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for thousands of years people have been telling you that the serious man is a better man, higher man, more evolved than the nonserious. The nonserious have never been taken into account.
But to me the situation is just the reverse. The nonserious one is the one who will come to know the real life and its experiences. Seriousness is closing you, making you hard, making you sad. Seriousness comes from ambition, from desire which you are not being able to attain.
But the religions have paid too much respect to seriousness. I have never come across in any religious scripture of any religion -- and there are three hundred religions on the earth -- that anybody has paid respect to nonseriousness, to playfulness, to a sense of humor. They all make you dodos.
I have heard... one day as the bishop entered a church in New York, he could not believe his eyes: he saw Jesus Christ standing there.
He said, "My god! I thought that prayers are never heard. I never believed that there is any God or any son of God -- but what to do with this fellow? Either he is a hippy or he is Jesus Christ. I am in trouble."
He approached the man and asked, "Can I ask you who you are?"
And the man said, "You have been serving me, spreading my word, and you don't recognize me!"
The bishop's heart started sinking: "My god! He is Jesus Christ! And now there is bound to be trouble."
He phoned the pope in Rome: "What am I supposed to do? In our teaching courses there is not even a single mention that `Jesus will come one day to your church.' So what has to be done, what is the right course? How should I behave?"
The pope said, "Don't create trouble for me! It is good that he has come to New York. Do two things: first, the most important, look serious and busy. Who knows, he may be... And second, don't forget to inform the police."
Religions have been teaching people to be serious because seriousness creates a certain kind of dullness in your consciousness. Seriousness is not a help. It is poisonous; nobody can take it away, unless you understand... then it will disappear.
A psychiatrist and a friend were walking down the street,
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