The Enlightened Person Is Always Joyous
by the Enlightened
Master Osho
Serious and sad people become something else, they don't
become enlightened. They become popes, Mother Teresas, Mahatma Gandhis, Morarji
Desais, Shankaracharyas, Ayatollah Khomaniacs, Imams, priests. The churches,
the synagogues, the temples, the mosques, the Gurudwaras they are full of
these people; they are serious people. They gather around an enlightened person
and they start destroying all that he has brought into the springtime. They
start creating a dead tradition and the tradition has to be serious, the
tradition cannot be non-serious.
The enlightened person is always joyous, but the tradition, the convention
cannot be joyous. The whole structure of a tradition is basically political; it
is there to dominate, it is there to oppress, it is there to exploit. And you
cannot exploit people playfully, you have to be very serious. You have to make
them so sad, so afraid of life itself, you have to create so much trembling in
their being, that out of that fear they fall into your hands; they become
objects of your manipulation.
A man like me cannot exploit you, because this whole place is more like a
tavern than a temple. It is more playful than serious. We are engaged in a
beautiful game! The moment you think of it as a game, all seriousness
disappears, things become lighter. You can walk in a dancing way; there is no weight
on you.
But the priests cannot do it; their whole prestige depends on their
seriousness. The more serious they are, the more somber-looking, the more
"holier-than-thou" they can pretend to be … And they will do
everything they will fast… naturally, when a person fasts he becomes serious,
he cannot laugh. When you are hungry, starving, you cannot laugh and you
cannot allow anybody else to laugh either. It is not a laughing matter! You are
starving, sacrificing, crucifying yourself, and people are laughing! It cannot
be pardoned, it cannot be forgiven.
Naturally, when you go to a fasting person you become serious you have to be
serious. That is simple manners. Now, a person who is distorting his body in
every possible way, who is torturing his body in every possible way how can
you laugh? The very scene is sad; you feel burdened. It is very difficult to be
with these so-called saints. That's why people just go to pay their respects
and escape immediately, because to sit with them means they will make you
burdened, they will create guilt in you...
These sad people become Catholic priests, Hindu Shankaracharyas, Mohammedan
Imam, and what-not. These serious people lose their humanity; they become
parrots. But it pays. You need not have much intelligence to be a parrot, you
need not have much courage to be a parrot; if you just have a little bit of
memory and you can recite the Vedas, the Gita, the Koran, you will be respected
and honored. You are not doing anything creative, you are not adding anything
to the beauty of the world, you are not contributing to the earth and its joys,
on the contrary, you are destroying. But people have been conditioned for
thousands of years, and they go on doing things according to their
conditioning. Parrots are worshipped….
Life has to be taken hilariously! Life is so full of laughter, it is so
ridiculous, it is so funny that unless your juices have gone completely dry you
cannot be serious. I have looked around at life in every possible way and it is
always funny, whatever way you look at it! It gets funnier and funnier! It is
such a beautiful gift of the beyond...
I am against all seriousness. My whole approach is that of humor, and the
greatest religious quality is a sense of humor not truth, not God, not
virtue, but a sense of humor. If we can fill the whole earth with laughter,
with dancing and singing people singing and swinging! if we can make the
earth a carnival of joy, a festival of lights, we will have brought for the
first time a true sense of religiousness to the earth."
Osho - "The Goose is Out"
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