A person cannot surrender. A person can only be surrendered.

The story is told of an overweight man who went to a spiritual teacher with the hope of receiving guidance on how he could lose weight. The teacher is supposed to have said: “Can you accept the fact that you are overweight? Can you surrender?” The man got noticeably upset, said that he could not, and stormed out of the room.

The questions not to ask are: “Did the teacher ask the wrong question? Was the man not yet ready to investigate whether the sense of self is real? Are we to suppose that ‘a seed was planted’ anyway?”

No, what the story brings out nicely is the central view: so long as I take my sense of being a separate self to be real, just so long will surrender be impossible. My life, like the goals I set, will be a serious, indeed a personal affair.

In his late teaching on ajata (the no-creation teaching of nonduality), Robert Wolfe observes that the nondual teaching is very simple ‘to get,’ provided that one can see that one, as a self, is not real. However, so long as one believes that one is real, the teaching will remain completely impenetrable. The reality of the self is the sticking point.

It’s totally fine that the man in question wishes to lose weight; it’s fine for him to have this goal; it’s fine for him to believe that he has a life to lead, that he is an agent in control (to some degree) of his life, that time is real, and that his life is what unfolds between birth and death. Ultimately, aware presence ‘doesn’t care’ whether one lives knowingly as awareness or not.

However, some (mysteriously) will come alive to the possibility that all of the above assumptions pertaining to birth, life, death, and selfhood turn out to be dream-like or illusory: they are appearances, yes, but they are not ultimately real. For those who feel a resonance with this teaching, it’ll become clear that a person cannot possibly surrender to actuality, to what is. The person, rather, is to be surrendered to what is. In this ultimate surrender lies total freedom.