YOUR "WILL" AND THE GODS' - WILL

Someone once asked, "They say true bhakti is giving your whole will, your whole being, to God. If you do that, aren't you making yourself completely passive?"

Many think that the ultimate devotion, called prapatti in Sanskrit, means giving up their willpower, their independence and their judgment for an attitude of "Now you direct me, for I no longer can direct myself, because I no longer have free will. I gave it all away."

This is a good argument against prapatti, to be sure, but a gross misinterpetation of the word, which is the very bedrock of spirituality. This is not the meaning of prapatti at all. Not at all. I shall give an example. People who are employed work with full energy and vigor, utilizing all their skills on the job, day after day after day, year after year after year. They give of their talents and energies freely, but they do hold back some of the energies and fight within themselves. This is called resistance. That resistance is what they have to offer on the altar of purification.

Getting rid of resistance, to be able to flow with the river of life, is what prapatti is all about. Prapatti is freedom. This truly is free will. Free will is not an obstinant will, an opposite force invoked for the preservation of the personal ego. This is willfulness, not free will.

Free will is total, intelligent cooperation, total merging of the individual mind with that of another, or of a group. Those who only in appearance are cooperative, good employees rarely show their resistance. They hold it within, and day after day, year after year, it begins tearing them apart.

Stress builds up that no remedy can cure. In religious life, we must have prapatti twenty-four hours a day, which means getting rid of our resistance. There are various forms of free will.

There is free will of the ego, or the instinctive mind, there is free will of the intellect that has been educated in dharma, and there is free will of the intuition.

For many, free will is an expression of the little ego, which often entangles them more in the world of maya. For me, true free will means the dharmic will that is divine and guided by the superconscious. In reality, only this kind of will makes you free.

Hindus with Western education, or who were raised and taught in Christian schools, whether they have accepted the alien religion or not, find it very difficult to acknowledge within their own being the existence of the Gods, because the West primarily emphasizes the external, and the East emphasizes the internal.

Thoroughly immersing oneself in the external world severs man's awareness from his psychic ability to perceive that which is beyond the sight of his two eyes.

You might ask how you can love something you cannot see. Yet, the Gods can be and are seen by mature souls through an inner perception they have awakened.

This psychic awakening is the first initiation into religion. Every Hindu devotee can sense the Gods, even if he cannot yet inwardly see them.

This is possible through the subtle feeling nature. He can feel the presence of the Gods within the temple, and he can indirectly see their influence in his life.