Cosmic laughter

If people cry at weddings why should they not laugh at funerals? If the person who has died made them laugh when he/she was alive, then laughter is a very proper way of commemorating them.

We find all sorts of things funny because humour is not just a way of expressing jollity, it is also a way of dealing with pain and suffering. This is why the trenches of the first world war bred so many jokes. This is why the emancipated inhabitants of countries lately under the yoke of the Soviet empire have stopped laughing so much.

All sorts of things make us laugh. But do you ever laugh at the Cosmos? Why would you do that?

Here’s an extract from Vedprakash Sharma’s blog. He’s a teacher in Delhi with a taste for music. He says:

You laugh at the whole situation as it is. The whole situation, as it is, is absurd -- no purpose in the future, no beginning in the beginning. The whole situation of Existence is such that if you can see the Whole -- such a great infinite vastness moving toward no fixed purpose, no goal -- laughter will arise. So much is going on without leading anywhere; nobody is there in the past to create it; nobody is there in the end to finish it. Such is whole Cosmos -- moving so beautifully, so systematically, so rationally. If you can see this whole Cosmos, then a laughter is inevitable.

He goes on to tell a very charming story about three Buddhist monks, and the funeral of one of them. Read it here.

Last Will and Testament

Lovely man, Jake. Don't know him? More info here

Seriously funny

“You shouldn’t have joined the Army if you can’t take a joke.” That’s what a soldier used to say to a friend writhing in agony with a bullet in his guts. Perhaps soldiers still do. Dark humour abounds on battlefields. It expresses courage and insouciance, admirable traits when 'The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,/ And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.’

Private Kevin Elliott and his best friend Barry Delaney made a pact: whoever died first, the other would wear a dress to his funeral.

Kevin was killed in Helmand on 31 August. Barry was, as you can see in the photo, as good as his word.