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follow me. You are just expected to listen and understand, and then to go on your own way, following your own insight.
Deva Lane. Deva means divine; lane means the cheerful one. The full name will mean divine cheerfulness.
Religion is not something serious -- sincere, but not serious. And sincerity is a totally different phenomenon than seriousness. Seriousness has something sad about it, something heavy, gross, rocklike. Sincerity is authenticity, truthfulness. It is not a weight, it does not crush you. On the contrary it gives you wings, it makes you more and more light, unburdened.
Sincerity helps one to become simple, and the simple person is naturally cheerful. It is only the complex person who becomes a victim of sadness; his very complexity creates it. And seriousness is the shadow of the ego: the more egoist one is, the more serious. The egoist cannot laugh, it is below him. He cannot joke, it is below him. He is always in a state of tightness, he cannot relax. He lives as if in a straitjacket, in a very very tense armor. The ego can exist only in tensions; it feeds on tensions, anxieties, sadness.
If a person is religious, the only proof of his being religious is his cheerfulness. Going to the church does not prove anything. Reading the Bible or Bhagavad Gita proves nothing. You can worship God and pray every day ritually; it means nothing unless your heart dances continuously, unless you create an aroma of cheerfulness within and without. Then whether you remember God or not, it does not matter. If you are cheerful, God remembers you. And that's what is really significant: not your remembering God, but God remembering you.
One of the great Indian mystics, Kabir, has said that "There were days when I used to remember God, and I searched in every nook and corner, I went everywhere. I asked the learned people, I listened to very scholarly discourses. I was continuously crying and weeping and calling God, but no reply, no response; the skies remained absolutely indifferent. But then one day when I forgot all about God, and was dancing and singing, and was so lost in my dance and in my song that I could say I was not, only
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