Role Playing

 

 

Look at the world as a great drama. A thousand and one plays are going on and you have to participate in many games. You are constantly moving from one stage to another: from the house to the office, from the office to the church, from the church to the club, and so on, so forth. They are all different stages, different sets, and you have to play different roles. But they are all roles – don’t take them seriously.

 

There is no need to renounce them. To renounce them means you have taken them seriously.

 

That’s why I say never to renounce anything. Live your role, enjoy it, it is fun, but take it lightly, take it easily. It is not worth worrying about. So, whatever role you have to play in a certain circumstance, play to your utmost ability, play it totally, but once it is finished whether you have succeeded or failed is irrelevant.

 

Don’t look back, go ahead: there are other roles you have to play. Failure and success are unimportant.

 

What is important is the awareness that everything is a game.

 

When your whole life becomes full of this awareness you are freed, then nothing binds you. Then you are no more tethered to anything, then you don’t have any chains on your hands, then you are no more imprisoned by anything. You use masks but you know that that is not your original face. And you can remove the mask, because now you know it is a mask – it can be removed, it is removable. And now you can know your original face too.

 

The man who is aware that life is a game comes to know his original face.

 

And to know one’s original face is to know all that is worth knowing, because that is the face of god, that is the face of truth, that is the face of love. That is the face of freedom.

 

-Osho, "Eighty Four Thousand Poems, #21“