Can a businessman meditate and become a sannyasin?

Beloved master, I am a businessman. Can I also meditate and become a sannyasin?

Remain a businessman, but for a few hours forget all about it. I am not here to tell you to escape from your ordinary life. I am here to tell you the ways and the means, the alchemy, to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Be a businessman in your shop and don't be a businessman at your home. And sometimes for a few hours forget even the home, the family, the wife, the children. For a few hours just be alone with yourself. Sink deeper and deeper into your own being. Enjoy yourself, love yourself. And slowly slowly, you will become aware, a great joy is welling up, with no cause from the outside world, uncaused from the outside. It is your own flavor, it is your own flowering. This is meditation. Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. Sit silently, doing nothing,…

It makes me feel very sad whenever you say that a businessman cannot be religious, because I am in business. Is there no possibility for me?

A BUSINESSMAN IS ONE THING, and to be in business is quite another. You can be in business AND religious, but you cannot be a businessman AND religious And they are poles apart. They are not synonymous. I am not saying that you have to renounce all your businesses to become religious. I am never in favor of any renunciation of the world. But when I say a businessman cannot be religious I mean something totally different. I mean the psychology -- not the work that you do in the market-place, but the psychology, the mind. The mind of a businessman is always bargaining, always greedy, always thinking of the profit, always in the future, always interested in petty things, mundane objects. When I say, "Don't be a businessman," I mean drop this psychology. And you can drop the marketplace and go to the Himalayan caves -- that won't help…

Osho, I adopted many religions in order to experience truth. I also kept meditating by the methods they prescribed, but I did not succeed. Now, in taking sannyas, the ochre robes and mala are becoming an obstacle. Please suggest a solution! Can one receive sannyas by meditating only, so that truth can be experienced?

Dr. Munshi Singh! You seem weak. Utterly cowardly! What religions could you possibly have adopted, and what spiritual practice could you have done? The one who trembles even at changing clothes—what else will he change? If someone’s very life shudders at changing something as trivial as clothes, will he change his mind, will he change his soul? You are squeamish about lancing a small boil, and you want surgery for cancer! You say: “I adopted many religions to experience truth.” You must have loitered around the temples from the outside. What does “adopted” even mean? If you panic at the idea of wearing ochre robes, if the very thought of a mala makes you feel as if you’re being hanged, what could you have adopted? And you want to experience truth—so cheaply! You want it for free. You want someone to spoon-feed it to you. You want it pre-cooked—you won’t…

So my sannyas can be reduced to a simple definition: non-identification with any role you are playing, whatsoever it is. One can be a doctor or a businessman, one can be an engineer or a painter -- whatsoever role you are playing, remember it is a play. Don't get serious about it. Success and failure are the same when it is a play. Whether you succeed or fail does not matter; what matters is that you remained alert all the time. Success comes, you watch it; failure comes, you watch it. Life is there, you watch it; death comes, you watch it. Your whole work is to remain a witness to all that happens around you, within and without. This is the foundation for my sannyas. And the second thing to remember is: this witnessing is possible only if you slowly move into meditation.

Is it possible to live religiously and continue on the road to enlightenment while living in a country like the usa and involving oneself in a competitive business?

It is not accidental that Jesus' followers go on talking about Jesus' miracles.What are those miracles? First, they are physiological: a blind man is given eyes, an ill person is healed; or miracles like Jesus' turning stones into bread. Just think! These miracles say something. Jesus does not turn stones into sermons, but into bread; Jesus does not turn stones into music, but into bread; and he turns water into wine. Now we don't have any miracles like that around Buddha. There are miracles, but they are totally different -- the hierarchy. Buddha's miracles are so different that you will be surprised. A woman goes to Buddha: her child is dead and she is crying and she is weeping, and she is a widow and she will never have another child, and the only child is dead, and that was all her love and all her attention. She goes crying…