So that was a strategy to prevent anybody getting any kind of freedom, any kind of license – a psychological strategy. Unless all the five decide to conspire together…and that is very difficult, that is almost impossible. Sinners are known to become friendly to each other, saints are not known to become friendly to each other. They don’t know what friendship is, they can’t conspire. They will watch, they will try to find every kind of fault in the other and they will report to the master. And Hindu monks used to move – even now they do the same – in big groups of hundreds.
Buddha says: You have dropped a small family and now you have moved into a bigger crowd – you have become another family. Nothing has changed. First you were thinking that was your security, now you think this is your security, but the old idea of security still persists.
He says that to be a sannyasin means to accept the natural insecurity of life. That very acceptance is sannyas – to accept that, “I am born alone and I will die alone, and between these two alonenesses all ideas of being together with somebody are just fantasies. I am alone even while I am alive.” One is born alone, one lives alone, one dies alone.
Buddha’s emphasis is very much on the fact of your aloneness; he wants you to be aware of it. Once you are aware of it you will be surprised at the beauty of it, at the joy of it. You will not be scared; you will rejoice in it because it has a freedom, it has an ecstasy in it, it has a purity and innocence in it. And why hanker for security?
Life is insecure in its very nature, hence it is simple logic: those who want to be more alive, they have to live in insecurity. The greater the insecurity, the more will be your aliveness; the greater the fallacious, so-called security, the less will be your aliveness.
That’s why you see so many dead people in the world, almost dead, for the simple reason that they have become so much attached to the idea of security. And the more dead you are, the more secure you are. Don’t do anything that can create any insecurity, remain confined to the familiar, don’t ever go beyond the limits. You will never know the ecstasy of going beyond the limits. You will never know the ecstasy of exploring the unknown and the unknowable.
According to Buddha, both categories are the same people. Of course they are extremists and they appear opposite to each other, but don’t be deceived. They are not really opposite; they have found different kinds of security.
A Jaina monk wrote to me that he would like to come here. He has been reading my books and he wants to become my sannyasin, but he is afraid he will lose all his security because now the Jaina community protects him, feeds him, takes every care of him, respects him. Once he leaves the monkhood, the Jaina community won’t be protecting him anymore.
He asked me whether I am ready to take his life in my hands, whether I will be his security. Now he wants to change from one security to another security, he cannot take a jump into insecurity. And my sannyas is insecurity.
Real sannyas is always insecurity because real life is insecurity. There is a great security in being insecure. In dropping the very idea of security you are secure with the whole, with God, with the total. And there is great excitement then, because each moment you don’t know what is going to happen.