Laugh your Way to Life not Death🔗

If we make death a day-to-day affair, then we will never be in fear of it. People ask me surprised, 'What are you saying, Master! How is this possible?' I tell you: talk about death, crack jokes and bring it into the realm of the ordinary events of your life. Treat it like a daily chore, like going and buying your daily vegetables; make it a part and parcel of your system! Then it will lose its fearful hold over you. We will be able to laugh at ourselves; we will be able to let go.

When we laugh, we drop our seriousness. We will see that death will become our intimate friend. And contrary to our belief, death will guide us and help us to live our lives completely, from moment to moment.

A small story:

There were three Chinese mystics. Nobody knows their names now and nobody ever knew their names. They were known only as the Three Laughing Saints because they never did anything else; they simply laughed.

These three people were really beautiful: laughing with their bellies shaking. And then it would become infectious and others would start laughing. The whole marketplace would laugh.

Till just a few moments earlier, it would have been an ugly place where people were thinking only of money. Suddenly, these three mad people would come by and change the quality of the whole marketplace.

Laughter is eternal, life is eternal, the celebration always continues. The village people would forget that they had come to purchase and sell. Nobody bothered about greed. For a few seconds, a new world would open.

The saints traveled all over China, from place to place, from village to village, just helping people to laugh. Sad people, angry people, greedy people, and jealous people: they all started laughing with them. And many felt the key: we can be transformed.

In one village, it so happened that one of the three saints died. The village people gathered and they said, 'Now there will be trouble. Now we have to see how they laugh. Their friend has died; they must weep.' But when they came, the two saints were dancing, laughing and celebrating the death of their friend.

The village people said, 'Wow, this is too much! When a man is dead, it is profane to laugh and dance.' The two saints said, 'During his whole life, we laughed with him. How can we give him his last send-off with anything else? We have to laugh, we have to enjoy, we have to celebrate. This is the only way.'

The body was to be burned, and the village people said, 'We will give him a bath as the ritual prescribes.'

But the two friends said, 'Oh, our friend has said: don't perform any ritual and don't change my clothes; don't give me a bath; just put me as I am on the burning pyre.' So we have to follow his instructions.'

And then suddenly there was a great happening. When the body was put on the fire, the old man played his last trick. He had hidden many fireworks under his clothes and suddenly there was a festival of fire crackers and displays! The whole village started laughing. The two mad friends were dancing and the whole village started dancing.

It was not a death; it was a new life. Laughter is eternal, life is eternal, the celebration continues. Actors change but the drama continues. Waves change but the ocean continues. We laugh, we change and somebody else laughs but the laughter continues. We celebrate, somebody else celebrates, but the celebration continues. Existence is continuous, it is a continuum. There is not a single moment's gap in it. No death is death because every death opens a new door: it is a beginning. There is no end to life; there is always a new beginning, a resurrection.

If we change our sadness to celebration, then we will also be capable of changing our death into resurrection. So learn the art while there is still time.

Death - The Ultimate Agent of Change

All that we understand of death is that it is anti-life. Again, because of our fear, we think too much about death. The actual experience of death is not as bad as our fear of death. We project our fear and see death as a giant figure. If real death is six feet tall, because of our fear, we see it as sixty feet tall! Because of our fear, we make the six feet death look like a sixty feet tall, frightening figure!

Be very clear: no one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is us, but someday, not too long from now, we will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

Our time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life! Don't be trapped by rigid rules, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice.

Most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. Somehow, your heart already knows what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Fantasies - The Root of Greed

Let us go to sex. In the same way, because of our greed, we make sex bigger than what it really is. That is why there are such huge hoardings of actors and actresses all over. All our fantasies of sex are projected outside. We contaminate true understanding of sex by creating too many imagined expectations and too many unfulfillable dreams. We in effect create the recipe for personal disaster.

A small story:

Mullah Nasruddin was bitterly complaining to one of his friends about his salary. 'I earn only twenty thousand dollars per month. I don't know how I will manage with this amount!' His friend was surprised and asked him, 'Nasruddin, for your lifestyle, what you earn is more than enough! Why don't you feel satisfied? What was your salary when you started working?' Nasruddin said, 'When I started, my salary was two thousand dollars. Now it is twenty thousand dollars.'

The friend was astonished, and exclaimed, 'Then why aren't you satisfied with what you have?' Nasruddin replied, 'The moment I heard my salary was twenty thousand dollars, I began to feel I was worth one million dollars. I felt I deserved much more than what I was getting.'

Our mind projects us as someone bigger, someone greater than what we really are. The moment our existing reality changes, our imagination goes haywire! It seems like reality arrives by train while our imagination reaches by telegram. Our imagination as compared to our reality is moving on the super-fast lane. Before we can even start understanding our reality and living with it, our imagination has overtaken our life, our very existence.

In the same way, because of our ever-increasing imagination, we contaminate sex. We make our life miserable by being greedy for sex and being fearful of death. We allow both these emotions to tear us apart. This is the state that I call hell. The fabric of our whole life gets tinted with these two colors: sex and death. Both these look like the two banks of a river that will never meet and merge. We think that sex is life; death is anti-life. They seem to contradict one another.

The man who is greedy for sex is the man who is anti-death. It is deep greed that makes us want to live continuously. We want to live so that we can accumulate. The truth is that the greedier we are, the less we will enjoy what we have. Greed will drive us on to get more and more. We will never stop; we will never relax to appreciate and enjoy what is there. We are afraid that if we pause we may lose out on something. Greed is all about the quantity of life, not the quality. We try to actualize all our sexual fantasies by getting into more and more relationships. We trap ourselves in a number game, not realizing that satisfaction depends on the depth and not the breadth of our relationships.