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I write and I talk about breaking free of the illusion of the self, and of course the question comes up, “Well, how do you do that?” It’s hard to explain how you do that, because the whole point is to get beyond the ‘you’ that is trying to do things. It’s really a more of a giving up, a surrendering.
How do you surrender? What does it mean to surrender? There is an element of surrender in all the major religious traditions. Christians try to emulate Jesus when he said, “Not my will but thy will be done.” “Islam” means surrender, surrendering to Allah. In Eastern traditions like Hinduism the surrendering might be to God in a theistic sense or as a more impersonal aspect of the greater reality. Then there are elements of Zen Buddhism that come from Taoism, where you are surrendering to the Tao, the Way—giving in to it, becoming one with it.
I don’t think it really matters what you call whatever it is we surrender to, or whether your conception of this is through a personal relationship, as many people feel their relationship to God is, or it is thought of as more impersonal. Ideas about who or what you are surrendering to come from your bent of personality and what kind of concepts you have come to be comfortable with. The important thing is the sense of surrender to this larger reality.
When I talk about surrendering there is usually an objection, “Does that mean you don’t do anything, you just sit there?” But this that you are surrendering to has life in it—is life, really. When we are living out of the ego mind, it often seems like our life is driven by our own will and that without that nothing would happen, that there would just be stagnation. But if you look at nature, you see that it is constantly moving, growing, changing, without any human will involved. In giving yourself over to the life force that is behind all of reality, there will continue to be movement, but movement that seems more effortless. Not that you don’t make efforts physically, or even mentally, but it feels like less of an inner effort; there is less internal conflict and resistance to the inner guidance of the heart.
When people have been with the spiritual life for a little while, practicing meditation or some prayer form to go deeper within, they get a sense of this source of life inside themselves, some sense of direction from within—what I sometimes call the heart center. You can think of it as though it is a chick within an egg. This quiet space within yourself, the heart center where your life derives from, is the chick. And it’s growing; it’s growing as you sit on the egg to keep it warm. Your meditation or prayer practice is sitting on the egg, creating the environment for it to be able to grow inside. It grows for a time, and then it begins to peck at the shell; the shell is the self. The chick wants to break through that. It’s not sure what is beyond it, or how different life will be afterward, because the inside of the shell is all it has ever known. But it feels like it has to open up.
What does it mean to break through that shell? It means to give yourself over to the heart center, to allow it to take over. In your daily life as you find yourself caught up in mind stuff—caught up in an emotional state like anger or fear, or thoughts about how things should be or other people should be, or the incessant planning about the future—you give that over to this inner quiet space, and let that life force within take over and give you movement rather than having the thoughts and emotions control your direction. Just be guided in the present moment by this life force, by God, by the Tao—whatever it is. Let it give you guidance. Surrender your own ideas about the way things should be and let this inner force take you where you need to go.
Now, that doesn’t mean that it is bad to have plans and projects, it just means you shouldn’t take them so seriously. When your life is not going the way you thought it should, when it feels stuck, like it’s not quite getting you where you expected, give that over. Let the inner quiet come and open up to it. Let it give the calmness that it is offering, and allow it to give you direction.
So this surrender, even though it is a surrender of the self in one way—in that our familiar self is composed of our projects and plans, and ideas about who we are and who we are supposed to be—is not a negation of life. The word ‘self’ becomes confusing here because there is the ‘self’ that constricts like the eggshell and there is the ‘self’ within that’s like the chick, growing and coming out of the shell. The true self, breaking through the false self. Big mind breaking through little mind. The sense of oneness with God cracking through the sense of separation.
It is a surrender to something larger than yourself, not a surrender to nothingness—although it is even called nothingness at times, meaning that you can’t assign a name to it or describe its attributes. You allow it to take over and move you and feel a sense of fulfillment in who you are becoming when you do that. That is what surrender means. It is giving over to that internal nameless self that wants to grow, life that wants to live itself—life to the fullness.
Alan F. Zundel is a counselor, author, and teacher currently living in Eugene, Oregon. His talks are available to download for free at HeartAwake Center at www.heartawake.org.
Alan F. Zundel is a counselor, author, and teacher currently living in Eugene, Oregon. His talks are available to download for free at HeartAwake Center at 