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Then you must have misunderstood me. I am not against life. I am not against any enjoyment. In fact, what I am saying is that the way you are living, you are not enjoying life. The way you are living, you only dream that you enjoy. You simply suffer. You remain miserable. You simply hope.

Hope is not enjoyment. Hope is just a trick of the mind to console, to somehow convince oneself that today is gone but tomorrow everything is going to be good. Today one is in misery; tomorrow one will not be in misery. One dreams, hopes, projects.

A man of real enjoyment is herenow. He never thinks of the morrow, there is no need to think of the morrow. If you are really happy, you never think of the past, you never think of the future. Who bothers? For what? Your whole energy moves herenow, becomes an infinite dance of bliss, happiness, celebration.

I am not against life. I am not against enjoying it. If you have understood me that way, you have misunderstood me. My religion is of celebration. My religion is of delight. My religion is of dance. I don’t want you to worship any god who cannot dance; then he is no longer a god. I want to teach you how to live life so intensely, so passionately, that you live it and yet you don’t cling to it. Because clinging always shows a miserable mind. You cling to things only if you are not living them well.

So the first thing: as I see you, I see you miserable. You may be thinking you are enjoying life. Think again, meditate on the fact – are you really enjoying it? If you are enjoying it, then there is no problem. Enjoy it with my blessings. But I know you are not enjoying it. You simply believe you are because to see the naked fact of your misery will be too much, unbearable. So you go on pretending to yourself that you are enjoying life.

You go on smiling to hide your tears. You go on dressing yourself, painting yourself, to hide your wounds. You go on somehow, deceiving others and deceiving yourself that you are happy. It is not so. If you are happy, you have attained; then there is no need to meditate. If you are happy, then there is no need for any religion for you. Religion is needed as a means; religion is not the end. It is a method for those who are not yet happy, for those who are still in misery, in darkness, who are still in anguish and anxiety.

But I know: your anxiety is so much that you need a shelter, the anguish is so much that you need a dream, so that somehow you can hope – hope for the future, for tomorrow. Your heaven and your happiness is always somewhere else; it is never where you are. Real happiness is always here; it is always now. It knows no other time and no other space. If you are really happy, only happiness exists; you don’t exist.

Remember: only in misery do two things exist – you and misery. In happiness, only happiness exists. Happiness is non-dual, what we call in India, advaita. Misery is dual. In misery you are always two. Misery is a division of your being; cut apart, you are not an organic unity. Something goes against you. There is something there you never wanted to be there, but it is there, a thorn in the flesh. You suffer it in the hope that tomorrow it will not be so. But remember your yesterday? Your yesterday was also the same, and you were waiting for today because this today was tomorrow then. Now it has come. Nothing has happened. In the same way your other tomorrows will go on coming, but they always come as todays, they never come as tomorrow. Tomorrow never comes. It cannot come by its very nature; it is just a dream on the horizon. You can think about it but you cannot live it. It is a falsity.

You think you are enjoying it? Rethink it because I don’t see it. I look inside you and I find you miserable there – hiding it, but who are you hiding from? And what is the point of hiding it? The more you hide it, the more difficult it will be to get rid of it; because the more you hide it, the deeper it goes. The deeper it goes, the more it poisons your very being; the very source of your life becomes more and more poisoned. Misery spreads. It becomes almost a part of you and then you don’t know how to get rid of it.

So the first thing: I am for life, all for life, and all for enjoyment. I am not for somber seriousness, I am not for sadness. I am against all those religions which go on teaching people to be serious. God is not serious; otherwise flowers wouldn’t exist. God is not serious; otherwise birds wouldn’t be able to sing. God is tremendously into fun – that’s why we say in India that the creation is not a creation in fact but a play, a leela.

God is playing; he is like a child running hither and thither. Out of sheer energy, overflowing, enjoying, dancing a thousand and one dances, singing a thousand and one songs – never exhausted, he goes on innovating, goes on peopling the earth. Each person is his new way to dance and each person is his new effort to sing again, to love again, to live again. Each person is again a project, again an effort. He is never tired. Infinite is his play.

God is not serious. God is not Christian. He does not live in a church. He is festive. Look at life: it is a constant festivity. Listen to these birds – a continuous festivity. See the trees continuously flowering, the sun and the moon and the stars. From the lowest to the highest, it is the same rhythm of joy. Except for man, nobody seems to be serious. Except for man, nobody seems to be worried and anxious. Except for man, the whole of life is fun.

No, I am not for seriousness. I am absolutely against it. I would like you to be playful. Listen to me well: I would even like you to pray as fun. Once seriousness enters your prayer, it is already dead. I would like you to meditate like love – a subtle delight, a continuous delight in just being here, in just being alive.

I am not against enjoyment, but I don’t see that you are enjoying; hence meditation is needed. Meditation is to clean you of your seriousness. Meditation is to make you aware of your deadliness. Meditation is to help you get rid of all the hangovers of the past, and all the projections and dreams of the future, so that you can be herenow, simply, spontaneously.

Meditation is to help you to enjoy so tremendously that you disappear into that enjoyment. If you remain, misery remains. Let me say it in this way: you are the misery. If you are, seriousness continues. Wherever you are, immediately you create a serious, somber climate around you; something is already dying. You are your death. You are the disease.

When you are enjoying, dancing, loving, or just sitting doing nothing, you are simply happy for no reason at all. Happiness needs no reason. If you are looking for reasons, you will never be happy. Happiness needs no cause – it cannot be caused. You cannot make it part of the world of cause and effect. It is absolutely illogical. If you want to be happy, be happy! Don’t wait, don’t arrange – there is no need for any arrangement. You are capable of being happy just as you are. Nothing is lacking. If you can learn this much from me, you have learnt all, my whole art.

Happiness needs no cause. The cause is created by your misery. The misery says, “Today I am miserable, how can I be happy right now? First, preparations have to be made. Of course, then time will be needed, so tomorrow when everything is ready I will be happy. I have to find a beautiful wife; I have to find the perfect husband. I have to find a good house, a big car – this and that. This is only possible tomorrow. Right now, how is it possible? Time is needed.”

This is a trick of the miserable mind. The miserable mind says time is needed. The miserable mind lives in time, depends on time. Happiness has nothing to do with time. Just now, just herenow, please try to see the point. It is a question of seeing it. If you become a little alert you can see it right now. It is a realization. Right now, who is barring your path? If you are thinking that before you can be happy you have to find a perfect wife, that looks logical – how can you be happy without a perfect wife? But have you ever heard of a perfect wife? Have you ever heard of a perfect husband, a perfect house or a perfect car? All illusions.

I have heard about one man who was searching and searching and searching. He reached seventy, and somebody asked, “Isn’t your search over? When are you going to get settled?”
He said, “I am in search of a perfect wife.”
“Seventy years have passed. Death is already knocking on the door. When will you settle down?”
He said, “What can I do? How can you be happy without a perfect wife?”
The friend asked, “But you have been searching so long, couldn’t you find one?”
He said, “Yes, once I did find one woman.”
Then the man said, “Then why didn’t you marry her?”
And the seventy-year-old seeker became very sad. He said, “It was difficult: she was also in search of a perfect husband!”

Perfection is a mind-demand, an ego trip. Life is beautifully imperfect. Once you understand this, you start enjoying right now. And the more you enjoy, the more you become capable of enjoying.

Let me tell you: happiness needs no cause – happiness needs only a habit of enjoying, just a natural quality, a capacity for enjoyment. Nothing else is needed. And that capacity comes only by enjoying; it comes by nothing else. If you enjoy, you become more capable of enjoyment. The more capable you become, the more you enjoy. This goes on and on; it reaches a higher and higher crescendo, a higher and higher peak.

Every moment comes out of this moment. The next moment will come out of this moment. If you have lived this moment totally, loved, delighted, the next moment will come out of this moment, and you will be born out of this moment. The next moment will open more possibilities and it will make you more capable.

Happiness is a capacity which you already have, but you have never functioned with it. It is as if a child has never been allowed to walk on his feet and he has become crippled. He has the capacity to walk, but he has never been allowed. The mother was too afraid he might fall, so now he continues walking on all fours because of fear. Every child is born to be happy as naturally as every child is born to walk. There is nothing else to it.

So your question is: “We like life and enjoyments” – not as much as I do; otherwise, you would be a hundred percent in it – “and think that we belong to the half-hearted.” You belong to the halfhearted because you have not loved life totally. Never think about my meditations as something other than life; never make them the opposite of life. I am not trying to give you goals other than life itself. I am not trying to convince you of some other journey than life. Life is the journey. Life is the goal.

Religion is not a separate journey. It is, really, to live life so totally that life starts revealing all its secrets; God is its innermost secret. Once you love and live life, it reveals more and more. Suddenly, one day, it reveals its most secret center: God. Loving life, one day you love God. Living life, one day you live God.

So don’t be half-hearted. Be totally in life. I am not here to distract you from your life. It has already been done. All of humanity is suffering because of that. Religions have proven a calamity because they have made goals the opposite to life, diametrically opposite to life. George Gurdjieff used to say that all religions are against God. He seems absolutely right. Just think about religions: they all seem to be against God – being against life means being against God.

God is not against life, this much is certain; otherwise, life would have ceased a long time ago. Your mahatmas may be against life, but God is not. Your mahatmas go on teaching you: Renounce! And God goes on creating more and more life. He doesn’t seem to be an escapist, a renouncer; he seems to be tremendously and deeply involved and committed to life. His involvement is eternal.

Just think: within a life of seventy or eighty years, you are fed up and tired, and you want to escape and go to the Himalayas – and God has been creating for eternity and is not tired yet. He does not know what tiredness is; his energy is still fresh and young. It is as if this is the beginning right now. The past is not carried. Each moment is a new creation.

If you become religious in my sense of the term, you will not renounce life. You will renounce yourself, not life. You will drop yourself and be totally one with life, so no division exists. The “I,” the ego, has to be dropped, not life.