I don’t know any effort in my life. And I cannot conceive that a man of effort can ever be in tune with existence. With whom are you fighting? Effort is a fight.

I don’t give you any discipline, I don’t give you any commandments. I don’t want you to be anyone else than you are. It is perfectly beautiful the way you are. The day you understand it…

No trees are making any effort. Small bushes are perfectly happy with being small. Tall cedars of Lebanon are perfectly happy with their tallness, but there is no comparison; they don’t look at the small bushes as inferior – that is their spontaneity, that is how they are. In this relaxedness comes a shadow, silently, without even making any sound of footsteps – acceptance.

But I don’t like the word, because acceptance means that something in you is not accepting – maybe it is a minority part. To repress that minority part, you bring total acceptance.

A young man came to me some twenty years ago and said, “I want to totally surrender to you.” I said, “Then you have knocked on the wrong door – go back. The day there is no idea of total and there is no idea of surrender, my doors are open to you. I will rejoice in you as you are – not pruning your branches, molding you into a certain ideal.” But all the so-called religions of the world have been doing the same. They are asking of you only one thing: “Don’t be yourself, be somebody else.”

Just the other day, I was talking to Deva Amrito. I told him, “These should be the last words in your pilgrimage, in your seeking for the truth…” His book is going to be called Years Of Preparation. That gives a dangerous meaning: it means you are moving to achieve something, to become something. There is a certain ideal, far away – you would like to be a Gautam Buddha, a Bodhidharma, a Chuang Tzu or a Jesus Christ. The figure may not be very clear, but there is some faraway star that you are striving to reach. I told him, “These are my words, and should be put in quotation marks: All these years of preparation were futile. You are exactly the same as you have always been.”

But there are types…people like me are very lazy. I know that this is my place; I don’t go running around and then come to this seat. Years Of Preparation – and to achieve something you have always been? And you cannot achieve anything that you have not always been.

He told me – he is a very nice heart, very childish and very loving – “I am disillusioned with money, with power, with love, with relationships…”

I said, “You have to be disillusioned about one thing more.”

He looked at me – “What else is there to be disillusioned about?”