Wonder And Awe – In Gita Verse 7.14 This divine energy of Mine, consisting of the three modes of material nature, is difficult to overcome. But those who have surrendered unto Me can easily cross beyond it.
Krishna gave direction and courage not only to Arjuna but to all of us. He understands our difficulty when we are lost in the Three Gunas it is very difficult to overcome. He tells us the easiest way to overcome is surrender.
In my Bhagavad Gita Verse 6.10, I wrote that surrender is the beginning of real knowing.
What is the beginning of real knowing?
Think over the word “remembering.” It really means becoming part again of the whole, becoming a member again of the family, that existence is: “re-member.” It means that we suddenly learn the language that we had forgotten. It is like a name forgotten: you see somebody on the road, you recognize him, you feel that you know who he is, but you cannot remember his name. You have forgotten, although you can remember this much: that you have known him before. You say, “His name is just on the tip of my tongue.” But if it is on the tip of your tongue, then why is it not coming? You feel absolutely certain; the name is just on the tip of your tongue. And then you try hard: the harder you try, the more difficult it becomes, because whenever you try to do something very hard you become tense, you become closed. Your consciousness becomes narrower and narrower. And it becomes more and more difficult in such tension, in such anxiety, to remember.
Then you drop the whole project, thinking that it is not possible. You forget all about it. You start listening to music or you go into the garden and you sit under a tree, or you start doing something else, sipping tea or talking to somebody… and then suddenly from nowhere the name surfaces.
This is the whole secret of enlightenment: it happens in relaxation, it happens in a deep state of rest. Surrender means relaxing. Ego means tension, carrying a load of anxiety, and unnecessarily.
The moment you rest, the moment you relax, you know that existence is already going, moving, reaching towards higher peaks. And you are part of it. You need not have separate ambitions. You need not think of yourself in terms of a person. You are not a person.
This is surrender: relaxing, resting, dropping all private goals, dropping the whole achieving mind, all the ego projections. And then life is a mystery. Your eyes will be full of wonder; your heart will be full of awe. And to me that is authentic religiousness: wonder and awe. The man who is full of wonder and awe is the only religious person – not the Christians, not the Hindus, not the Mohammedans. They are too full of knowledge; they are too full of rubbish, junk. They are simply repeating scriptures like parrots.
How will the quality of Wonder And Awe will help us to surrender?
Wonder and awe are the greatest spiritual qualities. Wonder means you function from a state of not knowing. The knowledgeable person never feels wonder; he is incapable of feeling wonder because he thinks he already knows. He knows all the stupid answers, he may know the whole Encyclopedia Britannica; hence every question is already answered in his mind. When a question is such that there is no answer to it, that it is unanswerable not only today, but forever; not that it is unknown, but it is unknowable… When one encounters the unknowable, unanswerable, one experiences wonder. One is in a state of awe, as if the heart stops beating, as if you don’t breathe for a moment.
The experience of wonder is such that everything stops. The whole world stops; time stops, mind stops, the ego stops. For a moment you are again a child, wondering about the butterflies and the flowers and the trees and the pebbles on the shore, and the seashells – wondering about everything, you are a child again.
And when you can wonder and can feel the immense beauty of existence which can only be felt in awe, when suddenly you are possessed by existence, overwhelmed, you can dance, you can celebrate that moment, you can say “Aha!” and you don’t know anything else to say, no word, just an exclamation point…!
The knowledgeable person lives with a question mark and the man of awe and wonder lives with an exclamation mark. Everything is so tremendously deep and profound that it is impossible to know it. Knowledge is impossible. When this is experienced then your whole energy takes a jump, a quantum leap, from the mind to the heart, from knowing to feeling. When there is no possibility of knowing, your energy does not move in that direction anymore.
When you have realized that there is no possibility of knowing, that the mystery is going to remain a mystery, that it cannot be demystified, your energy starts moving in a new direction: the direction of the heart. That’s why love is related to wonder and awe, to childlike innocence. When you are not obsessed with knowledge you become loving. Knowledgeable people are not loving, heady people are not loving; even if they love, they only think that they love. Their love also comes via their heads. And passing through the head, love loses all its beauty, it becomes ugly. The heady people are calculating; arithmetic is their way.
Love is jumping into a dangerously alive existence with no calculation. The head says, “Think before you jump,” and the heart says, “Jump before you think.” Their ways are diametrically opposite.
Krishna says that when in wonder and awe you become a child like, you allow existence to possess you as you are so empty and in that emptiness you have surrendered or allowed existence to possess you. You have gone beyond all Three Gunas.
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