Be Playful

Playful In Activity

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 in 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 and can make you again a child. You can start running after butterflies, searching for seashells on the beach, colored stones.

Be Playful in Activity

Work should be considered as play, not as work. Work should be considered as play, just a game. You should not be serious about it; you should be just like children playing. It is meaningless, nothing is to be achieved; just the very activity is enjoyed. You can feel the distinction if you play sometimes. When you work it is different: you are serious, burdened, responsible, worried, anxious, because the result, the end-result, is the motive. The work itself is not worth enjoying. The real thing is just in the future, in the result. In play there is no result, really. The very process is blissful. And you are not worried, it is not a serious thing. Even if you look serious, it is just pretending. In play you enjoy the very process; in work the process is not being enjoyed – the goal, the end, is important. The process has to be tolerated anyhow. It has to be done because the end has to be achieved. If you could achieve the end without this, you would drop activity and jump to the end. But in play you would not do that.

The businessman is not playful. And if you are not playful, you cannot be meditative. Be more and more playful. Waste time in play. Just playing with children will do. Even if there is no one, you can jump and dance alone in the room and be playful. Enjoy. But your mind will go on insisting, “What are you doing, wasting time? You can earn something out of this time. You can do something, and you are just jumping, singing, and dancing. What are you doing? Have you gone mad?”

Try it. Snatch whatsoever time you can get out of your business, and be playful. Whatsoever. You can paint, you can play on a sitar, anything you like – but be playful. Look for no profit out of it, see no future in it, just the present. And then, then you can be playful inside also. Then you can jump on your thoughts, play with them, throw them here and there, dance with them, but not be serious about them.

Millions of people have tried meditation and dropped out of it because they took it very seriously. Religion has been thought to be a very serious affair – it is not. One has to understand – at least those who are with me – that religion is a playfulness, a laughter. Take it easy; then things blossom without any tension. You are not taking it easy, you are making it difficult.

Existence loves laughter. You may have observed, or not, that man is the only animal in the whole of existence who is capable of laughing. Laughter is the only distinguishing mark that you are not a buffalo, you are not a donkey; you are a human being. Laughter defines your humanity and your evolution. And the greatest laugh is at your own ridiculous things.