Surrender is a flawed concept

Surrender is a term that is used so frequently it has almost lost its meaning. As near as I can make out it either means to submit or to accept. It is a completely dualistic concept. You have someone who does the surrendering and someone or something to whom the surrender is offered. If the object to which one is surrendering is impersonal, like accepting the things that happen in life or putting one’s faith in God, there is little danger of mischief. But if one is submits or surrenders to the will of someone else one is asking for trouble.

Even if a seeker can achieve a relatively peaceful mind by accepting what life brings he or she still has a problem, assuming the goal is Self realization. The way one deals with the world may have been solved but surrender does not get rid of the small self. In fact, it reinforces the notion that one is limited, inadequate, separate and incomplete. Yes, surrender may bring one to the point of self inquiry but it presents the problem of who is surrendering. If you know that you are whole and complete the very idea of surrender is ridiculous. You are what you are surrendering to. How can that be? Are there two yous? So the problem created by my surrender is that there is still a me. And this me is always limited. As long as I feel limited I will not be happy because freedom is my nature. If I can ‘surrender’ or accept this sense of limitation I should be fine but again the problem arises who is accepting what? If I am the Self there is no question of accepting anything. I understand myself and reality and therefore there is no need to react to my stuff or the world by assuming a certain state of mind. Additionally, when I do assume a state of mind I encounter another problem: how to make this state permanent. In fact there are no permanent states of mind so I can never achieve perfect surrender or acceptance. Imperfect anything, including surrender, is never acceptable. The mind will not rest until it has realized that it is already perfect.

Ultimately it is much more useful to think of spiritual life in terms of understanding or truth. In reality there is no small self that is going to surrender to a ‘higher’ self. But if there is a small self it can be neutralized with understanding. To neutralize it with understanding means that I see it as an object, as not me. It is no more me than a material object. It is inert and insentient and I am the one who knows it. Surrender means that I have not inquired into the nature of that to which I am supposedly surrendered to. It is a kind of unthinking blind acceptance of the object.

So you should never surrender to a guru or anyone claiming to be enlightened. In the first place you are asking for grief because you have ceded your God given authority to someone else…and since your definition of surrender is based on the idea of accepting things without question you are putting yourself in the dark spiritually. The spiritual world is replete with stories of people who quit thinking for themselves and let a presumably more spiritually aware person do the thinking for them…to their detriment. Every week I am treated to tales of gurugic exploitation and the subsequent heartache it produced. The modern so-called ‘satsang’ and ‘advaita’ world is a case in point. It is so easy for someone to sit in front of a group of people for a couple of hours and speak inspirationally about the Self but this does not mean that the person speaking is a righteous person. If you want to believe in someone…always a bad idea…you need to be a fly on the wall of that person’s life. You need to hide in the corners and observe them objectively to see how they handle their own desires and fears. Although there is no way to determine the truth it would probably be reasonable to say that most people purporting to be enlightened are no more honest or decent or selfless than the average person. And often people who feel the need to enlighten others are massively insecure and needy and have gargantuan egos.

Spiritual life is about empowering yourself spiritually. If I follow someone else what happens to my life when that person dies, refuses to take responsibility for me or proves unworthy of my trust? If I don’t know what enlightenment is and I assume that it means that anyone who has it is kind, considerate, selfless, and compassionate I am asking for trouble. Enlightenment is something that happens at any time in a person’s development and it often happens to very troubled people. Because I suddenly see that I am OK does not mean that my psychological dysfunctions immediately cease to operate. It means that they are no longer a problem for me. But this does not mean that others are immunized from them.

If someone tells you what to do and you accept it without question you deserve whatever misery comes. Vedanta has a word for surrender that does not entail blind acceptance: shradda. Shraddha is often translated as faith but it actually means that my belief in something, or acceptance of something is not unconditional. I understand the value of calming my agitations by surrendering but I do not stop inquiring. I continue to investigate the object to which I am surrendering. And it is only when I have true knowledge of the nature of the object that I discover that my faith or surrender was justified…or not.

You should always think of gurus and spiritual teachers as flawed human beings who may be able to share some useful insight but who are potentially dangerous. If you feel the urge to surrender to anything you should surrender to the scripture. You can trust scripture because it is unauthored…no one gains anything by your acceptance. If a guru tells you to do something or to believe something he or she says, check with scripture to see if his or her teaching is consistent with accepted purified wisdom. Clever gurus have figured a way around this…they write books which you are meant to consider scripture. But one need only read the writings of Osho or Da Free John…or whatever superlative he is calling himself these days…to see that the truth is so tied up with personal views and presented in such a slick manner that an unsophisticated person will easily swallow the hook with the bait.

Surrender is a very tricky dangerous idea and one that could be profitably be dropped in favor of the attitude contained in these words of the Buddha, “Accept nothing you have read or anything you have heard…even if I have said it…unless it corresponds with you own common sense and reason.