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Explanation
This comic depicts a student approaching a wise master on a mountaintop, asking him to calculate the expected value of seeking "total spiritual oneness" versus simply gaining worldly success. The master asks how many people have achieved spiritual oneness -- the answer is very few, maybe millions have tried. He then asks how many have achieved worldly success through ordinary means. Through a rough expected-value calculation, the master concludes that seeking spiritual enlightenment is essentially a terrible bet -- it's like a lottery ticket with poor odds. The student observes this is "better than looking at the average salary of a yoga teacher" and confirms the masters at the top are doing well financially. The master asks "Can I sell you some books?" -- revealing himself to be essentially running a spiritual grift.
The humor mechanism applies cold, rational expected-value analysis to spiritual pursuits. By treating enlightenment as an investment with calculable returns, the comic deflates the mystical aura around spiritual quests and reframes them as poor financial decisions. The punchline -- the wise master trying to sell books -- completes the satire by revealing that the real money in spirituality isn't in achieving enlightenment but in selling the promise of it. This echoes the old joke about gold rushes: the people who got rich sold shovels, not mined gold.
This is a recurring SMBC theme: applying rationalist or economic frameworks to domains (religion, philosophy, spirituality) that traditionally resist quantification.