For the present, the comedy of existence has not
yet "become conscious" of itself. For the present,
we still live in the age of tragedy, the age of morality
and religions.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Laughing gas has been discovered at the center of our galaxy.
THE GRAB BAG
Ah Ha! Ha Ha! The universe did not begin with the Big Bang but with the Big Giggle (Guffaw, Chortle, Snicker…take your pick).
QUANTUM COYOTE
MAYBE "enlightenment" means waking up NOT ONLY to the non-duality of being BUT ALSO to the comedy, the Cosmic Joke of you being you.
This dreamstate we find ourselves in is both an infinite game and an elaborate improvisational fiction, first devised by the Source and then promptly forgotten - so as to make things "really" entertaining.
Prior to this realization, we are like actors on a stage, who forget that they are playing characters in a fictional drama, and take all the twists and turns of the plot - which can put them in hideous, as well as delightful, situations - seriously. Meanwhile, the audience is laughing its head off at - and at the same time deeply pitying - these poor souls on stage who do not realize that its all a play that will end sooner than they realize. The audience, in this case, is made up of those who have seen through the artifice - are awake to their status in The Game. Compassion is in order, of course, but still - the Cosmic Joke is apparent.
As Tom Armstrong put it in LAUGHING YOUR WAY TO ENLIGHTENMENT.
http://www.hundredmountain.com/Pages...laughing1.html Countin’ flowers on the wall. It don’t bother me at all/ Playin’ solitaire till dawn with a deck of fifty-one/ Smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’ Captain Kangeroo/ Don’t tell me I’ve nothin to do.
OLD STATLER BROS. SONG
THE SWEDENBORGIAN philosopher Wilson Van Dusen wrote in The Natural Depth in Man, “The purpose of creation is that the One playfully experience all its possibilities, so to speak, just to pass the time. Each individual is a possibility that leads back to the One.”
Scholar, writer and zenyk Ken Wilber in an interview in Pathways Magazine, titled “A Ticket to Athens” [reprinted at the Shambhala Publishers website], said much the same, in an elaborate answer to this question: “Why does Spirit bother to manifest at all, especially when that manifestation is necessarily painful and requires that It become amnesiac to Its true identity? Why does God incarnate?”
He said, “Here you are, the One and Only, the Alone and the Infinite. What are you going to do next? You bathe in your own glory for all eternity, you bask in your own delight for ages upon ages, and then what? Sooner or later, you might decide that it would be fun -- just fun -- to pretend that you were not you. I mean, what else are you going to do? What else can you do?”
He went on to say, “[it] is exactly the core of the answer given by the mystics the world over. If you are the One, and -- out of sheer exuberance, plenitude, superabundance -- you want to play, to rejoice, to have fun, then you must first, manifest the Many, and then second, forget it is you who are the Many. ...”
Perhaps, then, the ultimate cosmic joke is that we are here to laugh at our own ultimate cosmic joke. Like a troup of storytellers from the Decameron or Canterbury, we journey a pathway home, laughing at our strangely precious foibles and follies.
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee and I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
ROBERT FROST