Active Versus Passive Forms of Surrender to the Divine

In his book, The Mother, Sri Aurobindo distinguishes between the needed attitude of surrender to the Divine and what he terms a 'tamasic surrender'. "Note that a tamasic surrender refusing to fulfil the conditions and calling on God to do everything and save one all the trouble and struggle is a deception and does not lead to freedom and perfection."

Many people confuse surrender with a total absence of effort, relying instead on the Divine Force to act in the face of what amounts to a tamasic reaction. There are, of course, the stories of the two types of aspirants, the 'baby monkey' type and the 'baby cat' type. The distinguishing characteristic between the two is that the baby monkey has to actively participate and hold on to its mother in order to be carried; while the baby cat gets picked up and carried along without effort. This is frequently used as a justification of a lack of effort. While there is a deeper spiritual truth about the two modes of devotion, the integral yoga does not have the same objective as the historical paths of yoga or spiritual development, as it is not looking for an end result of the liberation of the individual and his merging into the spiritual consciousness; rather, it seeks to actively transform the entire life to receive and embody the higher spiritual consciousness. The difference means that there is a need for the active participation of the individual seeker, even while he relies on the Divine Force to enter, embed and permeate his being as the basis for that action.

When tamas predominates, there is darkness, fatigue, lethargy, all of which leads to the expression of the habitual actions of the body, life and mind since they have established pathways built into the being. What is needed is an active awareness, keen discrimination of the sources and actions of the forces, and a process of receptivity to the higher forces and denial of the habitual forces that have ruled the earth-nature for millions of years as they resist, object to and deny the advent of the higher forces that will transform their action.

Sri Aurobindo writes: "Faith, reliance upo
God, surrender and self-giving to the Divine Power are necessary and indispensable. But reliance upo
God must not be made an excuse for indolence, weakness and surrender to the impulses of the lower Nature: it must go along with untiring aspiration and a persistent rejection of all that comes in the way of the Divine Truth. The surrender to the Divine must not be turned into an excuse, a cloak or an occasion for surrender to one's own desires and lower movements or to one's ego or to some Force of the ignorance and darkness that puts on a false appearance of the Divine."

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 2, Faith -- Aspiration -- Surrender, pg. 24