We Must Learn to Appreciate God’s Sense of Humor
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“How can God allow this? How could a good God allow a world like this to come into being?”
Now, if we simultaneously grasp that the modern ego structure—the structure of the Jekyll and Hyde character—has since become morphed into human nature—it wasn’t always—but it has become that, and at the same time that that happened, the whole field of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy developed, and ratified that this is indeed human nature. I mean, Freud said, this is it: we are all Jekyll and Hyde’s; that’s what psychoanalysis is based on. You start free associating and Jekyll starts talking, but Hyde interrupts, and pretty soon you’re talking directly to Hyde. And when he can’t hide anymore, that’s when you can begin to do some work with him. But Freud basically said there’s nothing we can do to turn Hyde into Jekyll. The evil of human nature is inherent to us.
And if we are made in the image of God, and our nature is evil, what does that say about the Lord? You see—and that’s where human consciousness has come to. But I would like to propose another theory, and I’m deadly serious about this theory, and that is that the universe is inherently structured as a joke. It is one extended comedy routine; and could it be anything else? If you imagine a being of infinite intelligence creating a universe, could it be anything else than a joke? Exactly.
And this is why comedy is the highest form of humor. The highest form of humor—there you go, the joke is on me now! It’s also the lowest form of humor. Now, there are lower forms of humor and higher forms of humor, and that needs to be taken into consideration. What kind of a joke is it? It could be a very sardonic, cynical joke, a scatological joke, which is what most people’s sense of humor resonates at. Or it could be a very high level of wit, right? There’s very little wit left in the world, particularly among world leaders, which is a joke in itself. But in any case, wit used to be the high point of human culture—unless you’re a woman, and then they called you a witch, and they burned you at the stake. You weren’t allowed to be too smartass as a woman. But that was the whole point of male culture, was to see who is the wittiest.
Right. OK, that’s been lost. But in any case, let’s picture this video. You’re watching a very serious documentary it takes place in a Zen monastery, probably a Korean Zen monastery, because they’re the most serious now—the Japanese aren’t serious anymore, but they do glow in the dark, but it’s because of the radiation from Fukushima, it’s not from Zen meditation. So we’re in this Korean Zen monastery, and they’re all very seriously meditating, and the guy is walking around with a stick to see if anybody is hunching over, or anything else, or falling asleep, God forbid, and they get decapitated altogether.
Well, in the middle of this meditation period, one of the monks in the middle row starts to just laugh uncontrollably and nobody moves. Right. The guy with a stick hits him, but he just laughs harder. He won’t stop laughing—he’s getting hit massively, and pretty soon another monk starts laughing, and then another, and soon they’re all laughing hysterically. And finally the head monk can’t stop either, and he just starts laughing hysterically. Alright, scene cuts.
Now you’re at a Catholic cathedral, and the archbishop is giving Mass, and suddenly, in the middle of Mass, he starts laughing hysterically. And pretty soon the whole congregation is laughing. Cut.
Synagogue. They’re reading the Torah and trying to give an interpretation, and the Haftorah and all this, and suddenly the guy who’s doing it just starts laughing at what he’s reading, and everyone in the synagogue—laughter. Right? OK, cut.
Now you’re having some scene of a news reporter and he’s reading some absurd piece of propaganda, and he can’t do it with a straight face, and he starts laughing, and they have to take him off the air. And then you see a politician giving a press release declaring that Russia has done something horrible to us, but in the middle, he starts laughing. He can’t hold it, he can’t believe in it, what his own lines are. Soon there is no one who can believe in what they’re saying. And it is recognized that the entire system is, in fact, a joke.
I think they’ve reached that point, quite frankly. Alright, so if, in fact, the system is a joke and the entire world is really a joke, and it is meant for our enjoyment—and could it be anything else, if the qualities of God are willpower, intelligence, and bliss? How is that bliss going to be expressed unless the universe is, in fact, totally humorous at its very heart?
Now, here’s the problem: the concept of the numinous does not include that. It’s holiness without goodness. OK, I can accept that, but it’s without humor also. So I propose a concept of the huminous, and that this is our highest realization of God, but that, in our personal development, we have to go through seven stages to get there. We have to go through the doominous, and then the gloominous, and then we reach the fuminous, where we’re angry at everything, and then finally we may get to the luminous. OK? And it may be because of the radiation from Fukushima. And then it’s after that, we’re filled with the light that we become the bloominous. OK?
And that’s when we begin to be able to zoom into all the different humor in the world, and we become the zoominous. And then finally we become the embodiments of that humor, and we are the huminous. And if there is anything to our humanness, it is the huminous. And the sense that I have is that we have lost that, and that’s why the world is the way it is. It has lost its sense of humor.
The religions take themselves too seriously, the politicians, everybody, and it’s a cover up for the fact that they have no intelligence, no content, no will, no goodness. And so it all has to be a cardboard face over a barren, empty, greedy ego, that is far too serious for its own good. And it’s that seriousness that has to die.
Now, the seriousness has to die, but not the compassion, not the love. There has to be a kind of humor that shares joy. If it isn’t joyful humor, then it’s a form of sadism. And so there are people who laugh at other people being tortured. There is sadistic humor. There is cruelty that some people find humorous. So it has to be a truly divine humor. But my theory is that that is our true nature, that it is divine humor that we live for, that we want to express, that we want to be in an environment of, and that we want to enjoy the laughter of others participating in that humor.
And when we can be in that state, then all of that which is worst in religion—which to me the worst part of religion is the ascetic hatred, the part that says, “I can tough it out. I can be more stoic than you are. I can fast longer than you can, put up with a bed of nails better than you can.” But there’s no love in it. It’s just purely an egoic act of superiority. And it’s to give up that superiority complex that our humor is necessary.
And then the opposite of the ascetic hatred is the fragile dependency of people who are needy, and demanding, and want to take advantage of others, and can’t stand on their own two feet, and they can’t have a sense of humor either. And so to really have a sense of humor, you have to have a very well developed, refined, mature capacity to handle your aloneness, your solitude, to be able to enjoy all of the dimensions of this human comedy that we are part of.
It’s when the capacity for humor has reached its fullness that the mind can be silent. I think the times of greatest silence in the mind is after you’ve had a great laugh, and then you can really be present, and wipe away the tragic sense of life that has contaminated our consciousness in this latter Kali Yuga day.
And so there is something serious about our approach to humor, and I would propose that humor and seriousness are not opposites, because it takes a great deal of refinement and discipline, and education, and training, and sensitivity, and compassion, to find what is humorous in the dark clouds that reality is blowing our way. And to find it for real, not an artificial humor that has a laugh track behind it, but a humor that grasps and integrates all the sides of reality into one.