Osho – Life is divine. In fact life and God are synonymous. There is no God except life, and there is no life except God; they are two terms for the same mystery. But for centuries religious people have been against life. They were living with the idea that if you want to choose God you have to renounce life, you have to sacrifice life in order to be with God.
That is utter nonsense, but because of that nonsense millions of people could not be religious because they could not renounce life. It is so unnatural to renounce it. It is your very being — how can you renounce it? So only very few people, who were pathological, neurotic, became religious. The healthy person remained unreligious, he had to remain unreligious. The religious people created such barriers for the healthy that only the ill, the mentally perverted could get in. Health was
something unspiritual.
My whole effort here is to destroy that whole nonsense and to help you to love life. Sannyas is not renunciation of life but a tremendous love affair with life. The deeper you live, the closer you come to God. The more passionately you live, the more divine you are. The intensity of your life, your liveliness is the only way to reach God.
Nothing has to be renounced. Everything has to be lived with deep awareness, with totality, with understanding, because escape is not a way of growth; hence all the so-called saints who have escaped from life remain psychologically immature. Maturity is in life, in all its bitterness and sweetness, in all its misery and joy, in its nights and days. One has to learn through these polarities to move alert, conscious, so that one can remain balanced between the two, exactly in the middle.
That’s what sannyas is. It is not renunciation. It is rejoicing in life, of course with a different quality than ordinary people live it. Ordinary people live unconsciously — a sannyasin tries to live consciously. That’s the only difference, otherwise both live the same life.
Source: Osho Book “If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself”