Keshav Chandra Sen started feeling very embarrassed. A crowd had gathered seeing that Keshav Chandra, a great philosopher, was going to Ramakrishna; many people had come to listen, hearing that something was going to transpire there. Even they started feeling that the whole journey had been futile. “This is a strange thing that is happening!”
And Ramakrishna danced and laughed and he said, “Even if there had been any doubt in my mind about God, you have destroyed it. How can there be such intelligence without God? You are proof, Keshav Chandra – I believe in you.”
And Keshav Chandra has written in his memoirs, “Ramakrishna’s laughter defeated me – defeated me forever. I forgot all arguments. It looked so foolish! And he had not argued against me, he had not even said a single word against me. He simply kissed me, hugged me, laughed, danced. He appreciated me as nobody has ever appreciated – and I was talking against him! He said, ‘Keshav Chandra, your presence, such intelligence, such genius, is enough proof that God is!’ He said this to me,” Keshav Chandra writes, “but really his presence, his laughter, his dance, his hugging and kissing, proved to me that God is; otherwise, how is such a phenomenon as Ramakrishna possible?”
The uneducated Ramakrishna, the villager Ramakrishna, proved far more profound than the very sophisticated, educated Keshav Chandra. What happened? Something tremendously beautiful happened. Ramakrishna is really religious; he knows what religion is, he knows what godliness is: to take life in a dancing way, to take life singing, to accept life in all its manifoldness, without any judgment – to love it for what it is.
A sannyasin means one who is not trying to solve the mystery of life but is diving deep into the mystery itself. Living the mystery is sannyas, not solving the mystery. If you start solving it you become serious. If you start living it you become more and more playful.
See the difference between sannyas and other initiations. There is a qualitative difference. It is not initiation in the old sense, just as it is not a learning in the old sense – it is an unlearning, and so I can say it is uninitiation. It will bring you out of all your initiations, because if you have been to so many schools and sects and ideologies, many things must be still hanging around inside you. You need a good cleaning, you need a thorough cleaning, you need a good bath – and sannyas will give you a shower, it will cleanse your soul. It will give you back the innocence of a child, the laughter of a child, eyes full of wonder and awe.