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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
co-operation 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.
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“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.”
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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!
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.
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.'
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