By Cathy Eck

The Senses

We all know about the five physical senses.  Clearly, if someone loses his or her sense of sight, hearing, or even taste, his or her life experience is deeply compromised.  Likewise, those with sharper senses often have a heightened life experience.  Life is often much easier for such people.

Most people know about a false version of the sixth sense.  The sixth sense is commonly related to our intuition, gut feelings, or the voices we hear inside of our head.  Some view the sixth sense as a psychic talent, like you find with mediums.  Many don’t consider that to be a real sense that’s available to everyone because it’s not physical.  It’s a mental sense…a very important sense when you understand it.  From the initiate’s point of view, the sixth sense was our sense of discrimination.  It was our ability to read all of our other senses and decipher when something was true versus false.  When this sixth sense is sharp, you can easily tell the clones/personas from the True Selves. So you can’t be tricked by others.  Clearly those who master the sixth sense have a much easier time in life.  So we could logically conclude that sharp senses, whether physical or mental, contribute to our ease in life.

The Seventh Sense

There’s one more mental sense that’s just as important as the other six senses.  That’s our sense of humor.  People do call it a sense; they just don’t think about what they’re saying.  Life for most people becomes so serious that the seventh sense has been labeled a talent reserved for comedians and pundits.  But we all have a sense of humor; and when we step on the road of initiation, a pure sense of humor has the potential to turn a dirt road into a superhighway.

It’s not easy to laugh at our flaws, problems, diseases, fears, mistakes, or emotions.  And yet, no more powerful tool for transformation exists if our laughter truly comes from our seventh sense, which means that it’s authentic laughter.  When we can truly laugh at what’s false, it can’t hurt us.  We lose our fear; and without fear, we do exactly what we want to do in life.

There are lots of laugh therapy groups out there.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about real, authentic humor that comes from deep inside.  Authentic humor causes us to laugh because we get the inner joke.  We see that what we thought was true is not true at all.  A true comedic moment is not just relief from the stresses of the day; it’s a permanent transformation where we let go of something false and limiting.  The true comedian who can help us to see the utter stupidity of our false self or get us to remove the mask that hides our true nature is a rare one.  That’s the power of an authentic sense of humor.  We all have that power.  We were born with it.

The Dream that Changed my Mind

Years ago, I had a vivid dream that taught me the power of laughter.  I was standing in the barn where my daughter boarded her horses.  That barn was like my office while she was riding each day.  A big, black dog mysteriously appeared just feet away from me.  The dog was dirty and frothing at the mouth.  I was terrified.  Just as the fear was close to paralyzing me, I heard a voice.  My sixth sense had stepped up to help.  The voice said, “Laugh at it.”  That was a pretty simple instruction.  I followed the voice’s wise guidance, and laughed and laughed.  The dog whimpered and ran away.

Then I suddenly understood the power of the seventh sense.  I wasn’t just laughing as a technique; I was laughing at myself for thinking that a dog could harm me.  My false mind had created an illusion; and I thought that my illusion was real and true.

As a child, my sense of humor often kept me safe and happy.  Over time, I lost touch with it.  I began to focus too much on reality and became painfully serious.  Oh I could laugh at a comic, joke, or funny movie.  But I couldn’t laugh at myself or at life anymore.  I was ashamed of my mistakes and humiliated by my direct way of speaking.  My extended family convinced me that I should live in a small box so that I would not disappoint them or hurt their feelings.

Hurting Other People’s Feelings?

The reason I was put in a box was so that I’d stop laughing at other people’s beliefs.  Beliefs are funny, really funny, because they make no sense at all.  They’ve been that way for me for much of my life.  When I saw beliefs as true, they weren’t funny anymore.  So this sense of humor was a real barometer for my potential for joy and freedom.

Beliefs actually do nothing but harm the believer, and yet people will go to war for their limiting beliefs.  People who identify with their false self think that you’re laughing at them.  They think they are their beliefs.  They don’t get that you’re freeing them and honoring their true power when you don’t accept their silly, powerless beliefs as the truth.

In truth, you can’t hurt another’s feelings.  The human mind was perfectly designed so that our emotions are in response to our own thoughts.  Let’s say that I don’t invite my friend to the movies.  If she feels hurt, it’s only because of her thoughts about my action or me.

If my friend thinks, “I always get left behind.”  Well that is not true because she doesn’t always get left behind.  She will get an emotional charge in her body to set her straight.  That emotional charge is her reminder to let her thought go.  If she thinks, “Cathy was so rude.”  That is not true either, and she will get another emotional shock.  Each time she adds another belief to her chain of thought, she gets another shock of emotion.  She has to falsely believe that her emotions are validating her thoughts to keep the chain of false beliefs alive; and that’s going to take her deeper into the illusion.  I might have been the catalyst for the chain of painful thoughts to arise in her mind, but she created the thoughts.  She also had the power to stop them if she discriminated (sixth sense) and let go because her thinking was so funny and false (seventh sense).  If my friend honestly assessed her own mind, she would have thanked me for exposing her false viewpoint.  We could have had a good laugh together.  We wouldn’t be laughing at her.  She was never her beliefs anyway.  I’d be laughing with her.

Our false view of life is what brings us problems, makes us sick, and eventually kills us.  Our false view is metaphorically demonstrated with the big black, rabid dog.  Dog is the backwards spelling of God.  Black (no color) is the negative aspect of white (all color).  The True Self has all potential (all color) within it; the false self has no potential at all.  So the false self is black as night; we can’t see where we’re going.  The dream is clearly teaching me that loss of laughter means that I would be living at the triangle bottom.  The triangle bottom is the realm of the illusion of good and evil. To get to the top of the triangle, the perspective of the True Self, I need to let go and regain my seventh sense.

The best thing we can do for others and ourselves is laugh at that rabid dog.  Why?  Because laughing at it proves that we know it’s false.  When we know something is false, we are free of it.

It took many years of clearing beliefs from my mind before I realized that the greatest honor we can give to our True Self is to laugh at anything that tries to cover it up.  If we laugh at our own false self, we give permission to others to do so as well.   People don’t have to pretend not to see the elephant in our room so relationships become more intimate.  Conversations become so much easier.

At the same time, I’ll be the first to admit that when my beliefs are banging at the door of my mind, they appear very real.  It takes strength to look at those beliefs and laugh.  That is when you need a friend who doesn’t take you seriously, who believes in you, and who wants you to be free too.

Perfect friendships are rare.  Laughter is a key ingredient.  In a perfect relationship, we laugh our flaws away; we purposely challenge each other’s baggage.  Friendships often end when one person takes something serious and wants sympathy, or an apology, instead of laughter.  One person thinks that their beliefs are right, and the other’s beliefs are wrong.  The relationship descends into the old familiar mutual suffering and sharing of problems and woes.  The perfect friendship is over; or if it lives on, it exists as a superficial acting gig.  There’s just no love or intimacy in shared suffering.

It’s Never Too Late

You can still go back and laugh at those people who gave you their beliefs in the safety of your own mind.  In fact, I highly recommend that you don’t do this with others until you master your own mind.  If you aren’t clear, the other will take your laughter as a judgment, and they will be right.  It’s powerful therapy when done right; it makes a mess of things when done wrong.

You need to let go of the belief that it’s not socially acceptable to laugh at authority figures.  Most of us learn that belief early in life.  Laughing authentically at the evening news could end disease, war, and crime.  If we could laugh at our politicians and business leaders instead of believing them, we would identify dishonesty before they take us to the cleaners.    False prophets disappear when you laugh at them, as well as those fake spiritual teachers, preachers, and gurus.  We should never be afraid to laugh at a doctor’s diagnosis.  If he or she is a true healer, they will laugh with us.

It is not considered politically correct to laugh at someone with a disease or other problem.  But what if laughter is the perfect cure that is right in front of our eyes.  Laughter breaks the curse of seriousness.  It takes the S or the Serpent, sin, or seriousness out of the curse; and so it becomes a cure again.   That would be some joke, wouldn’t it?   All this money and time spent trying to cure things, and all we had to do was realize that the disease wasn’t real or true; we can laugh at it and make it disappear.

You may remember the story of Norman Cousins who healed himself of a rare disease by watching comedy.  The problem was that he couldn’t sustain it.  He died a couple of years later.  Comedy outside isn’t the same as our seventh sense.  It’s laughter that lightens our mood.  But it is fixing effects.  The same is true of that laughing yoga crap.  Such things are faking it until we make it.  I’m never talking about doing that in initiation.

In laughing at outer comedy or laughing yoga, we’re doing something to alleviate discomfort…to take our mind off of our problem.  The seventh sense is laughter at the disease because we know the disease is false.  That isn’t something that many can do with any authenticity until they’ve been letting go for quite a while.  I work on it all the time by letting go of whatever keeps me from laughing at disease.  Disease beliefs always feel serious, real, collective, and true at first.  But they are false; our emotions are telling us that the belief is false.  So as we let go, we see the joke.  If Norman Cousins could have laughed at himself instead of the Marx Brothers, I think he would have made it back to complete health.

I watched Josh Blue on Comedy Central the other night.  He’s a comedian from the reality show, “Last Comic Standing;” he has cerebral palsy.  He made the joke that he needed to stop laughing so much about his condition because he might lose his disease; then he’d lose his material.  He gets it.

True, seventh sense, laughter lifts you up because it defies gravity; seriousness or gravity takes you to the grave.  It is a slow form of suicide.  In short, one who can laugh at their problems has real power, the power that creates miracles.  So have a good laugh today, but make it a real laugh.  If you can’t do that, then let go of whatever stands in your way until you can.  In time, you’ll get there.

In my articles, I make letting go seem too easy at times.  I’m reminding people of what they knew but forgot because they covered up their truth with beliefs.  You don’t want to put what I say in your mind just because you like it, or you create what I call a letting go clone.  That takes you further from the truth.  Use what I write as a trigger to let go.  Often people already have clones in their mind, and they can’t see what to let go.  They just know they aren’t being themselves.  That’s why I created the Gold Circle.  In that program, I go into much more detail.  I charge for that program because it was an incredible amount of work, and I had to dive into the illusion and live in it in order to write my way out.  In the Gold Circle, I take you down into the beliefs that keep you from living what I just wrote.  Once you take those beliefs out, then what I wrote becomes your normal state.