The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [71]
Why wait? You can be as alive as you want to be through a process known as surrender. This is the next step in conquering death. So far in this chapter the line between life and death has become so blurry that it has almost disappeared. Surrender is the act of erasing the line entirely. When you can see yourself as the total cycle of death within life and life within death, you have surrendered—the mystic’s most powerful tool against materialism. At the threshold of the one reality, the mystic gives up all need for boundaries and plunges directly into existence. The circle closes, and the mystic experiences himself as the one reality.
SURRENDER IS . . .
Full attention
Appreciation of life’s richness
Opening yourself to what is in front of you
Nonjudgment
Absence of ego
Humility
Being receptive to all possibilities
Allowing love
Most people think of surrender as a difficult, if not impossible, act. It connotes surrender to God, which few except the most saintly seem to manage. How can one tell that the act of surrender has happened? “I am doing this for God” sounds inspiring, but a video camera in the corner of the room couldn’t tell the difference between an act performed for God and the same act performed without God in mind.
It’s much easier to do the surrendering on your own and let God show up if he wants to. Open yourself up to a Rembrandt or Monet painting, which is after all as glorious a piece of creation as there is. Pay full attention to it. Appreciate the depth of the image and the care in its execution. Open yourself up to what is in front of you rather than allowing yourself to be distracted. Don’t judge in advance that you have to like the painting because you’ve been told it’s great. Don’t force yourself to respond because it makes you look smart or sensitive. Let the painting be the center of your focus, which is the essence of humility. Be receptive to any reaction you may have. If all these steps of surrender are present, then a great Rembrandt or Monet will evoke love because the artist is simply there in all his naked humanity.
In the presence of such humanity, surrender isn’t difficult. People themselves are more difficult. Yet surrendering to someone else follows the same steps we just listed. Perhaps the next time you sit down to dinner with your family you might decide to concentrate on just one step of surrender, such as paying full attention or being nonjudgmental.
Pick the step that seems easiest to approach or, better yet, the one that you know you’ve been leaving out. Most of us have left out humility when we relate to our families. What does it mean to be humble with a child, for example? It means regarding the child’s opinion as equal to your own. At the level of awareness, it is equal; your advantage of years as the parent at the table doesn’t discount that fact. We all had to be children, and what we thought back then had all the weight and importance of life at any age, perhaps more so. The secret of surrender is that you do it inside, without trying to please anyone else.
As much as it disturbs us, eventually we all find ourselves in the presence of someone who is very old, frail, and dying. The same steps of surrender are possible in that situation. If you follow them, the beauty of a dying person is just as evident as the beauty of a Rembrandt. Death inspires a certain wonder that can be reached when you go beyond the knee-jerk reaction of fear. I recently felt this sense of wonder when I came across a phenomenon in biology that helps support the whole notion that death is completely wedded to life. It turns out that our bodies have found the key to surrender already.
The phenomenon is called apoptosis. This strange word, which was completely new to me, takes one on a deeply mystical journey; and having returned, I find my perceptions of life and death have changed. Punching apoptosis into an Internet search engine