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• LAUGHTER IS A FORM OF MEDITATION

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Hindustan Times                                                                         
December 11, 2004

LAUGHTER IS A FORM OF MEDITATION
Swami Chaitanya Keerti

Osho’s greatest gift to humanity is to teach it a lifestyle of meditation and celebration.

He does not want to man to renounce this life and escape to the Himalayas, but remain in the marketplace and learn the art of meditation, to transform this life into one of playful creativity.    

Not to treat this life as a burden but as a unique gift from existence. This gift transcends religious seriousness and monotony and enables us to expand beyond the limits of our intellect. This is an art of living that modern man must inculcate. 

Osho introduces laughter as meditation. Our noisy mind stops for a few precious moments in our spontaneous laughter, giving us the taste of meditation. 

In the twelfth discourse of The Transmission of the Lamp, Osho says: “One of my contributions to religion is a sense of humor which no other religion contains. And one of my basic statements about it is that laughter is the highest spiritual quality. Most religions have made it difficult to laugh. A sense of humour has not been recognized by any religion as a religious quality. And if we can decide that every year, for one hour, at a certain date, at a certain time, the whole world will laugh, I think it will help to dispel darkness, violence, and stupidities – because laughter is the only human characteristic which no animal possesses.” 

“All animals are incapable of laughter and whenever religions make somebody a saint, he loses laughter. He falls down the evolutionary ladder, and does not rise higher,” Osho says. 

“Laughter has a beauty and is multidimensional. It can help you relax, it can suddenly make you feel light, it can make your world a beautiful experience, and not a burden. It can change everything in your life. Just the touch of laughter can make life something worth living, something to be grateful for.” 

Indian Express, Faithline                                                                           Back to top

SAINT AND SINNER
Reconciled, they make a sage  
Thursday, December 16, 2004                                        

Meditativeness and love are opposites. Meditativeness needs aloneness, love needs the other. Sexuality and meditation are opposites. Sexuality is a desire, a continuous desire, unfulfilled — it remains unfulfilled. And meditation is desirelessness. These are opposites. When they meet, suddenly there is a flare-up. Something happens which was not contained in either.

The saint is just meditative. He is carrying one part — hydrogen or oxygen. The sinner is just sexual, he’s carrying another part. When the saint and the sinner meet in you, the sage is born. When the polarities meet in you in deep embrace, are lost into each other, lose all definitions, merge, become one, the sage is born in you. The sage is the rarest flowering in existence. The saint is a faraway echo of it, as far away as the sinner.

So Sufis say that the sage is not a saint. You can find many saints, that is very easy. Saints are a social phenomenon. But to find a sage is difficult because the sage is as individual as the criminal and as cosmic as the saint. Here is both together. In the sage, God and Devil meet and lose all their identities. That is the highest meeting. There is no higher meeting than that. This moment of meeting within you of the sinner and the saint, of the negative and the positive, is the moment of samadhi.

The sage is no-mind. The sinner is negative mind, the saint is positive mind, the sage is no-mind. The sinner lives is constant duality. He has to fight with his saint, remember it. The sinner has continuously to fight with his saint, because the saint is there. The sinner is going to kill somebody and the saint says, “Don’t do this, this is not right.” He has to fight. His fight is as arduous as the fight of the saint. The saint has to fight the sinner. If somebody insults him and a great desire to kill him arises, he has to fight with that desire. He cannot do it, he is a saint, he is a holy man, he is a religious man — this and that. Both go on fighting. They have to because they live in the duality, and the repressed part goes on taking revenge. It waits for the right moments to assert itself.

In the sage there is silence, there is no duality. The sage becomes a silent shrine. There is no longer any conflict, any antagonism. There is no longer any war going on in him. There is utter peace. That’s what Sufis call Islam. There is utter peace, silence. Those warring elements have disappeared into unity. The marriage has happened.