Osho,
Life is tremendously serious...

No, life is not serious. You are serious. Life is very nonserious; nothing can be more nonserious than life. Life is absolutely nonserious!

Osho,
But certain things have been achieved only because a person has been – maybe the word serious is not good – but the person has been really intense.

Intensity is a very different thing from seriousness. If you are serious, you can never really be intense; you can only be tense. That’s a different thing. With seriousness, you can never be intense and deep. With seriousness, you will always be shallow.

Life is not serious at all. Life is just a nonserious play – with nothing to be achieved, with nowhere to reach. It is just a play, with no end. Seriousness is always end-oriented. It means you are living in order to achieve something, and life will be meaningless if you don’t achieve it.

This is seriousness: the meaning lying in the end, not just here and now. The end must be achieved. If you achieve it, then it is okay. If you don’t achieve it, then everything is lost. So you are serious because you have made a point somewhere, and with it you have identified the whole meaning of your life.

You can never achieve anything, because nothing is static, everything is changing. You fix something today; tomorrow nothing is going to be the same, not even the planner. The whole will have changed completely; the end will remain only in your mind. The whole situation has changed now so you can never achieve it. That is why there is so much frustration

You try, you think, you plan, you work – and then there is no achievement. The very thing that you desire never comes into your hands. It can never come. If life were a static and fixed thing, not dynamic and flowing, then you could achieve it – but then life would be a death. Life is life because it is dynamic, changing. You cannot predict its course. I is unpredictable. That’s what we mean when we say it is dynamic and flowing; it is always flowing into nowhere.

If you are serious, then you cannot flow. Then you are frozen inside; then you become just a dead stone. Then there are resistances around you. You cannot melt, you cannot be. As life changes, transforms, you cannot transform and change yourself with it. You have a fixed pattern, a fixed shape. Now the shape will be the resistance. Then there will be a struggle. Seriousness creates frozenness; frozenness creates a struggle. You cannot just let go.