Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

We then transcribed their conversations and identified exactly what the bereaved participants were talking about when they laughed. Here again, data suggest that laughter is not a sign of denial of trauma, as widely assumed, but an indicator of a shift toward a new perspective enabled by the imagination. We coded participants’ references to several existential themes related to bereavement—loss, yearning, injustice, uncertainty. We also coded for insight words that reflect a shift in perspective, phrases like “I see” or “from this perspective” or “looking back.” Our participants who laughed were most likely to be talking about the injustice of death—the unfair termination of life, the difficulties of raising a family alone, the loss of intimacy—but they engaged in this discourse with perspective-shifting clauses. Laughter was part of these individuals’ shift in viewing the death of their spouses. It was a portal into a new understanding of their lives. A laugh is a lightning bolt of wisdom, a moment in which the individual steps back and gains a broader perspective upon their lives and the human condition.

Finally, our data speak to the social benefits of laughter. Our bereaved individuals who laughed reported better relations with a current significant other. They more readily engaged in new intimate relations.

LAUGHTER=NIRVANA

 

The Buddha’s path to enlightenment was arduous. He had to leave the comforts of his well-to-do family, his wife, and his new child. He wandered for years grasping for the state of nirvana in different spiritual practices. He nearly died in ascetic practice, starving himself to bone on skin. When the Buddha finally attained enlightenment under the bodhi tree, it was in the realization that the suffering of life is rooted in self-centeredness and desire and that, once shed of such illusions, goodness arises from within. Loving kindness, compassion, right talk and action, peace, and indescribable joys are realized. In this epiphany the Buddha must have deeply exhaled. My bet is that he laughed as well.

Nibbana—nirvana—originally meant “to blow out.” Clearly “blow out” refers to blowing out of the flames of self-interested desire, the obstacle to nirvana. I’d like to think a second possibility is that nirvana means to blow out, to exhale, to laugh.

Images of the Buddha are often images of full-bellied laughter. Study the images of the Dalai Lama with heads of state from around the world and they are all images of body-shifting laughter. The 100 Zen koans amassed in twelfth-and thirteenth-century Japan were used by Buddhist teachers to disengage the conscious rational mind, opening up opportunities for enlightenment. Well-known koans are intentionally paradoxical:

 

 

If you meet the Buddha, kill him.

Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?

 

Many other koans employ absurd humor; they have survived because of their capacity to reduce disciples to laughter:

 

 

What is the Buddha? Three pounds of flax.

 

 

What is the Buddha? Dried dung.

 

 

Laughter may just be the first step to nirvana. When people laugh, they are enjoying a vacation from the conflicts of social living. They are exhaling, blowing out, and their bodies are moving toward a peaceful state, incapable of fight or flight. People see their lives from a different point of view, with new perspective and detachment. Their laughter spreads to others in milliseconds, through the firing of networks of mirror neurons. In shared laughter people touch, they make eye contact, their breathing and muscle actions are in sync, they enjoy the realm of intimate play. Conflicts are softened, and often resolved. Hierarchies negotiated. Attraction and intimacy are created. What was once in the denominator of the jen ratio—conflicts, tensions, frustrations—fades away. People move closer to one another in peaceful ways.

8Tease

 

MALE PEACOCKS are well known for their outlandishly beautiful tails—hypnotically patterned signs of their genetic fitness, alluring to the more dowdy and modest peahen. Less well known is how provocative the florid peacock male can be during the ritualized patterns and exchanges of peacock courtship. Often, when an inquiring peahen approaches, he will turn his back on her, as disinterested as the coldest of cold-shouldering high-school girls. He then stretches out his expansive tail to reveal to her inquisitive eyes his backside. What does the peahen get upon expressing initial interest? Very often, a nose brush with the male peacock’s unseemly behind.