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.
[Want to support TED?]
[Become a TED Member!]
[Learn more at ted.com/membership]
