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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Rainn Wilson. Rainn is an American actor, comedian, writer, director, businessman, producer, and activist. He’s best known for his role as Dwight Schrute on the American version of the television comedy, The Office. Other film credits include lead roles in the comedies The Rocker and Super and supporting roles in the horror films Cooties and The Boy. Rainn wrote an autobiography called The Bassoon King and he’s also co-founded the digital media company, Soul Pancake. Rainn Wilson, along with his wife, founded the non-profit organization Lidé. Lidé is an educational initiative that uses the arts and literacy to build resiliency and empower at-risk adolescent girls in rural Haiti helping them to transition into academic or vocational education.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Rainn and I spoke about the profound shift of heart that he experienced that led him back to his Baha’i faith and also, a life of devotion. We talked about God as the great mystery and what it means to strive know the unknowable. We talked about art being an expression of faith and how we can be of service through our artistic expression. Finally, we talked about the founder of the Baha’i faith, Baha’u’llah, why he was tortured and imprisoned during his life, and the Divine Springtime that he predicted will come for the human race.
Here’s my conversation with the very honest, vulnerable, and funny Rainn Wilson.
To begin, Rainn, I have to say I’m really excited to talk with you and I want to thank you for making the time for this. Thank you so much.
Rainn Wilson: Thank you for having me. I’m thrilled and excited to talk to you.
TS: You co-founded a media company called SoulPancake, and from what I’ve been able to learn about SoulPancake, you explore issues at the intersection of philosophy, spirituality, and creativity, which sounds terribly interesting to me and on top of that, you chew on life’s big questions. That’s the subtitle of the book, SoulPancake: Chewing on Life’s Big Questions. I wondered how would you feel about you and I chewing together here on life’s biggest questions?
RW: I love it.
TS: Really?
RW: Let’s get chewing.
TS: Is it okay if I chew with my mouth open?
RW: That would be disgusting, especially on a podcast because everyone would hear the saliva, so let’s not do that.
TS: OK. OK. Here we go. I’d like to know here at the beginning—and then I’m going to share with you what it is for me—but I’d like to know for you, what are the handfuls, so you can count them at least on one hand, that throughout your whole life these questions seem to keep weaving in and out of your life, you return to them. They’re the ones that have really been, you know if my language, the philosophical driver in your life.
RW: OK, good. You’re going right to the meat of the thing. Right to the most personal question possible, too. I love it. OK, so there’s many. I would start with one I know the answer to now, but I struggled with.
TS: Well, that’s even better. I’m happy if you know the answer. That’s great. That’ll save us a lot of time.
RW: I struggled with, “Is there a God?” or “Is there a Creator?” for a couple of decades. That was a big driver through my life. I guess it’s still … I think it’s the biggest question. Believe it or not, it may seem like there’s other big questions, but every other question is really predicated on that one. I still return to that question, but in a kind of a different context because knowing that there is a Creator—a creative force behind this universe and an infinite number of other non-physical universes behind this one—puts everything into context for me. So I still return to that question even though I know the answer to it.
TS: OK, so let’s go into that for a moment. I’m presuming that the answer you came to, based on what you just said, is, “Yes, there is a creative force behind the universe.” How did you come to that as a definitive answer?
RW: I grew up a member of the Baha’i faith and was quite involved in that religious faith as a kid. My parents were very involved with it. They became Baha’is in the late 60s and early 70s. In fact, I just wrote an essay that I just put out today on Patheos.com about the gatherings that they would have with all of these kind of hippy, bohemian spiritual seekers in their house during that era. It was so prevalent to be digging into these big questions. And for people of that generation, spirituality had answers. Nowadays, spirituality is either seen as kind of a hobby that you think about occasionally at a yoga class, or you’re in some kind of fundamentalist religion. And there’s not much middle ground.
It’s certainly, spirituality in our current American Western culture doesn’t seem to hold any answers to life. It holds a lot of obstacles, and sources of disunity and division, but it doesn’t hold answers. But back in the late 60s and early 70s, people thought that spirituality actually had answers to and relevance to their lives. Remember this is when The Beatles were visiting the Maharishi and Cat Stevens became a Muslim. People were exploring different religious faiths. They were exploring spirituality and engaging in these big, deep, discussions. That’s when my parents became Baha’is and I grew up in that milieu, especially, I was born in the late 60s, but especially in the 70s.
This is a long roundabout way of saying, Tami, that I, like so many teenagers, once I left home and got out into college for a little while I just wanted nothing to do with the religion of my parents. I really turned my back on faith. Most of my friends were at least agnostics, if not atheists at that point. I wanted to be a bohemian actor/artist. I didn’t want morality hanging over my head. I didn’t want right or wrong. I was rebelling against my parents and I knew that leaving the faith and leaving God would really hurt them, so I was partly malicious and rebellious. And I just wanted to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it in my 20s, and moved to New York City to be an actor. I really turned my back on all of that.
I guess what really happened for me is I wanted to be an actor and I was being an actor and this was beyond my wildest dreams. I was actually making a living playing characters and that was amazing. At the same time, I was very unhappy. I was deeply unhappy in my life. I was getting into a lot of trouble with drugs and alcohol. I was really like the, what’s the, the Amish kids when they go off the rails. It was kind of similar to that. I grew up in a Baha’i home that was all about peace, love, and unity, and no alcohol and no premarital sex and stuff like that, then kind of went berserk in New York,
But I was really seriously unhappy in my life and that led me to a long journey of asking that question. I had this kind of … You know how on a bad movie trailer they have that record scratch. It kind of goes [errk]. I had that record scratch sound effect in my heart that kind of was like “[Errk]. Wait a minute. Maybe I threw the baby out with the bath water with this whole God thing and maybe there is a Creator, and I just rebelled and just jettisoned all that and I need to go on a journey to discover this for myself. From around 26 to 34 was really the main time that I was really diving into that question.
TS: That’s the kind of question that one has to answer from some type of inner discovery process. You can’t just read a bunch of books or hear what a bunch of other people have to say about it. That’s what I’m curious about. Was there some moment during that time leading up to age 34 where you can now answer this question, “Yes. There’s a Creator.” How did you get there? What gave you that inner conviction?
RW: Well, it was a long journey. It took years. It really hinged around the fact that … It’s hard to share what the internal … I want to share what my internal journey was. When you wake up at three in the morning and you’re a working actor, I had a gorgeous, wonderful girlfriend, who is now my wife, we’ve been together 26 years. At the time I had an awesome apartment in Brooklyn and that was $700 a month, and on the surface everything was perfect. Yet, I would wake up at three in the morning with a kind of a deep longing in my chest of like, “Is this all there is?”
I had shifted my almost evangelical Baha’i belief, when I was a kid, to being an artist. We really believed that we could change the world through doing experimental theater to the right audience. If we did the right production of the Three Sisters to the right 37 people in a church basement, we thought as actors like, “Oh, we could shift their thinking and explode their hearts and have them see the world in a different way.” That wasn’t really happening. I was doing, I was working with a lot of great theater directors. We were doing some great theater productions, but it was not changing hearts and minds and lives. Like I said, waking up at three in the morning and going, “What’s this all about? Why am I so dissatisfied? Why am I so chronically dissatisfied? I’ve got a cool van and an awesome mate, partner. I’m doing plays. I’m living in New York City. This is my dream, but I’m dissatisfied.”
Just inside I just had this … maybe it was my Baha’i upbringing. I thought, “Well, it really does have to do with God because if there is a God, if there’s a Creator, I could be connecting with that Creator right now. I could be praying. I could be asking for help. I could be asking for guidance. I could be asking to be shown my purpose. For me, God and purpose were very linked and if there wasn’t a God, then we’re a simply a random mashup of molecules in a physical space. There was a Big Bang and now we’re here and we have consciousness. We’re just slightly evolved above monkeys, who are just slightly evolved about armadillos, who are just slightly above jellyfish and there may or many not be other conscious life forms in this universe, but there’s… there really is no meaning, ultimately, if we’re just random molecules. It’s just do whatever makes you happy.”
I was doing whatever made me happy and I wasn’t happy. So I started asking my friends, “Do you believe in God?” and my friends all were very, very vague—and this is something that just is a pet peeve of mine. Tami, I’m not going to lie. It’s a pet peeve of people having a very vague idea of God. Like, “I have a general sense,” they would say, my friends would say, “I have a general sense there’s something out there, but I don’t know what, but I know it’s not a judgmental old man with a beard on a cloud scowling down on me. It’s not the God of my parents and my parent’s church and my grandparent’s church or synagogue or temple or mosque. It’s not that, but I have a general sense of something loving out there that’s beyond space and time, but I don’t know what it is.” I would say to them, “If you don’t know what it is, we have to find out. We have to, we have to dig into that question. Let’s go crazy. Let’s really dig into that, like what does that mean? I don’t know.”
I would go into nature and I would meditate. I always felt more connected to purpose and consciousness and reality and a creator or creative force when I was in the beauty of nature. I went to a whole bunch of different religious ceremonies. I went to Buddhist ceremonies where they were chanting “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” and I went to church and I went to Muslim gatherings and I started reading holy books. I read a lot of the big holy books. This was a big deal for me for 10 years. I took this journey, very, very seriously. My journey was a journey of faith. I returned to the faith of my childhood. I like to think that I went back into the Baha’i faith eyes open, well-informed, having explored other religious traditions and other ways of thinking.
One of the things that was really important to me on this journey was I read a number of things about Native American spirituality. That’s what really opened my heart to the possibility of a different kind of god. We’re so laden with this judgmental Judeo-Christian God and this idea of Hell, and if you don’t believe in the right way and if you don’t have water sprinkled on you in the right way, then you’re going to burn in Hell for eternity. That’s not anything anyone really wants to be a part of, but when I went into Native American spirituality, the idea that … For instance, in the Lakota Sioux tradition, God is called Wakan Tanka. I don’t know how to pronounce it. I’m probably pronouncing it wrong. This Wakan Tanka literally translates as “the great mystery”. It’s the god of nature and of our ancestors and is beyond space and time, and is a god of beauty and mystery and being. That really moved me, and it kind of opened my mind and my heart to a different experience of what a creator could be.
TS: OK, so I am with you with understanding, knowing, having an inner confidence in the great mystery and I think that’s a wonderful phrase to use here for this creative force. I hope it’s not too vague for you because you’re the one who brought it up, the great mystery.
RW: Yes.
TS: OK, but what I found is that even knowing that there is a great mystery that underpins all of my life and all of life, that has not actually answered all of my questions and other big questions that I wrestle with. It’s interesting to me that you said, once you really know the answer to that, all of your other questions kind of come under that, and also are released in a certain kind of way. It’s not exactly the words you used, but help me understand why you believe that’s so.
RW: Well, oh, there’s so many different ways to approach that. Well, you sound to me like you believe that there is a great mystery, that there is something more out there than random molecules.
TS: Yes. Yes.
RW: That’s awesome, and you’re on this journey and you have your podcast and your writing and your company and all the work that you do with different writers and the CDs, the meditation stuff that you guys do, and you’re encouraging other people to go on that journey, you’re on that journey yourself and that’s all that’s important. I just salute you and all listeners and everyone that’s just on that journey to discover the great mystery because that’s really what it’s all about. Number one, I want to say that.
Number two is, in the Baha’i tradition—I don’t want this podcast to be just a plug for the Baha’i faith or something like that, but it is my faith, so I have to kind of turn to it for some wisdom and from what I’ve discovered. In the Baha’i tradition God is unknowable, and at the same time we are taught and we say a prayer every day that we have been created to know and to worship God. How can we be created to know something that’s unknowable? To me that is… It kind of flummoxes you, but at the same time it’s really exciting. Like, that’s cool. As an artist— I’m a hacky sitcom actor, but at one point in time I was an artist—and I think of myself as an artist sometimes. As an artist, I love the idea of striving to know the unknowable. That’s a journey. It’s not a result, but as long as you know that you’re on that journey then that is a god, so that is an answer.
The other answer is life is meaningless. We’re a random assemblage of molecules. I want to seek out as much pleasure and “happiness” as possible until I die and then my consciousness will switch off like a light switch and that’ll be the end of it. You can pretend to create whatever meaning you want to create out of it, but everyone’s just going to create their own separate meanings. But spiritual seekers are on a journey to know this unknowable force. I don’t know if I answered that question.
TS: I like, first of all, you addressing everyone on a journey and all of us exploring together knowing the unknowable. It’s interesting. Here we are. We’re chewing on life’s biggest questions together, and what I want to say to you, Rainn, right here at the beginning, is this is a great joy to me. To me, there’s a great joy and like you said, “You’re getting right to it,” but getting right at what the core is and being willing to talk about it, because I think so often we don’t do that. It’s under the surface of our lives, but we don’t actually talk about this thing that’s the center point.
OK. Here’s the big question that in many ways has fueled my search for a long time. Not as much anymore even though I don’t know the answer to it. So I’m excited to ask you, which is: what happens when we die?
RW: Well, what happens when we die? That’s the number two great question because that really goes to question one because, again, if we’re a random assemblage of molecules bumping into each other forming consciousness, a step above monkeys, and we die, the light switch goes out and that’s it. So we had a good run, you know? 60, 70, 80, 90 years, whatever we had on the planet. You had a good experience as this kind of very highly evolved animal and then your consciousness goes away. That’s one option. A lot of people in secular America believe that option.
A lot of people in the fundamentalist America believe that if you believe in Jesus in the right way, in this specific way, to believe in Jesus or Mohamed, for instance, for that reason, that you will go to a Heaven that’s for the believers and then the nonbelievers will go to Hell. I don’t get with that. I think a lot of people more and more, even in the Church are moving away from that belief system.
What happens when we die? When I had a shift, a profound shift inside of my heart where I knew and experienced God in my life—not as a being, not as a man on a cloud, but as a force, as an energy, as music, as art, as beauty, as science, as the largest possible conception I could ever attach to what the Creator is and even knowing that God is much greater than whatever that conception could be—but once I had that, then I knew that my journey is a soul journey. I’m a on a soul journey. I’m in a human body, as Teilhard de Chardin says, I’m sure it’s been quoted on your show many times before, and Oprah likes to use it too, like, “We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” I think that really sums it up from the great Jesuit priest and thinker and philosopher. “We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
I try every day. My goal is to witness myself as a spiritual being and not as a human being. My human being, I want … What do I want? I want a sandwich. I want to have sex occasionally. I want to be thought of highly by my tribe. I want to be in comfort. Those are my physical human … There are nothing wrong with those things, but that’s part of who I am. But I have a deeper connection to who the I is in me, Rainn Wilson, and that I is a spiritual being that is on a journey. And I’ve got a rental car called a body and it’s for about 80 or 90 years, I’m going to use this rental car until it falls apart and then my spiritual journey will continue. I know this. I would never try and… It’s an interesting thing how faith works because I know this. I don’t think this or believe this—I know this, but I would never seek to foist that on anyone else.
One of the wonderful things, which is one of the great questions, is, “Do we have free will or what is free will or if there is a God, can we have free will?” If there’s an all powerful force, is it a deterministic God? How do we have free will in that context? But I also know that we have free will and that every listener and yourself and everyone has the power to make their choices in this life in their bodies. In my journey, I’ve come to this knowledge that there this is a Creator and I’ve come to this knowledge that I am a soul. There’s a famous quote often attributed to C.S. Lewis, but it’s not C.S. Lewis, it was actually some other preacher around his times like, “I don’t have a soul. I have a body. I am a soul.” I witness myself. I am a soul, and I know that the soul will continue on in some kind of form, in some kind of journey past this physical one.
TS: When you say that every day you have this part of your life, this focus on witnessing yourself as a spiritual being, can you tell me more? What does that mean? What do you do? Is that your meditation and prayer practice? What do you do? How do you do that?
RW: Yes. It is my meditation and prayer practice. I pray and meditate every day, although I didn’t get a chance to this morning, and I feel a little discombobulated. And I should’ve prayed and meditated before doing the Sounds True podcast, but I’m also a deeply flawed human creature, and I forgive myself for being deeply flawed every day that’s part of my spiritual practice, too. Prayer and meditation absolutely grounds me. We’re very focused on meditation these days and it’s crucial. It’s scientifically proven to make you happier, longer life, reduce anxiety, feel more connected, feel purpose, to ground you—it affects a person in so many positive ways. It’s so important. It brings us in the moment.
There’s so many benefits to meditation, but as a believer in the great mystery, prayer I think goes hand in hand with meditation, and often prayer is left out. Even people who are agnostic or have a semi-sense of this great mystery out there, this creative force out there, they don’t go to the prayer, but I think the prayer is crucial. Because the prayer is asking, “Why?” The prayer is beseeching. The prayer is yearning. The prayer is, “Show me the way,” or the prayer is gratitude like, “Thank you for what I have. What I have is amazing. Thank you,” or the prayer is, “What should I do next?” or the prayer is just, “Open a door, open a door somewhere, universe. Can you just show me an open door and I promise if it’s open I’ll go through it.” There’s kind of a give and take in prayer. It’s… meditation is listening, and if you just focus on listening, that’s great, but then you’re not really communicating with the powers of the universe as well.
That’s part of my spiritual practice and I talked about forgiveness, too, where I forgot to pray and meditate this morning, or I got too busy and I didn’t do it. That’s OK, because I’m going to make a lot of mistakes as I go through my life. I’ve made so many terrible mistakes on the course of the journey of my 51 years so far. But then, what I like, Tami, what’s really exciting to me is when I can witness myself, when I witness my human needs and where my ego is. It’s like a part of my spiritual journey is just noticing what are my wants and needs, and where are they coming from?
If I have anxiety, it’s like, “Oh, why do I have anxiety around this? Oh, because I don’t know the outcome. Oh, I have anxiety because I don’t know the outcome.” Well, I can’t know the outcome because I can’t control outcomes. “Oh, what’s that like? Oh, that’s my human… ” Of course, I want to control outcomes. Every human does. Every animal does, but I need to surrender that. I need to let that go. “I want a positive outcome because it will benefit me and I will get money from it, or I will get esteem from it, and I will get praise and status from it,” “Oh, those are all needs of my ego. Oh, how ’bout that?”
Part of my spiritual practice, part of my witnessing my soul is witnessing what my baser needs are. Not judging them, it’s totally fine to want stuff. It’s totally fine to want a sandwich, or to hit a jackpot on slot machine, or have beautiful, sensual relations with someone, or to connect with someone. Well, now I’m getting spiritual. It’s totally fine to want stuff. Our ancestors accrued stuff in caves for the last 100,000 years. We’re hardwired to want stuff, but when we have that sense of ourselves as a spiritual soul moving through a physical experience, then we get to just notice. We just get to notice that stuff and that’s part of the spiritual practice, just noticing.
TS: Now, when you talked about your own prayer practice as a kind of dialogue with the great mystery, do you have any guidelines inside yourself? Do you touch into a feeling in your heart? Do you just talk about whatever’s on your mind? Like, “Help me with this thing,” or whatever comes up for you?
RW: Yes, so in the Baha’i faith there are many prayers that have been written by Bahá’u’lláh—the prophet and founder of the Baha’i faith—and some others, so I can certainly turn to those when need be, and they’re very beautiful prayers for all kinds of different occasions and what not. That’s a little more formal. And my personal informal prayer, which is also very much encouraged as Baha’i. In the more informal kind of prayer that I do, it’s… This has been a long evolution, so when I first kind of knew there was a Creator and I would pray, I felt weird praying. I felt like, “Oh, am I a needy kid? I don’t want to pray for what I want. I don’t know how to pray. What does this God think of this weird little creature living in suburban Los Angeles?”
It just felt awkward and weird. And if I had been not good in my life and I was just feeling bad about myself, I never wanted to pray, because I just felt too much shame and too bad about myself. Then I would only pray when I felt good about myself, but there was kind of an arrogance in that because I was feeling good about myself. It’s been a long evolution of coming to the point where I can just commune with the great mystery. I can commune with the great loving power that’s out there because that’s part of what I know God to be, is just love.
I actually had a really mystical experience once. I had a dream when I was in the middle of that search, and I had a dream that I was on the other side. And I was flying over this field, this giant field that was filled with all of these waterfowl, birds, and an intense feeling of love, like I’ve never felt before. Like love as a force, almost like the light of the sun when it’s really strong. That was love, and it was everywhere, and I had just this kind of visceral experience.
I believe that God is, as they said in the 60s, “God is love.” It’s an evolution now where I train myself to, on a daily basis, just simply open my heart and just share what’s in my heart and it’s OK. If that needs to be, I’m whiny and I’m complaining, it’s OK. I’m a deeply flawed person. If it is gratitude for my life, for what I have for my family, for my health, for the nice things that I have, for the privilege that I have as a wealthy, white male in today’s society, I’m grateful for that. And I want to use that privilege to try and help as much as I can, be of service as much as I can.
If I want an outcome, I can pray for that outcome. God doesn’t really work on my timetable, so probably the highest form of prayer in my mind is, “Thy will be done, not mine. God, your will be done. Not my will. What is your will? What is … ” When I’m in alignment with that, we talked in the very beginning, Tami about purpose, that’s where purpose … That’s when it rings like a bell at the end of the meditation and they ring the bell, [ding]. For me, that ringing of that bell is your will. My will is in alignment with Creator’s will and it’s just… I don’t know that it is, but I strive for that feeling because that’s when things line up. It took me years to get to the point where I could just share my heart in that way, kind of unedited.
TS: Yes. You used the word “commune.” I thought that was interesting.
RW: Yes. Commune, not even language so much. I have a son who’s 13. His name’s Walter. I love this kid so much. I love Walter so much, sometimes I just find myself staring at him and he’s just so miraculous and beautiful and I’ve looked at this creature grow up for 13 years and my heart is just … Sometimes it just spills with love for him—and think about how much infinitely more God must love each one of us. I know, all of a sudden I sound like a born-again, but it’s true. The intensity. The intensity of the love that the Creator has for its creation has got to be staggering and a thousand, thousand times greater than my love, even for my kid. If my kid has a tantrum, if my kid breaks something, if my kid struggles with… tells a lie or my kid has a hard time at school, or gets in a fight at school, or something like that, there’s consequences, but there’s so much forgiveness there. I think that’s an important thing to understand in this quest.
TS: Now Rainn, I pulled out a quote from your introduction to the book, SoulPancake, and I want to talk about it. Here’s the quote, “I believe art and its expression are the same as faith and its expression.” You know, most people know you as an actor, and they associate you with Dwight on The Office, and here we are. We’re talking about faith and its expression and being on purpose and I can imagine someone going, “Wait a minute. What do you mean? How was his playing of Dwight in The Office, how does that have anything to do with faith and its expression? What’s the connection here?”
RW: Great question. You’re good. You go right to the heart of it. I love it. That’s something that I struggled with for a long time. I have always had this interest in spirituality. Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe it was my parents. Growing up with these wild hippy discussions in our house, bohemian discussions, as a kid reading holy works. But here I am playing the dorkiest, most annoying comic character on a sitcom. And in it there seems like a weird dichotomy of me the actor talking about spirituality, playing the least spiritual person ever on the history of television. Playing Dwight, who wouldn’t believe in anything other than what’s in front of his face. It starts to get complicated. Part of that is, I always felt a little bad because comedians in Hollywood—no one in Hollywood talks about God—but comedians, if anyone is going to, it’s going to be a more dramatic actor person. It’s certainly not anyone in comedy. It’s a comedy killer to talk about God or faith or spirituality. I risked a lot by going down this path. That’s number one.
Number two is how is Dwight an expression of faith. Let me start by saying that it is a … One of the things when I left the Baha’i faith and then came back to it, I discovered all these writings about the equating art with faith. The son of the founder of the Baha’i faith, he had a quote that said, basically, “When you put the paintbrush to the paper, it is as if you were kneeling in the temple.” That the making of art is sacred and an expression of the divine. There’s a lot of different reasons why it is.
Number one it’s service. You’re making a beautiful wall hanging. You’re crafting a beautiful plant holder. You’re writing a poem for someone to enjoy that makes them look at their life differently. You’re singing a beautiful song. You’re creating a character where one wasn’t before. These are creative acts of service that make the world a better place.
Number two, that also emulates God the Creator. You notice I call him, her, it, this force, the Creator because it helps me get closer to the Creator. God creates, and then when human kind creates as well we’re emulating the Creator. There’s a blank page, and we put a poem or a painting on or a story on that blank page where there was nothing before, we’re emulating the best of our Creator. I also think that the best thing about Dwight is when I get those messages on social media or I meet people that said, “My sister was really sick, but every Thursday night we would gather around the TV and we would watch The Office and we would just laugh. And thank you, thank you for the laughter. It helped us so much and it brought our family together.” I get that a lot and realizing like, OK, yes. We’re just doing kind of a dumb workplace comedy, but it has helped people and I feel gratified about that.
I think that’s the… I talked about, “Thy will not mine be done,” God’s will. God’s will usually wants us to be, I think, to be in service to others. That’s really the highest expression of the will, of the divine will, is in all of us being in service to other people.
TS: I think that’s where it can get a little tricky for me, when I think of art as an expression of faith and of being of service. Some art has that effect on me, but a lot of other art doesn’t. Afterwards I might feel negative. I might even feel more mean or more despairing or all kinds of things, but I’m sure someone else would have a different response. They might say you know, “I loved that horror film. It was so entertaining.” I would just be like, “Oh my god.” I felt traumatized when I walked out of the movie theater. Have you had to turn down a lot of roles that you thought, “I don’t think this role is actually—this film, this theatrical performance— I’m not sure this will be of service to be,” or do you not see it that way?
RW: No. I definitely see it that way. I have definitely done some projects that I would call morally questionable, morally dubious, that I needed to take for one reason or another, but I turn down work I feel that makes the world a worse place because there are … That’s a real tough discussion you could have an hour long podcast about, about art and what constitutes art, versus just entertainment. I have turned down …
In fact, it just happened the other day, that I turned down a movie that was about rock and roll. And I love rock and roll and grew up listening to it and was in a rock band in high school. I love rock of the 70s and what not, but it was… The story was just about hookers and tits and cocaine and big deals and wads of money, and it didn’t have any redemption to it whatsoever. I just don’t want to be a part of that. I don’t want to be a part of … Fortunately, because I was on a TV show, I have lot of money in the bank and I don’t have to take all these jobs, but I don’t want to be a part of something that I feel takes humanity in the wrong direction. That being said I’ve done stuff, action movies or big dumb comedies that I feel like they’re neutral, but they don’t degrade humanity.
TS: Mm-hmm (affirmative). In the projects that you’re the most excited about and in your work with the media company, SoulPancake, what gives you that feeling? You could give us some examples of some projects where you feel like, “Oh my god. This is so on purpose for me. I know I need to do this project.”
RW: Yes. That’s one of the amazing things that SoulPancake has become this kind of laboratory of media, because we have a YouTube channel, that’s one of our main outlets. We do other stuff on TV and on other channels, but it’s an amazing … For instance, my wife and I do a lot of work in Haiti working in girl’s education, scholarships and literacy. I found out about all of these Haitians living being stuck as migrants in Tijuana, Mexico. All these thousands of Haitians had gone to South America. Then tried to get up to the United States and all got stuck in Tijuana.
Right now, you go to Tijuana, there are thousands of Haitians there. It’s crazy. I found out about this and I was able to go to our company. We were able to get some money from some different places to go shoot a video there. We got to go do a video in Tijuana meeting the Haitians, hearing their stories, seeing their faces, and tens of thousands of people have now, or hundreds of thousands of people have now learned about this story that they didn’t know about it before. That’s a really cool thing.
We have a show called The Science Of and we explore… The big hit version of that was called The Science of Happiness, so we were reading about positive psychology—I’m sure you have a lot of positive psychologists on your show—and learning about it. We got to make a show for millennials about positive psychology wrapped in a really just fun six- or seven-minute video. We did one on gratitude. It’s got five million, 10 million views on it. We get to take these big ideas and deliver them to an audience. It’s a like a dream come true. It’s a playground for ideas and positive content.
TS: Now I want to circle back to something you said, Rainn, that really got my attention. You said that at a certain point there was a profound shift in your heart. I thought that was so beautiful. And it made me curious about kind of how you would describe that from the inside, and especially to somebody who might be listening who might say, “You know, I’ve had some profound shifts, but they didn’t last. My heart didn’t really change in its shape or contour such that I have the kind of faith that Rainn’s talking about, where he knows in his being what it’s like to be a soul and to have this kind of communing relationship with God. I’ve tasted it a couple times, but I haven’t really shifted in any kind of major way.” How do you address that person and share with them more of that inner shift?
RW: Yes. Good. I want to keep it as personal as I can make it, because that always is more effective than… I have a tendency to kind of go to ideas. The shift was long in coming. I won’t say that there was one a-ha moment, or one kind of spiritual breakthrough where all of a sudden I had all the answers, but it started incrementally. There was a decision for me … I think a lot of times it comes through pain, like really intense pain. I went through some periods in my life where there was incredible personal pain and turmoil and there’s nothing like weeping in your bed at five in the morning, after having not slept all night, to help clarify this stuff. But for me, as I turned back to my faith—the Baha’i faith—and started reading the holy writings of the Baha’i faith and exploring it, that was … There were a lot of … It’s always two steps forward, one step back.
As you described it and as you describe the listener, maybe they had a spiritual experience or had a shift in their heart, but they’re like, “Well, it didn’t translate.” I would say that for me—I don’t know about anyone else—but I know that for me this has taken decades. I’m not arrived or anything like that. I’m not a guru. I’m not spiritually arrived or mature or anything. I have a few things that are working for me a lot better than they were working for me 10 or 20 years ago. That’s all I know. What it takes is discipline.
There’s a great word. Devotion. I don’t know the root of it. I should look it up and do some research sometime, but I think about this word devotion because when you have devotion, when you express devotion, you are devout. When you think about someone who’s loyal, they’re devoted. Right? Maybe that’s where Devo, maybe that’s where they got their name. No, that was de-evolution. Never mind. Devotion is a really cool word, but it takes discipline. I don’t even know why I brought that up, but we’ll leave that in, but it takes a kind of discipline to put that shift into action.
For me, what that has been is attending spiritual gatherings, actively seeking to be of service to other people in the world, taking time out for myself to be in nature, being a better husband and father and more connected to people, listening better on a daily basis, taking my inventory, kind of, on a daily basis of like my, “How did I do today? Am I carrying any resentments or defects or things that are holding me back? How can I be a better person tomorrow?” A daily prayer and meditation.
It’s almost like—if you want to be a triathlete, you can’t just have a shift in heart to be a triathlete. You have to have a shift in heart, but then you have to train for it and work at it and buy a bicycle and keep that bicycle well-maintained. There’s all these things you need to do. I think the spiritual path is one that takes great… It takes a practice. There’s a daily practice. It’s not enough to have that shift in the heart.
TS: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Now you also mentioned that for many actors, or certainly for a comedian, it would be a career killer to be out talking about devotion and your love of communing with God in the way that you are. I’m curious to know, did you carefully consider this? Did you just know, “Look. I’m going to have to do this, come what may.” What was that process like for you?
RW: I’m much more out as a spiritual thinker and person now. If you look at my Twitter feed, it will have a dumb fart joke next to a spiritual quote, or a link to something or a holy quote or a great video that’s inspiring. People know that I do both. It probably has hurt my career, you know? There’s probably a lot of people that were like, “Oh. Maybe we should cast Rainn Wilson in this,” “You know what? That guy’s a weirdo. He’s like some kind of … He belongs to some weird unpronounceable religion and he’s always talking about God. Like, you know what? I think he’s probably in a cult, and he’s weird and let’s stay away from him.” It probably has hurt me. It certainly hasn’t helped.
TS: You’re getting big opportunities to be on podcasts, like Insights at the Edge. Come on.
RW: Here we go.
TS: Come on Rainn.
RW: Here we go. This could be it. I could be discovered.
TS: That’s right.
RW: I could be discovered. Yes, but it’s been a struggle, but remember I did The Office for a long time and this is just who I am now. I’m both of these things. I have to … I think that’s part of the spiritual journey, too, and looking at our soul and the divine aspect of ourselves is, we are filled with contradictions. One of my contradictions is I like insanely stupid humor and playing ridiculous characters and dick jokes and at the same time, I love reading Meister Eckhart and Thomas Merton and meditating. That’s just the contradiction that I have. What are contradictions that you have, Tami?
TS: Well, we’ll get there in a moment, but I would like to know what are some of your favorite dick jokes?
RW: I’m not going to tell a dick joke on Insights from the Edge…
TS: No. You could. You could.
RW: … Sounds True podcast.
TS: One dick joke, just one.
RW: One dick joke.
TS: OK. I’ll tell you one. Sometimes I wish I had one. It’s not really a joke. I’m not good at jokes, Rainn.
RW: I tell you what. You stick with-
TS: I’m going to stick with what I do well. OK. What are one of my contradictions? I would say as much as I recognize unity, I’m a fiercely competitive person at the same time. It’s in me. I have, like, a lion’s roar in me.
RW: Yes. There’s so many great spiritual lessons to look at, at that because of course you are. Of course, you’re wired to succeed and to dominate. We were scrabbling with thigh bones and living in caves and hoarding corn for tens of thousands of years, so to compete and to get ahead is, it’s part of our imperative as human beings, which is awesome. Unfortunately, when that’s unchecked and it simply becomes about the ego, then we become like our President. But at the same time when you can harness that for good, as you have. You have built a company from nothing that has delivered hundreds and thousands of hours of amazing audio-visual content about people realizing their potential and connecting to their true selves. You’ve done a great thing.
There’s so many great things about competition. Just great spiritual lessons in all this stuff, but you see when we examine our contradictions we can learn a lot. I think people stay away from the dark side, the Jungian shadow side. We put that under the carpet. We put that in the closet. We don’t want to look at that stuff, but our addictions, our predilections, our need for power or control or whatever it is, we can embrace all this stuff.
TS: Now Rainn, there’s just one final thing I want to talk to you about, which is you mentioned the founder of the Baha’i faith. Bahá’u’lláh. I don’t think very many people are familiar with him. I’m not. I know that he’s the founder of the Baha’i faith and that he lived approximately 200 years ago in Iran, but that’s all I really know. What I’d love is if you could introduce me to this great teacher.
RW: Well, thank you. Yes. Certainly. This weekend, I don’t know when this podcast will air, but October 22nd is the 200th birthday of Bahá’u’lláh. The bicentennial of Bahá’u’lláh. Bahá’u’lláh, the word means “Glory of God,” in Arabic. It was a title that was given to him. He was a Persian nobleman, who turned his back on being a nobleman and gave away all his possessions. He was known as a young man as the Father of the Poor, because he spent his life serving the poor and turned his back on riches, just like the Buddha. And Bahá’u’lláh proclaimed himself to be a promised teacher from God, in a long tradition of divine teachers such as Zoroaster and Krishna and the Buddha and Abraham and Moses and Jesus and Mohammed. Baha’is believe that God sends these divine teachers, prophet—Baha’is call them manifestations of God—sends them down every 500 to 1,000 years or so to update humanity spiritually and Baha’is believe that Bahá’u’lláh is the most recent of these teachers, and that his message is the most spiritually relevant message from God for humanity.
Bahá’u’lláh spent his whole life being tortured in exile, his family members killed and tortured. He ended up living most of his life in prison in Palestine, after being banished to Iraq and then Turkey. He wrote many books and hundreds of tablets and Baha’is believe that Bahá’u’lláh has brought a Divine Springtime to humanity right now. We’re in kind of some really terrible spiritual growing pains. That’s who Baha’is believe Bahá’u’lláh is.
TS: I was with you until the Divine Springtime. I don’t think many people have the sense that we’re currently in a Divine Springtime.
RW: We might be in the depths of winter right now, but there’s a springtime around the corner. Humanity will need to unite. It may be after unprecedented destruction—ecological and military—but eventually humanity will need to unite and come together with love and service and social justice. This is the main teaching of Bahá’u’lláh, is the harmony of humanity.
TS: Why was Bahá’u’lláh tortured and imprisoned?
RW: Well, because he lived in the Muslim world and proclaimed himself to be a spiritually inspired teacher and that did not go over well with the Muslim clergy and the authorities. They tried to shut him down and banish him to the farthest corners of the empire.
TS: If Bahá’u’lláh is the most recent divine messenger giving us the updated teachings that we need right now for this time we’re in, could you summarize in terms of this Divine Springtime—and I hope the Baha’i faith is right that that’s going to emerge from our current winter. What would you say are a couple of those core teachings that are new, that we need now that are updates, if you will?
RW: Well, there’s a lot of what he was teaching in the mid-1800s are very important to us as contemporary Americans or people in Western society. Bahá’u’lláh taught about gender equity at a time when women were treated like mules, and as a spiritual teaching that women and men are both creatures with souls, and women need to be—are equal to men, should be educated the same as men, treated the same as men, given the same power as men. We see eruptions about this all the time in the contemporary world, but Bahá’u’lláh was talking about this in the 1860s and writing about it as a spiritual imperative. One of this spiritual teachings is the elimination of extremes of wealth and poverty. That’s a teaching for this day and age. There’s always been the very rich and the very poor, but right now that inequity threatens to destroy our race. I forget what the number is, but what is it, like 47 billionaires own as much as the bottom half of humanity?
Bahá’u’lláh has a spiritual perspective on this, that we need to find a spiritual solution to that really complex issue of economic inequity. A lot of Bahá’u’lláh ‘s teachings are very socially, what you’d call socially progressive and are… They’re kind of accepted as fact if you go to liberal college in the United States, this stuff is all accepted as fact. But, really, the pioneer in so many of these ideas Bahá’u’lláh was writing about in the 1860s and 1870s.
TS: This may be a strange thing to say, but I notice I really like saying his name. I’ve never heard it said out loud before you just said it and I think I pronounced it incorrectly, based on the phonetic writing.
RW: You were close.
TS: I was trying.
RW: Yes. Yes.
TS: I was trying, I was moving in the right direction, but Bahá’u’lláh … I know that there’s a certain … It has that kind of hallelujah feeling …
RW: It does.
TS: … in the name itself.
RW: It’s got a little hallelujah in it.
TS: It does.
RW: In Arabic, Allah is God, so the end part ‘llah is God and Baha means glory, so u is of. It’s like Baha’u’llah, Glory of God and it does have a nice ring to it.
TS: OK. Just finally, Rainn, two things. First, I just want to thank you and I want to thank you for being such a faith-filled, courageous person, dick jokes included because you’re being yourself. You’re being yourself, and you’re coming out strongly with your heart and I just want to thank you for that and celebrate that.
RW: Thank you. I appreciate that.
TS: Then, finally, this program is called Insights at the Edge and one of my curiosities is to know what someone’s current edge is? And by edge, I mean, kind of like what you’re working with right now that might even be a little challenging for you, that you think of as your growth edge.
RW: That’s a great question. I’m at a point of growth right now where, in seeking to align myself with God’s will. Like, what the hell do I do next? I was on this sitcom and I do some acting here and there, and developing and writing some projects, and stuff like that. I’m also working in Haiti. With what I know, where next? I really honestly don’t know. It scares me, because I know what I want. I want to be successful in show business, and for people to love me, and that’s part of my insecurity. It’s part of my shadow side. It’s also totally understandable, but “what next?” because what next may not involve people loving me. It may not involve being successful in show business. It may be kind of a deeper level of service, and that’s scary to me.
TS: Yes, look what happened to Bahá’u’lláh.
RW: Yes. Exactly. Exactly, so I don’t know. That’s where I’m at. It’s like, what’s my deeper purpose?
TS: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). Thank you for sharing that and thank you so much for being a guest on Insights at the Edge. I’ve been speaking with Rainn Wilson. He’s an actor that I’m sure many of you have heard of and watched playing Dwight in the TV series The Office. He’s the author of the autobiographical book, The Bassoon King and one of the Creators of a digital media company called SoulPancake, dedicated to making stuff that matters. Rainn, thank you so much.
RW: Thank you so much for having me. This was a really fun and great discussion. Thank you.
TS: We talked about stuff that matters.
RW: We did.
TS: We did.
RW: Check that off the box.
TS: All right. Thank you so much.
RW: Thank you, Tami.
TS: Soundstrue.com. Many voices, one journey.
