NOEMAYA

At some point in my life, there was nothing more despicable than the concept of surrender, quite often heard in spiritual and developmental circles; it seemed to promote a morbid passivity that I saw beneath the human station. However, it took pains and a thorough self-examination for me to realize that no one is immune to this attitude of surrender: we can either choose it or we are dragged into it.

So many of my active battles with life situations were, in their exact nature, a way of surrendering to my ego or my demons. So many times I surrendered my attention to things that weren’t worthy of it. Eventually, and very imperfectly, I learnt to pick my battles, and that there’s no shame in leaving a scene without resolving a conflict or surrendering to the urge to take care of things. Now I have more respect for the concept of surrender, of course when it’s adopted attentively. But why is it so important to have and use this tool in navigating through life? Why should we sometimes surrender instead of ceaselessly wrestling with life?

An attitude of surrender exposes the nature of the problem. When we are fighting something, a person or a state of affairs in the world, we live in a charged attitude, and this charged attitude also charges that which we are fighting. Surrender is a grounding and a discharging of our attitude, and hence of the whole battlefield. In other words, surrender stops the projected aspects of the problem we are trying to solve. 

Any problem we face consists of a discrete set of objective parameters and an overlaying projection to fill in the gaps so we can make out a coherent face, to give the problem a character; we want the problem to have a face because that allows us to reposition ourselves more effectively and throw the right punches. We say that we face the problem, we give the problem a face. This projection, however, is rooted in the subjective; often, it is built on our past experiences and fears.  

Here’s an example from my own days: I have been procrastinating on writing up my thesis; I don’t even have the data that I want; I have only two weeks to submit the data and I need to have at least 80 pages in writing. I haven’t even downloaded Microsoft Word! If I don’t submit it on-time, I can’t defend it and I can’t graduate on-time. The lab is down, so I can’t even collect data, and it’s all out of my hands; and there are parts of the project that I am not even sure how to do. This is the most important deadline in my life. 

This description is very stressful, and it seems to give a more or less complete picture of the whole situation with regard to this goal. 

Now let’s look at the objective aspects of this problem, the aspects that are truly there: I am sitting in front of my computer; the browser is open and I am drinking my morning coffee. 

This is it; there’s really not even a problem here. The rest is complete projection; none of what was presented in the projection is happening right now; even the lab being closed is a projection; it was closed as of last night and I don’t know anything about it’s status right now.

There’s no question that there’s a goal involved here, but maintaining that projection doesn’t help anything and anyone at all. What can be helpful is for me to pull myself out of the projection and perhaps make a call to the lab or start by typing just the title page of the thesis, etc.. 

Surrender, thus, is the act of pulling oneself out of the projection so that we may see before us some actual means of taking a step forward. Insofar as I’m pulled into the projection, I am oblivious to the solutions that are clearly sitting before me. 

To surrender is to gently shift focus from the projection, from the face we’ve given to the problem (which is often a scary face), to the objective parameters of the alleged problem. We’d often be surprised to see that in reality there’s barely ever a problem in front of us; it is rather our tendency to avoid imperfect decisions that keep us in the projection.

But surrender can made more accessible by practice. What has worked for me at times when I find myself in a messy projection is to practice embodiment and vocalizing reality, to bring attention to my bodily sensations; and then I start naming the true things around me: the wind is hitting my skin, the weight of the sunglass frame lies on my nose, I am feeling of the chair, the fridge is making a buzz, Alli singing the crow song, etc.. Surrender is the retraction of one’s attention from imaginary beings to what is. 

That which we refuse to see, we make up stories about what it should look like.