Experience the Power of Surrender

Krishnamurti stunned a room of followers with six words: "I don't mind what happens." This episode unpacks what he actually meant — and why surrender isn't giving in, it's giving up preferences. From Michael Singer's Surrender Experiment to a McKinsey CEO who ignores nine problems out of ten, Neil makes the case (with his own white coat and clipboard) that the people who try to control least often get the most. The answer to last week's question: how else are we supposed to live?

Show notes:

In Episode 4 we exposed the ego's need to assert its preferences — to get its own way — and the drama that causes. This week, the alternative.

Neil traces a single idea through Krishnamurti, Eckhart Tolle, Michael A. Singer and the Stoics, lands the corporate reality check ("how many situations out of ten do you try to control?"), and distinguishes surrender from passivity. The thread holds: surrender is the conscious response to the same mechanism that asserting reacts to.

In this episode:

• Why "surrender" means surrendering preferences, not surrendering to anything
• The three things to recognise: how much happens despite you, how good outcomes follow bad turns, and how much drama comes from forcing your agenda
• A reflection you can run on your own past
• Discernment over dogma — when to control and when to leave space (incl. an exco navigating COVID vaccine politics)
• Equanimity across the traditions: Stoicism, "Let go and let God," Inshallah, Hishtavut, the Tao, the Buddha
• Loss as the gateway to wisdom

References mentioned:

• Jiddu Krishnamurti — "I don't mind what happens"
• Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
• Michael A. Singer, The Surrender Experiment
• Rajat Gupta (former global head of McKinsey)
• Carl Jung; Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (flow)
• Daniel Goleman & Richard Davidson, The Science of Meditation

If something landed, subscribe, rate and review wherever you're listening.

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Links: 

Find the written companion on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/neilbierbaum/p/experience-the-power-of-surrender 

Practical Mindfulness https://practicalmindfulness.co.za/ 

Equanimity Masterclass https://neilbierbaum.com/shop/equanimity-masterclass/ 

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© Neil Bierbaum

Transcript

Cold open — "I don't mind what happens"

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is what to believe. Finding signal in the noise. I'm Neil Pierbahn, a journalist turned master coach, reporting what I've found across four decades of investigation into the human condition. What I've found is a flaw in the human operating system, one that makes it hard for us to face the truth about ourselves and leaves us believing things about ourselves and the world that are false. You'll find a strange comfort here. The comfort of knowing how little is really true, how little of it really matters, and what to do with the reality that remains. Welcome back to another episode in this series where I'm exposing the flaw in the human operating system, one mechanism at a time, from different angles using hundreds of examples. And remember, what we're doing here is learning to look at things directly, so that you can gain an insight that causes a direct and immediate shift in behavior. You don't have to process your feelings about it. You see something and the behavior changes, and the thinking and feeling can catch up afterwards. That gives you the power to self-manage in a way that doesn't cost you, and where giving up something is not experienced as a loss. The gain is self-mastery. The gain is the freedom that you get out of it.

The question Episode 4 left open

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Welcome to episode 5. In the previous episode, we looked at the automatic mechanistic ego reaction of needing to assert our preferences, to exercise choice, to get our own way. And we saw what drama that can cause in the world. It probably left you with a question, how else are we supposed to live? What's the alternative? Is there even one? I said I would offer one, and so here it is.

Krishnamurti's secret

SPEAKER_00 1:37

And I'll start with this quote by the Indian philosopher Jitukrishnamurti. He had all these followers, devoted followers, and one day he stunned his audience when he said, Do you want to know my secret? And the crowd went quiet. Of course, they wanted to know his secret, and so he said, My secret is I don't mind what happens. Yes. That we're talking about a major spiritual philosophical thinker of the 20th century. You can look him up. I'll put his name in the show notes. And the foundation of his philosophy was to not assert his preferences on the world or on reality, to not have to have things go his way. It's got to tell you something.

Surrender — not surrender *to*

SPEAKER_00 2:23

And a term that often gets used to describe this is the word surrender. An example is Ecotole from The Power of Now Fame, and he says the only true spiritual practice is to surrender the next moment. In other words, to give up your preference for what should happen next. And note, I didn't say surrender to the next moment, just the word surrender. So we're not giving in, we're giving up preferences. There's a difference. I'll explain some more later.

Michael Singer & The Surrender Experiment

SPEAKER_00 2:55

And then there's Michael A. Singer, a guy who founded and built a big American software company, and he did it explicitly following a philosophy of not listening to a voice in his head that expressed preferences. He grew up in the 60s, 70s and became aware of this voice in his head that told him what to do all the time, expressing preferences, we can call it. And he decided not to live according to that, but according to a different philosophy. I'll explain some more later as well. In the end, he published a book, a memoir about his journey to the top, you could call it. And the title for the book was The Surrender Experiment. So now, are you interested? Because we can see surrender might lead to some good results financially, commercially, and it's much more than that. For

My WhatsApp status (and testing it for real)

SPEAKER_00 3:45

years, my WhatsApp status has been experience the power of surrender. And that's not a slogan. That's me having gotten out my white coat and clipboard and tested this as a way of life. I literally, as I'm known to do, threw my life at it and tested it. And I'll share more about that later in this episode too. And so I can really talk about this from first-hand experience.

The McKinsey CEO: nine out of ten

SPEAKER_00 4:08

And lastly, to put a proper commercial relevance stamp on it, Rajat Gupta, who's a former global CEO of McKinsey, has put this in a slightly different way. So he's been quoted as saying, I know that nine problems out of ten go away. If you don't address them, you have to deal with a tenth. I often don't address things until I have to. So that's another version of the same thing, once again, by a top-flight businessman.

It sounds like madness (and why it’s not)

SPEAKER_00 4:32

To the Western mind, this sounds like madness. When I give this talk to corporates and I ask them how many situations out of ten do you try to control? The response I usually get is between seven and eight, closer to eight, seven point six to seven point eight is the average that I have in my head. And the fact that we have to have a whole workshop on the subject of reducing that number proves my point that we think it's madness. And here are some of the points I make in those workshops that help me land the possibility of there being another way, the fact that there is another way. The first is to recognize how much happens despite you, not because of you. Often we think people are doing things because we told them to and they wouldn't do it otherwise. The fact is, we've very seldom have tested whether they would do it anyway. We like to think it's because of us. If we got out our white coat and clipboard, we might find that actually they were going to do that thing, but now they feel micromanaged because you told them. And that's something a lot of my clients learn, sometimes to their disappointment, because it means they're not as important or things aren't as dependent on them as they would have liked. However, we do tend to think that everything happens because of us when often it happens despite us. The next thing is to recognize how good outcomes can happen even when things don't go your way. And we often say that. We say, I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. And yet it was the best thing that happened to me. You know, I was really disappointed when this happened, and then it turned out well. And so we realize that we're not always the best judge of what's going to happen. If we were, we should be in sports betting professionally, making a living out of that. But we don't always get it right. And so sometimes when things don't go your way, there can be a positive outcome. But we never realize that in the moment. We always realize that after the fact, in retrospect, two years later, grudgingly. It's like, oh, yeah, okay. The desirable position, what we're pointing to here, is to be in the situation and go, oh, this might be one of those situations where things might turn out well, even though it doesn't look like it's going my way. That's the essence of what we're talking about here, really. And the third thing to recognize is how much suffering and drama happens as a result of people trying to assert their preferences. Corporate politics is the obvious example, and all corporate politics comes from somebody or other within the organization trying to assert their preferences, to have things go their way, to force their agenda on the world, on the people around them. And it's when we learn to relax that a little bit that we experience less politics. And that's not to mention actual politics. And another one is the tension in television shows. If you watch movies and series, all the tension in television shows that keeps you gripped is driven by this, by people having an agenda, trying to force their preferences on the world. Littlefinger and Game of Thrones is the paragon of that. In a detective series, you'll get the angling of a corrupt cop or some politician who gets involved, some business person. They're all trying to force their agenda. They're trying to assert their preferences on the world. So once again, we can see that this automatic mechanistic ego reaction has enormous costs.

A self-reflection exercise

SPEAKER_00 7:46

So maybe it's worth taking a moment to reflect on that for yourself. How many situations out of 10 do you try to control? And you can think of various scenarios. Maybe as a parent, I'm sure the number's close to 10. As a partner, maybe it's a little less, like a nine or an eight. And at work with your team, the people that report to you, probably still an eight or a nine, and with your peers, with situations around you. Maybe there it's a slightly lower six or seven or something like that. And I don't want to lead you with those numbers, I'm just having a bit of fun. It's really for you to figure out where you're at. And then when you've thought about that, you could maybe look at how much of that stuff would happen anyway, but with happier people. In other words, children not rolling their eyes on you. Mom or dad, you know, duh, I was going to do that anyway. And likewise the other people in your life. And maybe you could get out your white coat and clipboard and evaluate some past events. To find a time when something didn't go your way, and yet it turned out okay, or turned out even better. Could be something simple like ordering pizza. They didn't have the one that you usually order, so you ordered something else, and that turned out to be your favorite pizza. You went to a movie or watched something that somebody else suggested that wasn't your choice, and it turned out to be a great movie. Music. You got introduced to music or something bigger, maybe an actual business failure or a job you didn't get or the job that you lost, and then it turned out to have a positive consequence, pushed you into a into something that you'd always wanted to do, but never took the chance, or never thought you would be allowed to or able to, and then you find yourself in a position. So gather some evidence on that and start building that case. And importantly, with this, ask yourself how hard was it when that thing did happen, and how long did it take you to actually acknowledge that you didn't get your way and yet it turned out well or even better? Can you even now acknowledge it? What would have to happen for you to allow for the possibility that you might be about to discover something similar in a situation you're currently going through and that you're trying to control? Could you, based on that evidence from those past experiences, open up in this situation and say, maybe something is emerging here or could emerge that could be better than I could create for myself? Can I let go of trying to control and assert my preferences in this situation too? And can you do that while it's happening rather than only accepting it grudgingly in retrospect in three years' time? That's what we're looking for. That's the real outcome here. We have that as a way of life, as a way of

Why we control — the ego reaction (and Jung)

SPEAKER_00 10:30

being. I hope you can see that this is where this is going. Recognizing that we're not the best predictors of what should happen. As I said, if we were, we should all be professional sports players. And so why do we continue to try to control things? Well, in the same way that we think we created ourselves to be the way we are, the theme of episode four, we think we control life way more than we do. And both are an automatic mechanistic ego reaction. It's our ego trying to make itself be something in the face of the awful truth that we didn't create ourselves to be the way we are, that we didn't choose life or this life. So we don't really need to ask why we do that at an individual personality level. We don't need therapy over it. We just need to see it. The automatic mechanistic ego reaction. We need to see that it's a bad neighborhood, an exit. So the attempt to control eight things out of ten is a bad neighborhood. It's you being in a bad neighborhood. And why is it a bad neighborhood? Because, as we've seen, there's all the drama that it causes. Think of the family wedding and the mother-in-law who wants everything her way, that level of drama and the other things I mentioned. And secondly, and most importantly, and this is the key thing to get, is that because that's not how life is set up. You didn't create yourself to be the way you are, you find yourself being the person you are, and you don't control as much of life out there as you think you do. I quoted Carl Jung in the previous episode, where he said that all modern people assume that there is nothing that they have not made up. We think we have invented everything physical, that nothing would be done if we did not do it. That is our basic idea, and it is an extraordinary assumption. End quote.

Why surrender works (because it’s real)

SPEAKER_00 12:12

So to exit this bad neighborhood of thinking it's all up to us is not giving up. It's aligning with the way life is. It's a more accurate response to reality. It means dealing with what's real and what matters, which is the promise of this show. It enhances your power to impact reality because you'll focus on what you can and can't control, or you'll distinguish between what you can and can't control and focus on what you can control. You'll look for the gift in the situation, and not only afterwards, in retrospect, two years later, but even while it's happening. So that means meeting the situation as it is and not as you are.

Surrender is discernment, not passivity

SPEAKER_00 12:51

And so the term surrender as we're using it is not a choice between being active or passive. It's not binary. It's about treating each situation on its own merits, making your best guess as well. Is this a situation I need to manage and control or one that I should let play out? That's what Gupta in our quote earlier was pointing to. If he's saying nine out of ten things sort themselves out, then what planet is he on versus the one that you're on? And this is the biggest lesson for most of my leadership coaching clients, that it's about discernments, about knowing when to act and when to leave space for things to happen, and to do that consciously with awareness by choice. Ironic that we bring the word choice in there. Because the choice isn't over what happens, the choice is over how we approach the problem, what we focus on, how much control we try to exert versus allowing space for things to emerge for what wants to happen, what's going to happen anyway. And once again, this isn't just my opinion. There's a lineage to this, and I'll go through some of them, I'll mention them briefly, and then we'll unpack them more in more detail in separate episodes. So Krishna Murti, I've mentioned, we'll certainly talk more about him and his philosophy in future episodes. Ekotole, another one. So he said surrender the next moment. And note again, he didn't say surrender to, just surrender. So it's not giving in to something terrible that we can foresee is going to happen. It's about giving up preferences, surrendering the preference, giving up the preference, giving up the attachment to the outcome, to what must happen next. That grabbing, holding on to. There's a difference here. It's important to really get this. A relationship issue, something with your child, something at work. What's your preference for how that should play out? Now surrender that. Put it down on the table instead of holding it. Open it up to possibility. Open yourself up to everything that might happen. Don't follow your fears. And don't believe that you know best. If you know best, then you should also take up sports penning. Stay with not knowing, stay with what's real. And of course, don't be stupid about it. If somebody might die, then you might not want to leave too much to chance. This again, as with my corporate clients, it's about what's your situation, what's your context, what's appropriate in different situations. If you're an ER emergency first responder, you're probably going to be closer to that eight or nine and you should stay there. However, if you're managing some other bakery where you're selling cakes, you might not find that every situation is life and death, even though we treat it that

A high-stakes COVID example

SPEAKER_00 15:34

way. And all that said, sometimes even in high-stack situations, things could work out better than you could have planned if you let them. I've had that situation. Bringing in vaccines into the country and having some issues, political issues around that, and having to deal with those. And we were going through this process while that was happening. And so they chose not to overreact and try to control outcomes, but to allow the situation to evolve and see what emerged. And a much better solution arose out of that than they would have been able to create for themselves. And they acknowledged that they were very clear about that in the feedback after the program. So it really is about discernment. This really isn't just for the small situations, it can also be for the big, intense, high-stakes situations.

Michael Singer's story: a precis

SPEAKER_00 16:27

I mentioned Michael Singer. I'm not going to tell his whole story here. However, he did recognize very clearly and distinctly, he says it in his book, that he recognized the voice in his head expressing preferences, and he chose not to live by that, but to respond positively to everything that came into his life. And so he ended up, in order to do this, I'm telling a bit of a story now. In order to do this, he built a cabin in the woods where he wanted to go and meditate and observe and manage this voice in his head. And one thing led to another. Someone asked him to build a cabin for them. That led to a construction company. Then he bought a computer to do the accounting for that. Someone saw that, asked him to do something for their medical practice, which led to a big medical insurance software business. That's the pressy version of his story. And all the time he was just responding to the invitations that were extended to him rather than trying to force the preferences on the world. And he ended up with a hundred million dollar, multi-hundred million dollar, maybe billion dollar, I don't know, software company, one of the biggest in America, acting as an interface between medical practices and medical insurance.

The Stoicism lilnk

SPEAKER_00 17:36

And another part of this lineage is an important one and one that has gained some currency in the last decade or so, and that is Stoicism. And Stoicism arose out of Greek culture, which was all about fate and the actions of the gods. They were very much about recognizing that we don't create ourselves to be the way we are. In fact, they were at the other end of the spectrum. Everything is up to the gods. The best you could do was to placate the gods with offerings and sacrifices. However, the Stoics recognized that there was one thing they could control, their response to that reality as

Equanimity — the word we're missing

SPEAKER_00 18:08

they saw it. And there's a word for what we're describing. We've used the term surrender, that's the action, but the thing itself we would call equanimity. Being with things as they are, treating different alternatives as equal, equanimity. And this is one of the ultimate spiritual qualities or capabilities that all the religious and philosophical traditions point towards. So there's two of them: compassion being the one. We understand that we see it in religions and philosophies. The other one that is less visible and we're less aware of is equanimity. It's not a word we see much. It's completely absent from our leadership lexicon, incidentally. Our leadership lexicon, the language of leadership, is all about war, fighting, directing, competing, and winning, and whereas equanimity doesn't occur anywhere in all of that. And

Equanimity across the traditions

SPEAKER_00 19:02

equanimity means having a balanced relationship with the world, being okay with whatever happens. And as I said, it's been present in all the spiritual and religious traditions of the East and the West. So in Christianity, we might have the phrase, let go and let God. In Islam, it's inshallah, if God wills it. In Kabbalah, the step of Hishtavut on the path to meditation is developing equanimity. So before a person can move to the next step, they have to demonstrate equanimity, and that's measured in that tradition by the question of whether you would treat someone the same, regardless of what they say about you, regardless of how important they are to you. Another place where equanimity occurs is in the Chinese Tao, which sees life as a flow that you align with rather than as a set of circumstances that you command. And one more is Gautama the Buddha. We know his story. Intense observation of the mind through meditation, and through that, he saw that all human suffering comes from the need to assert our preferences. You have to get our way. And that reminds me of some programs we have, the Practical Mindfulness website and the Equanimity Masterclass on my website. I'll put links to those into the show notes as

More about Stoicism

SPEAKER_00 20:13

well. And just to return to the point about Stoicism, Stoicism is often confused with equanimity. But equanimity is an outcome of Stoicism. The foundation or the essence of Stoicism is something else. I mentioned earlier that Stoicism arose out of Greek culture, which was about surrendering to fate. So they were the complete opposite to our Western philosophy, modern Western philosophy of believing that everything is up to us, that we control everything, that it's our God-given right to assert our preferences on the world. We see choice as being about choosing things, choosing outcomes, choosing what we want and having our way over what happens. In our world, God must listen to us. Stoicism arose in a world where there appeared to be no such choice. The gods, through fate, determined everything. The Stoicism pointed to the one choice that they did have, the choice over their attitude, their mindset, their approach, their mental approach. So Stoicism in its essence wasn't about denial or equanimity, although that's often how we see it. It was about managing the one thing you could manage, your mind or your attitude, and that led to equanimity as the visible behavior, as the outcome. And if we bring that into other modern traditions, we see that it aligns with the work of Victor Frankel, Man's Search for Meaning, and Mikhaili Shikshent Mikhalli, who wrote about the flow state or state of optimal experience. And it aligns with what we're doing here. So that's the lineage of what we're working with. It's not me saying so. And

For the sceptics: the neuroscience

SPEAKER_00 21:40

for the skeptics among us, my people, I'm one of you, neuroscience supports the notion of equanimity as a thing. There are studies that show that the brain can actually grow connections that enhance equanimity, enhance your ability to do what we're talking about here. And that is achieved through long term meditation. You want to read more about that, the book. By Golman and Davidson, The Science of Meditation, I'll put that in the show notes

My own life: standards, then loss, then wisdom

SPEAKER_00 22:04

as well. And I mentioned earlier my own experience with this theme. So I've said in previous episodes, when I started out when I was younger in my early adulthood, I was extreme standards in terms of order and aesthetics. I was very driven by that. And then with awareness, I learned to live with people more comfortably, to live in a world that never quite matched my standards by giving up the need to be right. And in that way, I could surrender my preferences in this area. And in doing that, I saw that it was the rigidity of my standards that was the problem, not the people or the world. And later on in midlife, I went through some very challenging times, lost a business, and in the same year, I lost a relationship, lost my mother who passed away, and my ex-wife emigrated with my teenage son all in one year. I ended up sleeping in the spare room of a childhood friend, you know, having sold and lost everything that I owned. And practicing equanimity, being okay with the way things were, was key to me being able to get through that situation and to recover. And right now, I'm 59, approaching 60, and I see I have some clients who are approaching 70. And for myself and people around me, friends my age and clients I mentioned, so much of life has been about loss and not getting what you want. Ironically, my day job coaching is all about helping people to get what they want, and that's fine. But this is the added layer that often we don't. And how do we approach still maintaining our goals, our objectives, but understanding that things may not go our way, and sometimes that's okay, sometimes that's even better. What I can say is that as my clients and friends get older and I do, and into more positions of power and with age, it's all life is often more about what you don't get than what you do. It's often about loss and grieving that loss. The more creative ones of my friends and clients actually literally turn to writing poetry about it. I see it as the mark of a life well lived. If you've really lived, taken chances, expressed yourself, you're gonna have that. You're gonna have those losses, and it's the gateway to wisdom. I don't believe wisdom, and it's not just me saying so, there's references for this as well, is that wisdom is achieved through a loss. Nelson Mandela, capable of great wisdom, spent 27 years in jail. That's a tremendous loss.

Back to "I don't mind what happens"

SPEAKER_00 24:24

So let's go back to that opening statement. I don't mind what happens from Krishna Murti. It should mean something different for you now than it did in the beginning. And you should now, between episodes four and five, the previous one and this one, be able to see the two sides of that automatic mechanistic ego reaction of needing to assert one's preferences. So asserting is the automatic ego reaction to how life is. It's a reaction to the fact that we didn't get to choose, and so we go all in on choice, versus surrender being the conscious response, exercising a different kind of choice, the choice that the Stoics and Michael Singer recognize. In other words, choosing not to be driven by the need to assert your preferences, but rather choosing to align with the way life is and see what emerges. Work with what's real and what matters. Hence the promise of this show: getting to the number of an issue to see clearly so that you can deal with what's real and what matters.

What should I cover next?

SPEAKER_00 25:23

But today we really just laid out the map, the landscape. And in future episodes, I'll walk through each of these paths that I've laid out. And so let me know in the comments what questions you'd like me to address. Because I could talk about this for a year. It's my thing, it's my favorite subject, so best you help me to focus my attention. That's what to believe for this week. If you're finding value from this, please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you're listening. If something landed, not just made sense, but actually landed, then share it with someone who you believe could benefit from it as well. That's how this work spreads. You'll find a written companion on Substack under my name, and if you want to take it further, there are ways to work with me. You'll find the links in the show notes. I'm Jel Bierbaum, thank you for listening. See you next time.