Twinn Swan

You are the Father of this world, moving and unmoving. You are to be adored by this world. You are the greatest GURU, (for) there exists none who is equal to You; how can there be then another, superior to You in the three worlds, O Being of unequalled power? (11:43)

The Holy Geeta by Swami Chinmayananda

In surrendering our ego (the small self) to God, we have no choice but to bring to His feet our vasanas. Vasanas are our desires and our wishes. They are the past behavioural tendencies and karmic imprints which influence the present behaviour of an individual. They could either stem from an ancestor or may be a remnant of an unfulfilled desire that we brought forward from a previous incarnation. From a psychological perspective, our vasanas are the subconscious or latent tendencies that exist within our nature.

Depending on the vasanas that we have inherited from our ancestors, we are inherently predisposed to making certain decisions and choices. Furthermore, our past lives also come to the fore to either help or hinder our progress and our goals in life. To exhaust and extinguish all unfulfilled desires, one must surrender the ego and reach for the lotus feet of God.

When a devotee touches and reaches for the feet of his Father in a spirit of surrender and love, what he tends to offer are his vasanas. He beseeches God. He prays for certain outcomes or prays to be saved from certain scenarios. Whenever we pray, we seem to be in a state of supplication. We are looking to get our unmet needs met. It seems to be a universal phenomena.

In Hinduism–and in all older religions traditions–a significant amount of emphasis is placed on surrendering our lower desires for our higher desires through acts of sacrifice. On a mundane level, this could mean abstaining from meat for a month a year. Or one could make a sacrifice vis-a-vis a donation of money, volunteer work or even educating others for free. By meeting the needs of others, the emphasis tends to shift from the small self to others in the community.

Yesterday, I wrote about the familial and individual issues that can arise due to a bad gambling habit. Sometimes, we just have to focus on completely giving up the bad habits that we’ve picked up during the course of our life. We most likely got into these habits because we were either curious or we simply enjoyed the thrill of exploring the realm of what is taboo. Experimentation is sometimes necessary to grow up and to gain experience. While it may not be necessary to act on what you feel in every situation, accepting the power, the depth and the agency of your inner experience enables you to discover your own truth.

At the same time, however, hedonism or rampant pleasure-seeking can descend into a shameful and taboo lifestyle that is very difficult to get out of. There is nothing worse than being a prisoner of a lifestyle of your own choosing. Have you, inadvertently, surrendered yourself to a lower desire such as: emotional games disguised as love or even duplicity and dishonesty in business? You’d be surprised at how many of our highly profitable and ‘reputable’ corporate titans indulge in the latter. It is truly quite shocking.

Sometimes we have to accept that what we thought to be a glamorous lifestyle was an illusion the whole time. It is a pity that so many people willingly accept what takes away their freedom. Not only that, due to the addictive nature of the vice, they have been left with no choice but to give their freedom away. The real and true problem is that we have surrendered to materialism and hedonism at the expense of all else.

What are your higher desires? Do you even know what they are? Have you–whether you realise it or not–set up your life in such a way that you are attracting people who are bad news? If so, this is something that has to be either minimised or avoided entirely. In which areas of your life do you lie to yourself just to get along and get by? Don’t you realise that you are worth far more than this? Sometimes, we must pay heed when a warning is issued to us.

Are you setting up structures in your life that are attracting people and situations who are not appropriate for what you hope to accomplish with your life?

If so, the next sloka in the Bhagavad Gita offers us some enlightening advise:

Therefore, bowing down, prostrating my body, I crave Your forgiveness, adorable Lord. As a father forgives his son, a friend his friend, a lover his beloved, even so should You forgive me, O Deva.

The Holy Geeta by Swami Chinmayananda

Surrendering ourselves so that we may rise above ourselves into our higher desires is the true prostration that the devotee is seeking. Lower desires can neither sustain nor satisfy him. They will never give him happiness.

The ego and ego-centric lower desires that arise out of our false identification with over-materialism has destroyed any hope of our experience of the Divinity that resides within us. By surrendering our ego to the Lord, we allow the Lord’s presence to swell in our heart.

When we begin to experience the Divine presence of Sri Krishna, that is when the limited ego finally escapes all its limitations and enters into a world unknown to it so far. It is there that he experiences the joy, the happiness and the vastness of his own potential.