In conversations with my more intimate friends, when we share the difficult experiences we face, the more dense matters of being alive in society, it is not uncommon for me to share what I have found to be the ultimate stance of our existence in this plain of experience: the posture of surrender. Surrender, it seems clear to me is the only practice that this incarnation, this instance of being has been called to do over and over again.

“When you say surrender, what are you surrendering to?” My friends would ask as a follow up. I explain and quite expectantly wait for the next question which never fails to proceed. “How do you surrender?”

I ask them, as I suggest now, to look when the mind is not stirred up, when the mind is not reaching, not resisting, not hunting for comfort, distraction, productivity, or relief. In such a moment, you may notice this if you can come to terms with this simple fact: you didn’t choose your place of birth, your race, your gender, your metabolic rate, your preferences for ogbono over waffles, how your tongue rolls or how your pinky and ring finger are not separable when you spread your hands wide enough. Physics has felt more boring to you than art and so being an aeronautic engineer would totally bore the hell out of you? And nothing you could do could change this orientation. Isn’t it incredibly obvious and bewildering that you didn’t choose any of these aspects of manifestation? If we could look long and hard enough at this, would we not find it easy to see that our being is in fact not ours? (So whose is it? Ah! Wrong question! Keep searching!) This being was not authored by a personal hand. And yet a sense of authorship appears. A sense of control. A sense of separation. Where does it arise, if not from thought?Is it not our thoughts that rise up to claim ownership of our destinies, mistakes and inadequacies? Is it not our thoughts that somehow rise up in times of success, to claim that it was indeed our(its) hardwork, our(its) morality and our(its) own doing that resulted in whatever acheivements and successes we take pride in? Maybe, just maybe there has been something else working in the background all along! Something that moves all things. Let’s call it Grace, for the sake of this essay. It is this Grace that our personal minds claim as its own doing. Yet, our bodies live, life unfolds spontaneously. Our thoughts arriving afterward to sign its name at the bottom. Maybe when we drop the sense of personal achievement(the ‘I’ thought) and see that we are always being done, then we can truly “consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spoil: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the filed, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”

Is it not when we surrender to living and being that we get the opportunity to see what the Tao had been saying all along? In Tao Te Ching(48), it says, “when you arrive at non-action, nothing will be left undone’. In Tao Te Ching(2), it writes, “The Master can act without doing anything, and teach without saying a word. Things come her way and she does not stop them; things leave and she lets them go. She has without possessing and acts without any expectations. When her work is done, she takes no credit. That is why it will last forever”.

When surrender happens, we see that living moves forward without need for commentary. Being stands unfiltered, unadulterated. And this has absolutely nothing to do with belief. It is also not some kind of strategy or coping mechanism. It is clear seeing. To hold this knowing without turning it into a religious view, to rest in it without claiming it as a technique, that posture is surrender.

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