Surrender is the highest form of love, the purest form of love. You will not feel dependent, because there will be no clinging in it. You will not feel dependent, because it is not out of loneliness that you have surrendered. If you have surrendered out of loneliness then it is not surrender at all, then it is something else.

Another thing: surrender always happens, it is not a doing. You cannot do it -- how can you do surrender? If you do it, it is not surrender. You are the doer -- and if the doer is there then it can be taken back any moment.

Surrender happens; the doer is not found. You simply find yourself melting into somebody, into something. You may find yourself melting into a sunset, and it is surrender. You may find yourself melting into the starry night, and it is surrender. You may find yourself melting into a woman or man, and it is surrender. You may find yourself melting into music, and it is surrender. Surrender has many dimensions, but the taste is the same: you simply find yourself melting. You simply find yourself no more; a kind of egolessness is felt.

You are... in fact you are very much, and yet you are not. Presence and absence both together -- surrender is paradoxical. Presence, because the ego is not there, so you are just awareness; and absence because the ego is not there, so you cannot say "I am."

-Rajneesh

Old Heraclitus is right -- he is a buddha -- he is right when he says you cannot step twice in the same river. No buddha is ever the same again; not even for two consecutive moments is he the same. He moves with life, he is a river, he is not stagnant. He has uniqueness, originality. He speaks, not authoritatively, but on his own authority.

Remember the difference. The person who speaks authoritatively derives his authority from somewhere else -- from the Vedas, from The Bible, from the Koran, from the tradition, from the state, from the church. The man who speaks on his own authority derives his authority from nowhere. It is his own experience -- and experience is self- evident, self-validating.

-Rajneesh

One Sufi mystic who had remained happy his whole life -- no one had ever seen him unhappy -- who was always laughing, who was laughter, whose whole being was a perfume of celebration.... In his old age, when he was dying, on his deathbed and still enjoying death, laughing hilariously, a disciple asked, "You puzzle us. Now you are dying, why are you laughing? What is there funny about it? We are feeling so sad. We wanted to ask you many times in your life why you are never sad. But now, confronting death at least, one should be sad. You are still laughing -- how are you managing it?"

The old man said, "It is simple. I had asked my master -- I had gone to my master as a young man; I was only seventeen and already miserable, and my master was old, seventy, and he was sitting under a tree, laughing for no reason at all. There was nobody else there, nothing had happened, nobody had cracked a joke or anything, and he was simply laughing, holding his belly. I asked him, 'What is the matter with you? Are you mad or something?'

"He said, 'One day I was also as sad as you are. Then it dawned on me that it is my choice, it is my life.'

"Since that day, every morning when I get up, the first thing I decide is... before I open my eyes I say to myself, 'Abdullah'" -- that was his name -- "'what do you want? Misery? Blissfulness? What you are going to choose today?' And it happens that I always choose blissfulness."

It is a choice. Try it. When you become aware the first moment in the morning that sleep has left, ask yourself, "Abdullah, another day! What is your idea? Do you choose misery or blissfulness?"

And who would choose misery? And WHY? It is so unnatural -- unless one feels blissful in misery, but then too you are choosing bliss, not misery.

-Rajneesh

This is one of my fundamental things -- you have to understand I am against the whole idea of karma. It is a strategy of the mind to throw responsibility on the past. And once the responsibility is thrown on something -- whatsoever it is, x, y, z, it doesn't matter what it is -- you can relax in your misery and you can remain miserable. What can you do? You start feeling like a victim. Now the past cannot be changed; what has been done has been done, you cannot undo it now, you have to accept it.

It is because of this foolish idea of karma that the East has suffered so much. People are poor, and they say what they can do? They are hungry, starving, dying, and they go on thinking what can they do? They have done something wrong in the past, they have to suffer for it. A great invention of the priests to keep people in misery and yet contented, in great suffering yet creating no trouble for the status quo.

-Rajneesh

We are brought up in such a way that we only believe that we are free, but we are not. While nations exist, no man is really free. While politicians go on dominating humanity, the world will remain in slavery. They go on persuading you that you are free. You are not. There are a thousand and one walls around you -- maybe very transparent so that you can look through the walls, and that gives you a feeling that you are free, but you are not. While there are religions in your head -- Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Jainism, Buddhism -- you are not free. A mind cannot be free.

Freedom means freedom from the mind.

Only a no-mind knows the taste of freedom.

But to be a no-mind is so risky; you will have to lose all that you have become accustomed to, all that you have become so attached to. All your possessions are contained in your mind: your philosophies, your religions, your concepts, your theories, all are contained in your mind. If you drop the mind -- and that's what meditation is all about, dropping the mind -- you will feel as if you have been robbed, as if you have suddenly been forced to be naked, as if suddenly inside you have become empty. You will miss that old fullness, although it was only junk. But people's idea is that it is always better to have something than nothing, whatsoever that something is.

-Rajneesh