The Laughing Heart

The Laughing Heart with Errol Strider Fear, Trust, and the Search for a Palpable God A Doorway Into the Current Dilemma In this episode of The Laughing Heart, host Errol Strider opens by describing the show as a doorway into what is essential, absurd, and hopefully enlightening. He frames the episode around what he calls the current dilemma: the breakdown of culture, threats to democracy, divisiveness, global warming, possible nuclear catastrophe, pandemics, authoritarian tendencies, distrust, and fear. Rather than treating these issues only as separate crises, he suggests they may be symptoms of an old worldview breaking down. From “Not Enough” to “Enough Already” Errol says the culture has long been driven by the phrase “not enough.” In his view, this scarcity-based worldview has shaped everything from agriculture and industry to war, domination, and social organization. He proposes that the next epoch may be characterized by a different phrase: “enough already.” This shift, as he describes it, is a turning away from separation, competition, fear, and duality toward a recognition that people are part of one body of shared consciousness. Cooperation Over Competition Drawing on the book No Contest, Errol questions the assumption that competition is necessary for human flourishing. He suggests that evolution and spiritual insight point more strongly toward cooperation as the path of thriving. Yet he acknowledges that when a society is caught in fear, division, and reaction, it becomes difficult to share perspectives rooted in peace, growth, and understanding. He warns that division makes it easier for controlling forces to dominate a culture. Betrayal, Distrust, and the Collapse of Confidence Errol reflects on a workshop he once led with his friend John titled “Reclaiming Trust in a Society of Betrayal.” He connects today’s cultural distrust to deeper experiences of betrayal, referencing psychologist James Hillman’s work on reactions to betrayal such as paranoia, denial, anger, and self-betrayal. He asks how trust can be established when people depend on realities that are fundamentally unstable or untrustworthy. This leads him toward the need for a more holistic and spiritual orientation to life. Spiritual Gravity and the Evolutionary Imperative Quoting a line from The Urantia Book, Errol says a lasting social system without morality grounded in spiritual realities is like a solar system without gravity. He describes gravity as the cohesive force that draws things together, then compares that to what he calls the evolutionary imperative. In his view, evolution involves two balancing movements: the push toward agency, freedom, liberation, and new creation, and the pull toward center, harmony, and coordination. Teilhard, Tangential Energy, and Radial Energy Errol brings in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, describing two kinds of energy: tangential and radial. He connects tangential energy with movement outward into agency, diversity, and new phenomena, while radial energy calls things back toward center and wholeness. The quality of human life, he says, depends on how people participate in that evolutionary dance between freedom and harmony, individuality and unity, movement and integration. “What About You?” and the Quest Beyond the Known Errol then shares his poem “What About You?” The poem invites listeners into a shared quest beyond the known, asking whether they will walk the mountain of trust, move beyond self-limitation, leave behind the weighty past, hear clashing points of view, abandon the easier way, and follow the infinite path of faith. The poem serves as a direct challenge to the listener: will they participate in a deeper journey of trust, mystery, and transformation? You Gotta Love It Returning to his daily practice, Errol says he has begun responding to moments of disappointment, frustration, grief, and fear with the phrase “you gotta love it.” He presents this not as sentimental denial, but as a spiritual discipline. Since he sees love as the essential dynamic of the universe, he suggests that fear is ultimately illusory. He uses an image from Planet of the Apes, where a projected fire barrier keeps the apes away, as a metaphor for fear: a projected image that appears threatening but may not be ultimately real. Convicted of Fear Errol compares older Christian teachings about being convicted of sin with what he sees as a modern need to be convicted of fear. He argues that people must recognize the extent to which they are driven by fear. Quoting A Course in Miracles, he says the ego will allow people to see themselves in many negative ways, but not as truly afraid, because the ego depends on separation and maintains that separation through fear. The work, then, is not merely to manage fear but to see through it. A Palpable God The episode closes with Errol’s provocative poem “A Palpable God,” set to music by Charles Mazzell. The poem imagines a speaker longing for a God who can be touched, held, recognized, and encountered in ordinary life: at the mall, supermarket, unemployment line, human longing, spiritual hunger, and the messy places where people search for meaning. The poem wrestles with depression, yearning, disbelief, ritual, desire, disappointment, and the hope for a God who fills the emptiness. Errol acknowledges that the piece has drawn resistance, but he still offers it as a curious, challenging, and potentially helpful exploration of the human search for divine presence.

The Laughing Heart with Errol Strider The Wisdom of Duh, the Obvious, Resistance and Innocence Errol Strider Opens The Laughing Heart In this episode of The Laughing Heart, host Errol Strider explains that the show will take a departure from its usual format by featuring an older episode of Insight Out, The Naked Truth, the radio program he hosted with his longtime partner Rochelle Alicia Strider. Errol says he revisited one of those programs from 2016 and found it still useful, amusing, and relevant. The chosen theme is the word “duh,” used as a playful doorway into what is obvious, essential, absurd, and spiritually revealing. “Duh” and the Beginning of Wisdom Errol and Rochelle begin by asking what makes something obvious. Rochelle jokes that “duh” is obvious because it is obvious, while Errol reflects on the idea that the beginning of wisdom is a firm grasp of the obvious. They explore how a “duh” may not be obvious to everyone at first, because what seems self-evident often depends on perception, experience, maturity, and willingness to see. The program uses humor to suggest that wisdom often begins not with something complicated, but with finally recognizing what has been right in front of us all along. Resistance Adds to Pain One of the main “duhs” of the episode is the recurring Insight Out teaching that resistance is what people add to pain to make it last longer and hurt more. Errol and Rochelle explain that this may sound obvious once a person has experienced it, but until then resistance often feels normal and protective. Rochelle describes how embracing pain, fear, wind, cold, or emotional difficulty can reduce its intensity and reveal what to do next. Errol adds that when he stops resisting cold after swimming, the experience becomes easier to accept. Humor, Characters, and the Search for Meaning The episode includes several of Errol’s recurring comic-spiritual characters, including Professor Umbridge, a rabbi, a senator, and Father O’Malley. Through these characters, Errol and Rochelle playfully examine certainty, letting go, service, the universe’s response to human questions, national debt, spiritual communion, and love. The humor keeps the discussion light, but the underlying point remains serious: life offers repeated chances to recognize what is true, release unnecessary struggle, and return to breath, presence, and love. Maturity, Emotion, and Human Infancy Errol and Rochelle discuss human immaturity by comparing destructive adult behavior to infants throwing things on the floor. Rochelle suggests that much of the world’s trouble comes from people who do not yet know how to master fear, anger, and virulent emotions. The rabbi character frames maturity as learning to meet fear or anger and transform it into another “duh.” Rochelle offers her own approach: instead of fighting fear, she imagines putting her arms around it until it melts into nothingness. Innocence, Forgiveness, and Returning to the Moment The conversation turns toward innocence as something people may lose but can regain by returning to the present moment without judgment. Errol suggests that innocence is one of the qualities needed to become available to the “juicy reality” of life. He also offers reflections on forgiveness, describing it as what happens when a wall appears between a person and love and one casts love upon it. Rochelle adds that while it can sometimes be easier to forgive others, people must also learn to open their hearts toward themselves when they fall short of their own ideals. Love, Service, and Heart-Opening Another central theme is heart-opening. Errol says the work is to open the heart so God, or the ever-present origin of being, can “dump a bunch of love” into the soul. He and Rochelle connect this to service, partnership, non-resistance, and the willingness to embrace what is abrasive until something softer is found within it. They suggest that life’s obvious spiritual truths are not always easy, but they become clearer when people stop fighting reality and begin participating more fully in the moment. Closing with the Final “Duh” The episode closes by returning to the core reminder: resistance adds to pain and makes it last longer. Errol encourages listeners to notice how many “duhs” they can discover in daily life, not merely as jokes, but as recognitions of truth. Rochelle repeats the familiar closing teaching, and Errol answers it with the perfect final word: “duh.” The result is a playful, philosophical, and tender episode about seeing clearly, softening resistance, and letting the laughing heart meet life as it is.

The Laughing Heart with Errol Strider Meeting the Moment: Errol Strider on Human Connection, Complaint, Feelings, and the Art of Being Seen Errol Strider Opens The Laughing Heart In this episode of The Laughing Heart, host Errol Strider explains that his goal is to use art, metaphor, music, parable, and story to reveal the essence of the human condition. He says the program will move through both shadow and the possibility of the sublime, using several audio pieces he created in the past. The episode becomes a meditation on human encounter, perception, humor, complaint, emotional honesty, and the small but powerful ways people can truly meet one another. Remembering Life in a San Francisco Apartment Building Errol begins by recalling his early 1970s experience managing a 65-unit apartment building on Polk Street in San Francisco while he was still in his early twenties. He describes that experience as the beginning of his “real life education,” because the building brought him into contact with people from many backgrounds, personalities, and emotional worlds. He mentions residents such as Mary and Ralph, Eddie, Claude, Virginia, and Patrick, some of whom were difficult, unpredictable, or even dangerous. These memories establish the episode’s larger theme: ordinary human life is full of complexity, pain, comedy, conflict, and revelation. “Impressions at a Deli” and the Beauty of Ordinary Encounters The first featured piece is “Impressions at a Deli,” inspired by a night Errol spent observing people in a delicatessen on Bush and Polk Street. The piece turns a simple deli scene into a rich metaphorical universe of sandwiches, tables, voices, gestures, clothing, glances, and “diamond people” circulating like particles in a living system. Errol describes customers coupling and uncoupling through conversation, choice, appetite, laughter, and passing contact. The deli becomes a symbol of human interconnection, where every new person changes the room and every small exchange carries the possibility of meaning. Seeing People Through a Metaphorical Lens After the piece, Errol reflects on how a metaphorical perspective can reveal the spiritual or emotional significance inside everyday activity. He suggests that normal encounters, even casual ones in a restaurant or store, can become moments of realization if people are willing to perceive them deeply. He connects this to the work of Martin Buber, especially the idea from I and Thou that “all real living is meeting.” For Errol, people want to be met, understood, and acknowledged, not merely passed by. The Practice of Asking Someone’s Name Errol shares that, at age 82, he spends much of his time trying to genuinely meet people in ordinary settings. One simple practice he has developed is asking people their names. He describes meeting a cashier named Brian at Whole Foods and later being impressed when Brian remembered his name. Brian explained that he remembered Errol because Errol had taken the time to engage with him, unlike many customers who simply pass through without connection. Errol uses this story to show how even brief recognition can become meaningful. “Will We Pass By?” and the Possibility of Contact The second featured piece, “Will We Pass By?”, asks whether people will move past each other unnoticed, hidden by routine, fear, sameness, rejection, or indifference. The poem explores the missed possibilities that occur when people avoid eye contact, hesitate to reach out, or fail to recognize the human being nearby. It suggests that even strangers who come close to one another may carry an opportunity for shared ecstasy, tenderness, or understanding if they pause long enough to exchange something real. The Power of the Pause Errol then shifts into a reflection on the importance of pausing. He says that in comedy, as in life, the pause can be essential. Pausing allows a person to become centered and gives space for the unknown to appear in a fresh way. He encourages listeners to stop, pause, and allow the divine spark within them to reveal something new, whether that is a new perception of the world or a previously hidden aspect of themselves. “The Buck Stops Here Complaint Department” The episode then turns toward humor with “The Buck Stops Here Complaint Department.” This satirical piece imagines a complaint department where frustrated people can rant without being challenged, blamed, corrected, or made accountable. Errol exaggerates the desire to dump anger on someone who will simply nod, validate the complainer, and preserve the illusion that everyone else is foolish while the complainer is fully justified. The piece pokes fun at chronic complaining, righteous indignation, emotional dumping, and the human tendency to want relief without self-examination. The Laughing Heart Website and Creative Work Errol briefly invites listeners to visit TheLaughingHeart.org, where he says they can find audios, videos, essays, cartoons, and other creative work. He mentions a cartoon series called “If Words Could Speak,” in which individual words have personalities, complaints, and ambitions. One word dislikes the sentence it is in, while another wants to be written in all capital letters because it feels minimized in lowercase. This playful aside reinforces the episode’s central style: language itself becomes alive, comic, revealing, and spiritually suggestive. “Feelings, the Language of Relationship” The final featured piece is “Feelings, the Language of Relationship.” Errol introduces it as a way of understanding what feelings communicate underneath ordinary emotional expression. The piece names emotions such as fear, fondness, anger, delight, grief, gratitude, hatred, exuberance, despair, tenderness, frenzy, firmness, sadness, gladness, bitterness, and joy, showing each as a message about what a person needs, feels, or wishes to share. The message is that feelings are not merely reactions; they are forms of relational language that can help people understand one another more deeply. Closing Invitation to Laugh, Reflect, and Connect Errol closes by hoping the episode has been inspiring, revealing, and fun. He invites listeners to contact him by email, visit TheLaughingHeart.org, explore his YouTube channel Strider Entertainment, and find him on Substack. The episode ends as it began: with a commitment to probing what is essential and humorous in human life. Through poetry, satire, memory, and reflection, Errol invites listeners to notice people more carefully, pause more often, complain more consciously, and recognize feelings as invitations to relationship.

The Laughing Heart with Errol Strider The River of Life: Love, Interconnection, and Moving Beyond the Illusion of Separation Entering the Essential with Errol Strider In this episode of The Laughing Heart, host Errol Strider welcomes listeners into a reflective exploration of the human condition, promising to go deeper into what is essential while maintaining a spirit of enjoyment and creativity. He introduces material from an artist and author who, according to the account he shares, experienced a visitation from Jesus, referred to as Yeshua, in 1991. Errol explains that the encounter led to extraordinary conversations published in two books, and he chooses to narrate a selection called “The River of Life,” describing it as profound, challenging, and potentially enlightening. Love, Spirit, and the Emergence of Creation In the narrated selection, the author asks Yeshua about “adamantine particles” and how physical mass first appeared within primordial space. The response presents creation through a spiritual metaphor: in the beginning there was love, and through love’s desire to know itself and have experience, viewpoint, space, spirit, life, rhythm, energy, time, free will, and physical substance emerged. The selection describes adamantine particles as the first trace of substance, created so that nothing arising from spirit would ever be lost, regardless of the changes or difficulties that occur within existence. Life as Relationship Rather Than Separation The teaching continues by challenging the idea that reality is best understood as a collection of separate objects. In the narrated dialogue, Yeshua says subatomic particles, living beings, ecosystems, and the universe itself can only be fully understood through patterns, connections, and relationships. Errol presents the selection’s contrast between closed systems, which decline toward disorder, and open living systems, which can move toward greater order, energy, and complexity. The core message is that life is relational and interconnected, and that people begin to understand its power when they extend genuine care beyond themselves to include others. The River of Life and the Call to Love One Another The reading applies this view of interconnection to evolution, bacteria, medicine, adaptation, and human behavior. It claims that life continuously expands through shared patterns and relationships, and that fear and hatred encourage destructive outcomes while love supports positive adaptation and symbiosis. The central spiritual teaching is that loving one another is not merely a rule for human fellowship, but a doorway into everlasting life. The selection also emphasizes that unity does not erase individuality; instead, interconnection creates the conditions in which rare and beautiful individual expressions can flourish. Art, Music, and Memorial Day Reflection After completing “The River of Life,” Errol explains that adamantine particles are described in the teachings as the most basic unit of mass in the universe. He then introduces a piece he wrote many years earlier called “Concerto,” inspired by a spiritual teaching about art foreshadowing higher realities and transforming temporal emotion into eternal thought. Errol expresses excitement that artificial intelligence has now helped him realize the piece musically. As the program falls on May 24, the day before Memorial Day, he also reflects on remembering those who sacrificed themselves for higher purposes, extending that remembrance beyond soldiers to anyone who gave deeply for others or for an ideal. From a Culture of War to the Divine Lover In the closing portion, Errol calls for a transformation from a culture continually at war with itself toward one characterized by peace. He interprets Yeshua’s statement about bringing a sword as a symbolic cutting away of the ego-self from the authentic self. For Errol, the ego is rooted in the false belief that people are separate from one another, and that illusion creates the foundation for military, economic, domestic, and personal conflict. He concludes that humanity can move beyond duality by recognizing one seamless shared existence, then introduces another of his own pieces, “The Divine Lover,” as a way to help listeners experience their unity with the divine. He closes by directing listeners to his website, Substack, and YouTube channel and wishing them well.

The Laughing Heart with Errol Strider Connectedness, Meeting, and the Courage to Move Beyond Separation Opening Reflections on How We Really Are In this episode of The Laughing Heart, Errol Strider opens with a gentle reflection on the everyday question, “How are you doing?” He admits that people often ask the question casually, while he does not always answer with complete honesty. From there, he introduces the episode’s central theme: connectedness. Errol describes it as one of the most critical calls in human experience, a call to move away from the many ways people separate themselves and toward a deeper, more essential joining that could help improve the human condition. Connectedness as a Radical Human Need Errol then shares a piece called “Connectedness,” which he originally wrote in 1981 for the Association for Humanistic Psychology and has revised over the years. The piece explores how human beings stand before one another as individuals shaped by their bodies, histories, experiences, fears, dreams, wants, and defenses. It asks whether people can move beyond isolation, comparison, longing, and self-protection into a place of authentic contact. The writing suggests that people deeply want love and union, yet often fear that if love truly finds them, they may disappear inside it. The Search for a Place to Join The heart of “Connectedness” asks where human beings can genuinely meet one another without violence, compromise, or false performance. Errol’s piece explores whether connection comes through honesty, vulnerability, confession, touch, shared pain, grief, longing, terror, or the willingness to drop the protective shells that keep people apart. The poem calls for a kind of courageous nakedness, not merely physical but emotional and spiritual, where people can reveal their confusion, innocence, fear, resentment, and longing in order to rediscover the humanness they share and the divineness they hope to become. Individuality Inside Oneness After the piece, Errol unpacks its meaning by reflecting on the relationship between individuality and unity. He explains that each person is distinctive, yet also part of a larger undivided reality. To illustrate this, he recalls living in Marin County, California, where individual towns each had their own personality, even though from above they appeared as one continuous community. For Errol, this becomes a metaphor for the human condition: people are unique, but their deepest suffering comes from believing they are fundamentally separate from one another. He describes surrender not as giving up, but as letting go of false ideas of separation. The Meeting and the Fear of Dropping Barriers Errol then performs a more comic dialogue called “The Meeting,” inspired by Martin Buber’s idea that “all real living is meeting.” The sketch features two characters discussing misery, aliveness, barriers, fear, body sharing, loneliness, and the risk of truly seeing and being seen. Through humor, the dialogue shows how people build invisible walls, compare themselves, shame or blame others, and cling to separateness in order to feel safe. Eventually, the characters begin to look at one another directly, admit fear, exchange names, and experience the first awkward but real moment of meeting. Repentance as Turning Toward Union In the closing reflection, Errol says the episode’s pieces reveal the essential challenge of the human condition: people become absorbed in daily problems and desires while overlooking the deeper call to move beyond the illusion of separateness. He uses the religious idea of repentance as “going the other way,” meaning turning away from separation and toward union. He encourages listeners to notice when they compare themselves, act from guilt, live by “shoulds,” or make themselves better or worse than others. He closes with a love poem that says he cannot live outside of love, because only in love does he truly know himself, and he invites listeners to continue the journey through The Laughing Heart website, email, Substack, and YouTube presence.

The Laughing Heart with Errol Strider Flow Podcast the One - Mastering the Flow and Navigating the Flow This episode of The Laughing Heart explores the metaphorical and spiritual dimensions of "the flow"—a universal movement that carries us when we stop resisting. Host Errol Strider, through poetry and dialogue, examines how aligning with this current transforms our experience of pain, finance, and human connection. The Nature of the Flow The flow is described as a persistent, unfolding movement that exists independently of our efforts to manage or control life. We often spend our energy trying to "fix" or "shape" our circumstances, but true wisdom lies in recognizing that there is something already moving and carrying us. By stopping the "push" and letting go of the need to analyze, we can enter a state of being that is already in motion. Metaphors and Mechanics of Alignment Using the metaphor of a ship navigating a river, the flow is depicted as a "living tension" that cannot be harnessed by force but must be moved with. It is often choppy and unpredictable, yet it leads to "port" if the sailor trusts the drift. This alignment requires a "willingness to share our inner life with the ground of being," transforming the flow from a static command into a living movement that carries everything forward. Practical application of this philosophy involves "non-resistance." When facing physical pain or financial hardship, the key is to remove the judgmental labels we attach to these experiences. For instance, shifting focus from the word "pain" to the actual sensation allows one to be with the experience rather than fighting it. Similarly, in the realm of finance and social interaction, "reciprocity" and authentic exchange create the connections through which the flow moves. The Inner World The journey concludes with a call to "go within." By turning away from the "merry-go-round" of external sights and sounds, individuals can access an inner world where "miracles occur" and "heaven and earth shake hands." This internal focus is the ultimate source of the flow, providing a stable ground of being that remains unaffected by the hectic race of time and space. Embracing the flow is not a passive resignation to fate, but an active alignment with the deepest drives of the universe. By practicing non-resistance and fostering authentic connections, we transition from trying to "harness" life to gracefully riding its current toward a deeper consciousness.

The Laughing Heart with Errol Strider Navigating The Great Puzzle Of Existence, Exploring Life, Love, and Spirit In this inaugural episode of The Laughing Heart, host Arrel Strider explores the intersection of spirituality, theater, and human connection. Through allegorical storytelling and philosophical sketches, the program examines the struggle to find meaning in a fragmented world and the pursuit of "inner awareness" amidst the noise of modern life. The Journey from Theater to Enlightenment Arrel Strider opens the session by reflecting on his personal evolution, which began with a "precocious" midlife crisis in the 1960s. This crisis sparked a lifelong journey through various religious teachings and group experiences. Drawing on his background as an actor, dancer, and director, Strider interprets spiritual discovery through the lens of performance, suggesting that the process of development is fundamentally about becoming more inclusive of others and deepening into internal stillness. The Allegory of the Universal Jigsaw Puzzle A central theme of the episode is "The Puzzle," a metaphorical story describing 40 billion people attempting to assemble a massive jigsaw puzzle without a clear vision of the final image. This era of "puzzle building" is characterized by conflict, hoarding of pieces, and frustration as individuals struggle to find where they fit. The narrative shifts with the appearance of a man carrying the "box top"— a representation of the complete picture—which offers a sense of wholeness and serenity, though it is met with both fervor and violent skepticism. The Logic of "More" and Wholeness Through a comedic sketch featuring the characters Lord and Lady Umbridge, the dialogue tackles the existential question: "Is this all there is?" The conversation posits that "more" is an inevitable habit of existence. They conclude that because the "whole" is greater than the sum of its parts, the addition of more parts—more experiences and more people—actually allows the whole to become "greater" and "more holy" (wholly). This perspective reframes the feeling of being "adrift" as a transitional state toward a larger arrival. Stillness and the Illusion of Separation In the final segment, the discussion turns to the practical challenges of meditation and the nature of the physical body. Strider and his guests admit to the difficulty of maintaining focus, often only achieving a few seconds of "presence" before the mind wanders to mundane tasks. They argue that the perception of the body as a separate, isolated entity is a "fancy illusion" or a projection of our perceived separation from the source. True reality, they suggest, is found by dropping into an "essential nature" where goodness and truth reside. The episode concludes with a poignant love poem, emphasizing that self-knowledge is only truly achieved through love and the embrace of the "other." By allowing "two inside," the soul is enhanced and expanded, moving from the illusion of separation toward a larger, more inclusive reality.