This Voyage

Life Is A Leela

A really meditative person is playful; life is fun for him, life is a leela, a play. He enjoys it tremendously.

Meditation is not anything of the mind, it is something beyond the mind. The first step is to be playful about it. If you are playful about it, the mind cannot destroy your meditation. Otherwise it will turn it into another ego trip; it will make you very serious. You will start thinking, ‘I am a great meditator. I am holier than other people, and the whole world is just worldly – I am religious, I am virtuous.’ That’s what has happened to thousands of so-called saints, moralists, puritans: they are just playing ego games, subtle ego games.

Be playful about it. It is a song to be sung, a dance to be danced. Take it as fun and you will be surprised: if you can be playful about meditation, meditation will grow in leaps and bounds. But you are not hankering after any goal; you are just enjoying sitting silently, just enjoying the very act of sitting silently – not that you are longing for some yogic powers, siddhis, miracles. All that is nonsense, the same old nonsense, the same old game, played with new words, on a new plane….

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 start 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!

Be playful. It will be difficult because you are so much – structured. You have an armor around you and it is so difficult to loosen it, to relax it. You cannot dance, you cannot sing, you cannot just jump, you cannot just scream and laugh and smile. Even if you want to laugh you first want something there to be laughed at. You cannot simply laugh. There must be some cause: only then can you laugh. There must be some cause: only then can you cry and weep.

You are serious. You look at life as a business or as mathematics. It is not! Life is poetic, illogical. It is not like work, it is like play. Look at the trees, the animals, the birds; look at the sky: the whole existence is playful. You are very serious, so it is no wonder that you have become separate from existence. You are uprooted from it, and then you feel alienated, then you feel like strangers, then you feel that this existence is not your own. No one else is responsible for it except you and your seriousness.

Put aside knowledge, put aside seriousness; be absolutely playful. You have nothing to lose. If you do not gain anything, you will not lose anything either. What can you lose in being playful? But I say to you: you will never be the same again. If you can really be playful, you will have a new perspective, a new way to look, a new way to be. And you will not be the same person. The whole of life will change its meaning for you, because the meaning is given by you. Now life looks like boredom, life looks meaningless. You have made it so because of your seriousness. Life is playful, beautiful, but it can be beautiful only if your eyes are open to beauty.