It Turns Out Enlightenment is Just Having a Really Good Sense of Humour

I’m not sure how people made such a big deal out of this simple message, but I think it’s because everyone else took things seriously and created a lot of problems for themselves. They upheld Buddha to be enlightened, worshiped him, created another religion and have largely missed the basic point over the years. Another Buddhist master, Longchenpa, realized this simple truth again some two thousand years later and said:

“Since everything is just an appearance, which has nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one might as well burst out laughing.”

What about the warning from spiritual teachers that everything you imagine is a clever lie, constructed by a psychological defense mechanism built up against the existential truth of impermanence. In other words, you are not who you think you are. That’s pretty funny, isn’t it? Laughing about it and not taking yourself too seriously is a wonderful coping mechanism for dealing with such seemingly hard truths. As Longchenpa says, you might as well burst out laughing, or as modern Zen master Adyashanti explains:

“We realize – often very suddenly – that our sense of self, which is shaped and constructed based on our ideas, beliefs and images, is not really who we are. It doesn’t define us, it has no center.”

I’ve seen hundreds of spiritual teachers and the best ones have one thing in common: they giggled a lot. Even my main Buddhist teacher, an intellectual giant in the Gelug-pa Tibetan Buddhist Tradition consistently predicted his arrival at the temple with fits of laughter. Another favorite teacher of mine is Alan Watts, who you can’t watch for five minutes without hearing his infectious cackle, and the current Dalai Lama is famous for his warm giggle at almost everything. Alan Watts once noted:

“People suffer only because they take seriously what the gods created for fun.”

Laughter and humor are not only frivolous, but can also be a sharp tool to cut through the nonsense. Sometimes in society it is the comedians who are the only ones telling the truth. Not the politicians, not the priests and not even the school teachers, but it is the people who can take a step back and see the ridiculousness of current events. In fact, more and more people are getting their truthful political information from the Late Show and from comedians like the late Bill Hicks and George Carlin, who would deliver sobering doses of reality that was actually very true and therefore very funny. Comedians often point out the discrepancy between how we think things are and how they really are. Fortunately, that provokes laughter. Unfortunately, people tend to go back to living lies after the laughter wears off.

The enlightened fool is the one who sees society’s ego stumbling and can still find joy and laughter in it. The fool is often the enlightened one, the one with mad wisdom, with laughter and jokes as their weapon. They break through everyday conformity and reveal the latent child as a bliss bubbling just beneath the surface of all seriousness. The fool possesses a wisdom beyond the reach of the conformist. A playful attitude in contact with an enormous amount of creativity.

Humor is also extremely healing. They say laughter is the best medicine, and that’s true. It can also relieve the stress and tension of everyday life, reduce boredom at work and unite people from different backgrounds. Everyone takes themselves and others too seriously. That is the way the ego exists. Start being a little more playful and you will see the ego evaporate.

So if humor can heal, relax, unite people, undo the ego, and entertain everyone at the same time, that sounds enlightening enough to me.

Which brings me to the ridiculous way most people understand enlightenment. There is a common belief that an enlightened person is a perfect person with perfect virtue, perfect love, perfect knowledge and even perfect smelling sandalwood farts. This ideal of the perfect person is a joke and does not exist in reality. It creates cults of worship around people considered perfect and only leaves the rest of us feeling guilty for not living up to these idealistic fantasies. If Nietzsche declared that ‘God is dead’ and the Zen Buddhists urge us to ‘kill Buddha in the street’, I would add: if you believe in a perfect guru: punch yourself in the face and see if it doesn’t hurt . That’s the reality. Reality is perfect because it can produce a wide range of human emotions, from sadness and despair to elation and joy. Trying to have only perfect emotions and a perfect life will only lead to enormous disappointment. As Alan Watts says, you can’t be right or even right without them actually implying each other.

All you have to do then is just be your natural self. Your authentic, conditioned and confused self, and always find a way to laugh at yourself. As someone once said, if you can laugh at yourself, you’ll never run out of material. Or as one of my favorite Zen teachers Brad Warner says:

“The state of ambiguity – that messy, greasy, confused, confused and terrible situation you are living through right now – is enlightenment itself.”

I would add that discovering the funny side of all that stuff is enlightening.

Another cosmic joke is that we will all die. This isn’t scary, it’s reality. Of course, religions have made a point of promising you that there is life after death and that all your actions after death have consequences. The fear of fire and brimstone or the desire for virgins in heaven are powerful motivators for taking responsibility in our lives. and also a strong call to take priests, churches and traditional lineages seriously. It’s the oldest trick in the ‘book’. But it’s time to grow up and be able to act responsibly without the need for fairy tales. We live, we love, we grow, we die. That is absolutely beautiful and enchanting enough. As Osho says:

“Life as it is should be enough reason to laugh. It’s so absurd, it’s so ridiculous. It’s so beautiful, it’s so wonderful. It’s everything together. It’s a great cosmic joke.”

So where does the cosmic joke lead us? Back to where we started; to the unadulterated pure joy of just being alive – laughing for no reason and grinning like a mad hatter. Life becomes a game instead of a chore, a cosmic dance on the needle head of eternity. The truth frees us to have an enlightened sense of humor and there is no greater joy than sharing this pleasure; violence becomes unnecessary. In touch with the truth of impermanence, with the bubbles of bliss and humor that are now on the surface, the true celebration of life can be found in this freedom to love and laugh and experience heaven where it truly can be exist here on earth.

Chad Foreman is the founder of The Way of Meditation and has been teaching meditation since 2003, determined to bring authentic meditation practices into the lives of millions of people in the modern world. Chad is a former Buddhist monk who lived in a retreat hut for six years and studied and practiced meditation full-time. He now has over twenty years of experience teaching meditation. Chad likes regularly
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