Why am I afraid of sannyas?

Question: Second question: Osho, why am I afraid of sannyas? Harish! Fear of sannyas is natural. You are dyed in the colors of the world—well dyed. With birth itself you are initiated into the world. If you are forty or fifty now, that is forty or fifty years of the world’s hypnosis. We start hypnotizing little children in the language of the world. We tell them, “If you study and write, you’ll become a nawab. If you play and frolic, you’ll be spoiled.” To make them nawabs you’re busy ruining their heads. You don’t see the state of the nawabs—that all the nawabs have become kebabs—yet you keep trying to make the kids nawabs! “Study and become a nawab,” and, “If you play you’ll be ruined.” The poor child gives up play and begins to study and write. Study becomes ambition. “Come first! Bring the gold medal!

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, I have been listening to you for years. I have been with you a long time. From time to time I have heard many different statements from you, even mutually contradictory ones, yet no question has ever arisen in my mind about them. And in spite of them you have always remained one and indivisible in my vision and in my heart. Kindly shed some light on this.

You can be with me in two ways: through thought and intellect, or through the heart and feeling. If you are with me through the intellect and thought, there will be great difficulty. Day after day you will find contradictory statements. Every day you will have to sort them out, and still you will not succeed. The intellect never really resolves anything. Even where things are simple, the intellect tangles them up. And my words are very tangled. Even where everything is clear, the intellect creates problems. And I speak of paths filled with mist. Even if there were only one path, the intellect would find contradictions; here there are countless paths—contradictions upon contradictions. There is hardly a statement I have not refuted a thousand times. So if you are with me through the intellect, only two things are possible: either you will go mad and drop the intellect, or…

[NOTE: This discourse will be in the book "India Coming Back Home", which has not been published, as of August 1992.] INTERVIEW BY THE DAILY (BOMBAY) THE LAST FEW YEARS I HAVE OFTEN THOUGHT OF TAKING SANNYAS, BUT I AM AFRAID. WHY? It is not only your question; there are millions of people who are in the same position. The fear is very fundamental. To be initiated into sannyas means dropping so many things you have loved, liked, and become identified with. For example, a Mohammedan, a Hindu, a Christian -- the first fear is what will happen to their Christianity, to their Hinduism? My sannyas simply means that you drop all the conditionings that have been imposed upon you after you were born -- because nobody is born a Hindu, a Christian, a Buddhist.

I desire to become a sannyasin, but at the very idea a great fear grips my heart. It is so new. And, moreover, I had not come here to become a disciple, I had just come to see a friend who is a sannyasin.

But you are caught, you are trapped! Now it will be very difficult to escape. It is always difficult to choose the new, but only those live who choose the new. To choose the old is to choose death, not life. To choose the familiar is to remain in the prison of the familiar, to choose the known is to avoid really the unknown that is knocking on the door. To choose the known is to reject God, because God is always unknown -- not only unknown, but unknowable. God is always fresh, as fresh as the dewdrops. God is always utterly new, unfamiliar, unmapped, unscheduled, uncalculated. God comes only as the unknown. And if you become afraid, if you shrink back, then you have to live in your so-called dark hole. What is your past that you cling to? What is there to cling to, except that it is…