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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.
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