VBT – Meditation 110.2
Be Playful
Be playful, Shiva says, Gracious one, play. The attitude of the player means he is enjoying the activity, it is good in itself. No profit motive is involved; he is not calculative. Just look at a businessman. Whatsoever he is doing, he is calculating about the profit, what he is going to attain out of it. A customer comes. The customer is not a person, he is just a means. What can be profited out of him? How can he be exploited? Deep down he is calculating what is to be said, what is to be done. Everything is calculated just to manipulate, just to exploit. He is not concerned with this person, he is not concerned with the deal, he is not concerned with anything – he is concerned only with the future, the profit.
Look at the East: in the villages still, a businessman is not just a profit-maker, and the customer has not come just to purchase something. They enjoy it. Osho was sharing – I remember my old grandfather. He was a cloth merchant. Me and my whole family were puzzled because he enjoyed it so much. For hours together it was a game with the customers. If something was worth ten rupees, he would ask fifty rupees for it, and he knew this was absurd. And his customers knew it too, they knew that it must be near about ten rupees, and they will start from two rupees. Then a long haggling would follow – hours together. My father and my uncles would get angry. “What is going on? Why don’t you simply say what the price is?” But he had his own customers. When they came, they would ask, “Where is Dada, where is grandfather? Because with him it is a game, a play. Whether we lose one rupee or two, whether it is more or less, that is not the point!”
They enjoyed it. The very activity in itself was something worth pursuing. Two people were communicating through it. Two people were playing a game and both knew it was a game – because of course a fixed price was possible.
In the West now they have fixed prices because people are more calculating and more profit – motivated. They cannot conceive of wasting time. Why waste time? The thing can be settled within minutes. There is no need. You can just write the exact price. Why fight for hours together?
But then the game is lost and the whole thing becomes a routine. Even machines can do it. The businessman is not needed; the customer is not needed.
I have heard about a psychoanalyst who was such a busy man and who had so many patients that it was difficult to have personal contact with everyone. So he would feed his tape-recorder for a particular patient and the tape-recorder would say whatsoever that psychoanalyst wanted to say to the patient.
Once it happened that it was the appointed time of a patient who was a very rich man. The psychoanalyst was entering a hotel. Suddenly he saw the patient sitting there. So he asked, “What are you doing here? It was your time with me.” The patient said, “I am so busy that I have fed my words to my own tape-recorder. Both the tape-recorders are talking to each other. Whatsoever you have to say to me, my tape-recorder has recorded, and whatsoever I have to say to you, your tape-recorder has recorded it from my tape-recorder. At the same-time and, we are both free.”
If you are too calculating then people disappear, and more and more mechanization comes in.
Tags: Be Playful
