The Cosmic Joke
Obviously, lots of very unfunny events take place daily on this planet. Multiple wars are underway, which are always reliable causes of variously horrible and/or sad events. People being people, various other smaller scale crimes that cause various levels of harms occur daily.
But if you keep up your consistent meditation practice long enough, you may find yourself grinning from ear to ear for no apparent reason.
You may start to see the perversity of humans routinely accting in ways that keep them stuck in samsara, the seemingly endless round of rebirths that does end with awakening. You will see how you do this to yourself and laugh at yourself.
He’s not being cruel when he talks about the vaious horribles going on in the world in one breath and laughs in the next breath, but Ajahn Sumedho does that routinely. He reminisces about his university days when he was a peace activist in a movement that was not very peaceful.
The point of awakening is transcendence. Transcendence means wht is beyond ordinary human experience, which is not the best definition because the Buddha focused enntirely on objects and events that are part of daily human experience, but the point is that any of us is capable of awakening without any divine or metaphysical inntervention.
Awakening is trascendent in giving us an entirely new perspective on our lives and experience. As Ajahn Sumedho says constantly now, all of our thoughts, our language, our reality, is a human creation. It is a good Buddhist paradox — minute, meditative attention to what we experience every day can take us totally beyond that experience and see the world in an entirely new way.
The wars, crimes, and other horrible events are all human creations, self inflicted at the global level. We just need to stop. That’s the cosmic joke. You’re not being dismissive or cruel when you grin or laugh during your meditation practice.
You’re just starting to get the cosmic joke. So meditate, grin, and laugh.
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