Why is God Laughing if There is So Much Suffering?

In my book Why Is God Laughing, the premise is that the ground of our being is joyous and full of laughter. I have often been asked, “With so much suffering in the world how can you say God is laughing?” There is extreme exploitation of people everywhere , 50% of the world’s population are living on less than $2 a day. We see war, terrorism, and ecological devastation everywhere we look. If God is laughing, he is then he is a cruel megalomaniacal tyrant at best. Albert Einstein once wrote “Human beings, vegetables, or comic dust — we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.” This echoes what the great wisdom traditions say, that every particle of cosmic dust is actually a microcosm of the universe. The universe is a beautiful symphony or song. In fact, that’s why we call it the universe, -- one verse, uni-verse. When we are tuned into it, then we hear the divine symphony. The Vedas say, As is the microcosm, so is the microcosm, As is the atom, so is the universe, As is the human body, so is the cosmic body. We are all inseparably woven into the patterns of connectivity in the whole universe. In other words, there is no separate self. It is when we experience the separate self that we create all the suffering in the world. All the problems of exploitation, poverty, injustice, war, conflict and terrorism are created by the separate self. If we could go back to our original self, which is inseparable from the music of the universe, then we would hear the laughter of the universe. We would be incapable of hurting others or being hurt by them. In the Divine Comedy, Dante says the song of the angels sounds like the laughter of the universe. When we hear that laughter of the universe and we are part of that one song, then we go beyond our separate self. We are returning to the memory of wholeness—ready to heal and be healed because we have become holy, we have become all is. In that state it is impossible to create these problems that we see in the world. My hope with the message of Why Is God Laughing is that it because we cannot hear the laughter, because we are not at one with the laughter that we have suffering . It is a reminder to go back to our original state and heal ourselves and the world. When we do that life will be fun, joyous, peaceful harmonious and be full of laughter and love. In our ha ha experience we will also have the ah ha experience.