_Question:_ Sometimes we think that we have surrendered to God, but later we find out that part of our ego has not surrendered at all. It has been hiding and afterwards comes out. How can we attain complete surrender? How can we make all this ego surrender as a whole?

Sri Chinmoy: Let us view surrender as a muscle. By taking exercise we develop our muscles. If we exercise every day, our muscles become strong, stronger, strongest. Day by day they are strengthened. This happens through regular physical discipline, physical exercise. Similarly surrender, which is a spiritual quality, grows by regular exercise. Surrender is the very breath of our true existence. We can develop this surrender day by day. In one day we cannot make complete surrender to God. It is impossible. Nobody on earth has done such a thing. It is not your fault; it is not my fault; it is nobody’s fault. But in order to achieve absolute surrender we have to exercise this spiritual quality constantly.

First we have to know where our greatest enemy lies. Our greatest enemy is the ego. At the time we want to surrender, ego gets up and stands defiantly in front of us. We have to know where it actually hides. The ego hides most of the time in our vital. It hides more in our vital than in our mind, more in our mind than in our heart. In the mind and the heart there is some ego, but in the soul there is no ego at all. The soul is egoless. The moment we leave the domain of the soul, the moment we come into the heart, with its affections, likes and dislikes, we find ego. Then, when we come to the mind, we see that the ego looms large — the mental ego. When we come to the vital, again there is tremendous ego. And when we enter into the physical, it is all ego.

So let us start our journey not from the body, not from the vital, not from the mind, not from the heart, but from the soul. Let us try, in our conscious meditation, to live in the soul. Daily, we will try our utmost to live in the soul. Let us take our body as a bundle, our vital as a bundle, our mind as a bundle, and our heart as a bundle. One, two, three, four bundles let us throw into the soul, which is an infinite Ocean of Light, Peace and Bliss. The moment we throw the body, vital, mind and heart into the soul, we will have all joy, all delight, all perfection.

When we are in the soul, we see immediately that it is a portion of the Infinite and is being constantly pulled by the Infinite. The Infinite, like a great magnet, is pulling, pulling, pulling the soul, and the soul is most happy to be pulled. Most cheerfully, gladly, devotedly the soul is drawn to the Infinite. In the process of this magnetism, the soul surrenders of its own will and begins its divine manifestation. We are spreading the wings of the soul when we live in the Infinite. This is the way to make our surrender complete. Only by throwing the body, vital, mind and heart into the soul, can we live in the soul. The more we can stay in the soul, the easier, the more complete becomes our surrender.

If we live in the mind, surrender is impossible. If we live in the vital, it is unthinkable. But if we live in the soul, gradually the light of the soul penetrates these unlit parts of our existence: the body, the vital, the mind and the heart. When the soul’s light fully permeates all the parts of our inner and outer existence, our surrender becomes complete.

From:Sri Chinmoy,AUM — Vol.II-5, No.11,12, November-December 1978, Vishma Press, 1978
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