First of April is universally celebrated as the day of pranks and jokes to lighten up the atmosphere of seriousness of friendship and relationships. We are living in an era of “fake news” and instant social media circulation, which is not fun but irritation to many people. April Fool day is pure fun which is harmless and should be observed that way.

Osho lovers around the world have chosen this day to be dedicated to Mulla Nasruddin, a Sufi and also one of the oldest figures of Sufi anecdotes. Osho made him alive again by telling thousands of jokes in his name.

Spiritual discourses are often very serious and profound, and majority of people do not find it easy to grasp the essence. The enlightened ones and mystic masters create anecdotes, some times very funny and hilarious, weave them in their discourses, to make the profound  things easy to understand. For Mulla Nasruddin, the world is a cosmic joke — and he himself is part of that. Hindus call this world God’s Leela, a divine play.

Down the centuries the religion has been very serious affair for most of the believers. It has been too ritualistic and too grim. Being pious or holy became synonymous with seriousness. Hence, the so-called religion deprived people of their natural innocent laughter. By performing so many rituals people became egoistic, the priests and the religious followers started feeling holier than others. Others who were not doing the routine rituals became condemned as unholy or un-spiritual. So not to be condemned by the so-called holy people the ordinary people started performing their religious affairs just not to feel guilty. This conduct made them hypocrites and serious. The whole affair of religion became heavy and serious and most of the people have been living with that burden on their heart. They forgot to laugh and celebrate.

Osho changed it all. He says: Religion cannot be anything other than a celebration of life. And the serious person becomes handicapped: he creates barriers. He cannot dance, he cannot sing, he cannot celebrate. The very dimension of celebration disappears from his life. He becomes desert-like. And if you are a desert, you can go on thinking and pretending that you are religious but you are not. You may be a sectarian, but not religious. You can be a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Jain, a Mohammedan, but you cannot be religious. You believe in something, but you don’t know anything. You believe in theories. A man too much burdened by theories becomes serious. A man who is unburdened, has no burden of theories over his being, starts laughing.

According to Osho: Laughter is far more sacred than prayer, because prayer can be done by any stupid person; it does not require much intelligence. And Sufis are very playful; they created Mulla Nasruddin. And Mulla Nasruddin is an alive figure, you can go on adding to him — I go on adding.

Today the world media is talking about the possibility of Aliens descending on the Earth. This possibility excites people in both the positive and the negative way. Most of us feel certain thrill that we would be able to see how the life evolved on other planets and how we would relate and communicate with life on other planets. There is another group of people on Earth who is very suspicious and full of fear, thinking that Aliens will attack the earth and kill us. The Scientific American news says …that we will eventually discover life beyond the bounds of our planet. To true believers, what may be more uncertain is whether or not such news would cause global panic—which depends on how our minds, so greatly influenced by our Earthly environment and society, would perceive the potential threat of something utterly outside our familiar context.

Express, UK newspaper comments: Humanity “will take it well” when aliens are found according to an expert, which comes after 100 planets orbiting stars outside of our solar system were discovered and could be home to extraterrestrial life.

And a reader says: The bigger question should be will Aliens be sympathetic to Humans if there are found to be highly developed people from another world? And it’s all very well talking about microbes and stuff but would we be wise to import unknown critters, no matter how seemingly humble, into our already polluted world I wonder?

New York Times reports: In a separate study, 500 different participants were asked to write about their own hypothetical reactions and humanity’s hypothetical reaction to an announcement that extraterrestrial microbial life had been discovered. Participants’ responses also showed significantly more positive than negative emotions, both when contemplating their own reactions and those of humanity as a whole.

In India, nobody is even bothered about life on other planets, or the possibility of Aliens descending on the earth. We have our own Aliens amongst us, who were born in Mother India, and flourished here escaped with all the wealth they could manage to loot. So there is no need to worry or fear the possibility of any invasion by Aliens from other planets–we are fully capable of giving birth to Aliens on our holy land.

Hindustan Times tells us: “An 18-month-old girl was raped on Monday afternoon by her father’s friend who was tasked with babysitting her at their home in an urban village in south Delhi.” Such things are very alien to our culture, and such things are rampant in India. Just look around and you will find so many Aliens walking around in the human form. The population explosion has given birth to more Aliens here than humans.

In such a situation, there is a real urgency to meditate and create a loving atmosphere in which all of us live like human beings. Osho suggests: Now is the time to meditate. If love and meditation go together, you will have both wings, you will have a balance. Love and meditate, meditate and love, and slowly, slowly you will see a new harmony arising in you. Only that harmony will make you contented.

Let us be Humans first.

The divine resides in our body. But we have made this abode of the divine contaminated by feeding it with all kinds of junk. There’s no sense of balance in our eating habits. Most of the time we eat out of greed or anxiety to fill some emptiness within us. This emptiness may have some psychological reasons. We may not be getting nourishment of love as a child gets from his mother or a lover gets from his beloved. The food becomes a substitute and we start eating more than our body needs. This way our body suffers tremendously. The more we eat, the more we feel empty, as the psychological emptiness cannot be filled with anything other than love. A loveless life makes us fat. It has also been proved psychologically that without love-nourishment, people do become fat. And as soon as they fall in love they start losing weight. Love is the inner nourishment. We need to love ourselves and love each other — that’s the surest way to be healthy.

On the other hand, many so-called saints have been teaching us to ignore our body, and let it starve. This is another extreme. They teach that the more you feed it, the more it will demand. They themselves fast because they are afraid, because if they give food to their body, the body creates extra amount of energy which becomes difficult to handle. So they become scared and miserly. And they live a loveless life. They forget that they need abundance of energy, overflowing energy, to love and celebrate life in all its colours.

There’s a poem by Kabir:  There is neither body nor mind: And where is the place that shall still the thirst of the soul? You shall find naught in that emptiness. Be strong, and enter into your own body… Elaborating on the poem, Osho comments: “Kabir is a great lover of the body — and all the great mystics have been lovers of the body — because the body is the real temple of God. And if you find somebody condemning the body, know from the very beginning that he knows nothing. If somebody is against the body, he has not known anything at all. He does not even know the ABCD of spirituality.

He has not even begun. If he condemns the body he is still afraid of the body. If he condemns the body he is a dualist: he thinks himself separate from the body. If he condemns the body he still has great lust and greed in him. If he condemns the body, it means the body still tempts him too much and he shivers and trembles before the body. He is antagonistic to the body because he has not yet been able to understand what this beautiful phenomenon is that we call the body. The body is the temple of God. God is enshrined in it; God is embodied in it.”

The one who is watching the thoughts is your wakeful intelligence.

The journey of our life seems to be a very strange journey, which begins in deep unconsciousness as a new born child who does not know why the birth has happened. For his existence and his survival, the child is utterly dependent on the people who look after him and teach him to live their own particular way. The child himself does not know what is the right way. What is being taught to him in, becomes the right way of living. Society around him does not allow his own intelligence to unfold or grow and he becomes fully burdened with a certain conditioning imposed by the people surrounding him. This becomes a long journey of social conditioning, an imitation and a borrowed life.

It is the role of an enlightened master, a Sadguru, if we are fortunate to come across in our life, to guide us to awaken our inner intelligence and remind us of our true self. With him it becomes a new journey of awakening, realising our potential on the path of meditation. Ordinarily, within us we have two currents — one is of thoughts, which is very dominant. The other current, which we rarely feel, is the current of watchfulness. The enlightened master Osho tells us the distinction. An ordinary man has one current of thought within him, the watcher is asleep; the meditator has two parallel currents within him, thought and watching. Within an enlightened person only one current remains, that is watching.

Thinking has died. But because you have to learn watching from a state of thinking, you will have to meditate on thought and watching side by side. If we have to move from thought to watching, we will have to meditate on thought and watching simultaneously. Osho calls it right-observation or right-remembrance. Mahavira has called it ‘wakeful intelligence’; mindfulness and wakeful intelligence. The one who is watching the thoughts is your wakeful intelligence. It is very easy to find thinkers, but it is difficult to find someone whose intelligence is awake. Awaken your intelligence. I have told you how to awaken it — by watching your thoughts with awareness. If you watch the actions of the body, the body will disappear; if you watch your racing thoughts, the thought process, then the thoughts will disappear; and if you observe your emotions closely, then the emotions will disappear. I have said that for the purification of emotions, allow love to come in place of hatred and friendship in place of enmity. Now I tell you to also be aware of this truth: there is a dimension behind the one who is loving and the one who is hating, which is just awareness — which neither loves nor hates. It is simply a witness. It sometimes watches hatred and sometimes watches love happening, but it is simply watching.

Osho suggests: Love should come out of your silence, awareness, meditativeness.

In the beginning there was Love and then came the Relationship. Love was born in the human heart as an existential gift.  The relationship  was born in some kind of practical understanding of life; that love needs grounding, some expression, a sharing in some way on a solid ground. This sharing and commitment gave birth to a bonding with others and formation of various relationships. In these defined relationships, gift-love got transformed into need-love in the forms of husband and wife, the parents and their children, brothers-sisters and cousins, far away cousins, gurus and disciples, and friends and strangers. This was a real grounding for love, and with it came not just the sense of natural belonging, but the loss of freedom, suffocating attachments and clinging, leading to all kind of emotional sufferings and psychological violence. This can be called falling in love — in the real meaning of word.

Often we have been using this expression of falling in love in various romantic terms also — Laila and Majnu, Romeo and Juliet..there are so many such examples. These stories seem to be other-worldly, but in reality, they are very worldly. The really divine stories happen in mystic unions of Uma and Shiva, Sita and Rama, Radha and Krishna and so many other divine beings. These mystics existed in human forms, but they attained to enlightenment through meditation and transformation of  love. For them it was certainly a rising in love, and not falling in love.

In the ordinary life, when people fall in love, very soon they start exploiting each other, using the others for themselves, all in the name of love. They become calculative and their love becomes very conditional and full of expectations. The real love has to be an unconditional sharing to blossom in its absolute manifestation, like a rose flower that shares its fragrance without any expectation. This rarely happens in our ordinary relationships. It does happen wherever the relationship is based on meditation. It happens between the enlightened mystics and their close disciples. It is unconditional love without any attachment and expectation. It is pure freedom. This could happen between ordinary individuals also if they evolve into this understanding of bringing a flame of meditation in their life and radiate in love. Osho suggests: Love should come out of your silence, awareness, meditativeness. It is soft, it is unbinding – because how can love create fetters for the one who is loved? It is giving freedom to each other, more and more. The enlightened mystic adds: “Falling in love you remain a child; Rising in love you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love – now you are love.”