What is surrender?

Here, one is talking about surrender in the spiritual field.

In the Kurukshetra war, Krishna asks Arjuna not to surrender his weapons but to take them up and fight because Arjuna is  protecting dharma. Krishna says to him, ‘Surrender unto me’ 

Surrender is not giving in to temporal forces. In fact, if you surrender to the worldly forces that tempt you and act as obstacles to your spiritual path, you will not be able to turn to spirituality at all.

Surrender comes from the understanding, that however much we intellectualise, whatever we may do with our limited intelligence, we cannot touch divinity. The mind after trying to catch God in all directions, finally decides, “This is not in my hands now. Let me pray for grace.”

This only comes with great humility. There are people who do tapasya for a hundred years hoping to find God, but it is only when they finally surrender that God reveals himself.

Without grace one cannot even turn towards the spiritual goal. 

Dharmakshetra is the battle field of our mind, where this fight goes on between righteousness and unrighteousness, between material pleasures and the internal enjoyment of the spiritual. This constant battle can be resolved only when one can abandon this field of activity and turn inward. It is not admitting defeat. It is understanding that all this circus is not going to solve the problem, so let me be quiet and in that quietness perhaps the divine will reveal itself.

There are millions of people on this earth who work for a living and are doing so many things. But how many want to go into a serious search for the divine? This requires grace. In fact, to surrender to the spiritual, one has to be a true warrior in the temporal and fight the battles; because it is a constant battle. And if you surrender, you get help to fight the battle.

When all the vrittis or disturbances of this field called the mind are removed and the mind becomes placid and quiet then that is the take off point for the soul towards its spiritual journey.

You begin to realise the inner dimensions of your mind, which are so advanced, you begin to look at yourself and see how limited you are and you open up and see how your mind moves from the limited to the unlimited.