According to Osho, true sacrifice isn’t mutilation or heroic suffering; it is dropping the inner ‘doer.’ When the egoic urge to act and achieve is surrendered, you shift from action to being—silence dawns, truth is revealed, and transmission becomes possible. If sacrifice is imitative or greedy, it is meaningless; only authentic renunciation of doer-hood brings immediate awakening.
Real sacrifice is letting go of the bossy part of you that must control and do, so quiet truth can appear.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
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.
Osho, you have earlier said, “Live moment to moment, live in the present.” Now you are saying, “Return to the past.” What should we do?
So it is with the mind—there are ruts. The past means endless grooves. However much you understand, your intellect agrees, you make decisions, you resolve—at the moment of resolve you feel something is going to change. But not even an hour passes before your decision breaks. Then only self-condemnation is produced, nothing else. Your saints, your fakirs, your priests and pundits—most of the time they only succeed in producing self-condemnation in you, nothing else. Their words are logically correct. You cannot even say they are wrong; you have to admit they are right. In that admission you take a decision. But against what are you deciding? Inside are grooves carved since who knows when, deep tracks. Walking in them has become a habit. It is easy to walk in them. They will pull you again and again. The meaning of returning into the past is: these grooves must be erased.…
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.…
Before it comes into existence one lives moment to moment. Who cares to remember the past? So the child up to the third or fourth year remains spontaneous, wild, natural, outside society, on the fringe. It is a cultivated phenomenon, hence it can be dropped. If it were natural there would be no way to drop it. Because it is put together by society it can be easily dismantled. And that's what sannyas is all about, dismantling the ego. The process is painful because you have to become too attached to it. But once you understand that the ego is the root cause of all your misery, you are ready to go through the surgery. It is better to be finished with it in one stroke rather than to go on being miserable for your whole life.
Osho, tell us of some lure that would set us moving toward God—some temptation that would engage our mind in God-realization.
Difficult today, difficult tomorrow; the day after, not so difficult—if you persist and don’t jump up, “Oh, a bad thought—get rid of it!” The witness has nothing to do with good or bad. Thorns have the same worth as flowers. We label; the witness does not. Soon, an amazing thing begins: now and then a gap appears—an interval. A thought comes, then the next does not; a space remains. In that empty space, the first glimpses begin. In that emptiness, even you are not—there is only emptiness. That is the door. Keep at it, and thoughts lessen; spaces grow. It’s like a road where a person passes, then for an hour no one—emptiness. A thought appears on the screen, then none for a long while; the screen is blank. From that blankness, your first contacts with God begin—because in that moment you are present. Thought can take you to past…