Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 504: How To Stop Living An Artificial Life | Karen Armstrong

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

Most of us come into the world with the suspicion that we are the center of the universe. This self-preoccupation is natural, but it can often lead to unhappiness in the form of rumination, wallowing, comparison, etc. Our guest today, author Karen Armstrong, has a clear proposal for how we can stop living what she calls “artificial” lives and shave down our inborn self-centeredness. Not for nothing, she believes her proposal has the added benefit of perhaps helping to save the planet. Armstrong is a former nun who has become one of the world’s leading thinkers on religion (particularly the monotheistic ones). She has written such bestsellers as: A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, The Battle for God, Islam: A Short History, and Buddha. Her latest book is called Sacred Nature: Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World.In this episode we talk about:Practices you can try for using nature as a way to make yourself happierHow Armstrong conceives of God at this point in her lifeThe benefits of the Confucian practice of “quiet sitting”How her time as a nun paradoxically made her more self-preoccupied rather than lessAnd her definition of holinessFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/karen-armstrong-504See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, everybody. Most of us come into the world with the suspicion that we are the center of the universe. This is completely natural, this self-preoccupation, but it can often lead to unhappiness in the form of compulsive Romination, rowing, planning, wallowing, comparison, etc. As I like to say, the view is so much better when you pull your head out of your ass. But this of course raises the Perennial question, at least the Perennial question here on this show,

how to actually do this. My guest today has a very clear proposal for how we can stop living what she calls artificial lives and shave down on our inborn self-centeredness. Not for nothing, she believes her proposal has the added benefit of perhaps helping to save the planet. Karen Armstrong is a legend. She's a former nun who has become one of the world's leading

thinkers on religion, particularly the monotheistic ones. She has written such bestsellers as a history of God, the battle for God, Islam, and Buddha. Her latest book is called Sacred Nature. Many people have criticized organized religions, again, primarily the monotheistic ones, for promoting the idea that we humans have dominion over nature and can do whatever we want. In her new book, Armstrong aims to set the record straight, in particular by studying Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu texts that show that many of the world's great religions and contemplative traditions saw nature as holy, as a powerful path toward escaping the prison of the world's great religions and contemplative traditions saw nature as holy, as a powerful path toward escaping the prison of the ego.

She argues that recycling and protesting, while important, are not enough to save the planet. We actually need to revise our relationship to the earth and ancient religions, she says, provide a roadmap. This is a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion. We start with nature, and she has tons of practices you can try for using nature as a way to make yourself happier. But we also go quite broad in this interview.

As a non-believer, I especially enjoyed hearing her talk about how she conceives of God and the holy at this point in her life. Spoiler alert, it's a skeptic-friendly view that she now espouses. Anyway, I'll let her hold forth on that. We'll get started with Karen Armstrong right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us wanna live healthier lives,

but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app.

It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonicle, and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos, to access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10percent.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur.

I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from, MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Karen Armstrong, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. So let's start with your latest work. I'm curious how did you arrive at this subject? Well, I had been going to write a long book. I tend to write rather long fat books about the way the world religions have viewed

nature over the centuries, and I deal with all the world religions, the main ones, and I expected it to take the general, the sort of form that many of my previous books had. But then I had a Zoom call, rather like this, with my publishers and editors who had read my proposal and they said, look, we want something quick and now because nature is a hot subject. In fact, it's a very difficult time for us ecologically. So they said, make something short and that's accessible to people. And that gives them something to do, because, you know, when people hear about the environment and how dangerous it is, we often feel a bit paralyzed. We know we've all got to stop flying around the earth because it's bad for the environment,

and yet we're still doing it. We know we should be using public transport rather than jumping in our cars all the time, but we're not doing it. And when environmentalists talk about nature, it's often in rather scientific terms that doesn't move us emotionally, necessarily. Whereas it seemed to me that the world religions have always seen nature as paramount. Here I have to exclude two of the major world religions and that's Judaism and Christianity. Instead of seeing the sacred of the divine in nature like the other world religions, Hinduism, Confucianism, Darwinism, etc. they saw the divine in the events of history, such as the Exodus from Egypt or the life of Jesus Christ.

But interestingly, the Greek Orthodox, who are also Christians, of course, they developed from the very start a sense of nature because they had a long pagan history of nature, with Aphrodite, goddess of nature, who was in every single flower, every single tree, every single river, but invisible. And that's the kind of view of nature that the world religions all had. They didn't see a god in the heavens as the Judeo-Christian religions do. They saw instead a sacred force that is present in its physical and spiritual. It's beyond our grasp, but we experience it. It's what brings us things into life. It's what makes these seasons grow. It's a sacred force. In China they called it Chi, in India they called it Brahman or Rita, but the sacred force produced the gods. It produced human beings. It produced mountains. It was

an continual operation and it was very much revered. This was interesting I thought because we in the West have moved away from that, instead of seeing as sacred as divine, we've seen it as a resource, something that we can master, and don't let fool ourselves, our science has been marvelous in many ways. In medicine, for example, I myself have benefited much from modern medicine, but we are now, as I've said, in very dangerous straits. We have to do something about our behaviour. So I tried to do something that's where we could introduce some of the older customs bit by bit into our lives, step by step, sort of 10 steps as it were, so that we could start to be aware of nature because you know how often have you

been to a place of extreme beauty and says the seaside or a mountain mountainous region and you notice that people either got their headphones on and are listening to some music or having some conversation or walking along by the seaside chattering on the phone to someone else. Or they're taking photographs of nature. They take lots and lots of photographs, but instead of seeing the nature itself and being in touch with it, they prefer a virtual copy of it for themselves. And so my, what I mean trying to do is to make us wake up to nature again and make us look at it and see it as a force, a beauty, something that we are entirely dependent upon and which, unless we treat it with reverence, we are in dangerous trouble.

I want to dive quite deeply into the 10 steps or the ancient customs that we might integrate into our lives now. But before I do so, a few sort of meta questions or framing questions, one of them is, do you think it'd be safe to say that in the face of the parallelism that many of us feel, in the face of the climate crisis, given the necessity for structural change? I think some of that powerlessness makes sense. Nonetheless, would you say that if we were to follow the customs that we will dive into, if we were to integrate some of these rituals into our lives, that we would, whether or not we're

impacting the larger picture, we would be improving our own lives in the process. Yes, certainly, I think, because we're living in a very artificial way, as I've just said, instead of seeing nature, we prefer a photograph of it. And I think it's quite interesting, the British romantic poets were very concerned about this, because it was really beginning to become quite extreme during the 19th century. And what fascinates me is that Wordsworth, who began life as a young boy, absolutely filled with joy of nature. He lived in the lake district up in the north of England, an extremely beautiful part of the world, and he was absolutely ecstatic about nature,

but that faded as he grew up. And he had to teach himself again, how to look at nature properly, how to look at nature differently. And in his great poem, Tintan Abbey, he says, I've learned to look at nature differently, not as I did when I was a child, but hearing oftentimes he said,

the still sad music of humanity, nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power to chase him and subdue. And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts. A sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man. A motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things. Now that is a perfect description of what the Chinese

called Chi, what the Indians call Brahma. It's an archetypal way of looking at nature that seems to be natural to us and that we can, as words were said, learn to look at it differently. And you notice he uses the words something. He won't say this is God because our notion of God in the West has become very different from the ancient worlds. We see God in the heavens, our father who art in heaven as a distant reality, accessible, as I said, in the monotheistic religions in certain historical events. But this idea of nature being infused with the divine, which as Wordsworth put it, is returning to a more natural way of looking at the world, which we can start to learn ourselves. He calls it something, he won't call it God. Don't use the word something

in a very loose way when, don't we say, what we're having for supper tonight? Oh, I don't know, eggs or something. But he's saying it's something that he won't define, because there's no word in our modern English vocabulary to say what it is that he's seen. We need ourselves to find that something. And before we dive into some ideas for finding the something, the mysterious something, one other sort of larger question, because you mentioned this earlier that all the world's religions, as far as you can tell, had a reverent view for nature, except the Jews and the Christians.

And you said that they saw the footprints of the divine and historical events. But what do you think was going on that the Jews and the Christians were overlooking nature? Too much time in the desert and feeling pissed off about that or what happened? No, again, we're not sure. We're not sure how long they spent in the desert. So the desert is a place where you get a lot of nature. It's not just a sort of sterile place, of course. It's alive with nature. No, we just went, our scriptures are entirely different. And if you notice, you have God making the world, and it's separate in the opening of Genesis, the first chapter of the Bible.

And at the end of it, God says to Adam and Eve, now take the earth and subdue it. And the great philosopher Bacon in writing in the 17th century said that was God's command, God had told Adam that he had to subdue the earth and make human beings the master of the universe. And he said Adam failed to do that, he sinned. But it's now up to us here in Europe, to us Christians, to subdue nature in this way, to make it serve us, to make it serve our ends. And we have done that. And in many ways, it's been very effective for us, because as I say, just look at Mug and Midson and what it has achieved. But this subjugation of the earth has become endemic to us. And it's quite unlike the reverence that was very carefully cultivated in the other

world faiths. And they still have that in places like India or China. They're still very concerned about nature in their traditional way, even though of course they've adopted all our scientific knowledge and practices to great effect themselves. They haven't lost that, but this is quite alien to us since the 17th century. Then you have a Descartes, for example, who said that the whole purpose of science will be that we will no longer feel wonder when we look at nature. He said, it will soon not be necessary for us when we look at a cloud to say, oh, how beautiful, how strange. No, exactly what that cloud is. And God, he said, created the world, set it all up, and then he retired to heaven.

And the things of nature, he said, were just like the new machines that were being produced in Europe at that time. Clocks and fountains, new things that we could develop and make for ourselves. But they were not things that filled us with wonder and with reverence. And then you have Newton, who saw God as rather as a blown up version of himself. A great scientist, he said, a God was obviously very well skilled in geometry and mechanics. But this is pairing down the divine and seeing it as a sort of personality, rather like ourselves,

and the things of nature as objects that are for our benefit, instead of seeing the divine as absolutely something that you can never define, because it is everywhere in everything utterly present, in everywhere in everything, including the clouds and the sun and the moon. We've lost that sense of wonder. And that's what I think we should try to reawaken in ourselves, because our world is magnificent. Even here in London, you can't see it, but I have a tree just in the middle of London, a beautiful tree. And in the winter, particularly, I look up from my desk over there and look up and see this tree

and it's how it changes every day, how it's got a life of its own, not a life like ours. We mustn't sort of humanise nature and make it out to be sort of like ourselves writ large. That tree has a mysterious inner life of its own, an existence of its own that is sacred and something that we should revere. And so one of the things I've suggest that we do is just take ten minutes a day looking at nature. Take off your earphones, turn off all your technology and just let, just ten minutes a day to start with. Let the sounds, look at the birds, how busy they are, the insects, the flowers, the trees, the leaves, the vitality of nature. Just learn to look at it.

Just 10 minutes, and then you can increase it day by day. But just bake ourselves aware of our surroundings on which we are utterly dependent. We are killing ourselves as we kill the environment. And if we live in the city, this is just to put a fine point on this. If we live in the city and we are tempted to tell ourselves, oh, we can't look at nature ten minutes a day because we don't live in nature. Parks suffice. Parks, exactly. Parks we have, and as I say, I mean, it's just a tree, an ordinary tree in a road that you can start looking at it. I'm lucky because I've got a little garden and I can sit out there and watch the birds come

and the flowers come, but not everybody has that. But there are places, as I say, the parks, that the rivers got a canal at the bottom of my street. Lovely walking along the canal and seeing all the wild birds flying around the canal, and the traffic retreats a bit. There's nature all around us, and you don't have to go and look at a place of absolute supreme beauty. You've got to learn to look at a perfectly ordinary garden or a perfectly ordinary tree and see that it has a life of its own that is utterly mysterious

to us and utterly precious. Just learn to look at it as you would learn to look at an individual person and know the mystery of that person. For those listeners who like evidence as a chaser for anything that might come out of the mystical or religious world. Previous guests on the show have talked quite a bit about the volumes of data we have to support the beneficial physiological and psychological impacts of exposure to nature on the human animal. There's a bit of a digression because your comments are making me think about a conversation I had recently with a new friend of mine, a recently new friend of mine, shout out to Josh.

We were sitting in my backyard and there's quite a bit of nature around and Josh was telling me about how a friend of his had given him a microdose of psilocybin or magic mushrooms and he had been sitting in his backyard after having ingested the substance and the trees started breathing back at him. And I thought, okay, that sounds marvelous. And you don't need that to have a sustained profound relationship with nature on the regular. Yes, and I think you don't need it, but I think we need to accustom ourselves to looking at nature. That's the thing. Just as I say, we ourselves

away from social media for a few moments and just let the sounds and life of nature that's all around you, even in my little garden, you see insects, birds coming in and out, everything busy and just be aware of these worlds around us. Just build up a habit, just first of all, 10 minutes a day, increase it, and it becomes a part of your life. You become aware of it when you're just walking down the street, and seeing the extraordinary trees or squirrels running across our road first thing in the morning. This life of nature is all around us and we need to just make ourselves aware of it. Is what you're describing what the Taoists refer to as quiet sitting? It's the Confucians actually, rather than the Taoist quiet city, especially the Confucians,

was exactly what it says, sit quietly. You don't have to sit in the yogic position with an upright back or with cross leg or anything. Just sit in a comfortable position, in a comfortable chair or seat or on the ground. And then just open your mind and heart and ears to the sounds and things around you, even the smallest things, becoming aware of that, just for ten minutes a day. And you become aware that nature is a sacrality. The Chinese, for example, said that the golden rule, which all the world religions see as essential to their morality, never treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself, the confusion said, now you must apply this to nature too, not just

to other human beings, but you must treat nature as you wish to be treated yourself. And some of them went to such lengths that they found it impossible to cut the grass, because they said the grass has a life of its own. That might be extreme, but they be themselves look at the things of nature with the same kind of reverence they cultivated with when they saw other human beings. Now we don't even look at other human beings with great reverence very often. We're often in the Russia here in London pushing ourselves onto buses and hurrying along and not noticing, but to spend time being aware of others and other things, the Chinese said that the things of nature

are our friends and our companions. And we have to sort of cultivate that sense. Now we use the word thing, don't we, as of something that is not really alive. This glass, for example, we call it a thing, but it has no life of its own. For the Confucians, however, the word thing does not mean that at all. It is full of life, full of its own secreality.

And as one Confucian said, each one has a principle of its own that you must study as carefully a scientist study that the makeup of things and recognize it as they are our brothers and sisters. And we depend upon them as they depend upon us for survival. I'm just curious how far you personally take the golden rule as it pertains to nature. There's a wonderful, I think I quote it in the book, in the 18th century wonderful novel, Tristram Shandy, where Uncle Toby, who is a very abhorious, great and wonderful figure, has been sitting at lunch and a fly has been buzzing around

and being frightfully irritating all throughout lunch. And what, finally, Uncle Toby manages to trap that fly. And then he takes it out, saying, dear fly, I'm not going to kill you. Why should I live rather than you? And talking to it in this gentle way, he then takes it across and lets it out of the window. And the narrator says that he never forgot that aspect of Uncle Toby. And I've got a bit like that now about flies myself. I don't like to see them buzzing around or even wasps letting them out, just making yourself aware. You can't get fanatical about this.

But making yourself aware that these things have precious life of their own. And let alone all the things of nature that we don't see that are invisible, but just to build up a sense of the fragility of nature, the wonder of it, and so that it becomes a part of our world instead of being absent from it as it has become for the last two or three hundred years. I'm with you, much to the annoyance of my wife and child. I take the bugs outside and I even have gotten into the habit of taking mice out of the mouths of my cats and bringing the mice outside. I just kind of want to be out of the killing business.

Yes. And I think you see, we often look at the way animals were sacrificed in the ancient world and say how cruel. But in fact, we don't think of the millions of beasts that are being slaughtered every day in our abattoirs without any ceremony, without any pity, without as just done as a mechanical job. And I think we should make ourselves aware of this. As indeed, they did in India, if you were going to sacrifice an animal, you went through a whole lot of ceremonies, months in which the person who was making the sacrifice had to remake himself and sort of live at a hut with his wife and separate himself from luxury. But they said it's really better

in the end if you don't kill the animal and give it to one of the priests to be looked after for the rest of its days. And if you did kill it, that animal was killed very quickly and mercifully, but he was still preferable not to do that. In Greece too, they had a custom after an animal had been ceremonially killed of throwing the knife that had cut the animals throat, throwing the knife into the sea and drowning it in punishment for what it had done to the animal. So they had the ancient world they built up slowly

from being in the really ancient world very casual about animal welfare, to becoming extremely sensitive to it. And that's the sort of thing, sensitivity that we need now to apply to ourselves and to cultivate. Coming up, Karen Armstrong, on the benefits of the Confucian practice of quiet sitting. She'll also talk about the importance of puncturing our sense of self-concern and the value, the counterintuitive value I might add, of reflecting on the pain of the world right after this. Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on earth and

What really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast life is short with Justin Long If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like what is the meaning of life? I Can't really help you but I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs, and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times, but if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats

between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. Let me just go back to quiet sitting for a second. You said this is a practice you're undertaking now personally, and I'm going to guess at

what some of the benefits might be, but I'd like to hear you talk about it, but I'm guessing and I'm extrapolating from my own experience, doing similar practices, that there will be two twin to benefits. One is the benefit of AW, AWEW-E, where your ego starts to feel smaller, and so you're just less stuck in this painful self obsession. And the second is that one that happens, you can feel, I believe, you used the word earlier from Wordsworth, interfused, more connected to something larger and have a sense, as you've discussed earlier, how dependent we are on each other and the world. On every breath we take we depend upon

nature, upon the purity of the environments that we're busily polluting right now especially here in London. And yes I think we just need to make ourselves aware of this. The quiet city is to just give some time every day to nature and that becomes habitual. It becomes a habit and that's a habit that it becomes a part of you. It's no good saying that right now I'm going to be like some Francis of Seasie from this day forward and be an absolute saintly ecologist. That's not going to happen. The thing to do is to do it little bit day by day. And one of the practices I think that is also important is to, while you're

sitting or sitting on the bus even or taking the dog for a walk, letting your mind go out from yourself, we're so preoccupied with ourselves. With our own feelings, our own grievances, our own problems, troubles, and these Chinese call its concentric circles. Start with yourself, then you move out to nature around you. And look at it, become aware of it, become aware of its magnificence, the become aware of your dependence upon it, its beauty, its activity, become aware of that, then move further out to other cultures and send goodwill out to them too. You see, today, our sort of spirituality tends to be rather looking

within, where we see statues of the Buddha for example. He is very much seems to be looking as it were within, but the Buddhist text tells us that the Buddha was not looking inside. He was sending out his goodwill and affection and concern to everything in the universe, every person whether they liked them or not, every creature, every tree, every plant in every part of the world. And he achieved that total sense of equanimity for all beings. He did not achieve enlightenment. That was what brought him enlightenment, where you escape the prison of oneself and oneself concerned and send it outward.

The exercise of nature, of appreciating the extraordinary bit of nature and seeing that nature and seeing that as companions, as one Buddhist text tells us, they are our companions. They're not just things that we use or admire or ignore, they are our companions. And that means that they are our friends and that we care for them as we care for our human companions. We've got to make them part of our family and our vital concern. Listeners to this show, at least many of them will be pretty familiar with Buddhist practices, you know, meta-MeTTA practices, love and kindness practice, where you systematically send goodwill to individuals and then all beings everywhere. But if I'm hearing you correctly and please correct me, I'm not hearing you correctly, you're

calling for a kind of meta-practice or loving kindness meditation practice that is a done sort of in the course of daily life and be directed toward nature specifically. Yes, I think the best way of forgetting about the self, which is what you have to do as Buddhists call it, anata, no self, leave the self behind, is to focus on the things around you. And nature should be first on the list because it is something on which we are absolutely dependent.

Now, people talk about God and the theologians said that in the presence of God, we feel absolute dependence. That the sense that our whole life and our being and our health and our everything depends upon this being. But what the Buddhists and the Confucians were saying, yes, but nature too, first take it out to nature because that is sacred and make ourselves aware of the wonder we've losing that sense of wonder now and talking all the times in terms of rather

scientific discussions of nature or else polishing our own souls and our own well-being and seeing how well we are coming along, forget the self and reach out to other beings, all beings, as one Buddhist text tells us it's a prayer that the Buddha encountered some people who lived in the forest and they said, look, we can't do this yoga, we don't know how to do it. We have a different kind of life. He said, you don't need it. And he gave this poem, let all beings be happy.

You know, large or small, alive or still to be born. May they all be perfectly happy. May our loving thoughts fill the world above, beyond, and so that we're free of hatred. And I think this is something that you don't have to sit in a yogic position to do. You can do it while you're working, walking to work or sitting on the bus or simply going about your business in the house. Extending your mind out to include other beings, other creatures, all beings be happy, even a wasp and ant, as well as other human beings, because sometimes it's easier

to feel affection for nature than it is for some of our fellow human beings, and to sort of break down those barriers of likes and dislikes and to let it go. And nature should be the first thing on our list. It's the power that keeps everything going. But we also have to feel that utter dependence upon nature. We've used it for so long as a resource and a convenience. And now it's time for us to recover what for centuries people did in the world religions, so that every single leaf or tree or smallest little creature was revered as sacred. And in India, they had a very strong sense that somehow nature needed protection. So they performed very complicated rituals every day in which

they would try to build up nature again. But not many people could attend those sacrifices. They were really for the priestly elite. And some of the ordinary people would never go, would never understand it or even go to these rituals. But so instead they introduced and this is one of the steps that people can take, what they call the great sacrifices, which didn't mean killing an animal because the word sacrifice comes from the Latin sacrum faturé. It means to make holy. It's not about killing an animal, it's about making it holy. So they said to do it every day. First of all, they said, every day put out some food or water for passing animal. Just something you can easily do.

And every day let every person who comes into your house, whether you like him or her or not, treat him with absolute respect as if he were a God. You know how the Indians have that custom of holding their hands and bowing towards the divinity they're acknowledging in the other person. And then they said, they called something scripture study that did not mean you dived into the Bible or the Holy text, you simply sat in a quiet place with your eyes on the horizon and recited a hymn or a poem to yourself. Every day building up that sense of making the world holy, of acknowledging the holiness that you encounter with others, because when we are treated with utter respect

We feel enlarged. It does something to us and we can do that to people every day in the way just standing up for someone in the bus for example helping someone with their shopping something small that makes people feel that they're noticed precious and sacred feel that they're noticed, precious, and sacred. Because that's, we'll lose the whole thread. We need to build this up day by day in small study. One of the practices I suggest is kinoces, which is Greek for emptying. Just emptying ourselves, because we're so self-preoccupied, and so concerned with ourselves and our hang-ups and our problems and our difficulties and our rights. But just remember, every night, just ask yourself, how little we know.

Just think, just remind yourself, no, beating of breasts, no saying, I'm sorry, I'm so evil, just reminding yourself of how little you know and how little you do for others. Not again, a great display of guilt, because that's all ego to just quiet acknowledgment that there's still more to be done. Many paragraphs ago, you said something like, forget the self. I understand, I believe, what you're saying there. But just to push slightly because there's an interesting balance here in a tricky one, I think. We're advised by you and by the Buddha to send good will to all beings everywhere, but we're beings too. And so we do need to take care of ourselves while not getting into this kind

of self-obsession. Yes, absolutely. As you probably know, I was a nun as a young woman. And we had to do a whole lot of penances that reminded ourselves of how sort of sinful we were, and how hopeless we were, et cetera, to remind ourselves of this. But actually, this just embedded us in ourselves. It just made us self-conscious instead of just seeing how insignificant we are really. And learning to look with admiration at others, things that other people do better than we do. We often don't quite like that,

but there are people who will suddenly do something very kind to somebody. And that's a gift that we can learn from and say, well, I can do that, but just to puncture that sense of self-concern that is natural to us, we need it for our survival. We can't just go wandering around taking no notice of ourselves, but we are not the center of the universe. We're not even the center of our own family or our own group of friends, but just reminding ourselves of a lack of achievement occasionally. Again, not saying, oh, I'm a miserable sinner because that's a self-inflation, but just, well, I could have done more today. In the book, there's another technique you recommend for getting in touch with our insignificant sort of getting out of our heads, which is to reflect on the pain of the world, you

say. Can you say more about that? Yes, and that's one of the things that the Buddha did as he was trying to achieve enlightenment, but starts looking, A, at the pain of others around us. We see that every time we turn on the evening news, to be honest. But we see it also in the street. There are people at the top of my road sleeping in the street at night. And often we just walk past because we don't know what to do with it. We should let that pain and disquart enter our hearts somehow. And we should chide ourselves for not thinking of that enough. I had a friend, a rabbi.

He was a wonderful rabbi. He used to give talks on the radio every morning, every week, during the news, Lidel Blue. And he was very eccentric in many ways. But one of the things he used to do was buy a whole lot of sandwiches and go down to Houston station and deliver these sandwiches twice a week to all the people sleeping rough. And sometimes I'd go to have dinner at his house

and there'd be some extremely learned rabbi from Germany or somewhere, greatly if everyone's sort of bowed to who was there for supper and me as some students. And then there'd be a chap that he saw sitting outside the tube station nearly every day who was there among us as part of that? And he was a sort of saint I think, but he was so funny, he was also gay, made no pretence

about that, but such a sort of tenderness for other people, but with no great show about it, sort of self-effacing. I've never forgotten him, but we could all be like that. We can all do something for someone who is sleeping at the rough of the top of the road. God knows there are enough of them here in Islington, and we just don't. Start off small, but remember that all creatures are companions, as one of the Chinese says. And those as well as the natural world, these are our other fellow beings too, that we need to treat with reverence. And as though there's something sacred there,

because there's something sacred in every single human being and in every single thing of nature, every single tree, every single plant, and we need to make ourselves aware of that sacrality. Your story of Lionel Blue, if I'm remembering his name correctly, gets me thinking of a story about compassion that I want to tell you. I'll say in advance, the story might not resolve itself perfectly into a question, but maybe you can just react to the story.

You began your last answer by talking about the value of tuning into the pain of the world. And I suspect that in the minds of some listeners, they might have reacted by saying, well, I've got enough problems. I don't want to tune into the pain. It's too much. But what that story about the sandwich delivery points to, I think, is that compassion is inherently ennobling and uplifting because you're moving out of being swamped by the pain of the world into a posture of being useful and helpful, which even if you're not solving the whole problem just feels way better. So the story that I was going to tell is that this is another new friend I made recently. Not a man I know very well,

but his wife was at our house the other day telling us about how this guy is having a horrible health situation, horrible, so bad that I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't fall back to sleep and was, I was doing some walking meditation around the house just trying to do something constructive with my sleeplessness, but I kept being ambushed by all these thoughts about how this horrible situation that this guy who I don't know very well, but I really like, is going through.

And then I remembered something that, you know, over the last 13 years of Buddhist training I might have remembered earlier, which is that I can just send him what in Buddhist lingo we would call caruna or compassion, just bring him to mind and silently repeat phrases like may be free from pain, may be free from despair, may be free from suffering. And it didn't solve his problem or mind per se, but it made me feel much better and I was able to stay connected to his suffering without feeling swamped or powerless. Okay, end of story. Yes, and I think that what that does is as you're saying it, you are taking yourself

out of yourself at just a moment of putting others before yourself. And in that comes a certain freedom as you point out. The value of such an act like the sandwiches, for example, that Lionel would bring, it makes you sensitive to the pain of others, an acknowledgement that we're not going to solve these problems, that pain and suffering are with us always and always will be because you can just become self-indulgent and relish in your sort of sorrow for the world. But you remind us, we can all do something. We can all make some minuscule bit of difference to somebody in our lives every day. We can do something. It won't alleviate their pain completely,

but it might just put a little spark of hope or something there. And even if it doesn't, the act itself is taking you out of yourself and putting yourself in the place of another, which is I think is what spirituality is all about. It's a form of ecstasy, which means ecstasy, which means stepping outside. It doesn't mean you're in some glorious trance, but you're stepping outside the confines of ego and selfishness just for a moment and putting yourself there. And these actions have ever small, they can become as they did in line, or kind of habitual. So that it's part of your daily living without any great song of dance about it. Coming up, Karen Armstrong on recognizing the small unnoticed things in nature,

how her time as a nun paradoxically made her more self preoccupied rather than less, and her definition of holiness. That's after this. We've been talking a lot about these practices that we could all integrate into our lives based in ancient spirituality that might help us with our very modern illness of dispoiling nature. I'm curious how optimistic are you that we're going to at least mitigate the climate crisis through the mechanisms you're recommending or any other? To be honest, I'm not a very optimistic person. I tend to look on the dark side,

and I have great fear and sorrow. I mean, a religion for me as a child was full of anguish and despair and sinfulness and all that. But I think what these little actions can do is just break us out momentarily. These such moments like buying the sandwich, for example, or offering that for up for your friend, for example, takes you out of the self. And it's a form of ecstasy. It's been standing outside the self. Now, built up over time, day by day, built up over time day by day, hour by hour. That kind of behavior, that kind of concessions, can become more habitual. But don't expect that we're all going to become saints by tomorrow.

We're not. We're going to be still failing our friends. The same time as we're doing a kind action for somebody else. But just the concentration of a concern for another person or another creature takes us out of that self-preoccupation. So from here, you correctly, you have optimism that we as individuals can integrate these practices into our lives and that they might gradually, marginally, in a compounded fashion improve our lives, but maybe not a lot of optimism about all of the foregoing actually getting us out of the climate crisis. Look, we have to keep hope. We have to keep on trying. we'll just sit back and do nothing. And I think anxiety and fear about that are not enough really because again it makes us sort of self-obsessed. I think

we've got somehow to maintain that sense of hope that we can do it. I mean, you think of what people have achieved, something like Gandhi, for example, or achieved by small things that have a massive effect on the world. And if we all did this, if every day we made ourselves conscious by some of the practices that I've suggested or that others might suggest, make ourselves aware of the pain of nature, the beauty of nature, that was very much central to all world religions, as I say, except the monotheism. Then we just have to build it up in ourselves, not give up, but realise that we're up against a huge amount that is something we can do and think of the people who do great things. We may

not be up to the Buddha or that these people may be way beyond our capacity, but we can all be like Lionel Blue and change lives. And by the smallest actions that we can achieve, just by small humdrum, I think words with, call them sort of small unnoticed things that change attitude, take us out of the self in an ecstasy, is a stepping outside the self. This is a bit of a digression. It goes back to some comments you made earlier in the interview, you've had such an extraordinary life

having been a nun and then now written so extensively and beautifully on the world's religions. I'm just curious, where has that left you in terms of how you conceive of God at this point in your life? I have had great difficulty with God in my life, but I think that for me, I've recovered a lot of that anger, that sense of hopelessness I felt that I would never be able to come near God or that God was so terrifying in many ways. I mean, God seemed to be a huge big brother who always noticed all your failings and, you know, we're always confessing our sins and which really wound up too much really. But it's all about self. And for me, I have moments of peace and quiet. When I've just lost myself for

a moment, when I've just seen something very kind like the idol's activities, or seen something extremely beautiful like my tree, or a little creature, a tiny little creature crossing my desk, a little spider or something, and wondering about that about its life, how extraordinary life there is in that tiny little thing that's crossing my path for a few moments and marvelling at it. And I think if we learn to look at the natural world as a series of wonders, as a series of mysteries that just give us not great revelations, but just tiny things that take us away from ourselves. And I was wretched self-preoccupation for a moment and wonder about it, what is it like

for that little creature crossing my desk? We'll never understand what is in a tree, for example, how my tree sort of feels. That we can't even think of, we mustn't even try and project our own feelings onto these creatures or that tree. But we recognize that there is something other there, and otherness is holiness. We're talking there about the holiness of seeing the otherness of things, seeing their life, and that means it's holy. The word holy means other sacred

other. It takes us out of our soul to just look at the tidy things, I think. And it's a sort of something you can do day by day, hour by hour. So your concept of God has transformed from a scary big brother sky God to something a mysterious ineffable us shot through everything. It shot through everything, and that's what the world religions had always said. That's what I try and say in my very first chapter, and they saw it particularly in nature, in sacred nature. And so the world is full of wonder. The Indians in their poetry, when they talk about a tree or a river, that's alive, there's a deity there. It's alive, but it's something beautiful and holy, and you celebrate it in

the best way you can by poetry and art, and those are the things that help us, I think, more than science. And poets can help us. Jerrod Mani Hopkins, for example, who read a poem of his, glory be to God for dappled things, and make you look at the marbles of a bird's egg, and its fragility and its beauty and delicacy, the source of life that is in it, to learn to look at nature, as he said, in small things that take us out of ourselves and fill us with wonder. And I don't see God as a being, but as a force that is, it fuses everything, that you infuse, that is in every single person, which is why the Indians bow to one another when they are acknowledging

the divinity there, but also it's alive in plants and trees and spiders to become aware of the security that is and just make a little stop every day to say that is a sacred thing. And it's less overpowering than wondering what Navanna is or God is, which could often just paralyze us a bit, because we don't know, but there is the quality there in everything. I made a note to myself when you talked about your earlier conception of God as the big brother always noticing, always critiquing, always judging, and I realized that whether we believe in God or not, we're all, or at least most of us, doing that to ourselves all the time. Yes, we do. And it's not helpful. You know, I mean, in the Convent, we were endlessly confessing our faults. And we had little

beads underneath our habits where we pull every time we're committed to fault, we pull down that bead and then we counted them up at lunchtime and noted it down in a notebook. And instead of losing ourselves, which is what religion is about, emptying ourselves, Kenosis. We were self preoccupied and we are still often self preoccupied, you know, even in our most secular lives about our appearance and about our success and about our ability to get on with others. And the thing to do is to forget about the self. And it's very hard to do, but just the best way is by trying to notice others, the other, the small things, the little things, the marvellous things. The rain we had this afternoon, which was colossal, we're having terrible weather here at the moment. But this power of, after weeks of drought, this path of rain thundering down and awe inspiring,

let us be filled with awe when we see things like that and realize that we are privileged beings that have the minds to see through things and see the sacrality that it lies within each one and don't just pass it off mechanically. Karen I'm sensitive to your time this has been a delight but let me ask you the two questions I often close with. One is, is there something I should have asked but failed to ask? No, I don't think so. I came to this with an open mind. You've asked me a whole lot of things

that I wasn't expecting, but it's been a delight. So thank you very much. And then the final question is, can I nudge you to please give a full plug for your new book? Well, what my book is trying to do is not just making us feel terrified about the environmental catastrophes, but telling us how little day by day we can make a difference to, instead of feeling powerless and impotent before the hideous problems of our climate at the moment, that we can do small things that actually make a difference and also bring us a sense of holiness in our lives. And the book is called Sacred Nature Restoring our Ancient Bond with the Natural World

Available Everywhere. It's one of the things you recommend in the book and we didn't cover this is gratitude, but I will say that I feel gratitude for having had this opportunity. So thank you. I've been grateful to be allowed to have this conversation. It's been wonderful. Thank you. Thanks again to Karen, Armstrong. Thank you as well to the many people who work so incredibly hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Kashmir, Justine Davie and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneiderman, Kimmy Regler is our managing producer and our executive producer is Jen Poient, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultraviolet audio.

We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode. It's the final installment in our series on the four foundations of mindfulness, which if you haven't heard the earlier episodes, you should go back and check them out. The four foundations of mindfulness is a classic Buddhist list of four ways you can establish mindfulness, wake up, stop sleep walking, and we're gonna talk about

the fourth foundation with the great meditation teacher, Bonnie Durand, coming up on Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.

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