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.

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