(Other installments in the true tale “Me and the Monks” may be discovered via search bar on this site)
*****
I don’t often find myself in appropriate surroundings for telling my Zen hot dog joke (jokes if you’re a sucker).
If you tell them in the right places you get the kind of gratifying burst of hilarity which loosened all our creaky seams at that gallery dinner.
If you tell them in the wrong places you get a reaction something like this:
“Ah. Yeah…?”
The last right place I had found had been at a performance of Swami Beyondananda.
This occurred at a rather peculiar time in my (admittedly altogether rather peculiar) life.
I was there with a group of well meaning seekers, devotees of a short-lived local guru-ess whom I can only describe as a sort of wannabe Ganga-Ji (a bright blessing on that lovely lady).
I found the local clone to be generally full of waste matter but enjoyed hanging around with her people, the most enthusiastic of whom had changed her name to Satya Priti (loosely translates to “Joyful Gospels” or “Good News”) and recently taken me home to live in her spare room as a “gift to God.”
At this point in our relationship I was in the process of figuring out that this “gift to God” included all of her housework including meal prep, as well as the unspoken hope of being swept by me into a torrid lesbian love affair of the craving for which she was in seriousness lifelong denial.
It also involved clingy public possessiveness and obsessive jealousy of her self-perceived holier-than-thou status as my benefactor.
Be all that as it may, she and her fellow followers had by then become well aquainted with my clownier side.
For those of you unfamiliar with Swami Beyondananda, you’re in for a treat. Google up “Wake up Laughing” and see what it gets you.
He’s not a monk, exactly. He has, in fact, a wife, whom we did, in fact, meet that evening (more on this later).
But he is a very holy man. Or holey, if you’re talking about his sox.
This good swami delivers up your enlightenment with a twist. A very large twist of laughter.
In the arena of desirable social change he advocates “positive change in small increments, as opposed to negative change in large excrements.”
On gun control: “Every child in America should be taught the appropriate use of arms as soon as they have arms to raise – hugging. Hug first, ask questions later.”
On planetary ascension: “Now is the perfect time to make the shift, and I will tell you why. Because it’s too late to do it sooner, that’s why. I’ll put it bluntly. If we humans don’t begin rowing together in the same direction, we’re going to be up shift creek without a paddle.”
On the particular evening in question I had earlier schooled myself to an unaccustomed degree of personal circumspection.
“There will be plenty of humor in the room without your — um — assistance,” I told myself. “Just tell your hot dog joke to some poor soul nearby and then relax and go along for the ride, okay?”
Ya, fat chance.
The performance began when the swami’s aforementioned (and doubtless immensely long suffering) wife stepped to the microphone elegantly attired in a floor length dress, modestly jacketed, to introduce her husband and to assure the audience that he will “answer or avoid” any query put to him in the satsang which follows his presentation.
“I asked my husband what I could do to help his act be successful,” she told us, “and he said I could come out in a slinky dress. I’d do anything to help his message reach the people, so here you go…”
And off came the jacket, revealing a dozen colorful plastic Slinkies sewn onto its bodice, all of which sprang immediately and enthusiastically outward from her giggling form.
And so the evening went.
My plans for mouselike nonparticipation wobbled when the swami opened up the floor for satsang.
Not to dis the people who were there that night. There might gave been flu going around. Chemtrails. Something, anyway. Because audience response was, for lack of a better way to put it, well, feeble.
“Speak to us of enlightenment,” one requested. “Speak to us of love,” intoned another.
Meanwhile, a young member of my own party, seated just in front of me, had draped his hand and arm over the back of his chair for the express purpose of using it to point at me from time to time, following it with the universal motion for “waving me on.”
What can I say? When it comes to humor I’m not strong. To put it baldly — as you probably have known all along that I would — I fell.
In direct contravention of the strict orders I had given it to remain sedately in my lap, my hand shot up as if yanked by string from the ceiling. It may even have waved itself around a little. (Once I fall I lose all sense of perspective and tend to see no percentage in doing things halfway.)
“O great, wonderful, amazing, holy, uplifted, enlightened and generally awesome one!” I cried when called upon.
The swami took a second look, and smiled, if possible, a little wider than he’d been smiling already.
“Yes?”
Liberally interpreting this syllable as actual encouragement to continue (and being at that point in a condition fairly beyond the more sensible discouragement he might have meted out anyway), I adjusted the breathless unctiousness of my tone upward by a notch or two.
“I am only the pimple on a flea infesting the hindquarters of your meanest beast of burden,” I announced, “and I have traveled far…”
“Oh, you have traveled far, have you?” came back to me from the stage with a distinctly Marxian lilt.
“Yes! I have traveled far! To ask you this question which has bedevilled all my days and nights until I could come here and avail myself of your great wisdom!”
“You have chosen well!” the swami assured me (to my obviously vast relief). “Now, what is this question, my child?”
I allowed the silence to grow for a beat or three, and then spoke in a smaller voice (but still large enough to reach the stage):
“Um, I forgot.”
“You forgot?”
“I’m sorry. It’s all the travelling. It was right here somewhere…”
The swami is no dummy. He knew reserve material when he saw it, and for the rest of the evening whenever things got too slow he’d swivel back to yours foolie.
“Have you remembered yiur question yet?”
“No! I was so distracted — I was bathing in your effulgence…”
“Oh, that was you, was it?” Severely. “You left a ring around my effulgence tub.”
“No,” I cried, carried entirely away by the jolliment of the moment, “It was her!” And I pointed randomly beside me, forgetting that in that position sat Satya Priti, looking both sour at having been usurped in her holy superiority by my ongoing exchange with the stage, and anxiously uncomfortable in the ultracool and very expensive but both visually and vibrationally mismatched sparkling shawl which she had just purchased from one of the event’s vendors.
Well.
As you may have surmised, this “Gift to God” was summarily asked to take itself otherwhere not long afterward, rendering it for that nonce homeless.
Even so… it was worth it!…
The poet/editor of this website is physically disabled, and lives at a fraction of her nation’s poverty level. Contributions may be made at:
Timeless Classics 
One thought on “Me and the Monks – Beyondananda”