“Your body is the wall; your mind is the wall. Behind your body and mind there is your real home ... your very source of life. When somebody finds it, he has a good laugh: "I was unnecessarily standing on my head, distorting my body doing yoga exercises, fasting, going on holy pilgrimages, torturing myself in the mountains, in the deserts -- and all the time I was carrying my truth within myself." Whenever somebody finds it, can you think he will not laugh -- laugh at himself? Mind laughs at others. Beyond the mind there is only one laughter, but it resounds for centuries. The place where Bodhidharma became enlightened ... I have been to that place. He became enlightened fourteen hundred years ago and people have made a temple in his memory, in the place where he laughed for the first time. And the story is that if you sit silently in the temple, you will still hear the laughter. There is a statue of Bodhidharma. He was a very strange man. If he meets you in the night, you will never go out of your house in the night again. He had such big eyes that, if he looked into you once, that was enough for enlightenment! And his laughter must have been a great laughter because he has a very good, big belly. Even in the statue the belly has ripples. I had not time to sit there in the temple, but I know that if you sit there in the temple in the silence of the forest, perhaps you may hear the laughter. Perhaps the mountains, the trees, the rocks around the temple are still vibrating with that great man. I have looked into the lives of many great people, but Bodhidharma stands apart ... very strange and very unique. It is possible that his laughter was so infectious that the trees started laughing and the mountains started laughing. Although Bodhidharma is dead, they are still laughing; they cannot stop it. If you go with the whole idea, perhaps you may really hear it -- or you may imagine it. But I have come across people who have heard it, because they have told me. I had gone there, but I had not time enough to stay in the temple, because the right time is in the middle of the night -- when he had become enlightened. And particularly on a full-moon night in a certain month, if you stay in the temple, in the middle of the night there is every possibility that either you will hear the laughter or you will start laughing. That's what I am doing ... Just the very idea that you are such an idiot: a man who has died fourteen hundred years ago, you are sitting, waiting to hear his laughter now! The body has its own giggling points -- "G-points." Mind always laughs at others. No-mind only laughs at one's own ridiculousness. But the sense of humor is spread over your whole being, from body, mind, and soul. In fact, everything that you have has counterparts in the body, in the mind, in the soul. The purest will be in the soul and the crudest will be in the body. The mind is just in the middle of the two; it will be half primitive, half cultured. That's how all these three layers of your body function in harmony. And once in a while you may find something which is happening in all the three layers simultaneously. For example, when Bodhidharma laughed, it cannot have been only a no-mind laughter. It must have got down into the mind, created ripples in the mind; it must have got down into the body, created ripples in the body. We are an organic unity. Anything that happens anywhere has its echoes all over our being; hence my emphasis on the sense of humor. I am the first man in the whole of history who is trying to make the sense of humor a sacred quality, a spiritual quality. All your so-called religions are too serious. To me seriousness is sickening. Laughter has a health, a beauty, a quality of grace and dance. I am in absolute favor of laughter and against sadness. Sadness is sickness and is very close to death. Laughter is life and is very close to the universal life, to the very God that is spread all over.” ~ Osho
