The “funny side of things” is what reveals both their lack of absoluteness and their pretension to be treated as the Absolute. Humor stems from a subtle sense of the distance separating what appears to be from what actually is. It therefore implies duality: God’s humor arises, as it were, from the level of His Relativity—that of the relatively Absolute, to use one of Schuon’s key concepts—as it would have no meaning independently from a consideration of it. It could also be said that there is no room for “humor” or “laughter” in the Supreme Non-Duality unless one wishes to consider the All-Possibility as an Infinite Matrix or “Pandora’s Box” prefiguring the unfolding of Mâyâ.

Be that as it may, God’s “humor” may be considered as lying in His apparent negation of Himself in Mâyâ. Esoterism is accordingly akin to humor because, by contrast to exoterism, it is supremely aware of the relativity of manifestation as a veil upon Reality or as “unreal reality”.