ART OF SURRENDER

“When you lose yourself, you find the key to Paradise,” the song goes.  Surrender is not defeat.  Surrender is victory.  Only by relinquishing our thinking mind and egoic self, who we are not but believe we are, can we advance spiritually. 

The trouble is, most of us do not know how to give ourselves up, assuming we have decided to do so.  We’ve never done it before, and therefore are baffled by it. 

The way to do it is by doing something else, by being something else.  This does not mean being someone else, which is trading apples for apples.  Rather is it trading apples for nothing. 

Buddhists do it by way of altruism, serving other people.  A good example is the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard who has been actively involved for years in the building and maintaining of clinics, schools, and orphanages in Nepal.  To him and his fellow monks, the smaller their identities, the larger their spirits.