How can I avoid becoming too serious about my meditation practice?

Beloved master, is there any possibility for enlightenment for a nonserious meditator?

He was a carpenter. He used to come to do some work in my house also. So I said to him, "I cannot approach the actors this year. Last year was enough! Although I did no harm to anybody -- everybody loved it, the whole city appreciated it. But now they are guarding every actor and they don't allow me close to them. But you are not an actor. Your function is some other work. But you can help me." He said, "Whatever I can do, I will do, because last year it was really great. Can I be of some help?" I said, "Certainly." And he did it.... In the war, Lakshmana, Rama's younger brother, gets wounded by a poisonous arrow. It is fatal. The physicians say that unless a certain herbal plant from the mountain Arunachal is brought, he cannot be saved, by the morning he will be…

a conscious person can help you to discover yourself he does not impose anything upon you he does not programme you he simply deprogrammes you and leaves you open, available, a clean slate so you can make your own signature you can write your own song and you can dance your own dance and the greatest experience in life is the experience of one's uniqueness meditation is not something serious it is a very very long tradition that says meditation is very serious -- it is not it is very playful it is closer to song than to anything else closer to dance than anything else closer to love than anything else meditation cannot be serious by its very nature seriousness is part of the mind playfulness is part of the heart.

There is an ancient Sufi story of an Egyptian king who was a great player of chess. He went mad. All kinds of treatments were tried -- nothing worked. His condition was deteriorating every day. Finally a mystic, whom the king used to visit, came to know about the problem. He said, 'This is very simple. Find some great chess player and pay him whatsoever he asks for -- because he will ask a fabulous price, otherwise who would be ready to play chess with a madman? Give him whatsoever he wants but let him play chess with the king. And come back after one year...' They found the champion of chess players. He really asked an almost impossible sum of money -- they agreed. Out of greed he started playing chess with the madman. After one year they went to see the mystic; he asked, 'How are things?

Mind lives in time, mind is time. It consists of past and future. Remember, I divide time into only two tenses, past and future. Present is not part of time, present is part of eternity. Present is that moment where eternity crosses time. Time is horizontal, eternity is vertical; where the vertical line crosses the horizontal line, that point -- it is just a point -- is the present. And the whole art of meditation is to live in the present, to be herenow, dropping the past, dropping the future. Once you are capable of dropping all the past and all the future, all that is left is the present moment, the now. And that is the time, the moment, the space in which the revolution happens. Suddenly your horizontal line becomes vertical, you enter into eternity, into timelessness. That is the world of truth, the world of the real.

Beloved master, I love to do t'ai chi and it has become my daily meditation, but I have a tendency to become too serious about it. Can you drive out the monkey?

Anand Srajan, it is impossible for anybody to drive the monkey out of your mind, because it does not exist; your seriousness is creating it. And nobody can change your seriousness either. It is your life attitude which is making you serious. What is there to be serious about? Existence is a continuous celebration, a festival that knows no holidays. You are serious because 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…