Surrender or Accept?

Most of the personal development blogs I often read seem to emphasize that surrender means the letting go of, or release of, pain and suffering. I contend that surrender confirms loss, while acceptance asserts that you have nothing to lose.
The need to surrender confirms loss or failure. Therefore, you have not released yourself, but further bound yourself to a belief in your own inadequacy and littleness. Choose carefully the words you use to define yourself since what you think you ARE, is what you will maintain yourself AS.

Acceptance identifies and asserts that what was once fought against is no longer deemed worthy of battle. You do not surrender and thus admit defeat, but rather you accept and admit freedom from conflict. You cannot win nor lose, conquer nor surrender, since neither is applicable to a life of acceptance.

Many might contend that this is exactly what “surrender” means. However, if you surrender to your depression, you essentially concede that it has controlled your life, thus might it not have that power to do so again? Does your surrender give it that power? Are you now subordinate to your depression, since you have surrendered to it, and does this requires that you no longer resist being defined by it as opposed to your defining yourself in anyway you choose?

Acceptance means that you can now define IT.

I believe "surrender" is a western perception and you will rarely encounter this concept in eastern philosophy or spirituality. This relates to the western ideology of control through conquest. It reinforces the idea that conflict, battle and the waging of war are the chief components of overcoming your "defects." Surrendering to the conflict asserts that the conflict has won and you have lost.

Acceptance demonstrates that there never was a battle nor is there anything to win.

The American Heritage dictionary defines surrender as “to relinquish possession or control of to another because of demand or compulsion” and “to give up in favor of another.”

When you surrender to your depression, you allow IT control. However, if you accept your depression, you allow it an equal presence in your life along with all other parts of your whole. As such it loses power to control.

"Does this mean I should not seek to alleviate my depression?"

No. What you fight against and surrender to, reinforces the need to conquer it and the worthiness of the battle. Yet, what you accept needs no resistance and need not be conquered. What you resist must persist, what you accept merely becomes a part of the experience we call Life.

This is difficult to comprehend through the western paradigm of overcoming or conquering, rather then joining with or unifying. We demand war and rarely admit defeat. We demand the world conform to our expectations and, rather then closely examining the validity of what we expect, we continue to blindly demand it acquiesce.

You hold yourself hostage to these same standards.

"But if I “accept” my addiction do I not give it power to define me?"

If you accept your addiction, it will recede from view. It only HAD power because you resisted it. If you surrender to it, you assert it once had power over you, thereby making it that much harder to accept and alter.

"But isn’t detaching a form of surrender?"

As the dictionary defines, to surrender is to "relinquish control to another because of a demand." Therefore, what is surrendered TO must then assume control. These are the spoils of war.

Make no mistake, the mind is conditioned to differentiate between power and powerless. Acceptance immediately equalizes the playing field. Surrender emphasizes loss of power and imbalance. In your surrender, you may experience a brief feeling of relief because you are no longer waging war. But make no mistake the judgment of loss is upon you and will dog your steps from here on out.

To accept is to join with and make One. Your addiction is you and in accepting, you MUST see it differently and in that way IT must recede in importance and control. If its no longer important and no longer compels your behavior, how can it be considered an addiction?

To surrender to adversity means you were once pitted against it. Now the opponent has grown in size and power. Therefore, In surrendering will you really forget that you were once at war and that you have lost?

Hardly, in fact, does not surrender simply reinforce your littleness and set the stage for future battles requiring additional surrender? Although you deny this, the fact is that essentially you define yourself by the struggles that have been won or lost. Your life is a series of overcoming or being overcome, winning or losing, “the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat.”

"Nothing clings to the mind like the past" and therefore, nothing is as powerful in defining the future. If all is accepted, what power does it have to define? Surrender defines loss, acceptance defines that there has never been anything to lose. The future is easily and effortlessly accepted simply as it unfolds.

God does not require your surrender, only your acceptance.

Many would argue that I merely engage in hair-splitting, semantics. Yet, I respond that we live by the concepts and beliefs of our mind. Words have power simply because words, even more then images, define who and what we are. Surrender is a concept that defines you as defeated by your suffering, while acceptance defines you as embracing all, even the suffering. There is nothing to surrender TO as all is accepted.

You can only surrender to that which controls. Acceptance nullifies control and asserts equality. The more you accept suffering, the less you suffer (strange how that works!). You can accept everything and in so doing, you make it part of you. Never surrender, always accept.

"This is the ever-present Tao, never resisting or surrendering, but accepting, flowing with and Being."