Surrender implies a shift, a sudden change. Surrender is a global cessation of resistance: you stop fiercely defending your old ideas. All of a sudden, you don’t know anything any more and you are open to the new.
It is like a muscle in spasm suddenly relaxing, suddenly letting go. A new world opens up. What we had been tensely resisting is no longer occupying our focus.
Surrender is also the path of many religious and spiritual traditions. Entering a monastery, taking a vow of service, shaving your head and taking on a new name, accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior, accepting a Guru in Hinduism or a monk as your teacher in a Zen monastary—these are all moments of surrender. The value of surrender as an entry point to a spiritual path has been known and practiced by many cultures.
Science and rational thinking (Aristotelian logic) do not understand the value of surrender. Surrender is a quantum leap, not continuous, incremental change. Even our formal mathematics has great trouble dealing with discontinuous change.
In the human psyche, surrender happens on many fronts at the same time. Surrender is a transformation of posture, a major change of attitude. A dam has burst and outside thoughts, ideas and influences that had been kept at bay can suddenly seep in.
Our entire system of defense involving rationalization, minimalization, distortion and denial is fragile like a glass bubble. When we crack it open in one place the entire structure crumbles. New ideas can enter and transformation begins on many fronts.
When you surrender there is a total collapse of the Psyche as far as the old organization of ideas. All of a sudden you don’t know who you are because all your old notions of “Who I really am!” go out.
Every notion of “who I really am!” conspires in keeping you stuck. When you surrender, over the next few years you become a new person, you get to redefine who you are as a human being. You may bring back some of the old qualities you’ve always had—your sense of wonderment, your desire to be kind, your innate sense of joy and laughter, your mischievousness.
When you surrender, your boundaries are breached and you are connected to the outside. You are no longer alone. Surrender is an act of saying “YES!” There is power in saying Yes! Yes is positive, No is negative. When you say “Yes!” you are affirming something, you are letting something in. There is something inherently satisfying to the human organism in saying yes, rather than saying no. Try it just now… say NO! and see how you feel, then say YES! and see how you feel. There is a release of tension with yes. Surrender begins with a yes!
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