What happens to addictions after taking sannyas?

Osho, before taking sannyas I used to drink every day. It was a habit of ten years. Along with it came gambling, smoking, and other addictions. But the moment I took sannyas, everything suddenly dropped. And after sinking into meditation, a pure intoxication has arisen that does not wear off. This is your compassion, your grace—yet I still want to ask, how did all this happen?

When it happens, everyone feels, “How did it happen?” Because it doesn’t happen by your doing. And I don’t trust your doing either. The meaning of sannyas is simply this: I have done everything and nothing happened—now let God do something. Sannyas means I surrender. Sannyas means I am defeated by myself. Now you take me. Wherever you want to take me, take me. However you keep me, so will I remain. Whatever you feed me to eat or drink, I will accept. Your gesture will be my destiny. That is the meaning of sannyas. After this event, things begin to happen on their own. That’s what happened. You had been drinking for ten years, and for ten years you must also have been trying to quit—and it wouldn’t quit. Even in trying to give up there is ego. You surrendered. You saw, after doing everything, that nothing happens by…

To be a sannyasin is to be an apprentice in an alchemical school. Long is the process, arduous is the task, but the payoff is infinite! And how long it takes depends on your intensity. If your intensity is total it can happen in a single moment too. It all depends on intensity. If the intensity is just lukewarm it can take lives. So let sannyas become a very passionate affair. Let it be hot, not just so-so. And then you are very close to something which you have been seeking and searching for not only in this life but in other lives too! Everybody has been seeking and searching; everybody wants to be transformed, because to live as one is born is ugly.

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, how do I take sannyas? I keep thinking and then I stop. What is this hesitation?

One night a thief broke into Mulla Nasruddin’s house. While the thief gathered things, Mulla quickly spread his blanket on the floor. When the thief, ready to tie up the loot, looked for a sheet to wrap it in, he found a blanket laid out. He was a bit scared—when he had entered, there had been no blanket on the floor. He’d seen a man sleeping under it; now that man lay on the bed without the blanket, and the blanket was on the floor! But it wasn’t the time to ponder. He tied his bundle and set off. Mulla got up and followed. Hearing footsteps, the thief turned and saw the same man who had been on the bed—first under the blanket, then without it. The thief got nervous and said, “Why are you following me?” Mulla said, “Why not follow? I was the only one left back there!…

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.