Most purifying, the most healthy, the most rejuvenating, the most refreshing, and the most total experience…Laughter..

Sannyas has to be a real break away. A loving surrender to the new....

Most purifying, the most healthy, the most rejuvenating, the most refreshing, and the most total experience...Laughter..

 

I am never in agreement with any superstition, howsoever old and ancient it may be. And I don't care at all what others have believed, lived. I trust my own experience more than any holy scripture, more than any great saint or sage.

 

My experience about laughter is that it is the most purifying, the most healthy, the most rejuvenating, the most refreshing, and the most total experience. It can be your first experience of totality. You can laugh totally.

And another beautiful thing about it, it is not only of the mind. Mind may trigger it, but soon it spreads all over you. It is overwhelming. There are beauties upon beauties as far as laughter is concerned. When you are laughing, one of the greatest things is that mind cannot think. And if you are alert, you can experience a space of no-thought, which is the experience of meditation.

 

And laughter gives you a childlike innocence. It helps to unburden you of unnecessary seriousness, which all the religions have been burdening you with. They have taken away even the smiles from your lips — what to say about laughter? They have been preaching seriousness. They are afraid, as if God will feel offended if you laugh.

And I cannot conceive of God in any other position, in any other posture, than laughing. If he exists at all, he must be laughing twenty-four hours at the hilariousness of humanity; because we don't know the whole of humanity, we know only a few people here and there. God must be watching all over humanity, and so many circuses going on.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche said, "God is dead." But the question is, "Who killed him? Or what was the disease, if he died naturally?" Sometimes I have this idea: perhaps laughing since eternity, he popped off. There is a limit to everything. You must all feel compassionate towards poor God.

 

But in another way, he enjoyed more than anybody else. He may have been disturbed once in a while — "What kind of man have I created?"

 

And it is a well established fact that after man he stopped creating. Seeing man, he must have become aware that, "I have committed a mistake. Now it is time to stop creation."

 

He did not stop at horses, he did not stop at buffaloes, he did not stop at millions of species of birds and insects and animals and trees. But suddenly the day he created man — since then, nothing has been heard about him. He became so much worried about what he had done. So either he died out of too much laughter, or he committed suicide, seeing what these creatures are doing whom he has created in his own image.

 

A beautiful young woman is strolling through the zoo, and finally stops in front of the monkey cage. Seeing no monkeys around, she asks the keeper, "Where are all the monkeys today?"

"They are inside their house, miss," he replies. "It is the mating season."

"Will they come out if I throw them some peanuts?" she asks.

The keeper scratches his head and says, "I don't know, miss. Would you?"

 

OSHO