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with people but the people are living in misery and he lives in joy. He looks exactly like the others but he is not like the others. A Jesus, a Buddha, a Zarathustra -- these are strangers, utter strangers. They speak a different language, they behave in a different way. They are a different kind of being: awakened, alert, blissful. Hence the symbolic meaning: coming with joy.
A sannyasin has to both a stranger in the world of misery and yet he has not to escape from it. Rather than escaping from the world of misery he brings joy to the world, he shares his joy.
Sannyas is initiation into that space where one starts belonging to God, where one no more thinks of oneself in egoistic terms, where one starts thinking in terms of the whole. When you start feeling yourself in harmony with the whole great joy arises in the heart. Harmony is joy and disharmony is misery. Whenever we are not in tune with the whole there is misery. Whenever we are attuned to the whole suddenly clouds disappear and it is all sunshine. Suddenly flowers start blooming in your heart, you are full of the fragrance of the unknown, of the beyond. But it happens only in those moments when you are in harmony.
And everybody knows those moments once in a while. Of course they happen accidentally. Just watching a sunset you may feel you are falling into a subtle harmony. Something inside you may become quiet, as the sun goes down your inner turmoil may settle for a moment. The tremendous beauty of the sunset may overwhelm you, may possess you so deeply and so totally that for a moment you forget that you are separate, the observer becomes the observed. And then you feel great joy and great beauty and great silence. This happens, but it happens only accidentally, once in a while.
To be a sannyasin means to learn the art of creating situations where it starts happening more and more and more, to learn the secret art of creating the right space for it so that one day it happens but never leaves you again. That is the day of enlightenment, one becomes a Buddha or a Christ. The day the harmony has become so engrained in you that now there is no more any possibility of separation,
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