The personality can only perpetuate itself. The moment you try to do something, you're on the wheel of action and reaction which is what we call the wheel of samsara. Perhaps to you surrender means that you will engage in an activity. But the activity of the personality is a rejection, which is ultimately hope and desire, leading to frustration. How can that be surrender? Surrender can only be awareness of activity. When you are aware of that activity, you're not interested in engaging in it. If you can feel the core of frustration directly and understand what it is, you are not engaged in it even though you might be feeling it. And the more you see it, the more it becomes ego-alien. If you see the activity and don't go on with it, then the essential state which you've been resisting will arise and melt away the contraction and reactivity. What arises is a kind of acceptance and love, which flows and melts you away.

Surrender is not resignation. It is very important to distinguish between them. Resignation means that you are admitting that you cannot get your own way. You are taking yourself to be a separate self with a separate will that is being thwarted by reality. This is very different from true surrender, which is neither acceptance nor rejection, but ceasing to separate one's own will from reality. To learn to surrender means to expose your willfulness -- the belief that you have a will separate from reality's and that you can have it your way.

When there is surrender and letting go, there is no activity and ego is not there. The cessation of resistance, the cessation of rejection, the cessation of defense, is also the dissolution of that part of the personality. It may bring fear because you believe that you will disappear. And you may be concerned about who will do what is required if you don't do it. You need trust and confidence in Essence here.

Surrendering our thoughts, feelings, judgments, preferences, and desires doesn’t mean that these things disappear but that we don't have them in the same way. They just come and go. We don’t hold on to them as possessions. They are not vital for us. Maybe we can learn to be that poor inside. But then, as we begin to have experiences of reality, of essence, of awakening, the ego wants to possess these too. We believe that essence, spirit, and inner states belong to us, that we accomplished them. Havingness is back again. We might even believe we have virtues like patience, humility, courage, equanimity, and so on. On a spiritual path, the ego can become rich again, can come to possess a wonderful inner panorama, the panorama of spirit.

The issue of getting one's own way is a big one for the personality, and the thought of surrendering to God's will may seem to involve giving up your own will. However, if you are sincere and truthful with yourself, and you stay with your experience without trying to change it in any way, you find out that having your own way is really a matter of surrendering to your inner truth. Your way is following the thread of your own experience. It is not a matter of choosing or not choosing it; your way is something that is given to you. It is the road you are walking on, the landscape you are traveling. You discover that it is a huge relief not to feel that the territory you are crossing should be different than exactly how it is for you.

Surrender is a step further than letting go, a small step further. The letting go is ceasing the activity of resistance. When you surrender, you realize that you are pushing and resisting, and then you understand it so that you are not as interested in the resistance. And then, because you have stopped pushing, a certain essential state, a certain energy arises and begins to flow. This flow of energy of the essential state, plus the letting go, the cessation of activity, is felt as surrender. So surrender is a meeting of the personality and Essence. The personality does its work of seeing its identification, its resistance, and its contraction. That's its part; it can't surrender. Essence comes along and melts it. The personality can't melt on its own, but it can be melted.

So you can see from everything that has been said thus far that True Nature really doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t push and it doesn’t hold on to anything. It simply relaxes, effortlessly, and is present with full awareness, embracing the immediacy of feeling and sensing our experience. That is the sense in which surrender is meant. It’s not that we are going to do something: “Okay, now I am going to surrender.” What are you going to do to surrender? I have never seen anybody surrendering. Nobody ever surrenders. Surrender means basically nondoing. It means not doing anything to what is arising in our experience. It means leaving ourselves and our experience alone. When we have been pushing and pulling and resisting and controlling and then at some point we stop doing that, the transition can sometimes seem like surrender. When we have been holding ourselves together or remaining involved in an active, rigid mental process, and we recognize that and stop doing it, we call it surrender. But stopping doing something is not doing something. So, surrender is not an activity. And it is definitely not control.