The Unfolding of Faith and Surrender

Then the sharing of satsang started and for many years it went on the same lexicon of Advaita Vedanta till most probably I have to give credit or blame to Kabir Ji, where I feel like he started it, where he started asking questions about faith, about love, about God, about how much our surrender is. And I started to see that I was getting very comfortable in like a lip-service spirituality and getting to a point where it was almost mechanical to just speak about the things which were deeply conditioned here by that point of time. But he shook me out of a sort of slumber with the Abraham story, and he said that spirituality without faith is not spirituality, and no risk, no faith.

He started asking questions about faith, about love, about God, about how much our surrender is. And I started to see that I was getting very comfortable in like a lip-service spirituality and getting to a point where it was almost mechanical to just speak about, you know, the things which were deeply conditioned here by that point of time. But he shook me out of a sort of slumber with the Abraham story, and he said that spirituality without faith is not spirituality, and no risk, no faith. And the highest amount of risk that one can probably take in this life is the story of Abraham.

And I looked at that story and said, whichever way we are approached—as pure awareness, just pure presence, as a tiny instrument of God—whichever way we looked at it, as a moral being, as ethical, as a human, as right and wrong, any angle, I would not, could not get myself to be as open and accepting as Abraham was. It just wasn't there. So if God had given me the task that he gave to Abraham, I start to feel like this is not at all something that I can get myself to do, you see? And of course, I tried to Advaita it away and not get identified, all of that, but I saw that there is a hypocrisy in me where, you see, where in the moments of insight I'm noticing the reality of what I really am, but it is not really playing out in my life in that way.

I'm not living anywhere close to that faith, anywhere close to that surrender, anywhere in that sense of saying that if God's will is guiding me in this way... then I started really questioning the boundaries of my faith and I realized that my faith is really, really small, really, really small. And then so many things happened. We watched The Chosen, we watched Tulsidas Ji, we watched so many of these things, and I realized that there is something very drawn to this kind of a deepening where—I don't know, I don't have the words to say where, what—but where something feels a little more risky. Something feels like my boundaries are being exposed. Something shines a light on my hypocrisy, my lip service, of seeing, of truly seeing that my reality is that, but also the littleness of my worldly existence, which played very clearly from time to time and I could not deny. I did not want to be in denial of that anymore.

And then I really started to study the lives of the sages and I found that really, truly, the greatest sages were not in denial of this aspect, even in spite of the highest recognition, you see? And then it started occurring to me that both are alive at the same time: the highest insight, which is Atma in indistinct oneness with God, complete non-duality, and that tiny aspect of the 'me' which continues to play out, which can rely on the words of the truth of that Ultimate Reality to shelter itself and avoid deepening in love and faith to God.

So that process of unfolding is happening, happened here in some way. And I've been so blessed by such beautiful gifts throughout this life, that His grace blessed me with the Darshan of the Atma within, then His grace took me to the recognition of that Nirguna reality that I am. But His grace also did not allow me to convert that into just a conceptual understanding and something to sit on for the rest of my life, and showed me the boundaries of my faith, the boundaries of my love, and showed me that that which seems so distinct at times, all of these parts, all of this game of spirituality... then when God is taken to be central and not what I know and what I share, then all of it is like a beautiful flower. But if I put myself at the center of it, all seems like a tug of war and difficult. But what is true? Is it like this or is it like that? So more and more deepening in love and servitude to God also is happening by His grace alone.