what is surrender?

through all this last year there's been a few teachers who have blessed my life by helping me to peer into dark crevices and see that i was hiding. the mind is tricky, it does all sorts of sneaky things, while informing me that it's not, in fact, being sneaky at all, and around the things i've read it seems particularly guilty.

there comes a point where the teachers and teachings are their own kind of prison cells. i find my mind on the lookout for how and where to see the things the teachers talked about - somehow ignoring the obviousness of the whole "finger pointing at the moon" that i really am aware of.

it's insanity, actually, when i watch really closely how the mind works. i can be saying out one corner of my mouth that i really know that no belief is true, and i can grok that deep in my gut, and then the other side of the mouth is trying to ingest as much stuffing as it can to bolster up the very "belief that no beliefs are true"..... it all goes along like the most insane mirror-room in the funhouse i ever could dream up.

surrender isn't a thing i can achieve, and then all becomes well. that may be a lie that the mind tells, it tries to jump on that boat all the time, but if i roll along with the mental idea of surrender, it will quickly take a genuine moment of abandon to the will of the universe and turn it into an experience, and then spend it's days conceptualizing and chasing after that thing called surrender. angela doesn't do surrender, really. surrender is almost like an exhaustion, the grace of trust and just stopping the argument with what is going on.

my mind likes to argue over and over again that "this can't be it" that the way i feel right now, this very moment of life, isn't right somehow, that there's a place out there somewhere called perfection that is going to be achieved somehow. and even working with the kind of teachers and teachings that say the very opposite of that - the mind is So Damn Good at taking those very words and mixing it all into a step-by-step program of what can be *done* to get to the place called *no argument with what is*....

for me, when i hit the days of exhaustion and surrender, the reality that i don't know anything, really, don't know a single thing, it's painful. it makes me cry, not in a wailing bemoaning kind of a sense, but in this really small child woundedness, just simple tears rolling from my eyes and a quiver in the lower lip. it's like a pouting somehow. and yet, at the same time, the effortlessness, the grace that opens up, allows fresh air into this horrid claustrophobic cell.

it's been interesting during the demolition, that the times when i have to face the starkness of not knowing that it has happened in layers. i've had four major events of i don't know so far, and each one has led me into an even deeper kind of i don't know. from the personal stories, to the philosophy, to the social structure, to the quantum level of reality.... it's come over and over again as the mind tries to graps these increasingly complex ideas that it eventually just beats its head against the wall enought that it gets knocked unconscious.

the last event happened on friday, after days and weeks struggling with the sort of 'nature of reality' questions. contemplating existence of myself and the world, what teachers mean when they say emptiness, what they're talking about when they say that they look at a thing (like a table for example) and know the table as themself. i was turned into a gigantic fucking knot trying to figure that shit out. because my gut doesn't seem to have any questions about this stuff - death and existence and all that. it's pretty cool with the experience of life as is. it doesn't say that a table isn't "me" or that it is. it just goes about its business. but the brain wants to push into being a vision where there is an understanding of emptiness, or where it's visually obvious that a table is the same as me.

and i went around and around so thick and fierce and fast that i wound up on friday sobbing in my bed all afternoon under the covers begging for a moment of silence. i would have given myself a lobotomy for just a second of peace. and then i took a shower because i was nearly shaking out of my skin, and under the warm water i just was like, fuck it. i give up. i can't do this anymore.

and during that giving up it became clear to me that there are teachings that have been grasped so tightly to cause that mad seeking. jed mckenna who i think is so amazingly rad, talks about going after the ego like this mad ahab after the whale, and somehow i got caught up in doing what he said, or thinking that was the "method" for finding the truth, that i forgot entirely that he also said "think for yourself and figure out what's true".... like all good teachers, inherant in the discussion of the truth is a paradox because language is dualistic. and the mind will pick and choose according to it's plan to keep itself moving around, and assign meaning wherever it senses it will continue to get fed and thusly stay alive.

i realized i have to abandon all the words that anyone is saying, or has ever said, about any of this, and go be alone and sit with myself and just be. which is why i also have to take a retreat from my friends whom i talk to about this stuff, because i get caught up in what i am saying about any of it and then the ideas grow cement shoes and in the course of one conversation i have "become" something with some perspective and some idea.

and all i know, really, is that i don't know anything. and trying to know stuff overloads my system and fries me. i already have enough energy moving through my body to feel like 10000 volts in a 500 watt system. i can't do it anymore.

and when i see how afraid i am of giving up, or giving in, and how the mind tries to argue that if i don't keep fighting i will never get 'there' i want to just laugh out loud. yeah. there. where? if it's that afraid of me giving up and not chasing around each of it's little silvery idea turds, then let it do whatever it's going to do.

it tries to tell me that every little pinprick of energy i feel in my forehead (of which there are many these days) is going to be the 'one' that blasts open my system and along comes the enlightenment. it tries to tell me that if i can just hold onto one of the jolt-awareness-centering type moments that have been happening since march, then it will all unfurl into awakening. it tries to tell me lots of stuff.

but i'm too tired and i'm going to let it just run around in circles in the corner over there, and do whatever it's going to do. it's obviously taken too many drugs in it's life and is significantly damaged in it's view of things. i love it, and have compassion for it's insanity, but i'm just too goddamn tired to deal with it.

so the fear of not becoming, the fear of the reality of i don't know (seriously - i don't even know if time is happening or if the doorknob exists, i don't know if i'm here or who is typing these words or listening to the buckethead colma album right now.... ) the fear of whatever may come if i give up.... whatever.

if the universe wants me to be a shell shocked wanderer, then fine. i give up. thy will be done.

the gratitude for the simplicity of things permeates my system and i feel full somehow, and oddly joyful. and then i remember i can't believe in that either. it is what it is, and it's no more true than anything else.

but surrender? it happens again now, and now, and now. it is never finished.