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Laughter is the Best Medicine

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Email: robert@sirlaffsalot.com

FAVORITE QUOTES

Cat Stevens’ Peace Train

The past is all memory

The future is all imagination

The Now is all powerful Robert Smith

“Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritation and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.”

 Mark Twain

“Good humor is one of the preservatives of our peace and tranquility”

 Thomas Jefferson

Understanding the nature of life has value. I was standing on my lawn wondering why a Frisbee gets bigger as it gets closer, and then it hit me. Robert Smith

“Children are natural Zen masters; their world is brand new in each and every moment.”

 John Bradshaw

“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”

 Alan Watts

PART I

Start Here Now

The Unraveling

A Zen monk and his novice assistant were traveling, walking together through the forest from one monastery to another. They stopped to have lunch. The novice asked the master. “How do I enter Zen?” He was asking about the state of Being which is Zen, the peaceful, joyful state of Being One with Life.

The master did not speak for a long time. The novice’s mind was spinning. He was trying to uncover the mystery of Zen by thinking about it. He was worrying about why the master was not answering.

Finally the master said, “Do you hear that distant mountain stream?” The novice had not heard a stream. He was too busy thinking about Zen. Eventually, as he began to listen more intently, and his mind became quiet, he heard the faint murmur of a distant mountain stream.

“I hear it! I hear it!” He said with quiet amazement.  The master smiled, looked at him and said “Enter Zen from there!”

The novice’s whole world shifted. He was elevated by the beauty of everything around him. A quiet Joy and Peace filled him as it had not done in the same forest only moments before. They walked on in a peaceful aliveness. After some time the young man’s mind started to analyze his experience. He was again entranced by an endless stream of thoughts in his head; the beauty and grace of life were lost to him once more, though he hadn’t realized it. Eventually, he got up his nerve to ask the master another question. “Master, I thought of another question. What would you have said if I had not heard the distant stream?”

The master looked at him both kindly and sternly and said, “Enter Zen from there.”

The only time to begin is now and there will never be a better starting place.

Start Here Now.

The past is all memory

The future is all imagination

The Present is All Powerful

The Present is the portal. Denying this – denying the Present - is denying yourself, because the Present is Life and you are one with Life. You may hide from Life in a dream of thoughts or in an imaginary future or in memories of the past, but these are no better than hiding in a game of hide and seek by covering your eyes with your hands.

Accepting the Present – as it is – is your ticket on the Peace Train. It is the door of unlimited potential. It is the Way. The resistance you feel to accepting the present is what you must overcome to get on board the Peace Train.

The past and future are just seats in the waiting room at the train station. Sitting there remembering the past, waiting for the time when things will be like that again, or waiting for the time when your life will really get started, will never get you where you want to be.

The important truth here is that where you need to be, is where you are now.

And… it will always be so.

And… it may often feel like something is wrong or missing or not quite right, until you turn and embrace the present.

It is only your resistance to where you are now that separates you – in your perception – from the Oneness you seek. The actual Oneness is always the reality here and now, ready for you to open to it. Confusion arises when one seeks one’s true essence outside of oneself, simply because it cannot be found there. What we seek is our Being. We are human beings. The human aspect, the physical form as it were, is obvious. But our Being is that less tangible part of us that is calling out to us. It is the essence of Life that wants communion with itself, with the rest of Life through you.

BEING, (as opposed to doing or thinking), is the destiny you have been seeking or waiting for. (Seeking is never successful – it is an activity that does not end in satisfaction – unlike finding. Waiting will also never reach fulfillment. It is not an activity – it is postponement.)

I am a conductor yelling “All Aboard!”

The only place you can ever start from is here, where you are now. You cannot prepare for this journey. You cannot accumulate frequent failure miles, future earnings, or clever strategies to help you. They will all add nothing but wait.

You cannot accrue enough wait to buy a start. And you cannot ever have screwed things up so badly that you cannot begin now.  So, why not start here now?

“How do I start now?” Accept everything the way it is now.

The notion that your life will really get going for you when what you perceive around you matches the imaginary model in your head, is what is keeping you and the novice monk from enjoying, and participating wholly in the beauty that is Now. And it is a strategy that will never work.

Breathe deeply. Breathe consciously. Breathe down into your tummy. Follow your breath in your nose, down into your tummy and back out. Follow it again.

As you’re breathing, allow everything to be as it is – or as the Beatles said, “Let it be”. Let this be. Relax into it. It is a great release of stress. Just let go of any need to do anything, fix anything, change anything, fight anything or find anything. (This does not mean you can never work for change. More on that later.)

Take in where you are without judgment.

Listen with alert attention to all you can hear, allowing all the sounds to be ok, whether they are pleasant or unpleasant, man made or natural.

If feelings come up, allow them to be. Allow them to be and they may just drift through you, like smoke through a screen. If they linger longer, allow them to be. By staying present with them, you are actually reclaiming your power from them. Staying present with them means watching the thoughts and feelings come and go without getting caught up in them, like the novice monk got caught up in his thoughts.

Look at them as thoughts and feelings and see that you do not have to identify with them. Your job is to BE the Awareness that observes the thinking; as you see the thoughts and feelings passing by, you get that they are not you. The more you practice Presence, the more alive, healthier and happier you will become. Allowing things to be as they are is the first and most vital step in coming fully into your Being.

As the bad guy in the movie says, “Resistance is futile.”

What he hasn’t said is, “It’s also the cause of your suffering.”

As you surrender to everything the way it appears now, you are actually surrendering all “your problems”.  Want to keep your problems? Just keep dwelling on them, fretting over them the way you have been. It’s your attention that keeps them alive. The paradox is that acceptance deflates them. This is what I call the unraveling. It’s unraveling the web of thoughts that binds you, that limits you, that blinds you to your freedom, which is always Here in the Now - available to you when you turn to it.

We have slept under the illusion that we are small, separate, weak little me’s, like caterpillars thinking they are worms. But the truth is that we are One with the Wholeness of all that is seen and all that is unseen.

Gangster: “I’m telling you judge, it’s all a case of mistaken identity.”

We have come to identify with the incessant stream of thoughts through our heads as what we are. Thoughts, like a dense web of confining fibers have insulated us from our true powerful nature. That cocoon may have been part of our development, and as such may have felt natural, even sometimes safe and familiar, but we are ultimately destined to free ourselves from this dark womb and make the evolutionary leap into ownership of our higher nature.

This shift of identification from the “little me” to Oneness, involves releasing ourselves, our attention, from the limiting web of thoughts that hypnotizes and enslaves us – this is the unraveling.

The unraveling is a process. Awakening, the notion, realization, or glimpse of yourself as something more than a bundle of thoughts, may happen spontaneously. But the unraveling usually takes place over time. Some have called this process embodiment, meaning to embody the greater part of your nature, which you have not been aware of. The unraveling is the Awareness of Life - your true nature - replacing the pain and confusion of the ego, the false self. Awareness/Consciousness is becoming aware of itself in form, through form – the human form.

The ego, with its incessant streams of thought, with its core insecurity, its bottomless pit of fear where your soul should be, diminishes as Awareness increases - as the healing Wholeness takes root, finding greater expression through you.

The case of mistaken identity, is us thinking we are that small separate little ego. Thinking in itself is not really a problem, it’s our identifying with the thinking that is what we must now unravel. The immense stresses that we experience today are not from the boss’s attitude, or the hellish commute – these things are all symptoms of the same underlying cause of mistaken identity. The fundamental loneliness, alienation, insecurity and fear that the ego fosters individually, all manifest in the insanity of our civilization on the macro scale. Like a quick glimpse of the collective insanity? Watch the evening news for a few minutes.

Feelings are generated by thoughts. Thoughts trigger feelings. In cannibalistic cultures, eating someone’s head could be a prize. In other cultures, the thought of that same act would bring up very strong feelings. Our thoughts about how things should be, set up the models where by our emotions can get triggered. When you are feeling badly, check in to what you were thinking and you will see that some thought pattern hypnotized you into giving it your full attention – thus feeding it – evoking these feelings of depression, anger or whatever.

By catching those patterns as they drag you in and then realizing that the greater Awareness growing in you has seen it – as opposed to being so caught up in it that you did not even know it was happening - you are making progress.

As feelings come up, be present with them. Watch them. Allow them to be. Don’t make yourself wrong for feeling anger, jealousy, etc, just allow it to be without getting caught up in it. The feelings can be very potent, but you can handle it. Allowing them to be – without reacting to them – is a way of unraveling them. They can be like the annoying vacuum cleaner salesman coming to your door. You can’t force him to stay away, but each time you decline to buy in, you diminish his incentive to return. Eventually, he will have no energy left to knock on your door. But you need only remember that allowing in the present moment, is your freedom now. The future will take care of itself.

Mistaken identity: you are not the thinker. Thinking happens. You are the Awareness that is Aware of the thinking. As your Awareness grows you will see that thoughts pass through your Awareness and you have a choice about giving them your attention. Optimally, thinking is simply a tool to be used when needed and then put away, like memory, like imagination. These are all tools in your tool bag as a human being. They will serve you when you need to imagine how a design you are working on will function with this or that feature, what clothes your child will need to start school in the fall, to remember which time of year you have always fertilized the fruit trees.

Wouldn’t it be silly to get hung up thinking you are your hammer? But this is what we have been doing.

Most of us have played the game of Monopoly at least once. At the start, you must sort out which playing pieces will represent you on the game board. You don an identity for the game. “I wanna be the race car.”  “I will be the iron.”  It’s all very clear that it’s just a game.

But isn’t it interesting how caught up we can get into the game. Some people will even have to be told, “It’s only a game”. You can feel pretty bad when someone takes all “Your” hotels and real estate. People lose track of the “reality”, that they are in a room playing a game with worthless plastic houses and monopoly money. It can feel so real, so important.

Dreaming offers another way of glimpsing our capacity for “getting lost” in thinking. One could also say getting caught up, or seduced, entranced, hypnotized – all meaning totally identified with a thought form.

When you are dreaming, you may be appearing in the dream as another character or as yourself. Either way, the dream is a fiction, but you are so lost in the dream, that you are at that time completely unaware of the fact that it’s a dream. At that moment you are completely identified with the character and are totally seduced by the fictional story of the dream.

Identification with one’s thoughts, (replete with gobs of back story), in the waking state, can be just as complete as when we are dreaming. We walk around acting out as if we are the person our thoughts tell us we are, when we are infinitely more! We have bought into the whole fictional identity of the ego, (a bundle of thought forms), as being who we are. Indeed the dream metaphor is often used to illustrate the predicament of this state, calling it asleep, and salvation from it: awakening.

Other terms for the unaware state you may have heard: hell, unconscious, illusion, maya, etc. For the awakened state: Heaven, (which Jesus said “Is in the midst of you”), Paradise, Nirvana, Moksha, Liberation, Enlightenment, Realization, Freedom, etc.

What has looked supernatural in legend and religious tradition is in fact the next step, this step, in human evolution. And as such it is both revelatory and quite natural. It represents an evolutionary leap, like when scaly, crawling lizards leapt into the air and became birds. OK, OK, so we are not quite that scaly and that didn’t happen overnight – this too is a process that will benefit from the cushion of time.

So, if we are not the sum total of the thoughts in our heads and what they say about who we are, then who are we?

We are part of the Totality of Life: beautiful, endlessly variegated expressions of the One. We are One with all that is, both that which can be seen and that which cannot be seen. In other words, the Totality is both the invisible, raw unarticulated potential and it is the many, more solid looking forms into which it manifests as things we can see around us. Whether, it is organized into forms or sitting silently, invisibly as that pool of potential that we can call upon, it is all One.

We are an aspect of the Totality manifesting as this human form. While all forms are such expressions of the Totality in its myriad shapes, what makes this point in our evolution significant, is that we are becoming Aware of ourselves as expressions of the Totality. We represent the unique aspect of the Totality that is becoming Aware of itself in form. Awareness aware of itself; Consciousness conscious of itself in form. This represents a paradigm shift in Consciousness on our planet.

As Conscious human beings we will continue to walk the planet as individuals. We will have varying tastes, talents, etc, but we will be aware of our essential Oneness.  Aware of our Oneness, we will not be driven by the core insecurities of the ego. Conscious beings are Aware of their uniqueness on the level of form and at the same time their deep connection to the source of infinite Creativity, Beauty, Joy, Prosperity and Peace leaves them so secure in the validity of Being, that they feel no need to dominate, to prove themselves, to diminish any other expression. Supporting, appreciating and affirming the expression of others is natural to them.

It may be that a different sort of future is in store for the planet when a critical number of humans become Conscious, but let’s remember the only Way forward is the Present. The future will take care of itself.

Right now our job number one is the unraveling. Job may not be the best word, because to release all the pain, confusion, alienation, fear, fragmentation and stress we have been living with is a very positive thing on the individual level and the planetary plane. Letting these things go is a tremendous relief.

Replacing them with Peace, Joy, Prosperity, Creativity, and Connectedness is an extraordinary healing. And it can be a whole lot of fun, which is where this book comes in. Humor has a profound transformative quality that will make this process even more enjoyable. Laughter is very good medicine on many levels. And as Joy is a fundamental aspect of the New Consciousness, and as such calls out like the piper, it will help heal the entire planet as it ripples through the undercurrent of Life on Earth. We are contributing to the transformation of the Whole as we undertake our own healing with Humor.

The game of improv has rules. It also requires learning certain skills. Playing the various games within the game of improv is great fun and that alone would make writing this book worthwhile. But the real value lies in the fact that these rules and skills, which you’ll learn in this book and in the Zen and the Art of Comedy Improv Workshops, apply directly to the unraveling in your life.

This training allows you – in real time - to experience direct connection to the infinite Source of all Humor, Creativity, Peace, Joy, Prosperity, and Health. And it supports you in embodying the Awakening Presence, and freeing yourself from limiting thoughts and conditioning.

As a process, the unraveling does take time. You may forestall the inevitable tide of your personal evolution for a while, but you will only be prolonging your suffering, so I ask you; why not start here now?

PART II

The Rules of the Game

The Game of Improv, The Game of Life

1) Start Here Now

2) Just Say YES

3) Trust

4) Conscious Listening

5) Sin and Safety

6) Be Here Now, Be Happy Now

7) Forget Yourself

8) Always Mine, Never Mind

9. 9)Action! Just Do It.
   

Chapter One

Start Here Now

As we have just read in Part l, postponement is merely an avoidance tactic. In improv, there is no script. Come to think of it I haven’t been able to find a printed script for my life either. In improv you have no plan, no script and when you are a trained pro, no thoughts about what you will do next. Sound scary?

You may think it’s a scary idea now, but if you are like most who get into improv, you will grow to love the exhilaration that comes from finding the words, the action, and the story unfolding as if from out of nowhere. Well actually, that is exactly where they’ll come from.

Imagine yourself as a highly trained commando dropped behind enemy lines with no weapons, or communications gear. Your mission is to blend with the scene on the ground and ultimately make your way to uncovering the enemy’s plans for attack. You have your training and nothing else. Circumstances may call upon you to be a postal worker one morning, a waiter that evening, a bank executive the following day. In other words, your identity is whatever it needs to be in a given moment. You are no one and you could be anyone.

Here, in this book/workshop, you will get your training and part of it is: Forget everything you think about who you are and fly by your wits. Learn to trust your instincts. When does your mission start? Now. How much prep time do you have? None.

Your middle name is resourceful. Wherever the scene is, take it from there. Use what ever you have – no matter how scant. You start with what you have.

Now imagine you are the improv commando. You and a fellow player are called up on stage. The audience has just provided you with all the information you will get about your mission. Who you are, where you are, and what you’re doing.

You are two construction workers working on the stage, when you get surprised by the rising curtain. There you are in front of 5,000 people, the lights are up, the music is playing and ballerinas are now flitting all about in fairy outfits.

What do you do? Well, you start. Start what? Well there are probably many options. Me, I would start dancing. See, it’s not that hard. Then what? Go with whatever happens. Your partner may be looking shy and stiff. You start showing him how to do ballet. He could then get so into it, that your efforts to make your way to the side of the stage and exit this embarrassing situation are thwarted by him hamming it up, thinking he’s now the new Baryshnakov in a tool belt. There, you’ve just found your way through a scene and it had a story, a conflict and a lot of humorous action.

You and a fellow player are given a scene in a dentist’s office. What do you do? Well, you will sit down and the other will put his hand in your mouth and then ask you stupid questions.

Start with what you have. Take it from there. Have you ever been down a real dark country road at night - the kind with no street lamps? Your head lights will illuminate a certain distance ahead - maybe 100 feet - but you cannot see further than that. But it’s OK, because as you continue, the subsequent 100 foot stretch of road gets illuminated. And so you go. Let go of the need to see the end of the road, the outcome. Let go of the need to force a particular outcome. Just allow it to unfold. Listen carefully to the clues that are being made available. Stay alert, and present. Pay attention to everything going on around you. Sound like Life? You betcha.

Homework

Make a list of three to five things you’ve been wanting to do, but that you’ve been putting off for whatever reason. They could be fun things or household chores or writing that Aunt in Chicago a letter. Look at the list carefully, and then crumple it up and throw it away and forget it. Now when, in the coming days, the opportunity arises to address one of those items, just start to work on it. Don’t try and see the whole thing completed or worry too much about how much progress you will make, or how it will come out. Just start here now with one of them and follow your nose – as if going down that dark country road, and allow it to show you what comes next. Have fun! Report in next week.