OW DO WE COME OUT OF IT? The first thing I always say is to believe it’s not that serious. When it reaches the stage of sickness or disease, at that point it may be difficult to come out of it. For them there may be further treatments or therapies. But if we are not yet to this stage, let’s not be serious over side issues—whether it is attachment or greed or whatever. What is attachment? You got too serious about a relationship. Greed is seriousness about money or anything more than you need. Unnecessary seriousness includes body identification. The body needs care and health for living but how much? Since the body is transitory and will not be with you permanently, why to be so serious about it? Just keep your body healthy, use it and live. If we live in this way, body identification will not bring sadness and sorrow when we depart from this world. By avoiding such unfounded seriousness, our consciousness gets released.
      This is spontaneous, moment-to-moment living. It keeps the journey joyful. Many times we slip. If we slip a few times in life, it doesn’t matter. But if we fall down into mental ditches on and on, we will be miserable. It is very natural when we are born into this five-elemental body that we sometimes get muddy, but if it happens regularly, that is perversion. Then what happens? It gives an outlook on life totally different from what it should be. Life either becomes sad or miserable or problematic or difficult; one of these will always remain and will keep us from being happy. Being too serious is synonymous with being old, actually. So before you get too serious or too old in thinking, apply this valuation to any condition in which you may be stuck.

OME GET STUCK WITH MONEY OR POSITION or body identification or relationships and that is where problems start: life becomes stagnant. In balanced life, harmonious life, you are paying attention and you are loving but you are also releasing your consciousness. It’s not that everyone is stuck in only one thing; mostly we are stuck in more than one. This is not because life is problematic but because you have made it stagnant. When you get serious about something on and on, on and on for months and years, you are making it a sore spot in your life’s fabric and that’s bound to smart. Now it is painful every time you see or touch that thing. Every time you sleep or sit in silence or talk in private, that painful episode or feeling will come up. What you do not want gets magnified and stands out glaringly before you and remains more alive than your happy moments. If you hate someone, for example, the very thought of that person brings you pain, and this remembrance is sometimes more intense than remembering someone you love. If you are trying to avoid something but are still remembering it, you are keeping it alive.
      This may be a common remedy but worth repeating: Let go. What does it mean to let go? Don’t be serious about it. Pay a little attention and be done with it. Don’t go on screwing the same screw tighter and tighter; the time comes when it no longer fits. Letting go is a very practical way of living. If I am aiming a telescope at quasars or pulsars or solar systems, it is easy to get lost in attractive, colorful phenomena because it is worth studying or paying attention to. I could get stuck with my telescope aimed at one point and be missing a hundredfold more interesting things. Or to put it differently: what if I reach there and that phenomenon is not as great or attractive as I thought it would be? I can come back again, right? At least I will know where I was going and where I reached, so my curiosity is over. It will end with a certain success, a certain satisfaction. I still have freedom to come back and enjoy this world too.