(Potential future thread about surrender. See letting-go-of-effort too.)
seflathing
people who speak of surrender: please teach me your ways! i have seen success with both “melting” and “unclenching” but i sense i’m not fully letting go
(decent risk of me Efforting very hard to let go here, but hoping there’s something out there that’ll help with the shift)
@mettafied maybe you have something for me?
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seflathing
@mettafied thank you! with my buddhist hat on, i’d interpret that as surrender as simply no grasping, no aversion. right ballpark?
@mettafied and as it happens i grew up Muslim :) as time goes by i think everyone’s pointing to the same thing, so if you have Islamic flavoured surrender thoughts, i’d gladly hear them too 🙏♥
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seflathing
@mettafied this is great, thank you. i definitely have some prickliness around worship (also judgement, hell etc), which buddhism managed to sidestep long enough to slip by
that said i felt called to do 108 bows the other day so y’know, stranger things have happened
@mettafied i think “submission to the will of God” is much more in my vocabulary recently than it ever has been. i can understand that framing better
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seflathing
@mettafied yeah. i stumble on the worship, but i can see that as self/other confusion. the judgement and punitiveness, life as a big test with a grade and dire consequences at the end… haven’t managed to square that part
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seflathing
@mettafied i suspected you wouldn’t let that slide :) totally right ofc, including on the sterility. at least in the soto zen i’ve seen, i’ve often felt we rote copy forms but do a LOT of convenient cherrypicking of some teaching/practice but quietly casting aside others
@mettafied which on one hand: if it’s still a successful/liberatory practice, great; it’s adapted to culture a zillion times. but also i often get the icky feeling that it’s westerners playing mystical dress-up
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seflathing
@mettafied heck yeah, ty
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@mettafied helpful, thank you. surrender not so much a verb. (inclined to say a state but that gets squirrelly fast)
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seflathing
@meridians_ do you feel them as the same thing? surrender is acceptance? or acceptance first, then adding something else to make it surrender?
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@meridians_ yes, i’m with you. i am of course “still bad at” acceptance, but some days it comes. there was one day when it came, and everything else came with it 🌸
i’m asking about surrender because i get the impression folks mean beyond-acceptance, and i want to get a sense for it
@meridians_ maybe i should ask the question in a different form. what do you mean by surrender? what does it feel like to you?
as i circle around this, i’m getting the feeling that it’s something like
acceptance = yes, it is like this
surrender = and i won’t try to change it
though i wouldn’t be surprised if people say those are “recognition” and “acceptance” respectively, in which case i’m back to square one
nograsper
@selflathing With enough time observing the nature of your sense experience, its impermanent flow, and what happens when you try to hold onto it (suffering), the insight will arise that there is nothing actually here to grasp at, the whole movement was confused.
https://t.co/3NBa4QDvdu
seflathing
@nograsper this is the thing that to me, feels like turning 90 degrees through a different dimension so you’re infinitely thin in this one and there’s nothing in the way any more
@nograsper i think it is strange to call that “surrender” though. perhaps “becoming surrendered” (per the other branch of this sprawling thread) but even so
what i’m getting from most replies is that full surrender = enlightenment: give up ego, desires, etc. drop it and just Be
not the answer i expected but makes sense. and explains all the moon-pointing that took me 20mins of frustration to work through 😆
thanks all 🙏
this is my surrender thread now
https://t.co/u2pxZX308z
https://t.co/8n8ZoY3WTP
chogyam trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism has a chapter on surrender, which i read here
https://t.co/rSM1Yy4lJ3