Chapter title: Laughter is Prayer

‌Chapter title: Laughter is Prayer‌

17 November 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 7611175 ShortTitle: WHIP09 Audio:

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[Osho gives sannyas to a five-year-old girl and she skips back to her seat. Osho speaks to her parents:]

Anand means bliss, joy, and hasya means laughter. Teach her to laugh more and more. And when you play with her, keep the atmosphere of laughter around her. If you can avoid seriousness, you will be fulfilling your duty. Children are crushed under seriousness. Certainly older people are more serious and children are laughter-like, but by and by they start imitating; they start feeling as if laughter is something wrong. And older people create an impression in their minds that to be serious, to keep quiet, to be silent, is something good, virtuous. That is wrong, because once the child loses contact with laughter it is very difficult to gel back the contact. So many therapies are needed, and even then it is difficult to get your childhood back. So many religions are needed. In fact there is no need for any religion in the world.

If children are allowed to be natural, laughing, allowed fun, spontaneity, no religion is needed, no church is needed. People will be religious without any religion, and people will be religious without any church. They may not know the name of God, they may not go somewhere to worship, but their whole life will be worship, because laughter is a prayer.

The moment the child loses fun, death has settled in, and near the age of three, a child starts dying.

That's why even in old age people remember that there was paradise in childhood -- childhood was heaven.

That feeling that something has been lost continues -- the garden of Eden has been lost... Adam has been expelled.

In fact, it is beautiful -- the story that he ate the fruit of knowledge is beautiful -- he ate knowledge. He 1/08/07

Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

must have become serious, because the moment you become knowledgeable you lose laughter, you lose fun.

His laughter must have stopped. And he was hiding from God. The moment you stop playing, you start hiding from God. He was expelled because of his knowledge, his seriousness. He had become a saint -- he was no more a child. That's why Jesus goes on insisting that unless you become a child again, you will not enter the kingdom of God.

So whenever you have a child, you have a garden of Eden around you. So don't force him to become serious. No child should be forced to become serious. Rather you should lose seriousness when you are with her. Laugh and become a child. If you can help that much, she will grow into a beautiful sannyasin. Mm?

Good!

[to a visitor]:

Close your eyes and if something happens in the body -- the body starts moving and swaying, your hands start moving in a mudra, a gesture, your head leans forward, backward -- allow it, as if you are not there but only energy is.

Open your eyes and enter into another world, mm? Just feel me. This will be your name: Ma Deva Aneesha.

I am giving you a very paradoxical name, but life is paradoxical and I love paradox. Only lies are not paradoxical -- truth always is. Deva means divine, and aneesha means godlessness; divine godlessness. And that is exactly the case -- God is not a person. In fact there is no God -- there is only divine energy. It is better to call it godliness rather than God. Life is divine, but there is no God like a father-figure, there is nobody who is manipulating, controlling -- nobody has ever created life, it is eternal. In this sense Christianity, Judaism, Islam are very childish religions. Their concept of God is the concept of a child who looks at the father and cannot believe that the world can be without a father... who goes on thinking that there must be somebody just like his father who protects, shelters.

But in the East we have developed great religions -- religions for the grown-up person. The Buddha's teaching is without any God. It teaches you divinity, but there is no God in it. H.G. Wells has said about Buddha that he is both the godliest man and the most godless. Never has anybody walked on this earth who was more godly and more godless.

If Nietzsche were born in India, if he had known anything about Buddha, he may not have gone mad. He said, 'God is dead.' But then he could not manage -- he himself was not yet so grown-up as to be able to accept a world without any centre, to conceive of a world without somebody controlling it -- he was shattered. His own mind was still that of a child, and he stumbled upon a very great concept -- that there is no God. Now it was impossible for him to be quiet, to be silent -- he was split. A part of him was demanding that God is needed, and another part was saying that there is no God.

In the same situation, if he were in India, if he had known something about Buddha, he would have become another Buddha. Buddha never went mad -- he denied God absolutely but there was no problem in it. He simply became so grown-up that the childhood concept was left behind like toys, meaningless.

Christianity in that sense remains a beginner's religion: if Christianity is the ABC of religion then Buddhism is the XYZ; if Christianity is the alpha then Buddhism is the omega.

And this name is a buddhist name: Ma Deva Aneesha. I would like you to become more and more divine, and yet godless. Then divinity is a freedom. Otherwise even God becomes a bondage and a prison.

So a christian monk or a christian nun has no taste of freedom, of what freedom is. Their bowing down to some God in heaven is a sort of mental slavery. Not that bowing down is wrong, but to bow down out of fear or out of greed is juvenile. To bow down out of love is another thing. But then love is not for some person in particular -- love is for the whole existence.

So this is my message for you: don't look for God -- look for divinity. And you will find it everywhere --

in the trees, in the rivers, in the laughter of children, in the wrinkles of an old face, in the birds, in the sky --

you will find it everywhere! If you are looking for God you will never find it. In God you can believe, but it never becomes an experience. If you are looking for godliness, it is everywhere. Then wherever you touch there is godliness, because the whole stuff that the universe is made of is godliness.

So don't look for a God in an anthropomorphic sense, don't think of God in a human form -- just think of godliness. Mm? it is an ocean of godliness taking so many forms and so many waves. All ripples are His, but when I say His I don't mean a person. I have to use language so I use it, but I mean a no-person, just a quality. God is more like a fragrance than like a flower... more diffused, more formless, more nebulous.

1/08/07

Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

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Prem means love, and rachana means creation. And to me, only love is creative. All else is destructive.

Creation is out of love, and whatsoever you do with love becomes creative. Anything that is touched by love is golden. Even small ordinary things im- mediately have a different quality to them. So a person who lives a life of love, lives a creative life. In fact only he lives. Loving is living -- and to live a life without love is to drag.

Love has been destroyed very badly by religions. They talk about love, but they talk about something abstract -- that abstraction is not possible. Love is a reality, a very concrete phenomenon. For example, religions say, 'Love humanity.' Now this is foolish! You cannot love humanity. Whenever you love, you love a human being, not humanity. Where will you find humanity to hug and to kiss and to love? --

impossible! But abstraction looks beautiful -- 'Love humanity.' And there are many people who are incapable of loving human beings. They hide behind humanity -- they say they love humanity, they love God.

It is very easy to love God because you are not going to enounter Him. It is very difficult to love a human being because to love a human being is to go through fire, and growth comes out of fire. To love God is almost impotent, it is meaningless. And unless you have loved human beings, real human beings, there is no possibility to reach to higher altitudes of love. One needs a foundation in the earth.

I am very earthly that way. I know one has to go higher and higher, but every height needs depth. A tree goes high, but then simultaneously it is going deep through the roots -- it is almost the same proportion. If the tree goes fifty feet high, it goes fifty feet deep in the earth. It is not possible that a tree should go only two feet depth, and fifty feet high -- it will fall down, it will not have foundations.

So first grow your. roots in the earth. Based on the earth one can rise high into heaven. And heaven and earth are not enemies -- but religions have made that trick. They have managed to create the idea that heaven and earth are enemies, and if you want to love heaven, you have to hate earth. This is absurd, and not only absurd -- it is poisonous. If you want to love heaven you have to love earth as deeply as possible, as totally as possible. The more total your love for earth, the greater will be your flight into heaven. Even a bird that goes far away into the sky knows that there is a nest waiting for him; by the evening he will be able to come back and rest. He can go so far only because he has a nest somewhere on the earth. One can go as far as one wants, but one should have a foundation in the earth.

So love concrete human beings, concrete animals, concrete trees, love the real, and then your life by and by will become more and more creative.

[A sannyasin, who has trained in and practiced massage, says: I'm very attracted to doing massage. I have some resistance to it as well. I'd like your guidance on that.]

Mm. That's very good. So would you like to start massage immediately or would you first like to do a few groups and then start massage?

... I think it will be better, mm? A little work on you, and then you do massage. And massage is not simply massage. You are sharing energy; and unless you have energy flowing in you, soon you will become tired. Then it is very risky. It is not physical tiredness that comes -- that is not important; you will sleep, you will eat, and it will go. But massage is a deeper sharing of energy. When you are massaging somebody's body, not only are your bodies involved -- your subtle bodies, two energy bodies, two bio-plasmas. The person who is taking massage can take too much of your bio-plasma, and unless you have a constant inner supply, unless you are joined to the source, you will become very much dissipated by it. It may not immediately affect you because you are young. Even for months and years you may not feel it, but one day suddenly you will feel you have collapsed.

So my understanding is that first one should work upon oneself, and one should become very very centred. When you are centred, you are not. When you are centred, the source starts functioning. Then you are just a passage. The cosmos starts flowing through you -- then there is no problem. You can share as much energy as you want, and you will be constantly getting new energy, mm? Then you are not like a reservoir of water which has no springs to it. You are like a well which has many springs to it; you go on taking the water out and new water is flowing in -- you cannot exhaust it. In fact you take the old, rotten, stale water out and the fresh and alive water comes in. So the well is very happy -- you are unburdening it from the past and the old and the stagnant.

So if you are in a flow and your energy is flowering then there is no problem. But right now I see that 1/08/07

Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

you will be taking a risk. So first do one or two camps, do a few groups, and then wait for me. But go on reminding me, so that when I feel that now the right moment has come and you can move into massage, you will move. Otherwise later you will repent. When somebody is young it is not difficult. But later on, when one is going downhill -- after thirty-five years, and the downhill slope comes -- one starts feeling many problems. And you may not even connect them with your massage unless you know. This happens to many healers: they heal people, but one day they fall very badly ill, and then nobody can heal them because their own energy is almost spent, exhausted.

So massage and healing and these phenomena are very subtle. And it is not only a question of knowing the technique. The bigger question is how to be at the source -- then there is no problem. Then I don't bother even about the technique and whether you know it or not. Mm? you can simply start playing with somebody's body and energy will be flowing, and there will be great benefits. But there is only real benefit when the person who is massaging is also benefitted through it -- then there is a real benefit. Then the healer is benefitted, and the healee too -- both are benefitted. Nobody is at loss.

Do the camp, and then I will see. After each group you will be seeing me, then I will see how things are going. Once your energy is flowing, start massage in the ashram. Mm? Good!

The Shadow of the Whip

Chapter #10

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