Love Him when you see Him
and surrender yourself the same moment,
you cease to exist and your goal is achieved.”

Our Sahaj Marg sadhana reaches a culminating point in the surrender of the self into the Universal Self of the Master. It is a culmination in sadhana but only a beginning in spirituality! All abhyasis ask how this surrender is to be achieved, or how a state of surrender is to be arrived at. Master has taught many things about it. The first step is meditation, to be followed by constant remembrance. After this a stage comes when we must have got rid of the idea that we are ‘doers’. It is Master who is the real doer, the real karta. When this attitude becomes established, the fruits of action, the karma-phala, also belong to Him. All ideas of reward, of punishment etc., evaporate away here, to leave a vacuum into which He can flow in increasing measure.

God did not create Himself for any one race or any one country or any one set of people. He created everything and if He created everything, everything is His, whether we like it or not, and in ourselves it is spirituality. We are only seeking to cease being our own and to become His. This is what surrender implies. Surrender says, ‘My Lord, I am no longer my own as I thought I was, I am now yours, do unto me as you will.’ This becomes possible when there is love, not when there is fear. When there is fear we cannot surrender. We may talk of surrendering. We can surrender only our arms, as one set of forces does to the victorious. So surrender in those terms means victory and defeat. Here surrender of the soul to its creator is only returning to Him what belongs to Him. There is no question of victory or defeat. On the contrary I would consider it our victory over Him, because we are able to persuade Him to take us back when all our life we have been trying to run away from Him, to negate His very existence. So in that sense every soul that can go back to its maker has won a victory over its own maker by persuading Him to take it back in spite of all transgressions, of misdeeds, in spite of saying that God does not exist. This is the general picture that emerges from my Master’s teaching.

Surrender means . . .
Surrender is not a process; like cleaning is a process, meditation is a process. Now in cleaning we are doing something to remove something, to achieve a different condition. I eat so that my hunger may be fulfilled, but that’s not the purpose of eating. Hunger is a sensation created by the system to show me that I need more fuel in the boiler. So there is no such thing as hunger – hunger is a signal to say, “Put more fuel inside.” So when we say, “I am hungry,” it does not mean I am hungry - I feel a sensation which tells me that my stomach is empty and I need something put into it.

Similarly with thirst. My body needs fluids, drink - it doesn’t mean I should take wine or beer. It means my body needs some fluid content. Similarly, when I feel unclean, I take a bath. Now there’s no word for clean and unclean. You can only say, “I feel dirty.” This is external dirt, which you can see; you can touch and say, “Oh, it’s all black.” Internal dirt, grossness, we don’t feel. So the Master comes and says, you are gross, do the cleaning. Now you need outside help. So first we depend on ourselves – we feel hungry, we feel thirsty, we feel sick, we feel happy, all these things and we try to fulfill these needs ourselves.

Then come the inner needs: that I am heartbroken, I have to go to the psychiatrist; I have bad dreams, I have to go to somebody else. Now I need God. I cannot find Him, I don’t know where He exists or how to get in touch with Him, so I go to the Master and He says, “All right, first do the cleaning and then take the sitting.” Now when we come to the Master, it’s like when we go to the doctor. Master says if you go to the doctor and say, “do this” or “do that”, it is not surrender to the doctor. You must allow the doctor to do what is necessary. If he says, “lie down” you have to lie down. If he says, “I want to put an injection in your arm,” you say, “Yes, doctor.” He says, “I have to operate.” You say, “OK.” We are surrendering to the doctor. We are able to surrender to the doctor because our need to get well is urgent. Otherwise I can die. So our interest in ourselves makes us surrender to the doctor.

But in spirituality we don’t feel the urgent need to correct our inside condition, because we cannot see it, we cannot feel it. Therefore we say, okay, we’ll do it tomorrow or next year and we go on delaying and the grossness increasing, our condition is worse and worse, and then, like in underdeveloped countries like India, one day, when we are dying, we go to the doctor when it is too late. So we should be able to appreciate that, like my health is vitally necessary to me, therefore I am willing to say to the doctor, “Do anything you like, but make me well.” I must be able to have so much interest in my spiritual welfare that when I go to the Master I must say, “Do what you like, make me well spiritually.” And therefore my Master uses the ultimate example of the dead body: it has no reaction, it has no pain, it has no pleasure, it has nothing. Anything you want to do with it, you can do with it. That must be our condition in surrender.

Accepting and handing yourself over to Him
When we talk of loving, and being loved, it is a very tragic situation that we are sort of dragging down that which should be sublime and divine, to the marketplace of commerce, bartering, trading, selling, buying. Oh, I love my Master so much, why does He make me suffer so much? Maybe because He loves you so much. I would be surprised if a Master who loved me, wouldn’t make me suffer when I had to. I mean what sort of a Master would that be, who would be merely misled by my tiny suffering that I have to undergo? And he says, “No, no, no, poor Parthasarathi, he should not suffer, let me withhold this gift from him.” Would you call him a Master? Would he be worth the salt that he is eating? On the contrary, he should say, “My dear friend, you have come to me, I am an ironsmith, I have to melt you, beat you, pummel you, pound you, put you through the presses, tons of pressure on you, so that you shall be this.” And we must say, “Gladly Master, I acquiesce. I am here because you can do it. I wouldn’t go to a guy who doesn’t know what to do with me.” Would you go to a blacksmith who didn’t know how to melt his metal or to hammer it into shape? Would you accept a car driver, a chauffeur, you see, who didn’t know what to do with a steering wheel?

All these peculiar, funny ideas that we have of suffering, pleasure and pain. We want to go through spiritual existence as if it’s a pleasure cruise in the Mediterranean in one of the Shah’s yachts - with three bars in every drawing room. That is not the spiritual life. The spiritual life is my life entrusted to my Master’s care, to do what He thinks is best for it. And if He thinks that I have to undergo so many things which my senses tell me are pleasure and pain, well, that’s my problem. I interpret a situation as a painful situation, or a pleasurable situation, not he. He does what is necessary. I interpret it. The trouble lies in the interpretation.

Wisdom says when you are with a Master and when he is working upon you for your welfare - he has nothing to gain by it – accept. And how to accept? He himself says, “Be like a dead person in the hands of one who is dressing you to be buried.” You see, no reaction. A corpse has no reaction. That’s the ultimate stage of, shall we say, pliability in the hands of the Master that we should adopt, that there is no criticism, because there is no judgement. Who am I to judge? What is my intellect capable of judging?

Let us try to be wise and let us try, more than to be wise, to grasp an opportunity which rarely comes, of having a Master who says, “Come to me, I take charge of your lives, in a total way. Leave everything to me.” That’s what surrender means. Surrender does not mean, “Permit me to be moral in certain ways, and permit me to be free in certain other ways,” It’s like a train saying, “All the right-hand side wheels will go on the rails, but the left-hand side not.” You are going to have a derailment. Or a plane, you know, four engines, and the engines on the port side say, “Well you know, I’m tired, why don’t you let me opt out of this flight?” And the pilot says, “Fine. You know, we are a free nation and you are a free engine; I’ll switch you off.” So you see, we are run by an engine here (pointing to the heart) which has only one standard. Please recognize it.

One, who has totally given up his personal freedom, contributes the most to general welfare; and that is the state of the saint or the Master. Because in the existence of a person like our Master, you find the example of a life sacrificed for the general human welfare by handing over all his personal freedom to his Master; freedom of choice, freedom of action, freedom of thought, everything. And this we call surrender.

We achieve many things by this single act of surrender. If you look at it item by item, you hand over your house, your furniture, your possessions, your jewelry; I mean, you can go on itemizing, you know – my son, my daughter, my grandson, my great grandson – everything we hand over. But in one single stroke of surrender the whole thing is done. Now we are trying to let go one by one. “Yes, I have given up smoking.” Next we give up drinking; three years later we give up drugs; five years later we adopt a certain code of moral life, starting with not telling lies – the most trivial things. When are we going to achieve the really worthwhile, the really necessary, handing over – which is surrender? When are you going to really give that which is most valuable, which is most possessive and possessed, which you dare not part with – your life?

So, surrender does not mean lack of self-respect or lack of the self, giving up the self. It doesn’t mean anything like that. It means giving myself over to a higher entity, who can do for me what I cannot do for myself. Like when I go and lie flat on the surgeon’s table – I cannot operate on myself, but he can.

So, when we don’t have the wisdom of seeing anything but what is before our nose, as the English people say, we must hand ourselves over to somebody who can see farther. They are called seers. So, surrender is not denigrating myself or dissolving my individuality. It is just saying, “You can see better. Look for me. You can walk better. Carry me. You are stronger. Take my strength, too.” So surrender is really entrusting ourselves to somebody, as we are, knowing that he will take us. Like we get into a bus – I mean it’s not shameful for a man to go in a bus to Johannesburg. “No, no, I am a proud fellow. I have hunted lions in my time!” Yes, but that is in the forest, you know, when you walk four and a half miles and shoot a poor lion which has nothing to answer for. Can you walk thirty-six kilometres or sixty kilometres? You need a bus. Is it not surrendering to the bus?

Now we are familiar with the other quotation, “I came, I saw I conquered.” That was the idea of conquest of victory, of power. Here was the summation of surrender! “I saw, I fell, I never rose again!” People often ask, “What is surrender?” you see, I think those three short words – ‘See, fall and do not rise’ – these epitomize the value of surrender.

Giving everything
When you want to get, you have to give. Give and take is the law. So when you give yourself, you get something better than yourself. If you give parts of yourself, you only get parts, something better than that part which you gave. So, in India we say when you give a part of yourself, it is something like prostitution. Therefore it is never satisfying. However high salary a man may get, however advanced he may be in his profession, unless he gives something and gets something else out of that, we are not happy with salaries. We want recognition, we want approbation, we want a man to say, “Well done.” And that, “Well done,” is often better than the money that you get for it. Good bosses should know this. A pat on the back is worth a hundred thousand francs.

So you see, human behaviour must conform to this, that more than anything else, you have to give sympathy, you have to give approbation, you have to give love. And when you give totally, you get something much more than what you have given. This is the philosophy of surrender. So when we do transactions with parts of ourselves, selling our intellect, selling our bodies, selling our sex, selling our beauty, it is demeaning because you know you are getting less than what you have given. Always. But when you give yourself, you get something enormously more than what you have given, that is blissful. Therefore the philosophy of giving says, “Give totally or do not give.” It also implies that you can only surrender once. There is nothing left to surrender, once you have surrendered. Therefore in love we must surrender totally, you see, and having surrendered, there is nothing else left to surrender.

We have set up a tiny creation of our own, in the form of our individual material existence, having layers after layers of grossness and opacity. What is now to be done is to shatter off these layers of opacity one by one and assume the absolute state as we had at the time of creation. This is all the gist of the philosophy of our system ‘Sahaj Marg.’ We are, so to say, to dissolve this creation of our making or to unfold ourselves. The easiest and surest means to achieve this end is to surrender yourself to the great Master in true sense and become a ‘Living Dead’ yourself. This feeling of surrender, if cultivated by forced and mechanical means, seldom proves to be genuine. It must develop automatically within you without the least strain or pressure upon the mind. Even if the knowledge of the fact is retained then it is not the true form of surrender. What remains to be done, when you have surrendered yourself in true sense, is, I believe, nothing. In this state you will be in close touch with Reality all the time and the current of Divine Effulgence will continue its flow to you without a break.

You see, we are not asked to give up our possessions. Here is the great secret that give away yourself and you have everything with you. It is like a man giving his heart to a woman – if it is possible today and his wife finds – she did not only get him, she got his house, his ponies, his carts, his horses, his farmlands, whatever he had she got with him. When we surrender to God, and get God in return, we get everything that God has, not merely what we had.

Your heart is made to radiate love like the sun is radiating light for millions of years, and if the physicists are to be believed, it does not lose anything. It is supposed to be giving out millions of tons of energy every day and yet it is not growing smaller or being depleted, because it gives without expecting to receive back anything. Now if we can create a human heart which will love without seeking to be loved in return, you will have the beginning of a spiritual life. Spiritual life, therefore, consists in giving without thought of the self. Give as long as you can give. Give as much as you can give. Finally give everything you have. This we call surrender.

Not resorting to prayer even:
For me prayer seems to be some sort of an insult to my Master. That I have to remind him that I am suffering. When we say, “He sees everything, He is with me all the time,” how is it he does not know what I am undergoing now, either in the way of pleasure or in the way of pain? If he does not know that, what is he? If he is that, then where is the need for my reminder? If he is that and let me undergo this or that, he wishes me to undergo this or that. If he wishes it, who am I to deny it? This is surrender in its real sense. And it is possible only when we can become unselfconscious.

Different aspects of Surrender
All that is essential for success is contained in the abhyasis’ willingness to accept guidance from the Master, and to pursue the path inexorably. If we examine this concept of ‘willingness’ carefully, we find that ultimately it points to the need for total surrender to the Master. As Master has repeatedly emphasized, surrender is necessary on the part of the abhyasi, if Master’s work is to succeed. In one of Master’s writings he has given a pointer to this. What should be the ideal abhyasi’s attitude? Master has used an illustration to emphasize this point. He has stated that a carpenter can easily fashion whatever he desires from timber, but if he is given a chair as raw material to work with, what can he do? With timber he is free to do as he pleases, and to fashion what he has decided to create, whereas with a chair he is faced with severe limitations which cannot generally be overcome.

When we accept change, we accept the Master’s Will. When we accept it totally and unreservedly, with the faith that it is essential for all progress, the stage of Surrender sets in. Surrender, looked at in this way, is a humble submission to the process of change that my Master initiates in us, for our growth to the highest levels of spirituality available to mankind.

My Master said, "It is an amazing thing, Parthasarathi, that the poor do not beg. It is the rich who beg. And the richer they are, the more they beg for. So this is another principle of invertendo that the needy do not beg, they just surrender to existence, you see. You find them in the poor countries of the world, they are lying by the street-side, too poor even to beg, too weak even to ask, even from God. It is therefore in the poor of the world that you find this attitude of surrender. You may say, “Well, it is an enforced surrender.” Why not? Surrender in whichever way it comes is desirable. And if you have to be poor and made to suffer before you can surrender, that is also one of the ways of God, one of the ways of destiny. In fact it is one of the ways that the individual soul has evolved for itself from its experience arising out of its previous life.

Really and truly speaking, surrender is only sitting in a boat and allowing the current to take us with it. Now anybody who has struggled against the current in a river knows, how much effort is necessary, and how little progress we really make. Whereas if you just sit back and allow the river to take you with it, it takes you to your destination.

In the highest level of spirituality we can do without knowing anything. We have to do without knowing anything. The doing is ours, the knowing is His. And when we are able to accept this situation, and tell the Master, “I am doing what you told me to do, the rest is your business,” that is surrender – one way of thinking of surrender.

Real freedom lies in surrendering
This idea of total surrender to the Master seems to pose certain difficulties, the most insistent fear in the minds of abhyasis being the idea that surrender implies total loss of freedom, loss of personal identity etc. Our sisters and brothers of the West seem to face this problem in greater measure. One preceptor of the West actually asked this question. He asked, “Master! You are always talking of freedom, yet you ask abhyasis to surrender. Does surrender not imply loss of freedom? How to reconcile these two things?" Master answered, “The only freedom is the freedom to do the right.” I would add that since surrender is right and necessary for spiritual growth, it is an act of freedom to surrender oneself to the Master. In fact I consider surrender to be the highest expression of one’s freedom. It is the perfect expression of freedom itself.

So what are we really surrendering to the Master? All that we surrender is this very stupid, very limited freedom that we have, reflected in nothing but our ability to do wrong things, to suffer, so that we can enjoy a real freedom, because now we are, in a sense, looked after by the Master! So that was one of the highest levels of His teaching, “Be free from these ideas of freedom and surrender because in that lies your highest benefit.”

In examining this idea of freedom we have been led to the conclusion that what we have thought of as loss of freedom is really nothing but a state of surrender to the Master’s will. We have not lost freedom in the sense that we have been deprived of it. We have voluntarily, wholeheartedly and devotedly surrendered it to the Master of our Soul. We now see why the need for such surrender is paramount. Choice implies knowledge of how to choose, and will to enforce that choice. Our choice was exercised when we chose the Master and his way. It is like a bachelor who has virtually unlimited choice of a bride, but having chosen one and married her, the question of further choice no longer arises! The time for choice is over.

At higher and higher levels of evolution the very idea of choice ceases to exist. A stage has now been reached where even knowledge is no longer necessary. Many great saints have testified from their personal spiritual experience that a stage is reached when we have to bid knowledge and the intellect good-bye. It is not that we abandon knowledge as being unworthy or incapable of helping us. It served its role, its part has been played out, and the time for it to leave the stage has come, that is all! All that we need now is will, will to act and will to obey the Master in every single instruction. To those who are fortunate enough to arrive at this exalted stage, the Master is no longer a guide for spirituality alone. He has now become the Master of one’s life in all its aspects of existence. He becomes the father, the mother, the son, the teacher, the doctor, in fact there is no role that He does not play in the abhyasi’s life! He has taken total charge of the abhyasi. So we see that only our surrendering to him can bring about a state where he can take total charge of us!

So He gave us the greatest freedom to allow us to achieve the greatest possible freedom. And what was that? The ability to surrender which alone would give us what He promised as the highest “freedom from freedom.” It took me a very long time to understand this “freedom from freedom.’ I could finally understand it only when I understood the idea of surrender, that what it really is, is the freedom from the stupid freedom that we think we are now having, because if all of you would examine the degree of freedom that you enjoy, you will understand it’s not worth having.

When to surrender?
The day we first receive our Transmission and Master makes us come alive to the real existence, in the life in life, that should also be the moment when we should surrender that life to Him and the new life that has come to us doesn’t belong to us because He has made it. He has given us life. So it is His. If we are able to do this supreme act of surrender at the moment of awakening to this existence, then the whole thing is very easy. Because then we cease to exist, the moment we come into existence. And now it is the Master’s business to look after that which He has brought alive, like a mother looks after the baby she has given birth to. It is not the baby’s business, it is the mother’s business. Why? Because, she brought it into existence. So she looks after it with care, with love, and devotion, as no other person. A father is not able to do it. I don’t think a father can look after the child in that way, that special way, you see, that maternal way – “This thing has come from me. It is not only my creation, it is part of myself. And if I neglect it, I neglect myself. If it dies, I die.”

So, for the Guru, for the Master who can master Transmission and give it to us, our existence is His existence. And how can He not look after us? How can He not protect us? How can He not make us grow into what He is? It is not something grown from something into something else. It is a growth of a child into an adult. A child is a human being, the adult is still a human being, the old man is still a human being. So the child of the Master must be a Master. If this grand and supreme act of surrender can be done at the moment of awakening itself, then there is His baby, which grows into an adult unknowingly, unintentionally, unwillingly perhaps even in the sense that it has not the will to do it, but it is a natural, spontaneous thing that a human child becomes a human adult, very much like a monkey’s child becomes a monkey-adult. And a Master’s child must become a Master-adult. I don’t see anything difficult about it. Assuming that we are not able to do it at the moment we are awakened, arise into His existence, well, we should endeavour to do it at the earliest possible moment. And if we are able to achieve that, then He starts taking care: ‘You are my son.’ Leave the rest to Him.

How to surrender?
You know, personalities like Lalaji Maharaj, sometimes people ask, “Why was he born?” Well, it is like, he comes himself to help us. We don’t come like that. We come out of compulsive forces of our samskara. We are here by our efforts, we shall be there by His effort. So, the cooperation is by stopping our efforts altogether and permitting his efforts to grow and grow and this dual activity or dual response to the situation is what I would like to call surrender. Surrender means two things: not doing anything myself, and simultaneously allowing him to do everything.

In a well-ordered spiritual society there would be no need for God or Masters, because the unfolding of life itself is the divine mystery. Can there be a God apart from life? Or can there be life apart from God? I believe not. So you see, this transcendental miracle becomes possible only through an act of surrender. Surrender is not the giving up of your personality or your ego or things like that. Those are commonly understood, improperly understood, incompletely understood ideas. Surrender means sitting in meditation with this idea that, “I am preparing the environment for you my Lord. I wait for you. I wait for you with great love, with longing. This self of mine is useless. This body is not used. It is the most physical thing, yet I have not been able to use it properly. This mind of mine, this superb intelligence that you have given, I have used hardly 0.0007 percent. This equipment that you have bestowed me with I have misused or I have left it lie unused.” The parable of the talents all over again.

“So take charge. You can act, with or without a body. You can act, with or without an intelligence. All that you need to act is the will. You have given me that too, but it has not served any purpose. Because at every juncture where I have to decide upon a fork, which to take, I have failed. To do or not to do, still remains my question. I leave it now to you. May things happen as you wish.”

I remember once Babuji advised my wife about some problem she had. He said, “Either give up everything to the Master or you keep everything. Don’t give him all your disease, and your sickness, and humiliations and your annoyances and your petty miseries, and keep all the good for you.” Give him everything or keep everything. Here there is no cutting the cake into two and sharing it. So you see, this is the whole cake, and it must be given whole to him. This is the idea of surrender. And the benefit is, when we don’t feel we are doing something, we cannot be held responsible for what we have neither done nor not done.

So you see, surrender is the final answer to the unfolding of the cosmic or the divine plan. Otherwise, we continue to interfere, and like anything which interferes – l don’t know what is the alternative, except that we shall be removed from the scene of things. When a child interferes with your work, you try to tell it playfully, then you try to tell it lovingly, then gently you put it away. When a fly interferes, you chase it away. If it keeps coming you chase it away again and again. Otherwise, I saw one beautiful fly-swatter in Denmark made by this wonderful Karl Jenson in solid silver costing, I think, 2,600 krone. All horsehair tail, and easy to swat a fly with. But a fly, when it is swatted does not care about the price of the swatter! [RP-224-225]

If we believe that there is a future for the human race, if we believe there is a future for us and that future will unfold in the lives of our children and grandchildren and into the future of the human race, we must understand that we have to stop interfering with the cosmic plan. We must understand next that having stopped interfering, we must surrender to that plan. Next, we must understand that if we are willing, perhaps some of us will be chosen as the media for the unfolding of those plans. Such media are the great Masters, the great Personalities, the Avatars, through whom the work unfolds, through whom things happen but yet they are not the doers of that. [RP-225]

Now, I would like to say that when we give up this idea of doer-ship, we at one stroke remove the idea of self responsibility. Of course, with the other side of the coin goes the other side of the coin too. No heads, no tails, no coin. No blame, no praise. No punishment, no reward. You see, it is always the temptation of praise and reward that makes us claim doer-ship. And when we face loss and punishment, deprivation and punishment, we blame God. “Why has this happened to me? I did my best.” Anybody who says, he did his best is a liar. It is not possible. Why? Because we lack the will. We lack the intelligence Or rather, I should say, having the will and the intelligence we have not used them.

Surrender is the easiest way out of this mess into which we have got ourselves. Sit and relax. I don’t do anything. I think nothing. Truly speaking, I think nothing. Where do the thoughts come from? Not from the brain cells. Not even from memory, because memory is only what I have put into it. Not even from instinctive memory because that is the memory of my past, of my race. Where do the thoughts come from? We say, “I had a thought,” or, “A thought came to me.” Where from? So you see, in the beginning they come from samskaras, which we call thoughts. In the middle when we understand the role of samskaras, the role of the human being, the role of the Master, we begin to try to think. But then when we slip into this meditation business, clean ourselves, wait patiently for His appearance, now thoughts descend into us - inspiration comes, inclusion comes. Inspiration means having something breathed into you by the cosmic breath. To such a receptacle which is empty, which is waiting, which is fit – the divine pours itself into it, uses it as a medium of its action, of its thinking. Then comes the great revelations.

You see, this is the spiritual law that what you get does not depend on what nature produces. Nature produces in profusion, but we will not get until He permits us. I’m trying to suggest that we should look at duty the same way, and when we perform our duty to the Master, all our duty is over. He looks after the rest for our sake. He even looks after our duties for us. This is nothing but again going back to the idea of surrender, that even our duty we surrender to the Master. Because what we do in surrender is to surrender ourselves, the self is surrendered; when the self has gone, now whose is the duty? So the existence of these conflicts indicates the existence of the 'I.'

Remembrance makes surrender possible
Constant remembrance makes us forget ourselves. When we forget ourselves, we forget our problems, our pains, our sufferings. And at the same time, because of our remembering him, love for him grows. Love becomes established and surrender becomes possible. When surrender is established there is nothing left to do. So you see, constant remembrance helps us in two ways. Now if we are remembering ourselves, we suffer everything that we have suffered. Headache is worse, stomachache is worse, everything is worse, and also we begin to hate ourselves and hate Him also. Because the more we remember ourselves and the more we suffer, we hate ourselves for our suffering and we hate the Master who we think is giving us the suffering.

So remembering ourselves creates two negative benefits – Hatred for ourselves, hatred for the Master because we blame him for giving us everything. Remembering Him gives us double benefit – removes our suffering and makes surrender possible. So that is the great technique which Master has evolved. But it must be constant Not constant remembrance for five minutes a day! Babuji has said if any one can do constant remembrance for one week then he cannot stop it. So all that we require is one week practice.

Very often people ask, “If I am to think of the Master or remember him all the time who will do my work?” This is what happens: you are now like a machine, you love the Master and your body does the work automatically and because the Master is working through you, the work is as he wants it to be, please remember carefully, it is as he wants it to be. You cannot say it is perfect, you cannot say it is good, you also cannot say it is bad. It is what it has to be. That is the way of the Nature, you see.

Surrender only means letting go of this egocentric hold that we have upon this material existence, thinking it to be ours, thinking that we have the ability to control it, direct it, regulate it, when we have none of these abilities, and letting a superior power take charge of it, saying, “Lord, I cannot do it, you do it for me.” When I involve myself totally in His work, thinking only of the work, forgetting results, forgetting my health, forgetting my body, forgetting my income, forgetting everything else, don’t you think it is a physical or objective presence of that state of surrender?

Surrender through love
He can only respond in the way in which we accept him. When we fragment him, and accept him partially, he can only respond partially. When we accept him totally, his responsibility for us becomes total. This is why surrender epitomizes the absolute acceptance of the Master. Then, because we are totally his, he is totally ours, he looks after us totally, every aspect of our existence becomes his responsibility and we can live in that sublime innocence where we are desire-free, where we are fear-free, where we are even need-free because he is looking after us. So, how to achieve that state? There again the miracle is, only by love we can surrender, not by fear. Of course, in the armies we surrender, to a thief on the streets we surrender our belongings. But between two human beings surrender is an act of love, not fear, not temptation.

In Sahaj Marg we must lead a natural life, people must get married, have children, support them, look after them, love them and sacrifice for them. Of course, they also sacrifice for us, isn’t it? So a family makes a mutual love possible and because of that love, sacrifice becomes possible. Now why is this important for Sahaj Marg? Because you have to love the Master. Here the goal is represented by the Master because we believe the Master is Divinity come in human form to help us. And why He comes in human form? Because we cannot recognize a God which does not exist before us. So He comes in a form which we can... like, you know, sitting with him, talking with him, eating with him and slowly we learn to love him, which only means we take Him into our heart, because this love is not the human love, it is the spiritual love where the devotee takes the Master into his or her heart.

Now, only when we have love can we sacrifice. So, what is it we sacrifice for the Master? You sacrifice yourself, which is called surrender. So this surrender is impossible without total love. Therefore, without family existence, even though we have to love the wife, the husband, the children, the uncle, the mother, the father, everybody, we have to love them in such a way that we can leave them mentally. Therefore we live in the family, we look after them, love the Master, or try to love him, slowly, little by little, and then this detachment happens from the family. They are still ours, they are still our children, our parents, but the heart belongs only to the Master. Therefore my Master said, “Our relationship with the people of the world should be nominal.” So you see, that our love here must be just enough for us to fulfill our duties. Slowly, the duty remains but the love is transferred to the Master.

Now happens a very miraculous thing, because your love is transferred to the Master and sometimes we are lost in that love, you see, we cannot remember anything. The Master takes over our duties, this is the miracle of Sahaj Marg, not some crude way of, if you do this, you will have that; if you do that, you will have this – that’s very crude and that is commercial. But what the Master says is, “This poor lover of mine, devotee of mine is thinking all the time of me. So I must see that his work does not suffer.”

By surrendering the love that we receive, we keep uninterrupted the cyclical flow of love. When we surrender this to Master, the mighty ocean of His love is swelled, ever more and more, until it too merges into the Universal repository of Divine Love. From there the Universal power of the Master showers it abundantly back on all humanity of which we too are a part, and we thus derive our love-sustenance from it! Thus a cycle of love is established by which we derive increasingly more and more of the love that we surrender to Him – provided we do not selfishly treasure the love that we receive and lock it up for ourselves in our little hearts in miserly fashion. If, unfortunately we do this, then the love that we receive stagnates and finally corrupts us and thus does a disservice to those who had given us generously of their love.

The acme of surrender, is therefore, the surrender of the love we receive, and it is this which brings about a state of spiritual surrender in us. It is not merely a duty to surrender all the love that we receive, to the Master, it is the real way of surrender itself! This is true surrender.

Obedience leads to surrender
In spirituality obedience is the highest virtue. When a person surrenders to a Master, it means he has surrendered completely in all ways. He has become merely an instrument in the Master’s hands. How can such a person even try to decide what is right or wrong? Here obedience alone is correct.

How can there be surrender without obedience? Obedience means, for that moment, I am obeying one, whom I consider higher than myself, my Master, my Lord, my God, everything. When that attitude becomes a continuous twenty-four hour attitude pervading my life, it is surrender – “I am yours; whatever you do, I do; whatever you say, I say; whatever you think, I think.”

Dependency – the way to Surrender
I often wondered how to bring about this state of surrender. I found a hint in Master’s writings, where he says that to achieve this state one should create a feeling of dependency on the Master. This idea of dependency creates its own problems in the minds of abhyasis. It seems to imply that the abhyasi is a helpless being bereft of freedom of choice, freedom of action etc. I too felt in this same way until one day, during meditation session with abhyasis of the Madurai Centre, some ideas came to me. I understood that we are all utterly dependent on so many things for our very existence. We are dependent on air more than anything else for our life, for without air to breathe, we would die in a minute or so. We are dependent on water to a very great extent.

It is not enough that there is water all around us. It must be fit for drinking. As a poet has said, “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink!” So we are greatly dependent upon this second element of Nature for our survival. Then we are dependent upon food for our living. Here we see a law which seems to operate in Nature. Air is vital for our very existence; water for our living. As the element becomes grosser, our dependence seems to decrease accordingly, but nevertheless the dependence is there.

A baby is dependent totally upon its mother. Without the mother it could not survive. But the child does not feel it is a slave of its mother. Then, as human beings, we are dependent upon one another for love, for help and so many other aspects of our social existence. We are dependent upon energy sources whether animate like animals, or whether inanimate like the sun, coal, oil, etc. So we find that when we analyze this subject adequately, it reveals total dependence on so many things, but are we thereby made slaves to these things? I think not. Our human condition is a state of existence in dependence while being free to live as we choose within the parameters of that dependence.

Master gives us the beautiful illustration of a mother and child. If a child should be attacked by a tiger, the child runs to its mother. The mother does not hesitate to protect the child even if she should be killed in the process. Nor does the child wonder whether its mother can protect it. It runs to the mother naturally, and the mother protects the child in a similar natural manner. This gives us a clue to the state of dependence. It is a natural state created by Nature in its boundless wisdom and mercy so that by interdependence all may grow on the evolutionary way. Dependence therefore is a help. What we could not do for ourselves, natural dependence makes available to us. No human being would like to face a situation where he had to manufacture the very air that he breathes! Is such a thing possible? Nature gives it to us free of cost, without putting us to any effort for it.

There is a beautiful story in the Mahabharata, where the five brothers, the Pandavas and their cousins, the 100 cousins, the Kauravas are at war, or going to be at war, because the eldest brother has gambled away everything including their common wife Draupadi. And they determine, these 100 cruel, tyrannical cousins decide to humiliate the 5 brothers in public by stripping her of her sari. Now it is said that her own brother was Lord Krishna. And here, they call the cruellest of these fellows, Dussasana, and he starts to disrobe her, pulls away her sari. She is holding on tight, weeping, for shame. And when the last bit of flimsy cloth is going, she throws up her hands and says, “Krishna, where are you?” At that moment the miracle happens, Dussasana is pulling yard after yard of sari, there is no end. Ultimately he falls. He cannot stand even, so much of his energy has gone into it. And she is still fully clad, and there is a mountain of sari lying there. There is Krishna, you see, with his hand raised. And the sister, you see, here comes a very famous or I should say very important moral to the whole story, Draupadi turns around and asks him, “Where were you? Till I shouted for you, you didn’t come?” And he says, “Sister, I was always with you, but while you were holding, how could I help you? When you let go and said ‘Hare Krishna’, now it was my business to hold and you see the result.” This exemplifies the need to surrender, you see. Surrender what? That which you are most unwilling to surrender, our sense of shame. How can a human being who calls himself divine, have a sense of shame? What is shame but another protective device which we build around ourselves?

Now this conveys the biggest lesson, the most important lesson: as long as we hold, he says, “Go ahead. You think you are responsible, you think you are capable, well I have no quarrels with that. Even that capacity is mine, use it. But remember as long as you depend on yourself, I am out of the picture. When you are no longer capable, when you have exceeded your limits, call me, I will come.” Spiritual wisdom says, “Why do you want to wait so long? Do it in the beginning.” Anything that you may have, however competent you may be, however strong you may be as a human being, whatever be the wealth that you have got, in His kingdom it is less than an atom. What are you really surrendering? Throw it at His feet and say, “Lord, take it and take me with it,” and then see the miracle. You don’t have to wait ten years, fifteen years, twenty years and then surrender. Surrender today and the battle is won.

We have to live in this world. Whatever we may do or not do, our existence is something over which we have no control; I mean the physical existence. But surely we have control over our spiritual experience when we surrender ourselves to the Master. His control comes only when we give up our control to Him. That is, instead of my depending on myself I transfer this dependence to our Beloved Babuji Maharaj and then when the dependence is surrendered it becomes a true state of surrender. That is as Master states repeatedly “create in yourselves a state of dependency and surrender will automatically come.”

As faith advances, there comes a stage of total dependence on the Master which can be fittingly called a state of surrender. Surrender is not a ritual act to be piously and ritually gone through, but is a state of existence which comes into being when one’s dependence on the Master has become complete. Here we meet a problem – all our life we have been taught to be independent, to stand on our own legs, to manage our affairs ourselves and so on. How then are we to negate a lifelong and deeply inculcated teaching and accept the opposite state?

A proper understanding of the real meaning of this state becomes necessary. Surrender does not mean an external dependence for material fruits of one’s actions. Surrender does not mean the impotent dependence on external powers to support or bolster our weaknesses. Surrender does not mean outside help in the crisis of existence. All such connotations are wrong, and are largely responsible for the criticism of the doctrine of dependence on the Master. The right meaning is that we recognize the all-pervading, omnipotent and omnipresent nature of the Master’s spiritual essence, and this being so, our endeavour, action becomes something arising out of His will, not ours, and therefore they must have a definite plan and goal and this being so, He works, not we. He achieves, not we and we become instruments of the Divine will of Master. A sure belief in the Cosmic Person carrying out His plans rids us of belief in, or dependence on ourselves, because our judgement of causes, effects, events is no longer useful or even necessary. And so, the earlier dependence we had on our own selves becomes naturally transferred to a total dependence on Him.

What happens when we come to this state of surrender? Hesse’s beautiful imagery comes to my mind where the seeker at just such a desperate moment, comes face to face with a model of a human figure that really consisted of two persons, back to back, first one being himself. This side was blurred, while the other one, of his Master, was strong, well-developed. As he watched, the figures became crystal clear, and he could see inside. Then he saw something was flowing from his own figure into his Master’s, and he thought or felt, that his figure would completely flow into his Master’s, so that only the Master would remain, while he disappeared entirely.

In Sahaj Marg we have this, and in addition we find that as the abhyasi becomes ‘empty’ in the real sense of the word, his Master flows into him, so that what was nothing more than a mere mortal to start with, with all the weaknesses, frailties and limitations of humanity, becomes Divinised until he becomes Master in spirit and essence. This, to my mind, is enriching the individual to the Divine State. I would like to complete Hesse’s beautiful imagery by adding that there is this reciprocal flow, from us into Him, and from Him into us – and only this latter flow of Him into us can really complete what Master calls the Laya Avastha the state of complete mergence of one in the other. The individual is not destroyed by being taken into the Master; all that Master does is to empty us of all that is merely human, and then pours Himself into that vacuum to recreate us to His own state of Being. This, then is the culmination of our search, of our endeavour, that we become He by He becoming us!

All extant systems of yogic practice teach that after a certain state of spiritual elevation has been reached, there is no longer the need for a Master. The Sahaj Marg system is unique in reversing this trend of thought by teaching that, as a disciple develops, his need for the Master increases and at very highest levels of spiritual attainments of elevation, a Divine Master alone can take him on to further achievements. Therefore, instead of dependence on the Master falling off, the dependence on Him for everything we need – physical, material, mental or spiritual progressively increases.

At this stage a disciple may be said to become a pure instrument of the Master’s will and ego falls off. Instead of the disciple acting for himself, by himself, he becomes an instrument in the Master’s hands used at the Master’s will, for unfolding the Master’s plans. No unused instrument can remain sharp and rust-free. It is only a used chisel which remains bright and sharp but it must be recognized that the chisel does not act by itself but allows itself to be used according to the artisan’s will. The disciple must similarly be able to perfect himself under the Master’s will and guidance and later, to surrender himself as a mere instrument into His hands for His use, to achieve His purpose. This may be said to be the state of surrender.

At this level, the instrument offers no resistance or impediment to its use; and, to use an analogy, that pane of glass is perfect which allows the total quantum of light coming from one side to pass through to the other side. A disciple who can achieve this stage of utter transparency where he does not exist for himself, such a disciple alone can allow the Master’s will to pass through him to act for itself. Therefore we must try to become ‘nonexistent’ to the rest of the world or universe, very much like a pure plate of glass which is often unperceived.

I remember one amusing incident when a new airlines office was opened. A full office front of plate glass was kept so impeccably clean and transparent that a prospective passenger who had just purchased his ticket walked out right through the glass front, not perceiving that there was a pane of glass in front of him. The perfect disciple should be similarly ‘transparent’ or nonexistent, because ego manifestation from within himself would have ceased, and the Master alone perceives him as an instrument working at His pleasure. Such a one would fit the definition of a perfect disciple.

By enriching ourselves and coming closer and closer to the Ultimate within ourselves, we become more and more dependent on that inner self. We seek His guidance, we seek His advice, we obey His voice when He speaks to us; and as this dependence on Him increases and becomes Ultimate, it becomes surrender. It is surrender without surrendering; it is renunciation without renouncing, it is truth without seeking it.

Submit the Ego to the Master of the Ego
This final act of surrender can only come through love. But today we find every tyro in spirituality – you know, they just walk through the door for the first sitting, and say, “I have surrendered.” Of course the idea is good. Therefore the Master smiles, and says, “I am happy to hear it.” “Hum bhi yehi chhahte hein – this is what I want.” This is what my Master used to tell every person who says, “Master, I have surrendered to you.” Later He would say, “When you say, ‘I have surrendered’ the ‘I’ is still there. So surrender is not complete.” Now can ‘I’ surrender and yet be conscious of that surrender? So, when you are conscious that you have surrendered, that surrender is not there. It is only a consciousness, like there can be pain without consciousness of pain or you could have what we call psychosomatic pain where there is no real cause of pain, but you feel pain and aches all over. It is an imposition of my own fantasy of myself. For instance, can a dead person get up and say ‘I am dead?’ The whole town would run away from such a person and say, “He is possessed by devils” or something like that. A dead person cannot say he is dead. Similarly, an abhyasi who has surrendered cannot say, “I have surrendered.” It is an impossibility. One who has surrendered cannot say he or she has surrendered. And all those who say they have surrendered have not surrendered.

And now what is the problem? The ego. Because we want to feel, “I have done this work.” So when the ego is there, the Master cannot be there. So the ego must be given to the Master, because without the ego we cannot exist. As my Master Babuji said, “The ego is our greatest friend, it is our greatest enemy also.” How to use it? This is the secret of surrender, because when we say, ‘I surrender,’ what is it that we really surrender? Because, you know, you can give your body without giving your heart, you can give your mind without giving your body, you can give a present without giving love with it. But when you give your ego, you also don’t remain. Therefore surrender really means surrendering the ego to the Master. So people say, “Oh! I am working for the Master, my body is his, my life is his.” When you say, ‘My life is his,’ it is still mine! How can my life be His? It is still mine when I say ‘my life.’

We should lose our personal identity and say, “Master, thank you for bringing me into existence. Today, I cease to exist at your Holy feet. Take me and release me from this bondage of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, and put me back into that grand, original home of which you have talked about so much and let me become part of that grand, fundamental unity of which I was part, from which I foolishly separated myself by an act of thinking that ‘I am’. Now I am not. Take me and put me back.”

As long as we are “we”, or, to put it in another sense, “I” and “mine” are still available with us, still exist in us, we have to be alert. But once you have surrendered to the Master, and lost the identity of your individual self, your individual existence, how can you be alert? It is not the question of the necessity for alertness, there is no longer the possibility of being alert. So that is what Sahaj Marg says, you see, and of course all great philosophies have stressed this fact: "Surrender to Him and you have no more any problem, any need to be alert, any need to look after yourself, any need even to be conscious of yourself, you cannot be."

Therefore, when an abhyasi is alert, conscious to the dangers that beset him, conscious to the possibilities of growth, we may say that he has not yet surrendered. It is a negative way of finding out, whether the surrender has been established or not. Because once the “I” is not there, the Guru knows him. As Babuji said, at culmination it is the lover, the beloved and the love itself, all merging to become one. There is no longer love, there is no longer a lover and there is no longer a beloved. They have all the three come together into one grand, climactic union, you see. What is there after that, who is there to find out? Because if you are not there, and your Master too in a sense not there, and the love itself is not there, individually by itself, then who is to find out what?

Suppose God could put up a fight from within ourselves and tell the ego, “Get out.” But God is a lover you see. He wants to be loved and taken, not overpowered and taken. So that means when you go with love, surrender is part of love. And what is it that is obstructing the lover from surrendering to his beloved? It is again the ego. So this temporarily powerful thing doesn’t want to give up its hold. The eternally present thing says, “I can wait.” So, this is a war between two attitudes: one of strong, patient resignation to eternal waiting, if necessary; the other, of a temporarily, arrogant, overpowering, shall we say, dictatorial presence, which says, “Even if I rule for one day, I will rule.” So it has to be overthrown. Now, how to overthrow it?

There is in me, the inner self, the higher Self. There is me, the human self, the outer self. These two are invariably opposed to each other. What this wants, I don’t want. What I want, He says is not right. Integrate! Now, what is integration but bringing the two together into one. Now, which is really surrendering to which? Is God surrendering to me, or am I surrendering to God? Can anyone of you prove that God is not surrendering to me? What on earth is He there inside me for? Waiting? I think sometimes it is stupid to say we are surrendering to God. 'He' has surrendered to us from the day of creation. He is there all the time, suffering with us, enjoying with us, dying with us again and again, being reborn with us. And we, in our stupid ignorance, arrogance, egoistic pride, we think we are surrendering to Him. He is my eternal companion. Why should He be with me through sickness and misery and death? Is He not the real surrenderer? So, now let us look at surrender in another way. Accept His surrender to me, and go ahead.

Now, what is the problem with surrender? We are not surrendering anything, isn’t it? Like you say in English, “A friend in need is a friend indeed.” We all know that a man gets drunk every evening and he has a very nice, loyal friend who pulls him out of the ditch, who takes him home, undresses him, puts him to bed, only to be hit by the friend. Now, this drunkard knows that without this friend he cannot exist. But his ego does not permit, so he hits him, he beats him, he calls him names and throws him out of the house. But the friend is so loyal that he is prepared to put up with all this. But human friends may walk away one day and say, “Go to hell, you damned fool. You want to get drunk and die – do it!” There is a point up to which anybody will go. The God within me is not like that. But it is unfortunate that God, being eternally with us, we think He is some stupid fellow who doesn’t care a damn and who can be insulted, beaten, thrown about, kicked about, and we are doing this life after life.

Why is God so willing to forgive us and say, “Come, you have not done anything wonderful” because He does not want us to be egoistic, even about our sinning. He says, “Ego is ego, whether it is right or wrong.” Like in Sahaj Marg, samskara is samskara, whether it is good samskara or bad samskara. There is no difference you see. So, in the eyes of the Lord, which is myself, my inner Self, ego is ego whether it is born out of the right need for egoistic tendencies or the wrong need for egoistic tendencies; because the ego isolates me from myself. He says, “My son, I can exist without you, but you cannot exist without me. Therefore come back, I am willing to forgive you. You are like the son at home, you may run away but where can you go from your father? A wife can run away from the husband and marry another person but a son cannot be divorced. Can a father divorce his son? It has never been heard of. So you are eternally my son, whether you are sinful or virtuous, you are still my son. Whether you are good or bad, you are still my son. I have created you, I must take the blame for it, therefore I absolve you of your sins. Come home.”

So what my inner Self really telling me is: whether you are virtuous or vicious, the ego is the same, it is not me, it is something other than me. So don’t take credit for the virtuous deeds, because that again is the play of the ego. Do not take on the aspect of sin, because you have gone in this way, because that too is egoism. Give up both! This is the ultimate truth, that in surrender we say, “I don’t know what is right, what is wrong, whether I do right and I am egoistic, or I do wrong and I am egoistic, I am still egoistic. This ego of mine is making me feel separate from you. I give up my right to action, you please do it.”

Now, one final and very important point: it is the ego itself which is surrendering itself, you see. There is no compulsion. The ego says, like a prisoner who kills somebody and himself goes to the police station and says, “I have committed a crime, I have come to report it, put me in jail.” He surrenders himself. In the law, he has certain benefits if he does it himself. If he waits to be caught, there are other consequences. Here too, it is the ego now which speaks and says, “Lord, everything that I do, whether it is good or bad, virtuous or vicious, right or wrong, is only bloating me up further and further like a balloon. I am suffering the consequences, because the more I bloat, the less You are perceived. The more I am important, the less is Your importance, until I become so arrogant and proud and big that, virtually, there is no place for You. Forgive me. This has happened again and again. You have been with me through eternity, from the beginning to the end, through vice and virtue, through sin, through misery, through corrupt existence, through saintly existence, everywhere You have been with me. I now realize that it was not me who was doing it, it was You. So, why should I continue to live in this fallacy that I am the doer? You are the doer. Use me to do what You want.” Now, why I say this is, the ego is not destroyed; it is not mutilated; it is not thrown away. It is very much there, but now, divinised. Because when you hand yourself over to the Divine, you are divinised. So, instead of the human, proud, arrogant, restricted, vicious ego, we have now a soft, divinised ego which performs like God Himself.

So please remember, that it is He who has surrendered to His creation. It is He who has surrendered to every bit of creation. And this truth my Master has repeated. Babuji Maharaj has said, “When a person surrenders to God, he surrenders to everything in the universe.” It cannot be otherwise. It is like a zookeeper, you see. A zookeeper cannot have a favourite lion and a favourite tiger and a favourite snake; he looks after all of them, he has to feed all of them, look after their health, look after their cleanliness, wash the pit of the snake, the cage of the tiger. Isn’t it? So, He is a zookeeper who has created all of us, and is waiting for us to evolve into that which is the culmination of evolution– Himself!

There is only one way in which we can really cooperate. What is it that obstructs His work when we are conscious of His work? Our wishes, our desires, our ego. So the wishes and desires, that is what we say in the prayer, you see, they are putting bar to our advancement. But when we realize that our desires, wishes, also come from the ego, then we realize that we have to surrender the ego itself to the Master.

I think the only proper way is, to hand it over to the Master. In the Hindu Yogic literature there is a statement that the eye cannot see itself, though it can see the whole universe. Similarly we cannot deal with the ego ourselves. At the same time the ego is very necessary because it is the thing that takes us across life itself. So we hand it over with affection and devotion to the Master of the ego. It is not a joke. It is like keeping our money in the bank – our ego should be safe but should not run away with itself. So we hand it over to the Master.

Self Surrender
We practice Bhakti or devotion in order to achieve communion with the Supreme Master. We look upon Him with faith and reverence. By degrees we become so closely intimate to Him that every other object loses prominence in our eyes. This is submission to the will of the Master, or in other words, the beginning of self-surrender. It goes on developing as our faith grows stronger. It brings us to a stationary condition stopping the oscillations of the mind. In due course we begin to feel ourselves overpowered by some great force which drives our mind away from everything else. We become free of the unwanted activities sticking all the time to the right functioning of the organs(the Indriyas). Self-surrender is nothing but a state of complete resignation to the will of the Master, with total disregard of self. A permanent stay in this condition leads to the beginning of the state of negation.

When we surrender ourselves to the great Master we begin to attract a constant flow of the highest Divine force from Him. In this state a man thinks or does only that which is his Master’s will. He feels nothing in the world to be his belonging but everything as a sacred trust from the Master and he does everything, thinking it to be his Master’s bidding. His will becomes completely subservient to the will of the Master. A beautiful example of surrender is presented to us by Bharata, the son of Dasharatha, when he went to the forest along with the people of Ayodhya to induce his brother Rama to return. In reply to the entreaties of the people Rama gravely replied that he would be quite willing to return to the capital provided Bharata asked him to do so. All eyes were turned towards Bharata, who was himself there to induce him to return. But he calmly replied, “It is not for me to command but only to follow.”

But, so far, we reserve to ourselves the right of discretion and are, therefore, responsible for all our actions whether good or bad. At a higher stage of self-surrender such a discretionary power becomes almost extinct and a man does everything thinking it to be his Master’s will. The question of right or wrong does not at all arise in his mind, or it becomes absolutely certain that by following his Master’s will, he is doing the only right thing and he does nothing but the right, feeling it to be his Master’s will.

It is really the state of self-surrender in which one as a true devotee, surrenders himself completely to the will of God, the Master, basking in the sunshine of His Grace. That is the relationship between the Master and the devotee, which is to be maintained all through because that is the only relationship that will finally bring brought us up to that highest level of super-consciousness. It is only here that the true character of our being is revealed. But if the idea of freedom lingers still, or he has a feeling of it in any way, he is not free from the shackles. When the consciousness of freedom is also gone, one finds himself lost in the maze of wonder. The idea of Reality even is not there. He feels that he is not keeping pace with Infiniteness. The condition can better be described either as having been dissolved in toto, or that Infinity has been poured into us in toto. When everything is dissolved, one finds himself nowhere. Absorbency in Brahman commences, but we push on still to attain the last stage destined for a human being.

I have found that as long as you keep a Master outside yourself and you are thinking of surrendering to Him, there is a question of ego becoming troubled. Why should I surrender to Him? Who is He that I should surrender to Him? What is it in Him that makes me want to surrender to Him? How is He qualified that I should surrender to Him etc. True surrender is, surrender to your Self. The self being the higher Self ‘S’. When my Master is enshrined in my heart I don’t go to bow before Him. In any case He is not there for me to go and bow before Him physically any more. My surrender is to my Self. If you look at it in the right way, whenever a man fails or falls you say, “He has surrendered to his weaker impulses sir.” If that is true why not I surrender to my own higher impulses and say I surrendered to my Self. I have conquered my Self or I have surrendered to my Self.

So we have to understand that, what we have been accustomed to thinking of as a benevolent Deity looking out for us, protecting us, wishing us, cherishing us, nurturing us is in reality, seated within us, in our hearts, governing us from inside. And the more we hand over ourselves to Him who is there, the more we are able to submit and allow Him to perform for us. And, what can be better than His doing our duties as against our fickle, insufficient, inefficient approach to anything that we can do? So, this we call surrender; that at some stage we have to let go ourselves and give Him a chance to preside over our life from within.

We should be willing to make that final sacrifice. And what is that final sacrifice? It is not death. It is death of self to the Self. That means total surrender – it is an act – the final act of acceptance of the Master – in a remarkable act of bravery, utmost bravery that here I am and I surrender myself to you. Because with that act of surrender we cease to exist. It is not death in the physical sense, it is not death in the spiritual sense, it is death of myself to my Self. Then I become the remarkable thing, raw material in His hands which He can shape as He chooses. So it is almost as if a living being has to become inanimate, to become something, which the Master can really work upon and make what He wishes to make.

Now I am only an instrument. So there is no question of doer ship, there is no question of culpability, because I am no longer acting, I am no longer doing, I am also no longer responsible. This is the final stage of Surrender, what we call Surrender in spirituality. Then the body is just moving like a puppet in the hands of a puppeteer. He who is inside me is making me move and act and do whatever is to be done. And largely the saints are supposed to be like that, they are unconscious of what they say, they are unconscious of what they do. They respond to the situations in the most unique way.

One who has surrendered to the Almighty has surrendered to the whole universe. I mean it is a consequence of the fact that I have surrendered to Him who is the ruler of the universe. The universe is also part of Him, or He is the universe too. He is inside the universe, He is also the outside of the universe. He is the creator of the universe, He is also the universe from which perhaps He came. Nobody knows. So in that sense surrender means surrender to everything. Not itemizing. You know, “I surrender to the bear. I surrender to the fish,” not like that you see. The attitude that, in everything I see the Divine presence, as part of Divinity - then it is ‘He’ who is before me in the form of a bear, in the form of a wolf, in the form of a philosopher, in the form of a prostitute. It is still He. Because without His presence this thing could not move, act, live. Therefore, if I have surrendered to Him, I have to surrender to Him in every aspect in which He manifests Himself. Therefore, we don’t really surrender to animals, and birds and beasts. We surrender to Him in those forms. He who has known the Ultimate cannot distinguish between types of existence. Therefore he who has surrendered to the Ultimate, must, by that act of surrender, have surrendered to everything. Not because you itemize and say, “I surrender to these things too.” There’s no question of I surrender to these things too. I surrender to God. God is everywhere. I surrender to everything!

So surrender is the ultimate, the easiest, if it is able to be practiced at the outset. He who can surrender first does not have to do anything more. No tapasya. Tapasya (austerity) is for those who cannot surrender—saranagathi. Not an artificial surrender, like writing letters to the Guru and saying “I have become yours, I have surrendered everything to you.” And what have you surrendered? If tomorrow your Master says jump off the Kutub Minar, which one of you will be able to do it? It is said of Prahlad that he was able to do it but where is the second example? So you see, surrender must be tested to the point of death.

When we surrender to the Higher, to the Ultimate, we allow His plan to work for us. And His plan will work whether we accept it or not. When we plan it and we fail, it is only because His plan is different from my plan. When I give up my planning process, His plan is still active, is still potent, is still realizable, and is realized.

If you want to reach the total transformation without surrender, as it is called, you see, cooperation, obedience put together is surrender, without that surrender, it is not going to be possible. With surrender, it is possible that the next instant the Master may be compelled to say, “I thought you were an abhyasi, I find you are my son.” Now he is in the unfortunate predicament of having to say, “You think you are my sons, but you are merely abhyasis.” So you see, we have to become children of the Master. Forget this nonsense of abhyasis and preceptors and central region and all these stupid hierarchical notions of power and position. I must see him as he is. That can be done only when I become like him, when I look at him and I see myself reflected in the mirror. And then he sees me and says, “Yes, this I knew I was. Now I see it in you. Therefore I know myself too. My son, thank you for that.”

I hope these few thoughts may make it possible for abhyasis to realize that surrender is not what we have apprehended it to be. It is a most desirable state, one in which we are not merely promised all, but in which we receive all.

Some Pearls to pick

• The conception of the Guru as a spiritual mother promotes within us the feelings of love, reverence and surrender which are the main factors of a spiritual life. 
  
  
• When the thought of cooperation springs up in the abhyasi’s mind he has come up to the first state of surrender. 
  
  
• Surrender means the act of putting aside unwanted things, which are no longer necessary for our existence. 
  
  
• Upanishad means to sit at the feet of the Master. “Just sit at my feet, everything else I do for you.” And ‘sit at the feet’ doesn’t mean physically, but it is an act of surrender – “Master I am eternally with you.” 
  
  
• Discipline is the elementary step of surrender. 
  
  
• When you have surrendered, the question of doubt does not arise at all. So please give up doubting. 
  
  
• When we have surrendered all our belongings to the Master, we are free from the encumbering weight thereof. 
  
  
• Surrender is our duty. To make us evolve is his duty. 
  
  
• The right understanding of surrender is, that, by serving the Self, we can serve the whole of humanity. By serving the self, we are selfish, self-centred, avaricious, acquisitive, etc., etc., 
  
  
• Submission is the life of surrender. 
  
  
• Troubles can be overcome, happiness can be accepted, only when both are negated, both are accepted, and both are interiorized and forgotten. That is another aspect of surrender. 
  
  
• There is only one small difference between man and God. Man can surrender only once. After that he himself is not there to give anything more. What can he give? He cannot surrender a second time. But God gives Himself again and again through eternity, to eternal number of people. This is all the difference. 
  
  
• A true state of surrender makes absorbency possible. When there is absorbency in the Divine then every cell of the body becomes energy, and then that becomes its own absolute, that is, it becomes Divine!