[The sannyasin says: My tendency is to always be serious when it comes to the business of enlightenment.]
Osho – Not even there! If you are serious anywhere else, it is not so dangerous. But if you are serious when it comes to enlightenment, then it is absolutely wrong. Anywhere you can be forgiven, but not there, because enlightenment is only for non-serious people.
Nobody has ever heard that any serious person became enlightened. It doesn’t happen in the nature of things, because a serious person remains serious, closed, calculating. He is never available to the wilderness that life is. He is never available to God. Even if he encounters God, he will have his own conditions.
Even God is afraid of serious people. He still comes and plays with children, and He still comes and talks with madmen. He has stopped communicating with serious people long ago. So don’t make the idea of enlightenment a nightmare. Take it easy. In fact, if you can take all that life makes available non-seriously, you are enlightened. If you can understand that life is a game, a leela, a play, you are enlightened.
Enlightenment is not something that one has to achieve. It is just a vision that happens to a liquid person. It comes to a relaxed person. It is not that you go to enlightenment. If you are relaxed, collecting seashells on the beach, splashing in the river or just fooling around, it comes to you. And sometimes it is needed to pretend. If you feel it is going to help somebody, pretend. I allow you even to lie if you feel that yes, this is going to help – because people are in such a state, even lies help them. If you feel that this lie is going to be creative, don’t be worried. This is what I call the whole-hearted readiness to live.
And take life as being more like poetry than like a syllogism. In poetry you have much more freedom than in prose, and you can play around with language too. In fact the greater the poetry, the lesser is the impact of language on it. In real poetry, language becomes almost irrelevant, and the rules of grammar and linguistics become absolutely useless. The higher a poetry rises, the higher it rises beyond rules, regulations, forms, formalities and the same happens in life. The more you understand it, the higher you rise. But when I say ’the higher you rise’ I don’t mean that you escape from this ordinary mundane life. No – you remain there, but now you don’t take it seriously.
Then you enjoy whatsoever is. You enjoy your failure and you enjoy your success. You enjoy both so tremendously that you cannot figure out which is which. Then it is perfect; everything is going perfect then. Enlightenment will come seeking you – don’t be worried about it. It never comes to people who are waiting for it, never. It comes only to those people who have completely forgotten about it. One day suddenly they find one morning that they are enlightened.
It is just like lightning. A shudder goes through your being because you have nothing to bar the way, no hindrance now. It can happen in any situation. It can happen in odd postures; it can happen in strange ways. It can happen anywhere. It is not that it happens only under a bodhi tree, or it happens only in temples or in the Himalayas. It has nothing to do with anything outside you. You just have to remain open so that the inside becomes more and more available – and flexible, so whatsoever happens can vibrate in the same frequency, with the same rhythm. Go happily, relaxed, looking at life as a beautiful game. It is a beautiful game.
Source: Osho Book “The Passion for the Impossible”