Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Good afternoon.
For the next 18 minutes, I am going to make you uncomfortable,
very uncomfortable.
The subject I'm about to discuss
will make you squirm, cringe and possibly grimace.
How do I know this?
Because this subject makes me do all of these things.
You see, I'm going to talk about God.
I was right; many of you look uncomfortable,
and I see a woman in the back who's definitely grimacing.
(Laughter)
You probably want to know, "Where is he going with this?"
And even more important, "Where is he coming from?
Is he some sort of religious fanatic or perhaps a militant atheist?
I signed for up for a TED talk, not a sermon."
Relax.
Stay with me.
Let me tell you a story.
Not that long ago,
I found myself in the emergency room of my local hospital.
Now, a disclaimer: I don't like hospitals, and I really don't like doctors.
My father was a doctor, an oncologist,
and I learned at a young age that people died,
and that they tend to die in hospitals.
So I figured if I just avoided hospitals, I would never die.
And that is exactly what I managed to do
until this warm August evening
when I found myself in the emergency room
with this sharp, shooting abdominal pain -
I had never experienced anything like it before.
And they performed a bunch of tests,
and the doctor came in and informed me that there was something,
and I quote, "funky" with my CT scan.
Now, you really don't want to hear the words "funky" and "CT Scan"
in the same sentence,
especially with my state of mind.
So I was basically freaking out,
concerned that I had some terrible, incurable disease,
when a nurse walks in.
And she's there to draw blood,
and she must have smelled my fear -
I mean, how could she not? I was reeking of fear -
and she leans over to draw the blood,
and she whispers in my ear six words,
six words I will never forget in my life:
"Have you found your God yet?"
Those were her words. What a question.
Have I found my God yet?
Do you know something? Have you seen my funky CT Scan?
Where's the doctor?
But she's gone; she's out of the room.
And I'm just left there,
in this paper towel that they call a gown, but it's really only a paper towel.
(Laughter)
I am discharged from the hospital.
I am, as you can imagine, tremendously relieved,
but also somewhat unsettled.
That nurse's question keeps haunting me, nagging at me:
Have you found your God yet?
And I decide that perhaps she might be on to something.
Maybe I haven't found my God
because I haven't looked hard enough for him, her, it.
So I decide to answer her question,
but first I realize I need to decide,
determine really,
what am I?
Well, I was born Jewish,
but we were really gastronomical Jews -
bagels and lox, gefilte fish, whitefish salad -
if it was edible, then it was Jewish;
it had something to do with God, maybe.
That was about the extent of my Jewishness.
So perhaps I'm an atheist.
My dictionary defines an "atheist"
as someone who denies the existence of God.
Well, that seems awfully definite, doesn't it?
And I'm not that certain about anything;
I'm not that certain about soy milk or argyle socks.
How can I be so certain that God does not exist?
So maybe I'm an agnostic.
An agnostic is, literally, "one who does not know."
And that certainly describes me when it comes to matters of faith.
But there's something about the agnostics,
their smug uncertainty,
that rubs me the wrong way,
and I can't help but wonder if all agnostics are not really,
as Stephen Colbert put it so colorfully,
"atheists without balls."
(Laughter)
So there is no label to fit me,
so I decide that I'm going to have to invent one.
I am, I decide, a confusionist.
Root word "confusion."
We confusionists are deeply and profoundly confused about matters of faith.
Now, you're probably thinking,
"Hey, isn't a confusionist just a fancy word for agnostic?"
No.
We confusionists don't even know what it is that we do not know.
We are, in a way, meta-agnostic or pre-agnostic.
The thing is we're also hopeful, we confusionists.
We have a dog in this hunt:
We fervently hope that there is more to this world than meets the eye,
that there is a God, however you define him, her, it.
So, now that I have this label of confusionist,
I decide that I am truly going to go forth and answer the nurse's question.
But I realize, how? How can I answer her question?
Well, I'm going to have to actively choose my God,
and that may sound blasphemous to some,
but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense,
especially for we Americans
because we love choice, right?
We can choose our calling plans, our breakfast cereal,
our whitening toothpaste with or without tartar control,
so why not choose our God?
So, I go online and look for the number of religions out there,
my sort of menu of choices.
How many can there be, after all?
9,945.
With two or three new ones being formed every week.
This is the problem with choice: a little is good, a lot paralyzes,
or, as the French say, too much choice kills the choice.
So I realize I need to narrow down this list of 9,945.
Some religions seem a bit limited to me.
Hungarian Folk Religion, for instance.
Being neither Hungarian nor particularly folksy,
I scratch that one off the list.
Unitarian Universalist.
I admire them very much, if there are any out here today,
but believing in everything strikes me an awful lot like believing in nothing.
I scratch the Unitarians.
Rastafarians intrigue me for a brief moment,
but then seem suspiciously like an excuse to fly down to Jamaica,
listen to Bob Marley and smoke some really good weed.
Ultimately, I come up with a list of eight religions,
a sort of smorgasbord of faiths,
some monotheistic, like Judaism and Christianity,
some polytheistic, like Wicca or Witchcraft,
and even a few atheistic religions, like Buddhism and Daoism.
Now, what to do with this list?
My natural inclination is to study these religions at arm's length.
I am, by nature, an observer, a voyeur; I like to watch.
I was a journalist for 20 years,
and we journalists are taught to report, not to feel.
"Never get involved" is the journalist creed,
and that was me for a long time.
But I sensed that I needed to get involved,
I needed to experience these religions.
And I read a wonderful classic book on the subject
by William James, brother -
the lesser known brother - of the novelist Henry James;
it's called "The Varieties of Religious Experience."
Written more than 100 years ago,
James knew intuitively that what really matters
is not what we believe, but what we experience.
But where to experience this variety pack of religions,
where to begin my search?
I needed some place where I would be accepted,
some place where, if necessary, I could make a complete fool of myself.
California seemed like the ticket.
Many a spiritual journey has begun there, so I thought why not me?
So I'm off to Mendocino, California.
I had signed up for something called "Sufi Camp."
And I just love that juxtaposition of "Sufi" and "camp" together,
and the brochure had these sort of blood-red colors
of this chunky wine goblet
that looked like something out of an Elizabethan tavern.
And the words, and I swear, said,
"Come drink with the beloved."
So I'm thinking, at the very least,
there might be a nice zinfandel or perhaps some merlot in it for me.
But I get there, and, frankly, I'm disappointed.
Sufi camp turns out to be considerably more camp than Sufi.
There's lots of hand-holding and dancing,
and it's all making me terribly uncomfortable.
There was a complete and utter lack of irony at Sufi camp.
(Laughter)
And also, it's kind of a mishmash of faiths.
We would start the day early with a few recitations of Buddhist sutras,
move on to some Hindu yoga,
throw in some Japanese tea ceremony,
and by day five, I was just screaming to get out of there.
I was in desperate need ...
of some gluten, of some irony.
And really, of some authenticity.
Because the problem with religions
is, like cuisines, they don't always travel well.
They get watered down,
and anyone who's ever had chow mein can attest to this problem.
I realized I needed to go to the source.
Now, for the Sufis, who are the mystical sect of Islam,
that source, I think, would be Turkey.
Turkey is the home of Rumi,
the great mystical poet of the 13th century.
It's also home of the whirling dervishes.
I don't know if you've ever seen what's called the Sema,
the performance of whirling dervishes,
but it is absolutely mesmerizing to see these dancers -
dancers doesn't do these people justice -
up there, turning and turning.
They are both so extremely active and contemplative at the same time.
One hand is down in this world, the other up in the other world,
and they're turning and turning,
and when I saw that, I thought,
"I want to do that.
I need to do that. I need to turn like the dervishes."
And so I set about trying to find a teacher, which is not easy.
But I persisted and persisted, and I found a teacher.
A tough woman named Deddin,
with fiery red hair and the demeanor of an East German gymnastics coach.
She would cross her arms,
and she would watch me attempt to turn
terribly,
and she would "tsk tsk tsk tsk" - make sounds like that.
I was doing it all wrong:
I need to turn from the inside, not the outside, she said.
She said, "If you want to be a dervish,
you must first rid yourself of all negative thinking."
And I knew at that moment, right then and there,
that I was completely and utterly screwed.
Because for me, negative thinking is like breathing;
it comes very naturally,
and I do it several times a minute, you know.
But finally, I've got Rumi's advice in my mind,
"Fall a thousand times but come, come again."
And I am, and I'm trying.
And then one moment, inexplicably,
I'm turning, and I get it.
And I'm turning, and I'm like a planet turning on its axis,
and I shout, "I'm turning,"
and immediately fall on my face.
For I had forgotten Rumi's sagest advice of all:
"Never analyze enthusiasm."
And, besides, these flashes of insight in the spiritual world
are really not what it's all about.
Our spiritual practices, when it comes to them,
we need landing gear and not just wings.
The Buddhists have a parable about this.
There's a group of students who ask an enlightened master:
"Master, what were you doing before enlightenment?"
"Chop wood, carry water."
"And now, Master, after enlightenment?"
"Chop wood, carry water."
The Buddhists struck me as wise,
and I thought they might help me get grounded.
So I'm off on a plane to Kathmandu,
and I immediately sign up for a meditation lesson
with the Himalayan Buddhist Meditation Center -
wonderful name, wonderful setting.
And I'm on these cushions, just like this,
and the teacher tells me,
"Okay, first, you need to have your spine straight."
And I do.
"And you need to have your eyes three-quarters closed."
And I do.
"And you need to watch your breath."
And I do.
For about three seconds.
Then my mind takes off,
my "monkey mind," the Buddhists call,
it's moving a thousand miles an hour,
and it's moving directly toward nail clippers.
I cannot stop thinking about nail clippers.
I had not brought any with me,
I am convinced there are no nail clippers in all of Nepal, in all of South Asia,
and I fear my nails will grow to grotesque, Howard Hughes proportions.
(Laughter)
Mind you, this is not a passing thought,
this is a recurring, obsessive thought,
so that my first meditation lesson goes something like this:
Breath.
Nail clippers.
Breath.
Nail clippers.
Nail clippers. Nail clippers. Breath.
I realized I had a problem
and concluded the problem was not me or my monkey mind, but my teacher.
I needed a new teacher.
I'm looking for a genuine Tibetan Lama.
The problem is
they all seem to be in California.
They followed the money or followed the students, at least.
But I persist and finally someone says to me, "Have you tried Wayne?"
"Which part of Tibet is Wayne from?"
"The Staten Island part."
"I see."
The problem is Wayne confuses me,
he says seemingly contradictory things
like "First steps are often last steps."
And one day he tells me,
"You need to be thrown back against your own experience,"
which strikes me not only as obtuse but also possibly painful.
But then one day, Wayne says something that I do get.
He says, "You need to dive into the pause."
The pause.
We think that our thoughts
are a totally connected series of electrical impulses,
one after the other,
but the Buddhists tell us that no, there is a pause,
a barely perceptible pause, but there it is between thoughts.
"And that pause," Wayne tells me,
"is the basis for the meditative experience."
And we know this intuitively.
We say something gives us pause if it makes us think again.
Graphic designers and artists know that the space between things,
the pause,
is what gives those things their beauty.
Musicians and public speakers are able to use the pause ...
to great effect.
(Laughter)
So, Wayne no longer annoys me; he amazes me.
And for a brief, fleeting moment, I think, perhaps,
the great Wayne of Staten Island is the God I've been looking for.
But no.
I continue my journey.
I go to China where I practice Qigong and try to unclog my qi,
which was terribly backed up.
I go to the South Bronx, hang with the Franciscans,
go to a Catholic confession
and nearly confess, but - I swear I'm not making this up -
the priest was on his lunch break and had to leave.
I go to Vegas where I hang with the Raelians,
the world's largest UFO-based religion -
yes, there is more than one.
And I even dabble in Witchcraft and even Judaism.
All of which takes me way out of my comfort zone.
So what I have learned from this variety pack of religions?
Number one: I've learned that religion need not be a series of empty rituals,
that religion at its best is a kind of applied philosophy.
Religious teachings, good religious teachings
help us get through the day
a little bit wiser and a little bit happier
than we thought possible.
Now, are these religions that I dabbled in, are they "true"?
Well, I don't know.
And, frankly, I don't care.
As William James said, "Truth is what works."
Does that seem a bit irrational - truth is what works?
Well, good.
Because I think religion, good religion
is all about the power of irrational thinking.
See, most of our time, most of our lives, we live in "because mode":
Our employer hires us because we can contribute to the bottom line.
Zappos sends you that box of beautiful shoes
because you gave them your credit card and expiration date.
But when it comes to, say, our family,
we don't love our children because of their accomplishments,
we love them in spite of their accomplishments.
And so it is with religion;
we don't believe - we don't experience because it makes sense,
but in spite of its apparent nonsense.
So, if I met that nurse on the street,
how would I answer her - have I found my God yet?
No, I don't think I have.
I think, to be honest, it's not exactly the right question.
There is nothing to find, only finding.
There is nothing to know, only knowing.
And that is okay.
I have all these doubts, and again,
good religion doesn't attempt to eliminate the doubts;
it celebrates the doubts.
Things that are beyond doubt are in a way dead,
they have nothing to teach us.
The Jains of India, religious group in India,
have a word for this, "syādvāda."
Translates roughly as "maybeism."
Isn't that a great concept? Maybeism?
An entire philosophy, an entire religion based on the concept of maybeism.
Maybe I'm a maybeist and not a confusionist.
The Jains, by the way, do not believe in a God.
And that's okay.
For the goal, the ultimate goal of religion, I now believe,
is not God, but life.
And here, I quote my friend William James:
"A richer, larger, more satisfying life."
And to that I can only add one word:
Amen.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)