Surrendering Is Not Something You Do
Rendirse no es algo que tú hagas
A question about how to surrender and let things be, when one's habitual way of relating to experience has been predominantly mental.
Surrendering Is Not Something You Do
A question about how to surrender and let things be, when one's habitual way of relating to experience has been predominantly mental.
Letting go and surrendering, letting everything be as it is: I assume that is not a mental process.
Correct.
That's what gets me, because most of my life has been mental. Everything was mental for me. I used to think through everything, either believing my thoughts completely or being totally unaware of them. But now that I am aware of my habits, my thoughts, my emotions, I don't know how to surrender to what is. I notice it, but I don't know what to do with it. And I know I don't have to do something about it, but still.
Surrendering is what happens when fighting fails
What you cannot do is surrender. In this process, you will do everything you can to fight, and surrendering is what happens when fighting fails. In hindsight, you will be able to say surrendering happened because everything you did and tried had failed.
What you can do is see what is real, and look.
When you said everything in your life was a mental process, that's an idea. You're interpreting your life. Your life has never been just a mental process. You can live from that belief, or even interpret your past from that point of view, but even now your life is a lot more than mind, more than thoughts. You are hearing voices, you are seeing images, you are having sensations, experiencing all of that. You can only believe that there is only thought, but that doesn't make it true or real.
Thought is only a slim part of experience
All of your experience, including the belief that it is dominated by mental doing, is only a very, very slim part of your total experience, even when you feel the mind is huge and is taking over everything. It's not true. And that's what can be seen.
You can see the illusion of "I am lost in thought," or "thought is constant, everywhere, all the time." But whenever you have had thoughts, you have also had sensations, sounds, sight. As you see that more and more, surrendering will happen. But it's not you doing it.
It begins with conviction, you could say, or even the love of seeing what is real, what is true. If you choose that, if you choose the real, if you choose the seeing, if you choose the love, then you will see more and more what is true, what is real.
Whenever you feel like you are completely taken by thought, just ask yourself: are there sensations? Are there sounds? Sight? You can see that the idea of thought having taken over everything is an illusion. And that takes no effort. It just takes a moment, which is not even a moment, to look at what is happening, what is appearing. And then you will see more and more of that.
When thought becomes more than thought
Thoughts are just thoughts. When they appear to be taking over everything, it is because thoughts have become more than thought. If you are thinking about tomorrow, you can notice that all of the experience of tomorrow is thought, one hundred percent of it. But when tomorrow becomes a really big deal and it takes over, when this present moment disappears, tomorrow has become more than thought. There is a reality injected into it that we are doing.
Same with the past. It is memory-based. It is imagination based on memory. The future is imagination based on memory and prediction. All of it is thought. It can be useful, but it is never more than thought. It is like doing math. If I need to do math, it's useful. If I don't need to do math and I'm doing math all the time, it's not very useful.
I see what you are saying, but where I get stuck is this: I see the thoughts, but to know whether a thought is useful or not, I need to judge it. So I see thoughts as they are, but I'm not sure whether I need to use them. They become less and less heavy, but in life I still need to make choices based on them.
The illusion at the center of choosing
That's not something you need to challenge right now. The choices happen. The illusion there is the belief in what you think you are, which is so central in the choosing process. The subject, what you refer to as "I," contains a lot of thought. What is called "I" is largely made of thought, and that is what needs to be seen.
Then you can live and function very freely and in a very harmonious way without the sense of you having to do the thinking and the choosing. You can start to see that a lot of that is just happening naturally. If you know how to ride a bicycle, you don't think of all the movements. If you know how to swim, you don't think of all the movements. Same with walking. Same with thinking and decision-making. It is like riding a bicycle. Very little thought will be needed.
The narrative of "I" is made entirely of thought
The core of it is this: all of the narrative around the "I" can be seen, just like the imagination of tomorrow can be seen as fully thought. The imagination of "I" is the same. There is a sense of "I" which is empty. But then there is all the content, the narrative, the thought, and that can be seen as entirely made of thought. All of it.
That was enough, and it was helpful. Thank you.
I hope it helps. The more we see thought as thought and nothing more than thought, a surrendering will happen. That illusion will dissolve, and that dissolving can be called surrendering. But if you try to do it, it is just going to be more thought.