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How laughter can keep you on your spiritual path
A few years ago, I traveled throughout India looking for spiritual inspiration. Naturally, I wasn’t the first person to have done this. At all the temples, ashrams and holy mountains, I found crowds of Westerners looking for something as well, and presumably it wasn’t the bedbugs, diesel fumes and diarrhea. It was easy to identify the seekers in a crowd. While regular tourists wore shorts or khakis or brightly colored Indian shirts, spiritual tourists wore a lot of white. They walked across temple courtyards, a slow-motion blur of white drapes and scarves, their faces a vision of sobriety and introspection.
Inside the shrines, they sat perfectly still, unfazed by the heat, various itches and their gurgling tummies. They sat in full lotus or Zen kneeling positions. Their eyes were sublimely closed. Rarely did they smile, and when they did, it was more of a knowing smile.
Their manner perplexed me, especially when I walked out of a shrine into the chaos of color, sound and personality that is India. Everywhere I turned, Indians were smiling, shoving food in my hands, cracking jokes, playing with kids—theirs or a stranger’s. And when I met a real-life Indian guru, she seemed to be laughing most of the time. Amma is known as "the hugging saint" because she gives affectionate embraces to the thousands of devotees who line up to see her everywhere she goes.
A petite, plump woman with a perfectly round face, warm dark eyes and a beaming smile, Amma could also have been called the laughing saint. One of my clearest memories is of her squinting her eyes closed, leaning her head back and breaking into peals of laughter.
If the very gurus the seekers come to see are laughing, why are the seekers themselves so serious? I decided I wanted to learn something about laughter’s ability to unlock the spirit. After all, as James Baraz, a Buddhist meditation teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California, told me, "It’s called enlightenment for a reason. Lighten up!" I went in search of some lighthearted tips on the spirit.
Why don’t Buddhists vacuum in the corners? Because they have no attachments.
Baraz didn’t always have such a merry outlook. He’s been a serious—dead serious—student of Zen since 1974. For a number of years, he says, he interpreted Buddhist teachings on the illusory nature of sense perception as an instruction to regard everything with a kind of gloomy existential detachment. "The Buddha started taking on a very stern look to me," he recalls. "I somehow mixed up [the Buddhist concept of] the end of suffering with the end of living."
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What a wonderful article! As Wavy Gravy says, "If you don't have a sense of humor, it just isn't very funny..."
I agree that spiritual seekers tend to be an overly serious lot. We take the very thing we are trying to get rid of - our personal selves - way too seriously. This attitude only adds to our delusion. It reminds of a story Amma once told about a guy who walks into a bar (I'm "serious"! She really told a story that began with' a guy walks into a bar'!). Anyway, a guy walks into a bar and orders 3 shots of whiskey, proceeds to drink them one by one, then gets up and leaves. This pattern repeats itself regularly over some weeks. One day the bartender says, "You know, if you order a glass a whiskey, it will have the same amount as the 3 shots, but will cost you less."
The man says, "That's OK. I order 3 shots because in my hometown I used to go drinking with my 2 brothers and we would each order a shot. So by getting 3 shots, it's like I'm drinking with them. It’s my way of remembering them".
A few weeks later, the man comes into the bar and orders only 2 shots. "Oh dear", the bartender says. "Did something happen to one of your brothers?"
"No", says the man. "They're both fine. It' just that I've decided to stop drinking".
posted by Vishwan on 9/29/2009 2:42 pm