Folks. I wanted to talk a little bit today
about some of the ideas
that are contained in my new book,
"Soul Boom: Why We Need
a Spiritual Revolution."
But first things first.
I thought it would be really important
to initially define the word "spiritual."
What do we mean when we say
the word "spiritual?"
Because that means
a lot of different things
to a lot of different people.
So when you're talking
about a spiritual revolution,
what exactly are we discussing,
how do we define our terms?
To a lot of people,
"spiritual" means ghosts
and seances and Ouija boards.
That's certainly not
what I'm talking about.
To many people,
"spirituality" or "spiritual"
refers to a kind of,
what I would call
a vague feeling in the heart
while at a yoga class
or meditating or a crystal or incense
or something like that.
That's also not what I'm talking about.
I don't mean to insult
that spiritual path in the slightest.
I think it's incredibly important.
More on that later.
And to some people,
the word "spiritual" is synonymous
with religious and religion,
and "spiritual" simply means church
on Sundays at 11 am.
That's also not what I'm talking about.
I'm going to go right to the source,
I'll go to the Oxford Dictionary.
And spirituality is the "quality of being
concerned with the human spirit."
And in the Cambridge Dictionary,
it's "the quality that involves
deep feelings and beliefs
of a religious nature
rather than the physical parts of life."
So those are two pretty great definitions.
And right there, smack dab in the middle
is what I'm talking about
when I say that we need
a spiritual revolution.
So to tiptoe toward some
of these larger ideas,
I need to go back in time.
I'm throwing myself way back
to my childhood in the 1970s,
and one of the most important
words from the 1970s
is television.
I was raised by a television, folks,
like so many of us
here in the United States,
and two of my favorite
shows from the 1970s
kind of reveal what a spiritual path is.
These two shows
are “Kung Fu” and “Star Trek.”
So I'm going to start with "Kung Fu."
“Kung Fu,” for those who don’t know,
is about Kwai Chang Caine,
and he is a half-Chinese Shaolin monk,
practicing in China,
learning not only martial arts
but Daoist wisdom, Confucianism
and Buddhist ideas of wisdom
and self-reflection.
He is then sent out of the monastery,
and he goes to the Old West.
This is set during the 1860s,
and he is wandering through the West
and encountering all kinds
of unfortunate events
like racist cowboys and mean people
and aggressive landowners with shotguns.
And he is distilling his eastern wisdom
and sharing it with people.
He is learning as he goes.
He's learning how to be ever more
thoughtful and patient
in the midst of all of these
terrible racist cowboys.
And eventually there's always
a kick ass fight.
To me, "Kung Fu" is incredibly profound.
I have a section on it in my book
in which some of the phrases
of the show "Kung Fu"
can be compared
to the Bible, to Confucius,
to the Bhagavad Gita,
to the sayings of the Buddha.
And this is a path that we
all walk as spiritual beings.
We all are seeking to increase our wisdom,
our kindness, our compassion,
our patience,
all of these, what I would call
spiritual virtues,
as we move through the world,
we're cultivating these.
We are beset by tests.
We have our own version of racist cowboys.
We have, you know, mean bosses
and deadlines and Zoom calls
and impatient kids,
and we have to make money
and raise our families
and we have our moral purpose
to make ourselves better human beings.
And that is the "Kung Fu" path.
And the other path,
our other part of our moral purpose,
is to contribute to the well-being
and maturity and maturation
and social evolution
of humanity as a whole.
And this is what I would call
the "Star Trek" path.
The "Star Trek" path is, of course,
about humans in the future.
We have created The Federation.
All the countries are united,
we're boldly going into outer space
and seeking a new life
and new civilizations.
But to me, it's a very
spiritual television show
because what has happened
on planet Earth
that they don't talk about
very much on "Star Trek"
is that we've worked
out all our problems.
We have ended income inequality
through the power of technology.
We have solved racism.
We've ended sexism.
And we are at peace with nature
and with our own nature.
And this, to me, I see as the other part
of the moral, twofold moral path,
which is our spiritual contribution
that we make to our species
as it grows and matures
and moves along its journey
toward maturation,
love, harmony, unity in diversity.
And that's the "Star Trek" path.
But then ultimately,
the thesis that I want to build toward
is how do we look
at this more "Star Trek" path?
How can we use spiritual tools
to affect societal change
at a foundational level?
So to continue the conversation,
I want to bring Carla.
Hi, Carla.
Carla Zanoni: Hi, Rainn.
You know, when I read your book
and when I was just hearing you
talking about the "Kung Fu" path,
which is highly personal,
personal development,
and the societal path of "Star Trek,"
I was feeling really hungry to hear:
Do we have any evidence,
especially for such an evidence-based,
science-thinking audience here at TED,
that this kind of
way of thinking can be applied?
Rainn Wilson: Yes, well, I have
a couple of very specific examples.
So one of the, again,
in the second part of the book,
when I’m getting, kind of digging deeper
into the spiritual tools
used for kind of, societal
and social transformation.
I talk about, at great detail,
about partisan politics
and the election system,
especially here in the United States.
We talk about how the other party is wrong
and bad and evil and misguided,
but no one is having a conversation
about how the system itself
is so colossally dysfunctional.
So we have, what I would call,
a really toxic system
that is ultimately
unsustainable as a system.
I bring up an idea
from my personal faith tradition,
which is the Bahá’í Faith,
but rather than quote me about it,
I want to quote the great
author Amanda Ripley,
who wrote a book called "High Conflict,"
in which she brought out one small
part of the Bahá’í tradition,
which are Bahá’í elections.
She talks about how in Bahá‘í elections
there’s no clergy in the Bahá’í faith.
So Bahá’ís elect a body
to govern each local area
so the Bahá’ísof Los Angeles every year
come together without any electioneering,
no campaigning, no funds, no money,
no one suggesting anyone over anyone else,
and meditatively and prayerfully
elect nine people
to govern the affairs
of that community every year.
And they seek out the people
with the most spiritual wisdom
and the most selflessness
to be public servants.
And my thought is, well, we can't really
do that for the United States.
That seems unrealistic.
But what if, what if,
there were a small community,
Pancake Flats, Colorado,
that was tired of all the divisiveness
and hyper aggression
and financial waste
from partisan politics,
and they said, we’re going
to do the same thing,
and we're going to elect
five or seven or nine
or however many town council members
to govern the affairs of the city
and the people that are the most selfless.
And when we think about it like that
and we think about a small change
happening at a grassroots level,
you can start to imagine,
oh yeah, perhaps there is a way to,
in an entirely new ...
In an entirely new method
to change fundamentally
how we govern and seek
our public servants.
CZ: I'm wondering,
like, what do we need to do
as individuals to work on ourselves
so that we can then participate in
that kind of, societal way of working
that you're describing?
RW: Great question.
And I am old enough, TED attendees,
to remember the 1970s,
and I spoke about television,
but I also remember the great hippie
bumper sticker that said,
"Let there be peace in the world
and let it begin with me,"
and I also remember when people
were actually talking about world peace.
Nowadays, if you talk about world peace,
people roll their eyes,
and they think you're naive
and it'll never happen.
But I truly believe that we can
work towards world peace.
But you're absolutely right.
Let there be peace in the world
and let it begin with me.
We have to also, at the same time,
be working on our “Kung Fu”
part of our journey,
on our personal,
what I would call spiritual development.
And you certainly don't need a belief
in a higher power to do that.
But one of the aspects
of the book I have at the end,
I have seven pillars
for a spiritual revolution,
and one of them is virtues education.
So I believe that we all have
spiritual virtues contained in us.
There are small pieces of the divine,
the reflections of God,
they're reflections
of the beautiful creative force
that courses through the universe.
They are kindness, humility, patience,
honor, creativity, love, honesty.
The list goes on and on.
And that these need to be cultivated
in us and in our children especially.
And we don't really do that.
Now I want to just say that, again,
one doesn't need to have a religious faith
to look at the these virtues in this way.
You can simply look at them as positive
character traits or leadership qualities,
and we want to cultivate
those in our children
with or without any kind
of religion or spirituality.
That's up to the parent.
But, all too often, I've noticed
in raising our son that when,
let's say a child is dishonest
and caught in a lie,
a parent will say,
"Hey, don't lie.
It's bad to lie."
But they will not have done the work
to talk about the quality of honesty
and how important honesty is
and how honesty manifests in your life
and how your life can be made better
and other people's lives
can be made better
through the quality of honesty.
But the importance of virtues education
is something that we can do
on a personal level,
we can do it on a family level,
we can do it in our cul de sac
or our condominium.
We can do it at our local church
and we can do it at our local school.
And it's one of the pillars
toward a spiritual revolution.
CZ: And Rainn, one of the things
that you talk about
so eloquently in the book
is really pointing to one
of many pandemics
that we're living through,
including racism, sexism,
materialism, climate change.
You also talk about
the mental health pandemic
and particularly how that applies
to young people in our lives.
RW: So I talk at great length in the book
about having spiritual conversations,
about deep topics that have existed
from the dawn of time,
from the Hindu tradition,
from the, you know, the Vedas
and Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita,
through the sayings of the Buddha,
the dharma paytas
through the Bible and the Koran
and the holy writings of Indigenous faiths
as well, and traditions.
And one of the biggest issues
with young people
in the mental health epidemic
has to do with resilience.
If you ask psychologists,
there is a lack of resilience
in young people.
So let's break that down a little bit.
In our contemporary Western culture,
we no longer talk about death.
Death is just, it's taboo, it's forbidden.
But because we're not talking about death,
we're also not talking about suffering
and the nature of suffering.
And this is what the Buddha taught.
You know, “I teach one thing
and one thing only,
suffering and the end of suffering.”
Guess what? Life is suffering.
It's filled with disappointment
and struggle and conflict
and heartbreak
and death of pets, of friends,
of relatives, of grandparents.
The list goes on and on.
And so this affects young folk
in a way that they have
much less resilience.
Now, there's much more
to the mental health crisis than this.
This is just one small slice of the pie,
but it does have to do with why spiritual
conversations and spiritual tools
are so important.
CZ: And it's interesting,
I had heard the surgeon general's ...
discussion about the pandemic
of loneliness.
And it was very striking to me
that it is both with young people
and with our elderly
and really spanning generations
and incredibly serious.
But in your book, as a rhetorical device,
you propose the creation of a new
religion called Soul Boom.
And in that, in the tenets
of that religion,
you say that science and religion
should really live side by side.
This is a pretty crazy idea, right?
RW: Such a great and important question.
And I do believe that...
Contemporary society
has been so toxified by partisanship
and bifurcated,
that, for some on the political left,
any mention of spirituality or spiritual
solutions has to do with church,
which has to do with the political right.
And any talk about science
and like, science fixing let’s say,
climate change or whatever,
has to do with a partisanship
and negativity having to do with the left.
So we're kind of at each other,
and what has happened
in this, kind of, church versus reason,
faith versus reason debate
is we've created a false dichotomy
that science and religion,
science and spirituality, rather,
are two wings of one bird.
And that bird is reality.
That they're not
in opposition to each other.
They are very much in harmony.
There are two ways
of understanding one reality.
Science understands,
it's a way of processing data
through experimentation.
And it's also a compilation of the data
that's been compiled,
that has been proven.
And this is how we're able
to have this conversation
on these laptops with these cameras
over the magical interwebs,
is through the beauty, grandeur,
majesty and amazingness of science.
So what does spirituality do?
Well, throughout the great
wisdom traditions,
throughout the great faith traditions,
not only of the Abrahamic faiths,
but the eastern faiths,
the Daoist faiths
and the Indigenous faiths,
spiritual ideas seek to understand
the reality of what it is
to be a human being.
CZ: You have a very specific prescription
of how to connect with nature
to find that sacredness in life.
You also talk about some
personal, deep experiences
that you had with that.
How can we bring the sacred
into our lives in, you know,
our day-to-day lives now?
RW: Right, so part
of the spiritual journey
and spiritual tools
that I'm talking about in the book
have to do with cultivating a life
of deep meaning, purpose,
satisfaction and well-being.
So I have a section
of the book on sacredness
because I went on a spiritual pilgrimage
in my faith tradition.
And it was so profoundly moving to me
that there were shrines
and prayer and meditation.
There was connection to beautiful nature
with a group of people
from all over the world
going on this same
kind of journey together.
And it was so deeply touching
and meaningful.
And then I got back
to my life in Los Angeles
and everything was like,
Zoom meetings and phone calls
and you know, appointments.
And I've got to run to Trader Joe's.
And I was realizing there is a lack
of sacredness in my own life.
And I thought that this might be
an interesting cultural conversation,
like, can we bring the sacred
to bear in our daily lives
in such a way that it fulfills our hearts
and fills us with meaning and connection
and transcendence?
One of the --
And I talk about how this doesn't
necessarily need to be a shrine,
although it could be
a place, for instance,
right outside my window here,
I have a wooden bench
that I meditate on every morning.
So to me, that's kind of,
a sacred space for me.
It doesn't need to be a place or a space.
It could be a pancake breakfast,
it can be a condition of the heart.
But nature is a beautiful
way to find sacredness.
And this is something
that everyone can agree on.
The people who are walking
a spiritual path
or those who are agnostic
or atheist or spiritual but not religious,
we can always bask in the awe
and wonder of nature.
And I talk about specific ways
to just simply increase
our connection with nature.
You know, if you go outside
three times a week, make it four.
If you're outside
for this many days, do this.
Like, make sure that you have
at least once a year,
some time in wild nature
that's completely off the grid
because that cultivation
of awe and wonder,
you can look at it
as a spiritual experience
or you can simply look at it
as an uplifting experience
for our nervous systems.
Putting that aside, let's go back
to the "Star Trek" path for a minute.
Again, the “Star Trek” path is about being
part of making humanity deeper,
better and wiser.
Don't let your awe and wonder moment end
simply by an experience in the forest.
Go back home with your families,
your children, your community,
your condo association, your cul de sac,
your co-op board,
do something to help preserve forests,
do something for nature.
Get involved in a nonprofit
for climate change.
Save an animal.
Be a part of making a difference
by drawing on that powerful well
of awe and wonder
that you have connected with
when you stood in a forest,
watching the sunrise.
CZ: I think this is a perfect transition
to some of our audience questions.
We have somebody, let's see.
TED member Diana writes,
"You briefly mentioned yoga, church.
If it's not those things,
what do you recommend
that people engage with
to grow spiritually?"
And I think connecting it
with what you were just saying,
how do we connect the personal aspect
of that spiritual growth
to then be part of a community,
to give back in service,
to be part of something
larger than ourselves?
What does that look like?
RW: Great question.
And I certainly don't mean to insult yoga.
Let’s go back to this very simple
idea of “Kung Fu” and “Star Trek.”
So we go to yoga class,
we meditate, we pray,
we read the texts from the holy writings
that have been around
since the dawn of time.
And then we take that,
just like I talked about,
our connection with nature,
and we move it into service.
Bahá‘u’lláh, the prophet
founder of the Bahá’í Faith,
said all men were created to usher forward
an ever-advancing civilization.
So in this context,
there is a spiritual charge to all people
to help make the world a better place.
You can be a bus driver, a school teacher.
Everyone has a role to play in making
the world a better place, right?
So you take that action, whatever it is,
volunteering, working for a charity,
and guess what?
When you give in service,
that actually also recharges
your own spiritual batteries.
If you want increased well-being
and greater happiness,
give to others.
Share with others, serve others.
Live in service.
You recharge your batteries,
then you have even more to give
and the cycle continues.
It's like a yin and yang.
CZ: Our TED member Diana writes,
"You mentioned that, in the '70s,
many people thought
world peace was a worthy goal
and now many people think it's naive.
What do you think is the best way
to convince people
who think wisdom equals skepticism
or being ‘real’ about
the darkness of humanity?”
RW: That’s such a beautiful
question and well-posed.
I'll share a personal story
that I shared in the book.
In my section "Seven Pillars
for a Spiritual Revolution"
I talk about "foster joy and cynicism."
And I had an experience
in New York as a young actor.
I was studying with the great
acting teacher, André Gregory,
subject of the film "My Dinner with Andre"
and he would meet
with his acting students.
And we had tea one day
in his apartment and he said,
"So Rainn, how are you doing?
What's going on?"
And I said, "Well, Andre,
I'm feeling really down.
I'm feeling depressed, I'm feeling
pessimistic, I'm feeling cynical.
I don't feel like the world
can get any better.
And I just don’t know
what difference I’m making,
and I'm just feeling
really down about it."
And he was 70-something at the time.
And he reached out
and grabbed my arm hard
and he looked right into my eyes
like laser beams.
And he goes, I'll never forget this,
he said, "Don't, don't do it!
You can't do it.
If you're cynical,
if you're pessimistic, they win.
If you are negative, they win.
You have to stay hopeful.
You have to keep hope alive.
You have to stay optimistic
because if you're cynical,
you'll sit back on your couch
and you won't do anything.
But if you stay optimistic and hopeful
and positive about change,
then you're actually
going to do something.
Don't let them win."
And he released me,
and I went out of his apartment
into the West Village of Manhattan,
and it really stuck with me
my entire life.
And I have my own internal battle
because I can get very pessimistic
and surly and negative.
My own internal battle
is on a daily basis to say,
"To keep hope alive, what can I do?
How can I make a difference?
How can I make the world a better place?"
Because he's right.
The more cynical we get
and pessimistic we get,
especially about something
as important as climate change
or ending racism for instance,
things are just going to stay the same.
CZ: I am a poet at heart, and I think
we need to kind of close there.
One of the poems that you include
is one of my favorite poems,
William Carlos Williams.
And the poem reads,
"It is difficult to get
the news from poems,
yet men die miserably every day
for lack of what is found there."
What does that have to do
with spirituality to you?
RW: It's a beautiful way to bring
this conversation around.
When I was speaking about these pandemics,
I frame it by using that poem.
It's a segment from a much larger
poem by William Carlos Williams.
"It is difficult to get
the news from poems,
yet men die miserably every day
from lack of what is found there."
What is found in poems?
Universal human experiences,
transcendence, beauty.
Inspiration, upliftment.
A mirror being reflected toward us.
A kind of storytelling, a metaphorical
kind of storytelling that reveals truth
about the human condition.
You can't get the news from it.
But we are in a crisis right now,
mental health crisis.
We are experiencing tremendous
numbers of deaths,
of despair,
and for lack of what is found in poetry.
And I would say that one could simply
and very easily substitute spirituality
for the word "poetry."
It is difficult to get the news
from spirituality,
but yet men die miserable every day
from lack of what is found there.
There are deep, rich,
profound spiritual tools,
writings, holy writings, wisdom traditions
from Indigenous peoples,
from Eastern religions,
Western religions,
that again,
if we've thrown the spiritual baby
out with the religious bathwater, OK,
but are there truths there
that we can draw from
to enrich our lives, again,
on a “Kung Fu” level, on a personal level?
And are there tools and wisdom
and light and hope and love
from these great rich, ancient traditions
that can also help transform humanity
and take it on a path to ever-greater
love, compassion and unity?
CZ: Rainn, I am so grateful for this time,
for a very profound conversation.
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