THE DISEASE CALLED SERIOUSNESS

Question : LIFE IS TREMENDOUSLY SERIOUS...

Life is not serious. You are serious. Life is not anything serious; nothing can be more nonserious than life. Life is absolutely nonserious!

Question : BUT CERTAIN THINGS HAVE BEEN ACHIEVED ONLY BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE HAVE BEEN – MAYBE THE WORD ’SERIOUS’ IT IS NOT GOOD, BUT, RATHER, ’INTENSE’.

Intensity is a very different thing from seriousness. If you are serious, you can never really be intense; you can only be tense. That’s a different thing. With seriousness, you can never be intense and deep. You will always be shallow.

Life is not serious at all. It is just a nonserious play – with nothing to be achieved, with nowhere to reach. It is just a play, with no end. Serious is always end-oriented. It means that you are living in order to achieve something, and life will be meaningless if you don’t achieve it. 

This is seriousness: the means lies in the end, not in The here and now. The end must be achieved. If you achieve it, then it is okay. If you don’t achieve it, then everything ii lost. You are serious because you have made some condition for your life. You have identified the meaning of your life by some condition that has to be fulfilled.

If you are serious, then you cannot flow. Then you are frozen inside; then you become just a dead stone. Then there are resistances around you. You cannot melt, you cannot change as life changes. You have a fixed pattern, a fixed shape, and because of that shape you will resist change. Then you are not flowing with life, you are struggling against it. 

Seriousness creates frozenness, and frozenness creates struggle. You can just let go.

Be ready to be anyone, to be anything, to be in any shape at all. Any shape is good. Intensity is killed when you have become identified with a particular form, a particular way of being. Then you are shallow because you are concerned with your form not with your being. Then you will be tense, not intense.

Whenever there is seriousness, sadness is about to come. You cannot enjoy seriousness, you cannot laugh with seriousness. Saints have never laughed. Sadness is bound to be somewhere around the corner, always.

Seriousness is sad, it cannot laugh. And even if it laughs, it is only a release mechanism. The laughter is not innocent it is only a release mechanism. A serious person can laugh but it is only to release the tension of seriousness. Then again he is ready to be serious, and more tensions are accumulated.

If I tell a joke, I create tension in you, expectation. curiosity. What is going to happen? How will it turn out? You become tense with expectation. You become serious, your mind begins to work. How is the joke going to end? if it ends just as you expected it to, you will not laugh because then there is no release. But if the end turns out to be completely unimagined, if it is a complete turnabout; if you never expected that this could be the end, then the tension that has been brought to a climax is released. You laugh. Understand, it is just a release of tension. Every joke has to create a tension in you. Then, when you laugh, you feel released.