Traditionally, sannyasa was given to members from a certain caste and it meant absolute separation of the individual from society; but very few could live this way. Over the centuries, it was modified enabling more people to follow the lifestyle and discipline of sannyasa. Sri Swami Sivananda and Sri Swami Satyananda broke with tradition by initiating females and foreigners into sannyasa.
In this seminar, Swami Sivamurti Saraswati will elucidate the qualities of Sannyasa and how to follow this way of life in modern times.
There is a beautiful statement in the Bhagavad Gita which says: ‘Sannyasa equals investing the karmas’. Nobody has picked up this sentence. When asked to define sannyasa, people open up the scriptures and find long sentences and paragraphs describing it, but nobody says that sannyasa means investment of karmas. In the context in which Krishna was speaking to Arjuna, karma combines jnana, wisdom, and bhakti, devotion, surrender, or awareness of a higher reality. So sannyasa is actually a way of living in universal harmony by investing your karmas for the growth and development of your individual being and of the global community.
– Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati
http://www.yogamag.net/archives/1990s/1996/9607/96072gen.html