Consciousness Beyond the Brain: What Nearly Dying Taught Me | Robert Greene

Robert Greene is the author of The Law of the Sublime and was the first guest on The School of Greatness. The sublime is a feeling of awe that comes from seeing the world with new eyes, and a bond with something larger than the ego eases the misery that disconnection breeds. Topics include the death sublime, the false sublime versus the true sublime, panpsychism, Bruce Greyson’s near-death research, the Pamela Reynolds case and the Eleusinian Mysteries.

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

• 0:01Lewis Howes?

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• 0:44Lewis Howes?

  Because at the end of the day, if something tastes good, you're going to want to keep eating it. Stars and Honey Protein Bars are now available at starsandhoney.com or Target stores nationwide. Order online or grab a box on your next Target run. The School of Greatness is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. You know what they say, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So go with Amica and get coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers. One that looks after what's important to you together. Auto, home, life and more. Coverage that fits your unique needs. Amica helps you protect what matters most. Visit amica.com and get a quote today.

• 1:28Lewis Howes?

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• 2:11Lewis Howes?

  Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Welcome, my friend. This is a very special episode. This is episode number 2001. And it's a full circle moment for me because almost 14 years ago, I had the dream to launch the School of Greatness. Because I wanted to not only impact other people, but I wanted to find ways to improve my own life. This is the school that I wish I got to go through, through so many years of my life, growing up, that wasn't available for me. It really wasn't until I got into sports where I started to feel like I was able to learn skills in different ways than the classroom taught me.

• 2:54Lewis Howes?

  So this was my adventure 14 years ago, was to launch something where I could continue to learn how to develop myself. And interview some of the most inspiring people in the world. And Robert Greene was the very first guest. And episode 2001, he's come back. And I'm so grateful for him for his mentorship and friendship over the years and the wisdom he's shared in the show so many times. And it's a powerful and inspiring full circle moment. 2001 episodes later, he is back. And I want to ask you if you've ever looked at everything you've built in your life, every goal that you've ever checked off? Do you still feel like, what is my life about?

• 3:39Lewis Howes?

  I went and got the job. I launched the thing. I got married. I did all the things that I was supposed to do, that everyone else around me is doing. And for some reason, I still feel like something's missing, something's stuck, something stagnant in my life. Like your days are starting to blur together and you're just running from one thing to the next without really feeling fully alive. Like having this awe and wonder in your heart and that sparkle in your eye like you used to have when you were a kid. You just stopped seeing the world with wonder. And it became more about getting through the days, getting through the weeks, the responsibility, the insecurity, the self doubt, and trying to keep up with everyone around you.

• 4:20Lewis Howes?

  Well, in this conversation, you're going to learn why your attention shifts from the world to your own ego as you start to grow up. And the hidden reason behind so many addictions or numbing devices that so many people have. What nearly dying taught Robert Greene about love, about life and about letting go of his own ego, and some simple ways to experience your everyday life with fresh eyes again. Because wouldn't it be amazing to just have that childlike spark, that wonder, that amazement of life for every little thing that comes by your day? And just bring that to your life? Wouldn't that be amazing to live that way again?

• 5:04Lewis Howes?

  Well, we've got Robert Greene back. He's the bestselling author of many books, millions of copies of his books sold. The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, The Laws of Human Nature, just to name a few. And he again was the very first guest on this show. And now 2001 episodes later, he's here to talk about his newest book, The Law of the Sublime. And you're going to love it. Welcome back to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes. Let's get into this one with the one and only Robert Greene.

• 5:38Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness. I'm excited about our guest. We have the one and only Robert Greene in the house. And Robert was episode number one on the School of Greatness. And this is episode 2001. I get chills just thinking about it because of so much that has happened in the last almost 14 years for both of us.

• 5:58Robert Greene?

  Hey, hey, yeah.

• 5:59Lewis Howes?

  But I'm so grateful for you for being, taking a chance on me being my first guest when no one knew what a podcast was back then. So a big thank you.

• 6:08Robert Greene?

  What were you thinking back then? You thinking, it wasn't even called a podcast, was it?

• 6:12Lewis Howes?

  It was, but no one knew what a podcast was. I was thinking, I'm going through a stage where I feel stuck in my life. I feel stuck in a relationship.

• 6:22Robert Greene?

  What were you doing before then?

• 6:24Lewis Howes?

  I was running.

• 6:25Robert Greene?

  Good about you here.

• 6:26Lewis Howes?

  I was running, I was running an online marketing company. I had a business partnership, but we were kind of like arguing a lot and we weren't seeing eye to eye. I had moved to LA, maybe six months before then for a girl that didn't work out. And so I felt stuck in this kind of relationship that was off and on and we weren't seeing eye to eye. And I just, but I was making money in a business, but everything in my, my relationships were falling apart. And I was at the center of all those kind of breakdowns. And so instead of blaming everyone else, I kind of had a aha moment. I was like, oh, maybe I'm the problem. Maybe there's something that I get to look at within me that's causing these breakdowns or choosing relationships that aren't in alignment for whatever reason.

• 7:11Lewis Howes?

  And that's when the healing journey began for me. And I said, I feel stuck, but I also had access to really wise individuals who have given me mentorship for the previous few years. I wonder, and I'd kind of been interviewing people organically without recording it. And I would just take action specifically in my business. And I was like, well, maybe I can just interview people and see if it can help me get unstuck, but also help others.

• 7:39Robert Greene?

  Oh, interesting.

• 7:40Lewis Howes?

  And I was actually stuck in LA traffic when this idea came to me.

• 7:44Robert Greene?

  Interesting.

• 7:45Lewis Howes?

  And I was like, everyone around me stuck in the, in the highway was all looked frustrated, honking their horn. I was like, they look stuck, I look stuck. Maybe we're all stuck. And I was like, what is it within me that's causing this or that's attracting this or aligning with this?

• 8:04Lewis Howes?

  And the podcast began and you were the first guest that we had on. So I want to acknowledge you again for constantly inspiring me and so many people in this world for the work that you do. And I'm grateful that this is the sixth time that you've been on for 2001.

• 8:19Robert Greene?

  I can't believe I let a total stranger into my house.

• 8:22Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 8:22Robert Greene?

  It could have been a who knew which.

• 8:24Lewis Howes?

  Who knew?

• 8:25Robert Greene?

  But anyway, I'm kidding.

• 8:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah. You've got a new book out called The Law of the Sublime. That everyone needs to go get right now. And I'm going to read something really quickly for people. Because most of us are consumed by routine, ambition and anxiety. And we have lost our capacity for wonder and with it, our awareness of what it means to be alive. And in your most original and expansive work yet, you reveal how to rediscover that lost perception, how to see beyond convention, to recover the curiosity of childhood and to explore the hidden frontiers of the mind so that we can awaken the unseen dimensions of reality that surrounds us. And this has taken you seven years of your life to work on this book.

• 9:12Lewis Howes?

  And it's a masterpiece. And I know a lot of people are going to love this. But I'm curious, we're talking about childhood awe and wonder that we have as kids. I was telling you beforehand that my twin daughters just turned one.

• 9:24Robert Greene?

  Wow.

• 9:25Lewis Howes?

  And you have a whole chapter about childhood in here.

• 9:29Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 9:30Lewis Howes?

  What is it about childhood that allows for awe and wonder that we as adults tend to forget how to tap into?

• 9:40Robert Greene?

  Well, it's hard because we can't remember our first months and first years of life, right? And it's kind of a strange thought. We can remember everything else. Probably the reason is we didn't have language then, so we'd have nothing to stick our memories on to. But I did a lot of research. And if you think, and if you've had children, you look at the baby when it's first born, and it's just this bundle of nerves and impulses, just crying all the time. It's got all these things you've got to attend to. And it's kind of in this strange state of just needing. It's almost like an animal, okay? Then around nine months or so, maybe ten, depending on the child, things start calming down a little bit, and they start looking up at the world. They start looking up in their crib.

• 10:24Robert Greene?

  They look at the mobiles, things that are moving. They see their parents moving about. They start observing the world. And try imagining this for a moment in your adult perspective, but you're seeing the world for the first time. You're seeing things for the first time. So your mind is really open and expansive. The childhood brain is so much more plastic than the adult brain. It's constantly forming these new neural pathways in the brain and making all sorts of connections, which is why child's imaginations are so powerful, right? So the brain is just really active, and it's seeing all these things for the first time. And it's utterly enchanted. Colors, right?

• 11:06Robert Greene?

  Just colors, not for the object, but just the color itself is fascinating. Everything, you know, the sky, animals, particularly pets, are absolutely mesmerizing. The world of adults, which seems so weird and strange, these tall figures moving about, doing their strange activities. You don't even know language, so it's just noise that you're hearing. The world is strange. You're not an animal, so that you don't have any... You're conscious, but you don't have words to hold on to. So it's this incredible experience that you're going through, right? So the adult brain operates through what we call inhibition. In order to get through our day-to-day lives, our brain is inhibiting the information that comes in, right? So that we can function.

• 11:50Robert Greene?

  If we had to see all the colors and things going on around us, we would be able to handle our day-to-day business, right? The child's brain has very little of that inhibiting going on. So it's paying attention to everything, right? Even the silliest, stupidest thing, it's paying attention to and wondering what that is, okay? So it's this whole other world that they have entered. And then they learn language. You know, it depends on the age. I don't know if your children are starting to speak yet. They're probably not...

• 12:23Robert Greene?

  Babbling kind of thing. You know, I don't know exactly when, a little after a year, year and a half. You start, you learn the word "I", and that's a very powerful moment, because up until then, you don't really have a sense of yourself as an individual, something separate from mommy and daddy and the environment. And so you become interested in, I'm this person, I'm this individual. And that's also very fascinating. And perhaps you look in the mirror for the first time, and you see an image of yourself reflected, and that's a very strange experience, okay? So everything is weird and wondrous and strange and enchanting. Of course, there are people who have had troubled childhoods. We have to acknowledge that, and it's not all wonderful.

• 13:08Robert Greene?

  But even still, their minds are still fresh and open, and there are moments of this incredible enchantment, right? Then slowly, slowly, day by day, we start losing it, okay? So that sense of having a self and an ego. So there's a proportion going on in childhood. The world is fascinating. Ninety percent of your attention is in the world and how interesting things are. Ten percent maybe is about yourself and your needs and who you are, because you're just beginning to think of yourself as an individual, okay? Slowly, those numbers start to reverse. Until you're an adult, and ninety-eight percent of your attention is about yourself, your ego, your insecurities.

• 13:52Robert Greene?

  Am I getting attention? And maybe two percent is noticing things that are around you, okay?

• 13:58Lewis Howes?

  Is being in awe of something or noticing something?

• 14:01Robert Greene?

  Just even paying attention. People, I walk, look at people. I'm up in the hills of Griffith Park, riding my bike. It's spectacularly beautiful, and people are like this. They're not looking at the trees, the sky, the... Just the insanity of our planet Earth. So they're not even... So two percent of it, you might even paying attention a little bit to the environment, okay? So in the book, I call it the lost self. Your child is your lost self, right? You've lost it. But if you never had your childhood, you would never know what you were missing, and you probably wouldn't be unhappy.

• 14:42Robert Greene?

  But because you once knew this mind that was so open and fresh and excited and awe, unconsciously, in the back of your mind, you're going, I'm missing something. I once had it. You're not thinking that consciously, but unconsciously, it's affecting you, and it's secretly making you visible, because you once knew that you had possessed a mind that is experiencing the world in a very immediate and powerful fashion. And so I say, you know, you maybe try drugs, you get into addiction, all sorts of things to try and recapture that feeling of not being separated from the world. And in the book, I try and tell you, and there's a lot of research I go through,

• 15:25Robert Greene?

  it's not about recapturing the paradise of childhood or being all nostalgic or looking at photographs and TV shows and that. It's about looking at the world through the eyes of a child again, re-experiencing your childhood in the present, how you experienced the world, okay? And I give you exercises on that and how you can go back to... So one example I'll give you is children experience time in a much different way than adults do. First of all, we obviously have to experience time for scheduling, right? And we all go crazy with that, particularly nowadays, where we're expected to be on top of so many things, okay?

• 16:09Robert Greene?

  But a child, I give the metaphor of, imagine a river, okay? And you are in some, a raft, a canoe on the river, and you're just floating along the river, all right? The child experiences time as if it's inside that river. It's just, it's a flow. It's a feeling of being, of movement, and it's a physical sensual sensation of just being in the present and flowing with the time. And it's kind of an ecstatic experience of being alive, right? You can't look behind, because you're not, you're just flowing down the river. You can't really look ahead. It's just the sense of flow is what it is. The adults are standing on the shoreline,

• 16:53Robert Greene?

  and they're seeing the river pass, so they can see back to the past, so they can see forward. But they're not inside time, they're not inside that flow. Time is this abstract thing of, tomorrow I've got to finish this, in an hour I've got to send this email. Yesterday, that person said that, what did that mean? I'm so angry and upset. You're not inside time, you're viewing it from the outside, and it's making you anxious and neurotic and upset and worried. When you're in the flow of time, it's just like liberating... Now, I'm not saying you can go around like that all the time. You wouldn't get any work done. But upon occasion, you need to get back to that sensation of just experiencing time as this sensation of being alive in the moment and being inside that flow, that movement, just the sensual feeling.

• 17:38Robert Greene?

  I have other things about that that I'm gonna help, because at the end of each chapter, I have exercises, which I've never done in any of my books before.

• 17:48Lewis Howes?

  Why did you do it in this one?

• 17:49Robert Greene?

  Because I don't want it to be an academic book about a subject, about the sublime, and the subject can be very academic. I want the reader to experience everything I write about, because, I mean, we can get into this later. When I had my near-death experience, my stroke, the world, when I emerged from it, the world was different. It looked different, it felt different, it had this sparkle, this intensity. And part of the reason to write the book is I wanted people to have that in their life without having to die. So I wanted to give you exercises so that you can feel what I'm writing about. So that's one of the exercises, and I have others

• 18:30Robert Greene?

  so that you can perceive the world more in that immediate, fresh, open fashion and re-enchant it, so everything doesn't seem so similar and the same. And so, and you're always craving something new. I have a quote in there, "You don't need to travel to different planets and have all these incredible experiences. What you need is a new pair of eyes." It's a quote of Marcel Proust. You want to be able to look at the same world that you're looking at, but with a new pair of eyes, and that's a lot of what I'm trying to do in the book.

• 19:03Lewis Howes?

  How do we start to look at the world with a new pair of eyes when we are dealing with a lot of challenges or stress or responsibilities or overwhelmed constantly? And it's hard for us to remove ourselves from that or, like you say, step into the flow of that feeling?

• 19:20Robert Greene?

  Well, nothing really of great value in life is gonna be easy, okay? But what I try and say in the preface to the book, and I understand this is a strange concept. Robert writes about power, he writes about seduction. Man, those, I get what that is, but the sublime, what the hell is that?

• 19:38Lewis Howes?

  Mastery, all these things, yeah.

• 19:39Robert Greene?

  Yeah, well, I don't know. So I try and ground you in the preface, and I try and say...

• 19:47Robert Greene?

  That probably you've had moments where you've sensed something else about life, something greater than your individual concerns, but it's very fleeting. But I want you to get a feel, understand that a lot of your misery and unhappiness and depression come from feelings of being so disconnected from your surroundings, from other people, and even from yourself. It's making you miserable, right? And you don't think about that way. Your tendency will be to blame other people for your depression, your unhappiness, or the world. Okay? But there's something about how you experience life that can alter all of that.

• 20:30Robert Greene?

  And in experiencing life in this different kind of zone, this different kind of level, it doesn't mean you can't go around about your day to day work. You can't get things done. In fact, being so anxious and depressed and having, thinking about constantly about emails you have to respond to, it's not making your career, your parenting, your relationships any better. It's probably making you crazy, right? So in some ways, feeling like there's something greater than your ego out in the world is going to make it almost easier to function in the day to day life. So I want to make it clear that this is a book that can actually make life easier for you if you can absorb some of the lessons.

• 21:18Lewis Howes?

  You ever grab a protein bar because you're trying to eat healthier? Take one bite and wonder why you're putting yourself through this? I've always believed that if you want to build healthy habits that stick, you've got to actually enjoy what you're eating. And that's what I love about the idea behind Stars and Honey. They make dessert inspired protein bars because eating better shouldn't mean giving up great taste. Each bar has 15 grams of protein, six grams of fiber, just four grams of sugar, and 190 calories. And we're talking flavors like iced lemon cookie, mint chocolate chip, and red velvet. They've even brought on Martha Stewart as their chief taste officer to help choose flavors and create new ones.

• 22:02Lewis Howes?

  Because at the end of the day, if something tastes good, you're going to want to keep eating it. Stars and Honey Protein Bars are now available at starsandhoney.com or Target stores nationwide. Order online or grab a box on your next Target run. In business, there's the easy way with staples or the hard way. Hard means waiting too long for custom prints when your business needs them now. Easy means banners, business cards, and more, ready as fast as same day. Hard means unfortunate printer errors. Easy means quality, professional grade print solutions. Don't choose hard, choose staples. In store, online, or through the app. This fall, LL Bean is celebrating

• 22:46Lewis Howes?

  the moments people look forward to all year. The first school drop off, the first sweater weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions. Crunching leaves in Maine made bean boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider. For those that chase success, money, or fame, and they realize that it doesn't give them the ultimate fulfillment

• 23:31Lewis Howes?

  they're looking for, how can chasing or tapping into the sublime bring them more joy and fulfillment than money, success, or fame?

• 23:44Robert Greene?

  Well, it's a well-known aphorism, and I write about it in The Laws of Human Nature, that if you make things like money and success your goal, it's almost you're going to get in your own way and you're going to make life harder. So the most successful people in the world, you can take, you can take an example like a Steve Jobs, for instance. Notoriously, he never cared about money. He wouldn't spend it. He lived in a very plain apartment. He didn't buy all these. What his motivation was, was creating these beautiful objects, was design. He was a designer more than anything. He wanted to marry technology with beautiful aesthetic design, right? It was his obsession.

• 24:29Robert Greene?

  And in the process of mastering that and the pleasure it gave him and the flow, which is a subject in mastery, he made a lot of money, more money than a lot of, you know, almost anybody else, right? So I don't know Elon Musk. I don't know him personally. I know, I can understand Steve Jobs better. But I have a feeling that what motivates him is the excitement of some new bit of technology that he could create, something like out of a comic book, a car that can fly. Whoa. More than, I know money is certainly is probably important to him, but I think the real motivation is the excitement of creating something that he imagined, right?

• 25:12Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 25:13Robert Greene?

  So this isn't a book that's going to make you more successful in life. I understand that. So maybe you'll be put off in reading about it. But to feel like there's something larger than yourself, that you're connected to something deep. For so many millennia, we humans needed religion. We needed the feeling like there was something transcendent, greater than our self, our ego, our individual self. It kind of grounded us in the sense that there's something much more important, much faster, right? And that sense of connection was very healing to the human being because we're the only animal that's conscious of our mortality and our death. And if we think about it, we go,

• 25:57Robert Greene?

  why go on doing anything when it's all going to be canceled out by death? Religion was an incredibly important value in our world, and it's largely disappeared. You can't get through life without having, coming to terms with some of these things. At some point, your health is going to leave you. You're going to suffer. Your relationships will fall apart. People you know are going to die. And you're going to be confronting the bare realities of life and how harsh it can be. And you're going to want to have something that grounds you in, that's more than just money, more than just success, more than your ego. And if you haven't been developing this in your twenties and thirties,

• 26:40Robert Greene?

  you get to your sixties and seventies and you can't cope, you can't handle what life is throwing at you. So I must, I have to say, this isn't a practical book for success. It's a practical book for living your life, experiencing life on a higher level. That's the practical value in it.

• 27:00Lewis Howes?

  And the flip side of that, when you live your life on a higher level, you should be able to attract more success, more opportunities, more experiences that bring you more joy.

• 27:11Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 27:12Lewis Howes?

  And when you're in that joy state, you typically can create better results in your life, typically.

• 27:18Robert Greene?

  I have a chapter in there about love. It's called The Love Sublime. And I'm trying to say that love between two humans is like the highest form of the sublime in so many ways, okay? And the reason is we're, we humans have two sides to us. We're physical, we're an animal. We have sexual desires. We want that kind of pleasure. We're also spiritual creatures that are aware of our mortality, that are aware of higher things. And we have spiritual cravings for something transcendent, okay? Just sex by itself is a kind of an emptiness. We get that satisfaction, then we want more or something.

• 28:03Robert Greene?

  It doesn't really fulfill us. There's something missing. Pure spirituality, going to the church, you know, it could be great. But we're also physical beings. And so there's something seemingly alienating about that. In The Love Sublime, you're combining the physical attraction to a person with the spiritual. Your love becomes something spiritual. The person that you are attracted to, normally, the people in our lives are objects. They, we just pass them by. You know, we, we see them like anything else, right? In Love Sublime, that person becomes a subject. They live inside of you. You can connect to their consciousness. They become a part of you, okay?

• 28:48Robert Greene?

  The reason I'm mentioning this is we have the metaphor of falling in love, and it's like literally falling, okay? And there's a fear of that falling. We fear if we get too far, we're vulnerable and we're going to get hurt. And so we stop it, right? We start having doubts and mistrust and I don't know if I can trust this person. They might hurt me. You know, then power struggles start emerging. And the moment you stop the process of falling, the other person feels that. And it causes them to distrust you, and it causes them to stop falling. So your attitude affects the other person.

• 29:32Robert Greene?

  But by letting go and letting yourself fall deeper into what I'm calling the Love Sublime, the other person is drawn into that and goes into the same process. So how you feel about the world, how you feel about yourself, translates to other people. And in this one instance, that sensation of letting go of your defenses and your ego is going to draw the other person into that. So there is a power that comes in submitting to the sublime.

• 30:01Lewis Howes?

  It's interesting, in the book, The Law of the Sublime, you know, and the first words you write are about how you owe your life to your wife.

• 30:11Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Lewis Howes?

  How has your relationship with the law of love and the sublime transformed since having your stroke eight years ago in your marriage? How has that law of the love of sublime transformed in some way for you?

• 30:30Robert Greene?

  Well, we've been together for many years. And like any couple, we had our ups and downs. But it was, but we had a very strong bond. And then,

• 30:43Robert Greene?

  It's hard to explain, but when somebody saves your life, you have a, it kind of alters things.

• 30:51Lewis Howes?

  A literal saving, not just, oh, you saved me by coming into my life, but she saved you from dying.

• 30:57Robert Greene?

  Yeah, because I was driving my car in Los Angeles and she saw that my, I was slurring my words incredibly and my face was falling. Half my face was drooping and she didn't panic. She didn't scream or, or one, she just stopped the car, pull over, get out. He started getting out of the car, get back in. And she called 911, run right away. She kept her, she was level headed, you know, which is something a lot of people wouldn't write. She's a very level headed person. She saved my life because

• 31:33Robert Greene?

  30 seconds later, I would either be brain dead or I'd be dead.

• 31:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 31:37Robert Greene?

  You know, they would have come, but it would have been too late to get the blood flowing back to my brain because my brain, there was a blood clot and no blood was flowing to the brain. So when someone saves your life, there's, there's a different, obviously a different kind of feeling. Right? And I always very much loved her. I still love her, but it, it, it was like something even deeper. I have to look at her through new eyes. I have to see that I am here because of her, you know? I literally would not have a brain to write a book or I wouldn't, I'd be dead. Right? So, you know, you have to think about that every day as you look in the mirror, as you get up in the morning.

• 32:22Robert Greene?

  And as you look at her, this person that, that did that for you. And so beyond which she had to deal with this lump of human flesh, me, that couldn't do anything. For months, I was like a baby.

• 32:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 32:38Robert Greene?

  And she had to be patient and she had to be loving and she had, she didn't want to lose me, but she had to also pretty much take care of me. And I, you know, I don't like being dependent. I'm a very independent person. So it was rough for me, but her patience and, and she's still very much patient and understands my limitations. I don't know what more can you get out of another human being, you know? So we already had a very deep bond. We don't have children. We have pets, which are, are our children and she's a filmmaker and I write books. And so we have, those are our children, but

• 33:20Robert Greene?

  our bond is very powerful, both through the book and through what we've experienced because she said that that was the worst day of her life. She's, she saw very, how close she came to losing me. So it just brought us that much more closer.

• 33:36Lewis Howes?

  What was the biggest lesson for you over the last eight years that you've learned about love? Seeing it with new eyes?

• 33:44Robert Greene?

  We're so wrapped up in words and language and ideas that we don't understand that we're animals. And that our communication to other people happens pre, un, pre-verbally. Other people sense your emotions. They sense your defensive, your insecure. If you sense for me that I don't like you, Lewis, which is the opposite, but if you sense that, you would have a much different relationship to me, right? I don't have to say where we were talking about this earlier. Right? So I know that the moment I start getting, my ego starts popping up with a little voice going,

• 34:25Robert Greene?

  am I getting enough attention? Is she, does she really love me enough? Is she helping me enough? I go, shh, get down. That's, that's stupid. That's ridiculous. Right? If I let my ego constantly come up with defensive, resistant reaction type things that are, happen a lot with couples. She would sense that and it would have this kind of back and forth dynamic.

• 34:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Robert Greene?

  So the idea is in your relationship, you can change that back and forth dynamic by how you relate to the other person. You can, when, when your ego starts popping up and you hear its voice, you can say, wait a minute, I don't need to go there. It's going to cause problems. It's not important. The ego isn't important. What's important is giving to the other person. If you give the other person, they're invited to give to you. So I learned that in a very powerful way because my ego was dealt a very severe blow with the stroke. I can't, I'm somebody that likes to swim, to hike, to bike, travel.

• 35:31Robert Greene?

  I can't do anything. I'm like, you know, I'm like this helpless creature. And so I became very aware of how small I am and how I am not this powerful person. And it kind of altered how I look at myself and how I deal with my ego. And that's the most important lesson in, in, in the relationship that I've had since then.

• 35:55Lewis Howes?

  Would you say that most of our pain and suffering in life comes from focusing too much on ourselves? What we lack in our ego?

• 36:04Robert Greene?

  Very much so. I mean, um, you know, we're, first of all, we're a social animal. And we can't, our whole sense of self and who we are comes from being around other people. If you've ever been alone for a long period of time, strange things start happening to you. You start wondering about yourself. You, you, you lose connection to reality. We need other people to validate ourselves. We need to be seen through their eyes. So we're a social animal, but we're also an animal

• 36:38Robert Greene?

  that's aware that we're going to die someday. And that there are these forces that are much more immense than we are. Like the universe itself, like life on planet earth, like, like 13, 14 billion years of the life of our universe, like four billion years of our planet. We're aware of how incredibly insignificant and small that we are. Right? And so to the degree that we can get, get outside of ourselves, we can heal some of those wounds that came from that period I mentioned earlier. As a child where we were absorbed in the world and then we lose it, it's a wound that, that's constantly flaking us.

• 37:20Robert Greene?

  We can heal it. There's a story in there of a psychotherapist in Buenos Aires in Argentina, who has a patient named Miguel. Miguel is happily married, beautiful wife, three loving devoted children, a beautiful house, a great job, but something is missing. He's unhappy. He doesn't know what it is. Something feels flat in his life. So he goes to this therapist and they talk and they talk, they go through his childhood, they go through all of his grievances, all these problems at work.

• 37:55Robert Greene?

  And the therapist is thinking, this isn't going anywhere. You know, we're just going around in circles. And finally, one day he says, we're going to stop all of this. We're going to train for three months, you and I. You're not going to ask me why. And we're going to go and climb Aconcagua, Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the southern hemisphere in Argentina, right? In the Andes. One of the most amazing, it's like the Mount Everest of the Andes. Okay? And, uh, don't ask me why, we're just going to train and we're going to go do that. And the guy goes, all right, all right. So they trained, they finally make this climb and it's the most insane experience. There's storms, their, their lives are at stake.

• 38:39Robert Greene?

  The stars at night are spectacular. The scenery, the landscape is just unworldly. And then they, they don't make it to the top because the weather is bad and they come home, but the guy is transformed. And the idea is all of the talking just centers you on your ego. Getting outside of yourself and going to a landscape like that and putting your life at risk and seeing the stars and seeing the universe makes you realize that what is bothering you is so insignificant that it alters your scale of values. So opening up to what I call the cosmic sublime is a way to kind of heal some of the wounds that your ego inflicts.

• 39:21Lewis Howes?

  You know, when I think of sublime, for me personally, I think of God. I think of, when I think of awe, I think of wonder, like, and questioning. How is this all happening? What is this universe? Even though it's, we, we know what it's made up of, but how is it really made up of that? How long, you know? Why are we here? Is the soul returning from somewhere else? Where does the soul go afterwards? All these things made me think of God, this idea of sublime. How has your relationship or view of God evolved since writing this book?

• 39:59Robert Greene?

  Well, I'm, I'm not, I was, I was born Jewish, but I never really got into the faith because it just didn't relate to me growing up in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and had no relevance. So I have no organized religious background. I've had girlfriends who were Christian and I've kind of see, saw, you know, the world through their eyes. I, you know, I've been doing a form of meditation that's from Buddhism and I'm very much involved in that, but there's no God in Buddhism. But, so I'll say this though. First of all, I have deep respect for religions and I recently reread

• 40:43Robert Greene?

  the New Testament and it was just like, it's incredibly beautiful document. And just as literature, it's, it's so beautiful. But I'll say this, in the cosmic sublime, I explain the insane chain of circumstances that led to the formation of planet Earth and life on Earth, starting from the Big Bang and how things could have gone completely differently. How a slight change in the temperature, there would be no matter because particles couldn't cohere. There would be no light because photons of light couldn't happen. There would only be darkness. And how the first star evolved and then exploded,

• 41:25Robert Greene?

  which sent all the elements that seeded other planets happened. And there was almost a chance that didn't happen. On and on and on to planet Earth, this, this rock, right?

• 41:37Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy.

• 41:38Robert Greene?

  That, that gets

• 41:39Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 41:39Robert Greene?

  Hit by another planet called Thea, another moon, that now creates the, the iron core of our planet, that changes the tilt of our planet. And all these details that go into place that are just enough for the life to form. If we were 2% closer to the sun, life would not have happened, right? And that planet that hit Earth that caused the things that also allowed for our planet to have an environment, the chances of it hitting us exactly the way it did are insane, all right? When you go check list of all these things that happened

• 42:21Robert Greene?

  with our, you know, the, the magnetic field that protects us from radiation, the oceans that came from a thousand years of raining that filled all the asteroid basins that give this water, the elements that came probably from asteroids. The unlikeliness of this makes you think, is there a purpose there? Was there some reason for this? Was there some reason that all of this came together? So that humans, 13 billion, 14, almost 14 billion years after the Big Bang, could be conscious and recreate this entire story of our universe? Maybe other people on other planets have, but maybe not?

• 43:06Robert Greene?

  It almost makes you wonder if there was a purpose, if something is going on for a reason, right? To me, that's the closest I can get to this eerie sensation that there is something out there that's guiding it. But it, it might be irrational, but you get that feeling when you read this story.

• 43:24Lewis Howes?

  My friend, I hope you're enjoying this episode. And the School of Greatness drops new conversations every Monday, Wednesday and Friday around money, mindset, healing, manifestation and relationships. And if you're not yet following the show, then you're missing all of them. Please tap the follow button right now and you'll get notified the moment every new episode drops because the next one might be exactly what you need. Now let's get back to the conversation. There's a point in a run where things just start to feel different. You stop counting the minutes. You stop thinking about how much farther you have to go. Your body finds its rhythm, your mind gets quiet and you're just there. That's what I love about running. It clears out some of the noise.

• 44:07Lewis Howes?

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• 44:52Lewis Howes?

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• 45:37Lewis Howes?

  and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider. The crazy thing is, you know, my, my twins just turned one yesterday and my mom is staying with us right now. My wife's parents were with us and some of their family were there having a little celebration. And at the end of it last night, I was just hugging my wife, talking about how great of a job she's done over the last year as a mom and going through the challenges she went through. And I was just like, you know, you did it and we did it.

• 46:19Lewis Howes?

  And they're here and they're so beautiful and they're, you know, they're growing and they're developing. And it's just such a joy to be around these two beings every moment we have with them. And I was telling my mom, I was like, Mom, thank you for, you know, having me so that we could have these girls. And like, none of this would be possible without you.

• 46:41Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Lewis Howes?

  And I, she's been telling me more about her life stories over the last, you know, couple of years about her childhood and then how she met my dad and just the chances of them meeting. And then their parents, the, and like, you just go all the way back for my kids to be born. The chances are so slim on everything lining up to be here now. And for us to be here now, 14 years later, after our first interview, or episode one to episode 2001. It's got, you know, you call it cosmic sublime, right? It's like, but there's gotta be some purpose to all this, right?

• 47:19Robert Greene?

  Well, first of all, so you're, that's, that's absolutely perfect. So you talked about your parents. I calculated or I read somewhere that there have been 70,000 generations of humans going back to the first Homo sapiens. So that chance encounter happened 70,000 times.

• 47:38Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy.

• 47:39Robert Greene?

  Right? Okay. Now, you may have been born, but you'd be in a completely different fashion. You wouldn't be Lewis Howes. Who knows what you'd be, okay? But also, 66 million years ago, an asteroid hit Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula.

• 47:56Lewis Howes?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:57Robert Greene?

  The most devastating experience in the history of our planet. I have, I retell the story of that last day of the dinosaurs in the book. I did a lot of research because I liked that day. One day where all of life practically disappeared on planet Earth.

• 48:14Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 48:16Robert Greene?

  If that asteroid, so if you think about the asteroid was pretty large, it was like the size of a skyscraper. It was a very big one. But if you think of the empty space in the universe and the chances of it hitting the Yucatan Peninsula where it caused the maximum damage because of these limestone beds that were there and the water and the tsunamis. If it had missed, if that hadn't happened, dinosaurs would be roaming the planet or something else and we wouldn't be here. But look at your children. I mean, the, the fact of life being created is one of the strangest, most, if you had just thought about it, it's so weird to see these, these beings come, come into life, you know?

• 48:59Lewis Howes?

  When they were tiny little cells at one point.

• 49:01Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 49:01Lewis Howes?

  And now they, it's, it's crazy.

• 49:03Robert Greene?

  Yeah. And, and their bodies are, are like these miracles of, of, of something. I don't know what. So recently I had surgery on my left eye. You might see little signs of it. I had a, a cancerous growth on my eyelid. The doctor removed it, it was very bloody and there's like a hole there. In two and a half weeks, it's all like healed itself.

• 49:29Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 49:30Robert Greene?

  The powers of our body are just insane, but it's like millions of years of evolution going into your children's bodies. My book is about just stopping for a moment and thinking about these things and get your mind out of your day to day problems and just realize the chance, the unlikeliness of your being who you are and being in this world right now. My book is, there are like 12, I call them doors, 12 doors outside that circle. And the word sublime means up to the threshold of a door in Latin, up to the threshold. And so I'm taking you up to the threshold and you're looking outside the circle, okay? And there are 12 different versions of that.

• 50:15Robert Greene?

  The last one being death, looking through the doorway of death itself. So I could have had more points around the circle, but that's what it ended up being. And it kind of gives you a complete feel of what it could be to experience this other reality that is outside of what we normally experience.

• 50:36Lewis Howes?

  What would you say is then the enemy of sublime for people?

• 50:39Robert Greene?

  Well.

• 50:40Lewis Howes?

  Is it focusing on their stressful thoughts, their phone, or just not paying attention to the sublime? Anything that distracts them from it, or what's the main enemy?

• 50:49Robert Greene?

  Well, I have two things in the book. I talk, it's a good question. I talk about the anti-sublime and the false sublime.

• 50:55Lewis Howes?

  Oh.

• 50:57Robert Greene?

  So the anti-sublime is kind of an attitude that you might, we tend to find a lot in the world today where, oh, come on, Robert, there's nothing, it's just, the world is just what it is. Science teaches us, there's just facts out there. You know, there's nothing to be feel awe or enchantment about it. It's just a world as it is, right? People are there, the mountains are there. There's no reason, you're just adding like romantic subjective beliefs to it. There's no need to be subjective. It's just all objective scientific facts.

• 51:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I was dealt the cards that I've been given and this is the way life is.

• 51:33Robert Greene?

  Yeah. It's kind of a cynical, hard edged view of the world under the pretense of being realistic, right? So there's no room for romanticism or sentimentality, which people would think that's what my book is about. And it comes from a kind of a fear of anything different. And in the end, it's kind of a fear of death itself. But it's a fear of having to open up and be, open up your heart and open up who you are and your emotions.

• 52:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 52:04Robert Greene?

  You want to just narrow things down to hard brutal facts, to data, to algorithms, to what computers give you. That's the anti-sublime. And it's very painful because

• 52:19Robert Greene?

  we were children once and we did experience the world as enchanted and weird and strange. And to completely repress that is going to secretly make you miserable if you want it. The false sublime is you want the sublime, you want to be taken outside of yourself, but you want you want it to come from the outside, you want it to come from stimulation. So I'll take a drug and that will give me the feeling, right? I'll take, I'll drink a lot of alcohol, that will give me the feeling. I'll play video games or I'll go see Marvel movies with all these fantastic weird imagery. That will get me out of myself, right?

• 53:01Robert Greene?

  Or I'll get addicted, any kind of addiction will do that, or online porn, or whatever it is. So you want the feeling of being taken outside yourself, but you want that to come kind of easy and quick, something that you can take or something that somebody can give you. Whereas the true sublime versus the false sublime is, it comes from within. It's nobody's giving it to you. When you climb that mountain, when you look at your child, when you think back at your own childhood, there's nobody stimulating you or giving you these images. It's coming from your own imagination, your own experience. And that is much more powerful and that's much more enchanting and awesome than having it

• 53:45Robert Greene?

  come when you're never quite happy and you want more and more of it, it becomes an addiction. Whereas the real sublime is, is a much different experience.

• 53:53Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. From everything that you've studied and researched in your own personal experience, what do you think is the root cause to someone being addicted to an outside stimulus to try to give them a feeling of this? Of all addiction, what do you think is that root cause?

• 54:12Robert Greene?

  Well,

• 54:14Robert Greene?

  I don't know, this might sound weird, but when you you spent the first nine months of your life, or whenever it was, in a womb, right?

• 54:24Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 54:25Robert Greene?

  And you were inside another body and you were completely a part of it, okay? And then you're thrown out into the world through the birth canal and you're screaming and crying and it's light and it's bright and you're, you're not happy. But you're still, your mother is there, hopefully, and you feel a deep, powerful connection to that body that you once were inside, right? And you're sucking on its breasts and you feel that kind of oneness, all right? And then, as I explained, you're slowly getting separated and you slowly get inside of your ego and you feel, you feel the pain of disconnection and separation

• 55:08Robert Greene?

  from what you once knew unconsciously, probably, obviously, right? And so an addiction is an attempt to get back into the womb.

• 55:18Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 55:18Robert Greene?

  Attempt, yes. Is to get a feeling of something so soothing, it brings back the feeling of oneness, it crowds out all the anxiety and that feeling of being separated because you're like with this substance and it's taking you inside this other comfortable zone where there's nothing else in the world. You're protected, right? And I feel, I could be wrong, I'm not an expert on it. I feel that that is at the root of addictions, the sense of separation and trying to soothe yourself and feel that and get over that anxiety that it causes.

• 55:57Lewis Howes?

  I saw this story online, it's a video, I think. I think Wayne Dyer might have said it originally about, it's kind of relevant for my, my situation. It's about twins who are having a conversation in the womb, right? Imagine twins in the womb, having a conversation and saying, you know, is there life after the womb? And you're saying to yourself, you know, is there life after the womb? You know, it's safe in here.

• 56:26Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 56:27Lewis Howes?

  It's safe in here. I feel a presence, but I don't know what it is, but after the womb, like we're gonna die, you know, there's no more life because how are we gonna live? Once we're not connected to your mother anymore, how are we gonna get fed?

• 56:39Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 56:39Lewis Howes?

  It's a different way of living, right? I'm curious, have you, on all your research on the sublime, what do you feel like happens after life?

• 56:48Robert Greene?

  I mean, this is not quite answering your question, but everyone was dead once already. So before you were born, you didn't exist. So if you think about it, you were kind of dead already. And when you were in the womb, you're already kind of close to that moment where you didn't exist, which is a form of death. So now you're returning to it. You're returning to where you once were. Look, I, the last chapter is on the death sublime. It's very important because it's near death experiences, which I didn't have as powerful a near death experience as those who see angels and light and all these other things happening. So I have to qualify, but I had a near death experience.

• 57:34Robert Greene?

  And so I did a lot of research and I wrote a lot of stories in the book. To me, some of the most interesting stories about people who had near death experiences. Now, I don't personally have any experience of like angels or God or seeing my dead relatives, which a lot of people do have. And so there's a lot of literature on it.

• 58:00Robert Greene?

  And some people believe that these experiences prove the existence of an afterlife. I'm not going to go there because it's not my experience and I can only write about what my experience is. There are very interesting books, a book I highly recommend called After. It's an excellent book, a scientist. His name is Bruce Gerson, something like that. He's like studied all of these after death experiences and he, he's a scientist, but he's also made to wonder, is there something going on here? And there are examples of people who were hardcore scientists who suddenly think that there might be evidence of an afterlife, okay?

• 58:42Robert Greene?

  But what I will say is very strange things happen in the near death experience.

• 58:48Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 58:48Robert Greene?

  Yes. So I have two stories in there. I have many more, but two of them are, so there's this woman who named Pamela Reynolds-Lawrie, very famous story in the near death literature. She has a brain aneurysm that could pop at any moment and kill her, but it's at the base of her brain, which makes it extremely difficult to put a clip on to stop it from popping. So she's at risk any day, she's like in her twenties, any day it could pop and she'll die. And there's no way to get that far down. So there's this man in Arizona who's devised a possible surgery that could work. And what it is, is he freezes the body.

• 59:33Robert Greene?

  He takes all the blood out and he cools it and he puts it back in at a temperature in like 50 degrees where you're actually, you're dead.

• 59:42Lewis Howes?

  Come on.

• 59:43Robert Greene?

  Yeah, he brings you as close to death as you can. He puts you on a heart lung monitor to keep you breathing from a machine. But everything is stopped, okay?

• 59:55Lewis Howes?

  There's no blood flow.

• 59:56Robert Greene?

  No. Well, the heart lung machine is keeping things, right? But there's nothing in the body.

• 1:00:02Lewis Howes?

  Right. Wow.

• 1:00:04Robert Greene?

  And so.

• 1:00:06Lewis Howes?

  This happened?

• 1:00:07Robert Greene?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:08Lewis Howes?

  Holy, yeah.

• 1:00:09Robert Greene?

  There's a name for it. I talked about it in the book. And anyway, he puts these things in your ears to make sure that there's no brain activity. Because he has to completely stop the brain. So that he can see down far enough into the brain to see the aneurysm and put the clip on. If there's activity going on, it's too... I don't know, I'm not a surgeon. Okay? So these things in the ears, you can't hear anything when you're... And it's monitoring that there's no activity in the brain. He puts you in a barbiturate coma, right? And so you're essentially as close to death as a human being can be, right?

• 1:00:50Robert Greene?

  And then your eyes are all taped shut, etc. Okay, she's in this hospital room. And the last thing she remembers is the sound of the wheels of the gurney. And then she's out of it. Suddenly, in the middle of the operation, she wakes up.

• 1:01:06Lewis Howes?

  Come on.

• 1:01:07Robert Greene?

  Yeah. And she finds herself perched on the shoulder of the doctor, okay? And she sees him taking out this weird... Looks like an electric toothbrush. What is that? And he's putting attachments on that look like a socket wrench, like your father used to use. And she goes, "Oh, that's the drill he's using to drill into my brain," right? And then she goes higher up towards the sitting. She looks down and she hears these two people talking about trying to find a vein to put something in her leg. She's wondering, "Why are they messing around with her leg?" Anyway, she goes through this other journey with light and dead relatives, etc. She comes back into her body at the last moment.

• 1:01:51Robert Greene?

  And she have to... She feels... She jumps up and down three times. And then she hears the song "Hotel California" by The Eagles. And then it's gone. And then she's carried away. 12 hours later, she wakes up from the drugs. And this assistant doctor is there. And she says, "By the way, let me just tell you what I experienced." And she tells them about the drill, about the two people talking, about the bouncing up and down three times, about the music, and a few other things. This guy's going, "What the fuck are you talking about? You can't hear anything. Your ears have these things in them. You can't see anything. Your brain is dead. There's no activity.

• 1:02:34Robert Greene?

  There's nothing going on, right? There's no electrical activity in your brain. This is impossible." He goes and tells the doctor, who says, "I don't know what you got, which you're smoking, but this can't be." But the woman is obviously... She heard that. And that is the song that they were playing at the time.

• 1:02:53Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:02:54Robert Greene?

  And so I have another story. Like, I won't go into it, but the idea is that your consciousness is not necessarily connected to your body, right? If your brain is dead, if your mind has nothing going on, if your eyes are sealed, you can't hear anything, how can you be conscious? Well, maybe consciousness is something that exists outside the brain, right? It is something that we connect to with our minds when we're born. And it's out there in the environment. And then when you're dying and the brain is closing off, it's connecting in another way, but you're still conscious. I don't know. A lot of scientists find that ridiculous. But it calls into question...

• 1:03:39Robert Greene?

  Near-death experience call into question the very nature of our consciousness in a very profound way.

• 1:03:44Lewis Howes?

  I mean, what is your thoughts, then, from all the research you've done, on energy and frequencies? And how consciousness, the mind, the heart are connected through some type of energy or frequency that's tapping into the sublime nature of this universe? Or other people, or being able to... I don't know. What's your thoughts on this topic?

• 1:04:10Robert Greene?

  Well, you know, I am a sort of a... My background is kind of a rationalist and kind of a materialist. But I'm open to things. And, you know, you wonder sometimes. And in my connection to death, I had sensations that you can't rationally explain. Like, I was there witnessing my own funeral, essentially, with my mother and my wife there at my funeral and stuff.

• 1:04:43Robert Greene?

  But there is a lot of scientists, physicists, neuroscientists, etc., who prescribe to an idea called panpsychism, or in some version of it.

• 1:04:58Lewis Howes?

  What's it called?

• 1:04:59Robert Greene?

  Panpsychism.

• 1:05:01Lewis Howes?

  What does that mean?

• 1:05:02Robert Greene?

  It means that pan means everywhere, everything, and psychism. So it's like consciousness and psyche are everywhere in the universe. The question is, how could we become conscious if there wasn't already something else out there like it? It's like the chicken and the egg syndrome, right? How could consciousness emerge from nothing? It's the same paradox of how could the universe emerge from nothing? How could life emerge from nothing, right? It's very... Can't get your mind around it, and science can't seem to explain it. Some people believe, and they're very eminent people, they're not quacks, who believe that there's a consciousness that pervades the universe.

• 1:05:47Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:05:48Robert Greene?

  Yeah. And that all that happened was we humans now are tapping into the consciousness that is out there. And I'm not doing a great job of explaining it. It's much more interesting than that. But it's everywhere already in the universe, and that we are tapping into it. And that there is essentially... So in Buddhism, they call it one mind. And the idea, they say, "Mind is Buddha, Buddha is mind." And so the mind, consciousness, is everywhere. And you're just a part of that, and you're tapping into it. It's transcendent. It's a transcendent consciousness.

• 1:06:30Robert Greene?

  And it explains why we humans have transcendent feelings and emotions, and why we feel... We feel that there's something larger out there than what we can rationally explain. We feel like there's something bigger out there than what our minds and our egos can describe, you know? And that's really the essence of the sublime things that are beyond words, that you can't really explain. And so I find it an extremely fascinating idea and subject. And in my meditating, I can kind of... I can kind of try to go there and imagine it. I can't say for sure that it's 100% this is the reality,

• 1:07:14Robert Greene?

  but it fascinates me, this concept.

• 1:07:17Lewis Howes?

  From everything that you've researched and studied, and also your own experience, at this season of your life, do you feel like there is a God of some sorts?

• 1:07:27Robert Greene?

  Even if there is a God, you actually can't know it. It's like you have to experience it, right? It's not a question of knowledge, like I can... Like a formula, like in words.

• 1:07:40Lewis Howes?

  It's a feeling?

• 1:07:40Robert Greene?

  Experience of that sensation of something much larger than yourself. I've had that sensation. I don't know if it's like the God of Judaism, the God of the Trinity, of, you know, the Holy Spirit. I can't say if it's the God of Islam. I don't know. But there's a sensation that there is something larger than yourself, and there's something unifying the universe. Now, in Buddhism and in other indigenous cultures, there is a concept of one energy that permeates the universe, right? And in ancient Egypt, it was called Ba.

• 1:08:23Robert Greene?

  In Buddhism, it has another name. I can't remember it. And I talk in this about an African culture that had a similar concept. And the idea is that everything in the universe originated from one thing, right? And if everything in the universe originated from one thing, the Big Bang, then everything in the universe is connected, is part of one.

• 1:08:45Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:08:46Robert Greene?

  So there's one energy that permeates everything. So when you sense, in whatever practice you have or in every moment, that oneness, that everything originated from one thing, including yourself, that is a sort of an experience of God in some way.

• 1:09:02Lewis Howes?

  Yes. What did ancient civilizations think, know, or do differently that we don't do today?

• 1:09:12Robert Greene?

  When I went to college, I studied ancient Greek. And so that was... I'm fascinated with ancient cultures and their languages and their belief systems. So in this chapter, I try... I tell a story of the greatest ritual in the history of a religion called the Eleusinian Mysteries. It existed for 1,000 years in ancient Greece, and it was also in ancient Rome. And it was the most powerful religious experience anybody could ever have gone through. And I'm not going to tell you all the details, because I don't want your listeners to go crazy with this stuff. But I take you through the entire ritual

• 1:09:57Robert Greene?

  as much as I could, because it's a mystery. And nobody was allowed to ever talk about it, or they would be killed.

• 1:10:03Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:10:03Robert Greene?

  But we know certain facts, and we've been able to piece together certain things. I take you, the reader, listener, reader, through this ritual, right? And it gives you a feeling of dying and then being reborn, okay? But the essence of the story is to tell you that your idea of pagan gods, ancient Greek gods, Egyptian gods, whatever, is completely wrong. They're not these silly little personifications, anthropomorphized entities out in there bickering, doing things like Zeus in the sky, like how we figure imagery of it. There's nothing to do with that. They are forces of nature.

• 1:10:46Robert Greene?

  They are spirits. They are waves of energy that permeate the universe. So Aphrodite is this energy, the goddess of love. It's this energy that permeates the universe that makes things want to come together, that makes things want to unite sexually, in whatever fashion, right? It's the goddess of love, okay? And when an ancient person fell in love...

• 1:11:13Robert Greene?

  They felt it wasn't they themselves that were feeling the love. The goddess had inhabited their body and was possessing them.

• 1:11:20Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:11:20Robert Greene?

  So religion to them was a feeling of being possessed by something greater than themselves, by a force of nature, by an energy that goes on. Zeus is something violent, is the violence of the universe. Poseidon is the energy coming from the ocean. You know, Persephone was the goddess of the underworld who brings life up vegetation. You feel these energy forces through you. You feel possessed. It's not happening you by yourself, but the world is possessing you. I find it a very, very beautiful concept. I'm sorry, it doesn't seem very modern. But the idea that your sensations don't come from you, but come from outside you,

• 1:12:06Robert Greene?

  that there's something larger going on. That when you're attracted to a person in an overwhelming way, you're being possessed by this energy that is constantly throughout the universe trying to unite things, particles, et cetera. And so in the ancient Greek world, Theos, the word for God, really means something that is like a shimmering, that's something very quick that's passing through. It's not a thing.

• 1:12:35Lewis Howes?

  It's like an energy or?

• 1:12:37Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:12:38Robert Greene?

  And Entheos is to be filled with that energy. And it was the highest form of religious experience to feel your possession. And Atheos, where we get the word atheism, meant

• 1:12:51Lewis Howes?

  It's without.

• 1:12:51Robert Greene?

  abandoned by the gods. They don't even want to bother with you.

• 1:12:55Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:12:56Robert Greene?

  And that's like the worst feeling that you can have. I don't want to get too into the weeds into this. But the pagan indigenous experience of the world to me fascinates me because I'm constantly experiencing these things. I'm reading about them and I'm very, very attracted to that worldview.

• 1:13:14Lewis Howes?

  That's interesting.

• 1:13:18Lewis Howes?

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• 1:14:01Lewis Howes?

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• 1:14:44Lewis Howes?

  It tracks your sleep, stress, activity and more. The Aura app brings it together so you can spot patterns and see how you're recovering. Say you've been going to bed early or taking time to unwind. You can see what changes in your data over time. And the more you understand about your body, the better you can live in it. Learn more at auraring.com. Wear your best life with Aura. Everything you're talking about in this book is fascinating to me. I'm curious, what surprised you the most in researching this? Or lessons you learned, things you studied, stories that brought you awe that you didn't already know?

• 1:15:24Robert Greene?

  There's two chapters, one about the brain called the neuro sublime. And the idea is that the human brain constructs what we consider to be reality, right? So you think you're seeing the world as it is, but you're not. You're seeing the world that the brain creates for you and constructs for you. It makes everything simple. It makes everything orderly, makes everything patterned and familiar. And there's another, and it's creating exactly how the world appears. There's another way of seeing the world, right? There's another reality out there. And I describe that and I describe the story of a woman who had a stroke. I don't know if you've ever heard of her, Jill Bolte Taylor.

• 1:16:07Lewis Howes?

  Is this the brain surgeon, the neuroscientist who?

• 1:16:10Robert Greene?

  Who had a stroke.

• 1:16:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:12Robert Greene?

  Great story. Anyway, she experienced the world for three hours where the brain isn't constructing what you see. And so I'm trying to go into that and show you that you can explore something similar. It connects to the next chapter, which is about what I call the interspecies sublime.

• 1:16:32Robert Greene?

  I happen to be a deep animal lover.

• 1:16:36Lewis Howes?

  You have cats or dogs?

• 1:16:37Robert Greene?

  I have cats.

• 1:16:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I've got two cats.

• 1:16:39Robert Greene?

  You do?

• 1:16:39Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Robert Greene?

  Well, I've seen that.

• 1:16:40Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you got four?

• 1:16:42Robert Greene?

  I got two.

• 1:16:42Lewis Howes?

  Two, yeah, two and two. We got twin cats.

• 1:16:44Robert Greene?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, cats are amazing.

• 1:16:48Lewis Howes?

  They are different types of creatures. They're different, their energy is very healing from my perspective, but they can also be kind of crazy too.

• 1:16:54Robert Greene?

  They're definitely crazy. They're not, they're part wild.

• 1:16:57Lewis Howes?

  They're not predictable.

• 1:16:58Robert Greene?

  No, they're not.

• 1:16:59Lewis Howes?

  They can just

• 1:16:59Robert Greene?

  They're not like a dog.

• 1:17:00Lewis Howes?

  Start biting you like in a second. It could be calm and then you pet them a certain way, like, ma, you know, it's like.

• 1:17:05Robert Greene?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's very true.

• 1:17:08Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:17:08Robert Greene?

  That's why we love them. And so in that chapter, I went very deep into the research. So for instance, I tell the story of a man who's obsessed with a falcon, with a hawk. And he tries to become a hawk and he follows this one hawk everywhere and he studies it. And he gets so inside their way of thinking. And at the very end of the story, and it's from a book and it's a fantastic book called The Peregrine. He almost feels like he's like, this hawk has accepted him and it allows him to come closer. And so the point of this chapter is

• 1:17:45Lewis Howes?

  Like a wild hawk, not a hawk that you?

• 1:17:46Robert Greene?

  Oh, no, no, totally wild. It's called a peregrine. It's a falcon

• 1:17:50Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:17:50Robert Greene?

  in England.

• 1:17:53Robert Greene?

  And the supreme hunter among predator birds of prey. And I just claim its physiology is insane. It reaches the highest speeds of any animal on our planet. Okay. Anyway, the point is animals have a different consciousness and brain and they see a different world than we see. Right? So a hawk can see things we can't see, literally. Snakes feel heat. They can see heat around them. And they can feel the body temperatures of things around them.

• 1:18:32Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:18:32Robert Greene?

  Spiders are essentially blind, but they feel vibrations and they live in a world of pure vibrations. Elephants can feel the vibrations in the earth and they can sense like a earthquake coming well before anybody.

• 1:18:46Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:18:48Robert Greene?

  You know, on and on and on. Birds can navigate through knowing the magnetic fields of the planet. They see a different reality than we do. It's not to say it's different, but they see a planet earth that we, our senses doesn't even reveal to us. But through our knowledge of their physiology and how their brains are, we can voyage into how they see the world.

• 1:19:11Lewis Howes?

  Fascinating.

• 1:19:12Robert Greene?

  And I'll just end with the story. Mozart, the composer Mozart, loved animals and loved birds. And one day he passes by this, he hears somebody singing a song from one of his concertos that has never even been performed. He goes, what is that? He follows the sound and it's a bird singing this.

• 1:19:35Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 1:19:36Robert Greene?

  And it's a starling. The bird heard him rehearsing it nearby. And so he's go, wow, and he loves birds, so he buys the bird. It's a starling and he names it, I think he names it star or something similar. He takes it home and he and the bird bond. He just loves that bird to death. He takes it everywhere with him. Then when the bird dies, he's like just so depressed. He has a funeral for the bird with friends. They go on this big funeral and they bury the bird. Anyway, he composed a piece that was dedicated to his bird.

• 1:20:11Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:20:12Robert Greene?

  And people for the years thought this was the worst thing Mozart ever composed. It makes no sense. It's kind of ugly, it's discord. It was his great failure, right? And years later, this woman in like the 1990s, she has the same bird, a starling, right? And

• 1:20:31Robert Greene?

  She wants to see if maybe the starling will like Mozart's music. And the starling isn't really into it. It prefers bluegrass music, right? He gets really excited with bluegrass.

• 1:20:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:41Robert Greene?

  But then she plays this piece that everyone thought was horrible, right? And the bird's going crazy. She's never seen it react like that.

• 1:20:49Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:20:50Robert Greene?

  And then she does the research and other people have noticed the same thing. So what it means is Mozart got so into the bird, the starling that was his pet, that he could think like a starling and he could compose music that could communicate to this bird. I just find that story fascinating for the sense of crossing the species barrier and being able to communicate to another species, almost like Dr. Dolittle sort of thing.

• 1:21:16Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy. Did you, well, first off, whatever happened to the eagle? The man with the eagle, did something happen with that story? Well, the end of that, did he?

• 1:21:24Robert Greene?

  Well, he'd been following the peregrine for years. And then he just, he learns that he's got a rheumatoid arthritis and he's dying. So he wants to spend one last year following these birds. And he goes to this part of England and he hones in on one bird that's, that he's just loves to death and he's follows it everywhere. And the bird avoids him because he's a human and they don't, he can't eat a human, so he's not interested. Slowly, over the course of months, it takes place over six months. The bird will get a little bit closer and a little bit closer. At one point, he has the feeling that the bird is going to attack him. But then it doesn't.

• 1:22:06Robert Greene?

  Then at the very end of the story, the birds, the peregrine is going to migrate out of southern England because the season is different. So he's never going to see it again and he's going to be dying. So this is his last chance. He's despair, he's desperate to see it one last time. He, he doesn't, he thinks it might be gone. He finds traces of other dead prey. So he knows it's still around. He sees the blood. He follows it. And there it is overlooking the sea. And he crawls closer to it and the bird moves away. He crawls closer and then finally he gets like as close as you and I are sitting and he goes, ah, my, and the bird goes to sleep, which means that he's accepted him in a way. And that's the end of the story.

• 1:22:51Lewis Howes?

  Wow, interesting.

• 1:22:52Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:53Lewis Howes?

  Wow. I'm so excited for people to get your book, The Law of the Sublime. Obviously you've had so many other mega hit books that have done millions of copies sold for many of them. But I think this is going to be one that opens people back into their childlike sense of wonder.

• 1:23:08Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:09Lewis Howes?

  Which I believe is the thing that we are lacking the most right now as a society. We're, we're too focused on timelines and responsibilities and stress, overwhelmed and day to day things that we gotta get done.

• 1:23:24Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:24Lewis Howes?

  As opposed to taking moments.

• 1:23:26Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:27Lewis Howes?

  Where we can really just be in awe and wonder.

• 1:23:30Robert Greene?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:30Lewis Howes?

  And so I really hope people get this book, The Law of the Sublime. And you, you dive in and you allow yourself to feel awe and wonder in these different areas that you've talked about. You talked about some of them. Cosmic, sublime, love, death, all these different things that you talk about in here that you cover in this book. And I want people to follow you as well because you always have great content online.

• 1:23:56Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:57Lewis Howes?

  So they can follow you. What's the best place that people can follow you right now? Are you typically sharing the most online?

• 1:24:03Robert Greene?

  Well, we have a, an ancient website.

• 1:24:08Robert Greene?

  Literally. Power, seduction and war and spelled out dot com. And there you'll find links to all my other books. This is my eighth book and to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube channel and all that stuff. So that's the best place to go.

• 1:24:29Lewis Howes?

  Well.

• 1:24:29Robert Greene?

  And I don't know when you're gonna post this.

• 1:24:33Lewis Howes?

  It's coming out right around this launch, yeah, the week before.

• 1:24:36Robert Greene?

  You can preorder the book, but it won't be.

• 1:24:39Lewis Howes?

  It'll be the week before so they can preorder it or order it whenever.

• 1:24:42Robert Greene?

  Special goodies if you preorder it.

• 1:24:43Lewis Howes?

  Where, if they go to that website?

• 1:24:46Robert Greene?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:47Lewis Howes?

  It'll be, it'll be on that website.

• 1:24:49Robert Greene?

  Yeah, or you go to Amazon.

• 1:24:50Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:24:51Robert Greene?

  Amazon, you can preorder on Amazon as well.

• 1:24:53Lewis Howes?

  Cool.

• 1:24:53Robert Greene?

  Or Barnes and Noble.

• 1:24:54Lewis Howes?

  Where can they go get the goodies?

• 1:24:57Robert Greene?

  Well, if you preorder it and you send us the receipt, it's all on my website.

• 1:25:02Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. Okay, cool.

• 1:25:05Lewis Howes?

  Was there anything you wanted to add or share that's been on your heart or mind? Before I get to the final couple of questions.

• 1:25:12Robert Greene?

  About the book?

• 1:25:13Lewis Howes?

  About the book, about your life, about anything new, about anything else that we can be of service to you about? That you wanna share or that you want people to know about?

• 1:25:21Robert Greene?

  No, I, I think you did an amazing job kind of covering things here. I think I just want to leave people with the idea that this book is designed to enter your bloodstream and all. The people who have read it have said that they don't look at things the same way.

• 1:25:41Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:25:42Robert Greene?

  You know, and they don't think about things the same way. So it's not like you have to suddenly quit your job and just go live in the desert and look up at the stars. But you can live your daily life, but you're, you see things differently. And the moment where you, the feeling that you look at the world differently is something I can't even describe in words. It's extremely powerful. It's what happened to me in the first days after I nearly died. And I look at the world, it just doesn't seem the same. So I'm trying to somehow draw you into what I had experienced in those few moments.

• 1:26:18Lewis Howes?

  Let the law of the sublime enter your bloodstream. I like that. That's good. I've asked you this before a number of times. This is your sixth time on the show. I wonder curious if it's changed. It's called the three truths question. So hypothetical scenario, you get to live as long as you want in this life. But far in the future, it's your last day. And you get to continue to create and make all the work you wanna make and write more books if you want to. But for whatever reason, on this last day, you have to take all of your content with you. Social media, books, gone from this existence. Hypothetical, but you get to leave behind three lessons to the world on the last day. And this is all we would have of your content. What would those three lessons or three truths be for you?

• 1:27:02Robert Greene?

  There's something larger than your individual self out there and you wanna tune yourself to it. You are a social animal and by your ability to understand people and get inside their spirit, you will be happy, fulfilled and powerful. And finally, life is very short and you, you have to, even though I was given 200 years to live, it's still very short. And so you have to have a sense of urgency in this world. You could die tomorrow, any moment, even though I was granted 200 years. You could die any moment. So you have to have a sense of urgency. You have to be aware of how short life is.

• 1:27:45Lewis Howes?

  Beautiful. I think they evolve every time I ask you the question.

• 1:27:48Robert Greene?

  Oh, oh, well.

• 1:27:49Lewis Howes?

  You know, it's good. I like it. I like it. It's like, it's okay. It's great. Robert, again, I got one final question for you, but before I do, I wanna thank you again for all you do for me, for so many people in the world. You've been a light with your books and the content you've created and all the interviews you've done for many years now. Before I interviewed you, I didn't see you doing a lot of interviews out in the world. But now with podcasts, I see you doing a lot more, which is a great gift for so many of us. So I wanna thank you again for all you do, for being episode 2001 as well as number one as well. So it's a cool milestone for us here.

• 1:28:25Robert Greene?

  Okay.

• 1:28:26Lewis Howes?

  My final question is what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:28:31Robert Greene?

  My definition of greatness is knowing who you are to the core and realizing what that core would be, what, what, what is truly you, what is unique about you? The special weird power you have been born into, the seed that was planted in your birth. Knowing it and bringing that seed to life is truly greatness.

• 1:28:54Lewis Howes?

  Robert Green, thank you for being here.

• 1:28:55Robert Greene?

  Thank you so much, Phil Lewis. I always love it.

• 1:28:57Lewis Howes?

  Amazing. My friend, I hope you're enjoying this episode right now because we are on a mission to impact 100 million lives every single week. And every follow here on this podcast helps us reach more people. Make sure to hit the follow at the top of this show's page right now. It's the single biggest thing that you can do to support the show and the impact of us reaching you every single time we have new episodes. I appreciate you and I can't wait to see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links.

• 1:29:38Lewis Howes?

  And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I wanna remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

• 1:30:23Lewis Howes?

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