The One You Feed - Robert Sessions

Episode Date: April 5, 2016

A native of South Dakota, Robert Sessions earned a B.A. from Drake University and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan.  Before focusing on photography, for more than four decades he taught at Kirkwood Community College, Grinnell College, Luther College, and the University of Minnesota in Duluth.As a photographer he works frequently with his wife, travel writer Lori Erickson. Together they produce Spiritual Travels, a website describing holy sites around the world, and Holy Rover, a blog hosted by Patheos, the world’s largest website on religion and spirituality. His photos also appear regularly in publications that include the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette and Group Tour Magazine. He is a member of the Society of American Travel Writers.In addition, Sessions is the author of Becoming Real: Authenticity in an Age of Distractions and co-author of Working In America: A Humanities Reader.  He has also published several dozen articles on environmental philosophy, the philosophy of work, ethics, and the philosophy of technology.He lives in Iowa City, Iowa. In This Interview, Robert Sessions and I Discuss:The One You Feed parableHis new book, Becoming Real: Authenticity in an Age of DistractionsThat authenticity is something fundamental that is at the heart of what we are all seekingHow authenticity is impacted by variables found on the inside as well as in the world surrounding a personThe three main distractions that get in the way of authenticityThat work is a major context within which we discover ourselvesHow bad habits surrounding technology can get in the way of being our authentic selvesFor more show notes visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

People need to understand that we need to learn to use our technologies so that they maximize the things we really care about. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series. Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kickstarting your personal growth. If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Robert Sessions. Robert is a native of South Dakota and earned a BA from Drake University and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Michigan. Before focusing on photography, for more than four decades, he taught at Kirkwood Community College, Grinnell College, Luther College, and the University of Minnesota in Duluth. As a photographer, he works frequently with his wife, travel writer Lori Erickson. Together, they produce Spiritual Travels, a website describing holy sites around the world. Robert's most recent book is Becoming Real, Authenticity in an Age of

Distractions. He has also published several dozen articles on environmental philosophy, the philosophy of work, ethics, and the philosophy of technology. Here's the interview. Hi, Bob. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. I'm glad to be here. Your book is called Becoming Real, Authenticity in an Age of Distractions, which we will get into in a little bit as we get deeper into it. But I'd like to start like we usually do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents

things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops, He thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather, and he says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, it's a wonderful traditional parable. And I'm a firm believer that one of the most important things about stories like this is that they contain truths that can't be captured entirely with discursive, factual references. You know, they're sort of fathomless in the sense of being bottomless, barreled with truth. What does it mean to me? I've spent a lot of time thinking about, reading about, and writing about the development of the self.

And I'm a firm believer that while, yes, we have something to do with how we turn out and who we become, that I really take a more sociological or social philosophical perspective and believe that human beings are probably the most hyper-social creatures on the face of the planet and that we, to a great extent, in our very being, our identities, our very selves, are social through and through. And so what that means for me, at least in part, is that if we want to learn to feed the good wolf, we need to be embedded in really the right kinds of social relationships, families and communities and so on. And that much of the bad wolf comes from bad culture, bad society, bad families, bad philosophies that are far beyond our individual capacities to do much shaping.

Well, that's a great way to lead into your book. So it's, as I said earlier, it's called Becoming Real, Authenticity in an Age of Distractions. And you say, I'll just read this here. You say, what people desire is authenticity, a deep sense of being real. I believe that many people cannot attain this elusive quality of being because of the myriad distractions that keep them from a genuine quest and keep them looking in the wrong places. What leads you to believe that authenticity is the thing that we're after? innate desire, not just to be recognized, which I think is very, very strong, but also to be the person that we might be. And you see this coming out in a thousand different ways. Certainly, the paradigm example is teenagers who, you know, rebel against everything people say, and they want to be their own person and so on. I mean, it's just a very, very strong desire that people have. And so then I came at it in my book from kind of the downside.

Well, what prevents this from happening to the extent that people want it to? And how do people get lost? There are many, many people who, for example, have midlife crises. How do people get lost? There are many, many people who, for example, have midlife crises. And I don't like that word crisis because I think often experiences of difficulties can be great opportunities for growth and development and discovery. But the reason people have that, I think, often is because they've been pursuing someone else's version of themselves, someone else's dream for them. Stereotypical example, but I think it's a powerful one, unfortunately, in our culture,

is that people get convinced that to be the person who is going to be recognized for themselves and viewed as authentic, the way to do that is through material possessions. I mean, that's the major drumbeat in our culture. If you only get enough money, you're going to get recognized and famous and so on. And of course, legions of stories of people who finally realize that doesn't do it, no matter how much you have. book that you talk a lot about is I think when we think about authenticity, we tend to think of that as being a uniqueness that is inside of us. It has something to do with finding ourselves. And you say that being authentic has as much to do with what occurs in the world around us as it does with what we experience internal to ourselves. Can you explain that a little bit more? Yeah, again, that's very complicated, but I'll try to say it straightforwardly. The selves that we become have, again, a huge amount to do with the models around us. That's why having good mentors, good role models, and so on is so absolutely crucial. Our sense of what our possibilities are have to do

with the stories we read, the people we experience, the events that we perceive. And so figuring out who I am has a great deal to do with the world around me. One other aspect of this is what a social philosopher called the looking glass self. We see very little and dimly when we simply navel gaze, when we look inside. To a great extent, to really know who I am, how I'm coming across, what I'm like as a human being, we need to see ourselves reflected in other people's responses to us. Believing that very process of recognition and certainly the process of self-formation is a relational phenomenon. You name three main distractions that you think get in the way of us being more authentic. Work, technology, and nature. Let's talk about work for a minute.

In what ways does the current culture and the way we approach work leave us feeling less real? Uh-huh. I actually wrote a couple of other books on this topic, so I have a lot to say about it. In fact, people are interested. My major book on it is called Working in America. It's a humanities reader on work. And usually when people write about work, it's from the point of view of economics and labor relations and so on. And mine is a humanities philosophical look at work. Work is something that people think we really don't want to do. I mean, think about the Monday morning syndrome. God, I just didn't have to go to work. I mean, think about the Monday morning syndrome. God, I just didn't have to go to work. I'm retired now, and what I'm seeing in my retired friends

is that in a whole variety of ways, they have to find something to give meaning to their lives now that work is over. And so the problem, I don't think, is work per se. I think it's a variety of things about how we do work. It's not our work system. Yes, work is a way to produce products, and it's a way to create wealth, and I don't at all diminish the importance of that. of that, but it's also the context or a major context within which we discover and express ourselves. And if we don't have meaningful work, if we don't have ways to contribute to our own lives, but equally importantly or more importantly, perhaps, to contribute to the lives of our communities, of our world, then our ability to discover, to create, to develop and advance and mature in ourselves gets tremendously diminished. And so work, per se, is not the problem. It's how we do work, where we emphasize that what work is

about is simply making a living. And again, I don't diminish the importance of that, but work is much more than that. And we don't really value those other aspects of work, except for a few people, for example, creative artists. Their work, you know, is their products, but they are allowed, in fact, they're encouraged to develop themselves by doing their work. Very few other people do that. Most jobs do not involve very much self-discovery and so on. My son, my oldest son, who is a biochemical engineer,

works for a wonderful company that encourages the engineers, at least, to make some long-term plans about where they want to be 5, 10, 15 years from now. And not so much in terms of money, but in terms of keeping them interested in what they're doing, keeping them creative. keeping them creative, and they realize that if people aren't developing and having the opportunity to really be creative and express themselves, their capacity to do the kind of work that they're doing becomes very, very compromised. So again, we're talking about a bigger cultural issue here, the way that the culture values work that people do. issue here, the way that the culture values work that people do. How can those of us that are working find ways to make our own work that we're doing, whatever that is, more meaningful to us so that we don't fall into this trap that you're describing? Yeah, that's an excellent question. Certainly, one of the things I, for example, taught at a community college for a quarter of a century, and one of the things that we had available to us was a union.

And it's not a closed shop union. It was an open shop union in the sense that people didn't have to join. But we in the union encouraged the development not just of good salaries and benefits and so on, but of working conditions, not just in terms of benefits and so on, but of working conditions, not just in terms of safety and so on, but that really provided opportunities for the faculty, in this case, to develop their art, to explore, to go to conferences, to take time off and do writing, and so on. to conferences to take time off and do writing and so on. And so part of my answer, again, is that we're social beings and we depend heavily for our very beings on our social context.

So one of the main things I'd recommend for people to make work better is to work with their fellow employees, not necessarily to create unions, but to create copacetic working conditions where everyone is fed, where everyone has the opportunity to be creative, to explore, to do things differently. And I'm convinced that this can happen in, if you will, the lowliest of occupations. I've done a lot of handyman work, a lot of painting and house building and so on. And I've seen it done poorly, where people are just assigned. They don't have any responsibility except to hammer the nails in the right place. And on the other hand, I've seen people who really do some wonderful things

as carpenters and painters and so on because they're given recognition for the importance of this, you know, the creativity and exploration that I'm talking about. I've seen it in a lot of different places. I think it can happen in restaurants. Or an example is the difference

between working at Walmart and working at Costco. Both working big box chain stores, the morale in Costco is huge, not just because they pay twice as much as Walmart does and have benefits, but because they really encourage people to participate in creating better products and better displays and new lines of products and so on. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow.

I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, really. And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Another of the things that you talk about, I thought this was really interesting, because when we think about going off the wrong, you know, going down the wrong path, we tend to think of it as these really perilous things that happen, these big things.

But you talk about how most of us in America stray from developing and becoming ourselves because of what seem like pretty benign distractions. Yeah. Yeah, and my example in the technology chapter really plays to that. I mean, think about the much commented upon phenomenon of people socializing, walking down the street or sitting in restaurants or whatever on their phones. They're not with the people they're with. They're not living in the moment and so on. That's a very small kind of thing, but there's a kind of accretion to it. It adds up. It spoils significant relationships, but it also creates in people a set of mental habits. It's kind of like a drug. They need that fix of constant distraction. And we all know that if you really want to be clear on who you are and do something

significant with your life, you've got to be able to focus and concentrate and be fully in the moment. And picking up those habits that we do from our technologies can lead us to feel like, okay, all that matters is like the proverbial pigeon poking at the feed trough in the pen, you know, constantly wanting another sunflower. And it looks like that too often. And I don't want to just pick on phones. Here I am talking on one. I think there are tremendous technologies, but people need to understand that we need to learn to use our technologies so that they maximize the things we really care about.

If I could just go one more step in this line, there's a wonderful book out now that's a bestseller and lots of people are reading it. It's really a very simple idea, the book on tidying up by a Japanese-American woman. And what she basically is saying is that everything in our lives, everything in our lives should be something that really brings us meaning. And if we don't get that from something, then we need to get it out of our lives, but do it in a kind of ceremonial way. That is, to pay homage to whatever it is, an item of clothing or a plate or whatever, and say, well, you served me well, and I want to put you somewhere where someone who really will find you meaningful can have me. And that would help in a whole variety of ways. For one thing, it would clear up people's lives so they aren't so tied to their stuff. clear up people's lives so they aren't so tied to their stuff. It would also help people be much better materialists. You know, everybody talks about how Americans are too materialistic.

In a different sense, I think people in America are way too little materialistic. That is, we really cared about the material world, we would take better care of it. But in our false materialism, we end up despoiling the world, whether it's garbage or the way we treat the land or air. Pick your favorite example. You talk a lot in the book about how nature is a really important and powerful way to bring us back to ourselves, to become more real, to become more authentic. What is it about nature that has that power?

A lot of things about nature. First of all, one of the things that it's easy to forget, especially in this Internet-laden world, this electronic-laden world, is that we are natural beings through and through. We're biological beings from dust to dust and so on. Secondly, that we are part of an ecosystem. This is not an abstraction. This is one of the major concrete things about us. You know, if you read Kathleen Norris's book, Dakota, but if you read stories about people who live in different places in the world, different climates and

geographies and so on. People really are different based on the world around them. You know, that world affects us in all kinds of profound ways. We also, in our society with our tremendous, you know, cultural artifacts, our cities and buildings and so on, we have taken people away from experiences with the natural world. So what most people do is to watch a YouTube video of that cute, cuddly panda bear the other day. In the snow, yeah. Playing in the snow, a wonderful video. My gracious, that's not an animal in the wild, and that's not an ecosystem that's intact.

I mean, that's an indication that it's not intact. And so if we're not familiar with it, we don't love it. We don't understand it. We don't value it. So much of the ecological crises that we have in our world have to do with that abstraction from the natural world. But my point of view is that we need the natural world for our very selves, for the lives of our souls. There's that wonderful book about nature deficit disorder. Children who don't have any encounter with nature.

And it isn't just that kids aren't as healthy because they're not eating up dirt and so on, or their immune systems don't develop because they don't have those encounters with bacteria. But it's that much of what we are as natural beings doesn't ever get triggered and developed as a result of this isolation that we have. One other way, of course, that's been much discussed that's so important, if you study the biographies of the great spiritual people throughout human history, the major place where they go for their encounters with the holy is out into the desert, into the wilderness, into the mountains, you know, the famous hermit up in the cave and so on.

Because what's there is a lack of human distractions, and it opens you up to a variety of things that are essential for, as I say, people's spiritual development in life. For one thing, you get perspective that, hey, my life is short. I'm only one being among many. I'm only one species among many. I'm part of this larger community. You know, it puts you in perspective and helps you realize that my life is not all about me.

and helps you realize that my life is not all about me. I think that's another distraction and terrible cultural message, I think, that we've gotten in our society, and that's that your life is all about you. With regard to happiness, if I can use that word as a way of describing the good wolf, I think a major ingredient is to learn to diminish the ego and to give it away. Not give the ego away, but give your life away. Give yourself to other people. And lo and behold, the more people you help in really genuine ways, the happier you end up being. I mean, ways, the happier you end up being. I mean, it's one of the most remarkable phenomena that you can come across that people just don't realize. But if you look at every religious tradition, that's a major part of the formula for happiness, is to live unto others.

I think the nature piece is the sort of thing that I natively would sort of think, well, I don't know about that. It just doesn't resonate with people, I think, who are a more sophisticated crowd. But one of the great teachers of my life was a gentleman named Lou DeWine, who founded a place called Niches, which was founded on that exact idea that basically it's lack of contact with nature that is one of the things that makes us sick as a culture. And I wouldn't have believed it until I experienced it so well, but I found that to be so true. And I think even a little bit of time, five minutes, 10 minutes, because a lot of us live in areas where there's not a lot of nature around, but if we can find just small bits of it, even that is really helpful.

I recently had the experience, it's not in the book, of spending well over an hour with a Rinpoche, a holy man from Tibet who's second in the world to the Dalai Lama in terms of his holy rarity as he's from Mongolia, but he was a captive in Tibetan China for the first 25 or 30 years of his life and tortured and so on. And the man was just so peaceful and just exuded this happiness. But he clearly had transcended the ego in so many ways. And yet he was very straightforward. He wasn't at all off-putting. He was as welcoming as he could be. And he spent the time with us that felt good, and then we parted.

But we were so privileged to spend that time with him and to realize that much of his spiritual depth had come from time that he spent in nature meditating. One of the things that you talk about is that in our current world, it's called the postmodern world right now, we have choices in everything. Whether it be the obvious things like, oh, I could buy 30 brands of cereal, or more profound and fundamental things about who do I want to marry and where do I want to live and what kind of job do I want to have to do and what are my beliefs and what is important. And I think that we're in this place where those are all good things in some ways. But you make the point that there's two issues. One is living up to our values and our ideals and to our culture. And you say that, you know, that's always been a problem for human beings to live up to that. But that in earlier societies, the idea of having to figure out who you were wasn't there. All you had to do was work to live up to the culture to do that. You didn't have to figure out who you were on top of that. And that that's one of the challenges we as a

modern society are wrestling with. Yeah, I think that's a really, really important point. It's the underside of freedom, if you want to use that kind of language. It's wonderful to have choices, and it's awful to have so many choices. And you can think of all sorts of examples. One social psychologist called this the cytophobia. You're standing in front of a rack of toothpaste and say, oh my God, which one am I going to choose? And we end up choosing the same one we chose last time just to get out of there. It feels oppressive rather than liberating. But as you say, this is

true about every aspect of our lives. And I think the only way to traverse this gauntlet of choices at every turn well is, first of all, to have help. You know, good parenting, good modeling, good friends, good teachers, and reading good stories. I can't emphasize that enough. You know, to really get your belly full of the absolute best stories that are available. get your belly full of the absolute best stories that are available. I think that's a major job of childhood, so that when it comes to making these decisions, you've got some models. You know that this way of doing things that such and such a character tried out isn't a good idea, and there it is right in front of you,

a different version of it, but the same dilemma and so on. And so I think that it takes a lot of training. Whereas, as you said in the past, you know, you didn't have any major choices about who you were going to be, what you're going to do in your life. You belong to a certain class. Your father was a miller, so you're going to be a miller. You're going to stay in the same village you were born into, and so on. And, you know, that can be oppressive, especially for certain kinds of personalities. But it also is a tremendous relief from all of these pressures to make decisions.

They put several children through college, and that whole process of choosing the college is so crucial and so difficult to a great extent because it involves knowing who you are. And, of course, why you go to college to a great extent is to figure out who you are. And we've known a number of people, and it's very, very costly mistakes, where it turned out, no, they thought that was the right choice. They went to 50 different schools and went on campus tours and so on and chose one. And by golly, that didn't work. And the one that they should have chosen wasn't as fancy or as expensive or whatever. And so they ended up with a year lost and $50,000 of tuition. It can be very costly, and I'll multiply that.

People choosing the wrong mate and the wrong career 20 years later realize, oh, no, I didn't want to be a jazz musician. I wanted to be an mathematician, and'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart Series for the third year running. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar.

You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You talk in your book a lot. You reference another

book, which is one of my favorite books of all time, which is The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. And he talks about in that book, I don't think he came up with it, but this idea of a happiness formula. Could you share with us what that formula is? Yeah, well, Haidt, there's another book, by the way, that I'd highly recommend, Mathieu Ricard, who is one of the great students of the Dalai Lama, who is French, and his father's a French philosopher. And he goes off, I think he was a chemist student, and he went off after getting his PhD to Tibet and came back 35 years later with this advanced ability. to Tibet and came back 35 years later with this advanced ability. He's got a book called Happiness that just has great insight. So I highly recommend that. Happiness hypothesis, you know, is complicated in some ways, but pretty straightforward in other ways. That happiness is, first of all, something that you can't get if you pursue it, okay? It comes as an epiphenomenon,

comes along with doing something else. And that something else has to do with some of the things I've been talking about. You know, if you're clear about who you are at a given point, and you're doing things from that identity, you're acting from that identity, then you're going to be much happier than if

what you're doing doesn't fit who you are. So that's one aspect is self-discovery and self-expression in your daily life, in your work, in your personal life. Part of happiness comes from having good relationships. Again, something I've been talking about. If we don't have mates or spouses or lovers who really fit us and understand us and can help us discover ourselves and call us up short when we make mistakes and so on, we're going to be less happy. A certain amount of wealth is important. And maybe that's the wrong word to use because people immediately think of being rich. No, I'm talking about having enough. What they've found is up to a certain point, so that you don't have to worry every day about, gee, where's the next meal going to come from?

Where am I going to stay tonight because it's cold outside and so on? That increases your happiness. After a certain point, more wealth doesn't really improve your happiness much. In fact, it can be a real detriment to your happiness because achieving and maintaining that wealth and then maintaining all the stuff and the lifestyle and so on that go along with that can keep you away from doing things that are much more valuable to your happiness. Being rich is not all it's cracked up to be. In fact, it's contrary to well-being. There's a wonderful book by a woman who talks about her work with Mother Teresa's Foundation in India, and she had the job of fundraising. And she would go to wealthy people, you know, executives and CEOs and people with

millions and billions of dollars, and tell them that their lives would be a lot richer and more meaningful and happy if they would give it away. And she said over and over again, she gives example after example of how that was the case, that people had thought hoarding and having a big bank account was the way to go. People had thought hoarding and having a big bank account was the way to go. That's a major ingredient, again, of letting go, giving it away. In the book, I was struck by how both you and Jonathan Haidt kind of came to a very similar place. Him with happiness, you with authenticity. authenticity. And I think it was that what really struck me was with both of those things, the Western approach has very much been, it's about me, you know, it's, it's an internal, find yourself, go inside self-discovery, all of that stuff. And what you both came to was a sense

that it's not, you know, we say happiness is an inside job, which is such a cliche and there's, it's not, you know, we say happiness is an inside job, which is such a cliche. And there's, there's some truth in it, but where you both landed was that it's both happiness is both an inside job. We have to be doing things, working internally, and it's what's happening in the world around us. It's the people around, it's the life we've constructed, the conditions we have. And you kind of landed in the same place with authenticity. Part of it is who we are internally and not being distracted by all these distractions, and part of it is the culture, the circumstances, the people that we're around. I've landed again in Christianity. I was not for a while. I've explored a lot of different religious traditions. But one of the things that I want to

say about Christianity is I've discovered how incredibly countercultural Christianity is. It's not about wealth, it's not about individual salvation as much as it's about relationships. You know, God is love. You know, if you really get it, it happens because of opening your heart and loving relationships. It's relational. And like I say, that's very countercultural. That's not all about me. It's all about us. Right.

I think that's one of the things that just comes up over and over and over again on the show that has struck me that I don't think I was as aware of before we started doing it was that second aspect. I was certainly aware of the meditative aspects and the going inside and the knowing yourself. But over and over and over, people we have on the show, very wise people, talk about this idea of relationship and other people and the culture and the people around. And I'm more and more recognizing what a critical part of a good life that is. Yeah, and I really appreciate your program, that you're finding that, because the message is so much by a lot of self-help gurus that it's all about me, it's all about going inside myself, and so on.

And like I say, that's an important part of it, but it's only a small part of it. There should be and can be what I would call a good creative tension between, you know, being pulled towards internal focus and taking care of yourself and all those things. And at the same time, giving to and being connected to the world outside. I think a good creative tension pulls you into the middle with that, where a lot of us tend to get to one extreme or the other. And a lot of the self-help that's out there, various programs, encourages us to go one direction or the other. Yeah, and one of the ways that people come at this in much of the literature

about work and so on is about work-life balance. And I think that's a less adequate way of talking about it, but I think it's getting at something similar. One of the things I wanted to mention, I mentioned Christianity a minute ago. I don't know how many people you've talked to that use this language, but I really do think what you're after in this program is a spiritual quest. This is really a spiritual issue through and through. And I know it sounds kind of funny to use that language in talking about work and technology and so on, but it seems to me that that's at the heart of why it is people end up with difficulties, losing their way, and so on. And one of the things that I like about using it as a spiritual quest is that spiritual quests,

if you look at every tradition, are about getting lost, or about wandering on the way, to use the Taoist terminology, about koans and paradoxes and getting mired down in, of having to struggle and being challenged and so on. And I think that's a really, really helpful lesson to people who think that this is all just about finding roses and, gee, something's wrong if I'm having a difficulty. I would put it the other way around. Something's wrong if you're not having some difficulties. You know, the greatest atheists of all time have not been the armchair

atheists that abound these days. It's people who are very, very spiritual beings who have doubts as they go, because they're developing, they're discovering new relationships to the holy and new understandings of the holy. Yep, I agree. Well, I think that is a good place for us to wrap up. So thank you so much, Bob, for taking the time to come on. I really enjoyed the book. You cover a lot of ground from Eastern philosophy to Western existential philosophy. There's a lot in it. I really enjoyed reading it. So thank you so much for taking the time. Well, thank you for finding it. And I've enjoyed this too. Thank you.

Okay. Take care. Bye. Okay. Bye. you can learn more about robert sessions and this podcast at one you feed.net slash sessions