Surrendering isn’t about saying, “I think today I’ll surrender.” That’s not what surrender is about.
That’s all just another ego trip.
Surrender is when you get put in an absolutely impossible position, and you see that there is no other way but to surrender.
People come up and they say, “Aren’t you courageous to surrender.” HA! I don’t have a choice!
I have a brother who is sort of weird at times…most of the time. He keeps escaping from hospitals. I visit with him all the time, and I come in and we go into these incredible places, and they can be really, very hard. The last place we were in, I got up and walked out, and he was screaming at me as I went down the street. I mean, he had done a few heavy things like hiring murderers to kill my father, and calling in the middle of the night to my father’s wife and saying “Your husband is in the hospital. He just died.” You know, just sort of fun things. So, I was sharing with him the fact that maybe he wasn’t totally conscious about how he was dealing with Dad at this point. So he threw me out. I walked down the street, very self-righteous. I got so far down the street, and then I asked myself how far could I go? I could, in time and space, move around the block, further away from him physically, but here we were. The dialogue was still going on between us. So I went back and I knocked on the door and he says, “Well, I’m glad you’ve come back.”
We started into another place, and this time I was in a very calm place saying, “Right. This is what we are going through. This is his karma, and mine, and here we are in this dance. He’s only my brother in this incarnation, and I love him.”
I love you and here you are, and I know you’re here and we will be here together, and when I’m pure enough to be here, you’ll be here too. That will be the way we will exercise whatever it is, and I have nothing to do but to work on myself for you, and that at this point there’s nothing more I can do, and then I can leave.
At that point we were left at a certain place of the karmic resolve, the karmic resolution of the relationship.
How long would it all take, I don’t know. Maybe a lifetime, maybe we’ve been going through this dance again, and again, and again. I don’t know, but each time I met him, all I could do is love him and be conscious that whoever it is that any of us thought it all was… it wasn’t.
-Ram Dass
Photo by Lisa Law
