Neither Robbins nor Ikkyu are frivolous clowns who are blind to the misery and the suffering that stalk the world. What makes Robbins and Ikkyū unique is that they haven't allowed pain to rob them of their passion for life. They have consciously chosen playfulness as a way to keep finding beauty even when existence turns unkind. Robbins himself explains beautifully the paradox of being “cheerfully cynical”:
My view of the world is not that different from Kafka's, really. The difference is that Kafka let it make him miserable and I refuse. Life is too short. My personal motto has always been: Joy in spite of everything. Not just [mindless] joy, but joy in spite of everything. Recognizing the inequities and the suffering and the corruption and all that but refusing to let it rain on my parade. And I advocate this to other people.
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Anyone can whine about bad luck, and maybe they are right. Maybe their lives are truly terrible and painful. But endlessly lamenting never solved anything. My mother once delicately voiced this idea to my grandmother after listening to her complain for three days straight, “If you really don't think that you can be happy in life, and nothing can ever cheer you up, maybe you should just kill yourself
and be done with it. If you want, I'll help you.” We didn't hear a complaint out of my grandmother for weeks.
Being able to stare at tragedy in the face and still find the strength to laugh is an art, and I bow to anyone who can master it: this is what real spiritual depth is all about. Escaping from the clutches of melancholy is a sign of talent and courage. And as Nietzsche reminds us, “Courage wants to laugh. . . . Whoever climbs the highest mountains laughs at all tragic play and tragic seriousness.”
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Closing the door on dogma and defeating the ghosts of tragedy are the most fundamental ways laughter can help religion. But a third key function of laughter is its power to heighten our ability to feel and perceive the sacred.
Just mentioning the word “sacred” is enough to make many people stiffen up. The connection that exists in the minds of most people between “sacred” and “serious” chases away even the thought of a smile. Frowning brows and gloomy expressions stand in the way of getting the full experience out of rituals, prayers, or meditation. They limit our ability to feel and perceive things at a deeper level. A tense consciousness can only skim the surface; a relaxed one is more open to the experience of the sacred. This is why humor and laughter are so important; they help us unwind and relax. By making us take ourselves less seriously, and softening our nervous edges, they put us in a more receptive state of mind. And it's only in this state that we can have access to more profound sources of insight.
When we are facing a deeply spiritual event, gravity and somberness usually take over and run our consciousness. The problem
with this is that suddenly turning overly serious can make us tense and rigid. And when we are not relaxed, our perceptions become dull. Instead, let's take a hint from Thoreau. He writes: “Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment and childlike mirthfulness.”
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The same holds true for any other activity in life. Whenever we are in a state of relaxed awareness, we are able to think more clearly and get the job at hand done with less effort. Look at any athlete who is relaxed: their movements typically are sharper and more effective since tense muscles are not slowing them down. Look at a public speaker, or a masseuse, or whoever else you feel like looking at, and you'll see the same story repeating itself. In pretty much any human endeavor, physical or mental, relaxation aids fluidity. And fluid minds and bodies can think and act on their feet because they are not obstructed by any nervous energy.
This same idea is found in any tradition that embraces humor. From Black Elk to Zen master Hakuin, many insist that laughter has the power to unlock “the doors of perception” and make us ready to capture life's secrets.
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Personally, I find this suggestion worth trying. In the best case scenario we gain access to greater wisdom than we ever thought possible, and in the worst we end up having a good time: not a bad deal.
OK, I'll confess all the ugly truth. Although it's true that I'm passionately advocating the importance of laughter, even I have to admit that I am not always thrilled with humor, whether in a religious context or not. No rule is without exceptions, and humor is no different.
Mindful of what a turnoff painfully serious religions are, many pastors, priests, and other figures of authority have made the conscious choice to spice up their services with humor. They crack jokes, encourage laughter, and do their best to keep their audiences entertained. Just the same things I'm arguing for, right? Not really. If we are to tell it like it is, when certain people
try
to be funny but aren't, it's almost worse than when they are being rigid and somber. Trying to be funny and miserably failing is even sadder than being stiff and serious. Forced humor is worse than no humor at all.
The issue is not whether I like their jokes or not. Humor is not one size fits all, and it's not my business to be a censor. As long as someone finds it funny, good for them. No, the issue is in how unnatural and forced some efforts at humor are. Rather than flowing naturally, some people's humor is the result of having told themselves too many times that they are supposed to be funny. Rather than being spontaneous, inducing laughter turns into a choreographed performance and a duty—something that clearly defeats the very purpose of humor.
But I guess an effort toward laughter is better than no effort at all. And this is why, despite having had firsthand exposure to horrendously failed attempts at being funny, I still feel humor is one of the keys to a healthy religion.
In
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, one of the most extraordinary books ever written, Friedrich Nietzsche asks a fundamental question: “Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time?”
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Typically, we are told laughter and wisdom don't go together. We are invited to choose between either path for—in the popular mind—we can't follow both. We can be superficial, happy, and outrageously funny
or
deep, wise, and deadly serious. Nietzsche addresses this suicidal dichotomy head-on. Why should we be satisfied with one or the other? Who is strong enough to take the best of both approaches and combine them in the same overabundant personality?
In my mind, if there ever was a challenge worth accepting, this is it. I'm not interested in gloomy religions created by and for depressed people. And I'm equally disinterested in the happy but stupid. What I want is to wed the greatest depth with the most intense enjoyment of life. It seems masochist and self-limiting to pursue one without the other. This is why I'm a paradox-hunter. The only religions fascinating me are those that can help me capture this beast.
Finding ways to keep happiness alive in the midst of a harsh world is far from a frivolous task. If my own religion has a mission, it's the expansion of joy. And laughter is its main ritual. When many things in our path will try to crush our spirit, laughter will be there to keep the flame burning. Like an orgasm, laughter erases all duality; it cleanses us from fear, dogma, and rigidity. It's a yes to life—all of life. It celebrates the unashamed enjoyment of being alive. It makes fun of “spirituality,” heaviness, excess thought, rigid categories, unnecessarily complicated concepts, and all the sorry bullshit that chokes our souls. One good laugh does more for us than a thousand days locked up in churches or temples. It reminds us that life flows. It reminds us that after all is said and done, nothing, not even the most serious things in life—perhaps
especially
the most serious things in life—should be faced with gravity. The day when you stop laughing at yourself and the universe and everything else is the day
you give some sad-looking priest power over your life. Laughter has no fear. Laughter is brave. Laughter defeats all the demons for me. Laughter refuses to bow on the altars of guilt, sin, and blame. The laughter I speak of is not only mindless amusement (even though mindless amusement is so much fun). The laughter I speak of doesn't back down from the most deadly serious challenges. It is precisely because of laughter that we can face our challenges better than an army of serious assholes too worried about the heaviness of it all to be able to ride the tallest waves. The laughter I speak of simply doesn't let staring at the deepest abyss ruin its good mood. This is the essence of my religion.
It's time to sharpen our weapons. It's time to choose which tools are the most appropriate for our journey. Without the right equipment, in fact, even the most well-intended and noble quest is doomed to fail before it even begins. Jump off a plane without a parachute and you quickly find out why preparations are important. Trust the wrong map, and rather than taking your kids to Disneyland, you'll find yourself vacationing among toothless rednecks and three-headed goats next to a nice nuclear dump site.
In venturing out to create our own religion, we need to first ask ourselves some basic epistemological questions. If I make it sound more complicated than it is, don't be alarmed. Epistemological questions are neither scary nor needlessly difficult. They are about figuring out how we know what we know. They are about deciding what instruments we will utilize in our search for answers. Philosophers, scientists, and religious leaders all praise the virtues of different methods to get to the truth. So let's roll up our sleeves and review our options.
“Faith” means not wanting to know what is true
.
—Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed,” declares Jesus in the Gospel according to John.
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As disturbing as the implications of this sentence are, they are child's play compared to the stories of the Old Testament addressing the same point. Genesis 22 tells a chilling tale that forms one of the theological pillars on which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam rest. Here we find God Himself calling on Abraham and giving him the pleasant order to sacrifice his own son. Incredibly enough, Abraham promptly agrees. It's only after Abraham has tied up his son, and raised the knife to drive it into his body that God sends an angel to cancel the order. It turns out that the whole sadistic drama was just a trick to test the depth of Abraham's faith. By obeying, Abraham passed the test with flying colors, and he is rewarded with a blessing from God and the promise that his descendants will prosper.
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I don't know about you, but I'm slightly puzzled by the notion that a parent willing to cut his kid's throat in an effort to obey the commands of a disembodied voice should be honored as a role model by all three main Western religions. Am I missing something here? Where I come from, whenever you start hearing voices telling you to murder your children, it's time to go have your head checked. Obeying it should earn you a one-way ticket to a criminal asylum, not God's blessing and the reverence of millions of believers.
This story, and Jesus' words quoted earlier, illustrates the importance of faith as an essential religious requirement. We are so used to hearing the word “faith” as being a desirable quality that it is easy to
forget what faith actually means. If you are sure of your conclusions, you don't need faith. Faith has nothing to do with real knowledge (since knowledge depends on evidence) or rational thought (since rational thought depends on some logical basis). Faith comes into the picture when you don't know something, but you badly want to believe it anyway. Your need for reassuring certainties is strong enough not to let the total absence of supporting evidence stop you. When it comes to religious questions about the nature of life and the universe, even many people who depend on logic and reason in their day-to-day lives decide to forgo them in favor of faith. But as Sam Harris stated in his book
The End of Faith
, holding on to strong beliefs that lack any rational justification is a symptom of psychosis, not sainthood.
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Its roots reach deep in the fertile ground of intellectual dishonesty.
How did faith get so popular then? How did a word that should be used as the name of a disease come to be so highly regarded by millions of people? It all goes back to the desire for answers when no logical answers are available. Remember the Big Two, God and the afterlife? The very annoying fact that we don't know anything about either of them is too much for most people to bear. For all their charms, logic and reason don't offer us any of the answers we crave. They don't tell us whether there is meaning in life or not. They don't tell us whether death is but a doorway to a more glorious world or it is the end of everything. They don't tell us whether our existence is supervised by an all-knowing, all-powerful, benign entity or a puppet in the hands of chaos. There are far too many key problems left unsolved by logic and reason.
This is why faith enters the picture: to substitute a cold silence with hope. When reason abandons you to face a grim reality, faith
consoles you, enveloping you in a protective embrace. Faith has the power to rescue you from the demons of grief. It can infuse courage against the inevitability of death. It can give us a shot of optimism when there is no good reason to be optimistic. Faith is the logical (and yet illogical) consequence of having exhausted all rational options. If you can't accept uncertainty, made-up answers are more appealing than no answers. Some hope, however illusory it may be, is better than no hope. So it's no coincidence that the more a religion tries to reassure us about the existence of God and the afterlife, the more it will embrace faith. Proving that the reverse of this equation is also true, several religions that don't depend so heavily on the Big Two are much less interested in faith.