Humour

Humour plays a big part in the teaching of Zen and it is very easy to understand why.

· Can you concentrate if you are tense?

· Can you perform difficult tasks when you are really wound up?

· Are you at your best if you are under a great deal of stress?

· The answer to all these questions has to be - "NO"!

Ask any performer or sportsmen how to achieve peak performance and somewhere the word 'relax' will appear. This not only applies to physical activities but also, in fact even more so, to mental tasks.

"RELAX" - easier said than done. Entire philosophies, religions and businesses have built up around the idea that you really ought to relax more.

So where does humour fit in to this? Well, laughter and humour are amongst the very best ways of reducing stress, relaxing and doing whatever it is you are doing better. And so it is with Zen. How could you possibly become 'enlightened' whilst wound up not just like a watch spring but like a Swiss made, chronologically tested, titanium, waterproof, shockproof, accurate to a second a year, etc.

Of course there is much more to humour than the beneficial effects it has on your well being, it also enables the mind to look at ideas in a different way, to move quickly from one idea to another. Why? Well, humour relies a great deal on the putting together of conflicting images, of surprising us, by being different. All these aspects of humour are exactly what you want if you are looking at pushing the mind into new territory. Of course humour is a huge topic, in fact so large it is worth looking at some specific aspects of it in future posts.