Surrender cannot be brought about. Freedom cannot be directly achieved. Surrender is the complete absence of selfreferential activity. Freedom is the complete absence of selfreferential activity. Deliberate actions and conscious intentions are both selfreferential, pointing, mistakenly, to a separate self as their source. Surrender is the falling away of selfreferential activity. It is replaced by pure or spontaneous activity, activity that just happens. Actions unclaimed and untainted by any selfreference. This falling away results from clear awareness. Awareness as a seeing into the mechanism of the mind that allows a seeing into the true nature and source of perception, intention and action. Once the veils of the mind’s projective mechanism fall away action, and its originating dynamic, can be seen just as it is. An indivisible network of impersonal inevitability. This triggers the collapse of the sense of the separate self as the doer.

All that we can do is extend an invitation to surrender. By enquiring into the nature of our actions. As all actions, like all objects of which they are a specific category, are perceptual events, this becomes an enquiry into the nature of perception. The invitation to surrender is extended not through specific special actions or activities. But through enquiry into the true nature of our habitual actions. Enquiry into that which is actually happening.

People are so used to the notion that improvement in life is brought about by judicious intention and skilful action that to ask them to simply look openly at what is allready being done is unpalatable and unacceptable. Nevertheless that is all that is required. Anything more will prevent the possibility of surrender.

The practice of yoga involves utilising a specific set of actions as the basis for this enquiry. The importance and power of these specific actions (such as the yoga postures and their internal dynamics) lies not in what their external effects are but in their ability to focus attention more deeply and clearly on the mechanism of that which is actually happening.

All actions are based on either the body or the mind. So yoga practice is based as directly upon that as possible. The postures and breathing practices are desigend to free action from external results. Within this freedom the actual nature and source of action can become clear. Yoga takes us on a journey into the nature of action from the body, via the breath to the mind.

Inviting surrender, then, is a centripetal activity, that works from the coarse to the subtle. In the ashta anga methodology of classical yoga this means working from the gross activity of the body to the most subtle activity of the mind. This begins with yama and niyama as a code whereby the enquiry is conducted. Asana takes this beyond the bodies structure into its functioning. Pranayama leads likewise through the breath to the mind. Meditation takes us through and beyond the mind to awareness and surrender.

At first surrender is momentary, relative to a single moment. In the light of awareness all actions are revealed as being inherently impersonal and inevitable, and no self to which they adhere asserts itself. When this has been confrmed beyond any doubt whatsoever, surrender is permanent. In between we fluctuate between selfidentification and surrrender, bondage and freedom. It can be a long journey between the first and final surrender. This is not important. Somewhere along the line, however, a watershed is reached.

Now enough behavioural tenencies have been seen through, and the identityfield has been weakened enough that the true nature of the self and its actions is more often experienced than not. It is now no longer possible to believe in the personal nature of the identityfield, nor in the application of any activity as a means of deliverance, for the truth of the human dilemma is known. Now it is simply a question of time and grace.

1998 canam ibiza