His omniscience – Burns’ that is, not God’s – continually mystified his assistant Harry Von Zell and his neighbors Blanche and Harry Morton. While giving viewers a metaphoric glimpse of omniscience, it also provided one laugh after another. The show won the Emmy Award for outstanding comedy series three years running from 1954-56. The show’s co-star Gracie Allen was also nominated for best comic actress four times.
An Oscar winner, Burns lived more than 100 years, perhaps because, as a lifelong come dian starring in vaudeville, movies, radio, and television, he understood how to take life lightly, and he lived that way, as well. The comic quipped: “If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn’t ask me, I’d still have to say it.”
His television metaphor that sees life from a distance is also a metaphor for a higher state of consciousness that’s available to you as well. Let me explain. In the normal state of waking consciousness lived by more than 99 percent of the people on the planet, the perception of life surrounding a person occurs through the senses. While that’s also the case for those who’ve become enlightened and live in a state of Self-Realization, for the latter, it’s more as if they’re seeing not so much with the eyes as through the eyes. That’s because the center of their consciousness has shifted from that of their limited ego encapsulated within a bag of skin to the higher Self within them that is transcendental to the field of their changing perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, and is therefore, non-changing. So when they look through their eyes and listen with their ears, the center of their experience is a stable unmoving Self. As Krishna – the greatest yoga teacher ever – put it in the “Bhagavad Gita:”
One who is in Union with the Divine, and who knows the Truth will maintain ‘I do not act at all.’ In seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, walking, sleeping, breathing, speaking, letting go, seizing, and even in opening and closing the eyes, he holds simply that the senses act among the objects of sense.
– Chapter 5, verses 8-9, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi translation
While George Burns is regarded as one of the funniest comedians ever to have graced a vaudeville stage, the stand-up stage, a radio microphone, a television set, and the movie screen, he was actually the straight man to his wife Gracie Allen, who played a daffy dropper of malaprops. But it’s witty one-liners that will keep him immortal. Lines like:
“Happiness is having a large, loving, close-knit family in another city.”
“If you live to be one hundred you’ve got it made.
Very few people die past that age.”
“I don’t believe in dying.
It’s been done. I’m working on a new exit. Besides, I can’t die now – I’m booked.”
“When I was a boy, the Dead Sea was only sick.”
“Nice to be here? At my age it’s nice to be anywhere.”
“This is the sixth book I’ve written, which isn’t bad for a guy who’s only read two.”
“The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible.”