The three levels of surrender🔗

One question which many people ask me is, ‘Swamiji, how to surrender?’ Understand, surrender cannot be done. It has to happen. At the most, we can decide to surrender, that’s all! We can carry a deep prayer inside that surrender may happen in us.

Surrender happens at three levels: surrender of the intellect, surrender of emotions and surrender of your very senses. Surrender of intellect means, trusting the Master’s intellect more than your own. This is just intellectual surrender. At this stage, you follow the lifestyle that the Master shows you, that’s all. Surrender of emotions means, trusting the Master’s emotions much more than your own emotions. This means trusting that the relationship with the Master is the ultimate relationship, more than any other relationship. If god appears before you and asks you to choose one person on planet earth as the only other person who can be alive except you, who will you choose? If you choose the Master, then emotional surrender has happened to you. If you feel that your emotion towards the Master is stronger than any other emotion, then emotional surrender has happened in you. Be very clear, 99% of the people remain in the first level. Only 20% to 40% of these people move deeper to the second level. Then there is the third kind of surrender, surrender of the senses.

In Krishna’s life there is a beautiful incident which illustrates this: After the Mahabharata war, when Krishna and Arjuna are relaxing in a garden one day, Krishna suddenly says to Arjuna, ‘Look Arjuna, there flies a green crow!’ Arjuna says, ‘Beautiful! A green crow!’ Krishna says, ‘Fool! It is black, not green. How can a crow be green?’ Arjuna says, ‘Yes Krishna! It is black, not green.’ Krishna asks, ‘What is wrong with you? When I say green, you say green. When I say black, you say black. What is going on with you?’ Arjuna says, ‘Krishna, let me be honest. I don’t know what color that crow is. But when you said green I saw it as green. When you said black I saw it as black. I know nothing else!’

Arjuna’s very senses trusted Krishna. He trusted the Master’s senses much more than his own!

Once you experience something beyond logic, once you experience the compassion of the Divine, your logic simply gives way, your whole being simply gives in to that experience. Even if you want to suspect the Master’s words, suddenly you will see that your logic has no power over you anymore. His words are simply entering you beyond your logic. You will see this happening to you also, when you sit in the presence of an enlightened being!

This is what we call Upanishad - just being around the Master, sitting in his presence and opening up to him. Upanishad means ‘sitting at the feet of’. When a disciple sits in the presence of the Master, the same experience that happened in the Master is reproduced in the disciple. The account of how the experience was transmitted - how the process began, what happened and how it ended - this report is referred to as an Upanishad.