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.

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