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THE HUMOUR AND WISDOM OF MULLA NASRUDIN
The way to flush people out who keep their inflexibility hidden is to test whether they can endure humour or not.
If you want special illumination, look upon the human face. See clearly within laughter, the Essence of Ultimate Truth.
RumiSerious things cannot be understood without humorous things, nor opposites without opposites.
Platoo Humour is important as a spiritual technique because it is an eminently practical rather than theoretical tool in helping free the human mind from conditioned thinking and behaviour.
o Certain jokes and humorous tales contain both an experiential and inner nutritional content. The fact that a fruit tastes delicious does not mean that it cannot have food value.
o Humour can produce a sudden switch-over from one way of looking at things to another by breaking expectations and mental patterns. The indirect approach of humour can slip behind the defences of our usual logic and pierce the protective armour of conventional thought.
o Metaphysical jokes and tales are intended to challenge the consciousness and may be viable in several different ranges of meaning.
Jokes are structures, and in their Sufic usage they may fulfil many different functions. Just as we may get the humour nutrient out of a joke, we can also get several dimensions out of it on various occasions: there is no standard meaning
of a joke.Different people will see different contents in it; and pointing out some of its possible usages will not, if we are used to this method, rob it of its efficacy. The same person, again, may see different sides to the same joke according to his varying states of understanding or even mood. The joke, like the non-humourous teaching-story, thus presents us with a choice instrument of illustration and action. How a person reacts to a joke will also tell us, and possibly him or her, what his blocks and assumptions have been, and can help dissolve them, to everyones advantage. (1)
o A sense of humour, or lack of it, is a reliable guide for distinguishing between real and false spiritual teachers. The way to flush people out who keep their inflexibility hidden is to test whether they can endure humour or not.
Traditionally it has been noted by genuine mystics that the professionals, those who have no enlightenment but plenty of obsession, because they lack a sense of humour. Humour, here, be it noted, is not to be assumed in those who merely giggle a lot, or those who understand only the banana-skin variety: indeed, these two forms of behaviour are the types most often found in pseudo-mystics.
As a shock-applier and tension-releaser and an indicator of false situations, humour, certainly to the Sufi in traditional usage, is one of the most effective instruments and diagnostic aids. (2)
…
Yes, humor is a way to help point people to the idea of not taking anything too seriously. It helps break down rigid ego-based ideas of how things “are supposed to be”. People drop their guard and a more authentic expression of themselves (through laughter) presents itself.
There is a whole practice of “laughing qigong” in the Healing Tao called “Immune Qigong”, which is a subset of the Cosmic Healing curriculum. It boosts your immunity, because it is considered the song of the DNA.
S
As Nasruddin emerged form the mosque after prayers, a beggar sitting on the street solicited alms. The following conversation followed:
– Are you extravagant? asked Nasruddin.
– Yes Nasruddin. replied the beggar.
– Do you like sitting around drinking coffee and smoking? asked Nasruddin.
– Yes. replied the beggar.
– I suppose you like to go to the baths everyday? asked Nasruddin.
– Yes. replied the beggar.
– …And maybe amuse yourself, even, by drinking with friends? asked Nasruddin.
– Yes I like all those things. replied the beggar.
– Tut, Tut, said Nasruddin, and gave him a gold piece.
A few yards farther on. another beggar who had overheard the conversation begged for alms also.
– Are you extravagant? asked Nasruddin.
– No, Nasruddin replied second beggar.
– Do you like sitting around drinking coffee and smoking? asked Nasruddin.
– No. replied second beggar.
– I suppose you like to go to the baths everyday? asked Nasruddin.
– No. replied second beggar.
– …And maybe amuse yourself, even, by drinking with friends? asked Nasruddin.
– No, I want to only live meagerly and to pray. replied second beggar.
Whereupon the Nasruddin gave him a small copper coin.
– But why, wailed second beggar, do you give me, an economical and pious man, a penny, when you give that extravagant fellow a sovereign?
Ah my friend, replied Nasruddin, his needs are greater than yours.
* * * * * *
One day Nasruddin went to a banquet. As he was dressed rather shabbily, no one let him in. So he ran home, put on his best robe and fur coat and returned. Immediately, the host came over, greeted him and ushered him to the head of an elaborate banquet table. When the food was served, Nasruddin took some soup with spoon and pushed it to the his fur coat and said,
“Eat, my fur coat, eat! It’s obvious that you’re the real guest of honor today, not me!”* * * * * *
Clad in his customary shabby robe and tattered hat, Ikkyu went to beg at the door of a wealthy family’s home. He was roughly ordered around to the back of the estate and given scraps.
The following day, Ikkyu appeared at a vegetarian feast sponsored by the family, but this time he was decked out in the brocade robes of an abbot. When the large tray of food was placed before him, Ikkyu removed his stiff robe and arranged it in front of the tray.
“What are you doing?” the startled host asked.
“The food belongs to the robe, not to me,” Ikkyu replied as he got up to leave.
* * * * * *
One day two small boys decided to play a trick on Mullah Nasruddin. With a tiny bird cupped in their hands they would ask him whether it was alive or dead. If he said it was alive they would crush it to show show him he was wrong. If he said it was dead they would let it fly away and still fool him.
When they found the wise old man they said,– Mullah Nasruddin , that which we are holding, is it alive or dead?
Mullah Nasruddin thought for a moment and replied,
– Ah, my young friends, that is in your hands!
* * * * * *
“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise.” Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.
“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise.”
In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.
One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.”
She does not answer, and the question is repeated. “Is the bird I am holding living or dead?”
Still she doesn’t answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.
The old woman’s silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.
Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. “I don’t know”, she says. “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”
Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.
* * * * * *
“If you put the cat in the box, and if there’s no way of saying what the cat is doing, you have to treat it as if it’s doing all of the possible thingsbeing living and deadat the same time,” explains Eric Martell, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Millikin University. “If you try to make predictions and you assume you know the status of the cat, you’re [probably] going to be wrong. If, on the other hand, you assume it’s in a combination of all of the possible states that it can be, you’ll be correct.”
* * * * * *
Schrödinger said, “One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following diabolical device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid.
If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The Psi function for the entire system would express this by having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”
It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a ‘blurred model’ for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.”
* * * * * *
“We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something you could not bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don’t you remember being young when language was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see? When questions and demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?
– Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture
🙂 (-:
Nothing in my hands but…
Life is like a path…and we all have to walk the path… As we walk… we’ll find experiences like little scraps of paper in front of us along the way. We must pick up those pieces of scrap paper and put them in our pocket… Then, one day, we will have enough scraps of papers to put together and see what they say… Read the information and take it to
heart.Uncle Frank Davis (quoting his mother)
PAWNEE
The Snow Man
BY WALLACE STEVENS
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Source: Poetry magazine (1921)back to top
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Sir William Henry Wills, in a letter to Dean Lefroy, published in the [London] Times in June, 1898, says Toplady was one day overtaken by a thunderstorm in Burrington Coombe, on the edge of my property, Blagdon, a rocky glen running up into the heart of the Mendip range, and there, taking shelter between two massive piers of our native limestone rock, he penned the hymn,
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.There is a precipitous crag of limestone a hundred feet high, and right down its centre is the deep recess in which Toplady sheltered.
Telford, p. 257
This hymn was sung at the funeral of William Gladstone in Westminster Abbey, London, England. Prince Albert of Britain asked it be sung to him as he lay dying. In Hymns That Have Helped, W. T. Stead stated:
when the London went down in the Bay of Biscay, January 11, 1866, the last thing which the last man who left the ship heard as the boat pushed off from the doomed vessel was the voices of the passengers singing Rock of Ages.
In another story:
A missionary complained of the slow progress made in India in converting the natives on account of explaining the teachings of Christianity so that the ignorant people could understand them. Some of the most beautiful passages in the Bible, for instance are destroyed by translation. He attempted to have [Rock of Ages] translated into the native dialect, so that the natives might appreciate its beauty. The work was entrusted to a young Hindu Bible student who had the reputation of being something of a poet. The next day he brought his translation for approval, and his rendering, as translated back into English, read like this:
Very old stone, split for my benefit,
Let me absent myself under one of your fragments.
JonesThe hymn was also reportedly sung at the funeral of American President Benjamin Harrison because it was his favorite hymn, and the only one he ever tried to sing.
THE SHIP SUNK IN LOVE
Should Love’s heart rejoice unless I burn?
For my heart is Love’s dwelling.
If You will burn Your house, burn it, Love!
Who will say, ‘It’s not allowed’?
Burn this house thoroughly!
The lover’s house improves with fire.
From now on I will make burning my aim,
From now on I will make burning my aim,
for I am like the candle: burning only makes me brighter.
Abandon sleep tonight; traverse fro one night
the region of the sleepless.
Look upon these lovers who have become distraught
and like moths have died in union with the One Beloved.
Look upon this ship of God’s creatures
and see how it is sunk in Love.Mathnawi VI, 617-623
The Rumi Collection, Edited by Kabir Helminski
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