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existence.
A Zen monk was sentenced to death. The king of the country called him and said to him, "You have only twenty-four hours -- how are you going to live them?"
The monk laughed and said, "Moment to moment -- as I have always lived! There has never been more than this moment for me, so what does it matter whether I have twenty-four hours or twenty-four years? It is irrelevant. I have always lived moment to moment so one moment is more than enough for me. Twenty-four hours is too much -- one moment is quite enough."
The king could not understand it. The monk said, "Let me ask you, sir: can you live two moments simultaneously?"
No one ever has. The only possible way to live is one moment at a time. Two moments are not given to you simultaneously; only one moment is ever in your hand. And that one moment is so flickering that if you are engrossed in the past or enchanted by the future you will not be able to catch it. It will pass you by and you will miss it. Only the mind which is receptive, here and now, can create the situation in which meditation happens.
The fourth thing is seriousness. People who think and talk about meditation take it seriously. They regard it as work, not play. But if you take meditation seriously, you cannot create the situation for it to happen. Seriousness is tension, and a tense mind can never be in meditation.
You must take meditation as a game, a child's game. People who meditate should be playful -- playing with existence, playing with life -- weightless, non-tense; not in a doing mood but in a relaxed mood. It is only in a relaxed moment, only in a playful moment, that the happening is possible.
A serious person cannot be religious. And all religious people are so serious! It seems as if only diseased people with long faces become religious. But meditation is not something that is a "must," it is something absolutely purposeless; it is something whose end is intrinsic to it. There is nothing to be achieved by it or through it -- it cannot be made a means.
But as I see it, people who become interested in meditation are not really interested in meditation, they are interested
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