Sannyas is to be true to your original face. Then all your fragments start melting into each other and they create a centre, they create integrity, they create individuality. And that's what religion is all about.

 

Religion has nothing to do with god or heaven and hell and all kinds of theories and philosophies. The basic concern of religion is truth.

 

And one has to live it, only then can one know it.

 

Truth is god.

 

Truth does not mean a conclusion arrived at by thinking. It means experience arrived at through living. Truth is not a hypothesis; hence philosophy has no truth in it. Philosophy goes round and round, it moves in circles, but it never reaches the target. It is only through experience, not through thinking, that one arrives home.

 

Sannyas is a change of gestalt. From mind you have to move to the heart, from thinking to living, from speculating to experiencing. Ordinarily religious people say "God is truth," but I would like to say that that is not right. Truth is God. If you say "God is truth," you have already come to a conclusion. But truth is God. That means a great enquiry is needed, you have to explore from within and without.

 

And sannyas is exploration of truth. It is not belief, it is discovery.

 

Truth is not something which has to be achieved. It is already inside us. We are it, the seeker is the sought. But we go on rushing hither and thither searching for the truth. We will never find it anywhere else; hence the only way to find it is to stop seeking it outside. The only way to find it is to sit silently and look within. It is not a question of doing something, it is more a question of not doing anything. When you are in a state of non-doing, utterly relaxed, it happens, it wells up. It has always been there but you have never been there. The meeting happens when you are also inside.

 

Truth or God is waiting there in your very heart; don't go on knocking on other's doors. There is no need to go to any church, any temple, any mosque. There is no need to search in the Bible, in the Koran, in the Vedas.

 

Stop all seeking and searching and find it. In fact immediately one finds it. It is such a joy to see that which we have been searching for lives together and over which we were always being frustrated because every effort was doomed to fail.

 

When truth is, we are not. We are the only barrier. The ego is like a wall surrounding you, it is your imprisonment. So truth can never be an achievement, because all achievements are through the ego. The ego thinks in terms of achievement.

 

Truth comes to you not as an achievement but as a gift. Neither is it a reward. It is not that you are worthy, pious, virtuous, so you will be rewarded by truth. It comes to those who are ready to receive it, welcome it. It does not matter whether you are a saint or a sinner, it knocks on everybody's doors. It makes no distinctions between sinners and saints. The guest comes to anybody who is ready to open the door and welcome it.

 

The whole art of allowing the truth to take possession of you is of being vulnerable, of being open, of being in a let-go. Or in other words, the whole art consists of one word, "surrender'.

 

And that's what sannyas is, that's my definition of a sannyasin: a man who is surrendered to existence so totally that he never thinks in terms of achievement any more, because he is no more. Who is there to achieve? -- he has disappeared totally, he has not left even a trace behind. In that very moment, when you are just a pure nothingness, truth arrives. It is a gift of God.

 

Earnestness, sincerity, authenticity -- these are the foundations of sannyas.

 

They are not different things but different aspects of the same phenomenon. One has to be utterly truthful about oneself. One need not hide, only cowards hide. The courageous person remains as he is, naked. He is ready to accept whatsoever the consequences, but he is not ready to compromise his truth. This is the only way to become an individual, this is the only way to have integrity.

 

The world teaches people to be pseudo, to be compromising. The world makes people deceptive, false. All your so-called morality, character, respectability, is nothing but an effort to create a facade so you can hide your reality, you can hide and you can go on showing a false face to the world. Whatsoever is expected from you, you can show it to the world. But a man who hides his reality and shows his falseness to the world becomes split, he becomes two. In fact he becomes many, because in each situation he has to use a different face.

 

You can't use the same face with your wife that you use with your girlfriend. You can't use the same face with the boss that you use with your servant. You have to carry many faces so that whatsoever the requirement of the situation, you wear a mask. Slowly slowly it becomes automatic. You need not change, they change of their own accord. To be in such a state means to be miserable, mad, divided in thousands of pieces. Life will be a chaos and a misery and a hell.

 

But one can drop the facade, one can drop all the masks. That's what sannyas is: to be true, to be your original face. And then suddenly you start feeling a kind of strength which was never there before, because you start becoming one. All your fragments start melting into each other and they create a centre, they create integrity, they create individuality. Then one is earnest, sincere, authentic.

 

And that's what religion is all about. Religion has nothing to do with God or heaven or hell and all kinds of theories and philosophies. The basic concern of religion is truth. And one has to live it, only then can one know it, there is no other way. It is not a belief, it has to be your own existential experience. You have to experience it in the innermost core of your very being. And that liberates. That brings freedom to you, bliss to you, benediction to you.

 

Knowledge is human, wisdom is always divine. Knowledge comes through our efforts, wisdom comes from god -- it is a revelation. We have only to be receptive. We have not to do anything, we have just to be open and available. It is not like science -- so much work, experiments, and then finally you arrive after many experiments at a certain hypotheses. Then too it is only a hypothesis. It may be proved wrong tomorrow, some new facts may crop up. It is never absolute, it is never certain. It is temporary, it is for the time-being.

 

Wisdom is absolute. When you know, you know. It never changes. What Buddha knew, what Jesus knew, what Zarathustra knew is the same, it is not different. It is not that after twenty-five centuries of Buddha you will discover something else, no. It will be the same revelation, absolute the same. Truth never changes.

 

Through human effort we can never reach the truth, we can only reach a certain hypothesis. And because it is human we can never be absolutely certain about it. We can use it, it is useful, but it is not wisdom. Albert Einstein knows much, maybe much more than Buddha, but he is not a Buddha, he is not awakened. He has not received the truth from the beyond, it has not descended in him. His is human effort: through great human effort he has come to certain conclusions. But human conclusions are human; they have a certain limitation.

 

The search for truth is not like a scientific search. It is totally different. Scientific enquiry is aggressive, religious enquiry is receptive. Scientific enquiry is more masculine, religious enquiry is more feminine.

 

So be open, available, silent, listening, so that God can reveal something to you. It always comes as a revelation.

 

We are keeping truth at our backs. All that is needed is a little turning in.

 

We are all extroverts. Our education makes us extroverts. Society needs extroverts, it has no use for introverts. The introverts cannot be made into soldiers, the introverts are almost as useless as rose flowers. You can appreciate a rose flower but what else can you do with it? It has no utility. It has tremendous poetry but not utility.

 

So is the case with truth: it has great poetry, great joy, great ecstasy, but is absolutely unmarketable. You cannot reduce it to a commodity, you cannot sell it -- and the world believes in selling and purchasing.

 

The world is a marketplace, and to be an introvert is to be out of the marketplace. Hence we turn every child into an extrovert, we try in every possible way to make sure that he does not have any idea that there is something inside him. We make him forget any desire to go in. And of course if you teach every child for twenty-five years continuously, if you condition him, hypotise him, he becomes paralaysed. He cannot turn his neck, it won't move; he can only look outwards, truth is inside you. You brought it with your birth.

 

My work here is just to help you, to de-hypnotise you, to uncondition you, to undo what the society has done to you. It is anti-social work. Hence the society was perfectly right in crucifying Jesus: he was an antisocial element. So was Socrates, so is every awakened person. He has to sabotage, he has to destroy the structure that society creates around you. He has to bring you to your inner reality.

 

That does not mean that you cannot work outside. Being an introvert does not mean that you become fixated. One should be flexible. One should be able to come in, to come out easily, without any difficulty. So whatsoever is needed... if you are needed on the outside you can be available, if you are needed inside you can be available. Then you know both prose and poetry, then you know both logic and love, then you can be in the marketplace and yet be in yourself.

 

The seeker of truth has to go beyond doubt, has to drop doubting, because doubt keeps you tethered to the mind, doubt is the method of the mind. If you doubt you can never go beyond mind. It is through trust that one goes beyond mind. It is through trust that one goes beyond mind. And truth is beyond mind.

 

Nobody has ever discovered truth through mind -- not a single individual in the whole history of humanity. Many have discovered truth but they have all discovered through trust, not through doubt.

 

So one has to go beyond doubt and one has to learn the language of trust. Doubt is the language of logic, trust is the language of love. We all live in doubt, we are all doubting Thomases because we all live in the mind. The society perpetuates the mind, all the educational systems strengthen the mind. And the more stronger the mind becomes, the less is the possibility of love growing in you. You start doubting even the existence of love. You start doubting even the existence of truth, so the question of discovering truth does not arise at all.

 

Doubt creates such confusion in you that you don't know what to do and what not to do. You go on asking the same mind and it goes on giving you all kinds of answers, which are all contradictory to each other. Mind is a [past ?] master in creating chaos.

 

Learn the way of love, learn the way of trust. Even a coward can doubt; only a courageous person can trust. Trust needs some guts. It means that you are taking risks, it means that you are moving into the unknown. Who knows? -- there is no guarantee. But there is tremendous joy in exploring. With a loving heart one can go dancing into the unknown.

 

Go beyond your doubt, your doubting mind, and then you will really be a seeker of truth. A seeker of truth neither believes nor doubts. He is simply available, ready, open, vulnerable. He is ready to go with the universe wherever it leads. And the universe is always leading you, guiding you towards the ultimate expression of your being.

 

If you can surrender to existence, if you can allow yourself to be overwhelmed by it, then the transformation happens so easily, without any bloodshed and without any damage. Not even scars are left in you. One changes so silently, so noiselessly, as if nothing has happened. On the outside everything remains the same and on the inside nothing is the same.

 

One can seek truth either out of misery or out of bliss. Both people are seekers, but the first one is going to miss, he will never reach. His very first step is wrong. Only the second one arrives.

 

On the surface both seek truth, but you can find only if you seek rightly, in the right mood, with the right method; if you travel on the right path, if you enter through the right door. Otherwise you can go on and on searching and seeking for millions of lives and you will not find. the truth.

 

The most important thing is the first step: what is the motive? That is very essential to understand. Why does one want to seek truth? Is it out of misery? -- then truth is an escape, an escape from your misery. You want to become occupied with something so far away ,so impossible that you can remain occupied forever and need not look at your misery; so that you can avoid your anxiety, anguish, so that you avoid channeling your energies towards truth.

 

But one who is trying to escape from himself in any way will never reach truth, because truth is within you. Truth is not out there somewhere. Truth is now, truth is here, truth is within you.

 

And the person who starts seeking and searching for truth because life is miserable has already taken an attitude. He has concluded that life is miserable. His mind has already become prejudiced.

 

The real seeker has to be without conclusions, unprejudiced. He has to function out of a state of not-knowing, he has to be an agnostic, neither atheist nor theist. He has to accept his ignorance, he has to be sincere about his ignorance. He has to say to himself and to others. "I don't know. And because I don't know, how can I be a Christian and how can I be a Mohammedan or a Hindu? Because I don't know, how can I be a Catholic or a Communist? Because I don't know, how can I believe in god or disbelieve in God?"

 

Disbelief is also a belief -- a negative kind of belief. The Catholic believes, so does the Communist, he also believes. The seeker of truth has to start dropping all beliefs, disbeliefs and is not to have any conclusion. He has to start moving towards truth with a cheerful heart, because only when the heart is cheerful do you become available to existence. Just look at the trees, clouds, stars... The whole universe is in an eternal dance. It is an orgy of joy, a non-ending carnival. It goes on and on. It is sheer festivity.

 

So unless you move through cheerfulness, blissfulness, you will not be moving in the right direction, you will not fall in tune with existence. And the moment you fall in tune with existence you know who you are. When the within and the without are meeting, merging, melting into each other, they create such an explosion of light that everything becomes clear, nothing remains unclear. That's the moment of truth.

 

Many have sought, very few have found because their search was wrong from the very beginning. They were tired of life, they were antagonistic to life, they were failures in life, they were miserable people -- and they started seeking and searching for truth.

 

My effort here is first to teach you how to sing, how to dance, how to love and how to be cheerful. Once that has started happening in you, once the process is triggered and you become like a child -- innocent, excited, ecstatic about small things...

 

A butterfly is enough for the child to be in awe. When you are so innocent and so cheerful and so full of wonder then the first step has been taken, and taken rightly. Then you can ride on the wave of bliss and it will take you to the other shore.

 

The seeker of truth is on a very negative journey. Truth cannot be sought directly, you cannot make a goal out of it. In the first place you don't know what it is, where it is, so how can you make a goal out of it? Your journey will remain a groping. So those who think that truth can be attained directly start from the very beginning in a wrong way. Their truth simply means something that they have learned from others. They have already concluded what is true; the search is bogus. They are simply trying to prove themselves right. They are not on a real journey of discovery.

 

The real journey has to be negative, not positive. And by negative I mean that you have to see your lies. You don't know truth, so nothing can be done for the moment about the truth. You cannot seek it, you cannot search for it -- the question does not arise. But you know many lies in which you are living, in which everybody is living. Our society teaches us so many lies.

 

The god that has been taught about by the priest is a lie. The heaven, the hell, the theory of karma, rebirth -- anything that has been taught by others is a lie. Truth cannot be taught. There is no way to transfer it. One can experience it on one's own. No education is possible about truth, but you can be he helped to be aware of what kind of lies you are living in. And as you see a certain lie, it drops. The moment you see it, it drops, you cannot hold it any more. In your seeing that it is a lie, it becomes impossible to go on living through it.

 

Slowly slowly more and more lies will start falling like dead leaves from a tree. And when all the dead leaves have fallen, new leaves will arrive of their own accord. That's how truth arrives: you destroy the lies and truth comes, you negate the lies and truth comes. It comes as a gift of god. You simply prepare the ground, you simply empty yourself of all kins of false notion, of all philosophies, ideologies, religions. You simply go on emptying yourself. The moment you are totally empty, truth descends in you. It is not your achievement, it is god's gift.

 

- Osho,  “If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself, #3”