(Auto-generated)Welcome back you wonderful people who matter so very, very much.
I'm W.S.
Walker and this is the Laughing Matters Podcast.
A quick mention to any new listeners and a reminder to any that have a few of the newer
episodes under their belt but haven't done this yet.
The podcast is based on a book that I spent 10 years writing because I found something,
something kinda huge and bigger still when I saw what it was all connected to.
It is easily the most important thing I have ever written and will ever write.
And everything you hear on this show is in reference to the book or something that I
learned by way of what I wrote about in the book.
I recorded each chapter of the book, the Laughing Matters, as episodes and there's 12 of them
and they make up all of season 1.
So before you go any further, check out the book.
You know, you're not going to have any frame of reference for a lot of this stuff and a
lot of it's just going to, meh, right over your head.
The Preface episode, the very first one, which you may or may not catch me pronouncing as
Preface because I went half my life without knowing that P-R-E-F-A-C-E in writing and
Preface were the same word.
But anyways, that one can be skipped or replaced with a short summary.
That way we can get you hooked on the book quicker.
It is a shame though, because you're going to miss out on an anecdote that I tell to
explain a necessary practice for reading the book the way it needs to be written.
And you'll also miss out on a pretty good Bruce Lee impression.
I picked his voice for the monk because Bruce was very fond of telling the story of the
Western Philosopher that seeks out the Eastern Philosopher.
And I tell the story in the book because I say a lot of things that you will probably
already have some kind of baseline in your brain for.
I mean, you've lived a life.
You've learned a life.
And as such, the human brain tends to slice and dice new information so that it can categorize
things that fit and things that jeopardize the beliefs that the brain has formed from
said life living or jettison the whole lot of it.
The brain gets lazy like that as we get older.
We tend to question currently held beliefs less and less.
So we take the pieces from this new information that we can easily mentally file away in each
of our already existing mental folders as support for the beliefs and understandings
that each folder represents.
And the rest of it we jettison.
Now true, if something is truly profound, earth's shaking truth, a lot of times it
leaves a residue and it stains like a cup of coffee spilled across the folders and the
files.
So in the preface episode, I basically asked you to create new folders for what I'm telling
you about in the book, asking you to file this information away whole, because it's
not all going to make sense until you have the whole thing.
And I need you not to jettison some of it before you understand why it's true.
If you finish the book and you still have pieces of it that you don't agree with, that's
perfectly fine.
You are welcome to disagree with it.
For the record, I don't think you will, but if you do disagree with it, please be vocal
to me about it.
You're going to see things in it that I'd never be able to see on my own because I'm
not working with your file cabinet.
You'll think of questions to ask that I never would have thought to ask, and on the flip
side, I'm going to have some answers for your questions that you likely would have never
considered.
So it's win-win, you know?
Bring what you got.
Let's see what you got.
Bring what you got to the table.
This definitely is a proactive, contributive process.
So what you got?
So yeah, the preface covers that.
It touches on how, when I talk about my belief that there's a God, I'm referring to a sentient
creative force that intentionally created us, and is far more complex than us, and that's
all I'm narrowing the definition down to.
I use the terms God and He because my childhood was spent in a Catholic environment, which
is where I first learned about that creating being.
But when I say these names, God and He, I say them with a definition that applies to
any religious belief or sect or faith or understanding without getting itself too shredded in the
filing process.
Also in the preface, I address that I'm a science and physics nerd.
My late 20s were spent studying to become a science teacher and a physics professor
eventually, out of my love of shaping minds and my adoration for what we've learned about
our physical existence.
I'd like to get that out upfront because I believe there's a creating force, and there
seems to be this prevailing stigma of science versus a belief in a creator, that either
science is right or the believers are right.
Just so you guys know, this is a myth.
This doesn't actually exist in the scientific community.
In the preface, I lay out a bunch of quotes and support from several representatives of
the fields on natural, formal, and social sciences.
The majority of people either in or teaching these fields that I've met believe that there
is something that's out there, but I have noticed that they do tend to disagree with
accepting everything that a group believes without evidence in order to be part of that
group.
Which makes sense.
I mean, these are people that spend all of their time working in a very precise environment
and system that has it down to the one hundredth of a percentile, whether or not a result counts
as evidence of a theory.
Your theory has evidence that supports it, or it doesn't get to play.
Of course they'd have issues with backing religions.
But a belief in something?
To see the patterns emerge over and over again, and see how mind-blowingly incredible the
naturally occurring patterns that form systems with specific purposes are, and how intricately
they interlock to allow for life to thrive in our universe?
Yeah, there's a lot of them on board with that.
But these days, there seems to be this underlying tone that belief is owned by the religions.
You either throw in with their specific beliefs, or your own beliefs lack credibility.
And I want you to know that this is not the case.
But let me be clear.
If you are religious, and you believe everything that your religion has taught you, that is
completely awesome.
I am glad you found a community that mirrors your beliefs so long as they are your beliefs.
If you are part of a religion, and only stayed because you believe in God, however you have
come to believe in that creative force, and don't have much in common with that religion
outside of that, just kind of going through the motions, I encourage you to seek God out
elsewhere.
I encourage you to look around you at the rest of it, and seek God out.
If God made everything, well then He would be there too.
If those are not your beliefs, then why are you trying to make them so?
Just because you believe something different, doesn't mean you are wrong.
And it doesn't mean that they are wrong.
Humans have been around a long time now, and we were all over the earth.
I figured that if God had interactions with any of us, He probably interacted with more
than one person, and said different things each time in different regions.
In other words, if one religion has had some kind of interactions with God, I think it's
probably likely that most of them have.
Religions are based primarily around the history of people's encounters with God, or God's,
or the people who spoke on God's behalf, right?
They're a snapshot of our past with God, and then mankind pontificating on what it
learned from it.
I figure that there's probably more than one true story out there, so I learn what
I can from the stories told about them, and I look for the common threads.
Because if God repeats Himself, it's probably a good idea to take note of what He said.
So yeah, feel free to start at chapter one if you want to dive right in, and we'll be
right here waiting for you when you get back.
But I cannot recommend going forward from here, because the next thing I wanted to talk
about was a little something I noticed about our subconscious recognition of the Breaking
Laugh.
It occurred to me while watching a rather brilliant piece of television put out by Disney
and Marvel Comics.
I'm talking, of course, about WandaVision.
The series takes place in the Avengers universe just after Endgame, and Wanda Maximoff, aka
the Scarlet Witch, is dealing with the loss of the love of her life, Vision, who's an
android that was brought to life through a fusion of Tony Stark's artificial intelligence
Jarvis and one of the Infinity Stones, the Mind Stone.
Now this series was creative and excellent and touched all the right notes.
All of that has very little bearing on what I noticed and what I wanted to talk to you
about today, but I did want to note that I thought it was a pretty great watch.
Any who, this scene takes place in a flashback, where Wanda's watching a scene from the
90s sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, a scene in which Howl, the dad, is installing a new
roof.
He just built the frame of it, he steps back to admire his work so far, and the whole thing
just falls down on top of him.
Vision, an android who's still learning the nuances and reasons behind human behavior,
watches the show beside her.
It is funny because of the grievous injury the man just suffered.
No, he's not really injured.
How can you be so?
It's not that kind of show.
Have you ever watched or read a work of fiction that has a character, usually an alien or
a robot or some intelligent animal, that's trying to understand humor, having seen it
for the first time?
At some point, most of them ask that same question.
They point it out to us, not really to be funny, but because it seems to be true.
And the funny thing about that is as works of fiction, their dialogue is written by other
human beings.
Human beings telling stories to human beings and offering up this truth that's hidden in
a place that is very hard to look directly at, like trying to push together two negative
ends of two rectangle magnets and line them up perfectly.
It feels like something that wants to stay hidden.
There is this part of us that knows what the breaking laugh is, in so much as you can know
something you've never really looked directly at.
And when a fictional character learns about the concept of funny for the first time, we
chuckle a bit, as the subconscious way of acknowledging it as true.
True, true, alright so let's change the subject and move right along, haha.
We've known it for a long time, but it's hard to look at.
Have a think about this.
What is the demeanor of someone who is teaching someone about laughter when the learning character
asks questions about humor?
Most times that I can remember, the teaching character seemed to be a bit embarrassed or
off put by the question, if not totally derailed.
Because deep down we do know.
There's a part of us that has never stopped knowing what it is that we are doing to ourselves
with a breaking laugh, and that it's not okay.
It's like there's a part of you that relaxes and nestles in when we genuinely laugh.
Anyways, just something I was thinking about.
Also that wandavision scene that I played has an absolutely stunning observation that
Vision makes about grief that I wanted to pass along.
Me, I am a sucker for writing that can put a very big idea summarily into only a few
words.
Like C.S. Lewis's, the pain I feel now is the happiness I had before.
That's the deal.
So concise.
And the Marvel writers did not disappoint.
Listen.
But what is grief, if not love persevering?
So good.
So I propose a toast.
To love's persevering.
Love endures if you give it a home.
So be good to them, be good for them, and you're gonna be fantastic.
This is W.S.
Walker signing off.
Be sweet and bye everybody.