What is the cosmic joke?
The cosmic joke is rumoured to be the greatest joke ever told, it is a long joke, it takes the entire length of your existence to tell but I am reliably informed that the punchline is amazing. Some say the secret of life is to live believing that life is truly part of a joke, that life is what happens whilst we are being told the set up to the joke and to live a good life is to live in anticipation of the laughter that follows being let in on the punchline.
That is the nature of the cosmic joke, it is not a cruel joke, it is the joke that everybody gets to share when we are released from this experience and return to being part of a single consciousness. When that happens we remember that we are a single part of oneness, we are everyone, every experience, every thought, we are part of the totality of all experience, and that every unique life is experienced and shared by everyone. If you are able to understand that, then your behaviour, your actions, your impact on others, every way you think or act towards other must by definition effect you in the same way in the end, after all what you do is who you are, and ends up being part of who we all are.
When you improve someone else's experience you improve yours, ours, the whole experience of being human and humanity. It could seem like that means you have to act at all times in a selfless way, however you are here to have your experience for all of us, you decide what that experience is by being present and having presence with who you are and when you are in alignment with yourself, your action flow accordingly and in line with that experience of yourself.
Even if the impact of your action produces what seems to be negative experience on someone else. Putting aside the fact that you do not have the full knowledge of the downstream consequences of a single negative experience and it could even be positive overall, as if it is the right for the whole life experience of who you are, it can be the right action for you both even when it hurts another, as long as it accords with who you are. Even if it does not, it could be the learning experience that you needed through which you learn who you are which benefits everyone in the long run.
It could be what you need to find out that you are a person who does not hurt people or force them to act against who they are, as that would be of the shared benefit to us. It could be that you learn that if you stand up to the strong and protect the weak, it is a shared benefit to all including yourself. It could be that you learn the strong own a duty of care to those who are weaker, that they are an opportunity to show who you are and you gladly give those who are stronger the opportunity to be the best version of who they are. It could be that you come to believe in a world of peace, free movement, action, that we are honest and open. That we have a world of shared abundance, where uninteresting work is done by the robots, and instead we add real value to each other and maybe if everyone thought that it could be true, it would be. A world of imagination inspired by experience and made true by our joint belief that we already have such a world.
But I know that I can make such a world true for me now, I already do, I know that the world is full of abundance for me, my friends and family, that the world is full of good and interesting people, as I seem to keep on meeting them. I know that I am happy now and even if it is such a delightful lie, it might as well be true, as it is true right now in my personal experience. Which if I am being truthful, is the one that really matters to me!
I invite you to believe as well, when you do the magic starts, you begin to start seeing beauty, you start to appreciate all experiences you have had, even bad ones as they teach you so much they should be treasured and valued, serendipity starts happening, you become graceful, at ease and joyful, you believe that having comes form doing and starts with being. And it bears repeating the world is beautiful, you only have to see it in this moment.
So maybe the cosmic joke is about how we actually chose this life, and that you chose your life with all it's advantages, unique experiences and problems, and that you even chose it especially because of those unique challenges that we all have, and you did so with the full knowledge that you were going to face them. Or maybe the joke is just how wrong we actually are in everything we think, is that the sound of laughter?