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Remember this: regain your childhood. Everyone longs for it, but no one is doing anything to regain it. Everyone longs for it! People go on saying that childhood was paradise and poets go on writing poems about the beauty of childhood. Who is preventing you? Regain it! I give you this opportunity to regain it.
Be playful. It will be difficult, because you are so much structured. You have an armor around you—it is so difficult to loose it, to relax it. You cannot dance, you cannot sing, you cannot just jump, you cannot just scream and laugh and smile. Even if you want to laugh, you first want something there to be laughed at. You cannot simply laugh. There must be some cause; only then can you laugh. There must be some cause; only then can you cry and weep.
Put aside knowledge, put aside seriousness. Be absolutely playful for these days. You have nothing to lose! If you don’t gain anything, you will not lose anything. What can you lose in being playful? But I say to you: you will never be the same again.
My insistence on being playful is because of this. I want to throw you back to the very point from where you stopped growing. There has been a point in your childhood when you stopped growing and when you started being false.
You may have been angry—a small child in a tantrum, angry—and your father or your mother said, “Don’t be angry! This is not good!” You were natural, but a division was created and a choice was there for you: If you want to be natural, then you will not get the love of your parents.
In these eight days I want to throw you back to the point where you started being “good” against being natural. Be playful so your childhood is regained. It will be difficult because you will have to put aside your masks, your faces; you will have to put aside your personality. But remember, the essence can assert itself only when your personality is not there, because your personality has become an imprisonment. Put it aside! It will be painful, but it is worth it because you are going to be reborn out of it. And no birth is without pain. If you are really determined to be reborn, then take the risk.
Instructions First stage:
For the first hour you behave like a child, just enter into your childhood.
Whatever you wanted to do, do it—dancing, singing, jumping, crying, weeping
—anything at all, in any posture. Nothing is prohibited except touching other people. Don’t touch or harm anyone else in the group.
Second stage:
For the second hour just sit silently. You will be more fresh, more innocent, and meditation will become easier.
Two hours a day for seven days.
Decide that for these days you will be as ignorant as you were when you were born—just a child, a new babe, knows nothing, asks nothing, discusses nothing, argues nothing. If you can be a little babe, much is possible. Even that which looks impossible is possible.
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