Osho initiates His Father into Sannyas



Osho initiates His Father into Sannyas
In October 1975 Osho's father visits, and asks Osho to initiate him. His new name is Swami Devateerth Bharti.
My father took sannyas four years after my mother became a sannyasin. He started feeling bad that he was not courageous enough; but he started meditating, started coming to the meditation camps. And finally, one day, there were two things: the breakdown of the personality and the breakthrough into a new existence, into a new life. dless11
My own father cannot sleep after three. He goes to sleep near about eleven, so he has three, four hours sleep at the most. My mother has always been worried, but I told my father to sit in meditation. So he sits from three, and that has become his door to the divine. For years now he has sat from three to seven...and he almost becomes like a statue; he forgets the body.
Now that has been the most precious experience of his life; no sleep can give it. He is fresh by three; that's how his mechanism, his body, is functioning. In the beginning he used to try to go to sleep. It was a misery because the sleep wouldn't come and he would get tired trying to sleep, and frustrated; by the morning he would be frustrated. Three or four hours of struggles to sleep every night and it doesn't come; how can you remain unfrustrated? But since I have given him meditation, all frustration has disappeared, and those have become his most valuable moments. Now he longs for them: for twenty-four hours he thinks about them, because those are the most peaceful. He has used it rightly. losers23
He was almost childlike as he went deeper into meditation. And he took sannyas only when he had touched the rock bottom of meditation, not before it. People take sannyas to enter into meditation; he waited. My mother took sannyas, my uncles took sannyas, but he waited.
Everybody was asking me, "Why don't you tell your father?" My uncle was saying it, my mother was saying it.
I said, "He has never told anything to me, never forced me to do anything. Now this would be absolutely unfair on my part to tell him to do something and particularly to take sannyas. Whenever he wants, he will say. I am not going to tell him. And I know he is waiting"--because he was continuously reporting about his meditation to me: how he was going, what he experienced, for how many seconds his thoughts disappeared and what kind of thoughts came when they came.
Whenever he came to me he was mentioning his meditation--and that was a clear indication that he was waiting; until he had touched rock bottom he would not say anything about sannyas. And he knew perfectly well that I was not going to say anything.
One day, in the morning...he used to meditate from three o'clock in the night up to six--three hours. So just nearabout six, Laxmi came running and said, "Your father wants you immediately, and he also says, 'Bring a mala and the sannyas form.' I don't know what has happened to him." He had been sitting for three hours; he was staying in the room where afterwards Laxmi stayed, in Lao Tzu house in Poona, the same room. He had just come for a few days, so Laxmi had moved out and he was staying there. I went into the room. He said, "Now the time has come: give me sannyas." misery01
Knowing my notoriety, knowing perfectly well all the condemnation being thrown at me from all the so-called respectable places, he became my disciple. That is courage, immense courage. Even I was surprised when he touched my feet for the first time. I wept...in my room of course, so nobody could see it. I feel those tears still in my eyes. When he asked to be initiated I could not believe it. At that moment I was just silent. I could not say yes or no, I was simply silent, shocked, surprised. Yes, you have the right expression in your language: "taken by surprise," and taken so powerfully. books08
And when he became a sannyasin, I reminded him. I told him, "Look. Now you are going to be a disciple of somebody who is good for nothing. And all that I can do for you is to make you also good for nothing."* bond32
*Note: As a child Osho was called 'good for nothing'. 'Nothing' also describes nirvana or enlightenment.
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