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The first question:
Question 1
I LIVE IN THE LAND OF SERIOUSNESS, IMPRISONED IN ITS BORDERS. CAN YOU DRAW ME A ROAD-MAP TO YOUR LAND OF LEELA? HAVE I A DEFECTIVE GENE? I CANNOT FIND MY LAUGHTER OR LIGHT-HEARTEDNESS. I SEE IT AROUND ME, BUT DO NOT FEEL IT IN ME.

SARJANA, 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 ungrown 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.

That’s what LEELA is, playfulness is. But you are in love and it becomes serious, and you start thinking of marriage and you start thinking of having children and you start thinking of having a family – and the whole thing has gone ugly! If these things happen, let them happen as by-products, not as results. Yes, if you love a woman, you would like to be with her – this is marriage! There should be no other marriage. There should not even be the idea, because the VERY idea makes things down-to-earth; the poetry is destroyed. It becomes mundane; the romance is destroyed.

But the moment you are in love, immediately your mind starts weaving and spinning... about family, how to have a family of one’s own. Why should you need ’a family of one’s own’? People possess things and people possess people too. If you possess things, it can be forgiven, but how can it be forgiven when you start possessing people? You say ’my wife’, ’my husband’, ’my child’ – what have you DONE to call this child yours? Who are you? How do you come in? Can you create a child?
Can you create the child according to your own desire?
A child comes from the unknown, is a gift. You are not the creator, how can you be the possessor?

It IS NOT according to you that the child takes shape and form and being. You were longing for a beautiful child and you are hit with a lulu and still you call it ’my child’. You have been just a passage in the great play of existence.

Just as there are liberation movements, women’s lib movement, so a new movement should be mounted: children’s liberation movement. Nobody should be allowed to possess children.
Possessiveness should not be allowed! Nobody should say ’my child’. All children are of God. You can only be a caretaker, not more than that. And you should be grateful that you have been chosen to be a caretaker of a new life evolving. That is more than enough! Enjoy the game of it! of being a caretaker of an evolving life, but don’t start possessing.

But our mind is possessive. The possessiveness has gone to the very roots, and that has been the greatest hindrance in human growth.

When love is possessive it becomes exclusive. Then ’this woman is mine, and exclusively mine!’ – then she cannot laugh with anybody else, then she cannot hold hands with anybody else, then she cannot look into the eyes of somebody else. What nonsense! Why? Who am I to possess? And how can love be possessive?

Love is always inclusive; it can never be exclusive. If I love the woman, I will love to see her happy in a thousand and one ways, with a thousand and one people. I would like her to be happy. That will be my joy. If she is happy dancing with somebody, I should not feel jealous – I love her! how can I feel jealous? I should be thrilled that she is happy. But when you claim that she is your wife, then you cannot allow this. You start crippling her. She starts paralyzing you in revenge. You both become destructive to each other.

Love is the greatest creative energy, but up to now it has been a misfortune, the greatest misfortune. People have not been killed because of hatred: people have been killed because of love. Life has become so bitter, not because of anger: it has become so bitter because of love.
You fight for the love of a woman or a man; you fight for the love of your family or clan. You fight for the love of your ideology or religion; you fight for the love of your mother-country or father-country, father-land, motherland. You go on fighting for your love! All murders, all killings – all kinds of sufferings exist because of your so-called love.

Something is basically wrong with your love – your love is a fixated love; it is not a flowing play. It is serious, it is exclusive, it is possessive. It is full of stupidity.
One should be able to see all this – and just SEEING it, you start relaxing. You see the point of it and you start relaxing, and a new awareness arises in you.

Just.... I am surprised when I come across a man whose wife has died – and he is still crying and in anguish: his beloved has died. Why be so monopolistic? There are so many beautiful women still alive! This makes no sense. Your husband has died and for your whole life you will remain in a nightmare – because you cannot love anybody else? Your love is so tiny? so fixated? it was a kind of obsession? It was neurotic, it was not healthy. Otherwise, when the husband is dead, yes, there will be sadness, but you will say goodbye and you will move. You will not sacrifice your life – because sacrificing your life is dangerous. If you sacrifice your life and you become a martyr, you will take revenge on life; you will create guilt in your children, you will create guilt all around. And you WILL suffer! And when a person suffers, he creates vibes of suffering all around.

No, this makes no sense! The world is full of so many people, why should you be so fixated? But the fixation comes from the very beginning: the moment a child says ’my mother’, and the mother feels very happy, the fixation has started. Now the child will remain obsessed his whole life.

And when the child is small, he is naturally dependent on the mother – and mothers and fathers have exploited that dependence immensely. He is helpless, he cannot survive on his or her own; he HAS to look up to the mother and the father. His helplessness is exploited. He knows if the mother is gone, he will be dead. If the mother is no more available, he will be dead, he will not be able to survive.

This idea goes on and on getting deeper and deeper.... And the mother helps it, because the mother enjoys the ego trip that ”You cannot survive without me.” She threatens many times, ”Listen to me, otherwise I will leave and go forever, or I will die – and THEN YOU will know!”
And the child is shaken to the very roots – he cannot survive without the mother.

This becomes, by and by, a conditioning. Later on it will be reflected in all his relationships. He will think the same about his wife: if the wife is no more, he will not be able to survive. This will become unconscious. He will think the same again and again about everything: ”If this job is gone, then I am finished. If this house is no more with me, then where will I be? If this bank balance is no more with me, then where will I be?” His whole life he will think in terms of fixation, and his whole life will be a long long, unnecessary suffering. He is no more a child, but he remains childish because of the conditioning.

Love, and immediately you turn it into bitterness because you become serious about it. You start thinking of the future. Think of the future – marriage, children, security – and you have destroyed the play and it has become a game, and a very dangerous game. And you will be a loser – nobody is ever a winner.

With play, everybody is a winner. With seriousness, nobody is ever a winner – all are losers.
You come to meditate here and you become serious about it. And I go on insisting: Don’t become serious. Meditation can happen only in playfulness, in utter playfulness, when you are not searching and seeking for anything, when you are simply dancing or singing or chanting; when you are not asking, when the activity is all and all in itself, no future is provoked, no future is involved in it... then it happens. Meditation is a happening. You cannot snatch it from God’s hands. You cannot desire it and you cannot have it. You can only do one thing: you can become an empty receiving end – an;d that’s what happens when you are playful.

Meditation is fun! Even the word looks absurd with meditation – meditation and fun? Down the ages, you have been taught that this is the seriousmost thing: go into the church and become serious – even if you don’t have one, create a long face, then you will look as if you are in the church. Don’t laugh, don’t dance, don’t be playful! – it is a serious affair. You are facing God.

This God seems to be somehow very strange! He cannot allow laughter, He cannot allow dance, He cannot allow love, He cannot allow joy. The Gods of the past were very revengeful, jealous Gods, violent Gods; ready to crush you and destroy you, ready to throw you into hell-fire. Even the idea of God was ugly.

Here with me, you will have to learn a new language: meditation is fun, prayer is love and laughter; and the temple, the church, the mosque, is the place to enjoy, the place to be drunk with life; the place to dance and hold hands, the place to share what God has given to you, the place to be absorbed utterly into the moment. That is the meaning of fun, that is the meaning of laughter, that is the meaning of joy: to be utterly absorbed in the moment as if no other moment exists. So how can you ask for a result? Result needs another moment in the future.

Become like small children – dancing, singing, shouting – and God will come to you unawares.
Suddenly one moment, you will find He is surrounding you; suddenly you will find you are not holding the hands of a woman – God is holding your hands; you are not holding the hands of a man – it is God. Looking into the eyes of the other, playfully, joyously, suddenly you will fall into a depth unknown to you, unknown to your mind. You will start disappearing into a deep abyss.
That’s what God is! God is not in the scriptures – it is in the eyes of people, and in the flowers and in the rivers and in the moons. God is written all over the place! Don’t go to the scriptures. And if you cannot find God in alive trees, green and red and gold, if you cannot find God there, you will not find Him in the Bible, the Koran and the Vedas. How can you find Him there if you cannot find Him here? Once you have found it here, you will find it anywhere... then He is everywhere.

Once found, God is everywhere – but you will have to find Him in life, in playfulness.

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.

You ask me, Sarjana: I LIVE IN THE LAND OF SERIOUSNESS, IMPRISONED IN ITS BORDERS.

YOU CAN EXIST ONLY IN THE LAND OF SERIOUSNESS – you as an ’I’; and you can exist only imprisoned in the borders of seriousness – as an ’I’. If you want to be playful, you will have to drop the idea of ’I’. The ’I’ cannot be playful; it resists play, because play is death to it. The ’I’ is always serious.
Have you not watched it? When you laugh, just have a look inside: the ’I’ disappears. That’s why egoistic people cannot laugh – impossible! When you are dancing, a moment comes when the ’I’ disappears. But egoistic people cannot dance; they cannot allow the ’I’ to disappear ever. Naturally, they will remain imprisoned, they will be prisoners. But this is your choice!
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.

I LIVE, you say, IN THE LAND OF SERIOUSNESS, IMPRISONED IN ITS BORDERS. CAN YOU DRAW ME A ROAD-MAP TO YOUR LAND OF LEELA?
And you are again asking about a road-map – that is a serious thing. I have none. If you want road-maps you will have to go to the churches and to the priests – they have. Actually! – in Indian temples there are maps of heaven, hell, and how to reach there, and what you will find... the whole geography! Who is who, and where God lives, and where the great saints live – everything you will find.

They have charted all the maps – all imaginary! because God cannot be caught in any map. And heaven is not a map, neither is hell; they are not geographical at all – they are psychological states.

When you are serious, you are in hell; seriousness is hell, playfulness is heaven.

You ask me: CAN YOU DRAW ME A ROAD-MAP TO YOUR LAND OF LEELA? HAVE I A DEFECTIVE GENE?
No – nobody has a defective gene. And a defective gene does not create the problem: the problem comes from the ego. And the ego has nothing to do with the body; the ego is a mind attitude.

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.

You say: 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! Just see the point of it! Don’t postpone it – these are tricks of postponing, Sarjana. You don’t WANT to be happy; you still want to remain unhappy. You still want some new excuse to be unhappy. Now this is the excuse: ”I am searching for happiness, I am searching for joy. Right now I am unhappy. I will be happy when I have found – but how can I be happy right now? I will have to find, and the journey is long and the path is arduous, an uphill task.”

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.
And you have been laughing when you were a child. Every child is born laughing, and there are very very few fortunate people who die laughing. One who can die laughing has arrived. But if you want to die laughing, you will have to live laughing.

Once an old Parsi came to see me and he said, ”Do you know? We have a beautiful story about Zarathustra – that he was born laughing.”
I said, ”That is nothing special – every child is born laughing.”
Zarathustra is simply a symbol. Every child is born alive, full of joy! great energy, great love for life, great curiosity, infinite wonder, awe for small things. Every child is born an adventurer, an explorer.

And every child is born with great courage to go into the unknown. We cripple him. We stop him.
We prevent him. We start cultivating – and whatsoever we call cultivation is nothing but destroying all the possibilities, allowing only small holes for him to live in, taking his whole sky away and giving him a very small corner in the world.

He was born as all men, all women, all animals, all trees, all rivers, all mountains are. And what do we do with the child? We take all that he has brought away from him; we make him a doctor, an engineer, a businessman, a soldier, a politician – we confine him. He was born as all, as infinity; all the alternatives were open. We close all the alternatives and leave only one alternative open. We have killed him! We allow only a minute part of him to live.

Just think of a businessman: he simply lives as a businessman. Morning, afternoon, evening, night, he lives as a businessman. He dreams of business, he talks of business, he reads of business – his whole life has become business. What have you done to this man? What misfortune has happened to this man? He cannot be anything else! He does not know how to relax. He does not know how to slip out small hole in which he has started living – he calls it businessman, doctor, engineer, professor.

A man should be liquid; he should be able to be all. You should not live only as you – you should live as all humanity, past, future, present. You should live as a totality; multi-dimensional you should live, not one-dimensional, not linear. To live like a line is to live a very poor life.

There is no need! But we have all become focussed in small corners, tethered in small corners we call our minds, egos, this and that. And we are so much obsessed with those small places, caves – -dirty and dark, dismal and sad. But we have become accustomed to those places and we are afraid of the open air and we are afraid of the open sky and the sun and the sand, and we never go out of those small spaces. Hence, laughter has disappeared.

Life has disappeared! – how can laughter live without life? Your spirit is dead. And this is a miracle, that your so-called spiritual people are the MOST spiritless people – and you call them spiritual. My definition of the word ’spiritual’ is: one who is spirited, one who lives a passionate life, with intensity; who lives at the maximum, not at the minimum; who does not live a lukewarm life.

Be courageous! and laughter will follow. Be courageous and live intensely! and you will not need to ask how to be playful. Out of the maximum, playfulness happens of its own accord – because when you live at the maximum you start overflowing. That overflowing of energies is what playfulness is – there is no map to it, there is no technique to it. Just understanding.

Osho
Walk Without Feet, Fly Without Wings and Think Without Mind -
Ch#5 : Playfulness is Heaven
am in Buddha Hall
[part 1 of 2]