Joyful Irony
The Sunday Signal - 3 May 2026
I find that the unrealistic expectations we have of awakening and life thereafter go a long way to explaining its elusiveness.
The end of the Waking Up path is not an escape from the world or an elevation above it, but a new relationship with it. One way to sum that up is as I interpret verse 63 of the Tao Te Ching:
My paraphrasing snippet of the verse is:
Awareness and balance yield potency. Fear nothing, but disregard nothing as insignificant. Play human games calmly, recognising them as games.
And my interpretation:
In the metaphor of life as game, enlightenment isn’t escaping the game. It is - while playing - recognising the game for what it is rather than mistaking it for something it is not.
But this is silent on the role of a critical element. The ‘awakened’ relationship with life is grounded in a humble and unexpectedly powerful perspective: Humour.
Holding the World… Lightly
We live most of our lives managing an infinitesimal fragment of the universe that is of immeasurable importance to us - our minds, bodies, local environments and the people closest to us. In the grand scheme, we hold little, but our grip is fiercely tight.
As our understanding blossoms, we recognise that these minds and bodies are not what we, essentially, are. A long path of seeking or a blinding epiphany reveals that we are the expressing and experiencing spaciousness that holds and makes up all that is.
Wow! That is a lot to hold! But we - as Being - do so effortlessly. We might say that Being holds itself lightly. A stranglehold on reality - such as we personally sometimes try to achieve - would hardly do the trick.
There is a sense in which the individual ‘awakened’ life within the Dream, within the Play, within the Game, is a tiny holographic shard of Being as regards this light hold. Realising that that-which-one-is holds everything, one’s embrace adjusts accordingly.
Beyond Literalism
Sounds great. It might even ‘make sense’. The words of this article might articulate conceptual entities and relationships in a way that is useful.
But the ‘awakened perspective’ cares only so much about that. It’s easy to expect too much of words. They are, in the end, a closed circle of cross-references that, while an undeniable part of reality, cannot hold a candle to reality itself. We overburden them - expecting the paper menu to taste like the meal it describes.
The escape from literalism - a term we might give to experiencing life largely through the concepts and names we use to narrate it - is a hallmark of awakening. And a light-heartedness characteristic of ironic humour accompanies it.
I’ve long loved Greg Goode’s term - Joyful Irony. It works as a nimble handling of language that avoids expecting the world to conform to the words we use to describe it.
It allows me to say, ‘I’ll visit you tomorrow,’ even though I know that that-which-I-am is not this person but All That Is (!). I can say, ‘I prefer chocolate to vanilla,’ without fearing that I’m committing the universe (the Expression of Myself) to this gastronomical judgement.
The Nobel Laureate, Hermann Hesse, put it like this:
Only humour … (possibly the most original and brilliant of humankind’s achievements) can accomplish the otherwise impossible feat of uniting all spheres of human life by bathing them in the iridescent light of its prisms. To live in the world as though it were not the world, to respect the law but to remain above it, to have possessions ‘as if not possessing’, to renounce things as though it were no renunciation: all the things asked of us in such well-loved and frequently expressed words of wisdom can only be put into practice through humour.
Humour helps us include life’s paradoxes in our gentle, loving hug. Without it, we would drive ourselves crazy trying to ‘make sense’ of things. Why, we could get lost forever in the paradox of awakening itself - that “we” are both the person currently searching for the “dash” key and the eternal spaciousness that holds all manifestation. Father and Son. Holy cow!
Sloughing Skins
The sense of fearlessness at the heart of awakening sees us live like a snake, sloughing off the skin of our fixed identity time and time again.
Humans suffer when they identify with any specific set of conceptual characteristics - ‘honest’, ‘thin’, ‘weak’, ‘spiritual’... Concepts can seem durable - fixed - but life is ever-changing. When life conflicts with a concept that seeks to contain it, life wins, 100% of the time. And the awakened know that “we” are life.
Inconsistency? (Snicker), Incompatibility? (Chortle), Unacceptability? (Chuckle).
These concepts, roles, signifiers are not problems when we know that they are costumes. Each is as quick and simple to don as the last. The awakened know themselves as the whole blooming wardrobe.
Costumes can die, die, die. Undefended. Ungrasped. ‘Selves’ can die, die, die.
Funny, huh? WHAT?!? Even death?
When ‘you’ are dying every moment while ‘You’ are hosting every birth and passing, even this paradox can bring a wry grin. But that doesn’t mean we impose this view on those experiencing fear or grief - Joyful Irony isn’t a trophy, commandment or weapon.
See you at the frontier,
p.s. If these signals resonate, here are three ways to move deeper into the work:
1. Life Navigation: A private coaching arc to update how you relate to yourself, others and life events, growing from success into genuine Self-Leadership.
2. Spiritual Inquiry: A guided private inquiry for seekers ready to step from the heavy burden of the separate self toward lived realisation of the perennial truth of the world’s wisdom traditions and contemporary insight.
3. Frontier Intensive: For those in Ireland able to travel for in-person meetings with me, a 3-month hybrid private mentorship for deep personal re-orientation, geared towards Life Navigation or Spiritual Inquiry, based on your aims.
The Next Session
Satsang: Open Studio, Thursday, 7 May at 6pm UK time
I’ll be in the studio this Thursday to play with light-heartedness. This is where I record the session for our archive, but the door is very much open.
You are welcome to drop in to observe the inquiry and participate in the practice. If you can’t make it live but have a question you’d like me to address in the recording, just reply to this email.
Phil Grimm’s Progress - A Modern Myth for Anxious Times
I am serialising this ‘Sophie’s World for spirituality’ on Substack, and you can receive the weekly instalments to your mailbox every Wednesday. Learn More.
THE DEEP PATH: MEMBER CORNER
Join the Next Session: Click here for Link & Schedule
Missed a Session? The Map Room (Video Archive)