The two surrenders

Continuing the conversation

I find it essential to mention that I intend my logbook posts to be interconnected and an organic prolongation of their previous ones. My philosophical exploration is a journey and so, every entry intends to represent a step towards this mysterious calling leading my way.

The attention that attends curiosity

If something has marked me with a nonplussing certainty during my eclectic life path it's the sensation that what modern paradigms call coincidences are rarely so and that patterns have a subtle yet tangible presence in the Cosmos.

To be able to find patterns is a tricky endeavour. Due to my metaphysical curiosity, I often find myself observing how there are underlying common substances to some experiences with various specific and diverse contexts; analogue to the differentiation of the essence and the form.

The best way that I can exemplify this is the following: imagine that you have colourized waters of different hues. You can move the same water to different containers but the colour inside will remain the same, and you can also put another colourised water in the same jar but even if the shape keeps its equality, the essence present, the reflections and light that projects are different just because the tonality inside it’s so.

Of course, if we go to a more universal appreciation we can say that, even if the shades change, they are still all water, and that is correct, but one observation doesn’t annul the other. There are multiple levels of generality and specificity in reality and they must not be incompatible since our existence is not a paradox (or is it? Just messing with you).

Following the analogy of the colourized water, I believe that human experience is all about perception and experimentation. The explanation as for why I think this, would be the motif of another entry but it would be dishonest not to state the subjective stepping stones upon which I build my philosophical observations and conclusions -and by the way, I also believe that admitting this, far from invalidating my philosophical process, it makes it stronger since I’m completely convinced, and I even dare to debate in defence of this argument against anyone who challenges so, that no human knowledge has ever been produced objectively; and so being aware of where our subjectivities lay aids to a better grounded, less pretentious understanding and far less inflated presentation of our ideas-.

Inter-relational meaning

So, since I believe that being human is about perception and experimentation, the only way to honour that raison d'etre is through our perceptional attributes that, if in the physical world are the five senses that immerse us in the material reality through our sensitivity, in an etheric level the parallel attribute is, you guessed it, our soul or psyche -depending on your theoretical inclination-. Needless to say, I see our feelings the same way I see textures, colours and tastes. For me, envy, happiness or greed are equivalents to bitter, rough or orange and our sensorial apparatus is the one that enables the experiences of the senses in multiple layers.

This is what I mean when I say that colourized waters can have different vessels and yet the experience will be grouped in a feeling even if the shape is not the same. Love can take many forms and yet the colour is the same, jealousy, hatred, hope, ingeniousness, ingenuousness, inspiration, etcetera. Some feelings we are unable to recognize until we’ve been through them, and then we can start seeing them in someone else, like ingenuousness. In my opinion, this is the beginning of language since it’s impossible to develop a common language without a common experience. Without a shared ‘signified’ there is no space for a ‘signifier’ (thank you, de Saussure). Even more so, you can give any name to any experience and if it’s only experienced by you and there is no one to share it with, language becomes obsolete.

So I would go a step further and say that human life is not only about experiences but about shared experiences. I’ve mentioned this in the previous post but I’m going to reiterate: we live in a very individualistic-oriented globalized society that tends to put on a pedestal the individual spiritual and philosophical paths, but it’s impossible to find patterns with a mentality too attached to this perspective because it subtracts us from the shared ground we are standing on.

Releasing control

Surrender has become for me a significant and highly relevant aspect of my spiritual practice. Holding and releasing I might say, is the closest I found to the everyday practice of breathing, and I find that simplicity captivating. But the fact that something is simple doesn’t always imply that it's easy, sometimes the hardest goal to achieve is being simple, and this is the case of surrendering.

I will express myself in this article in terms of duality, but like in my previous post, this duality can also be perceived as two parts of a whole, like the wisdom in the Yin and Yang symbol.

There are two types of surrender that although different in gradation are equal in essence, and even if I never thought or had the need of giving them names until this precise moment, for the sake of an easier understanding of them I’ll call them the ‘inexperienced’ and the ‘experienced’ surrenders. Both surrenders might have diverse holders and the way the water gets into them is different too but I guarantee you that the colour is the same.

Surrendering has a powerful mystical meaning. It’s the biggest act of faith a human being can make and for that, this is not going to be a light undertaking to explain it.

To hope or to have faith

It has come to my attention by a video made by a fellow Wiccan and graduate of comparative religions, called Thorn Mooney, that there is some controversy around the word ‘faith’. It seems that the term faith belongs to Judaeo-Christian religions and the true meaning if it can’t nor should we try to extrapolate it to other religions, but in case you haven't noticed by the title of this section, I’m going to.

To unify the multiple definitions of ‘faith’ that I found on the internet, we could sum up the meaning as “the complete trust, confidence or unjustified conviction in someone or something”. Someone could say that faith is a firm and obstinate hope in something, but also it’s the belief that when you release control there is something there that will catch you, and that, my friends, is an act of surrender.

I’m not a person who is likely to respect the monopoly some groups pretend to have over some words, words belong to humanity at large and so no one has more right over their meaning than others. I‘m convinced that faith is inherent in human nature -just like any other sensation- and if some people deny it within themselves because its Christian connotation makes them feel uncomfortable, then that’s their prerogative, but even believing that only logic and reason can explain reality is also an act of faith, because to be able to prove such statement they should be able to explain everything through logic and reason already. So each of us holds beliefs that keep our alienation from the world at bay in order to be able to have a functional interaction with it -whether we recognize it or not-.

Why faith?

I like to think that we are in a constant dialogue with Nature -maybe not always in a verbal one but nevertheless-, and because that Nature is as much outside as it’s inside we can find a point of connection between the hermetic premise of “as above, so below” and the Delphic maxim of “know thyself and you’ll know the universe and the Gods”. And so going from an inexperienced to an experienced state of consciousness is not only inevitable but also crucial to the spiritual experience. But because our species seems to learn better from contrast, the more we know about the world the more taxing surrendering becomes, and the more resistance we seem to encounter to the process.

Now I think it's fair to ask why I see surrender as an act of faith and not an act of nihilism. Well, because life is statistically unlikely to thrive and yet, here we are. Given Nature's tendency to inertia, the fact that something exists when it could've been nothing instead challenges any kind of statistical foreseen -and keeps doing so-.

In honour of the truth, I also need to clarify that I only really care about statistics when it challenges our preconceived ideas of what is possible and leads us to question probability since I find the attachment most people have to it, is also a belief and a coping mechanism.

You don't need to be spiritual to go through the mystical journey of surrender but if you reject any intention of finding meaning in reality, probably its spiritual outcome will remain obscure to you.

Being really held

First I’d like to address the inexperienced side of surrender.

I have a personal story that led me to this entire set of observations, but before I share it with you I’d like to establish a mindset that truly captures the meaning of inexperienced surrender. When young birds jump from a high branch to fly for the first time, they're almost completely unaware of the power of gravity in their bodies and the fatal effect the fall might have on them, and yet, there is something instinctual that prevents them from dying or hurting themselves. There is a pull toward surviving in the most unconscious and unresisting manifestations of life so immense, that the most experienced forms of consciousness would pale in comparison.

The personal anecdote that led me to this realization was the following. For the longest time, every time I took the tube in Buenos Aires, my eyes would automatically redirect to the rails in front and under me, and I always had the intuition that I needed to go down there someday. This might sound like a suicidal thought but I’ve actually had suicidal thoughts and this didn’t feel anything like it. I just felt a pull, as if that place was calling me.

Years went by, always having that indescribable allurement in my soul every time I took the subway rails, until one day, I was really late to an appointment and because my head is always in the clouds I went down the tube entry in the wrong direction, and I didn't have the time to go up and down again but I saw a technician open the side door that goes directly to the rails and disappear in the shadows, and I just knew this was the moment to follow that calling. My pragmatical need was more pressing than all the contrarian sensations I had in my gut, so it made me not pay attention to them, I walked towards the side door and ran across the rails from one side to the other. When I realized what I had done I felt a little disappointed. All this time I was having such a mystical pulling to the experience and once I've done it didn’t feel particularly meaningful.

Once again, years went by and one time I was talking with a friend who was really into engineering, and I told him about this story and he looked at me in horror. He told me “Do you realize how dangerous is what you did? There are lines of electricity going through the rails and the chances of you going across unharmed when you don't know anything about the system are very slim”. His reaction was so emotionally charged that it actually affected me, and his comment was what I finally needed to complete the mystical experience of that pulling sensation because it made me feel held by something ineffable, and reminded me of the bird's first flight.

This is not the only time that not fully understanding the consequences and risks I was taking, made me feel held by something greater, and in a certain way, the energy of surrender always reminded me of Le Mat arcanum (the Madman tarot card), but I could’ve not been able to tie that pattern if I hadn’t gone through this experience.

Duality or a cycle?

Long story short, both.

To embrace the other side of surrender we need to inhabit the not-so-pleasant feelings of fear, frustration and entrapment. The experienced side of surrender usually comes plagued with resistance, since fear has a powerful influence in reality, and knowing most of the possible ways of how something can go wrong, far from letting us flow with the wind, makes us stiff enough to make the flying adventure a catastrophe, and that is my point exactly. Surrendering will always have one essence, and it can’t be faked or forced, but the path one takes to arrive at it will be very different from an experienced or inexperienced starting point.

There is no surrender without releasing and there is an undeniable call from Nature that urges us to do so. But, "what posses me to make such an ostentatious affirmation?" First of all, an unapologetic shamelessness, but beyond jokes, the fact that the scenarios we fear the most tend to materialize in our lives when we give them power over us shows a pulling towards release even in the most tense realities. You don’t need to be a mystic to notice this, it’s common to the human experience. Nature will always have the tendency. to release any state of tension and our psyche and actions are also part of Nature.

The other kind of duality

I’m not a person who likes to analyse reality from a moral perspective, not because I lack one but because when it comes to my philosophical curiosity, I’m more interested in understanding reality from multiple sights than in restricting it or denying what I don’t like. I think there is so much richness in approaching duality from a perspective of complementary forces that can merge instead of forces being in dispute. That being said I have developed a set of ethical precepts I adhere to in my personal life, in case my previous statement appals you.

I must now state the obvious, that in my preceding contemplation of surrender, I haven’t mentioned one of the most obvious contexts of it, and that is the defeatist connotation of those who give up a fight or find victory impossible even in a moral context. But haven’t I?

The battle between good and evil is such a universal and timeless dispute that even in individual cases when we feel that we gave up and ‘evil’ won -which is also subject to our personal appreciation-, that might have been a battle but not the war, and so in a complex interweaved collective narrative, no one can know how any loss can contribute to an ultimate victory, just like in chess to win a game we need to sacrifice some pieces.

So, in a way, even coming from a defeatist context, surrender is a forced-by-circumstances act of faith that continues the cycle of falling until we recover a sense of innocence on a collective level, even if the feeling of Nature catching us might not be obvious or immediate from an individual standpoint.

Final thought

I know it seems paradoxical to state before that the human journey is about having experiences and then directing our attention to a surrender that aims for an inexperienced state of mind, and to address this observation I’ll make the boldest statement I've made in any writing of mine: I believe Nature to be subjective. I don't believe it to be objective at all and the fact that there is a direct correlation between our relationship with our feelings and the events that occur in our lives is, if not a proof at least a hint of this truth.

I believe Nature is leading us to be able to hold experience without the need of mislaying our ability to surrender. Because in a universe where everything could be, becoming true magicians means being able to trust that Nature wants to give us everything our soul needs and help us manifest it in union with her instead of our modern tendency to force ourselves upon her.

Now more than ever, comprehending that magick and spirituality don’t lay only in incorporeal states of being is crucial, to taking humanity to greater awareness.