Life As Non-Serious
The moment you start seeing life as non-serious, a playfulness, all the burden on your heart disappears. All the fear of death, of life, of love – everything disappears. One starts living with a very light weight or almost no weight. So weightless one becomes, one can fly in the open sky.
Zen’s greatest contribution is to give you an alternative to the serious man. The serious man has made the world, the serious man has made all the religions. He has created all the philosophies, all the cultures, all the moralities; everything that exists around you is a creation of the serious man. Zen has dropped out of the serious world. It has created a world of its own which is very playful, full of laughter, where even great masters behave like children.
Seriousness is sickness, it is not a device. It leads to death, not to eternal life. Life is playfulness, fun, because the whole existence is a tremendous circus. It is all fun ― all the colors of the flowers, so many beautiful animals, birds, clouds, and for no purpose; they don’t serve any purpose. There is no goal to life. Life is a play unto itself. It is sheer abundance of energy, overflowing energy ― existence goes on expanding.
No God has created it, because whenever something is created there is purpose. Whenever something is created there is a motive, and when somebody creates it, the created can never be anything other than a machine. Existence has no use as such, it remains eternal, an eternal play of energies in millions of forms.
Fun is the most sacred word, far more sacred than prayer. It is the only word that can give you a sense of playfulness, can make you again a child. You can start running after butterflies, searching for seashells on the beach, colored stones.
Life as such has to be taken as a cosmic joke – and then suddenly you relax because there is nothing to be tense about. And in that very relaxation, something starts changing in you – a radical change, a transformation – and the small things of life starts having new meaning, new significance. Then nothing is small, everything starts taking on a new flavor, a new aura; one starts feeling a kind of godliness everywhere. One does not become a Christian, does not become a Hindu, does not become a Mohammedan; one simply becomes a lover of life. One learns only one thing, how to rejoice in life.
But rejoicing in life is the way towards God. Dance your way to God, laugh your way to god, sing your way to God!
