Editorial
September 2021
How to Surrender?
The Vedanta Kesari
10
I
n the Bhagavad Gita, the Lord gives us his final and supreme word: ‘Take refuge in me alone, I will deliver you from all sins.’ Over the centuries, countless saints have affirmed that this surrendering to God is the most efficacious spiritual sadhana. Surrendering to the Lord is a dynamic process, and how we go about it depends upon our nature or spiritual maturity.
To surrender means to love God constantly, unconditionally, and wholeheartedly. Such love develops by the steadfast daily practice of repeating His name, singing His glories, serving His devotees and earnestly praying as Sri Ramakrishna taught us to do: “I have taken refuge at Thy feet. I have sought protection in Thee. O Mother, I pray only that I may have pure love for Thy Lotus Feet, love that seeks no return. And Mother, do not delude me with Thy world-bewitching maya. I seek Thy protection. I have taken refuge in Thee.”
To surrender means to connect all our actions with the Lord. Swami Brahmananda teaches us how to do this: a) before beginning the work pray to God for strength to do the job unselfishly; b) again in the course of the work pray to God for strength to do it perfectly; and finally c) after completing the work pray to God to accept the fruits of the work. Along with this spiritualisation of work, we should reject all activities that divert us away from God.
To surrender means to merge our will in the will of the Lord. How this works is seen in the life of Girishchandra Ghosh, the householder devotee who gave to Sri Ramakrishna his ‘power of attorney’ or the responsibility for his spiritual welfare. One day, hearing Girish say “I shall do this” in connection with a small matter, Sri Ramakrishna exclaimed, “How is this? Why do you say ‘I shall do this’? Suppose you fail to do it? You should say, ‘God willing, I shall do this.’” Later in life, Girish explained what merging his will with the will of the Lord meant: “one has to continually scrutinize if even his minutest thought and action are actuated by the power of the Lord or by his own wretched ego.” But how to know the Lord’s will in our every initiative?
Our will manifests in three levels: a) the animal level where our will is controlled by our sub-conscious mind and its vasanas; b) the human level where our will is empowered by our conscious mind with its power of discernment; and c) the divine level where in our superconscious mind our will intuitively becomes one with the will of the Inner Lord. To awaken to this state of superconscious mind the mental impurities should be removed through steadfast sadhana.
Such ‘cleansing’ implies a total effacement of our limited identity. This is when we reach the highest state of surrender, a state in which we realise ‘He is I’. We can then say with Sri Ramakrishna, “Not I, not I, but Thou, O Mother!”
