Colors

I wonder about colors. No beginning, no end, but emptiness. What about orange, the color of the sun, and the sannyasins?

SANNYAS is the ultimate game -- the last, the final. Beyond it there is no game. It had to be very colorful. The householder, the grihasth, plays a game but it is in black and white. Poor. A sannyasin is playing a game but not in black and white. It is colorful. A sannyasin has to become a rainbow because the moment you know that everything is empty everything becomes possible; because that emptiness has in it all. To me, sannyas is not renunciation against indulgence. No. It is renunciation in indulgence. sannyas is not leaving the world; it is living in the world as if you are out of it -- it is an 'as if' phenomenon. You live in the world but you are not in it; you move in the world, but never, never, do you take a single step in it; you remain in the world…

Osho, when one experiences different forms of light and colours in meditation -- such as red, yellow, blue, ochre, etc. -- how can one know to which layers of being they belong? Is there any gradual sequence of colour and light experiences before reaching the ultimate light experience?

There is a Sufi sect which uses black -- black clothes for their fakirs. Black is also very, very meaningful. It shows absence of color, everything absent. It is just the contrary of white. Sufis say that unless we become totally absent, the God cannot be present to us. So one must be like black -- absolutely absent, a nonentity, a nonbeing, just a nothingness. They have chosen black. Colors are meaningful. So with whatsoever you choose you show much. Even your clothes indicate much. Nothing is just accidental. If you have chosen a particular color for your clothes, it is not accidental. You may not be aware why you have chosen it, but science is aware -- and it shows much. Your clothes show much because they belong to your mind, and your mind chooses. You cannot choose without your mind having certain leanings, certain tendencies. So the sequence…

During my lsd experiences I saw a particular sequence of colors: saffron, then yellow, then white, then a deep blue. What do these colors mean?

We do not see every color. The seven colors that we can see are not all the colors that exist -- beyond those seven we are colorblind. Below and beyond these seven colors are infinite ranges of colors. We have not seen them so we will not experience them in our inner journey. All that is felt or experienced is what we have stored within us of the outer world. If a musician goes into meditation he will experience sounds that a nonmusician can never know. A painter will experience colors that a nonpainter can never know. If someone like Van Gogh were to go into meditation, we cannot conceive of the colors he would see or what new combinations he would know. This, too, will differ from individual to individual. Only one thing is certain: when you go deep within on your own inner path, things will begin to…

Questioner: what is the meaning of wearing orange clothes as a sannyasin?

It is not accidental that a book on sexology like the KAMASUTRA was not written in a country with a cold climate. It is the same with TALES OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS; it is the product of a tropical climate. People living in tropical climates are more sexual because of the sun. Therefore people who were working on sannyas from many directions thought that sexuality could be calmed if the red color were kept away from sannyasins' bodies -- hence ochre was selected. You can ask why ochre was selected and not red. Pure red could well have been selected; it would have been more effective in calming sexuality. But there was a difficulty in choosing red, true out-and-out red; it would have totally prevented red from entering the body. But the body needs some amount of red rays to keep fit, so it would have been bad for the…