I really struggle with surrendering to what is. To truly surrender is not to give up or run away or at the other extreme to attempt to control. Both these extremes being the same axis of trying to keep experience as one would like it. Give up and look up a monk I know says, pointing to addressing what needs to be and can be addressed and accepting what comes. Formal meditation improves awareness and the ability to just be with what is without adding. Recent years, being so stressful have seen me let formal sitting slip, although I'm gradually feeling back into the call to sit and also resistance to it. I will be more inclined to sit when I get a better space for this set up at home and not just in a corner of my study. And that's a whole other story- the effort required to get the house more in shape.
In a way, the above paragraph is enough- whatever the nature of reality, everyday life does come back to how we deal both practically and emotionally with what arises. But within that which informs our approach is I think, a belief system and fundamental to that the very nature of reality. A key part of this for me at the moment seems to concern our Buddha nature. The scientific approach recognises that we cannot know the nature of reality except though the apparatus available to us (including our own senses and faculties) and so is not so different to sunyata in Buddhism in many ways. And there is great debate in the scientific and philosophical communities about the nature of consciousness. Is the unknowable void- the unborn which is the unity of reality from which everything comes- synonymous with consciousness? Are we that which cannot ever be destroyed because it is uncreated and is that which is both the seen and the seeing (there being no separate self doing the seeing)? And thus is it so that after death of the physical body whilst there is no individual self which (as say a soul) passes to some other realm, there is that which in the non-dual realm (of the unborn) both exists and does not exist (depending upon how we attempt to bridge the absolute and the relative in our 'understanding') and is 'continuous' before our birth, during our life and after our death? Plainly the material of our physical body and the cause and effects of many threads making our life have this quality. Life is like grandfather's hammer. But more fundamentally, is consciousness not just an emergent property of complex arrangements of matter- itself an aspect of the unknowable void- I cannot see that any other way- but actually the ground of matter? Does consciousness come out of matter or matter out of consciousness? They're interdependent of course. And so we return to sunyata...
I'd hoped years ago that one day I'd see very deeply our true nature- not just see sunyata cognitively and through my experience of everyday life, not just through the vulnerability and made-ness of everything or even just the pregnant with possibility of each moment but a deep and liberating experience of the unfolding moment. There have been I think, glimpses. But I'm really still very very much an afraid self. A deeper Self if I can use that way of summarising the above ie at the very least a transpersonal self and more deeply Buddha nature (is there a difference?) whilst in the 'mix', is not to the fore; there's not much playful samadhi, there's constriction. And this invites the question- what do I really believe?
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