The action of a person who has abandoned all desires is freed from desire. Indifferent to ownership or sense of possession and free from any sense of ego, he attains peace.

-- Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2; verse 71

Having acquired the state of a warrior you are eligible to act in whatever way the stature of a warrior demands out of you. But you are not entitled to any benefits resulting from your actions. At the same time you are not entitled to a state of not acting at all. Thus you should act according to you stature without any hope of enjoying the fruits of your actions.

Mind fixed on duty and all thoughts about the fruits of your action abandoned; such equanimity of mind is the essence of yoga.

Bhagavad Gita - Chapter 2; verse 47, 48

No effort that you put in following your Dharma is wasted nor is your growth hampered. Practicing your dharma even in it's mildest form saves you from harm.

Bhagavad Gita - Chapter 2; verse 40

There was never a time when I or you or any of these kings here did not exist. And all of us shall certainly exist in the future too.

-- Bhagavad Gita; Chapter 2, verse 12

Resignation is not surrender. You don't need to accept an undesirable or unpleasant life situation. Nor do you need to deceive yourself and say that there is nothing wrong with being stuck in the mud. No. 


You recognize fully that you want to get out of it. You then narrow your attention down to the present moment without mentally labeling it in any way. This means that there is no judgment of the Now. Therefore, there is no resistance, no emotional negativity. You accept the "isness" of this moment. Then you take action and do all that you can to get out of the mud. Such action I call positive action. It is far more effective than negative action, which arises out of anger, despair, or frustration. Until you achieve the desired result, you continue to practice surrender by refraining from labeling the Now.


Let me give you a visual analogy to illustrate the point I am malting. You are walking along a path at night, surrounded by a thick fog. But you have a powerful flashlight that cuts through the fog and creates a narrow, clear space in front of you. The fog is your life situation, which includes past and future; the flashlight is your conscious presence; the clear space is the Now.

Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is. Inner resistance is to say "no" to what is, through mental judgment and emotional negativity. It becomes particularly pronounced when things "go wrong," which means that there is a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of your mind and what is. That is the pain gap. If you have lived long enough, you will know that things "go wrong" quite often. It is pre-cisely at those times that surrender needs to be practiced if you want to eliminate pain and sorrow from your life. Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects you with Being. Resistance is the mind.

"Forgiveness" is a term that has been in use for 2,000 years, but most people have a very limited view of what it means. You cannot truly forgive yourself or others as long as you derive your sense of self from the past. Only through accessing the power of the Now, which is your own power, can there be true forgiveness. This renders the past powerless, and you realize deeply that nothing you ever did or that was ever done to you could touch even in the slightest the radiant essence of who you are. The whole concept of forgiveness then becomes unnecessary

A Buddhist monk once told me: 'All I have learned in the twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises passes away. This I know."

What he meant, of course, was this:

I have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.

Chapter 2 - State of Realization

The world appears from the ignorance of the Self and disappears with the knowledge of the Self, even as the snake appears from the non-cognition of the rope and disappears with its recognition

Knowledge, Knower and Knowable - these three do not in reality exist. I'm that stainless self in which this triad appears through ignorance.

Oh, duality is the root of all misery. There is no other remedy for it except the realisation that all objects of experience are false and that I am one and pure, intelligence and bliss

I am pure intelligence. Through ignorance i have imposed limitation upon myself. Constantly reflecting in this way, I am abiding in the Absolute.

Oh, in me the limitless ocean, diverse waves of worlds are produced forthwith on the rising of the wind of the mind

With the calming of the wind of the mind in the infinite ocean of myself, the ark of the universe of Jiva, the trader, unfortunately meets destruction