WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS TO SURRENDER TO KRISHNA?
There are no Conditions to surrender to Krishna because Surrendering to Krishna is SPONTANEOUS and can make a person pure devotee.
A devotee should be like a child.
A child has no doubts about his parents and has blind trust on them.
In fact, a child CAN NOT THINK anything against his parents.
(SYMPTOMS OF PURE AND SURRENDERED DEVOTEES! READ HERE!)
This innocence is the reason why all the people like children.
Similarly a devotee blindly trusts Krishna and he is depending only Krishna for all his needs. In fact, he does not have any other needs except the opportunity to serve Lord.
Krishna too likes such innocent devotees who are depending on Him in a surrendered state of mind.
Surrender – Ok. How can we surrender to Lord?
It needs total change in our consciousness – from material consciousness to Krishna Consciousness.
5 Tips to come to total surrender state!
(1) We should accept and deal only with those things & persons that can help us grow in Krishna Consciousness and avoid (or reduce) things and persons unfavourable to Krishna Consciousness. For example, we should avoid foods that increase tamo and rajo gunas and take us away from Krishna. We should have less and “only on need” association with the people who are highly materialistic to avoid getting dragged into materialistic life again.
(Is Surrender to Krishna possible when we perform duties as said by Krishna? READ HERE!)
(2) We should have firm belief that Krishna will protect us and save us from the painful material lives. We can not grow even a bit in surrendering process if we do not have this faith.
(3) We should be fully dependency on Lord for all the needs of our life as said above.
(4) When we grow in the service of Krishna, we should lose interest in materialistic life style. This will naturally happen. Unless we start to lose interest in mateialistic way of life, that means, we have not sufficiently grown in surrender. So, total desertion of materialistic life leads to total surrender.
(5) More humbleness – More surrender. So, a totally surrendered devotee is humble to everyone and everywhere. No one can accuse such a humble devotee for any reason.
(Surrender to Krishna and Surrender to Guru – which is important? A detailed analysis! READ HERE!)
Now, we have to evaluate whether we have grown in surrender process. Unless we evaluate this periodically, we can not attain that total surrendered state earlier.
This is the secret of success in attaining peak stage of total surrender in our devotional practice.
Will chanting help in surrender?
Surrendering to Krishna means depending only on Krishna for everything and not thinking that we have independence to do the things. This can not be taught theoretically. It should be practiced and experienced.
All the actions mentioned by you are just the tools or modes for practice to develop the mood of surrender.
(WHAT IF A DISCIPLE IS UNABLE TO SURRENDER TO GURU? READ HERE!)
A simple description here:
Chanting is a sadhana, ie, devotional practice.
Reading is also a sadhana. Offering worship to Lord every day is also a sadhana.
Getting initiated means, we are taking oath in front of a guru that we will follow all the recommended sadhanas.
Why these practices or sadhanas? Can we go back to Krishna just by doing these practices?
It is not the meaning. We need to understand properly.
At present, most of the people are surrendered to maya and hence they are busy in satisfying their senses.
Therefore, we have to divert those senses towards Krishna to purify them and to make them have the highest taste and forget these lower tastes.
(How to divert those senses towards Krishna? READ HERE!)
Here comes these practices.
We first try to chant, worship and read about Lord.
When we feel that we have developed a taste and can adopt this higher taste, we like to take an oath for our entire life to develop Krishna Prema.
Therefore, we accept a guru through initiation and promise him that we will follow the devotional way of life.
As promised, we chant, read, worship and think more about the Lord.
Continuous following of these practices slowly changes our material consciousness and our view towards this material life.
The first sign is that we will start thinking ourselves as insignificant without Krishna and we have a value only if we are connected to Krishna.
(Since this world is under Maya, how can we fully surrender to Krishna? READ HERE!)
This humbleness is the first sign of developing in devotion to Krishna and this indicates that we are surrendering our ego of “I”, “Mine”, “I only can”, etc to Krishna and accepting Him as the doer of all the actions and we are just the instruments in the hands of Krishna.
We start to feel Krishna as the most important person for us. We slowly develop a love towards Krishna.
Our practices are started to be done with more taste and dedication. This further increases our priorities towards Krishna.
Then, we become uninterested in satisfying our senses.
We start to think about how to please Krishna.
We come to a state that we can never remain without thinking of Krishna.
We see only Krishna in whatever we see and whoever we meet. We develop mercy on all the surroundings.
Thus, we start to perform our assigned duties like a machine and our thoughts remain with Krishna.
This is the surrendered state.
Now, do you understand why we chant, read and accept a guru?
These practices, if done sincerely, will gradually take us to the state of surrender to Krishna. If we do these practices mechanically without a taste, it will take more time to go to the surrendered state.
Hope you are clear now about the Conditions to surrender to Krishna
(SYMPTOMS OF PURE AND SURRENDERED DEVOTEES! READ HERE!)