Tami Simon: Hello friends, my name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, and special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us. Explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Perry Garfinkel. Perry is an accomplished journalist, editor, speaker, and author of the bestselling book Buddha or Bust. Since 1986, he has contributed to many sections of the New York Times and has written for National Geographic, the Los Angeles Times, and other outlets. With Sounds True, Perry Garfinkel is the author of a new book, a book that has a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It’s called Becoming Gandhi: My Experiment Living the Mahatma’s 6 Moral Truths in Immoral Times. Perry, welcome.
Perry Garfinkel: Thank you very much, Tami. I’m very happy to be here with you.
TS: Let’s start with what inspired you to do your own experiment living the Mahatma’s six moral truths and the writing of this book. What inspired this?
PG: There were two factors. One was personal and the other was external. Personally, I felt I had hit a wall. As I write about in the beginning of my book, I had descended into a kind of dark place and acting it out in different ways. So I thought, it’s time to reset, reboot. Looking for Perry 2.0.
The other was that as I looked around at the world, I saw we had lost track. We’d lost our moral compass. And I was looking around for someone who represented a high level of moral integrity. I landed on Gandhi because he was such a figure. I’ve been to India many, many times, and like many people, I didn’t know enough about the man. I didn’t know about the broad strokes of his interests and his philosophies. So I undertook this mission.
I really started in the fall of 2019, and it was the end of December 2022 that I finished writing the book. But over that course of that two-and-a-half years, almost three years, I was following these six principles and exploring what Gandhi meant by them all.
TS: Six principles. How did you distill Gandhi’s life and teachings into six principles?
PG: Well, there are 11 that people point to that he prescribed. I reduced it to the six that I thought I could handle the best. As I joked about, was it laziness or book deadline that brought me to taking on six? But, I think six was an ambitious experiment.
TS: And, we’re going to talk more about those six principles and how you explored “becoming Gandhi” in your own life, embodying those principles. But right here at the beginning, you’ve talked about this sense of Perry 2.0. I’m curious how the work on becoming Gandhi changed you, what it left in its wake after you completed the writing of the book. Now, a year, year-and-a-half after that, how are you changed by this?
PG: I knew the test results would be in how much I had changed. I also knew that this would be one of the first questions people would ask me, even before I finished. “Has it changed you? How are you changing?” I think in the beginning of my book, I talk about the fact that I laugh more and I cry more. I am more empathic, so I feel more. For some reasons, these six truths I followed, plus traveling to three countries in the world to be where Gandhi was, maybe made me a more sensitive person and kinder to myself, because this was a lot of inner work, Tami.
TS: That’s very interesting. I was not expecting you to say something like, “Laugh more and cry more.” When we talk about these six principles, I’ll just state them here so people know what we’re talking about: truth, nonviolence, vegetarianism, simplicity, faith, celibacy. We’re going to go into how these became applicable for you in a contemporary way. But how did any of this help you laugh more and cry more?
PG: I just began to see the poignancy of the human condition. As we were talking about before, laughter is an elixir for me. It enables the cessation of pain. Norman Cousins wrote about the power of laughter in his book. I grew up in a family, Jewish humor is famous, and that was both our dagger and our salve. It was natural to me as I looked around. You have two choices when you look at the universe and the way people are with each other. You either laugh or cry.
One response of laughter seems inappropriate when you see death and dying, old age, and all the difficulties we have. But, sometimes, laughter loosens you up to go deeper into, where’s the pain? and to let it go. The crying, also—I’m a super-sensitive guy, and sometimes I would cry watching Lassie. It all came up that these multiple dimensions of the human experience all came to me much more clearly. So, yeah. I laughed, and I cried. Even as I’m walking around now, Tami, I have thoughts to myself that would have triggered an inner laugh, but now I laugh out loud. I’m walking alone in my three-mile hikes every day and I think of something that I go, “Hah.” I just laugh. I get teary-eyed, as well, about things that I see that upset me.
TS: Right here at the outset, Perry, I want to address the listener who perhaps had a similar halting response that I had as I started reading Becoming Gandhi and reading about things like celibacy and vegetarianism. I’m not celibate. I’m not a vegetarian. I thought to myself, these principles and Gandhi as a model, as an exemplar, are going to be unattainable for me. I’m just going to feel terrible about myself reading this book. How do I even enter Gandhi’s life as having lessons for me? And, I wonder if you can address that here, at the start.
PG: Perfect question, and I can tell it in an anecdote. As you know, the original title of this book was Being Gandhi. As I looked at his life, more and more I thought, what he was seeking? And in many ways, what he has attained is unattainable for most human beings over the course of many, many generations. But in this time, where we are witness to more violence, more lying, less simplicity, I was troubled. So, I realized I should change the title of this book to Becoming Gandhi, because the attempt was enough of an achievement. The trying was a success. I feel that you can take some of these principles and basically taper down, or taper up, into them step-by-step. We try and we fail, we try again. As the old Zen saying goes, “Fall off the cushion nine times, get back on it ten.” So in thinking about how to proceed, I just realized step-by-step will get me somewhere in an improved way than what I previously was. And, that’s enough, Tami.
TS: It’s interesting this phrase, “Taper up, taper down.” I think as I engaged in contemplating each of the principles, I was trying to understand what’s at the core, what’s really happening here? Not so much necessarily the details of the behavior, but what’s the inspiration at the essence of the moral principle? I wonder what you think about that.
PG: Mm-hmm. This is a good question. I think it comes down to, if we look at, let’s say, Gandhian faith. All of these six principles are interwoven, they’re additive. It’s like the Tao of Gandhi. I think that the core is the question that intelligent, sentient beings ask, “Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose?” Each of these, I think, drives us down to a simpler state of being in which we can ask this core question: Who am I? What can I do for the world? What has the world done to me? How can I course correct some of these things? So, I think that’s the through line, Tami, that bring us down to our essence in each of these. Then, let’s look at these principles and kind of move up.
I want to make a point about the tapering part. I had an autoimmune dysfunction about ten years ago. The disease was called polymyalgia rheumatica, and I was taking prednisone. The idea, coming from new age, natural everything, it was repugnant, this idea to take prednisone. I heard there are many side effects, but my rheumatologist said, “Let’s taper down. We’ll start with 20 a day. Then, we’ll go to 15. Then, we’ll go to 10. And then when we get down to 5, 6, 7, 8, let’s just refine what you can tolerate and what benefit it will show you.” I took the same approach with each of these principles. I don’t have to go cold turkey, vegetarian. No pun intended. I just have to eat less meat, less meat, less meat, until I have no craving for it. That’s exactly what happened, and I applied the same principle to each of these other five.
TS: Let’s move into the first principle truth. You write about how Gandhi coined the term “satyagraha,” an insistence on and holding firm to the truth. Help us understand what satyagraha is.
PG: Satyagraha is a higher principle related to—let me start by saying, Gandhi, when he talked about truth, the first phrase he coined was “God is truth.” Then, as he got deeper in his studies of the different kinds of truths, which I enumerate, he changed it. He flipped the script to “truth is God.” In other words, truth can be the guiding force, the guiding principle, that can lead you to God.
I think the biggest truth here is, when we look in the mirror—this was the hard one for me, Tami—you cannot lie. That’s a kind of superficial way of being in truth. You can acknowledge a higher force than you. That is absolute truth, or the unconditional truth, that we read about, the nondualism of Buddhism. For me and for most people, I think looking in the mirror and looking at your foibles, looking also at your strengths, acknowledging them, working with them, dealing with them, is the kind of truth that I think of. I think, for Gandhi, satyagraha was that, as well.
TS: Well, of course, Perry, Sounds True has true in the title. This whole notion of holding firm to what’s true, it’s really important to me. When I think of your book Becoming Gandhi appearing right now, during this time that we’re living in, it seems like, for me at least, this notion of our respect for truth, publicly.
I don’t usually go directly into talking about Donald Trump on Insights at the Edge. At the moment, I just want to talk about him as somebody who I see has normalized lying in the public. This is my own perspective on it. It’s come to be where there’s just this sense of, we can’t count on being given what is true when we read the newspaper, the world of fake news, when we listen to politicians. This is really where I resonated with your subtitle of Becoming Gandhi, Immoral Times. I’m just wondering how you see that specifically in relationship to this notion of truth and what it might mean for us to resurrect satyagraha in our time.
PG: As soon as you brought this up, knowing the history of Sounds True, knowing the body of the titles you’ve published—just FYI, I was familiar with you and Sounds True long before you started publishing books. I knew you as an audiobook publisher. So, yeah. Would she bring up Trump? Are we going to go there, so to speak? But, it does loom large and more, unfortunately, from my perspective, he created this energy that questioned truth and flipped it. It’s very unfortunate.
Michiko Kakutani’s book, The Death of Truth—I mentioned it in my book. She really goes into the issues that Trump brought up. This is my perspective. Yes. He brought in this idea of fake news, but is he and all of that movement, a reflection of what 50 percent of Americans who voted for him believe in?
There is something in our nature that wants us to question the truth. So as a journalist, I’ve always been looking for the truth. There was a line that you need two or three sources to verify a truth. I think it was Jesus who said, “When two or more are gathered in my name, there I am.” In a way, our truth is based on a consensus. I, as a journalist, again, rely on evidence-based facts, so my sources are NIMH and other institutions that study any kind of phenomena as scientists. The truth will be out in the evidence.
Now, we’re in a time where people are questioning, and I partly, also, blame the internet. I was working for Rodale Press in 1995, publishing company you’re probably aware of. That was when the internet was introduced widely to big publications and then the world. So, they taught me how to study websites looking for the truth. You look to the bottom of the page and see who’s saying this.
I think a lot of Americans, and people around the world, just take these things for granted. I have a niece who deals with some medical problems, and she cites Reddit as a source for her information. I said, “Sweetie, that’s not a reliable source. That’s a conglomerate of other people’s thinking on these things.” I feel that, again, we’ve lost our way to truth.
Even when the media saw Trump lying, there was some kind of taboo about calling it a lie. That worried me. That made me think that even those who were the seekers of truth, the media, are being pulled in this direction because as a courtesy to the President of the United States, they were not going to call him a liar, which in fact, they are lies. The cautionary lesson here is, check your sources, find out, get a consensus on what the truth is, and then come to your own conclusion and attribute your conclusion to your sources. That’s one way to get to it.
TS: Perry, there are several things in Becoming Gandhi that made me very fond of you, I have to say, as I read that.
PG: Aw, thank you very much.
TS: It’s true. It really evoked that in me. One of them is, you dig into “What does it mean to me,” as you put it, “how to Gandhi? How am I going to Gandhi when it comes to truth?” In your own reflections, you write, “The place where I need to start is, ‘The truth is, I lie.’” The truth is, I lie. I thought, I’m going to give Perry a hug, right about now, right here at this point in Becoming Gandhi. Tell me how you came to that discovery, the willingness to make that statement, and then how it impacted you in your own, if you will, process of moving into greater truth telling.
PG: I’ve always been quite honest about my feelings. I’m vulnerable, I’m sensitive, and this all comes from me looking within, asking myself, am I who I’m projecting I am? Because we all play this game. I also mentioned that we wake up every morning with a lie, in a deeply existential way. We invent ourselves as soon as we wake up. I’m a wife, I’m a child, I’m a student, I’m six foot four, I’m too short. All of these ways we identify ourselves in a very deeply spiritual way. These are not the truths. This is the costume we wear. I’m citing my first spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, who talked a lot about how we recreate ourselves as the reflection of what others are seeing.
So when I strip this down, I have to cop to the fact that I do lie, and that these ways I invent myself every day is part of the big lie, Perry’s big lie. I’m comfortable in my skin with my vulnerability. So why, then, do I lie to others when, I’m saying tongue in cheek, I say I am five ten when I’m really five nine. This is a true fact. I lie about my weight and my age as a kind of cover up.
I looked at these things deeply and said, why, Perry? Why are you doing that? Let these lies go. It was so freeing, even to write this down on the page, so to speak, on the screen and share it with, who knows, we hope millions of people. It somewhat frees you from the web of lies. That’s the clichéd expression, because one lie leads to the next. And if you can un-lie, then it all is like a house of sand that crumbles down. So, it’s in my nature to lie and not to lie. I get caught in that vicious circle. I think over the course of the period of this book, I came to understand that whatever I am, that’s good enough. Maybe, that’s the title in my next book, Good Enough. That gives you a little answer to it. Does it not?
TS: It does. I’m really glad you brought in this notion of “good enough.” This is a further reflection on what I said in the beginning of our conversation, which is that I found, wrestling with each one of these principles, I had feelings come up of guilt, of my conscience being tweaked in this way or that way. I was like, how did Perry do it? How did he take this on for three years? Really, Gandhi? How did he do it and face himself in these different ways?
PG: He will try to answer. I kind of had to withdraw. This is where we’ll talk about simplicity, too, in the context. First, I had to withdraw into myself even more than I am. I’m a kind of loner, and I live alone. My daughter and husband and granddaughter live about eight blocks from me, but I had to cut myself off. Just like a science experience, I had to isolate the problem. We are contingent on, we are all Taoists, in that we are interconnected with each other and we’re interconnected with our external environments.
So first was to isolate myself, and it was very difficult. I mean, then came COVID. I was coming back from my visit to South Africa, where Gandhi spent some 20 years, when rumors of this viral disease were going around What was it? March 6 that the world shut down?
Many people thought, oh, what a grace period for a writer who’s going to write a book and isolate himself. It didn’t work out exactly that way. I went into a kind of dark mood. I don’t want to call it depression. It was difficult to write, let me say. I drew solace from an interview I saw. John Lithgow wrote a children’s book that came out, and he was asked, “How did you do it?” He said, “It was really hard.” Every writer he knows is depressed now.
So, I had COVID as an excuse to isolate myself, and it didn’t work out that way. I can admit to you, since I’m all about admitting everything, this was the hardest book I’ve written. This is the fourth book I’ve written, and the fourth coauthored book I’ve written. Buddha or Bust was a challenge, because the history of Buddhism around the world, every country had its own wrappings about the type of Buddhism that it follows.
Gandhi was difficult because he was unattainable. At first I thought, I’ll try to emulate him. I’ll get the wire-rim glasses—what we now call the John Lennon glasses. I’ll wear a dhoti, the Indian garb. I’ll learn to spin with a charkha, the spinning wheel that Gandhi made popular. I’ll do all these Gandhian things. But it didn’t work out to be beneficial. It was, OK. I’m learning to spin with cotton into yarn. But it didn’t bring me to that place I thought I was going to get to. That was very frustrating. To be more confessional, it was so difficult, I almost gave up twice. I thought, I can’t write this book. It’s too big a subject. Who am I to try to become Gandhi when—you know? Many millions before me had followed him in India. He was a role model to Martin Luther King. He was a role model to Barack Obama, Obama tells us.
But as I eased into it and it became harder, there’s a quality in me that says, never give up. You can do it. It’s like the—what is that Nike slogan?
TS: Just do it.
PG: Just do it. I came to the realization, if I go to my keyboard every day, something will come out. I’ll further admit that when I wrote the first chapter, I thought, this is schlock—a great Yiddish word, by the way. This is not really anything like any of the other books I had read. I read something like 32 books by or about Gandhi, and I thought, this is way off tone. Yet, it turned out to be what you and my editors liked.
So I really came to the conclusion then that, wow. Telling the truth gains you something internally. Also, people, as you just said, feel a kind of camaraderie or admiration and the willingness too. OK, if this schnook from New Jersey can do it, so can I.
TS: Yeah. Connection and affection. OK. Here’s what I want, Perry. I want to go through the five other principles and have you share one powerful insight of how you were able to embody it in a practical way in your life that made a difference.
PG: Great.
TS: So, let’s move to nonviolence. And you talk about nonviolence in thought, word, and deed.
PG: Yes. And, nonviolence is, I think, the longest chapter in my book, because it’s both so important to Gandhi and so important to what the world needs to hear now. For me, in the “How to Gandhi” section, I talk about “Don’t hit a pillow” like the—who’s the psychologist who promotes that?
TS: Yeah. Fritz Perls, Gestalt.
PG: Fritz Perls. Yeah. I say, “Don’t hit a cushion, sit on it,” so meditation. But again, just to double back, the violence that we see in the world is the violence we feel inside. So while practically, I stopped watching movies that have a lot of violence in them—and by the way, that’s a lot, a lot, a lot of movies. I stopped or at least tapered down, shall we say again, from watching the news. I remember when the presidential debates came on, they were so violent, so triggered by this kind of feeling of tension that I stopped watching them. So, I eliminated these external influences of violence, which have nothing really to do with us in our daily life, for large part. Eliminating those brought me a little more peace.
Then, the hardest one, again, is to look at the way I’m violent against myself. I do write about the kind of, oh, Perry, you messed up again. I spill things. I’m a bit of a klutz. So, every time I would spill something I used to say, “Perry, you F’d up again.” Now, I say, “Aha, there it is again,” and I clean it up. I clean up the mess, and that became a metaphor. Nothing is unfixable. So the violence I showed myself about being so self-critical, I began to let go of those. That, I think, was the biggest takeaway.
TS: It feels to me, I’m going to share this sentiment, that in the experiment of Becoming Gandhi, a kind of purging was needed to find Perry 2.0, this purging of exaggeration. Do you relate to that notion? That’s how it felt inside of me, engaging.
PG: Well, explain a little more what you mean by purge.
TS: Purging, I mean, this kind of vomiting, so it’s quite literal when I feel it. It’s detoxifying. So, letting all of this toxicity in me, including the violence that I’ve watched in films and other things, pour out of me like a cleansing of some kind.
PG: I see what you mean. I would use the word filter out. I would situationally and with discretion do less of this, less of this, and more of that. Somewhere in my “How to Gandhis,” I do talk about taking things step-by-step. So, you eliminate one bad thing today, and you add one good thing. Or, you just in your head you say, I’m going to stop using curse words. I’m going to be more creative with my words. Then, with the words come the feeling.
Sometimes feelings leads to words. Sometimes words generate a feeling that we’re not always identified with, because they carry so much baggage and so much emotional history. So I wouldn’t call it purging, because as I write about and as I’m explaining, you can’t completely purge yourself. You can taper down. You can systematically eliminate the toxins, as you put it.
TS: No. One thing, once again, to talk about the “immoral times” that we live in. One of the things I notice is, even talking about something like our moral compass and Gandhi’s moral compass, and how do we embody that more, that it could bring forth in people a kind of eye rolling, if you will. Like, “Oh, my God. Really?” Meaning, our culture is so built around interesting slang words and our favorite movies, the popular movies, of course, having violence in them. So it’s like, “Really, Tami? You’re having this conversation now?” I wonder how you address that, that response that some people may have of eye rolling, even as we talk about this.
PG: Well, anecdotally, to speak to the eye rolling, one of the last interviews I did in South Africa was a professor of sociology who wrote a book about Gandhi in South Africa. At the end of all the interviews, I would turn to these experts and professionals, book publishers of Gandhian materials, and I’d say, “OK, fine. But, how do you, yourself, follow any of these principles?” The guy I interviewed in South Africa, I rattled off what I’m doing, and he laughed. He jumped up, he interrupted the interview and said, “Are you kidding? These are not Gandhian principles. These are principles. These are values since time immemorial of how we should live a life with integrity.” It took me aback, and he was right. I’m calling them Gandhi’s principles, but they’re the principles of mankind.
If the eye rolling comes from the fact that we’re pinning this on this guy from the late 19th century into the 20th century, an Indian who eschewed formal clothing to live in a simple Indian garb, the eye rolling is, “Meh. Such an esoteric character and has nothing to do with my life today.”
Let’s eliminate Gandhi from the equation. I use Gandhi as a prism to look at these things, and it just happened to work. If you’re anti-Gandhi for some reason, and there are enough people who are, then take him out of the equation. Let’s just look at these isolated values and see how they fit for you. That helped me.
TS: OK.
PG: You think that—
TS: That’s helpful. Let’s move to vegetarianism and how you took that on your own tapering down, if you will, to use your language.
PG: Well, I come from a family that was real meat and potatoes. Every weekend in the summer, Dad would grill a steak. It wasn’t a meal in my family unless there was meat on the table. So, it came to tapering down, again. I remember, actually, when I signed this contract. I took myself out for a last supper, so to speak, at one of those steak houses. I was in Jersey City with my agent. I ate alone, and it was a steak.
I discovered that it’s the anticipation of this piece of meat that tastes better than the meat itself. As a reviewer of restaurants, I’ve eaten in a lot of great restaurants in the world. When I’m with people, we start eating and the food becomes secondary. These could be expensive dinners, but I’m the one at the table going, “Was there cardamom in there? What’d he do there?” But everyone else is distracted by the company they’re keeping, which is a nice thing. We diminish the actual taste of things.
So, I was surrounded by these rituals. Once I unwrapped them, it was easier to eliminate them. I had indulged throughout the three years to eat meat. I was actually writing a book for an Indian chef. He made such great food, I had to taste everything on the menu. But the enjoyment of the chewing of the meat and the taste did not feel great. Then, the repercussions of my digestive system. They shouted at me, “Do you need this? This is not good for you. Your stomach is not prepared to digest and excrete this much.” Experientially, it was easier. Mentally, it was harder.
TS: And Perry, for those of us who don’t know that much about Gandhi, maybe we saw the film and we’ve learned a little bit. Did he write and teach on each of these principles, or is it more looking at “My life is my message,” the famous quote attributed to Gandhi, and saying, oh, we’re deriving these six principles from his life?
PG: Yeah.
TS: Or, did he declare, “These principles are the principles by which I’m living?”
PG: I will answer that in a second, but going back to the vegetarianism. I had explained that now I eat fish, so I’m a pescatarian. Another example how this experiment helped me modify my eating experience, and I feel healthier and cleaner because of that. Gandhi’s was a strict vegetarian. So, in answer to your question—can you rephrase the question a little bit?
TS: Sure. I’m wondering, did he write and declare, “These are the principles by which I’m living my life and I recommend for others,” or is it more just looking at how he lived—
PG: No.
TS: —that you derived the principles?
PG: He wrote and he read voraciously. He was a deep thinker. I think he contemplated too much, in my opinion. He was so diversified. He burrowed into each of these subjects. Eating—in fact, with vegetarianism, when he really became a student of vegetarianism, aside from the vegetarian eating habits of his strict mother, was in England. He became a secretary of the Vegetarian Society of London, which still exists today, with another name and another place.
He was a student. As I hope your listeners know, he was a lawyer. He studied law in England, and he passed the bar and he became a lawyer. In reading his things, I always am realizing, this is a lawyer looking at everything with a 360 degree focus. So he wrote extensively. He started a newspaper in South Africa, and he started another newspaper in India.
Basically, as far as I can see, he wrote whole magazines, newspapers, I should say. He was working out his philosophies through his writing and his reading. He was a voracious reader. In the Mani Bhavan, which is the house he lived in when he was in Mumbai, writing what became the constitution of the independence from England, he was practicing these things. He worked it out. It was like a scientist cum lawyer, working out how this works.
I have books on each of these practices. He wrote treatises on health, on education. I didn’t get into education in my book, because I didn’t see it as one of the principles to follow, but he was an innovator in education. He was an innovator in the use of the homemade, handmade, natural fabrics. Each of these came from extensive research and thinking. Then, put them into practice. So, you could sit in your room and think of all these things, but then he found ways to apply them in the real world.
TS: I also read in Becoming Gandhi that Gandhi was quite the walker, and that he walked many miles a day. That was one of the practices you also took on in your own How to Gandhi experiment.
PG: Yes. It said, and I’ve read it in many places, that he walked ten miles a day. He walked at a fast clip. I tried to calculate what that would mean and how many hours a day. It’s impossible to do unless you’re an athlete in training. I started training and building up. I was walking five or six miles a day, before I went to India, as a kind of ritual. Now, I walk at least three miles a day. It’s like forty-five minutes to an hour. Nowadays, I wonder, Tami, how am I fitting this in? I mean, I got a lot to do and more that I should be doing, but I always, and I say this underlined, I religiously walk at least three miles a day.
What difference does it make? One, it clears my head. It oxygenates me. It’s an aerobic exercise, because I do walk at a faster clip. I work my arms and my legs. It frees my mind to free associate, when I’m walking. The tricky thing is to have a notebook and stop. Now, I have my phone where I can talk into. I found that in writing, you can be stopped on a line and you can’t figure out the right way to write it. You can be paralyzed by this line, and you can give up for the day. Then, I discover if I walk away from the keyboard and take a walk, I swim frequently, it’s then that this perfect version of the line I’ve been spending an hour trying to polish comes to me full-blown. Then, the trick is to write it down, speak it to myself because ideas are ephemeral. They come and go, like your mind. So, yeah.
The irony is when I worked for Rodale Press, which publishes health magazines and books, I became aware of lots of little factoids that I follow. One of them, back in the day, was that even 20 minutes of walking is good exercise if you can do nothing else. There’s science behind it. So, I realized, this is a good thing. I shall do this. I’m not Gandhi now. I’m still becoming Gandhi. The walking was a powerful addition, and it sounds superficial a little bit. Just as now I eat oatmeal for breakfast because Gandhi ate oatmeal. He ate oatmeal because it was the cheapest kind of breakfast he could have, but it turned out that it was a good value add. It was good for my digestion. It was simple.
I found that the more ritualized I became, the less I had to think about what I’m going to do. As an example, I don’t have to think about, will it be eggs this morning or French toast or something else? It’s oatmeal and fruit.
TS: Which leads us, Perry, to principle number four. I want to see if we can at least touch briefly on six of the principles. Simplicity, it sounds like you’ve simplified your breakfast. Tell us something else about how this teaching impacted you, has changed you.
PG: The first thing I did was go into my closet and simplified my closet, which is, again, a wonderful metaphor for all your emotions and your life. So, I took out clothes that I never wore. They were cluttering my closet, and I recycled them. I gave them away.
That also held true to things in my apartment that I keep. I’ve traveled a lot, as you can imagine, throughout my career. For that period I was following Gandhi, I was on the road two different times for ten weeks at a time. Then, a few three-weekers in there. I’m really adept at packing everything I need into a carry-on. When I come home, I unpack this carry-on on the living room floor to separate out what to wash, etcetera. I look around in my closet, even my stripped-down closet, and I think, wow. I have so much stuff. What do I need all this stuff for? I seem to thrive very well on this one carry-on suitcase. So, it made me look at ways I can just simplify.
The other one is, I mentioned Marie Kondo’s book, Spark Joy, keep only things that really give you joy. I think many of the things we keep are tied to memories. Some of them are not great memories, so you can discard those.
The other thing was spend less time online. Now, there are hotels that will invite you and your spouse, your traveling companion, to leave your cell phones at the front desk. It’s a great challenge for most people nowadays, where the cell phone seems to be embedded in their palm. It’s valuable, because the less input you have from time to time, the more you can go inside and look at what your issues are, what you love and what you don’t love. So, yeah. I fall victim to this. I get in bed at night and I have my laptop in my lap in bed, and those are the last images I look at. So, I’m bombarding myself with more data, more information that I don’t necessarily need. So, I can get a night’s sleep that is not being distracted by the last images I saw.
TS: Powerful, good, clear, simplicity advice there, Perry.
PG: Thank you.
TS: We have two more, faith and celibacy. Let’s tackle celibacy first. How—
PG: Let’s do.
TS: —could this be at all meaningful to you at this point in your life?
PG: As I wrote, I’ve been virtually celibate because I don’t have a significant other, a girlfriend, in my life. So, it was not hard to be celibate, but still sex lives in your head. So, I began to eliminate sexual triggers. Whether walking in the street and seeing a beautiful woman and turning around and looking at her again—why was I doing that? Why did I need that? Taking my filter, as I said before, and looking at ways in which we are also bombarded by images of sexuality. The cliché, “sex sells,” is true. So the commercials on TV, the ads in newspapers, the ads we see online, often have somebody very pretty, whether it’s a man or a woman, to promote the sale of this whatever. So, I began to do that.
I had been going to porn sites. I eliminated those. There’s a wonderful movie. What’s it called? Don Jon. About a guy who has the most perfect woman in the world. It was Scarlett Johansson. She caught him looking at a porn site the night he was with her. I thought, this is too close to home. How am I sabotaging my true appetite for sexuality?
I was challenged by your editor, Haven Iverson, to address, how does celibacy have a moral—why does it fit on this plan for living a more moral life? I was pulled up and could not really answer that. Gandhi’s explanation is, it’s a purification process. So maybe, from the yogic position, it’s like not going into your lower chakra. We should be moving up the chakras into ultimately our crown chakra. So, the pull of sex can distract you from the mission to find your purpose, unless you’re a porn star, I guess.
For me, of the six, it was questionable. How does this bring me to a more Gandhian lifestyle? At the end of the day, I’m not sure I would have included that. Of the 11, it was always up there in the top six. In Hindi, it’s called Brahmacharya.
I should say, personally if I may, my ex-wife, God bless her, gave me this beautiful daughter. At the time, we were studying with Ram Dass, who was encouraging brahmacharya. So, Iris and I tried Brahmacharya for a while, but we were young. We were in our 20s, and our sex drive was still alive and well. One night, in bed, we probably touched elbows, and it triggered our desire to make love. There’s a difference between having sex and making love, I want to point out. We made love, and we both think that was the night I impregnated her with this beautiful being, Ariana.
I would not prescribe celibacy, unless you see it as a kind of experiment with abstinence. Then, go for it, go back to making love with your lover.
TS: Thank you. That’s a beautiful explanation, the love making and the notion that as we explore Gandhi’s life and teaching and what we can learn from it, we can find our own way here, in terms of a creative interpretation. Healthy lovemaking might be our interpretation.
PG: I’m also always surprised by these phrases, like you and I are saying “making love,” but having sex is one that sort of dissolves its meaning. Or, I went to bed with her or him. OK. What did you do? Sleep. It’s our way to kind of obfuscate the fact that sexual intercourse is an expression of our love.
TS: Moving to the last principle, because there is one more thing I need to talk to you about, Perry. So, we have a lot to cover. So, let’s touch on the sixth principle, faith.
PG: Yes, and this was a really interesting experiment for me. I grew up in a Jewish family. I was bar mitzvahed. At the time of my bar mitzvah, I was actually turned off by the rabbi, who I discovered, through rumors and actual experience, drank alcohol. It turned me off to Judaism. The other thing that turned me off to Judaism was the fact that I didn’t have a direct experience of God through prayer and attending services. That’s why I move toward Hinduism, and then Buddhism. In Buddhism, if you meditate deeply, the absence of everything else brings you closer to godliness. I’m not going to say God, but godliness has a different kind of meaning. So the universe, the force, whatever you call that thing that holds this whole world together, I had less of an experience of it. So, I moved to the Eastern philosophies and spiritual practices, which I did find gave me more of a sense of my spirit.
Gandhi grew up in a very devout family. Vaishnav is one of the esoteric branches of Hinduism. Faith drives our moral compass. It is the moral compass, the right thing to do. These phrases that we say and the leap of faith, I just explored more deeply what they mean, what do we mean, and what do they mean to me, and what can they mean to you?
I am an empiricist. As a journalist, as I said before, evidence-based information is what convinces me to follow this path or that path. The leap of faith means that I have to accept this idea that there’s something that I can see that convinces me there is a higher being.
“What is faith?” became my koan, the Zen question that has no answers. I went around to my local community. Well, within my community, within a two-mile radius, there’s many, many, I mean dozens where I live, and more so in cities. I went to leaders of several different churches, synagogues, temples, and practices of faith. I asked them, “What is faith?”
To be honest, their answers seemed like the party line. They didn’t really bring me to the answer to, what is faith? It’s too intellectual an endeavor, I would say now. The experience of faith, in my experience, comes from—I’ll say two things—comes from meditation practice. The other is I found that, in writing my last book, Buddha or Bust, Buddhism is the religion of no gods. It’s the faith of no faith. It’s trust in what you see, hear, feel, experience.
I joke that I came from the religion that invented the one-god theory, and I moved to the religion of the no-god theory. But somewhere in-between, we all have to find, what do we have faith in? Oftentimes, it’s faith in yourself. Faith in your ability to overcome obstacles, faith in your ability to believe in yourself, faith in your trust of others. I think that as we savor and nurture and water these vague ideas that even I’m talking about now, but to contemplate what is faith will bring you closer to faith.
TS: Would you say you’ve made a leap of faith in your life, inside you?
PG: No. My faith has come from years of failure. Years of falling off the cushion have been more instructive to me than back on the cushion. I don’t leap to faith. I slowly rise to faith. I don’t fall in love, I rise in love. Once I fall in love, it’s very hard to fall out of love. It takes me a time to fall in love, and I think the same thing about faith. It took me years, I think. But that said, intuitively, deep down, I saw in my grandfather, who founded a small synagogue in Queens Village, New York. The way he carried himself, the gentleness of his personality, the attention he would pay to me and my sister, these are so moving, right now, I’m almost drawn to tears myself. That he, Grandpa Garfinkel, taught me what could be faith. So, he was my kind of guiding light in many ways.
That all said, I feel like from a very early age I was a spiritual expeditionary. I know you’ll ask me, “What is that? What do you mean by that?” I think I mean that I’ve always wanted to find out, what is the truth? What is my truth? Why are we put together here? Because I don’t believe in God as a being up there in heaven. I continue to ask myself, what is faith? How do I find faith? How can I exhibit faith if I haven’t taken a leap of faith? All of these questions. And the practice of becoming Gandhi has only amplified the volume of these questions I ask myself. And again, it’s the asking that leads you to a sense of understanding. If you don’t ask, you’re never going to get there, wherever there is.
TS: And then the last thing, Perry, and I don’t think it would be fair to this whole conversation of the practice of becoming Gandhi without bringing this up and understanding how you hold it. Even before reading Becoming Gandhi, I had heard that there were criticisms of Gandhi, that there were some of his writings that people considered to be racist in tone. I’m curious to know what you discovered in your research were the biggest criticisms and how you were able to take that in and make peace with it as you were practicing becoming Gandhi.
PG: OK. So, I’ll speak to the two major criticisms. As I point out in the beginning of my book, and I’ll just say for your listeners, it was difficult to isolate Gandhi’s principles from Gandhi the man. And then again, Gandhi the politician who never called himself a politician. But, he was highly influential, obviously, to the history of India’s independence from England. So that said, separating all that out, because the other criticisms may come from his political actions and the criticisms that he may experience from Muslims or zealot Hindus. There was a zealot Hindu who assassinated him.
So isolating all those, when he was in South Africa, he had called the Blacks “kaffir,” which at that time was a very derogatory term for Blacks: the Zulus and other tribes. So, he used that in some other derogatory phrases. My way to explain it and justify it is when I was a kid, maybe we use words that would not be used today, ever.
He was in his 20s when he was in South Africa. So when the Black Lives movement latched onto “Gandhi was a racist,” and they started vandalizing and pulling down Gandhi statues all over the world—examples in many different countries—it was that that drove it. I feel that I could forgive him if he had changed, just as my vocabulary had changed and my feelings have changed in the 40 years I’ve been on the road. So, I forgave him that.
The one that I had trouble forgiving, there’s stories and examples and writings about him having gone to bed and slept beside two of his nieces. They must have been in their early 20s, or teenagers. He did it, he said, to test his celibacy. It was a very flawed experiment. He spoke about it publicly, and he was publicly criticized for it. I explain it as his flawed thinking that sex comes from just sleeping next to a woman, in his case. We don’t know what happened between the sheets. Were they naked? Were they dressed? Was he? The flaw, thinking that he would be sexually aroused by sleeping beside these two women, showed me that he had basically turned off his sexual chakra, that he was asexual by that point in his life, because it was after his wife had died.
So, those were the two major—and I have no excuse or an explanation for them other than what I just told you. But as I said, I saw this as a flaw and forgave it because we all have some flaws. So, that was how I dealt with it.
TS: And when you think of this beautiful phrase, “My life is my message,” and you think of Gandhi’s life, we’ve talked about these six principles and you’ve explained that, as a trained lawyer, he wrote about these in great detail and gave the argument, if you will, for these principles. But now, we step back and this will be the last question, Perry. We look at this question, “My life is my message.” You told us so powerfully about your grandfather as a person whose life embodied this quality of faith. What comes up for you when you think of Gandhi’s life as his message?
PG: What comes up for me when I think of Gandhi’s life as his message? What comes up for me is that he was not afraid to undertake these arduous experiments and kind of tried different things. He was an education reformist and all the other things we’ve talked about. What also comes up for me is this question that always comes up as we talk about people in history: Did man make history, or did history make the man? Gandhi was a unique individual. Was he a saint? Was he an avatar? Was he a Mahatma, a great soul? He was a great man, and he moved the dial in so many significant ways by his simple life. But, for us to emulate that is difficult. I thought the question you were going to ask me, which I’m going to pose to myself, how do I see my life? Is my life my message?
Because everything he said, we have to take as a kind of bounce back to, can you say that about your life? With humility, I would say my life’s work are the books I wrote, especially this one. This book, I hope, helps people take on some of these principles and see how they improve their life.
It has improved my life. My work is my message, but my relationships are also my message. In some ways, I fail at some of these relationships, and I work to improve them. I can only work to improve myself. I think my friends who know me say I’m persistent. I’m not going to be pulled down by defeat. You can say the same of Gandhi. He had great opposition to what he was attempting to do, but over time he was proven to be right.
TS: It’s a hugely inspirational book, Perry, and one in which I feel so much warmth for you, the writer, and your journey, your experiment. Thank you so much for not giving up and completing Becoming Gandhi: My Experiment Living the Mahatma’s 6 Moral Truths in Immoral Times, a gift to us.
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