According to Osho, seriousness is a spiritual illness; existence is playful, God is joking. Treat life as a cosmic joke—drop the heavy, tense ego and meet events with laughter, lightness, and joy. True spirituality is celebration, not grimness: laughter loosens fear, melts rigidity, and opens the heart. Choose playfulness over solemnity; it brings clarity, resilience, and love.
Don’t take life so seriously—laugh and play, and you’ll feel happier and closer to truth.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
But certain things have been achieved only because some people have been -- maybe the word 'serious' it is not good, but, rather, 'intense'.
Someone has written me a letter. He writes that he believed in someone as if he was bhagwan, a God. For fifteen years continuously he believed in him. Then one day he saw that the man he had believed in was angry He writes that on that day not only did that man become just human -- not a God -- but from that day on "I cannot believe that any human being can ever be bhagwan, can ever be a God." I have written to him that there are two possibilities. "If one whom you believed to be divine became angry, there are two possibilities. Either this man is not divine -- or your definition of divine was wrong!" But no, your definition can never be wrong. This man who you thought was divine must be wrong. Your definition is more meaningful to you than fifteen years of faith…
Question: BELOVED OSHO, YOU ARE AGAINST SERIOUSNESS. YOU HAVE LAUGHED ABOUT EVERYTHING, INCLUDING GODS, GODMEN AND SCRIPTURES. HOW COME YOU THINK THAT PEOPLE SHOULD TAKE YOU AND YOUR TEACHING SERIOUSLY? Anand Maitreya, who has told you that I expect people to take me and my teachings seriously? I want to be understood joyously, not seriously. I want to be taken playfully, not seriously -- not with a long British face, but with beautiful laughter. Your laughter, your playfulness is the recognition that you have understood me. Your seriousness shows that you have misunderstood me, you have missed it -- because seriousness is nothing but sickness. It is another name of sadness; it is a shadow of death. And I am all for life.
Osho, when serious, sad people become enlightened, do they remain serious and sad or do they become funny like you?
The enlightened person is always joyous, but the tradition, the convention cannot be joyous. The whole structure of a tradition is basically political; it is there to dominate, it is there to oppress, it is there to exploit. And you cannot exploit people playfully, you have to be very serious. You have to make them so sad, so afraid of life itself, you have to create so much trembling in their being, that out of that fear they fall into your hands; they become objects of your manipulation. A man like me cannot exploit you, because this whole place is more like a tavern than a temple. It is more playful than serious. We are engaged in a beautiful game! The moment you think of it as a game, all seriousness disappears, things become lighter. You can walk in a dancing way; there is no weight on you. But the…
(TO LEELA) Those who take life seriously become pathological, because life is not a serious phenomenon, it is all playfulness, from the top to the bottom. It is a song to be sung, a dance to be danced, a love to be lived -- but with utter playfulness. The moment you become serious you become blocked, the flow stops; you are cut off from the universal energy. You cannot dance when you are serious because seriousness is basically sadness. Seriousness is also calculation, business: one is always looking for the motive -- why? One is always asking "Why do it? What am I going to gain out of it? What will the profit be?" These are businesslike attitudes. They are good in the marketplace but they are absolutely wrong when you start moving inwards. The more you move inwards, the more life appears as fun, as tremendous fun.
To know life in its truth is a blessing; to know life as a lie is a misery. To live in lies is to live in hell. Lies are many, truth is one. To attain to that one is to enter paradise. Paradise, heaven or hell, are not geographical situations, not there somewhere in the space; they are inner psychological states. It just depends on knowing the knack of it, and you can turn the hell into heaven... just as if it is done by magic. The magic, the secret of the magic, is to be authentically true, vulnerable, open, not hiding, not hiding from anybody. It needs courage and guts, but once you start feeling the joy of it things become easy; every day things become more and more easy. One day one is suddenly relaxed. In that relaxation the ego disappears. That is benediction, that is vardan!