ARTICLE - Can't You Show Me Nothing But Surrender

In 1975 Patti Smith's debut album Horses was released. Horses exists in a curious liminal space that it opened up between punk and performance poetry. Suddenly poetry was fashionable and hip, and was interacting with rock n roll in the same way The Beat Poets had with the druggy haze of Cool Jazz. The eponymous title track is written as though its taking place within the sort of woozy headed rush of a fevered dream, 'The Boy' who looks at Johnny ending up in a street fight with switchblades. And in the middle of this furious tussle the -

Angel looks down at him and says, 

"Oh, pretty boy, Can't you show me nothing but surrender?"

All because 'The Pretty Boy' in the heat of the fight, his heart pumping like 'Arabian stallions lapping into sea horses' seems suddenly to go compulsively passive, surrendering himself up to whatever is happening to him in the moment. Unsure even of the reality of the reality he is in. If he is in the middle of a drug induced hallucination, a psychological fight or an actual physical attack, or all three. And who is this Angel anyways? But the angel certainly believes 'The Pretty Boy' has other options, and surrendering? well this is just too easy, lazy even. Sometimes you have to fight your corner for what you want. Apathy can be a passive form of surrender. True surrender is always an active choice.

This points us in the direction of one manifestation of surrender. You recognise that you are not in control of what is happening to you, so you give up fighting it. Even if the result maybe, as in this case, potentially life threatening. You let down any defenses surrounding yourself and offer yourself up to some form of death, whether that be literal or metaphorical you cannot tell. Its an example of what I'm  calling - Nihilistic Surrender. A reckless and self regarding extinguishing desire. And in Patti Smith's Horses, we have references to one of its modern archytypes - of doomed self immolating individualism. Surrendering oneself up to being murdered, or to debilitating drugs, to the couldn't careless destruction of the boundaries of the self. A suicidal masochism. Quicken the pace and die young with an emaciated corpse, that they made from forging their own way in life

And whilst this might appear to be a modern phenomena, it does have its imaginative antecedents in the religious imagery of Catholic martyred saints and of The Buddha during his pre-Enlightenment phase of starving his own body to see what might arise from deprivation. The inviolability and sanctity of the body is being fundamentally questioned and tested, to find out what may happen when you give up trying to protect and cosset it. This element of Nihilistic Surrender exists at some level in many religions.

Surrender is then a familiar refrain in spiritual practice. It denotes some form of death, not necessarily actual, but certainly intended to be spiritually transformative. It makes saints and sages in this life or the next. The Self is seen as a form of corrupting influence upon the ultimate sanctity of existence, and its diktats need to be repressively denied in order to free yourself from them.You extinguish one thing in order that the whole of you is made available to be transformed. A religious re-configuration of Nihilistic Surrender preceding, and indeed preparing the way for the more elevated Transformative Surrender.

And yet, this Transformative Surrender also seems to be only the start of another process, of giving oneself up to something more ultimate and eternal in nature. Whether that be to a God, a higher state of consciousness or an elevating expanded perception of reality.  These seem to be examples pointing towards Eternalistic Surrender, of surrendering oneself to something that is above, beyond and transcending that of mundane human existence entirely.

Surrender shares qualities with renunciation, though it is a slightly different level of the beast. For to truly renounce anything you do have to let go of whatever you believe is an obstacle. The thing that is holding you back. You have to have had prior insight into your way of behaving, living or being that you wish to move beyond. And this thorough form of renunciation can be transformative, which nevertheless tends to be slow moving and incremental in nature. 

If you prematurely renounce without a substantial insight into the consequences of a behaviour and what damage that does to your 'soul', then this is really a self denial or punishment lacking in any higher uplifting trajectory. The worst sort of renunciation would be to do so because it says you should in a book, or a Pastor, Pope or Guru tells you that you should. This leans heavily towards Nihilistic Surrender in that you are very consciously knowingly punishing yourself. Its a flagellation of the self, that perhaps takes too literally the willful extinguishing of human desires.

Much of spiritual practice, whatever the religious tradition, is a very conscious choice 'to do this - instead of that'. We might not initially couch these in terms of renunciation. And in these primary stages of renunciation, surrender can have an unassuming cast to it. But there is something in the nature of  ultimate truly transformative and then eternalistic surrender that is no longer humble, its no longer consciously accompanied by a particular goal in mind. Even terms like letting go and surrender start to feel as if they have this acquisitive undertow, in that there is assumed to be something you are letting go into. 

In Buddhism stages of letting go are suggested by the teaching of Sunyata. Now, listen carefully because this teaching is often misconstrued. Though Sunyata's reductive meaning is emptiness, this is not the nihilistic emptiness of an extinguishing void. It is empty, in that existence is 'emptied' of any applied meaning we might wish to give to it  The four stages of Sunyata concluding with The Emptiness of Emptiness itself. Here existence simply stands, naked of any descriptive noun or verb. Its what Zen refers to as Suchness. 

Whatever the colour or tone applied to surrender, these are ultimately conceptualisations that loose their usefulness as the journey progresses. To suggest that there is both someone who can surrender, and something that can be surrendered too, begin to loose their traction. There is a lot of reference these days to the idea of Radical Acceptance, where you are encouraged to let go of any notion of control or desire for ourselves and of reality to be different from what it actually is. To let things be as they are. The danger in this is that people might mistake this 'letting things be' for passivity. Whilst accepting that this idea is also a human concept, I would like to suggest the term Radical Acceptance may have some value. It feels more in alignment with a state of just being Being. Of developing a Sympathy with Suchness, until that becomes you.