Every few months I think back on my time with the Rama guy, and every time I do, I find myself thank- ful for something he taught me that was unique, something I haven't really seen that often on the spiritual smorgabord. One of these unique teachings was about the healing power of laughter.
"What," you say? "That's not unique...there have been lots of spiritual teachers who taught about the healing power of laughing. There have even been scientific studies about the healing power of laughing." While this may be true, I wasn't talking about the healing power of laughing. I was talking about the healing power of being laughed at. Whatever else you may say about the Rama cult, we laughed a lot. At Rama's jokes, at the movies we'd go see together, in the desert, at home...laughter was a big thing in the Rama trip. And one of the things we got used to laughing at -- and to having it *be* laughed at -- was our self. Selves (small s) were "fair game" for laughter in the Rama trip. If you had an ego on you, it was going to be laughed at and made the butt of jokes, often in front of hundreds of other people. That was one of Rama's techniques for wearing away the hold that egos had on his students -- make fun of them and laugh at them. Not at the students, mind you. Only at their egos. And the egos cringed when laughed at. They felt a twinge of resentment or anger at being laughed at. But, possibly because the attention levels were so high while this laughter was going on, something would "snap" and you'd realize that all these people laughing at you were *right*, and that the machin- ations of your ego in this case *were* laughable, and the damnedest thing would happen. You'd find yourself laughing along with the people laughing at you. And I have to tell you, that's one of the neatest spiritual experiences I think you can have. Because the being laughing at his own ego is no longer that ego. Something has happened to shift one's identification with that ego, to knock it out of place enough so that one can see it for what it really is, and laugh at it. It's a real Castanedan shift-your-assemblage-poing experience. When someone makes fun of you, if their intent is clean, what they're doing is making *fun*. They're creating a kind of koan-like doorway into a world that is more *fun* than the one you're in now. They are saying to you, "Dude...you're so *serious*, and over such mediocre shit. Lighten UP, and join the party." And if you can get this, you really *can* join the party. There are few things in life more liberating than getting to that point where you can laugh at your self. The very process of doing so seems to loosen the hold that that self has on the inner you, the one that would be laughing most of the time if that oh-so-serious self weren't in the way. Laughing at your self knocks it out of the way, and what is left is the eternal laughter of Self. In my experience, I think I learned more from and benefited more from those moments in which I was able to laugh at my own assholiness than I ever did from all that talk about holiness.
