Laughter

Beloved Osho, it is for the first time I have been so close to you. When I am sitting here with you I feel my heart in tune with your heart, I feel a deep love for you. But I also feel my outer seriousness. Why is laughter so difficult for me?

The sardar said, "Don't force me, because the secret is very embarrassing." They said, "Embarrassing? But we thought you are doing great. We always hear laughter -- either you laugh or your wife laughs... no fight." The sardar said, "What happens is, she throws things at me. If she misses, then I laugh; if she hits me then she laughs. The same things are going on, but it is just that we have made a different arrangement -- what is the point? So I have learned how to dodge her, and she is learning how to...." After twenty years the same sardar wanted to divorce his wife. The magistrate had heard about them, that this was the only couple in the whole city who had never been known to fight. They simply laugh -- the whole city knows them as the laughing couple. The magistrate said, "What has gone wrong?…

Beloved Osho, about four years ago I was in a space which I always remember as "paradise on earth." it felt as if I'd arrived home. Being in such deep and sweet relaxation and love, I felt as if I had fallen deep inside myself. Beloved Osho, why is it so difficult for me to let myself rejoice like that again?

Don't ask for anything to be repeated in your life, because there are always higher things. Why waste your life with anything lower? Always ask for the higher, for the better. And of course, you don't know what is higher and what is greater; again you are just waiting for the unknown. Just as the unknown has given you a gift in the past, it will be giving you many, many gifts; but you have to have the same childlike innocent heart -- waiting and longing, but not definite about what you are asking. Just trust in existence, and you will find better spaces. There is no scarcity of paradises -- there are paradises beyond paradises -- one has just to be innocent and not cling to anything. You are clinging to a certain experience, and that very clinging is becoming a barrier to prevent another experience from happening. If…

Beloved Osho, when I heard you say laughter is a small release from our misery, my mind would not compute. It felt as though hysteria was filling the room as we all laughed, and I am still asking myself, "what happened?"

You can see what happened! It can look like hysteria. For example, when you understand something and laughter happens as a relief from misery, a great energy is released. Every understanding releases accumulated energies in you. For example, you are not laughing the whole day -- only once in a while. You are not being loving the whole day -- only once in a while. What happens to the energy in the big gaps? It accumulates, and if you come to an understanding of a certain phenomenon there is a great release, and the release is so strong that it will feel hysterical. But it is not hysterical; it is really getting relief from energy which could have become hysterical any moment. You can find people in madhouses laughing for hours, laughing so much that tears come to their eyes. They are mad because they could not manage to release…

Osho, you make us laugh so much, but why do you yourself never laugh?

Veena, I laugh in solitude. Here, when I look at you, I feel like crying. The human condition is so wretched, so full of inner pain. It’s a wonder one is alive at all. So I can make you laugh, but I myself cannot. In solitude I do. When you are not there, when the very memory of you fades, when your faces are no longer before me, when your pain and your sorrow are forgotten—then I laugh. But before you, laughing is impossible. Those in whose breath no fragrance of flowers ever dwelt, who at playful buds have only ever cracked crude jests; in whose eyelid-gardens no butterfly was ever caught, on whose lips a smile never came, not even by mistake— if I could make such ill-starred ones laugh their fill, then I would laugh; I do laugh—let me get into the mood and I will laugh. Those…