Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 22. SANNYAS IS OF THE HIGHEST
kind of ray, the red one accepts another kind, and the water inside the bottles is affected by those
rays in a big way. The rays of the sun serve as food and nourishment for the water.
Experiments and research conducted over thousands of years led to the discovery of ochre clothes
for sannyas, and it has yielded rich results. Physicists know well the function of colors. They know
that the color of your clothes keeps the same color away from it. We think just the opposite; we think
that a piece of red cloth is red, but it is not so. For instance, when the rays of the sun, which have
seven colors, fall on a particular object and the object appears to you as red, it means that the said
object has absorbed all the colors of the sun except the red one; it has kept the red away. And that
is why you see the object as red. And if some object appears to you to be blue, it means that the
object has repelled the blue color. So when this blue of the rays of the sun reaches your eyes, you
see the object as blue in color. So whatever color you have on your body, it will not allow the same
kind of color to enter you.
Ochre was selected as the color of sannyas after a great deal of investigation and experiment. The
color red arouses many kinds of sexuality in a human being, because it is very strong and vital. On
entering a human body it provokes its sexuality. For this reason people living in hot countries are
more sexual than others. The hotter a country’s climate, the more sexual its people.
It is not accidental that a book on sexology like the KAMASUTRA was not written in a country with
a cold climate. It is the same with TALES OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS; it is the product of a tropical
climate. People living in tropical climates are more sexual because of the sun. Therefore people
who were working on sannyas from many directions thought that sexuality could be calmed if the
red color were kept away from sannyasins’ bodies – hence ochre was selected.
You can ask why ochre was selected and not red. Pure red could well have been selected; it would
have been more effective in calming sexuality. But there was a difficulty in choosing red, true outand-out
red; it would have totally prevented red from entering the body. But the body needs some
amount of red rays to keep fit, so it would have been bad for the health to keep red totally away from
the body.
There is yet another reason we did not opt for pure red. Even the sight of the pure red is harsh
and harmful; we had to be wary that the color of sannyas should be such that it did not hurt others.
Sannyas takes care of everybody and everything. You put a piece of red cloth in front of a bull and
see how furious he becomes. The red hits the bull’s eyes hard; he cannot take it.
You will be surprised to know that people who work on color psychology in the West have arrived
a very strange conclusions. A lot of work on colors is in progress in the West; large scale research
is under way. And they have found many new uses of colors. An owner of a department store in
America had a study done on the colors on cans and containers of goods he sold. It was amazing
to find that even the color influenced the sale of goods in a big way. A researcher kept constant
watch on the customers – mostly women do the shopping just to see how they were attracted to
various colors. It was found that while the yellow attracted only twenty percent of the customers,
red attracted eighty percent. The sale of the same article increased fourfold when the color of its
container was changed from yellow to red. Red attracts women like anything, and it is not surprising
that this color has been the most popular among women all over the world.
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 426 Osho