July 18, 2018 – Difficulties of Surrender – Part 1

At first she stepped into a night of God.

The light was quenched that helps the labouring world,

The power that struggles and stumbles in our life;

This inefficient mind gave up its thoughts,

The striving heart its unavailing hopes.

All knowledge failed and the Idea’s forms

And Wisdom screened in awe her lowly head

Feeling a Truth too great for thought or speech,

Formless, ineffable, for ever the same.

An innocent and holy Ignorance

Adored like one who worships formless God

The unseen Light she could not claim nor own.

In a simple purity of emptiness

Her mind knelt down before the unknowable.

All was abolished save her naked self

And the prostrate yearning of her surrendered heart:

There was no strength in her, no pride of force;

The lofty burning of desire had sunk

Ashamed, a vanity of separate self,

The hope of spiritual greatness fled,

Salvation she asked not nor a heavenly crown:

Humility seemed now too proud a state.

Sri Aurobindo

Savitri, Book VII, Canto V, page 522

Difficulties of Surrender – Part 1

It is rare that somebody can surrender entirely to the Divine’s Will without having to face one or another of the difficulties.

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How many efforts and struggles again to give ourselves, to surrender, once the individuality is constituted!

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For if the struggle is not an actual one, that does not mean that it will not come one day in one form or another.

For always, at least once in our life, we are placed in some circumstance to test whether we are ready for an entire surrender to the Divine Will; whether we are, before all, human beings striving to attain and manifest the Godhead; ready to renounce everything in the world – what seems to us good as well as what seems bad – for that supreme conquest. In that ascent towards the heights, both virtues and duties – that is to say our mental prejudices and preferences – stand far more in our way than our exterior weaknesses and faults. An error can always be used as a spring-board, whilst a virtue is more often a limit, a barrier that must be surmounted.

I will add, quoting a passage of The Synthesis of Yoga, “All these are within us waiting to wall in the spirit with forms; but we must always go beyond, always renounce the lesser for the greater, the finite for the Infinite; we must be prepared to proceed from illumination to illumination, from experience to experience, from soul-state to soul-state, so as to reach the utmost transcendence of the Divine and its utmost universality.”

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The way in which most people surrender:

Let God manifest his will but let it be the same as mine.

The Mother

Words of the Mother II, CWM vol. 14 pages 113 – 114