Sister Surrender

Arjuna, Surrendered to Krishna

In the growing aspiration of every devotee for continual Christ communion, there is perhaps no more valuable experience than that of surrender. 

Often, and understandably, we have trouble relating positively to surrender.

Am I supposed to just quit? Do I stop fighting for a cause, simply because it has gotten difficult? Can I just stop showing up to work because I don’t like it? What can possibly be respectable about surrendering? 

Obviously, such external notions of surrender carry not the same meaning as surrender on the way to ultimate ego-transcendence. As an attitude of spiritual development, surrender is an inner unfoldment for how to relate to life, from the inside out. 

Far from waving a white flag on the battlefield, surrender as an inner process involves coming back into God’s fold, to make space for His Will, and not just our own whims and fancies.

Intellectually, this can make sense enough, if one is prepossessing even a small portion of faith in a higher power. And yet it is, that we don’t generally arrive at the deeper layers of God’s Revelation and Truth, until we are faced with the humiliation of our own inadequacy to realize them of our self-effort alone. 

This is why so many saints of yore have emphasized suffering as a path to God. For in the suffering of this ego-selfhood, lies a common means to realizing the helplessness we face as an ego-self on the path to total re-birth in the Divine Self of all.

In my own life, surrender has come in waves at different times, and in surprising ways. 

The first major wave was the realization that the mundane life of a 24 year old establishing a comfortable career in finance, experiencing life in different cities, attending social events and happy hours, was not satisfying my deeper nature. In fact, it was pushing me to a point of crisis. “Isn’t there anything real in this world?” Tirelessly I searched for something to give meaning to life, as the old pursuits gradually, and sometimes dramatically, fell by the wayside. 

The critical moment of surrender came when I realized it was time to leave my job - something I had spent around 6 years building up, through university, internship, training, and now as a certified 9-5'er. I remember vividly stepping outside of the office to call my mom, and tell her my predicament, with all the resignation of one who has simply reached the end of the rope. 

My mom’s response was more valuable than gold that day, when she said, “Zachary, the most important thing is that you are happy. If this isn’t it, I support you to keep searching. There is something else for you.”

And so I embarked on experimenting with the process of surrendering to that something else, though I did not know what. Surrendering the comfortable income from a work which was antithetical to my nature; surrendering the need to figure out how I would survive in a big city far so from home, and the fear which this created in me; and most importantly, surrendering into a new kind of hope, that there is something else waiting for me. 

The blind leap of faith brought about by surrender soon took the form of a move to Los Angeles for a fresh start. It continued in the form of new jobs, for which I mostly possessed no prior experience, during an economic recession; I had every reason to doubt, and sometimes I did. What the heck am I doing?

Yet, I was also experiencing, largely unbeknownst to myself, that surrender meant being open to every next step, and leaning into each one with some kind of growing faith and confidence in life itself, without the security and benefit of knowing what would happen next. 

In the process, I found myself beginning to change - I was becoming simpler, I didn’t spend extraneously. Enjoyments were more centered in going to parks and spending time in nature, visiting local museums and hearing speakers share their inspiration. 

Eventually, the path of surrender led me to the Sierra mountains for the first time, where employment soon arrived in the campgrounds of the national forest. Here, life was totally transformed, from my confusion in a valley of worldliness and materialism, to a mountain peak of oneness with all life and Nature, which had eluded me since childhood. 

No longer was the foundation of life built upon the rules and trends of the world. It was rather like viewing this world and God’s Creation from above, with fresh eyes, and fresh inspiration for my own life. Life itself was the stars and constellations of the night sky, the sun rising each morning to greet the day, the calmness of a mountain meadow, the warmth of a warm fire, the prana of drinking water flowing in the creek, the mid-day rain which often blessed the mountain in the early afternoon. 

And at every step, lay a new experience of surrender. Surrendering old attachments to what I felt I must have to survive, or be happy; surrendering the fear about what would happen if I didn’t stay a part of the system which had given definition and direction to my life up until that point. Surrender to what anyone may think, as I followed a star that couldn't be explained on the outside. 

At one point in the process, it seemed as if almost every friendship I had known with my peers had fallen away, which in itself was shocking from where I had come from only a couple years prior. Now the few friends around me were 65 plus years old, and I was 25. I remember wondering, will I ever have friends my age again? It didn’t matter. Because I was surrendered in God’s hands, and it was truly wonderful. He gave me friends, and guides, and exactly what I needed at every turn, even if not always what I would have chosen.

Since that time, surrender has not stopped. This was the beginning. An inflection point to a new way of life.  

The grace which took me to the mountain top through surrender, soon took me off it, after 2 mountain seasons. Waves of tears and sorrow wrecked me as I drove up highway 99 in California, observing how we live as people, with eyes of one who had just arrived on earth for the first time, and is realizing they will have to live in the midst of this strange condition called civilization. 

To leave that time and place of the central Sierra in all the pristine glory of our Creator, and re-enter a world which held no meaning for the sensitive heart which had been re-ignited in me…. another step in learning to surrender. 

Here I write this, nearly 17 years since leaving that job in the city by the Bay, and surrendering that direction in life which was no longer serving me.

This last decade has taken me through tragedy and triumph; brought me into organization, and cast me back out again; taken me before those who taught me by showing what not to do, and brought me before my very own, SatGuruDev; it has filled me with inspiration to do the Will of God, and struck me to the ground, with no ability of my own to carry on. And yet, in all of this, the lesson of surrender remains the eternal constant. I may not be able to do it, but God can and will through me, if it be His will. Naught else matters.

There is no end to the surrendered state, so long as we are still growing into the perfect knowing of our oneness with God. So long as there is still this little i, which has its own motivations and agenda for life, we will be met with an ever new need to cultivate surrender to the God inside. To ask Him, what do you think? How can I help? Will you guide me through this? All that I know is that I need you. I am lost without you, Lord. 

It can all sound a bit dramatic to the worldly mind, and especially the mind of man in early Dwarapa Yuga, set as it is on its course of ego-empowerment and proving oneself in the world. Yet, we have found time and again, that all the wealth of the Rockefellers doesn’t bring happiness, and all the fruit from the tree of knowledge eaten in one sitting doesn’t make one wise. Must we aspire to accumulate it all for ourselves in order to learn the lesson? 

As we each exhaust all the various bi-ways on the interstate of an ego-centered commute, and find that none of them, in and of themselves, have the happiness we seek - we arrive again and again at the doorstep of our dearly beloved, sister surrender. Not out of defeat, but in the realized victory of the Soul. Out of total freedom from the littleness of ‘me and mine,’ and in total submission to the God in one and all.

Far from being defeated, He fills us up with so much inspiration and joy, for how to live in this world, for how to help it, for how to be a good neighbor, for how to be a servant of His will, that far from being a terrible place - this world itself and everyone in it, are He. And we are inspired anew to treat it that way.