What should I do to take sannyas?

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!…

Osho, you call sannyas, meditation, and love a leap. What do you mean by a leap?

Narendra! Whatever is essential in life—be it meditation, love, or sannyas—does not come the way mathematics does. It has no method, no staircase. There is no sequential movement in it. It is an explosion. Everything happens in a single instant. It is not a conclusion of thought; it is a condition of the heart, a state of feeling. Suddenly! When you light a lamp, darkness doesn’t go away gradually—first a little, then a little more. Here the lamp is lit, and there the darkness is gone—in one moment, at once. I call the lighting of the lamp and the vanishing of the darkness a leap. If it left little by little, in sequence, in measurable increments, then it would be a process. So too with sannyas: it is not a process. In a moment of awakening, the futility of life is seen. It is seen with such intensity that nothing…

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.

Question: First question: Osho, I want to take sannyas; when should I take it? I have heard an amazing story. There was a wondrous true master named Fachang. His entire teaching was only this: “Now, here.” Just two words. The emperor had invited him to Japan to give discourses. He stood on the platform—the emperor seated, his courtiers present, a great arrangement; Fachang was a famous master. He struck the table loudly and said, “Now, here.” He stepped down and left. The emperor was startled. He asked his ministers, “What is this? What kind of discourse is this—banging the table and saying ‘Now and here’? What does it mean?” The ministers said, “Your Majesty, that is his whole teaching. In it he has said all that the Buddhas of all times have said.” If you are to do the auspicious—now and here.

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.