"If you can look at the whole world as if it is a drama you will regain your original consciousness.

This whole world is just like a drama, so don’t be too serious about it.

Go to a movie theater and look at the viewers.
Don’t look at the screen, forget the movie;
don’t look at the screen;
just look at the audience in their seats.
Someone will be weeping and tears will be rolling down,
someone will be laughing, someone will become sexually excited.
Just look at people.
What are they doing?
What is happening to them?
There is nothing on the screen, just pictures — pictures of light and shadow. The screen is vacant.

But how are they getting excited?

They are weeping, crying, laughing.

The movie is not just a movie; the film is not just a film.
They have forgotten that it is just a story. They have taken it seriously.
It has “become alive”! It is “real”!

This is happening everywhere, not only in a movie theater.
Look at the life that is all around you. What is it?

Many people have lived on this earth.

Where you are sitting, at least ten dead bodies are buried in that place, and they too were serious like you. Now they are no more. Where have their lives gone? Where have their problems gone? They were fighting — fighting for a single inch of earth, and the earth is there and they are no more.

And I am not saying that their problems were not problems. They were — as your problems are problems. They were “serious” — problems of life and death. But where are their problems?

If the whole of humanity should disappear any day, the earth will be there, the trees will grow, the rivers will flow and the sun will rise, and the earth will not feel any absence or wonder where humanity is.

Look at the expanse:

look backwards, look forwards, look to all dimensions at what you are, what your life is. It looks like a long dream, and everything that you take so seriously this moment becomes useless the next moment. You may not even remember it.

Remember your first love, how serious it was. Life depended on it. Now you don’t remember it at all, it is forgotten. And whatsoever you are thinking that your life depends on today will be forgotten. Life is a flux, nothing remains. It is like a moving film, everything changing into everything else. But in the moment you feel it is very serious, and you get disturbed. This technique says,

"To be happy is to see life as a movie."

If you are unhappy, you have taken it too seriously.

And don’t try to find any way how to be happy. Just change your attitude. You cannot be happy with a serious mind. With a festive mind, you can be happy. Take this whole life as a myth, as a story. It is one, but once you take it this way you will not be unhappy. Unhappiness comes out of too much seriousness.

Try this for seven days;

for seven days remember only one thing — that the whole world is just a drama —

and you will not be the same again.
Just for seven days! You are not going to lose much because you don’t have anything to lose.

You can try it. For seven days take everything as a drama, just as a show. These seven days will give you many glimpses of your inner purity. And once you have the glimpse you cannot be the same again. You will be happy, and you cannot conceive of what type of happiness can happen to you because you have not known any happiness.

You have known only degrees of unhappiness:

sometimes you were more unhappy, sometimes less unhappy, and when you were less unhappy you called it happiness. You don’t know what happiness is because you cannot know. When you have a concept of the world in which you are taking it very seriously, you cannot know what happiness is. Happiness happens only when you are grounded in this attitude, that the world is just a play.

So try this, and do everything in a very festive way, celebrating, doing an “act” — not a real thing. If you are a husband, play, be a play husband; if you are a wife, be a play wife. Make it just a game. And there are rules, of course; any game to be played needs rules, but don’t be serious about them. They are rules, and one rule begets another. But don’t take them seriously, and then look how the quality of your life immediately changes.

Go to your home this night, and behave with your wife or husband or your children as if you are doing a part in a drama, and see the beauty of it. If you are playing a part you will try to be efficient, but you will not get disturbed. There is no need. You will do the part and go to sleep. But remember, it is a part, and for seven days continuously follow this attitude. Then happiness can happen to you, and once you know what happiness is you need not move into unhappiness, because it is your choice.

You are unhappy because you have chosen a wrong attitude towards life. You can be happy if you choose a right attitude.

What is right attitude? What is the criterion? To me this is the criterion: the attitude that makes you happy is the right attitude, and there is no objective criterion. The attitude that makes you unhappy and miserable is the wrong attitude. The criterion is subjective;

your happiness is the criterion."

- Osho

Condensed version of Meditation 58.