This Voyage

Playfulness Is Heaven

THERE CANNOT BE ANY MAP TO THE LAND OF PLAYFULNESS. All maps lead to seriousness. Playfulness is when all maps have been burnt down. There is no way to – playfulness, because playfulness is not a goal and cannot be a goal. When you forget about goals, when you are not going anywhere, when the very idea of going is dropped, then herenow – playfulness starts growing in you, happening in you.

Playfulness is not then and there: it is herenow. So how can there be a road-map? You are not to go: you are just to be.

Seriousness is goal-oriented. And even when a serious person starts playing, he transforms the quality of the play – it becomes a game; it is no more play.

That is the difference between a game and a play. When a play becomes serious, it becomes a game.

People go to see wrestling, people go to see bull-fights or American football – ugly, violent, inhuman.

The people who are going to see these things are immature, a little perverted too. The spectators are as ingrown as the gladiators. And both are in some way catharting; in the name of the game, they are throwing their rubbish, they are simply vomiting their violence.

This is a very violent, violent world! That’s why love cannot exist here. When human beings will really be human beings, things like bullfighting and wrestling will be unheard of, they will become part of history. Just to imagine that thousands of people have come to see a bullfight looks so ugly, disgusting. But people are serious. They change the play also into seriousness.

A play is something in which a goal is not at all concerned. The very being together is beautiful!

for the sheer joy of it! In a better world, with more understanding, games will disappear – there will only be plays. There will be nobody as a winner, nobody as the defeated – because the very idea of defeating and winning is inhuman. There is no NEED for it! Why can’t we enjoy the sheer togetherness? There should be no counting, no marking. There should not be any result out of it.

If you are in love with playing football, play football! Just play it! Don’t look for the result. If the result comes in, you become serious, the play is destroyed; it has become almost businesslike. Enjoy the sheer outpour of energy. Enjoy the moment – don’t sacrifice it for anything else.

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.