Create Your Own Religion (29 page)

If I had to pick a single reason why I love the one and only Elizabeth Han, I would be hard-pressed. Is it because she is smart? No. The fact that she is smart is great, but that's not it. Is it because watching her unbelievably beautiful naked body go through a yoga sequence is one of the best things that human eyes have ever seen? That sure helps, but it's not it either. I know hundreds of smart people, but most of them bore me to death. I know hundreds of beautiful people who no longer look so beautiful once you see them for who they really are. There are plenty of reasons why I love her, but the main one is that she can laugh like no one else I know. Sometimes heaviness and mental bullshit weigh me down, and life feels like a math problem. But then I hear her laugh, and it's like a bomb of irrepressible joy tearing down all the walls that were keeping me prisoner. Her laughter is so damn contagious that you just can't resist it: it's a ceremony that frees me of any excessive mental baggage and makes me fall back in love with the beauty of it all. It chases away all the ghosts, for demons have power only as long as I take myself and my problems very seriously. Had Nietzsche heard her laugh, he would have never gone crazy.
²⁵³

OK, man, so you love this woman whose laughter possesses demon-exorcising, love potion-dispensing, magical qualities. So what? What does this have to do with religion anyway? Whereas many traditions frown upon mixing humor and religion, some, like Zen, Taoism, Tantrism, and Sufism, just to name a few, embrace laughter and treasure it as their most prized possession. Ancient Egyptians believed that, following death, people would be judged by having their hearts weighed on a scale against a feather. Only if the hearts were lighter than the feather would they be deemed worthy of immortality. Lightheartedness to them was, quite literally, the key to heaven.

Among some American Indian tribes, humor is an integral component of the most sacred ceremonies. Once, during the Sun Dance, the most important ritual of the Plains tribes, I saw a group of little Lakota kids sitting in a circle singing “Barbie Girl” by Aqua. Hearing the refrain “I'm a blonde bimbo girl in a fantasy world” sung with gleeful satisfaction by a band of eight-year-olds in the midst of a pre-Columbian ceremony was shocking enough, but even more shocking was the fact that no one thought of chastising them for disrupting the ritual. The adults had a good laugh and carried on as if the song was part of the ritual itself. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. Lakota religion, after all, includes the role of the Heyoka, a sacred clown whose task is to behave in insanely bizarre ways making everyone crack up. For the Lakota, this is not just comedy but an extension of their spiritual life; as Lakota Elder Wallace Black Elk once told me, “The spirits like laughter. Spirits are funny.”

Finding out that Lakota medicine men and Jessica Rabbit have much in common puts me in a good mood, and renews my conviction in the primary religious value of humor. Not only do I strongly feel that laughter and spiritual depth
can
go hand in hand, I would
even venture to say that without laughter it is very likely religions will take a wrong turn. If you don't want to take my word for it, stay with me for the rest of this chapter as we explore why humor is more essential to the health of a religion than the most sophisticated theological arguments.

Those experiences that we deem most sacred are always in danger of giving birth to dogmas. The more important something is to us, the more likely we are to want to preserve it, protect it, put it on a pedestal, and—continuing the alliteration of the deadly
p
's—turn it into the exclusive Playground of Priests. Along the way, plenty of religious and political ideologies that began as vital, genuine sources of stimuli and liberation lost their flexibility and shifted into dark, sinister dogmas. The freshness of their messages dries up when their followers begin worrying about conserving the truths they've discovered. Proving that sometimes love can do as much damage as malice, followers embalm their favorite teachings in a protective layer of rigidity, mummify them, and ultimately kill them. Invariably, deadly seriousness and lack of humor plant the seeds of fanaticism, and fanaticism negates the very spirit that produced good ideas in the first place.

This is why, if we want to avoid falling into this trap, we should never neglect to feed our sense of humor. Any religion that can't laugh at itself is a scary religion. Precisely because something is sacred and important, we need to be able to laugh about it. Nietzsche had it right when he wrote, “I do not know any other way of associating with great tasks than play.”
²⁵⁴
Laughter and playfulness, in fact,
are the only antidotes to self-righteous dogmatism. They keep things loose. They save us from becoming too arrogant in our beliefs.

Any time I stumble into people who are too rigid to laugh at themselves, a warning bell goes off in my head. What are they scared of? Do they really have that little confidence in the power of their ideals as to believe they could be somehow weakened by a good joke? A lack of self-humor is a sure sign of pathological insecurity as much as macho posturing, defensiveness, and aggressiveness. It is the result of a very large but very fragile ego. As Tom Robbins writes, “People who are too self-important to laugh at their own frequently ridiculous behavior have a vested interest in gravity because it supports their illusions of grandiosity.”
²⁵⁵

Posers need to take themselves very seriously. They are extremely attached to the image they strive to project in public because deep down they know it's all they have—small dogs with a very big bark screaming “Look at me. I'm a bad, bad, big dog. You should be afraid of me and respect me. Can't you tell how important I am?” All their constant yapping is a desperate effort to convince everyone of their worth. But if they only possessed an ounce of real self-confidence, they could afford to lighten up. Big dogs don't need to make so much noise.

When I look at many self-described “spiritual” people, I feel the same way as when I see a Chihuahua acting tough. Their trying so hard to behave and talk “spiritually,” their working so desperately to live up to an idealized image clearly tells me how far they are from that ideal. I was reminded of this when I witnessed an amusing interaction between two women at a Sun Dance ritual. After several, failed attempts at lighting a ceremonial pipe, a white woman in her thirties took a deep breath and with great gravity said, “Ah.
The spirits don't want us to smoke the pipe today.” Next to her was a Lakota lady for whom the word “old” was a bland euphemism. Age, however, didn't prevent her from cracking up. In an effort to be polite, she subdued her laughter and advised the younger woman, “It's a windy day, that's all. Try putting your hands around the lighter and you won't have any problem.” Right there was the difference between the real thing and a poor imitation. The old Lakota lady lived and breathed her religion, so she didn't need to overdo it: sometimes spirits are trying to tell you something; sometimes it's just a windy day. Her spirituality was concrete, tangible, grounded in day-to-day life. The other lady's spirituality, on the other hand, didn't flow naturally out of her being, but rather was all effort. It was full of
oooooh
and
aaaaaah
—it looked like a Hollywood production of what Lakota religion is supposed to be like.

The gravity that so many religious people cling to ends up spoiling whatever genuine insight they may have. Their lack of humor pushes them to idealize “spirituality” as something removed from honest-to-earth daily life. But real spirituality is not afraid to laugh and dance. Real spirituality revels in the miracle of ordinary experience. As a Zen poem recites, “How wondrous, how mysterious! I carry fuel, I draw water!”
²⁵⁶
When Zen breathes freely, humor is never far away.

Speaking of Zen, here is a tradition that doesn't shy away from making the most serious of points in the most hilarious of ways. One of my all-time-favorite Zen stories clarifies this perfectly. The hero of our tale is fifteenth century Japanese Zen master Ikkyū (a.k.a. “Crazy Cloud”), a Buddhist version of Bugs Bunny, a long-haired, sake-drinking, sex-hungry trickster who loved nothing better than to shake up powerful institutions and traditions. Some of his own
Zen brethren were terrified of his sharp wit. His approach to Zen was a little too raw, direct, and authentic for their taste.

The story tells us that, on a certain day, Ikkyū had an interesting encounter on a ferry with a
yamabushi
—an ascetic hermit who practiced a mix of Buddhism and Shinto. Feeling cocky, the yamabushi decided to play the old “my-religion-is-better-than-yours” game and boasted to Ikkyū about his ability to perform miracles. To prove his point, he began conducting an elaborate ritual until he conjured up the fiery image of one of his gods in the bow of the boat. “Can your Zen top this?” asked the yamabushi with smug satisfaction. Responding to the challenge, Ikkyū promptly pulled down his pants and pissed on top of the vision, putting the fire out. “Look!” exclaimed Ikkyū innocently. “Here's a miracle issuing out of my own body.”
²⁵⁷
How can you not love this man?

But enough with the anecdotes and stories. The point is that by encouraging joy and mental flexibility, laughter and humor are the best weapons to avoid the fruits of religious dogma: conflict, violence, and “holy” wars. No one who can truly laugh and be relaxed about even their most important convictions would ever willingly kill or be killed in the name of religion. She wouldn't start deadly riots to protest cartoons poking fun at her faith; she wouldn't burn people at the stake because of spiritual differences; and she would never feel compelled to shove her beliefs down everyone else's throats.

Few things, in fact, can help bridge people with very different ideologies as much as humor. In my history of religion classes, I tell potentially offensive things to my students regularly. The only thing allowing us to chat about them pleasantly instead of murdering each other is a smile on our faces, reminding us that life is both deeper
and more fun than attachment to any ideology. Whether someone can burst out in a spontaneous, deep belly laughter tells me more about our ability to get along than any similarities in our ideas. Far from being a secondary issue, laughter is what can save a religion from turning into a fanatical machine of violence and oppression.

Any way you slice it, life is tough. From sickness to death, old age to broken hearts, betrayals to failure, life has a whole menu of possibilities for dishing out pain. No matter who you are, how rich or poor, how lucky or not, the bottom line is that you'll get hurt—over and over again. Providing solace to this inevitable pain is one of religion's main functions. Religions try to minister to our injuries, nurse our wounds, console us with explanations, and promise us an escape from life's most unpleasant face.

I am sure that explanations and promises work well for some people, but they do nothing for me. They look too much like desperate attempts to exorcise misery with overly complicated rationalizations or delusional promises. In any case, most religions have a vested interest in perpetuating the notion that life is pain, and only they have the cure for it.

Personally, I prefer laughter. Yes, there are plenty of things in life to be bummed out about, but as long as I can find humor in the darkest of circumstances I can rise above it. I'm not overly fond of self-pity and depression—two of humanity's drugs of choice—and I find that laughter is the best weapon to keep them at bay. It's a natural antidote to anxiety, stress, and anger. Medical research indicates that even our immune systems are shaped into gear by laughing often.
As Tom Robbins writes, “Armed with a playful attitude, a comic sensibility, we can deny suffering dominion over our lives.”
²⁵⁸
Truly, words to live by.

This in no way means we should pretend that suffering doesn't exist. No, what we are talking about here is refusing to pay too much attention to it; refusing to take it too seriously, since suffering thrives on both attention and humorless gravity. Nothing annoys and disarms suffering more than acknowledging its existence but refusing it the power to rob us of our enthusiasm for life. Pain exists whether we like it or not—but how we choose to react to it is what makes the difference between becoming its hostage or not. Suffering doesn't cause depression; our reaction to suffering causes depression. If I may steal another line from Tom Robbins, “All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.”
²⁵⁹

Not at all disturbed by the threat of death—which, by the way, turned out to be very real when representatives of the US government successfully arranged to have him murdered—Lakota leader Sitting Bull, declared, “The whites may get me at last, but I will have good times till then.”
²⁶⁰
In other words, events beyond our control can always take place, and there isn't much we can do about that. But, we
can
prevent them from draining the fun out of life. Admittedly, this is sometimes easier said than done but, like with any muscle, it's an ability that becomes stronger by exercising it. In my mind, the truly religious attitude needs to encourage an insistence on happiness in the midst of desperation; happiness regardless of all the pain and hurt that life may throw our way.

One of the reasons Ikkyū and Tom Robbins are two of my personal heroes is because they are masters of ceremonies in a religion that celebrates the sheer joy of being alive. So many very intelligent
people allow misfortune to push them toward a gloom-and-doom vision of the world that it's refreshing to run into someone who doesn't let destiny boss them around. Whereas I have been prevented from hanging out with Ikkyū by the lack of a time machine and psychic powers, I had the honor of spending some time with Tom Robbins and consider it one of the most formative experiences of my life. I learned more by being around him for a little bit than in all the years I spent in school.