Page 176 - Wisdom Unfurled

would be a wrong understanding and extreme stretching of the mother cat- kitten analogy. One has to do his part as a duty enjoined upon him by the Master resigning himself to the will of the Master.
Master as the means and the goal
As we march towards finer and finer states of surrender we will realize that the Master is Himself the means and as well as the goal (upaya and upeya). Our efforts through karma (action),jnana (knowledge) and bhakti (devotion) are not always with us but the Master continues to be with us always. The person, who recognizes Him to be the saviour, does not attach himself to any means other than Him. This is what the tradition calls siddhopaya and Lord Krishna has been considered one such being ‘all Vedas, all sastras, all human goals, all sacrifices and all loved ones.’ One who knows the Lord as such is deemed to have done all sacrifices. Imperience on the Natural Path has enabled several aspirants to assert the same with regard to the Great Master Sri Ramchandraji Maharaj who has become the means as well as the goal for them. The Master has repeatedly said that He had taken His Master to be all in all for Him. In this context we may note the much quoted Gita verse ‘bahunam janmanam anthe jnanavan mam prapadyate I vasudevassarvamiti sa atma durlabhah II which means that the jnanavan or the man possessed of the knowledge or realization of his own nature of absolute dependency on God, the nature of Reality and who has developed the intense aspiration for liberating himself and attaining union with that Reality or in other words, a mumukshu emerges only after very many births and that he has come to realize that a total and integral surrender to the Lord is the only means and further, more importantly, that the goal he seeks is also the very Lord Himself (vasudevasasarvamiti). In practical terms jnanavan is some one who is human in the first place and is driven by values such as satya, ahimsa and so on and has his consciousness resident at least in the ‘U’ plane as noted earlier.
Ego – the barrier
The one and only barrier that comes in the way of achieving surrender is our ego. This causes problems even in the development of understanding of interdependency of various shades which we go through in the path towards surrender. Ego is also known as pride, self-importance and may be considered as the compulsive need to view oneself as separate from others. It has been very aptly described by a modern psychologist as a love denying obsession with separation and self concern. From the point of view of spirituality it may be taken to be an emotional knot in the consciousness granting a sense of separateness to us. Our samskaras are born out of our attachments to things, men, notions ideas and ideologies and all these have been acquired only through the sense of separate self, idea of doer, knower and enjoyer. The ego