What Is the Meaning of Mystical Experience?

What would it be like to wake up one day with the ability to greet the world with warmth, patience, grace, and affection? This is what happens to the main character in the Pulitzer Prize–winner Ayad Akhtar's magnificent new novel, The Radiance. It is a tale of spiritual transformation in which Akhtar gives a detailed description of our inner landscapes. David and Akhtar talk about what it's like to see the world with new eyes, and how difficult it is to move from the head to the heart. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. “The Permanent Questions” is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:19Speaker 01

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• 0:35David Brooks?

  Ayad Akhtar is one of America's leading playwrights and writers. His plays, like The Disgraced, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and his earlier novels, including Homeland Elegies, often describe what it's like to be a Muslim American in the post-9/11 era. His characters, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, are often coping with rage, pressure, resentments, hostility, a feeling of being judged. His new novel, The Radiance, is about a man whose spiritual state is transformed, who begins to radiate a glow which emerges from a kind of inner illumination. You could say he becomes one of those incandescent people you meet from time to time. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it's something of a masterpiece. The book brilliantly puts into words that most ineffable thing, spiritual sensations and experiences.

• 1:20David Brooks?

  If you read it, which of course I recommend, you'll be led on a tour through those deeper inner places that most of us struggle to see and understand. When I started doing this podcast, I thought I had a great conversations at an intellectual and emotional level I feel comfortable with. But now, as I prepare to talk with Ayad, I feel like a person who is about to jump off a high dive into a bottomless pool even though he can't swim. I'm nervous and even a little afraid because I'm going to talk to someone who knows about realms I struggle to see and understand. I'm beginning to get the sense that this job is going to demand that I enlarge and deepen myself in ways I hadn't planned for, but may end up doing me some good. If you come along for the ride, I think the conversation will have the same effect on you.

• 2:03David Brooks?

  I'm David Brooks, and this is The Permanent Questions. Ayad Akhtar, welcome to The Permanent Questions.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  Thank you, David.

• 2:13David Brooks?

  Now, on the cover of your book is a blurb by Abraham Verghazi, who wrote The Covenant of Water and other things, and the blurb is, simply put, a work of genius. And when I read that-

• 2:25Speaker 03

  I'm sorry.

• 2:26David Brooks?

  Of course, I wanted to kill you. But I thought, well, I'm a little suspicious. Maybe it's just a friend. But this book, is, simply put, is a work of genius. I think it's just going to be one of the important books. You know, it's been a few years since we've had a novel that was really a literary occasion. And I'd say this book is that literary occasion, in part because of the stuff we'll talk about, but in part because we've lived in an era where so many spiritual poisons have been let loose by politics, by technology, by the general ranker. And here's a book that takes spiritual life seriously and really lays out the inner world and describes a landscape of it.

• 3:07David Brooks?

  And I found that remarkable, and I have to say, I'm a little intimidated because I try to think about the spiritual life, but it's all a little fuzzy down there. And so I think one of the books, things the book did for me was give me words to describe some of the things you vaguely feel, and also just to think, well, how does spiritual life develop and grow? And so I guess, you know, my first simple question is, describe the premise and the concept of the novel.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  So, a writer who has my name and many of the facts of my life, which is something I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about, leaves the city after writing a previous book in which he had done the same thing, given the narrator his name and many of the facts of his life, and moves to the country. And after being there for a while, is out on a country road on a bike and gets hit by a pickup truck from behind, thrown into a grove of trees, and wakes up in a hospital after a coma about 36 hours later. And as he awakens into himself, something's changed. There's a luminosity and a silence that is the ground of his experience.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  And then that experience seems to deepen and get more complex over the subsequent eight months. And that, the book basically tracks that eight-month period. And simultaneously to this, he also has a friend who is teaching at a local college where he is asked to teach as well for a semester. And so the ongoing political divisions on campus, as well as within the local rural community, play a significant role as our narrator experiences what some friend of mine once called it, in reading it, said something like a beatitude or a state of grace.

• 4:52David Brooks?

  He's like, he's luminous, he's incandescent, and he's having a great time. And the first thing I love about his state of consciousness is that it's about perception. And the very beginning of the book, before you even get to the chapters, the sentence is, "This is a record of altered perceptions."

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:11David Brooks?

  And what I like about that is, we used to think perception, the act of seeing the world, was this passive thing. You open your eyes, the world floods in, and you record it the way an old camera would record light. We now know from neuroscience that's not the way it happens. But even more, I think we've learned that it used to be, you thought, well, you see the world, and then you think about the world, and then you act in the world. And we used to think, the action is in the middle, it's in the thinking. But in my view, it's in the perception. It's in the seeing and the way you see and the quality of attention. And that, you know, the quality of attention you bring to the world determines what you see in the world. If you're distrustful, you're going to see threat. And if you're loving, you're going to see people doing the best they can.

• 5:54David Brooks?

  And this is where I'm hoping to walk you into, is mystics have always paid a lot of attention to perception. And the one I know best is Simone Weil, who was a French mystic in World War II, and said, "Attention is the ultimate form of generosity." That primary, it's your primary form of morality, is what kind of attention you bring to the world. And one of her followers, Iris Murdoch, who was a novelist and a philosopher, says, "Our goal is to cast a just and loving attention on others." And so what you see with this character is a man learning to attend the world in a radically different way than he used to.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  I think that's fascinating, the way you laid it out. I think that's right. I, you know, I think in thinking about the book, there was a difference between rendering new experiences and rendering processes that were the result of something that was experiencing itself. That is to say, a change of the one who is experiencing. So it's not just states. And there's also a moral dimension to the change that he doesn't really understand. He's not trying to be a good person. He's just trying to understand what's happened-

• 7:02David Brooks?

  Right.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  -and spends a fair amount of time at the doctor's office trying to figure out what's going on.

• 7:06David Brooks?

  Trying to be a good person, there's all sorts of ways to do that. Like, people think, well, you build up these muscles. I got a courage muscle, I got an honesty muscle, I'm going to build my muscle, I'll be a good person. But I don't think that's the way morality works. It's the quality of love you bring to your perception of the world.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  I think there is something about the self-evident nature of relating to the world in a certain way. I mean, Emerson has a beautiful thing that he says, that virtue is the secret pillar that holds up the world, which in a ways, it's a way of saying that virtue is an efficient cause, that the best way to get something done is to be virtuous. It may not be the quickest way, but it might be the best way in the end. And these are not ideas that he's trying to follow, they're just experiences. And he approaches those experiences with just as much skepticism as pleasure. Because keeping that question alive about what is happening, why does this matter, what are the implications of it, felt to me important for a reader today.

• 8:06David Brooks?

  So for him, it comes as this weird gift as the product of an accident, a nearly fatal accident.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:13David Brooks?

  Now, you-

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Has it happened, by the way, for Montaigne? Montaigne was thrown from a horse-

• 8:17David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  -and spent the next four days in a kind of beatitude that totally transformed his life.

• 8:23David Brooks?

  The Montaigne story, I've always loved it because he was worried about how to die. And then this happens to him, and he records his own body as he's near death, having had this accident. And he says, "Oh, the body knows how to die. I don't have to worry about this anymore. And my father passed away about three or four months ago. He was the only person I've ever walked to death. And I was like, yeah, the body really knows what to do." And it was just, that was a great comfort to me. Now, you have a piece forthcoming in The Atlantic, which is not really an excerpt from the book, but it's in the neighborhood of the book.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:54David Brooks?

  And it's sort of a nonfiction piece, and it's really more about you directly. And you didn't have an accident, but you had a process. And so describe that.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  In college, I started to have a very alarming experience that I couldn't ignore, that there was some sort of a hole opening up inside me. And it was a curiously physical sensation. It was very, very concrete. And I, you know, my parents are both doctors, so I spent some time trying to figure out what the medical genesis of this was and could not get any clarity on that. My mom sent me to a psychoanalyst who was more interested in my sex life than any kind of hole that might be opening up inside me. But I started to pay attention to this experience. And it got me interested, the psychoanalytic sessions got me interested in Freud.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  So I started reading Freud, and I read The Interpretation of Dreams, and started to have some very, very vivid dreams, and started paying attention to my dreams. And then had a mentor who also paid attention to her dreams and taught me a little bit how to pay attention to my dreams. And close attention to my dreams for many years, I think, opened up some different kind of space in my psyche, in my being, in my life, and led me down a path where I started to spend more and more time focused inwardly. We might call it meditation, but I'm not sure folks would recognize what I was doing as meditation.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  And I think there was that inner attention got me focused on a level or a layer of subtle experience we're always having. And the more attention I brought to it, just as with dreams, the more focus I spent writing my dreams down, the more vivid and more dreams I had. At one point, I was waking up every 45 minutes to write my dreams down. This lasted two years. I literally have thousands and thousands of written dreams. But similarly, with this subtle layer of experience, the more attention I paid to it, the more it seemed to open up. So similarly, in the book, as the writer is writing about this experience, it seems to somehow deepen it.

• 11:08David Brooks?

  The sense of a hole.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:11David Brooks?

  Now, I have a sense of a shallowness sometimes, like I'm just living on the surface. And I sometimes don't know how to do what you just described, which is like, look inside. And I don't know, like, and you did it through dreams because dreams opened up different states of knowing, I guess?

• 11:29Speaker 03

  I mean, to quote something out of your own idiom, David, I think the need created an intense desire. I was a young person with a real sense that something was wrong. I'm not really going into full detail, as I do in the essay, about just how, just how bad the experience was. I mean, I think I felt, it felt clear to me that I might not survive, that I would do something that would hurt me or hurt somebody else, or I might kill myself. So I think the experience was not just like a disembodied hole. The experience was all-consuming. And when I read Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain, I remember sort of recognizing in

• 12:10Speaker 03

  the spiritual crisis that he had at Cambridge and Columbia, some aspects of what I was experiencing. For me, a solution could not be to go to a monastery or go to the church. I had lost my religious faith, and restoration of my religious faith was not going to solve the problem. I had to somehow be attentive to the experience I was having and to trust. I don't know why I had the trust that if I was, that something would emerge from that, some orientation would emerge from that that would help. And it did. It took a long time, and it's one that I wanted to convey in the book, but I needed a more truncated and more dramatically impactful way to do so.

• 12:50David Brooks?

  Right. Now, one of the things that strikes me is your instinct, when you see, feel this void, is not to go to psychology.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  I tried.

• 12:58David Brooks?

  Oh, you did try.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Well, my mom, my mom sent me to a psychiatrist.

• 13:02David Brooks?

  But I have a friend who suffers severely from depression. He's written about this, so it's not a secret. And he goes, he gets institutionalized from time to time. And the psychologist will not go to, he says, "My problem is spiritual. You don't understand. It's not psychological. It's not my mom," or something like that. And they can't go there.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Look, at the root of the word psychology is psyche, and psyche in Greek means soul. Modern psychology is burying the lead, in a way. We are concerned with issues of the soul, but that's a word that we can't really use anymore. And I get why we can't use it. And part of the project of the book and part of the project of this essay was to, was to try to find a language that was secular, in a way, for inner experience that defies the secular frame, and what it would mean to be paying a certain kind of attention to that experience. And so, I mean, I think there are psychiatrists or psychologists who do understand this. And there is one in the book, actually.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  She has a, she has an openness to, to some of this stuff. And I think the importance of it is not necessarily that we land on a model that is right, but we land on a model that's useful, useful to the one who is undergoing whatever process they're undergoing.

• 14:20David Brooks?

  And so, did you, when you gradually turned the corner, was there a moment, or was it this process of dream analysis? And then, did you experience the radiance that the character in the book experiences?

• 14:31Speaker 03

  As for whether I experienced what the writer experiences in that book, well, I couldn't have written it if I hadn't. But, but I think I certainly am giving it shapes that it doesn't have in my life, because even though he has my name and many of the facts of my life, we are not the same person.

• 14:54David Brooks?

  I started writing down, because the, all spiritual experiences are ineffable. They're hard to describe. And so, I started, because I was so fascinated by how you did it, started writing down all the different phrases you used to describe this state. There are things like a sublime, burning calm, inner silence, effortless patience, a disembodied halo of self-awareness, a visionary tenderness. And one of the things I think they all capture, you all sort of are getting closer to that state.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  A state which is always different.

• 15:24David Brooks?

  Why? What do you mean by that?

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Plato has this wonderful idea that we are caught between. We are in the May taxi. We live between the forms and the matter. And when we, in Plato's terms, when we rise to the real, we're not always rising to the same place. There's different configurations.

• 15:46David Brooks?

  I see.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  And so, you know, some of those states that he's experiencing are more inflected by emotional tenderness, some by a certain kind of brilliancy of vision and clarity. Each of the experiences phenomenologically is a soul experience. And to have all of those experiences at the same time, I don't really know how I would give language to that.

• 16:09David Brooks?

  But they are in a movement.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  They are.

• 16:12David Brooks?

  You have a quote from Dostoevsky, who writes of, "Abnormal intensity, if minute of sensation, remembered and analyzed afterwards in health, turns out to be the acme of harmony and beauty, and fires the feeling, unknown and undivided until then, of completeness, of proportion, of reconciliation, of ecstatic devotional merging, of the highest synthesis of life."

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:35David Brooks?

  That's a beautiful description.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:37David Brooks?

  One of my favorite descriptions of joy comes from Zadie Smith. I read this somewhere. And she was out at a nightclub in 1999, and it's crowded, her feet hurt, and she can't find her purse. And suddenly, a song from the group A Tribe Called Quest comes on the sound system, and some stranger, a guy she doesn't know, grabs her, and he pulls her onto the dance floor, and he says to her, "Are you feeling it? Are you feeling it?" She says, "I am, I am." And she says, "Our heads exploded, and we gave ourselves up to joy." And I've always loved that description of like, these highest states of transcendent beauty.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:13David Brooks?

  I don't know if you've, you're prone to those, but they're delicious when they happen.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Well, he certainly is. You know, another experience that he's having in the book, which is an unusual one, but one that's reported by a lot of, by a lot of traditions, is that he starts to experience the localization of his consciousness or his awareness, not in the head, but in the heart. That's what I hear in Zadie's description about joy, that somehow the head explodes, that somehow the localization in the mind changes. You're no longer just in your mind, or even in your mind.

• 17:54Speaker 04

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• 18:23Speaker 00

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• 19:00David Brooks?

  I don't know if you share this as part of a central feature of your life, but my parents were academics. We grew up with a lot of books. So I've spent most of my life trying to move from my head about 18 inches down to my heart. That's been my whole life, with some success and some failures. And you have a phrase, and you sort of refer to it, "The curious seeing with my chest."

• 19:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:21David Brooks?

  And so have you gone through the same struggle against over intellectualization?

• 19:26Speaker 03

  For sure. I had a wonderful mentor, remarkable mentor, Yerzy Grotowski, a Polish theater director of some renown. Most famously, I think, for people, "My Dinner with Andre" is largely based on Andre's experiences in a Polish forest with Yerzy Grotowski. So I worked with him in my early twenties. And I remember almost the first day that we started working together, he said, "You're not going to read. You're going to stop reading. That's it. No more reading for you." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because you think too much. We need to get you into your body. I need you to be operating from a different part of yourself." So I basically didn't read for eight months. It was an interesting experience. The work was very physical and very vocal.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  And so not having that escape hatch to try to figure out what something meant, or the defense of why it was okay I wasn't able to do something, all of that still going on, but it was not as prevalent because I wasn't spending the evenings when I was back home trying to sort it through by reading, which is something I've always done. But then I went back to reading, so.

• 20:31David Brooks?

  Good. Well, clearly, because you can't write if you don't read. Yeah, John Stuart Mill was raised by his father, who was a big utilitarian, and his father's friend Jeremy Bentham, and they just fed the kid books. And he, you know, he could read Greek when he was three. I mean, he was incredible. And then he has a complete mental breakdown when he's 20. And he realizes that an overemphasis on reading and analysis wears away feeling. And he finally recovers when he discovers poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge and those kind of guys. And I've certainly, that's been a central problem with my own life. I sometimes worry that career as a journalist and writer, I'm always on lecture mode, even to myself,

• 21:11David Brooks?

  which I think is a way of making yourself unavailable for the resonance that you're talking about, the falling into the deeper registers, because the voice is going, "The voice, the voice." But when you need to quiet.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  I have a practice, and the practice is about focus, inward focus. And the points of focus can change depending on how the practice is evolving. I've done all different kinds of stuff over 30 years, and so I've accumulated a... Laurence Olivier once said about a performance, building a performance, that rehearsal was all about figuring out what buttons he needed to push, and the performance was just about pushing those buttons. So I've got a lot of buttons that I've accumulated, and I just figure out what buttons I need to push on any given day, as long as I have time to do it. And I think, to me, that's what I've discovered,

• 22:04Speaker 03

  is that it really is about application of will in time, commitment. And if I do it regularly, then sometimes I feel like I can have a more steady movement of the head to the heart, to use your language, or to quiet the mind, or whatever it may be. And if I don't do it, then that doesn't happen.

• 22:24David Brooks?

  And what exactly are you doing when you say you're pushing the buttons?

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Well, it's so elaborate and so specific. I mean, a lot of what's going on in the book is really me sort of sharing various buttons, you know, different kinds of inner focus and seeing, focus on, you know, different parts of the body, focus on different kinds of thoughts. You know, Ibn Arabi, the great Sufi mystic visionary, talks about the higher use of the imagination, that the imagination is actually a tool to get us to the real. As Dante, "Heaven is the high fantasy." Or Blake will use the imagination to approach some higher way of seeing. So similarly with Ibn Arabi, just the use of the imagination,

• 23:09Speaker 03

  the judicious use of the imagination can create states of absorption, so.

• 23:14David Brooks?

  You can slip into, in journalism or whatever job people are in, finance, whatever, you can slip into prosaic modes of consciousness that make this really hard.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 23:23David Brooks?

  And I noticed when I first started praying, I was like editing it. It was like, "Oh, this prayer is so repetitive. It lacks coherence." And I remember once I was at a service, and the pastor asked us to pray for deaths in Syria. And we gathered with groups of three, and we're supposed to pray, and be seaching God to help those who were suffering in Syria. And I said, "Lord, please help pass UN Resolution 242 to preside safe zones for the..." Like, I prayed to not bad peace, basically. And I look back on that, it's like, "I suck at prayer." But would you say, obviously you don't believe in God, but something like that?

• 24:06Speaker 03

  I mean, it's not that I don't believe in God. It's just I don't see the utility of engaging in belief as a way of addressing my experience. Emerson has this wonderful, I've quoted Emerson a bunch just because I read him so much, and I know that there's mindshare between us around Emerson. I think Emerson once described prayer as a disease of the will. I think he means a certain kind of prayer, prayer for commodities, whether those commodities are intangible or tangible. And there's maybe a different order of prayer that I can resonate with. I don't necessarily pray, but I can resonate that it's a different order of attention, a different kind of focus.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  But I think if I do that regularly, if I build it into my life and I'm loyal to it, I get a good benefit. And if I don't, then I don't get the benefit.

• 24:56David Brooks?

  When I came to faith, I was shocked at what faith was, and that I used to think it was about belief. You had to believe certain propositions. And of course, it is about belief. It's not totally void of belief. But I experienced it more as a longing than as a set of beliefs. And Dorothy Day, my hero, wrote a book called "The Long Loneliness." And by loneliness, she did not mean solitude. She meant her longing for God. And one of the beautiful moments in her life comes at the end, where she's asked by Robert Coles, she wrote this memoir, "The Long Loneliness," when she was young. And at the end of her life, she was asked, "Did you ever think of writing another one, the rest of your life?" And Dorothy Day, for those who don't know, was a woman who not only served the poor,

• 25:41David Brooks?

  but lived amongst the poor, a life of selfless love, really. And so she said to Coles, "I thought about writing a memoir. And so I got out of the legal pad, and I wrote 'A Life Remembered' by Dorothy Day." And she said, "And I sat there, and I sat there, and I sat there, and I thought of the Lord and his visit to us those many centuries ago, and I was just grateful to have had him on my mind all that time." That's so entrancing for me, is that it's serenity. And somehow she's reached that spot of serenity, a simple serenity, that the voices stop. And so it's a beautiful practice that she had to live through her whole life to get to that spot, but.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Grotowski used to tell this story. We were translating something together. I spent a great deal of time with him in one period, and he told me this story a couple of occasions. It was a kind of a technical story, trying to convey some technique to me about something. It's a Hindu parable in which an aspirant goes to God and says to God, "You know, I love you so much, God. You know how much I love you?" God says, "Oh, yeah, you love me a lot." And he says, "So how many lifetimes is it going to take for me to get out of this, birth and re-death and all this stuff?" And God says, "Well, you love me a lot. Seven. It's going to take you seven." So he says, "Okay, all right, seven. So if I hated you, how many more would it take?"

• 27:00Speaker 03

  God says, "Well, if you really hated me, it would take you three." And I says, "What are you talking about?" Says, "If you really hated me, you'd think about me more." And it was Grotowski's way of conveying to me that really what mattered was intensity and application, and not so much intention, or the moral valences around the intention. I mean, it's a challenging proposition to think that you could experience something like a radiance without being committed to being a good person. But certainly, that narrator is not necessarily committed to being a good person or a bad person. He's just living the consequences of this grace.

• 27:43David Brooks?

  Yeah, I'm going to pick up on that intentionality, the yearning which I was talking about. One of the things we tend to do in our society is we try to define human beings by what separates us from the other animals. And so we come, starting in Plato and up to the present day, reason. Reason is what defines, what distinguishes us from the animals.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:06David Brooks?

  And I think that's not true, but I was struck, I'm going to talk.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  You mean, it's not true because you think animals also have a degree of reason?

• 28:15David Brooks?

  I think that's not what centrally defines us. I think reason, your desires, your yearnings are telling you where you're going to go, where you're going to devote your energy. Reason is there to help you figure out how to get there.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:26David Brooks?

  So it's downstream, and emotions are there to tell you if you're getting closer or further from where you want to go. At the deepest, the part of the brain that really is most important to us is not the one that distinguishes us from the animals. It's the one we share with the animals.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right, right.

• 28:37David Brooks?

  Which is that longing, that yearning, which comes from rewards.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  And fear, and fear.

• 28:42David Brooks?

  Absolutely.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:44David Brooks?

  And so that helps me think through where I want the center of my conception of myself to be.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Which is?

• 28:51David Brooks?

  Which is the stuff that doesn't get measured on an SAT score.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  And it's measured how, if at all?

• 28:57David Brooks?

  I think it's measured by sanctification and degradation, a feeling. There's a line in C.S. Lewis that there's some piece at the core inside of yourself, and every act you do turns that little core piece inside of yourself into something a little more holy or a little more profane.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  What does it mean for you for it to be more holy? What is the phenomenological experience of that? What does it actually feel like? Have you had to give language to it?

• 29:22David Brooks?

  Yeah, this is why I'm not you. I have a friend who lived in India, and he said, "What I liked about it in India, everything was on a vertical axis as well as a horizontal axis." So you are having a moment of beauty, spiritual beauty. It feels like, more like beauty.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:43David Brooks?

  And more like...

• 29:46David Brooks?

  A swelling out of the heart, that's I guess how it would feel. And I think of the moments in my life where I experienced the greatest sense of spiritual peace and joy, like the Zadie Smith story. I mean, one of mine was, I was pulling into my home, my kids were little back in those days when we lived in the suburbs, and we had a driveway that spun around the side of the house, so I could see into the backyard. And my kids had one of those little balls that you get at the supermarket, and they were kicking it up in the air. And I just sat there in my car, looking through the windshield at my three kids tumbling over each other and laughing. And I just sat there. And I, I had a swelling,

• 30:28David Brooks?

  tears come to your eyes. It's something touching you.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:33David Brooks?

  And I, I think I would call it, and I want to get, return to this word you've used a couple of times, a swelling of the soul. And now in your Atlanta piece, and I think in the book too, you're uncomfortable with the world soul. I think you at one point called it an anachronistic concept, and yet you use it.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Well, I've learned from Shakespeare that the best way to assert a meaning is to negate it with equal force. Anytime a reader feels that you're aligned with one thing against another, they naturally array themselves against you. So the way to create space for them to have freedom is to assert both poles with equal conviction. So the book, obviously, and I, in my own intellectual life and with myself, because I noticed that that tendentiousness is something that my own cognition partakes in, that if I'm too aligned with some particular thing, there's some other part of me that begins to bark, well, you didn't think about it like this. So being equally committed to both orientations

• 31:36Speaker 03

  is a way to have more freedom. And it's also a way to have the reader make up their own mind, if you will.

• 31:42David Brooks?

  Is this a literary device or a personal reality for you?

• 31:45Speaker 03

  I mean, what's the difference? All the great traditions, and certainly the Kabbalistic tradition is very, very clear about this, that, that, that reality is composed of oppositions, and that you can't have one thing without its opposite. That is how, that's the warp and woof of everything. So I think that the extent to which language reflects that deeper truth, it is probably reflecting it in a literary form. And for me, Shakespeare is the one I spend the most time, I was reading him this morning just to try to get, it's like Mozart for baby's brains for me, it just kind of wakes me up a little bit. So, you know, I, I get a lot of lessons from reading him, and that's, that's the big one.

• 32:29David Brooks?

  Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote probably in the 40s or 50s, he was president of the University of Chicago, and he said, "There's an eternal great conversation that we've been having as humans for thousands and thousands of years. And it's between fitting in and standing out, between individualism and belonging, between freedom and equality, between all the dialectics of life."

• 32:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:51David Brooks?

  And his point was, "These questions never end. You never get to a resting spot."

• 32:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:55David Brooks?

  It's just you're looking for the thing that'll work at that moment.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  I think the pieties of any given cultural moment are fueled by the illusion that there is a resting place in that conversation.

• 33:06David Brooks?

  Now, I want to come back to the soul, because one of the really high watermarks of this book is a scene with Allan Bloom, who I knew at the University of Chicago, I was never part of the cult. So he was a philosopher, and he wrote a great translation of The Republic, which I think is still read today. So the narrator in the book is in love, and we're going to get into this, with a woman named Lucy.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:31David Brooks?

  And Lucy's a brilliant woman. And she is with Allan Bloom at the moment he tells her what a soul is. If you could walk us through that scene.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  So I did a lot of research on Bloom for this book, and, and that era at the University of Chicago where Lucy was an undergraduate. And, you know, one thing that many of his students who kept faith with Bloom's teaching over the course of their years, whether as teachers or as people in their lives, kept referring to was this sense that somehow, when he talked about the soul, you had a feeling, even though you couldn't define it, and he never really defined it, that you all knew what you were talking about, which is a fascinating proposition. So in this scene, young Lucy, she's 22 years, 21

• 34:20Speaker 03

  years old, is in his class, and she has been sitting in back because there's never any chairs, and she shows up late because she's got a class across campus. And she comes down to the bottom of the auditorium after class, and after all the courtiers have kissed the ring and left, and asks the great Allan Bloom, "You talked about a soul in today's lecture. What exactly do you mean by soul?" So he then proceeds to ask her to close her eyes, and he talks her through a bunch of questions. And she answers, and he responds, and she answers, and finally lands on an experience that she articulates in her own language, that he then reflects back to her as a definition of the soul. And she even

• 35:04Speaker 03

  says, "I'm not sure what this proved, and yet somehow everything was different. That my contact with whatever it was I had been inquiring about enlivened me." So that's the scene.

• 35:18David Brooks?

  And then she, she comes to the belief the soul is the first mover. It's

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Well, it's Plato. I mean, it's, you know, the soul is that which moves, but is not moved by anything. You know, you move your arm, you're moving it. So what in us is always moving, but we're not moving it? That's what she connects with.

• 35:38David Brooks?

  Right. And I would say something was lost and gained when we lost the concept of soul in public conversation. It's true, vast majorities of Americans believe they have souls.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 35:49David Brooks?

  But in most public culture, we just don't talk about it.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  It's discredited.

• 35:52David Brooks?

  Yeah. And, but I, I think it's very hard to understand oneself without this concept.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  I think subjectivity is discredited. I think subjectivity is embraced as a radically individualist, totally relativistic idea or notion. I think the, the possibility there might be subjective facts is something that we are not equipped intellectually as a culture to grapple with. And I think that's what, that's what I'm suggesting by saying, I think we need to have a conversation about things like the soul, even if we are going to put them in quotes, because I think there's a whole order of our experience, maybe the most important order of all of our experience, that we're not actually having a conversation about.

• 36:34David Brooks?

  Let's talk about the care and feeding of the soul, I'm going to insist on this word, how to, how to enlarge the soul, or how to purify, or I don't know, make it more what it should be, let's put it that way, so not to prejudge. And there's different philosophies of how you purify your inner state.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:52David Brooks?

  And one of them is self-emptying. You renounce desire, like the Stoics had this belief in apathy, you just achieve tranquility. And there's a lot of that in Eastern mysticism. And so you, you renounce the self, you take yourself out of the way, and you're just quiet.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  That'd be great if I could do it, but I can't do that.

• 37:10David Brooks?

  I can't do that either. And so maybe by default, I've gone to another way of feeding the soul, which is, another of my heroes is Gregory of Nyssa, who was an early church father and living, and I think was what is now present day Turkey. And he was surrounded by Greek philosophies that had the idea that happiness is rest. You work hard, you achieve your goals, and you just rest, and you can relax. That's what happiness is. And he was like, "Well, you know, my main goal in life is to, to know and understand and love God perfectly. But if I could do that perfectly, that would imply that God is finite,

• 37:49David Brooks?

  which he is not. Therefore, rest cannot be happiness. And there must be something else." And so he has a sermon, and a lot of sermons, on the Song of Songs, and this is the sexy part of the Bible. And the bridesmaid is chasing her beloved, and he withdraws. And she chases, and with each chase and withdrawal, there's an encounter. And each time, her love is more deep, and her experience is more soaring.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:20David Brooks?

  And so Gregory says, "No, it's not in rest, it's in pursuit." And that, to me, makes sense. It's when I fall in love with something, and then something outside touches something inside and sets off an explosion. And I'm in pursuit of that thing. I think that's when my soul is happiest.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. When you can trust your desire. What I would say to that, and what I think I tried to use the book to explore, and to, for myself, was that attention to a certain kind of experience, attention to a certain subtle coursing continuity in my awareness, began to deepen and open into different

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Terrains. And that exploration may be a kind of pursuit that you're talking about. Was not activated by a sense of longing or desire, in my case, but more activated by a curiosity. So I think we're in the same ballpark.

• 39:29David Brooks?

  Yeah, curiosity is a form of longing and desire. It's a desire for understanding and clarity.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  Aristotle has, we are defined as creatures as the creatures who wish to know. So being in pursuit of knowledge is a different way I read what Gregory is talking about.

• 39:44David Brooks?

  Yeah, I think that's right, though. The longing to know can sometimes be a very weak passion in a lot of people.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  Well, there's two words for know in French. One is savoir and one is connaître. And savoir is to know about. And connaître is to know. And one might be oriented toward an objective understanding of something and the other a subjective understanding.

• 40:06David Brooks?

  I think this was like in the Bible, to know, obviously famously can mean

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:11David Brooks?

  To love, it can mean to have sex with, it can mean to enter into a covenant with.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:15David Brooks?

  It's an all body experience.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 40:18David Brooks?

  And maybe in the Enlightenment or somewhere else, we divided that. And that division was, I think, it did great injury to how we understand ourselves because it allowed to

• 40:27Speaker 03

  Created the modern world.

• 40:28David Brooks?

  It did.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  We could go back to Descartes and say, Descartes created this world that we now live in. And so there's obviously been benefits, but yeah, we've lost a lot by not, by not allowing that kind of knowledge, which again is what I'm trying to focus on. It's a knowledge that I don't know what it means. I just know that I'm experiencing it.

• 40:48David Brooks?

  Okay, yeah, okay. Now, there's a lot of love in the book, which I liked. And one of the most interesting relationships in the book is for the narrator with this woman Lucy, who was the University of Chicago lady we've been talking about.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Who becomes a professor later.

• 41:03David Brooks?

  Yeah. And it's literally Platonic love. So describe that love he has for, because he is pursuing her and fascinated by her and amazed by her. And she, by the way, is a wonderful marriage.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:16David Brooks?

  Which he does not want to interfere with.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  I've had, you know, some extraordinary mentors in my life and a number of them, a number of the most important mentors have been, have been women and have taught me about so much. And I resonate particularly, I mean, as we said earlier, there's a lot of Plato in the book. And there's, there's a lot of Fedrus in the book, one of the dialogues, and something else that there's a lot of which I don't talk about is the Symposium. And in the Symposium, Socrates tells a story about how he learned about love and that there was an older woman who mentored him named Diotima. So Lucy's a bit of that kind of a figure, somebody who really has an understanding of

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Eros in the higher sense of the word. What would it mean to relate to Eros not out of a desire to possess, but to be animated by the aliveness in knowledge? So anyway, very high minded, but I try to give it a, you know, I try to give it some juice in the book.

• 42:20David Brooks?

  Yeah. And C.S. Lewis, in his book, The Four Loves, makes it just extreme need love and gift love. And need love proceeds out of a void and it's the desire to possess, to control. And gift love just flows out of a blessing.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  In Plato, this proposition in the Symposium is basically that love has a ladder, that you learn love in one form, and if you're open to it, it leads to another kind of love, which then leads to another kind of love. It maybe starts with the body, but it elevates out of the body into some, someplace higher. So similarly, the book is exploring the possibility of what it would mean in a secular age to be related to your own experience and the experience of the world, not through a kind of materialist separation or wanting to accomplish or desire, but really just being attentive to the aliveness of that experience.

• 43:14Speaker 00

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• 43:53Speaker 01

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• 44:23David Brooks?

  Now, I'm presuming, and it's really through your writing, you've had these numinous experiences. Have you had like transcendent, mountaintop experiences that William James used to write about or that sort of thing?

• 44:38Speaker 03

  As time has gone on, and I think over 30 years of, of various kinds of investigation and practice, I've had lots of different experiences. And I think more and more the experience that's the most valuable to me is a kind of continuity of connectedness in the everyday. And feels to me more and more a better definition of the transcendent than some of the wild, dynamic, knock your socks off experiences that I may have had and that the narrator certainly does have in the book.

• 45:17David Brooks?

  So connected to experience, that's like, I am in the world.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  Connected to the continuity, there's a continuity between us, continuity with my ancestors, all of that stuff that that's, it's there, it's here, it's with us now. So being connected to that in a lived sense without self-consciousness, that to me feels like a better definition of the transcendent.

• 45:42David Brooks?

  I get that. But way before I had any faith, I had this sense of what you might call historical ecstasy, the moment of touching something or being someplace like Chart Cathedral or Gettysburg Battlefield, where the procession of people who've been there has left a residue. I was once at a home that was purported to be the home of Mary outside of Ephesus in Turkey. And you could, I don't know if Mary ever lived there, but centuries of prayers and mourners moved through that space. And there's something is emanating from it, a sensation of the procession. I don't know if that's, if I'm correctly interpreting what you're describing.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  I mean, that's certainly a version of what I'm talking about. I think what I'm talking about is even more, in a way, prosaic. But, but yes, and by the way, the book does end in Chart.

• 46:30David Brooks?

  Yeah, I noticed that. Now, you have quoted Thomas Burton and people like that, Augustine, Master, I care, comes up, a lot of your spiritual companions or guides, they took this and they took it to religion.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:50David Brooks?

  You accompany them part of the way, but you don't take it to where they took it, which was the Bible or whatever, the Quran, whatever. Now, is that just, I just don't feel that. It just doesn't feel authentic to me. Or have there been advantages and disadvantages to this spiritual sense that's not tied to an institutionalized religion?

• 47:13Speaker 03

  I mean, it's such a, it's such a beautiful and cutting question. I don't know. I, I think I'm trying to live by an empirical ethic, an ethos of being attentive to my experience, being attentive to those who've written about their experiences, trying to accumulate whatever wisdom over time that I can, recognizing that they are making connections, both which I value and others which I don't understand.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  I don't want to take anything on faith because to me, faith is not about an object. It's about an orientation. I think I put it in the, in the Atlantic essay. It is a, it is a living form of relationship with the unknown that feels like its own worthy form of knowledge, to be in living relationship to the unknown and not for it to have a name, because the name can sometimes get in the way of the practice. Doctrines are often things that were once practices that have now been turned into meanings. Now we consume them as meanings, but we have lost connection to the practice that led to some experience.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  I think mystics in general are focused on experience. And so maybe I just share that kind of granular phenomenological interest in experience itself. And I'm much more interested in that than I am in what it means. Because anyway, I'm not going to get any kind of clarity about what it means. I may get clarity in a moment. But as the brain scans of nuns and Tibetan monks tell us, they are having very similar brain scans, but the language they use to report what their experience is, is almost opposing. Union with Christ or emptiness.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  So what does it matter what the concept is, unless the concept is helping to activate technically? Does that make sense?

• 49:23David Brooks?

  It does. And I'm not judging here or comparing. I'm just, we have had two different experiences of this.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  Yours might be better. I mean, when I said it was a cutting, cutting question, I think that what, what my orientation lacks, and I think which is important, is community. Because I'm a renegade out there on my own. I don't, you know, I've never really talked much about this stuff. I feel alluded to it a couple of times in interviews, but I've kept to myself about it because it's been an investigatory thing. It's my pursuit, and so I don't have it to share with other people. Which maybe suits me fine as a writer, and as an observer, and as an outsider, and maybe that's my life choice, but I think it does deprive me of community.

• 50:07David Brooks?

  Yeah. Shiva, say, the Jewish morning ritual, is a beautiful, very spiritually and intellectually very sophisticated way to handle grief. It also gives everybody in the congregation, they know what to do. Everyone knows exactly what to do. And I would say, religion has provided me with a broader sensation, at least the way I process spiritual experiences. And so I was having one of these numinous experiences in Colorado. I was on the top of a mountain by a lake. And because I'm me, and even, I was not a big believer in that, and I was still wandering in those days, I brought up a book called The Valley of Vision, which is a collection of Puritan prayers.

• 50:48David Brooks?

  And I happened to open when I'm having this very moving and beautiful experience. And the first prayer is a very famous one. "Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly, thou hast brought me to the valley of vision, where I live in the depths and see thee in the heights. Hemmed in by mountains of sin, I behold thy glory. Let me learn by paradox, the way down is the way up. To be low is to be high. To be brokenhearted is to be a healed heart. A contrite spirit is a rejoicing spirit. A repenting soul is the victorious soul." And when I read that, it's really a prayer of the Beatutinal Wisdom, that all these spiritual inversions. And it gave me something to hold on to. And it also gave me a sense, which I remember thinking, that there is a moral order to the universe.

• 51:33David Brooks?

  And I had a sense of this moral order before I had a sense of God. That this is so beautiful, these inversions. And there's a structure to them, and it's sort of an intellectual encompassing of everything that I love. And I have a friend named David Wolpe, who was a rabbi in LA, he's retired since. He had a passage which has rung in my mind, which I wanted to read to you to get your reaction. And he does not believe in spiritual without religious. And he writes this, "Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes, religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself, religion is dissatisfied with the world."

• 52:13Speaker 03

  Well, I think my book is a, is a direct contradiction of that, that, that orientation. I mean, I, I respect that, that quote a lot, and I think that it's largely true, but it's also clearly not. I think, you know, I'm interested by this idea that you're at the top of the mountain, and you're having an experience, and in that moment, you reach for language. I don't. That's the difference. And, and I don't know what value that difference has for other people. I know that for me, reaching for language in that moment fixes the experience.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  And I want the experience to continue to exhibit that continuity that I was talking about earlier. That that is a, that's a technical matter, actually. By allowing it to be, it is allowed to have a different evolution. So that's just something that I've, I've learned, that the meaning I could derive from the experience is ultimately less lasting and less valuable than continuing to relate to the experience.

• 53:25David Brooks?

  But you have a, someone in your book says to the character, "You're seeking states, not truth." Now, when you're talking about these, not reducing it to language, how do you retain it?

• 53:37Speaker 03

  The aspirant who hates God only has to be around for three more lifetimes. If you focus on it, you're going to retain something. Language is not a way to retain it. Language is a way to no longer relate to it, in my experience. So that's why the challenge of the book was how to articulate this experience in a language, you know, between my last book and this book, I learned something about the sentence. Sentences for me before this book were about a meaning conveyed between punctuation.

• 54:17Speaker 03

  In this book, somehow, the sentence became a way to move inquiry and energy across punctuation into the next sentence. And so it was like, in a way, like the scene with Bloom, what is the force that's moving? There's a movement that, once it begins, shouldn't stop. And it should not be stopped by any meaning. It should not be stopped by any scene. There has to be some absorbing continuity that the reader is drawn into.

• 54:46David Brooks?

  Yeah. That gets me back to my friend Gregory Avnissa. He's about movement, spiritual movement. I once read a book by a guy named John Coats, who's a neuroscientist, who said, "We didn't evolve to solve problems. We evolved to move across a landscape." And he says, "If you think of the brain as a, an organ designed to foster movement, you will never see yourself the same way again." And that, that's true, since I read that sentence, I've never seen it, but...

• 55:13Speaker 03

  And, and that's what happened to me with the sentence, the writing of a sentence, understanding how a sentence could function with this book. That it functioned to move, not to fix.

• 55:23David Brooks?

  Now, there's a moment, and I keep ruining our conversation with neuroscience, but...

• 55:28Speaker 03

  There's a lot of neuroscience in the book.

• 55:30David Brooks?

  I know, that's what I'm getting to. There's a scene where the character's like, "What is going on in my brain? That all this is happening." So he goes to a doctor, he says, "Oh, your insula," which is a part of the brain, "it's growing."

• 55:44Speaker 03

  It's thickened.

• 55:45David Brooks?

  It's thickened. Now, should I see that scene as a desacralization of his experience, of his condition? Like, I was somehow disappointed, it's reducing it to the insula, like, and I've been guilty in the last conversation to do that, but...

• 55:58Speaker 03

  Well, we all are. I think when the medical vocabulary enters our experience, it becomes the final vocabulary. It is our way of materializing that immaterial terror of death that we have. Because we're so frightened of death, rightly so, or as Montaigne would say, not rightly so, that medical language, which is the primary language of mortality and, and morality on some level in our culture, becomes the final way to talk about anything. So it was impossible to write this book without including the medical map, without including the medical language. It's been demonstrated that activation of this area of the insula that's up against

• 56:43Speaker 03

  the temporal lobe creates religious experience. So what are the implications of that? What are the implications of there being a physiological corollary to the experience that the narrator's having? Does it disqualify that experience? Well, there's lots of instances of the uncanny in the book as well. So that presumably is not explained by the brain scans. And yet, all those things have to coexist, because those are the languages of the 21st century. I didn't want to write a book that was not responsible to the languages that we live in. I wanted to write a book that at least attempted a process of restoring a magic, at least

• 57:25Speaker 03

  for me as a writer, as I was writing it, the magic of the inner life. Because it felt to me that that was something that we're all more and more sensitive to and longing for.

• 57:38David Brooks?

  C.S. Lewis, before he was a, well, a long time being of the writer of the Narnia stories, he was a medievalist. He wrote about medieval literature. He said, "Something was lost when humans used to look up to the night sky and they would see magic, enchanted. Now we see balls of gas burning far away."

• 57:56Speaker 03

  That's the opening quote of my book, by the way, Gregory Lukas. There was a time when we would look up at the starry skies and see the map of all possibilities.

• 58:05David Brooks?

  So have we lost something, or is there something we need to be on the watchout for as we, as our culture has trended in this direction?

• 58:13Speaker 03

  I don't know. I know that I don't want to lose it, and so my focus is not losing it. And so I focus as much as possible on that invisible, immaterial, inner part of us that is the substance of our moral life. The Russians wrote about it beautifully. It's why we still read the Russians. I don't know why we got so timid writing about such things.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  So yeah, I think we certainly have lost something, but I don't want to lose it.

• 58:47David Brooks?

  I do think that's why I read the Russians too, for that moment when, say, in Tolstoy, Prince Andre is on the battlefield somewhere and he looks up at the endless vastness of the sky, or Levin is cutting grass and he has this experience of...

• 59:00Speaker 03

  Or Ivan Ilyich at the end is consumed and subsumed by a radiance.

• 59:05David Brooks?

  And they're not all happy people. They had the radiance and they...

• 59:08Speaker 03

  I don't think a fundamental orientation and soulfulness is about happiness. I mean, I think that the great saints and in all the traditions and, I mean, in your own tradition, Christ, I mean, he's not happy. The lesson is not happiness. And I feel like that is part of the problem of our orientation to some of this stuff.

• 59:32David Brooks?

  He could have been like six life hacks to be a happy Messiah.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  Happiness is overrated. Happiness of a certain ilk, I think, is overrated if you really want to talk about this kind of stuff.

• 59:44David Brooks?

  And I would say some of the things that challenge my spiritual life are my achievement orientation, time orientation. There's a lot you have to let go of, which I have trouble doing. You mentioned earlier, maybe we'll close on this because it's a fascinating part of the novel and your own life that I can't explain and don't understand, which is you talked about your dreams and the coincidences that you often dream. Describe some of that and what it means to you.

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  You know, I still don't understand it. I started keeping track of my dreams in college and then really accelerated that sort of focus on my nightlife, if you will, between the ages of 22 and 26, when I was sleeping with a pencil tied to my finger, to remind me when I would sort of get into that hypnagogic state that there was something I needed to write down. So I'd write down every dream. And during this period, one thing that started to happen with a degree of unpredictable regularity was that I would dream of something that seemed to then happen. And I talk about it a little bit in the Atlantic essay. It's usually pretty prosaic stuff, but still didn't make any sense why this

• 1:00:57Speaker 03

  would happen. And seemed to point to the fact that maybe spacetime was not what we think it is, even if I had no other way of knowing that. So this has recurred throughout my life as I've continued to pay attention to my dreams. Unfortunately, I've never seen any lottery numbers. So I don't know what it means, but it clearly is a mystery and does point to there maybe being more in heaven and earth than is contained in the kinds of books that I and all of us tend to read. So that's part of the novel as well. The

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  psychoanalytic tradition does deal with this a bit because it's a phenomenon that occurs relatively regularly within analytic settings at times. So they have some sort of way of working with it, but it's interesting. I don't know. I don't know what it means. I'm not sure what the utility of this strange proclivity that has, you know, that I've had, but I know that it's a fact. It's a subjective fact that I have to deal with. And it must tell me something about the world that I'm living in, which is different in essence than how it appears.

• 1:02:12David Brooks?

  I hope people have listened to us and seen, got a sense of how valuable and important this book is. I really mean that because it, sometimes we're feeling we're fighting the shallification of life. And maybe you would call it the rationalization or Max Faber, the iron cage, or we're now in a silicon cage. And to delve into these regions strikes me as the most important thing we can do to preserve our humanity. And it's not always easy and it's not always clear. But it's where our efforts should be and people should definitely buy this book. I don't know if you have any closing thoughts?

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  I'm just grateful, David. I'm so gratified to have this conversation with you. And I think the name of your new endeavor here, The Permanent Questions, is beautiful and right on.

• 1:03:05David Brooks?

  One of the highlights for me of my conversation with Aya is when he pushed back on the David Wolpe quote I read criticizing people who are spiritual and not religious. He is spiritual and not religious. And I have to say, he has more spiritually evolved certainly than me, and maybe more than a lot of pastors I know. He has put in the work, done the reading from Plato to Master Icar to Thomas Merton, and he's constructed a spiritual sense. And it's humbling to see that. The thing I 100% agree with him on is that we do our culture harm when we try to bleach spiritual talk out of our public conversation, public debate. Human beings, religious or not religious, are metaphysical

• 1:03:48David Brooks?

  creatures. And if you take that element out of our lives and out of our common lives, you're doing real damage to your society and to the people in it. Thanks so much for joining us for this week's conversation with Aya Daktar. The Permanent Questions is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Aya University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays. You can subscribe on The Atlantic's YouTube channel, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. See you next week.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

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