Surrender, insight and letting go

 We carry the aspirations, the fears, the good and the bad of countless prior generations with us, and most likely the desires and aversions, the wrong and the right of numerous prior incarnations as well. Our current society imposes a similar duality of good and evil on us. How to break free from all these interferences and see life as it is rather than as it appears?

 

It is said that Ramana Maharshi when he was still a teenager felt death descending and rather than fighting it just sat with it observing and seeing it through until he awoke with a new life completely free of this collective “pain body” of personal interferences. Eckhart Tolle reported a similar descending into a vortex, even though his letting go was more subconscious.

 

Is there a surrendering of the personhood in the case Ramana Maharshi described, or is it more a curiosity to see what “foreign presence” envelops us and watching it fall off instead? I would call this letting go process more a standing up to an inner energy that seems mistaken, and a curiosity to see what we find instead if we just sit with it without fighting and judging it.

 

Is it surrender of ego or insight into the oneness of body, mind and world? Maybe it’s a little bit of both. Either way, it’s part of the spiritual quest that continues with the force of a stream that becomes a river and that finally merges with the ocean. Water is propelled to move from the highest to the lowest point, our imagined personhood is designed to fall into oneness.