IRC-Galleria

53. Play



Play
Krishna's challenge to Arjuna

Your mind goes on playing infinitely-- the whole thing is just like a dream in an empty room. While meditating, one has to look at the mind just frolicking, just like children playing and jumping out of overflowing energy, that's all. Thoughts jumping, frolicking, just a play--don't be serious about them. Even if a bad thought is there, don't feel guilty. Or, if there is a very great thought, a very good thought--that you want to serve humanity and transform the whole world, and you want to bring heaven onto earth--don't get too much ego through it, don't feel that you have become great. This is just a frolicking mind. Sometimes it goes down, sometimes it comes up--it is just overflowing energy, taking many shapes and forms.

The dimension of play has to be applied to your whole life. Whatsoever you are doing, be there in that activity so totally that the end is irrelevant. The end will come, it has to come, but it is not on your mind. You are playing, you are enjoying.

That's what Krishna means--during the Mahabharata, the great war that is chronicled in the Gita--when he tells his disciple Arjuna to leave the future in the hands of the Divine: "The result of your activity is in the hands of the Divine, you simply do." This "simply doing" becomes a play.

That's what Arjuna finds difficult to understand, because he says that if it is just play then why kill, why fight? But Krishna's whole life is just a play; you cannot find such a nonserious man anywhere. His whole life is just a play, a game, a drama. He is enjoying everything but he is not serious about it. He is enjoying it intensely but he is not worried about the result. What happens is irrelevant.

It is difficult for Arjuna to understand Krishna because Arjuna calculates, he thinks in terms of the end result. He says in the beginning of the Gita, "This whole thing seems to be absurd. On both sides my friends and my relatives are standing to fight. Whosoever wins, it will be a loss because my family, my relatives, my friends will be destroyed. Even if I win, it will not be worth anything because to whom am I going to show my victory? Victories are meaningful because friends, relatives, family will enjoy them. But there will be no one, the victory will be just over dead bodies. Who will appreciate it? Who will say, 'Arjuna, you have done a great deed'? So whether I am victorious or I am defeated, it seems absurd. The whole thing is nonsense." He wants to renounce. He is deadly serious, and anyone who calculates will be that deadly serious.

The setting of the Gita is unique. War is the most serious affair. You cannot be playful about it, because lives are involved, millions of lives are involved--you cannot be playful. And Krishna insists that even there you have to be playful. You don't think about what will happen in the end, you just be here and now. You just be a warrior, playing. Don't get worried about the result because the result is in the hands of the Divine.

And it is not even the point whether the result is in the hands of the Divine or not--the point is that it should not be in your hands, you should not carry it. If you carry it then your life cannot become meditative.