Laughter is the very essence of religion. Seriousness is never religious, cannot be religious. Seriousness is of the ego, part of the very disease. Laughter is egolessness.
Never misunderstand seriousness for sincerity. Sincerity is very playful, never serious. It is true, authentic, but never serious. Sincerity does not have a long face, it is bubbling with joy, radiating with an inner joyousness.
If you find a saint who has no sense of humour, then he is not a saint at all. Impossible. His very seriousness says that he has not achieved. Once you have some inner experiences of your own you become very playful, you become very innocent, childlike.
God is always joking. Look at your own life – it is a joke! Look at other people’s lives, and you will find jokes and jokes and jokes. Seriousness is illness; seriousness has nothing spiritual about it. Spirituality is laughter, spirituality is joy, spirituality is fun.
While one is asleep one cannot do anything that is good. Virtue is impossible in unconsciousness, only sin is possible. Unconsciousness is the source of sin.
Wakefulness is the only saintliness there is, and sleepiness, unconsciousness, is the only sin there is; all other sins are born out of it. Cut the root, cut the very root! Don’t go on pruning the leaves.
If you are unconscious, unaware, you are living only in the body, the mortal. And a person who lives for the body, in the body, and only for the body, lives in sin.
To me, each individual is far more valuable than society as a whole.
During the first seven years, every society tries to condition the mind – and conditioning means nothing but hypnosis: forcing authority, law, tradition, religion, scripture, the priest, the church, into the innermost unconscious of the child so that from there you can control him.
Society is just a structure with no soul. The soul is of the individual. One individual outweighs all societies. And, one individual’s revolution outweighs all revolutions in the whole of history, because one man can become the womb for God to be reborn.
Meditation means: put the mind aside and watch. The first step – LOVE YOURSELF – will help you tremendously. By loving yourself you will have destroyed much that society has implanted within you. You will have become freer from the society and its conditioning.
The fool knows nothing of God; he never comes across anything divine. He remains part of the stupid collectivity. Remember, the society, the collective has no soul; the soul belongs to the individual. Hence, those who belong to the collective are destroying every possibility of being souls.
Spirituality is rebellion; religiousness is orthodoxy. Spirituality is individuality; religiousness is just remaining part of the crowd psychology. Religiousness keeps you a sheep, and spirituality is a lion’s roar.
Surrendering means non-desiring.
Drop the mind and the divine. God is not an object, it is a merger. The mind resists a merger, the mind is against surrender; the mind is very cunning and calculating.
Surrender is not something that you can do. If you do it, it is not surrender, because the doer is there. Surrender is a great understanding that, “I am not.” Surrender is an insight that the ego exists not, that, “I am not separate.” Surrender is not an act but an understanding.
Surrender means seeing that “I am not separate” – just SEEING that “I am not separate.” Nothing is surrendered, nothing is dropped; just a nonsense idea, a dream is no more there because you are awake.
My own observation is: lovers don’t surrender to each other, they surrender to something unknown that exists between them. They surrender to love – call it the ‘god of love’ – they both surrender to the god of love. Hence nobody’s ego is fulfilled by your surrender; both the egos disappear in love.
Buddha says if you surrender the ego, if you surrender yourself, you come in a harmony with the law and everything starts happening on its own. You have but to surrender. If you are ready to disappear, you will be full of the law and the law will take care.
Bliss follows witnessing – and that is going to be your meditation. Witness your body as separate, witness your mind as separate. Remain rooted in witnessing: “I am only a watcher.” That is going to transform your whole life, it is going to give you the ultimate.