Here is a re-post of a recent email newsletter from Hridaya on "Trust & Surrender". Surrender is a word that I had a lot of resistance to, but over time its meaning to me changed and it became something I find beautiful and think about often. If I could put it into one sentence, it might be distentangling caring from surrendering.

Why Trust and Surrender?

It's natural for the soul to be called beyond the material frontier. A bird cannot remain forever in its nest. It needs to fly. Trust is the faith of a bird that feels the lightness of the breeze under her wings before she ever opened them. Flying is a leap of faith.

Why trust and surrender? Because you are infinitely more than your mind and body, vaster than what you take yourself to be. You don’t need to be frightened by the mystery and wonder of your own presence anymore.

The longing that starts as a vague intuition grows later into trust, to further complete itself in constant and total surrender.

This trust is Trust by excellence. It is not the mind’s belief in something. It’s not the trust of positive thinking adepts because it doesn’t refer to any object. It is just Trust… Not a “trust in…,” because ultimately it doesn’t address anything, or you could say it is trust in everything and nothing at the same time, trust in what you really are.

Trust is evidence that Love is stronger than death…

Surrender is the blossom of Trust. It is the only wise choice when you realize that you are in exile here and home is calling you.

Surrender is your main chance for realization. Without surrendering your personality, there wouldn’t be longing, empathy, compassion, and love. The real key to awakening is surrender.

Surrender is a paradox since it can’t be an act of personal will, but it is a conscious act of trust… It may seem difficult, but when it happens, it’s so easy—the most freeing release. Surrender shrouds you in beauty, bringing awakening, inspiration, and love.

Rumi says:
If they ask what Love is, say, the sacrifice of will.
If you have not left will behind, you have no will at all.

Surrender is a complete act because it echoes on all levels of the being. It means dropping all masks, layers of personality, and limitations. At the same time, surrender means settling in Self-awareness, in Truth.

Real surrender is sacrificing individuality to universality, the temporal to the eternal, the limited form to infinity.

Surrender is freedom—beyond judgment, resistance, or personal intentionality. It’s another term for being aware, centered in the Spiritual Heart, transparent to the Self. Absolute Consciousness is pure surrender.

So, let your soul fly; just trust and surrender…

With Love,
Sahajananda

@sunset 19:58 I think the way surrender sounds like "defeat" and "abandonment" in English is part of why I had a resistance to it, and perhaps also this word association made it particularly memorable to see the word in a new way. perhaps transmuting fear of defeat into something else, to a place where those fears are no longer needed

active nihilism is an interesting phrase too .. the idea that nihilism would be associated with hedonism or evil always seemed a bit paradoxical to me too

thanks for the the new italian word

@sunset 19:58 reflecting a bit more on my experience with the word nihilism: I learned about nihilism as thinking the essence of the universe is pointlessness, and so maybe this leads to hedonism - vs my feeling about surrender might be the reverse of this. and what the two have in common is a lack of fear or shaming

@Landoo @sunset 19:58

I'm currently on the phone on hold with o2, perhaps no better time to write about nihilism, surrender and other matters of the heart.

First, I want to say these are subtle/sensitive subjects. I think a lot of these words (nihilism, faith, surrender, point) mean different things to people, and land differently depending on their personal history. When I shared this writing, its because it moved me, and maybe it resonates with someone else, maybe it even resonates with someone else with a meaning totally different than I get from it, or not, and that's fine too.

This is an important clause for me, because there's a long history of coercive missionary religious activity, and I think also a lot of scars from this, even leading to coercion in the opposite direction. I'm also hoping to write something longer about this at some point, as someone who was raised in a family of secular scientists and became interested in spirituality later in life, I got to appreciate it without coercion, and just gravitate towards what seemed true to me and leave what didn't, and I think about non-coercion often.

Also when sharing my experience of nihilism, I just meant my experience with the word, not a proclamation for anyone who identifies with that term. In my inner monologue, I think of nihilism sometimes as a feeling. When I feel nihilistic, I feel like nothing matters and I feel depressed. When I feel in a state of surrender, I feel in a state of flow with all that is. When I feel nihilistic, I don't feel like I am creating my own meaning, I just feel gray.

But thinking about nihilism vs surrender, I would somewhat modify my statement of being opposites, or I get a bit of an opposites and mirrors feeling, like Sahajananda saying that Trust can be understood as trust in everything or trust in nothing, and perhaps they could sometimes be two sides of the same coin, or one articulation might resonate more with someone than another person, when really its all just words for feelings which are hard to describe. Nihilism and vedic philosophy as I understand them also both seem rooted in a longing to see through illusions and see things as they really are.

In terms of where meaning comes from, and creating your own vs discovering it, I think about this 2x2 for faith-related practices:

Institutional vs Mystical
Non-Dual vs Dual

Mystical traditions believe you ave direct access to knowledge and insight, vs institutional traditions are mediated (by books or clergy etc.).
Non-dualism sees the divine in all things including internally, dualism sees the divine as something specific and external.

Personally, I'm drawn to non-dual mystical forms of spiritual practice (based on the definitions above, which are again not shared by everyone). Anything which wasn't this was immediately off-putting to me.

Maybe we have some other differences in perspective, could very well be, but based on how you described nihilism, to me it shares something in common with a non-dual mystical perspective.

Although personally, when I think about the direct insight in this perspective, it still feels to me more like discovering meaning than creating. But it all gets very semantic. I might use the word discover, in part because I imagine that even in a world without humans there would still be meaning. But in my own life, finding that meaning is something that no one else can tell me exactly how to do.

This became a bit of a ramble, some topics that had been brewing for a while and might want to write about more at some point, questions about language which makes itself accessible to many different backgrounds, and how to create communities which are genuinely inclusive to people who resonate with spiritual frameworks and those who don't. Maybe a discussion for a future in-person meeting.