My second act for my newfound stand-up comedy hobby, written over the past 24 hours, uses the technique of telling one's onw story, with yourself as the subject. It's amateur, but a good start for my new skill.
As before I begin with the slow and methodical presentation, in the style of Alan Watts, allowing for gravity upon each phrase.
This allows for laughter and uses my dry sense of humor or double meaning. You need time for the brain to perceive any double meaning, so I slow down the delivery in the beginning of the act.
It's almost like reciting poetry, or song lyrics, except the voice is the only instrument, and language the brush to paint the picture in the mind of the hearer.
The theme as usual is metaphysics and a somewhat iconoclastic irreverence for it. It also uses common contemporary themes, which you will pick up in the script, so give it a read below and let me know what you think.
I have yet to memorize or perform these acts, and that is the next step, first on my phone camera video, which will allow me to look at it and hear it and time it, and all that.
It's good to capture these written scripts as they flow from the imagination right now, so let the good rhymes flow.
Image: source
From monk to mind millionaire
Welcome today everyone,
I’m here to tell you that it’s all in the mind.
So if you don’t mind, (laughter)
let me tell you the story
of how I became enlightened
and how you can too.
Just sit back and open your mind
to the possibility that you may already be
enlightened
and that you just don’t know it.
After all, it’s all about how you identify nowdays, isn’t it?
And I identify as enlightened (laughter).
It’s that easy. It’s all in the mind.
For example, I decided that, as an enlightened being,
which is possible for anyone by the way,
I was also going to identify as a millionaire.
Why should enlightenment require sacrificing
anything that can be used in the service of the divine?
It’s all a divine comedy anyway, isn’t it?
Feeling like a million dollars came to me,
admitedly, after some effort.
I first spent ten years in a yoga monastery ashram training school,
as a celibate monk.
Ten years without sex! (laughter)
That’s going to make anyone feel like a million dollars. (laughter)
especially at the age of twenty to thirty.
Actually part of my decade as a monk,
wearing nothing but saffron robes and flip flops,
took me to India a few times, for pilgrimages
and training in remote temples, once for six months,
where for most of the time I was in the rural villages,
where I wore no shoes at all.
And some of the time it meant passing
through the hectic cities of Mumbai and New Delhi.
There I saw poverty like I had never seen before,
and I’m from Africa.
After six months in India, I came back to Africa,
the far south coast, and saw
how clean and neat and easy my life was compared to life in India,
and immediately I felt like a millionaire
just living in this country where I had always lived all my life
but never realized how rich I actually was.
It looked so clean to me after India,
that i felt as if I could eat off the streets.
No not street food, I mean literally
eat my food off the ground in the street.
It looked so opulent and new and smart.
This was almost 30 years ago mind you.
It sounds weird now, I admit,
but that is how fine things looked to me
when I came back home after only six months in India.
Since then feeling like a millionaire has been extremely easy.
Because it’s all in the mind,
and how you frame things.
Compared to India, my home town
was rich and fancy, man.
I was living the life of a millionire all this time,
and I just never realized it,
because I had no other frame of reference.
That insight alone was like gold.
I was already there and I just didn’t realize it.
And remember, I was a monk,
so I had no money of my own.
Yet still that feeling of being a millionaire grew in me.
And it grew further.
Until I eventually outgrew the life
of a celibate monk in the yoga ashram altogether
and allowed myself to take off the saffron robes,
in private of course, (laughter)
and to indulge my senses a bit.
And let me tell you, after a decade of the austerities I performed,
having a little fun really felt like a million dollars right there. (laughter)
Stuff you all take for granted...like icecream. And peanut butter...
and weed. (laughter)
Actually usually it was the weed first, then the munchies...then the peanut butter... and icecream... or peanut butter with iceream. (laughter)
Wow man, that first joint after a decade without any intoxication whatsoever. Woohoo
No alcohol, no lsd, no magic mushrooms, all that stuff, none of it for ten years. And then one hit on a joint and I’m like...wow, this is liberation man.
(laughter)
Is that Krishna in the corner there? On the altar?
I think he just winked at me. (laughter)
I bet he has this stuff in heaven. (laughter)
Is that why the Shiva babas are always choofing the chillum?
Like a steam train...choof choof choof.
Clouds of smoke billowing about.
None of that stuff in the Krishna ashram.
No sir. I had to fast and wake up at 4am daily for years.
No movies, no novels, no news, no pop music,
and of course no sex. (laughter)
All of that went out of the window when I left the ashram.
And so feeling like a millionaire came easily.
And it only cost me ten bucks.
That’ll buy you all the weed you need for a joint, (laughter)
and a peanut butter ice cream. (laughter)
Some of us are easy to please.
Your version of enlightenment might be a little different,
or of being a millionaire.
I mean are we talking dollar millionaire or rupee millionaire?
Buddha liberation or badass liberation? (laughter)
It’s all in your perception of reality, it’s all in the mind.
After a decade of sacrifice, austerity,
deep study of the Sanskrit texts,
hours of meditation daily,
it was easy to feel enlightened,
and rich at the same time.
Life was going to be good after all that self-denial.
Now I could let my hair down,
not easy for a bald monk (laughter)
but it grows on you (laughter)...
all this freedom, like a man walking out of prison,
or a monk walking out of his cave
and back down the mountain to the village.
And this village had some wicked stuff man.
Like music, and movies, and literature...
and cell phones, this was the late nineties remember.
Back then, in the monastery,
I had created for myself
a totally different perception of reality
compared to the average man in the street in my town...
based on a large dose of magical thinking,
suspension of disbelief
and cognitive dissonance.
The kids of today do it all the time.
It’s called the woke movement (laughter).
“Identify as whatever you like,
don’t let science get in your way,
this is a post-truth world now, baby”.
So if I wanted to identify as enlightened,
then who was going to stop me?
I was already high on life
way before the weed came along.
The weed just make it all seem clearer and more immediate.
Imminent and less transcendent.
Weed will do that to you. (laughter)
(takes a hit from an imaginary joint)
wow man...is that Krishna’s flute I hear? (laughter)
Hey Krishna, blue skin looks good on you dude.
We are all colour blind here brother, all one big family.
None of this father stuff, or my lord, with these indian gods,
even though they’re older than all the other gods we hear of.
Bro is just fine, or lover in fact,
if you want to go deep on the pastimes of the gods
and our relationship to them.
I mean the whole story is magical thinking at its best.
You think the famous fantasy movie Avatar
was original creative thinking?
No way man,
those blue guys are all taken from the ancient Sanskrit Vedas.
All the Vedic avatars are either blue or green,
and the animals speak.
Look at Ram, he was green,
and he had a whole army of monkeys who also spoke,
Jai Hanuman.
And then there’s the god with the elephant head, Ganesh.
I mean, what were those guys smoking? (laughter)
That must be some wild weed right there man,
back in the distant past, when they wrote all this stuff down,
in between puffs of hemp bhang or hashish from Manali,
there at the foothills of the Himalayas...
just a tain ride north of New Delhi.
Heaven is just a train ride away.
Bob Marley went through Babylon by bus,
I went to Paradise in a tuktuk.
With loud horns blasting all the way.
Like the trupmets calling for the opening of heaven’s gates.
And when I came back to earth, to Africa,
to life outside the monastery walls after ten years,
I realized that magical thinking was just fine for Krishna,
so it must be fine for me.
Who needs science anyway? (laughter)
I was way ahead of the woke movement of today.
Gender? Who needs to carry that illusion around with us all day long?
According the Gita you’re not this body anyway.
No no, it’s fine to identify as whatever you wish on the day,
this is a post-truth era, biology is so last century.
So what if a man’s cervix can’t give birth
to anything larger than a mango,
let them have babies.
Who are we to discriminate?
Magical thinking has full right of way nowadays,
I was totally in the closet back then
about my inner feeling of being enlightened.
I mean you couldn’t just openly come out and say it.
People will think you’re nuts.
A god with an elephant head is fine,
but don’t try to imagine yourself into heaven buddy. (laughter)
Yes, I know it doesn’t quite fit
if you put an elephant head on a human shoulder,
or how does the neck even work?
Does he need to brush his teeth?
What does he eat?
Will he need clothes?
Is it an elephant brain and a human heart?
Don’t ask questions,
just have faith you blasphemer.
It’s in the book, so it must be true.
And yes, Krishna is totally blue,
and had sixteen thousand wives,
each with a palace of her own,
and an expansion of Krishna would go to each queen
simultaneously every evening for dinner.
No, I don’t know if they had peanut butter icecream, (laughter)
just shut up and chant your rounds.
It will all become clearer when you are enlightened my son.
And it did.
I realized what it meant to be enlightened.
After the austerity of India,
and the decade of fasting
and renunciation in the temple monastery,
I walked out into the streets of Africa
and it was there...that sense of knowing...
that realization...
that smell of weed everywhere (laughter)...
I knew I had arrived in paradise...
that I was always already there...
we all are...
because this is it...
and that thou art...
and weed is legal here now (laughter)...
this is what liberation feels like
and what enlightenment sounds like.
You are looking upon a man
who has seen god face to face,
and heard the call...
the phone call... from god,
on a direct line, via wifi, or sci-fi, or siddhi,
that’s how i roll, with god on speed dial,
any network, linked up to the heavenly planets,
where every step is a dance and every word is a song,
with an unlimited bong,
how could I be wrong,
if it feels so right,
right?
It all went to my head, you say.
Well you’re right because it’s all in the mind,
all is mind on this level of reality,
so don’t mind me,
I’m now of two minds
that we are all the one mind,
god observing himself
through the lens filter
of ego and human persona.
So while simultaneously I straddle the divide,
one foot in heaven, the other in Africa,
walking with god, hand in hand
to the promised land,
because I choose to identify as enlightened.
Without being frightened
because god has the greatest sense of humor
in all the three worlds.
So now you know.
Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen,
that’s all for now, until next time
Namaste, Vanakam, Hari Om, Radhe Shyam, Jai Sri Ram.