(Auto-generated)Welcome back, you wonderful people who matter so very, very much.
Congratulations.
We're here.
We have finally arrived at the chapter that covers the initial aha moment that I had 10
years ago that sent my entire life's focal path down a completely different direction.
Everything that has happened since has given my life what I truly needed.
Purpose.
You have something worth giving my life to, worth giving top priority to.
For me, the realization of what is covered in this chapter and all the changes in perspective
it unlocked.
It was too much.
It turned my world upside down and for the first few months I honestly debated on whether
or not I had finally lost my mind.
I mean, these things that I was finding, they were not the things that I had ever thought
I had ever wanted to be.
I was just a person who was always thinking about the things that I wanted to be.
I couldn't find any record of someone saying the things that I had found or the intimations
that the concepts put together made.
I looked and I looked but this viewpoint seemed largely unspoken for.
And yet everything that I found on the subject seemed to support this new perspective.
I was watching a whole world unveil itself in the eyes of the world.
And a whole world unveil itself to me.
One that I 98.4% believed was the truth of the matter.
The other 1.6% was questioning if I had in fact gone mad.
I mean, can you blame me?
Fanatical belief in something that no one else has said before?
The resulting passionate research and obsession into the pursuit of answers, connecting strands
of yarn on a corkboard.
Was I passionately pursuing a tremendous find or obsessively deluding myself in a fit of
But I didn't go crazy.
It was everywhere.
And I was finally able to confirm that when I finally started talking about it to people.
To realize that they saw it too.
And it unsettled them just as much.
This chapter is twice as long as most of the others, so I will have to split it up into
two episodes.
But the plan is to release this one and then that one a day apart.
So check back tomorrow and I should have part two ready for you.
Until then.
Chapter 8.
Breaking.
Not the genuine and breaking laughs come out of the relationship you have with the person.
And another way of saying that is that the amount of benign in the joke directly equates
to how much love you have for the victim.
How close you are.
The closer they are, the cleaner the laugh.
The more you love without aim, the more genuine the laugh.
The more violation it has, the more breaking of a laugh it is.
Or at least that's what I've come to call it.
The breaking laugh.
Simply put, we care about others in general to an extent.
Varying degrees from person to person.
There are a lot of times where we laugh off a moment where we could have had compassion.
I mean, most of us don't like to see harm come to others, right?
Okay, well, we make a lot of exceptions there.
But to be fair, for the average general person that you don't know, you don't typically
want bad things to happen to them, right?
It would be nice if good things happened for them.
But we don't necessarily want to be responsible for having to use our time, our energy, or
our attention to make nice things happen for that person that we don't know.
Well, in that case, the breaking laugh is another option.
It's a salve that we put on a wound that we keep open.
One that never closes.
It breaks off a little more compassion for a fellow man each time it's applied.
We are actively training ourselves to care a bit less about others with the breaking
laugh because in its simplest form, feeling bad for someone else doesn't feel good.
Yes, that feeling of connection when you are compassionate feels good, but feeling terrible
about something that happened to someone else isn't what most people would describe as
a good time.
And that wound that doesn't close, that's the raw edge of the compassion that keeps
breaking off as we delve further and further into the focus of ensuring the safety of my
own path.
After all, that's the other reason that we step away from that compassion for them.
Because feeling that compassion is to be open to the possibility that they may need your
help.
And who knows what they might need from you and how that might alter the course that you've
set for your own life.
I mean, you can't know until you've already done it and found out.
And so once again, we hand over control to that granddaddy fear of the unknown, who promptly
pulls us back from those who may need help.
And the more the wound worsens and the more self we need, and the more compassion crumbles
and breaks off.
And once the, I can get more for myself if I care about others less mentality really
takes hold.
It gets easier and easier to deny others your compassion and to laugh that breaking laugh.
Let's take a look at a comedy show example that I have a definitive guilty pleasure for.
It's always sunny in Philadelphia.
This quick witted group of actors created one of the funniest shows on television.
So we have Dennis, Sweet D, Mac, Frank, and Charlie as our core characters.
Dennis is a complete narcissist and frankly a dangerous sociopath that preys on women
and anyone else for that matter should it suit his desires.
His sister Sweet D is a talentless wannabe that would likely be the voice of reason among
the gang if she didn't immediately lose her moral high ground at the first sight of something
that she wants.
Mac is pretty delusional as well.
He's obsessed with his body image without really taking care of his body.
And by the way, that's this was written before the recent season.
So yes, I am aware that he works out, but he's obsessed with his body image without
really taking care of his body and he sees himself as a dangerous, clever authority figure
when in reality he's a bit of a moron and fails miserably at his attempts at toughness,
particularly when showing his karate moves.
Frank played by Danny DeVito is disgusting.
He will swindle anyone if given half the chance and has become very rich several times over
by doing exactly that.
He's often the voice of betrayal, lives an absolute squalor, and is the frequently completely
emotionally absent father of Dennis and Dee.
His favorite Christmas gift was to give his children a box with nothing inside while recording
their reactions.
They are horrible, wretched people, or they are pathetic.
We should feel bad for them, but instead we laugh at the unfortunate situations that they
get themselves into and that they frequently, I don't care, they're way out of, often at
several victims' expense.
But lastly, lastly we address Charlie.
Charlie is an illiterate young man who works at the bar of the Gang Homes.
While Dee and Dennis serve, Mac does security, I think, Frank drinks and handles the business
side of things, and Charlie is in charge of bashing the rats to death, cleaning the bathrooms,
and dealing with any refuse, usually by burning it in the bar's furnace.
Now let's talk about the trash.
What do I do with the trash?
How do I dispose of the trash?
I don't know.
We disposed of the trash in the dumpster last night.
What are you doing with it?
I am taking it to the furnace.
We have a furnace?
Absolutely.
Where do you think the heat comes from?
You burn the trash in the furnace?
This bar runs on trash, dude.
This bar is totally green that way.
How is burning trash green?
Uh, because I'm recycling the trash into heat for the bar and lots of smoke for the bar
and giving the bar the good smoky smell that we all like.
The bar smells like trash.
That's the exact opposite of green, Charlie.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Well, I could put the trash into a landfill where it's going to stay for millions of years,
or I could burn it up and get a nice smoky smell in here and let that smoke go into the
sky where it turns into stars.
Charlie is Frank's roommate in that disgusting apartment, a place where alley cats yell so
frequently and loudly that he has to feed himself a mixture of liquor and cat food to
make himself pass out in order to get any sleep.
Charlie is about as uneducated as people get and is the unpredictable wild card of the
group.
His neural pathways are fried from his frequent glue and spray paint huffing, and he obsessively
stalks waitress, frequently getting her fired from her jobs.
But don't worry, as it turns out, she's kind of a terrible person too.
My point is, is that their situations are manipulated carefully to show some of the
worst within these people without deliberately crossing a very tricky line.
And by doing so, we are very rarely reminded that these are human beings and that we are
supposed to care about them.
Charlie is one of the most pitiable human beings that I have ever seen.
He's likely the victim of child molestation by his creepy uncle who is constantly over
Charlie's mother's house and creepily hits on Charlie no matter who is in the room.
He's constantly taken advantage of by his friends, or even outright betrayed without
a second thought.
He's constantly lied to and has become convinced, somehow, that he is an expert in bird-mowling.
And yet, instead of feeling horrible for this poor wretched creature, he is the funniest
character on the show.
As the incomparable Mel Brooks once brilliantly stated, tragedy is when I cut my finger.
Sorrow is when you fall down a manhole and die.
Moving on, let's take a look at jokes.
I can't think of a better joke to examine than the oldest joke in show business.
The Aristocrats.
Now for those of you unfamiliar, the Aristocrats is not a joke that gets told by comedians
to an audience.
Nor is it something that you would find on the joke page about two-thirds of the way
through an issue of Reader's Digest.
This particular joke is a joke that comedians tell to each other.
It's one of the best examples of a journey joke that exists.
It's basically a joke that a large portion of it is just improvised.
The teller of the joke begins innocently enough by introducing the players in this unfortunate
performance.
A man walks into a talent agent's office and proclaims, buddy, do I have an act for
you?
Then you insert the comedian's ad lib on what the act actually is.
The manager declares that it is an impressive act and asks what they call themselves, to
which the person replies, the Aristocrats.
That doesn't sound like a funny joke, does it?
That's because insert comedian's ad lib here doesn't even touch on it.
When the agent asks what their act is, the comedian launches into what is essentially
the most vile, heinous, debaucherous acts that people can perform, although technically
it also involves family pets as well.
Horrific acts intertwine often, and the comedian runs wild, constantly describing back and
forth in detail all of the action, the dirtier the better, and I've noticed most of them
draw a line at some point, and I've often wondered if that was their own personal, internal
line that was drawn, or just the line beyond which they believe the listener would stop
laughing and start to be genuinely horrified.
Telling this joke has often been recommended to comedians as a good creative practice and
can really make a positive impact on one's improvisational skills, provided you can work
dirty.
There's even a very successful documentary that is solely about this joke, and has a
surprising amount of the most famous comedians in the world either talking about the joke
or telling it.
Well, this joke was, famously, told by Gilbert Godfrey at the Friars Club Roast of Hugh
Hefner.
This was pretty significant for two primary reasons.
The first, again, is that this is a joke that comedians tell other comedians.
This is not a joke that a comedian takes the mic with.
The comedians in the audience and seated on the stage, according to others that were there,
looked somewhat confused as they recognized the setup and then immediately lost it.
For several of them, I would imagine that's a day that still lives in infamy.
The second reason was that it was told right after he made a joke about having to make
a connecting flight at the Empire State Building, two and a half weeks after the attack and
collapse of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.
The joke was met by silence, boos, and a small smattering of nervous laughs and a general
sense that it was far too soon.
A too-far joke and a highly offensive joke as a result.
But instead of backing down, he told the most offensive joke a comedian knows.
Instead of turning to empathy and compassion for the 2,996 lives taken in the 9-11 attacks
and the 6,000 plus wounded, Gilbert made the decision to jump the other way.
Most comedians would agree it was the funnier of the two options.
And I'll note here that Gilbert Contrary's version of the joke was very family-based,
and instead of having the man explain the act to the agent, he brings in the whole family,
including the dog, and they perform the acts of extreme incest, bestiality, and mass defecation
right there in the talent agent's office as the audition.
Now I would venture that outside of the confines of the joke.
If this were to actually happen in front of us, in our own office, most of us would imagine
we'd immediately do everything in our power to get those children away from their psychotic
parents and that sadistic grandmother.
What is being described in this joke is horrifying and deliberately the stuff that pushes the
absolute limits of what the comedian can get away with.
We break our empathy more and more to cope with all the horrors that occur in the world.
The guilt of not standing up for the victim, and the fear of not knowing what will come
our way if we did the right thing by way of all of those around us.
It would seem that this is actively worsening the situation as we go.
Our progression of humorous entertainment has been... exploratory would be a word for
it.
Shows like Jackass and Most Extreme Elimination Challenge with the emphasis on people hurt
or injured or in pain or discomfort or humiliated or tortured in new and interesting ways for
our entertainment.
And the typical response to this entertainment?
The breaking laugh.
So many of us are actively training ourselves to be more readily able to defend against
our compassion should it put itself in the way of what we want slash planned for ourselves.
So yes, we use the breaking laugh, but what could we possibly use as a salve for something
as big as the pain of not being the thing that you are?
Which is someone designed to care about the rest of them.
And designed to be a part of a community, to be intertwined, to be interconnected.
It would have to be a pretty powerful salve to soothe the agony of opposing the design
of happiness, right?
Unless we trigger the best feeling that we have.
Love.
Or rather the illusion of love.
The breaking laugh is an okay, bootleg version of feeling love.
But it doesn't stay.
Laughter, genuine laughter is the sound of love unnamed and we've been triggering it
in response to our pain.
We preemptively strike out against our compassion.
We make jokes about spouses cheating on their partners, cancer, third world conditions,
mental disabilities, AIDS, crack addiction, leaders that are actively ruining one's country,
terrorism, public embarrassment, and pretty much every single thing that causes people
to suffer.
And that compassion?
People that is your tether.
That is your bond that links you to the rest of us in the most important of ways.
Love and compassion are the links between those other parts of God and ourselves.
In a very real sense, in the simplest possible terms, to break your compassion here is to
know God less.
When I did for others without worry, God became louder and closer.
I could feel Him all around me.
And when I was focused on myself, He became quiet and distant.
It seems logically sound that we were designed with two gigantically main goals to achieve
in our lives.
We'll get to the other one in a bit.
And the first of those was to care about one another.
When we love, we feel important.
We feel full.
We feel good.
And when we don't love, we feel unimportant, alone, and unfulfilled.
I would very much like to share with you what I have found to be the genius of happiness's
design.
Think about the last thing that you were really excited to get for yourself.
Most of the happiness was in the wanting and acquiring.
Once you had it, though, whatever it was, the happiness immediately began to recede.
And that shiny thing that you just acquired began to tarnish and lose its luster.
It's like trying to hold water cupped in one hand.
And how much more excited were you when you headed out to get whatever it is than when
you owned it for a day?
Doing for self most often offers diminished returns in happiness.
But doing for others, that's quite a bit different.
Sometimes you still pay for it with money, which is bond by your time, your effort, your
attention.
But often, you simply pay for it just with your time or your effort or your attention.
You take a little bit from yourself when you help someone else or you bring them a bit
of happiness.
It's a gift that almost always means more to the receiver than what the giver gave.
But the happiness you get back, it's a happiness with texture and consistency of real sustenance.
It recharges a whole set of batteries in you you may not have realized were empty.
I will say that when it's tools that help the buyer create that are purchased for oneself,
those tools for creation tend to have a bit longer of a shelf life in the happiness department.
But I believe that this is because they are used to help you share something inside yourself
with others.
Be it a better cello bow or a new set of paint brushes or a new camera lens.
They're using those tools to create something with the intent of eliciting an emotional
response from others through that which they created.
So it does become more of a doing for others situation.
See part of the problem with self-based happiness is it appales in comparison to happiness born
out of connection.
It's like having for dinner a handful of candy you enjoy versus having something savory and
delicious nutritional and that's just the right amount of heartiness leaving you comfortably
full and satisfied from your socks up.
And yet we go for what it is that we are convinced that we want at the cost of compassion and
the cost of connection.
I tell you all of the things that I treasure the most in my world share two things in common.
A. I had no idea that they were everything I never knew I always wanted until I was in
their path.
And B. They were all born out of interconnection with others and I was led to these things
as a byproduct of caring about others.
But we are so convinced that we know what is best for us that we go to some pretty extreme
links sometimes to stick to the plan or get back to my own path.
And we've both trained ourselves and been trained by our society since birth to believe
that fear is our savior that caution shall protect that trust is to be earned with a
watchful eye and given with a tentative hand.
I want you to do something for me real quick please if you'll indulge me.
I want you to imagine this and not just the frilly lovely version where everything just
works out but the real life way it would actually go down in the real world.
Picture yourself getting out of bed tomorrow and deciding to drop your defenses.
Openly loving all of them without remorse or recoil.
Helping wherever you see need and whomever you see needing.
Try picturing your day tomorrow spent strengthening your compassion and your interconnection.
How would that go down in the real world?
If you would please pause the podcast here run through the scenarios in your mind's eye
and then pick me back up and go.
I imagine quite a lot of bad things happened in quite a lot of your heads.
After all you are essentially letting go of the rudder while boating at fairly high speeds.
You're at the mercy of the current.
One which you can't even really see to predict.
And prediction and predictability are so important in those pursuits aren't they?
Having a good grasp on the likeliness of up and coming outcomes.
Whether essential if one's going to stay on my own path correct?
And loving openly?
Well that's basically pure unpredictability.
Also known as pure unknown.
Also known as just about the closest thing to pure grand daddy fear that there can be.
No wonder things went so wrong for you in your imaginary self when you were imagining
spending the day openly loving everyone.
We poked the main nerve and stared it straight in the eye.
And since we're here, so far as I have found, there is only one completely effective weapon
against that main fear.
That grand daddy fear that I know of.
And it is, as I understand it to be, the antithesis of fear.
The base to its acid.
The water to its fire.
Its counterpart.
Faith.
And that's it for me guys.
Thank you for coming to the reading.
You can check out the YouTube channel at youtube.com slash could help.
You can contact the podcast that will help mail at gmail.com and you know what?
Send me questions.
Send me anything.
I'll talk about anything.
I'll respond to you either on the show or you know, in personal correspondence.
I'm here to help people.
Please utilize me and you can also come talk about this stuff.
Ask questions or hear what others think at our slash the laughing matters on Reddit and
you can stay up to date with the show's Facebook page at facebook.com slash I could help.
And of course, the laughing matters.com until next time.
My advice is similar to last week's try to spot the breaking laugh when it happens.
Start recognizing it for what it is when you do it.
Both the genuine and breaking laughs are heavily dependent on how much you care about the victim
of the joke and you get to decide what that relationship is with each of them out there.
See those laughs for what they are and let each occasion of this laughter motivate you
towards making a decision.
An active, deliberate choice on whether or not you want more genuine or more breaking
laugh in your life.
Take some responsibility each time as one of the world shapers and make the choice or
make an honest case if you haven't chosen yet.
But think on it.
This may well be the most important decision you make in this life.
You can try to do right by them and love them or you can further divide by stepping to the
side past them giggling.
If you're able to catch yourself laughing either type of laughter, take an inventory
on how each laughter felt when happened, especially a few minutes after the laugh.
Because with a genuine laugh, you're building bridges because you're loving without aim.
The laughter is either the start or the continuation and conversation of that love.
In other words, that love is still there and has very possibly grown.
Tends to do that when left unchecked, especially in the presence of the genuine laugh.
Go figure, soul loves to love.
Whereas the breaking laugh is only really there for the laugh and then gone until the
next one.
Breaking laugh is a quick fix and the genuine laugh is a cure.
My advice, be good to them and be good for them.
You're going to be great.
Be sweet.
Bye everyone.