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Laughter Psychology
LAUGHTER PSYCHOLOGY
Theory:
- Once a thought occurs, you have 3 possible responses: joy, neutrality or hate
- Whatever your response is, increases the tendency of you to respond to that thought in that same way again
- Therefore if you have a negative response to a thought, you will continue to create more hate to that thought
- If you laugh when the thought occurs then you are reprogramming the negative tendency into a positive tendency
Practice:
- Sit down
- Adopt a free, non-clinging, perfectly content state of mind
- Sooner or later, the ego will start to think about what it could be doing or what it has done
- Respond to thought with a joyous free laugh
- return to #2
The value of this method is that it is self-therapeutic – you dont need lengthy interpretations, suggestions or the control of an external therapist who may misinterpret you. Also the external therapist will have a delay in giving you instructions whereas laughter as self-therapy will become more and more spontaneous all the time.
The benefits of this method:
- continual stomach pumping is highly cathartic and beneficial to digestion
- progressive lightening of the control of thoughts over you
Related self-therapies:
* Zen Buddhism – http://www.mro.org/zmm/teachings/meditation.php – "The only agreement that you make with yourself in this process is that if your mind begins to wander – if you become aware that what you're doing is chasing thoughts – you will look at the thought, acknowledge it, and then deliberately and consciously let it go and begin the count again at one. … Each time you return to the breath you are empowering yourself with the ability to put your mind where you want it, when you want it there, for as long as you want it there."
* Freezone Scientology Solo Auditing: there are a number of solo auditing procedures in Freezone Scientology. The success of them is measured by progression of the PC up the tone scale – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_scale … while laughter can only be considered at most 8.0 (Exhilaration), it is a great step towards the top of the tone scale. One issue that most scientologists would have with this Laughter Psychology is that one is not truly "duplicating" the thought or becoming cause over the thought and is attempting to NOT-IS the thought by laughing at it. The only reply I have is: "unconditional happiness is not based on being at cause over conditions"
* Yoga – a number of yogas practice a posture known as breath of fire, which involves rapid contractions of the navel. If this same posture were done with the mouth open, then the person would laugh!
* Hinduism – This technique is related to the Hindu concept of koshas, or body layers – http://www.swamij.com/koshas.htm. While the deepest layer of body is the sat kosha, or truth body, the joy body (ananda maya kosha) is very close to the truth body, separated only by the consciousness (chit maya) body.
* Universal Clearing Process – http://net-prophet.net/ucp/
* Annette Goodheart, Laughter Yoga, World Laughter Tour – these 3 organizations promote laughter for no reason.
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