I seem to only care about my needs, not yours, thus I’m not caring about our needs, so it seems like you might get exploited or overdrawn if you try to open yourself towards my needs.
It’s not surrendering to you, it’s surrendering to the We. Surrendering not to the other, but to a larger whole that contains me.
The thing I’m calling We (it may not be the best name) is not just about collective identity—lots of dysfunctional families or totalitarian states have plenty of that. It’s about some actual sense of there being a larger whole here that if I open to it will care for me. Not perfectly, but enough that I like it.
Surrendering to a We is, naturally, harder to do the less present the sense of We feels, which means that the less I trust that you’re in touch with our sense of We, the harder it’ll be for me to be in touch with the We.
Since my ability to access a We stance with you is profoundly affected by my trust in your ability to access a We stance with me, there’s a natural self-reinforcing feedback loop here that takes you further in whatever direction you’re going: We begets We, and separation begets separation. Trust begets trust and distrust begets distrust.
My needs matter to the universe because they matter to me and I am part of the universe. This is perhaps an underappreciated implication of nonduality.
Egos emerge in order to take care of our needs in contexts where we don’t trust the strategy of surrendering to the We.