Osho Quotes on Laughter

Osho Quotes on Laughter

1. Laughter comes out of health. It’s an overflowing energy. That’s why children can laugh and their laughter is total. Their whole body is involved in it — when they laugh you can see their toes laughing. The whole body, every cell, every fiber of the body, is laughing and vibrating. They are so full of health, so vital; everything is flowing.
2. A sad child means an ill child, and a laughing old man means he is still young. Even death cannot make him old, nothing can make him old. His energy is still flowing and overflowing, he is always flooded. Laughter is a flooding of energy.
3. My emphasis is to increase your cheerfulness, your laughter, because this world is not for the miserable. This world is not for the people who have become too accustomed to anxiety, anguish. This world belongs to those who live moment to moment in utter ecstasy. Cheerfulness, nonseriousness, a sense of humor to me are very fundamental qualities of a religious being.
4. If we can fill the whole earth with laughter, with dancing and singing — people singing and swinging! — if we can make the earth a carnival of joy, a festival of lights, we will have brought for the first time a true sense of religiousness to the earth.
5. When you really laugh, suddenly mind disappears. And the whole Zen methodology is how to get into no-mind — laughter is one of the beautiful doors to get to it.
6. If you are possessed by laughter, thinking stops. And if you know a few moments of no-mind, those glimpses will promise you many more rewards that are going to come. You just have to become more and more of the sort, of the quality, of no-mind. More and more, thinking has to be dropped.
7. TM has an appeal for the American mind, because repeating a mantra — monotonous, the same again and again — the mind loses interest in it, starts falling asleep. That’s the beauty of laughter: you cannot fall asleep. Laughing, how can you fall asleep? It brings a state of no-mind and no-thought, and does not allow you to fall asleep.
8. Look at people’s faces. They carry life as a burden — boring, with no meaning. It seems that everything is just a nightmare, a very cruel joke, that somebody is playing a trick, torturing them. Life is not a celebration, it cannot be. With a mind burdened by memory life cannot be a celebration. Even if you laugh, your laughter carries boredom. Look at people laughing: they laugh with an effort. Their laugh may be just to be mannerly, their laugh may be just etiquette.
9. My whole effort here is to keep you as non-serious as possible, for the simple reason that meditation, all kinds of meditation, can make you too serious and that seriousness will create a spiritual disease and nothing else. Unless a meditation brings you more laughter, more joy, more playfulness, avoid it. It is not for you.
10. Life has to be taken hilariously! Life is so full of laughter, it is so ridiculous, it is so funny that unless your juices have gone completely dry you cannot be serious. I have looked around at life in every possible way and it is always funny, whatever way you look at it! It gets funnier and funnier! It is such a beautiful gift of the beyond.
11. When laughter comes out of thinking it is ugly; it belongs to this ordinary, mundane world, it is not cosmic. Then you are laughing at somebody else, at somebody else’s cost, and it’s ugly and violent. When laughter comes out of silence you are not laughing at anybody’s cost, you are simply laughing at the whole cosmic joke. And it really is  a joke! That’s why I go on telling jokes to you.
12. Nobody is for life, nobody is for living, nobody is for laughter. No religion has accepted a sense of humor as a quality of religiousness.
13. If my people go on being nonserious, laughing, dancing, singing, not finding any reason for it — life is enough reason for it — we can make the whole world aflame with laughter. Nuclear weapons can be destroyed by a laughing, smiling, dancing humanity. But as humanity is now, there is no hope.
14. To me, authentic religiousness means a childlike innocence, playfulness, and a wholehearted capacity for laughter.
15. Whenever you touch a height, enjoy the height; whenever you touch the bottom, enjoy the bottom. One thing should remain continuously flowing in you — the enjoyment. Giggle within yourself when you are beyond yourself, and giggle within yourself when you are within yourself — but giggling should continue. Make life a laughter when great things are happening, and when nothing is happening, laughter should continue. Laughter should be the running thread of the garland of flowers of all your ecstasies and experiences of the beyond. They will change, but one thread of laughter can continue within you. Laughter is almost the shrine of the witness. Within the laughter, you will always find the watcher. And to become a watcher without discontinuity, without gaps, is all that is meant by enlightenment.
16. No religion in the world has accepted a sense of humor as one of the fundamental religious qualities. I accept it, and I want that no religion can possibly exist in the future unless it has as a fundamental quality the sense of humor. A religion without laughter… a God who cannot laugh and dance and sing is not worthy of being God. Send him to hell!