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Maalok: I think on hearing some of your above examples (all of which led
to desirable final outcomes) we can perhaps wrongly deduce that if we
want to get things done our way we should adopt this trick of leaving
things up to God. I don't think that's what you meant. In the state you were
describing, one truly doesn't have a preference for things to work out one
way or the other. Is that true?
David: Yes. The state of being grateful for the way things are is the goal. It's not
a trick to get what you want. If things turn out well, that's just a side effect. It's
not the main purpose of surrender. Surrender is an aim and a goal in itself.
Let me read you a couple of answers that Sri Ramana gave to a devotee
who was asking about surrender. They were recorded in the 1940s by Devaraja
Mudaliar in Day by Day with Bhagavan:
Question: Does not total or complete surrender require that one should not
have left even the desire for liberation or God?
Answer: Complete surrender does require that you have no desire of your own.
You must be satisfied with whatever God gives you and that means having no
desires of one's own.
Question: Now that I am satisfied on that point, I want to know what the steps
are by which I could achieve surrender.
Answer: There are two ways. One is looking into the source of 'I' and merging
into that source. The other is the feeling 'I am helpless by myself; God alone is
all powerful and except by throwing myself completely on him, there is no other
means of safety for me.' By this method one gradually develops the conviction
that God alone exists and that the ego does not count. Both methods lead to the
same goal. Complete surrender is another name for jnana or liberation.
In the first reply Sri Ramana gives the answer that true surrender is being
satisfied with whatever God gives you, without having any desire for your life to
be any different. In the second answer he explains that one can approach this
goal in a gradual way. I think that Sri Ramana knew that no one could
immediately give up all thoughts, ideas, desires and responsibilities, so he
encouraged devotees to do it in a gradual way. One can start on the path of
surrender by handing over to God some of the petty responsibilities of life that
we believe are ours to solve. When we feel that God has done a good job with
managing them, we have more faith in Him and we are encouraged to hand
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over more and more of our life to Him. The stories that I narrated earlier belong
to this phase of surrender.
Sri Ramana occasionally encouraged his devotees to give him all their
problems. That is to say, to tell him about them, and then forget about them.
One of his persistent images or metaphors was of a passenger on a train who
insists on carrying his luggage on his own head instead of putting it on the floor
and relaxing. The idea behind this is that God is running the world and looking
after all its activities and problems. If we take some of these problems on our
own heads, we just inflict unnecessary suffering on ourselves. Sri Ramana is
telling us that God is driving the train that constitutes our life on this earth. We
can sit down and relax with the knowledge that he is taking us to our
destination, and not interfere, or we can imagine that we are responsible for it
all. We can pace up and down the aisles of the train with 100lbs on our head if
we want to. It's our choice.
When devotees surrendered their problems to Sri Ramana, it was the same
as surrendering them to God. They were submitting to the same divine
authority, surrendering to a living manifestation of that same power. Here are
some statements that Sri Ramana made on this subject. I have taken them from
a book I am currently working on. Each sentence was originally recorded by
Muruganar in Tamil verse: