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A brainless robot cannot surrender; and those who find difficulty in surrendering are brainless robots. To surrender, great understanding is needed, great intelligence. You will be surprised to know that the more stupid a person is, the less possibility of surrender. Idiots can’t surrender, although those who can’t surrender think they are very intelligent and that’s why they are not surrendering. But have you ever heard of any idiot surrendering? Imbeciles cannot surrender, retarded people cannot surrender.

The highest intelligence is needed to surrender, to see the point that “I have been running in circles. If I go on depending on myself, I will go on running in the same circles again and again.” The only possibility to get out of the wheel is to take somebody else’s hand, somebody who is outside the vicious circle. To take that support is what surrender is.

Down the ages it has been thought that the intelligent person can’t surrender, that it is the gullible person who surrenders. That is not so. Modern research says something else: it is only the very, very intelligent who can surrender. The gullible believes, but does not surrender. The intelligent surrenders, does not believe. And the difference is great.

You can believe without surrendering; then the belief is just a lip-service. You say yes on the surface, and deep down you go on doing whatsoever you are doing. To be surrendered means you have said yes from the circumference to the very core. You have become a yes from the center to the circumference. There is only one quality of consciousness: yes. And immediately, in this yes, you come out of the ego – because ego exists on no, ego feeds on no. The more you say no, the more ego is strengthened. No is the food for the ego; yes is the food for egolessness.

It is a simple phenomenon, but only very, very intelligent people can understand it. Have you observed? Whenever you say no, you feel very clearly that you are. That’s why people enjoy saying no. Even when there is no need, they will say no. The child asks the mother, “Can I go out to play?” and she says, “No!” Now there is no need to say no, and she knows perfectly well that the child is not going to listen. And the child also knows perfectly well that if he creates some kind of tantrum that she is going to say yes, so he creates a tantrum. The mother says no because she feels good by saying no. Then the child starts saying no to the mother; that is how he creates his ego.

That’s why parents and children are always in conflict; teachers and students are always in conflict. Universities are not just accidentally burning all over the world: the conflict is that the teacher says no and the student says no. Two no’s fighting! Husbands and wives are fighting continuously; each has to say no, and the ego feels very hurt. Watch: whenever you have to say yes, it feels that you are defeated, the other is a winner. Then you try to find a situation where you can again say no and remain with your no and force yes on the other.

This is how the ego exists. The day the child learns to say no is the beginning of the ego. Before that there was primal innocence; before that the child was in trust; he had no idea of who he was. There was utter silence and peace and joy and celebration. The day he says no, something closes up; he becomes defensive, he creates an armor, and he starts saying as many no’s as possible. If the parents say, “Don’t smoke,” he will smoke. If the parents say, “Don’t do this,” he will have to do it. The rebellion has started. He has to become an ego.

Surrender means you have lived through the ego and you have seen the futility of it, you have seen the utter misery of it. You have lived through the ego and you know that you have not been able to really live through it. It does not allow you to live, because it does not allow you any expansion. It makes you smaller and smaller and smaller; it encages you deeper and deeper. It puts you into a windowless state, all openings disappear. You start living in a kind of grave. To surrender means to see this, and then to find a person with whom it will be easier to say yes, a person who has had a glimpse of the real man and to whom love has happened, who has become love.

If you can find a man with whom you can say yes easily, you have found your master. This is the criterion for how to decide if you have come across a master: if you can say yes easily, simply, innocently. The presence of the man makes you feel to say yes. No becomes difficult; even if you want to say no out of old habit and structure, you hesitate, you find it hard to say. Yes comes easily, like a flood. Whenever you say yes, great joy arises; whenever you say no, you feel great misery, as if you have harmed yourself.

Whenever you have found a person with whom this starts happening, you have found the master. Then forget about the whole world and what they say about the master. You have found the master. He may not be the master for others, but he is the master for you. Disappear into him.

[What is the difference between being totally surrendered and being a brainless robot?]

A robot can never surrender, not even partially. Only an utterly intelligent person can surrender. Of course, in the beginning it is partial; slowly, slowly, one gathers more and more courage. As one tastes the joys of it, the more one adventures, explores into it.

The man of utter intelligence surrenders totally. In that surrender, the ego disappears. Not that in that surrender you become a slave to the master – there is nobody to make you a slave. The fact that there was nobody to make you a slave is why you were feeling so beautiful in saying yes to the man. If there was somebody to make you a slave you would have naturally felt it impossible to say yes. His ego would have offended your ego; there is a subtle interaction between egos.

If the man has helped you to surrender, that simply means there was nobody to offend you. There was pure love, there was nobody trying to possess you. You were not being cowed down. Once you have surrendered the ego, you will be surprised that there is nobody to take possession of you – the ego has disappeared. The master and the surrender was just a device. You have attained to primal innocence; you can move on your own.

When the master sees that you have surrendered totally, he makes you absolutely free. He says, “Now there is no need, now there is no question of surrender.”Once surrendered, then there is no need for any surrender. The need for surrender is because of the ego. Once the disease has disappeared, the medicine has to be thrown away. The master takes it away, himself.

And then you are free of ego and free of egolessness. That’s what Ikkyu calls real emptiness: you are empty of everything and empty of emptiness too. Ego has gone and egolessness has also gone. Now there is nobody, absolute nothingness. And the purity of it and the benediction of it are such that if you don’t taste it in this life, you have wasted it again.