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There is a great difference. Not only a difference: obeying and surrender are diametrically opposite. Listen well.

If you are surrendered then there is no question of obeying. Then my voice is your voice; you don’t obey it. Then I am no longer separate from you. If you are not surrendered, then you obey it, because my voice is separate from yours. You manage to obey; you enforce a certain discipline on yourself. There must be some greed behind it. You must be looking for some result. So you obey, but deep down you remain separate. Deep down the resistance goes on continuing. Deep down you are still fighting with me. In the very word obey there is resistance.

Obeying is ugly. Either surrender or be on your own. Obeying is a compromise: you don’t want to surrender, one thing; and you are not confident to remain on your own, another thing. So you compromise. You say: I will remain on my own, but obey. I will listen to you, whatsoever you say, and will find ways and means to obey it.

Surrender is a totally different thing. There is no duality in surrender. When a disciple surrenders to a master, they have become one; that moment the duality has disappeared. Now the master is no longer thought of as separate, so who is going to obey and who is going to obey whom?

“Why does so much reaction come against discipline?”

Because the surrender has not yet happened. Otherwise, discipline is beautiful; there is nothing like discipline. If surrender has happened, then you don’t enforce discipline, it comes spontaneously. When I say something to you, and you are surrendered, you hear my voice as your own. In fact, you will see immediately that this is what you wanted to do, but you were not clear about it. You will be able to understand that I have told you something about which you were groping in the dark. You had a certain feel for it, but things were vague – I have made them clear for you. I have spoken for you. I have brought your own heart’s desire to you. In surrender that is going to happen. Then what is the point of calling it “obeying”? It is not obedience. In obedience, a certain conflict is hidden.

I have heard an anecdote…

A man had been having trouble with his teenage son, so he sent him out to a cattle ranch operated by an old friend. After the youth had been working on the ranch a couple of months, the father asked about his progress.
“Well,” said the rancher friend, “he’s been working good. Already he speaks cow language.”
“Sounds alright.”
“But,” said the old cowman seriously, “he ain’t learnt yet to think like a cow.”

That’s the difference. Once you start thinking like a cow, then there is no question of any obedience or disobedience. Once you start thinking like me, then there is no question, then there is no problem, no conflict, no struggle, no effort. Then, in fact, you are not following me, you are following yourself. This happens in deep surrender.

Ordinarily, people have a very wrong notion about surrender, particularly in the West. Surrender is a deeply Eastern concept. People think that in surrender your individuality will be lost. Absolutely wrong, one hundred percent wrong. In surrender your personality is not lost. In fact in surrender your personality for the first time becomes clear; because if you surrender, you surrender the ego, not the personality, not the individuality. It is just the wrong notion that you are somebody - you drop that notion. Once that notion is dropped, you are at ease; you grow. Your individuality remains intact, in fact it grows bigger and bigger. Of course there will not be the feeling of “I,” but a tremendous growth will happen. If surrender is not there, then millions of questions arise about how to obey.

I was called to a seminar; chancellors and vice-chancellors from many universities had gathered there. They were very worried about the lack of discipline in the schools, colleges and universities, and they were worried about the new generation’s disrespectful attitude toward the teachers.

I listened to their views and I told them, “I see that somewhere the very basis is missing. A teacher is one who is respected naturally, so a teacher cannot demand respect. If the teacher demands respect, he simply shows that he is not a teacher; he has chosen the wrong profession; that is not his vocation. The very definition of a teacher is one who is naturally respected; not that you have to respect him. If you have to respect him, what type of respect is this going to be? Notice: ‘have to respect’ – the whole beauty is lost, the respect is not alive. If it has to be done, then it is not there. When it is there, nobody thinks about it, nobody is self-conscious about it. It simply flows. Whenever a teacher is there it simply flows.”
So I asked the seminar: “Rather than asking students to respect the teachers, please decide again – you must be choosing the wrong teachers, people who are not teachers at all.”

Teachers are as much born as poets, it is a great art. Not everybody can be a teacher, but because of universal education millions of teachers are required. Just think of a society that thinks that poetry is to be taught by poets and everybody is to be taught poetry. Then millions of poets will be required. Of course, then there will be poets’ training colleges. Those poets will be bogus, and they will demand: Applaud us because we are poets! Why are you not respecting us? This has happened with teachers.
In the past there were very few teachers. People used to travel thousands of miles to find a teacher, to be with him. There was tremendous respect, but the respect depended on the quality of the teacher. It was not an expectation from the disciple or from the student or the pupil. It simply happened.

If you are surrendered, obedience simply happens without any self-consciousness. Not that you have to follow, you simply find yourself following. One day you simply recognize the fact that you have been following, and there has been no conflict, no struggle. The more you try to be obedient, the more resistance will grow.

I have heard… A woman complained to her doctor: “You just don’t know how bad I feel! Why, I can’t even eat the things you told me not to!”

Once you say to somebody, “Don’t do this!” a deep desire arises to do it. “Don’t eat this!” a deep desire arises to eat it. The mind always functions negatively; the very function of the mind is to negate, to say no.

Notice how many times you say no in the day, and reduce that quota. Watch yourself, how many times you say yes and increase that quota. By and by you will see just a slight change in the degrees of yes and no, and your personality is basically changing. Watch how many times you say no where yes would have been easier; there was no need really to say no. How many times you could have said yes, but either you said no or you kept quiet.

Whenever you say yes, it goes against the ego. The ego cannot eat yes; it feeds itself on no’s. Say: No! No! No! And great ego arises within yourself. When you go to the railway station, you may be alone at the window to purchase a ticket, but the clerk will start doing something; he will not look at you. He is trying to say no. He will at least make you wait. He will pretend that he is very busy; he will look into this register and this and that. He will force you to wait. That gives him a feeling of power, that he is no ordinary clerk – he can make anybody wait.

It happened just in the beginning days of Soviet Russia when Leon Trotsky was the War Minister there. He was very strict with rules, discipline, this and that. There was going to be a great meeting of the Communist Party, and he was in charge of issuing passes. He completely forgot that he also needed a pass to enter the hall. When he went there the policeman who was standing at the gate stopped him. He said, “Where is your pass?”
Leon Trotsky said, “Don’t you recognize me?”
He said, “I recognize you perfectly well. You are our War Minister. But where is your pass?”
Trotsky said, “Look at the other passes you are holding in your hands. They are signed by me.”
The policeman said, “Maybe, but this is the rule, that nobody can enter without a pass. So go back home and find a pass.”
Leon Trotsky wrote in his diary, “I could see how powerful he was feeling that day: saying no to the War Minister, making him feel tiny.”

People go on saying no. The child asks his mother: “Can I go outside and play?” And immediately, without thinking for a single moment, she says no. Politics! What is wrong with being outside, going outside and playing? The child is going to go; the child will insist, and he will throw a tantrum, and then mother will say, “Okay, you can go.” This could have been done in the first place, in the very beginning, but even a mother cannot lose an opportunity to say no.

The first thing that comes to your mind is no. Yes is more difficult. You say yes only when you feel absolutely helpless and you have to say it. Just notice! Make yourself a yea-sayer; drop no-saying because it is the poison of no on which the ego feeds itself, nourishes itself. A religious man is one who has said yes to existence. Out of that yes, God is born. Yes is the father of God; that yes attitude is a religious attitude.

But remember: I don’t insist on obedience. Either be with me totally, or don’t be with me at all. Compromise is not good, compromise kills. Compromise will make you lukewarm, and nobody can evaporate from that state. Compromise comes out of fear. Take courage – either be with me or don’t be with me; but don’t be in limbo. Otherwise, one part of your mind will go on saying: I have to follow, I have to do this, and another part will go on saying: No, why should I do it? And this constant conflict within yourself dissipates energy, it is destructive. It will poison your whole being.