lives - ideas about how they should go in the form of hopes, fears, or expectations. These expectations are very rarely met, or at least not met in the way we had hoped, and this causes us to be dissatisfied with their results. When things go differently than our fixed ideas, we have the tendency to hold them even more tightly, try to make them fit our expectations even harder. Eventually, they become rolled into other unrelated situations in our lives. This creates even greater unhappiness, and suffering.
We call these attachments (to what we wish had happened or want to happen) or aversions (to what we wish hadn't happened or don't want to happen).
By learning to meditate, we can use this valuable tool to watch our bodies and minds as they create these attachments and aversions. We can eventually stop them as they are created, or see ourselves grasping them in these situations in our lives and let them go. We can also look into our body and see how it reacts up when we think about these situations and our attachment to them, and let that tension melt by relaxing our body, and our mind.
As we work with these events we start to work through the backlog of our fixed ideas, liberating them one by one, and freeing our mind from their tyranny. Each realization is a small victory.
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