Have you ever thought about is the being you are right now a result of cumulative subjective decisions you have made in the past, or completely determined by the universe? If I had to summarize the book in a short description, that would be “life has a plan for everyone, surrender and do whatever is put in front you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal preferences or results”. Someone would immediately reject the conclusion as it makes humans look passive and vulnerable. Others might vehemently argue that it’s not possible to surrender in the extreme scenarios like life-threatening moments. To be honest, those also were my initial thoughts when I started reading the book and at some point I even felt reluctant to continue because it contradicted with my previous experience and values. Then it occurred to me that since the book is about surrender to life, I might as well give it a try, surrender and keep reading. Now I have finished the book and have a different perspective than from the beginning, and I am ready to embark on my own surrender experiment.

The book, a New York Times bestseller, is written by Michael A. Singer, a respected spiritual teacher and successful businessman. It all started from the desire of seeking a peaceful mind as a young adult, Michael described how the surrender experiment, let go of personal preference and let life in charge, for decades had guided him from solely pursuing spiritual growth with concentrated meditation and secluded life-style to being able to perform spiritual growth and worldly growth in harmony, serve others, overcome obstacles, and establish a successful business whose achievements in information technology was recognized by the Smithsonian Institution. For people without any spiritual experience, the book may be just another biography of a businessman with some psychology massage. However, personally I think whether or not one understands the message delivered by the writer resides on how we interpret the success story, which has two options – 1). Michael proactively took challenges and worked really hard, so he succeeded by secular standards. 2). Michael surrendered to the flow of life, worked wholeheartedly on whatever was presented by life, and success is the natural result and part of the plan of the universe. At first I struggled a lot trying to figure out what are the differences between those two interpretations, beyond one being secular and the other being spiritual. Now I understand it’s the mind that differs. Some people triumph with a stressful mind while some thrive with a peaceful mind. The book belongs to the latter. As the writer put it “The surrender had taught me to willingly practice in life’s dance with a quiet mind and an open heart.”

My surrender experiment has already unintentionally started at the moment when I decided to continue reading the book even though I didn’t agree with it at the beginning. Since then I have been trying to practice it in my daily life. With the awoken awareness, I started observing how personal preference leads to “chatter” minds and the needs to let it go, how surrender helps me accept challenges peacefully and treat it as an opportunity to take me beyond myself, and how denoting heart and soul to the present make me switch swiftly to problem-solving mode. In the end, I would like to conclude the review with two sentences quoted from the book, which indicates the ultimate destination and executable action of the surrender experiment.

Find a more peaceful and harmonious way to live your life and to better appreciate the amazing perfection that unfolds around us.

If life was unfolding in a certain way, and the only reason I was resisting it was because of a personal preference. I would let go of personal preference and let life in charge.