Our reply to a letter from a friend,
about "entertainment"

Surprise, humor, play, excitement--these seem to be the ingredients of entertainment. For the last (and its attendant violence) I hold no brief: it always runs counter to the quiet jelling of the realization process. But as I ponder the others I wonder of there is not a divine dimension here, a clue or two, to this mania for entertainment.
Someone once asked me if I could epitomize spiritual life in a single word. I chose surprise. It is surely one of its delightful features. God/Truth is always appearing where least expect; at an unseasonal hour; in a form not chosen, not meditated upon. Reading The Visions of Sri Ramakrishna will show how true this was for him. Whatever breaks up our patterns, challenges our expectations, as your letter said, can have a consciousness-raising effect. We aspire and work for lofty ideals and goals which seem in the beginning to be far off--only to discover, often suddenly, that these were here with us all the time! On the poetry page of this issue a poem bears the title "Surprised by Joy." That's it, I think. And perhaps we can call being surprised, even unpleasantly, a shake-up in the right direction, throwing us back upon our deeper resources.
Coming to humor, it has always been a puzzle to me just what its essence is, and books are not very helpful. You are a person who laughs a lot and easily becomes amused, yet possibly you know no more about why than others do. Exaggeration is an element of what makes something funny, as Chaplin realized and practiced to perfection. Of course it has to be done in the right way, with the pretense of seriousness. And that brings up incongruity, maybe the commonest element in humor: the juxtaposition of features antagonistic or unrelated. The elephant-headed Ganesha, riding upon a rat! Words like ludicrous, preposterous, ridiculous, pop into mind. But we are shocked or dismayed only when the impropriety touches some raw nerve in our social or moral conditioning; otherwise "it's funny!" If we could totally uncondition ourselves, would everything be funny? Wouldn't the symbolic nature of things be patent to us?
Nicholas of Cusa's most famous dictum was that the Divine Being is "beyond the contradiction of contraries." Faces abruptly with pairs of opposites we acknowledge momentarily our superiority to them, and that is our spiritual nature, would we know it. Hence the joke, cartoon, puzzle, enigma, koan, the paramahamsa, in lifting us from the intensity of our involvement and preoccupation, move us forward.
Then there is the spirit of play. To be as a child. No one of us, no matter how jaded or twisted, ever forgets the innocence and unconcern of early childhood. Our dreams are full of puns, our daydreams whimsical. Do you recall that Swami Vivekananda was discovered by one of his American hosts sitting in his room just laughing to himself? Asked the reason why he said, "Oh, I was just thinking how funny God is!" And you know how Ramakrishn dwelt on "the Mother's play."
With the horrors of our day spread out for all to see, a kind of collective pall hangs over us now. Is that too why entertainment, which can part the clouds and return us by a glimpse to the Unaffected, has become an obsession?
I am not making an apology for mental or physical dissipation, my friend, I'm just trying desperately to get some fun out of them.