Be Playful

Purity Of Childhood

If you want the ego, you will have to accept the prison, you will have to accept the boundaries. If you want a bigger and still bigger ego, the prison will become smaller and smaller, and the walls of the prison will come closer and closer. If you want to become the greatest ego in the world, you will be nothing but a prison, you will be surrounded by China Walls from everywhere, you will live in a straitjacket, behind iron walls.

But if you want to be alive, then the ego has to be dropped. Ego is a distraction from life.

You have a mind and that is your defect. I will not say that you have a defective mind – mind is the defect. You will have to drop the mind. And dropping it, suddenly you will find you have always been in the land of leela; not for a single moment had you left it – nobody can leave it. We can just forget about it. We can become serious and we can forget about it.

You are still the children playing on the sea beach. You are still the children searching for sea-shells on the beach. You are still the children collecting wild flowers. You are still the children trying to catch hold of a butterfly. That purity of childhood is still there; it has not been taken away from you – it has only been superimposed by seriousness, ego, mind. It is there! The rock is blocking the fountain, but the fountain has not disappeared. Remove the rock and the fountain flows again in all its splendour.

We feel and say to ourselves: I CANNOT FIND MY LAUGHTER OR LIGHT-HEARTEDNESS.

Seeking, you will never find it. Finding, or the effort to find it, is a serious thing. IT IS HERE! – you need not find it. Start enjoying it! Start being cheerful this very moment! Don’t try to find it, because if you try to find it you will remain serious. How can a seeker be non-serious?

You are searching for happiness and laughter and joy – you have to be serious, otherwise how will you search? Meanwhile you will remain serious, and the seriousness is getting stronger every moment. Tomorrow again you will search; but one day has passed – twenty-four hours’ more conditioning of seriousness is on you. You will find less laughter tomorrow; the day after tomorrow it will become even more difficult… and so on and so forth. And you will always be searching and seeking and trying to find.

Just be cheerful THIS moment!

So you can be happy with your unhappiness right now, and tomorrow we will see… and tomorrow never comes.

Don’t try to postpone – these are tricks the mind goes on playing upon you. Be happy! Have a good laugh! Have a good dance!

In the beginning it may look a little awkward, because you have not laughed for so long. The lips may have lost their elasticity. But it will come… just give a little opportunity for the lips to learn it again. They cannot lose it. Maybe forgotten – it will be revived again.

One can never forget how to laugh. It is like swimming: you cannot forget it. Once you have known it, you cannot forget. You may not go to the river for fifty years; after fifty years, suddenly, you can swim. You will not even need to remember it.