I have struggled with the notion of spiritual surrender for years. My results attempting surrender in prayer and meditation have been barren for a long time. I have not understood it, though I’ve read much by many of my spiritual guides about what it entails. I’ve been too much in the mind, and influenced by concepts of Deities (as objects) that I was supposedly surrendering to. Today, I began to understand with the fabric of the being, the soul, and not the mind, for the first time. And it was this poem by Rainier Maria Rilke that opened the door:

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
​
Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child —
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.
​
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
​
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
​
So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.
​
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

There’s no other way to state it: something in the depths of my soul recognized what it was for the first time. I felt a subtle, subdued interior “Ahhhhh”, and there was quickly a deep interior relaxation and letting go, a release of sorts. Immediately, there was a strong deepening of consciousness felt in the head and torso, a pillar of subtle force and presence pulsing at an intense, low vibration. Peace and suffused stillness set in at once. I understood.

Surrender to a limited aspect is just another limitation. Because of this, Jnana Yoga advises us to surrender to the Spiritual Heart (atman). For a jnani, real surrender means sacrificing individuality to universality, the temporal to the eternal, and the limited form to infinity. That is why Nisargadatta Maharaj recommended and encouraged surrender to the inner guru (the Supreme Self, the Spiritual Heart), rather than surrender to any form or person:

“Q: This is what I call surrender to the guru.

M: Why exteriorize? Surrender to your own [S]elf, of which every­thing is an expression.”

Ramana Maharshi also affirmed: “Surrender is to give oneself up to the original cause of one’s being. Do not delude yourself by imagining such a source to be some God outside of you. Your source is within yourself. Give yourself up to it. That means that you should seek the source and merge in it.”

Surrender: Letting Go and Opening to the Self

What I would say in the wake of this experience is that surrender falls under the province of the soul vessel, not the mind, and it goes hand-in-hand with an interior call. Too, it is a feeling-state, not an action: a call or appeal (a yearning or a want?) from the periphery of our existence to the Center and a simultaneous recognition that for all of our efforts, we are incapable of truly sanctifying and spiritualizing our lives from our surface consciousness. Only the silent and mysterious Source at the center of our beings is capable of doing that. But that silent unnamable Source is not an object addressed as in our conventional thinking. It is Mystery, beyond apprehension, not understood, perhaps not capable of being understood within our limited cognitive mindsets. It has a drawing Power towards Itself in the Center, like gravity. It is always enacting a subtle pull on us, which we unconsciously push away from and struggle against in our efforts to stand out, “be someone,” to craft our own identities. We need only drop our efforts, conceptions, and activity, be still, and make the interior appeal with the recognition of our inadequacy in managing our own being. At that point, it feels entirely natural and right that we lay down our self-made designs and schemes to Surrender; we see the deep futility of attempting to “add a cubit to our stature by taking thought.” Ultimately, our Surrender is not to Anything or Anyone as we conceive it; it is an objectless-Surrender, a deep allowing. It feels like falling into Nothingness, which can sound terrifying to the mind. But it reveals itself as a sweet nectar, nourishing to the depths. The Motive Power from the Mystery is always present and never fails to act, the same way gravity never fails to act within its sphere of activity. And the result, to the depth that the Surrender permits, is a deep, standing peace and a vast stillness. May you also seek and find. And may peace be always with you.