To leave everything and just sit under a tree and feel happy is not difficult….OSHO

Sannyas has to be a real break away. A loving surrender to the new....

To leave everything and just sit under a tree and feel happy is not difficult....

There are two types of sannyasins in the world: one type renounces life and enters the life of the mind completely — these are the anti-life people, escaping from the world towards the Himalayas, Tibet.

They renounce life to be completely absorbed in the mind — and they are in the majority, because to renounce life is easy; to renounce mind is difficult.
What is the difficulty? If you want to escape from here, you can escape!

You can leave your wife, your children, your house, your job — really you will feel unburdened, because your wife has become a burden, the children have become a burden, and the whole thing, working every day, earning… you are fed up! You will feel unburdened.

And what will you do in the Himalayas? The whole energy will become mind: you will repeat Ram, Ram, Ram, you will read the Upanishads and the Vedas, and you will think profound truths. You will think about where the world came from, where the world is going, who created the world, why he created the world, what is good and what is evil. You will contemplate, think — great things! Your whole life energy which was engaged in other things will be freed from them now and will be absorbed in the mind. You will become a mind.

And people will pay you respect because you renounced life. You are a great man! Fools will recognize you as a great man: fools can recognize you only because you are the greatest of them and they will pay respect, they will prostrate themselves at your feet — you have done a great miracle!

But what has happened? You renounced life just to be the mind. You renounced the whole body just to be the head — and the head was the problem! You saved the disease, and you renounced everything. Now the mind will become a cancerous growth. It will do JAPA, mantra, austerities — it will do everything; and then it will become a ritual.

That's why religious people move in rituals: ritual means a repetitive phenomenon. Every morning, every day they have to do their prayer: a Mohammedan does five prayers in a day — wherever he is, he is to do the prayer five times; a Hindu goes on doing the same ritual every day for his whole life; Christians have to go to church every Sunday… just a ritual! Because mind likes repetition, mind creates a ritual.

In your ordinary life also, mind creates a ritual. You love, you meet friends, you go to parties… everything is a ritual, has to be done, repeated. You have a program for all the seven days, and the program is fixed — and this has been so always. You have become a robot, not alive.

To live with a wife and to be happy is really difficult; to live with children and to be blissful is really difficult. To work in a shop, in an office, in a factory and to be ecstatic is the real difficulty.

To leave everything and just sit under a tree and feel happy is not difficult — anybody will feel that way. Nothing to do, you can be detached; everything to do, you become attached. But when you do everything AND remain unattached, when you move with the crowd, in the world and yet alone, then something real is happening.

If you don't feel anger when you are alone, that is not the point. When you are alone you will not feel anger because anger is a relationship, it needs somebody to be angry towards. Unless you are mad you will not feel anger when you are alone; it will be inside but it will not find any way to come out. When the other is there, not to be angry THEN is the point. When you don't have any money, any things, any house — if you are unattached, what is the difficulty in it?

But when you have everything and you remain unattached — a beggar in the palace — then something very deep has been attained.

And remember, and always keep it in your heart: truth, love, life, meditation, ecstasy, bliss, all that is true and beautiful and good, always exists as a paradox: in the world, and not of it; with people, yet alone; doing everything, and being inactive; moving and not moving; living an ordinary life, and yet not being identified with it; working as everybody else is working, yet remaining aloof deep down. Being in the world and not of the world, that is the paradox. And when you attain this paradox, the greatest peak happens to you: the peak experience.

It is very easy to move into a simple existence either in the world and attached or out of the world and detached — both are simple. But the greater comes only when it is a complex phenomenon. If you move to the Himalayas and are unattached, you are a single note of the music; if you live in the world and are attached, again you are a single note of the music. But when you are in the world AND beyond it, and you carry your Himalaya in the heart, you are a harmony not a single note.

An accord happens, including all discordant notes, a synthesis of the opposites, a bridge between two banks. And the highest is possible only when life is most complex; only in complexity the highest happens.

If you want to be simple you can choose one of the alternatives — but you will miss the complexity. If you cannot be simple in complexity, you will be like an animal, an animal or someone in the Himalayas living a renounced life — they don't go to a shop, they don't work in a factory, they don't have wives, they don't have children….

I have observed many people who have renounced life. I have lived with them, observed them deeply; they become like animals. I don't see in them something of the supreme happening; rather, on the contrary, they have fallen back. Their life is less tense of course because an animal's life is less tense, they don't have worries because no animal has worries. In fact they go on falling, they regress; they become like vegetables — they vegetate. If you go to them you will see that they ARE simple, no complexity exists — but bring them back to the world and you will find them more complex than you, because when the situation arises they will be in difficulty.

Then everything that is suppressed will come out. This is a sort of suppression. Don't regress, don't move backwards — go ahead.

A child IS simple, but don't become a child, become mature. Of course when you become absolutely mature, a childhood happens again, but that is qualitatively different.

A sage is again a child, but not childish. A sage has again the flower, the fragrance, the newness of a child, but a deep difference is also there: a child has many repressed things in him and whenever the opportunity is given they will come out . Sex will come out, anger will come out — he will move into the world and become attached and lost. He has those seeds within him. A sage has no seeds, he cannot be lost. He cannot be lost because he is no more. He carries nothing within him.

OSHO