About the afternoon meditation: Kirtan – singing and dancing – is one of the secret doors, one of the deepest doors. The approach is very basic. The first thing to be understood is: don’t take religion seriously. You can sing and dance in it; long faces are not needed. We have lived with long faces too much and for too long. If you see the old face of God it is sad, and it creates boredom.
Now – and not only now, it has always been so, but more so today – now we need a dancing and laughing God. This seriousness has killed religion. Irreligious people have not killed religion, atheists have not destroyed religion, seriousness has killed religion: the serious faces of the priests and prophets.
Seriousness is a disease. Because of the serious face of religion only diseased people have been attracted to it. Those who are young, alive, dancing and laughing have felt that they are not for religion and religion is not for them. When they become old, diseased, hen life has withered away, when their energies have dimmed, then – when death is coming near – they will seek the divine.
This has proven fatal, and because of this, the whole earth has become nonreligious. Religion must be young, alive, fresh, and it must have a different base. I call that base festivity, celebration, a deep attitude toward happiness.
The afternoon meditation means all these things. You have to dance in an ecstatic mood. Allow your life energy to be flowing, laughing, singing. Celebrate life, don’t try to fight with it. In celebration you will transcend, and you will become the winner.
In the morning meditation we were doing catharsis. When you have gone through catharsis you need something to dance, to sing about. Catharsis is negative: you are just purifying yourself, and when you are ready and purified, feel a deep gratitude. Sing and dance, and completely merge yourself into the dancing and singing. The moment the dancer has disappeared and only the dance remains, you have entered. The moment the singer has disappeared and only singing has remained, you have entered.
Forget the dancer, the center of the ego. Become the dance. That is the meditation. Dance so deeply that you completely forget that you are dancing and begin to feel that you are the dance. The division must disappear. Then it becomes a meditation. If there is division, then it is an exercise: good, healthy, but it cannot be said to be spiritual. It is just a simple dance. Dance is good in itself. As far as it goes, it is good. After it, you will feel fresh, young. But it is not yet meditation. The dancer must go, until only the dance remains.
So what to do? – dance so totally, because division can exist only if you are not total in it. If you are standing aside and looking at your own dance, the division will remain: you are the dancer and you are dancing. Then dancing is just an act, something you are doing. It is not your being. Get involved totally, be merged in it. Don’t stand aside, don’t be an observer – participate!
Let the dance flow in its own way. Don’t force it. Rather, follow it: don’t force it, allow it to happen. It is not a doing but a happening.
Remain in the mood of festivity. You are not doing something very serious. You’re just playing, playing with your life energy, playing with your own bio-energy, allowing your bio-energy to move, to move in its own way. Just as the wind blows and the river flows, you are flowing and blowing. Feel it.
And be playful. Always remember this word playful. With me, it is very basic. In this country we call creation God’s leela. We call creation God’s leela, God’s play. Nowhere else in the world does this concept exist: God as the creator. The Jewish God, the Christian God is very serious and very revengeful. He is not playful. He is sitting on the throne as a judge, to condemn.
In this country we have evolved a totally different attitude – the attitude of play, not of creation. God has not created the world. It is his play. When you create something it becomes different from you. You paint, then the painter can die but the painting will remain. You paint, and the painting has become separate from you.
This play is just like dance. The dancer and the dance are one. If the dancer dies, the dance will die. You cannot preserve the dance without the dancer. That’s why we call God the dancer, Shiva the dancer.
The world is not a creation separate from the divine. It is divine and everything is just a play. And God is not your judge, because he is not separate from you, he is you! Allow the divine to be playful. Allow the divine to be dancing and singing and celebrating. Only then can you approach it, only then does it become revealed to you.
So don’t approach this inner search in a serious way. It is not something like work, it is just like children playing. So one more thing: it is not work, it is play. It is not even a game, because a game has rules. Play has no rules – that’s the difference. When you are in a game you have to follow rules. When you are playing, you just have to follow your own life energy. Follow it. Flow with it.
Forget yourself and let there be dancing and singing, and you will reach a very deep source within you. Many new flowers will come to your life, many new dimensions will open. But allow your life energy, and always remember: your life energy is wiser than you.
Once you know your life energy and can allow it to lead you, you will come to feel what type of a fool you were before – stupid! You were trying to lead life, you were trying to force life; you were trying to force a greater energy with your mind, with your poor concepts, your mental concepts. You were trying to put a window around the sky.
You are just a frame! Don’t be too concerned with it. Be concerned with the life source, the force, the energy that is within you. In singing and dancing, I hope that some day the frame may break and you will throw the frame away and your life energy will be freed. Once freed, you will have a different quality. That quality is divine, it is not human.

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