Osho – Nirdosh means innocent. Sannyas is an effort to discover your intrinsic innocence. It is not an effort to gain knowledge. The knowledgeable person is always a stupid person. The knowledgeable starts depending on knowledge, he starts functioning through knowledge. Life goes on changing every moment and knowledge remains static and life is growing. So there comes a gap between knowledge and life.
Knowledge means ready-made answers, but no ready-made answer can ever fit life. It is like ready-made clothes you can purchase them — today they may fit the child but the child is growing and the clothes are not growing. Soon the child will be in difficult if you insist that ‘Don’t be inconsistent; if these clothes were perfectly okay two years before, why are they not okay now? — they are the same clothes!’ And the gap between knowledge and life is not only of two years; it is of thousands of years.
People are reading the Vedas, the Bible, the Koran; they are deriving their ready-made answers from those ancient books, and life has gone through tremendous changes. If the people who wrote the Vedas are brought to the earth again, I don’t think they will recognise anything, they will not be able to recognise anything at all, everything has changed. But this is the trouble with a knowledgeable person, he tries just the impossible, he tries to make life fit with his knowledge. It cannot happen, and then he is frustrated, and in his frustration he starts gathering more knowledge, thinking that more knowledge is needed.
In fact innocence is needed, not knowledge. Innocence means your just being a clear mirror — it is a state of not-knowing, and your functioning o ut of that state of not-knowing. Then you don’t have any answers ready-made. Then life is there, a challenge, a continuous challenge, and you are here to respond, so you respond according to the moment. It always fits; there is no gap between your response and the situation, there is a deep harmony. But it is possible only through innocence.
So the really wise man is not knowledgeable, he is innocent. He drops all knowledge and becomes just a mirror. The moment you become just a mirror you are enlightened, because suddenly you see the tremendous beauty of life. Its very truth is revealed to you, all its mysteries are suddenly open to you, all its doors are open, all locks disappear.
Source – Osho Book “Is the Grass Really Greener… ?”