The Eric Metaxas Show - Krish Dhanam

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

Krish Dhanam was in the studio a while back and talked about his mentor Zig Ziglar, his ministry work with Ravi Zacharias, and the seminars he leads to help people reach their God-given potential in life.

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I tell all my relatives to take it. relief factor.com. Coming up is a previously recorded pre-quarantine interview Eric did with Chris Denham. Enjoy. Hey, you there. You can't ignore me. No one can ignore me. I'm Todd the announcer and Eric lets me do his announcing.

I'm always right there by his side to loudly announce everything he does. Even things like coughing and sneezing. His wife hates it. And now, Eric Mattaxas. Oh, hello, folks. Hey, you know, you never know who you're going to meet. Or I should say you never go know whom. you're going to meet.

I was having dinner with a new friend Brad Huff a few months ago. And he said, can I bring my friend Chris Dunham along? And I said, I don't know, can you? And he said, may I? And I said, yes, you may. And we had the most wonderful conversation. And I thought, you know, Chris, maybe you can come on my radio program and my audience can get to know you. I think they would like that.

And here he is now, here you are now. Chris, welcome the program. Well, thanks a lot for having me. How do you pronounce your last name? Slowly. Dunham. Dunham. It sounds like Lena Dunham. Chris Dunham, but it's D-H-A-N-A-M and you grew up in India. That's right. Now, you're a little bit hard to sum up. You were born in India. You were educated in India. And then somehow you end up coming to the United States. Your story is fascinating. But if somebody says to you today, what is it that you do today?

How do you describe what you do? Well, for six months of the year, I work for the yacht people that pays the bills. The yacht people? People who own yachts and boats. What does that mean? That means the rich people. And then for six months of the year, I go serve the boat people. All right.

Now you're joking when I'm looking for seriousness. No, the reason I say that is, came here like anybody else to find the American dream. rose to corporate ranks, became a VP of Global Ops for a company, and then felt a call of God to go back to my country and do something for the folks there. So half of the year I had run a company where I do corporate training and business seminars. Okay, that's the yacht part. Yep. So corporate training, and you are, you became the vice president of global operations for Zig Ziglar.

Yes, sir. And now you are an independent consultant. consultant. Yeah, I own my own company and I work with the SkyPass group of companies in Dallas. And you, but you have, you have done your clients, I mean, I look at this list, the United States Army, American Airlines, Christian Dior, Marriott Hotels, Cadbury Shweps, Texas Instruments, Tashiba and PepsiCo. So you are at the top in terms of what it is to be a consultant. But what, when you say the boat people, what does that mean? Well, you know, some of your, I think a couple of months ago, you had one of my. mentors, Ravi Zacharias on your program. I serve as a global adjunct with him. And so I teach cultural apologetics for folks who are looking for hope and the philosophical need for faith in countries far and wide and go try to help the pastors and pastoral training. So that's the

second part of my life. Okay, so basically you're a brainy guy who works with Ravi Zacharias and you do corporate consulting on the side. So let's see, you've written three books. I guess I want people to know your story because we can talk about big ideas and we will talk about big ideas and faith and brain and heart. But the book of your life is called The American Dream from an Indian heart, living to learn and learning to live. So you have to share your story because you shared it with me at our dinner with Brad and I thought I want my audience to hear your story. Well, today is a dream come true if you look at it. York City is where I landed in 1986 with $9 to my name. I left India with sold everything I had and came here to follow the pursuit. Why did you come here? What degree had you gotten in India and what

were you planning to do in the U.S.? Well, I had a business management degree in India. My wife was born here but raised in India when her parents had gone to school here. We were basically within the Indian caste system. We were people unequally yoked. I grew up in an Orthodox Hindu home. She grew up in a Christian home to escape the prying eyes of the folks there. She says, why don't we move to America? I can go there. I was born there. So she came back here and set up shop. So it really was a problem given the caste system in India in the 80s. Is it still? Oh, yeah. It's okay. I mean, listen, most of us in America, we have no clue. We think the whole world is like America. So you're saying this was an issue for you and your wife?

It was. And even though our parents are fairly well-educated and all that, we just thought that moving to the West would give us a new break. and a place where we didn't have to begin each day by defending our choices and could at least spend our day focusing on our chances. So that's what we began doing. So what did you want to do when you came to the States in 86? Believe it or not, I grew up in India watching Western movies. So I wanted to come to America. John Wayne was my hero. I wanted to come to America and drive a truck. But unfortunately, by 86, John Wayne had died. He died. And so my how-to moment was when I actually went to his home in Winterset, Iowa and took a picture there. That was my pilgrimage. Are you serious? Yeah. Wow. I didn't even know that he grew up in Iowa. Yeah, he did. So, okay, so you come to the West and you want to be in business.

Yes. And so we went into sales because of the fact that that was the only profession that would accept people without worrying about the qualifications. Is that true? Yeah, so, you know, because in those days it was. But you had an MBA. What do you mean qualifications? Yeah, but my MBA was in India and when it's day here, it's night there, so nobody could call to check my credentials. Oh, stop it.

All right. You're a joker. And we don't typically allow any joking on this program, but we're going to have to make an exception for Chris Donoms. And people, if they want to spell your name, it's D-H-A-N-A-M. And if they don't want to spell your name, it is still D-H-A-N-A-M. Okay, so you come here. Tell us what happened in 1990 with Zig Ziglar.

Well, I went to a seminar in Dallas at the Irving Calvary Temple, January 26, 1990. I'd won a sales contest, and my boss said, hey, you know what? you're an underachiever because you're hitting exactly what we want you to hit, but there is more potential. So I said, what are you talking about? He says, I want you to go here, this guy who will stretch you. And that's Zig Zig Zigler. Okay, now he's a legend. Many people know who he is. But for people who don't know who the legend Ziglar is, tell us. Well, here's a man who, by the time he was finished, had written 29 books, 9 and made the New York Times 10 best, and he had never been to school. I mean, since he didn't go to college. Self-taught, self-motivated, kind of.

and a revolutionized, the concept of positive thinking was an acolyte to dump some degree of Norman Minson Peele. But in those three hours at that seminar in Dallas, he radically changed and transformed my thinking. And the first thing that he taught me was, if you want to succeed, challenge every assumption you hold dear. And as a first generation immigrant, I had assumptions of what America is and what it would allow me to do. And I left that seminar believing possibility did exist. And that's began the climb. I never looked back from then. I've never looked back from then. never been unemployed and I've always, you know, moved from one thing to the next. But he radically transformed my life. I went to work for him in 1991, traveled with him as his assistant and his

aid for 17 years all over the globe. Holy cow. I didn't realize that. And actually wrote another book with him called Top Performance, which was just re-released by Baker. So, yeah. Wow, that's, that is extraordinary. I mean, to spend 17 years working that closely with Zig Ziglar, talk about your life's changing three hours and then you spend 17 years with this man. And he's the one who led me to Christ in the marketplace. That's where the transformation took place. Now, that is interesting because Zig Zigler is known outside of Christian circles as this business guru, but of course at the heart of his beliefs is his faith.

Yes. But so sometimes he doesn't share that publicly. In other words, he's just a corporate consultant or he's sharing these things. But at the end, I guess he does share his faith. How does he do that? I mean, if he was doing a public seminar where people would come from all over the world and pay a lot of money to be with him for two days. He would say the seminar is over, you've all graduated, but in 15 minutes I'm going to share the real truth that will radically alter your life. All are

invited, not all are expected. This is verbatim. I heard it so many times. And out of the 200 people, 100 would stay back for that 15-minute presentation where he would share his faith. About 60 or 70 would give their life to Christ. And outside of Billy Graham, I don't think of anybody I know who's led more people to Christ in the marketplace than Mr. Ziegler. That is truly staggering. I mean, seriously, amazing, that you've got 200 people and that you're going to lead 60 or 70 of them to faith. And these are really big businessmen. This is, it's not just a crowd. These are leaders.

Yeah. So that is very dramatic. And that's where his faith became center stage. Most of the people in the speaking world, you do a lot of speaking as well, said, don't mention God in your corporate events. Your business will tank. And in 1974, he made the radical decision that he would always mention. got in every talk and he never used a booking agent and he was booked two years in advance.

Wow. We're going to go to a break. Folks, I'm talking to Chris Dunham. More to come. It's the Eric Metaxus show, Don't Coewe. Swing low. Sweet. Come for to care.

Make like Mr. Milk toast, you'll get shot out. Hey there, folks. This is the Eric Metaxis show. As you know, if you listen, it's the show. everything. We try to talk about almost everything. If we ever talk about everything, we'll have to shut things down because we're done. But our goal is to talk about everything. Today, I'm talking to a new friend, Chris Dunham, about a lot of things, maybe not everything, but we're talking about a lot of things. Chris, first of all, is, Chris is short for something or no? Yeah, short for

Krishna. That was my given Indian name. Your given Indian name was Krishna because you grew up in a Hindu families. Absolutely. So does anybody, would they in India, would they call you Krishna? Yeah, still. I mean, my legal name is still Krishna Dunham. My marketing name was Krishna Dunham and that's just, I mean, that's what my dad called me at home, so we just stuck with it. But yeah, in passport, my name is still legally Krishna Danam. That's so funny that they would name you after Krishna. I didn't know that they would do that. That's like naming somebody Jesus. But I guess they named people Jesus, so it can happen. I was thinking that. I'm glad you said it. Of course, right? But it's so interesting.

Cultures are so fascinating because in America, you know, in the West, you would never name somebody, Jesus. But in Hispanic culture, you say, yes, and it's fine. But I think sometimes in certain circles, they just think of him as a saint, you know, like Mary. But we're not going to get into that right now. When you speak for Ravi Zacharias, what is the principal topic that you deal with? Because, I mean, you make your living, you make your life speaking. So what is your main topic? primarily the need for faith through a logical perspective, so dealing with it from the ethics perspective.

When I look at culture and look at America and all of that, the need of the hour is a return to some basic morality, a right and a wrong, a yes and a no, a black and a white. So we try to focus on the absolutes and defend the absolutes through logic and through data. Okay, when you say the absolutes, what are you referring to? The absolute of the fact that, you know, I mean, you obviously figured out that I use humor a lot. But in a corporate event, I may say something to the simple, like a, for example, I would say, one, there are three things I know. One, there is a guy, two, it ain't me, three, ain't you either. Or something like that, but that's to drive home the point that there is a fundamental belief, a point from which I originate. And then we take them a little further.

And in corporations, for example, they use the Ten Commandments. They just don't want to admit it. I would go into an HR and say, how long can you survive if you kill somebody on the job? Okay. Or if you start a relationship with the person sitting in the next cube that's not legitimate. Technically, we follow the commandments as laid out biblically, but we don't want to admit that. And that goes back to the tenets of America being a Judeo-Christian country. At least that's my fundamental belief, and I try to defend.

And it's because they work. In other words, this is what I find fascinating. it's part of why I wanted to have you on the program because you you explicate what is implicit. You force people to deal with what is there and to see it in their minds when normally they don't want to. In other words, they don't want to say, many people don't want to say like, what do you mean 10 commandments? I don't believe in the Bible. I'm just, you know, I'm living my life. And you force them to see that it's impossible to actually live your life without dealing with right and wrong.

And you may even have your own definition. point is that everybody deals with this in the terms of how they live, but very few people think it through, and you help them to do that. Yeah, and you'd mentioned Brad earlier, but Brad and I were up in Boston where I was given the explicit instructions before a speech saying, please do not mention politics, religion, or relationships. We're a social organization. I said, oh, that's absolutely fine with me. I'm just a simple immigrant. Just I'm really excited to be here. Is there any way I could quote some of the founding fathers I heard there from your area.

This is in Boston? Yeah, so they said, sure. It was actually in Concord, Massachusetts, believe it or not, when something famous did happen. So I said, I opened my speech by saying, how many of you would like to hear a quote from Daniel Webster, one of the lesser-known people in American history, but in great oratorical statesmen, and they all raised their hands. And I said, if we in our posterity reject religious instruction and authority violate the

principles of eternal ethics, and I went down the rant. When I finished, an 80-year-old man came up to me, he says, you violated all. of our rules, but you did it with immunity. Bravo. And that's all it is. Well, it's important, this is, you know, one of the reasons that, you know, I'm convinced of the, um, the intellectual, uh, weight of Christian faith is that there's no way around it. In other words, if you want to talk about, let's talk about self-government and liberty. You like self-government. You like liberty? Most people say, oh, yes, I do. Well, let's talk about what does that mean? And how can you get it? it without virtue, without faith, you really can't. It's like math. And it's the same thing with

success in the business world, and that's what you deal with, is that you want to pretend that we don't have these black and white standards, but you're saying, practically speaking in business, if all you care about is the business, you have to deal with this. Absolutely. And again, you know, they overlook some of the basics, and they don't expect a first generation immigrant like me who looks like me, sounds like me, to have any kind of either a conservative or a Christian bent. So that works in my favor because when it comes from me, majority of them are actually rooting for me because they want to hear the truth and they're glad it's coming through someone like me who has some amount of immunity in the public domain.

So that allows me to push the envelope a little bit and not get away with stuff, but reveal things that people already know but need to be repeated just for our benefits. Well, so let's get into that. I remember Chuck Colson, who became a friend, my hero, Chuck Colson. I think in 1993, he spoke at the Harvard Business School. And he was, you know, he was cheeky in a way that you are. And he was thinking, how can we talk about business school ethics without God? How do we get there? And he did a Q&A. And it really is very similar to what you. you're talking about, if we're talking about ethics, because people always talk about ethics in business, how do you get there? Where do you start? If you don't believe there's a God, or you say we don't really believe in right and wrong, it's all subjective, it's kind of impossible to do any kind of business. And so is that the sort of thing that you talk about? Yeah, at a public sector undertaking in Houston, and I'll leave the organization out of it. But I raised the question. I said,

how many of you believe that ethics are relative, which means they can evolve over time and have no absolute moorings? And majority of them raise their hands. I said, then why are you worried when your business schools that teach relative ethics produce the likes of a Canelae or somebody like that who ends up taking Enron down the tube and cost the average American taxpayer 60 grand? I said, relativism has a price. And so if you're not teaching it in business school, then you're going to reap what you're. you so. And suddenly they see the error of their ways. Everybody wants this subjective reasoning that my feelings are going to govern, but there is an objective truth behind all of this, that there is a right and a wrong and a yes and an else. Well, I mean, we know this when it comes

to math and engineering. I mean, if somebody says everything's relative, you're not going to trust that guy to build a bridge or a building. You have to deal with the facts. And you're saying that when you're dealing with ethics and business, this is inescapable. But it sounds like the point is people are uncomfortable with this, that we are trying to have it both ways. We want our employees to be honest. We don't want them to steal from the supply closet, but we don't want to say we have these ancient ideas of the Ten Commandments. And so how do you make this clear to people that you cannot have it both ways? Well, I mean, I'm an illustrator in the sense that I use illustrative and observational reference

points to make my point. But I talk about, for example, a father is called into the principal's office because his son has got stealing pencils. And the father tells the principal, I don't know why he's stealing pencils from your school. I can very easily bring them from the office. So these things, suddenly it dawns on a father who is doing that. Or Mr. Ziegler used to use this analogy when people call your home. He says, it's a telemarketer. Tell him I'm not here. So what the father is telling the son is, it's okay to lie for me. don't ever lie to me. So some of these things, when you extrapolate them out, they become what society has now considered norm. So right becomes wrong and wrong becomes right. I mean, I've

lived in America 35 years, and I've seen a great reversal from the days of Reagan. I mean, my shining moment was when I heard a Shining City on the Hill speech, and I had hope. And I always tell people, you know, as long as I was a first generation immigrant who sounded different and acted different and had and was hopeless, society accepted me here. The moment I embraced hope, I was, you know, classified or deplorable. Well, that gets into big question. Well, that gets into the question of how, I mean, I saw this first in the 80s when I went to college at Yale, and I saw this idea of victimhood being a virtue that because I grew up

as the son of first generation immigrants, or I should say I'm the first generation. generation immigrant. My parents came from the old country that this gave me a kind of virtue that I grew up in a working class home and that my parents were foreigners to this country. And I thought, this is an interesting thing because we have people in America now embracing victimhood. And the idea that I can pull myself up on my bootstraps or do all these things that were the American dream have now become dirty words. This. this idea that you can help yourself or that there's hope or something. And patriotism has become a dirty word.

When we come back, we'll continue the conversation with Chris Dunham. This is the Aircom Taxes Show. Don't go away. Hey there, folks. I'm talking to Chris Dunham about a lot of stuff, business, faith, subjectivity, objectivity. We were just talking about this concept of hope. You said that Reagan delivered his famous speech, of course, quoting John Winthrop. the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who was himself quoting Jesus, the shining city on a hill,

and this hopeful idea of America. And you say you fell in love with that idea as a newcomer to America, but then you discovered that a lot of people in the elite cultural circles were looking down on that idea. What do you mean by that? Well, earlier you talked about victimization. And I've often believed that there are some true people who are really victimized. but on the day of productivity, we all should not participate in the process. Because when you participate in the process of victimization too long, you're giving others an ability to define what you're worth.

So I decided I was not going to do that. And part of this was the genesis of Reagan's hope message. Years later, when I read John Maxwell, he said, if there's hope in the future, there's power in the present. And Adler said, hope is the foundational quality of all change. I want you to just follow that thread, because when President Obama came on the scene, he used the word hope in a very positive way

that galvanized him to the front and eventually made him president. But very quickly, people turned on the two words, hope and change, which were very interesting. And so I came to the conclusion that hope without gratitude is hopelessness. And change without strategy is cluelessness. And if you want to have both, and Reagan's hope was built on gratitude, that there was something fundamentally pure about being someone who could pull yourself up by the bootstraps, that there was opportunity. and going to bed at night believing that tomorrow did have possibility allowed you to dream better dreams.

So positive thinking, you know, for me, was not something that was not a concept. It was something I had to embrace just to make a living and survive. And so that's the thread I follow. Even when I talk to people, I try to convince them that if you want to have hope, it has to be built on a premise of gratitude. You have to be grateful for the nation, for what it stands for. It's not a question of if you don't like it, leave and then everybody, have you ever noticed? Everybody who doesn't like this country says, I want to leave, and none of them go to Mexico. All of them want to go to Canada.

And none of them do. And the tragedy, none of them leave. No, but look, there's no doubt about it. When you said, if you want to hope you have to have gratitude, gratitude is like a number of things we talked about a second ago. It's become a dirty word. First of all, you and I would say gratitude to God. We would also say gratitude to those who have gone before us, who have made these great sacrifices. And that's why we say America is great because people have suffered and bled and died to give us a land of genuine freedom.

But there are many people trying to portray America not as a land of freedom and a land of oppression and that we go around the world and we don't share freedom. We oppress. And I would say that's simply untrue. But even if there is some truth to it and there's some truth to everything, it's the larger narrative is a lie. Sure. And we don't really, you just said if you don't have gratitude, you can't have hope. When I was thinking about this in my book, if you can keep it, I realized that if you don't love America, or if you don't love your country, no matter where you're from, there's something sick. You should take pride in who you are and where you come from.

And you should be familiar with the good things about whether it's your tribe, your family, your state. whatever, there's something fundamental about that kind of an attitude. And if you have this grumpy victim attitude, it's toxic. It will lead you away from success, away from hope. But it's being sold. So, Chris, why is this being sold? Why is this being pushed in our culture? This victimology, the idea that we're victims, the idea that somebody is to blame for where I am.

And it almost seems like people become in love. with this idea. They don't, it's almost like they don't want hope. Yeah, and if you, if you go back through the annals of history, I mean, you know, George Orwell predicted this when he said, you know, freedom will, freedom will be slavery and ignorance will be strength. We are living in some very precarious times because people are afraid of educating the masses truly. So you have to have a level of people dependent on hopelessness for bad ideas to survive. It almost, is as if that, I mean, I call them poverty pimps for lack of a better classification, because I grew up in India where there is a large percent, I mean,

some of the India's exports are the most brilliant people who have changed the way the world looks at technology. They're the heads of some of the biggest organizations. This is all India's export. But you go to India, there's a large percentage of people that are kept out of the education just because you can continually perpetuate that victimhood. So I look at America in the last 35 years, The Indian lobby has just now surpassed the Jewish lobby as one of the most affluent in this country. And people always say, you know, why is that?

I said because the Indians who move to the West do not participate in victimhood. So what do you mean? I said, you know, the late night mocking of accents, the Indian accent is the only one that can still be mocked on late night TV. But the Indians don't care. We're not on late night TV complaining that someone needs to correct us. And people say... You know, by the way, that's very interesting. You're right.

I have never seen an Indian spokesperson coming from that victim attitude. I never thought of that, but that's really, it's kind of interesting. Yeah, and someone's laughing all the way to the bank, and they're doing it with an accent. I mean, they don't care. I mean, you know, you can say that, hey, they own motels, and that's a joke, but did you know that they own roughly $100 billion worth? Now, suddenly they'll get your attention. Yeah, I was going to say, that's, okay, we have to go to another break.

We'll be right back talking to Chris Dunham. Don't go away. I'm talking one guy be. I kissed her and she kissed me. Like the fella once said, ain't that a kick in the head. The room was completely black. I hugged her and she hugged back.

Hey there, folks. This is here. I'm talking to Chris Dunham. And I've got to ask you, Chris. I haven't asked you yet. How can people find you on the web or whatever if they want to look you up? Well, the name, Chris Dunham. Chris Dunham.com is my one.

You think people can spell Chris Dunham? Well, just go online and say Indian Motivator, you should find me. Indian Motivator? Is that true? Probably pop up, yeah. Okay, but Chris is K-R-I-S-H. Not that many people are named Crish. K-R-I-S-H. Dunham

is D-H-A-N-A-N-A-M-D-H-A-M-D-H-A-M-D-H-A-N-A-M dot-com, you said? It's the website. There are a couple of other, skylifsuccess. com. Sky-lif-Success. SkylifSuccess. Dot com, yes. Sky-life is the name of my company.

Uh-huh. And that's where we do our corporate training, and that has its own website. Okay. Now, there's a couple of books in front of me here. First of all, the book where you tell your personal story we've touched on it, it's called The American Dream Dream. from an Indian heart, living to learn and learning to live with a forward by Zig Ziglar. And then the book I want to touch on now, though, in front of me here, it's called From Abstracts

to Absolutes, searching for the true identity of God. Tell us about that. Well, when I met Mr. Ziegler and he was talking to me about faith, he had a catchphrase that everybody in this world wants the same eight things, to be happy, to be healthy, to be reasonably prosperous and you can go online and find Zig Ziglar's famous eight. But as I started the search, he kept alluding that there was one commodity that was hidden that made all of that come together and that was faith. I wanted the eight things he was selling. I didn't want the faith because I was raised a Hindu and it would be a betrayal of my identity, my culture, my tradition. So when you first encountered him, I was not a believer. You were not a Christian. No. Okay. So you said

that he was the one that led you to faith, this great Zig Zig Ziglar. So keep going with that. And so I began, I started traveling with him in 92, and then I started researching these things for myself. I saw a man who was incredibly happy, incredibly content. Even though I was so much as junior from a different culture, he never introduced me as an assistant. He always said, this is my associate, my future, my legacy. He called me son. And I never understood why a person who looked different from me, acted different for me, was a white wizard from the West. I was this guy from India, the immigrant, first generation, why he would treat me with so much joy.

And one day in passing, he says, my mother told me that one day will stand in front of a colorblind God. And I would never heard of God as a first person or a person who could interact. He would say things like, when I get to heaven, not if, I'm going to go hug my mama and then I'm going to find my baby girl. And so he made heaven a present continuous reality. So I began doing my own discovery because I still had answering to my parents. So I set out to find where in the world all the eight things he was offering would exist, and I studied all the worldviews at that time. Christianity was the only one that posited all of that, the happiness, the joy, the contentment, the relationships.

The practical side of how I became a believer was very simple. My wife, who was raised a Christian, was expecting our first child, and she looked at me, and she said, I know you don't believe in Christ, but I'm going to raise our boy in the faith. So I went and asked Mr. Ziegler if he would come to my son's baptism, because he was the only Christian I knew. And I'd have a prominent one on the video, so I'd have bragging rights at boring parties. And he looked at me and asked me the question

of theologian had asked a very practical question. He said, why do you want to send your son to someplace you're not sure you're going? Boom. You see, this is why he's Zig Ziglar, because he comes up with this stuff just like that. Why would you want to send your son to a place you're not sure you are going?

I mean, people would sort of instinctively think something similar, but they wouldn't be able to come up with it. I mean, boy, he put it to you. Yeah. And then I, knowing what the feeling is when you hold your child, for those of you listening who have children, you know that feeling. The mother does all the work. The father is just a participant. And at the end, he holds the child and acts very victorious as if he did something. Yeah. But we don't want that feeling to ever go. Yeah. So when I realized, then I told my mother-in-law who had prayed for me and my wife who had prayed for me. I said, when our son gets baptized, I want to be baptized too. So by this time you had intellectually come to accept that Christianity is true.

Right. So I had the rare privilege of being baptized with my boy in 1993 and Mr. Ziegler was peasant. Wow. That's incredible. Now, you mentioned your parents that obviously for anybody who is the son of people from another culture. I experienced this growing up with my Greek dad. there is a lot of cultural pressure to conform. And in many ways, that's a healthy thing.

There's something very good there. But in your case, this was trouble. Yeah. Tell us how you dealt with that. You know, tradition is one thing that India is a very traditional society. Culture defines you. Tradition is what is all around you. And my father didn't talk to me for five years in respectful terms.

He acknowledged that I existed, but he thought I had betrayed the culture completely. I had abandoned the identity. See, I come from a high priest background. My father's uncle's names are engraved on Temple Stone, so you're not talking about a big deal. But I told my dad something that I asked Mr. Ziegler, how would I answer a father who was angry with me? And Mr. Ziegler's response to me was out-love him.

Out-love him. Once again, that's why he gets to be Zig-Ziegler, because he comes up with stuff like that right off the bat. Out-love him. So I told my dad, I said, dad, a limit to your hurt because it's earthly and it's traditional. There's no limit to my love because it's heavenly and I follow a God of love. I will outlove you.

You'd be like your dad's worst nightmare. That's so funny. How do you answer that one? You're like, oh, let me think about that. Now, let me ask you, though, were you in Indian culture, were you Brahmins? Yes. Okay, so Brahmin is the highest of the casts. So it's interesting because there's tremendous prize.

And there's an upside and a downside to this because it's elitism, obviously. So you think like we are the top, we are the top cast, and it's a fundamentally racist worldview, is it not? Technically, because- I mean, if you look at it from a religious perspective, you always ask yourself, how can you have classes of people that are different and can never intermingle or interspersed? But Hinduism is a philosophy as a broad construct because it's something that constantly changes with its own perspective of how it tries to defend itself. In fact, the cab driver who brought me to the airport day before yesterday asked me a question about Hinduism. And he says, you were raised a Hindu. How would

you become a Christian? And I said, oh, it was the easiest decision I ever made because there was an origin and there was a destiny. And in between is where I exist with some kind of purpose. And he was Buddhist, the gentleman who was driving me to the airport. And he looked at me and said, I've never heard it put so concisely. And that's all it is. So when I kept telling my dad that I want joy in my life, I'm not doing this to create agony for you. I'm doing it because I want joy in my life. He began to understand. We're going to go to a break.

We'll be right back. Folks, you don't want to miss this. Chris Dunham is my guest. Stick around. Hey there, folks. It's Eric Metax's a show. I'm talking to Chris Dunham. We're talking about the book from abstracts to absolute, searching for the true identity of God.

in a minute. We're going to switch to the newer book written with the head of Microsoft. Former president. The former president of Microsoft, Rick Beluzzo, hardheaded, soft-headed lessons from the boardroom to the break room. But I want to let's stick with this. From abstracts to absolute, searching for the true identity of God. Where did we leave off? Well, we talked about how Mr. Ziegler had led me to Christ and how I got baptized with my son. Yeah. And so when you say searching for the truth, from absenteenth, Abstracts to Absolute searching for the true identity of God. What do you mean from abstracts to absolutes? Well, having been raised in Hinduism,

Hinduism is a pantheistic worldview where you have multitudes of gods and you have two basic constructs of reincarnation, where you come back as someone or transmigration, where you could come back as something. So everything tends to be holy and all your acts tend to be spiritual because you're trying to fight cycles of life. And you hope that you're good and you're bad in each cycle that you complete will one day counteract each other

and you'll reach what is called Moksha and you'll be liberated. So that was Hinduism. It's abstract. You don't know the beginning. You don't know the ending. You don't know what you owe. You don't know your punishment. You don't know why you're being punished. And you just go through life.

The karmic mindset is basically one that does not allow you to focus on self-motivation because you begin with the premise that you don't know whether you're bad in your previous life will be overcome in any way by the good in this life. So I began with the premise of if there is an abstract which what I was raised, And here was a man who I was following, who was giving me an absolute identity in the person of Christ, saying your past is forgiven, your future is assured. There's nothing you can do that is bad enough that will keep you away from me. That is nothing you can do that is good enough that will bring you to me.

I hang in the balance. I suddenly had a quantitative to a qualitative. So that's why I began that journey of discovery. So you say searching for the true identity of God. In other words, is this, did you have some sense of God in the Hindu faith, but it was so vague? and that you were looking for more. And within Hinduism, it's an impersonal god because there are many gods. So gods compete with each other.

I think Ravi says in his things, there are roughly like 300 million gods in the Hindu pantheon. 300 million. Yeah. Now, they would have about 15 or 20 that would be the major prophets. What a concept, though. I mean, you kind of, it's fascinating how a religion can evolve over the millennia. That is so, it doesn't bear on reality as we know it, and yet there are so many people who actually live their lives based on this.

I mean, Hindus who go by a Buddhist temple would bow in reverence, where Buddha, who was started as Gautum Buddha in India, basically began by rejecting the caste system. When he says that they cannot be any rich or poor, even though he was raised rich, or they cannot be any classes because he was starting to find this truth, he rejected the Vedas when he says, all the knowledge that exists is not enough of me, I've got to find my own nirvana.

So even though these people bow down to Buddha, Buddha is the one who rejected Hinduism in his fundamental tenets. So there is a contradiction that constantly evolves, but tradition seems to always surpass. So when I talk to my dad and I witness to him, for example, he says, what you're asking of me, I can never publicly do because it will be, it will go against everything that I have stood for. This was the same thing. When East Stanley Jones, the missionary, went to India, he wrote a book called Christ of the Indian Roe. his best companion was a gentleman by the name of Mahatma Gandhi. He wrote consistently to Gandhi.

And the Stanley Jones Foundation has the letters from Gandhi back to East Stanley Jones saying, what you're asking of me will be a betrayal against everything I've stood for, though the Christ your offering really warms the heart. Wow. Okay, we're at the end of the program, but we're going to keep you here, and we're just going to keep talking. Chris Dunham, privileged to have you here. Wonderful to talk to you.

go away and to my listeners don't you go away because we're staying right here