The real power is in the Divine within. To attain to this power, one has to surrender self-will, because self-will, like self-love, is very destructive.
To practice surrender, I would sometimes promise the Divine that for a particular length of time I would do anything a certain person wanted me to do. Then before beginning the practice, I would put that person into the Light for a week or sometimes up to three weeks. I always made it clear in my preparation period that I would not do anything against my conscience, but anything else I would go along with.
One time, when I was doing all the housekeeping at the Ashram, I was practising this surrender with a fellow who had a workbench in the basement where he sawed wood. We had forced air heating with big ducts. He reached up and rubbed his hand over one, and he said, “Look at that. You call that clean?” Well, it had never occurred to me that it was my duty to clean his workshop, but I had said I would do anything, so I cleaned it.
At one time that promise to surrender to someone cost me two thousand dollars. I had to decide whether to follow my decision to surrender or save the money. I said, “This is probably a very special test. How far will I go? Will that include money, too?” So I let the two thousand dollars go out the window. That was a tremendous amount of money in those days, when I was getting only fifty dollars for a lecture. I had to give many lectures before I got that amount together again.
In doing this practice, you don’t sacrifice your ideals, you don’t go against your conscience. But you sacrifice whatever else you have to sacrifice, and one day the time will come when most of your surrender is no longer a sacrifice.
By Swami Sivananda Radha
Excerpt from Time to be Holy
Published by Timeless |
