What happens if I take sannyas without having experienced love or meaningful relationships?

That's what sannyas is: creating a right space, the right soil for love to grow, for love to expand. As your love becomes bigger, you become bigger. When your love is perfect you are perfect. There is no other way to be perfect. Only the perfection of love can bring perfection to your being. There are two ways to reach God: one is meditation, the other is love. A few people reach through meditation, a few people reach through love. Both are valid ways and both reach the same experience. When the meditator reaches the ultimate peak he suddenly finds love arising in his being, and when the lover reaches the ultimate peak he finds meditation happening of its own accord. On the way they are different, at the peak they become one. The path of meditation is arduous, it demands a little superhuman effort.

It is from a new seeker, greg ewart. Osho, I want to become a sannyasin; but surrender means love, and I have never experienced love, nor have I ever established a meaningful relationship with anyone else. If I take sannyas now, my decision to do so would be an intellectual, maybe a hypocritical one. I would feel as though I were using you. How can I become a simple, sincere sannyasin?

I am the black door -- and there is no other way to know me except by entering me. You say you have never loved. Unless you love, how will you know? You say you have never been in any deep, intimate relationship. Unless you are, how you are going to know it? Love, surrender, trust, are like swimming. You have to go to the river. You cannot make it a condition that you will not get into the river unless you know swimming. If you make that condition you will never learn, because there is no other way to learn it. You have to go, cautiously of course, slowly of course; there is no need to go to the deepest part. But enter -- find a spot where you can learn swimming and where you are not afraid to die. Don't enter into me, just give your hand to…

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.

Osho, is sannyas essential in order to relate to you? I have not yet taken sannyas, nor have I met you personally. Yet I become filled with strange feelings toward you; sometimes I weep, and sometimes I just go on gazing at you. Osho, why does this happen? And what should I do? First, someone has asked: “Is sannyas essential in order to be related to you?” That is like asking whether, to be related, being related is essential.

Buddha called the state of samadhi “dharma-megha samadhi”—when one attains samadhi, one becomes a cloud. Dharma-megha samadhi! The water of dharma begins to pour from him, as rain falls from the cloud. Rise, O rise! For many lives to come, fill yourself today— the cloud has thundered. Do not let this time slip by. The call has arisen; do not suppress it. The attraction toward sannyas has arisen; do not miss it. Because if you wish to do the auspicious, do not delay. And if you wish to do the inauspicious, do not hurry. If anger arises, say, “Tomorrow.” If love arises, do it now—who knows of tomorrow! If you must make enmity, put it off—tomorrow, the day after, keep postponing. But if you are to make friendship, do not delay even a moment. Right now, here. Only then will friendship happen. If you think “again, sometime,” then never. I…

Psychological memory has to be dropped. Factual memory is okay, it is not a problem, it does not create any dust. If one can drop the psychological memory and can be new every moment, every day, then life becomes a joy. It becomes an incredible experience. Each moment brings new surprises. Each moment flowers go on showering on you from the beyond. Sannyas is a sunrise; hence the orange colour. It is the colour of the sky in the East just before the sun rises. It is the colour of the dawn, the night is over and the new day beings. A new chapter opens. Sannyasin is not a continuity with your past, it is discontinuous. Put a full stop on your past and start from ABC, fresh. Be a child again. Unlearn all the tricks that you have learned before.