The Truth of Surrender – A Natural Way of Life, and Not a Choice
Themes – Existential, spiritual, and meta-physics
Summary – We are often told that surrender is something we must learn, practice, or strive toward. Yet, what if surrender was never something to be achieved, but something that has always been happening? From the moment we are born—without choosing our body, breath, or circumstances—life unfolds through forces beyond our control. Even our most personal acts, like breathing, walking, or thinking, are guided by processes we neither command nor fully understand. When seen closely, choice itself appears less like authorship and more like participation. Perhaps the truth of surrender is not in effort, but in realization—that long before we tried to surrender, life had already been living us.
If you follow a little bit of content around spirituality or self-improvement, you’ll find words like surrender, manifestation, and consciousness floating everywhere on the internet. But while everyone talks about how to surrender and how it benefits our lives, what nobody talks about is the core truth about it. Yes, a truth that would make surrender a lot easier without much effort. But maybe it’s kept hidden because that would shut down opportunities to talk more and make a selling point around it.
But today, here on The Naked Soul, we’re going to address the depth of surrender and uncover the truth about it — that you have always surrendered your entire life ever since you were born, and in reality, there is no need to put any effort towards it. Instead, all you need is to realize it, be aware of it, and accept it.
So, here we begin.
Just think for a while. All our lives, from the very foundation of our upbringing in school, we have been taught to do and achieve so much that we always feel that we are the sole doers of everything. The entire system keeps pushing us to become “achievers.”
But in this process of achieving and being a part of what we do, we forget to acknowledge the forces that actually come together and allow us to express ourselves in the world. The thing to note here is that these forces that play a vital role in everything that we do aren’t actually under our control. And this is the point of our interest and contemplation, from where knowing that life, in reality, is an act of surrender begins.
So let’s get a little deep into it.
Think: did you ever choose the very first events of your existence, which include your birth, the place of birth, date, time, the parents you were born to, and the face you were born with? No, right? But it all happened with neither choice nor resistance from your side.
The very first thing of our life and existence began with nothing else but an act of surrender, where none of it was our choice, rather a decision of some unknown natural forces.
So the question that goes against what we feel — that we take our decisions and we are in control — is this: when the very beginning of our lives was never in our hands, then how come the things that unfold further could be completely ours? Because if life were a tree, the beginning itself would be the root of every branch that grows later in life.
What this means is, if you say that you chose a subject or language to study and that was your choice, the reality contradicts it. Because your choice wasn’t solely yours; instead, it was extracted from the available choices in your surroundings, and somewhere it was influenced either by them or by the people you saw speaking that language you chose.
Well, while we will talk about this in depth later in this article, firstly, let’s address the fact that our life has always been an act of surrender.
So, moving forward, if we think of the time when we were in the mother’s womb, when food and oxygen to survive were provided, we would realize that our survival and life began with things not chosen or decided by us. It was as if something unknown took care of us and allowed us to open our eyes to this world. And even after that, the very first time we breathed air through our nose, it all happened by itself — without the knowledge of breathing and without it being a choice of ours. Even now, as we breathe, the body itself manages to filter out oxygen from the mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, consuming only oxygen from it and eliminating carbon dioxide. Moreover, even if one doesn’t know what the difference is between oxygen and nitrogen, that wouldn’t stop them from the right to live, as if it’s all a natural law and a part of the play that began from our birth, which we didn’t choose.
So when breathing and this complicated phenomenon happen each and every second within us, which we hardly control or conduct, the question that arises is: on what do we rely blindly for such an essential process of life? And if this act of faith is not surrender, then what is it?
Moreover, another mystical thing that happens here is that, at this point in time of our infancy, surrender was such a natural act of life that there was no need or choice to surrender as well.
Well, before we get more and more entangled with the never-ending philosophical threads of the same thing, let’s move forward and understand how and where else life itself seems to be an act of surrender.
Let’s take an example of something that is a part of our day-to-day life and where it feels more like our own choice, like walking. We think it’s we who decide and make a choice to walk on a certain path. We feel it’s we who choose the direction and the pace of walking. But the truth is, even simply walking includes total surrender, as at its core, rarely any of the things involved in the process of walking happen under our conscious control. Let me explain.
Walking includes the awareness of the decision to walk, which further includes choosing a speed depending on the urgency of the situation and the directions that come on the path. Now, while this process looks quite simple and much like a conscious choice, deep down the making of the choice to walk and its awareness include neurotransmission in our brain and body, which further finds expression through muscles fed by oxygen via blood, and various movements in the tendons, muscles, cartilage, and bones — all of it happening in seconds, without our conscious knowledge or commands. And to add to the bizarre, we walk the way we walk, we lift our legs in certain ways, and the muscles move in a coordinated manner with the joints only because gravity has a certain value and force upon everything — again, something that is totally out of our control.
If we see at microscopic levels, it’s a chain of things that is neither conducted nor controlled by us, but instead facilitated by natural forces to give the final image of life and activities. And it’s not just limited to walking, as you’ll find the same pattern in everything — like forming sentences while talking, singing, thinking, and even breathing and digesting the food we eat.
In the process of digestion, we neither churn the food nor make our cells absorb nutrients to keep our body healthy and alive. Similarly, in breathing, the absorption of oxygen and elimination of carbon dioxide — which is an essential process for life — happens without any conscious effort from our side. And it continues whether you’re asleep or running for your life, where breath catches the rhythm and pace by itself as per the need.
Just think for a while. Here, the act of surrender is so natural that you never think twice before you go to sleep that your breath might stop when even the knowledge of yourself and your existence ceases.
So I guess by now, you must agree with the fact that these essential activities for life are not conducted by us consciously. But now the question is, if not us, then who conducts them? Or on what do we rely for such crucial things in our lives? And beyond all, if it’s not blind faith in unknown forces of nature, then what is it? Or in other words, if it’s not surrender, then what is it?
But before we conclude, here comes the last and most intriguing part of the story — that which makes us feel that it’s all our decisions: the ability to think and the thought of taking every decision.
Yes, deep down, more than awareness, everything is a thought. Whether it’s awareness of something or awareness of taking a decision, in the end, they are all thoughts in the brain. So the question is, are our thoughts ours?
Scientifically, thoughts aren’t independently ours. Everything we learn and know, including our own name, is accumulated from our surroundings. Since our birth, if we were a blank page, we got everything on it from the pool of information called society. So anything and everything that we express is a thread of information that we gather from society. And this goes for our name, education, job, relationships, and everything else — which are nothing but extracts from the opportunities offered by time and our surroundings. Following the same pattern, our brain too trains itself from instances and responses it sees from others, then adapts and practices them to deliver choices in the future.
So if we see deep down, our choices and decisions are more the result of permutations and combinations of all the information we collect throughout our life and less about our own conscious choice.
To understand this, try to think of something that you have never heard of or seen anywhere. You would realize that anything or everything that you can think of would be a result of something mixed with whatever you have known from the available information to you.
Moreover, if we go deeper into science, there is an experiment that shows how mysteriously, before we can choose things and actions, the actions themselves choose us. Yes. An experiment conducted in 1983 by Benjamin Libet proved that whenever we make a decision, the activity in the brain for that particular act precedes the awareness of that decision in our brain.
In simpler words, if you choose to pick a bottle of water, brain activities to perform that act begin even before you get to know or decide that you want to pick the bottle. While scientists are still trying to understand where the decision comes from in the first place, one thing that is certain and has been verified through further experiments is that this experiment and its outcomes weren’t wrong.
But now, coming back to our topic, from the above observations and contemplation, we can conclude that scientifically, our thoughts and decisions are not our conscious choices but outcomes of the information available in our surroundings, and the brain that thinks it all to be its decision is merely an observer of it.
So the bottom line is, if our thoughts aren’t our own, then how can the thought of choosing things be ours?
Moreover, if we go back to every example we have talked about, we would find points where we lose our shields and blindly believe in some natural and unknown forces that allow us to operate and live the way we do. And this itself is nothing different from an act of surrender.
So the entire point of this article was to emphasize the fact that if you see every act from the very beginning of our lives till now, you would realize that it all begins and ends with nothing but an act of surrender. And this remains the same whether you see it scientifically, existentially, or philosophically.
But while teachers and gurus sitting on the World Wide Web keep talking about surrender and sell their courses to make a profit, what no one tells us is this core truth about it — that from the very moment we were born, and even before that, our entire existence and life have been an act of total surrender. And the secret was never to surrender again, but only to realize and be aware of it.
So the next time you sit and try to surrender your wishes and desires, just go back in time to where it all began. See where you got your desires from, what ignited them, and you would realize that you never actually made the choice. Instead, you were placed in those situations, and somehow, you were chosen for what you chose. This itself will enable you to realize that before you could surrender, you already had — and it was just a matter of realizing it.
In case you liked the depth of this article, try another one, where we have talked in detail about The Reality of Manifestation Vs Modern Day Businesses going around it.
Click on the link to read the article – The Reality Of Manifestation Vs The Online Business Hype Around It
