Laughing at Your Ego’s Absurdities

There’s a point in your spiritual realizations where you just have to laugh at yourself.

Your ego’s beliefs about you and about life hit a point of absurdity. You realize that what you think has very little to do with anything real. Furthermore, a lot of those thoughts cause unnecessary stress, duress, and suffering. Even further, you don’t have to think in those ways at all!

Which leads many of us to simply laughing at ourselves. It’s too comical to be sad, and why be sad if you have a choice?

Sure, there are many kinds of spiritual realizations that laughter won’t be the natural response, but for some, it really feels like the only sane response. So let’s talk about the “going sane” process, aka the spiritual awakening process, and how laughter naturally fits in as its own kind of spiritual practice.

As a quick reminder, I have a free newsletter. You can sign up for that below.

Sign up for Jim’s Free Newsletter

Also, the subscribe option floating in the upper part of the website lets you subscribe to get notified when I have new blog post published on this website.

Did I Really Believe That?

There are lots of questions that we ask ourselves as we go inwards and pay attention to who we’ve been trying to be. Some are:

What am I doing?
Where am I going?
Who am I?

There are plenty more beyond that, and the last one about who you are is particularly profound. I sometimes ask my students, “Who are you?” But it is a question that we have to be ready for. Or else, we’ll just answer what our egos are used to answering based on a whole host of beliefs we’re used to believing.

But as we open up, we start to see our beliefs from a different light. In that light, many if not most are quite absurd. It makes you say things like, “Did I really believe that?”

And you did.

And some people believe so blindly in their beliefs that they’ll end relationships, ruin careers, destroy businesses, rape, kill, start wars, and many other things. Truly, false ego beliefs are no laughing matter, but then sometimes, they also are.

On a Less Serious Note, and Most of it Isn’t Serious

However, most of our ego beliefs aren’t so outwardly destructive, and while some can be inwardly destructive (lack of self-worth beliefs), many aren’t super dangerous. They waste our time. They create undo anxiety. They create hope about things that we don’t really want but think we want. Most of all, our ego beliefs create a lens on life that skews what we see into ridiculous things, and that’s worth laughing about.

Look, I could write out a long list of ego beliefs that cause problems, but I’ve got over 800 blog posts here for you. So feel free to dive deeper using the search tool on this blog. These posts are also good starting points:

Identify, Accept, Embrace, and Let Go

No Thoughts, But Plenty of False Beliefs

Holding Onto Beliefs and Blocking Truth (video)

Seeing Your Ridiculousness

But really what I want to encourage you to do is to see the absurdity inside you. When your ego tells you that some stranger is “not your type,” laugh. How does your ego know? It has a bunch of beliefs based on other people and other situations, but this is a brand new situation. You don’t know this person!

When your ego tells you that something is your dream job, laugh again. How does it know? It doesn’t. It’s just applying more beliefs from past experiences and probably from what other people have told you you should want.

Again and again, laugh at the narrative and thoughts the ego sends through your brain, and know that you do have a choice in changing from believing your ego’s beliefs and thoughts implicitly to seeing them as entirely made-up.

Here’s a post about spirituality and laughter and me with a ridiculous photo of myself. Check it out, and feel free to leave a comment.

Spirituality and Humor: Finding Laughter in Your Life