Most of us believe we are leading our own lives. Mickey Singer knows that we’re not. In The Surrender Experience, he chronicles his journey through his life as he let it lead him.
As a young man, he found himself wanting to quiet the loud chatter of his inner voice. It was constantly announcing its likes and dislikes, compelling him to think in certain ways, and annoying him. He was fed up letting its every whim dictate his life and he wanted it to be quiet. This, it turned out, was the beginning of his spiritual journey. It led him to make the crucial decision that he was going to surrender to what his life had in store for him; he was not going to try and be in control.
The first thing he did was move to the woods for solitude. He bought a few acres, parked his van, and meditated all day as he became acquainted with his inner voice. He was finishing up a degree in economics (even though his heart wasn’t in it) and through a turn of events was offered a part-time teaching job at his university after graduation. He took it, and the measly salary was plenty for him to sustain his simple lifestyle.
One day he decided he wanted to build a house to live in. Nothing extravagant, but a building with a permanent roof sounded nice. So he invited some friends over and they built one from scratch. They put their hearts and souls into the house and it turned out great. People liked it so much that one day someone asked him to build them a porch. Then someone needed a shed. Then a couple asked him to build them a house of their very own. Every time someone asked, despite whether or not he really wanted to do the project, he surrendered to life and said yes, and always did the job to the best of his ability. His business grew slowly over time until eventually Singer was the owner of a state licensed construction company with multiple crews working on projects all over his home state of Florida.
In the meantime, he continued with his spiritual practice, meditating twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. He built a Temple (The Temple of the Universe) on his property and began leading numerous weekly meditations. He invited renowned spiritual leaders to visit his Temple and hold mass prayers. He even started a prison group that he would go on to attend twice a month for decades. He signed his land over to the Temple and soon other people came to live on the property, each on their own journey, each a caretaker in their own way.
One day he was in a Radio Shack and saw a new electronic product on display called a personal computer. Something drew him to it and he bought it on the spot. He quickly became interested in programming and started writing his own programs just for fun. When he got good enough, he wrote a program to help do the accounting for his construction company. He put his heart and soul into it and it turned out great. People liked it so much that one day someone asked him to write a program for their business too. So he did, and just like his construction company, before long he became owner of a (nation-wide, multimillion-dollar) software company called Personalized Programming.
All the while, he never lost his spiritual path and continued teaching others at his Temple how to quiet their own inner voices. His community grew, as did his family. He bought adjacent plots of land as they came up for sale and the Temple’s acreage grew, too.
All of his life’s adventures (I won’t spoil the ending for you) are a result of one core philosophy: surrendering. Every time the voice in his head announced its preferences, Singer quieted it down. He allowed his life to unfold in front of him, preferring to travel where it lead him, not where his inner voice told him to go. “It’s not that surrender gave me clarity about where I was going” he writes, “I had no idea where it would lead me. But surrender did give me clarity in one essential area: my personal preferences of like and dislike were not going to guide my life. By surrendering the hold those powerful forces had on me, I was allowing my life to be guided by a much more powerful force, life itself.” Singer doesn’t swim against the current; he follows the flow.
The debate is out about whether we are running our own lives or if life is making plans for us, but there is truth to be found in the sentiment that surrendering to the way things are, or seem as though they would like to be, as opposed to how they might be, or how we might wish them to be, is a good thing. Trying to control things beyond our control is a recipe for frustration. Life is an adventure, one we are going to experience whether we like it or not, so perhaps it’s best to let it unfold with as little friction as possible. Who knows where our life might take us?
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