Sanyas has existed in India since religion came into existence.
Different religions have different concepts of sanyas, though they
also share some similarities. One concept that has always remained
very central to it is renunciation. Sanyas and renunciation are almost
synonymous. A sanyasi is expected to renounce the world, family life
and proceed to a forest, monastery or ashram to meditate. But today,
we see so many sanyasis living a political life or as social
activists. Instead of meditating, we find them debating social issues,
agitating and provoking the public.

In the 20th century, Osho proposed a radically new concept and called
it “neo-sanyas”. While talking about Zen haikus, wild geese and water
he said, “Be simple, be natural and be spontaneous. I teach ecstasy
and ecstasy in the ordinary life. The life has not to be in any way
renounced but transformed. Renunciation is escapism, it is
cowardliness. Till now you have worshipped cowards as saints. You have
worshipped people who were not courageous enough to accept all the
challenges of life. And there are millions of challenges — every
moment is challenging. The coward escapes. The coward has to be
condemned, not respected.”

“My sanyasis have to live in the world, totally in the world,
responding to every challenge, because the more you respond to the
challenges of life the more intelligent you become. Intelligence is
like a sword: The more you use it, the sharper it becomes. If you
don’t use it, it starts rusting,  losing its sharpness and becomes
useless.”

There is a Zen saying: “The wild geese do not intend to cast their
reflections. The water has no mind to receive their image.” Osho
explains: “The wild geese have no desire to cast their reflections in
the water, and the water has no desire or no mind to receive its image
— although it happens! When the wild geese fly, the water reflects
them. The reflection is there, the image is there, but the water has
no mind to reflect and the wild geese do not bother to be reflected
either.

This should be the way of my sanyasis too. Be in the world, live in
the world, live without ambition, without desires. Don’t be greedy,
because greed takes you into the future; don’t be possessive, because
possessiveness keeps you clinging to the past. A man who wants to live
in the present has to be free of greed, possessiveness, ambition and
desire.”

According to Osho, sanyas is an art of meditation i.e., be meditative,
but be in the world. This gives you every opportunity to be
distracted, but if you don’t get distracted then each success brings
tremendous joy. You remain centered, you become the centre of the
cyclone. The cyclone goes on roaring around you, but your centre
remains unaffected. Be a lotus flower. In the East, lotus symbolises
the essence of sanyas.

A lotus grows in mud. It does not escape, it remains there. It floats
in the water, but there is a beauty, a tremendous phenomenon: It is in
the water, but the water never touches it… That’s the way of a true
sanyasi. Being in the world but remaining untouched, unaffected.

It is not just Indian Yoga that has become commercially successful in
the Western world, a deeper and a higher science of meditation is also
growing on the same lines. Suddenly, so many scientists and
psychologists have become so interested in researching the benefits of
something that the East has been practising since eternity. The East
with its inexhaustible treasures of meditative practices has always
mystified the West. But the West does not accept anything without
scientific examination.

Today, Western science and psychology are supporting the beneficial
effects of meditation on practising individuals. A recent research
published in Biological Psychiatry, coordinated by Carnegie Mellon
associate professor J. David Creswell, demonstrated that meditation
does, in fact, change the brains of practitioners in positive ways
that appear to equip them to cope better with life stresses.

The East didn’t practice meditation for mundane gains — becoming
successful in the world or slowing the process of ageing — but to find
the deeper meaning of life and existence i.e., the innermost realms of
conciousness.

The seekers sacrificed their material world for the spiritual world
and to share their realisation with the world at large. The end result
of meditation has been compassion.

But the West has a totally different, diametrically opposite approach.

In a report, the co-founder of the Wellness Project said her company
is finding success selling meditation trainings to companies for their
employees in New York.

Most clients, she said, are small to medium-sized businesses and she
noted that “companies are more open to this today”.

She elaborated: “Companies that take a vested interest in meditation
and wellness could see vast jumps in their bottom line, not just from
better work produced by rested and more focused brains, but also from
the production of more creative ideas and more honed problem-solving
skills.”

This influences practitioners from the East to travel to the West and
sell their practice.

There’s an ancient story told by Osho.

King Bimbisara once went to Mahavira, the 24th Tirthankara of Jainas
and said “I want to attain to the truth and I am willing to give
anything that I possess, I must have the truth that rids man of all
sorrow.”

Mahavira saw that the ruler wanted to conquer truth in the same way he
was trying to conquer the world and that he even wanted to buy the
truth.

The master told Bimbisara to first go to Punya shravak, a poor citizen
of his empire and get from him the fruit of meditation.

Bimbisara went to him and said, “I have come to ask something. I want
to buy the fruit of your meditation. I will pay whatever price you may
require”. Punya Shravak replied, “My lord, meditation means serenity.
It means keeping the mind free from temptation and hatred and
remaining steady in one’s self. You want to buy it, but this is
impossible. I cannot sell meditation.”

Meditation is like love and prayer. It is self-realisation. It cannot
be sold like a commodity. The fruit of meditation is compassion.

A self-sufficient meditator is a person who lives a life of
mindfulness moment to moment, though sometimes he or she may need to
meditate sitting watching the breath, as they do in Vipassana or
Anapansatiyoga.

A self-sufficient meditator is a person who lives a life of
mindfulness moment to moment, though sometimes he or she may need to
meditate sitting watching the breath, as they do in Vipassana or
Anapansatiyoga. But essentially, meditation means living life,
everyday life with awareness in the present. Becoming aware of your
each movement as you wake up, drinking a cup of chai or coffee,
driving to work, and such routine tasks with undivided attention.

This becomes a life-style of live-in-the-moment, accepting and
enjoying the moment, and not a mechanical habit. It functions as an
antidote to the fast-paced tech world we are forced to live in. You
create your own path of mindfulness as you encounter life moment to
moment, and enjoy it to the fullest.

Osho says: “You will have to create the path by walking yourself; the
path is not ready-made, lying there and waiting for you. It is just
like the sky: the birds fly, but they don’t leave any footprints. You
cannot follow them; there are no footprints left behind.”

Meditation succeeds where psychology fails. Recently, some
psychologists in the United States did some research about the mind
and its functioning. The conclusion they reached was really
mind-blowing.

“We’ve spent years trying to discern how the mind functions, but today
I am forced to admit that this so-called research was nothing more
than a fool’s errand and that we people of learning were the greatest
fools of all,” said American Psychological Association president
Nadine Kaslow at a press conference.

It is a great revelation for those who have this illusion that the
mind can know everything. The mind can certainly know much. It can
store a whole library of books in its memory bank. But what it cannot
do is know itself. Today scientists are gradually realising this. One
scientist has articulated his realisation in the following words: “Can
the eye watch itself? Can a book read its own pages? No. It’s now
clear to us that despite all the painstakingly conducted studies and
all the data we have meticulously gathered since the late 19th
century, we have, in essence, been nothing more than the snake that
devours its own tail.”

“All that we thought we understood was merely a mirage crafted by the
very unfathomable minds we once so stubbornly insisted we could know,”
admitted Ms Kaslow, before declaring the APA, with its 134,000 members
and 54 academic divisions, forever disbanded.

This realisation may appear to be a failure, but to me it is a
blessing in disguise. Now, scientists can change the way they look at
things and explore what is beyond mind — the mysterious realm of
consciousness. We are born with consciousness. This consciousness runs
through all beings and it blossoms absolutely when someone becomes a
Buddha. Along side this realisation, we develop our mind with the
information that comes to us from society, education, etc. Mind is
that part which has been given to us. The mind is borrowed, cultivated
and that which society drills into us. It is not what we really are.

Osho points out: “Consciousness is your nature; mind is just the
circumference created by the society around you, the culture, your
education.

In his book New Alchemy To Turn You On, Osho adds: “Mind means the
conditioning. You can have a Hindu mind, but you cannot have a Hindu
consciousness… Consciousness is one; it is not divisible. Minds are
many because societies are many; cultures, religions are many… Mind is
a social by-product. And unless this mind dissolves, you cannot go
within; you cannot know what is really your nature, what is
authentically your existence, your consciousness. Remember well that
you don’t have one mind; you have multi-minds… you are poly-psychic.
Mind is a flux: river like, flowing, changing. Consciousness is
eternal, one.”

But we are identified with the mind. We go on saying, insisting, “My
mind. I think this way. This is my ideology.” Because of this
identification with the mind, you miss that which you really are.