O sho says: “Laughter is therapy. If you enjoy a belly laughter without restraint, to find your Buddha will be easiest job, because you will be free of all seriousness, tensions, inhibitions, suppressions…. And this in this freedom only can one find Buddha. I want you to laugh as deeply as possible, so you are unburdened. Then meditation is very easy, for nothing inhibits you. My contribution to the world is to make sense of hummer a part of spiritual growth. A man was cannot laugh is sick – sick unto death.”

And now a joke: Bernie comes racing into the emergency room of a hospital.“ Excuse me,” he pants, to the receptionist. “which ward is Miss Fitz in?” “Miss Fitz?

The woman who got run by a steamroller today?” asks the receptionist .

“Right” says Barnie. “well,” explains the receptionist, “ You'll find her in wards eight, nine and ten!”

Research in laughter therapy supports Osho's viewpoint . Enjoying a good laugh – even anticipating laughter – can boost your immunity and reduce stress , says new research from the University of California-Irvine. Laughter raises our levels of endorphin and other relaxation – inducing hormones while lowering the production of stress hormones. In other words, laugh a lot for batter health. “this stuff is real,” says lee Berk, leader of the study and researcher in complementary and alternative medicine. “It shows that even knowing that you will be involved in a humorous event days in advance reduces levels of chemicals known to aid relaxation.”

This study is the first to show that anticipating a funny event has the same biological effect as participating in it. “You have been thinking about it al day, so you experience a change in biology even before you get there, “says Lee. “That is therapeutic,”

Osho discusses the mechanism of joke: “Laughter naturally comes as thunder come – suddenly. That is the very mechanism of a joke, any simple joke. Why does it make people laugh? What is the psychology of it? It builds up certain energy in you; your mind starts thinking in a certain way as you listen to the joke, and you are exited to know the punch line – how it ends.

You start expecting some logical end – because the mind can't expect anything but logic – and a joke is not logic. So when the end comes, it is so illogical and so ridiculous, but so fitting, that the energy you were holding in, waiting for the end, suddenly bursts forth into laughter. Weather the joke is great or small does not matter, the psychology is the same.”

In Sudden Clash Of Thunder, Osho talks about laughter thus: “laughter is the very essence of religion. Seriousness is never religious, cannot be religious. Seriousness is of the ego, part of the very disease. Laughter is egolessness. The whole drama of existence is so beautiful that laughter can be the only response to it. Only laughter can be the real prayer, real gratitude.”