Rainn Wilson
Appearances
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Comedy, it's healing because you cannot laugh and cry at the same time. Some of my most unhappy times in my life was while I was shooting The Office. Comparison and envy and ambition. What do you do when you're desperately unhappy, off track, questioning everything? That's what forced me to turn toward a spiritual path. The greatest issue facing humanity right now
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
The word anxiety was not in the lexicon other than, you know, it was something you felt if, you know, you were afraid you were going to be late for a movie. You know, there wasn't... It wasn't an idea kind of entrenched that, you know, there's an epidemic of loneliness and anxiety and depression and addiction. So I started facing those demons without any help, without any money.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
There was no therapy available. You know, therapy was outrageously expensive. No one I knew was in therapy or had ever been in therapy. And so what do you do?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
when you're desperately unhappy, unmoored, off track, having anxiety attacks, feeling depressed sometimes for weeks on end, questioning everything, like why am I alive, why am I here, dealing with addiction issues, drugs, alcohol, sex, porn, whatever, you name it, whatever's there. And, You know, what do you do?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
So the only thing that I knew to do was to start exploring spirituality and a spiritual path. And Julia Cameron, in the artist's way, not in the artist's way, but in an interview, said, I come to spirituality not out of virtue, but out of necessity. And that's what forced me to turn toward a spiritual path was seeking a balm for the amount of anguish that I was in as a young man.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but I went through some rough times, some ups and downs, a lot of what I would call, like, chronic, anxious dissatisfaction while on the TV show because, you know, we're wired as human beings to just want more, and it's kind of like, hey, I'm now a TV star after struggling for, you know, 15 years as an actor. Why can't I be a movie star?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And I won't say that I was lost and now I can see. I won't say that I was like immediately saved. It wasn't immediately, it didn't bring immediate clarity and peace or serenity or anything like that for me. It has been a long process, a long unfolding process, but it has been the richest, most rewarding process I've ever experienced.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And I'm now, again, like The Office, looking back on it, I'm so grateful. And isn't that interesting? how oftentimes the times in our lives we go through the greatest anguish, you get out a few years, especially five, 10, 15, 20 years, look back on it and go, oh my gosh, I'm so grateful I went through that. I'm so grateful.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
If I hadn't, I wouldn't have found kind of the rich, rewarding path of spiritual discovery.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Well, yeah, that's an interesting question. You know, I'm much more balanced right now, but it's a different set of challenges at 58. You know, it's kind of like What should I be doing? What is my life really about? Am I on the best possible path for myself? A bit more existential? It's a little more existential. You have a little bit more of a sense of the end zone is up here.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
It's only 20 or 30 yards away. It's not way down there. and every year every clump of years certainly every decade really counts when you're hitting your late 50s and headed toward dear god my 60s so it's a different kind of spiritual crisis so maybe when i'm 87 i'll look back and be like Oh, remember when you went through that, what you went through in your late 50s and how rewarding that was.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And I'm sure there will be some of that. I'm sure there will.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Well, I still have a codependent relationship with show business, which is frustrating. Show business is just a giant popularity contest. I've gotten to play amazing roles since The Office. I've gotten to be in some incredible films and TV shows. And I did this travel show on happiness called Rainn Wilson and the Geography of Bliss that came out last year. I saw that. Yeah, and it was...
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
really rewarding, one of the most rewarding things that I've done. But it's hard making it in Hollywood and it's hard, you know, getting new projects and exciting projects and having people see you differently than Dwight Schrute has always been a challenge. So I still have that kind of iron in the fire.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And, you know, there's part of me that kind of wants to just give a big fuck you to Hollywood and just move out into the woods and write books and play chess. And I may still do that. So that's one challenge. And sometimes I feel a little bit stuck. Sometimes I feel like I've taken a lot of really positive steps. Like I'm in recovery. I've taken really positive, great steps in recovery.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
That's been a really rewarding journey for me. Writing Soul Boom, doing the Soul Boom podcast, having these kind of elevated spiritual conversations has been exciting and uplifting for me. But, you know, can I go deeper? What does that look like? You know, what does, you know, the great spirit, the great mystery, the, you know, the cosmic force want from me in the next, you know...
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
steps along the path before mortality, you know, rears its ugly, interesting head. One thing I'm very excited about is with my old business partner from SoulPancake, Shabnam Muggarabi.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And why can't I make more money? And why can't I get this kind of, he got that kind of deal, why can't I get that kind of deal? comparison and envy and ambition, it's never enough. And it's so funny now, sitting 10 years after The Office has ended, and looking back on it, and like, Rain, it was enough. It was everything you could have ever wanted. It was your dream come true.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Almost. We're going to do a documentary on God. called The Notorious G.O.D. based on the chapter from Soul Boom, an exploration of what God might look like in the modern world. I'd love to interview you for it. Are you open? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, great. And, you know, projects like that to me are really exciting. I pitched it as a TV show all around town, and it got turned down everywhere.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
In fact, when I went into Netflix with it, they said it was too controversial. which is hysterical to me that you can have like dating shows where everyone hooks up with everyone, no problem. But if you want to do a documentary on God, it's too controversial. So that's the kind of the world that we live in right now. So... those are my main struggles.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And to find, you know, what's the best way for me to leverage what I've learned, what I know, and the stories I want to tell to help a very wounded world right now. There's parts of me that gets very angry and very engaged in the immediate stuff. You know, Trump, as we speak, Trump has just won this election. I see that there's a lot of
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
injustice going on in the world and I want to scream about it, right? But I also want to have a larger view of where we're headed as a species on this planet and address that beyond the partisan ups and downs of legislation and headlines and doom scrolling and, you know, outrage clicks on the internet. So, in fact, there's a story from the Baha'i Faith
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
This woman named Rahia Kanum had this dream about this great spiritual teacher from the Baha'i faith named Abdu'l-Baha. And there was a big, a dam had broken and there was a big flood and the water was washing everyone's homes away. And everyone was down trying to rescue people and pull them out of the water. And Abdu'l-Baha was up on top of this hill crying. doing something up there.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
She couldn't quite see what it was. And she was like, what's Abdu'l-Waha doing up on top of that hill? You know, we need him down here helping everyone out of the flood. And then someone said to her in the dream, someone said, oh, he's building a machine to stop the flooding in the future. So...
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
There's nothing wrong with, in fact, it's lauded to be pulling people out of the flood, but there's also nothing wrong with doing something to build a machine or a system or a way of thinking that is going to prevent dam breaks in the future and has kind of a looking at things from a 20,000 foot view, you know, a different perspective.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Well, great question. And it goes to the thesis of my book. And it's something I'm madly passionate about. We sit here across from each other in Topanga Canyon. Is that okay for me to show away Topanga Canyon? It's all right. In a secret hideout in Topanga Canyon, California.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
which I would say in a lot of ways is the epicenter of so much incredible healing modalities, spiritual ways of thinking, perspective shifts. But there is a certain kind of contemporary Southern California limitation to spirituality where spirituality is used as a expedient tool to fight one's current anxiety or depression. For instance, I'm crazy busy with my life,
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I mean, to spend nine years, 200 episodes, playing a really memorable comic character. You've kind of trained and groomed your entire life to play memorable comic characters and from theater school and from being a nerdy teenager and onwards. And, you know, getting paid well, you can pay off your student loans, even buy a house, travel, meeting new people, getting new work opportunities.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
whether I have a job, whether I work at home, I'm raising kids, what have you. Oh my God, I feel so flustered. I feel so overwhelmed. I know I'll listen to a spirituality podcast. I'll go to a yoga class. I'll burn incense. I'll get this app. I'll read this incredibly wise person and it'll recenter and recalibrate my mind
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
my thinking, my being, my breath, my heart energy, and this will make my life better. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I wish everyone would do that. I wish the world would do that.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
If we had, instead of hundreds of thousands or millions of people doing that every day, if we had billions of people centering around their heart every day, taking deep breaths, being in the moment, undergoing a spiritual practice, the world would be a much better place. But
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
That journey can become very solipsistic, and it can become very navel-gazy, and it can become very consumerist, where I'm going to pay X amount for this podcast, and X amount for this app, and X amount for this audiobook, and the X amount for this yoga class or this, you know, healing practitioner. And in return, I want X amount of anxiety reduction.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
so that I can go about my crazy, busy, flustered, overwhelmed life more effectively, then essentially you're just trading dollars for a result. And that ultimately is not a shift. in a kind of a greater awareness, right? So there's another aspect to spirituality which really comes from the Baha'i tradition that isn't talked about as much in the spirituality world. And that has to do with
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
collectively, where are we going as a species on this planet? And how can we harness and use spiritual tools to make our collective life better? When you really start unpacking Buddhism, for instance, and especially if you read the Dalai Lama, especially if you read Thich Nhat Hanh, but go to the source, the Buddha himself, The main awareness that one is cultivating is compassion. Why?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
So that you can relieve the suffering of others. If we only pay X amount of money and get a certain app and a certain book and a certain podcast and certain animal cards or what have you to relieve our own anxiety, and have compassion for ourselves, that's a great place to start, but it can't end there. We have to increase the compassion for other people. And then what do we do?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
How do we put that into action collectively to reduce suffering en masse? And... This may sound airy-fairy or pie-in-the-sky or may say, well, that's not really the purview of spirituality.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
To a lot of people feel like, well, if I'm just better, if I'm kinder when I go into a Trader Joe's parking lot, then I'll spread that kindness and I'll be nice to someone else and they'll be nice to someone else and it'll have a ripple effect. And that is true. But we also have to harness those tools and those ideas collectively to try and reduce suffering and make the world better.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And there are real and tangible ways to do that. And a lot of us and a lot of folks do it in their jobs. You know, they work in education, they work in healthcare, they work in the nonprofit sector, they work in climate and environment. And that's all wonderful, and that is part of the solution. But... Why I say soul boom, why we need a spiritual revolution is that this is a yin and a yang.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
We cultivate our internal spiritual progress, our serenity, our awareness, our love, our radiance, our wisdom, our connection to the divine source. so that we can use it to help others. And the more we help others, the more fulfilled we are. And then we can harness that energy and help even more people. And in so doing, it becomes a cyclical thing. So...
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Part of the issue I have with contemporary Western ideas around spirituality is that often begins and ends with tools to reduce anxiety and doesn't move out into the world and find a kind of a collective harnessing of proactive action to reduce injustice and to limit suffering on a grander scale.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Like, this is it. That's it, you know? And... So it's interesting being in it and being dissatisfied and being past it and looking back on it and being so grateful for the experience. Because that's all I feel right now is like, we're really tight, the whole office family, we text all the time, joke around all the time.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Well, I applaud you. You've actually read my book, and I love it. You've thrown in lots of little juicy little references there. Thank you so much. Yes, sir. It means so much. I really appreciate it. We need a spiritual revolution because we literally are seeing right now the grinding down decay and collapse of old ways of doing things.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
the ways that human beings have done things for eons are not sustainable. They're based on the worst impulses of humanity. They're based on, you know, greed and one-upsmanship and every man for himself and self-interest and a dog-eat-dog world and all of these...
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
wonderful energies that allowed us to get to this place in time where we're sitting in this beautiful studio in Topanga having this amazing conversation and there's lights and there's technology and we've got education. Humans struggled and overcame and had ambition and war and conflict to get to where we are as a species right now on the planet. two things. Number one, that wasn't all we were.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And that's a very limiting kind of way of thinking about humanity. Humanity is also really good at cooperation and really good at collectivism and kindness and working together. And some of the most successful societies are the ones that cooperated the best and were the best at trade and were the best at communication. Not the most warlike ones, you know, that conquered the most land.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
So that's number one, but number two, continuing to move in that direction when essentially the resources of planet Earth have been sucked up and used, it's not sustainable. And we're seeing it. We're seeing all the different ways that it's breaking down right now. I go into a list of pandemics and soul boom of beyond the pandemic we just came out of, materialism and racism and sexism and
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And, you know, when I hear about how much that show has meant to people, it really moves my heart.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And the mental health epidemic we talked about a little bit. And nationalism and militarism. These are all pandemics that are eating away at the soul of humanity in a large way. So we have to find a new way of doing things collectively. I try and bring some answers in there. I don't have...
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
any exact answers i i feel like the baha'i faith has some really beautiful ideas about how to move things forward at the grassroots which is a very important Part of this, if there's a spiritual revolution to be had, I don't know that it's gonna be immediately global. I think it's gonna start in a neighborhood.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
It's gonna start in a cul-de-sac or at a school or at a church or at a community center. And it's gonna involve children and kids and youth working together, believing that they can change the world. Recently, I heard a phrase and it really rocked my world. And that was that the greatest issue facing humanity right now, the greatest disease, dis-ease, disease that we are facing is this kind of
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
almost universal belief that things can't get better, that we are incapable of change, and that there's no way that we're going to fix the current state of affairs. This is a cancer that is affecting, infecting countless young people in the world today. It's at the heart of the mental health epidemic, this belief the world is not gonna get better. I don't count.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I can't help make the world get better. We collectively, we're too fucked up. We will never collectively be able to make the world better. This misguided, cancerous, wrong belief is the biggest issue that people are facing.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And this is one thing that you, your listeners, your viewers, this incredible community that you've built, the people that you interview, every single last one of them are an antidote for and to, because the people that you interview and you talk to believe there is a way out.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
and bringing hope, bringing the possibility of collective change toward justice, towards peace, is possible, is kind of the most important work that we can be doing toward a spiritual revolution.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I love that book. That's why I quote it in there. It's one of my favorites. Yeah, very inspiring.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was studying with Andre Gregory, And he's famous director and acting teacher, author, and he was the star of my dinner with Andre. And I was doing this acting workshop with him and he would meet with his students and we sat kind of like we are right now at his apartment, had some tea. And he was like, so Rain, tell me what's going on. How are you feeling?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
What's going on with you? And I was like, oh, Andre, I'm feeling overwhelmed. I just feel like the world is a pile of shit, or mankind's driving into a ditch, and things are bad out there. And he cut me off and stopped me. He did not tolerate that conversation. I mean, he literally grabbed my arm, he looked into my eyes, and he was like, don't. Don't do it. You can't be cynical.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You cannot be pessimistic. The world wants you pessimistic and cynical. That's what the world wants, because then you'll sit there on your couch, on your ass, and you won't do anything. We have to believe that hope is possible. We've got to believe that change is possible. You cannot...
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
give in to that despair and cynicism you and so he's like now get out there and you know and do something about it you know and he like kicked me out of his apartment and it was a seminal point in my life i'll never forget that conversation i'll never forget what the sun looked like kind of dappling the cobblestones in the west village outside of his apartment as i came out of his apartment and words never rang truer than what i heard that afternoon
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I was maybe 29, 30 years old, and I knew that there's not room in this universe for me to give in to cynicism and pessimism and nihilism. Of course it sits on us sometimes like a blanket and you have to kind of wrestle with it and figure out a way out. And I knew at that point I needed to be part of the solution and not part of the problem, frankly.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Well, it's interesting. I created a company a long time ago called SoulPancake. It was an early YouTube company, and we had over 3 million subscribers, and we did a lot of positive, inspiring content. One of the things we did, we did a long-form documentary called Laughing Matters, and it was about the intersection between comedy and mental health.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I'll share what is a uniquely Baha'i faith perspective on this.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
So the Baha'i faith was founded in the mid 1800s in Iran, Persia. The prophet founder of the Baha'i faith was given the title Baha'u'llah, which means the glory of God. Baha'is believe that Baha'u'llah holds a station similar to those of the great prophet teachers of the ages.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, Abraham, Lord Krishna, the Buddha, Zoroaster, all of these great spiritual teachers come from the same source, the one source, what we in the Baha'i faith call the unknowable essence, God, for lack of a better word. this unknowable essence is so vast and so unknowable and beyond human understanding.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I compare it sometimes like we're like dogs trying to figure out the internet. A dog on a keyboard can't figure out chat GPT and how it works, right? It's a comprehension on a whole other level. That's like us trying to understand the divine. So we need these interpreters. We need these teachers to show us the path. So there's about 6 million Baha'is all around the globe.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
It's fairly small as religion goes. It's pretty young, too, 150, 180 years old. But it is very widespread. Any country you go to, go to Barbados or Mongolia or Serbia, there's going to be Baha'is there gathering, serving, working in the neighborhoods. Hopefully. And Baha'u'llah's main mission was to bring about the unity of humanity. The teachings are all about unity.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And the reason I'm going into it in that way is I realize now after a lot of therapy and a lot of soul searching that comedy for me did come out of a certain measure of pain and trauma. It was a coping mechanism that got me through a difficult childhood and also was a way for me to connect with the outside world in a way where I always felt alienated and cut off and like I never fit in.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
It's all about we're all one human family. Prejudice and racism needs to go. Sexism needs to go. Men and women are two wings on the same bird, that we need the masculine and the feminine to move forward as a species. There's no inequality there, essential inequality there. That science and religion are also in harmony, that work together.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
is this kind of almost universal belief that things can't get better. There is a way out. We need a spiritual revolution because the ways that human beings have done things for eons are not sustainable. So how can we distinguish the dogma from the beautiful truth of what these spiritual teachers brought?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
There are two ways of understanding the same ultimate reality. You can look at reality through a scientific lens. You can look at it through a spiritual lens. They both support and help one another. So all the teachings that Baha'u'llah brought are about building community, working in service. The highest form of worship is service to others from a Baha'i perspective. And
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
So going back to your question earlier, you talked a lot about old dogmas that don't work anymore. This is what happens. A great divine teacher comes, You look at, let's take Jesus Christ. Let's look at the message and life of Jesus Christ. There is nothing more beautiful on the planet.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You know, the red letter Bible, you know, they have the Bibles and the red letter is what Jesus actually is purported to have said. You can read through a red letter Bible and be so profoundly moved at his humility, kindness, sweetness, putting himself outside of what society deemed as okay to serve the servants, right?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
To wash the feet of prostitutes and to be with lepers and to be with people of tribes that were not of his tribe. And His teachings are so inspiring and his words and his sermons, his prayers. And then what happens, you know, not to point any fingers or anything like that, but, you know, 300 years later, there's, you know, certain books of the Bible are thrown out.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Other ones are, you know, included this idea of like, you know, Essential sin is included and hell becomes very central or hell is kind of very obviously metaphorically, you know, related to in the Bible, but it becomes central. And then there's wars between Protestants and Catholics that kill millions of people.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I mean, huge percentages of the population of Europe were killed in wars between Catholics
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
of followers of jesus i mean it's it's astonishing and you look at the dogmas that have grown up and the mistaken beliefs that have grown up and now in contemporary america so much of christianity is about making lots of money and being very militarized and there there doesn't seem to be any disconnect between guns and jesus and
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
If you read the Bible, there's a huge disconnect between guns and what Jesus was saying, right? This isn't to point any fingers, but this is why these essentially pure spiritual ideas need refreshing every few hundred years. They need refreshing every few hundred, every few thousand years. So this is why new faiths come. Is there essentially the same message? the messages added to and moved on.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
So as a Baha'i, we get to read the teachings of Baha'u'llah, right? His eldest son, Abdu'l-Baha, also a great spiritual teacher. We get to learn from them. We also read the Quran. We also read the Bible. We also read the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapadas of the Buddha. all of these are incorporated into one spiritual canon of truth, of beauty, and of wisdom. So how can we distinguish the dogma
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
from the beautiful truth that lies at the center of what these spiritual teachers brought. Muhammad exhorted his followers not to convert by the sword. Conversion by the sword was not allowed, actually. And very soon after his death, that became kind of the centerpiece of what it was to be a Muslim.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
So humanity takes, warps, changes these essentially pure teachings, and we have to go back to the source. And all of those holy books I mentioned and countless more are there for us, that we have thrown the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater. We have said, oh, gosh, I hate what Christianity is doing today. And we throw it out and we miss not only the teachings,
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
but so many other great mystic teachers and Thomas Aquinas and mystics and other folks, Thomas Merton, that you can draw so much energy and strength from. So I think part of the struggle for young people that are spiritual but not religious is to say, hey, Are we sure we haven't, you know, tossed everything out?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Like, let's go back to the source and really get connected from these incredible, beautiful teachers.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And comedy was my way in. Like, I was never gonna be popular. I was never gonna be good looking. I was never gonna be a jock. I was never gonna be... you know, smooth and charming, but I could do weird impersonations and I could do funny pratfalls and I could tell jokes. And that allowed me to fit in.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
That is such a key question and it's very important to set our terms. What do you mean when you say a spiritual revolution? What do you mean when you say spirituality? Because it does mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And even working in this space, as you know, I'm doing a spirituality podcast and people want to come on my show that channel angels.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
There's nothing wrong with channeling angels at all. I believe that one can channel angels. I believe that we can speak to the people that have passed from this tiny kind of pathetic material realm that we live on, you know, into the realms beyond 100%. That's not exactly what I think of when I think of spirituality, however. So, you know, who am I at my core? Know thyself. I'm knowing myself.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
What do I know about myself? Well, I just pointed at my body. I felt a sensation in my chest with my finger. I have a rapidly decaying 58-year-old, still pretty. fucking amazing body that does all kinds of weird things. My right knee creaks, right? My sinuses are a little stuffed up right now. My neck has a little tweak in it from how I slept on my pillow last night.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I certainly have an awareness of my body, my breath, my blood. And frankly, this body is gonna serve me for what, 20, 30, 40 more years. And then, what is spirituality? Whatever is left that is going to continue the journey is spirituality. So it's like science and faith, or science and spirituality being two sides of the same coin of reality.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I remember when a friend of mine told me once, and he was kind of refuting spirituality, he was like, aha, they found in a brain scan the exact place in a human brain where you have spiritual experiences. And he was saying it like that. Aha, that disproves. You know, it's all an illusion. It just happens in the cerebral cortex or whatever. And I was like, yeah, exactly. Because it's one.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
It's all one. The physical realm and the spiritual realm are the same. They're in complete harmony. My... Consciousness is kind of the best way for a kind of spirituality 101 to understand what spirituality is, because what is consciousness? Like, here I am having this conversation with you. I'm taking in your radiant face, you know, and I'm...
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I'm breathing and we're communicating, yes, with words, but we're communicating deeper than that too. We're communicating with our bodies, with our energies. Memories are coming up for me. I'm feeling things. I'm feeling joy. I'm feeling self-doubt. I'm having memories from my past. This is all part of consciousness. And...
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And it's funny, the professor and author, Arthur Brooks, talks about that in terms of comedy, that you can't... Two things can't exist in the brain at the same time, which is like, you can't live in comedy and laughter, and you can't live in depression at the same time. They're like pistons working like this.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
this consciousness doesn't go out like a light bulb when this rapidly failing body ends. So it's the divine spark that's within all of us. I don't even want to say within, without all of us, around all of us, inhabits all of us, that can be cultivated within,
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
that can be cultivated in meditation and in prayer and in service and in elevating and centering those qualities of the divine that we all have. In Islam, there's 99 names for God, right? The compassionate, the kind, the loving, the strong, the, you know, the list goes on and on. These qualities of God are qualities that we have to know thyself.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
To know God is to know thyself, it says also in the Qur'an. I think it was, maybe it was the Imam Ali's hadith, I'm not sure, but to know God is to know thyself. What does that mean? Because God is in each and every one of us. When I am in compassion to someone who is hurting, that is, I'm flexing a divine muscle. When I experience real humility, not fake humility, That's a divine muscle.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
When I'm honest with someone in a way that's uncomfortable and difficult, that is flexing a divine muscle. I even hate using that analogy. That is opening a divine window. But these can be cultivated. Honesty, compassion, humility can be and should be cultivated. So that's what the spiritual path is for me. So... I don't want to say it's dualistic. There's body and spirit.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Body and spirit are commingled, just like that brain scan. They work in tandem. They work in harmony. And it's a glorious journey that we're all on. Believe me.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Well, Carl Jung, when asked if he believed in God, said, I don't believe in God. I know that there's God." It's one of the most important conversations that one can have with being alive. It doesn't end. You know, it's cyclical. Faith isn't something like you find and then it stays like this incredibly powerful, dominant force in your life that's unshakable and unwavering until death.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
That's not how it works. Faith is fickle. I will say that... I've never wavered in knowing that I am a spiritual being having a human experience. I just know this to be true. I know it in my prayer and in my meditation practice. I knew this especially when my father passed away about five years ago, and I prepared his body for burial in the traditional Baha'i way, which was to wash it.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Yeah, exactly. Or love and fear can't occupy the same brain space at the same time. You can literally try and feel love and fear at the same time. You can't do it. You know, they're an antidote for each other. And laughter and sadness are the same way. It's like the drama masks, you know. It's the smiling and the crying drama masks from ancient Greece. And...
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
and to wrap it in silk and say prayers over the body. And it's an incredibly beautiful experience. I think there's many other faith traditions that prepare the body in a similar way. And for a very good reason. I'm there with the corpse of my father. and I see his little eyebrow hair sticking out and his little mole that he has here.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And then, you know, the scar he had on his neck from a surgery and, you know, his thinning, you know, gray hair. He was 79 at the time. And it became so clear to me, just like a gong ringing, just gong. This body is not my father. His light, his spirit, his experience, his consciousness, his beingness, his personality, his laugh, his beauty has moved on.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And this was the vessel that contained it for 79 years. And, you know, I love that vessel. I have an experience with that vessel. I've hugged that vessel hundreds of times. But that's not the reality of my father. And anyone who has that experience of seeing someone that's passed, this can really... help one to see the continuity of existence.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And everything I read, everything I think, every time I connect with nature, I see a continuity of existence. And so I just have a profound fundamental sureness about that. It's in every faith tradition. You can read about near-death experiences. And in every culture of the world, near-death experiences have the same kind of essential tenets, right? And...
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
this idea that our ancestors, our family members, greet us and move us on is in every culture on the planet. You know, from Pygmies to Andean Indians to Inuit peoples to you name it, Vikings. It's in the mythology of being a human being.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
When I had this YouTube channel, SoulPancake, we commissioned a show from a young filmmaker, Justin Baldoni, also a member of the Baha'i Faith. Good friends with his sister. Oh, really? Yeah. You know Sarah? And their family. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's great. We commissioned Justin Baldoni to do a show about death that was his idea called My Last Days. And... It was a viral hit.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You know, out of a really difficult childhood that was incredibly challenging in its own way. We've all had very challenging childhoods, I'm sure. There are ones far worse than mine. Mine kind of was centered around a loveless marriage and a lot of like suburban ennui. You know, I wasn't like...
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
These shows had hundreds of millions of views, and they were all about lessons about life from people at the end of their life. Who better to learn from than someone who's facing their own mortality? And every episode is just gorgeous and touching and heart-wrenching and uplifting.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And we had people writing in saying, I watch an episode of this every single day because it reminds me how precious life is. So I think facing death and mortality is crucial. It's not something we do very often in Western society. Death is something you don't really talk about. We live in a denial around death a great deal.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, there's several meditations on death that are, you can Google them. Trust me, look them up. They're incredible. I forget the name of the meditation, but it goes from like meditating about being in pain, meditating about taking your last breath,
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
meditating about people around you grieving, meditating about passing on, meditating about your body, meditating about your body going into the ground, meditating about your body dissolving into the earth. And it just goes from step to step to step that you do a deep meditation on all of the pieces of your mortality. It's incredibly powerful. I've tried it before.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Have you ever tried one like that?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Yeah. Powerful. When you go into the nitty-gritty of what is that going to be like if your family was around you at a hospital bed when you passed? What would it be like for you? What would it be like for them? What would happen to your body then? Like, then the IVs are unplugged and your arms are folded and the blanket goes over.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And then step by step by step, it's incredibly powerful and revitalizing. And guess what? Life is short, it's precious, it's beautiful. And this is, again, why we need a spiritual revolution, because... The hours are short, my dear friend, and we have much to do with them. We have much to do with them.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I have. I think, you know, one of the aspects of death meditation and looking at one's mortality is, you know, are you good with God? You know, have you cleaned up your messes? That's a great thing the 12-step program gives you. You know, this idea that when you're wrong, you promptly admit it. And you, you know, you clean up, you make amends for people that you have hurt.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
beat, you know, there wasn't like, you know, grotesque things happening to me like happened to a lot of people in the world. So I want to I want to couch it in that. But again, comedy was my way out. Comedy was my way of soul searching. So All of a sudden, I signed up for an acting class. I found I was pretty good at it. I made people laugh. I played characters. I did funny walks.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You practice forgiveness. You know, are there people we have yet to forgive? Forgiveness is a tough one, right? You know, are there amends that we owe people? Is there wrongs that we need to right before we die? But also the famous quote of like, no one goes to their deathbed wishing they had worked more. You know, are we connected enough? Could we be connected more?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
What about that family member that if you were going to your deathbed, you wish you could have given one final hug to? or connected with, those kind of regrets and remorses we don't want to be saddled with. You know, we want to go joyfully. And so I feel good right now. You know, I've made some big mistakes in my life. I've done some messed up stuff. I've hopefully cleaned it up.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Hopefully I'm good with folks, pretty much. And I feel good. I feel incredibly grateful for the life that I've had. I mean, I have been blessed. I don't know why. I don't exactly know why I have gotten to
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
work at my dream job, that dorky, weird kid in the high school, you know, skit, you know, getting those accolades from pretty young women and deciding to become an actor, you know, getting to be on one of the great TV shows, living my dream, and then getting to share and have conversations with on Soul Boom about spiritual conversations that help make the world a better place. I mean,
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I'm so blessed, you know, it's just it's up to me to not fuck it up and to just kind of continue to try and spread the light.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I'm reading the new book by Father Gregory Boyle, who's one of my favorite human beings on the planet. Have you had him on your show? No, not really. The founder of... Homeboy Industries. He's taken thousands, tens of thousands of people off the streets from gang activities and out of prisons and put them into the working world.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And his books are... His most famous one's called Tattoos on the Heart. And his new one is called Cherished Belonging. And... And he's getting up there in years, you know, and you can kind of tell in his writing. And he is one of the most radiant, beautiful human beings on the planet. Jesuit priest, founder of Homeboy Industries.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And he's taken tens of thousands of gang members, you know, out of prison and off the streets into, for lack of a better word, rehabilitation. But that's a gross word. In Cherished Belonging, he just talks about God and just really rethinking God. And he said, God is there when you're kind. God is there when you're tender. God doesn't have time to be judging you. God is too busy adoring you.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
God is spending all of his, her, its time in wonder and adoration every single last one of us. There's no time on God's calendar to be judgmental or disapproving or, you know, moralistic or anything like that. We're unrepeatable miracles of the universe. And God looks at us with the adoration that we look at if you have a child of a toddler, you know, taking his first steps.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I did funny voices. I told jokes. I did improvisation. I got a lot of accolades for that. These tools that I had learned in this kind of pressure cooker of a really... kind of disconnected, loveless child space, all of a sudden came in very handy. And then I went to acting school, and then all of a sudden I was working as a professional actor.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
That's how God is with us all the time. And he hits this point over and over again. Sometimes you roll your eyes and then sometimes it's just like, oh, it just gets you.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And it's been so beautiful for me to just read this and be reminded of that idea of the divine, that there's not a disapproving, sky daddy, patriarchal, bearded, mean guy in the sky who's like Santa Claus checking off who's naughty and nice. But there is just this force that loves us, beyond all measure and is there for us at any second in time. It's just there. It's absolutely there.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
So I think getting right with God is less about any kind of like accounting. You know, get right with yourself. Get right with your own heart. Get right with your own conscience, you know. Get right with your resentments and your remorse. Clean your side of the street. But to get right with God is to just tune in that God is just, wants to just give everyone gigantic hugs all the time.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
That's such an important question. I truly believe that's one of the top three most important questions that anyone working in this space can be asking. because of the mental health epidemic, and especially with young people, there is a disconnect between pain and suffering and life and resilience.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And when you have a deeper understanding of the purpose of suffering and misfortune and tests and difficulties, it can give you such a greater resilience to live a much more full, deep, and vibrant life, especially for young people undergoing mental health issues. What is the purpose of our physical reality?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Let's just suppose, put all your skepticism out the window, and let's just say that there is pure, beautiful, cosmic source understanding, light beyond time and space, infinite, and that we'll call it God, and this God wants what's absolutely best for us. Why does this God put seven, eight billion of us into this physical universe, into these flesh suits for 70, 80, 90, 100 years?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Why does this happen? You know, in a certain way, this must be the perfect soul-growing laboratory Otherwise, it wouldn't have been created. Again, we're taking the supposition that there is this all-encompassing, beautiful, loving light, and this is just the beginning of a journey of great continuation. So, what is the purpose of our physical reality? It is... to struggle and grow.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
But then I got onto some TV shows, and here I was on one of the all-time great comedies. But again, while I was on the show, very little awareness of the healing properties of comedy. And I think it's something really worth exploring and digging into because, you know, the way the world is right now, It's very interesting. There's not many good comedies on television anymore.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
We're here to struggle and grow. This is why oftentimes atheists say, well, I don't believe in God necessarily, but I can understand that we might be an avatar inside of a video game. This might have a meta construct element to it. And when we die, we wake up outside of this kind of 3D hologram reality. Because video games are kind of a great metaphor for being a human being on planet Earth.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You struggle, you suffer, you have limited lives, you beat the beast monster and you overcome and you hop from ledge to ledge and you drive your car here without crashing or whatever. to move forward. And this is what it is to be a human being. And there are some terrible tests out there that I wouldn't wish on anyone. God, one can only guess at God's infinite wisdom.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
It's one of the big kind of metaphysical and philosophical questions of all time. If there is an all loving God, why is there so much suffering on the planet? But for the majority of us, again, our suffering and our tests and our difficulties are the things that we end up being the most grateful for.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And that's because they've allowed us to mature and grow and grow wiser and grow closer to God and develop those spiritual qualities we talked about before, like kindness and generosity and joy and humility and honesty and That's what this 3D construct world is for. We've got a short, you know, there's a metaphor in the Baha'i faith.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
There's some mystical writing that it's like, this physical world is like a banquet hall. And it's a sparrow flying through the banquet hall and it flies through and it bumps against the windows and it eats some grapes and some pie and it flies through and it flies on out. And that's life, is a sparrow flying through a banquet hall. I just love that image for some reason.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I'm not exactly sure why, but that's... That's what we're doing here. That's the purpose of physical reality. And, you know, the Buddha said, life is suffering. You can also translate it as there is suffering. We are in suffering. And guess what? There's a way out of suffering from non-attachment. And we can be freed from so much of our own suffering.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And I will say that if humanity were able to put aside war... and greed and materialism and nationalism and one-upsmanship and kind of the most grotesque aspects of capitalism and consumerism. And we were able to come together in harmony and service on the planet and put all of that technology that's currently used to be building drones to be fighting cancers and diseases together.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
we could absolutely feed everyone on the planet. We could be living a very healthy, beautiful, amazing life. We're not there yet. You talked about humanity being in its turbulent adolescence, which is very true. And Humanity is going to head to rehab. You know, we're going to have to fall down hard and split our head open and there's going to be some suffering.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And hopefully we come out on the other side, you know, having some wisdom, some serenity and some focus.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
That's so well said.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Yeah, the forces that you're referring to and you mentioned before is, again, another idea I stole from some Baha'i. I borrowed from some Baha'i ways of thinking. But I just love the way this phrase sums up so much of what's happening in our contemporary life. There are forces of integration, right? bumping up against working alongside forces of disintegration.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Both of these things are happening at the same time. Our political system is disintegrating. It's becoming more and more disunified and corrupt as it goes along. And at the same time, more and more people are searching, are questing, are looking for connection, are coming together more and more.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And they're hard to find. You have to sift through a lot to kind of find them. And we need them more than ever. And one of the reasons I heard that a lot of like the streaming services and TV networks are not picking up new comedies is because people keep turning back to the old ones. They're watching Seinfeld and
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
social injustices that were just a given a few decades ago are now questioned, you know, at the grassroots. And this is another thing that's hard for young people dealing with a mental health crisis to see. They only see the disintegration and they're not looking towards the integration. Or they're confused that there are two forces going on at the same time. We like things black and white.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Like, oh, the world is a mess and it's all fucked up and it's all falling apart. Right? Yes. The world is also beautiful. People are coming together. There are amazing things happening. There's incredible organizations and movements and communities that are being built at the same time. So, how do we hold in our awareness both of these things happening at the same time?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
This is a... It's very much in the Hindu tradition. I wish I was more well-versed, but I'm thinking about, like, Maya in a world of illusion. I'm thinking about, like, gods of chaos and gods of peace. And, you know, all of these forces kind of swirling at the same time. And... Our job is to align ourselves with the forces of integration. So where do you find that?
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
As a Baha'i, all of these are incorporated into one spiritual canon of truth, of beauty, and of wisdom.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You can find that in a youth group, in a therapy session, in a 12-step room, in a church basement. You can find that at a synagogue. You can find that in a meetup.org hiking group on a Sunday morning. You can find that in a meditation group. You can find it in a nonprofit that's really trying to make a difference.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You can find it in a group of people that are addressing injustices and imbalances in your neighborhood or community and are actually doing something about it. Align yourself, hang your hat on the forces of integration. Disintegration is going to take care of itself. You know, the doom scrolling, the headlines, the outrage headlines and outrage clicks, that's all happening. We get to let that go.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And in these brief, beautiful, sacred days that we have left, align ourselves with integration, with people coming together and building community.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
and Friends and The Office and Parks and Rec and some of those old great comedies, 30 Rock, for their comedy fix. But it's healing because you cannot laugh and cry at the same time. And even if you get your fix of half an hour here or there, it can take you through a day.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I guess, I don't know. I mean, that's such a great question. And that would be a great question If you or someone were conducting a workshop or something like that, there could be a written meditation. You know, I did one when I was in a therapy retreat where we had a conversation with our wise self.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
It wasn't necessarily an older self necessarily, but you put in an empty chair, you put your wise self. Yeah, spiritual gestalt. Yeah, yeah, it's spiritual gestalt. It is. And then you... You know, you talk about what's going on with you and then you sit in the chair and you become your wise self and then you speak to yourself from the wisest part of yourself.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
So I guess it's, you know, there's more work to do. What's coming up for me right now, just on a gut level, is ways that I limit myself, right? And I think that we all limit ourselves. Part of my spiritual journey my 12-step recovery journey, my therapy journey, has been to let go of my limiting beliefs.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And if you had asked that pimply, awkward teenager who at age 13 was watching Mike Wenzel slap John Valadez on the shoulder and ask him about his weekend, if you had said, hey, 45 years from now, You'll be writing books. You'll be having fascinating conversations. You'll be a successful actor. You'll have a successful and beautiful long-term marriage. You'll have a family. You'll be healthy.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You'll have something to offer. You'll be working in...
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
philanthropy like that would be beyond my wildest dreams but what was it about me that limited myself in my in my 20s and 30s and and held me back from believing that i could bring a great deal of light into the world i'm not trying to put myself as some kind of guru or anything like that i'm really not i'm just i'm an actor i've suffered i've read a lot that's it but
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Can I continue to shed self-limiting beliefs that are holding me back from maximizing my divine possibility? So that would probably be the conversation. What does that look like? I don't know what that looks like. Could it be... more books and bigger podcasts and larger conversations with more people. Maybe it looks like that. Maybe it looks like getting smaller.
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E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You know, maybe it looks like letting that stuff go and turning inward a little bit more and spending kind of more intense time in a deeper contemplation to try and get at something even more true and more deep and more internal. Maybe it's both. I'm not sure.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You really want to crack this nut, don't you? I want to crack it. Yeah. I think I have a lot to offer, especially young people that are suffering right now in the mental health epidemic, because I've suffered a lot in that way. I've suffered in anxiety and depression, and I've thought a lot about these issues.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And I think it's really important for me to excavate that stuff and share it as widely as I can, because hopefully it can help some people. And at the same time, pay the bills maybe by making people laugh a little bit on the side. So that's where my hunch is, is part of the reason I have struggled as much as I have is because I get to share my struggle with others and maybe help a few people.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And that doesn't mean I have everything figured out. It just means I have some experience. I've gone through some shit. I have some wisdom resulting from those conflicts.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
This next book I'm working on has something to do with the meaning of life. It's like the meaning of life according to Rainn Wilson or something like that. I don't know what it is. I just recently took a note, I'm not even kidding you, three days ago. I was like, practice versus belief. There's a lot of talk in spiritual realms, like what do you believe? What do you believe?
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Do you believe we have a soul? Do you believe in reincarnation? Do you believe in a god? Do you believe in multiple gods? Do you believe that life after death? Do you believe we can talk to angels? That's all fine and good, but ultimately who cares? What do you do? What do you do? My wife became a Baha'i not that long ago. And she would always ask the question, what do Baha'is do? What do they do?
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You know, okay, you believe this, you believe that. But what are they doing? What are you actually doing? And hopefully Baha'is are doing actual good shit out there. I think they are, for the most part. So... I practice gratitude. I have a daily gratitude list and a group of guys that I send a gratitude list out to. It's a very small thing. It's an incredibly powerful shift.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I'm sure you've talked about gratitude on this show dozens of times. But we will always live in a kind of mental place and spiritual place of deficit, of lack of, and of an unsettled anxiety. And when we turn toward, hey, what do we have and what's working? It's a tiny little subtle shift that makes a huge difference. So I have a daily prayer and meditation practice.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Meditation is very simple for me. It's like 15 minutes. It's just a quieting of the mind. And it's opening my wise self to the reality, to greater reality. Prayer is an important part of my practice. I believe that there is an unknowable essence out there that is... approachable by prayer, that is connectable. Is that a word? Connectable with by prayer? It's not.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And I believe that prayer and meditation are in a dance together. It's reaching out, it's beseeching, it's longing, it's connecting, and it's being open and it's listening and it's being still. This is a very important part of my practice. As a Baha'i, I say a daily obligatory prayer every day that kind of grounds me and reminds me of... my place in the universe.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Baha'is have a period of fasting, so there's a... a 19-day period every spring, the Baha'is do a deep fast. And I have, as part of my practice as well, I have daily 12-step things that I do. I call my sponsor and I go to meetings and I connect with people that are struggling, share my experience, strength, and hope. This goes hand in hand with my Baha'i practice and with my own personal practice.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And I seek every day in the highest form of prayer that exists in both the 12-step program of recovery and in the Baha'i faith, that essentially the highest prayer boils down to this. Thy will, not mine, be done. If I can get my greedy, egoistic, selfish, petty, you know, thrashing little will out of the way,
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
and surrender to the divine will, to the divine force, to the divine light, to the unknowable essence, thy will, not mine, be done, that's where the rubber meets the road. What do I try and do out of that? I try and foster conversations on Soul Boom. I work in philanthropy. I try and make the world a better place. And I try and make the world a better place when I'm driving down the street.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I try and make it a better place when I'm in a Trader Joe's parking lot. I try and make it a better place when I'm interacting with service workers that I encounter to make everyone feel human, loved, seen. I try and connect with people. That is a practice. That's a daily practice.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Yeah, it was a coping mechanism for me. I loved the classic American sitcoms of the 70s and early 80s. I grew up and watched every episode of MASH. I watched... Cheers, Bob Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore reruns, Bewitched and Dick Van Dyke and F Troop. And the list just goes on and on. I just devoured anything having to do with half hour comedy.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
One of the things about my father I most admired was when he passed away, I realized something about him that I didn't appreciate while he was alive, which is that he made every room he went into better. He made every room he went into more alive, filled with more light, with more humor, with more laughter, with more curiosity. He would always ask people questions. How are you? Where are you from?
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
What are you doing? Tell a joke. And he'd share his opinion and laughter and listen. And that's a practice. What would that be like for the listeners, the viewers, listeners? Every room I go into is an opportunity for me to practice making that room more alive.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
This is so much fun. Yeah.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Well, I think that what you're doing on your podcast and in your world, I just want to just give a shout out to how important it is. Because when we can shift our awareness, like you said, it's kind of how we started our whole conversation. Spirituality is just shifting perspective a little bit like, oh, I'm not just an animal seeking to, you know, eat and piss and fuck and sleep.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You know, I'm a spiritual being having this human experience and having these conversations. all these different ways into that world is so important. And I love what you're doing. And I just think it's really important. And I hope you will join me and we'll work together in sparking a spiritual revolution.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Right? How about no boom? No boom. Soul thyself.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Then I discovered Saturday Night Live when it first came out in the late 70s and Money Python around the same time, which they would run on PBS all the time. You couldn't just go to YouTube and watch clips. You had to really search for great comedy out there. And Mad Magazine and Cracked Magazine. And these got me through my childhood. I just was drawn like a moth to a flame.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
And I think because of this kind of alienated emotional desert that I lived in, in suburban Seattle, that was a healing balm for me. Then, you know, I remember talking about, I don't know if it was in Soul Bloom, I also wrote a book called The Bassoon King that was kind of my comedic memoir. And I was such an odd child.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I remember watching other kids in school to be like, how do normal people behave? You know, I'm gonna watch people in the lunchroom. I'm gonna see how they behave and then I'm gonna copy them. And my parents were very odd, very odd people. So I knew I was not gonna like behave like my parents. So what do you do? So I'd go in the lunchroom and then I'd see Mike Wentzel
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
go up to John Valadez and say, hey buddy, how was your weekend? Give me a bite of that. And then like take his French fry or something like that. I'd be like, oh, okay, great. And I would literally, maybe not literally, but I would almost exactly copy that kind of behavior. But, of course, when you're trying, it's like an alien trying to fit into, you know, a human guise.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You know, when you try and go up to someone then and say, hey, buddy, how's it going? How was your weekend? Clap on the back. Take the french fry. It just, it rings hollow. And it was out of that and out of that oddness that, again, that coping mechanism of comedy came out so that I found that when I would be the cut-up and the goof-off, It worked for me.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I found when I took an improv class or took an acting class that I could make people laugh. And there was a kind of a, it's the cliche of the sad clown. There's a lot of cliche in and around what we're talking about. We're talking about comedy and tragedy. We're talking about the sad clown. We're talking about, you know, crying and laughing at the same time. But there's truth in that.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
That's one of the reasons that they are cliches.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I wanted to fit in, you know, more than anything else. I didn't even want to be popular. I just so didn't fit in. I really felt like I was an alien plopped down in human form trying to understand kind of normal human interaction. And it took me a long time to get out of that.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
But I remember my very first acting class, I was a junior in high school and I had just moved to this new high school and we did this exercise together. And I made everybody laugh. I was kind of the new kid at the school. And then I sat down afterwards, and all of these young, attractive high school girls that I hadn't met before came over and, like, patted me on the shoulder and punched me.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Like, that was so funny. Oh, my gosh, you're new here? Like, come sit at our lunch table. And, oh, my God, you made me laugh. Oh, he's funny. And... And when you're 16, I felt this glow and I was like, that's it, this is what I'm doing. I had been a colossal nerd before that point. I had a chess team and played the bassoon and- Yeah, you didn't tell me you were on the chess team.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
Okay, all right, we'll get into it. But I was never very good on the chess team, and that was a long time ago. But yep, chess, Model United Nations, Computer Club, ceramics club, you name it, every nerdy pursuit you could do. But once I got that kind of validation for making people laugh, I was like, that's it. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm gone. I'm, you know, I'm a drama nerd now.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You know, it's interesting how time works, isn't it? And memory, because I shared a lot about this when I was promoting the book Soul Boom about a year ago or so. There was some of my most unhappy times in my life. was while I was shooting The Office, which is crazy.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
You know, come hell or high water. And my path was set at that point. So that's, that's how it works.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I... speak about this a little bit in Soul Boom and also in The Bassoon King. When I got out of acting school, I was 23, 24, 25 years old, trying to make it as an actor. You know, really broke, barely getting by. And I became very unmoored in a lot of ways. There were certainly a lot of hedonistic pursuits going on.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I grew up a member of the Baha'i faith, like you mentioned, which I'm incredibly grateful for. And I learned and was kind of educated in so many beautiful true, wise teachings that I think foundationally stayed with me and ultimately really helped me. But I needed to rebel. I needed to leave that world of my parents behind and go to New York City and make my own way.
Know Thyself
E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution
I wanted to be an artist in New York City, and I didn't want anything to impede that. So what I encountered, when I look back at it now, was a real severe mental health crisis. And I was in my early mid-20s. And in the 90s, people were not talking about mental health crisis. There were no books on mental health crises.
Office Ladies
All About Pam Beesley
Warum würde ich oder jemand anderes denken, dass du jetzt heiß bist? Ich kann dich nicht impregnen, und das ist die Führung zwischen männlicher und männlicher Attraktion.
Office Ladies
All About Pam Beesley
Äh, du warst am meisten attraktiv, als du 24 warst, mit einer kleinen, gradualen Vergrößerung. Und eine steile Ausstrahlung, als du das erste Mal verheiratet wurdest. Graduelle Rückkehr, und äh, naja, jetzt, offensichtlich, bist du auf einem allzeit hohen Niveau.