Accept and Surrender

And life passes us by…. One day becomes one week and that soon becomes one month. Before we know it, another year has passed. We try to keep Sant Mat at the forefront in the hazy blur of our daily life. But, inevitably, the urgent crowds out the critical.

Every time we have the good fortune to see the Master, we try to re-engage in our spiritual practices with renewed vigour. But, inevitably, we find ourselves taking every shortcut available to achieve this goal. These range from squeezing in a trip to the Dera to working on some new physical seva that has been given to us. Eventually, we look back and try to gain some consolation – surely these efforts are signs that we are progressing on the path….

Sadly, however, our promise to re-start our meditation practice is safely back in the cobwebs of our mind.

What can we do to change this pattern of broken resolutions? Saints come to show us the true meaning of being a disciple. They explain that if we truly love our Master, we will have no choice but to stay in his command, his hukam. As Maharaj Charan Singh explains:

To remain in the Father’s love actually is to remain in his discipline. To submit ourselves to him – that is to remain in the discipline or to remain in his love. Anything which takes us away from his love makes us undisciplined, so whatever keeps us within his love, within his devotion, that is a discipline for us that we have to follow.
_{Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II}

Saints come as examples of how we should lead our lives in obedience to our Master. We remember the story of Guru Ramdas when he was a disciple. He had so completely surrendered himself to his Guru that he repeatedly built and destroyed platforms at his Guru’s instructions, long after the other disciples gave up on the task.

Eventually, obedience sets us on the path of surrender. As Maharaj Charan Singh says:

To attain that real surrender, which we call sharan, we have to remain within the dictates and principles that were told to us at the time of initiation. We have to put forth our honest efforts to remain on the path, to give time to meditation.
_{Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III}

The sine qua non of remaining in the Master’s discipline is to do our meditation. As we read in the Adi Granth:

The one Name is the Lord’s command;
O Nanak, the true Guru has given me this understanding.

In the end, the depth of our obedience and attending to our meditation is a mark of the maturity of our love. Our meditation, in turn, only deepens the fabric of acceptance and surrender in our lives.

Again, we look to the Masters to provide an example of how a perfect disciple should remain in his Master’s will. The Great Master expressed it beautifully in a speech given at the laying of the foundation of the Satsang Ghar in 1934:

All this development is the grace of that great Saint [Baba Jaimal Singh, his Master], it is the fruit of his meditation, the manifestation of his divine power. The farmer puts up a scarecrow to protect his field; I am a scarecrow put up by Baba Ji in his field of spiritual activity. Baba Ji is doing everything; I am only his slave and am grateful to him for appointing me as a humble servant of the sangat.
_{Heaven on Earth}

One is reminded here of a poignant couplet by a Sufi mystic:

Being together means not knowing
That space where I end and You begin,
Where it becomes the same
Whether I Am You, Or You are me.
_{Nobody, Son of Nobody}

So when we obey, we learn to submit. When we submit, we drive out the ego and bring in our Master. The saints tell us that when our love becomes strong, all other things are driven out. Then there is only acceptance and surrender.