Do you have a choice to surrender?

Following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner: Sir, it takes a certain trust and surrender to accept. But then that is not a choice again; we cannot choose to surrender.

Acharya Prashant: How do you choose to surrender to so many other things?

Don’t you choose to surrender to your boss when he is threatening you? Or does that happen involuntarily?

Listener 1: Sir that happens due to conditioning also. For example, we are told to behave in a certain way.

AP: The conditioning itself is the chooser. You are not choosing, the conditioning is choosing. But still, can the conditioning choose without your consent? Had that been the case we would all have been machines.

The machine may be very well programmed but still it requires someone to push the button. And you are the one who pushes the button, after that the process may be automatic. But you are the one who takes the initiating steps.

It is all, bluntly put, our own self-deception.

You never go and ask the real questions. You ask, “How to surrender to the Truth?” but you never ask, “How to surrender to money?” There you very conveniently and easily surrender. Anybody who has faced difficulty in surrendering to…