Laughter the very essence of religiousness

Laughter the very essence of religiousness

Seriousness is never religious, cannot be religious; seriousness is of the ego, part of the very disease. Laughter is egolessness. Yes, there is a difference between when you laugh and when a religious man laughs. The difference is that you always laugh about others; the religious man laughs at himself, or at the whole ridiculousness of man's being.
Religiousness cannot be anything other than a celebration of life. And the serious person becomes handicapped, he creates barriers: he cannot dance, he cannot sing, he cannot celebrate.The very dimension of celebration disappears from his life. He becomes desert-like. And if you are a desert you can go on thinking and pretending that you are religious, but you are not.
Even laughter is not just laughter. All purity is lost. You cannot even laugh in a pure way, in a simple way, childlike. And if you cannot laugh in a pure way, you are losing something tremendously valuable. You are losing your virginity, your purity, your innocence.
Watch a small child; watch his laughter ¬ so profound, comes from the very centre. When a child is born, the first social activity that the child learns ¬ or maybe it is not right to say “learns” because he brings it with himself ¬ is smiling. One should go on laughing the whole of one's life. If you can laugh in all sorts of situations, you will become so capable of encountering them ¬ and that encounter will bring maturity to you. I am not saying don't weep. In fact, if you cannot laugh, you cannot weep. They go together: they are part of one phenomenon, of being true and authentic.
You may not have observed, but Jews have the best jokes in the world. And the reason is because they have lived in deeper misery than any other race. They had to create jokes, otherwise they would have been dead long before. They have passed through so much misery, they have been tortured down the centuries so much, they have been crushed, murdered ¬ they had to create a sense of the ridiculous. That has been a saving device. Hence, they have the most beautiful jokes, the funniest and the profoundest.
What i am trying to show you is this: we laugh only when there is some reason which is forcing us to laugh. A joke is told, and you laugh because a joke creates a certain excitement in you. The whole mechanism of a joke is that the goes in one direction, and suddenly story goes in one direction, and suddenly it takes a turn; the turn is so sudden, so drastic, that you could not have imagined it. Excitement grows and you are waiting for the punch line. And then suddenly, whatsoever you were expecting is never there ¬ something absolutely different, something very absurd and ridiculous, never fulfilling your expectation.
Laughter brings some energy from your inner source to your surface. Energy starts flowing, follows laughter like a shadow. When you really laugh, for those few moments you are in a deep, meditative state; thinking stops. It is impossible to laugh and think together. They are diametrically opposite: either you can laugh or you can think. If you really laugh, thinking stops. If you are still thinking, laughter will be just so-so, lagging behind.
When you really laugh, suddenly the 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.