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say, Jesus never laughed. Now there cannot be anything more false than that. If one asks me I will say he never stopped laughing, even on the cross he laughed. The last thing that he did was to laugh, to have a good laugh at the cosmic joke! God has ditched him beautifully! Thousands of people were waiting for the miracle and nothing happened! Can you find a better joke? Even he himself was waiting and looking again and again... and nothing happened!
If something had happened the whole point would have been lost, the punch line would have been missed! It was really beautiful of god not to interfere. For the whole of his life Jesus was doing miracles -- raising the dead, giving eyes to the blind -- and at the last moment he could not manage anything! He must have laughed! And when they all met afterwards Jesus must have said, "You did it!"
I can't see why he should not laugh at the last moment. But Christians go on saying he never laughed. The statues they have made, the pictures, the paintings, are always serious. Those are not representative, they are false, they are inventions.
To me cheerfulness is the essence of religiousness. To take life as fun, to enjoy it, to love it and to accept it with all its thorns and flowers, with all its dark nights and beautiful days, to accept it in its totality is sannyas.
Yes, there is agony; it needs to be there, it balances ecstasy. Ecstasy alone will lose its taste. If one is ecstatic and never comes to know what agony is, one will start forgetting what ecstasy is. The ecstasy can be felt only when there is a background of agony. You can see the stars in the night only when there is darkness as a backdrop. In the day also they are there but the background is missing. It is so full of light that they disappear.
Once you understand life with its duality then even in pain, even in anguish, one has a cheerful heart because one understands; one understands the essentiality of the polar opposite. Then in success or failure one remains balanced, one's cheerfulness is not disturbed by anything.
When Alexander came to India he wanted one sannyasin to go with him -- his name was Dandamis --
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