Samsar and Sannyas
Samsar literally means the 'world' or the 'path'. It refers to the worldly life that causes endless cycles of birth and death.
There are two ways to move in any path: either with baggage and people or by yourself. In the first case, you may have to wait for a long time. In the second case, you can reach even this very minute.
Sannyas is the decision not to carry any baggage while moving. You can have everything, but you don't have to carry it. When you don't carry anything, Existence brings to you what you need for the moment. That is sannyas!
There is a beautiful story from the life of Buddha …
Buddha's disciples gathered around him one day and asked him to teach them the essence of sannyas. He told them a small story:
One man was living on an island by himself. Suddenly he got the feeling that it was time to move from the island. He did not have a boat. So he made one with some twigs, branches, leaves and whatever else he could find. It was a difficult journey but somehow he crossed and reached the other side.
Buddha asked the disciples, 'After reaching the other side, should the man keep the boat or discard it?'
The disciples came out with different answers.
Buddha continued, 'The man of sannyas discards the boat knowing that he will be provided for as needed in the future. The man of samsar keeps it so that his effort doesn't go waste if he wants to journey back!'
A sannyasi walks with his thought on Existence. A samsari walks with his thoughts on how to exist. A sannyasi uses the boat to cross the ocean of life. A samsari carries the boat even beyond the time it is needed, not knowing he can drop it. That is the difference. There is nothing right or wrong in this. It is just two different ways to live.
Let me explain sannyas in the context of karma because sannyas is the shortcut to exhausting karma.
Karma is nothing but the unfulfilled actions of your past that pull you again and again to take birth to fulfill them. It is the very cause of the cycle of birth and death. It makes you take birth again and again in this world until it is exhausted.
There are three types of karma – sanchita, prarabdha and agamya. Sanchita karma is your entire bank balance of unfulfilled actions (karma) accumulated over many lives. Prarabdha karma is that portion of sanchita that you bring and come to exhaust in this one birth. Every time you take birth, you bring with you a small portion of sanchita as your prarabdha to exhaust. It includes all your unfulfilled desires, lust, anger, fear, and such things. The third or agamya karma is the new karma that you create in this birth because of new, unfulfilled actions.
Ultimately, these three things need to be done in order to exhaust all karma completely. First, the new agamya should not get created because it only adds to the bank balance or the sanchita at the end of the lifetime. Second, the prarabdha with which you came should get exhausted, or fulfilled, in this life completely without a trace. Third, the volume of the sanchita itself should somehow be burnt so that the number of times you take birth reduces. This happens by fulfilling the prarabdha without accumulating any agamya in a lifetime.
If the prarabdha is exhausted in the right way, agamya will not get created. The same intelligence that properly exhausts the prarabdha will take care of not creating new agamya. The sanchita itself can be exhausted only by the grace of an enlightened master.
Now understand clearly: if the fantasy of your prarabdha is greater than your intelligence, then samsar (marriage) is the path for you. If the fantasy of your prarabdha is lesser than your intelligence, then sannyas is the path for you! In the path of sannyas, your intelligence wins over your prarabdha and brings it to control and exhaust it. In the path of samsar, life teaches you in different ways and you exhaust your prarabdha through millions of births.
In Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, there is an eightfold path to enlightenment. All eight parts have to be followed simultaneously. Three of the parts are pratyahara, dharana and dhyana. Pratyahara is drawing the mind inwards, away from the five senses. The next is dharana, the merging of the mind with the inner Self. The third is dhyana, meditation.
Withdrawing the mind from the five senses itself can happen only when the mind merges with the inner Self! For example, you can release the foot from the lower rung of the ladder only after establishing yourself in the higher rung, is it not? You can let go of the lower branch of the tree only after clinging to the higher branch. We all think that only after renouncing worldly attachments, we can attain god. No! The truth is, only after attaining god can you really shake off the worldly things. Only after you experience nithyananda or eternal bliss, you can shake off mithyananda or worldly fantasies.
If you can become aware of and hold on more firmly to the higher rung you may let go of the lower rung more easily. That awareness is called sannyas. It is the process of understanding and moving to the higher rung and leaving the lower rung. As you move, renunciation happens as a byproduct. Because you realize that to climb higher you don't need anything but yourself! Anything you take with you is only going to make it more difficult to climb.
A samsari moves to pursue his fantasies. He goes to places to see the beauty of Existence. A sannyasi sees everything around him as already divine and beautiful! He is fantasized by what he sees! When the samsari starts turning inward, he becomes a sannyasi. Until he finds the burning need for that, it is better for him to continue with what he is doing. For a sannyasi, the mind is happy all the time. What he gets is what he wants. He is always living in the mood of grateful and welcome acceptance. For a samsari , the mind is occupied with too many conflicts. He keeps trying to get what he wants. With intelligence, the samsari can awaken to the truth, that what he is getting is what he needs for that moment and for his ultimate fulfillment.
The samsari is concerned with material things and living life in a limited way. The sannyasi is concerned about death – death of all that is not him, which is his ego, possessiveness, lust, anger, fear, jealousy and discontent. He knows he is something beyond all this. His whole quest is to find this, because once he finds it, he has found the higher rung of the ladder and he can leave the lower rung where the constant push and pull of all these emotions and material things reside.
Sannyas is the search to answer the question 'Who am I?' A sannyasi puts his whole energy into discovering the answer to this question. If people ask you, 'Who are you?' you will generally reply, 'I am so-and-so's son, I am an engineer, I am a professor.' But those words describe who you are in your relationships with the world. If there were no world, then who are you?
The great enlightened masters who founded the world religions have said repeatedly, 'Aham Brahmasmi' meaning, 'I am That' in the Hindu tradition, or 'Be still and know that I am god' in the Christian tradition, or Anal-Haq meaning 'I am the Truth' in the Islam tradition. Experiencing that you are god is the purpose of human life.
Once this purpose is experienced, the inner bliss that all these great masters talk about starts happening. Then you understand that the outer world is a beautiful stage where the divine play is happening. There is ultimate freedom from all worldly difficulties. You do, and yet you don't do, you speak and yet you don't speak. You cry and yet you don't cry. Your inner Self remains untouched. You are in 'eternal bliss' – nithya ananda.
The problem is that people generally think sannyas is a hindrance to worldly life. They think sannyas is seriousness. No! Sannyas is a certain quality for living life to its optimum. Seriousness will never help one live life to its full potential. Only sincerity and laughter will help. Laughter is the greatest spiritual quality.
A master was seated with his disciples. He was in an expansive mood and his disciples decided to ask him about the various stages he passed through to reach the Divine.
The master started explaining beautifully …
'God held me by the hand and first took me to the Land of Action. I stayed there for several years. Then god returned and took me to the Land of Sorrow. I fell into deep sorrows but eventually went beyond them. I felt happy. Then, suddenly I found that god put me in the Land of Love. I went through burning emotions and found myself cleansed thoroughly. Then, he took me to the Land of Silence. There I learned the mysteries of life and death.'
The disciples asked, 'Was that the final stage of your quest?'
The master said, 'No. One day god said, Today I will take you to my very heart … and he led me to the Land of Laughter.'
Sannyas is your very energy. How can it be a hindrance to anything? Not only that, with the energy of sannyas, you are always young. With the energy of sannyas, you are ready for the challenges of life.
People ask me, 'Why can't we continue in samsar and live with the consciousness of a sannyasi?' You see, the nature of man is such that unless a conscious decision is taken, it is difficult to bring about a permanent transformation in the consciousness. Sannyas is a conscious decision to transform the consciousness. Sannyas is a conscious decision. That is why sannyas needs to be taken. With a conscious decision, there is continued awareness. Continued awareness decreases the chance of slipping back. Without it, there is nothing binding one to keep on the path. It becomes easy to slip.
With sannyas, you will continue to do what you are doing but in a much better way. With sannyas, you start watching everything. You become a witness. Because of this witnessing, a gap is created between you and the other person. That gap is misunderstood as 'renunciation'. If you notice, the gap was not there earlier. Each one was suffocating the other. Now the gap is there. The gap is not a gap of distance but a gap of awareness.
Sannyas is also living without the burden of the inner woman or inner man. What is meant by inner woman or inner man? It is nothing but the lust hidden in your mind, the fantasies that you have created in your mind. Shiva says beautifully in the Tantra, 'A man who has abandoned the woman in him, in his inner mind, is a sannyasi, even if he is still in the family.' On the contrary, if thoughts of a woman persist in a sannyasi's mind, he cannot be called a sannyasi. This is the scale to measure if a man is a sannyasi.
In Buddha's teaching, The Four Noble Truths, the second truth deals with the cause of suffering. He beautifully says that suffering is because of the demands we make on life every moment. It is like asking a banana tree to bear mangoes! We will understand this habit only when we bring in awareness.
Not only that, when you watch, you start seeing exactly how transactions are happening in relationships. You see how expectations are driving the whole thing. You see ulterior motives in everything.
The responsibility of a sannyasi
There is a little known truth about a sannyasi, that a sannyasi takes responsibility for the whole of Existence. He doesn't know the difference between his family and the rest of the world. All are the same. He wishes for the liberation of anyone who comes his way. On the other hand, a samsari takes responsibility for one family or maybe for a few organizations. This taking of responsibility is always towards a definite cause. It is either to accumulate the credit of serving, to fulfill some obligation, or to co-exist easily with the people around him.
The nature of a sannyasi's responsibility is completely different. For him, the whole world is his family. There is no obligation driving him. Responsibility happens completely out of the quality of his inner space. Also, a samsari can rest after fulfilling every duty at that stage in life. A sannyasi continuously works, because people are constantly in need of truths in their life.
A sannyasi is established in rich relationships. People think sannyasis run away from relationships. A young girl asked me while I was addressing a college gathering, 'Was it failure in love that caused you to become a sannyasi?'
I told her, 'It was success in love that caused me to become a sannyasi!' Actually, sannyas is what softens you into real love; love towards not just one person but towards the whole of Existence.
Ordinary love comes with a reason, or with lust. Real love knows no reason. It is just a causeless overflowing energy towards everything in Existence.
In reality, sannyas is living like a king. Sannyas is the beginning of a kingly life because when you have cleaned yourself of all your suffering, then you have gained everything you can ever gain! You gain far more than what mere wealth can give you.
A sannyasi recognizes the unending abundance of Existence. His vision is oceanic. He is not stuck in narrow perceptions. He perceives the whole of Existence as one. He feels part of the whole. That is why he is rich. A rich man who feels he owns a few acres is not really the rich one. The man who feels the abundance of Existence is really the rich one.
Understand that the very word 'rich' has been misinterpreted. How can a person who is enjoying just a few bungalows be rich? He cannot be! The rich person is the one who is enjoying everything around him continuously. His richness is the richness of the whole Existence. He enjoys everything with no attachment to anything.
Integrity – the trait of a sannyasi!
The word 'penance' means nothing but integrating yourself, making yourself a single entity. You may ask, 'Are we not like that now?' If you look closely, you will see that we exist as different entities, never as one. There is everything else in our life except integration.
If you look deeply inside, you will understand that there are hundreds of voices continuously talking inside you. The moment the mind says, 'Let us do this,' the very next moment the thought will arise, 'No. Let us not do it!' After thinking of the side effects and after effects, the mind starts oscillating.
Integrating the fragmented parts of the mind is the very essence of life. Integrating the feelings and the mind, integrating your face and your mind, ensuring that your face shows the same thing that your mind thinks, is the essence of life.
If you study the lives of great masters and try to search for one basic essence in all of their lives, you will find that it is not knowledge or devotion. It is integrity! What they believed in, they lived. That's all! Their integrity was solid. They were ready to lose even their very lives, but not their integrity.
Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the great enlightened master from Bharat, used to move around on the streets just singing devotional songs. He never bothered about what others said about him. What he felt, he expressed. To be like this requires a deep sense of sacrifice. It takes courage to sacrifice anything to live with integrity!
That is why anything that these great masters did in their lives always culminated in eternal auspiciousness! Everything they did was an effort to integrate themselves with deep sincerity and devotion. The intense effort to integrate oneself completely is what is called penance. Penance always ends in auspiciousness. There will be innumerable things happening in your life all the time. Enduring all those things and intensifying your integrity with them is called penance. On the other hand, if you allow life's happenings to shake you, then you land in disgrace. Which way you wish to go is up to you.
Adi Shankara was a great enlightened master from Bharat. As a young boy, he was caught in a dilemma when he wanted to pursue the path of sannyas. He wanted to leave home with the permission of his mother, but she was unwilling to let go of him.
One day, he went to bathe in the river. Suddenly, his mother heard him crying out loud for help. She ran out and saw that a crocodile had caught his leg. He was struggling to be free.
Suddenly, by a flash of thought, he cried to her, 'Mother, if you give me permission to become a sannyasi, I will be freed from this crocodile now to continue with my life.'
The mother was surprised and asked how. He explained, 'According to the Vedas, if I enter a new ashrama or stage of life, it is equal to being born again. So, if you give me permission to enter into sannyas, then maybe god will give me a fresh lease on life!'
The mother was totally helpless. She quickly made up her mind. It was better to have her son as a sannyasi than see him dead. She agreed.
Immediately the crocodile released the grip! Adi Shankara ran to his mother with great joy. He had lived the truth he sought at that moment … and it worked.
See, there are three things: Thinking the Truth Speaking the Truth Living the Truth
The first two are easy to follow. But the third, living the Truth all the time, is difficult. It is very rare. Sannyas is the courage to live what we think is the Truth. We give importance to speaking the Truth. But living the Truth is most important. If you start living your Truth, your respect for yourself will increase. That is the beauty of it.
When you integrate and live the Truth, you drop hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is pretending to be what you are not. Hypocrisy is hiding in many places so people can't see who you really are. The fragments in you dominate over each other and make you hypocritical. When you fight with your own fragments and win, you are a dheera, a courageous one! It is easy to fight with others and win. When you fight with others and win, you are a veera, a warrior. But fighting with yourself requires more courage. You don't fight unless you are tired of yourself. Only when you are tired, you accept that you need to start the fight.
Once you integrate, for the first time, you know who you really are. All the masks drop. You are ready to expose yourself in relationships. You become more authentic. You suddenly realize that you were missing things because of you! Sannyas is all about becoming more authentic. When I say authentic, I mean that you will radiate your individuality instead of your personality. With fragments, you are a personality. With integrity, you are individuality. Individuality is seeing your authenticity through your own eyes. Personality is a built-up image in the eyes of society. The master's work is to create a space in you where you don't have to guard your personality, where you can be free, where just understanding can cause transformation.
Buddha used to tell his disciples, 'Count your life only after you have taken sannyas.'
Someone asked me if taking the vow of brahmacharya or sannyas will lead to enlightenment. Whether taking the vow leads to enlightenment or not is secondary. But if you observe the vows strictly for one month, successfully, the respect you have for yourself will increase tremendously. That is enough! It is called asaadhya sadhana or doing the seemingly impossible task successfully. It is making you do whatever your mind says you cannot do! Techniques like firewalking are in this category. Ordinarily, the mind will say that you cannot walk on a fire bed. Once you do it, the respect you have for yourself will increase! Then you will come into integrity.
Integrity needs to be understood in two ways.
The first part is integrating the fighting parts of the mind into one. See, your very life gets wasted in the oscillation of the mind. If you can follow any one path, you will attain it. For example, let us suppose there are two paths to reach Bangalore. One path is 30 kilometers while the other is 30,000 kilometers. You are oscillating between these two paths not knowing which to choose. If you choose any one path and proceed, you will reach Bangalore.
But if you keep oscillating, if you go on one path for half hour, and then change your mind and go on the other path for the next half hour, what will happen? You will never reach Bangalore! At least if you decide and take the 30,000 kilometer path, you will reach Bangalore, even if it takes you one year! But if you keep oscillating between these two paths, even if it takes thirty years, you will not reach Bangalore.
Even if the chosen path is wrong, the one who moves with integrity automatically comes to the correct path. He achieves what needs to be achieved. There are only two types of people on planet earth – those who live with integrity and those who live without integrity, that's all! The scale to measure a person is not the path on which he went but whether he lived with integrity or not.
Integrity is the strength to live your belief, come what may.
Second, not getting diluted by external influences is also integrity. It is the ability to not alter our integrity or dilute ourselves due to inner confusions or outer influences. The person who lives with integrity, even if he dies on the train platform, will die with the satisfaction that he lived completely. The person who lives without integrity, even if he dies in the best hospital, will die with dissatisfaction. The scale to measure the quality of a person's life is to see how much he lived in tune with what he felt was life. For example, if he is an aethist, if he lived as a strong atheist and died as a strong atheist, there is nothing wrong. He will attain! That very strength, when it goes deeper and deeper in him and searches, will show him the truth!
Integrating the mind is the essence of life. Decide you will always say and do only what you feel is right. Then, you will come to tremendous clarity and conviction in the inner and outer worlds.
Swami Vivekananda recounts that his master, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, died leaving him the responsibility of the mission. At the same time, Swami Vivekananda's father died leaving behind a family of utter poverty. Swami Vivekananda was the only hope for his family. He stood between saving his family and saving the world. No one recognized the mission he spoke of. He says beautifully, 'Who will sympathize with the imaginations of a boy?' He was, after all, a young boy!
He describes those few days as 'unimaginable hell'. He was with a small group of boys, with no money, with only one thing: the integrity to live the life they believed in, the life taught by their master. Ten years later, he says, 'Ten years ago, I could not get one hundred people to celebrate the master's birth anniversary. Today there are fifty thousand!' Sannyas is taking a strong decision not to allow the unconscious to hinder the consciousness and to establish consciousness firmly on the master and his words.
Swami Vivekananda was questioned as to how he could desert his family at that time. He replied beautifully, 'I believed that Ramakrishna Paramahamsa's teachings could rationalize Bharat and many foreign races. With that belief came the realization that it is better that a few persons suffer than for such ideas to die out of the world. What if a mother or two brothers die? It is a sacrifice. Let it be done. No great thing can be done without sacrifice. The heart must be plucked and the bleeding heart placed upon the altar. Then, great things are done!'
Such was his integrity.
Not only that, those who said that Swami Vivekananda deserted his family do not know the correct facts. He continued to fulfill his duty by giving them the bare minimum requirements. He also went to the court of law to attend to some legal issues they faced.
With the strength of integrity comes utter freedom and bliss. With freedom and bliss there is no fear in the inner or outer world!
Life is for enlightenment
The very goal of life is enlightenment. You may have other goals, but knowingly or unknowingly, they are just different names that we give to the goal of enlightenment. In the same way, whatever else you may seek, what you actually seek is sannyas itself. But you don't know it. That is the problem!
You may think your goals are to have more money and more relationships. The truth is that even the one who searches for money actually searches only for enlightenment! See, there are only two things. One is money, and the other is name and fame. Name and fame mean nothing but to have more relationships. Whatever experience you feel you are going to get through money or relationships, you will only get through enlightenment!
That is why the soul never rests until enlightenment happens. No amount of money satisfies the soul. No relationship satisfies the soul. When money and relationships don't give satisfaction, it is called the 'depression of success'. This is what happens after reaching the peak of our career. People come to me and say, 'I have achieved all that I wanted to achieve, but what for I wanted to achieve, I have not achieved. I feel incomplete.' Understand that this is the call of your being that seeks no other goal except enlightenment. The response to it is sannyas.
Not properly understanding the goal of life is the root cause of all problems. Sannyas is recognizing the goal properly and integrating to achieve it. Whatever goal you may be running behind in your life, be it money or relationship or whatever, your end goal is only bliss. There is no other separate goal in life!
There are only two types of people. One group knows the word 'bliss' or 'enlightenment', and the path to it. They live their life according to that. The other group does not know the word or the path, so they come around in circles. That's all! The former is a sannyasi, the latter is a samsari.
You have achieved the human body which gives you the highest possibility to take the jump in consciousness. The glass is already reflecting the sunlight. Now all that the glass needs to do is to see the source of the reflection. That's all! Merging with the Source is what I call enlightenment. It is merging of the individual consciousness with the cosmic consciousness.
If this happens, then the goal of life, the purpose for which the glass was created, is achieved. Then, even if the glass breaks, there is no problem. But without achieving that, if the glass is broken, it is the greatest loss ever. If the human body perishes before enlightenment, there cannot be a greater loss than that.
Sannyas is the means to this achievement. Sannyas is not the end of life. It is the beginning of life. Sannyas is moving towards enlightenment, the only and permanent purpose of life.
Conditioning is the culprit
If the purpose of life itself is enlightenment, where are we stuck right now? In what areas of our lives are we moving in the wrong direction? Understand that the problem is in recognizing the correct goal. If the goal is right, you have achieved it. If your goal is right, it means you are already living it. 'Conditioning' is the reason that you miss the goal. When you were born, you came as a free bird, a Paramahamsa or the supreme swan, to flit and fly blissfully around and enjoy the whole of Existence. But after coming, not only did you fly around, but unknowingly you also landed on planet earth. That was the problem. There are many people waiting to catch such birds that land! Society waits to fit you into the frame of country, religion, caste, community and creed.
You were a sweet soul when you landed on planet earth. You were not a Hindu, or an engineer or a worker. But understand that society wants engineers and workers. It is not bothered about your consciousness. Actually, neither your parents nor society is aware that there is something called consciousness. They themselves don't have that intelligence. They teach you what they were taught. That's all. Their conditioning is not a deliberate attempt to restrict or condition you.
Conditioning is the unwanted dowry that has been handed over for generations and lives, from person to person. First, there is parental conditioning. Then there is societal conditioning. Based on these two, you create certain ethics for yourself. This is the self-imposed conditioning, your own dharma, your own path of righteousness.
Because we create so many layers of conditioning, we are unable to see the Truth directly. We are not able to perceive the goal directly. We are not able to live the goal directly. We are caught in the conditioning and forget who we truly are. The conditioning creates certain limitations in us, and we start thinking that the limitations are the real us. Even the clothes that we wear condition us to believe we are the clothes!
Many of the conditionings are created in society in order to peacefully co-exist. For example, for easy communication, many languages are taught. There is nothing wrong in learning a language, but taking it up as a conditioning and making the language your very life, and creating sorrow for yourself and others is wrong. That mental attitude is wrong. So many people have sacrificed their lives for the sake of language. If the conditioning were not there, so many deaths would not have happened! The very history of mankind would have been written differently. Conditioning is the reason for terrorism among human beings. Today, conditioning-based divisions go right down to the level of belonging to specific political parties!
By taking sannyas, you are taking the first conscious step to drop the past and enter a new world. The past is familiar, so you like to carry it. The mind always likes familiar patterns. Also, society teaches you to carry the past so that it can put guilt and fear in you that are based upon the past incidents. The past is unwanted baggage. Sannyas is disconnecting from the past. When you disconnect from the past and move to a new future, initially, there is utter insecurity. Sannyas is utter insecurity. In utter insecurity, there is nothing else to hold on to, so you will find god!
Why do you think I give you a spiritual name? I give you a spiritual name to help you disconnect from the past more easily. The new name that I give you will constantly remind you of the psychological revolution that has happened in you, the new understanding that has happened in you. The name also indicates your individual spiritual path, according to your own innate nature, which will lead to the ultimate flowering of your consciousness.
A sannyasi works for the present moment. He works to give his whole life to Existence and doesn't care about the results. The results take care of themselves. That is his way. He knows only the moment, nothing else. Therefore, he learns directly from Existence every moment. That is why he has no doctrine, no religion. He moves in synchronicity with the whole of Existence and learns through it.
There is a Sufi saying, 'The Sufi is the child of the moment.' In Sufi texts, every moment is called a breath. And the Sufis are called 'the folks of the breaths,' because they live in full awareness of every breath, of every instant. According to them, every moment, a new Self arrives. That is the spirit of sannyas, it is being fresh every moment. A person of the moment learns from the moment. For him, Existence is his teacher.
When the great Sufi mystic Hasan, was dying, somebody asked, 'Hasan, who was your master?'
He said, 'I had many masters. If I relate their names it will take months or even years, and it is too late now. I am going to die any time. I will tell you about three masters.
The first one was a thief. Once I got lost in a desert, and when I reached a nearby village, it was late and everything was closed. At last I found a man who was trying to make a hole in the wall of a house. I asked him where I could stay and spend the night. He said, 'At this time of night it will be difficult. If you don't mind staying with a thief, you are welcome to stay with me.'
I stayed with this man for one month. Each night he would tell me, 'Now I am going for my work. You take rest and pray for me.' When he came back, I would ask him, 'Did you get anything?' He would say, 'Not tonight. But tomorrow, god willing, I will try again.' He was always happy and hopeful, never in a state of hopelessness!
When I was meditating for many years, and nothing was happening, many times the moment came when I was so desperate, so hopeless, that I thought I should stop all this nonsense. And suddenly I would remember the thief who would say every night, 'God willing, tomorrow it is going to happen.'
My second master was a dog. One day, I was going to the river to quench my thirst. A dog came and he was also thirsty. He looked into the river, and saw another dog there, which was his own image. He became afraid. He would bark and run away, but his thirst was so much that he would come back. Finally, despite his fear, he
jumped into the water and his own image disappeared. I realized that the message had come from god to me: one has to jump in spite of the fear.
The third master was a small child. I went to a town where a child was carrying a lit candle. He was going to the mosque to put the candle there.
I asked the boy, 'Have you lit the candle by yourself?' He said, 'Yes.' Then I asked him, 'There was a moment when the candle was unlit, and then there was a moment when the candle was lit. Can you show me the source from which the light came?'
The boy laughed, blew out the candle, and said, 'Now you have seen the light going. Where has it gone? You tell me!'
My ego was shattered and my whole knowledge was also shattered.
It is true that I had no master. That does not mean that I was not a disciple. I accepted the whole of Existence as my master. I trusted the clouds, the trees. I learned from every possible source.
Sannyas is the joyful awareness that the 'moment' is guiding you closer to your enlightenment. All you have to do is be vulnerable, that's all.
Tomorrow also comes in the form of today. So why not focus on just today? When you are in the moment, there is no space for pain or suffering. Only when you live in the past or future, you create the space for suffering. When you live in the moment, you automatically create a space where everything is beautiful. Life itself becomes a romance with Existence! You resonate with the whole thing. You are in love with everything and everyone for no reason at all. That is sannyas. Then you don't amass. You don't fear. You don't worry. Things happen around you like a beautiful dream.
A sannyasi is an eternal wanderer in spirit. Even if he is in one place, his spirit wanders without any pattern, touching so many things far away. He doesn't care to accumulate anything. He gives away whatever comes his way. He receives much more than he needs. He lives like a king.