Chapter 32Surrender · Surrender and the Psychic

For surrender it is necessary not to insist on the mind’s opin-ions, ideas and preferences, the vital’s desires and impulses, the physical’s habitual actions, the life of the ego — all such insistence is contrary to surrender. All egoism and self-will has to be abandoned and one must seek to be governed only by the Divine Shakti. No complete surrender is possible without the psychic opening.

* It is impossible to become like a child giving oneself entirely until the psychic is in control and stronger than the vital.

* It is the psychic coming forward that brings the force of surrender.

* The power of experience is not gone — but what is most important now is to develop the psychic condition of surrender, devotion, love and cheerful confidence in the Mother, an unshaken faith and a constant inner closeness, and also to bring down from above the peace, wideness, purity etc. of the higher Self which is that of the Mother’s consciousness. It is these things that are the basis of the siddhi in this Yoga — other experiences are only a help, not the basis.

* It is the psychic surrender in the physical that you have begun to experience.

All the parts are essentially offered, but the surrender has to be made complete by the growth of the psychic self-offering in all of them and in all their movements separately and together.

To be enjoyed by the Divine is to be entirely surrendered so that one feels the Divine Presence, Power, Light, Ananda possessing the whole being rather than oneself possessing these things for one’s own satisfaction. It is a much greater ecstasy to be thus surrendered and possessed by the Divine than oneself to be the possessor. At the same time by this surrender there comes also a calm and happy mastery of self and nature.

* No surrender to the psychic being is demanded, the surrender is to the Divine. One approaches the Divine through faith; concrete experience comes as a result of sadhana. One cannot demand a direct experience without doing anything to prepare the consciousness for it. If one feels the call, one follows it — if there is no call, then there is no need to seek the Divine. Faith is sufficient to start with — the idea that one must first understand and realise before one can seek is a mental error and if it were true would make all sadhana impossible — realisation can come only as a result of sadhana, not as its preliminary.

* There is no need of all this complication. If the psychic manifests, it will not ask you to surrender to it, but to surrender to the Mother.

* The surrender must be to the Mother — not even to the Force, but to the Mother herself.