I once heard a contemporary spiritual teacher declare quite emphatically that in order to get anywhere on the spiritual path, one has to be “deadly serious” about waking up and being free. It seemed to me to be an odd admonition, given that enlightenment means, among other things, “to lighten up,” and every enlightened person I’ve ever met has also been outrageously hilarious. I once heard a Tibetan Lama at a monastery in Nepal laugh so deeply from his belly for about ten minutes, continuously, that it felt like a direct transmission of the Great Cosmic Joke. (If I could remember the punch line, I’d tell you.) Stewart Emery, the founder of Actualizations in the 70s, used to say that one sure way to know you’re off course is if you’ve lost your sense of humor. When you come across a spiritual group whose adherents seem to “haunt houses for a living,” he said, it should tip you off. Being grim and joyless is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Now sadly, the truth about me is that while I have approached writing about my
spiritual path in a humorous way, I have always been quite serious about the
pursuit itself. You don’t spend over 30 years doing the kinds of things I’ve
done if you’re not taking it seriously. Maybe not “deadly serious,” but serious
in the sense that I wasn’t just some cynical journalist reporting on all this
stuff from the outside, or from an emotional and psychic distance. I was always deeply involved with whatever I
was exploring, if for no other reason than because I was always genuinely
suffering and looking for a solution to the fundamental problem of my
existence.
The enlightened ones
kept saying there is no solution because there is no problem, which they seemed
to find endlessly amusing, but if I understood that, I wouldn’t have been
seeking a solution in the first place. I hated when Buddhist teachers would
make gleeful pronouncements like “No self, no problem,” because as far as I
could tell, I did have a self, and hence “many problems.”
But in fact the
awakening process is about untying that illusory knot of self, a transcending
or relinquishing of one’s identification with that voice in our heads that
keeps calling itself “I” and “me.” The moment of spiritual epiphany reveals
that one’s true identity is not merely this “feverish selfish little clod of
ailments and grievances,” as George Bernard Shaw put it, but rather, one is in actuality
and essence an infinite blank slate of primordial awareness. And if that’s not hilarious, what is? Of
course, there’s nothing worse than when the infinite blank slate of primordial
awareness has to perform ordinary life tasks, like buying pants, or worse,
earning a living. That’s usually where all the trouble starts.
So although I have perhaps been too seriously
pursuing a path towards wholeness for three decades, thankfully a lot of funny
events happened along the way to keep things in perspective. Like the time I found myself in a therapy
group at Esalen Institute with a very obese female therapist who decided to sit
on my head for a half hour so that I could re-experience being smothered by my
mother. And don’t even ask about the Tush-Push partner exercise I participated
in at a Human Sexuality Workshop.
Suffice it to say that it involved Vaseline, and sharing your
feelings.
I spoke to my first spiritual teacher
recently, Ram Dass, on a video call, and he told me he thought there was too
much sarcasm in my new book about my journey (The 99th Monkey), and I realized
he was right, in that I wanted to be able to court the cynics and skeptics out
there by being that way myself, for fear of coming off like some New Age flake
or True Believer. But short of wearing a
pyramid on my head while chanting in Swahili on one foot, they don’t come much
flakier than me. I mean, I got rid of
my microwave because I was told it made my chakras spin counter-clockwise; I’ve
had the coffee enemas and the decaf colonics; a Feng Shui expert came to our
house and told us to paint everything salmon, and a Pet Psychic came to the
house and told us to re-spay our cat. (But here’s the really scary part: we did.) How many people do you know had an 8-foot
long isolation tank installed in their living room, containing 800 pounds of
Epsom salts dissolved in ten inches of water? I ordered one the day my wife and
I got engaged, because I figured I might need some alone time.
It goes on and on. I sat alone for
40 days and 40 nights on a secluded mountaintop with no power or plumbing, took
ancient shamanic potions in middle-of-the-night arcane rituals in the forests
of Brazil, did a ten-day
retreat at Auschwitz. After trying to wake up
for so many years, I took a workshop with a guru who specialized in “waking
down,” but I wasn’t any better at waking down than I had been at waking up. I went swimming with the dolphins in the
Bermuda Triangle but they completely ignored me while frolicking with everyone
else.
In the end, as Wavy Gravy famously put it, “If
you don’t have a sense of humor, it just isn’t funny.” In “Hannah and Her Sisters,” the Woody Allen
character cures himself of suicidal despair by watching a Marx Brothers movie,
and it just might be that a good Seinfeld episode can be as spiritually
rejuvenating as prayer or meditation, possibly more so. Aldous Huxley had his
priorities straight on all this: when he was asked at the end of his life to
sum up what he had learned from all his spiritual studies and practices, he
said, “Just be kinder to one another.”
That’s the Dalai Lama’s approach as well. And while I don’t know if Huxley was a barrel
of laughs to be around, surely the Dalai Lama, whose people have faced enormous
hardship and suffering, has retained his light-hearted nature and is well known
for his enlightened chuckle. So after 30+ years of spiritual searching, maybe
it really does come down to a few simple things like laughter and kindness.
I’ll take it.
Something else to consider when things are getting
too serious, from a sign on a monastery in Thailand: Cut yourself some slack: 100 years from now–all new people.