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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News, I'm Shumita Basu. Today, exploring life's big questions with Rainn Wilson.
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Basu, Narrating: You probably know him best as this guy…
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Dwight Schrute: Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, "Would an idiot do that?" And if they would, I do not do that thing.
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Basu, Narrating: That's the actor Rainn Wilson in his Emmy-nominated role as Dwight Schrute on the hit "NBC" comedy, "The Office." He says, that's how people see him, as Dwight. But of course, he's not Dwight, he's Rainn. He's a real person who's lived a real life with real struggles. And the one constant that's helped ground him is spirituality.
Rainn Wilson: I love learning about religious faiths. I love reading the Vedantas and the Bhagavad Gita and the writings of the Buddha and the Quran and the Bible.
Basu, Narrating: This is not a topic that he takes lightly.
Wilson: I've thought about going to like divinity school or something like that. This is not like a hobby or pursuit that's like, oh, this is a fun quirky little side interest kind of like pickleball.
Basu, Narrating: He's exploring these themes of spirituality and soul-nourishing in a few ways. One is his new book, called "Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution," the other, a TV show on "Peacock" called "Rainn Wilson and the Geography of Bliss," where he travels to different places around the world to learn how different cultures seek peace and fulfillment.
Now, if all this talk of religion and spirituality is a turn-off for you, Rainn says, he gets it. He understands why so many people are rejecting religion today. But what he asks is that you stick around, listen to what he's gotta say, hold on to what you like, and leave behind whatever you don't. I even told him, look, I'm a nonreligious, nonspiritual person myself, but lots of the ideas in his book and TV show speak to me. It has to do with the human experience, what it means to want purpose and community and meaning in this life.
We'll get into all of that in this conversation. I started by asking Rainn to explain how religion and spirituality became such a big part of his life.
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Wilson: One part of my life is my kind of pursuit of spiritual knowledge and understanding, and this has come at me from a variety of directions. It came at me from being raised a member of the Bahá'i Faith, and Bahá'ís very much study the work and writing and mystical practices of all the world's faiths and religions and seek in those in those teachings a universality, a commonality about God and the mystery of being alive and the soul and our journeys on this planet.
Wilson: And, as I also describe in the book, a little bit, I don't get too much into it, but I was really challenged with a lot of mental health crises along the way. Especially in my twenties. And I quote the great writer Julia Cameron, who wrote "The Artist's Way" book, and she said, "I come to spirituality out of necessity, not out of virtue." And that's how I feel for me, that I was suffering in my twenties. We didn't have words for mental health issues back then. You just kind of like suffered and kind of figured things out. I was having anxiety attacks for years and years, depression, a lot of issues, and I looked to spiritual cures.
Wilson: I started reading the holy books of the world, cause I kind of thought maybe, probably because of my Bahá'i upbringing, that perhaps there are spiritual solutions for this imbalance that I'm feeling inside of myself.
Basu: Mm. Mm. So, before we go too much further, maybe I can ask you to explain what you see as the difference between spirituality and religion.
Wilson: I would say that we're all spiritual beings. We may not know it, we may not connect with that part of ourselves, but anything that seeks transcendence, love, joining, meaning, some kind of higher purpose, is a spiritual impulse. So, religion is simply a systematized spirituality. That's all it is. It has laws and codifications, it has, in most cases, rituals, and it provides a lens for understanding the world based on some of these spiritual laws which have to do with God and the soul and the heart and meaning and consciousness and why we were put on this Earth and how we humans connect to nature and what love is and what service is. Those are all kind of the basic building blocks of every religion.
Wilson: People are very quick to point out the differences between religions. But you can also very easily put on a different hat and look at the universalities. And those universalities are what I would call spirituality. And it's an important term to define. It has to do with anything non-material. So, love, connection, feeling, a search for the transcendent, those, what I would call, divine qualities that we grow in ourselves, like kindness and humility and compassion, and honesty. I would say those are tiny sparks of the divine, and those kinds of spiritual virtues are in every religious tradition.
Basu: Mm. I will say, one thing your book is not doing, is sneakily trying to tell people that they should join the Bahá'í Faith, even though that was your upbringing. One of the more interesting parts of the book, to me at least, was learning a little bit more about your upbringing and how your family grew up so involved in the Bahá'i community. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Wilson: Yeah, it's interesting. I remember, my dad passed away a couple years back, but I remember talking to him about life as a Bahá'i in the late '60s and early '70s, cause that's when a lot of people around the world became members of the Bahá'i Faith because there was this kind of universal thirst for spiritual knowledge. Remember, The Beatles went and met with the Maharishi, Cat Stevens became a Muslim, Shirley MacLaine was communing with ancient alien Egyptians. People were on a quest.
Wilson: So, my dad would say, he would have Bahá'i gatherings during that time, and he said, you could go out on the street and there'd be a couple like longhaired kind of hippie guys and leather jackets and you'd be like, hey man, you wanna come over to our house tonight and talk about God and religion and learn a little bit about the Bahá'i Faith and just have a spiritual conversation? And these like kind of semi-thuggish guys smoking weed or cigarettes or whatever hanging on the street corners would be like… Yeah, man! Sounds awesome! I'm there! Can you imagine [CHUCKLES] doing that now? [LAUGHS] Can you imagine having that kind of conversation? But that was the milieu that my Bohemian parents became Bahá'ís and so many others did as well.
Wilson: And there was a wonderful spirit to the Bahá'i Faith of, again, this universality, creating unity. All the religions come from the same source, all the races are to be celebrated, diversity is to be loved, prejudice is to be eliminated, women and men are equally powerful, and we can, you know, through love and unity build community. And that was right in line with the kind of the ethos and passions of that era. So, I grew up in that. It was great. There were Black Bahá'ís and Native American Bahá'ís and Hispanic Bahá'ís at our house, and we'd have Buddhists over and Sikhs over and Jehovah's Witnesses over, and we'd sing songs. And it inspired me, and I think fondly back on those days.
Basu: Yeah. Yeah. You talk about this in the book, and you mentioned this before, that in your twenties you really struggled a lot with, if I remember the way you put it in the book, with pretty much every type of addiction there can be. You've struggled with addiction, you've struggled with mental health, as you've mentioned, and it sounds like you went through some periods where maybe you were disconnected from your spiritual journey or from these ideas of spirituality that you're exploring so deeply right now. So, can you talk a little bit about those periods in your life?
Wilson: Yeah. Gladly. I believe in Hell. I don't believe that Hell is a place. I don't believe that Hell is some place where some kind of mean god casts unbelievers and tortures them for all eternity. And frankly, that's not in the Bible, and that wasn't even brought into any kind of Christian belief until the fourth or fifth centuries. But I've been in Hell. I think Hell is a kind of a condition. It's a disconnect, like you said, very well, a disconnect from the reality of my spiritual self, a disconnect from the all-loving cosmic source of creation and love itself, which is God, for lack of a better word.
Wilson: I have a chapter in the book called "The Notorious G-O-D," where I try and dig into this idea of God. And during those years, I experienced a lot of pain and suffering. And, like you said, pain and suffering can kill us, it can bring us down, but it can also motivate us to dig deeper and to seek and to excavate and to explore and unearth. And I was, you know, there were times when I was… you know, considered suicide, vaguely. I didn't get to that point, but I considered not existing. And that motivated me to seek a solace to my pain.
Wilson: And as I had grown up Bahá'i and then left the Bahá'i Faith to go live a bohemian life in New York City in the '90s, I thought, well, maybe I'd thrown the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater. You know, I threw the religion out the window. I didn't want anything to do with religion anymore, but maybe by jettisoning God and these beautiful universal teachings that come from all the world's faith traditions, maybe that was the source of my dis-ease and discontent.
Wilson: And it's not like, oh, magically things have gotten better, but decade by decade things have gotten better and clearer for me. And I feel like my heart is more aligned with the winds of the spirit and will of the universe. And for that, I'm super grateful.
Basu: Mm. It's interesting to hear you talk about the period in which you rejected religion, or sort of the formal framework of religion, cause I think, as you've noted, as it's widely known, so many people are rejecting the framework of religion now and turning away from ideas about there being a God or gods. And I know for me, at least, as I've mentioned to you, I'm not religious, I'm not really spiritual, and I think something that I can't mentally wrap my mind around is the concept of God existing. There being a God. And I wonder sometimes if this religious framework is the part that is the turnoff to some people.
Wilson: Right. I will say that we have jettisoned religion as a species for the most part, especially in the Western world, for very, very good reasons. Some of the worst atrocities in human history have come at the hands of religion. And they are often corrupt. And, as we see in the Catholic Church, horrific things had been perpetrated for decades… nay centuries. So, people are right to really question religion itself and to reject the religion of their parents. It's often… religion can also be… it's just not fun. It's judgmental and can be meanspirited. And if you're not a member of our religion, then you're not in the chosen tribe, and you're going to Hell, or you're judged in some way. So, that's a big part of it. But at the same time, what have we lost by rejecting religion, especially in the Western world, so much. Community. A community based on mutual service and transcendence.
Wilson: And… I even forget what the question is, but I will say this about [CHUCKLES] God. I think one of the explorations I do in "The Notorious G-O-D" is completely and irrevocably removing God from any kind of deity or being-ness or anthropomorphized daddy figure. I call him "sky daddy." Removing God from any kind of "sky daddy" and bringing God much closer to some kind of idea like love. And people often say like, how do you believe in God? It's like, well, I believe in love. You can show me brain scans of how love might work in my brain, but I know love is bigger than that. I know it's broader than that. And richer and more, more tangible than neurological impulses. And when I held my son, who almost died in birth in an emergency room hospital at 3:00 a.m. in a Van Nuys hospital, and I wept at his being-ness and filled with the magnificence of love. That's God. That is God much more than some guy with a beard.
Wilson: In my studies, I did a lot of study of Native American faith and traditions and ideas around spirituality. And I turned to a belief system from the Lakota Sioux about Wakan Tanka, "the great mystery." God is known as the great mystery that is known through… is known only through nature, essentially. Through the mystery of nature, the power of nature. We know God through the light of the sun, the heat of the sun, the power of the winds, the strength and wisdom of the mountains. Something that's beyond time and space that continues in the four seasons that exists in the memory of our ancestors. And this idea of the divine really inspired me and allowed me to move forward on this search.
Basu: Mmm. I have to say, that's one of the concepts that I walked away with from this book. Something that you talked about, this idea of anything can be sacred. Sacredness is not just a place, it's not just a location. It can be an event, it can be the way that your family gathers to have pancakes on Sunday, every Sunday. It is whatever you hold reverence for, I guess. And I love that idea. I think there's something that's very, um… that everyone can find something that they might define in that way.
Wilson: Yeah. I wrote that chapter on sacredness after I had gone on a pilgrimage to some Bahá'i holy sites in the Bahá'i holy land of Northern Israel, near Haifa area. And as I got back home, I realized, wow, there's nothing sacred around. Like, in my life, what is sacred? And in contemporary California civilization, what is sacred? It seems like we're just like texting and Zoom calling and stuck in traffic and impatient and gossiping and backbiting and wolfing down meals thoughtlessly. How do we cultivate the sacred in our lives? And this is something, again, that exists in every tradition, and I encouraged the reader to search for what is sacred. And it doesn't need to be a place where a prophet is buried, you know? It can be the picnic table where you gather and laugh. You know, can this conversation, Shumita, that we are having right now, can this be sacred? Cause we're talking about things that matter, things that are important, things that bring us meaning and joy and bliss. So, I discuss… Sorry, I feel like I'm going on, but you know, what the heck.
Basu: No, I've asked you to. [LAUGHS]
Wilson: I discussed the Japanese poet Bashō, who's a medieval Japanese haiku poet, and how Bashō would walk around Japan to various holy sites and shrines, and he would observe nature and he would write haiku depending on where he was. And he would leave these at the shrines. And this is so moving to me that poetry, nature, and holiness are effortlessly interwoven into what Bashō was doing. And what would it be like for us to be little Bashōs, to walk around, maybe down to our local Starbucks, and compose a haiku about a shrub and a bird that we've seen in it, and to share that with someone and to witness the divine in our journey at the same time so that art, poetry, nature, the divine, the sacred were all effortlessly interwoven. And that was very much a part of that era of Japanese culture. So, we can learn from all kinds of sources.
Basu: Let's turn to talking a little bit more about this show that you've got, "The Geography of Bliss," and how that falls into this conversation. too. The first episode takes you to Iceland. And one thing I like about these episodes where you end up in another country and you engage with some kind of practice that is central to happiness in that place or that people talk about as being important culturally to their pursuit of happiness. Like in Iceland, I love that there is a word for going on an ice cream run, [CHUCKLES] which is amazing and great, and you do it. And who wouldn't be brought happiness by going on an ice cream run?
Wilson: Yeah, ice cream road trip, and I'm forgetting the name of the… "Istleberder." I forget the name of the word right now, but it's an ice cream road trip, and it's enjoying the journey as much as the destination. And that's part of Icelandic practice. And I did cold plunges with these incredible group of Valkyrie, powerful Viking women, that would gather and sing and dance and hold hands and walk into the Arctic Ocean that was about, you know, 55 degrees or something like that. And submerged themselves every morning. And I got to participate in that.
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Rainn Wilson: I don't want to be this cold. I want to drink hot chocolate. And I'm scared.
Icelandic Woman: Okay.
Wilson: Okay.
Icelandic Woman: It's okay.
Wilson: Okay.
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Wilson: That was incredibly revitalizing. And, you know, I learned so much in each country, but one of the things that really struck me about Iceland is the Icelanders love their nature. They love their mountains and their forests and their fjords and their glaciers and their waterfalls. There's a connection to the land there that is just in their bodies. The reverence that Icelanders hold their land is remarkable, and it's something that we're missing in the United States, a connection to this land. The beauty and power and majesty and ancient mystery of this land can be a source of great happiness and joy and bring us meaning. So, that's one thing we can learn from those crazy, [CHUCKLES] eccentric Icelanders.
Basu: [LAUGHS] Yeah. I mean, finding joy in nature comes up in so many episodes. I'm remembering you washing the elephants in Thailand, bathing the elephants, and them bathing you for that matter. I remember them kind of spraying you, too.
Wilson: [LAUGHS] Yeah!
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Rainn Wilson: We're in the jungles of Thailand, I thought the river would be warmer… Hi, buddy… Oh, scrub, okay.
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Basu: That seemed like such a special experience, but also just… what a connection to make with an animal like this, with a creature like this.
Wilson: Oh, my gosh. I wanna cry thinking about it. It's so beautiful. Elephants just feel ancient. It feels like you're washing a dinosaur, and they're beautiful giant eyes that really are taking everything in and are so emotionally sensitive and astute, and then engaging in this practice cause they need help getting washed. You know, gotta scrub their back, get the dead skin off. And they love it, and what a celebration. I would just wish for everyone that at some point in time, it's a bucket list, you get to wash an elephant. It was, just, just beautiful and just brings me bliss thinking about it.
Basu: [CHUCKLES] I have to say, the way that the Thailand episode ended really had me thinking. You sat down and had a conversation with a Thai monk, and there were a lot of memorable moments in that conversation, but one that really stuck with me was when he said to you, you need to let go of resentments because only then will you be able to truly experience happiness and joy. And your reaction to that was really funny.
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Rainn Wilson: Thanks so much, okay! [LAUGHS]… Good, I made a monk laugh. I love it.
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Basu: What else could I possibly need to know about life, right? Right, let go of resentment. But this is something that I think about a lot. This idea of resentment having this calcifying effect on the soul. The way that it can just build up and harden over time. I just wanted to hear your thoughts after leaving that conversation, what you've thought about resentment and processing that piece of advice.
Wilson: So, yeah, for me, humans, us humans are wired to look at what's wrong and for very good reason. We are anxious for a reason. Because if we weren't anxious, a hundred thousand years ago, we would get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. So…
Basu: It's self-preservation. Yeah.
Wilson: Self-preservation. Yeah. We're looking for, uh-oh, if the bushes are rattling, we're gonna get eaten. And, uh-oh, if we don't have enough deer jerky, we're gonna starve. And resentment is part of that. It's like, we can be easily wired to look at what's wrong and what's out of balance and what's not right and what is not going the way that we want it to go. So, one of the most powerful tools is gratitude. And there's been a lot of writing about this, but I view it as a spiritual tool as much as a positive psychology tool.
Wilson: Gratitude is… Anne Lamott has a beautiful book, called "Help, Thanks, Wow." The three kinds of prayers that we give to God: "Help," like, help me out, "Thanks," thank you for this wonderful meal, and "Wow," just marveling at the beauty of the universe. Those are the three prayers. And so, gratitude is a kind of a prayer. And it also works from positive psychology. And it's kind of a superpower to make a gratitude list or to share gratitudes with people. And that's the way out of resentment, is to turn towards, Help, Thanks, Wow, towards gratitude, towards curiosity. And then we can rewire our brains. If you do that every morning, you can actually rewire your brain and be a much more positive person, and then you can reap the rewards and benefits of that, of living a life seen through kind of a much more positive, proactive lens instead of being mired in resentment and anxiety as I have been [CHUCKLES] for many, many decades.
Basu: You know, I appreciate that you bring that up in the conversation so much and you bring it up in the show as well. Things that you've struggled with and mental health. And you even say that you don't consider yourself a particularly happy person. And, I think, might be hard for some people to square knowing you as Dwight on "The Office," an incredibly funny show that brought joy to so many people, a character that brought joy to so many people. And I'm curious to know whether when you think back on your time making "The Office," whether that felt like a happy and joyful time in your life, but also this idea of success and how success can coincide with, or even sometimes conflict with, happiness.
Wilson: Yeah, in looking back at my time on "The Office," I spent a lot of really unhappy years being on one of the most successful shows on television. Because again, for me, resentment. It was not enough. I was a TV star, I wanted to be a movie star. I was this rich, but I wanted to be more rich. I wanted to have even greater kind of successes. So, it's that being programmed for like, not enough, not enough, not enough. Scarcity. I'm gonna be left out. I'm being disrespected. Ego.
Wilson: These are psychological journeys that we all take, and they're also spiritual conundrums that we all face at the same time. But going back to that thing about joy, you don't have to feel joy to inspire joy in someone else. If you're feeling down and low, you can go give joy to someone else. You can bring them a cake, you can make them laugh, you can do a service to someone. And in the doing you might receive, you get your 10%, kind of, agent's bonus of joy yourself, and you've also done an incredible service and uplifted someone. I didn't go into "The Office" to spread joy to the world. [CHUCKLES] I went cause I wanted to buy a house, [LAUGHS] and I wanted to pay off my student loans.
Basu: Good, I got a job. I booked it.
Wilson: Exactly. But, wow, how gratifying it is that over the last decade and decade and a half, it has brought a lotta joy to a lotta people. It's amazing. I hear from people every day, how much the show means to them, how much the laughter the show means to them, how much it brought their family together, or got them through COVID or through a tough time. I'm just so grateful for that, and I've learned a lot of lessons along the way, and I wanna share joy and spread joy however I can, even if I'm not particularly a joyful person myself.
Basu: Yeah. And I will say I think that "The Geography of Bliss" would've been a very different show if it were hosted by someone who's like, I am happiness inclined. [LAUGHS] This comes super easy to me. You are very frank about how you've had a lot of internal struggles with this.
Wilson: Yeah, I'm an anxious guy and filled with a lot of self-doubt. And I have to. I compare it to kind of like being diabetic, where a diabetic can be very functional. But you have to monitor your insulin and what you're eating and see the doctor regularly. I have to do that with my anxiety. I can be very functional, I can write books, I can get stuff done, I can be a good dad and a good husband, but I need to monitor myself every day. So, I do meditation, cold plunges, I do therapy. I have my spiritual practice. Anxiety may be there. It may not be something we can completely eliminate, but we can live with it and live happy, joyful, peaceful, serene, productive lives with our anxiety.
Basu: Yeah. So now that you have returned. Your last episode, I should say, in the series is you come back home to California. Now that you've experienced all these different practices and different traditions in different countries, is there anything that you were able to take home with you? Obviously, you can't wash an elephant very often, I would imagine, in California, but.
Wilson: We have pigs.
Basu: That'll help. Sure. [CHUCKLES]
Wilson: My wife washes the pigs.
Basu: You have two pigs, right?
Wilson: Well, I have two pigs. Uh, the Baron von Snortington and Amy. I don't wash the pigs. Maybe I need to wash my pigs more because they're so cute when you wash them. You make a big tub of water, like a child's kiddie pool, and then you fill it, and you fill it with Cheerios, and then they get in and they're gobbling the Cheerios, and then you take a brush.
Basu: Stop.
Wilson: No, that's what you do. And then you take a brush, and you scrub 'em up and down with soap, and they don't even pay attention cause they're so focused on the Cheerios.
Basu: [LAUGHS] That sounds amazing. That sounds amazing for everybody involved.
Wilson: But I haven't really done that, and I'm just realizing. See, I learned from myself. I need to wash my pigs more.
Basu: Missed opportunity right in front of you.
Wilson: Yeah. I think that since doing the show, in all honesty, it's just something I pay more attention to. Just my dailiness, waking up. How do I greet the morning light? How do I sit in stillness? How do I sit in contemplation? How do I connect with nature? I send out group text of gratitude to a group of friends of mine every morning. And I think about my life in terms of meaning and purpose and service and connection to that divine spark. And I'm not saying I'm a guru or I've got it figured out, but since doing the show, I'm 15% more directed in that direction to the pursuit of those things that allow me flourishing.
Basu: I wonder if there are any other exercises of that kind, thought exercises or literal exercises, that you would suggest people do to sort of reconnect with ideas about spirituality, especially if they've never really considered themselves very spiritual.
Wilson: Yeah, I think spirituality starts very small. So, that's why like when you go to a meditation class or yoga class, they start with like noticing your breath. Like, it just can be that simple. And it's really important to understand that a spiritual practice is not just a personal practice. It can be. It can be you and a yoga class or on a church pew or on a meditation bench or just walking outside. That can be a spiritual practice. But there is a spiritual practice of building community that is crucial as well. When we turn from being self-centered to other centered, we're of service to others, we're building community, we're seeking to have greater compassion and understanding of others. So, a spiritual practice it's not just a solo thing that makes you feel better, it's also giving back to the world and being an active participant in making the world a better place.
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Basu: Rainn Wilson, I've so enjoyed speaking with you. Thank you so much for your time.
Wilson: This was delightful. I love it. I love deep, rich, meaningful, elevated, inspiring conversations about being alive.
Basu, Narrating: You can find Rainn Wilson's book, "Soul Boom," on Apple Books. His show, "Rainn Wilson and the Geography of Bliss," is available on "Peacock." And if you're enjoying this show, "Apple News In Conversation," please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts.
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