Laughter and the sense of being

Jeroen

I wanted to talk about the experience of being while you are laughing. It is difficult to be mindful while you laugh, but after you have had a good, deep laughter, immediately afterwards you can examine the memory of it and get a glimpse… Osho once said that this is what it is like to be a buddha.

So what I experience is a kind of absence of mind, and a space filled with light, and cheerfulness, a living, jolly, tinkling place of the sense of song and bells. Pure joy, sheer dance, overflowing energy. Not at all serious but playful.

It was my mother who occasioned this. We were eating dinner, and she had put on her spoon an amount of powdered Parmesan cheese. Just as she brought this to her mouth to eat, she suddenly drew a deep breath, as if in preparation for a sneeze, with as result that she sniffed up a good amount of the Parmesan cheese! She was hacking and coughing for a good ten minutes, and I had to laugh so hard…

It was afterwards that I started to recall how great it felt. Laughter is a wonderful thing…