We surrender to a higher power when we no longer believe in free will

I like the idea of surrendering to a higher power. I just don't like the notion that this is God or some other supernatural entity, for I prefer my surrendering to be founded in reality, not illusion.

I'm not sure, though, if surrendering is the right word. Acceptance seems more accurate, but it lacks the imagery of surrendering -- which for me conjures up two generals negotiating the terms of the end of a war that one has won and one has lost.

In this case, what's being surrendered is a belief in free will, the subject I've been writing about recently. The idea of acceptance comes from an understanding that whatever is happening in my life, it is the result of a chain of causes and effects, not free will, so it makes sense to accept my life on those terms.

The main quibble I have with surrendering is that this really isn't a battle between two opposing forces. Actually there is no one to surrender to, and no one doing the surrendering. That's why I lean toward acceptance as a better term, except when I like the dramatic energy of surrendering. 

One thing that's being accepted by giving up a belief in free will is that nature is in charge, not us. Meaning, it is the entire universe that is guiding things, not a mythical free will that stands apart from the natural world.

Paul Breer says this in his book, "The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will."

According to [William] James, a surrendering of control to a higher power plays the key role in most conversion experiences, the specific object of that surrender being secondary. While in our culture it is God to whom we usually relinquish our power ("Not my but Thy will be done"), it could just as easily be Circumstance or Causal Necessity or Chance.

The secret, as Alcoholics Anonymous has long claimed, lies in "turning it over." For most individuals, what follows from that surrendering of will (or, more accurately, the illusion of will) is [as James says]:

the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be, even though the outer conditions should remain the same... A passion of willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing centre of this state of mind.

At what James calls the "glowing centre" of the conversion experience is a kind of power, but it is a far cry from the power of which Nietzsche speaks, the power to overcome either oneself or others through the exercise of will. It is, if anything, the very opposite.

It is the power which comes from seeing oneself as the instrument of a higher will or, in less theistic terms, as a vessel through which the energy of the universe is passing. It is the power of powerlessness, the power that comes from giving up all pretense of authorship, all aspiration to divinity.

In ordinary circumstances, powerlessness implies impotence and frustration at not being able to control events. The powerlessness of which James is speaking, however, is that of someone who sees that no straining is necessary. It contains no "violent effort," no desire to dominate, no frustrated need to prove one's superiority.

The self that has been converted or reborn is emptied of all trace of will and stands ready to experience that transcendent power we usually identify as divine, but which can just as easily be conceptualized as the power of Circumstance.

However described, such power is never experienced as one's own; it belongs to the whole field of forces of which the experiencer is but a part. For that reason, it is not something in which one takes pride. It is simply that which is arising here, something for which one is more apt to feel grateful than proud.

...With the giving up of agency, speculating about either the past or future becomes less interesting. We are drawn more intimately into the present and all the things going on around us right now. In the process, our perspective of how we are related to the world changes.

Seeing ourselves as links in a chain of cause and effect has the effect of reconnecting us with the world. Of course, we have never been unconnected to that world. It has only seemed that way because of our identification with an entity standing off to the side looking at the world or listening to the world, but never entering into it.

When we give up straining either to bend the world to our will or to prevent it from taking away the things we love, we can experience what it is like to live in that world. Because our wishes are less urgent and our efforts less violent, we no longer feel pitted against the world. 

Every event, at least in hindsight, appears necessary. When those events involve us, we feel more accepting of whatever outcomes arise here. We not only feel more accepting of them, we find ourselves identifying more and more with them.

We being to see ourselves as a stream of outcomes arising here and that awareness, more than anything else, is what makes us feel connected to the rest of the world. 

As a stream of outcomes, we are at the effect of a million past and present events: our genes, our education, friends we have made along the way, the house we live in, our boss's mood, the mail we get, the weather, and even the food we eat.

At the same time, through our own mood, our ideas and perceptions, our looks, our personality, and our physical movements, we represent the causes to which other events must respond.

This feeling of connectedness, while more superficial than the Oneness of Buddhist enlightenment, has the power to dissolve the paranoia which arises from our view of the world as alien and resistant to our will.

Comments

[Ron E.]

Breer makes some good points here for giving up the self-concept, especially with the consequent connectedness to the world and ourselves. Not that we were ever not connected, just that the ingrained idea of being separate selves makes it feel that way.

I’m happy to accept that nature is in charge, something that we can appreciate, stand in awe of and know that ultimately, in spite of our fears and apprehensions, nature inevitably is in control. For all the trials and tribulations that life brings, we can see that primarily it is our own habituated thinking processes, particularly our fearful and fanciful thoughts and ideas about ourselves and life, that bring us the most mental anguish.

Being divorced from nature (if only in our thoughts and imagination) is to deny our origins of the wonderful cavalcade of life and our intimate connections with everything and everyone else.

I think it’s relative to remember that the issue of free will has its roots in Augustian theodicy. Augustine, to solve the problem of God being held morally responsible for the fall of Adam and Eve as he (God) was the creator of everything, including evil, he introduced (or rather popularised) the idea of free will, benevolently giving man the choice – meaning that God is not responsible for evil and also not for man sinning.

A rather logical get out but characteristic of religious thinking – and also relative to the understanding, social climate and predispositions of the era. Perhaps coupled with the somewhat natural tendency to think ourselves to be separate beings (derived from the instinct to differentiate between me and not-me – eat or be eaten), the idea that we have free will still persists.

[SantMat64]

Paradoxically, surrender to "No Will" produces the same psychic benefits whether one is an atheist, agnostic, an ardent believer in a personal god, or somewhere in between (e.g., advaita, Buddhist).

The confession of helplessness confers peace of mind and confidence.

[Spence Tepper]

Think instead 'submit'.
The button you press for every inquiry, every comment, every final purchase. Every ",submission ' you make of your own free will.
If surrender bothers you, just press 'Submit' instead.

[La Madrugada]

Thank you SantMat64

The confession of helplessness confers peace of mind and confidence.

...and according to Charan Singh: Peace of mind is the greatest gift of all.
Because it was my destiny that I was allowed to "digest" that free will does not exist, I am curious what each day will bring to me and I will accept, surrender, being happy with the greatest gift of all.

[Spence Tepper]

"It seems to me that perhaps 'Freedom' is too vague a term in this sort of context. I think what we have to ask is what sort of a social pattern, and what sort of political regime is best calculated to help the individuals within the society to realize the maximum extent of their desirable potentialities. I mean it's quite obvious that most of us are functioning at about 10% of capacity. And wouldn't it be nice if we could function at 20% instead of 10%? "

Aldous Huxley
https://fb.watch/mOae1azzNR/

[Spence Tepper]

If only we didn't have a will. But we do. And sometimes we are quite willful. The suggestion that we don't have a will is at odds with our own. And we are often at odds with ourself. Submission is the key to partnership, and integration.

If only we could surrender. Certainly, we can adopt that attitude, but often that includes becoming less than personally responsible, making excuses, claiming God did it when we did it. Claiming it was society, or our upbringing, or our genes that did wrong, not "us". And then claiming there is no "us"...

This seems to me irresponsible. Irresponsibility for our bad habits that we project cause onto others and not accept the responsibility for ourselves.

So, while I love the notion of Surrender, but I suspect the claim exceeds the reality, and is a cover for lack of personal responsibility.

But anyone can submit their issues to nature, God, the greater positive power of life within themselves. And that greater power does indeed have its own direction and motion. Following it, we become more aware, more empowered, not less. But only empowered to move forward, not backward.

[Appreciative Reader]

Further to the comment I’d posted in the other thread. (By the way, do correct me, please, if I’ve got that wrong, what I said there. Doubt it, Breer’s words, that you’ve quoted, are clear enough. Still.)

Actually I just typed a (looooong) comment, and then on previewing it found that I’d ended up putting in effectively all of what I’d tried to put aside, in #1 through #4. Covering too much, asking too many different things all at once, is probably not the best way to take this forward! So I deleted that comment, and I’ll try again now, keeping it focused, and aimed only and solely at the follow-on off of my #5. A completely practical question actually, that does away with any conceptual disagreements/discussions entirely.

Stripped to this bare-bones practicality, my question was this: How does one get around regret et cetera, without also destroying the movitation for such ultimately dysfunctional and out-of-sync-with-oneself acts that much of life comprises? It could be anything, really, that triggers this. Realizing there’s no free will, maybe. Believing we lack agency, perhaps. Maybe a dropping away of self, or something akin to that, during meditation. Maybe simply some drug one ingests. Hell, maybe simply someone’s innate temperament. Whatever the cause, and without going into whether we resonate with the cause ourselves, let’s say you’ve ended up doing away with regret. While that’s fine, when it comes to regret about things past; but how would you then be able to find within yourself the motivation for such things as need to be done but that no sane man would actually want to do it absent of the carrot-and-stick thing, essentially without the whole regret thing?

Clearly Breer’s saying one doesn’t find motivation for such dysfunctional things, like I said in my comment yesterday. Clearly that’s how Breer answers that question, by suggesting that one might be better off without such dysfunctional actions. And that’s fair enough, that does make the whole thing consistent and coherent. Nevertheless, I wanted to explore this a bit further.

Take for instance something like the Ukraine war. Your country’s been invaded by a megalomaniac’s army, and you find yourself having to fight, and fight desperately and protractedly, to preserve your freedom. Or say a WW2 situation, where Nazi and fascist forces threaten to take over the world, and need to be kept at bay by fighting desperately and protractedly over many years. Or maybe your country’s been taken over by some parasitic colonial power, that’s bleeding your nation dry while enriching itself completely unjustly at your expense; and the only way to get rid of it is through many years of desperate protracted single-minded effort. Or maybe you’re (desperately and protractedly) fighting to overthrow that horror of a polity foisted on South Africa by lowlife racist scum, the whole Apartheid thing.

I don’t think any mentally healthy person would like to be in that kind of a situation, in and of itself, that protracted desperate struggle I mean to say. The sheer physical horror of such a protracted experience, for one. Two, the physical danger, that can be terrifying for some, and certainly at the very least unpleasant for almost all. And most importantly, having to kill enemy soldiers, having to take human life, not once but again and again and again --- lives of individual soldiers who themselves are probably no different really than oneself --- that is probably is the worst of the horrors of war.

Who in their right mind will want to do this, in and of itself, and keep doing it for months together, or years, or in some cases decades? No one --- or at least, no sane person! The only thing that would motivate one to do something like this is going beyond the present and dwelling exclusively on the future; that, and regret, that is, not being able to live with the regret of not doing this, and letting this state of affairs continue. Otherwise Ukraine would surrender to Russia; the Allies would capitulate to the Nazi-led Axis; blacks and coloreds would bend their knee to scumbag votaries of Apartheid in South Africa; and colonies like America (and even more so, colonies like India) would continue to be under the thrall of parasitic colonizers. Nor would the citizenry ever find the will to kick out worthless parasitic monarchs and aristocrats.

Is that truly what Breer suggests? Is that truly what Breer would be happy with, as “strategy” to live with full understanding of no-free-will and no-agency? Because I see no way to let in the more benign forms of avoiding the “frantic frenetic”, while allowing for people to do engage selectively in some instances of the “frantic frenetic”.

(And while these are extreme cases, but I guess this will also apply to, for instance, someone working a highly successful but high-pressure and in-and-of-itself dysfunctional career, that nevertheless offers great rewards, like investment banking. Or for that matter any kind of high-pressure and dysfunctional in-and-of-itself situation. It is one thing if one is retired, or if one is working at a safe easy sinecure, or for that matter if one is fairly wealthy already and in a position to step outside of the dysfunctionality while still living a life of dignity. But if you’re a poor young person starting out, with a family to feed, then you’ll probably need to tread hell fairly protractedly before you’re able to choose to comfortably forgo that “frantic frenetic” engagement. Else you’ll continue to stay at those depths, all of your life, except maybe with a beatific smile on your face nevertheless. Is that truly what Breer’s suggesting, the ideal of the Dionysian barrel?)

-----

And a second question, related, absolutely, but I suppose somewhat different, would be this:

“Giving up straining to bend the world to our will”, and “surrendering to a higher power, causality in this case”, is all good and fine; but only if it is predicated on truth, right? In this case the truth that so doing will lead ultimately to good things?

People who “surrender” or “submit” to God’s will may or may not reap psychological benefits; but it isn’t to reap those benefits that they surrender or submit to God. They do that because they literally believe that an omnipotent omnibenevolent God, who has their best interests in mind, will look after them. In as much as that belief isn’t true, that surrender, that submission, is completely dysfunctional, notwithstanding any incidental psychological benefits ---- it is easy to see why, I need hardly spell that out.

Likewise, I’d guess that wives (and husbands) who believe in their spouse’s fidelity are happier than those that don’t. But while obviously paranoia is dysfunctional, but ultimately the matter of psychological well-being is incidental: It is fundamentally a question of what is true. Any belief that ignores truth (whether with a false positive, or with a false negative), is deeply flawed, deeply misguided.

And likewise, those who, following Breer’s prescription of “(giving) up straining either to bend the world to our will or to prevent it from taking away the things we love”, probably implicitly believe in doing that everything will turn out all right. Will it, though? It may, sure, in the case of those who are already fairly comfortably situated; and it may, in some cases even when that is not so, simply as a matter of happenstance; but will things necessarily turn out (fairly, acceptably) well, by themselves, always, or even most times? I doubt that very much. Putin won’t leave alone enlightened Ukrainians who’ve given up straining to bend the world to their will; nor will SA lowlifes give up Apartheid; not will Hitler renounce his psycho project; and nor will a parasitic Britan retreat from the Americas and from India. Not unless they’re forced to, compelled to, by people, who with gritted teeth do “strain to bend the world to their will” --- and strain to the utmost, and beyond, to do that. There’s no other way.

Like I said, related question, this, to the first I’d asked, but a bit different. This no-straining-because-no-agency idea of Breer’s seems to implicitly assume a fundamentally beneficient Universe, which I’m afraid goes contrary to what we actually see in the world at large (some individual comfortably situated oases excepted), the whole nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw thing.

While Breer’s suggestion to “leave off straining” makes his thesis internally cohesive and consistent, but does it actually make sense?

-----

Like I said, I wanted to focus on this single issue here. But I suppose it won’t hurt to ask one single extra question that is completely unrelated to this issue, given that it can admit of a short enough answer: What is this “Oneness of Buddhist enlightenment” that Breer speaks of?

No such thing, no “Oneness” per se, in the Buddha’s teachings, as far as I’m aware! Not that I know all of what the Buddha taught, so I realize I may be mistaken, and I’ll be very happy to update myself on this if so. What is this Buddhistic “Oneness”, then?

(Like I said, completely unrelated to my main comment, this last. Just an incidental trivial sidebar is all, just something I was idly curious about. And not to take the focus away, with this last, from the rest of my comment!)

[Appreciative Reader]

In fact, what I said above, that reminds me of what I'd read in Olaf Stapledon.

Civilazations keeping springing up across the Universe. Only a few of them reach technological heights necessary for interstellar travel, but "only a few" out of millions and billions are still very many. A few of them are like we humans are --- essentially malevolent, like Europeans that colonized the Americas and Asia and Africa were, fundamentally. Brutal, brutish, violent, bent on conquest and exploitation, they spread out their malevolent influence across galaxies, growing bigger and bigger.

And then something curious happened. There were many civilizations far more advanced than these brutal brutish colonists, each of them capable of wiping out these colonist scum all by themselves. And yet, what happened was completely unexpected. Each of these civilizations started simply disappearing.

This is what actually happened. These advanced civilizations were essentially sane. Sanity is apparently the norm, not this violent colonizing insanity. And while they were, each of them, capable of destroying the hordes of the brutish colonist powers; but that would necessitate their reorganizing their economies, their society, their very nature, to violent ends. And that was completely intolerable to them, inconceivable even.

Rather than corrupt themselves by "straining" to obliterate the colonist scum, and unable to stand by and just let things be (because that would mean being run over by the less powerful colonist powers, which would again result in corruption of their nature): they chose to simply destroy themselves. So that, one by one by one, the creme de la creme of the civilizations of the universe started snuffing themselves out.

Which is when ...But no, not to spoil this marvelous tale any further, for those who might want to read Stapledon themselves. And nor is that further development relevant to what I wanted to say.

This ...inability/unwillingness to "(strain) either to bend the world to our will or to prevent it from taking away the things we love" --- Breer's words --- that Stapledon describes, that would see a brutish Putin take over Ukraine, and a brutish Hitler take over the world, and a brutish Apartheid regime lord if over South Africa, and a brutish Britain continue to ravage India and, to a lesser extent, America as well ---- is that what Breer advocates, then? Is *that* what his "strategy" amounts to?

He'd have to, I suppose, in order to be internally consistent with what you've quoted him as apparently advocating here, Brian.

And if not, then how not, exactly?

[Kranvir]

Gurinder singh dhillon of the satanic RSSB cult of beas , is the master , the sangat , are the slave. The slave surrenders to a higher power and only believe what their master says - they are under a heavy influence , a spell. This relationship is one where you become subservient, totally surrendering everything, and it is a very.unhealthy relationship. He becomes your controller. This is complete opposite of free will and freedom , an enlightenment of what you are. You fall for a narsasistical evil man that takes your soul, your ability to think critically, your ability to discern, you are totally lost. What a sad state to be in. You will never see that you are under this spell, you believe the false promises he makes, and take his word as final in every matter even though what he says is complete and utter garbage to an outsider. Becarfel of this toxic type of master slave relationship that cults such as rssb and gurinder singh dhillon uses to manipulate the masses.