Last week, the train I was taking from Devon
to London
ground to a halt for no apparent reason, in
the middle of open countryside. We had
already suffered an earlier delay while a
check was made on the rear axle. Now, it
seemed, we had broken down completely.
As my fellow passengers became increasingly
restless, the train manager finally made an
announcement. "Believe it or not", he
said,
"We have stopped here because there is a
swan on
the line. The driver is doing his best to
persuade it to move on, but it is proving
rather difficult."
Now for some reason, the thought of our
driver holding up a 125mph train carrying
hundreds of passengers while he waved his
arms about in vain trying to persuade a swan
to vacate the track proved irresistably
funny. Irritability and frustration was
immediately transformed into
laughter.
There was widespread agreement that this was
the best excuse for a late arrival that
anyone had ever heard, even better than the
legendary 'leaves on the line' and 'the wrong
kind of snow' which had both made the
headlines in previous years.
Being in no particular hurry, I enjoyed the
journey (we eventually arrived forty minutes
late) and was struck by how quickly and
powerfully an injection of humour can
transform our experience of a situation. We
can be stuck someplace and be suffering
because of it, or we can be stuck in the same
place and find ourselves enjoying it,
depending only on what we focus on in that
moment.
With that in mind, I came across a paragraph
in Jack Cornfield's excellent book 'A Path
with Heart', in which he lists a number of
questions that anyone who is considering
following a spiritual teacher or discipline
might ask. The question that jumped out at me
was 'Is the practice humorless'?"
"This", he writes, "is an important
sign." By which he means, a warning
sign.
I was reminded of the time when, as a
nineteen year-old spiritual seeker, I
hitch-hiked to Hampshire to hear J.
Krishnamurti give his famous lectures at
Brockwood Park. He was undoubtedly brilliant,
but he seemed to take his own teachings so
seriously that I soon lost interest.
By contrast, when I visited the Indian guru
Poonjaji some years later, I can remember
laughing so hard that my sides were hurting.
He was the wisest, most mischievous and
open-hearted eighty-two year old I had ever met,
and am ever likely to meet. Consequently, his
impact upon me was far greater.
Without really being conscious of it, I have
used Jack Cornfield's 'humour' test
throughout my life, and it has served me
well. In the homeopathic field, for example,
I came across
numerous teachers and training institutions
that were so caught up in the dogma and the
rules of practice that they didn't seem to
realize
just how serious and heavy they had become. I
quickly learned to move on and to learn from
those who seemed to be enjoying themselves
rather than carrying the burdens of the world
on their shoulders.
I've come to the conclusion that when humour
is absent, self-importance, fearfulness and
egotism have taken hold. None of which serve
to increase our spirituality, nor to improve
our healing abilities, as far as I can tell.
