"You will say, 'I have surrendered.' You will claim surrender, and if somebody says that it is not true, you will feel angry, hurt. The ego is there now, trying to surrender. The ego can do anything; the only thing that the ego cannot do is non-doing, witnessing.

"So just sit silently, watch the doer, and don't try in any way to manipulate it. Because the moment you start manipulating, the ego has come back. Nothing can be done about it; one has just to be a witness of the misery that the ego creates, of the false pleasures and gratifications that ego promises. Doings in this world and doings in the other world –spiritual, divine, the material – whatsoever the realm, the doer will remain the ego. You are not supposed to do anything, and if you start doing something you will miss the whole point. Just be there, watch, understand, and don't do. Don't ask, 'How to drop the ego?' Who will drop it? Who will drop whom? When you don't do anything, suddenly the witnessing part is separate from the doer; a gap arises. The doer goes on doing and the seer goes on seeing. Suddenly, you are filled with a new light, a new benediction: you are not the ego, you have never been the ego – how foolish that you ever believed in it.

"There are people who are trying to fulfill their egos; they are wrong. There are people who are trying to drop their egos; they are wrong. Because when the witness arises you simply see the whole game. There is nothing to be fulfilled, nothing to be dropped. The ego is not of any substance. It is made of the stuff that dreams are made of. It is just an idea, an air bubble – just hot air within you and nothing else. You need not drop it because in the very dropping or in asking how to drop it you believe in it, you are still clinging to it.

"It happened that a Zen master awoke one morning and he told his disciple, 'I had a dream in the night. Will you please interpret it for me?'

"The disciple said, 'You wait, I will bring some cold water so you can wash your face.' He went away to fetch water and returned."