Be Playful

Meditation Is Fun

Meditation is fun! Even the word looks absurd with meditation – meditation and fun? Down the ages, you have been taught that this is the seriousmost thing: go into the church and become serious – even if you don’t have one, create a long face, then you will look as if you are in the church. Don’t laugh, don’t dance, don’t be playful! – it is a serious affair. You are facing God.

This God seems to be somehow very strange! He cannot allow laughter, He cannot allow dance, He cannot allow love, He cannot allow joy. The Gods of the past were very revengeful, jealous Gods, violent Gods; ready to crush you and destroy you, ready to throw you into hell-fire. Even the idea of God was ugly.

With me, you will have to learn a new language: meditation is fun, prayer is love and laughter; and the temple, the church, the mosque, is the place to enjoy, the place to be drunk with life; the place to dance and hold hands, the place to share what God has given to you, the place to be absorbed utterly into the moment. That is the meaning of fun, that is the meaning of laughter, that is the meaning of joy: to be utterly absorbed in the moment as if no other moment exists. So how can you ask for a result? Result needs another moment in the future.

Become like small children – dancing, singing, shouting – and God will come to you unawares.

Suddenly one moment, you will find He is surrounding you; suddenly you will find you are not holding the hands of a woman – God is holding your hands; you are not holding the hands of a man – it is God. Looking into the eyes of the other, playfully, joyously, suddenly you will fall into a depth unknown to you, unknown to your mind. You will start disappearing into a deep abyss.

That’s what God is! God is not in the scriptures – it is in the eyes of people, and in the flowers and in the rivers and in the moons. God is written all over the place! Don’t go to the scriptures. And if you cannot find God in alive trees, green and red and gold, if you cannot find God there, you will not find Him in the Bible, the Koran and the Vedas. How can you find Him there if you cannot find Him here? Once you have found it here, you will find it anywhere… then He is everywhere.

Once found, God is everywhere – but you will have to find Him in life, in playfulness.

Playfulness makes you alive to the maximum. Seriousness cripples you. You become shrunken, frozen. You become closed, you become isolated. You become egoistic. That’s why seriousness has been so much cherished by people because seriousness gives you the ego, and playfulness takes the ego away.

WE LIVE IN THE LAND OF SERIOUSNESS, IMPRISONED IN ITS BORDERS.

YOU CAN EXIST ONLY IN THE LAND OF SERIOUSNESS – you as an ‘I’; and you can exist only imprisoned in the borders of seriousness – as an ‘I’. If you want to be playful, you will have to drop the idea of ‘I’. The ‘I’ cannot be playful; it resists play, because play is death to it. The ‘I’ is always serious.

Have you not watched it? When you laugh, just have a look inside: the ‘I’ disappears. That’s why egoistic people cannot laugh – impossible! When you are dancing, a moment comes when the ‘I’ disappears. But egoistic people cannot dance; they cannot allow the ‘I’ to disappear ever. Naturally, they will remain imprisoned, they will be prisoners. But this is your choice!