Surrender the World
Edited from a talk to his meditation group in Highgate, London, 26 August 1981.
We walk through this world - the world of living and time. And the mortal part of us, the time in us, picks up the time in the world. It’s like static electricity we bring in with us from out there. This is a space, an oasis, where we can quickly throw it off. We can surrender the world here. In meditation we learn how to do it, so that when the pressure comes on us in the world, and heaviness is upon us, we can surrender the tension. We can surrender our attachment to relationships. And if you do it often enough, it works … Because that’s what meditation is for - to take the pressure off, to take the yoke from us.
What is this pressure? Where does it come from? It only comes because I allow it; because I have not got my perspective right. The fact is I am going to die. But living is not life. Living is mortal and life is immortal. Everything that lives dies. Everything that has life is alive. When we pursue living in the world, we pursue mortality. But if I know immortality, inasmuch as I can experience and know life at any moment, then I am life - I am immortal. So we have got to get our perspective right. I am going to die one day, but just for this moment I die now. I die now, not tomorrow. I die to the pressure of the world. I surrender it. Surrender is dying now. If I am angry, I will die to this anger now. I release the person or circumstance from the prison within me. And when I have freed my prisoner then I am free. And I am much better for it.
There are always the problems of living, but most of them are a projection to tomorrow. You might have to pay the rent tomorrow and you don’t have the money. Can you take action now? Can you phone someone and ask for a loan? If you have done everything possible, when you can do no more, surrender. Or will you go on thinking and thinking with no intention to act? If you can do nothing, then give up. In this meditation you learn to instantly surrender. And before you know it you have started to give up thinking - because thinking is an attachment to the world. What do you think about? The world. You only think about living. You can’t think about life. You can’t think about the beauty of the robin’s song or the glory of the sunset. Any thought will be about living, not about the life you love; because you can’t think about love. See the one you love or have love inside you and all thought stops. Love, beauty and life are immortal.
There is nothing out there in the world that you can do that is meaningful in itself. It is only meaningful to the extent that it assists you to go into your immortality. That is the value of love. Love allows me to sink into myself, to become more real, kinder, more tolerant and patient, more loving; to become fine enough to sink through the tension and the strata of time in me; so that I can give up my living-ness, my desire to live, my desire to be something. In a state of love, I surrender all that, for the sake of love.
Meditating Is Surrendering