Laughter vs Ego — Spiritual Practice for Real Life

Three years ago I was broke, sharing an apartment with scorpions, and couldn't see a way forward. Then I discovered that laughter—the real, spontaneous kind—can be a powerful spiritual practice.

In this episode we explore why ego and humor can't coexist, and how laughing at yourself transforms everything from meditation to life's hardest moments.

What we cover:

• The scorpion story and the spiritual breakthrough that followed
• Why heaviness is "spiritual death" and lightness is life
• How to spot the cosmic joke in your own struggles
• Ancient wisdom on softness vs. rigidity in spiritual practice
• The line between toxic positivity and genuine humor

Featuring G.K. Chesterton's idea of "divine delight," Taoist wisdom on yielding over forcing, and practical ways to bring levity to real-world challenges.

If spirituality has started to feel heavy, this is your permission to lighten up without losing depth.

Chapters

• 0:05 Introduction - The Depressing State of Spirituality
• 2:40 Rock Bottom in Gilbert - The Mosquito & Scorpion Infestation
• 12:32 The Breakthrough - Learning to Laugh
• 15:07 The Cosmic Joke - Finding Humor in Absurdity
• 18:41 Gravity vs. Levity - The Lightness of Being
• 20:04 Seeing the Divine in Everything
• 24:00 Back to the Future - Transcending the Ego
• 29:36 Practical Wisdom - Applying Laughter to Life
• 33:58 Closing - Divine Delight & Eternal Infancy

Transcript

Jacob: 0:00

Yeah! Well I tell you what! We done turned spirituality into the most depressing thing since my Uncle Earl's funeral. We got yogis meditating on clouds, thinking about kale, preachers looking sadder than a possum in traffic. But shoe, I figured it out with mosquitoes biting me, and some scorpions, and without two nickels to rub together. And you know what I did? I just laughed my ass off, and everything changed. So stick around. We gonna talk about why enlightenment is basically just learning to chill the hell out. My eagles. How did you guys like that intro? Did that make anybody laugh? I sure hope so, because I put a little time into it. And it's actually the center point of the episode, really, is laughter. I want to talk about humor because humor I heard somewhere referred to as spiritual carbonation or carbonated spirituality. And it's true. Oftentimes on the spiritual path or just life in general, uh, we we take things too serious. We forget to remember that life is meant to be enjoyed, and we frame things from a certain paradigm that make things heavy. And that was my life three years ago, almost four years ago. When I first moved to Arizona, I was in a pretty dark state. I had nothing, I didn't have two nickels to rub together. My mom said that we could live with her until we found a place. So that was about three months living with mom. Hadn't lived with her in a long time. All my stuff was in storage. Wife and I were sleeping in the living room. You know, kids were, I mean, it was intense. I had to figure out how to reliably earn income again because in Las Vegas, I had been an Uber and a Lyft driver for about four years almost, and I was earning money pretty consistently there, which was easy in Vegas because the people that would come in and out, you know, kept me busy and the city wasn't very big. But Phoenix, it's a huge metro, and I could end up an hour away from the kids when they got out of school, and that's uh that wouldn't work for us. So I had to figure out a way to do deliveries locally, and I did, and the income was great. Long story short, I was able to earn money, but it was just enough to survive because the cost of living started to go into the um outer stratosphere. Uh, we were paying $2,400 a month at this apartment complex that we eventually moved into in Gilbert, Arizona. And the place was insane. You know, for $2,400 a month, we are paying a premium price. Paying a premium price, say that three times fast. Um, I'm getting distracted today, but we were paying so much money and the place was infested with scorpions and mosquitoes. So my wife and I, when we would come home, it was a nightmare. Or if you wanted to leave the house, because as soon as you open the door, a ton of mosquitoes would fly into your house. So we had this method where we would leave an electrical racket outside. It was like it looked like a tennis racket with an electrical grid where you can kind of wave it through the air and zap all the mosquitoes. So every time we come home, we'd have to wave that racket around and kill these darn mosquitoes, you know, and we'd leave incense outside the doorway to try to get rid of them. When I'd come home with groceries from Costco, I'd have to call the wife and say, Hey, I'm almost home. Get ready. She'd crack the door open just barely and put like a little incense stick out there to let it kind of marinate in the air and get rid of them. I mean, it was nuts. The worst part wasn't also the mosquitoes, but the scorpions. We had an infestation of scorpions at this apartment complex. And the management never seemed to care. Like we would we would go to the office and tell them, and we'd show them pictures, and they never cared. They'd send out this very generic guy with a little tin can, little spray can, and he'd just spray, but it didn't do anything at all to these scorpions. It got so bad we would start seeing them in the house quite frequently, and it was starting to really impact our mental health because these are bark scorpions, which we Googled, and they are the most venomous scorpion in North America. And it turns out Phoenix, Arizona is the headquarters, the central hub for all bark scorpions in the North uh in the uh North American continent. You could go Google me on that, but I'm pretty sure that's correct. At any rate, there was tons of them. And one day we saw one as we were getting ready for school, and these things blend in so well. If you don't have an ultraviolet light, they're almost invisible to your eyes. And we were getting ready for school and we saw something moving on the carpet, and we were like, what is that? And we looked really close and we finally saw it was a scorpion. And um, I was able to kill it by jumping on it with my shoe, but it took a couple of jumps, like digging in with my heel. And even after they're dead, they can subconsciously still sting you, so you have to be really careful handling them. And one day I was I was done with work, and my wife calls me up and she says, Babe, babe, babe. And I'm like, Yes, yes, yes, what is it? And I'm at the grocery store and she's like, I got bit. I'm like, what? You got bit by what? And she tells me she got bit by a scorpion, so I rush home. We kill the thing by throwing a uh cutting board on it, and I jumped with all my weight on the cutting board on the scorpion, still didn't kill it. So we had to use these tongs to get rid of it. And um, my wife, she got bit twice on her finger, and her whole arm went completely numb. She could not move her hand, she could barely move her arm at the elbow and shoulder, and her face, the left side of her face, went numb as well. So we go to the ER because we're panicking. We've never experienced a scorpion sting before. We don't know how serious it is. And we get there and the guy's like, oh yeah, that happens all the time. Yeah, oh yeah, uh, no problem. Yeah. It was like 600 bucks, but it was just a terrible experience. And knowing that our apartment was just infested with these scorpions, you know, it did not make life easy. Not to mention, every time we get home, there's a swarm of mosquitoes sitting on our doorway. So we my strategy when we would come home is I would clap my hands really loud because that would stir them all off the doorway. So they'd just kind of float around it. And then I'd start waving the electric racket around and you hear it as it's zapping all these things. So this whole first year in Gilbert, we basically had a bug infestation, no internet for the ability to play video games. And this was right around the time I had that breakdown that I talked spoke about in the first episode, because everything was just so crazy. And this is another side of it that I didn't really go into detail on in that episode, but I wanted to bring this up because it it's it was just such a heavy, serious point in my life. I mean, even taking time off, I want to pause here and explain to you guys. Like, I was working and I still am crazy hours at this time dealing with mosquitoes, dealing with scorpions, dealing with extreme bills, you know, paying $2,400 a month for a subpar apartment with thin walls, infestation, terrible internet, couldn't game like I used to. And I just had this breakdown where all the material things that I was used to and uh living without investation, it was like all these things were just flipped upside down. So not only was I struggling with my rent, but there was like the knowledge that everybody around me, all my neighbors were struggling to pay their rent too. And I started to really get dark in my head about it, like, man, what kind of di dystopia are we living in today? You know, and I I'm one of my neighbors, he was like a new father in his 20s, um, with like two kids. He's working two jobs just to barely survive. You know, I and I saw myself in him like 10, 15 years prior with that optimism, and I realized I was like losing my optimism in life, you know? And it was around this time that I started practicing spiritually, started to first time ever in my life, started to meditate, sit on a cushion, and just try to to um create a space within myself where I could really contemplate what I was experiencing. And it was intense. I mean, even during meditation sessions, I would constantly fear that a mosquito was like landing on me. And um anytime we had people come over, we would have um those electric rackets inside the house too. And we would tell people in advance, like, when we open the door, you got to come right in really quickly because there's mosquitoes. And then we would be ready with the rackets and we would try to kill all the mosquitoes that would come in. And we'd get most of them, usually all of them, but sometimes there's like one or two that we would see come in through the door and they would escape into the house somewhere and we're like, damn it. And then they would bite always bite us later. And at a certain point, after starting to practice spiritually and really be with what is, I started to loosen my hold on my expectations. Not that I I just roll over and take it in life, but it was this realization that sometimes life is going to deal you these crazy stupid punches. Scorpion infestation, mosquito infestation, you know, apartment complex that doesn't care and is charging you insane rent, you know, a country, an economy that doesn't give a crap about the working class. All of the all of these things were weighing down on me. But instead of my usual method of getting down about it and depressed, honestly, and this is why I emphasize it so much. Since I started meditating, I started to like look at it from a zoomed out perspective. Like, what does rock bottom look like and the weight of it all look like when you look at it from the perspective that you are the sky and these things that are happening are just the clouds passing through the sky, if that makes sense. It's it's like you get to kind of zoom back, and you know what happened? It it started to look like a comedy, like it was hilarious. Like people would come over, and here's my wife and I with these electric rackets, and our guests, you know, my sister and her husband would come over with their daughter, and we'd open the door really quick. They'd run in and we close the door, and we're sitting here swinging these rackets around, trying to kill mosquitoes, and we would just start laughing about it. It was hilarious. Or I'd come home with Costco groceries, and I would see my wife, you know. There was one time when she was late with the incense, and I'd see her quickly uh open the door a couple of inches and put the incense out and close the door real quick. And I'm just like, how did we get here to this point? You know, like it was just so silly. Or walking around the apartment complex, you know, flipping through photos on my phone of all these scorpions lit up by the UV light just everywhere. I mean, there was one time we were going to bed and we see a scorpion on the wall in the um on the wall next to the door where we would walk into the room, you know, and it's like, or on the back porch, we would go on the back porch at night just to relax. And um, one time my wife would have me go out there with a UV light first to make sure it was all clear. And there was one time when it wasn't clear, and there was a scorpion on the wall right at eye level as you passed through. I mean, it's it was terrifying and very stressful, but there's just a certain point where you laugh. You just have to laugh about it, and that really broke the tension, and I just saw how ridiculous it had all become. And I think that's a useful thing. You know, there's like this this cosmic joke to life sometimes. When you when you get a little quiet, sometimes you can recognize it a little easier. There was a quote from um GK Chesterton on this this cosmic joke idea where he says, I have suffered as much as any man from the public insult of the misprint. I have seen my love of books described as a quote, love of boots. I have seen the word cosmic invariably printed as comic, and have merely reflected that the two are much the same. I love that quote because he is highlighting how well, I mean, the quote speaks for itself, you know. It's it's like there is this great cosmic joke to life when we don't take things so seriously, and the absurdity of existence itself is really the joke. If you think about I mean, just look at the universe, the whole thing is like a firework show. We have these little balls that we're living on and dancing on and playing on, and they're just rotating around a big ball of fire in the sky, which someday will explode into an unfathomable violent explosion called a supernova, or it'll collapse into what we call a black hole, which you can never escape from. You know, I mean, that in itself is crazy. And you just think of how unfathomably huge the universe is and how infinitesimally small we are in comparison to it. And yet, our lives have such value, you know, all of the things that we experience in life on this infinitesimally small speck of dust, essentially, just floating in this great cosmic mystery, and we have no idea what is going on. We have no clue. We all have these theories about it, and you've heard me put forth many conceptual ideas of the great cosmic mystery on this podcast. But that is why, as you notice on this podcast, I always say, and that's why the name of the podcast is to stand nowhere, not on any single concept about this mystery, because we don't know. We have to embrace it, it's the fun of it. If we knew exactly what it was and how it worked, it would be a drag. So there's a there's an there's an ancient figure named Mullah Nasrudin, if I'm pronouncing his name right, and people would use Nasrudin as sort of this Joker wild card character to um teach a little bit of wisdom. And there was this scene where he is looking for his house keys under a street lamp, and he's looking and looking, and somebody comes up to him and says, Well, let me help you. And they search for a while, and the person says, Are you sure you lost them here? And he says, Oh no, I lost them near my house. And the person's like, Well, why are we looking here then? And he says, Well, the light is better here. You know, we we search for answers where it's easy, but laughter really shows us where the truth actually is. It it's it's sort of in the um the the indescribable, the unknowable, you know. Laughter doesn't make sense. But it only when you put it into words. It does make sense when you don't think about it, you know? I don't know. I just thought that was a little uh funny story. Laughter is kind of like what happens when you stop fighting reality and you see it for what it is. There was a um another quote from uh G.K. Chesterton on this on this note of laughter, how he compares the gravity and levity of life. He says a bird is active because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. It is easy to be heavy, hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity. And I thought that was really, really great to bring up, you know, really the heart of this episode is that laughter and spirituality is a lightness, it's not a serious heaviness. Can we look at our life and laugh? Can you look at your life and laugh? Some of the ridiculousness of it that you might be experiencing right now? So what is that what does this mean? Wha I mean, what can we what am I getting at here, really? Look at I I've pointed to this many times that on on past episodes I've pointed to the fact that everything is part of a single thing, right? A single unified whole. We talk about non-duality on this podcast, which is where separateness is essentially an illusion. You can't have up without down, you can't have black without white, you can't have self without other. They all go together. You can't have a buyer without a seller. The two create one another. They come into being mutually and go out of being mutually. Being a non-being, you know, the question to be or not to be, being a non-being arise mutually. So, can you see the divine in everything? For me, could I see the spiritual side and the hilarity and the divinity in my situation? Scorpions everywhere, mosquitoes covering my door on a daily basis. My internet, which I have been in love with since I was a kid, so I could play video games online, was suddenly gone. Not only did I have extreme work hours, but I I couldn't even play video games if I wanted to. For a whole year, I had to basically live like a monk, you know, disconnected from the digital world. I mean, I could stream movies, but like, could I see the the the divine in that situation and appreciate it? Laughter helps you see through the roles, and and that the same thing applies to people. Can you see the divine in everyone? Ram Das is famous for saying that when he looks at people, he sees God in drag and he puts photos of politicians that he disagrees with on his prayer table so that he can start to see the beloved in everyone else. And I'm not gonna digress into politics, but you know, pick your politician and can you see the divinity behind that person's eyes, regardless of what they've done? Or do you draw a very thick bold line between you and that person? Do you live in that separateness? I'm not saying that you have to accept all of the actions of people because some of them are nasty. There are Hitlers in this world, and there are varying degrees of them. But on an ultimate level, can you have compassion for the person even though you condemn the actions of them and fight their actions with every fiber of your being? You stand up, you protest, you do what you have to do, but can you maintain that compassion and still see everyone as part of one divine whole? And for me, freedom really came for freedom really came forth for me when I started to see my own seriousness in the way I took myself and my situation as another mask that the divine was wearing. And in a sen in essence, you know, existence was basically saying, Can you still love me now? I've taken away your financial stability. Do you still love me? Or is it conditional? Do you hate your life now? There there's a scene in uh the Back to the Future trilogy in the third film. If you haven't seen the Back to the Future trilogy, what the hell are you doing? I'm joking, but seriously, uh in the third film, there's a great, great scene on this topic. The protagonist, Marty McFly, he uh he travels through time. In the third film, he goes back to the 1880s and he gets in a fight with a cowboy. And Marty he has a huge ego. He finds out in the second film that his ego, anytime somebody calls him chicken, he can't back down from the fight. He just gets locked in, he starts seeing red, and this dude calls him chicken um because he wants to race him at this red light. So he says, you know, he he agrees to it and but gets into a car accident. And don't worry, I'm not spoiling the film. You find this out pretty early on. But he gets into a car accident, he injures his hand, and it destroys his musical career, changes his life forever. And this is a time travel film, so you can kind of put the pieces together. But in the third film, he finally confronts his ego, and uh this cowboy, uh his name is Buford, he challenges him to a duel, you know, one of the duels to the death. And of course, he can't say no, he can't back down. So he agrees to fight this guy, and in his mind, he's gonna be um using the time machine to go back home by the time of the duel, anyways. So he doesn't really care. He just kind of agrees to it, and then he plans on not showing up, but then something happens where he has to face him. So he's inside of this saloon, and Buford is outside calling him a coward, giving him a countdown, and the film gets really serious. I mean, these films are primarily comedies, but this particular scene gets really serious, and the music is serious, everyone's face is serious, nobody's smiling, nobody's laughing, and all the people in the bar are like, if you don't go out there, and Marty is like, What? What if I don't go out there? And the cowboy's like, then you're a coward, and you'll be branded a coward for the rest of your days. Everybody, everywhere, will say you're the biggest yellow belly in the West. And you hear the music just building and building, and it's like, first we find out that he destroyed his musical career, and now he's on the verge of literally dying because of his ego. And the the Buford guy, he's outside, he's counting down, and he says, Tan, you hear me run. I said ten. And the camera just zooms in on Marty's face, and he has this moment of enlightenment where he basically transcends his ego, and his eyebrows raise up, and he has this realization. He just goes, He's an asshole. I don't care what Tannin says, I don't care what anybody else says either. And he just realizes it's just my ego. Who gives a f I'm getting out of here? I'm not gonna die. And you just have to watch the movie. It's so great. It's my favorite moment in the entire trilogy. He just realizes like this voice in his head this whole time is bullshit, and you don't have to listen to it. And the point is that it's it's really the divine playing this divine prank on you where maybe your door is covered with mosquitoes, maybe your apartment is infested with scorpions, maybe you don't have two nickels to rub together, and it's real easy to get to get in your head in a mental tornado and say, woe is me, FML, you know, my life, my life. I don't want this show to be explicit or anything, but pardon my French. But it's real easy to get in your head about it. But when you create just even a little bit of space, you can you can kind of zoom out like Marty did, and just say, What the hell am I overthinking? I'm alive, you know, I've got my heart is beating, I've got blood in my veins. I mean, what am I getting so stressed out about and just laugh about it? And um I just I I I bring up that scene because it's real special to me, and um, it just popped in my head. It's popped in my head at various points in my life. It reminded me not to take things so seriously. And, you know, that's that's what I've really learned, and and what changes things for me is I've learned to just laugh at myself when I feel like I'm failing in practice or with my temper, you know, somebody cuts me off on the road. I just kind of chuckle to myself now. I I might my temper might get the best of me for a moment, but instead of getting upset over trivial things, making a chicken out of a feather, you know, I just kind of try to laugh about it now. Like, what am I getting so worked up over? It's not worth it. It was like uh almost a year ago now, my son moved out, and at first it was devastating, but now I just kind of laugh about it, you know. Like there is a wisdom that children have that I don't have, and I need to trust his wisdom as well. He needs to go out and make his decisions and do his thing, and I just kind of look at it like with A little bit of a laugh now. Like, why was I why why was I so serious about it before? You know, it was I miss him a lot, and I st I I did especially did when he moved out, and I still do, but I just need to zoom out a little bit and realize life moves to its own rhythm, you know. My air conditioner, like I mentioned in the last episode, just went out of my car. So I'm driving around sweating my ass off trying to earn money. You know, my income, my income's dropped about 35, 40 percent over the last three years, and I had to let a lot of debts go to stay alive, basically, to keep the lights on and pay the bills. So my credit score is back through the floor again, and it's hilarious. It's really hilarious. And I don't mean that like I'm not taking it. I I take it sincerely, but it's not serious to me. It's just a credit score, and there's nothing I can do about it right now. I'm looking at I'm looking at it like I'm lightening up. I'm looking at it with genuine hilarity. It's not like an insane laughter, like when when somebody has had a nervous breakdown and they're laughing when they shouldn't, but real genuine humor. You know, it helps lighten the actual load of life on your shoulders. Sincerity, not seriousness. It's like Jesus said, unless you convert and become as a child, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. So I wasn't becoming a child again. You know, I was becoming a brittle old stuck person, and laughter just changed that. It was like this water, like this much needed rain in a drought period of my life. And I'm still not out of the woods, you know. Like I've mentioned in past episodes, I'm looking for work and I don't know what the future holds. There it's real easy to just feel burdened by it all, but at some point you just have to kind of laugh and appreciate uh everything on a cosmic level. There's a verse from the Dao A Ching which really points to this. It says, uh, men are born soft and supple, but dead, they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant, but dead they are brittle and dry. Thus, whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail. So, yeah. Laughter really softened me up and returned me back to life. And connecting that with the spiritual traditions out there, maybe you go to church, maybe you practice on a cushion, maybe you're part of a satsang in a in a Buddhist um group. Whatever you do, maybe you go to a Hindu temple, just remember that it's supposed to be a light-hearted thing to bring you back to life. It's not supposed to weigh you down even more. Go to some churches out there of any faith, and sometimes they seem pretty heavy and dark and sad. And it doesn't need to be like that. You know, the Sabbath is supposed to be a restful period. In the Hebrew tradition, God took a day off. He didn't force himself to go somewhere he didn't want to because he quote unquote knew it was good for him. It's supposed to be a holiday, a holy day. That's where the word holiday came from. A restful day where you can breathe from your heels and relax all the way up to your head, you know, just totally resting. So take your life sincerely. Just don't take yourself too seriously. Laughter it's not a distraction from the path, but it is the path itself. And I want to close out with one more reading from G.K. Chesterton. He was the major inspiration for this episode. Reminds us that life is sort of a divine nonsense for fun. G.K. Chesterton, his vision of the divine delight, this is from his orthodoxy writings, he says, The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children. When they find some game or joke that they especially enjoy, a child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, do it again, and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exalt in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exalt in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, do it again to the sun. And every evening, do it again to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike. It may be that God makes every daisies separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy, for we have sinned and grown old, and our father is younger than we have.