We’ll talk of celebration. These are the days to talk of celebration because people are inclined to be sad. To put it simply, the basic reason of sadness is that you have a wrap around you that is called the physical. Just as this house is a sort of wrap around us, so the physical body is a wrap, too. As you can’t see anything outside this house, you see nothing beyond the limitations of the physical body. This causes sadness; this is the call of sadness. This very truth is a sad truth. But it is not that sad if you really realize that you are not essentially physical. Essentially you are non-physical, you are a divine being. It doesn’t sink in, strangely, although it is so obvious. One miracle you can never perform, that is the miracle of dying. That you can never do. Yes, you can never die. Each time you die, you will be so surprised to find you have opened a door, then another door, another door…. If life goes on forever, there should not be any cause of any permanent sadness, of any sorrow, any worry, any anxiety. 

Anxiety and worry are born out of impermanence, when something is going to vanish. If you have money, you feel insecure that you may not have that money later. If you have health, you may feel insecure you may lose that health. Father, mother, sweetheart, all of them are in transit, as you are in transit. But existence is not in transit. Existence has come to stay in some form or another, and that is the cause for celebration. We celebrate our existence, not our lives. And the moment we realize what existence is, the great intoxication of the very fact that you exist covers everything. People have turned into great philosophers only by realizing, for a single second, that they exist! Have you ever paid attention to it? You take it for granted! We take everything for granted. We take God for granted; we take our children for granted; we take our wives and our husbands for granted; and we let them fade out. Take anything for granted, and it fades out. It is so easy! We take life for granted, and there is no life left. There is only sadness then. 

So, let us look into what is the real nature of existence. It will throw you into an orbit of joy! Because it never ends. There was no time ever when you did not exist. And there will not be a moment ever that you won’t exist in the future. This life that you have on earth is just a serious joke God has thrown in your way, to test how long you can hold on to your smile. All the time you exist in other dimensions; you are smiling and laughing and dancing! Then God says, “Will you hold on to this joy?” 
And you say “Sure!” 
“Are you sure?” 
“Yeah, I’m sure!” 
And then he sends you here and says, “Let us see how long can you hold on to your smile.” 
How many of us have kept our word? All sadness is just amnesia.

There were 3 saints in China who were called “The Laughing Saints.” Mad they were! Because if you laugh all the time, you are likely to be branded as mad! They laughed all the time. They danced, they laughed, they sang songs. They went all over China, visited all the villages. Wherever they went, people came to them and started laughing! You know, with children, laughter is infectious. Have you ever observed it? One child is laughing, another child comes and does not bother to enquire why the first one is laughing and starts laughing, too. We know that laughter when it comes from the belly spills all over you and you can’t control it. The more you control it, the more it bubbles up. Then another person gets it, and the third one…  

So those saints just laughed! And they used to go to a marketplace, and the whole tone and quality of the marketplace changed immediately. People forgot what they came for, to buy or to sell. They forgot whether they were the customers or the shopkeepers! The greedy people, envious people, angry people, sad people, all kinds of people were there in the market. But when those dancing, laughing saints came, they started laughing! Dancing around them, dancing everywhere. Everyone forgot everything. 

One day, one of the saints died. The villagers said, “It is so sad. Look, he’s dead. And death has to be mourned. Don’t you laugh!” 
The other two saints had not yet come; they were somewhere else. 
One villager told another, “We shouldn’t laugh; we should weep. You can beat your chest, also, to show off great sorrow.” That is what they do when someone dies. If no one is there to pull one’s hair or beat one’s chest, the professional mourners come and you pay them some money. 
And so they said, “We have to cry, it is the only thing we can do for this poor soul because he has no relatives. He has no father, no mother, so let us cry.” 
Before they could start crying and howling, those two saints came. They saw what had happened. They bent down and looked in the face of that saint that was dead. They looked at each other, deep into their eyes, and then the laughter came. They broke into an uncontrollable laughter! 
The people said, “That is very unholy! You should not be frivolous with death!”
The saints replied, “We’ve spent all our life laughing with him. You think we should not give him this send off? This is the only send off we could give because that is the only thing we have, we have nothing else. So we have to celebrate life in life, and we have to celebrate life in death. And so we are celebrating, there is nothing wrong in it.” 
It did not impress the villagers, but they agreed because they could do nothing else. So the villagers said that now this body has to be burned. As the custom is, we should do some rituals: give him a bath, change his clothes, put some incense on his body, and put him on the funeral pyre. 
The two saints said, “Stop! The man, before he died, had given us instructions on how to handle his body after his death. He had clearly said, `When I die, there should be no ritual. Don’t give my body any bath. Don’t change my clothes, don’t touch me. Pick me up, as I am, and put me on the funeral pyre,’ so we have to do it.” So they picked him up, put him on the wood and the splinters and set fire to his body. And then something happened. 
That man was dead, but had already played his last joke. Within his cloak, he had hundreds of firecrackers and tiny bombs. Hundreds and hundreds he had hidden. The monks are very plump; he looked extra plump, that is all. Everywhere there were firecrackers. He had stuffed himself with them…a few in the mouth, a few, everywhere! And the moment the fire touched him, it burst into flames, not only flames, but colors and fireworks all over. It went on and on bursting like bombs! There were hundreds of rainbows splitting into tiny galaxies. The villagers couldn’t help it, so they started laughing. This man while dying had played the last irresistible joke. How can you cry for him! 

That is the celebration, the celebration of life. It has to go on. We have to remember it, particularly when we are struck by some calamity or something that may cause sadness. It does not mean that we should act like we are crazy, when we hear sad news. We need not start laughing, but a reaction has to be controlled. The reaction has to be balanced with the cause, and the cause is never new. But what can we do with the disease of seriousness? 
This disease, seriousness, is a symptom of modern civilization. Before that, seriousness was there but not as an epidemic. We pity those guys who had no TV, who had no videos, nothing! In the villages, in the evenings they used to gather. You can’t imagine their joy. You cannot imagine how ingenious they were in inventing new games, of playing on words, and entertaining themselves with original stories. Every day they had some program. They were wise people with understanding, and they knew how to entertain one another. There was no sadness there. Life was easy and there was not much stress. When there was conflict between two persons, it was soon resolved. Then they promised each other: “It is over, it is OVER! Let us celebrate!” 

Seriousness, in itself, is a heavy and dense state of mind. If continued for some considerable time, it turns into morbidity. Why must you be serious? Do you become more intelligent when you are serious? You become less intelligent, you become heavy like lead. When the intellect is bright and fluid, it shows itself as earnestness. The artists, the poets, the great scientists are earnest, not serious. They always sparkle with life. A substitute for seriousness is earnestness. You can be very earnest about your point of view. But you can’t tell another person to be serious. You can say, “Listen to me earnestly, give me all your attention.” 

And so with this disease of seriousness, sadness comes. You take everything seriously? You take life seriously. But you will say life is such a serious thing, shouldn’t I take it seriously? Precisely because it is a serious thing, do not take it seriously. You can’t handle a serious thing in a serious way. The more serious a thing is, take it less and less seriously. Only then you can handle it. That is the most serious statement, ever! No? And the easiest way to handle a monstrous situation is not to take it seriously. Then you will know what death is. When you are not serious, then everything discloses it’s secret to you. When you are serious, a door closes in your face. If you are more open in your heart, eager to help yourself and others, you can’t take anything very seriously because joy is the very essence and source of all action. Look at a child! It doesn’t try to laugh. A little child in a crib doesn’t know anything. The moment he looks at your face, he starts laughing. A child does it because he is living and swimming in the pool of life that is joy, until he becomes too heavy with knowledge like others. 

So this joy is inherent in us, is everywhere in us! Wherever we go, we carry it with us. When we forget, then we have to pay the price and others have to pay the price, too. If I ask you, when did you have your last belly laugh, you’ll have to think when you did it. It’s so sad! Unless you do it at least a couple times every day, your health is in real jeopardy. Your health is in real danger unless you burst into laughter at least once or twice a day. Laughing like that will do a miracle to your life and to your health. You have only to try! I sometimes wish someone had invented a jacket and would come from behind you, put it on you, lock it, and throw the key into the ocean. Then after every ten minutes the artificial fingers made of rubber would tickle you. The moment you would be relieved after ten minutes of laughing, then again it would start. Maybe we could learn the hard way!

There was a man, Norman Cousins, wrote a very famous book called, “Laughter is The Best Medicine” and “Anatomy of an Illness.” They couldn’t cure him, so he said, “I can cure myself.” When he started laughing in the hospital, some of the patients loved it; some of them said how can we sleep this guy laughs all the time. So he took a room in a hotel, and he got all the videos, whatever he could get, to make him laugh. He used to laugh and laugh all the time. After a couple of months he was tested, there were no symptoms of the dreaded disease! Anyone can try. It doesn’t cost anything. Only you get relaxed. A good laughter relaxes as nothing else does. 

But it is not so much about laughter; it is about that necessary ingredient of life—the sense of humor. If you have a sense of humor, you won’t have to force yourself to laugh, you laugh internally. A sense of humor is born out of the realization that nothing in this world should be taken too seriously, including yourself. Very little time is there! The only thing you can do is to be very balanced and not hurt anyone, undo what wrong you have done and build something very creative in this life, in a very relaxed way. Have you ever noticed, when you meet those great beings, they always greet you with a radiant smile! You can’t fathom the nectar they spread the moment you sit in their presence. I have seen saints so peaceful. Normally as people grow older, they get more and more grouchy because they have accumulated the worry and anxieties of a whole life. But when you sit in front of those spiritual beings, you feel very comforted. So, that is essentially what I am talking about.

I remember the story about Mahatma Gandhi being thrown out of the railway train. In South Africa he had bought a first-class ticket on a train, and two white people were sitting in the same compartment. They asked him, “Why are you sitting here?” 
He said, “I’ve got a ticket for this journey.” He was an attorney. 
The train had started moving. They opened the door and threw his suitcase out. Then they pushed him out. He fell down on the platform. A long time afterwards, he came to our university to give a talk. I was in my B.A. at the time. He asked the audience, “Do you have any questions?” 
So, with knees knocking, I stood up and said, “Mahatmaji, I have a question.”
“What is the question, young man?” 
“When you were thrown out of the moving train at the railway station with the luggage that you were carrying, you fell down, and the train moved on, what made you pick yourself up? Not physically only, I mean what made you pick `yourself’ up? And please, Mahatmaji, although I know Ram did it, but give me something else besides that for my immature mind.” Because all the time Mahatmaji used to say, “God does it. Ram is God. Ram does it.” But for a young mind, that was not enough of an explanation! There has to be something closer to home. You can’t oversimplify that situation. A highly educated self-respecting man, who was helping everyone, was thrown onto the railway platform. It was a serious affair.

The Mahatma laughed and laughed with that toothless laughter of his! He said, “Young man, when I was thrown out of the moving train, and my luggage was thrown out and I was thrown over the luggage and I fell down, what made me pick myself up? I will not say Ram did it, although I know it was Ram…well, it was a sense of humor that held me together and made me get up.” 
I asked, “What was the humor in the situation?” 
“Humor is not in the situation, young man, humor is in the human understanding!” 
What was the humor? Now, get it fast! Mahatmaji believed nothing of any monumental importance had taken place. He did not take himself seriously. We take ourselves very seriously and are puffed up with a helium gas ego! That is the root of it. When we think we are very small, that is a big ego, too. Because we are taking ourselves very seriously and getting hurt.  Sometimes we think too much of ourselves. “How could you say such a thing to me? How dare you say it!” Look at the ego of man. When you are so bloated, you are the entire world! And that is again ego, so you lose proportions! In either case, whenever you take yourself seriously, you go wrong. A great man never takes himself seriously. And that was the point of greatness in that man. I had other encounters with him, fortunately, and each time I met him, he proved his point. He was so jovial! He used to come down to my level and play jokes on me. There was such a distance between him and me, but he did it, because that was his greatness. He would laugh and laugh over my discomfiture sometimes, when I could not come up to his expectations or something else. So it was a great experience! 
When we erase our sense of self-importance and look at everything with the eye of a witness, insults and praises are the same for us.

There was a cobbler who used to repair and make shoes in some remote country. He was very well known for two things, gratitude toward God and laughter. He and his wife would sit in their very small hut and thank God for everything. They didn’t have much money, but they loved and thanked God for his blessings all the time. “Oh God! How much you give me! But I don’t need all that! Oh, God, how you shower your grace on me! Your blessings have no end! I’m so poor in feeling the gratitude! The weight is too much, Oh God, you are so merciful!” And if you looked at his hut—there was no chair, no table, there was nothing. They had to sleep on the floor. If they had eaten once in the morning, they didn’t know what they would eat in the evening! So the king of that place heard the news, and he was for some reason in search of someone who was really genuine in the heart and who had those qualities that this man was famous for. So he peeped through a window and found him sitting with his wife eating dry bread and saying, “Oh, God thank you very much for all this, all this!” 
The king tapped at the door. He was in disguise. He said, “I am a traveler, and I have come to this village. I heard this laughter, and so I came to you.” 
“Please come in. Share this food with us, share it! Are you hungry?”
“Yes, a little hungry.”
So whatever food he had, he shared it with him, very joyfully. 
The cobbler told everything about himself, “I am having a wonderful time, the leather is so cheap, I can make good shoes. I’ll make good shoes for you! If you don’t have money, don’t worry. I’ll make good shoes for you.” 
So the king said, “No, I don’t need shoes, but I’ll be coming here again.” He went back and wanted to put this man to test. He ordered that the leather should be priced two times higher. It won’t be available so cheap for the cobbler. So, the king returned after a few days and asked, “How are things?” 
“Oh, nothing could be better, it is so beautiful!” 
“Have you heard that the leather is very costly now?” 
“Oh, it doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter. People still have their feet, they’ll still want shoes.” Nothing happened to that guy. He was laughing, he was happy, thanking God. Leather became more and more expensive, and his laughter became more and more noisy. His great gratitude to God never seemed to dry up. 
Finally the order was, “There will be no leather available to any person. It will be used by the state for certain purposes. And there were special people who were making shoes, but there will be no ordinary people allowed to make shoes! 
So this man started only repairing shoes and still was very happy! 
And the king came, and he shared his dry bread with him. There was no change in him. The king thought, “He is a hard nut! I should do something else.” He announced, “No one is allowed to make shoes or repair shoes.” The cobbler was out of a job. And so the king returned expecting to see him crying. 
He was not! “Everything is fine, everything is fine.”
The king asked, “How did you find this food?”
“Oh, we had some clothes. We sold them and everything is fine.” He started carrying water to earn a little, and then the order came, “You can’t carry water.” He couldn’t even carry water for people. But he never was angry at the order, offended with the king or anyone, keeping his sense of humor all the time because that is the way he was. There was conscription going on because an enemy was at the gates. He thought that they might need soldiers. So he got conscripted and became a soldier. He was given the uniform and a sword. He was very happy. He came and told his wife, “Look, money is there. Look at the sword, how good the sword is, how wonderful the clothes. Now we’ll have good days!”
The king came and said, “Hey, you are a soldier now?” 
“Yes, I am a soldier now!” 
So more and more strict regulations came for his particular regiment to which he belonged. It was so difficult for him. He was told, “Your salary is cut in half,” then “your salary is only one-fourth of what you have been getting.” This man did not know what to do about it. He was at the point of starvation. 
So, he went to the marketplace with his sword and sold it. He got a wooden sword to put into the scabbard. 
When the king asked, “How are things?” 
“Oh, they are great. It didn’t matter at all. We are not getting any salary, almost nothing, so I sold the sword today. When the time of fighting will come, we will see, I will get some sword and I can fight. At least now we can eat, share it, have it, come on, eat this, eat that! God is so merciful!” 
The king became more and more adamant in testing this man’s devotion to God and sincerity to laughter and to himself. There was an occasion where a man had committed a serious crime, and he had to be beheaded on the crossroads, as was the custom long ago. So a very big platform was built, and that convict was brought. His head was put on the anvil. 
The king said, “Let that honest looking soldier do it!” 
The honest-looking soldier was no other than the cobbler-turned-soldier. He had to go up onto the platform. 

He was told, “You have to cut the head of this man off.” For a second he stood there frozen. He had a sword of wood! But he fervently prayed to God, “O God, light the bulb in my brain very fast, very bright! Things are getting out of my hands! And you’ve always helped me! And I know you will help me!” Suddenly he shouted, “I am the honest servant of the king, his mighty Highness, and I am ordered to behead this man, and so be it!” Then he said, “But there is an order from almighty God. He tells me this man’s innocence should be tested. If this man has really committed the crime he is accused of, I will chop his head off, but if he is innocent, O God help me, let my sword turn into wood!” He took the sword out of the sheath, and it was wood!!
All people stood up cheering and clapping; they shouted, “Great! Great!”
Thank God. If he had taken things seriously, do you think he would have survived? 
The king called him, “Do you recognize me?” 
“Certainly, your Highness, you are my guest who graces my hut now and then.”
“Did you know then, that I was the king?”
“How could I not recognize my own king?”
“Why did you tell me all your secrets then?”
“Because I trust you. I knew you would do nothing to harm your subject.”
The king said, “I was in search of a man like you, who loves God and has presence of mind. And I want to appoint you as my Prime Minister, because you are the person who, in any situation whatever, will never lose your head!”

These are the days when we should be less serious with life because life has become a very serious affair. Although, I very much wish, all through your life, you should take yourself less seriously. If you give people joy, if you help them to relax, and if you make them feel better, you certainly have done your duty. Whenever you talk to someone and walk away, it is fair to put this question to yourself, “Did I leave him in a better or worse state?” If you are having an ego problem with yourself, most certainly you have left him in a worse state. You have said something, did something, looked at him in a certain way, that he was not as happy as he was before he met you. But if you are not putting yourself first and you are talking to that person with great love in your heart, when leaving, say something, do something, so that after you have left him, you may feel that you have done a good act that day. It is so easy to do it. We are so contained within ourselves that we don’t want to share our inner joy with anyone else. But there are so many things to appreciate in people. If you go to some office, if you go to some place where two or three persons are there... In each person, there is something really good. I’m requesting you to be spontaneous! I’m asking you to look for the good points in people and sincerely praise them. And then you will meet only nice people. Wonderful people you will meet at every step, and you will be surprised how good people really are. And something else: people become as you see them, not what they are. That is one way of transforming a person. 

Thus, it is true we can be fair to others only if we are not bound by our ego, as to who we are, what we are. When we transcend our little ego, we become a true witness of men and situations, and then we have the presence of mind to appreciate others.

What does it really mean to take yourself seriously? It certainly does not mean to downgrade yourself and not to respect yourself. When I say you should not suffer from self-importance and should not take yourself seriously, I mean you should not have an emotional approach to what happens to you. By being vulnerable to situations we get hurt emotionally and thus get diverted from the real problem. Life is a tragedy for the person who is available emotionally to the happenings in his life. Such people hardly think dispassionately, they grovel in their emotional reactions.

It is also true if we have a bloated ego, then the simplest remark is interpreted by us as an affront to our dignity. One who has a sense of humor does not take a situation personally. Thus, he is above it. He is always calm and tranquil, always ready for anything—particularly innocent laughter!
Thank you.