Your laughter, Gayan, was still half. If you had looked into yourself, your laughter would have been complete. Then you would not have only seen me not there, you would have seen yourself not there, you would have seen those thousands of people disappearing – an empty mandir resounding with the chanting of Buddham sharanam gachchhami.

Next time it happens, don’t let it be incomplete. Because if it is complete, then you have come to a clear understanding which will follow you like a shadow in every act throughout your life. It will change your whole being. It will give you a new aroma, a new aura – and not only to you, you will see it in others too; although those others are not aware of it. But you will be aware of it.

That’s why the Japanese awakened soul Hotei has been called the laughing buddha. For what is he laughing? – his whole teaching was laughing. Seeing this ridiculousness that people are not what they are thinking they are, and people are what they never dream about…. It is a cosmic joke, but one has to understand it to come to a point when one can become a laughing buddha.

And I want the world filled with laughing buddhas, not the serious ones. We are sick of them.

We need the whole earth filled with laughter, and not ordinary laughter but cosmic laughter – a laughter that arises out of the understanding that it is a beautiful joke existence has played with us.

Osho,
The other night you spoke of the dark night of the soul – that state one passes through as one moves from sushupti into turiya.
Looking at it logically, it seems curious that as one moves towards the ultimate state of awareness, one is – just before realization – overcome momentarily by darkness. I would have thought that one would have been gathering more and more awareness, thereby dispelling darkness as one moved through the state of deep meditation – so deep that there are no longer dreams – to the point where the watcher is even able to witness sushupti.
Is it perhaps, analogous to what happens as death approaches? You have spoken of how life suddenly asserts itself at the point of death – the resurgence of the body’s life-force in the face of its extinction.
Is the dark night of the soul the final effort of any remaining vestiges of the unconscious to exist before it is totally annihilated by the light of total illumination – enlightenment?

Yes, it is the last effort of your millions of lives lived in darkness. The darkness has become so much attached to you, just as you have become so much attached to it. It is the last effort. So in sushupti it brings all its forces possible at a single stroke.