"Maybe God has a sense of fun"
HUMOR (as the bodily confession of God), from Adi Da
The other night some of us were sitting together and I jokingly said to our friend Vince: "Some time tonight, how about talking to us about God?" Then we had a little dinner, and I said, "Well, Vince, are you about ready to talk to us about God?" I let it go for awhile, and then I finally asked him definitely to start talking about God. And he had nothing to say. So I asked each person in the room to say something about God. And not only did nobody have anything to say, but everybody began to get very serious and quiet. I pointed out to them that last week, when we had a party, everyone laughed, had some wine, and all of that was considered an amusement. But now, when I asked them to talk about God, they got very serious. I began to speak to them about this:
"The fundamental embarrassment is the confession of God. It is to dwell in obvious ecstasy in the company of other beings, to be already free, to be fundamentally happy, to be conscious in God, and even to be outwardly expressive in that state, to speak of God, to think of God, to act in God, to be ecstatic. That is the taboo, not mere drunkenness and mortal confessions of pleasure and suffering, which mean nothing. To require it of a man to talk of God makes him feel embarrassed. He becomes ashamed. Because in order to talk about God, he must lose face. To be extraordinarily and unreasonably happy and to live that way embarrasses him. To be full of love and only talk that way, so foolishly, so naively, is socially unacceptable. We are supposed to be cool and hip and straight, oriented toward our survival, worldly and wise. But to be simply alive in God and happy, and to speak about it and act that way and think that way, is absolutely unwanted and not allowed. So we become seekers.
"It is all right to seek God. That is acceptable enough, because it calms everybody down a little bit, it makes them go out and get jobs and not kill their neighbors. So it is all right to seek God. But to realize God while alive is the absolute taboo. You might be allowed to sit quietly and meditatively. Everybody likes all this Oriental meditation because it is just a matter of being quiet and inward. You are allowed to meditate on the Self, realize Nirvana and disappear. That is acceptable. But to start talking about God, to think God, to act God, to make the Divine the present Condition of the world, to live in that Siddhi or Power, to live that Light, to be full, that is unacceptable, that is not permitted. As soon as you do it you begin to become unusable. You can't be exploited any more and you can't be embarrassed anymore. You cease to be concerned for the taboos of men, and their rules, their seeking.
"A cultic object is allowed to be Divine in this world, a conventional Guru is allowed to be Divine, a God in a book is allowed to be Divine, all kinds of fetishes are allowed to be Divine, but you are not allowed to be Divine! You are allowed to worship cultic objects and assume them to be Divine, but you cannot become Divine. You are expected to seek, to control yourself and seek, and always look forward to the Second Coming or the crash through the sahasrar or something. But in this moment you are not permitted to be happy. It is taboo. It is taboo to be already happy. You must seek happiness.
"To seek to find God, to seek to be realized, why does that seem so obvious to you, so reasonable? Because you are only reasonable. You have ceased to be unreasonable. You have ceased to live in your fundamental and prior Condition, which is enjoyment, bliss, happiness, fullness in which everything is justified, in which all functional conditions are justified and eternally free.
"You also imagine that the Divine withdraws universally and actually as a result of human sin and other such mythological defects in the world. But the Divine has never withdrawn. The Divine has never withdrawn from the world or from a single living being. That has never happened, and it never will happen, because the Divine is the always present Source of the world, the always present Nature, Condition and Sustainer of the world, and the absolute Destiny of the world. The Divine is infinitely Present, perfectly, absolutely and eternally Present, and available. The Divine must be lived, not sought. The Divine is the Condition of the world, not the ultimate hope of the world. There is no hope whatsoever. If the Divine is not presently lived, there is no Second Coming, no Millennium, no Revelation, no Liberation, no Nirvana. But if men began to live the Truth, if men became capable of ecstasy in society with one another, not simply in the rituals of privacy, you would see a vast and immediate transformation of the world."
After I had said a few things like that, I again asked everybody to talk about God. I said, "I am going to suggest a title for a story. I will begin it, and then each of you continue the story in turn." We did that, we went around once or twice, and it became obvious to everybody how unimaginative and dry and really stupid it was. Nobody was saying anything with any energy. It was hardly even amusing. So I said, "Well, let's do it again, but this time you are to speak ecstatically. You are not to think about what you are going to say first, you are just to keep speaking." So we started going around like that, and each one would try to think and try to not think. It got to be a little looser. It came around to me again, and I made up a nonsense poem and I sang it a little bit. Then we went around a couple of more times. Finally, we got to Marie and really worked her over, and Marie really started to sing. Then nearly everyone in the room began one at a time to sing ecstatically, crazily, about God. We were all clapping and shouting, praising God. It was just nonsense singing, ecstatic singing, happy singing.
All that was just a way of communicating something of the humor of spiritual life. It is basically humorous and happy. Not uptight and straight, lean and serious, waiting to understand. Understanding is an instant process, a really intelligent process, a happy process, not one of meditating on your own limitations, but a process of instantly transcending them in Reality. There is, of course, a relatively disciplined phase of the life of understanding, but as it matures it becomes more and more full, more and more ecstatic.
I have reminded you several times that there is a phase of my spiritual work in which I want to communicate the Teaching, and the appropriate life conditions, and create the Community, but there will come a time when I am essentially going to be finished with that, and I am no longer going to be concerned to create any images whatsoever or to make any sense at all. There literally will come a time when I no longer care to make sense. At least I will no longer accept it as a continuous responsibility. And I am just going to enjoy myself. The land we have just purchased in northern California will give me a place to do that, a place where the Ashram as a whole can do that, where the Ashram Community can live and have the refuge for its own life.
Once the Teaching and the Community are fundamentally established, the "reasonable" aspect of my function will be fulfilled. Just so, your own spiritual lives must also be fulfilled, in the Ashram, the Community of all my devotees. You must realize the mature phase of this work and become simply and unreasonably happy in the body. Not only in your room, not only in silence, but even verbally and dramatically. The time will come when you will be converted from your cultic and cultural ways and become unusable again, and only happy, and at that time you will have to make your peace with the rest of the world in order to make your living, to make your appearance. But you will be without concerns and without any more dues to pay. You will no longer be embarrassed by the demand to speak about God. You won't much care to do anything else.
That game that we played the other night, telling a story and then singing about it, it was just that, a game, a way of instructing. It is not that to speak of God you must only babble incoherently. That game was only a way of bringing people to realize, through instruction, the quality of their relationship to speech, to action, and to their own minds. When that realization has taken place, all speech becomes already ecstatic. And in the man of understanding there is no non-ecstatic speech, no action that is not full of ecstasy, no moment, no condition, no thought that is not already merged in God.
FROM: Garbage and the Goddess
So, AJ I would join you in the suggestion that God is
humorous and joyful, not uptight and buttoned-down.
Namaste!
Jim |
