The Vedic Perspective on Surrender and Letting Go

The Vedic Perspective on Surrender and Letting Go

[00:45] Can You Surrender the Surrendering?

Sometimes I’m asked about this surrender as a technique of advancing one’s spirituality. And it is a very, very, very interesting concept, surrender, because anything that cannot transcend itself is not in fact going to get us much traction.

What do I mean by that? When we look at the foundational wisdom of the practice of Vedic Meditation, it’s all based around “transcend where you are.” Transcend where you are. Transcend means step beyond. Go where you are not. Go beyond wherever you are. Experience that.

And how do you do that? Well, in order to go beyond, it is implicit that you’re letting go of that which you’re going beyond. 

Letting go is a very interesting concept on its own because there comes a point where we have to ask, does the methodology apply to the methodology? Can you surrender the surrendering? Is it possible to surrender the surrendering? And at what point do you surrender the surrendering?

Surrendering is only a valuable thing to do if we are moving from a less charmed state, a less attractive state, to a more attractive state. When we move from a less attractive state to a more attractive state, we are not conscious of letting go, even though that’s in fact what we’re doing.

So if you’re listening to mediocre music in one room, but through the open windows comes the most beautiful melody played in some enchanting notes, the awareness spontaneously will move from the mediocrity to the beauty, without consciously thinking, “I’m letting go now and I’m surrendering.”

But in fact, what’s happening is letting go and surrendering, however it is inbuilt that you are doing so, evidently, willingly, but one would never describe it that way. If someone said to you when you began listening to the more beautiful music, “How was it surrendering the mediocre music?”

You wouldn’t say, “Well, I surrendered the mediocre music and I guess I let go of it.” But it’s implicit. It’s so implicit you don’t even know you did it. The awareness just moves. That’s all.

[03:33] Pre-approving Movement of the Mind

And so then when we have to look at, “All right. I’m going to make a conscious decision here and let go.” 

In the practice of Vedic Meditation, we do train people to let go but, interestingly, when we’re settling down to deeper and more profound consciousness states, although we have trained them in the words, let go, they actually don’t use those words and they don’t experience themselves letting go.

It’s almost as if, as they say, in the credit card business, you’re pre-approved. You’ve pre-approved the process of movement.

And so rather than letting go, you’ve been told by a teacher, “Certainly don’t do the opposite of it. Don’t try to hold on. Don’t try to hang on. Don’t be tenacious.” And really what this is doing is it’s giving pre-approval to the movement that the mind makes, moving from lesser charm to greater charm.

Once we start to get in the habit of this through practicing Vedic Meditation, it’s very interesting how it begins to percolate into our waking state. So we sit easily, effortlessly, comfortably. 

We make use of a particular pulsating sound. This is referred to as a bīja mantra, but it’s not just any old pulsating sound, it’s a specific sequence of sounds or a sound that is matched to by the teacher to the vibratory requirements of the student.

And then when the student begins to experience this beautiful, mellifluous, resonant, sympathetic vibration, it gets subtler and subtler and implicitly one begins to let go of less pleasant layers of it, while the mind begins the process spontaneously of investigating more pleasant layers of the sound, which are subtler.

The sound keeps on getting subtler and subtler, and as it does so, it becomes intrinsically more and more fascinating. And you could say that we can imply you’re letting go of the previous layer, but in fact, all you’re doing is moving effortlessly to the next more charming layer.

And so this movement of the mind from that which is less charming to that which is more charming is, in fact, intrinsic to the human mind. It’s intrinsic now, when we come out of Vedic Meditation and we have to get on with our regular day, like making our breakfast and getting ready for the day, or doing all the stuff that we do at work, or all the stuff we do at home, if we’re working from home or whatever.

And then late afternoon, early evening comes, and once again, we submit to a process of moving effortlessly toward greater charm. And we do this again and again. Every morning, every evening, every morning, every evening. The brain begins to learn this is rewarding, and it doesn’t want to make it restricted solely to the meditation practice.

[07:06] Effortless Movement Towards Charm

So then the brain and the mind together begin to get in the habit of moving toward that, which has greater charm in it than that which has lesser charm in it. And with the stripping away of the polluting effect of stresses, stresses pollute the tendency of Nature, Nature’s intelligence operating through our desiring mechanism, is polluted by stress. Our desiring mechanism gets polluted by stress.

When we remove layers and layers of that stress, what happens next is that our desiring mechanism becomes purified and it can detect where the greater charm is. The process is not really a process of letting go, although that’s implicitly, in fact, what you did. When you move from a less charming thing to a more charming thing, letting go must have happened, it has to be acknowledged, but one didn’t really experience that.

One found oneself just moving effortlessly and frictionlessly toward greater charm. The greater charm is that which is more evolutionary than where you are now. This is what charm is telling us. Where is the direction of progressive change? Where’s the direction of evolution?

And naturally I’d like to lean into that because the direction of more evolution means more expanded repertoire. Greater amount of talent. Greater amount of creative intelligence. Greater effect for a less amount of work. The capacity to do less and accomplish more, to do least and accomplish most and so on. The leverage of that.

So then letting go, surrendering, becomes less of a kind of a guiding thing, except it becomes more of a descriptive thing. “I must have surrendered because I’m here now and I was there then, but I don’t remember having to consciously decide to let go.”

But I’d like to say that sweet surrender is a sweet thing when it’s viewed as, you have viewed in retrospect, “I must have surrendered. I must have.”

[09:38] Vedic Meditation: The Training Ground for the Removal of Unnecessary Tenacity

Otherwise surrender becomes that other word, which is capitulation. “I capitulated. I surrendered. I preferred to stay put. I preferred to stay tenacious, but instead of staying tenacious and staying put, I capitulated and decided intellectually to let go and to move on,” all sounds terribly painful to me. Really painful.

I think we can do without the pain, if we just acknowledge that the training ground for having the capacity effortlessly to move, the training ground for having the capacity effortlessly, frictionlessly, to transition, is the training ground of meditation.

You close your eyes and spontaneously you start moving within. Very often a teacher will say to a meditator, “Did you… when you found yourself settling down to those quieter states, did you let go and experienced the quieter state?

A meditator would say, “I guess I did let go because I just experienced the beautiful, quiet state. It was bliss. I must have let go, just like you told me to do. But I don’t recall actually deciding i’ll let go now.”

Very few meditators, even though we instruct them to let go, very few meditators can remember an actual process where, “Okay, I’m going to let go now.” But, because they’ve been told in advance it’s best not to do the opposite of letting go, best not to be tenacious, then they just let go of that entire concept, and the process just guides itself.

It’s not really necessary to tell a meditator more than a few times in the very initial stages of instruction to let go. They just find themselves having let go. It’s more pleasant. More pleasant. So then surrender doesn’t really become a prospective instruction. It becomes a description of what already happened. A description of what happened.

And it’s kind of like, “Hmm, in retrospect I can see that that must be what I did. I surrendered. How nice. I guess I’m a surrendered person.” So rather than methodology it’s more descriptive.

And the training ground, the training ground for it, if it’s considered desirable to be less tenacious, then the training ground for that removal of unnecessary tenacity is meditation itself. It’s a perfect training ground for it.

[12:46] Q – What’s the relationship between retrospective surrender and letting go?

What would be the relationship between the retrospective type of surrender you spoke about and the letting go type of surrender that happens?

[12:56] Monkeys That Don’t Let Go

There’s an analogy that was used in a story of Guru Deva. Guru Deva was the nickname of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati. Swami Brahmananda Saraswati was the master of my teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, like most great masters of India, was referred to by the affectionate epithet of “Guru Deva.”

Guru. Guru, and then D-E-V-A. Deva is pronounced Dev, without that final A.

Guru Deva told a story. He came up in his childhood and into his middle part of his life in British India. And in British India, when England ruled India, especially during the Victorian era, which was his era, monkeys were a highly desired pet that people in the whole Commonwealth, people who were well off, frequently would have a monkey imported into their home as a pet or something they could keep in a cage on display and so on.

And the place where the monkeys were in massive abundance was in colonial India. And so monkey catchers would be hired to go and capture monkeys.

And the way you capture a monkey is fairly easy. You take a piece of plywood. It has a hole in it that’s about this big, and you place the plywood on the ground and dig a hole down below the opening that’s about this deep, within reach of a monkey. And then you place down inside there, nuts and candy and jelly beans and things that monkeys like that you know they’re going to sniff out and go and get.

So the monkey would go up to this hole, unsuspectingly, insert its arm into the hole, grab onto the treasures of peanuts candy and monkey food, and with a fist start to pull their hand out. But because of the fist, they couldn’t get their hand back out.

[15:34] Don’t be Like the Monkeys

Now, if the monkey were to let go of the sweets and the candy and the stuff, the little jelly beans and things, the hand easily would come out. But the monkey catchers relied upon the monkey nature never to let go of sweets once you have them.

If you get your hand onto some jelly beans and peanuts, even at the cost of your freedom, never let go. And so relying on that, the monkey catchers would simply walk up with a burlap bag and throw it over the monkey.

Sometimes the monkey would be screaming in terror, and the monkey easily could get away. All it had to do was let go of that which was inferior to its freedom. What’s inferior to the freedom of the monkey? The sweets, the nuts, the jelly beans and whatnot. It’s a very poor trade and screaming in terror because monkey nature doesn’t allow monkey to let go, even if the cost of it is freedom.

Now, the analogy, it was used to say to humans, not monkeys, don’t be like a monkey. Have that consciousness whereby you know that you’re free, you’re always free. The monkeys were not actually captive, except they refused to let go and let the fist turn into a hand and slide out and run away into the trees. But because they wouldn’t let go, because they were monkeys, they had monkey nature.

And so Guru Deva would say to his students, “Don’t be like the monkeys.” Monkeys were always free. They were always completely free at all times until they wouldn’t let go of the inferior product. So with us humans, the instruction is, don’t be in monkey consciousness, be in human consciousness.

[17:43] The Capacity to See the Future in the Making

We have something the monkeys didn’t have, which is the capacity t o have context. Context is one of our great gifts as humans.

If a Bengal tiger is stalking the last reproducing member of the chital deer family, and chital deer are one of the favorite diets of Bengal tigers in India.

So imagine that there was the last chital deer that was capable of reproducing other chital deer, and the killing of which would cause all subsequent generations of tigers to die of starvation. And that tiger is stalking the last reproductive member of the chital deer, what do you think the tiger’s going to do?

Will the tiger stop and consider, “Hmm. If I kill this deer, then all my children will starve and all future… I’ll be the last Bengal tiger alive and I’ll starve to death too.” No, the tiger by its nature, is going to pounce on that deer and slaughter it and eat it.

And even if that’s the end of the tigers and when the tiger discovers there are no more deer, the tiger’s not going to wonder, “I wonder why this happened?” That tiger that was guilty of having killed the last reproducing member of the deer family is never going to wonder why there are no deer around and self-examine.

But we humans have the capacity for self-examination. We have the great capacity to see the future in the making, and we can see the sense of doing something that might be extra instinctive. By extra, I mean beyond instinct. Something that is extra instinctive means that you’re able actually to transcend your instinct and allow a thing to happen, that for an animal can’t happen.

If we gravitate toward the bestial, meaning we are emulative of the animal kingdom, then like the tiger who kills the last deer, or like the monkey that sacrifices its freedom for some jelly beans, we’re likely to find ourselves entrapped. But we do have the gift of standing outside of our instinct. That’s supposed to be one of the hallmarks of us being civilized human beings.

Each of us walks around the world with connubial desire. You know what that means, don’t you? It means the desire to engage in those activities that are of a sexual nature. But it’s incumbent on us to keep our connubial desires somewhat in check when we’re at the coffee shop and we might be casually checking out the particular potential pleasures of engaging with another human being.

Unlike the monkey kingdom, we’re not going to go leap on the person in the coffee shop. Or if we do, there’ll be a social outcry. That shows that we have the capacity to transcend instinct, that the animal kingdom don’t possess.

And this is where the analogy comes in. Don’t be like a member of the animal kingdom that would sacrifice its entire freedom for some jelly beans. We’re hanging onto all kinds of useless things and not allowing ourself to examine the greater charm of unboundedness.

[22:06] Close Your Eyes and Stay Awake

In the first instance, to ask somebody to practice Vedic Meditation, is to ask them to down tools, go and sit in a chair and do a thing they’ve never done before in their entire lifetime. Close your eyes and stay awake. Close your eyes and do something other than sleeping.

This has never been suggested to anybody before, and it doesn’t necessarily make instinctive sense to us. But if we’re willing to do the experimentation and engage in it, then we find the result of it incredibly rewarding.

We’re able to transcend our instinct to just continue eating, working, sleeping, and whatever else we do, reproducing and things, and move into an experience that is none of those things.

It’s not a thought, it’s not a food, it’s not a cuddle. It’s not a some kind of wind-in-your-hair kind of tactile sensation or anything. It is transcending all sensory phenomena, and in fact, it can only appeal to a human because only humans would have the capacity to conceptualize the beauty of the freedom of it.

And so we’re able to let go of the jelly beans, as it were, which is, the jelly beans would say, “Keep playing the video games,” and the meditation teacher would say, “Why not try this for a few minutes instead and see what it’s like?”

And so we’re able to conceptually agree to give it a try. Once we’ve given it a try, it then becomes instinctive. Vedic Meditation is non instinctive until we practice it, then it becomes instinctive because it’s productive of bliss chemistry, and the brain begins instinctively to gravitate to whatever that was that you did with your mind that created these bliss chemicals.

“Whatever you did with your mind that created these bliss chemicals, please do that again now. There’s the chair. Go. Go sit in it and do that. I want the bliss chemicals,” says the brain.

But until that experience is had and that freedom is gained, we might be tempted to hang on to the jelly beans.

So in my introductory lectures to people, when I’m talking to them about practicing Vedic Meditation, it’s my job to create a conceptual framework that makes the concept of giving Vedic Meditation a try, something that is more charming than not giving it a try, and see to what extent people are willing to let go of the jelly beans, or to what extent they prefer to stay monkeys. That’s it.