Don’t let your ego come between you and God

A S NEGI explains why surrender is the last path to attain the divine.

Surrender is the ultimate step to attain the divine. But it is the most difficult.
All other methods to reach the unknowable require effort. You have to depend on yourself to follow a technique. But no method or effort is involved in surrender. This is because surrender, in itself is a path and a method.

Also, in every method or technique you are always there to begin with. Your ego starts the whole process, or rather, you begin with the mind and then transcend it. In short, all these methods or techniques are efforts to show you how to go beyond the ego or the mind.

But on the path of surrender you cease to exist as on ego or mind right from the beginning. And having done that you cannot do anything else. For you all doing stops because who will do it? there is no one to do or make an effort because an ‘I’, or the doer, is needed for that.

To love and to surrender are synonymous. Here is an anecdote that illustrates this in a symbolic manner. Once a lover knocked at the closed door of his beloved. She queried from inside. “Who is there?” The lover replied.: “It is ‘I’”. “There is no space for the two inside.” The door remained shut. The lover was disappointed. He went away. For many years he roamed from place to place thinking over the words of his beloved. Then, one day, all of a sudden he understood everything.

He returned to her door after many years. Nothing had changed. The door was still closed. He knocked once again. The same voice responded.: “Who is there?” The lover replied: “There is no one. Only you are”. It is said that the door swung open for the lover.

Why did this happen this time? Because now the lover had ceased to exist as an ego and had merged into the beloved. Now there was no lover and no beloved.
There was only one.

Know that surrender is the last path to attain the divine. To begin with a seeker tries all methods and techniques to the utmost. He follows each one to the minutest detail. In fact, he drains himself of all the energy he has in the process.

Buddha did that for six years after leaving home at the age of twenty-nine. He went from one Guru to another and did whatever he was asked to do. At one time, he was required to fast for 40 days to reach the divine. He did that so faithfully that at one stage he could touch the bones of his spinal cord by feeling his stomach. But he did not give up.

Seeing his sincere efforts, all his so-called Gurus got frightened. They acknowledged their ignorance before Buddha and asked him to try others.

Ultimately Buddha gave up trying. And then enlightenment happened. Likewise when a seeker has tried every method and found it futile, then he moves towards surrendering to the divine. In fact, true surrender is only possible when nothing works and all seems lost. In that state one loses oneself. The ‘ego’ disappears and let go happens. Then surrender happens.

You are no more in that surrender. You are now totally open, vulnerable and insecure. Since love and surrender just happen, you cannot ask anyone to teach you how to love or surrender. Know that love and surrender are deeply one. If you cannot surrender to the divine, you are also incapable of loving. The barrier in both the cases is your ego.

When you are an ego, you are just like the peak of a mountain, or sheer height. And when you surrender, you become a valley, or a depth or an abyss, or a womb. Now the divine or existence can pour into you from everywhere. Your becoming passive is an open invitation to the divine to fill the vacuum caused in you by the departure of your ego.

Zen Master Rinzai, when he was a disciple, went to his Master one day and asked him: “Give me freedom”. The Master replied: “Freedom is freedom from ‘you’. First find out where this ‘I’ is, and where you are, then come to me.”

Rinzai went away, meditated for weeks and then returned to the Master. He told him that he has found this much only that he is not a body. The Master said. “Henceforth by this much (that you are not a body) you are free. Go and find more.” Rinzai meditated and after some weeks told the Master what he had found. “I’m not the mind.”

The Master told Rinzai that he was now three-fourth free. “Now go and find out who you are!”

Rinzai thought: “I am neither the body, nor the mind, so I must be the soul.” So, he meditated over this. He tried to locate his soul within his body but found it nowhere. Then he discovered that the soul was just a mirage created by words, philosophies, doctrines, discussions, scriptures etc., that he had read. It was a sheer myth. Suddenly, one day the truth dawned on Rinzai. He come running to the Master and said:

“I’m no more.”

The Master replied that he had now become free. Rinzai had discovered himself to be sheer nothingness, a wide emptiness. He, as an ego, did not exist. And when you are not, surrender is.