The Day of Laughter
Posted: Jul 14th, 2008
Self-realization is not for sissies. Transformation comes at a cost. We may be shattered and freed by hardship – eventually – but the process requires a stomach for change. “A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything)” was T.S. Eliot’s way of saying what happens when we’re stripped and remade by twists of fate. Because this process is spiritual, it requires a mental turnaround (“conversion”) whose trials may seem counter-intuitive, even perverse, to our rational, self-preserving minds.
Practice teaches us, in spite of ourselves, that even the most destructive forces are harness-able to constructive ends; and that pain we would much prefer to avoid can be used as a kind of battering ram for unearthing the true and beautiful.
This yoga – which comes from the Sanskrit for “yoke” (in the ying-yang sense of yoking opposite forces) – can begin immediately.
“What is on the day of laughter is also now,” a teacher of mine used to say. This saint had lived for 50 years on a mountain in south India. “What is on the day of laughter is also now,” he would repeat to his students, tossing the words out lightly, rubbing a palm across the gray stubble covering his shaven head.
What did he mean by this, I would wonder? What laughter could he be referring to? Then his meaning finally dawned on me. He was describing the laugh of a buddha, the sudden guffaw that seizes a person when he realizes who and what he really is. Siddhartha, the prince-turned-Buddha laughed after discovering his own true nature at last, the story goes.
Sometime after his enlightenment, Siddhartha was strolling along a country road when a passerby stopped him to inquire why he was smiling with such quiet joy. Siddhartha did his best to demur.
“Are you a magician, sir?” the traveler asked.
“No,” the master answered.
“Are you a god?” the passerby tried again.
“No,” Siddhartha assured him.
“Then what can you be?” asked the stranger.
The Buddha replied, “I am awake.”
Plato called this anamnesis, remembering what and who we are, underneath the camouflage of our lives, beyond what can be taken away. “The look of your face before you were born,” as a Zen koan describes this hidden self; the essence, the soul, the nub of you which transcends your shifting circumstances.
We are not, indeed, what we appear to be: This is the lesson sages have expounded since the days of the earliest seers and shamans. When we glimpse our true identities, it does inspire laughter, apparently. Derek Wolcott describes this recognition in one of his most beautiful poems.
The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome,
And say, sit here, Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you
All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
When I visited India for the first time, I was a wreck, a refugee from the fast-track New York publishing life I’d coveted yet grown to dread. I was working for the pop artist Andy Warhol as an editor at “Interview” Magazine. Andy remains the most desolate person I have ever known, a genius without question but an alien figure on planet earth.
Several times a day, Andy would waft through my office trailing his vacuous atmosphere. He’d admitted once (after being shot in the abdomen by crazy fan, Valerie Solanis) that his emotional life had been gutted that day, leaving Andy to peer out at the flesh-and-blood world as if through a screen of a TV set. He infused the magazine offices with this same estranged, nihilistic chill.
On my last Christmas at Interview, the boss distributed presents to the staff. Weirdly, my gift from Andy was a white silk scarf painted with a black pyramid and lotus-seated figure, the words THE ONLY WAY OUT IS IN scrawled underneath in inked capital letters. Six months later, Andy was dead following complications from gall bladder surgery. He was only 59.
I was already in India by then, traveling with Andrew Harvey, an eccentric British friend who had been born in the twilight of the Raj near Connaught Circus in Delhi, where we were now sitting one evening after dinner.
A harvest moon hung low in the sky. The air was dusty, sweet and warm. We’d been smoking hash, which made it sweeter and Andrew, a professor and poet, was now holding forth in his trademark style (operatic monologue) on the subject that most compelled him – the loss of sacredness in the world. “Until people realize that all of this,“ Andrew swept up his hands to encompass the great, entropic, swirling mass of humanity, rickshaws, cows and sirens surrounding us on all sides, “until people actually realize that all of this is divine, every last inch of it, even the ugliest parts,” he said. “Till they finally move past the naïve idea that a world with God would be a world without suffering, a big Disneyland where everyone gets in for free,” Andrew declaimed, “they will not truly understand that suffering is here for a purpose.”
“And what, oh wizard, might that be?”
Andrew ignored me. “We spin and spin in our little cages without looking outside of them or even more deeply within,” he went on. “But if people took the time to look more deeply, if they dared to look underneath their masks, they would discover something that could change their lives forever.”
“Please tell me what you’re talking about.”
“They would discover their real face in the mirror.”
What real face? I thought to myself. Till that moment I had never considered that there might be a different ‘face’ to things of which I was wholly unaware, some secret, even-more-bona fide visage. But what if Andrew was right, I wondered, influenced by the hash and the moonlight? My friend was hyperbolic but also wise on subjects spiritual and mysterious. What if this thing we called ordinary life really was (at least in part) a case of mistaken identity? Something in his words struck a chord of truth and tintinnabulated inside me.
In time, I would come to discover that spiritual traditions across the board all put forth some version or other of this same strange realization: that we do not know ourselves, in essence; that our worldly masks are, in truth, a mere façade. During times of crisis in years to come, I found myself, to my great surprise, increasingly aware of this other face peering out at me through my physical eyes, seeing through my own mask, penetrating with questions.
It was impossible not to notice that this new awareness emerged in direct proportion to assaults on my ego.
This must be why the Buddha laughed: because nothing more could be taken from him. He recognized his own true face. He was liberated from craving and fear. He saw the freedom in letting go, the hidden reward of not looking backward. This freedom came at a price, of course; it comes at a cost for all of us. But considering the dividends, in self-knowledge, joy, and unshakable strength, as I would soon learn on my own uphill path, only a fool would refuse to pay it.
www.markmatousek.com [Excerpted from When You're Falling, Dive: Lessons in the Art of Living, just out from Bloomsbury Press, by Mark Matousek (pictured below). The Vancouver Observer will be publishing regular excerpts from Matousek's book.]
Practice teaches us, in spite of ourselves, that even the most destructive forces are harness-able to constructive ends; and that pain we would much prefer to avoid can be used as a kind of battering ram for unearthing the true and beautiful.
This yoga – which comes from the Sanskrit for “yoke” (in the ying-yang sense of yoking opposite forces) – can begin immediately.
“What is on the day of laughter is also now,” a teacher of mine used to say. This saint had lived for 50 years on a mountain in south India. “What is on the day of laughter is also now,” he would repeat to his students, tossing the words out lightly, rubbing a palm across the gray stubble covering his shaven head.
What did he mean by this, I would wonder? What laughter could he be referring to? Then his meaning finally dawned on me. He was describing the laugh of a buddha, the sudden guffaw that seizes a person when he realizes who and what he really is. Siddhartha, the prince-turned-Buddha laughed after discovering his own true nature at last, the story goes.
Sometime after his enlightenment, Siddhartha was strolling along a country road when a passerby stopped him to inquire why he was smiling with such quiet joy. Siddhartha did his best to demur.
“Are you a magician, sir?” the traveler asked.
“No,” the master answered.
“Are you a god?” the passerby tried again.
“No,” Siddhartha assured him.
“Then what can you be?” asked the stranger.
The Buddha replied, “I am awake.”
Plato called this anamnesis, remembering what and who we are, underneath the camouflage of our lives, beyond what can be taken away. “The look of your face before you were born,” as a Zen koan describes this hidden self; the essence, the soul, the nub of you which transcends your shifting circumstances.
We are not, indeed, what we appear to be: This is the lesson sages have expounded since the days of the earliest seers and shamans. When we glimpse our true identities, it does inspire laughter, apparently. Derek Wolcott describes this recognition in one of his most beautiful poems.
The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome,
And say, sit here, Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you
All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
When I visited India for the first time, I was a wreck, a refugee from the fast-track New York publishing life I’d coveted yet grown to dread. I was working for the pop artist Andy Warhol as an editor at “Interview” Magazine. Andy remains the most desolate person I have ever known, a genius without question but an alien figure on planet earth.
Several times a day, Andy would waft through my office trailing his vacuous atmosphere. He’d admitted once (after being shot in the abdomen by crazy fan, Valerie Solanis) that his emotional life had been gutted that day, leaving Andy to peer out at the flesh-and-blood world as if through a screen of a TV set. He infused the magazine offices with this same estranged, nihilistic chill.
On my last Christmas at Interview, the boss distributed presents to the staff. Weirdly, my gift from Andy was a white silk scarf painted with a black pyramid and lotus-seated figure, the words THE ONLY WAY OUT IS IN scrawled underneath in inked capital letters. Six months later, Andy was dead following complications from gall bladder surgery. He was only 59.
I was already in India by then, traveling with Andrew Harvey, an eccentric British friend who had been born in the twilight of the Raj near Connaught Circus in Delhi, where we were now sitting one evening after dinner.
A harvest moon hung low in the sky. The air was dusty, sweet and warm. We’d been smoking hash, which made it sweeter and Andrew, a professor and poet, was now holding forth in his trademark style (operatic monologue) on the subject that most compelled him – the loss of sacredness in the world. “Until people realize that all of this,“ Andrew swept up his hands to encompass the great, entropic, swirling mass of humanity, rickshaws, cows and sirens surrounding us on all sides, “until people actually realize that all of this is divine, every last inch of it, even the ugliest parts,” he said. “Till they finally move past the naïve idea that a world with God would be a world without suffering, a big Disneyland where everyone gets in for free,” Andrew declaimed, “they will not truly understand that suffering is here for a purpose.”
“And what, oh wizard, might that be?”
Andrew ignored me. “We spin and spin in our little cages without looking outside of them or even more deeply within,” he went on. “But if people took the time to look more deeply, if they dared to look underneath their masks, they would discover something that could change their lives forever.”
“Please tell me what you’re talking about.”
“They would discover their real face in the mirror.”
What real face? I thought to myself. Till that moment I had never considered that there might be a different ‘face’ to things of which I was wholly unaware, some secret, even-more-bona fide visage. But what if Andrew was right, I wondered, influenced by the hash and the moonlight? My friend was hyperbolic but also wise on subjects spiritual and mysterious. What if this thing we called ordinary life really was (at least in part) a case of mistaken identity? Something in his words struck a chord of truth and tintinnabulated inside me.
In time, I would come to discover that spiritual traditions across the board all put forth some version or other of this same strange realization: that we do not know ourselves, in essence; that our worldly masks are, in truth, a mere façade. During times of crisis in years to come, I found myself, to my great surprise, increasingly aware of this other face peering out at me through my physical eyes, seeing through my own mask, penetrating with questions.
It was impossible not to notice that this new awareness emerged in direct proportion to assaults on my ego.
This must be why the Buddha laughed: because nothing more could be taken from him. He recognized his own true face. He was liberated from craving and fear. He saw the freedom in letting go, the hidden reward of not looking backward. This freedom came at a price, of course; it comes at a cost for all of us. But considering the dividends, in self-knowledge, joy, and unshakable strength, as I would soon learn on my own uphill path, only a fool would refuse to pay it.
www.markmatousek.com [Excerpted from When You're Falling, Dive: Lessons in the Art of Living, just out from Bloomsbury Press, by Mark Matousek (pictured below). The Vancouver Observer will be publishing regular excerpts from Matousek's book.]
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Mark Matousek
