Waving the white flag of surrender

Been totally exhausted the past couple of days, which I can normally accept in itself but every so often it’s accompanied by terrible feelings of exasperation and hopelessness. And I just feel like GIVING UP.....now, some people might race over and beg me not to jump off the nearest cliff. It’s not quite that kind of giving up. Although the cauldron of emotion that precipitates it is anything but pleasant, it actually feels like quite a liberating kind of ‘giving up’....a surrender to what is. You see, fighting reality as it stands is just too exhausting and painful...especially if you have something like ME. You don’t ‘fight’ it to overcome it. Like I stated in an earlier blog, the tree that fights the wind has its branches cruelly snapped. The tree that surrenders to the wind and just ‘goes with the flow’, survives intact.

Sometimes the world seems like a bleak and lonely place and these past few days I have been confronted with the horrendous suffering that man perpetrates on himself and his fellow species (I’m always getting action alerts to sign certain petitions and support various causes, which I’m delighted to be able to do in order to help in some small manner...although when I’m feeling sensitive and get graphic and descriptive emails about how 36,000 dogs have been brutally beaten to death in China it hits me like a punch in the gut - maybe not everyone would particularly care, but I am an absolute animal lover and sometimes actually prefer them to people). I guess when you’re feeling low physically and emotionally you’re more liable to view everything through a certain screen, and the world can seem rather insurmountably hopeless.

But in order to feel like that I realise I’m attaching to opinions and mental viewpoints that are destructive rather than constructive. The moment I realise that the ‘mental bubble’ is back up and keeping me locked in a certain set of negative thoughts and the corresponding emotional ‘juice’ that keeps them afloat, I can just recognise this mindstuff for what it is - thoughts (in this case storm clouds) drifting across the sky of mind and I can let them go. I can burst the bubble. I do that by GIVING UP. I just....quit.

Quit everything. Surrender everything - all viewpoints, all mental interpretations, all judgements of what ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be happening, including all hopes and dreams...they all go into a big bonfire - and free up some inner S P A C E . I then feel that I’m no longer the one in charge - was I ever really? And just who is this “I” that “I” constantly attach to, anyway?? Upon investigation, there IS no “I”...and, mercifully, no “me” equals no struggle. There’s just a surrendering to life, and allowing the tide to pull me out to sea. Whatever the sea is, whatever it will be and wherever it will take me, I just let it be. I let go and I let life be whatever it wants to be. Ultimately anyway it’s aaall the same. No one gets out of this experience we call ‘life’ alive...how deliciously ironic. At least the ego never gets out of it alive...the deeper reality of unconditioned, undifferentiated consciousness, the formless that animates the form, was never fully born into this world and so can never die.

When I reach this state, a feeling of inner spaciousness and release pervades. The body can still be physically exhausted with little energy, but the ego-mind has ditched it’s struggle (why do we all act like petulant toddlers anyway; thinking that our mind tantrums and protestations will actually change life and it it what we think it ‘should’ be?). It is what it is and there’s a feeling of emptiness inside, but a good emptiness. If the body wants to be tired, it can be. The deeper part of that which is ‘I’ (the big Self and not the little ego-self, that is) doesn’t actually mind all that much, I don’t think. It just allows whatever is to be. I once heard this described as the ‘benign indifference of the universe’ and it’s a strangely comforting thing.

today the key is complete surrender to what is. completely letting go. giving up the illusion that reality should be anything than what it is. only mind would suggest otherwise - and my days of being completely entranced by mind and unquestioningly buying into every thought are truly over. what is mind anyway, but ripples on the surface of a pond; mainly conditioned habitual thoughts stemming from unconscious patterning. most thoughts are actually aimless, repetitive and destructive. once you realise that, i think, a portal opens to genuine peace and freedom....even in the midst of turmoil.