:: LAUGHTER ::

LAUGHTER : THE ONLY APPROACH TOWARDS LIFE
 
Osho approach towards life is that of laughter. Osho says laughter contains love, joy, gratitude and a tremendous thankfulness to God. It is during a belly laughter that the ego disappears which very rarely happens in any other activity. Osho says "If the laughter is total the ego cannot exist; nothing kills the ego like laughter. That's why all egoists are serious. Ego can exist only in seriousness; ego lives, feeds on seriousness. And serious people are dangerous people." Read more….

"We have to destroy all kinds of seriousness in the world. Temples should be full of laughter and song and dance and celebration. That's how trees are, stars are, rivers are, oceans are. The whole existence, except man, is in a nonserious state; only man seems to be very serious. No child is born serious, remember, but we destroy the innocence of the child. We destroy his qualities of wonder and awe, we destroy his laughter, we destroy everything that is beautiful and valuable, and instead we give him a load to carry on his head -- of knowledge, of theology, of philosophy. The more and more he becomes educated by us, the more and more he loses all sense of humor. He can't see any humor in existence because he starts living through his knowledge; he knows everything. Because of his knowledgeability all wonder is destroyed. Because of his knowledgeability, the greatest religious quality -- awe -- is killed.

A young man at college, named Breeze,
weighed down by B.A.s and M.D.s,
collapsed from the strain;
said his doctor, "It's plain
you are killing yourself by degrees!"

By the time you come back from the university you are almost dead. Your state is pathological. You are ill -- ill with knowledge, suffocated by knowledge. And you cannot laugh; that is only for children and madmen.

And my whole effort here, Vimalkirti, is to make you both simultaneously: to make you childlike and to make you utterly mad. If these two things happen, then only are you a sannyasin. My only commandment is laughter!... and everything else will follow. If you can love and if you can laugh, totally, wholeheartedly, your life will become such a bliss and a benediction, not only to yourself but to everyone else. You will be a blessing to the world.

You have to drop all seriousness. You have to drop this seriousness because it has been forced upon you; this is not your nature. You did not come serious into the world, you came laughing. Each child is bubbling with joy and by the time he is four he starts dying. The age of four for the boys and the age of three for the girls is the time when death starts occurring. Girls are always ahead of boys in every way; even in this matter they are one year ahead.

And once death settles in you, it kills you slowly slowly. It is not that you die suddenly when you are seventy or eighty; that is only the completion of a process that started at the age of three or four. Have you ever noticed the fact that if you try to remember backwards you cannot pass the barrier of the age of three? At the most you can remember when you were three years old; beyond that all is blank. Why? You were here, certainly, and those three years were not blank at all; in fact they were more full of experience than any other year of your life is ever going to be. Each moment was full of experiences. You were constantly exploring life, people, everything; you were constantly in inquiry.

In one university they were doing an experiment. The experiment was... that children seem to be so active -- from where do they get so much energy? Their bodies are so small and their bodies are so delicate -- they are just like flowers, fragile -- but they seem to be so energetic, so vital, so overflowing with energy. From where do they get so much energy?

So they tried an experiment. They arranged that a very strong man would follow a child, and he would do exactly whatsoever the child was doing. And they were going to pay him; whatsoever he wanted they were going to pay him. He was a really big man, a wrestler, a famous wrestler, so he was not worried about following a child. What can a child do? But within four hours he was flat on the ground, because once the child knew that he was imitating him, the child jumped and the child ran and the child rolled on the floor and the child laughed uproariously.... And the child did so many things that the wrestler, within four hours, was finished!

He said, "Never in my life have I been so tired. I have been fighting my whole life, I have fought great fights, I have been always a winner. This is my first defeat!"
And that small child was not tired at all; he was still ready, he was still challenging the man. He said, "Come on! Let us have a little more fun! Are you finished? Why are you lying down on the ground?"

Every child is born with such great energy, but we destroy it. We paralyze every child, we cripple every child. And our churches and our temples and our priests have done the greatest wrong to humanity. They are the greatest criminals in the world, they are the real sinners. They have sinned against humanity -- they have paralyzed every human being. You don't know who you would have been if you had been allowed total freedom from the very beginning -- if your laughter had been free, your love had been free, your joy had been free, and you had not been hindered, interfered with, distorted, manipulated, forced, channeled in certain directions....

No child is interested in money, because no child is foolish. No child is interested in being the president of a country or the prime minister, because no child is so stupid. His interests are far more natural. He is interested in the flowers, he is interested in the butterflies, he is interested in the pebbles on the seashore. He is interested in dancing under the stars, in dancing in the sun, in dancing in the wind. He is interested in climbing the tree or in climbing the mountain. He is interested in swimming the river or in going into the ocean.

His interests are totally different, but we divert all his energies. We say, "No need to climb the tree, no need to climb the mountain. Climb the ladder of success!" -- which is an absolutely mediocre process, which is an absolutely unintelligent process. "Climb the ladder of success. Be more rich than others. Be competitive. Be jealous. Be possessive. Fight!" -- a fight for things which are meaningless. Then you lose your joy, then you lose your laughter. Then life seems more like a nightmare than like a beautiful joke.

Vimalkirti, it is a cosmic joke.
And my vision is that the future religiousness is bound to be rooted more in life than in death, more in laughter than in sadness, more in dance than in dragging your life.


Laughter time with Osho :

1. A group of young men -- all Irish Catholics -- go into a pub. They don't greet Abbie, one of the men already standing at the bar. Paddy, one of the young Irish fellows, asks his friends why they don't greet Abbie. "Oh, he is a Jew," they say, "and Jews are awful people. They killed our Lord Jesus Christ."
Paddy is very upset to hear this and goes over to Abbie and starts beating him up.
"Stop, stop!" shouts Abbie. "What are you doing this for?"
"I'm doing it because Jews tortured Jesus and killed him."
"Yes, I know," says Abbie, "but it is nothing to do with me. That happened two thousand years ago."
Paddy gives him another blow and says, "I don't care. I only heard it ten minutes ago!"

2. A long-suffering Italian husband was burying his wife. It chanced that in passing through the gate, the coffin was thrust hard against one of the posts. Almost immediately, to the amazement of the mourners, a muffled scream was heard. The lid was hastily unscrewed, and lo! the woman was not dead at all. She was taken home, and lived for three years. Then she died again.
At the funeral, as the coffin was being lowered from the hearse, the husband addressed the bearers very solemnly: "Boys, mind that post!"

3. A minister, a priest and a rabbi were discussing how they "divined" what part of the collection money each retained for personal needs and what part was turned in to their respective institutions.
"I draw a line," said the minister, "on the floor. All the money I toss in the air -- what lands to the right of the line I keep, to the left of the line is the Lord's."
The priest nodded, saying, "My system is essentially the same, only I use a circle. What lands inside is mine, outside is his."
The rabbi smiled and said, "I do the same thing. I toss all the money into the air and whatever God grabs is his!"

4. The first morning after the honeymoon, Mulla Nasrudin got up early, went down to the kitchen, and brought his wife her breakfast in bed. Naturally she was delighted. then he spoke: "Have you noticed just what I have done?"
"Of course, dear; every single detail," said his wife.
"Good," said Nasrudin. "That is how I want my breakfast served every morning after this."

5. Paddy and Sean were sitting in the bar when Paddy said, "You know, Sean, I have read so much lately about how smoking can ruin your health that I have finally decided to do something about it."
"So, you are going to give up smoking?" asked Sean.
"Heavens no," cried Paddy, "I am going to give up reading."

6. Paddy and Seamus are sitting in the pub, having a drink together.
"A burglar got into my house at three o'clock this morning," says Paddy, "while I was on my way home from the pub."
"Did he get anything?" asks Seamus.
"He certainly did," says Paddy. "The poor guy is in the hospital. My wife, Maureen, thought it was me!"

7. Returning from his holiday, Mulla Nasrudin asked for two weeks more in which to get married.
"But you just had two weeks off," said the boss. "Why didn't you get married then?"
"WHAT, AND RUIN MY HOLIDAY?"