Sannyas Is Not So Cheap - OSHO

I want my people to understand it clearly. Neither your clothes, nor your outer disciplines nor anything that has been given to you by tradition and you have accepted it just on belief, is going to help. The only thing that can create a revolution in you is going beyond the mind into the world of consciousness. Except that, nothing is religious. But to begin with and with a world which is too much obsessed with outer things, I had to start sannyas also with outer things. Change your cloths into orange, wear a Mala, meditate, but the emphasis was only on meditation.

But I found that people can change their clothes very easily but they cannot change their minds. They can wear the Mala, but they cannot move into their consciousness. And because they are in orange cloths, wearing a Mala, having a new name, they start believing that they have become a sannyasin.

Sannyas is not so cheap. Hence it is time and you are mature enough that beginning phase is over. If you like the orange color, the red color, perfectly good - it cannot do any harm, but it is not a help either. If you love the Mala, if you love the locket with my picture on it, it is simply your ornament, but it has nothing to do with religion. So now I reduce religion to its absolute essentiality. And that is meditation. If you are meditating and if you are reaching higher and higher into your consciousness, thoughts are left far behind. You experience that your body is just outside you, your mind is just outside you and you are standing in the middle, the center of the cyclone, in utter silence, in absolute beauty, in great light, in utter fulfillment. Except the process of meditation, everything is non-essential.

I don't want my people to be lost into non-essentials. In the beginning it was necessary. Now years of listening to me, understanding me, you are in a position to be freed from all outer bondage. And you can for the first time be really a sannyasin only if you are moving inwards.

(Osho - The Last Testament, Vol. 6 #12, 12 August 1986 in Bombay, India.)

The day you take the initiation into sannyas is not necessarily the beginning of sannyas. It is simply your indication that, "I am willing to wait for sannyas to happen to me." Initiation is only your saying yes to existence, and opening all your doors and windows for the fresh breeze and the sun to enter and cleanse you and make you part of the whole.

Some day sannyas will begin. It can begin in the moment of initiation, if your intensity, integrity, your trust and your love are total, but it is rarely so. It is always sixty percent, forty percent; seventy percent, thirty percent... There are people who may have ninety-nine percent trust, but that one percent doubt is enough to prevent... years, even lives. Unless you are one hundred percent open, unless the very word `no' has dropped from your vocabulary, the great revolution of sannyas will not happen to you.

(Osho - Om Shantih, Shantih, Shantih #26)