According to Osho, surrender can’t be achieved by effort; it happens when all striving to attain stops. Notice how the mind turns every word into a project; stay alert and refuse its old work-ethic reflex. Become receptive and playful—let work be love, not duty. Relax, trust, and allow what already is to reveal itself; surrender is recognition, not acquisition.
Stop trying to do surrender; relax, watch your busy mind, and let life unfold like enjoyable play.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, what is surrender? I used to think I knew. Now it is a mystery.
THE FALSE KNOWLEDGE de-mystifies existence; the true knowledge re-mystifies it. Knowing, if authentic, makes life more of a mystery than it has ever been before. Knowledge certainly covers your eyes with dark clouds, creates a wall of thick smoke, and you start feeling you know. In fact, you are going deeper into ignorance. To be knowledgeable is to be more ignorant than even the ignorant ones. The Upanishads have a tremendously significant statement. They say: The ignorant man is lost in darkness, but the knowledgeable is lost in deeper darkness than the ignorant -- because the knowledgeable lives in an "as if" world. He thinks he knows, but he knows not. He only believes; he has not seen. He believes in God, he believes in love, he believes in surrender, but belief is always a cover-up. Your wound is covered, but it is not healed that way. In fact, the…
Question: First question: Osho, how can the state of surrender be attained? In life, the most difficult, the most arduous inner state is surrender. The mind is built around the ego. It is easy for the mind to assume, “I am the center of the whole universe,” as if the earth, the sun, the stars all revolve around me, for me; the whole of life is a means, and I am the end. The ego-state means: I am the goal and everything else is a means. Everything exists for me; I exist for no one. I am the target; all that happens is for me. All is an arrangement to serve me. This is the ego-mood. Surrender is exactly the opposite: I am nothing. My being is like a void, and the center lies outside me.
Beloved Osho, my surrender is goal-oriented. I'm surrendering in order to win freedom, so it is not real surrender at all. I'm watching it, but the problem is: it is always 'I' who is watching. Therefore every realization out of that watching is a reinforcement of the ego. I feel tricked by my ego.
The ego is always goal-oriented. It is always greedy, it is always grabbing. It is always searching for more and more and more; it lives in the more. If you have money it wants to have more money; if you have a house it wants to have a bigger house; if you have a woman it wants to have a beautiful woman, but it always wants more. The ego is constantly hungry. It lives in the future and in the past. In the past it lives as a hoarder -- "I have this and this and this." It gets a great satisfaction: "I have got something" -- power, prestige, money. It gives a kind of reality to it. It gives the notion that, "When I have these things, I must be there." And it lives in the future with the idea of more. It lives as memory and as desire.…
Beloved Osho, I have always heard you speaking about surrender, and it seems to me that surrender is the only important factor in achieving transformation. Then how to surrender? What is the meaning, method and process of it? And what contribution does the active meditation make in reaching the state of surrender?
Mahavira succeeded -- the other seeker in the same part of the world. He was doing certain techniques and he succeeded. Through techniques he succeeded in dissolving his ego. That is why Jainas and Buddhists are bonafide enemies. They cannot come to any reconciliation, they cannot come to any compromise, because they are so absolutely opposite. Mahavira succeeded through technique, so the whole teaching of Mahavira is of method. Buddha succeeded through failure, so his whole teaching is of effortlessness: "Do not do anything." These are the two dimensions. Both are good, but my suggestion is to first try to follow technique. If you succeed, it is okay. If you fail, then surrender will be possible. Then it too is okay. I am for both; that is why I look contradictory. One young man reached me today and he said, "You are so contradictory that it is impossible to follow…
My anger has lessened, my sexual desire is not my master, my mind is more still, and still I know I am not surrendered to you. What will it take -- a thunderbolt.?
The first thing to be understood you cannot surrender; it is not something you can do. If YOU are there, then how is the surrender possible? If the doer is there, then how can the surrender happen? It is not an act. When YOU are not there, then the surrender IS. So you cannot surrender -- one thing is absolutely certain. YOU cannot surrender, because YOU is the barrier. And this is what you have been trying, trying to surrender. It is like trying to go to sleep: try hard, and then failure is absolute. Sleep comes when you are not there and the effort has ceased. When you are trying no more to go to sleep -- you have completely forgotten about it, because any activity is against sleep -- if you are trying to go to sleep.... That's what so many people who suffer from sleeplessness, insomnia, are…