Letting go and surrender: lessons from Richard Bach’s Illusions

Richard Bach’s novel Illusions has a short parable in it about letting go. It goes like this.

A village of creatures lives on the bottom of a clear river. The current runs over all of them, and each one clings to the twigs and rocks, because clinging is what they’ve learned since birth. One creature gets tired of it. He says he trusts that the current knows where it’s going, and he lets go. The others laugh and tell him he’ll be smashed against the rocks, and at first he is. But he refuses to cling again, and in time the current lifts him off the bottom and carries him along, and the rocks stop hurting him.

Downstream, creatures who’ve never seen him look up and call it a miracle. They call him a messiah, come to save them. He answers: “I am no more messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go.” They keep calling him savior, still clinging to their rocks, and once he’s gone they’re left telling legends about him.

(Paraphrased, with one short quotation, from Illusions by Richard Bach. The full parable is worth reading in the book.)

What we cling to

The current is the flow of life. Some people read it as divine will; others as simply the way things change whether we agree or not. We’re the creatures holding on to the bottom, afraid of where it might take us. The rocks and twigs are whatever we grip for safety: possessions, fears, fixed ideas about how things should go, and the comfort of the familiar even when it isn’t working.

Meditation is one place to practice letting go. You sit, a thought comes, and you watch it without grabbing it or pushing it away. The same skill carries into the rest of life. Things change, good days and hard ones come and go, and a lot of our suffering comes from trying to control what was never ours to control.

Letting go hurts at first

The parable is honest about this. The creature lets go and gets knocked around. Surrender usually works like that: when you loosen your grip on a relationship, a role, a belief about yourself or a need to be in control, the first thing you feel is often fear, and the first few knocks can hurt.

Spiritually, surrender means setting down the ego’s idea that it’s running everything, and trusting something larger, whether you call it God, the universe or life. In practice it can look like staying open to new experiences, dropping rigid expectations, and when things get uncertain, staying curious about what there is to learn instead of scrambling back to what’s comfortable.

“No more messiah than you”

The last part of the story is the one people tend to skip. The creatures downstream see someone free and decide he must be special. Calling him a savior lets them admire freedom without risking it themselves. They stay on their rocks.

We do this with teachers, gurus and anyone who seems further along. It can feel like respect, but it’s also a way of handing our own responsibility to someone else. The creature’s answer puts it back where it belongs. Whatever he did, any of them could do. Nobody can let go for you.

So the work is personal. Look at what you’re clinging to. Notice the stories that keep you there. And when you’re ready, loosen your grip a little, knowing it might sting before it carries you.

If you’d like to practice this alongside other people, come to Sunday Service, 3 to 6pm in Anna.