You are calculating wrongly: you are doing some arithmetic, two plus two is four, but you are putting five. The moment you realize that two plus two is not five but four, are you dropping something, are you renouncing something, are you losing something? Will you feel that it is a loss – it was five and now it is only four? No, it is not a loss because it was never five, it was always four. When you were thinking it was five, then too it was four. Not even for a single moment was it five. You were in a delusion.
Ego is a hallucination. You are not separate from the whole – trying of course; hence the whole misery. Trying to do something which is not possible, which is impossible, is bound to create misery. Misery is unnatural; it is your invention. Misery does not exist; it is your hallucination, it is a nightmare created by you. It is your great work!
Bliss is natural. Bliss is the very nature of the way things are. Aes dhammo sanantano, says Buddha: bliss is the way things are. But you are trying to be something which is not possible: you are trying to be separate, you are trying to be an island, and you belong to the continent, the vast, infinite continent of God or godliness.
Surrender means seeing that “I am not separate” – just seeing that “I am not separate.” Nothing is surrendered, nothing is dropped; just a nonsense idea, a dream is no more there because you are awake.
Two young couples had decided to spend their honeymoon at the same hotel. The first morning the two young men came into the hall at the same time and met at the elevator.
One turned to the other and said, “Say, where’s your wife?”
“Oh, she’s in her room, smoking. Where’s yours?”
“Oh, she’s hot too, but she’s not smoking!”
Just a misunderstanding.
An Irishman, on the night that his wife was confined in childbirth, went out a bit prematurely to celebrate the addition to his family, with a few chosen cronies. He did not return home to his family until three o’clock in the morning.
He was barely in the house when the nurse rushed up and uncovered a bundle of blankets, showing the bewildered Irishman triplets. At this very moment the clock struck once, twice, three times.
“One, two, three…sure, an’ I could count ’em myself, small thanks to ye,” Pat addressed the clock solemnly. “An’ one thing more – I’ll be thanking the good God I did not come home at twelve!”
Ego is a state of blindness, of drunkenness, of dreaming. Just waking up is surrender. Either wake up and surrender happens, or surrender and you are awake. They are two sides of the same coin.