Surrender means a free total giving with all the delight of the giving; there is no sense of sacrifice in it. If you have the slightest feeling that you are making a sacrifice, then it is no longer surrender.
– THE MOTHER (of Sri Aurobindo Ashram)
Surrender is one of the pillars of the spiritual path, but it can be easily misinterpreted to justify inactivity and laziness. Therefore, it is important to understand whom to surrender to, and what to surrender. Surrender does not imply surrender to evil or injustice. Surrender implies only surrender to the Divine. Regarding what to surrender, Sri Aurobindo once said that when people are told to surrender, generally the first thing that they surrender is commonsense! What we should surrender is personal will, subordinating it to the divine will. The fear commonly expressed is, what will be left of me if I surrender completely to the divine will. The divine will is not something imposed on me from outside. The Divine is also within me, and the Divine within speaks if I care to hear. Surrender only means that I should not only hear but also listen to what the voice of the Divine emanating from my deepest Self says. I should act on this voice, rather than the voice of the emotional or the intellectual part of the being if either of these is in conflict with that most authentic of all my voices. Subordinating personal will to the divine will thus translates into subordinating the inferior parts of my being to the Best in me, or subordinating my lower nature to my highest nature.
A widely quoted verse of the Gita talks about surrendering the fruit of our actions (2:47). This should make us conscious of the imperfect control we have over the outcome. But that does not mean that we need not act at all, or do what we do half-heartedly because the outcome is not in our hands anyway. The Gita tells Arjuna to shun not even the war that it was his duty to fight. We should also not do what we do half-heartedly because, in the spirit of the Gita, the action should also be surrendered to the Divine (3:30), and for that it should be fit to be surrendered. It will become fit to be surrendered only if we put our heart and soul into the work. Thus, like Arjuna, we should fight evil and injustice, and put our heart and soul into the work. However, making the work fit to be offered involves one more qualification. Arjuna is told to fight without hating the Kauravas (The Gita, 18:23). Thus, our fight against evil and injustice should also be free of hatred for anyone. As Mahatma Gandhi had said, we should hate evil, not the evildoer.
Surrender is a corollary to knowledge or devotion, or both. Knowledge of the glory of the Divine leads to devotion and surrender. Devotion leads to spontaneous surrender, and devotion and surrender both get deeper as the devotee also acquires knowledge. In the Gita, devotion and surrender are a corollary to knowledge that Sri Krishna imparts to Arjuna by giving him the divine vision (divya chakshu). The founder of Sri Aurobindo Ashram – Delhi Branch, Shri Surendra Nath, in his youth remarked humorously that his very name meant ‘surrender not’. And as a freedom fighter, he never surrendered to the authority of the British rulers. But after he became a devotee, he ended up surrendering completely to the Mother. Complete surrender is a process, not an event. We get a glimpse of the process from the way the Gita develops its argument. To start with, Arjuna is asked to surrender only the fruit of the action (2:47). Then he is asked to surrender not only the fruit but also the doership (3:27, 11:33). Finally he is asked to surrender everything, and is told that if he surrenders completely, he may forget about all guidelines of good conduct (18:66). This verse, which comes towards the end of the Gita, can be easily misinterpreted. A person may say that he has surrendered completely to the Divine, and therefore he need not follow any ethical or moral code. But total surrender to the Divine is not easy. It is so easy to be swayed by the emotions or the arguments of the intellect in favour of the voice of the Divine within. We cannot cater to personal whims coming from the inferior and superficial parts of the being, violate moral codes, and then take shelter under the broad umbrella of surrender. If we have truly surrendered to the Divine completely, we will listen only andalways to the voice of the Divine within. Only then are we exempt from the usual codes of conduct, because then we will in any case be doing better than any code of conduct imposed on us. But since complete surrender comes at the end of a long process, till we reach the terminal point, it is better to follow a code of conduct. The verse about forgetting codes of conduct comes only towards the end of the Gita, which means that we qualify for the exemption only if we have brought into our lives everything that has been said in the preceding seventeen chapters.
In our erratic and unpredictable world, surrender to the Divine is a potent and infallible prescription, yet to be improved upon, that saves us from a lot of avoidable stress. Surrender to the Divine is only an acknowledgement of the fact that we are feeble and fallible creatures, mere puppets in the hands of the Divine, and possess only an illusory free will, which has also been planted in us by the Divine. Therefore, true surrender does not belittle us; rather, it enlarges us by making us think and act from a wider, deeper and higher level of consciousness.
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