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 docu-series, 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 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 join at 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 soundstruefoundation.org—and in advance, thank you for your support.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Rainn Wilson. Yes, Rainn Wilson: actor, comedian, podcaster, producer, writer, and director. Best known for his role as Dwight Schrute in the sitcom The Office, a role for which he earned three Emmy Award nominations. In 2008, Rainn Wilson co-founded the company SoulPancake, an online media company that makes stuff that matters, encouraging open-hearted dialogue about what it means to be human.
Rainn is, as you know, funny. He’s also a deep and visionary thinker writing about such topics as death, meaning, and our purpose at this critical time in human history. He’s the author of a new book. It’s called Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution. Rainn, welcome.
Rainn Wilson: Tami, it’s such a pleasure. I love your show, your business model, your videos; the whole insights, the meditation—the whole thing that you bring. I love it and we’ve been trying to schedule this for a while and we finally are together. I was sick a couple days ago. It was brutal.
Just thrilled to be talking with you. That’s the moral of the story, I’m thrilled to be talking with you right now.
TS: OK, let’s hope that at the end of our time together, we’re both as thrilled as we are here at the beginning because I’m also thrilled.
All right, at the beginning of your book, Soul Boom, you asked this rhetorical question, “Why the hell is the actor who played Dwight in The Office writing a book about spirituality?” So let’s just start there and bring all of our listeners to this moment in time.
RW: Excellent question, important question, foundational question. There’s a number of answers to that. One is I almost died, so I will quote the great the Julia Cameron who said, “I came to spirituality out of necessity, not out of virtue.” The necessity for me was a severe mental health crisis, which I’ve honestly have been struggling with my whole life. It really was at its apex in my twenties in the ’90s when I was living in New York City, I have an anxiety disorder. I was depressed. I was struggling with addiction. And having grown up a member of the Baha’i faith and having walked away from religion, faith, spirituality, God, morality—any of that nonsense—I was so desperately miserable I started searching for a path and that was a spiritual path.
And since I’ve been in my thirties and forties and now my fifties, exploring spirituality, spiritual ideas, different faith traditions, different modalities of seeing our spiritual reality is something that’s really important to me. It’s helped keep me sane, it’s helped keep me sober. It’s helped keep me focused. It’s given my life a tremendous amount of joy and meaning and purpose.
So that’s the big central answer. There’s some others, but that’s the main one. That’s why Dwight is writing a book on spirituality.
TS: When you say you almost died, I just want to understand a little more. Meaning you were sort of hitting bottom in your life from all of the mental health challenges or you had some type of near-death experience? Or what was going on?
RW: Yeah, along with anxiety, depression, addiction, loneliness comes suicidal ideation. And yeah, I was hitting bottom. And I’ve had a lot of ups and downs in my life, but especially at that time, when you contemplate death, new vistas actually open up for you. I’m so grateful for hitting bottom in that way because it kind of pushed me down this path through the forest of big spiritual ideas.
TS: Now, Rainn, one of the reasons I’m so excited to talk to you and that I’m so thrilled about your book, Soul Boom, is that you have a way of talking about spirituality that’s funny and clever and sincere all at the same time. And what I noticed is that the part of me that’s looking from the outside at anyone who has this sincere devotional heart comes up with this kind of, I don’t know, kind of sarcastic, kind of slightly even mean observation, which you address right away in Soul Boom—which is so another person down and out with mental health challenges who seeks refuge in religion or God or seeks refuge in spirituality, like it’s a kind of weakness, if you will. Do what I’m getting at? The cultural critique that people move into a spiritual path.
And [that’s] something I’ve been afraid of my whole life—like, “Oh yeah, they’re just going to say, ‘Tami, she’s this sort of weak-minded, big-hearted devotional, whatever, love of God is kind of dripping out of her mouth. What’s wrong with her? Get your mind on, Tami. Think critically.’” And I’m just curious how you’ve dealt with that being both a critical thinker yourself, but here you’re saying it was when I was down and out that I turned to faith and people could say, “Wow, really, Rainn?”
RW: Yeah, I mean that’s such a great point and such an amazing conversation. We could spend the rest of our time together just addressing that, but it’s hard. I am a naturally cynical person. I’m a naturally pessimistic person. This lives in conflict with my big heart, which I’m also incredibly loving. I think kids that were traumatized and addicts kind of grow up this way. I’ve certainly been judged a lot in Hollywood for being a comedian and a comedy actor who also talks about God and the soul and has conversations with Oprah. That is the weirdest of the weird.
External society might say that spirituality is weakness—that belief in God or a higher power is for the people who can’t take reality, that reality is merely and solely physical and material. There’s so much to say on it. I’ll just boil it right down that in a way they’re right and it’s OK.
When we deal with death; when we deal with failure; when we deal with longing, loneliness, depression, overwhelm, disappointment—we go to a heart space that can be incredibly isolating and lonely and disconnected and we seek connection. Humans thrive in connection.
If you want to get hard data driven—I quote in the end of my book the Grant Study from Harvard University, one of the most thorough studies ever undertaken on planet Earth following 300 men for 80 years—from Harvard about living a well-balanced life. And the result of the study was really quite simple: just connect. Just like E.M. Forster said, “Connect. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect.” So I want to connect from my brokenness and I also want to connect from my wholeness. Both of these things can be true.
Part of connecting is to connect with the radiant cosmic force we’ll call God, for lack of a better word—the incredible beauty, power, and love that courses through every molecule. And if I turn to God and turn to God out of weakness, so be it. I also turn to God out of strength because that’s where I find greatest well-being, and greatest and deepest connection.
And guess what? Connection is what keeps us whole and sane, and it works. And there’s study after study. You can read The Awakened Brain by Dr. Lisa Miller about these hard data points having to do with having a strong spiritual life and how much meaning and hope that gives humans.
TS: OK, I’m going to keep going in this basic area because one of the most exciting segments—and there were a lot of exciting segments for me in reading Soul Boom—but one of the most exciting segments was when you wrote about, “Why I’m not an atheist.” And this was exciting to me because I’ve had a lot of conversations with people and I’ve tried to explain—tried to function almost like a translator to explain my love of a creative force and how it appears inside me.
And I often notice, I just end up being like, “I don’t know. I’m serving an evolutionary force of some kind. I don’t know if I can explain it, but I’m in service to it. That’s what feels the most true to me.” And the looks I get from people are like, “What are you talking about? What are you talking about? What evolutionary force and what are you serving and what are you saying, Tami?” And then I just come out to something like it feels right or something, and that’s the end of the conversation.
So I’d like to know how for you—when you’re talking to very rational, skeptical people who have, “Come on, really?” how you are able to talk about your theism?
RW: Yeah, I’m a theist. You’re a theist.
TS: Yeah. Oh, oh.
RW: Fellow theist. I love it. I’m an unabashed theist and well, yes—so, I honor atheists and I have a section honoring atheists in the book as well, which, because they don’t accept anything is given until it’s proven in some way, shape or form. So they’re natural skeptics. And you can be a skeptic and not be pessimistic. You can just say, “Hey, I’ll believe in something and I’ll do something if I can see the evidence that it’s right and it’s the right path to take.” I admire that about atheists because we had centuries—nay, eons—of people blindly following faith of their parents in ways that has led to a great deal of destruction and ignorance. So God bless the atheists.
Why do I believe in a God? I tried being an atheist. I tried. I really did. And as hard as I could, I just couldn’t jive with the fact that the mystery of my consciousness riding around in this meat suit. It didn’t make any sense. My scintillating consciousness that can imagine all kinds of things—I can make drawings, I can create poems, I can sing songs. We humans create operas and build beautiful things and cultivate gardens. And we laugh and we weep and we hold babies in our arms. And we have all of these emotions and they’re flooded with memories from our childhoods when we were babies being held in arms.
And I tried being an atheist and just [see] the world as simply atoms and molecules and forces of energy buffeting those around, and it just didn’t work for me. To quote Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “I just couldn’t believe that the universe was just stuff.”
And as I probed this idea of discovering God, one of the hang-ups I had to overcome was of course this cultural idea of God as male, patriarchal fatherly. I was joking, I did an event with another actor on The Office the other night, last night at the 92nd Street Y, and he was joking that, “What if we all died and at the end of the day it was hysterical because God really was like a 70-year-old man with a blowing white beard sitting on a cloud and we done the—‘No, this is me. I’m God. Yeah, I’m an old man with a beard, that’s who I am.’”
But you have to get around so many inherited ideas of what God is or could be.
And when I studied—I spent a lot of time studying a lot of Native American traditions, and when I heard about the Lakota Sioux idea of God as the title Wakan Tanka, which translates as “the great mystery.” And this is a God that is not separate from nature but knowable through nature, as far as I understand. This is my limited understanding as a white man who didn’t grow up in the Lakota tradition, but I want to humbly learn from the Lakota tradition that Wakan Tanka, the great mystery, is in all things beyond time and space can be tasted in the wind and the trees through the seasons, through the cold, through the heat, through water, through fire, through earth.
Then things started to shift for me like, “Oh, God doesn’t have to even be a being or a persona.” As the theologian David Bentley Hart says, a Demiurge, which is like a God with certain powers up above like a Marvel character, shooting superhero qualities down at us humans. I love the idea of a great mystery as an artist, as an actor. As a theater artist, when I started as a storyteller, I love idea of the great mystery.
And I can believe in a great mystery. I don’t even know that I can believe in God per se, but I can believe in a great mystery and that’s enough.
TS: Do you think of yourself in some way as a devotional person? And we’ve already said you’ve come out as a theist now, do you think of yourself as a devotional person? And if so, what does that mean? Devoted to what?
RW: I love that word. Devotion is a beautiful word.
So a devotion we know as a prayer. A devout person is someone who sincerely follows something, but look at the root word there. I don’t even know the Latin, maybe you do, but devotion, devout, a devotee, devoted to something—that whatever that kind of root word is, I’m part of that.
So for me personally, I’m a member of the Baha’i faith and I get great solace, wisdom, purpose, and meaning from my particular faith. So I am a member of a faith—so I am a devoted Baha’i.
Soul Boom is not about the Baha’i faith and it certainly has no agenda to try and make people—Baha’is—simply an exploration of deep, meaningful, and important spiritual topics that anyone can tap into. You don’t have to be a member of any specific religion to tap into this incredible groundwater of profound wisdom tradition that comes from spiritual teachings.
I say devotions in that I pray to God, I pray to a higher power and I am devout in my faith and a devotee of the founder of the Baha’i faith, Baháʼu’lláh. But I love that word ultimately—“devotion.” It’s a radiant word. It has to do with surrender and opening your heart, asking for help to be shown the path. There’s a beauty and simplicity and humility in that act.
TS: So Rainn, I’m going to just take my own process one step further here because what I notice is so important to me. One of the things—there’s several things about having this conversation with you is that as a person, my biggest coming out hasn’t been about being queer. It’s been about my devotional nature and being afraid of being made fun of for that by a rational society. And it’s like, oh, and yet it’s the truest thing. It’s the truest thing about me actually in terms of how I know myself and the thing that’s been the hardest for me to come into a public announcement. And I was thinking, “How’s it like for Rainn to write a book like Soul Boom? Does he have to go through any of that kind of public exposure for his devotional nature?”
RW: Yes, I referenced it before. For a regular actor or artist in Hollywood, it’s incredibly difficult to come out of the closet as devout or as a theist—is really hard, but especially for a comedy actor. The comedy acting world just does not know what the hell to do with me. It just is like, “Oh, I don’t want to look at this. I don’t want to talk about this.”
I mean, obviously being member of a religion, of any religion kind, of has a lot of baggage—a lot of cultural baggage. A lot on the political left view religions themselves as being kind of responsible for the evils of the world. Oftentimes religious belief is correlated with a political right agenda, which it certainly doesn’t have to be, especially if you look at the actual life of Jesus himself or the Buddha himself or even Muhammad himself.
So basically, Tami, I’ve lived my whole life really being afraid of what people have thought of me. I was a nerdy kid. I wanted to fit in. I was always a people pleaser. I was always a clown. There’s an element of an actor that just has kind of this little “dancing around in his or her heart”—saying, like me, “I hope you like me, please like me.”
And it’s taken a lot of contemplation, therapy, surrender to help me find my authentic voice. And my authentic voice says, “I believe in God. I am a spiritual being having a human experience,” as Father Teilhard de Chardin famously quoted—my favorite quote of all time.
And spiritual tools can help transform us both personally, and—what we seldom talk about—spiritual tools can transform us collectively as well. This is my reality. This is reality, reality. I know this to be true and I’m not going to hold my tongue any longer because the stakes are too high.
TS: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution—the subtitle of Soul Boom. Tell me what you mean by “a spiritual revolution”?
RW: Gladly. The way that current systems are set up—to just speak sociologically for a second—they are all based on some of the worst aspects—what I would call the most animalistic aspects of humanity. And I don’t mean to ride animals who are beautiful and perfect exemplars of their natural state. But if you base systems on aggression, competition, contest, one-upsmanship, “every man for himself,” “don’t tread on me,” “live free or die,” backstabbing, dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest—if you base your systems on those precepts, it’s unsustainable. And what we’re finding more and more is that these systems are all breaking down because they’re all based on these terrible parts of us being humans.
We have some beautiful aspects as humans as well. We’re cooperative, we’re humble, we’re honest, we’re kind, we’re generous, we’re joy-bringers. And how do we change society? Not by tweaking existing systems, not by slapping on band-aids, but re-imagining how a system might work. And that’s a spiritual revolution—is to look at the spiritual underpinnings of how we do pretty much everything and reimagining it on a foundation of love and unity and compassion.
TS: One of the things you write about is how we need a new story for our time—a new mythology that can be a guiding inspiration, an inspiring story for this time that we’re in moving into the future. What’s a story that you think we could look at right now here—right now—and embrace that would be a story of spiritual revolution?
RW: That’s great. I love it. Yes. One of the pillars of a spiritual revolution I get to towards the end of the book has to do with creating a new mythology for humanity. I bring up two mythologies in the book. I talk a great length about Star Trek, which I love. I’m a big Trekker. And Star Wars. I’m a big Star Wars fan, although these TV shows have kind of lost me.
If you go to Star Wars and the mythology, put everything else aside, here’s the world as it is, and all of a sudden Luke Skywalker meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, the spiritual teacher, who says, “Hey, by the way, everything you thought you knew about the world is not true. Not only are your parents, not your parents, not only this and that and the other thing, but we are spiritual beings and there is a force called the force that exists above, beyond and behind all physical activity, and you will find yourself by finding the Force.” So that’s a beautiful mythology, right?
The mythology of Star Trek is humanity has healed its ills on planet Earth. We’ve healed our racism, our income inequality, our sexism. There is, of course—remember the first interracial kiss of all time happened on Star Trek and dozens of TV stations across the south refused to air a white man kissing a black woman on primetime television. And we are then allowed to boldly go where no man has gone before and seek out strange new life and new civilizations because humanity’s gone through World War III on planet Earth and gone through a great conflagration and has emerged with a spiritual maturity.
So those are two fictional mythologies. I know you asked for a more specific one on planet Earth, but I will say that there’s many of them. One is here’s the mythology of Greta Thunberg. The old mythology is that it’s every man for himself. Our tribe is better than your tribe. The people that live in our cave are better than the people who live in your cave. The people in our town with this skin color are better than the people in that town and with that other skin color. We’re going to fight you, dominate you, survival of the fittest. We’re going to colonize and enslave the “weaker people,” and this is how humanity has always been. We’re selfish, we’re greedy, we’re aggressive. We’re always going to be that way. That’s one mythology. That’s kind of the existing mythology.
There’s a deeper mythology that has to do with humans have helped each other and cooperated and overcome tremendous issues. Tribes have come together—and the tribes of the Iroquois formed a council where they would consult on issues instead of going to war like they always had. And this was a great inspiration to our founding fathers that helped them kind of envisage American democracy. These are some of the stories.
I mentioned Greta Thunberg. Here’s a story of a young girl who’s helped change the world because of her devotion to justice, to climate justice. She gets made fun of a lot, but here’s a girl holding up a sign in front of Swedish Parliament every Friday. And then if there’s a few people—and then she’s interviewed on the news and a few more dozen and a few more hundred. And now she has millions and millions of young followers that de are demanding climate justice. This is a groundswell approach to changing the world. It started at the grassroots and it has had incredible reverberations. That’s another kind of mythology.
TS: One of the questions, Rainn, that I’ve been asking my whole adult life is: what will the future of religion look like? And part of my excitement about Soul Boom is that you spend quite a few pages exploring that in your own funny and interesting way. And what I mean is that when I first started Sounds True back in 1985—so almost 40 years ago—I was looking at the mystical dimension of the great world religions. Now people aren’t even interested in general in the mystical dimension. They’re interested in evidence-based mindfulness—science-based—like we don’t need religion anymore. We don’t need it. Let’s just be spiritual, but not religious.
And you make this very interesting case that there is a potential pitfall in being spiritual but not religious, which is this fall into individualism. And this hit me—this hit me directly because I see this—I see [it] in myself, I see this in the Sounds True community. This fall into sort of, “Me and my individual, I’m going to be peaceful, I’m going to manage my nervous system,” and we’re missing this collective transformation piece. And yet there’s this, “Really, do I want to be part of a group—like a faith tradition? Really? I don’t think I can do that. I don’t want to be part of a group. I want a community. I don’t want to be part of a group.”
OK, there’s a lot of different ways of asking you: what do you see as the evolution of religion in our time?
RW: Oh, you’re the best. I love you. How’s that? I love you and I love what you do. And I love that.
TS: I feel that, man. I feel that.
RW: Yeah. So probing and honest.
Listen: first, I want to give a shout-out to the people that have a problem with organized religion, I get it. Organized religions have been the cause of some of the greatest injustice in human history. Not to mention all the judgment—the whole idea of Hell. Like, non-believers are going to burn in Hell for eternity and sinners and all the judgment of people that are different, whether it’s gender or sexual orientation or all kinds of differences that religions can ostracize people. And I get that and I honor people who bump up against all that and that it’s crucial to do.
That being said, I think that one of the problems with what I would call New Age—and I wouldn’t say that what you do is New Age—but is that this smorgasbord spirituality of, “Oh, I like this incense and I like this yoga class and I like this Eckhart Tolle book, and I like this crystal, and I like this essential oil, and this makes me feel spiritual. It connects me and it brings me peace and serenity.”
The problem with that is that it is limited and can frequently lead to narcissism. There is nothing wrong with loving a crystal, an incense, an Eckhart Tolle. I love Eckhart Tolle, I love yoga, I love incense, I love crystals. I like all of it, right? There is nothing wrong with that. But if you stop there, you are being selfish. If you stop there, you’re being narcissistic and you’re being a consumer. Because a consumer wants to quell their anxiety. So we get our Rumi quote from Instagram and we do our meditation app and then, “Oh, I feel better and I’m done.” Right?
So that’s a selfish kind of Western attitude. Thích Nhất Hạnh is the leader in this. Thích Nhất Hạnh is our guide who[said] absolutely, it’s about being in the moment, absolutely having your meditation practice in your devotion, and you do that so that you can serve others. You do that so that you can build community. You do that so you can go out in the world and bring that peace and harmony you’ve found inside and share it with others. If you’re simply using spirituality to calm yourself, then you’re using spirituality the same as you’d use a Xanax. So that’s what I have a struggle with.
So that’s part one. Part two is we have lost something by losing religion. First of all—and again, we can look at hard data; people who are members of religious faiths are happier. They just are. They’re more well-balanced, they have greater resilience, they live longer, their marriages last longer. The list goes on and on. Now, we shouldn’t just be dismissive that they’re dumb, born-again idiots meandering about, but there’s something to be learned from that.
What does religion give you? What does gathering together with a group of people who have a shared belief system and a shared sense of focus and purpose, what does it give you? Transcendence. It gives commonality, a shared love. The idea that there is something more than this physical realm and we’re all in this together. We can gather together, we sing together, we create art together, we serve together. We’re rolling up our sleeves and doing work on the ground to try and make the world a better place.
Now, I understand that’s not all religion. A lot of some religion is just a fire and brimstone preacher, and you go to church for two hours on a Sunday and you say, “I believe,” and that’s the extent of it. That’s not what I’m talking about. That’s not true religion. Remember the origin of the word religion is “religio,” which is the Latin “to bind together.” It should bind people together.
Abdul Baha, the son of the founder of the Baha’i faith said that, “If religion be a cause of disunity, it were better, that there were no religion.” That’s pretty profound for a founder of a faith to say, “Hey, if religion causes disunity, then get rid of it—” that we shouldn’t have religion.
Here’s one last point I’ll make around this, and obviously it’s a topic that I’m very passionate about. The forces of darkness, however we term them, are incredibly systematized. And if we think that we’re going to fight the forces of darkness by just having our own private little spiritual practice that quells our anxiety and stops there and we don’t organize and systematize ourselves, then we’re sadly mistaken. I don’t think this systematization can happen through a political party. I don’t believe that partisanship—I think partisanship is actually a great evil.
But I don’t have any specific religion to recommend. That’s why I kind of make up my own religion in the book Soul Boom. But I do think we’ve lost something by jettisoning organized religion, and I think people more and more are feeling that calling from their heart to come together.
TS: I think what there is is there’s a gap that many people are experiencing. I left the traditional religions for all the reasons you’ve named, but been spiritual but not religious. I’m missing community. Yes, I want to be of service. Yes, I want to help. Yes, I want to gather with like-minded people, but where? Online? I don’t know. I’m confused. I don’t know how to do that. I think I’ll just go back to my solitary thing and my friends, they’re my little friend group.
So I mean, that’s my question is what’s going to come in? And for you, it’s been the Baha’i faith, and one of the things that I thought was so interesting reading—I didn’t know that much about the Baha’i faith—but there are no clerics. That was very interesting to me.
In the Soul Boom religion—so what you do is you say, “Here are the 10 fundamental principles we can see in all the faith traditions, and now I’m going to propose 10 more for the religion that I am fictionally creating here on these pages for fun.” And your first principle, “no clerics,” I was like, “Well, I might be able to go gather someplace where there’s no authority figure that I’m going to have to discover is full of S-H-blank-T at the end of the day, and I’m going to have to deal with all of that. I don’t want to deal with all that.”
But I guess my question to you is, first of all, tell me more about how the Baha’i faith operates as an example of a “no clerics” situation?
RW: Thank you. So I create the fictional Soul Boom religion on the pages of the book, and I definitely—and I say at the beginning, I’m going to borrow a couple of things from the Baha’i faith because there are some really beautiful aspects of the Baha’i faith that I think are really important. And one of my favorite aspects of the Baha’i faith is that there’s no clergy—there’s no clerics; there’s no mullahs, priests, priests, preachers, pastors, ayatollahs, gurus, rabbis or any of that. I think that the reason there were clerics originally is because they knew how to read. You had to have someone who knew how to read the Bible to the congregation that didn’t know how to read. And then they became interlocutors, inter—I don’t even know how to say that word. I can see it in my head.
TS: Yeah, but they’re between you and reality, which was always my problem. I was like, “I’m not going through you to get where I already am. That’s ridiculous.”
RW: Right? They were interpreters of … you can’t get straight to God, you can’t get straight to Jesus or Muhammad or whomever or even the Buddha; you’ve got to go through the clergy.
So right now, as we are speaking, there is an election going on—[like] no other election you’ve ever heard of—and this is in Haifa, Israel. Right now it’s the holiest festival in the Baha’i faith called Ridvan, which means paradise. And this is when the elections happen. And every five years there is an election, I think four or five years, there’s an election for the supreme body of the people that administer the Baha’i faith from Haifa, Israel. Now they’re—they’re not clergy, they’re not clerics, they don’t have any special station individually. But collectively, this is called the Universal House of Justice. They come together and they decide on the affairs of the Baha’i world. From every national spiritual assembly of—again, volunteers—that have been elected to serve the Baha’is—they all gather in Haifa, Israel in silent ballot style. [They] prayerfully, meditatively, write down nine names of the people they think would be best for the Universal House of Justice and put those in a box, singing, coming together in prayer. No one is campaigning. There’s no election, there’s no yard signs, there’s no ads. And these people are elected through a spiritual process.
And I think that’s really cool. And I think it’s something that we could learn from in the United States with our toxic political system—of like what if we had elections that were based on electing the most spiritually mature people who were the best public servants? And there was no campaigning, there was no fundraising, there was no political parties. So those are some of the pillars of what a new religious faith or tradition could be.
TS: OK, I just want to circle back around because I feel like I still want to hear your answer to this person who says, “Yes, there’s a collective aspect to a rich spiritual life. I don’t know how to realize that. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to do that in my neighborhood with the people that I know what I’m drawn to. I get that. I don’t want to just be off on my own, but I’m confused about that.” What do you have to say?
RW: And Tami, I wish I had a better and stronger, more definitive answer. I think that answer is different for everyone. For some people it might be finding a like-minded Buddhist community. Father Richard Rohr has a Center for Action and Contemplation, and I love the combination of that—you contemplate so that you get energy and then you go take action. There are synagogues where you draw on the rich, beautiful traditions of the Torah and the Talmud to go serve others. And there are churches that do the same thing.
So, they exist out there. You may have to look hard for them, but you have to explore and you have to put yourself out to try and find a like-minded community. But I think a like-minded community working together in harmony, trying to build at the grassroots, is really important.
I say one of the pillars of a spiritual revolution is “don’t just protest, build something.” And this has to do with the organized religion component. It’s so easy to criticize, it’s easy to sit back and send out angry tweets and fill out protest forms online and say, “Oh, this is broken and this sucks. And oh, here I’m outraged at this injustice and now I’m outraged at that injustice and now I’m outraged at that injustice.”
But what are you doing? What are we doing to fix it? What are we doing to build something? And that doesn’t have to be huge. You don’t have to be Greta. It can just be gathering people in your community to serve the downtrodden or raise awareness about Black Lives Matter or about people’s rights. Being involved in education is so important. So all of these things go hand in hand, but I wish I had a more specific way to say to someone, here’s exactly what you should do if you are looking for that.
TS: That’s fine. Just—it’s fine. I think you’ve made some good suggestions for people, which is to activate. And if there’s nothing that already preexists that they can find, to gather people and start; do it; congregate.
RW: Yeah, there you go.
TS: Now, Rainn, one question. You had the inspiration in sketching in Soul Boom this new Soul Boom religion and the qualities that it would have that incorporates the principles of the great faith traditions plus, plus, plus, plus. What inspired you to do that?
RW: To create a new religion?
TS: Yeah.
RW: I was having fun. One of the things that I struggle with in spiritual conversations is that, like I’ve said, oftentimes it stays… There is a self-help element to spirituality, and I love that, and it’s important. I control my anxiety with prayer and meditation and with a practice of seeking to be in the moment. That’s beautiful and that’s wonderful.
But there has been such a knee-jerk reaction to disregard everything and anything having to do with religion. I just wanted to say, “Hey, let’s just give religion a second chance. Let’s look again at some of the universalities of religion, the foundational aspects from…
Buddhism and Islam at the surface might appear completely different. Islam only talks about God and Buddhism hardly ever talks about God. But if you dig a little deeper, there are actually a number of similarities. There is transcendence and devotion. We are something more than just the material. We seek to find ourselves in service and enrich the journey of our souls. There’s an all number of universalities there.
So I just wanted to continue and have some fun. And ultimately the point of the book Soul Boom is just get to get people thinking and talking about these topics in a new fresh way. Especially young people.
I’m known for The Office, and a lot of Office fans are young, they’re in their teens and twenties and thirties. And I wrote it for The Office fan—a young person who maybe didn’t know even how to start thinking about spiritual topics and themes, and this is to probe and dig around and poke and get people asking questions.
TS: Well, I was ready to join Soul Boom by the time I got to the end of the chapter.
RW: That’s great
TS: I was ready to go.
OK, Rainn, there are two more things I want to talk to you about. Let’s see if we can cover them. The first is you write beautifully about your father’s death and being with his corpse. You write about it beautifully and also quite humorously. The question I had, though, is you write about how it’s obvious that the corpse is a meat sack. Your father’s not there. But you didn’t come to the conclusion that your father was just gone, lights out. You felt a sense of some continuity, if you will. Tell me about that and how that rested in you as a knowing. A knowing. Instead of a question mark, it seemed like, “No, there’s some soul continuity here.”
RW: Yeah. I’m sure some of the listeners have had the same experience. But when I saw my father’s corpse laid out on the table and we were preparing the body for burial in the Baha’i tradition, which is washing the body, wrapping it in a shroud in linen, and placing a special ring on the finger that has a prayer on it, I just was struck by, “Oh, this is not my father. That’s his face and that’s his eyebrow hairs, that’s the mole in his hand, but that’s not him.”
And I love the way you said that question. How did I know instead of question? And I don’t know how I know. I just knew. I was like, “That’s not him. He is light. He is consciousness and light and love and heart. And that light and love and consciousness and heart is not contained in his body anymore, and it is somewhere else.”
I didn’t look at the body and go, “Oh, it’s snuffed out like a candle.” I said, “Oh, it passed through—it passed through this experience in this body and has moved on.”
Now that is true to the Baha’i understanding of life after death and to many other faith traditions. And I just felt it. And I communicate with my dad. I talk to him. I pray. I don’t want to say I pray to him because that that’s not quite right. I commune with him in prayer. I feel his presence and his guidance and help, and that’s an important part of my life since he’s passed away.
TS: Can you feel him right now as we’re having this discussion talking about him?
RW: I do. I feel anytime that my heart opens and becomes tender and misses him and longs for him and seeks to connect to him, I feel his presence. I feel his blessing. I have an 18-year-old son who’s had a lot of struggles and is going off to college, and I’m sure is going to have a lot more struggles because that’s what we humans do—we struggle. And I’ve been a lot of prayer for my father to please help guide my son. “Please help guide your grandson, be there for him, open doors, inspire him, guide him, show him love, give him grace.” And I feel that to be true. I feel that to be happening.
TS: Gorgeous.
All right. Here’s my last question, Rainn. You write in Soul Boom about all the pandemics we’re experiencing now. And you’ve touched on it here—the condition we’re in because our world is built on human greed and ignorance; all of our systems. But you also represent—and this is part of what I love about the way you write, because I think this way often—all the different perspectives in the room, and let’s bring them all together for the conversation.
So you bring in the perspective of, “Well, actually there’s a lot of things that are a lot better now than they were 100 years ago, whether it’s the eradication of poverty or women’s rights, human rights of all kind.” And then you quote this Baha’i teaching that helps us understand how both of these trends—dissolution and this positive trend—could be happening at the same time. And how this is all going to take us to the same place. This is all going to take us to a sense of a unified world. And I wanted to understand how you see this Baha’i teaching applying right now to the moment we’re in. And we can end on that note.
RW: Yeah. Thank you so much. It’s an important way of looking at the world, and I see this in young people so much. They become very confused because they’re kind of like, “There’s so much injustice and things are falling apart and it’s so unjust, and police are so systematically corrupt.” And yet Black Lives Matter was a very powerful movement that affected a lot of positive change. And things are a lot better now than they were even five years ago. But yet there’s so much injustice. How do you live with both of those things?
Well, from a spiritual perspective—from looking at the big picture of the progress, the spiritual maturation of humanity—there are forces of integration and forces of disintegration. Forces of integration are Black Lives Matter, Greta Thunberg, Me Too movement, many other movements—the women’s suffrage movements, gay rights movements, all of these different movements that have given people rights, brought people together, and made the world a better place over the last 100 years or more. Civil rights movement, of course.
And there are forces of disintegration and that are systems falling apart—competitiveness, greed, toxifying the air, corporate interests, greenwashing. It goes on and on and on. Cultural appropriation. All of these different things that make the world worse, and both are happening at the exact same time.
George Bernard Shaw once said that the sign of true intelligence is someone able to hold in their mind that two dichotomous truths might be true at the same time. So it’s holding both [and] seeing that this is very necessary. We have the collapse of the world as it has been working for the last many hundred years, and the building of the world as it’s going to be working in the future based on community, collaboration, consultation, kindness, and mutual interest. Both of these things—they’re happening at the same time. They’re integrated and disintegrated and it’s part of the process, baby.
TS: And you have a confidence, though, about where we’re going as we hold both of these at the same time.
RW: Well, I think we’re headed for some real hard times, don’t get me wrong. How hard are those times going to be? I don’t really know. Is it going to be apocalyptic conflagration? I don’t know. I hope not. I ultimately know that things are going to get better, and it is important for us—all, you, your listeners; me, my readers—to keep hope alive, to fight for joy, bring joy to people, bring hope to people. “If we are hopeless and joyless, they win,” as Andre Gregory said. And we are going to go through some tough times, but humanity can come out of this mature, loving and compassionate
TS: Rainn Wilson, thank you so much for deciding that these times called you forward to pick up the mic in this way and to write Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution. I feel the boom.
RW: You’ve got the boom.
TS: I feel it.
RW: All right.
TS: Thank you.
RW: Thank you so much.
TS: I got the boom, baby.
RW: You got the boom. Me too. It’s such an honor always to speak with you, Tami. Love again what you do and just blessings to you. And let me know how I can help with Sounds True and all of your pursuits as well. So much love to you, and thank you for having me on your show.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after the show Q&A conversations with featured presenters, and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us.
SoundsTrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
