Seriousness

 

 

Question

Osho,

Life is tremendously serious...

 

 

No, life is not serious. You are serious. Life is very nonserious; nothing can be more nonserious than life. Life is absolutely nonserious!

 

 

Question

Osho,

But certain things have been achieved only because a person has been – maybe the word serious is not good – but the person has been really 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. With seriousness, you will always be shallow.

 

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

 

This is seriousness: the meaning lying in the end, not just here and now. The end must be achieved. If you achieve it, then it is okay. If you don’t achieve it, then everything is lost. So you are serious because you have made a point somewhere, and with it you have identified the whole meaning of your life.

 

You can never achieve anything, because nothing is static, everything is changing. You fix something today; tomorrow nothing is going to be the same, not even the planner. The whole will have changed completely; the end will remain only in your mind. The whole situation has changed now so you can never achieve it. That is why there is so much frustration.

 

You try, you think, you plan, you work – and then there is no achievement. The very thing that you desire never comes into your hands. It can never come. If life were a static and fixed thing, not dynamic and flowing, then you could achieve it – but then life would be a death. Life is life because it is dynamic, changing. You cannot predict its course. I is unpredictable. That’s what we mean when we say it is dynamic and flowing; it is always flowing into nowhere.

 

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 be. As life changes, transforms, you cannot transform and change yourself with it. You have a fixed pattern, a fixed shape. Now the shape will be the resistance. Then there will be a struggle. Seriousness creates frozenness; frozenness creates a struggle. You cannot just let go.

 

So be ready to be any shape or form. Any shape or form is good: trees are good and dogs are good and man is good. Be ready to be in any shape or form, then you will be living more and living intensely – because intensity is killed when you become identified with a particular form. Then you are shallow because you are concerned with the form, not with the being. Then you will be tense, not intense.

 

It you are ready to be any shape whatsoever then there is no surface to you: there is no shape and no form. You are ready to be in any form. Then you begin to live inwardly and you can flow with everything. And the more you can flow, the more alive you are.

 

So to me, life is not seriousness at all – but religious people have made it serious. That’s why religious people are basically antilife. But to me, that is not religion, that is just a metaphysics for suicide – it is suicidal. To me, religion means a very nonserious attitude – very childlike in everything, very innocent.

 

A serious person can never be innocent, and one who is innocent can never be serious. They are contradictory; they cannot exist simultaneously. A child is never serious, but very intense, in everything intense. If he is playing he is intense; if he is angry he is intense, if he is loving he is intense. But an old man is never intense. He is serious. Even when he is playing he is serious. He will turn play into work because the play will become a fight, a struggle, competition, defeat and victory – everything will come, every nonsense will emerge. It will not be just a play.

 

So intensity is something else. It is not seriousness. With seriousness, sadness is always about to come. You cannot enjoy seriousness, you cannot be happy with seriousness, you cannot laugh with seriousness. That’s why saints have never laughed. With seriousness, sadness is always bound to be somewhere around the corner.

 

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

 

If I tell a joke, then I create tension in you, expectation, curiosity. What is going to happen? How will the thing turn out? So you become tense with expectation. You become serious, and your mind begins to work – what is the end going to be? And if the end turns out just as you have expected it to, you will not laugh because then there is no release. If the end turns out to be completely unimagined, if the end is just a turning, a complete turn; if you could never have expected that this will be the end, then the tension which has come to a climax is released. You laugh. That laughter is not innocent, because that laughter is just a by-product of tension. So every joke has to create a tension in you. Then you feel released.

 

But innocent laughter is something very different. It is not a release mechanism, it is just a way of living. It is just a way of living!

 

Take laughing as a way of living. Exist as laughter; you will be absolutely nonserious. It may be that you may not be able to achieve anything, but what is the meaning of achievement? Even one who achieves – what does he achieve? Even by achieving, nothing is achieved. Then the whole absurdity is this: even if you achieve something, nothing is achieved and much is lost.

 

-Osho, "The Eternal Quest, #7"