-Hey, everybody. A few years back
when I was preparing the SoulPancake book,
I did a number of interviews with some great writers
and thinkers and artists about life's big questions,
about the profound topics
that we wanted to tackle in the book.
And one of those people was the late Harold Ramis.
We got to speak about all kinds of different topics --
life, death, the afterlife,
meaning, the Dalai Lama,
farts.
It was really great to unearth our interview
and edit it together for you guys.
It's a conversation I really enjoyed
and I hope that you will, too.
This is for the late, great Harold Ramis.
-My overt or covert message
is always the synthesis of Buddhism, Judaism,
existentialism, and psychology.
-Do you think you can do any of that with me here today?
-I have no choice. It's --
I'm compulsively self-revealing.
-Oh, my God. So, Harold Ramis,
let me lead off with this.
What is the meaning of life?
-What is the meaning of life?
Man.
I always go from a little book.
I like little books,
'cause they don't take that much time to read.
There's one called, "Man's Search for Meaning."
-Yeah, Viktor Frankl. -Viktor Frankl.
I thought that was a very impressive book.
And, you know,
what I came away with was, to me,
he's like a happy existentialist,
that life has no inherent meaning,
which, you know,
is a bleak prospect for a lot of people.
But it's completely consistent with, for me,
with not just with existential psychology,
which I kind of subscribe to,
but it's also a deeply held Buddhist principle,
that we create meaning.
That it's up to us to create meaning.
As children we start out, you know,
just looking for pleasure and fun,
later we convert that into we want power, money,
fame, success, control over our lives.
Those are maybe true, but once you're done with that,
then all you have left is meaning.
So then you're driven by a will to meaning.
And almost anyone who's achieved
maybe a fair measure of their original goals
is usually left with that feeling
of either despair, "Is that all there is?
I thought these things would make me happy,
but they haven't."
Or a feeling of discovery.
Like, you know, the beginning of, at least a glimpse
of the wisdom
that says that there's much more to life,
and it comes from a deep understanding
of life and responsibility
and identity, consciousness, all those things,
meaning -- the things that comprise meaning.
-For me, I found this kind of --
a renewed search for meaning
happened once I had achieved
what I really set out to do,
which was all of a sudden,
in my mid/late-20s,
I was a working actor. And I was getting paid.
And I wasn't making very much money,
but, you know, my career was on track
and I was -- I was doing what I had always wanted to do.
And yet,
I thought that was it,
and I got there
and I felt hollow,
I felt barren, I felt like I needed something more.
-Yeah. I think most people feel that.
Most people -- a lot of people are deprived
of that awareness
because they never get where they think want to be.
So they remain kind of mired
in that search for what they think will make them happy.
-Right. -The lucky ones
get what they think they wanted
and then find out, oh,
you know, there is no end.
That it is in fact
a constant seeking that never ends.
You never get what you need
'cause it doesn't -- it's not possible.
And it's a process and understanding
that you're engaged in this process,
like it or not, for the rest of your life
and there's no destination
and there's no ending where you say, "Okay, I'm done."
-Mm-hmm.
-You can say that till your last breath, I guess.
-Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
-Your mortality is not in doubt.
That's going to happen.
Whether you're here or outside or doing anything,
you have the same fundamental need
or responsibility to make this day meaningful,
whatever it is, even if you're in hell.
-Hmm.
You said before that you had spoken before,
you were going to be speaking on
humor as a survival tool for the Jewish culture.
-Yeah.
-Do you want to talk a little about that?
-This is my construct.
You can see the world as tragedy,
this fatal flaw makes life,
you know, unbearably, poignant, sad, and tragic,
or you can see it as comedy, that there's an inherent irony
in virtually everything in the world.
And I guess for me, you know,
seeing it as humor and attacking it with humor
was my own defense against it.
It doesn't hurt me 'cause I see it, I can joke about it,
I can defuse tension by making people laugh about it.
And for me, that's the defense mechanism
that comes with this absurd awareness.
-I've heard recently that
the fart is the most universal humor.
It's in every culture of the world.
-At any age, virtually. -Yeah.
But even Eskimos, they have 50 words for fart.
-Yes.
[ Both laugh ]
I don't know. I think --
I think --
I don't want to press this,
and I've never --
But let's just take the fart
as a metaphor
for our vulnerability,
the accidental revelation of our humanity.
-Which I accidentally reveal about 40 times a day.
You can ask my wife.
-It cuts through any pretension we have or all social classes,
all our intellectual,
any intellectual overlay
we have, just cuts through everything.
And that's what good comedy always does,
I think, is it bypasses
the intellect on a rational process
and it touches us where we're most human, somehow.
-Mm-hmm.
-And it's a reflex.
It's in the diaphragm.
You know, it's just like an instinct, like fear.
It's "Oh, that's funny."
-How are you spiritual without believing in God, per se?
-I don't deny that, you know, we live in miraculous world.
There's no question. And it's driven by forces
we may never understand.
And that -- you know, it's awesome,
it's mysterious, it's...
But I don't give it a name,
I don't pretend to understand it,
or accept that other human beings know the rules
or that there's some moral code that derives from it
that other people know that I don't.
I have no problem with God.
It's just making God
an entity is not an important thing for me.
-And real quick, we'll just finish up by,
let me ask about your history with the Dalai Lama,
you experiences with him,
and what you've taken away from your interactions with him.
-Hold on one sec.
-Yeah. -Here he comes.
Say hi to Rainn.
-Hi.
-How are you? -Hi, Dalai.
-Bless you.
That's me and my wife
and the Dalai Lama at our first meeting.
-Awesome.
-At the Four Seasons in Washington.
-Makes total sense.
-We had a great room.
And, you know, it's just what'd you'd expect.
He had no agenda, just humorous, patient,
and ready to answer anything.
And my wife asked him a good question.
She had spent the previous day at the Holocaust Museum.
And his speech had been about unbiased compassion,
a big public speech.
He said, "It's easy to have compassion for our relatives,
for our friends, for our kinsmen,
for our countrymen, you know,
but how do you have compassion for the other?
We spend a lot of time demonizing the other --
how do you have compassion for those people?"
So, she'd come from the Holocaust Museum
and she said, "I understand what you're saying,
but how do I find compassion for the monsters in the world,
the torturers, the Hitlers, the...?"
And he said, "Well," he said, "In a theistic tradition,
people believe in a divine retribution,
that they get theirs in an afterlife of some kind,
that they'll be punished."
He said, "In Buddhism,
we assume that everyone is a suffering being.
If they're not now suffering, they will eventually.
They have suffered or will suffer."
He said, "Imagine that you see a child running
and he's running toward a cliff,
and he's too far away.
He can't hear you yell to warn him
and he's too far away for you to stop him.
You see him run off the cliff.
He falls. He's seriously injured."
He said "You have to have compassion for that child
without even knowing him."
He said, "Now imagine you see another child running
toward the same cliff, same situation.
Having seen the first one,
you have compassion for this child
before he even falls,
'cause you know inevitably he will fall and suffer."
He said, "That's the world.
Everyone is running toward that same cliff and suffering."
-You look like the Jewddha. -I'm feeling that way.
-J-e-w-d-d-h-a?
No. Yeah.