So, when you build up your strength of individuality and self-reliance and character-strength from your young days, you are already catching that wind of Grace, and you are getting steadily stronger and purer to appreciate it and benefit from it.
And you become strongest when you surrender all your strength to that great breeze of Grace that blows all the time. For He alone is; we are only just a spark of that divine fire. We have not to run after, to pine after, Divine Grace; we have only to become grace-worthy. And that grace-worthiness is what one gets by achieving manliness through a life of self-reliance, hard work, and struggle to develop character -strength. This takes us closer and closer to that final spiritual revolution in total self-surrender—prapatti or saranagati.
When the mind is dominated by nature's powers of tamas and rajas, saranagati or self-surrender, if practised, will not be genuine. It is best then to practise purusakara, or self-reliance, accompanied by a general feeling of devotion and dedication to God. But, when the mind rises to the level of sattva, or even sattva-dominated rajas, it gets the capacity for self-surrender and the appreciation of Divine Grace. It is at this level that bhakti shines at its purest and best, and human life reaches the level of spontaneity: naturalness, and effort-lessness. The Srimad Bhagavatam gives a beautiful picture of such a life, in its exposition of the nature of a bhagavatottama, the best among the devotees, by the Nava Yogindras (XI. 2. 45-52):
'He is the best among the devotees of Hari (God), who sees the Blessed Lord as the Self in all beings, and all beings in the Blessed Lord as their Self.'
'He is a middling type of devotee, who practises love towards God, friendship towards His devotees, compassion towards childish or ignorant people, and indifference towards enemies.'
'He is an ordinary type of devotee, who seeks to worship God with faith only in an image or idol, but not in His devotees or others.'
"He is the best among the devotees of God, who sees this universe as the Maya of Visnu (the All-pervading Lord) even while experiencing its objects through his sense organs.'
'He is the pre-eminent devotee, who, through his constant remembrance of Hari, does not get deluded by the characteristics of the world such as birth, death, hunger-thirst, fear, cravings, and hardships affecting the body, sense organs, vital energies, mind, and intellect.'
‘He, verily, is the best a among the devotees, who, ever residing only in Vasudeva (Hari), does not experience the emergence of even the seeds of sense cravings and craving-satisfying actions in his mind.’
'He, indeed, is dear to Hi, who is no attached to the notions such as birth, action, caste, order of life etc., centred in this body.’
'He, indeed, is the best among the devotees, who does not entertain in his mind distinctions such as "this is one's own, this is an outsider or foreigner", and who is peaceful and looks upon all beings with equal-mindedness.'
Every devotee is inspired by this truth, when truly comprehended, that there is God's grace available to him or her. That is what will carry him or her onward in life thereafter, in a beautiful and natural and rewarding blending of self-effort and Divine Grace, until the flood of Divine Grace engulfs the devotee.
When people understand religion correctly as the science of total human unfoldment, they will realize that there is no gulf between man's external life and man's internal life, between man's secular life and man's spiritual life. External and internal are only formal expressions. Life or Reality knows no separation like this. What is external is also internal. 'Narayana, the Indwelling Divine', says the Narayana Upanisad, 'exists filling the inside and the outside of man and the universe’—
Antah bahisca tat sarvam, vyapya narayanah sthitah.
So, when you are working in the world, you are working in and through Narayana Himself. You are not really away from Him. Vedanta says that God is both transcendent and immanent. He is within as well as without. Sri Ramakrishna told Vivekananda: 'Learn to see God with eyes closed as well as with eyes open; with eyes closed in meditation andbha with eyes open during work and inter-human relations.'
So, in the early stages of one's life, when one is dealing with the world, one is actually in touch with the Divine as well. She or he doesn't know it yet, but that awareness will dawn depending upon how one handles one's life. And this truth will dawn fully on him or her, when that great strength gained by one's self-reliance and self-effort is able to go beyond itself to a still greater strength, the strength which is self-surrender to the Divine. This is the only occasion when surrender becomes supreme victory. The knowledge dawns that the breeze of Divine Grace has been gently carrying onward his or her little boat of individuality on the waters of life towards the ocean of total fulfillment. This also means that life and action continue even after self-surrender, but now, naturally and spontaneously and effortlessly, and as an instrument of the Divine and for the good of the world.
So, in Vedanta it is said: 'Even to turn towards God, or towards striving for liberation, man needs His grace.' Only through grace of God do you get even this tendency towards spirituality, this thirst for the highest. Blaise Pascal, the mathematician mystic of the seventeenth century, felt Lord Jesus telling him (Pensess, Dutton paperback edition, pp.150-51):
Seeking is also finding, because what is sought for is also the highest truth within us. That is the way Grace operates in human life; but we fully recognize it only when we become spiritually mature with the strength of manliness leading to the strength of godliness or saintliness in total self-surrender. Then, from that height, one can say: ‘My play is done; Now I see the truth; everything was and is Divine Grace.’ Personal effort and self-surrender to the Divine are only the earlier and later phases of man’s spiritual life in Divine Grace.
[The Speaker:] “I wish all of you complete success in your spiritual training, growth, and fulfillment from manliness to godliness, from manliness to saintliness. That is a complete philosophy of life; and that is the yoga of the Bhagavad Gita.”
Source: Book 'Divine Grace', by Swami Ranganathananda, Published in 1980 by: Sri Ramakrishna Math, Chennai.
