Surrender to the Self - 05.20.10

“Recently, an online student asked . . . ‘What is really meant by surrender to God?’ And to answer that question we have to really see the three elements of it: what do we mean by surrender; what do we mean by God; and what exactly are we surrendering to God?” argues Shunyamurti, the spiritual master of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And that’s what meditation really is: surrender to God. It is letting go of one’s sense of alienation. It is an offering of oneself. It is freeing oneself of any sense of separation.

“And so then the question is, ‘What do we mean by God?’ because in Advaita philosophy God is not an Other. And so, we are surrendering to the Self—to the Self that, in principle, we already are.” However, we have lost contact with the Self because of “the defense mechanisms that we created—that we call ‘ego’—that have been used to alienate ourselves from other individuals, from other people. And those same defense mechanisms, of necessity, alienate us from the Self and from the Supreme Self that is within our individual self.”

“And so the surrender requires an internal letting go of one’s defenses against a power and a feeling of love—a current of energy in fact—that is overwhelming to the ego. It’s letting go of our evasion of the presence, the intelligence, and the power of the Self. That will overwhelm the ego and dissolve it in the flow of that Divine Love.”

So we must have a burning desire for union with God, and, at the same time, let go of all of the lesser desires that have distracted us from the constant remembrance of the Supreme Self. And this means a letting go of the mind itself. “And this requires what is called Shradha, or faith: there has to be a sufficient amount of faith that in the letting go of the ego you will find something infinitely greater, more valuable than that which you are letting go of.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 20, 2010.