The Call to Surrender

We have been taught that surrender is a kind of defeat. The modern world celebrates the autonomous individual, the self-made identity, the unfettered will. But the soul knows — even beneath the noise of constant self-assertion — that this autonomy is a prison.

To surrender to the Supreme is not to become small. It is to become real. It is to stop playing the impossible role of the independent enjoyer and to resume our original, joyful function as the enjoyed, the servant, the beloved.

This is the beginning of bhakti. Not an acquisition, but a relinquishment. Not a climb, but a fall — a deliberate, joyful fall into the arms of that which has always sustained us.

The path is severe because our attachments are deep. But the grace that meets us on this path is deeper still.