Love and business need to be kept apart. If they are mixed, it will be like prostitution. In that nobody gains any pleasure, nobody gains any happiness. Divine love on one side and prostitution on the other hand are the extremities of the band of love.
Sa tu karma gyana yogebhyah api adhiktara
This love is higher than action, higher than any service that you may do.
Service done without love is of no use. People do a lot of service - they work in Red Cross, in hospitals, do this and that; you may do many good things to people, good actions - but Divine love is higher than action.
Knowledge - you may be a wonderful yogi, you maybe doing the highest form of meditation, yoga, practices, but, he says, it is much higher than people who are engaged in action, people who are engaged in knowledge and people who are engaged in yoga - karma gyana yogebhyah api adhiktara.
That does not mean that one who is in Divine love is just in a mood - “I am in Divine love - no need for any yoga, any meditation, any service..” No, he says, thay are all aids to you.
Om Namoh Bhagavate Vasudevaya
Om Namoh Bhagavate Vasudevaya
Om Namoh Bhagavate Vasudevaya
Surrender often denotes a sense of weakness, a sense of failure, a sense of slavery, isn’t it so? But there is another part of surrender. That aspect of the word “surrender” which denotes freedom. The pinnacle of Love is also called “surrender” - where your whole Being becomes one with the infinite, where the river meets the ocean, where the activity reposes in rest, in the self. The culmination of activity, the culmination of feeling, the culmination of action, of a moment, of an event is all called “surrender”.
Surrender simply means from limited power energy to unlimited ocean of existence. Growing from limitation to limitless, merging into the divinity, the vast powerful omnipresent, omnipotent truth. An intense love is associated with surrender. Normally the word surrender is used with intense fear, anguish, weakness. Actually a weak person cannot surrender. He will appear to have surrendered, but inside there is a deep-seated desire to take revenge, to come back with more vengeance. Only when you realize your magnanimity can you be at peace. That state you call surrender, that merging with the Divine. Often surrender has been used as something to convey slavery or weakness. When you let go of all the tension, fear, anxiety and small mindedness, what dawns in you is freedom - that freedom is real joy, is real love, is the beauty, and that could be called surrender. It is in your nature. It is in heaven and it is in your nature. Like the mother’s love for her baby, 6 months, 1 year, 2 year old baby - you can say the mother surrenders to her baby.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, spritual leader and founder of the Art of Living Foundation