There are two ways of living life. One way is of struggle, the other of surrender. Struggle means that my will is different from the whole; surrender means I am a part of the whole. There is no question of my will being different from the whole. If I am separate from the whole then struggle is natural. If I am with the whole then surrender is natural. Struggle brings tension, restlessness, anxiety; surrender brings silence, peace, bliss and ultimately divine understanding. Struggle inflates the ego, surrender dissolves it. Men and women of the world are struggling; the spiritual man has given up struggle and has surrendered. As long as you are fighting against the current, as long as you want your will to prevail, as long as you are complaining you are struggling. And struggle means tension, angst, anxiety. When you have no will of your own, when His will is your will, when you have no goal of your own, when you are ready to go wherever you are taken, when you don’t take decisions and let things happen as they will, you have surrendered. And surrender means peace, because you make no effort, you flow with the current.

When you give up struggle completely, you become unburdened, light and weightless. You can fly like the eagle high up in the sky without even flapping your wings. Then you fly on the wings of His winds. You don’t need to exert your own wings. You become light like a dry leaf and allow the winds to take you wherever they wish to. You are heavy and burdened only when you are struggling, when you are fighting against the current, when you are trying to swim upstream. And, the more you struggle the heavier becomes your burden. And, the heavier you get the more you fall to the ground.

When you don’t struggle and let things happen as they happen, you become light, and the lighter you get you rise higher and higher. And when you are able to give up struggle completely you are at the same height at which there is no difference between you and the divine. Kabir says:

 

 

(Now that I have met my lord I am sitting on the divine throne.

Ram and Kabir have become one, no one can see any difference.)

 On the other hand, struggle is the game your ego plays. The ego finds it impossible to surrender because surrender means the death of the ego. Ego and surrender cannot go together just as light and darkness cannot go together. You have light or there is absence of light which is darkness. As long as the ego exists struggle will carry on. And, the more you struggle the more the ego is strengthened. Ego is the root cause of all the ills. All the evils and all the vices stem from the ego. Ego is the millstone hanging round your neck which pulls you down.

Guru Nanak’s entire effort is to help you drop your ego. He prescribes only one remedy. And, that remedy he calls Hukam, His Will. He who lives his life according to the divine will, he who gives up his will has surrendered himself completely. This is his definition of a sikh. He is a truly religious person who accepts all that comes his way and surrenders his will before the divine will.

And, he who accepts his will gets everything. Gurmukh is one who surrenders his own will and accepts the divine will. He finds himself standing in front of the divine abode. He who struggles is the Vemukh who has turned his back towards the hukam and whatever he does takes him away from the divine.

There is only one way of coming face to face with the divine. And, that is to surrender your own will before the divine will. Just flow with the current. Just stop wasting your energy on fighting the current. Float; don’t swim. Then you are in tune with the flow of existence. You have stopped taking yourself as separate from the whole. You have become one with the whole as you always were. But, you were unaware of it.

How to know what is the divine will? Just remove your ego from the scene, and whatever else happens is the divine will. The only thing that is obstructing your vision to see the divine will is your ego. It is like the tiny speck of dust that blocks your view. Your ego is also very small. It is like the keyhole through which you want to look at the vast sky. Whatever you see will be limited by the boundaries of the keyhole. What a distorted view you will get is obvious. You think with your tiny intellect in a limited sphere. You form an image of God in your head which is nothing but a reflection of your mind. Remember, God is not because of you; you are because of God. You are not breathing because of your effort; it is because of Him.

All you need to remember is that nothing is happening because of you. Then you will find that ego has no feet to stand on. When you realise that you cannot even take a single breath on your own. Can you make yourself digest the food you eat? The most significant things are happening silently, without your intervention. Indeed, if you try to make an effort to do so, you will land yourself in trouble.

So, suffice it to know that you are mistaken if you think that things are happening because of your doing. They are happening according to the cosmic law, and you are unnecessarily imposing your ego on them. Your successes and failures are also not your doing. You are only an excuse, an instrument through which the divine will works. If you can see this truth there will be no scope for the ego to exist. If you can accept this reality you will surrender completely. The only thing that was coming in the way was your notion that you can change things, you can make things happen, whereas the truth is exactly the opposite.