The Rich Roll Podcast - Mastering The Mystical: A Deep Dive On Spirituality

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

For too long, the growing body of evidence showing that a spiritual practice is associated with better health and wellbeing has been dismissed by stoics and scientists. That is, until now. Welcome to our sixth masterclass episode, where we share big truths from some of my best podcast guests, honing in on a single theme or subject matter. Today we are diving deep on all things spirituality, sharing new perspectives, the latest scientific findings, some concrete and non-secular spiritual practices, and the value that an awakened state of being can add to your daily life. Whether you’re already part of a rich spiritual tradition or someone just beginning to seek a spiritual path, this one’s for you. I sincerely hope that after hearing all these perspectives on spirituality, you find yourself with an open heart, armed with new practices that can elevate your thinking and behavior toward a more spiritual consciousness—and ultimately, a more fulfilled life. If you’ve been inspired, then consider visiting the full, in-depth conversations with these esteemed guests. You can find links to each episode posted in the show notes below. Watch: YouTube. Read: Show notes. Masterclass Series: Click here to listen to our first deep dive on the microbiome, here for our second on mental health, here for our third on addiction & recovery, here for our fourth on mindset, and here our fifth on longevity. The full episodes for all guests featured in this episode can be found in the show notes below. I sincerely hope you find this experiment helpful and instructive—and/or that you share the episode with those who could benefit from it. Enjoy! Rich

We all have the opportunity to choose our sovereign connection to our spiritual nature. It's about getting into your pure, basic awareness. There is some bedrock of love, unalterable love, that is the truth of who we are. It's not just darkness. It doesn't just end. We continue. We have physical fitness for the physical core. We have physical fitness for the physical core. We need spiritual fitness for the spiritual core. You need a practice without devices where you can be at peace. One thing I've learned from conducting hundreds and hundreds of interviews over the past 10 years

is that regardless of who you talk to, doctors, theologians, therapists, researchers, or even addicts, the collective wisdom of various disciplines all agree, a spiritual practice of some kind, any kind is essential to human growth and flourishing. So in this, our sixth masterclass, my team and I have compiled a variety of helpful clips on spirituality from a variety of past guests

in the hope that you may glean essential wisdom, new perspectives, as well as some concrete practices that can add value to your daily life. Whether you're already part of a rich spiritual tradition or somebody just beginning to seek a spiritual path, the following clips can help all of us understand the importance of spirituality to our overall health and well-being. And in just a moment, we begin with Dr. Lisa Miller. But first. with Dr. Lisa Miller.

But first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many

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Life in recovery is wonderful. And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment, an experience that I had that quite literally saved my life.

And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you.

I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com.

Okay, a leading generational psychologist on the benefits of spirituality, Lisa is a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and is the founder and director of the Spirituality Mind-Body Institute. In this clip, Lisa unpacks the recent neuroscience research that establishes that humans are universally equipped with a capacity for an inclination toward spirituality. Here is Lisa Miller. In terms of evaluating the sort of scientific-based benefits of cultivating a spiritual life,

we should probably define what you mean by spirituality. Great. So thank you. So as you are well aware, scientists do not define spirituality all told, but we can use the lens of science to identify threads of lived human spiritual life that have enormous impact on the rest of our lives, our health, our wellness, our performance, our ability to connect and love. And the two threads within lived human spirituality where I focus in the awakened brain are the two areas where the lion's share of science says our lives are entirely different.

These two threads of lived spirituality are entirely game-changing when it comes to our possibility and our realization. And they are, one, the seat of transcendent awareness, which is to say our innate hardwired capacity to see into the deeper nature of life where we see that we are loved, held, guided, and never alone. There's a capacity hardwired in us to see a transcendent relationship with life. That is the first of the two. And the second is that that might be shared with one another so that we can show up and be part of that symphony of life where we're loved, guided, held, and never alone because we treat each other that way. So religion is,

through the lens of science, has been shown to be transmitted entirely environmentally. It is a gift of our ancestors. It is shared by community. But spirituality, as I'm discussing it in the awakened brain, our innate capacity for transcendent awareness and that that might be shared, that is hardwired. It is not merely a gift of our environment. So spirituality is innate and the environment alone transmits religion. Sure, innate and also heritable, which is something we get into, which is super interesting.

But before we even do that, I suspect that, and you talk about this in the book, that it is a challenge for many and obviously some within your profession to kind of reconcile science and spirituality. It presents this conundrum, this conflict, spirituality being something that is considered outside of science, that is something anecdotal

and observational. So walk me through the process of trying to drill down on how you actually study not just the impact of a spiritual life on one's mental health, but just identifying it in a situation where it can be calibrated to produce results that are reliable and compelling enough to draw conclusions from. So which many people will say, indeed, you know, I am not spiritual. I am very scientific. And very often, certainly there was a huge ice age around spirituality in the scientific community in the 20th century. It's starting to thaw a bit now. But for most of the 20th century, and still many people, the bad gift that science as a profession gave our larger society was a false

split between spirituality and science. And that is indeed a very false split. It turns out that science is a method. It's a lens. Whether you're talking about genotyping or MRI studies or long term clinical course studies, science is a form of observance. And we can point that lens at just about any question. And the host of questions are broad. We can ask questions that are compelling and new, or we can repeat the same questions we've asked 100 times before.

The questions we ask live within the imagination of the scientist. So the limitations that science faced on turning our lens to ask questions of spirituality in the human life were limitations of the culture, the climate, the vogue in which scientists were immersed. They were not limitations of the scientific method. They were immersed. They were not limitations of the scientific method. Now, with the shift in culture, came a shift, really the thaw in the Ice Age of the imagination of the scientist.

And as culture really, in some ways, academia was the last of the party. Our culture became much more spiritually aware before academia got on board. And as the group of scientists who were early in this transformative process, being amongst those labs that really brought the lens of science to spirituality in the human life. Still to this day, I can say there's

a number of scientists who've yet to separate the difference between the scientific method and the vogue tastes and appetites and the culture around academic science, which are actually sort of implicitly, latently secular material. There's no reason that the scientific lens has to be limited to interpretations or understandings that are simply, I don't mean materialistic, although that can come with material, but material, only that which we can touch, which we can point to. I literally have friends who are scientists who say that because you've shown the neural correlates of spirituality in the brain, we now know spirituality is real. That is a limitation in the culture of scientists, not in our method. Then let's look just squarely at the science. And the science says,

we are all innately spiritual beings with or without the embrace of religion. We're all born with the spiritual core. And if we build the spiritual core, we have physical fitness for the physical core. We need spiritual fitness for the spiritual core. And if we build the spiritual core, we have physical fitness for the physical core, we need spiritual fitness for the spiritual core. And if we do, we're 80% less likely to be addicted, 60% less likely to take our lives. We're able to be whole and thrive. We have disintegrated the spiritual core from the rest of the person and disintegration is unhealth.

So how do we put the spiritual core back in? Well, if it's a public school or the public square, it's minus religion. That can happen at home, but spirituality exists independent of religion. And how can we do that? Again, at home, the religious embrace of spiritual awareness is important for many families.

Roll with it, do that at home. But in a public school, we can strengthen the muscle of transcendent awareness of spiritual values towards one another. And in fact, when we look in the MRIs at the neural correlates of the awakened brain, of all forms of spiritual practice, that which most correlates with a strong spiritual awareness is love of neighbor. Love of neighbor and service altruism. And that can be taught in school. We have to do this work of formation. We have no choice but to go on a spiritual quest.

Every tradition has known it. When we foreclose the quest, what we get is the big donut size hole in the heart. We get the lack of formation, the lack of the knowing heart, the perceiving heart, that is a direct connection to God or the higher power, the perceptual organ through which we say, ah, he left me, she left me, but look who just showed up.

This ability to see that life is dynamic and full of surprises. And we don't make those surprises and we don't make that dynamism, but we can embrace this give and take, this dialogue with life. That is quest. The knowing of the heart is real. That's hard data.

So honoring and respecting the hunch, the little whisper and the tiny, tiny little sapling of a hunch, honor that. Give it love, give it attention. When you pay attention to your flashes of awareness, when you catch a synchronicity out of the corner of your eye and say, I think I saw something, honor that. Treat your perception as real. And when you do, it grows very, very quickly,

tenfold, a hundredfold. Listen to yourself and honor your inner knowing as hard data. inner knowingness hard data. The spiritual path is described by some as a search for or an embodiment of a feeling of unconditional love. But this next speaker, Professor Arthur Brooks, takes it a step further to claim that love is a decision, not a feeling. Arthur is a professor at the Harvard Business School and the best-selling author of From Strength to Strength, a roadmap for finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in our later years. Here's a clip from our conversation.

I love all religions, but I'm in love with the Catholic Church. And I learn as much about who I am as a Catholic by talking to people who are not. It's really, really important to talk to people who are not you. Because there's too much uniformity and spiritual compatibility does not expose you

to enough complementarity. Complementarity in life is actually how you learn things. You learn things from people who are different than you in a lot of ways. And you can stress test your- Stress test and also just they give you the better technique. I mean, studying with the Tibetan Buddhist monks in Dharamsala is how I learned to pray my rosary.

Wow. Yeah, I learned how to pray the rosary with my breath and heart by studying with the Tibetan Buddhist monks. That's interesting. Yeah. And how many times have you visited with the Dalai Lama? 10, 11, something like that.

Problem is that he's completely sequestered, so he's 86 or 87 now in July. It'll be 87 in July. But he's been in the States many times with me too. So when he would come here, and we've been in different parts of the States and I would interview him, but we've written together too, which is interesting.

What would you say is the primary thing that you've kind of extracted from being in his presence? The understanding that love is a decision and not a feeling. Elaborate. It's that, well, same time as Aquinas said that to love is to will the good of the other. It's nothing about feelings.

And this is an ancient medieval teaching that actually comes from Aristotle that love, philia, is a positive decision on the basis of who we are as people. And the Dalai Lama lives that every single day. He says, you must decide to love. You must decide to love. Might not like.

To like, as Martin Luther King said, to like someone is a sentimental something. But to love somebody is a positive decision. It's hard. It takes work. It's a measure of who you are as a person, is your decision to love in a world full of hate. And the Dalai Lama is a living embodiment of that.

He's as wonderful as he seems. I suspect that's true. And it's interesting to hear love contextualize as this action verb that you have control over. It gives you a sense of agency. Absolutely. And I think our Western notion of it is backwards in the sense that we're looking to receive love,

but we're not really adequately focused on how we're giving it or exuding it. Absolutely, we're a feeling-based society. And this is actually one of our great, I mean, you think... So one of your sort of preternatural gifts is how you've engineered your life on the basis of what you wanted it to be.

You know, this is one of the reasons that I listen to your show, and many people do, is because they want agency. They want to be fully alive and to be managed by themselves, as opposed to be managed by their urges, their impulses, their appetites, and their feelings.

That's a phenomenon that we call metacognition, And you're the walking example of metacognition. You made decisions on how you're going to live and you live that way. And that is not just a Western brainy idea. On the contrary, the Dalai Lama shows that by understanding ourselves at a certain remove, we can make these decisions for ourselves, including how we're going to treat others, the love that we're going to show to the rest of the world. You know, you find that people tend to walk away from faith or spirituality in their twenties. And the reason is because the world is messy, you know, and you say, how can there be a benevolent creator with so much pain in the world, et cetera. And I understand that, that this, that this is troubling to a lot of people, but when you're our age, you're like, yeah, everything's messy, nothing's consistent.

I can accept a whole lot of cognitive dissonance now that I was unable to accept when I was 28 or 32 years old. Just couldn't do it. And so the result of that is that whereas superstitions tend to fall away, I don't believe in the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, I'm more willing to be childlike in understandings of the supernatural.

Now, for some people, it doesn't work that way. But here's the deal when it comes to happiness. If you're left to your devices, your ordinary quotidian devices, your life is gonna be like a continuous tape loop of one episode of Better Call Saul. Like it was okay the first time and then it's the same and the same, and you'll go mad with

tedium, with boredom. It's just really my job, my car, my money, my friends, my time, my show, my me, me, me. Just give me a break. The Dalai Lama always says, every time I see him, he says, remember, you are one in 7 billion, by which he does not mean that I'm an ant, that I'm insignificant, by which he means don't forget the adventure of looking at things from a distance. Don't forget the adventure of seeing life in its spectrum, its majesty, its scale. At 40,000 feet, looking at the whole world where you're part of it gives you perspective and it gives you peace. You need that. Everybody has a Transcendental Walk. Now it comes, maybe it comes from the, you know, the incredible, I mean, it's like, I hang out with a guy named Ryan

Holliday. Yeah. I just talked to him like two hours ago. I talk to Ryan all the time. He's fantastic. He's fantastic. And he's, he's cut his teeth by, by, by introducing Marcus Aurelius to a generation of Gen Zers. Like, wow, Ryan Holiday discovered Seneca. It's awesome. But it's so smart and so good. He's such a, Ryan's a visionary guy. And you can study this, the philosophers, or as I mentioned before, the works of Bach

or understanding nature in a very metaphysical way or a traditional or non-traditional faith or spiritual practice or a meditation practice. There's lots of ways to do this, but we must have a transcendental walk because life is simply too intense and exhausting and boring if we don't do that. So how does one embark upon that

if this is a new alien concept? Yeah, I've asked the Dalai Lama that very thing. It's like asking for a friend kind of, but in, and I have a, my more traditional religious life actually proceeds from this because I realized, I mean, there are times when I was more religious and times when I was less religious,

but in my 30s, I recognized that this was a big hole in my soul and I didn't need to go across state lines to go to a different supermarket. What precipitated that? A need. I recognized a need that I needed better, more peace and better perspective. And I just have a sense that this is right. Now, what part is right? I don't know. I don't actually know, but I need a physics of spirituality. And just as I would not try to create my own mathematical structures try to create my own mathematical

structures and create my own alternative system of mathematics, I don't feel like I have to do so in a religious way. Other people feel differently about it. But the Dalai Lama talks about kind of a pyramid where the basis of the pyramid is moral living. And this is a Jungian perspective too. Carl Jung said that happiness comes from defining your values and living according to them. If you know what your values are and you don't live according to them, or you don't know what your values are, you won't be happy. Defining your values and your morals and living according to them with impeccable integrity. That means, you know, when they say make your bed, I mean, that's just a boring example of living according to what you think is right. And even when nobody's

watching, living according to it. What I recommend is that people don't lie ever, just don't lie. Now, when the murderer is at the door and says, where's the victim? Fine, but that's not what we're talking about. That's a different podcast. That's a different podcast. That's a Wondery podcast.

Or a Sam Harris podcast, maybe. So figure out, write down what your moral values are and make a plan to live according to them, that's step one. Step two is build a meditative practice, build a practice of contemplation. Maybe that's formal meditation, maybe that's walking in the woods, but you need a practice without devices

where you can be at peace. And finally, you need to read wisdom. You need to expose yourself to people who have had deeper thoughts and more profound thoughts than you. So number one, act according to your values. Learn your values, act according to your values, practice your values, write it down, journal it.

Number two is get your contemplative practice in order and make sure you start with at least 15 minutes a day. And number three is actually read the wisdom literature in whatever tradition you want and do that daily for at least 15 minutes. Starting there, your life will change. Your world will rock. In this next clip, I sit down with my wife, Julie,

also known as Srimati, as she takes us through the power of the breath and the posture of yoga as tools of activation for spiritual connection. She explains how our regular practice can result in a better life for ourselves, one that breaks the bonds of our past habits

and allows us to reclaim our sovereignty. Enjoy. Intellectual conversation is wonderful. It's amazing. And it really is important for us as humans to bond and connect and be inspired. And then there is a whole other universe of transcendence that happens in the processes of technique. And you cannot transcend by talking about it. You know, it will only lead you to a certain place. And we see this demonstrated in our sessions of holotropic breathing when we're on retreat. And you see humans go into a breathing space.

And there are people who have almost never practiced yoga before. And they have transcendent experiences. You have witnessed it yourself. Yeah, there are literally psychedelic experiences that people are having. And again, it's like I worked with somebody today who came to me who said, I feel like my life has almost passed me by and I have failed to access the spiritual part of who I am. And just in one session, she has such an awareness of her spiritual nature. Given the space, humans are connected to their spirituality. We are truly, I heard you say it recently, I'm a spiritual being having a

human experience. So Water Tiger is this portal of techniques, which are designed to lead you into a deep relationship with your own being. Because your life is about you and you alone. It's not about my life and it's not about any of the kid's life. It's about you and you alone. And you have, we all have the opportunity

to choose our sovereign connection to our spiritual nature. And what would those techniques be? Oh, they're huge. I mean, they're massive. I mean, well, there's like 40 maybe in the portal right now. There are devotional prayers. There are techniques that lead you to drop into the black fullness. It's empty full space. It's not empty space, but it's the void where you can replenish in that meditative state and gather energy in that state. And others are for amplifying presence, amplifying your presence in your body.

You know, there's a saying that if you don't embody your life print, meaning your physical body and your energetic bodies, something or someone else will. So meaning you could have an ancestral pattern that is living inside of your life print because you have not embodied that. You have not claimed your energy back.

Right, so to put a finer point on that, an example would be in my own case, me perpetuating a pattern that was imprinted on me by my mother or my father or the way that I was raised such that I'm not conscious that I'm in furtherance of this unhealthy behavior pattern and not totally aware of the fact that it isn't actually me. It's the result of neural pathways that got cemented when I was a very young person and thus feel reflexive as opposed to consciously chosen.

Yeah, it's an automatic pattern. We call it a miasm that is basically running in you. So it means your sovereignty is not activated. And then you end up doing the exact same behavior that you hated, literally hated as a child to your child. And you're not, you know, this is not a, I mean, this is everyone, you know, this is what we do. And then you're like, oh my God,

I'm acting like my mother, oh my God. So the point is, is that, I always say of anything that transformed my life in a positive way, in a transcendent way, it was the practice of yoga, physical asana, which you and I met in that environment. And yogic techniques are shelter from the storms. No matter what's happening, if the world is ending, practice yoga. It's like it creates an awareness of energy that is beyond space and time. It empowers your energetic.

It expands your ability to live free. And I'm not saying go into a yogic sect and get into all the lineage and all the teachings. I'm just saying, just get on the mat, develop a meditation practice and ask ourselves, like those of us who have apps who say they meditate and are running around, I mean, really, like how much are you really meditating? Are you really meditating or are you listening to a podcast? Are you reading more news?

Like if you just took your life like a pie and look at your energetic, the amount of energy that's available, how much of the time are you engaged in intellectual activities, pontificating, analyzing, judging, assessing, summing up like on a daily basis in this, you know, in this coliseum of life that we find ourselves in now. And how much time have you been in nature? Have you stopped? Are you connecting with your breath? And I mean, being in nature, not listening to a podcast, not listening to music, dropping in, sitting with a tree, like dropping in. Are we communicating on that level? So what I can do as an individual is I can dedicate my meditation

to expanding the power in my energetic field. And this could be through breath, through presence, through dropping into the state, the void. And what I'm doing is I'm amplifying the amount of light that I'm able to hold. And then I bring into my heart this feeling of peace, of humanity, of love, of where every human has a safe place to live, to, you know, food to eat, place to love their children. And I amplify that as much as I can. And then I say to the one breath, hear my prayer. May all my brothers and sisters who are suffering

feel my presence, that I am with them and that I hold this vision for a more expanded life experience together. And that could seem trite and silly and ridiculous to an intellectual, That could seem trite and silly and ridiculous to an intellectual, but thoughts are things. Energy is something. I feel like humans are not hardwired to inhabit that disposition. And that's why it is a practice and things like meditation and yoga are so crucial for developing that internal connectivity because humans in our minds are disposed to pattern recognition. We're looking for patterns like, oh, these things are always like this. And so that's the way this is. And we observe things and we listen and we hear and we assemble experiences

and we try to extract greater truths out of them. And the practice is about detaching from that and understanding that that's just a very small piece of the story of reality, which is another way of saying- It might not be reality at all, actually, quite honestly. You know, in either camp, you know, any ideas that I have about meditation, you know, it's probably not that, you know?

So, I'm just saying, like, it would benefit us to develop some reverence for the great one breath, the ancient force that is inhabiting all life and to return to some of the ways of the indigenous of listening to the winds and the trees and the earth and the air and the fires. And so, you know, listen, we, we have a lot of things that are inciting fear in the world. And there's a lot of systems that we believed in, or maybe we're an illusion over that we have put our trust in, I guess. And what I would say is the only thing you have,

the only thing you have is your connection to consciousness through your own heart. That's it. Everything else will fall away. This relationship will fall away. The kids will go their own way. People come into your lives, they go. Careers come in, they go. But what do you have? You have your consciousness. And if you're still here, if you're listening to this podcast, if you have a dream, if you have a desire, if you have breath in your body,

really, really embody that. It's a precious gift to be here. And we all agreed to come here to be part of this transformation. And transformation is happening. But it's our job to hold the highest vision. And it's not about political parties or us and them or masculine versus feminine, or it's about integration and the community.

Fear not, we've got more spiritual wisdom coming your way, but first. This next clip is from one of my favorite people, comedian Pete Holmes. Pete grew up in a fundamentalist Christian environment and actually studied to become a youth pastor before pivoting to stand-up comedy. In this clip, Pete explains

what initially drew him to faith. He then unpacks his current spiritual perspective and shares the practices that have helped him become a more fulfilled version of himself. The mantra that I think you adopt and you point this out in the book is this idea of like, what is this? Like, what is going on? Like this sense at a very young age

where you're walking around and everyone's living their lives and you have this like undeniable sensibility of awe and wonder about the world and what is actually happening on this crazy, you know, spinning blue thing. We're out in space and, you know, the sky is up, but it's also sideways. It's also below you. Yeah, all of that.

And just confused why no one wants to talk about that, right? And that ultimately seems to be, you know, in addition to your mother's impetus, like what leads you into the church and where you find a home for debating and talking about these things that also then informs your comedy. The what is this was my thing as a kid and it manifested in being very interested in UFOs

and Bigfoot and ESB and all these different things. Which made you immediately popular. Very unpopular. And comedy. Comedy is also like, you know, comedy is like playing operation. We're trying to figure out where the boundaries of socialness lie. And then that what is this kind of got funneled into the church. And what I liked about the church was we didn't really debate as much, but at least they said, um, God, which I liked. I enjoyed that they had an answer that was, uh, different from, well, I don't know, eat your, eat your fucking tacos. You know, who cares? We got to get to school. Um, it was nice that they were saying God, because God was something. I make a comparison in the book where I was leaving a superhero movie and I heard a kid say to his dad, dad, how do they make that

man fly? And the dad, without really thinking about it, just went computers. And I was like, that's very funny because computers really just means I don't know. He's just saying, I don't know. And in the same way, God might mean, I don't know, but at least it was something, at least it gave us a symbol and something to explore and unpack if you're feeling curious, computers or God. It gave me a foothold. But then I lose my faith because my wife leaves me. And I felt like I had been paying protection money to God. I think a lot of people feel this way, like the mafia.

And yet still someone had thrown, for the fifth time, a brick through my bakery window. I'm like, what am I paying this guy for? You know what I mean? I w I'm his sheep shepherd me. Sheeps don't have their wife sheep get fucked by a wolf. Like you fucked up. That's how I felt. So he broke his, he didn't hold up his end of the bargain in my sort of third grade, second grade, kindergarten understanding of God. But that was one of the things is when my wife left, I had to take a real hard look at like, do you really believe that? Like the example I use in my book is my brother is going to hell. He didn't believe like I did. Do you really believe that? Like really, really think about it. And I was like, well,

my behavior is maybe more honest than my thoughts. And my behavior was very clear. I wasn't really actively grabbing him going, you fool, there's a train coming and you're on the tracks, you idiot. I wasn't doing that. I was having tacos with him, tacos again. But so then I lose it and then I'm out in the wild and I start kind of feeling growing up a little bit and all these kind of interesting things. And then I took mushrooms with my girlfriend at Bonnaroo and we just thought it

was like something fun to do. I wasn't a big drug person. I'm not a big drug person. I hadn't done a lot of drugs. I'd probably smoked pot like, I don't know, 15 times in my life at that point. And then we bought some mushrooms from a roadie and we went on the Ferris wheel. And I, at the time I would not have said that I experienced the divine. What I did experience was something that was completely beyond language. So what we're saying, it was transrational. It didn't make any sense. It wasn't something I thought it was something that I became. And this, this sounds like if you read other people writing about mystical experiences, that's what they say. You can think I am made of the same

molecules as this table and as you, and yet here are two consciousnesses talking to each other. It's fucking trippy. But to become that, that'll lay you on your back. And it did. And I laid there, mouth agape, staring at the clouds and receiving like direct, real, even after I had come down, real transmission from the universe grabbing me and saying, we're so glad you're finally fucking here. in. I'm in. I'm a Christian. I'm in. Get all that shit out of here. Lay the fuck down on some grass and stare up towards infinity, you idiot, which is always there, you idiot. And really like, listen to me for a second. Stop praying by thinking, God, help me find parking. God, help me beat that flu that's going around. And listen, shut up for a second. So turn your brain off for a second. And that just plays directly into your main thing, which is what is this? Exactly. You know, and I was finally getting a taste and it was through something. It wasn't from,

as Richard Rohr would say, it wasn't from doing it right. Abstaining from drugs is from doing it wrong. What a beautiful paradox. God hides himself in pain and strange wayward afternoons in Tennessee. That's fucking gorgeous. That's amazing. So I did mushrooms and then I realized that there were some things that we can't really talk about, right? And then I started my heart I didn't know had opened up to the potential that the writers of things like the Bible were also trying to use myth and metaphor, because as Richard Rohr says, metaphor is the only language we have to talk about God. That doesn't mean it's not true. It means it's so big and vast and mysterious that

how else are you going to talk about it? I'm sorry to be so aggressive, but like, you're going to talk about it directly. You're going to talk about it like the contents of your refrigerator. You're going to add it to your Amazon wishlist, the mystery of everything. you can't talk about it directly. You can talk about it through music, sex, drugs, poetry, and metaphor. So once I opened up the idea that Jesus's death and resurrection, for example, is a metaphor for your death, your ego death, and your resurrecting to the dynamic source of all being. So you need to wake up to Christ consciousness, basically. Suddenly it wasn't about worshiping someone else's story. I write about it in the book, like Jesus was, you're on a football team with Jesus and he does this incredible return after a punt or whatever,

I don't know, football. So he catches the ball and he runs it back to like his own 30 yard line, but then he gets tackled and the ball splits out and falls in your arms. And instead of like running with the ball, you put the ball down so you can. Wow. That was amazing. Jesus. And Jesus is going,

you idiot. Go. This story isn't about me. It's about you. And worshiping someone else's story. Isn't going to do shit for you. Like's about you. And worshiping someone else's story isn't going to do shit for you. Like we need you to do it. You die. You die. You know what I'm saying? I get all passionate about this. No, I like it. It's one thing, like I believe this, so I'm in a club is way different from going,

oh, I saw what he did. I'll do it too. I can't literally raise from the dead and I can't literally heal the blind and I can't literally turn water into wine, but I can metaphorically and I have, and I do, and you do too. And that's what we're supposed to be doing. So if somebody was to say to you, you know, Pete, how do you define your faith? How do you canonize it? How do you articulate your perspective on these things? I'm a Christ-leaning spiritual seeker person. I still enjoy that because for better or worse, those things got in there and were imprinted on me when I was young. So I get very excited when I can reclaim those stories and bring them with me and not throw the baby out with the bath. But a lot of it, you know, I spent so much of my life thinking how to be more like Jesus would wear

those bracelets to say, WWJD, what would Jesus do? We wanted to be like Jesus as if Jesus, like the point of Jesus was how nice he was and how he got along with everybody. And when people say, how can I be more like Christ? I'm like, when? In between each of those words, I think you're probably closer than you think, you know, when we can stop and turn the volume down.

This is very unpleasing to the ego when we think it's not about having something, it's about letting go of something. But stillness and quiet, be still and know that I'm God, that it's right there staring you in the face. It's about getting into your pure, basic awareness. One of the more challenging aspects of spiritual practice is the act of forgiveness.

Here to offer wise counsel on this subject is spiritual thought leader, activist, and former presidential candidate, Marianne Williamson. How can we extend forgiveness to others and to ourselves? And how does that spiritual practice affect the way we interact with others in our lives and on social media? Here's Marianne. How do we develop the facility to forgive?

And why is that so important in terms of living our lives in a manner in which to be most whole and complete? Well, I'm a student of A Course in Miracles and the concept of forgiveness, which is central to A Course in Miracles, presents the word in a very different way than it is presented within traditional Christian terminology or any religious terminology. Usually when we think of forgiveness, it's, you're a jerk, but I'm so spiritual now that I deign to forgive you. The condescending, my favorite kind of forgiveness. It's judgment to destroy, the cross miracle says. But forgiveness within a deeply spiritual metaphysical concept means knowing that we are all created by god as innocent and good and we make mistakes and how you treat and that god does not punish us for our sins sin is an artery term means you miss the mark he seeks to correct

us for our mistakes and when you are in that place you realize that the love that is who you are and who i am is real the rest is this mortal hallucination that that we're having buddha called an illusion uh einstein said um time and space or illusions of consciousness albeit persistent ones that there is some bedrock of love un unalterable love, that is the truth of who we are. And I think that everything that we're talking about today, if you stand on that, that our function on this earth is to see that love in each other and to stand on that love and to invoke that love, everything changes. and to stand on that love, and to invoke that love, everything changes. Your criminal justice system changes. Your economic system changes. Your personal relationship changes. Your treatment of the earth changes. Now, that doesn't mean you don't say no. Sometimes love says no. Forgiveness doesn't make you a doormat. Forgiveness simply makes you someone who is capable of owning your

yes and owning your no. You have children. If a child, a small child walks into the kitchen, hi mommy, daddy, look at this razor blade I found. You know, it is incumbent upon you out of love for that child to make sure the razor blade is taken out of their hands. But you don't look at that child and forget who they are just because they were so uninformed and not old enough to realize you can't play with razor blades. Forgiveness means knowing that who we are is good. Living on this earth, we forget that. But when I look at you and I base my perception of you only on your error, only on your lovelessness,

then I am stuck within that realm of lovelessness. And the Course in Miracles says, you are at the effect of the laws that prevail within the world that you identify with. If I'm willing to extend my perception beyond what my physical senses perceive, your error, your lovelessness, to what I know to be true in you, then I remind both you and myself what is true in us and the situation repairs. And we're going to have to do that on a larger level. The hatred, the cynicism, the anger

on both the left and the right dispels and deflects the possibility for political miracles. And we must open our hearts and still passionately disagree, form boundaries, just like you have boundaries in personal relationships, you have boundaries in political relationships, but you can do all of that with love.

You can do all of that with respect and humility. And to me, that's the portal through which we can walk to a more sustainable world. The resistance to forgive, that impulse that we feel when we sense that we've been wronged is ostensibly to shoulder a burden. It's a self-punishment, right? And there is a liberation or a freedom that happens when you can develop the facility to let go of it, to forgive, as difficult as that might be. And that forgiveness should be sort of turned inward as well,

like self-forgiveness is a big piece of that as well. Well, you can't forgive yourself if you don't forgive others. That's why the Course says you become generous out of self-interest. The Course says when you're attacking someone, blaming someone, imagine that there is a sword falling down on their head, but it's actually falling down on yours, because at the deepest level, if you get into the metaphysics of it, there's no place where you stop and I start.

None of us, except enlightened masters, are perfect at any of this, but even making the effort transforms our lives. Yeah, we've all seen our soul elevated by witnessing somebody forgive somebody where logic would dictate that maybe they shouldn't. And we understand fundamentally that that is a noble act, right, that is nourishing. And yet we're in a culture where we're increasingly judging everybody based on their worst day and canceling people and saying, you go away now and that's it for you. There is no room, at least in the social media space for that forgiveness. And yet, unless we find a way back to that, a way to prioritize it and inject it into our kind of discourse and conduct,

you know, we're lost. You are so right. I think you put it so well, you know, we're judging everybody according to their worst day or their most stupid tweet. Everything's, I gotcha. It's terrible. You know, many years ago,

my best friend who has since passed, we were sitting in my bedroom and I was on the phone with someone who worked for me. And I started yelling at the guy. I got off the phone and Richard said to me, what was that? And I said, well, he did this or he didn't do that or whatever it was. And Richard looked at me and he went, Marianne, he made a mistake. People make mistakes. And, you know, it was a brick to my forehead, I remember. And no matter what he did, the fact that you were such a bitch about it makes you know better than, I got it. I mean, I'm not 100% of practicing it, but a lot better than I used to be because people make mistakes. Yeah. So how do we try to create space for that? The Course in Miracles says, you say, dear God, I'm willing to see this differently.

You know, the path that we are here to monitor is not somebody else's. You know, it's like you were talking about AA, you're not here to take somebody else's inventory. Right. The path you're here to monitor very vigilantly is your own. Dear God, I see how self-righteous I am in this moment. Dear God, I see how judgmental I am in this moment.

Dear God, I see how blaming, like, who do, how do I think I am? Dear God, take this away from me. And then, and then, and I see this all the time. Then what happens is sometimes you realize, just keep your mouth shut. There's nothing that even needs to be said. Sometimes you realize, oh, there's something that's going to need to be communicated here, but you will communicate it from such a different place. communicated here, but you will communicate it from such a different place. You will communicate it from elegance and charity

and compassion. Of course, a miracle says, if you're judging and attacking someone, you're wrong even if you're right. Right, but we have a social media ecosystem. Oh yeah, we do. That has a misalignment of incentives because it's rewarding people for that level of judgment and invective. We do, but each and every one of us

can refuse to participate in that and do what we can because there's also some beautiful stuff on social media. You know, there's a line in the course where it says, nothing in the world is unholy or holy except as determined by its purpose, what the mind is doing with it. And you can see incredible things, incredible good that comes from social media, and you can see terrible, even evil things that emerge from social media. It all gets back to the ethics and the principles of right and wrong and enlightenment that I do think so many of us are at least trying for.

A New York Times bestselling author, monk, philanthropist, activist, and teacher, His Holiness Radhanath Swami is a man that radiates love. He radiates compassion and grace with this really sweet and joyous disposition that has immeasurably impacted millions of souls across the world. In this next clip, Radnath explains the idea of a spiritual calling and how following a calling can shape someone into the person they were meant to become. they were meant to become. We all have our calling,

and it's not really so important what age we have that calling, but when that calling for goodness, when that calling for truth, when that calling for light, when that calling to be the change that you want to see in the world, and I deeply believe it's God's calling coming from within us, which could echo from around us through other voices too. But ultimately, it's a calling from within.

We all have our ways of responding to that calling too. But in my life, this is how I responded to that calling too. But in my life, you know, this is how I responded to that calling. Hmm. Yeah, I suppose in order to heed whatever calling is happening, you have to be present and aware enough to notice it's arising. And sometimes situations in the world that are startling, that are worrisome, even sometimes situations that appear hopeless, they alert us to responding to that calling. So, you find yourself in London, you're trekking about Europe, you're in Athens, you're sitting on the banks of the Thames in London at night, soaking in the moon, watching the river flow. At some point, you have this undeniable urge or calling to go to India. So, walk me through that experience. Well, you know, coming from Northern Illinois,

I went to Europe with two of my friends. We were supposed to be there for just two months and then come back for going back to college. I went to one semester of college. And that was the plan. That was our plan. But we got robbed the first day we were in Europe, and we had no money. And one of my friends went back to America that same day. And the other, you know, we made the scene in various places, and we were very popular. In many ways, we saw the world was opening up to us like anything, even though we really didn't have a home or money or anything, my heart, and it was getting louder and louder and louder. And that's really what started me on this quest. I was spending a lot of time on riverbanks and in forests, and I was meditating and reading various spiritual literatures from various religions. I was going to synagogues.

I was going to churches. I was going to cathedrals. I lived in Catholic monasteries. I was studying. I was searching. I was going to museums to study art, to find spiritual clues. And eventually I was living in a cave on the Isle of Crete, which is part of Greece. And I was just praying to God for direction. there that I had this voice within my heart that said, go to India. And I had never met an Indian person in my life. I've never ate a chili pepper in my life. I had no map. I had no money for a map. But I just left my friend the next day and started hitchhiking to India.

started hitchhiking to India. And I just believed if I just go in the eastern direction, eventually I'll get there. You're going to get there eventually, right? You travel through Afghanistan, you're immersed in extreme poverty in that situation, you're in Pakistan, you have this extraordinary story about getting caught up at the border between Pakistan and India. Can you tell that story? Well, I hitchhiked through Turkey and then Iran and then through Afghanistan and Pakistan. The whole trip took over four months. Now I get on an airplane from London and I do it in nine hours, the same amount of distance. But it's not as educational. But it's much safer, for sure. When I finally, when I was in the European countries, I was studying Christianity and Judaism.

When I was in the Middle East, I was studying Islam from some Islamic scholars and very holy people, actually. holy people, actually. And when I finally came to the border of India, India and Pakistan, you know, have been in conflict politically for, you know, since the partition. And there's a no man's land between the two countries. And when I left the border of Pakistan, I had to walk a couple hours through this no man's land to get to India. And at that time, the border post was in a forest near the city of Ferozpur in Punjab. And when I arrived, in Punjab. And when I arrived, they asked how much money I had. And as far as I remember, I had 26 cents in about four different currencies. And the immigration agent was very, very angry. She said that we have enough beggars in India.

We don't want another one. Go back to where you came from. And I pleaded with her that I just hitchhiked from London and I got so many diseases that almost killed me and people tried to kill me and so many difficulties I had to get here because I want to learn from your people. Please give me a chance. And she wouldn't do it. So for hours and hours and hours, I was just sitting under a tree and kept coming back and asking and getting rejected. But the problem was I couldn't go back to Pakistan either because I only had a one-time visa. So I was in this no man's land and there were no cell phones in 19, this was 1970. And there was no phone booths. There was no, I was just there.

And finally, just around the sunset time, the guards changed. And one man from the Sikh community, who was a soldier, took the post. took took the post and after the other immigration drove off in a jeep i i went to him and this man said to me that i have been ordered by my commanding officer to reject you unless you show me at least two hundred dollars At least $200. At that point, I cried. And I really cried because, you know, I was 19 years old and I, it was hopeless. And I begged. I said, I've given up everything of my life to learn from your country and to learn for your people.

Please, just give me a chance. And I promise you that someday I'll do something good for the people of India. And being an immigration agent, he looked into my eyes with such an interrogating glance. He was just looking into my mind and into my heart. For about a minute, he just stared at me. And then he spoke. He said, sometimes a man must follow his heart. And even though I have been ordered to reject you, I am going to give you the chance that you're crying for. And then he stamped my passport and said, welcome to India. I love that. That's beautiful. I feel like you need to reunite with him. I would like to see you visit him again and recount that story to him.

I wish we could. But that was, this year marks 50 years since that event happened. And so what was it about this experience in India that was so compelling and transformative for you? Well, I went to the Himalayas and I was studying from yogis. Some of them were living in the forests and mountains and in caves, and I was going to different ashrams of different saints or gurus. Some of them were very famous, some of them were unknown to the world.

I was studying Burmese Buddhism and Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhism and Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism. And I met people who were from the Baha'i faith. I was really trying to understand. And of course, within the Hindu faith, there's so many different branches of ways of approaching the one supreme being. So I was just like a little sponge that was absorbing and absorbing and absorbing and learning. And many situations were such blessings to my heart. Some of them were very disappointing and some of them were enthralling and so full of joy and gratitude. But they all kind of were bringing me forward in my search. And, Rich, I ended up like this. And Rich, I ended up like this.

We continue this exploration of faith with one of the most fascinating spiritual leaders in America today, a Lutheran pastor and public theologian dedicated to redefining how we think about church, how we practice religion, how we ritualize divinity and cultivate community. I'm talking about Nadia Bowles-Weber. In this clip, Nadia and I discuss the concept of grace, how it's often inconvenient and frustrating, and how it can lead us towards living lives filled with more compassion. I mean, the thing I've written about more than anything and spoken about more than anything in my career is the idea of grace. And grace is a really difficult thing for us because it means, it inherently means the ball's not in our court. You can't earn it.

It's not something that you climb toward. It's something that you get. And on some level, we think if it's free, it must be worthless. And so I think that people, instead of focusing on grace, like to focus on being good. But being good has never set me free in the way that truth has and things that have interrupted me from outside of me. So... Well, I think good or the pursuit of being good is the thing that provokes the feelings of less than and shame and guilt and insecurity, whereas grace is permissive, right? But grace is also

something that you describe as being a pain in the ass from time to time. Like, it's inconvenient. For sure. Especially when it's, when the reason grace is tricky is because I want to feel like I've made myself worthy of something. And if it's truly grace, it means it has nothing to do with worthiness. It just is. And that's hard. And then also grace sucks because if it's true for me, it means it also is true for the people who've hurt me. And I don't like that.

That's definitely inconvenient. I don't like that. Right. And I'm all for it until we get to that. That's why I always say that like, with my luck, I'll be seated at the heavenly banquet between like Ann Coulter and some racist cop. Yeah. Right.

Exactly. Like, if you believe in grace, it's like super uncomfortable in that way because self-righteousness is just never an option. And I love self-righteousness like I love chocolate. And so... Pete It's intoxicating. Jennifer It is. But self-righteousness... Pete And purity plays right into that.

Jennifer 100%. Pete Because if you really feel like you're more pure than your fellow person, that just, you're right on your bully pulpit to be self-righteous. Jennifer Yeah, totally. Well, that's why it was that moment was so interesting when I was interviewing Lance Armstrong. I had that conversation with Lance Armstrong on stage at Nantucket because that day it was so interesting when people knew I was the one.

So, I'm like obsessed with the idea of compassion right now, but not like as a virtue to adopt to be good. Fuck that. Nothing's ever worked like that for me. I'm not like if someone's like, oh, did you read that really great book about compassion? I'd be like, yeah, not interested. But I'm, because I'm such a pragmatist, I'm super interested in the effect of compassion. That I'm interested in. Because when somebody's been in a true space of compassion, right across from me, it's moved the needle for me in terms of considering something I

hadn't considered on my own, seeing a way I might have been wrong. Like it's a safe and it's a loose place to consider those things. Whereas when someone's been accusatory or challenging or calling me out, I immediately get defensive. I can't hear it, right? So, I'm just obsessed with this idea of what's the effect of compassion on me or even on my body in conversations. And so, this person I know who does trauma work, they work with people in trauma. I was asking them like, how do you, how in the world do you manage to not be completely depleted all the time taking in these stories. And she had this image I just can't get over, which is, she said, I imagine the heart of God, like, right behind my heart. So that whatever that person is saying, I feel it genuinely, because it comes through my heart,

but it doesn't land there. It lands in the heart of God. So, and then anything that comes out of me towards them doesn't originate from my own resources and deplete me. It originates from the heart of God and just comes through me, right? I'm obsessed with this. Well, that's a very, like, unique and specific way of imagining healthy boundaries for yourself, right? Right.

Okay. So that day when people knew I was the one having a conversation with Lance, they said, hey, don't let him off easy. Like people would come up to me all day and be like. Well, when it comes to Lance, everyone's going to have an opinion or some advice. Right. Okay. But like, why?

Right? So, I was... What is the end game? Because we love to know who we're better than, right? We're obsessed with it. So, if somebody so obviously had a fall from grace, there's the scapegoating instinct in the human being is almost inescapable. This is why, like when Brian Williams, you know, when his career had that huge

bump, because he didn't actually falsify a news account, he exaggerated a personal story, which, by the way, we all have done. And every single time we do it, it creates an icky feeling in us. And those icky feelings build up, and we have to do something with them. So, what do we do? We wait until someone like Brian Williams comes along, and we just throw all of our icky feelings build up, and we have to do something with them. So, what do we do? We wait until someone like Brian Williams comes along, and we just throw all of our icky shit that we don't want to tell anyone onto them, and then we have to kill them, right? It's this collective way of relieving the anxiety of the group. And we think that's going to make us feel better. That's right. But actually, it's like empty calories.

It completely is. I mean, self-righteousness, I always say, feels good for a minute, but only in a way that peeing your pants feels warm for a minute. You know, then you smell bad. It's cold. You know what I mean? Okay. So, I'm having this conversation with Lance. And I'm currently.

Can I just. Hold on. Let me just say one thing. I don't want to interrupt you. But, like, this was my first exposure to you. And everybody needs to know, like, you're. All right. So, Nadia's going to interview Lance.

And it's in the round at this very cool event called the nantucket project and you're opening this is what i'm telling yeah okay you are okay so i won't steal it no no okay this is where i'm going all right so just so you know they had asked me nadia would you so i'm i'm really interested in compassion right now i'm only really experimenting with it. I don't want anybody to be impressed. I'm just, I'm dabbling in compassion. Okay. So, but I'm thinking about it a lot. And they said, would you have a conversation on stage with Lance Armstrong? And I said, yeah, I totally would. Right? Then they said, would you have a conversation on stage with Sean Spicer? And I said, no, fuck that guy. Like, just to say, my ability to be open and

compassionate, fucking limited. Okay, so, I get to that day, everyone's like, give him a hard time. And I sit there and I have that image of compassion, of having God's heart behind mine, and sort of being open to this human being across from me as a person with a unique story, and that most of which none of us know, right? Most of us don't really know this human being's full story. this human being's full story. And I said to him, opening thing I said was, Lance, I see from my notes that you took drugs you weren't supposed to, and then you lied about it. And then I said, oh my God, I did that shit so many times. Pete It was so great. Pete And everyone laughed. Pete How long did it take you to figure that line out?

It was just that day. I was like, how is this going to happen? It just broke the ice. Totally. And everybody, there was like this catharsis. There was a catharsis, not just with him, but the whole audience who's like holding this tension. And then I looked around and I don't know if you remember, I said, you raise your hand, audience. If you at any point in your life took drugs, you weren't supposed to enlighten about it.

And people are like, yeah, I did that shit. You know, they raise their hand. Yeah, but there's also a lot of yeah, but. Correct. I get that. I get that. And it's tricky with Lance. You know, I see the gray and I've interviewed him for this podcast and I got the same thing.

Like, you know, you weren't hard enough. You were too hard. I mean, everybody's got an opinion on this guy. got an opinion on this guy. And my only agenda was, I want to understand this person better, who's on the receiving end of, you know, a lot of criticism and a lot of celebratory pats on the back. Like, how confusing for a human being and how many people on planet Earth have been as high as he has gone and as low. And that's inherently fascinating and it's incredibly human to explore that. Coming back for more, but first. One of the biggest spiritual and existential questions

that humanity has grappled with for millennia is what happens when we die? spiritual, and existential questions that humanity has grappled with for millennia is, what happens when we die? And here to respond to that question are Rainn Wilson and Reza Aslan from the Metaphysical Milkshake podcast. Each of them shares their perspective on the afterlife, but more importantly, reflects on the implications for how what we believe about the afterlife affects how we live while we're here. Here's Rain and Reza. What happens after we die,

I've talked about my belief as a Baha'i, in the Baha'i faith we believe that there's an analogy that the body, it's not just the Baha'i faith, there's many spiritual traditions that the body is a cage and that our reality is the bird within the cage. And when the cage is broken, the bird goes free. And that's not something to be mourned, the brokenness of the body or of the cage,

it's to be celebrated the glorious journey of the bird flying free of the material and physical limitations. But I will say that I recently had a friend pass away and this has been a big year of death for me. My father passed away about a year ago. The co-founder of our nonprofit in Haiti died of cancer. And then one of my dear friends died of cancer. Sorry to hear that. Thanks, recently. And, you know, it's such a tricky topic, but there are good ways to die and there's not so good ways to die. And in fact, one of our episodes, I'm sorry, I feel like I'm really plugging the hell out of this podcast. Well, we do ask a lot of these questions.

But we had a- You are here to do that anyway. A little bit. Just lean into it, Brian. We had a death doula on the show and she was amazing. And that's like a birth doula. It's exactly what you think it is, yeah. And it's, she helps you transition towards death. And that can be everything from like,

where do you keep all your Facebook passwords? And also, how do you want your ceremony to be? How do you wanna pass? What do you want your deathbed to look like? Yeah, that was the big question, what your deathbed. So in having these discussions, we talk a lot about death and this friend of mine who passed away, like he didn't wanna look at death.

And I think probably because he was mostly atheist. I think that he was like a third, you know, wandering, but mostly. And so for him, his journey towards this inevitability of death, because he was given stage four stomach cancer, was like, I'm gonna fight cancer tooth and nail with every power in my being, which is great. Right.

Which is important. But fueled by this terror of death. Fueled by terror and a kind of like, and I would be always the voice to talk to him and say, David, can we talk about this a little bit? Or I would send him like a little writing about from the Dalai Lama or a Buddhist text or something about death.

And I would encourage him to get some therapy, help process the emotions around it. But we live in the Western culture in this abject terror of death. We don't talk about death. A friend of mine was telling me that now in contemporary society, the Victorians never talked about sex, but talked about death all the time in Victorian England.

There were death parties and there would be corpse viewings and seances. And there was just this thing. And sex was not talked about. Now we just talk about sex and everything. Reality TV shows are just literally like, hey, these people are going to hook up. But this idea that we are so afraid to talk about death. And it is the one thing that we all have in common, everyone on this podcast and everyone listening to this podcast. And if we embrace it as a continuation of the mystery, and yes, it's scary.

We can have a very different relationship to death. Yeah. Yeah, I think it is less about what happens when we die. I mean, anybody who answers that question with any level of certitude is somebody I'm probably not going to trust. Right. I was just gonna say that. But it is about appreciation of death

and how to bring death into our daily experience so that we can appreciate the richness of life. Because that is a certitude and a certain duality that we need to understand. Our culture is so whitewashed of any references to death whatsoever. And despite our brains intellectually- Look at the mass denial happening in our country right now.

It's unbelievable. 650,000 people dead in our country in a year and four months. And we're not talking about it. And they're partying like it's 1999 and there's no one is looking at it. And so half of the population is going, I'm sorry to say this is going,

like what the fuck? And I know that gets- I think it is a reflection of this very thing, right? Because we're so afraid of death and we have so little, I mean, like, we don't connect with it in any way. Like the minute somebody dies, they're removed from our line of sight. And we don't have language for how to talk about it

in a healthy way beyond kind of like the traditional structures around funerals, et cetera. And I think intellectually, we all understand that we're gonna die, but I think deep down, we all think somehow we're gonna figure out and run around it for us personally. And that creates that like low grade fear

that we carry with us that forces us to even put it further out of our- Well, I think the answer is ultra marathons. Here's what I would say. Yeah, I mean, obviously I have no idea what the hell happens after we die, but to go back to kind of what I would say. Yeah, I mean, obviously I have no idea what the hell happens after we die, but to go back to kind of what I was saying earlier about the scientific fact that we are eternal, right?

That the things that make me what I am, I mean like the cells in my body, the atoms, you know, the sort of most base structure of what has created this body is eternal, is forever. Those things don't just go away, they become my cells, my atoms, they are forever. They don't just stop being. They just stop being me. But I am more than just this physical body. Whether you believe in a soul or not, you believe in consciousness. A lot of philosophers, a lot of theologians will say, your consciousness is your soul. Stop thinking of them as different things.

That your ability to say, I am me, is you recognizing and communing with what is your soul. Whatever consciousness is, and we don't know, is involved in our biological processes, right? So, I guess what I'm saying is, when I die, all the things that make up my material self continue forever. That's science. continue forever. That's science. The matter continues forever. The energy continues forever. Well, if my consciousness is in some ways the sum of my matter and my energy, then who's to say my consciousness doesn't continue forever in some way, shape or form. Do you know what I mean? So when people ask me, like, do you believe in life after death? That to me is life after death. That the thing that makes me me continues in some way that like my consciousness doesn't disappear because my consciousness is

the result of matter and energy and matter and energy doesn't disappear. And that's very Sufi. Right. Yeah. So the answer is, I don't know, but that's, that's my kind of prevailing theory. There's a great metaphor in the Baha'i writings that I've talked about in my chapter on death, which is, it's pretty simple. It's kind of like the bird in the cage one.

It's a little bit, you might go, that's kind of simple, but it's also profound. And that is that when we're a baby in the womb, we're growing what we need for this physical world. So we're in floating in this kind of stasis, growing our bones, our eyelashes, our ears and lips and eyebrows and elbows and everything that we're going to need. And it says the baby has no idea why it's growing elbows. If you ask the baby,

interview the baby, what's up with the elbows baby? Like, I have no idea. I'm sitting in this amniotic sack. I'm fine. I'm connected with my mother. It's all, it's all good elbows. I don't need elbows. But then there's this very scary event of like going through the birth canal i'm like oh shit this whole this whole experience is coming to an end this is terrifying there's blood there's pain there's discomfort but what an incredible world we get born into you get to kind of you know you get to see, you know, Picasso paintings and you get to have, you know, parties and you get to fall in love and there's all kinds of new experiences await you. Well, the same thing happens. So I don't know what happens when we die, but I think metaphorically

speaking, we are like the death doula might say, we are being born into a new experience and that what we're growing in this world are not physical arms and legs. We're growing spiritual arms and legs and elbows. We're growing patience and kindness and humility and compassion and love and honesty. And these qualities that are kind of, quote unquote, higher qualities, but qualities of light, those are what we take with us when we're plunged through that painful, difficult, bloody, difficult, painful birth canal of death into this other reality. I love that.

There's also something beautiful about wonder and not knowing the answer that I think gives our lives a level of richness. Like if we could know everything, is that something that we should aspire to? And or is it even possible to know everything? Is it possible to answer that question with certitude, what happens after death?

And if we could answer it, should we? What does it actually mean to drift between this life and the afterlife? Are there personal or universal truths to be gleaned from those who have survived a near-death experience? Well, my conversation with ultra runner Tommy Rives shines a light on those questions as he unpacks the particular spiritual awareness that he gleaned as a result of the coma he endured for several months. I hope you find this experience as profound

and as enlightening as I did. Where do you think he went? Like paint that picture for me of being in that in between. Oh gosh, there was exhaustion, I think, is the overwhelming feeling that I felt initially. And it was that I was trying so hard to stay here. I could sense that something was pulling me. And it was painful.

It was uncomfortable. Um, I was trying really, really hard to not leave whatever this was, um, trying to be held by my body still. And, and then I remember there was a, there was a time where I, um, where I was just so tired, just so, so tired. And I remember thinking, I don't wanna do this anymore. I don't think I can do this anymore. And by then I'd lost any recollection that I had a life here. I didn't remember that I had kids. I didn't remember that I had kids. I didn't remember, um,

you know, that I lived in Flagstaff, that I, um, any of it. Um, and there was a, there was a point where the weird thing is that Steph was always with me the entire time. I thought, I thought we were on this just grand adventure, you know, that we were exploring the cosmos together. And, um, and I got to a point where,

um, it's going to be hard. Um, I stopped, um, I made the conscious decision that I was going to be done, that I didn't want to fight whatever was pulling me away anymore, that I didn't have the strength to fight it anymore. And there was a sense of peace and just comfort in wherever it was that i was going and um and i saw it and it was inviting and um beautiful and safe and um And Steph nudged me and she said, you've got to go back.

And I said, I don't want to go back. Like, look at this place. I said, come with me. Just come with me. Like, don't you want to be here too? And she grabbed my face and, and turned my head. And, um, I said, I don't, I don't want to go back. And she said, and I could see in the distance my girls, and I'd forgotten that they even existed. And she said, you don't have a choice.

You've got those three little girls that you've got to go home to. And I remember seeing it and being so angry just because I felt like, I don't know how I'm going to do this. I don't have the strength to go back. I'm so, I'm so done. You know, I'm so ready to just, just stop fighting, whatever this is. And, um, I remember just closing my eyes and breathing and just kind of just accepting it. It was like, okay, I guess I don't have a choice. I guess I have to come back. And then the pull, all of that fighting that I had done to stay where I had been initially,

it was the same amount of effort to come back. But this idea, like the mysteries of consciousness when you're in a comatose state, right, is fascinating. And you have this, you know, basically near death experience that you recollect with incredible clarity. The idea that you had awareness in that liminal space is fascinating.

And coming out of that and now with some time and distance between that experience and where you're at now, like what do you make of that like spiritually? You know, like that's a trip. Right, yeah. I don't see it in any way as though like, oh, I discovered the truth. You know, I had this, I had this vision, I had this experience, and this is the experience that you have. I don't,

I don't feel that way at all. It was the experience that I had, but I remember, we continue. We don't, it's not just darkness. It doesn't just end. Um, but it's, um, and it's right here. It's all happening right here, but it's, it's different. Um, But I remember realizing that, okay, if I become unmoored from this body, I can't go back. And I will still be here, right here. All of this will still be happening. But I won't have the ability to communicate with everybody who's still in that space. And I remember thinking how agonizing that would be to see my girls and that they would still be right here,

but I wouldn't be able to communicate to them. I wouldn't be able to let them know. But you would have awareness of the other dimension. But also complete awareness of all of their fear and all of their questions and all of their questions and all of their grief and all of their heartache and being able to see it and feel all of it, but not be able to reach across and say, but I'm still right here.

Just so you know, I'm still right here. Wow. And that was, the fear of that was a huge, uh, motivator. Um, I remember also thinking and, and feeling and seeing, um, that, um, that heaven and hell, um, they exist, but they exist to everybody simultaneously. And they exist in proportion to the amount of love that we gave and the amount of love that we were able to receive. And then the hell part is the recollection and the understanding

of all of the love that we didn't give and didn't receive when we could have. And that heaven and hell exist simultaneously based off of the different relationships that we had while we had the opportunity to express those things. And that there could be a sense of heaven, such a big term, but a sense of peace with the way that we conducted ourselves with a certain individual and the complete opposite was an awareness of the way that we connect ourselves with somebody else. And that it is all, that it's all connected, that it all continues. And that,

gosh, just the urgency of now. And of now and that what we continue to feel beyond this is directly linked with the way that we interact with people. Comfort ourselves now. Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, that's so powerful. There is not this idealistic future somewhere down the line where we're going to find happiness. You know, where happiness exists there and we're going to be happy, you know, that we're going to get there and everything's going to be right. We're going to have this sense of just contentment and rest and ease. It's like, that doesn't exist. It's right, it's right now.

It's all happening this very moment. It's the choice that you make about how to experience your life moment to moment. The heaven and hell, heaven and hell are all happening all the time to all of us. The entire range of human emotions, experiences are all happening all the time to all of us. The entire range of human emotions, experiences, all of that is happening to us all the time. And whether or not we experience that joy, that happiness is based on our ability to see it as it's happening

rather than in retrospect, rather than looking back and saying, oh, okay, I was happy. I didn't realize it, but I was. Things were really good back then. Those were the good old days, you know? We don't ever realize that until after the fact. And our ability to have joy, to have happiness, to be happy, it is 100% based on our capacity to see it as it's happening. When we investigate what it means to have a spiritual life, to live a spiritual life, to pursue a spiritual life, we can benefit from learning concrete principles by which to live.

principles by which to live. Enter Raghunath Kapo, a punk rock vanguard who walked away from a successful music career to don the robes of a monk. In this final clip, Raghunath takes us through six very practical codes for living distilled from the ancient teachings of a renowned Indian scholar and mystic that when practiced are extremely valuable. So what is the process of rewiring that? Like when you go to the ashram and you start living as a monk, what is the teaching like? And what is the day-to-day existence

where you start to, you know, intuit these teachings and put them into practice? Well, there's a lot to share. I'm working on a book right now that extracted six very powerful principles that I taught from the teachings. And the first one is, and these are based on the teachings

of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, who is a great, considered by some as a child prodigy, because he was a child prodigy in Sanskrit. Some other people that knew him more intimately thought of him as a mystic, because he performed so many mystical things, Christ-like mysticism.

But his intimate followers, who are great gurus in their own right, they considered him an avatar. So his teachings were very simple. And one of him is very basic and it's a great takeaway. If you want to take away anything from today, you can take this way. Stop criticizing other people. Like the sound coming out of your mouth can be toxic.

And that was a powerful thing. Stop criticizing. I realized I'm living with so much criticism in my mind. That doesn't mean we should throw discernment out. We need discernment. But the condemning language that happens on a regular basis from finding fault with other people and how you would do things so much better

if you were doing them, cut it out. Stop letting that pour out of your mouth. That's a big one. If you want, I'll just run through these six. Yeah, let's do it. No, this is great. That's one. And first of all, when did this guy live?

What is this like? Same time Columbus was showing up here. This person Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, was in Bengal and traveled throughout India. And basically, it was a renaissance of bhakti. Bhakti yoga means connecting to source through love. That's all the word really means. And so a lot of the practices are singing, are cooking, are meditation, but everything is an action. You're acting in a loving way and dealing with other people.

And so, yeah, this is one of the teachings. The book is called The Six Pillars of Bhakti. And so one is not criticizing. The second one is being tolerant. Whereas criticism deals with other people. Another one is just dealing with life situation and stop blaming the world for your unhappiness. And this is very powerful.

It's transformational. Even if you're a materialist, this main teaching can transform your life. But if you want to really experience like the higher echelons of meditation, it's got to be there. Criticism, tolerance, and this is a huge one, number three. If you can add this one to your life, it's just such a game changer. It's, I take no offense, meaning I will not be offended on a regular basis.

And that's a very common thing. Sometimes we could see somebody talking over there and I get offended. I think they're talking about me. So without provocation, I think someone's got something against me. And sometimes we'll walk around holding some resentment for a person who didn't even mean anything. And that gets split in two things. Cause sometimes people don't mean anything,

but due to some proclivity that I have, that I don't trust the world, that I take an offense and I carry that resentment around with me and it becomes a burden. But sometimes people have hurt me. They've actually deliberately hurt me, but still that desire or that need to forgive has to be there. Because in the Bhakti culture is nothing's actually happening to me, it's happening for me, that there's a benevolent

energy lifting us higher and higher and higher. And we have to, and we have to see that everything is for my edification, for my purification and sometimes even tragic things. And so there's a firm faith that everything's happening for me. Now we shouldn't be, we shouldn't be heartless when it comes to someone else's suffering. I should see, okay, he's having a hard time. We should feel like I have to reach out to that person. They're having a hard time. But for my own situation, I should feel like, I'm going through a hard time

and this must be for my benefit. What is that benefit? And I can look at life like that. So we don't hold any resentment. We don't criticize, we're tolerant. Next one, we see the good in others and we let them know it. Find good.

And this is what we're talking about. Instead of finding what this person's doing so wrong, what are they doing right? Why are they good? This is such a powerful practice in this day and age. Because otherwise we're gonna lock in and we're just gonna foster hate with others. And we're gonna have no commonality whatsoever.

What do we have in common? What is right about this person? And it's such a great thing. Truthfully, it's a marriage saver. It's a relationship saver. What is good about this person? And then sharing it with them, telling them why I appreciate you.

And that lack of appreciation can really kill, it can kill love quick. I mean, isn't that what romance is, is full 100% appreciation for that person. Right, and the piece, the second piece about letting that person know is crazy powerful. Right. And it's something that most of us

don't do nearly enough of. I mean, we might have a person that would do anything for us. They would come anywhere at any time at any moment. Hey, I need your help. Can you come here? Yeah. That person, I never let them know how much I appreciate them. Sometimes the people that are the closest to us, we never share with them how much we appreciate them. Right. And in you recounting these lessons, I'm thinking, this should be the terms and conditions on Twitter. Like what if you, before you could log onto Twitter, you had to read through these sort of, you know, guidelines or, you know, sort of guideposts for how to behave or acquit yourself because everything that you just shared

is so anathema to the way that we conduct ourselves in the kind of public conversations that are happening on social media. And we're all seeing, you know, the fractures, the fissures that are starting to expand in the fabric of, you know, our society, like we're no longer able to productively communicate in a healthy way. And it's because we've lost sight of these very things that allow us to remember that we are truly one. And no one's happy.

They're all sad. Even if they're righteous, they're just like sad in their righteousness of their rightness. So that anyway, that's, see the good in others, let them know it. The appreciation is such a powerful, it's powerful in this world

and it's powerful in the spiritual realm as well. That's why I love this stuff because it's relevant. It's real. It's not just like, when I die, I'll go to heaven. Who cares? I don't know about heaven. I don't know anything about heaven. I don't even know if it's real, but I do know these are very, very practical in this life for my own personal joy, my own personal integrity, my relationships. You were saying like, yeah, people in Twitter should learn this. The reason why I sort of like extracted these from the teachings, because I was taking groups every year. I take a group on

pilgrimage this year. I'm going to Nepal. It's sort of like, you would like it. You should go to these various like spiritual sites all over the world, right? Spiritual sites all over the world. So we go trek this year, we're going trekking through Nepal in April. And so half the time is trekking and then holy places. And Nepal is like an old part of the Indian kingdom. One of the Indian kingdoms, they preserved a lot of the ancient Hindu texts, the Buddhist texts,

and it's got whatever, 1300 Himalayan peaks. So we're gonna do day hiking half the time. When are you doing that? April, come. Wow. Be great. That's tempting. But keep going.

And then we do India every year, which is also great and holy places. But you're bringing a bunch of people to India who've never been to a third world country and we're traveling together and they're not used to it. And it's a little shocking sometimes. So I've really set up these six pillars

as sort of behavior, sort of guard rails. This is what we do, we don't criticize. And it's sort of a contract. We like mentally sign, I read them over every day. This is what we're doing. We're not gonna criticize, we're not gonna find fault. We're not gonna be resentful, right? And we're gonna find the good in others.

We're gonna let them know it. The next one was quick to apologize. If you feel like you hurt someone's feeling, if you're a little obtuse, you apologize first. You say, hey, I'm sorry. I don't know if that offended you, but please forgive me if it did. A big game changer.

And another one is we keep a tally of how we are blessed. We keep a list of how fortunate we are. A gratitude practice, basically. What's that? A gratitude practice. A gratitude practice. And sometimes people don't have a gratitude practice. They have a, this is unfair practice. This is why, or an entitlement practice. And the problem with that is it's simple math. Entitlement makes you sad.

Gratitude makes you happy. If you feel like the world owes you everything, you're always gonna be miserable. There's never enough the world can owe you. This architecture is not that different from 12-step. And I know you've got this like Bhakti 12 step recovery program. I wanna spend a little bit of time talking about this because there's a lot of similarities,

like do a personal inventory, hold yourself accountable, like take the next right action, make your amends, practice gratitude. All of these things are endemic to recovery and are applicable to humanity at large. This is not like just something that, you know, alcoholics and drug addicts need to figure out a way to master. Because truth is for everyone and no one owns it

and no one's got a monopoly on it. And there's people, Bill Wilson, they're like inspired. They're somehow inspired and they've got the receiver on. Just like right now, there's like radio waves in this room, but we don't have our receivers on. We can't pick up the ham radio receivers or the channels from France or the channels from the country Western station. But when you have that receiver, you can start picking up of all, when you start to fine tune your radar into spiritual truth, not for your ego. If you tune in with your ego and spiritual truth, you'll find your little group that hates, that finds others, but you won't find

commonality and connection. It'll be just another way for your ego to live out in the name of I'm better then. And we find that in any type of, I mean, come on. Like I said, I'm a cult aficionado. I found it when I was a raw foodist. I found it when I was a local farmer growing straight edge Krishna. You can always find people who are into things. You find it in politics. You definitely find it in religion. That if I'm doing something for my self-betterment, I shouldn't become more hateful.

If I'm becoming more hateful, I think I'm doing something wrong. I sincerely hope that after hearing all of these amazing perspectives on spirituality, that you find yourself with an open heart, armed with new practices that can elevate your thinking and behavior toward a more spiritual consciousness and ultimately a more fulfilled life. If you've been inspired by what you've heard and learned today,

then please consider visiting the full in-depth conversations with these esteemed guests. You can find links to each episode in the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. Thanks for listening and watching. And please know that I'm wishing all of you the greatest spiritual life possible. Until next time, peace, plants. Hey. Thank you.