Osho – A few things about sannyas…. It is an initiation into the formless. It is not an initiation into some rigid form, it is not giving you a certain discipline — on the contrary it is an initiation into freedom, into a formless creative chaos.
The old concept of sannyas all over the world was to give you a rigid discipline, to give you a character, to give you a certain form, a pattern, a life style. My sannyas is not like that at all; it is a radical charge. I don’t give you any character, because to me the man of character is a dead man.
I would like to take all character from you so you are left in a creative chaos… so each moment one has to respond to life, not out of a certain pattern. The pattern comes from the past, and if the pattern predominates, the past predominates, and to be guided by the past is to be guided by death. The past is dead.
To respond in the moment without any pattern, just out of spontaneity — whatsoever the feeling of the moment decides, to act just like that — is what I call ‘creative chaos’… a characterless consciousness, a present without past, a freedom unhindered by any discipline. This very process of relaxing into freedom is what brings a person to reality. The more we are, the less the reality is; the less we are, the more reality.
We are a kind of resistance: what we call the ego, the personality, is nothing but a kind of resistance to reality. It is a kind of frozenness, it is a kind of fear and greed. It is a kind of private idiocy — that you would like to live your own life. It is against the universal and the total, hence it brings misery.
Sannyas means: now I will live in the universal. I will not have any private opinion of life — I will let the whole decide; I will not pretend the part is the whole. I will no more be decisive on my own. I will allow the decision to arise in my consciousness and take possession of me.
To live that way is to live the life of a sannyasin. It is utterly beautiful, utterly blessed, but great courage is needed because you don’t have a guide, you don’t have a particular form; you cannot depend on the past. One has to move from the unknown to the unknown and one never knows what is going to happen next moment, where one is going to land. There is no security in it, no safety in it; it is pure adventure.
So I don’t make you a hindu, I don’t make you a Christian or a Mohammedan; I simply make you a non-being. And there is every possibility that the freedom can grow in you. Just a slight push, just a little courage. And you are on the brink; the jump can happen any moment. It will not need any preparation — it will need only courage.
In fact, preparation is a kind of cowardice: people prepare to avoid the fact that they are cowards. When you are not a coward there is no need for any preparation. And all illumination is sudden, it is not gradual. It is not that slowly, slowly, you become blessed, no. Just a single moment before you were in misery and a single moment afterwards all misery has disappeared: it is a quantum leap.
This is the very revolution that this new kind of sannyas brings into life. So from this moment keep a little alert not to allow the past to interfere. Let the present moment be decisive; let it gain more power. And don’t think too much of the consequences. The man who thinks of consequences becomes a coward.
This moment, whatsoever feels right, do it — whatsoever the consequences. Don’t be too considerate of the consequences. We consider the consequences too much and we go on missing the opportunity. The opportunity is only for those who can take it, so don’t be at all concerned about the consequences and the results; they come on their own.
If one acts totally in the present a beautiful future is automatically created. If you have been loving in this moment, the next moment is going to be of greater love, obviously, because it will grow out of this moment; it cannot come from anywhere else. You need not worry about it.
A man who becomes courageous enough to live in the present starts creating a future without even thinking about it. And a man who is not courageous and goes on thinking about consequences, pros and cons — what will happen if he does this and what will happen if he does that — goes on missing the present. And naturally he goes on missing the future too, because if you don’t sow the seeds now there is not going to be any morrow.
Tomorrow again you will be thinking about another tomorrow because when tomorrow comes it comes as today. You become accustomed to the habit of thinking always of the tomorrow and the tomorrow never comes. So only this moment is, and to live in this moment as if it is absolute — no past, no future — is what sannyas is all about.
It needs tremendous courage and it is the greatest adventure there is, but it brings great ecstasies — unimagined, never even dreamt about. It brings great joy, great celebration… and unmotivated, uncaused: one simply feels joyful for no particular reason at all.
When joy is without any reason it is divine; when it has some reason it is ordinary, it is just worldly. You have won a lottery and are feeling happy; a friend has come to see you and you are feeling happy — but your feeling happy is dependent on causes. Those causes will disappear soon and then you will become unhappy. So the same causes that create happiness will create unhappiness, and one goes on moving in this vicious circle. The search is to find a joy which is uncaused. One simply is joyful for no reason at all… one is joyful because one is.
Source – Osho Book “Far Beyond the Stars”