Panch Mahavrat or The Perennial Path The Art of Living

Author(s): Osho Rajnish
Publisher: Osho Rajnish

Page 44

13 November 1970 am in
CHAPTER 5
Process of progress
Nonviolence, nonpossessiveness, nonstealing, desirelessness and awareness are the fundamental vows of the art of sannyas. Sannyas like life is an art. Only those who are experts in the art of life can achieve sannyas. The art of sannyas goes beyond life. Only those who can experience life in its totality are able to enter sannyas. It is the next step of life. God is that building which is reached by ascending the ladder of samsar-worldly life. So the first point I would like to make clear is that there is no opposition - no contrast between the samsar and the sannyas. They are the two camps of the same journey. Sannyas evolves and blooms in the samsar itself. There is no enmity between the sannyas and samsar, on the contrary the sannyas is the fruit of deep and wide experience of the samsar. In fact the experience of sannyas is directly proportionate to the experience of samsar. Only those who do not under stand life, those who cannot go deep into the experiences of life, remain away from sannyas.
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According to my view the flowers of sannyas blooms in the midst of samsar, and goes beyond, sannyas means going beyond samsar. In his search for happiness, a person finds that he is going deeper and deeper into unhappiness. While wishing or longing for peace he finds dis-quietude. While running after riches, he sees that poverty within becomes more solid. His eyes open and he begins to look beyond the samsar in his life. Some people have told me that they find this subject difficult to understand and it goes high above their heads. My advice is to raise your heads. That would enable your raised eyes to look into the world of samsar and those talks would enter your heart. These matters are bound to be complex and difficult, they cannot be easy because their final fruit in nothing but unhappiness, their final result is nothing but ignorance, their final essence is nothing but darkness. The thing appears in one form, our delusion creates something else, and the truth is yet something else - other than that. But we live as if we are lost in the samsar, so we do not even have the idea that there can be any other truth than this.