True surrender is ‘thy will,’ not mine, isn’t it? Isn’t surrender in its purest form an acknowledgment that the I doing the surrendering hasn’t got a clue how it got here or where it’s going and that nobody else out there is going to be able to help either?
True surrender is 100% Grade A, organic humility. And oh how we humans struggle at it.
The other evening after dinner our son was giving my wife and I props for ‘being good role models.’ It was a very sweet moment. Then my wife added that she was especially impressed with me over these past many years, at the changes in me, at all my ‘hard work’ embracing honesty and seeking truth in myself and so on.
I listened quietly. And what occurred was that while not so very long ago I’d have swelled with pride at this evidence of my spiritual efforts, now it rang false. It wasn’t that those changes aren’t real, it was that they are seen now as having nothing to do with me. My wife and son were giving credit where credit wasn’t due.
So when they were done I mentioned – mostly for my son’s benefit – that everything for ‘me’ changed in early 2006 when I reached a kind of tipping point and I fell to my knees and gave up. I’ve referenced that moment countless times here, but as time has gone by the importance of that moment has become more and more clear. It was the signature moment when, if only a little, the ‘Doug story’ was being called into question.
I Surrender – A Little
The surrender that day was as real as it could have been, and by that I mean that even then, when all seemed lost, when suicidal thoughts were a constant companion, even then a part of me froze and asked: Are you sure? Do you really want God or whatever to run the show? Maybe what God has in mind isn’t what you have in mind.
And so my surrender wasn’t complete. How could it be?
But it was enough, a starting point, that first oh-so-tiny moment where the ego, the me, had no answers, was willing to at least tentatively hand over the keys. Call it a grace, a gift, but something at last showed me that I was the common denominator to all of my life’s problems. That all my pomposity and ego, all my planning and mental machinations, all my stories and excuses were themselves the problem. They were the seeds of my suffering. I was so filled with ‘me’ there was no room for anything else.
Everything that came after that – the vision quests, the Amazonian ayahuasca, the healer guru in New Mexico, and a thousand other starts and stops since – all of it was set in motion by that initial time on my knees, that initial humbling moment of surrender. Over the years I’ve done a lot more surrendering, along with a recognition that even in surrender I need help.
Surrender: Story Killer
We humans spend virtually all of out time telling ourselves stories – both on micro and macro levels. I am this and I am that, I shall do this and I shall do that. We as a people stand for this and not that. Our religion, our cause, our movement, our…. The list is endless.
Over time these stories deepen and become entrenched in our very being, so that if any part of it is called into question we flare with emotion and words pour from us in righteous indignation – or our fists are raised, our guns are pointed, our bombs are dropped.
We’ve got nothing to do with any of it. We are lives being lived, not beings living lives. This is one of those great truths the sages have been offering for as long as humans have walked the earth. Which is why I told my son that while his praise was very kind-hearted and considerate, it also was mis-directed.
And this is a beautiful recognition, because it says that the traits he admires in me (or that I admire in the sages) are inside us all, awaiting our recognition, awaiting our first tentative steps toward letting go and letting God (as goes the saying).
