In Surrender Lies Victory (ft. Nayaswamis Ramesha & Bhagavati)
“When we give up what we have to give up, we make room for his light, for his joy, for his love to fill our lives to the brim.”
Good morning, everyone. My name is Ramesha, and this is my wife, Bhagavati. We live at Ananda Village. As you heard earlier, we work with the music ministry, and this is our first time here in eight years. So, we are very happy to be here and to share Sunday service with you all.
I’d like to start by reading from Paramhansa Yogananda’s book of prayer the man’s “Whispers from Eternity”. This is called “Oh Divine Sculptor, chisel thou my life, every sound that I make, let it have the vibration of Thy voice. Every thought that I think, let it be saturated with the consciousness of Thy presence. Let every feeling that I have glow with Thy love. Let every act of my will be impregnated with Thy divine vitality. Let every thought, every expression, every ambition, be ornamented by Thee. Oh, divine sculptor, chisel thou my life according to thy design.”
Isn’t that such a wonderful way to live? And as it says in the reading that Ethan just read, when we think of surrender, surrender is an odd word sometimes to use in the context of spirituality because we think of surrender as when you surrender in war, you give up fighting, you are done, you lost basically. But on the spiritual path, and I think we all know, all of us here know very well that surrendering to the divine will is a whole other story. It requires actually a lot of willpower. In fact, throughout the reading, Swami Kriyananda talks about willpower and what it takes to really live a spiritual life.
Why does it take that much willpower? It takes all of our willpower, honestly, and sometimes even more because what we are ultimately doing, we are gradually releasing all of our attachments, our self-identifications, our opinions, all the things that we identify as us into a higher reality, into the reality of remembering what we really are. We are one with God. We are none of that. We are not this personality, this body. This is major, and it takes a lot of willpower to do that.
This is something that may seem daunting, but we have to remember that every time we answer kindly when somebody speaks harshly to us, for example, every time we forgive when everything in us would like to retaliate, every time we put somebody else’s needs in front of our own, we are actually giving up, surrendering a little bit of this magnetic pull that the ego has on us, and we’re actually moving forward toward giving everything up to God.
But when Bhagavati and I moved to Ananda Village almost 20 years ago now, we were moving around a lot. We didn’t have a fixed home for quite a while. I remember the first time we went to the first housing meeting. It was very beautiful because there were, I don’t know, five, six households needing a place, and there were maybe two places opening up. Obviously, everybody needs a place, but who’s going to get it? The meeting started with going around the room, and everybody shared what their needs were. One wanted an extra room, one had children that needed more space. There were all kinds of different needs, and you could relate to each one of them, honestly. You could tell that everybody was hoping to get that perfect place they wanted. It was so beautiful to watch. It was new to me. I realized to people who’ve lived there for a while, it is normal. But to me, it was new to watch how as the meeting progressed, people started to tune into other people’s needs. By the end, people were like, “Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, I would like that place, but you need it more, and I think you should get it.” And everybody’s self-concern expanded to include other people’s realities. That was very beautiful to watch. I had never experienced that before moving to Ananda, so it was quite an amazing experience.
And there were a couple of things that I wanted to emphasize. First of all, we can do this work of releasing our will into God’s will. We can do it in different ways. We can try to do it gradually, and that works. We meditate, we practice our techniques, we do the purification ceremony like we did this morning. Why do we do that? Well, each one of these old habits, attachments that we may have, they demand some of our energy. Some of our energy is committed in different directions where all these desires are. When we meditate, especially when we practice a technique like Kriya that redirects the energy, we basically take away some of that energy from those attachments, and they become weaker and weaker until we arrive at a point where we feel like, “Oh, I’m ready to give that up. That doesn’t serve me anymore.” I think we’ve all had that experience. Something that maybe 10 years ago was, “Oh my God, I can’t possibly imagine living without this,” or whatever it may be, but all of a sudden you look back at it and go, “Why was I making such a big deal about that? It’s no big deal. Let’s just let it go.” This is why we do what we do. However, I don’t know if you notice this, but life sometimes has a way of presenting us with opportunities to let go of things that we didn’t even know we were ready to let go of. But ready or not, there it is.
I don’t want to embarrass my wife, but in 2021, she was diagnosed with a form of blood cancer. It was obviously a big shock for both of us, but also for our friends and families. So, 2022 was, we call it the ‘cancer year’, where it was all about going to town, doing the treatments, and all that comes with that. In looking back, I remember watching Bhagavati. I never heard her complain once. I never heard her say, “Oh, why me? Why does this have to happen?” All her concern was, “Gosh, I hope I’ll be able to keep singing and doing the things that I need to do, but I’m prepared to step back.” We made a lot of plan Bs for her to pull back. But as the treatment progressed, she was actually feeling well. She was fine. We had a lot of people praying for her. I say this almost as a disclaimer, but it is really amazing what prayers do when there’s a lot of people especially praying for you. We could feel that. She went through it very gracefully, and everything flowed smoothly. She did all this one step at a time. I remember one instance when she had an appointment in town for a small procedure. We arrived at the hospital and she was filling out her papers. While she was still filling out her papers, the nurse came to get her and said, “Are you ready for me?” She replied, “Well, I’m finishing this.” The nurse said, “Just take it with you. You can finish it later.” So, the nurse was taking all the vitals and all that. While she was still doing that, the doctor came and said, “Are you ready for me?” How many times have you gone to the doctor and the doctor is waiting for you? I can’t remember any other time, quite frankly. But that’s how things really flowed. I realized it was because she accepted things as they were, never complained, took things one step at a time, and things resolved. She’s in remission, she’s doing well. This is what a life given to God can bring. It doesn’t mean that if you get a different outcome, it means you’re not living a life for God. It just means that this was a different experience that you needed. But in our instance, we could really feel like a bubble of grace around us. That was quite amazing.
We may think that there are things in our life that are obviously things that we need to give up, and other things that maybe, well, that’s not that important. But let me read something to you, because when I read this, I thought, “Oh my God, this is amazing, perfect for this talk.” This is a quote from Gyanamata. Gyanamata was the most advanced woman disciple of Yogananda. She used to write letters to the other nuns and other people, not just the nuns, where she would give very, very deep and insightful suggestions for their spiritual life or whatever they were going through at that moment. This is what she says:
“First, we have to give up wrong actions. This is not so hard because we can see the reason. Having accomplished this, we are apt to rest, satisfied thinking that we can now enjoy the things that are rightfully ours. But God says, ‘No, come lay all the dear innocent pleasures at my feet. Everything holding nothing back.’ Until we obey that command, we cannot know that God himself is the gratification, the satisfaction of all desires, and the only real one. He is the joy, the bliss that we were seeking on the mountain and beside the sea.”
She says this because earlier in the letter, she says that she loved the ocean and she missed the ocean. And so there you go. So, it reminded me of those stores where everything must go, everything must go. Because the more room we make in our hearts and we empty it of all these things that don’t serve us anymore, the more room there is for God to come and dwell in there. And you know, it’s not done in a grim way. It’s something that as this process continues, less attachments, more God in our hearts, we feel more and more joy in our lives. And when we feel that, we start to realize that we actually want to give those things up. Because when we do, we are more and more happy.
And so, it is actually something that becomes almost like you read the lives of the saints, for example. The saints, they’re just so passionate and they have this way of really being, to us, they might seem almost exaggerated in their passion to really want to release everything, but that’s because they know. They’ve experienced what it is to live without attachments and to allow God to fill our hearts completely. And this is what we want. When we read those qualities that Ethan was reading in the reading this morning, the qualities that Krishna talks about, I mean, I think we all resonate with them. It’s like, “Wow, I really want that.” The reason is that those qualities are already inside. The only reason why we may not see them, or they may not always be apparent is because of that layer of attachments, desires, habits that we may have. But that’s not us. So, it’s not like we have to acquire anything. We just have to get rid of some things—some spring cleaning needs to happen. And it might take more than one season, maybe spring, summer, fall, it might take a little longer, but still, it will happen.
And so, not in a grim way, it has to become actually a joyful process. The other thing I wanted to emphasize, very, very important, is that we are not alone in doing this. We can always ask God for help whenever we feel that something is not serving us anymore. But we’re also aware that we still have a strong attachment for it, and we want to let it go. But we feel like we can’t quite yet. We can always ask God.
There’s a beautiful story that I recently read about. I don’t know how many of you have read the book, The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom. She was a woman during the war. She was from Holland, and she and her sister were imprisoned in a concentration camp in Ravensbrück. They were not Jewish; they were Christian, but they were hiding Jews in their house to protect them from the Nazis. So, they were captured, they were discouraged, captured, and imprisoned. Her sister Betsie died in the concentration camp. She had very poor health already, and she couldn’t make it. She died, and it was very tragic.
So, after the war, in 1947, Corrie, who survived the concentration camp, was released. She made it her mission to travel throughout Germany and give talks and lectures to the people there about forgiveness. She realized that probably after the war, after what had happened, maybe a lot of Germans might feel guilty. Nobody really feels particularly great after the war, especially if you lost it. She wanted to go there and help them, which is amazing in itself, considering what happened to her personally.
One time she was talking to a group of people and as she was talking, she was telling them, “Jesus is so great. You can just ask to be forgiven and you are. All your sins will be taken and thrown into the depths of the sea, and you are free and you are forgiven.” As she was saying this, she looked at the crowd and recognized a man who was one of the guards in the concentration camp where she was. He was still dressed in his uniform. She froze when she saw this man; this man had been the cause of her sister’s death. She just panicked a little bit. When the service was finished and people started to leave, this man started walking towards her. She didn’t know what to do. She started thinking, “What am I going to do? I don’t know if I can say a word to him.” Finally, the man was right in front of her and he stretched out his hand. He wanted to shake her hand. He said, “Fräulein, your speech was amazing. You mentioned Ravensbrück. I used to be a guard in Ravensbrück.” Obviously, he did not recognize her. He said, “But I’ve since become a Christian, and I know that God can forgive all my sins. But I really would like to hear it from your mouth that I am forgiven.” She didn’t know what to do. She knew that stretching out her hand and shaking his hand was the right thing to do. She prayed to Jesus. She said, “You help me do it because I can do the motion, but I have no feeling. My heart is completely cold and I have no feeling for this man whatsoever.” She stretched out her hand and grabbed his hand. She said, “In that moment, it started from my shoulder and there was this warm current of energy going down my arm, shaking his hand. Both hands were in this warm embrace.” She said, “It then continued throughout my whole body. I felt so much joy that I was weeping in joy.” She said, “Brother, I forgive you. Go in peace.”
She also made a comment after she wrote that story. She said, “I talked to a lot of people after the war who had lost people in concentration camps. The people who were able to forgive are those who were able to move on and have a normal life. The ones who couldn’t remained crippled.” Why is this? Because only the light can really heal. When we invite it inside of us like that, we’re able to give up anything, even things that seemed impossible. How can you forgive someone who caused the death of your sister? Well, that’s how, and she did it. So can we. We can overcome anything.
This is what God wants us to do. He’s not trying to take anything away from us. He just wants us to be free. He just wants us to be happy. When we give up what we have to give up, we make room for his light, for his joy, for his love to fill our lives to the brim. We wouldn’t want anything else.
So, let’s all in our hearts make this commitment to really not hold anything back, because we have everything to gain and nothing to lose. God bless us.