Surrendering to the flow of life events
What do you really want? Ask many people, and common answers may include money, possessing a specific good, fame, and similar characteristics of life, as Robert Waldinger points out in this series. In fact, according to Michael A. Singer—author of The Surrender Experiment and multiple other books—what you really want, in its most fundamental form, is well-being. You want to cease the unsatisfactory nature of daily existence inherent within you. The mind can come up with seemingly great examples of material achievements that it thinks will cease the constant, disparate, pedantic chatter inside of yourself usually located in the head.
Finding out what you really want is a journey of self-introspection because wants and desires are very often the direct or indirect by-products of mimetic desires—fashionable trends that attract your egoic attention because other individuals and groups around you are interested in that same thing. According to Singer, the way to get what you really want—a sense of total well-being and inner quietness—is through complete and radical openness. Openness to experience the full power of events as they arise and fade away. The openness to let the flow of life’s events guide your direction, while remaining grounded in gratitude and mindful practice—what Michael A. Singer calls the “Surrender Experiment” (and wrote a full book about his personal story with surrendering to the flow of life’s events).
Openness is surrender. Surrender is the courage to let events arise and see them as they are, fully in touch with reality and not wanting to change them, fight them, love them, attach your whole identity to them, or ruminate on them for years to come. Merely letting them arise and disappear in impermanence, an indelible characteristic of everyone’s existence. When you “look” at your life from above, beyond the universe, you can gain additional perspective to understand how rather insignificant yet powerful your existence is in the broader history of the world and the human species. If that is the case, why not surrender and let nature do its job, impermanently, as it has always done and always will do?