Can a Catholic nun also become a sannyasin?

Beloved Osho, what is sannyas?

Sannyas is rebellion against all slavery; it is living life in absolute freedom. To live life in absolute freedom, without traditions, without conventions, without religions, without philosophies, without ideologies -- political, social, and others -- to live unburdened is sannyas. But it will look crazy to the whole world. Freedom looks crazy because everybody is living an imprisoned life. To prisoners, the person who escapes from the prison looks crazy, because for them prison is comfortable, convenient, secure, safe. A Hungarian secret police colonel was inspecting a strip of the border. "Too many people have been slipping across at this point," he informed the guards. "I have been ordered to test your security precautions." After deploying the guards at strategic points, the colonel began creeping on all fours toward the barbed wire. "Can you see me now?" he called out. When they cried back "Yes," he started again. On the…

Sannyas is a quantum leap, a jump into the unknown, a great courage to become discontinuous with your own past. It is a rebirth. It is a change so great... as if the old dies, and dies utterly and totally and the new comes into being from nowhere, from nothingness, out of nothing. If the new comes from the old it remains the old. If the new is continuous with the old then it is only a modification of the old -- maybe a little bit colored and decorated and changed, with a new dress, with a new mask, but it is not a revolution, it is not a conversion. And sannyas to be true has to be a revolution so total that the old identity is simply dropped -- just as the snake slips out of the old skin and never looks back.

To be a sannyasin means to be ready to take this jump. Move from logic to illogic, from rationality to irrationality. It is a kind of superior madness, but that has been always the way of the mystic; he is madly in love with God but his madness is a superior kind of sanity Our so-called sane people are not really sane, just normally insane. You have been searching for long -- now the time has come to be totally committed and involved. A little search is not going to help; it needs your totality. How long will you be here? KAVYO: A year or six months. OSHO: Good. do as many groups as possible... and lose your head! (LAUGHTER). My people are very very skillful at cutting off heads. Soon you will be running around without a head.

Question: BELOVED OSHO, I AM A CATHOLIC NUN. CAN I ALSO BECOME A SANNYASIN? Mary, certainly! I am here just to destroy monks and nuns; that's my very purpose for hanging around. It is to sabotage the old idea of monks and nuns, it is to bring a new kind of sannyasin into the world. The monks and nuns of all the religions -- Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist -- have all been escapists. They are people who are basically afraid of life. I teach you fearlessness. Live as totally and passionately as possible, because it is through intense living that you will find God. God is nothing but life lived at the optimum, with total abandon, a dance danced so totally that the dancer disappears; only the dance remains. Then you have found and you have come home. Mary, if you are a Catholic nun, then be quick!

To me, sannyas is not something very serious. Life itself is not very serious, and one who is serious is always dead. Life is just an overflowing energy without any purpose, so to me, sannyas is to lead life purposelessly. Live life as a play and not as a work. If you can take this whole life just as a play, you are a sannyasin; then you have renounced. Renunciation is not leaving the world, but changing the attitude. That is why I can initiate anyone into sannyas. To me, initiation itself is a play. And I will not ask for any qualifications -- whether you are qualified or not -- because qualifications are asked when something serious is done.