Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. Today our show is just a little
Speaker 1: bit different because we're going to explore a story behind
Speaker 1: the story in the news. But the story in the
Speaker 1: news is just the basic idea of crisis. In recent weeks,
Speaker 1: the United States has felt like a nation in crisis,
Speaker 1: and then that national crisis is repeated out at the
Speaker 1: individual level for hundreds or thousands, or maybe even millions
Speaker 1: of people, each of whom is struggling with the core
Speaker 1: questions of how to live, to talk about crises, and
Speaker 1: how we can draw on the resources of spirituality to
Speaker 1: address them. I'm joined today by Professor Michael Alexander. Professor
Speaker 1: Alexander is a professor of Religious Studies at the University
Speaker 1: of California, Riverside, and he's the author of an extraordinary
Speaker 1: new book called Making Peace with the Universe, Personal Crisis
Speaker 1: and Spiritual Healing. I've known Mickey since we were graduate
Speaker 1: students together, and I had the pleasure and the privilege
Speaker 1: of hearing him talk through and work on the ideas
Speaker 1: that went into this book for years. When the book
Speaker 1: finally emerged. It moved me tremendously. It's written accessibly, it's
Speaker 1: written beautifully, and it's written in a way that can
Speaker 1: affect the reader at an individual, personal level. In other words,
Speaker 1: it's nothing like an academic book usually is. Mickey, Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for being here for me. This is
Speaker 1: like the culmination of a little dream to get you
Speaker 1: onto this podcast to talk about this amazing book and
Speaker 1: making peace with the universe. So first of all, just
Speaker 1: thank you for doing it, and thank you for being here. Yes,
Speaker 1: you've been involved with this for a long time. I
Speaker 1: cried on your shoulder many nights trying to figure this
Speaker 1: thing out, and it's great to finally see it in
Speaker 1: the world. Your book starts with a crisis, and then
Speaker 1: it's going to give us more people's crises, but it
Speaker 1: starts with a crisis of your own, and the crisis
Speaker 1: takes place on Sardinia, which you call a playground for
Speaker 1: Europe's richest people, which is not the obvious place for
Speaker 1: a crisis. But maybe start, if you would, by telling
Speaker 1: the listeners what that crisis was, because that will help
Speaker 1: us understand why you wrote the book. The original inspiration
Speaker 1: for the book is older than the crisis. I've been
Speaker 1: teaching religion and religious studies now for twenty years and
Speaker 1: have been studying it professionally for thirty. And I got
Speaker 1: my first job at the University of Oklahoma in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine, having moved there from the East Coast. And
Speaker 1: I turned on the radio and I heard this song,
Speaker 1: a country song that I'd never heard before, because I'd
Speaker 1: never really listened to country music before. And it was
Speaker 1: by this supergroup called the Highwaymen, and it had Willie
Speaker 1: Nelson and cut Johnny Cash. The song is about the
Speaker 1: spirit of adventure. The first verse is sung by Willie
Speaker 1: Nelson and it's about a pirate on the seas, and
Speaker 1: the second verse is about some kind of other adventurer.
Speaker 1: And I got in my head that someday I would
Speaker 1: like to write a book about the spirit of spiritual adventure.
Speaker 1: And it just sat there for ten years, and then
Speaker 1: I came to my own crisis. As it were, I
Speaker 1: was having family trouble. It was nothing exceptional, in fact,
Speaker 1: it was just sort of very typical domestic chaos. But
Speaker 1: I did wonder, after all these years of studying about
Speaker 1: the care of the soul, how come I wasn't able
Speaker 1: to sort of take care of my own. And at
Speaker 1: that exact moment, I was called upon by a good
Speaker 1: friend who was getting married on the island of Stardenia,
Speaker 1: to say some words at his wedding. And I didn't
Speaker 1: have anything to say. I was on the airplane, I
Speaker 1: had a yellow pad in front of me that was
Speaker 1: completely empty of any notes to say about the reality
Speaker 1: of marriage. And off I went to try to say
Speaker 1: something to these people. While I myself was contemplating getting
Speaker 1: out of my own up on the dais, a verse
Speaker 1: from the Upanishads returned to me, and that's what I
Speaker 1: talked about. And the verse is a fascinating verse from
Speaker 1: the Kathopanishad, which is a very old text roughly the
Speaker 1: period of the Hebrew Bible, and it's the story about
Speaker 1: a person who was given a favor or a gift
Speaker 1: by the gods. They're given the opportunity to ask death
Speaker 1: any question that you could possibly think of, and so
Speaker 1: the person who's given the gift thinks through what would
Speaker 1: you ask of death? What would you ask of the
Speaker 1: entity that has seen the course of every life and
Speaker 1: knows what a life amounts to? And he asks the
Speaker 1: question essentially, is there anything in life that is ever
Speaker 1: feels like you amounted to anything? Is there anything that's
Speaker 1: worth doing? That's the question. Death responds with a verse
Speaker 1: which is very terse or succinct, and the verse is
Speaker 1: there is a path of pleasure and there is a
Speaker 1: path of joy. Both attract the soul or a person.
Speaker 1: Those who seek joy come to find it, and those
Speaker 1: who seek pleasure never come to the end. That's the
Speaker 1: verse that I quoted for him, and then said a
Speaker 1: little couple of words about it, and then got off
Speaker 1: the dais and was completely mortified that I'd said something
Speaker 1: inscrutable and meaningless at my friend's wedding. But afterwards people
Speaker 1: came up to me and we talked about it, and
Speaker 1: I reali that I needed to look more at the
Speaker 1: classic sources that for so long I had treated as
Speaker 1: a scholar but had not treated for my own journey, essentially,
Speaker 1: and so I made on the island of Stardiny, I
Speaker 1: made this kind of pact with myself to put all
Speaker 1: my other research on hold, and to start to relook
Speaker 1: at all the verses and aphorisms and myths and rituals,
Speaker 1: everything that I'd ever looked at as though I was
Speaker 1: kind of a zookeeper at the zoo watching other people,
Speaker 1: and I realized that in fact I was I needed
Speaker 1: to help myself, and so that began this journey, which
Speaker 1: turned out it would be a ten year journey in
Speaker 1: which I had started to very deeply look into those sources.
Speaker 1: Not as an academic, although it's academically solid and actually
Speaker 1: all accurate, but really for me, there's something about being
Speaker 1: an academic that kind of splits us into two parts.
Speaker 1: Even if we study something that's about the human condition,
Speaker 1: like you do, you say, a religious study, what could
Speaker 1: be more fundamentally about the human condition or about the
Speaker 1: relationship of the human to the divine, We nevertheless get
Speaker 1: so trained in thinking about history, sociology, philosophy, anthropology that
Speaker 1: we tend to split what we're studying apart from our
Speaker 1: actual individual daily lives. And I think, in some ways
Speaker 1: what's so fascinating to me about your whole project here
Speaker 1: and about the book that came out of it, is
Speaker 1: that standing there in Sardinia, you had the realization that
Speaker 1: there's no point in doing all of this scholarship and
Speaker 1: study about the human condition if we can't turn it
Speaker 1: to ourselves and apply it to ourselves. And I think
Speaker 1: a lot of academics response to that would be no, no,
Speaker 1: don't don't go there and make you step back. It's
Speaker 1: too hard and it'll be too hard to be objective.
Speaker 1: Why did you in that moment think no, I gotta
Speaker 1: take it the other way. I've got to do the
Speaker 1: thing that actually non academics imagine we're all doing all
Speaker 1: the time, namely, if we're looking for the answers to
Speaker 1: the world's questions, try to look for those answers to
Speaker 1: use them for ourselves. Well, I can't answer the question
Speaker 1: in the arena of the law or in the arena
Speaker 1: of medicine, where somebody can potentially die on the operating
Speaker 1: table as a result of kind of a method that
Speaker 1: is unorthodox. But I think I'm liberated by the fact
Speaker 1: that it is religious studies and that if somebody should
Speaker 1: fail one of my classes, nobody dies on the operating table.
Speaker 1: Besides the marital aspect of it. I did have kind
Speaker 1: of a crisis regarding what am I doing teaching religion,
Speaker 1: because so much of it, as you're well aware from
Speaker 1: your own work, is you know, just the crassest justifications
Speaker 1: of nationalism and sexism and racism, and so I would
Speaker 1: be standing up in front of my students sort of thinking,
Speaker 1: what is the value here? Why are we studying all
Speaker 1: of this old stuff? And it became clear to me
Speaker 1: that for myself it was the value of it was
Speaker 1: in the arena of therapy, personal therapy. And that's actually
Speaker 1: I came to the insight in reading and teaching all
Speaker 1: these confessions confessional literature for so many years. I realized
Speaker 1: that most of the great confessions, from Augustine down to
Speaker 1: the present, to Tulstoy or whoever else, had been the
Speaker 1: result of somebody having a personal freak out in their lives.
Speaker 1: And because religion had been the form for therapy before
Speaker 1: there was modern therapy, people turned to it when they
Speaker 1: had nowhere else to turn to, when they needed to
Speaker 1: take one step forward. And I just realized that all
Speaker 1: of these confessions were, in fact, case histories of spiritual therapy,
Speaker 1: as it were. But I came to that realization actually
Speaker 1: as somebody who was seeking. In other words, when I
Speaker 1: was reading Augustine, I wanted to figure out how he'd
Speaker 1: figured out his life so I could figure out my life.
Speaker 1: When I read Tulstoy's Confessions, I was doing the same thing.
Speaker 1: I stopped reading it as a third person and I
Speaker 1: started reading the stuff as though it were self helped literature,
Speaker 1: because I think that's what it was the fastest growing
Speaker 1: category of quote unquote religious affiliation in the United States.
Speaker 1: Its people who say, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual. And
Speaker 1: it really strikes me that your book is partly about
Speaker 1: how there's really no difference between those things. I mean,
Speaker 1: in the end, the religious traditions were all designed from
Speaker 1: the beginning to address spirituality, and the people you write
Speaker 1: about in your book are on spiritual journeys. I mean,
Speaker 1: what we have is people tend to associate with religion
Speaker 1: the institutionalism of it, and that's not why your book
Speaker 1: is about at all. And that's not what the book
Speaker 1: is about at all. And I felt liberated and sort
Speaker 1: of going to the spiritual because there were precedents, and
Speaker 1: the greatest precedent was actually the founder of American psychology
Speaker 1: and the founder of American religious studies, William James, who
Speaker 1: himself had gone through a tough marriage and he was
Speaker 1: in his late thirties early forties, had never published a book.
Speaker 1: He was up at Harvard near your offices, sucking down
Speaker 1: nitrous oxide canisters in his office and calling it research.
Speaker 1: He was in a bad way, and he started to
Speaker 1: return to some of the spiritual masters that he had
Speaker 1: read about it in his youth more seriously, and the
Speaker 1: result of that work was The Varieties of Religious Experience,
Speaker 1: which you published in the early part of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: and it really turned his life around. So he makes
Speaker 1: a distinction about religion as an institutional function and religion
Speaker 1: as a person or private function. And I think a
Speaker 1: lot of my colleagues have a lot of problem with
Speaker 1: putting those blinders on it, and I do too, because
Speaker 1: I think that if you're missing the nationalism and the
Speaker 1: sexism and the racism and all of that, you're missing
Speaker 1: a lot about how religion functions. Nevertheless, I still felt
Speaker 1: this spiritual curiosity, and I felt that there was this
Speaker 1: essential thing driving people to either religion or spirituality that
Speaker 1: was not simply them getting pushed around by power politics.
Speaker 1: That was people looking for something, and I was looking
Speaker 1: for something. Let's turn now make you too the thing
Speaker 1: you found. And of course this is part of why
Speaker 1: people should read the book. But I'd like for listeners
Speaker 1: to get a flavor of your core observation, the thing
Speaker 1: you found in the different spiritual traditions that you explored,
Speaker 1: each of which, in one way or another, picks up
Speaker 1: on the idea that you began with, the idea that
Speaker 1: there's a path of joy and a path of pleasure,
Speaker 1: and you can find the path of joy, but the
Speaker 1: path of pleasure has no end. That insight simply rang
Speaker 1: true to me, meaning that when I thought about my
Speaker 1: own life and instances of pleasure, I thought about all
Speaker 1: the conquests of Saturday night, that Sunday morning receded into
Speaker 1: darkness and blackness, and you know, all the times that
Speaker 1: I was on an internet browser, you know, in four
Speaker 1: hours later getting up and asking myself what kind of
Speaker 1: a black hole was I just down? In other words,
Speaker 1: there it felt like a path with no end. And
Speaker 1: then I thought about other episodes in my life in
Speaker 1: which they seemed edifying, the episodes that I would call joyful,
Speaker 1: and even the words seemed old fashioned to make joy,
Speaker 1: who even uses it? But the episodes that I would
Speaker 1: use as joyful or think about as joyful had a
Speaker 1: kind of edifying aspect to it. And I use the
Speaker 1: word edifice building up. It meant that after you did
Speaker 1: that behavior, you felt like you built yourself up, like
Speaker 1: there was something left standing after you had done it,
Speaker 1: which was so different from pursuits of pleasure, where they
Speaker 1: almost receded while you're doing it, if not just shortly thereafter.
Speaker 1: And I started to think about what's the mechanism by
Speaker 1: which joys are created. Both of these are flavors of happiness.
Speaker 1: They're also deeply related to one another. One can enjoy
Speaker 1: pleasures in a joyful aspect, even something as basic as
Speaker 1: sexual relations done within the context of a meaningful relationship,
Speaker 1: it doesn't feel empty. It feels like something has been
Speaker 1: edified by the act. So I wanted to get to
Speaker 1: the mechanism of what that was, what transposes pleasures into joys?
Speaker 1: And sometimes when pleasures aren't available, how do you have
Speaker 1: joys even in the worst and hardest of circumstances, as
Speaker 1: we all sometimes have to do. It's not just about
Speaker 1: chasing pleasures. Sometimes you're alone with your best friend in
Speaker 1: a hospital gurney and they're passing away, and so those
Speaker 1: moments that have these intense feelings of connection that are
Speaker 1: not necessarily related to pleasures but sort of give you
Speaker 1: a kind of they throw you into a spiritual mood.
Speaker 1: I wanted to find out how that happened, and I
Speaker 1: read the sources, and it was pretty clear to me
Speaker 1: that the obvious statement that we talked about before was
Speaker 1: the mechanism that made all those things happen, which is
Speaker 1: that religion was the forum, or is the forum in
Speaker 1: which people thinking about the weight of the world. And
Speaker 1: when I gave myself over to the fact that the
Speaker 1: world has weight and meaning at all, that's when the
Speaker 1: joy started to arise. What I heard you saying was
Speaker 1: that when you feel the weight of the world on you,
Speaker 1: that the key thing to be able to do is
Speaker 1: to embrace the idea that the world has meaning, and
Speaker 1: by doing that, you're able to give what you call
Speaker 1: in the book, giving your assent to the universe instead
Speaker 1: of fighting back against it, to be at peace with
Speaker 1: the weight that the world has on you. And so
Speaker 1: what I wanted to ask you about that because that
Speaker 1: feels to me like it's very close to the heart
Speaker 1: of your proposal in the book, very close to what
Speaker 1: you've derived from these religious traditions. For me, sometimes when
Speaker 1: I'm feeling that weight, the weight of the world, that's
Speaker 1: exactly when it's hardest to believe that the world does
Speaker 1: have meaning. But I heard you to be saying the
Speaker 1: key is acknowledged that the world has meaning. But for
Speaker 1: me at least, that's often the hardest part. So what's
Speaker 1: the trick, as it were? How does one move from
Speaker 1: feeling the weight of the world to thinking, well, the
Speaker 1: weight of the world does have meaning, and through that meaning,
Speaker 1: I give my assent to the universe. Weight and gravity
Speaker 1: are a metaphor that I use, the reason being that
Speaker 1: there's no language that can really pin it down. I
Speaker 1: avoid the word meaning because I'm not sure that joyful
Speaker 1: moments necessarily have meaning. In other words, I just remember
Speaker 1: when my kids were young, there was an episode in
Speaker 1: which my youngest, who might have been three or four
Speaker 1: at the time, took a piece of saran wrap and
Speaker 1: pulled it over the toilet bowl as a trap for
Speaker 1: the next person who would use the toilet, and when
Speaker 1: I saw it, I felt joy. Now, I don't know
Speaker 1: what the meaning of the situation was, but I don't
Speaker 1: think it had significance beyond the fact that the little
Speaker 1: kid was playing a trick. And yet there was something
Speaker 1: that about the act that made the world feel like
Speaker 1: it was revolving on well oiled hinges, that I was
Speaker 1: at one with a universe that was okay. Sometimes that
Speaker 1: occurs in very hard circumstances. I used the word gravitoss
Speaker 1: or gravity, because the idea of it is that things
Speaker 1: feel like they have weight. I mean, things feel like
Speaker 1: people are born and people die, and these things matter,
Speaker 1: and that when I fall into the trap of thinking
Speaker 1: that these things don't matter, that's usually when my own
Speaker 1: pain and agonies are actually exacerbated and are the worst.
Speaker 1: In other words, if one went ahead and tried to
Speaker 1: do something about those difficulties in the world and embrace
Speaker 1: them as important or everything about it the world is important,
Speaker 1: that's when the joys came. So it seemed to me
Speaker 1: it was emotion. It was an emotional response as opposed
Speaker 1: to an intellectual one, meaning that recognizing just the reality
Speaker 1: that I feel that the world and things in't matter,
Speaker 1: started to feel good. Why do you think that your
Speaker 1: kids prank had this effect on you? I mean it's
Speaker 1: almost like a zen cohon of you know, the surround
Speaker 1: rap or for the toilet pull seed. You know, part
Speaker 1: of me wants to try to analyze it symbolically and
Speaker 1: think that it's about out death and that it's about transparency,
Speaker 1: and you know, but this is clearly the wrong way
Speaker 1: to go about thinking of this story. The question is
Speaker 1: why did it do this for you? Why did it
Speaker 1: give you that feeling of the world having wait in
Speaker 1: a good way? I think because I saw my kid,
Speaker 1: who was two or three years old, participating in joy
Speaker 1: and laughter, and it was a kind of pleasure at
Speaker 1: the fact of watching a young kid come into themselves
Speaker 1: and grow old and watch their intellect developed to the
Speaker 1: point that they were ready to set a trap like that.
Speaker 1: It was watching the world turn the way it's supposed to,
Speaker 1: as it were. Something that I find really hard in
Speaker 1: the context of spiritual growth is making the move from
Speaker 1: the isolated experience like you're describing, where you have that
Speaker 1: feeling of connection, you have that feeling of the world
Speaker 1: doing what it's supposed to do and mattering, and then
Speaker 1: translating that into a dane feeling of well being. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I feel very lucky and I am able to experience
Speaker 1: a moment of what you're calling joy, a moment of connection.
Speaker 1: Yet I still find it difficult to, as it were,
Speaker 1: regularize that sentiment or make it feel good over time.
Speaker 1: What are the traditions that you've studied, in the examples
Speaker 1: that you've studied, and we're going to turn to some
Speaker 1: of those examples in a moment, What do they say
Speaker 1: about that, about that move from a moment of recognition
Speaker 1: to actually being able to live well and in peace
Speaker 1: with the universe over time. First of all, it's always
Speaker 1: moment by moment, and you always slip an in and
Speaker 1: out of it. There's always a tension with seeing a
Speaker 1: meaningless universe in which you only want to run away
Speaker 1: from the problems of it. So it's simple to recognize,
Speaker 1: but it's never easy to do. A regiment of prayer
Speaker 1: is a means by which basically all the traditions remind
Speaker 1: a person to sort of think about how the world
Speaker 1: is turning. There are greater holidays and lesser holidays, but
Speaker 1: typically most traditions really advocate taking a break every couple
Speaker 1: of hours, and for things that you do regularly, such
Speaker 1: as wash your hands or take a meal, in which
Speaker 1: it's the time to stop and basically say I appreciate this.
Speaker 1: I know the alternative it throws you back into a
Speaker 1: position of gratitude and also of responsibility, by which I
Speaker 1: mean when you recognize the way to the world, you
Speaker 1: realize that your job is to pay it forward. The
Speaker 1: metaphor that I like so much about gravity is that
Speaker 1: it's not about you, it's about something else. It's about
Speaker 1: throwing in your chips with some function or power that
Speaker 1: is not of just about poor me. And the amazing
Speaker 1: and ironic aspect of doing it is that almost as
Speaker 1: soon as you stop thinking about poor me and throw
Speaker 1: one's focus to things that are more important than me,
Speaker 1: your own therapy or my own therapy was achieved almost instantly.
Speaker 1: A lot of my own self pity really came exactly
Speaker 1: from that poor me, poor me. Not that I don't
Speaker 1: have my own problems, or that other people don't have very,
Speaker 1: very substantial problems, but paying it forward is a pretty
Speaker 1: substantial way of digging oneself out of that hole. And
Speaker 1: I think that the religions really do try to offer
Speaker 1: ritualized opportunities to do that. We'll be right back, Michael.
Speaker 1: In your book, you've got amazing chapters which are sort
Speaker 1: of spiritual biographies in miniature of figures who had crises
Speaker 1: and engaged with them. They're all amazing, But I want
Speaker 1: to ask you about two in particular one because it
Speaker 1: was the one that I maybe knew the most about
Speaker 1: to begin with, and I was fascinated by to it,
Speaker 1: and the other because it was the one I knew
Speaker 1: nothing about. So the one I knew a little bit
Speaker 1: about was the story of the great Muslim philosopher and
Speaker 1: critic of philosophy of Mohammad al Hazali. I wonder if
Speaker 1: you'd start with his tale and what it was about
Speaker 1: his experience that resonated for you. I came across a
Speaker 1: title of his I didn't know anything about him, and
Speaker 1: the title was The Alchemy of Happiness. It was written
Speaker 1: in Persian. It was a Persian pressus of a larger
Speaker 1: Arabic work that he had been working on for a
Speaker 1: long time. And I didn't know anything about any of them.
Speaker 1: And so I started digging in into who is Ghazzali
Speaker 1: and what is the Alchemy of Happiness? And I happened
Speaker 1: upon his autobiography, his amazing confession and autobiography The Deliverance
Speaker 1: from Error, And as I read it to be perfectly honest,
Speaker 1: I thought a lot about you because you and I
Speaker 1: go back a long time. I was in graduate school
Speaker 1: with you when you were in law school, and Gazzali
Speaker 1: was a lawyer. He was the top lawyer for the
Speaker 1: sultan in a period in which the sultan ran everything
Speaker 1: practically from India to Turkey, and he had a really
Speaker 1: good job. He was the top of the law profession.
Speaker 1: The things that he said and the ink strokes of
Speaker 1: his pen really changed lives, hundreds of them, thousands of them.
Speaker 1: And then one day or over a period of a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks, all the top people were dead. There
Speaker 1: was either a coup or bad things happened, and everything
Speaker 1: that Gazzali had worked towards and had become a part
Speaker 1: of crashed into the sand, and there was a huge
Speaker 1: power vacuum that occurred in the region. And Gazzali didn't
Speaker 1: know what to do. He basically had a Cartesian moment
Speaker 1: of saying, where did we go wrong? How do we
Speaker 1: start this from the beginning, step by step? And were
Speaker 1: there calculations that we achieved that we thought we were
Speaker 1: doing in the name of God that in fact read
Speaker 1: to the complete devolution of society? And so he took
Speaker 1: a step back. He did whatever responsible adult would do
Speaker 1: in the situation. He runs away. He runs away from
Speaker 1: Baghdad because he's had since he was a kid's spiritual curiosity.
Speaker 1: He'd heard about the Sufi's his whole life. They had
Speaker 1: been on the street corners, he'd heard the things they said.
Speaker 1: They made very little sense to him, but there was
Speaker 1: something about them that rang like they could be true.
Speaker 1: These simistics the Sufis are the muslimistics. Yeah, yeah, the
Speaker 1: Sufis are the great mystics of Islam. So he took
Speaker 1: the opportunity to go finally, to follow his spiritual curiosity.
Speaker 1: He and a friend go to Damascus, which at the
Speaker 1: time was the center of mysticism. It's still a great
Speaker 1: mystical city. Christianity and Islam have great practices from there.
Speaker 1: All the great Sufi texts seem to have been published
Speaker 1: from there. So he gets up and he goes there
Speaker 1: to study, and his life is turned around on account
Speaker 1: of it, and he finds grounding, he finds spiritual grounding,
Speaker 1: and so he really became my intellectual hero. I mean,
Speaker 1: to this day, I think about Gazzali as the greatest
Speaker 1: of all time, as it were, you know, because of
Speaker 1: the bravery of that, because of the bravery of basically
Speaker 1: being at the top of your profession, feeling like you're
Speaker 1: not where you need to be and going for it,
Speaker 1: Which isn't to say that people need to leave their
Speaker 1: professions or anything like that, but it's as though. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think Gazzali in particular gave me the permission to
Speaker 1: look at my own spiritual curiosity because he had done
Speaker 1: so himself so explicitly and so carefully. I mean, my God,
Speaker 1: I can't think of an intellectual that really pierced through
Speaker 1: to the most essential issues more clearly than Gazzali. The
Speaker 1: other person whom I really wanted to ask you about
Speaker 1: is the extraordinary jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, and I
Speaker 1: knew her only as a name and perhaps a little
Speaker 1: bit of I'd heard a little bit of her music,
Speaker 1: but I had no idea of the extraordinary story of
Speaker 1: her crisis. An awakening tell us a little bit about
Speaker 1: Mary Lou Williams. So I've been trying to teach myself
Speaker 1: jazz quitar for at least as long as I've been
Speaker 1: trying to study religion. I'm probably successful in both of them,
Speaker 1: which is not very much. So. I'd heard about Mary
Speaker 1: Lou Williams as somebody who had written a conceptual piece
Speaker 1: in the nineteen forties, called the Zodiac Suite, and that's
Speaker 1: how she sort of entered the cannon I somehow, I guess,
Speaker 1: just scratching around, I learned that in nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: when she was at age forty four, she had a
Speaker 1: mental breakdown and walked off the stage in Paris and
Speaker 1: decided she was never going back again. And so I
Speaker 1: became very interested in the life of Mary Lou Williams
Speaker 1: and why that happened, and so I dug in deep.
Speaker 1: It turns out that Mary Lou Williams was a piano
Speaker 1: genius of the rank of Count Basie. It's amazing as
Speaker 1: a female instrumentalist. She was the piano player that basically
Speaker 1: swung the Andy Kirk Band in the ninth thirties. So
Speaker 1: she was a cant partner of a Kansas City group
Speaker 1: that was there with Count Basie and Benny Goodman and
Speaker 1: all of them, and she made her bones in the thirties.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen forties, she moved to New York and
Speaker 1: became part of the bebop generation and became the teacher
Speaker 1: to some towering giants of piano, including Thelonious Monk and
Speaker 1: the great Bud Powell. And so she was kind of
Speaker 1: recognized as this real heavyweight in the scene. Miles Davis
Speaker 1: was always trying to record with her. Dizzy Gillespie was
Speaker 1: essentially her best friend or one of her best friends.
Speaker 1: And she walked off the stage at age forty four.
Speaker 1: And when I heard about that, or learned about that,
Speaker 1: I just felt the same visceral reaction as many of
Speaker 1: us do, which is the desire to just walk off
Speaker 1: the stage. And so I investigated as deeply as I
Speaker 1: could and saw yet another person able to turn their
Speaker 1: life around. In her case, she was completely desponded in Paris,
Speaker 1: shows up to get her back to New York and
Speaker 1: tells her to start praying the Psalms. And Mary Lou
Speaker 1: Williams had always had a spiritual curiosity, and this opened
Speaker 1: up in her again the permission to go ahead and
Speaker 1: look into it. She gave up the piano and she
Speaker 1: started to pray, very very fervently. And then, even though
Speaker 1: she was an African American woman raised essentially in Baptist
Speaker 1: circles in New York City, as she was kind of
Speaker 1: wandering around in Harlem on a Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon
Speaker 1: looking for somewhere to sort of pray because she'd become
Speaker 1: quite fervent in it. She noticed that the Catholic church
Speaker 1: was open, which is such an amazing aspect of Catholicism,
Speaker 1: which is that the churches, where the cathedrals, are just
Speaker 1: there for people to walk in to get a little
Speaker 1: bit of rest and to have maybe a private chat
Speaker 1: with the Creator or whoever or however you want to
Speaker 1: conceive of divinity. And she started to do that very
Speaker 1: very regularly, and at some point she started to hear things,
Speaker 1: specifically music on her knees praying before her suffering Savior.
Speaker 1: She started to get sounds in her head, and she decided,
Speaker 1: I have to put this into music for other people
Speaker 1: to appreciate the same feeling of prayer that I have
Speaker 1: more with than reading my book. I recommend people go
Speaker 1: and listen to Mary Low's Mass. That's the first thing
Speaker 1: I would tell them to do. It's a stunning work.
Speaker 1: It's not Bach or Mozart. It swings. Her genius was
Speaker 1: the recognition that the swing rhythm brings people together. Rhythm
Speaker 1: is one of the most profound and ancient aspects of
Speaker 1: the religious or spiritual life. I mean, all traditions essentially
Speaker 1: have it. We have native American traditions from fifteen thousand
Speaker 1: years ago. Very likely there are these architectural circles that
Speaker 1: are created in North America that are currently reflected in
Speaker 1: sundance rituals. But these rituals are all around the world
Speaker 1: of people getting together with rhythm together and then commuting
Speaker 1: with one another and something larger than themselves. And she
Speaker 1: wrote that she realized that that's what jazz could be,
Speaker 1: and she became absolutely committed to writing a jazz mass
Speaker 1: and having it performed at the Vatican. It's a great story.
Speaker 1: I could talk about it forever. It's an extraordinary story,
Speaker 1: and I agree with your recommendation. That's what I did
Speaker 1: when I was reading that chapter, is that I immediately
Speaker 1: went and downloaded her music and listened to it while
Speaker 1: I was reading the chapter, and the combination was really,
Speaker 1: really extraordinary. I wanted to ask you, Mickey, finally, about
Speaker 1: whether the process of writing the book, struggling with the
Speaker 1: ideas in the book, and finding some kind of piece
Speaker 1: through the book worked for you. I mean, I found,
Speaker 1: I have to say, reading the book to be extremely
Speaker 1: powerful and it really helped me in my own journey,
Speaker 1: clearly an unfulfilled journey in my case to try to
Speaker 1: come to terms with the weight of the world. And
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if it was full for you. I wonder
Speaker 1: if you know when you think about where you are
Speaker 1: now as a human being in relation to the universe,
Speaker 1: relative to where you were when you began thinking about
Speaker 1: this project and struggling with it and putting it through
Speaker 1: the draft after draft, and the efforts to try to
Speaker 1: make sense of it and to experience it, do you
Speaker 1: feel that you are in a different place now? Was
Speaker 1: writing the book a journey for you in a way
Speaker 1: that reading the book at obviously a much more modest
Speaker 1: and small scale, feels like a journey to me? Yes,
Speaker 1: the book, I mean the answers, Yes, I'm in a
Speaker 1: better place. I was given permission to follow my spiritual
Speaker 1: curiosity by Ghazzali, by Mary lou Williams, by the other
Speaker 1: figures in the book, and that was it. That was
Speaker 1: the Keys of the Kingdom. And I wanted to you
Speaker 1: know that earlier desire to write a book about the
Speaker 1: spirit of spiritual adventure is really what I was trying
Speaker 1: to achieve, that other people and myself could just see
Speaker 1: how it had played out in people's lives and worked
Speaker 1: for them, and just to give people the idea that, hey,
Speaker 1: you could potentially work from. I feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: for listeners who may ask themselves practically speaking, Okay, I've
Speaker 1: got spiritual curiosity, what do I do next? Right? I
Speaker 1: think the answer is follow it. I think that I
Speaker 1: think that's the answer. That there's no particular thing for
Speaker 1: you to do. Everyone has to run their own experiment.
Speaker 1: And so if you've always wanted to read the Bog
Speaker 1: of Adida, then pick it up. And if you've always
Speaker 1: wanted to sort of learn cantatas or whatever your curiosity is,
Speaker 1: it's worth pursuing in its own right. That earlier distinction
Speaker 1: between pleasure and joy is a distinction that I make
Speaker 1: for myself now daily and regularly in a ritualized manner
Speaker 1: that we were talking about before, which is that I'm
Speaker 1: constantly asking myself whenever I have enough sort of sentience
Speaker 1: to be able to ask myself this question, which is
Speaker 1: what I'm about to do the path of pleasure or
Speaker 1: is it the path of joy? Is it something that's
Speaker 1: going to just to pate as soon as I do it,
Speaker 1: or is it something that's going to be edifying and
Speaker 1: help me to build myself up, and typically my inner
Speaker 1: voice is staggeringly clear when I'm aware enough to ask
Speaker 1: the question. Something tells me when I'm on the right path,
Speaker 1: and when I'm doing something that is edifying, and when
Speaker 1: I'm on the wrong path, and when I'm doing something
Speaker 1: that is going to feel really bad. And spiritual curiosity,
Speaker 1: I've never seen an instance in my life in which
Speaker 1: it has led to conditions which I severely regretted. I
Speaker 1: do have to say that, you know, we do face
Speaker 1: the problem that people do use religion for all kinds
Speaker 1: and spirituality for all kinds of terrible things, and I
Speaker 1: don't know what their inner voice is tell them. I
Speaker 1: don't know, but for me, that distinction between what is
Speaker 1: edifying and what is not is clarifying to the very end.
Speaker 1: Michael Alexander, you can't say it any better than that.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much for that formulation. I think, especially
Speaker 1: in times as crazy and as polarized and as intense
Speaker 1: as the ones we're going through, to try to keep
Speaker 1: that distinction between pleasure and joy and mind is really revelatory.
Speaker 1: Thank you. What a pleasure. I'm a longtime listener but
Speaker 1: a first time caller, so thanks for having me on
Speaker 1: the show. Thanks Mickey, you well, Okay. Talking to Professor
Speaker 1: Alexander really brought home for me just why I found
Speaker 1: his book so powerful. We all encounter and face crises.
Speaker 1: Sometimes those crises are not of our own making and
Speaker 1: come from the state of the nation, the way things
Speaker 1: have felt in recent weeks. Other times, those crises feel
Speaker 1: like they emerge almost unbidden, out of our own limited
Speaker 1: human spiritual capabilities and resources. When that happens, we need help,
Speaker 1: and we need to be able to turn to wise
Speaker 1: friends and deep thinkers, and as it happens, Mickey Alexander
Speaker 1: is both for me. The takeaway from our conversation and
Speaker 1: from his book is that we can look inside ourselves
Speaker 1: and seek after a path of joy, which doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that we have big smiles on our faces all the time,
Speaker 1: but rather that we're able to embrace the experiences of
Speaker 1: making meaning that we encounter at every minute and every
Speaker 1: day in our lives, and that can help us make
Speaker 1: better choices. It can help us move away from the
Speaker 1: path of transient pleasures or transient pains and in the
Speaker 1: direction of those things that matter most to us and
Speaker 1: that therefore enable us to feel the weight of the
Speaker 1: world and give our assent to it. Until the next
Speaker 1: time I speak to you. Be careful, be safe, and
Speaker 1: be well. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Our producer is Lydia Gencott, our engineer is Martin Gonzalez,
Speaker 1: and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Theme music by
Speaker 1: Luis Gera at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 1: You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman.
Speaker 1: I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you
Speaker 1: can find at Bloomberg dot com slash feld To discover
Speaker 1: Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com
Speaker 1: slash Podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today,
Speaker 1: please write a review or tell a frat This is
Speaker 1: Deep Background.