Do only cowards drop sannyas?

Question: BELOVED OSHO, DO ONLY COWARDS DROP SANNYAS? Nobody ever drops sannyas. Yes, once in a while a coward takes sannyas. And I am just incapable of refusing, so even if a coward comes to take sannyas... I know perfectly well he will not be a sannyasin. He will wear the robe, he will make every effort, but sooner or later he will be gone. I say nobody drops sannyas except those people who have never been sannyasins; they only looked as if they were sannyasins. I allow them to have the opportunity, because sometimes it happens that a person who takes sannyas without any understanding of what it is -- perhaps already thinking, "Let us try it.

What of those who take sannyas in poona, only to drop it back in their home environment?

Anand Lionel, they are assholes. And they are assholes not because they drop sannyas but because they take it. Their idea is that by taking sannyas here they will gain something, and then back home they can drop it. But if this idea is there from the very beginning, that "I am going to drop it when I am back home," sannyas will not be a blessing to you. It cannot be a blessing to such a cunning mind. You will become a sannyasin and yet you will not become a sannyasin. I know there are people, at least ten percent of the people.... I know immediately when they come to take sannyas -- their eyes say it, their vibe says it, their whole being stinks of cunningness. But I respect people, I cannot say no. And then I think what is the harm? Let them play the game of…

What do you think about people who drop sannyas?

I love them, just as I have always loved them. Sannyas is just a formality, it does not matter. They cannot drop me; I am going to haunt them in their nights, in their dreams, in their hearts. So dropping sannyas does not matter. I don't pay any respect to rituals and formalities. I know one thing: once somebody is here with me, I make a way in his heart of which he may be absolutely unaware. He may drop sannyas, but I am going with him. I am spread over all my people; they are my home. So I will love anybody who drops sannyas exactly the same as I have been loving him when he was a sannyasin -- with no difference at all. Love never depends on formalities.

Beloved master, when I hear people say that they have dropped sannyas, I wonder if this is possible. I feel that once you have started on this path of sannyas, there is no return.

You are right. Once you are a sannyasin, you are a sannyasin forever. You can drop the clothes, you can drop the mala, but sannyas is something that has entered into your being. You cannot drop it, unless you drop your heart. And I don't think anybody is going to drop his heart. Sannyas is initiation of the heart: the individual heart moving towards the universal heart. There is no way to drop it. So before you enter, think twice! Okay?

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.