Bhakti-Devotion/ Samarpan - Surrender - Osho ;I Am the Gate

I will call you near just to give you a taste of oneness, and if you can realize this even for a single moment, then you will never be the same again. This is a very patient effort -- very unknown, unpredictable. No one can say when the moment is near. Sometimes your mind is so tuned that you can feel the oneness. That is why I insist on meditation, because it is nothing but tuning the mind to such a peak that you can jump into the oneness.

Meditation to me means tuning of the mind toward oneness, opening of the mind toward oneness. This can only happen when your meditation has gone beyond you; otherwise it can never happen. If it is below you -- you are doing it, you are the controller -- then it cannot happen, because you are the disease. So I persuade you toward meditation in which, beyond certain limits, you will not be. Meditation will take you over. By and by you will be pushed. Of course you will begin the meditation, because there can be no other way. You will have to begin, but you will not end the meditation. You will begin, but you will not end it. In between, somewhere the happening will happen. The meditation will catch hold of you. You will be thrown, and meditation will come in. Then you will be tuned to the cosmos. Then you will be one.

Oneness is important, not relationship. Relationship is sansar, the world, and because of relationship we have to be born again and again. Once you have known oneness, then there is no birth, then there is no death. Then there is no one except you. All are included. You have become the cosmic. The individual must go before the oneness comes. The ego must go before the divine comes.

Ego is the source of all relationship. The world is the relationship. God is not a relationship, the divine is not a relationship. The divine is not selfness. This means you cannot become one with it. So a bhakta, a devotee, can never reach the cosmic, because he thinks in terms of relationship -- God the father, God the lover, God the beloved. He thinks in terms of relationship. He goes on thinking in terms of self and the other. He can never transcend the ego. This is something very subtle, because the devotee is always struggling to surrender. Devotion, the path of devotion, is the path of surrender. He is trying to surrender, but to someone.

If you try to surrender to someone, the other is there. And the other cannot exist if you are not; so you will go on existing in the shadows. You will forget yourself, but forgetting yourself is not surrender. You remember the divine so much that you cannot remember yourself now, but you are in the back, you exist in the shadows. Otherwise God cannot exist as the other.

So the path of devotion, as it exists, cannot lead you to the transcendental, to the cosmic, to the one. To me, it is not a question of surrendering to someone, it is just a question of surrendering the self -- not at someone's feet, just surrendering yourself. If there is no self, then you have become one.

The self can go on creating the seeds, it can go on creating the deception. And the greatest and most certain deception is that of the devotee and God -- a religious deception. Any deception which becomes religious can be dangerous, because you cannot even deny it. Even to deny it will create guilt. You will feel guilty to deny selfhood to the divine, but to the divine the selfhood is the projection of your self. The moment you are not a self, there is no self as far as God is concerned. The whole existence has become selfless. And when the whole existence has become selfless, then you are one with it.

Selflessness is the path.
Selflessness is the real devotion.
Selflessness is the authentic surrender.

So the problem is always of the self. Even if we think of liberation, moksha, we think of freedom of the self, not freedom from the self. We think that then we will be free. But then you cannot be free -- moksha is not the freedom of the self, it is freedom from the self. So I exist in a selflessness, in a flux, in a process of selflessness. Neither am I a self nor is anyone else a self.

Osho

I Am the Gate
Chapter #1
Chapter title: I am consciousness, I am freedom
14 April 1971 am in Bombay, India