The PIES Recipe:

The PIES recipe ingredients are the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual aspects of humanness. Laughter cooks those ingredients until they are blended into one magnificently connected taste treat.

P=PHYSICAL

Laughter literally rebalances the chemistry created by stress, tension and pain by shifting the chemicals of each cell and effecting every major bodily system.

"Laughter is the sensation of feeling good all over, and showing it principally in one place."
    ~ Josh Billings

"The old man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to food, and ended by saying that such a laugh was money in the man's pocket, because it cut down the doctor's bills like everything."
    ~ "Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain

"Wrinkles merely indicate where smiles have been."
    ~ Mark Twain

"Laughter makes your thymus plumper

and your circulation stronger.

Laughter stimulates your pumper;

Helps you live a little longer.

Laughter helps you keep your health

And it might increase your wealth:

So, don't let your organs shrivel-

Give a smile, a laugh, a giggle!

It improves the atmosphere

And you'll spread a lot of cheer!

    ~ Mercedes Nelson, RN, BSBA 

"Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter."
    ~ Sir Max Beerbohm

I=INTELLECTUAL

Laughter increases intelligence, promotes memory increases absorption and retention of information by relieving stress (click here for stress article), all resulting in a greater flexibility of thought and humor.

"Men have been wise in very different modes; but they've always laughed in the same way."
    ~ Samuel Johnson

   

"Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words."
    ~ Dorothy Parker

 

"Too often when we think we have found the truth we have only lost our sense of humor."
    ~ Noah benShea

 

"High comedy, and the laughter that ensues, is an evolutionary event. Together they evoke a biological response that drives the organism to higher levels of organization and integration. Laughter is the loaded latency given us by nature as part of our native equipment to break up the stalemates of our lives and urge us on to deeper and more complex forms of knowing."
    ~ Jean Houston

 

"Man thinks and god laughs."
    ~ Yiddish Proverb

E=EMOTIONAL

Laughter resulting from fear, anger and boredom comes from the universal human survival process of catharsis.

   

"There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion."
    ~ Carl Gustav Jung

 

"The world will end in laughter because it is full of tears."
    ~ The Course in Miracles

 

  "The young man who has not wept is a savage and the old man who will not laugh is a fool."
    ~ George Santayana

 

"We're in pain, of course, but to cheer ourselves up we get together and laugh from the bottom of our hearts. At any moment, we're scared. But at least this way, if there's another earthquake and I'm killed, I won't die alone."
    ~ Kunimasa Nakata, sitting around a campfire in Kobe , Japan

 

"If we're going to be miserable we might as well enjoy ourselves & laugh."
    ~ Annette Goodheart

S=SPIRITUAL

Laughter results in the experience of connection: with ourselves, each other, all living things and the universe.

"Time spent laughing is time spent with the gods"
    ~ Japanese proverb

 

"God writes a lot of comedy. The trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny."
    ~ Garrison Keillor

 

"But it certainly is a wonderful thing to wake up suddenly in the solitude of the woods and look up at the sky and see the utter nonsense of everything including all the solemn stuff given out by professional asses about the spiritual life; and simply to burst out LAUGHING, and LAUGH and LAUGH, with the sky and the trees because god is not in words, and not in systems, and not in liturgical movements, and not in "contemplation" with a big "C," or in asceticism or in anything like that, not even in the apostolate."
    ~ Thomas Merton, Trappist monk

 

".the wanderer is overcome by the joy of existence So that he can only laugh."
    ~ Tibetan Dhyani Buddha

 

"Since everything is but an apparition, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one my well burst out in laughter."
    ~ Long Chen Pa , Tibetan yogi

 

On his death bed, Oscar Wilde looked around the room and said, "This wallpaper is terrible. One of us has to go"
    ~ Oscar Wilde

 

"If you're not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there"
    ~ Martin Luther (1483-1546)

RELIGIOUS TRUTHS

Taoism: Shit happens.

Confucianism: Confucius says, "Shit happens."

Buddhism: If shit happens, it is not really shit.

Zen-Buddhism: What is the sound of shit happening?

Hinduism: This shit happened before

Islam: If shit happens, it is the will of Allah

Protestantism: Let shit happen to someone else.

Catholicism: If shit happens, you deserve it.

Judaism: Why does shit always happen to us?

Atheism: Shit never happens.

Agnosticism: Shit?

        ~ Anonymous