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Self-Surrender to God

Surrender to God
Continued from hunger for higher life

The realization that worldly things are passing shadows accelerates surrender to God.

Hunger and its appeasement are not always closely linked. Every time you feel hungry you have perhaps something ready at hand to place on your tongue. But there is a very large chunk of humanity even today — even in the midst of our boasted twentieth century civilization ready to leap into the twenty-first century — for whom the process of appeasement has to wait for hours after hunger has made its appearance.

There are, again, different kinds of hunger. There is the intellectual hunger, for instance. Can it be appeased easily? The innumerable desires that people have are also a type of hunger.

The spiritual hunger, the hunger to lead a 'higher life', is a superior kind of hunger. If the other types of hunger require struggle for their appeasement, the spiritual hunger requires super struggle. The pangs of spiritual hunger are far more intense than those of ordinary hungers. This becomes evident from a study of the lives of the illumined souls. What spiritual hunger means in its extreme form we see demonstrated in the life of Sri Ramakrishna. When this hunger came upon him, he became completely unmindful of food or drink or the comforts of the body. He spent whole nights in meditation. Sleep left him for good in those days. He would weep profusely like a child sore at heart at the separation from its mother. He would rub his face against the ground in agony. The pain became more and more intense as he discovered that time was passing and he had not got what he wanted. He began to think:Life is passing away.

One day is gone followed by another, never to return. Every day I am drawing so much nearer to death. But where is my Mother? The scriptures say that there is only one thing to be sought in this life, and that is God. Without Him life is unbearable, a mockery. When God is realized, life has a meaning, it is a pleasure, a veritable garden of ease. Therefore in pursuit of God sincere devotees renounce the world and sacrifice their lives. What is this life worth if I am to drag on a miserable existence from day to day without tapping that eternal source of Immortality and Bliss?

At last came the supernal revelation. Agony was transformed into ecstasy. The child who had surrendered his body, mind and soul at the feet of the Divine Mother, became Hers through all eternity.

The spiritual hunger of aspirants generally increases in stages. Simultaneously the aspirant becomes aware that life is passing. Every day is taking him nearer to death. The Goal seems to be far away, almost beyond reach. 'What can my puny efforts to realize God achieve? Death is sure to overtake me before I attain Him. No, I cannot attain Him on my own unless He, out of His unbounded grace, reveals Himself — this is what the aspirant at last realizes.

Self-surrender to God is a spontaneous process, it cannot be contrived by cogitation. In the fullness of the spirit of surrender to God, the devotee prays: O Lord, with the passing of every day the duration of life is seen to shorten, and youth decays. The days that are gone never come back; time verily is the devourer of the world. Fortune is as fickle and short-lived as the ripples on the surface of water. And life itself is momentary like a flash of lightning. Therefore, O Thou refuge of all, do/Thou even now protect me who seek refuge in Thee.

The spirit of surrender to God grows in one who has realized the temporary nature of the world.

Conclusion

We may now conclude by summarizing the main points. An important landmark in one's spiritual quest is reached when the world ceases to appear as a stable, permanent entity. When its ephemeral nature is revealed to the aspirant, three changes take place in him. His attachment to the world is destroyed or at least reduced considerably; a hunger for 'higher life' is created in him; and when this hunger intensifies, his spirit of surrender to God grows.

The first of the 'four-fold discipline' (sddhana - catustaya) prescribed for a student of Vedanta is discrimination (viveka) between the Real and the unreal. The Real can never cease to be; nor can the unreal ever come into existence. When we learn to distinguish the Real from the unreal, we will see that God alone is Real; the world and everything in it are just shadows.

Story first published: Thursday, January 13, 2011, 18:16 [IST]
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