Saranagathi

Surrender – SaranAgathi

The word surrender in English as per Britanica Encyclopedia dictionary “the action of yielding one’s person or giving up the possession of something especially into the power of another”.

 In general terms it is mainly referred to the ‘physical phenomenon’ such as ‘physical liberty, or physical arms and ammunition etc..

But in spiritual terms when we say ‘Surrender to the Lord’ there are many opinions and confusions that arise primarily on ‘what’ to surrender. Some of the questions that arise are:

-          Are we to surrender and give up our physical possessions such as food, cloth, comfort of the house, or the family?

-          Are we to surrender and give up the ‘physical actions’ that has negative outcomes such as anger, jealousy, envy, gluttony etc..?

-          Are we to surrender all our physical actions?

-          Are we to surrender all our mental and emotional ‘actions’?

-          Are we to surrender our choices, thinking and free will?

Here, we lack a clear concept. Even a thief is clear when he says he is surrendering to the Police, that he perceives Police as the designated authority, he sees himself as an offender of the authority, he is clear about what he is surrendering namely his physical freedom. He is clear he is not surrendering his mind, his ideas, his ideologies and has the option and choice to get legal help

In our case, we are not clear. We need to go back to the basics and root-cause analysis and start questioning and getting the right answers. This can happen if we approach our Gurus and ask them and the True Gurus have the answers.

If we start questioning, all the questions invariably leads to the concept “I”.  It is the ‘I’ that generates all the actions, all thinking, all choices, even the free will is generated from the ‘I’. It is the same ‘I’ that is the answer for the question ‘who wants to surrender?’. Then also comes the question does this ‘I’ different from the Lord as a substratum. At that point it becomes clear to us that because the ‘I’ started to think that it is different apart from the Lord, all these questions, confusions and the whole lot have come about.

To clear all this we need to surrender the ‘I’ back to the Lord where truly it belongs. Surrender our ‘Self’. This is the only course and only aim.

Is anything else there to surrender once we have surrendered the ‘I’? 

This is true SaranAgathi

-- Sriram S L