Simple Faith to Complete Surrender

Since childhood, most of us believers are brought up to believe in God blindly. Thats OK. We do too, as in follow our parents' words. We apparently do not think about it very much, accepting that God up there is watching out for us, warding off evil.

Suddenly there comes a situation in one's own life when there is this urgent need for some divine support. And even as one urges God for support, when one knows he or she is atleast partly at fault, how does one go about it ?

I asked this friend of mine for over decades and he quipped, 'Simply surrender urself'. So that sent me thinkin. How does one go about surrendering completely ? So I went to this Sai Baba temple on Minister Road and sat there for a while. Then this pujari comes and asks me, if I was going to stay for 'Aarthi'.

Even as I was wondering why he asked me, he said no one was supposed to leave in the middle of the 'Aarthi' song. So I stayed on. Initially a blank, then some trepidity and then a sort of lull. It took a while for me to realise that the seeming lull was showing signs of transforming into a sense of calm, relative though it may be, the first time.

And the experience at the Sai Baba temple on Minister Road was indeed hard-hitting the first time I visited, actually looking for peace of mind. On earlier occasions, I had simply parked my bike, left my footwear outside, gone in for darshan and came out after a while, all in rather a mechanical mode.

As I said, as my situation continued to be much the same without any improvement per se, I found that visits to other temples too, had a calming effect. It slowly dawned on. The definition of complete surrender. Definitions may be heard from others, read in books or over the net, but I understood that they are best understood only when experienced.