The One You Feed - Roland Merullo

Episode Date: February 17, 2015

This week we talk to Roland Merullo about focusing on our internal lifeRoland Merullo is the author of nine novels, including Breakfast with Buddha and Lunch with Buddha, A Little Love Story and��American Savior.Merullo's nonfiction writing includes Revere Beach Elegy:A Memoir of Home and Beyond" target="_blank">Revere Beach Elegy, a memoir that won the 2000 Massachusetts Book Award for Non-Fiction, and the travel book The Italian Summer, His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Readers Digest among many others. At various points in his life, he has worked in a parking garage, worked for the United States Information Agency in the former Soviet Union, served in the Peace Corps in Micronesia, worked as a carpenter, and taught creative writing and literature at Bennington and Amherst Colleges. In This Interview Roland and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.Choosing our own thoughts.How all that we are is a result of our thoughts.Using humor to convey deeper subjects.His definition of spiritualityFocusing on our interior life.The relationship between thought, emotion and behavior.Learning to see our conditioned thoughts.How we never catch up to God or the Divine Intelligence.Learning to be less materialistic- focusing on the things we can't touch or define.Is the human race evolving?Not knowing the answer to the big questions.His meditation practice.How meditation has helped him with depression.How he uses his writing as a vehicle of hope.Choosing the positive instead of the negative.Not passing our pain on to others.Worshipping false gods.The spiritual ideas in the Breakfast with Buddha and Lunch with Buddha books.How often spiritual leaders laugh.Did Jesus and Buddha laugh often?Roland Merullo LinksRoland Merullo HomepageRoland Merullo FacebookRoland Merullo TwitterRoland Merullo Amazon Author Page Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Dan HarrisTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jesus and Buddha, you just don't see any humor there. And I wonder if that was edited out. I hope so. 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. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast.

Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Our guest today is Roland Marullo, author of nine novels including Breakfast with Buddha, Lunch with Buddha, A Little Love Story, and American Savior. Marullo's nonfiction writing includes Revere Beach Elegy, a memoir that won the 2000 Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction. He also wrote the travel book The Italian Summer. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Reader's Digest, and many others. At various points in his life, Roland has worked in a parking garage, worked for the United States Information Agency and the former Soviet Union, served in the Peace Corps in Micronesia, worked as a carpenter, and taught creative writing and literature at the Bennington and Amherst Colleges. Here's the interview. writing, and literature at the Bennington and Amherst Colleges.

Here's the interview. I believe we're all doing the best we can in our lives with the abilities that we have and the things that we know, but sometimes getting some new methods or getting some accountability and support can really help us in feeding our good wolf and moving our lives forward. If this is something you're interested in learning more about, some of the programs that we're offering, send an email to eric at oneufeed.net. Thanks. Hi, Roland. Welcome to the show. Nice to be here.

Thanks so much for joining us this evening. And I'd like to start, Roland, by going through the parable like we always do. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, In life, there are two wolves inside of us. 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 and 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. I love the parable, and I have very strong feelings about what it means for me. What it means for me really comes down to our thoughts. And I feel like everybody who's ever lived has good thoughts and bad thoughts. The good thoughts are kind, generous, giving, considerate of other people. And the bad thoughts are hateful, divisive, violent. And sometimes those thoughts, the negative thoughts, can be about ourselves, I think, often. For many people, they are.

The negative thoughts can be about ourselves, I think, often. For many people, they are. The whole struggle of life, to me, comes down to how you deal with those thoughts. I'll speak for myself. I have them, and the trick is to ignore them, not indulge them. Just let them pass by and starve them, to use the terms of your parable, and feed the good thoughts and say, okay, I could be kind to this person or I could be unkind.

I could do something helpful to the world or I could do something greedy and destructive. And that all begins with thoughts. In the room where I work, which is in my house, which is a room I built myself, work, which is in my house, which is a room I built myself. One of the things I keep up on the wall is a Buddhist sutra, and it says, I'll just read the first line or two, all that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts. It is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.

And that's the bad wolf to me. That's those kinds of thoughts indulging and feeding them. It just changes the direction of a life, I think. What you just read, when I read it, was one of the most striking things to me that I thought I had ever read. I was like, wow. You sent me several books, and I read two of them completely, Breakfast with Buddha and Lunch with Buddha, which I liked a great deal. So thank you for sending those over, and really, really enjoyable reading. I love when I can be sort of inspired, educated, and entertained all in one fell swoop.

So very nice. So, very nice. Well, thank you. Thanks for reading them. So one of the things that goes on in Breakfast with Buddha and Lunch with Buddha is your protagonist is on sort of a spiritual journey. And one of the things that I think is interesting there, and I've heard you say before, you talk about that the big questions are so big and they can be so serious that humor helps a lot with those. And I often say that I think humor is a underappreciated spiritual virtue. So I'm just interested in humor in your process and in your writing.

Well, it took me a while to come to humor. I've always been considered a funny person in person, sometimes in the best sense of being funny and sometimes maybe not so good. But in my books, it took me probably 10 books before I allowed myself to try to be funny in more than, you know, one or two sentences in a novel. And I think the reason I did that was because I turned more directly at that same point to what might be called spiritual material. I really don't like that word. It's a little bit divisive, I think. And my meaning of it is pretty broad. But when I started to talk about the big questions directly in books, I felt like, given the fact that I'm not ordained,

I'm not a monk, I'm not a priest, I don't have a degree in religious studies or philosophy, I wasn't going to write a serious book. And those subjects can really divide people. And you can sound like you're trying to preach. You can sound uppity and superior. You can sound like you're trying to preach. You can sound uppity and superior. You can sound like you're trying to convince people to believe what you believe. And I am none of those things in person.

So I did not want to come off that way in my book. So I tried to make them funny and in that way soften or undercut the heaviness of the material. Yeah, humor is such an interesting line to walk, and you're right, those, well, the first thing I'll say is you didn't come off as preachy or any of those things in the book, which is what I enjoyed so much. You said that spiritual is a word that you don't like a lot, and I also wrestle with it. I'm curious if you could tell me, how would you define that word?

I'm curious if you could tell me, how would you define that word? I guess non-material in the sense that, you know, I know speaking for myself and I think for many of us, we spend so much time worrying about just staying alive and just feeding our pleasure center and eating and keeping the house warm or cool as the case may be tending to our health paying our bills there's nothing of course there's nothing at all wrong with any of that but it tends to keep us locked in a certain dimension and I think I think I would say that spiritual is what is outside that so the other part of being alive the mystery of being alive, the mystery of being alive, the what am I doing here part of being alive, to me is where I would put the word spiritual,

but the word spiritual for people who are not actively religious sometimes is a real turnoff. Yeah, it can be. I like that definition a lot. I think my working definition is just pretty much what you said. It's at least the recognition that there's an internal life to us that is helpful to pay attention to. That's a good way to think of it. I mean, I think a lot and write a lot about the interior, what I call the interior life.

And I remember reading Thomas Merton when I was in my 20s, and he used that term, the interior life. And it was the first time, either the first time I had read it or the first time I had really thought about it, but it made a huge impression on me. And I remember thinking, oh, that's what's going, that's the word for this place where I spend so much of my time. Yeah, that is a great phrase for it. So one of the things I'm curious about, though, we explore on this show a lot, and I'd be interested in your thoughts on it, is the idea of, so we've got thoughts, and we can sort of direct those thoughts one way or the other. And then we have emotions, which sort of tend to come. And I'm always interested in walking that line between not repressing what we feel, not being in denial about what's going on, so feeling our feelings to some degree, but also focusing on positive action and positive thought.

And I think that can be such a tightrope to walk. I'd be interested in your thoughts. Your thoughts? Yeah, I agree. I mean, you know, I think I have a weird habit. I drive a lot, and I have a weird habit if I'm on the road late at night coming home from a reading or something of turning on the radio and getting these preachers, religious talk shows from all across the country, and some of them just sound so fake to me, so somber and superior and fake. And I think maybe that's because their emotions are deadened.

I think part of what happens when you get in touch with your thoughts is that you really get in touch with what you feel. It doesn't mean you express everything you feel. I don't think it's anger, for example, is an issue for me. And it has always been. I'm not a miserably angry, violent person, but I can get really angry quickly. And my kids have pointed that out to me. And I've worked really hard to stop indulging that. It begins with a thought.

I've had a meditation practice for 30 years and no enlightenment, no visions of God, but it has really helped me in my ordinary life because it's enabled me to see things before they grow into emotion. Something will irritate me. I'll be in a certain mood. I'll notice the pattern of my thoughts. And then if something happens or if one of my daughters does something, that will act as a trigger. But if I have seen the pattern of thought beforehand, then that trigger is either nullified completely or it's really weakened.

trigger is it's either nullified completely or it's really weakened. And I don't know exactly where the dividing line is, but my suspicion is that emotions have deep roots in thought, in the patterns of our thought. That's one thing I'm always fascinated about is which precedes which, right? And I don't think there's an answer. I think it's kind of like the chicken that crossed the road question. Or it's actually not the chicken that crossed the other. It's like there's a relationship between all three, and you can move the lever on any one of them and have some ability to affect the other two. You can, for sure. I guess the place that I've settled in that question is that the thoughts come first. The workings, and sometimes they're so deeply buried, they're so reflexive, they're so habitual that we can't see them.

I really believe that there's layers upon layers of thought, of mental activity that I cannot see, that I'm just not in touch with yet. But I do feel like if the emotion is a tree, then the roots, they go deep, deep down into the layer of thought. I mean, I'm not saying I know. That's just what I believe at this point. Yeah, I've been thinking about that idea of everything being conditioned,

the idea that whatever thought or whatever is happening to me right now is the result of so many different conditions that happen and so many habitual reactions. And just starting to, and I agree with you, I think that the benefit of meditation for me is that I can at least start to question some of those and maybe think, huh, maybe that's not reality, maybe that's just my perception of it based on, exactly like you said, all these things that I can't even begin to fathom. Exactly, and I feel like, you know, people throw the word enlightenment around, and they talk about Buddha and Jesus and Muhammad and so on and so forth.

My suspicion is that they were in touch with their thoughts at a much deeper level than I am. And I feel like if I just look back 10 years in my own life, I feel like now I'm much more in touch. ten years in my own life, I feel like now I'm much more in touch. I've gone down to what I think of as a lower level or a more hidden level of my thoughts and brought them into the light. And I feel like that process just goes on and on and on and on. And eventually you get someplace that's extremely special and different and I'm not even close to. But I really do believe that that's the point of being alive,

that the things that happen to us make us aware of thoughts at different levels. I feel sometimes I liken it to a big, thick dictionary, you know, the old-fashioned Webster Dictionary, and you turn a page and you learn something else about yourself or you see something else, but there's another 5,000 pages that you can turn. Yeah, it certainly seems that way. At least I don't feel like I'm anywhere near, and nor do I think I ever will be,

continuing to uncover those deeper levels, which is fun most of the time. I feel like people say people who are universe expanding i feel like you you know you never catch up to god you know you you go or the divine intelligence is what the buddha call it instead of using the word god but you know you you get clearer and clearer and deeper and maybe better and kind of a you just keep going going it never ends you just uh. There's an unlimited amount of space for you to improve into. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No 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 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 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. One of the things that you said when you were referencing breakfast with Buddha and lunch with Buddha was that you were trying to counter what you called an excessively materialistic view that we hold in Western society. And you were talking about it, not in the way we normally think about it, like, I want to accumulate a lot of things, but about a view that really, that if I can't see it, feel it, touch it, it doesn't exist view. Can you expound on that a little bit? Yeah, I think for me that's been the contribution of Eastern mysticism, Eastern religions, Eastern writing is that, and I'm speaking in gross generalizations here,

but if you take Tibet for one example, or you could take Native Americans for another example, those are cultures that we would say are undeveloped, to use a word that's not politically correct. They don't have the roads that we have on the case of American Indians. They didn't have the roads. They didn't have the kinds of sophisticated medical procedures that we have. They didn't have the kinds of sophisticated medical procedures that we have. They certainly didn't or don't have the kind of weapons that we have or the architecture that we have.

But they had something else going on that we really don't pay attention to, and that's the non-material. I think that's the way I use that word, that they went to places in the interior world that we don't even know exist. We don't, as a culture, as a society, don't give much credit to. We don't really even think it matters. People talk about meditation as navel-gazing. That's a really revealing comment because it completely diminishes it.

You're just wasting time looking into yourself. That's the Western mentality. I have this idea, which I'm writing about a little bit now, that maybe someday those two philosophies will come together, those two ways of life. So instead of the Europeans crushing the Native Americans or the Chinese crushing the Tibetans, maybe we could say, okay, look, we know how to replace a hip.

We know how to develop these very sophisticated medications to fight disease. We know how to build, you know, 100-story buildings and fly planes around the world. But you know how to do this thing that we don't. And maybe we could learn from you and you could learn from us. That's my very idealistic dream for the future. Do you think we're moving in that direction? Some days I do. I mean, I don't think, I'm not sure that progress exists in the human realm.

I wish I believed that, but it just seems to me that for every new disease we can conquer, we have a new kind of weapon. There was war and torture 2,000 years ago, and there's war and torture now. I would like to think it's getting better, but what I really think is that individual spirits move through that. In other words, we go from a cruder place to a finer place as individual souls, and eventually we go on to someplace else. But the Earth itself, I'm not sure that that dimension of life really gets better, to use a judgmental term. I just don't see it. Do you see it? Yeah, I do. I think my general feeling is that, yes, I agree that.

I think we're human, and so to some degree the human condition is going to exist, and all those bad things that you mentioned will exist but it feels to me like even if you just look at you know being here in this country the the thing the progression we've had as far as you know civil rights or or gay rights or it's the sort of when torture happens now it seems like it's the sort of thing that that most people call out as a concern globally, worldwide. And I don't, I guess I wasn't around 2,000 years ago, but life just seemed like, it seems to me like that was, those things were a lot more common and accepted. But I'm also aware that I may have rose-colored glasses on in that one. But that tends to be how I feel.

But maybe it's, maybe I'm feeling that as a result of, like you said, my own spirit moving in a certain direction. I don't know. I mean, I think one of the things I love about the Zen monks is when they're asked, you know, what happens after you die, they say, I don't know. That's the perfect answer to me, you know, because really we don't know. And I think we have to have a philosophy that we live by. I think everybody has a religion, everybody. If you define religion as a philosophy about life, why we're here, what we should do, what happens to us. And it's helpful for me.

I have my own belief system, which is a hybrid system. But I think it helps us to live. It helps us not to be completely paralyzed by the mystery and the impossible puzzle of being alive. But at the end of that, I have my model. I think the world works this way, but at the end of ends, as the Russians say, in the final analysis, I say, I don't know. I'm with you 100% on that. I think that sometimes seems like the only reasonable answer to me. Who knows? It's interesting to think about, but it's a fascinating topic, but I don't feel like some of those questions, certainly I don't feel like I'll ever know.

So you talked a little bit about meditation, that you've had a daily meditation practice for a long time. You talked a little bit about the benefits. Could you maybe share a little bit about what that meditation practice is? Maybe more like the method that you use? I'm just, it's a topic I'm interested in. I know our listeners are interested in also. Sure, yeah. I should preface it by saying I was raised a devout Catholic, and for the last 30 or 40 years I've been really reading across the religious spectrum. It's a real hobby, it's a passion for me, and not just the religious spectrum, I read a lot of psychology also. So my own practice is a very strange hybrid, I think,

because I sit in a chair comfortably, and sometimes I keep my eyes open, sometimes I close them, and I say a Hail Mary, and I say an Our Father slowly. And then I do this, really, what's really a Buddhist meditation. Sometimes from the Hail Mary and Our Father, I do Tonglen, which is a Tibetan meditation. It's called the Prayer of Giving and Taking. So if you're thinking, let's say it's a birthday of someone I love or care about, or let's say a friend of mine's wife has cancer, or let's say it's the day on which my father died or my grandfather or grandmother died i'll think of that person and i'll breathe in and take all the negativity take their pain

distress discomfort fear whatever dimension of life they might be living or dead i'll take that upon myself on the in-breath and on the out-breath i And on the out-breath, I will breathe out to them love, happiness, peace, contentment, safety, and so on. And you can do it for yourself. I mean, if I'm having a particularly bad morning for whatever reason, sometimes I'll do that for myself. Or if I know that I have to go through something difficult that day.

So I'll do that for a little while, no set time. And then I'll do really what's closest to Dzogchen, which is another Tibetan Buddhist meditation, which is like Zen. There's no mental gymnastics involved. You just sit quietly and pay attention to your thoughts. And you try to have one thing that you come back to. So that thing, that anchor can be your breath. It can be your entire body. It can be a word like a mantra. It can be an image. It can be a thought of that particular person you're praying for.

But it's not rigorous in that sense. You don't force yourself to come back and say a mantra every 30 seconds or something. You don't count your breaths. You just pay attention to your mind and your mind will wander. It'll latch on to, you know, I have to pay the electric bill. Why did I forget to pay the electric bill? Gee, do I have enough stamps? There's snow on the road. Can I drive down to the post office? And so on and so forth. And then at some point you catch yourself and you say, oh, wait a second, let me come back to my breath. And that's it. I just do that.

And I set a timer, usually 30 minutes, sometimes 45 minutes. Once in a while I'll do an hour. And I'll just do that endlessly. And at the end I'll say an Omani Buddhist prayer and open my eyes. I'll stand up, stretch a little bit, and go about my business. I miss some days, but I'd say I average at least five or six days a week for the last 25 years. Yeah, that's a great practice. I've been meditating on and off for a long time, but it's really been the last year and a half or so that I got really committed to a daily practice. And for me, it's been good to just really do. It certainly saved my sanity.

It helps me in my work. It helps me tremendously as a father and husband. It's just the most wonderful thing. I'm so, so happy that it just came into my life. I don't think I'd ever let it go. So you describe in the past having wrestled with depression, and I think I've heard you say that you think that meditation has really mostly helped you overcome that. Am I recalling that correctly? Yes, you are. So what about meditation do you think

worked on your depression or what was going on in your depression that allowed it to be helped by meditation? You can take that either way, I guess. You know, it's funny. When I look back worked on your depression or what was going on in your depression that allowed it to be helped by meditation. You can take that either way, I guess. I was, you know, it's funny, when I look back at the high school and college and the years just after college, I really was almost bipolar. I mean, I had a best friend that's had in my life who's since died, had terrible bipolar disease. So I'm not, I wasn't at that level, I don't think.

But really, you know, I'd be up, up, up, and happy and outgoing like a politician on the stump for two or three days, and then I'd just sink down into the most, the darkest, dreariest, negative place where I didn't want to see people. Nothing good was ever going to happen. You know, it wasn't like I was tormented by that every day,

but it was definitely there. In my 20s and 30s, I started to keep notes about it. I called it hell notes. When I was in a really bad depression, I would force myself to get out my notebook and write a paragraph about why I felt that way, where I thought it began. And what happened with the meditation and that note-taking and journaling was that I began to see the depression much, much earlier than I was able to see it, much before, long before it took over my mental state. I could see the beginnings of it. I could see a certain pattern of thoughts.

And I could say to myself, okay, look, that's beginning to happen. That's just a thought. It's not reality. And that's purely and simply came from meditation. And once I got to that point, you know, I still have little ups and downs, but it's nothing compared to what it used to be. I mean, really nothing. And I credit that completely to meditation, and it's been so healing for me.

And my late friend, I began to teach him meditation, I mean, and my late friend, I began to teach him meditation, and he immediately, or very quickly, was able to reduce his, he was taking lithium, which is a typical drug for bipolar illness. So I think, you know, I don't know that it would work for everyone, but I know that it worked for me, and I really, depression is not even an issue in my life anymore at all. That's great news for you, certainly, that that worked. I've found that meditation has been helpful, but I don't know, and again, maybe I just haven't been doing it long enough, consistently enough, that it's been sort of that level of transformative for me yet. I think I'm probably twice as old as you are. I don't know about that, but you might have a few years on you.

If you've been meditating regularly for 30 years, you've certainly got a lot of hours logged that I don't yet, for sure. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No 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 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 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. You write a lot, and you describe your writing as a vehicle of hope. What does that mean to you, and how do you you make that happen and why is that important to you? I know I've heard you talk about positive

thinking and I feel the same way that you do about positive thinking. I don't completely buy the idea that if I think every day that I'm going to hit the lottery, I will hit the lottery. But at the same time, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, that you know that the good wolf and the bad wolf you can feed certain kinds of ideas that are more positive than others and you can I think we're kind of digital

I guess binary that every moment of life we could go this way or that way we could embrace this way or that way. We could embrace this kind of thought or that. We could make this decision or not that decision. If I'm an addict at any given moment, I can choose to pick up the bottle or not. I can choose to pick up the cigarette or not. I can choose to do drugs or not, or whatever the addiction might be.

And then once you make that choice, then there's another binary choice at another minute. I can choose to yell at my wife or not. I can choose to laugh at something that bothers me or not. And once you make that choice in a good direction, I think it leads you to, I don't want to sound Pollyanna-ish because I'm really not that way, but I think it does lead you to a more hopeful place in life,

and I think that's where I go with my writing. I have written some books that are really dark. I mean, The Talk Funny Girl is about a badly abused girl in New Hampshire, and I have some violence, especially in certain books, not in Breakfast with Buddha and Lunch with Buddha. It's not that I deny the darkness in the world at all,

but I really have hope. I try to go toward the good. I try to see the generosity in people. I was brought up by some really extraordinary people. My father and mother both came from huge families. I have like 40 first cousins. Many of those people were almost unbelievably warm and generous. They had lives that were difficult,

but that planted some seed of possibility in me that made me think, you know, I don't have to be crabby. I don't have to be frazzled. You know, whatever difficulties I face in life, and I've had a lot of difficulties. I've had a tremendous amount of physical pain, but I still somehow reach for the good or the hopeful, and I think a lot of that is in my books. Yeah, you say somewhere that some people indulge their pain and pass it on,

some fight it to a draw, and some people transcend. My goal reflected in many of my characters is to transcend, and I really liked that when I read that. That really hit me. It's in that same book, The Talk Funny Girl. The girl is tremendously abused, weirdly terribly abused as a child, and with the help of a couple of real angels in her life, she gets out of that situation and then becomes years later a parent. And she knows that some of that scarring is still in her. And she feels the tendency to pass that on to her children in certain ways, you know, to get angry, to yell, to hurt. And she feels like that's her work in life is not to pass that on. I feel that way too. Whatever hardships

I had as a kid in addition to the great stuff I had, I feel like the purpose of my life is to dilute that, to weed that out, to not pass that on to people. It's not easy. I struggle with it. If I'm in pain someday, I have a back spasm or whatever. I mean, it's, you know, if I have some in pain someday, I have a back spasm or whatever, I'm worried about something, and, you know, you go into the post office, it's hard to say, hey, how you doing, good morning, you know.

If somebody cuts you off in traffic, it's hard not to give them a finger and lean on them, and I don't always succeed, but I try. Yeah, I like that idea of not passing on our pain, stopping the, I've heard it referred to as, at least in a familial sense, stopping the cycle or breaking the cycle. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's some amazing figure,

like half or more of the people in prison were abused as children. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. So another thing that I've heard you refer to is the biblical idea of false gods. That's something that you, it is a concept that helps you think about things. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah.

Again, I think it's me taking my Catholic upbringing and reinterpreting it a little bit. And one good thing, one of the good things about that upbringing was that I listened to stories from the Bible every Sunday. And I think that was a wonderful education. And I'm familiar with that idea of having false gods or shall not have false gods and so on. And I think there's a lot of different kinds of false gods that we can have. Money is clearly one. Physical appearance is clearly one. Power is clearly one.

The intellect is a subtle, sneaky one. I used to teach in college. I haven't done that in years. And many of my friends are academics, but I did notice that sometimes there would be people in the academic world who are really, really intelligent people, but they make what I would call a false god of their intelligence, and that becomes the most important thing. That's what they look for in other people.

Are you intelligent like I am? And that's a false god. I think it's good to be intelligent. I want my kids to be educated. I have a great education myself but I don't put it in first place and I don't put money in first place and I don't put status in first place or at least I try not to put those things there. I try to see the whole human being, and I guess that's what the false God idea means to me. Yeah, I like that idea. I'm a fan of Stephen Covey's work, and he has an idea of what do we hold as our center, and some people are money-centered, some people are spouse-centered,

some people are family-centered, but that all those can have, not that there's anything wrong with any of those things being important, but if they become your center or in the terminology we're using here, your God, that your life gets out of balance and that a center that's based on principles is a center that holds a lot more, will hold a lot more strongly. Yeah, that absolutely makes sense to me. And you can see it. I mean, you can see, you know, you see people who have $100 billion trying to influence lawmakers to pass a bill

or to build a project that makes them richer. I mean, what's that all about? You know, that's just a kind of absolute craziness to me. Yeah, there's a lot of that craziness, and it just seems to, at least that idea of the inequality wealth-wise, just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. It's sort of becoming almost comic, if it weren't so tragic. Yeah, I think that's our number one problem. It breeds so many other problems. Yeah, I think that's our number one problem. It breeds so many other problems.

Yep, I agree. Have you been working on Dinner with the Buddha? Is that something we're going to see anytime soon? It's coming out. It's done. It's coming out June 2nd. Oh, that is great news. It's out from Algonquin on June 2nd. Lunch with Buddha just today came out in audio format.

And just about two weeks ago, there was some film, pretty serious film interest in Breakfast and maybe Breakfast and Lunch. That would be great. Yeah, the book has been good. But Breakfast, I mean, came out of nowhere for me. And it's been a wonderful thing for us. It sold a lot of copies, and it's kept me in business as a writer, and I've gotten the most beautiful, gratifying notes and emails from people about it.

It's really interesting that, so in the book you create a, the story is about a family man, he's pretty much part of the normal world, I'll put that in quotes and, and ends up going on a road trip with a spiritual guru of sorts. And it, it, it sort of unveils that his, his spiritual unfolding, as well as a good road trip and a lot of other things. What I find interesting is the character that you've created there as a spiritual guru is very interesting character. Have you ever thought of dressing up and playing him on TV?

No, but I have. I've gone on, especially before we had children, we were married 18 years before we had children, and in those years I went on a bunch of retreats. Some were Catholic, Protestant, non-denominational. Some were Buddhist. And I was really lucky on a couple of them. I went to the Providence Zen Center for a three-day retreat many years ago.

And I just happened to be there when Son San-Mim was there, who was the Korean Zen master who had these centers all over the world. And I also went on a retreat in France with Sogyal Rinpoche. And those two men, along with the Dalai Lama, so many things about them impressed me. But one thing that really impressed me was that they had a tremendous sense of humor. And Sogyal Rinpoche was a very funny guy, very happy. Sogyal Rinpoche can be very funny guy, very happy. Soger Rinpoche can be very funny. The Dalai Lama is famous for laughing at stuff and making jokes and goofing around.

And for a guy who grew up Catholic where, you know, the popes of my youth were not exactly comedians and the priest that we, I did have one really funny priest when I was a kid, but everything was so serious and so somber. And that was so refreshing to me, um, to, to, to see that they could be goofy, that they could laugh at themselves and laugh at life. And I, I really, uh, I really wanted to put that in the book. So Rinpoche, who's the character you refer to in the Buddha books, I think is a funny, goofy guy. Yeah, back to that idea of humor being an underappreciated virtue, or levity being an underappreciated virtue.

You know, I wonder sometimes, you know, Jesus and Buddha, you just don't see any humor there. And I wonder if that was edited out. I hope so. You know, I like to think that they could laugh sometimes, and you don't see that. And I wonder if the people who came after them, who had control over what was written down in both cases,

I wonder if they changed it to say, you know, to try to sound more grown up and more serious. But it just, it doesn't work as well for me. Maybe we could work on writing Jesus's joke book. Maybe. You know, I actually did write a book. I did, which is a crazy thing to do. I wrote this book called American Savior, which was published about six or seven years ago.

And the idea is that Jesus comes to earth and runs for president of the United States. So I ended up pissing off people politically and religiously. I had a good time, and it was like the Jesus of my imagination. He was funny and a little bit goofy and totally unpredictable and also loving and kind and deep and miraculous. But, you know, it's a little bit of a risky thing to do, but that too would be an option for film.

So maybe someday, who knows? I'll have to check that one out when I get time. We are kind of at the end of our time. Could you just maybe spend a minute and tell folks where they can find out more about you? I'll have links on the show notes to all of it,

but if you maybe just want to spend a minute with that. Sure, Eric. The best place is my website, which is just my name, rolandmarulo.com. I have Facebook pages and so on. I don't do a lot of tweeting, although I do have an account. But if you go to the website, there's information on all my books and my appearances. And also, a friend of mine who's published my backlist and Lunch with Buddha has put together a monthly newsletter that he's built up to over 1,000 people. And it has a serialized novel in it.

It has giveaways. It has a list of my appearances, and I always write a two- or three-page greeting on different, like a mini essay, like an essay on different subjects every month. So that's also, you can sign up for that through the website. Great, and like I said, I'll have links to that on our show notes. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I'm really glad that Matthew made the introduction. I really enjoyed reading both your books and look forward to reading some more in the future and staying in touch. Well, thank you. I really, really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks very much for having me on.

Oh, you're welcome. We'll talk again soon. All right. Bye. All right, Eric. Take care. Bye-bye. as a reminder if you're interested in doing some one-on-one work with me send an email to eric at one you feed.net. Thanks. You can learn more about this podcast and Roland Marullo at oneufeed.net slash Roland.