Osho Quotes on Laughter and Laughter as a Meditation

If people could laugh totally every day for at least one hour, without any reason, they would not need any other meditation. That would be enough, because while you are laughing you cannot think. While you are laughing you cannot be in the past, you cannot be in the future: you have to be here now. Laughter can open a door to the ultimate.
My own experience says to me that if you can laugh rightly, in the right moment, it will bring you out of unconsciousness into the open sky, from the darkness to the light. I am introducing laughter as a meditation because nothing makes you so total as laughter; nothing makes you stop your thinking as laughter does. Just for a moment you are no more a mind. Just for a moment you are no more in time. Just for a moment you have entered into another space where you are total and whole and healed.
You cannot laugh partially. Try, and you will fail. You can laugh only totally. That is a unique quality about laughter. That's why I had made a meditation of it -- because of its unique quality: in laughter you are total without anyone saying to you, "Be total."
The secret of the joke is that it brings you to a point where you are expecting, expecting, expecting that this is going to happen; then it never happens. And what happens is so sudden... and because you were expecting something you were coming to a tension, and then suddenly something else happens, and the tension has come to such a climax that it explodes. You are all laughter. It is a tremendous release, it is great meditation. If you can laugh totally, it will give you a moment of no-time, no-mind. Mind lives logically with expectations, laughter is something that comes from the beyond. Mind is always guessing what is going to happen, groping. And something happens which is absolutely contrary to its expectations: it simply stops for a moment.
Laughter is the only ordinary experience when you are no longer a mind, and I use it to give you glimpses of no-mind, of meditation, of a transcendence of mind. Perhaps I am the first man in the whole history of mankind who has been using jokes as a preparation for meditation
Before we enter into, not contemplation, but meditation, I don't want you to be serious. I am so against seriousness -- it is a spiritual sickness. Laughter is spiritual health. And laughter is very unburdening. While you laugh, you can put your mind aside very easily. For a man who cannot laugh the doors of the buddha are closed. To me, laughter is one of the greatest values. No religion has ever thought about it. They have always been insisting on seriousness, and because of their insistence the whole world is psychologically sick
Before we enter into our daily meditation, into our Zen... I am using laughter as a preface, a foreword to the coming silence. As laughter recedes into silence... the greater the laughter, the more total the laughter, the greater the silence that will follow behind it. Nobody in the past has ever used laughter as a device. But I find that only in laughter are you once in a while total. In laughter only, once in a while you forget yourself; just the laughter remains and you are not.
To me, to laugh wholeheartedly is the greatest celebration that can happen to a man -- to laugh wholeheartedly, to become the laughter. Then no meditation is needed, it is enough.
The idea has gone very deep in the human mind that religious people have to be serious and sad, with long faces. Laughter seems to be too mundane. It is not so. Laughter is one of the most sacred phenomenon on the earth. In fact in profound laughter mind disappears exactly like it disappears in meditation. That's why laughter is so relaxing, so rejuvenating. A good laugh is a tonic, it is very vital for one's well-being.

The man who cannot laugh is ill, sick. A heartfelt laughter releases your hidden sources of energy. One thing is certain, when you are in real laughter, when it is not just polite, when it is not just polite, when it is not just to say that yes, you understand the humour of the situation or the meaning of the joke, when it is really arising out of your heart, when it is total, whole, when your whole being is throbbing with it, then it gives you a taste of meditation.

Mind disappears; it cannot exist in laughter. It melts, it evaporates, for a moment there is no mind, there is only laughter. There is no one who is laughing, there is pure laughter. And that's exactly what meditation is. When the dancer disappears and there is only dance it is meditation, when the singer disappears and there is only singing it is meditation, when the lover disappears and there is only loving it is meditation, when the walker disappears and is only walking it is meditation. And laughter gives you the taste of meditation more easily than anything else.
Laughter is tremendously healthy. Playfulness is as sacred as any prayer or maybe more sacred than any prayer, because playfulness, laughter, singing, dancing, will relax you. And only the truth is possible in a relaxed state of being. When you are totally relaxed, in a state of let-go, the impossible starts happening, the miracle starts happening. Let-go is the secret of meditation.

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