The One You Feed - The Power of Silence: Wisdom on Stillness and Solitude with Pico Iyer

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

Are you ready to create lasting change through small, intentional steps? The Wise Habits program combines behavioral science with timeless wisdom to help you build habits that bring clarity, calm, and resilience to your daily life. Over 6 transformative weeks, you’ll learn practical strategies to create a sustainable spiritual practice, better manage your emotions, and live in alignment with your values—all while staying grounded in the chaos of everyday life. Enrollment is open through January 25th, so don’t miss this opportunity to start your journey. Little by little, a little becomes a lot. Learn more and enroll here. In this episode, Pico Iyer discusses the power of silence and offers insights and wisdom on stillness and solitude. Pico delves into the impact of silence on mental health and offers his deep understanding of the transformative effects of solitude in the pursuit of personal growth. Key Takeaways: Embrace the power of silence to unlock personal growth and inner peace. Discover the pathway to joy through contemplative practices in your daily life. Explore the profound impact of solitude on your mental well-being and clarity of thought. Uncover the spiritual journey of Leonard Cohen and its relevance to personal growth. Learn to balance hope with reality in facing life’s challenges for enhanced mental well-being. For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Pico Eyre, an English-born essayist and novelist known chiefly for his travel writing. He's the author of numerous books and has contributed to Time, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, and many others. Today, Pico and Eric discuss his newest book, A Flame, Learning from Silence. Hi, Pico. Welcome to the show. Hi. I'm so happy to be here. Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. You're somebody that I have wanted to talk to for a while now because I think you're just such an exceptional writer. So, I'm happy that

we're going to get to discuss your latest book, which is called A Flame, Learning from Silence. However, before we get into that, we'll start is called A Flame, Learning from Silence. However, before we get into that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchildren and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One's a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well which one wins? And the grandparent 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. It's interesting because that's the very question I ask myself almost every day. And I remember, especially during the pandemic, every day when I woke up, I thought, am I going to concentrate on what opens me up or on what cuts me up? Am I going to listen to the news, which will make me feel despairing and hopeless

and powerless, or am I going to take a walk and watch the sun rise over the hills and see the golden light over the hills and see the golden light over the town and feel suddenly reminded of all the blessings that usually I sleepwalk past? And so I think that parable is almost the perfect guidance for any life. I remember when I was a kid at high school, we had to read Hamlet, and there's that famous line, there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. And I think that's much more true than sometimes I remember, that we have a choice

more than we imagine how we're going to respond to things, and out of that choice comes our life. So I love the way that that parable is reminding us it's up to us. We're not at the mercy of circumstances. We're not at the mercy of the heavens. We can make the choice whether we choose to look towards the sky or towards the darkness. That's lovely. And I think it's a great place for us to jump into your new book because in your new book, as I mentioned, called A Flame Learning from Silence, you are reflecting on I don't know how many years, maybe you can tell us in a minute, time of you going away to a place, a monastery where you are alone and quiet.

And one of the things that comes through in the book very clearly is that you notice that when you're there, your thoughts have a certain way of working that might be closer to what we would consider the good wolf, and that when you're caught up in the busyness of day-to-day life, your thoughts look more like what we would say the bad wolf looks like. And you're very eloquent in that, but maybe first from your perspective, tell us a little bit about the book. Well, you know, I love that question because in some ways, I would say my thoughts disappear and my and I disappear when I'm in that very active, quickened silence that's been developed

over 40 years of meditation and prayer by the monks. And so what I love about going into silence in a monastery or a convent is there are no thoughts. There's the world. And I think at some level it's my thoughts so that a bad wolf, in other words full of anxiety and unsettledness and competitiveness, fear and what's outside me is the good wolf. And so as I'm driving up every time I drive along a highway along the coast of California and then I drive for two miles up to the top of the mountain where this Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California sits. Along the freeway, as usual, I'm fretting about my deadline, I'm worried about my

aging mother, I'm conducting an argument with myself or with some friend I saw a week ago. I'm full of my thoughts, which I think are the bad wolf, and I get there and I step out of my car and I step into my small room with the ocean in front of me and the sun sparkling across the ocean and the sound of birds and a rabbit running across my garden. And my thoughts disappear and the world comes in and that is where the good wolf makes his appearance. So it's almost like the difference between the social self and the silent self or the

daily self and the eternal self. That when I'm babbling to you, or when I'm down at the supermarket later today, I'll be full of my thoughts. But if ever I take the chance and make the resolve to step into silence, I'll be freed of my thoughts. And it actually goes back to what I was thinking

when you asked me about the parable, because I remember that one of the monks who stays in the monastery where I've been hanging out for 33 years now says that joy is the happiness that doesn't depend on circumstance. In others, all of us feel happy when the sun is shining and we're with somebody we love and everything's going wonderful in our lives and then light falls and the one we love leaves and we're feeling despondent. But joy is the spirit that I think monks and nuns cultivate that any of us has

access to that remains even when it's dark and the rain is pounding on our walls and we're not feeling fully healthy. And still we realize that there's a joy at the center of our being and a joy at the center of our world. And so I suppose joy in that sense is a place beyond even the good wolf and the bad wolf where we're not even making distinctions between good and bad or black and white. Yeah, I mean, I certainly think that has been the call to me of the spiritual life and the contemplative life is to find that place that there's an inner peace regardless of what else is happening. I remember I glimpsed that when I read some Zen Buddhism a long time

ago in high school. I just intuited that that's what they were talking about. And ever since, that's been kind of like what I would like to get to is to more closely resemble that. Yes, yes. And I think the beauty of it is that all of us have the possibility to reach it. Monks and nuns do it on a full-time basis, but you and I can try to figure out the circumstances that are most conducive to us feeling exactly that. So let me ask you a little bit more about something you just said. You said that when you get there, your thoughts disappear and the thoughts of the world are there.

You mentioned you've been going there for 30-some years, so you've got some practice in doing this. To what extent is that been an acquired thing that like over years of going there you've recognized that you let the other self sort of go faster or were you experiencing that really early on when you would go or some combination? Such a good question, Eric. And honestly, in my case, it was instantaneous. The very first time I went, 33 years ago, half a lifetime ago, and I was in my early 30s, I stepped out of my car in this ringing silence. I walked into my simple room and I felt in heaven.

But I know many people subsequently, I've told my friends to go and they don't necessarily have that connection. I've always loved the Big Sur coastline where that monastery happens to be situated. I've always loved the ocean. So somehow it agrees with me. But I think it's a matter of affinity as with people. I happen to have fallen in love with that place,

but you wouldn't fall in love with it any more than you might fall in love with my wife. And I might not fall in love with your partner. So I don't necessarily feel that everybody should go to the place I go to, but I do feel there's somewhere that's perfect for them that I hope they have the chance to find. And in my case, I've been to many other retreat places in England, in Australia, in Japan, and they all move me and liberate me in some ways, but this was the one that I was meant to go to.

And so from the first day, I felt that. And I remember, I think I went for three days initially. And the second day I went into the bookstore and there was a monk there and he said, how's it going? I said, this is heaven on earth. And he looked at me searchingly and he said, well, I'm glad you get on with it. Not everybody does. Heaven is by no means guaranteed, but clearly you are in the place that's right for you.

So keep on coming. That's why as soon as I went there, I stopped really looking for other places because I felt for whatever reason, this is the one that works for me. Maybe it's even like listening to songs. The song that transports me won't be the one that works for you, but there is a song that transports you and that will bring you to the same place. But in my case, therefore, it was not acquired. I think what was acquired is that initially, you know, I'm an only child, I'm a writer, as you know, I live most of the time at my desk, I love being

by myself, so I went into this place which is like the dream of a writer's retreat. I had a desk, I had an ocean view, I had food provided three times a day. I'm in heaven and no internet, no cell phone, no distractions. But what it took me a while to acquire was the sense that the point of going there wasn't to be alone and in heaven, but to learn how to be with others. And I realized, of course, the monks are the opposite of solitary because they're caring for one another and caring for guests like me around the clock. So I did learn many things over the course of the years and I did acquire a sense that solitude was a means to an end, a means to an understanding, compassion and community,

which is probably a good thing for somebody like me because otherwise left to my own devices I'd want to spend all my time alone and I was so happy to find this quintessential place of aloneness. And then it reminded me, well, this is only a doorway to learning how better to go back into the noisy world. And the one other thing I will say is that I was instantly in heaven, but as I started going more and more often and staying for longer and longer, two weeks, three weeks, you know, sometimes it would be stormy and it would be absolutely pitch black and the rain would be pounding on the roof of shaking the walls and I was very cold and

I couldn't see a single sight of human habitation around and I was in some ways imprisoned. I couldn't leave my little cell because the rain was too strong and I didn't know if I'd be able to drive out again. And it was like being in the wilderness, 40 days and nights in the wilderness. It felt like that, very lonely, unsettling, scary. And that was a good reminder that it's not always going to be sunny and in that sense, heaven is not guaranteed every day of the time there. But even in the rainy times, I thought if it's going to be a storm, I'm probably better off in this safe place of prayer and community than driving along the freeway. Yeah, it's interesting. You quote Father Thomas Keating who says that contemplation isn't

a cure for anxiety. And then you say, you know, the dark places don't go away when you step into silence. If anything, they rise to the surface. But here you can see them clearly as you never could when barreling along the freeway. And I think that's really interesting is some of it's the thoughts, but in many ways what you're describing is the space that emerges around the thoughts, that that context is what changes so dramatically. Yes, that was amazing, Eric. You found exactly the sentence in the book that corresponds to what I'd been saying, but exactly so. And I think the second part of that Thomas Keating quotation is that, as you said, contemplation isn't a cure for anxiety, but it allows you to see it on a larger canvas. And I think that's a little of what I get in that silence.

I'm stepping into a much larger canvas where I and my little concerns and hopes are very, very tiny. And what I'm surrounded by isn't something terrifying, but rather something radiant. And I realize that the more I'm out of the picture, the happier I am, that I'm the one who's sort of corrupting the beauty of the overall scene. And if I can leave myself down on the road, the beauty can come out undisturbed. So exactly so. You see it in a larger perspective of time and space. And I think as with the storm, it's a training in impermanence. This too shall pass.

And you realize that, you know, as I'm sitting in the storm, it feels terrible. But the next day I wake up and it's glorious again. And I'm just reminded, don't get invested in the moment because something much bigger than all moments. You also talk a little bit about sometimes when you're there that you see the radiance in other people, the people that are there. And you have a line where you say, well, where are these people in my day-to-day life? And you basically say, well, they're everywhere, right?

And then you have a line that I absolutely love. You say, it's never a possibility that's not present, only me. Exactly. Yeah, one of the big surprises for me of going there is I'm a fairly shy and reclusive person. And as I said, I love being by myself and happy to spend weeks on end, more or less by myself. But when I go there and I'm walking along the monastery road, quite often I'll run into a fellow traveler or another stranger who's staying there. And we'll maybe stop to chat for a couple of minutes. And I'll quickly find that that person feels like my oldest friend.

And it's because I think both of us are speaking from our deepest selves. We're not chit chatting about the election or what happened to the Dodgers last night or the state of the weather. We're speaking about something much deeper. Both of us have probably come to silence drawn by the same kind of thing. We want to make contact with something deep and real inside ourselves. And so we're not joined by our jobs or the common friends we have back home or our circumstances. We're joined by something much more essential.

And so every kind of interaction I have along the road with anyone I've met before or never met before really leaves me rich and replete and very happy. And as you said, then I think, well, wait a minute, why is this not happening at the rest of my life? And it's because I'm not really attending to people in the rest of my life. I'm at the surface of myself and they're probably at the surface of themselves too. But it's a fault of me, not of the world. I think Emily Dickinson says,

it's not revelation that's missing, it's our unfurnished eyes. And so it's almost as if there I get the eyes with which I can see the light in everything. And then the challenge, which is very tricky, is how you can sustain even a tenth of that when you're back in the world and you're distracted and you're racing from the bank to the pharmacy. How can you still see the light in other people?

As you probably know, I've been lucky enough to spend 50 years talking and traveling regularly with the Dalai Lama, and there's somebody, because I travel right next to him eight hours a day, day after day, whoever he meets, he finds a common point and he sees the light. And his friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu is the same. So it can be done, but it's very difficult for the rest of us, I think, to try that. But it's a good reminder that the light is there, if only I can find the eyes to see it. And so I never imagined when I traveled, as I said, into this blissful solitude, that one of the real blessings I would take back would be my interactions both with the monks

and with just the regular folks who are staying there for two days or three days. And it doesn't have much to do with me or even with them, but just with the conditions that allow us to see the light within one another. And I guess, you know, one of the things that always strikes me, one of the reasons I wrote the book is this is a Benedictine hermitage. The 15 or so monks are steeped in a thousand-year-old congregation called the Kamaldolese, the most contemplative group within the Benedictine order. But I'm not even a Christian. And so what strikes me is even though I don't share their faith, they make available the

silence where instantly I can find whatever is most sacred in myself. And really, I think I owe a great debt to them. I had lots of preconceptions about what monks were before I started hanging out with them. And one of the first to disappear was that the monks are the least dogmatic people around. They welcome everybody of any faith or no faith at all and know that whoever you are, you will find that light that you were describing. It's people like me who are dogmatic but these men are so rooted in their faith that they're open to everyone. I feel just like the Dalai Lama. I read a quote of yours and I don't know where it comes from so I don't even know if it's

accurate but I'm curious and in the quote you said something to the effect of that you don't meditate, you don't do yoga, that those just aren't things that you do. A, is that true? And B, if that is true, talk to me about what contemplation in silence then looks like for you. What does that mean? I know it's a very sort of Western thing to ask but what are you doing when you are there? You're not participating in the monk services, right? They have a lot of different services that organize and structure their day. You're not sitting in meditation. So talk to me a little bit about how you're getting these contemplative benefits

without what's traditionally thought of as maybe a contemplative practice. Thank you. And it is true. I have said that and it's still true of me. I take walks and I take retreats. And I think I always stress that because when I write about these contemplative worlds I'm keenly aware that some people who are intimidated by meditation feel that they're not qualified to do it, try it for a while and find that their fidgety monkey mind is still cavorting from branch to branch one way or another,

and then they try yoga and perhaps they're not physically comfortable doing that. And so I'm always stressed out to say that this contemplative space is available to, I think, any one of us, even if we don't feel that we're up to doing yoga or having a meditation practice. The challenge is to find what is the best way to do it. And I will confess that I didn't have any interest, I thought, in contemplation until my house burnt down in a wildfire. I lost everything I owned. I was sleeping on a friend's floor. And then another friend said, oh, if you're sleeping on the floor, you should go to this

retreat house three hours up the coast and at least you'll have a bed to sleep in and a desk and an ocean view and food provided for $30 a day. And I thought, what's not to lose? And that's what took me to the Benedictine hermitage where I stay. And so instantly, almost against my will or without my knowledge, I was ushered into this contemplative space. And now, although I don't meditate, or as you said, I don't go to their prayers, just being in that silence, being free of distraction for day after day, being able to take walks,

and feeling that the lens cap has come off, I'm open to all the world, and I'm liberated from little Pico. All of that, I think, brings me to the same space that people perhaps find when they meditate. And I'm sure I'd be a deeper and richer person if I had the discipline to meditate, but I suppose I'm issuing the invitation to anyone who is cowed by that kind of formal practice. Don't worry, there are opportunities for you too. And I think these days, you know, the world is moving so quickly and all of us are aching and longing for a release from the rush and distraction. I have friends who take rounds every day or swim or play the piano or play tennis.

And I think all of those are steps towards that. Anything that can free your mind from your thoughts and allow you to be open, as I was saying before, to things that are much wiser than you are, can begin to serve the same purpose, even though they're not as good as true meditation. You know, when I'm back in Japan, I go to the health club every day,

and I do my 30 minutes on a treadmill, and I make sure not to turn on the TV or to have any distraction when I'm there. Even those 30 minutes just clear my head, remind me what I really care about, fill me with ideas sometimes. I go energized mentally and emotionally as well as physically when I return home from that. There are many spaces in these days. I think I

sometimes am tempted to say I don't have time to meditate or take a retreat or to take a walk and it's almost like saying I don't have time to take my medicine. I don't have time to be healthy. I don't have time to see the doctor. It's a very foolish thing for me to say if I've got time to watch the Dodgers in the World Series, I have time to do what's much more essential, which is try to clear my head. So I stress that I don't meditate to say this is an invitation open to anyone. John Stewart is back at The Daily Show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more, joined by the sharp voices of the shows, correspondents, and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives

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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. It's interesting because I have done a lot of Zen practice and you go on a Zen sasheen or retreat, it's very intensive meditation. And then a number of years ago, I started sitting retreat a few times with another

gentleman who's sort of non-affiliated. I don't know if you would have heard of him, his name's Adyashanti. And what was interesting was on the Adyashanti retreats you do meditate some, but way less than you do on the Zen retreats. And what I found was that what I would then do is spend the entire afternoon, I would just go hike up in the Sierra Nevadas. And I ended up finding that that worked better for me than a retreat that I meditated all the time. You know, some meditation, fine, good, but that there was something about being in that silence, but further that there was a container of silence around the whole week. And I'm sort of sharing a little bit about what you're sharing, which was that silence itself, without even adding anything else onto it,

was very healing. I love that. That's a perfect example. Because I think sometimes we can get stuck in very fixed notions that you have to meditate to get this state and and that may not be the exactly the right thing for you it's like wearing somebody else's clothes that don't happen to fit and so you may know that when I was 29 I was living the fast-paced exciting life in Midtown Manhattan I had a 25th floor office apartment on Park Avenue lots of very stimulating job writing on world affairs.

And I left all that to go and live for a year in a Zen temple in Kyoto. But my year in a Zen temple actually only lasted a week. Though subsequently I've spent a lot of time around Zen temples, not in the formal practice that you did. And soon after I arrived, I read this sentence, which is, it is easy to sit still in the Zen, though the challenge is how are you going to sit still in the world? And I realized that, again, even the Zen meditation was a means to an end. I was too immature to be able to engage in that practice at that time, though I've done

more of it subsequently. But nonetheless, there might be other things that would still bring me to that space. And one of the things I do in the book, as you know, is to quote from Emily Dickinson and Henry Miller and Thoreau and all these people, none of whom were official spiritual teachers or meditators, but all I think who are speaking for the contemplative wisdom. It's a way of saying, again, it belongs to all of us. It's not particular to these Benedictines or to the Buddhists who are celebrated for meditation. It's there, but we have to find our own form. And I love the fact that your walks in the Sierra, they're already a rather liberating place, brought you to,

you know, even further maybe than that Zendo. Yeah. So you mentioned this idea of translating or keeping some fraction of what you gain in silence as you go back into the world. And you reflect on this a fair amount in the book. You actually say, you have a realization, what does it mean to sit in silence if it leaves me, at least from my first few hours back, less attentive, less thoughtful than I'd ever hoped to be? I think you're describing, you come back

and jump into email and you're a little bit frantic. So what have you learned over the years about how to take some of what you get in silence and bring it into the rest of your life? So I think very soon after I started taking retreats, it became clear to me, as I'd never seen before, there was almost a fork in the road. And one way led to success as I conceived of it as a boy, you know, getting money, power,

having a good job, and the other led to joy. And I think I'd been on the success track before and I suddenly realized that's not going to really leave me happy even if it leaves me more financially secure and that joy was the path to go on. So to some degree, I even more dramatically left my job, left a steady income, left all the possibilities of that world behind to live in a two-room apartment in the middle of nowhere in Japan as a result of going on retreat. One of my surprises was as a very solitary person who loved to be by myself, I realized I decided to get married and to take on two stepchildren and a lot of new financial responsibilities

by being on retreat. And I realized again, as I say, that retreat opened a door to a whole different set of values than the one I'd had before. It completely oriented me in terms of what was important and what was sustaining to me. And I remember, and as you say, I describe it in the book, one year into taking these retreats, I went down to the foot of the mountain where there was a payphone and I called my girlfriend in Japan. And she heard the light in my voice and the excitement and she felt a little rattled, maybe jealous. And she said to me, you know, if you were to meet another woman, no problem, I could defeat her, but how can I compete against the temple? And that sentence was such a good one and it so startled me that as you read, then and there, I decided

the next week or later that year to fly across the world and to make a commitment to her. And that meant living in a two-room apartment. Our rent is $500 a month. Been there 32 years now. So we live very simply, almost as students do, supporting her two kids and living a life that maybe five years earlier would have seemed very deprived to me. Who would want to live in a foreign country where you can't speak the language in a tiny apartment where there's not even space to open the bathroom door fully.

But being in the monastery had taught me what is really richness. Richness is not a big bank account. It's being free of longing. It's being free of the thought, maybe I should be somewhere else. And whenever I was in New York City, I was leading the life of my dreams, but a part of me thought, what would it be like to live in Japan or to be in Tibet or whatever? As soon as I arrived in Japan, as a result of my retreats in the monastery, I never thought again, should I be somewhere else? I knew that I had found my place. So it just reminded me on what real poverty is

and what real luxury is. And luxury, I saw, was a day that lasted a thousand hours, a day where to this hour, I've never used a cell phone, a thousand hours, a day where to this hour I've never used a cell phone, we don't have a car, it's a very simple life. And a simple life feels like a much more complete life than one I was acquiring accomplishments and amenities and distractions. So I think it really just completely changed the way I think about the world and what I really cherish and need. And I suppose it turned my attention to what I think about the world and what I really cherish and need. And I suppose it turned my attention to what I think of as the inner savings account.

I remember a few years ago I was sitting in this little apartment in Japan and I got a phone call that my mother in her mid-80s had just had a stroke and was in the ICU. So I got on the next plane, I flew over and I was by my mother's bed for week after week as she was hovering between life and death. We all face those kind of situations often. What struck me then was really all the money in the bank was no help to me or to my mother. And all the books I'd read and all the books I'd written, none of that was useful.

The only thing I could bring to that moment of urgency was whatever I had developed in silence, which is what I think of as my inner savings account, that that was really the treasure I had to draw upon. And it's the case with all of us when we suddenly get a bad diagnosis or face something really difficult in our lives. I don't think it's the material things that ever come to our rescue. It's only the, so to speak, immaterial things we've chosen to develop, probably by going on retreat or engaging in Zen practice or whatever form that contemplation takes. So can you say anything about what,

if you were to be able to name what those things are that were of benefit to you in that moment, say the moment where your mother is really sick or something very difficult is happening, you say these things I developed in silence, are you able to put a name to those? And if you're not that's okay but I'm just curious. Such a beautiful question, such an essential question. I think impermanence, nothing lasts forever, which I suppose I knew from my reading but I felt in my

bones after I began staying on retreat and watching the clouds pass across the sky and as in Zen practice to see nothing stays the same for a second even, including our emotions or including our good luck or our bad luck. I think seeing something that doesn't seem to change makes one less afraid of death in the sense that when my father suddenly died of pneumonia and I didn't know what to do and my mother was bereft, I got in my car and I drove for three and a half hours north just to sit on the benches in the monastery and I sat there and I looked at the ocean that never moved and I heard the bells and although that too is impermanent, at some level it was a vision of some silence

beyond the reach of the clock and my thoughts that seemed to be as close to permanence as you could get. I just sat there for two hours and then drove back that same day. It just put that death into context. Maybe something of the larger canvas, you and I, Eric and Pico, come and go, but there's something beyond us that's just rolling on, the river of life, I suppose some people would call it. And having that understanding, I think, too, takes the edge or the urgency off some of those difficult moments. And I suppose the less ones living

in one's individual self. You and I began by talking about the bad wolf is perhaps my thoughts and the good wolf is what's outside those. And the more you can bring what's outside your thoughts to that moment and see it's nothing personal and that in some ways there's no way you can affect the situation, but you can affect how you choose to respond to it. I think there's a lot in that. I sometimes think almost to my own surprise that of all the people I've met in my life, the one who has suffered most is the Dalai Lama. He's lost 13 of his siblings, he's been exiled from his homeland for 65 years,

he's called a demon in monks' clothings by the government of one of the largest nations on earth, and all he radiates, as we know, is joy and that infectious laugh and that constant smile. And it's a good example, I think. As I say, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the same, of how even facing constant challenge in the most difficult circumstances, we have the capacity to summon something beyond that. And I haven't exactly named all the things that you asked me to name, but I love that question, and it's one I need to think about. What precisely is it? I suppose the Dalai Lama's favorite phrase is wider perspective. Maybe that's a good one. It gives me a wider perspective. I'm not looking at things with a little keyhole of pico. I'm seeing things on a larger canvas. I love that. I don't know who said it but I've sort of captured it as a

phrase that I think is useful which is just with about anything like when in doubt zoom out. Like you said just bigger perspective. Whatever it is, is there some way to get a bigger perspective on this? Because that almost, at least for me, always seems to be where some degree of freedom lives. I love that. And it's so quotable. That's a great one-liner. Whenever you're in doubt, zoom out. Perfect.

Speaking of one-liners, you've got some great one-liners in the book that I was really struck by as I went through them. Maybe I'll pull one or two out now that we're mentioning one-liners. Yes. I love this one. You say, in my life below, and what you mean is your life back in the normal world, because you're reflecting while you're in the monastery, in my life below, I'm so determined to make the most of every moment. Here simply watching a box of light above the bed, I'm ready at last to let every moment make the most of me. Yes, and it's a way of saying, as I speak to you now, I'm in my typical daily life,

which means I'm ruled by my plans, which says 8 a.m. I talk to Eric and 11 a.m. I go and get lunch and 3 p.m. I go to this meeting and Everything's ruled out by my tiny and imperfect mind when I'm there I wake up and I can do anything or I can do nothing and I make it an important principle Not to tell myself what I'm going to do but to listen and it goes back to something I was thinking of earlier in our conversation Because I think the part of us that talks is to some extent the ego, and it comes from the smallest part of our self. And the part of us that listens is what's beyond, ideally, and comes from the good wolf, something much wider than ourselves. And so there, I listen. And who knows what it is

I'm listening to? Is it listening to my higher self or intuition, subconscious? It doesn't really matter what you call it, but I just listen. I wake up and what does this moment call for? Shall I take a walk? Shall I open a book? Shall I write something? Shall I just sit here? Sit here, sit here and enjoy the beauty of the world around me? And what a liberation, to use your word, that is. I'm not determining it. I'm not imprisoning myself within my sense this is where I have to be at 9.30. I can be anywhere at 9.30. I can be anyone at 9.30. And it took me a while to realize it was only by doing nothing that I could do anything at all. In other words, it's only by going to this place where I'm no one and I'm nowhere and I'm not doing anything

that I could be open enough to realize what I should do when I come back into the world two days later. So it's a way of saying that I'm much happier to be guided by something outside me than by my my fallible little sense of what's important. Yeah. It makes me think of something you've said in the past and I don't know where but you're talking about Japan and you're saying something to the order of that like a perfect date in Japan is two people go to a movie together and they sit and they watch the movie in rapt attention and then they leave and they don't say the first word about it to each other and that somehow in the silence between them is the more

real version of themselves. I'm not getting that exactly right but I'll let you kind of clear up what I haven't quite gotten there. Yes, so you were talking about your Zen practice and just I think yesterday I came upon this great sentence by Shunryu Suzuki who set up the San Francisco Zen Center and wrote Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, which to me is the great medicine that anyone could draw upon. And he's looked across the room with his students

and he said, all of you are enlightened so long as you keep your mouth shut. And I think to speak to your sentence, new silence is what brings us together in our deepest and most intimate selves. And speech is what brings us together in our deepest and most intimate selves. Speech is what brings us back into our thoughts and our dividedness and we're flying off in opposite directions.

The less we speak, often the closer we are together. We know that's the definition of friendship or true love in many ways. Silence brooks no argument. It's the place beyond either or. Your version of the truth versus your version of the truth versus my version of the truth. And you're right that I think the Japanese are very wise about this, but I think anyone who enters contemplations finds this. And as you know, one of the monks I talk about a lot in the book is the singer poet Leonard Cohen. And he was the most articulate

writer I've ever met. But what struck me was that when I would go and see him in his little house in a very beat up part of LA, we would chat for a little bit, have lunch maybe, and then he would pick up two chairs and take them out to his little garden in front of a flower bed, and he'd sit down, and I would sit next to him, and I would wait, and wait, and wait and wait and wait and he would say nothing and 10 minutes would pass, 15 minutes would pass, finally the first time this happened I thought maybe this is a gentle hint and I said, oh you must be busy I should leave and he looked up at me beseechingly, please don't go.

So having been a Zen monk and lived deep into silence as you did in your Zen practice, he had come to the understanding that silence was the deepest thing that we could share and also brings us to a sense of what we can share. Speeches reminding us of all the things we don't share. So every wise person I know, I think, knows the value of silence and Japan is a wonderful society that draws on that collective wisdom

that when you go to a movie with a loved one, you're sharing a movie with a loved one, you're sharing a beautiful experience. Why tarnish or scribble graffiti over it with your particular response, which is probably not that of your beloved. Catch John Stewart back in action on The Daily Show and in your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. From his hilarious satirical takes on today's politics and entertainment to the unique voices of correspondents and contributors, it's your perfect companion to stay on top of what's

happening now. Plus, you'll get special content just for podcast listeners, like in-depth interviews and a roundup of the week's top headlines. Listen 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 No Lily Podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like,

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or wherever you get your podcasts. We have to come back to Leonard Cohen in a second because he's the one guest I most wanted on the show in the decade I've done this that I never got. So we're going to come back there. But I want to go back to this idea of silence between people and words being what pulls them apart because I recognize in you saying that an essential truth. And there's also something though where I don't think that's all because I come from a silent family but not the good kind of silent family. There's something more in that silence that brings people together versus a silence that separates or a silence that's born of fear or awkwardness

or avoidance. And I'm curious what that thing is that goes along with silence that makes it companionable and draws people together. Thank you. That's a perfect point. And as I listen to you, I think collective silence, shared silence, communal silence. So you're absolutely right. When we receive the silent treatment, when we talk to somebody we care about and they

just shut off, they're using silence as a way to get away from us, silence becomes menacing and hostile and an obstacle to communion. So individual silence can be used as a sword or a shield or in all kinds of not so healthy ways, like individual speech. But communal silence is where you and I and many others are joining something, again, much larger than us that speaks for that maybe larger canvas or the ocean in which we're just drops. My experience is that if I step into a church or a temple or any place where people are sitting silently,

I always feel refreshed and liberated. In other words, I'm stepping into a silence that doesn't belong to any one person in the pews. It's been constructed around them. And I think that's what the monks and nuns do in their spaces. But you're absolutely right. When I come back to my apartment

and my wife is staring there without saying a word, that's her silence. It's the opposite of comfortable. So I'm glad you made that point because it's an important decision. Right. But there can be a very companionable deep silence between two people. So back to Leonard Cohen. So I mentioned he was the one guest I most wanted to have on this show that obviously didn't work out because he's not around to do it. But at one point, I got to know a monk who was with him at the monastery that he studied at in Los Angeles. And I'd gotten to know this monk a little bit. And I said to him, you know, I hate to ask this. Like, I really hate that. You know, I hate when people ask people to introduce them to other people. I want you to know you can 100% just

say no to this. But do you think there's any chance that Leonard might ever be a guest on the show? And he said, well, you know what, I'm happy to ask him. He said, but you should know that his monk name means great silence. So I wouldn't hold your breath. Was it by any chance Gento whom you got to meet? A youngish monk? Shoshan Jack Harbner? That's him. Yes. Yes. I know him too. Wonderful. Great friend. Yes. Yes. And a great writer too. Yes. Oh he's outstanding. He's so good. Yes. Yes. It was him. But based on what you're sharing about Leonard, it sounds like that name is apt, the deep silence.

Yes. So his name, which was Jikan, I heard translated as the silence between two thoughts. But it's very similar to what Genta said. But yes. And I think that his teacher, Sasaki Roshi, was very precise in choosing that name for a man of words and a man who lived by words. When I first met Leonard, it was while he was living as a monk on top of Mount Baldy and high dark mountains behind Los Angeles. What struck me instantly when I got out of my car, I didn't recognize him, though I had been a fan of his for more than 20 years, because he was wearing horn-rimmed glasses

and a very unflattering cap and a torn, ragged black robe. And he didn't carry himself like a famous person or a man of accomplishment or a published writer. He carried himself like an anonymous grant, a nobody. And I quickly saw he had brilliantly erased the being known as Leonard Cohen. He'd gone there to become nothing, to become nobody. And I remember I asked him about his career and he looked at me quizzically and he

said, well, I don't know exactly what you call my career. That's really not very relevant consideration here. So apart from everything, he had let go of everything that goes with Leonard Cohen, including the fluency and the beautiful gift with words. Yeah, you recount in the book that you said to him, you know, about being at the monastery that, you know, here you find answers and he replied to you, here you find freedom from answers. Yes, and freedom from questions, I think, and freedom from all the chatter of the mind. And yeah, freedom from the longing to search. I think to go to a place like that is to realize you don't have to look for anything.

You have to be found by something. You have to sit still long enough to be discovered rather than to think you have to travel the world to see something. So I want to pivot a little bit and talk a bit about a book that you wrote. I believe it was the one before this one, although I may not have that exactly right, called The Half-Known Life. It's one of your more recent books, I believe. Did I have that right?

Yeah, it was the previous one, and it goes with this one. Exactly right, yeah. Part of the question you're asking yourself in that book is, what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict and whether the search for it is problematic in and of itself. Say more about that discovery process and where you land with that. Thank you, exactly. That book is about cutting through our many notions of projection. We think it's going to be in a golden island. We think it's in the future. We think it's in the past.

We think anywhere but here. And I think we tie ourselves in knots and delude ourselves and take ourselves in the wrong direction by searching for a paradise. And at some level, we all know not just that paradise is in the eye of the beholder, but it's in the being. It's something that you develop, whereby, as we were saying earlier,

you can see the light in every one and you can see the light in every place, wherever you happen to be is paradise. And I don't include it in the book, but I remember one time I was standing along the river in Varanasi in India, the great center of Hinduism, and I'm of Hindu birth, and it's chaotic. There are flames on each side of you, cremating people. There are dead bodies floating apart. There are naked wise men moving around. It's just a mad carnival. And even though I'm from India by birth and from Hinduism by descent, I was totally freaked out by this place and standing there bewildered. And suddenly, out of nowhere, two Tibetan monks arrived, one an elderly Tibetan, one a younger American. The younger American, whom I knew

already from New York, came up and he surveyed the scene of absolute chaos. He said, isn't this wonderful? This is the whole human pageant. This is birth and death and transformation and everything in between. Essentially, he was saying, this is paradise, this place of confusion and chaos, this is the paradise, the only paradise we can trust and embrace because it's a paradise rooted in real life. It's not a set part from reality, it's right at the heart of things. And he had come to that wisdom because he was a monk

who had practiced for a long time in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. So yes, that book is about cutting through the silliness with which we project paradise onto other places and how can we find it within. And this book about the monks, of course, is speaking out people who have found their paradise exactly where they are. And the notion of being a monk or a nun, especially maybe in the Christian tradition, is that that walled cloister enclosure is

a model of paradise and you're living there full time and coming out of paradise in order to serve the world the way a Bodhisattva might. So this is about people who don't need to search and have been found, as it were. So you're absolutely right. I think of these two books as a brother and sister in a certain way. And the other point about the book I published just two years ago, The Half-Known Life, is I'm traveling to Iran and North Korea and Kashmir and Jerusalem and all kinds of war-torn places.

But in almost every place I visit in that book, I'm in the passenger seat and there's a local who's driving me around. And that's a very conscious choice to remind myself I'm in the passenger seat in life. I'm not in control. I'm being led by other people and I'm being defined by circumstances. And it goes to your point about I wasn't trying to make the most of every moment. I was letting the moment make the most of me. In other words, again, it was freeing myself from the delusion that I can control the world or create the circumstances and opening myself up. So that notion of being in the passenger seat was important to me in that book.

So without revealing what you're working on now, I'm curious what questions are the ones that are sort of at the center of your life today. I've heard you describe that you write books about something that you want to think about for five years or so. Again, I'm not asking you to disclose anything, but I'm curious what questions are really alive for you right now. I think maybe all my adult life I've been working with the same question, which is how to allow hope and reality to sit side by side. At the core of that book called The Half-Known Life, I quote the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney. And when he saw Nelson Mandela released from prison

after I think 27 or 29 years, Heaney wrote, once in a lifetime, hope and history can rhyme, which has become quite a common sentence now. How do we match hope and history? Because history has left all of us with wounds, with traumas, with fears that we can't just wish away or pretend never happened. But a life without hope is no life at all. So how can we see the world clearly as it is and still remain hopeful? And I think

I've never seen in my lifetime the world so despairing as it is now, so maybe it's an ever more urgent question. And so each of my books is trying to come at that from a different angle. And this book, A Flame, about the monks, I mean, they're living in a constant state of faith, which you could say is enlightened hope. How do you match that with reality? How do I, as a visitor to their world, getting a glimpse of the light that you and I have been talking about, keep that light alive when I'm back on the crowded freeway and everyone's honking their horns and I'm an hour behind schedule and all of that? So I think every one of my books is coming at that essential question because I don't want to live without hope, but I also Really want to attend to the world and I think one of the sentences you read earlier in our discussion had to do it

Looking at the world closely enough to love it and not to just assume that it's a broken world entirely Right, right. I think that is a fascinating question Like what is worth hoping for or what can we hope for? I think is a really deep and interesting question because if we look at, say, certain types of faith traditions, right, their hope is that this all has a rhyme and a reason and a purpose and that where they're going next is going to be a good place. But for those of us who don't necessarily believe that, like you said, what can I take from that which is a beautiful thing, but that more matches my view of the world and what is?

And I think about this a lot. I think about it with trust also, like what can we trust in? You know, there's similar questions that for a lot of people don't have easy answers. They don't have easy answers. I'm so glad you mentioned the word trust though, because I've been speaking about the hermitage I keep going to, and soon after I went there, I realized it was a place of love. But I realized more important, it was a place of trust. And I could trust everything there.

And I couldn't exactly tell you why. I could even trust myself, which is why when I wake up I don't make a plan, because I know whatever happens is right. And it's why I feel so close to everyone I meet along the road, because I trust them implicitly, as I might not if I met exactly the same person on the main street of my hometown.

There's some quality that whatever is happening in that silence, which is a much bigger canvas than the one we usually inhabit, is going to be the right thing and therefore you can surrender, as people ideally do in their traditions. You can submit everything is going to be right and the monks are great exemplars of trusting the moment and obedience to whatever is they're given, including sickness and calamity. Hope, as you say, is a much different thing. And as you know, I quote in the book, I stumbled upon a book in a monastery bookstore, which quoted Vaclav Havel, playwright and former president of Czech Republic, who says, hope isn't the notion

that everything will turn out right in the end. It's just the notion that something makes sense, even if it's a sense we can't understand, that there is some kind of order to the world. Now, you said that, you know, maybe that's something in the Christian tradition that those of us who are not Christians can't exactly hang on to. But I'm glad you used the word trust, because maybe hope is just trust in the universe. Bad things are happening, I am suffering, things are never the way I would like them to be, but maybe the universe is wiser than I am. And that's all I really need to know. Yeah, and I think that in a certain light,

it is, you said, a trust in the moment, right? Trust in reality. And again, I think this gets to what do we hope for, what do we trust? Because if my trust is that nothing bad will happen to me, well, that's a terrible, like that's not going to happen. That's not the way the world works. So it makes me think back a little bit to what you said about the thoughts that are yours and then the thoughts that are bigger than that and that are everything, right?

So if my hope or my trust is in me or what's going to happen to me, it could be a difficult hope or trust. But if it's to the world, well, that's a back to our bigger perspective, right? That's a bigger perspective. You also quote somewhere Thomas Merton saying something along the lines of The only faith he could trust would be the one that came to him not as an answer But is a probably unanswerable question Yes

I feel that the people who are deepest in faith are the ones who can live most comfortably With doubt and I heard that Pope Francis of all people when hes, doesn't pray for an answer to his questions, but just for the strength to live with the unanswerable. And yes, and I think the word reality, which you and I have been using a little, is an interesting one, because if I look at the reality outside my window today in this comfortable town in California,

it is pretty frayed and fractured and broken. But I think stepping into silence has admitted me to some reality that's beyond, behind, and beside the one that I usually see, in which I can have much more confidence. But I love what you say about the wrong forms of trust. Whenever I travel with the Dalai Lama, I'll attend his big public meetings. And nearly always at the end of the meeting, somebody will get up and say with great sincerity, your holiness, what do you do when you're really hoping to reverse climate change and bring peace

to the Middle East and live comfortably with your neighbors and it doesn't work out? What do you do when your dream doesn't work out? And he looks at them with great kindness and wisdom like an uncle. And he says, says wrong dream if you're hoping to bring peace to the Middle East tomorrow you're always going to be disappointed if you're going to want to reverse climate change by next week forget about it if you hope to be married to Brad Pitt ain't gonna happen but if you hope to find something

in the person you love that Brad Pitt would envy it can happen right now but he always stresses you have to be very realistic and rigorous in measuring your hopes, your dreams, because as you said, otherwise you're just drawing the prescription for your own broken-heartedness. Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Pico, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this conversation so much and I'm so glad we got to talk. You know, really it's been a delight for me, Eric. This is the richest conversation I've had in a long time because you know exactly all the things I'm describing and you've commented through Zen practice and other things and walking in the Sierras.

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