"At the same time, it is also a great meditation. Only in the Soviet Union are they working very deeply to find out what happens when people laugh. Their blood flow changes, their brain cells become more active, their heartbeat becomes more rhythmic. Something like laughter has been found by the scientists to be of tremendous importance – but they are being immensely stupid about it. They think it has to be a training; every school child has to be trained how to laugh.

"And if in the Soviet Union everybody is trained how to laugh, no laughter will exist at all. Now they are saying that in every hospital there should be a special ward, a humor ward where all the patients should tell jokes and laugh. It is very calculated: what their medicines cannot do, laughter can do.

"But to me, if laughter comes as a training it may do something, but it cannot be a total transformation where in a single moment your whole being is thrilled, vast, rejuvenated, and there are no side-effects.

"Just today, I came to know that one third of the diseases in the world are created by the doctors. Not knowingly – just because of their medicines, which are going to have after-effects. For the moment they may be useful, but they may create something in your chemistry, in your hormones, in your biology. And you may never connect them. You had taken the aspirin only for your headache – to be exactly true, only for your wife! But that aspirin is going to have its own effects, and you are a complex phenomenon.

"It is a poor humanity who needs training to laugh. The day would be very ugly when birds ask, 'First train us, then we will sing the song.' And the peacocks will say, 'We don't care about the clouds. First train us; then we will open our wings.' But the peacocks dance as the first clouds of rain start coming; there is no training for it, no training school for peacocks. No training for the birds, no training for the flowers – why should man be trained for everything? Why should he not be allowed to be spontaneous?

"There is some fear in spontaneousness, because the spontaneous behavior is unpredictable."