Meditating Is Surrendering
Barry Long speaking to his meditation group in Highgate, London, 5 August 1981.
Meditation is the surrender of yourself at any moment. Starting with the body: we hold on to it, as evidenced by the strain and tension in us. We are not generally aware of this tension unless we get a headache or a pain. We depend on some manifestation of our clinging to our body, in some dramatic form, to tell us we’re holding on to it. But in meditation we look inside to see if we are holding on, or are surrendered. That is the object of meditation, if it has an object. Eventually it is to be in the continuous state of surrender in the body; and then you don’t have to look to see if you are surrendered or not.
One can get the impression, as I did, from the Gurdjieff teaching that to really be alive one has to super-sensitise the senses; to be aware of what every sense is doing. That’s impossible. To get into the senses one merely has to self-surrender. The Gurdjieff teaching, which is admirable as a technique, gets your attention back with your body and senses so that you are aware of your own existence rather than always slipping away from the now. But to get up to this moment, which is more present than ‘the now’, you have to be surrendered. Being in the now is being in the senses: you are seeing yourself walking up the road, or doing something. To be in the moment is to be stiller. You surrender in the now, but to be surrendered is to be in the moment. And in the moment the sensation you reach in right meditation is the pure sensation of yourself, moving at the same speed as the mind. Then sensation and mind form one 360 degree unity. You are surrendered without any conscious effort whatever - you are just consciousness.
As I remember it, what J Krishnamurti says about meditation is that it becomes an habitual thing of the mind and not desirable without the understanding of what meditation is. His approach is that no effort is needed. And he is right. Looking down from the height of consciousness, where sensation and mind are the same thing, it is all very simple. But looking up, it takes time and effort.
How can it take time when there is only now? It takes time when you need time. If you’ve had a row or some attachment has gone wrong, it’s no good getting into your senses and self-remembering, because you are too disturbed. You have to deal with the great vibrating thing called the self, responding out of the past to the stimulus of the present.
The meditation I teach consists of using the attention. You are wherever your attention is. Attention is what you consist of in this moment. So if you are disturbed you put your attention on the disturbance, which is always within you. It does require you to know that what is disturbed is within. It does require you to get through the barrier of thinking, which spreads around the disturbed self like armour. We work on meditation to slow down the thinking so we can get at the disturbed self. A person who does not use right meditation will be distracted by thinking; the attention will shoot out in the direction of those thoughts and he just cannot get to the source of the agitation, so he cannot deal with it. There’s a holding on to the tension, the disturbance.
See the body as a well … The person is holding on to the sides of the well with grim determination. As we surrender and let go of the walls, we sink down and down. The attention sinks down. And we cannot think while we are sinking down because the attention is very still. It is the most powerful and effective, finest energy we have in self-discovery or in the journey to God; the end of the search being deep down in the unconscious at the bottom of the well. When the attention fixes on the agitated self, which is always much coarser, it gradually dissolves it. Then, when the pure sensation of the being is vibrating at the same speed as the attention, we don’t have to try or strive and we are totally surrendered.
So if you have had an argument, look for any tension in the body and give it up - slide down the well towards the unconscious. If there is agitation, find it in the body, isolate it, put the attention on it and just sit with it - no thought - and gradually the attention will become the sensation of the agitation. And that will allow you to sink further and further down the well towards the unconscious.
I cannot enter the unconscious as a conscious being. If I am to discover it, I must be the unconscious - it must be where I am. That is the reason for surrender - for letting go of the walls of the well, or let’s say the sides of the body within. As I sink down I must give up the knowing, the searching, and give up saying, 'What is this? What is that?’ The walls of the well - as the need to know something - are the only obstruction. But to the extent that I have been the unconscious, when I rise to consciousness, as I am now, I can explain all about it. You can always recognise the truth, when someone is speaking from the truth of himself as a 360 degree experience, because he is speaking from his unconscious; that is, speaking without thought.
Surrender