Osho,
I left my mother twenty years, and my wife over four years ago. Why can't I let them go?
One of the mysteries of life is the law of reverse returns. There are things which you cannot do. Although people have done them, although it is possible they may happen to you too, they are always happenings, they are never doings.
In fact the doer, the ego, is the barrier to the happening. Happening needs the innocent mind of a child who can still dream of fairies, who can still find treasures in colored stones, whose eyes are still not covered with the dust that we call knowledge. His ignorance is far more beautiful than the knowledge of a great scholar. Because ignorance is at least natural. At least it is yours; it does not make you a hypocrite, it is never insincere.
I have been wondering and looking in thousands of scriptures and commentaries on scriptures but I have not found a single statement in five thousand years’ literature which shows some understanding about ignorance. In fact, they are all interested in knowledgeability; ignorance they want to destroy. They want to gain knowledge because knowledge will give them power – knowledge is power. Knowledge will give you prestige, money, respectability. Knowledge will fulfill many of your ambitions and desires.
Ignorance cannot do anything for you, but it can allow something which is far more precious than knowledge can ever give to you. But its whole secret is in allowing, in patiently waiting – with a question mark in the heart, with a quest all over your being, a quest which is not partial, a total inquiry.
Ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. Rightly understood, it is not something negative. It is simply a tabula rasa – a clean slate. Nothing is written on it. You have to write your own holy Bible, holy Koran, holy Gita; you have to give birth.
Ignorance is a womb.
It contains the quest for truth – and if you don’t fall victim to knowledgeability, ignorance is the right beginning.
To know absolutely that “I do not know,” is the first step of wisdom. You have known something of tremendous value: you have known your innocence, and in this innocence, the ego dies. The ego can live only with the false – it is the accumulation of the false. The ego is interested in knowledge – borrowed, third-hand, rotten…but knowledge is cheap.
To know by experience is a risk. You may burn your fingers in the experiment.
In the experiment, you are dropping out of the crowd and moving alone in this vast universe and you don’t have any guide, any maps, any instructions. All that you have is a thirst.
But in the desert people say, and it is derived from thousands of years of experience, that when a man becomes so thirsty that he forgets everything…. The fiery sun on his head, the fire in the sand, and he is all thirst; now it is not even a verbal thing in him. It is not that he is thinking, “I am feeling thirsty.”
He is thirst. Not that he is thinking about it, he is it.
The desert people all over the world have experienced a very strange phenomenon. Whenever somebody comes to such a state of thirst – and many times it happens in the desert – he suddenly becomes intuitive. He starts moving toward the place where he will find water. He has no map, he has no instructions. He has no way to move logically in any direction because in the desert all directions are the same, and there is no reason to choose one direction and not another.
But now there is no question of choice. There is no question of thinking, he is just thirst. And that thirst moves existentially toward the place where it can be quenched.
When I came to know about this, I was surprised that no other mystic has taken note of the fact that the same is the situation of the seeker. Of course his desert is bigger, and his thirst is bigger too. The ordinary thirst is momentary; his thirst is eternal – but the basic principle is the same.
When a man becomes so aflame, he starts moving…I will not say he starts going in that direction; he finds himself going toward a certain direction, having no other alternative. There is no reason to stop. And that’s how those who have reached, have reached.
Remember one thing: that to get rid of the doer is the most essential thing if you want to taste another world – the world of happenings, where you are just a witness.
The law of reverse effect is: there are things which you can have but because you are trying to get them, you will not be able to get them. It is like when you want to fall asleep in the night. You try all kinds of tricks but you find that you cannot befool yourself – sleep is not coming. On the contrary, because of your tricks and because of all the things people have told you to do if you do not find sleep coming to you naturally – all those things keep you awake. Because to do them you have to be awake!
Somebody is repeating a mantra – but to repeat a mantra, you have to be awake. Somebody is doing some breathing exercises from Yoga – but breath is so deeply involved in life that if you are using breathing in a certain way, with a certain rhythm, it will keep you alert, awake, fresh.
Sleep needs totally different things. If you want sleep to come, forget all about sleep; that is the first rule. Do something else. Get involved in something so deeply that you are not at all concerned with sleep and it will start coming. You will hear small footsteps, you will feel it is coming, but don’t pay any attention.
Sleep is a feminine energy. If you look at it – and here you come to a very significant point – the feminine energy functions in a totally different way than the male energy. The woman wants you to chase her. She does not want you simply to sit and wait for her to come. Even though the woman wants you, loves you, wants to be yours, first she will run away. She will not run very fast. She will run in such a way that you can catch her; she will give you every chance to catch hold of her.
Every feminine energy has the same quality. Sleep is feminine, you cannot catch hold of her. You have just to close your eyes and lie down and wait. She will come…she is just in the other room.
In the same category are all great values: friendship, love, peace, silence, and ultimately the realization of your godliness – they all happen. You are not the doer.
So first, let this be settled in you: that there is a world of doings that is the outside world, the worldly world; and there is a world of happenings – the inner world, the otherworldly world. Certainly their principles are going to be diametrically opposite.
I have seen people trying to relax. I have seen a book with the title, You Must Relax! “Must” will not allow you to relax! Relaxation is not something that you do, it is simply the absence of all your doings. In that absence is the greatest experience of life, and all great values will grow on their own accord.
Of course, your ego will not be fulfilled. In fact, it will be dead by the time you have experienced a few things which only happen.
You have to choose between the ego and the world of happenings.
The ego can give you many things: misery, anger, sadness, despair, anguish…and the line is long. It has its own treasures, if you are interested.
The absence of ego has also its own treasures. And the world of the ego and the world of egolessness are not very far away. They are neighbors.
Just a very thin fence of thoughts divides them.
It is simply a question of understanding that there are things which cannot be done – so don’t do them, let them happen.
You just be a watcher. And once you have learned the knack of watching you will start growing up higher every moment toward the ultimate experience – of knowing oneself, realizing the nature of your consciousness…because that opens the door of immortality.
A meditator slowly slips from the world of mortality into the world of immortality. On this side, the world of doings, there is death. On the other side, in the dimension of happenings, there is no death.
And unless you experience a clear vision of deathlessness, you will remain miserable, you will remain in despair. And because you live in the world of doings, that is the only art you know – and that art is preventing you from entering into a different dimension.
So you have to learn sometimes just to be a child, playing, jumping, dancing, singing, for no purpose at all. Once in a while just lying down on the lawn, or on the beach – doing nothing, lying down in such a way…as if you are in your mother’s womb.
In fact, the scientists say that people feel good near the ocean because the child in the mother’s womb floats in a liquid which has the same proportion of chemicals, salts, as the ocean. And we are made eighty percent of water. It is a miracle! You just think once again…you are eighty percent water – walking, running, going home! Just twenty percent, the skin, is functioning like a bag.
You feel fresh near the ocean – the same salty air, some forgotten memory….
Scientists are now coming closer to the Eastern insight about human evolution. Now the latest researchers say that Charles Darwin is not right, man has not come as a growth from the monkeys. They are proposing that man was born as a fish, not as a monkey; in the very beginning he was born in the ocean. And because life needed all that the ocean contains, the mother’s womb has to contain everything just like the ocean. A pregnant woman becomes very much interested in salty things, because the child is asking for more and more salt. Salt is a necessity….
But for nine months floating in the mother’s womb the child knows the eternity of relaxation – no tension, no business, no worries, no taxation.
The child simply is, just a pure isness – that is relaxation.
By the side of the ocean, lying in the sand, just move as if you are back in your mother’s womb. You are not to do anything. Just lie down and enjoy the wind, the roaring ocean…and you will be surprised that the meditation that you have been trying to do for years and has not happened, is happening.
Once you know that there are things which need your support – not as a doer but just as a loving gardener looking at his rosebushes, waiting and trusting in existence…the spring always comes and it will bring flowers.
The spring of your consciousness will also come, but you have to learn a simple secret – that of let-go.
And the learning simply comes by trying to understand the nature of doing and the nature of non-doing.
I was taken to a theological college to talk about Jesus, and after I had talked with the students, the vice-chancellor took me around…it is the biggest Christian college in the whole of Asia which prepares missionaries. He took me around, and I could not believe what I saw. If Jesus had seen it the Jews would have been saved from crucifying him – he would have committed suicide himself!
The missionaries are being prepared…on what sentence what kind of emphasis has to be given, what sentence has to be spoken loudly and what sentence has to be almost whispered, at what point you should beat the table….
I told the vice-chancellor, “You are destroying these people. Jesus never went to any theological college; he was not trained in the art of oratory. He is certainly one of the greatest orators the world has produced, and he does not know any art; he is uneducated. His power and the fire that his words carry are not coming out of a training, they are coming from his heart. In fact, he is not doing them, they are happening.”
The difference is very delicate and very difficult…whether the person is making a gesture or the gesture has blossomed just like a flower. If you have to say something your hands will follow, because your hands are extensions of your mind. When the mind is trying to express something and finding it difficult, the hands add whatever they can contribute. And sometimes what words cannot say, the movement of the hand, the grace of the hand may say. The word may not reach its target but the heart may touch the hand extended toward you. Your eyes may catch the depth of the master.
I told that vice-chancellor, “You are spoiling three thousand students every year – and you think you are preparing missionaries who are going to convert others into religion. You are not even able to convert these people! Because if their hearts are with you, then their gestures will automatically follow, then their emphasis on certain words, phrases or sometimes just silence…”
A moment, a gap, one never knows…what the moment is going to bring is absolutely unknown.
Whatever you want to do, remember:
Doing is material, worldly, mundane. There is nothing which can be called “spiritual doing”.
Spirituality is a happening, it is bigger than you, you cannot do it. You can make a shelter of your house, but you cannot make the sky with all the stars.
All great values are like the sky – so vast and with so many stars and with so many mysteries. You can enter into this world of the miraculous if you drop yourself, leave yourself out of the temple.
I am reminded of a very ancient story….
There was a great sculptor in Rome. His statues were so highly praised that for the first time unanimously the critics said, “There is no more possibility of improvement.” He has said the last word; his statues look almost alive, as if just any moment the statue will come out of its place to greet you, to shake hands with you or give you a hug” – although I don’t think you will be ready! The hug may prove dangerous. But that was the appraisal from all over the world, that the man had come to the peak, and now there was nothing that could be added to the art.
Then the man became old, as everybody has to become old, and he became afraid of death. As oldness started settling he started thinking what to do about death. Being a sculptor this idea came to his mind easily: “I can make a statue of myself.” And he had a beautiful round hall where hundreds of statues were standing and sitting. So he thought, “When death comes I will be standing somewhere inside the crowd of my statues; only I have to keep my breathing as slow as possible.” And that was possible, because people used to say that his statues seemed as if they were breathing. They were so alive that they would do something, they could not remain standing forever in that way.
Death came and was puzzled. The sculptor had made a few statues of himself and placed them among other statues. Death could not believe that…she went around watching, looking, trying to find some sign but she failed. She said, “My God! He has done only one thing wrong…”
And the artist forgot completely the situation and the scene and said, “What?”
Death said, “You cannot forget yourself. And that I could see even by your nose, but I did not disturb you. I simply went on looking around. I wanted to see whether you could remain silent. That would have been really going beyond death – but you could not forget your ego and you were feeling more and more satisfied. The more I was going ahead, looking like a failure…I was seeing from the corner of my eye that you were looking more and more successful, certain that you had defeated death. I can be defeated but not by the ego.”
The egoless has no death to encounter. You are born – have you done anything? can you take any credit for being born? for having two eyes and not three? for having eyes at all? Otherwise the world would be dark – no colors, no light, no beauty. But all these things have happened to you. Birth happens to you, youth happens to you, love happens to you, old age happens to you, death happens to you – whatever is essential happens to you and whatever is non-essential is left for you to do.
So don’t waste your whole life in the non-essential.
That non-essential is also needed but remember that the essential has not to be forgotten.
And you have not to do anything for it. You have just to be receptive, open, vulnerable, available…so that if the call comes from the beyond you will be ready to say with your full heart, “Yes. I am coming.”

Osho,
I listened to the tender sound of a cool well, bubbling water just flowing without any effort and yet busy…Sunrays dancing to the melody, eternally fresh. But the I forgot. All that remains is the thirst to come back and be the well, sometimes recognized, sometimes not. Osho, is there anything to be done? Is the thirst enough?
The thirst is enough.
So the question is not whether the thirst is enough or not, the question is whether the thirst is there or not. Because there can be a false thirst – and you know about the false thirst: you are not feeling thirsty and suddenly you see a bottle of Coca-Cola. Strangely enough you start feeling thirsty, and just a moment before you were not thinking of thirst at all.
I used to live in one place…just next door was the richest man’s house; it was a beautiful palace. And in India nobody bothers about it; it is taken for granted that people will urinate anywhere. The whole of mother earth is a toilet. So by the side of this man’s house there was a small street, very lonely and once in a while somebody would urinate there and he was very mad about it. In the morning he would be in the garden and if he saw somebody urinating there was going to be murder! So much trouble he would create for the man, and the police will come and….
One day I was by the side of his fence and I said, “Why don’t you put small signboards around the house saying that urinating is prohibited?”
He said, “That’s good idea.”
So he made beautiful wooden signs – beautiful because they have to go with the beautiful marble – all around the house. And by the evening he came….
I said, “You must have come about those signboards that you have put up.”
He said, “Yes, I have come about those. Where is your father?”
“But,” I said, “my father has nothing to do with them. It was my suggestion, the whole credit goes to me.”
He said, “You keep quiet, just call your father.”
So I called my father.
He said, “This boy is dangerous. He tricked me! Now my whole house is stinking of urine; all around the house you can find nothing but urine.”
Just the human mind…when you see a board: “You cannot urinate here” such a great desire arises! One can risk anything, but one cannot leave that place, it is hypnotic.
The functioning of the mind is such that no prohibition can ever be successful. Prohibition becomes provocation, it becomes a challenge and suddenly…you were going on your way, thinking your thoughts, and suddenly this board makes you aware that you too have a bladder. And somebody telling you not to do something makes it attractive. It can become an obsession.
Don’t create obsessions in your life.
Live more playfully, less seriously.
Don’t be rigid; these are the qualities of the dead. Be flexible. Grow a sense of humor so that you can remain protected from all kinds of dark nights, dark holes. Your sense of humor will protect you.
And if once in a while you can have a deep laughter, from your very roots, it will give you a freshness, a new vitality, a new energy to move mountains.
Ten thousand years we have lived without understanding the subtle workings of the mind. Hence every religion says, “Don’t do this,” and creates the world that you see. This is the world created by people who have been telling you, “Don’t do this, don’t do that.” And those are the things which are being done!
And the more emphasis there is on denial…. Life reacts with a tremendous force against any denial, and you are caught in a very difficult crisis. If you follow life you cannot follow your holy scriptures, and that will create guilt in you – and to go on collecting guilt is like growing a spiritual cancer within yourself. If you follow these commandments in the scriptures you are going against your nature, against life itself. So there is not going to be any fulfillment, there is not going to be any joy; there is going to be only darkness, misery.
Slowly, slowly you start feeling a kind of death happening to you, because life is not being allowed to live in its totality. Death is bound to fill the gaps where life has not been allowed to blossom.
And every man is carrying within himself so many poisonous, life-negative ideas that everybody is in a limbo, just hanging in between. Neither can he do what life wants him to do – fully, completely, not holding anything back – nor he can repress. Because you are nature; and who is going to repress? You will have to divide yourself into two parts. You will have to create classes within yourself.
There are people who are thinking of creating a classless society – without knowing at all that inside, man as an individual is divided into classes.
In India, the brahmin is synonymous with the head and the sudra, the shoemakers and the poor manual laborers, are symbolized by the feet; the warriors are symbolized by the arms. And they have a hierarchy – the feet cannot become the head. So whatever you are, you cannot change, you cannot transform yourself. You have to accept your fate – this has been the teaching for thousands of years.
And the result is this miserable humanity. This is the conclusion of all your religions and all your prophets and all your saviors. This is what they have done, this is how they have saved you.
They don’t seem around too much nowadays – perhaps they have saved you completely! They may have gone to save somebody else on some other planet, some other star.
These saviors existed because we wanted somebody else to do this work of spiritual growth for us: “Somebody else should do it.”
Nobody else can do it.
It is your freedom to be miserable or to be blissful, to remain in darkness or to live a life of light. This is the prerogative of human beings.
The saviors are cheating you. To say to somebody, “I am going to save you,” means that the person stops his search and becomes only a shadow. He follows you. And remember, existence does not accept carbon copies; it needs the original. You have to take the whole responsibility for your life.
And it is not a burden. In fact, freedom can never be a burden. The moment you accept total responsibility, you become free to be whatever your nature demands, to be whatever your nature deserves. And only when you fulfill your destiny – alone – finding your path, risking everything for the search, then life is no more just vegetating. Then life is a song, a dance, a deep ecstasy.
But you have to drop the idea that anybody else can do it for you. You have to drop the idea that knowledge gathered from scriptures can do it. You have to be mature, you have to accept that “This is my life and only I can do something for it.”
In this way you become an individual.
In this way you become free from organizational religions, in this way you become free from any political, philosophical ideologies.
In this way you become innocent again.
Your eyes are clean, have depth; your heart is ready to dance.
And if you can forget yourself and start the dancing, start the singing…. And when I say forget yourself, don’t misunderstand me. Don’t start emphasizing the fact of forgetting yourself – that will spoil the whole thing. When I say forget yourself, I simply mean that when you are dancing, let the dance be there and the dancer dissolved into it. When you are singing then what is the need of the singer? Let the singer melt into the song, and each moment of life starts taking on the qualities of truth, of beauty, of blissfulness. You don’t have to go anywhere. And you don’t have to be anybody else, either. Wherever you are, whatever you are, exactly there – in silence, in peace – you can discover the very center of the universe.
That center exists in everyone. We are different only on the periphery; at the center we are one.
That’s why a person who has reached to his innermost core becomes a magnetic force – because he is now at the center and you are at the periphery. He has all the gravitation. If you just relax a little bit…because you are clinging with the periphery. A little relaxation and you will be pulled in.
And while you are slipping into the presence of the master, you will find that a dark shadow of your own, which we call the ego, is leaving you. As you are coming closer to the master, the ego is leaving you. The moment you have come and there is no barrier between you and the master, you will be surprised: for the first time you don’t have any weight. It is as if that ego was a mountain on you, and suddenly everything looks bright, fragrant, rosier.
Life is simple.
We make it complex by doing things against nature.
There is only one religion, and that is nature. Allow nature to take you completely; allow yourself to be one with nature.
Anything that goes against nature is against religion, is against spirituality, is against your ultimate welfare. So just listen to your nature – and your nature goes on telling you, but we are deaf.
I have heard…. In Tibet, two Buddhist monks were passing through the marketplace. One monk was very greedy. In fact, because of his greed it was suggested he renounce the world and become a monk; otherwise, “Your future is going to be nothing but hell.”
He listened to many saints, tried many times, but again and again he thought about all the possessions he had collected, and he went on postponing. One day the master called him and said, “It is enough, because now I cannot wait; I am going to die tomorrow. Now you decide.”
Under such compulsion – it was almost blackmail – he got initiated, renounced the world. But that does not make any difference.
The greed is inside you, not in the things.
So now it became attached to new things. He started collecting other things, with new names. He started collecting ancient scriptures….
Both monks were passing through the market where there was so much crowd and so much bargaining and so much noise…and somebody’s coin fell and he heard the sound.
He said to the other monk, “Did you hear it? I just heard the sound of a coin falling on the road.”
The other monk said, “You are a miracle! In such a maddening crowd…just the sound of a coin? You managed to hear it? You have to forgive me, I don’t have that much sensitivity.”
They both went to the master and told him about the incident. The master said, “It is not insensitivity on your part – he is too sensitive toward coins! Even in a market, the sound of a coin…he knows no other music.”
Don’t go against nature.
Listen silently – and whatever you have to do and whatever you have to be, all directions are within you.
Once in a while you may go wrong, you may commit a mistake. But they’re all part of natural life, and you will learn from them. Each learning is based on mistakes.
But one thing has to be certain: you have to be strong enough to take the whole responsibility of your life, for good or for bad. Act out of freedom, out of awareness; not out of dead principles and religions and books.
To me, fearlessness, courageousness is the foundational quality of a religious man. He will risk all, but he cannot go against his own insight. Whatever the consequences, he will follow his own insight. This is how he becomes stronger and stronger, more and more like steel, so that even fire cannot destroy him.

Osho,
Enlightenment seems to me always to be an end, a death, a kind of suicide where a comeback is never possible – no more adventures, no lovers, no sunsets, no dramas, no candlelight dinners. What can be more beautiful than the senseless dramas and joys of all my searchings? How is it after death for an enlightened man? Is it not boring for the next ten thousand years? I feel simply a death-fear.
Enlightenment can be a very scary thing.
It can create a great paranoia in you. And your question is significant, because millions of people in the world never think about enlightenment, and the reason may be this deep-rooted fear. They have known a certain kind of life and they think this is the only life possible – that’s where they go wrong.
This is the lowest form of life that we are living. In fact, to call it life is not right, it is only birth. It is only a possibility. You can make a life out of it – life has to be created. And the misunderstanding is so old…and people don’t want to drop it because it is so consoling to think that you are alive and you are enjoying everything and it is a beautiful drama.
But you have been through this drama many times.
It is the same drama. Small details change…A is married to B instead of to C. One lives in this country, is born into another…but goes through the same routine. The same misery will come, the same jealousy will come; all the games of ambition that people go on playing will be there – but you are not bored. You are not bored because each time you die your memory closes a door; otherwise you will go mad. Nature has an autonomous system: the moment a person dies his whole memory system of that life goes with him into the new life, but the door is closed.
One of Mahavira’s contributions to the world is his method of jati smaran. Jati smaran means the science of remembering your past lives. It was his absolute emphasis that nobody should become a sannyasin unless he goes through the remembrance of a few past lives. He was asked many times, “Why this insistence?” because nobody else insists on it.
He said, “Unless you look into your past lives, and you see that you have been doing the same thing again and again and again, and your hands are still empty, and you are again doing those same things….”
You will become bored and you will start feeling that “I must be utterly unintelligent” – but because each life is completely closed to you, you don’t know anything about your past. You don’t have any insight into your future.
All that you know is this small life, and in this small life you know two things: the misery and the pain of life, and ways and methods of forgetting that misery and pain. That you call your amusement, entertainment – going to a movie, to a circus. These are your ways to forget your life. There you became engaged for two or three hours in a different world.
The enlightened person is certainly difficult for you to conceive of.
It is just like if you smoke, you cannot conceive how millions of people go on without smoking. They must be missing! And the person who does not smoke is not missing anything except some nicotine, some poison that will kill you earlier than him. Otherwise, he is not missing anything. The person who is an alcoholic cannot believe that the whole world goes on without the bottle. He cannot live even a single day without the bottle. He feels pity for you: “Poor fellows, they don’t know that there is a way, through alcohol, to forget all the burdens of life.” But he cannot conceive of a life which has no burdens at all to forget.
And that is your position. When you think about enlightenment, the problem is that you don’t understand that the man who is enlightened is no more an ego. You can insult him but you cannot hurt him; you can abuse him, you can condemn him, and there will be no change in his being. Even if you kill him he will remain the same.
It is difficult for you to understand how an enlightened man can remain without going to circuses, movies…and all kinds of stupidities are there. But so few enlightened people have existed that not much is known about them. And much is such that unless you experience it, you cannot understand it.
For the enlightened person, everything that is going on around him is a circus. There is no need for him to purchase a ticket – his problem is how to get out of the circus! He does not want to go to the movie, he wants to get out!
But wherever he goes….
Just think of Gautam Buddha in Bombay….
It is not difficult to infer why these people have declined to happen. Why no more Gautam Buddhas, Mahaviras, Bodhidharmas, Zarathustras? Where have all these tremendously beautiful people disappeared to? Why are they not more available to us? Because humanity has grown so much – just in the proportion…. In India there were only two million people in the time of Buddha. Now there are nine hundred million people in India. Just looking at the proportion, at least a dozen Buddhas are absolutely needed!
But that kind of person has disappeared – and he has disappeared because what you call life he has found to be nothing but slow death.
And he has found the real life. Once a person finds the real life, why he should come back into a miserable world?
But your question is relevant. You feel afraid that sitting silently for thousands of years is going to be difficult.
But you don’t know that if you are silent, time stops. There are no more ten thousand years, ten million years, nothing. Just a simple now.
When mind is silent, time disappears because mind is time.
Now you are worried that in life there is so much drama, and the enlightened man…what is he going to do for eternity?
What drama you are talking about? One idiot slipping on a banana peel? And everybody starts laughing…this is not compassionate. Even if that man is a banana, he has every right to slip on a banana peel. He is not harming anybody, just doing some special kind of yoga.
But why are you laughing?
Your life is full of sadness and you are in search…wherever there is a possibility to laugh, some sadness is thrown away, some burden is thrown away. Certainly, an enlightened person will not be laughing. There is no need. The laughter is needed because of your sadness, it is an antidote to sadness. The enlightened man is so blissful…and remember, blissfulness is not happiness. That’s where things always become confused.
Happiness is momentary: on both sides of happiness there is unhappiness.
Blissfulness has no opposite to it, there is no such thing as “unblissfulness.” There is only blissfulness, and that blissfulness is not dependent on anybody else or anything outside the enlightened being himself.
His source of bliss is within his own being.
He is shining, radiating what he has experienced. And the more he shares it, the more it goes on growing.
Time has no existence for him any more.
He lives in the moment. And he lives so totally and so intensely that there is no space for any sadness or any misery to enter.
But don’t decide anything before experiencing at least a little sample. Experience a little meditation and it will be the answer to your question. Because one day you will find that you are sitting silently and so joyful, for no reason at all.
The moment one becomes enlightened, one becomes blissfulness, one becomes benediction. Time and space both disappear. He becomes one with the whole.
Then stars are within him, flowers are within him, skies upon skies are within him. Then birds on the wing are within him.
Right now everything is outside you.
Enlightenment brings everything inside you.
It spreads you far and wide, to infinities. Many such questions will arise, but don’t just intellectually think about them. Otherwise, you will be missing the real juice of life.
Experiment.
Your questions should come out of your experiments; then they will be existential and they will be of immense help for your growth.

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