Surrender to the Guru

When you surrender to the Guru, it is like entering into his room. If you stay in his room, naturally he will feed you. If you stay with your friend, how will your friend eat without giving you anything to eat? Is it possible if he is a real friend? He has allowed you to come into his room to stay with him. Since he is drinking Peace, Light and Bliss, will he not allow you also? Naturally he will. But your problem is to call him your friend, your eternal friend, and then to beg him to allow you to enter into his room. Once you are allowed to enter, naturally he will share with you when he eats.

Sometimes people ask a spiritual Master, “If I surrender to the Guru, how do I know what he is going to do?” I tell them, “If you do not make the surrender, then how are you going to know?” If you do not touch water, you will not know what water feels like. Only if you touch water do you get a feeling of what it is. If you touch a wall, immediately you feel the consciousness of the wall; the consciousness that is inside the wall will give you an immediate feeling. When you make a conscious surrender to the Guru, that means you are touching his consciousness. He is the tree. You have touched, let us say, the foot of the tree or you have touched some of the branches and leaves.

The moment you make surrender to your Master, you have established a free access to him. You can say that one part of your body is making surrender to another part. Let us say my feet are not yet illumined, but my heart is illumined. Now, if my feet are wise enough they will say, “The heart is illumined. Let us surrender to the heart and become one with the heart.” In the spiritual life, surrender means conscious oneness.

In the ordinary life, when one surrenders to someone, it is like a slave making surrender to the master. The master will use him according to his sweet will: “Sit down! Stand up! Go there!” In the spiritual life the Master cannot do that because if he is a real Master he knows perfectly well that he is only an instrument who is executing the Will of the Supreme. If you surrender to an ordinary human being, he lords it over you in his own way. But for the spiritual Master it is a different matter. He knows that he is not receiving your surrender. Somebody else, the Inner Pilot, is receiving your surrender, and the spiritual Master is at the mercy, at the command of the Inner Pilot, who is the real Master.

So the moment you make the surrender and touch the Master’s soul, you will know how he will guide you. If you don’t enter into him, if you don’t touch him inwardly, then you will never know. But in the spiritual life, you should not worry about how he will guide you. That is his business. How he will take you to God is his problem; your problem is to give yourself, to make the surrender. You have to jump into a boat. It is the problem of the boatman to pilot you. Your business is to enter into the boat and it is the business of the boatman to carry you through inclement weather to the goal.