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If each time the Power intervenes and brings in the Truth, you turn your back on it and call in again the falsehood that has been expelled, it is not the divine Grace that you must blame for failing you, but the falsity of your own will and the imperfection of your own surrender.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/32/the-mother-i#p8</ref>
Reject too the false and indolent expectation that the divine Power will do even the surrender for you. The Supreme demands your surrender to her, but does not impose it: you are free at every moment, till the irrevocable transformation comes, to deny and to reject the Divine or to recall your self-giving, if you are willing to suffer the spiritual consequence.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/32/the-mother-i#p12</ref>
<center>~</center> An inert passivity is constantly confused with the real surrender, but out of an inert passivity nothing true and powerful can come.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/32/the-mother-i#p13</ref> <center>~</center>
''I can try to call down the Mother's Force, but faith and surrender would require a wonderful Yogic poise and power possible only in born Yogis, I think.''
Not at all. A wonderful Yogic poise and power would usually bring self-reliance rather than faith and surrender. It is the simple people who do the latter most easily.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/32/faith-and-the-working-of-the-mothers-force#p8,p9</ref> <center>~</center> Human consciousness is so corrupted that men prefer the miseries of the ego and its ignorance to the luminous joy that comes from a sincere surrender to the Divine. So great is their blindness that they refuse even to try the experiment and would rather be subject to the miseries of their ego than make the effort needed to get rid of them. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/10-february-1972#p1</ref>
If you have the slightest feeling that you are making a sacrifice, then it is a spontaneous self-giving, a giving of all your self to the Divine, to a greater Consciousness of which you are a part. Surrender will not diminish, but increase; it will not lessen or weaken or destroy your personality, it will fortify and aggrandise it.
Surrender means a free total giving no longer surrender. For it means that you reserve yourself or that you are trying to give, with grudging or with pain and effort, and have not the joy of the gift, perhaps not even the feeling that you are giving. When you do anything with the sense of a compression of your being, be sure that you are doing it in the wrong way.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/4-august-1929#p3</ref> <center>~</center> There are many wrong ideas current about surrender. Most people seem to look upon surrender as an abdication of the personality; but that is a grievous error. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/4-august-1929#p3p5</ref>
The ordinary social notions distinguish between two classes of men,—the generous, the avaricious. The avaricious man is despised and blamed, while the generous man is considered unselfish and useful to society and praised for his virtue. But to the spiritual vision, they both stand on the same level; the generosity of the one, the avarice of the other are deformations of a higher truth, a greater divine power. There is a power, a divine movement that spreads, diffuses, throws out freely forces and things and whatever else it possesses on all the levels of nature from the most material to the most spiritual plane. Behind the generous man and his generosity is a soul-type that expresses this movement; he is a power for diffusion, for wide distribution. There is another power, another divine movement that collects and amasses; it gathers and accumulates forces and things and all possible possessions, whether of the lower or of the higher planes. The man you tax with avarice was meant to be an instrument of this movement. Both are important, both needed in the entire plan; the movement that stores up and concentrates is no less needed than the movement that spreads and diffuses. Both, if truly surrendered to the Divine, will be utilised as instruments for its divine work to the same degree and with an equal value. But when they are not surrendered both are alike moved by impulses of ignorance. One is pushed to throw away, the other is pulled towards keeping back; but both are driven by forces obscure to their own consciousness, and between the two there is little to choose. One could say to the much-praised generous man, from the higher point of vision of Yoga, "All your impulses of generosity are nothing in the values of the spirit, for they come from ego and ignorant desire." And, on the other hand, among those who are accused of avarice, you can see sometimes a man amassing and hoarding, full of a quiet and concentrated determination in the work assigned to him by his nature, who, once awakened, would make a very good instrument of the Divine. But ordinarily the avaricious man acts from ego and desire like his opposite; it is the other end of the same ignorance. Both will have to purify themselves and change before they can make contact with the something higher that is behind them and express it in the way to which they are called by their nature.