Surrender
(Sri Aurobindo:) “I never knew the meaning of ‘surrender’ until Mirra surrendered herself to me.”[1]
(Mother:) “To surrender to the Divine is to renounce your narrow limits and let yourself be invaded by It and made a centre for Its play.”[2]
(Mother:) “In fact, let His vibrations become your vibrations.”[3]
(Mother to Mona Sarkar:) “The soul has no need to make its surrender – it is an individualised portion of the Supreme. But the soul is veiled by the vital and completely deformed by the material substance. It is the surrender of the vital and of the material substance which is required so that the soul can act freely as the messenger and instrument of the Supreme.”[4]
(Mother:) “The most important surrender is the surrender of your character, your way of being, so that it may change. If you do not surrender your very own nature, never will this nature change. It is this that is most important. You have certain ways of understanding, certain ways of reacting, certain ways of feeling, almost certain ways of progressing, and above all, a special way of looking at life and expecting from it certain things — well, it is this you must surrender. That is, if you truly want to receive the divine Light and transform yourself, it is your whole way of being you must offer — offer by opening it, making it as receptive as possible so that the divine Consciousness which sees how you ought to be, may act directly and change all these movements into movements more true, more in keeping with your own truth. This is infinitely more important than surrendering what one does. It is not what one does (what one does is very important, that’s evident) that is the most important thing but what one is. Whatever the activity, it is not quite the way of doing it but the state of consciousness in which it is done that is important. You may work, do disinterested work without any idea of personal profit, work for the joy of working, but if you are not at the same time ready to leave this work, to change the work or change the way of working, if you cling to your own way of working, your surrender is not complete. You must come to a point when everything is done because you feel within, very clearly, in a more and more imperious way, that it is this which must be done and in this particular way, and that you do it only because of that.”[5]
(Mother:) “If you are truly surrendered to the Divine, in the right manner and totally, then at every moment you will be what you ought to be, you will do what you ought to do, you will know what you ought to know.”[6]
- “Sweet Mother, how can we make our submission gladly?
(Mother:) It must be sincere. If it is truly sincere, it becomes happy. So long as it is not — you may reverse the thing — so long as it is not happy, you may be sure it is not perfectly sincere; for if it is perfectly sincere, it is always happy. If it is not happy, it means that there is something which holds back, something which would like things to be otherwise, something that has a will of its own, a desire of its own, its own purpose and is not satisfied, and therefore is not completely surrendered, not sincere in its surrender. But if one is sincere in one’s surrender, one is perfectly happy, automatically; rather, one automatically enjoys an ineffable happiness. Therefore, as long as this ineffable happiness is not there, it is a sure indication that you are not sincere, that there is something, some part of the being, larger or smaller, which is not sincere.”[7]
(Mother:) “When you do anything with the sense of a compression of your being, be sure that you are doing it in the wrong way. True surrender enlarges you; it increases your capacity; it gives you a greater measure in quality and in quantity which you could not have had by yourself. This new greater measure of quality and quantity is different from anything you could attain before: you enter into another world, into a wideness which you could not have entered if you did not surrender. It is as when a drop of water falls into the sea; if it still kept there its separate identity, it would remain a little drop of water and nothing more, a little drop crushed by all the immensity around, because it has not surrendered. But, surrendering, it unites with the sea and participates in the nature and power and vastness of the whole sea.”[8]
- ↑ Quoted in Amal Kiran, Our Light and Delight: Recollections of Life with the Mother, p.7
- ↑ Words of the Mother – II, p.107
- ↑ Huta, Mother You said so..., p.71
- ↑ Mona Sarkar, Throb of Nature: Conversations with the Mother on Flowers and Nature, p.162
- ↑ Questions and Answers 1950-1951, p.372
- ↑ Words of the Mother – II, p.107
- ↑ Questions and Answers 1954, p.210
- ↑ Questions and Answers 1929-1931, p.115
See also