“But only a man of deep surrender knows that god is our protector,” says Osho.
(To James)
This is your name: Swami Samarpan James. Samarpan means surrender, total surrender, a state of ultimate let-go. And James means god is our protector.
But only a man of deep surrender knows that god is our protector. If you are not surrendered, you can never come to know that beautiful truth. The unsurrendered man tries to protect himself; obviously, there is nobody else to protect him. He is alone and he has to struggle and fight against everybody: against nature, against society. His whole life is a struggle to survive.
Charles Darwin says the whole history of life on the earth is nothing but the struggle for survival and the fittest survive. So you have not only to be fighting continuously, you have to prove your mettle. You have to be more aggressive than others, you have to be more cunning than others, you have to be more destructive than others, only then you can succeed.
Charles Darwin knew nothing of surrender. He has seen only the superficial history of life, he has not looked into the depths.
There have been people like Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, who have lived without any struggle, with no idea to survive, who were ready to die any moment, who were so surrendered to the whole that there was no question to protect themselves or to fight for their protection or even to fight for their existence, yet they lived the highest quality of life. They reached the ultimate pinnacle of joy.
Bertrand Russell says, there are three struggles in life. One is with nature; science arises out of it. Another is with society; sociology, morality, ethics, these arise out of it. And the third is the struggle of man with his own instincts. Out of that struggle religion arises.
Now he has explained everything with a single idea of struggle. There is no need for any concept, for any hypothesis for surrender in his vision of life. But his vision of life is not of much depth. It is the same: it is really nothing but a reinterpretation of the Darwinian hypothesis.
Bertrand Russell also lived without knowing anything of meditation.
Meditation’s whole secret is surrender, trust, and then a totally different dimension opens up. Suddenly you know god protects you. You are safe, you have always been safe, you were unnecessarily struggling. There was no need to struggle, you were simply wasting your energy. You would have rejoiced with the same energy. You would have danced with the same energy. Your life would have been a beautiful flowering and a fragrance with the same energy that you wasted in fighting, all kinds of fights.
Osho, No Man is an Island, Ch 12 (unpublished)
12 May 1980
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