Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And 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, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an aftershow 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.
I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at SoundsTrueFoundation.org. And in advance, thank you for your support.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Mark Matousek. Mark is an award-winning author, teacher, and speaker whose work focuses on transformative writing for personal, professional, and spiritual development. He’s the founder of The Seekers Forum, and he’s the creator of the Writing to Awaken method. He’s also a contributor to countless well-known publications, and he’s the author of eight books, including When You’re Falling, Dive and his latest book, Lessons from an American Stoic: How Emerson Can Change Your Life.
Mark, friend, welcome.
Mark Matousek: Great to see you. Hi, Tami.
TS: Great to be with you here and to talk about what it’s like to live as a Stoic. One of the things I’ve seen in the last few years that there’s been an increase in interest in Stoicism. I might even call it a type of Stoicism renaissance. And right at the beginning of your new book, you write, “Stoicism is at its best when circumstances are at their worst, which explains its growing popularity today.”
So to begin, why is Stoicism at its best when circumstances are at their worst?
MM: Because it’s the most practical of all philosophies. It’s close to cognitive behavioral therapy in some of its principles in terms of working with the mind, understanding the limitations of control, accepting mortality, which is a huge piece of the Stoic philosophy, and also understanding that in any given day you’re going to encounter adversity and disappointment and pain and loss. And to prepare ourselves for that, to prepare the mind for that, is what Stoicism is all about.
The purpose of Stoicism is to reduce, as much as possible, negative feelings and painful emotions. And the way that they do that is by understanding how our impulse to control things interferes with the natural flow of experience and also how we set ourselves up for disappointment and failure and stress by trying to control things that are simply outside our sphere of influence. So Stoicism is meant to be a very sturdy rope to hold on to in times of trouble.
When Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations, his famous journal that became a wonderful classic book, the Antonine Plague was decimating the Roman Empire. A third of the Roman Empire died from the Antonine Plague. So in the midst of that he was writing the Meditations. So there’s a parallel to what we’re going through today with our post-pandemic fears and anxieties, and people are reaching for things that are practical. They’re grounded, and they deal with how the mind works. The Stoics were fascinated with how thinking interferes with wellness and how we can use the mind in a more skillful way.
TS: I wonder if we can get more specific. So let’s say someone’s listening and they’re thinking, “Yeah, there are things that are happening in the world that I feel I don’t have any direct control of, and yet I have a lot of negative emotions that are coming up. How would the Stoic philosophy, how specifically could I use it to help me when that’s what I’m going through? My frustration, rage, grief, the things I can’t control that are happening in the world around me.”
MM: It’s first accepting and surrendering, you could say, to the limitations of control, which is something that we don’t always do, particularly when we’re talking about things going on in the world. So many of us are looking at the headlines these days and saying, “What can I do?,” feeling powerless and suffering over that powerlessness, instead of understanding that what we can do is impact our immediate surroundings and not waste our time and our energy trying to in a grandiose way make a huge difference in the way the world is moving. We can’t do that. What we can do is help the people around us. We can minimize our own suffering. And we do that, as I was saying, by understanding that we simply—it’s outside of our sphere of control.
But the mind can get so grandiose in its desire to change everything, to impact everything, and we simply don’t have that ability. And that’s what the Stoics are very clear on. That’s why they talk about humility. It’s important to be humble about what we are able to do and what we can’t. So it’s about sort of pulling it back, bringing it back home.
TS: There’s some subtlety and nuance here, I think, that’s important because it’s also—it’s one thing we can say, “I don’t have any control over these things [that] are happening.” But it’s also important that we rouse our agency and rouse our effectiveness. And I think this is also where it can get—and I’m not trying to get overly abstract. I’m trying to really be in my own experience. Sometimes it’s hard to know when do I let go and when do I like, no, I need to find some small thing I can do.
MM: Absolutely. And that’s the middle path, as the Buddhists would call it. It’s not about absolving ourselves completely of responsibility, but it’s understanding what we actually are capable of and getting out of this egotistical idea that we’re meant to have opinions about everything, we’re meant to have agency over everything, we’re meant to somehow be as world citizens involved in the whole mishegoss of what’s going on in the world.
In fact, we can’t do that. And it’s one of the delusions, I think, of living in the media age, is it gives us this false reach, this sense that we are connecting with all of these events outside of ourselves around the world, when in fact they’re abstractions to us. We simply have no impact on the suffering, most of the suffering, that’s happening in the world, obviously.
TS: OK, I’m going to keep going here, and you could say that if I get annoying at any point, Mark. But what if somebody who says, “That’s kind of like the ostrich move. Like is Stoicism like an ostrich where I’m just going to put my head in the ground and say, ‘Oh, I can’t control, I can’t say anything about what’s going on in the Mideast or about climate change. It’s outside of my control.’” I don’t think that’s what you’re saying.
MM: Not at all. There’s nothing ostrich-like about it. It’s realistic. The Stoics were realist, pragmatist. What can I do about what’s going on in Gaza other than send some clothing, make some contributions, write things that support getting useful information out there? There’s very little that I can do. So it’s not about being an ostrich. It’s about being a realist. And that’s what Stoicism is about. It’s not getting lost in fantasies of being bigger than we are or having more impact than we do.
That doesn’t mean we can’t have impact, but there’s got to be humility in it. Humility is understanding our proper proportion in the universe, and that’s what Stoicism is all about. What is your proportion? And then proportion leads to appropriate action, and we can be much more effective that way than if we’re sort of pumped up and puffed up and have all these big ideas, and then it becomes an ego trip and it’s a setup for failure.
TS: OK. I feel satisfied now with the completion of that answer. Now tell me what Stoics mean by this phrase that I’ve heard—but I’m not sure I really understand it—“amor fati,” to love life.
MM: Amor fati, yeah. Amor fati is one of their primary teachings. Amor fati is about learning to love the life that you have exactly as it is, making space for things as they are without feeling like we’re missing out or we will be OK when such and such happens. But rather it’s being in the present moment. It’s about practicing what we call mindfulness and opening our hearts to what is here around us now.
And that’s the way, again, that’s about humility. It’s about understanding we can’t have everything. There will inevitably be disappointments and losses, things that we would love to aspire to, but simply don’t have the ability. Amor fati says surrender, lean in to what is going on, and open your heart to it. And that’s a way of celebrating our lives as they are.
And again, this isn’t about being an ostrich and it’s also not about being Pollyanna. It doesn’t mean that everything is hunky-dory, that we love everything about our lives. Obviously our lives are imperfect, and we are full of foibles and lacks and limitations. That’s OK. What the Stoics say is that’s OK, this is who you are, and there’s a lot that you can bring to your experience to enrich it, to deepen it, to have more love for the people around us, and honor. The Stoics are very big on honor and virtue and wisdom and justice, having a sense of doing the right thing in our lives. And amor fati is connected to that sense of having a more just way of looking at our existence.
TS: Now, what would a Stoic do with the emotions that come up when something happens and it’s really not what I wanted to have happen? It’s like here I am. I have amor fati written on a Post-it note someplace. And then I get that email that says, I don’t know, something like, “There’s going to be an IRS investigation into X, Y, Z,” or I’m thinking of things that if I saw them in my email, “You’re being sued, Tami, for misquoting this or that,” or something, and I’m like, “Amor fati.” What do I do in these moments? Because we all have our version of that.
MM: Yeah, the first thing you do is allow the emotions to come up. If it’s rage, if it’s fear, if it’s—whatever the emotions are, allow them to come up. Understand that they are not going to kill you. So make space for them in awareness. And then don’t attach a story to them that keeps them embedded in your psyche, allowing the emotions to pass through you as they will and as they do when we don’t leap on it and turn it into a cause célèbre or a reason to feel sorry for ourselves.
Stoics had no patience with self-pity. We are meant to face our challenges, our obstacles, our fears, our rage, whatever happens to come up, all of it, but not grasp onto it, not turn it into an identity, and not go into a delusion of thinking that therefore because this happened, therefore that’s going to happen. And then of course that just becomes a progressive negative cycle of anticipation.
So that’s what they’re trying to do is pull us into the moment. Say, “These things will happen,” but we don’t have to make them into an identity and we don’t have to hold on to them indefinitely as part of who we are. Things happen, but they belong to what Emerson called the “exterior life.” It doesn’t change who we are inside.
TS: I think one of the ways that I can sometimes get confused when it comes to applying ideas like this in relationship to emotions that come up with experiences, sometimes things happen and I have a strong grief response and I don’t want to cut that short and say, “OK, now it’s time. Tami, you’ve spent X number of minutes grieving this thing. Time to embrace the Stoic philosophy. See it differently. Move on, girl, and get going. Get with it.” That doesn’t work for me. And I noticed, though, I can kind of—I don’t know if I want to use the word “wallow,” but I can work it. I can get into it. And I’m trying to find if you can any way to help people sort through that. How do they honorably grieve but not get stuck in grief at the same time?
MM: Yeah, that’s a great point. Grief is an inside job. Nobody can tell you how long to grieve and nor can we tell ourselves how long to grieve. But I know from my own experience when my authentic grief or sorrow or sadness is turning into a tragic tale that I’m telling myself. I know when I’m clinging on to it, when I’m milking it, and when it’s time to move on. So there’s a time to grieve, there’s a time for despair, and there’s a time for letting go of that despair and not being oppressed by it anymore. But that’s an inside job. Nobody can tell you what that is.
Do you know what I mean about “milking it,” where you were just—?
TS: Yeah.
MM: So at that point, you know it’s time to get clear and not keep indulging that repetitive thought pattern.
TS: You work with people in all kinds of workshops and groups, offering them writing prompts in your Writing to Awaken approach. Do you have a sense of what might be a good writing prompt for somebody who’s sorting through “Have I entered that zone of”—I don’t know if you want to use the word “milking,” or what might help someone get clear inside?
MM: Well, one good prompt is, “What are you afraid of losing if you let go of this pain?” Often we hold on, particularly when we’re grieving someone who’s died, we hold on to that grief because we think it’s our connection to them. But another point that the Stoics make is that how we hold our memories is within our control.
Another good prompt is “a story that you’re telling yourself right now that isn’t true.” Very often folks will say to me, “Well, nothing. I’m not telling myself any story that isn’t true.” And then their eyes will light up, and there’s a kind of an aha moment, and they realize they are repeating something that is not actually genuine in the moment.
So those are two really good prompts to use for—to help us get clear on when we’re holding ourselves in grief, we’re holding ourselves in suffering and telling ourselves a story about it that reifies it and keeps it stuck in our present moment, when in fact it’s something that has been long passed.
TS: Now, you said something that I found a little stunning, that we have a choice about how we hold our memories, that this is a Stoic perspective. I think a lot of times when our memories surface, they surface from a body knowing. Let’s say I go and I get some deep tissue work done or something like that, and memories surface and I think, “I have a choice about these memories? These are just memories [that] are coming up.” Now I do have a choice, I guess, [in] how long I spend continuing to think about them, but they seem like they come unbidden a lot.
MM: Yes, they do. And body memory is its own thing. Trauma that we hold in the body, memories we hold in the body, is its own thing. The Stoics are more talking about the memories. For example, let’s say you lose a friend. Let’s say a friend dies, and you go through a grieving period. At a certain point you have to decide, is this how I want to remember that person? Was there no beauty in the friendship? What about the love? What about the joy? What about the wonderful things that we shared? Is it always going to be veiled by this regret over losing them?
Stephen Levine used to say that when somebody dies, the first 15 minutes you’re crying for them, and after that you’re crying for yourself. So what the Stoics are saying is we can choose how to hold our memories. At a certain point, once the intense grieving is past, the initial despair and the sadness—we need to let ourselves fall apart. But after that we can say, “What is the narrative? How do I want to remember this person?”
And I remember the first time I read that in Seneca, I was shocked. Do you mean we have control over the past? The past is the one thing we feel like we can’t control. But we do have impact on how the past lives in us and the story and how we describe the past and how we choose to remember.
TS: It’s interesting that you gave the example of losing a friend. You write about someone who is very dear to you. How did you apply the Stoic approach, if you did? How did that work for you in your own life experience during that loss?
MM: It was interesting because I wasn’t doing it deliberately. This was a dear friend of mine for 35 years. We’d been lovers, we’d been friends, we’d been every iteration of a friendship you could have. But what I noticed was that after Robert died, I didn’t feel the kind of grief I expected to feel. I didn’t miss him as intensely as I thought I would. We had been very complete. I had gone through his dying process with him. There was nothing left unsaid. I was so grateful for everything that we had shared.
And what I find now—it’s almost seven years later—is that I think of him with love and gratitude and joy and a kind of celebration. I’m not sunk in despair that he hasn’t been around for the last six years. It’s not where the emphasis is. So I didn’t do it deliberately. It was just an experiential surprise for me. I thought that I would hold on to it harder. I thought I would hold on to it differently.
So often our ideas about emotions are different from the emotions themselves. My actual emotions—he lived a full and happy life. He died a charmed death. I’m not sitting here feeling badly about this person who was a—he had a triumphant life. I don’t use that lightly. He went through life-and-death illness. He went through many, many things bravely and in an exemplary way. That’s what I hold when I think about Robert. He’s not forever the person who died too young or the person who I can’t have in my life anymore. That’s a selfish way of looking at it.
TS: Right. I’m going to ask a question that I’ve kind of snuck up on, but I’m going to ask it really directly because it’s important to me, Mark, and I know that our goodwill relationship can handle me going in like this a little bit.
We’ve all heard of spiritual bypassing, and what I can imagine is Stoic bypassing, like, “Oh, now we’re engaging in Stoic bypassing,” meaning we’re somehow skipping over something or other. “So I’ll remember this person—.” How do we make sure that’s not what we’re doing?
MM: Well, the first thing is to allow ourselves to have our feelings. If you lose a friend and there are no tears, if you lose a friend, for example—we’re using that as—and there’s no grief and there’s no despair, and you’re going right to, “Oh, it’s all good,” or going to what I’m saying about remembering them well, chances are we are spiritually bypassing or stoically bypassing.
But once we’ve had the emotions, months have passed, and we’re back in our lives, that’s when we have choice about how we want to proceed with that experience as part of our past and how we want to hold it. This isn’t about spiritual bypassing at all. And unfortunately the word “Stoic”—the connotation of the word “Stoic” in our culture is “repressed.” And when people think of Stoicism, they think of emotional repression. So it’s important to tweak those two things apart, that the Stoics we’re talking about from ancient Rome and Greece, and then Emerson, Montaigne, and other Stoics, is not being a Stoic in the sense of not owning your feelings or dissociating or spiritually bypassing.
TS: In terms of learning from Ralph Waldo Emerson, he lost his son. He lost his son. His son Waldo died of a disease, scarlet fever. And I’m curious, what can we learn from the way that this great essayist and poet went through and was changed by that loss? What can we learn from that?
MM: Well, first I just want to say one of the reasons I fell in love with Emerson was that he was a flawed person who had many tragedies in his life. He didn’t come by this wisdom easily. This isn’t secondhand wisdom. He lost his father when he was nine. He lost his first wife when he was 26. And then he lost his namesake, Wally.
And what Emerson learned in the process of his own grief was that what happens to us externally, which includes our relationships, doesn’t touch the inner life. What he was surprised by was that he had gone through this terrible tragedy and it hadn’t destroyed him. Something that he thought could not be taken from him without him losing his soul, without him losing his will to live, had in fact been taken from him, and he was still there. He was still intact.
So [what] he realized was that grief belongs to the exterior life. Now, it doesn’t mean that it’s not an inner experience, but it’s connected to the changing world of what’s going on outside of us as opposed to our inner world, which isn’t affected—the soul as he called it.
So he was shocked when Wally’s death, while it made him very sad—he was very, very sad, and he had sadness about it for the rest of his life—it didn’t defeat him in the way that he thought it would. So that’s, for me, a role model. And it has something to do with what I was just saying about my friend Robert. I would’ve thought that I would’ve been devastated, and I wasn’t. And it made me think about Emerson and the way that he had gone through that experience. And I didn’t intend for it. I wasn’t aspiring to be like Emerson, but my experience matched the process that he was describing.
TS: OK, I’m going to take this in a slightly different direction, which is to say I’ve been surprised of late of how external changes in my life, loss, transition, not how I’ve been centered in my soul, in my bright inner light of the unchanging, but quite the opposite, how I’ve suffered a lot from them. And I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve been suffering. It surprised me. I wouldn’t have expected it, but I’m telling myself the truth about the suffering.
And in doing some research on the Stoics, this is something that really inspired me, and I’d love to talk about it, which is from Seneca, who I understand is a great Stoic philosopher of the past, pitied people who had never faced misfortune. And he said, “No one can ever know what you’re capable—even you don’t know what you’re capable of if you haven’t gone through and worked through misfortune.” And I noticed that somehow inspired me.
And I wonder if you can speak to that, this notion that somehow what we’re facing when we face travail, adversity, it actually can show us our capacities in some way.
MM: Oh, absolutely. Emerson said, “He has seen but half the world who has never been shown the house of pain.” Until we enter the house of pain, until we’ve had experience in the house of pain, we can’t grow into full human beings. And while nobody looks for tragedy, nobody looks for adversity, there is no doubt anyone who’s gone through a crisis and come through it with insight knows that when we are tested, we grow in ways we cannot grow without those tests.
I know, for example, if I hadn’t been, my life hadn’t been threatened in my late 20s—I got a bad diagnosis—none of my life as a writer, as a seeker, as somebody who’s interested in philosophy, none of that would probably have happened. So while gratitude can sound a little glib, there’s no question in my own life that there’s thankfulness for what I’ve endured, what I’ve had to endure, my particular lot of pain. I’m actually thankful for that. It’s made me the person that I am. So when you realize that, it shifts your attitude towards suffering.
This was the number one insight I had after I got my diagnosis. I spent about ten years as a dharma bum. I was living in monasteries, ashrams, trying to figure out how I was going to get through my fear. And the major insight that I had, Tami, was that suffering has a purpose. I grew up in an atheist Jewish, nominally Jewish, household where suffering was just a cross to bear and no one ever talked about suffering having a purpose, that it can be grist for the mill, that it’s an energy that we can shift and that deepens us.
For me, that was a huge—it was a life-changing insight. All of a sudden, no matter what was happening, I could learn from it. I can learn. I can deepen. What can I let go of here? How can this make me wiser? How can this give me more empathy? How can I be less attached? There’s always something to learn. And I know that that can sound Pollyanna. It’s not meant to. It’s simply realistic. If life is going to give you darkness and hard things, what are you going to do with it? Are we going to let it defeat us and just become this sort of heavy load on our back until we get more and more bent over until we can’t see straight anymore? Or do you say, “How can I use this?” And that’s what the Stoics were all about, using your adversity to get free.
TS: To ask again for a good writing prompt, self-reflection prompt, for that person who says, “OK, suffering has a purpose. I’m not 100% sure I know what the purpose is of the suffering I’m going through right now. I’m not sure I know.”
MM: As simple as, “What can this suffering teach you about yourself, about your relationships, about your expectations, about places where you’re misguided?” What can it teach you? Where is the information?
The Stoics have another great practice called “turning the obstacle upside down.” So whatever comes to us, realizing that we can turn it upside down through a shift in perspective. So how can you shift your perspective on the suffering you’re going through now in such a way that there’s potential, that it is in some ways strengthening. Or how can you use it just to open your heart? Because that’s another thing, is a lot of times when we’re going through hard times, we shut down, we contract, we isolate. How can we use that same suffering, that same pain, as a bridge to other people in pain? That’s a radical shift.
TS: Let me ask you a personal question, Mark.
MM: Yeah.
TS: You spent a few years working on How Emerson Can Change Your Life, working with these ideas, the principles of Stoicism. Did you hit any suffering during that time where you thought, “OK, I’m going to apply this.” And it was hard. It was hard. Maybe you made it through it, but it wasn’t just like [SNAPS] “got it.” It was a journey for you, and what happened?
MM: Yes. I mean, I went through some relationship issues with people who I care a lot about, and I went through a lot of rage and a lot of pain and sadness during the writing of this book.
So I noticed that after I had sort of been with it for a while, a few months, I saw what I was mentioning to you earlier. I saw how I was holding on to it. I was turning it into a cross to bear, and I started to do, little by little, mindfulness practice around choosing how I wanted to remember these people and how I wanted to define what had happened between us.
Once some of the emotion had subsided, I could have a bit more objectivity. I used the Stoic practice of trying to love the situation as it was. Our relationship’s changed in a radical way. How can I actually appreciate this? What’s better about this, in fact, than the way things were?
So it’s turning the obstacle upside down when it’s appropriate, when the time comes, and realizing that I have more agency—we were talking about agency earlier—than… I haven’t always given myself credit for how much agency I had over my own suffering.
TS: This is really interesting in terms of choosing how we want to remember certain people, especially people that perhaps we had a difficult falling out with or a breakup or the relationship didn’t end well, but perhaps it was a deeply nourishing relationship for quite some time. We have a choice about how we remember it. That’s very interesting to me.
MM: It blew my mind when I read that the first time, that we have a choice over how we hold the past. It felt like a complete oxymoron, because the past is the one thing we feel like we can’t control in any way, but we actually do have impact on how it affects us.
TS: In terms of how we look at things, in How Emerson Can Change Your Life, you write about this notion of “the angle of vision,” that we can shift our angle of vision. Can you explain this concept of the angle of vision?
MM: Yes. Well, his angle of vision was his way of saying “perspective.” And this is nothing new, and this is vintage Stoicism. And he says, “What is a man but what he thinks about all day?” What we think about, our preoccupations, come to define us.
So understanding our perspective is the first step to bringing change to our lives and to shifting out of a suffering place. But it means really being honest. And that’s something we are not often as honest as we think we are. We think we’re telling the truth, and most of the time we’re euphemizing or we’re lying by omission or we’re practicing reputation management or all these other ways that we don’t actually tell the whole truth.
So when we look at our angle of vision, we have to say, “Honestly, how do I look at the world? How do I see? What are my projections? How do my projections form my expectations?” And getting really honest about that.
It’s not pretty, sometimes, when you are truthful with yourself about how bitter you are or how stuck in the past you are, how competitive or how envious, whatever the ugly emotions are. We’re often not truthful about that. So you can’t shift your angle of vision until you’re honest about what your angle of vision is. And that can be a reckoning. That can be a real wake-up call.
TS: Let me ask you a question about that, because it’s one thing to be honest about your angle of vision, and then it’s another thing to say, “I’m going to shift it.” Let’s say someone’s like, “OK, I can be honest about it, and I enjoy being a grump.” Not really, or something like that. “But no, I’m not going to shift it.” What do you think keeps people, even when it’s their own unhappiness, that keeps us from shifting our angle of vision? What is it that keeps us from making that shift? “I’ll tell you the truth about it. I just won’t change it.”
MM: Yeah, yeah. We believe that our perspective defines us. We think that our identity is our perspective and vice versa. And when you understand that perspective is something that’s changing all the time, in fact, and if you let it, we’re actually much more fluid than we think we are.
But there has to be the desire. Like you’re saying, if somebody says, “I’m a pessimist. I’ll die a pessimist. This is how I want to live,” that person’s not going to change. But for the person who doesn’t want to live with so much pessimism and gloominess and doom, a doomsayer kind of personality for the rest of their lives, that’s really useful to understand, “Gosh, this goes really deep in me. What is my attachment to this pessimistic point of view? What am I afraid of losing if I let it go?” A lot of pessimists look at optimists like we are delusional or like we are misinformed or just childish.
So how, for example, does one confuse pessimism with realism? A lot of pessimists will tell you, “I’m a realist. You are the one who’s pie in the sky.” So just using pessimism as a common example of an angle of vision that people struggle with, particularly today, it’s very—there’s a lot of pessimism and a growing feeling of pessimism.
So to be an optimist in this culture, in this moment, is to really go against the tide. And the optimism I’m talking about is—Emerson talked about optimism, which is reality-based optimism, understanding that things can change. Everything in nature adapts, that we can reinvent ourselves. There’s always that the imagination exists. The imagination can help us get through hard times. That’s the kind of optimism we’re talking about.
He called it “cosmic optimism,” which can sound a little grandiose, but it’s really just not losing a sense of the beauty of the world and the possibility of being a human being. So no matter how bad things are, we can always keep asking questions. There’s always something to be learned. The heart can always open a little bit more and deepen.
That gives me hope. And that’s another word people have a lot of trouble with, particularly nowadays. Some people prefer hopefulness to hope. So we can have a feeling of hopefulness and possibility when we’re willing to open the aperture on our angle of vision and say, “What am I not looking at here? How am I keeping myself small and narrow and stuck and in pain?”
TS: I noticed when you were talking about “cosmic optimism” and you were describing nature’s regenerative powers, you were pointing to that, that I got more optimistic, realistically optimistic, as you were talking about it, because I thought, that’s true. Nature does have this adaptive regenerative capacity within it, and we are that nature too.
So I wonder if you could just say more about this notion of “cosmic,” that word, because that’s interesting to me, cosmic optimism.
MM: Yeah, cosmic optimism in the sense that we are connecting to the force at the center of being. And you can call that whatever you want, call it Eros, for example, that animating, creative, imaginative force at the center of our being. We don’t lose that even under duress, even when we’re bombarded with bad things happening. That remains there.
So cultivating that and really nurturing the connection to our cosmic optimism, to that regenerative power within us, is absolutely critical, particularly when we’re going through hard times. A big part of self-care is remembering that as a part of nature, you have the ability to recreate, to adapt, to find new ways forward. And that’s so helpful in times of suffering. It’s so easy for the lights to go out completely, but it’s like it keeps the pilot light in your mind going.
TS: And I wonder, once again, moving from the personal more to the collective, if this notion of the possibility of going through hardship and that there’s some new adaptive regenerative possibility—I mean, some people refer to this as conscious evolution. That you can say we’re going through these very dark times, or you can say we’re in the middle of conscious evolution, which requires this kind of adversity in order for us collectively to grow. So I wonder how you see that when you look at applying these ideas in a larger social sphere?
MM: Well, that’s a classic example of both are true, and it’s also a classic example of angle of vision. So we can look at it as just bad things are happening, tragedy, hopeless, or we are part of an evolutionary cycle that is larger than this moment, as painful as it is. And when we can hold it in that way, we are not as defeated. And we can also be effective.
Hopelessness doesn’t lead to service in the world. There needs to be a sense that we can have some impact. But we can’t have any impact if we don’t have any hope. And so realizing—and that’s a good way of doing it, seeing that we’re part of a larger cycle of history, of transformation, of evolution. That instills that feeling of hopefulness that I’m talking about, that it energizes us, it motivates us, and it makes it seem worthwhile to help and to do what we can to make things better.
TS: In Lessons from an American Stoic, at the end you have a whole collection of exercises and different going deeper reflections and exercises that go with each chapter of the book. And in this segment on talking about looking at our own angle of vision, you offer this really interesting idea, and I found it worked for me like that [SNAPS].
So I want to share it, which is you said, “Imagine that this was happening from a view from above.” So I spun myself way up and was up in the galaxy someplace looking down, and that really, really helped shift me. And then you took it further, and you said, “Imagine that this was happening to someone else,” whatever personal thing. And that also helped me. So I wonder if you could say a little bit more about these two shifts that you’re suggesting people experiment with, and why do they work so well?
MM: Because we’re so identified with our suffering, we’re so identified with our story and with our ego, that when we take what the Stoics called “taking the view from above,” we’re abstracting ourselves, we’re stepping outside of our experience, and we’re using what meditators or spiritual traditions call “witness consciousness.” And when you move into the witness, you’re not as enmeshed in the situation, whatever it might be.
And we can do that. We can do that no matter what’s happening with us. And imagining it happening to someone else is also very interesting, because we hear about terrible things happening to other people, and the ease with which we kind of turn the channel or turn the page or move on is kind of extraordinary. So when you shift it from “this is me and mine and my life and my loss” to “this is a human being going through this experience,” it’s expansive and it relieves the pressure of “poor me.” We live so much of our lives in poor me. “Why me?” And this is the antidote to that.
TS: OK. Another big topic I want to talk to you about, Mark, is The Seekers Forum. This is this online offering that you’ve created and run for many years now. But here’s the part that’s really interesting to me. The Seekers Forum—and you could say Sounds True, which has been around now for almost four decades—helps people find their own truth, their own way, through self-inquiry, self-reflection, doing various kinds of spiritual exercises. And OK, wonderful.
And some of the feedback that I’ve gotten over the years is people saying, “Gosh, I wish Sounds True would just tell me what to do. I wish it would just tell me what to do. This whole notion that I’m going to find my own—if I knew how to find my own way, I’d have found it. I haven’t. I don’t know. I’m confused. And now Mark Matousek said X, Y, Z about the Stoics. And then I listened to another podcast X number of weeks later that said something totally different. These things are like, are they contradictory? Are they paradoxically true? I’m confused. I want to find my own way. But the truth is I’m kind of mixed up inside.” How do you address that?
MM: The Seekers Forum is a nonsectarian group. I’m not a card-carrying anything. I’m not much of a joiner. I’m not really a group person. I’m not attracted to any specific—I’m attracted to many different teachings, but no specific tradition. And I wanted to create a group for people like me who are interested in asking questions.
The core of the group is self-inquiry, but I’m not there to tell them what is true and what is not. That’s not my job. I feel I see myself as a guide or as a friend. I like the Sufi concept of “sohbet,” which is the spiritual talk of friends.
TS: No, I’m with you. But my question has to do with people reporting confusion.
MM: That’s their confusion. My job isn’t to make their confusion go away. My job is to ask them questions. “So why is this—what is this confusion? Let’s be specific.” And that’s a big part of Writing to Awaken and what we do in The Seekers Forum. It’s getting specific. Very often we kind of stop at the generality and saying, “Well, what exactly are you confused by?” And then saying, “Where is your desire? What truly gives you joy? Where do you feel guided, and what feels like a closed door to you?”
So by asking questions, people can find their own way and come back to their own experience and say, “Well, yes, maybe. Maybe I need to try yoga,” or, “Maybe I need to try journaling,” or whatever it happens to be. My job is to provide them with possibilities, to ask questions and trust that they’re going to find their own way, which is what happens. The kind of folks who are attracted to this group, Tami, are not looking for me to tell them what’s true and what isn’t. They’re just the opposite of that, in fact.
TS: Sure. And my question isn’t so much specifically—even though I mentioned The Seekers Forum, it’s not so much specifically about that actual vehicle. It’s more about this time that we’re living in when so many people are no longer a singular this or that on their spiritual journey. They’re taking pieces from here and there and creating their own—I’ll use the Emerson term, “self-reliant”—path forward. And at times it seems to work really well, and at times it doesn’t seem to work really well. And instead there’s confusion.
And I’m wondering, you’re saying get specific about what that confusion can be. I think there’s also a sense of, “I don’t know if I—can I trust myself? Do I know enough? Am I asking the right questions?” So I’m wondering what, specifically, more advice you have to people who have that moment of like, “Am I growing? Is my spiritual journey taking me anywhere? I’m asking a whole lot of questions. Self-inquiry, OK, but I have a lot of doubts about this.”
MM: Yeah. And doubt is a great motivator on the spiritual path, and so is confusion. And struggle has a purpose in spiritual life. I wouldn’t be there to take away their struggle. I would tell them to go into the struggle. Go more deeply into your struggle. What is actually troubling you? Where’s the fear? What’s the insecurity? Where’s the longing? What is your true longing? Do you long to belong to a religion? Or are you somebody who has no interest and no faith whatsoever?
So it’s not about taking them and making it easier for people. This is a challenging path. The path of coming to know yourself is a lifelong journey. So I encourage people to remember that it’s a practice, first of all, and to not expect it to be easy. Why would it be easy? Or not easy. Nothing in life that’s worthwhile is easy. Love, work, art—none of these things are easy. Spirituality. These are all challenging things.
So it’s about not feeling sorry for ourselves, that it’s not just kind of handed to us or that we’re not completely clear all the time. And accepting that the price of admission to wisdom and insight is struggle. That’s the way it goes. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong.
When people tell me that they’re confused, I know they’re working. That tells me that they’re engaged with their process. When things seem to come too easily or when people just kind of accept something at face value, I’m waiting for them to hit the wall because they haven’t actually often come up against the truth of what’s going on inside them. And spiritual life is a very, very personal journey. It’s a personal endeavor.
So we can accompany one another. We can hold each other’s hand on our way, guide each other home, as they say, but we can’t take away that uncertainty. It’s meant to be there.
TS: It’s very interesting to me to hear you say the price of admission is struggle, because I think sometimes there can be this notion that if I’m struggling, I’m doing something wrong.
MM: Exactly. And that’s why I emphasize that. No, on the contrary, you can’t have a relationship without struggle. Whether that’s a relationship with another human being or a relationship with a faith or a relationship with yourself. There’s always going to be difficulty. The problem is that we want it to go away, or we think there’s something wrong if we’re not just getting it. And then things don’t stay the way they are.
But of course, we’re in an impermanent world. Nothing is certain. Everything has many different sides to it, which is another reason I love Emerson so much. He talks about paradox really being at the heart of our existence. Everything is contradiction. We are homo duplex. We’re the two-sided ape. Why wouldn’t the different parts of ourselves argue with each other and have difficulty and conflict? It’s a part of being a human being.
TS: The last chapter of Lessons from an American Stoic is on enlightenment. And a previous book that you wrote that I read many years ago—it must’ve been north of 20 years ago—was called Sex, Death, Enlightenment. I loved that book. As a younger person it was particularly meaningful to me.
A lot of people don’t use the word “enlightenment” anymore. It’s like, “Oh, there’s so much confusion around it. No one really knows what it means. I’m not sure I know what it means. We’re not going to talk about it. Let’s just leave that word off.” But here you are at the last chapter, How Emerson Can Change Your Life, is on enlightenment. What can we learn from Emerson about enlightenment?
MM: He saw the whole purpose of his work was to bring light to the lives of people who couldn’t find their way out of darkness. His whole project is to brighten our awareness and brighten our perception, our angle of vision, and our appreciation of nature, our appreciation of the world.
So enlightenment is about brightening our angle of vision. It’s about freeing ourselves of repetitive stories. I like what Sharon Salzberg says about enlightenment, which is that you’re sitting on the meditation cushion. Every time your mind wanders and you realize it’s wandering, that’s a moment of enlightenment. So it’s a humble, small, accessible experience. Every time you realize that you—when you become aware of being aware and you can see yourself thinking, and you can see how you’re projecting and painting the world with your thoughts and your feelings, that’s a moment of enlightenment. It’s not a permanent state.
So I’m talking about enlightenment with a lowercase e. I’ve spent enough time around great spiritual masters to know that they all have their issues. They all have their problems. They’re all works in progress. I’ve never met a teacher who wasn’t a work in progress. So are they enlightened? Yes, they have an unusual level of self-awareness. There is some attainment there, but it’s always imperfect. It’s flawed. And catch them on a bad day, say something to them that they don’t want to hear, and you’ll see how that enlightenment suddenly becomes very, very human and very, very messy.
For me, enlightenment is about allowing the mess to be there. It’s really about making space for the contradictions, the inconsistencies, and our humanity with all of the failings and foibles to be there. And big surprise, big surprise that we have these contradictions.
TS: Mark Matousek, how wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much. How radiant to be with you in this way. The author of the new book, Lessons from an American Stoic: How Emerson Can Change Your Life.
MM: Thanks, Tami.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the aftershow Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
