What special difference does sannyas make in life?

Osho, some of us take sannyas and do spiritual practice; some do not take sannyas and still practice—in both cases we follow your path. Please tell us: what special difference does sannyas make in life?

There is no way to know the difference without taking sannyas. Sannyas is a taste. Sannyas is the taste of coming close to me. Sannyas is the courage to surrender. You do sadhana; but the sannyasin is not alone—you are. You practice; the sannyasin also practices. The sannyasin is with me; you are not with me. I am with both! But you practice in your own way. You listen to me, but you go on choosing. The sannyasin does not even choose. Once he has chosen me, he drops choosing. He says, Enough! I am with both, but the sannyasin comes to be with me—and that makes a revolutionary difference. But you will know it only when you know it. There was a famous Christian woman—Theresa. She was a poor beggar. One day she announced in her village, “I want to build a great church for Jesus.” People laughed. “How…

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.

Beloved Osho, what is sannyas?

Sannyas is hope -- hope against all hope. People have lost all hope; they are living hopelessly. They are living simply because they are cowards and cannot commit suicide. The existentialist philosophers are right when they say that the most important philosophical problem is suicide: to live or not to live, to be or not to be. If this is life that ordinary people are living, then it does not seem to be worth living at all. What is the point of getting up every morning and going through the same empty gestures you have gone through thousands of times? The same breakfast, the same nagging wife, the same ugly husband; the same suspicions, the same possessiveness, the same jealousy, the same anger, the same ambition; rushing to the office, the same boss -- everything is the same, a constant repetition. And again coming back home and sitting in front…

Osho, what is the definition of God?

Words are very small. If you say God is light, then what of darkness? The scriptures have said that God is light. Suppose we accept this as a definition—then what about darkness? Where will darkness go? Darkness is too; in fact it is far more than light. Light sometimes is and sometimes is not; darkness is always, eternal. Where will you place darkness? If you say God is light, darkness is left out. If you say God is darkness, then light is left out. If you say God is both darkness and light, a contradiction arises: they cannot be together. Try to have both darkness and light in the same room. If you bring in light, darkness disappears; if you preserve darkness, you cannot have light. Then how can both be together? That becomes an impossibility. So you cannot say “both” either. Then the fourth device is to say: it…

That's what sannyas is: becoming a child again again reclaiming the innocence of childhood which the society has destroyed. It will be difficult, because to live with people who live in lies, without lies living with them is difficult. People who are all pseudo and phony, to live with them as true is to invite danger -- but it is worth. This life is bound to go, so even if one has to sacrifice one's life for truth one should not be worried about it. Truth is far more valuable than life itself because life ends in death but truth never ends. Truth is eternal, timeless, deathless. Manoj Bharti. One thing to be remembered: that from this moment meditation becomes your goal; everything else is secondary. So arrange your life in such a way that everything revolves around meditation.