Question: Sometimes we think that we have surrendered to God, but later we find out that part of our ego has not surrendered at all. It has been hiding and afterwards comes out. How can we attain complete surrender? How can we make all this ego surrender as a whole?

Sri Chinmoy: Let us view surrender as a muscle. By taking exercise we develop our muscles. If we exercise every day, our muscles become strong, stronger, strongest. Surrender also grows by regular exercise. We can develop this surrender day by day. In one day we cannot make complete surrender to God. It is impossible. Nobody on earth has done such a thing. It is not your fault; it is not my fault; it is nobody's fault. But in order to achieve absolute surrender we have to exercise this spiritual quality constantly.

Our greatest enemy is the ego. At the time we want to surrender, ego gets up and stands defiantly in front of us. We have to know where ego actually lives. The ego hides most of the time in our vital. It hides more in our vital than in our mind, and more in our mind than in our heart. In the mind and in the heart there is some ego, but in the soul there is no ego at all. The soul is egoless. The moment we leave the domain of the soul, the moment we come into the heart, with its affections, likes and dislikes, we find ego. Then, when we come to the mind, we see that ego looms large — the mental ego. When we come to the vital, again there is tremendous ego. And when we enter into the physical, it is all ego.