Surrender or Faith in the scriptures is the vital element that is added into Mananam by this step. The path necessarily involves a combination of Effort and Surrender.
This Step comes as a warning sign for the
serious spiritual aspirant: “Do not take the Upanishads lightly. Be serious
about your search for God, especially from here onwards.”
Combination of Effort & Surrender
The head and the heart must unite in our quest
for the Truth. Both are necessary – deep inner intellectual reflection as well
as surrender of the heart to the Divine.
i) If surrender is absent, then the effort is
likely to become egoistic; the ego in our effort can poison it. So effort has
to be balanced by surrender.
ii) If effort is absent, one’s surrender becomes vain and unworthy, almost slavish. In surrender without effort, we run the risk of being driven by emotion or sentiment, and there lies the danger – that is what Fanaticism is made of.
Main goal in spiritual sadhana is to transcend
our ego. It is in the context that Effort and Surrender must go together in
perfect alignment.
We start putting in all-out efforts / Purushartha in Sadhana and if surrender is lacking, the belief that
"I am doing sadhana",
where, ‘I’ refers to our ego, that belief itself may take us away from our
goal to transcend our ego.
And, we cannot sit quiet, giving up all efforts,
saying that we have surrendered to God and He shall take us to the goal of
realization.
The saying "Do your best and leave the
rest" applies as much or in fact, applies most in Sadhana. We have to do out very best as far as spiritual sadhana and rest in total surrender,
allowing Lord to take over and guide us and elevate us in our path to reach and
merge with Him.
On this spiritual path we are restricted only by
the subtlety and sharpness of our Intellect, and the intensity and stability of
our Faith. Faith, going hand in hand with the intellect, is the only way open
for us.
When well-nurtured, faith grows and grows with
time. As from seed to tree, so also from faith to conviction. Given the water
of logic and the sunlight of enquiry, faith begins to experience change.
The ultimate test of faith is actual Discovery.
A series of experiences, each one taking us closer and closer to the Goal,
marks the route to the ultimate Experience.
In this process of transforming faith into
conviction and culminating it in Discovery, we have a perfect picture of what
the purpose of Vedantic Sadhana is.
Veda is Wisdom, the supra-sensory experiences,
the seer being the one who ‘sees’ or ‘hears’ the resonance of OM, the eternal
sound in extra-ordinary moments of enlightenment. Vedic hymns represent the
expressions of those experiences without any human effort in composition.
Wisdom of Vedanta and renunciation, ascetics of
purified nature, dwell in silence of the forests at the end of their lives in
the supreme immortal world of Brahman.
Sankara clarifies that with Mind purified by
scriptures, enlightened teachers and restraint of the senses aid realization of
the self. Scriptures remain neutral like sun light, but do not reveal truth. It
is necessary that one should study vedic scriptures as the means for
realization of Brahman, and not only reading them.
Swami
says,
“From
the principle of Brahman emerged Akasha
(ether). From Akasha, Vayu (air) originated. From Vayu, Agni (fire) emerged. From Agni,
Jala (water) emerged. From Jala came Prithvi (earth). From Prithivi,
Oshadhi (vegetation) emerged. Oshadhis gave rise to Annam (food) and man is born out of
food.
Thus,
you can see that man and Brahman are intimately related. On this basis, Lord
Krishna declared:
“Mamaivamso Jeevaloke Jeevabhuta Sanathana” (the eternal atma in all beings is a part of My
Being). Without the principle of Brahman, nothing can exist, be it ether, air,
fire, water, earth, vegetation or food.”
(SSS-
Volume 33)
Love.
