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You Mean I Need To Accept That?

Many people doing spiritual work have come to believe that we should accept whatever presents itself. We think that the posture of true surrender is one of accepting everything, trusting it is God's will.

I question this. Although I am very devoted to the path of surrender, I don't believe it means embracing everything as it is. Some things are simply wrong: injustices, abusive behavior, lying. Our commonsense reactions prompt us to resist these things. Common sense also prompts us to improve what isn't working in our lives. Acceptance doesn't mean lying in your own shit.

I think there are two things we need to accept. The first is the reality of things, often referred to as the truth. We need to accept the fact that we are lying in our shit and not pretend it's a bed of roses, or that we landed here by mistake, or it is not really us who is in that shit. We need to face the reality. The truth may be that you've overspent what is in your checking account. Or that you slept too late to get to your meeting on time. Or that you were speeding to try to make up for your mistake and got caught and now must pay the fine. The truth may be that you love someone even though that person has hurt you, and you wish you didn't love him or her anymore. The truth is the fact of the situation. It is what is.

The truth also includes the larger scheme. It includes our true nature and the capacities of our soul. It includes the fact of impermanence, of suffering, of grace, of miracles. Our perception of these truths depends, in part, on our openness. Some people are open to miracles, others are not; some are open to perceiving the suffering around them, others want desperately to deny it. It takes strength and a certain fierceness to open to all of these truths, both personal and universal, immediate and eternal.

The other thing we must accept is our humanness. We must accept our feelings, our thoughts, the parts we are proud of and the parts we would rather hide. Many teachers and therapists suggest that what we fully accept can change, but what we push away, sticks like a burr. Not everyone agrees. Some urge us to reprogram our unacceptable thoughts and feelings and replace them with something more pleasant. Sometimes the message is mixed. For example, we're told to embrace our anger, yet reminded that anger is one of the primary causes of suffering. This leaves us split, the result being an acceptance that is superficial. We try to embrace our anger in the moment, but we disdain its existence. It is a little like trying to eat canned spinach without tasting it.

Acceptance means there's no denial, no turning away from the truth. Not even a little bit. When we accept something, we fully acknowledge what is there. Eventually, we may even open our heart to it. For example, when a person comes to accept his or her impending death, it can go beyond a resigned "yes, it's happening" to a more embracing attitude of "and I'm okay with it." This later stage often comes when we see the truth or rightness of a situation.

But what if we face the situation clearly and we see that it is not right and we cannot be okay with it? Then that is the truth we must embrace. No one says you have to put on a happy face. Maybe you are divorcing and you're mad as hell about it. That's your truth in the moment. It may change in the next moment, but it is your truth in this moment. The challenge is to not take that truth and try to impose it at any cost. Other people have their truth too.

The neat thing is that when you really commit yourself to the truth, the truth keeps opening up. It keeps getting bigger. To get to this larger truth, we have to accept the changing subjective truths without being too attached to them. We need to see that they are not the whole reality.

What if you keep looking for the larger and larger truth and still believe that what's happening is wrong? Then you must fight it. You must resist it with your whole being. You must resist and yet, at the same time, remember that you don't have the whole picture. Just recognizing this can help you discriminate what actions are appropriate.

What I am talking about is a certain humility. You can be passionately committed to something and still have the humility of knowing that your view is not omniscient. This humility can take away some of the righteousness, softening the hard edge that is sometimes there. The world cannot be divided into good guys and bad guys. We're all good and we're all bad, and the existence of bad ("evil") may have a place in our world. So what I am saying is that we can accept that injustices exist, that we should do our best to change them, and that both their existence and our battle against them may be part of a larger movement serving the good.

Let's look at this in relationship to trust. The existence of evil seems to make it harder for many to trust. I can empathize with this; it would certainly be easier to relax into a world we perceive as all-good. Yet the existence of evil doesn't exclude the possibility that there is something that is trustworthy. Often when we trust on the larger level, it means we believe there is a benevolent force that it is working for the good of all. We can believe in a benevolent force without it implying that things are all "worked out." No intelligent person would say that they are. The condition of our global environment, for example, is quite alarming. To believe in a benevolent force is simply to know we aren't alone. There is help behind the scenes.

Humans have sometimes pointed to the suffering in the world and said then there can't be a God. No God (worthy of the name) would allow this. But for all who in bitterness turn away, there are yet more who offer some kind of explanation. Maybe God is trying to help but isn't all-powerful. Maybe God purposefully leaves us to deal with our own messes. Or maybe this dichotomy is false, and the way God works in the world is through us. People have explained it different ways.

Some make suffering tolerable by adopting the belief that everything happens for a purpose. I don't necessarily agree. I think that some things are meant to be and others just fall out as they do. They are the result of various causes. They can have meanings (either meanings that are embedded in them in a "predetermined" sort of way or meanings we assign to them), and they can serve a purpose in terms of what we can learn from them, but this doesn't mean they are inviolate and shouldn't be changed.

Many things should be changed. Our job is to discriminate what to change and what to leave alone. We need to recognize when acceptance is bowing to a higher intelligence and when is it just plain stupidity. We need to see when it is born of wisdom and when it is cowardice.

How do we do this? I think it is primarily a matter of developing a capacity for seeing things clearly. We must learn to see freshly, without attachments or preconceptions. It is the open mind, the relaxed mind, which can do this most easily. This is where contemplative practices come in. We need to be able to step aside from the surface activity of the mind in order to perceive things more directly.

I don't think we are meant to accept without question what others tell us or what is happening around us. Why would we have the powers of discrimination and choice if not to use them? Nothing suggests to me that the current situation is the way things are "meant to be." I think it is up to us to fix the messes we've created; it is up to us to find solutions. I think this is part of what God banked on when setting up this experiment: that there would be intelligence interacting with the situation in each moment. What better experiment could there be?

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