Is Spirituality Compatible With Modern Life? - Rob Bell | Modern Wisdom Podcast 245

You have Google engineers who are the whole comfort of rationalism and would mock anything spiritual or religious, but then can't wait to show you the photos of their weekend at Burning Man where they ran around half-naked in (laughs) the desert-

Off their face on psychedelics.

... acknowledging a burning ... Yes. Saying, "Oh, man, I was in touch with the universal cosmic oneness."

(laughs) .

It's funny that you would say that because that's a direct quote from the Old Testament, the Bhagavad Gita. And Buddhism even actually has a very sophisticated 2,000-year-old way of naming what you think is just, "I had mushrooms and felt one taste."

(laughs) Can you tell, for the people who don't know, give us your background. How did you end up here?

How did I end up here? I, from a young age, was utterly fascinated with the big questions of what we're doing here. How does this whole thing work? What is this wondrous, strange experience that we are having on a ball of rock hurtling through space at 67,000 miles an hour? And in the world I came from, if you're interested in those things, you become a spiritual teacher, a pastor. Uh, you help people explore the big mysteries. So that's what I did. That's what I've been doing for a long time now, and I love it. So books, tours, films, events, um, however I can help create spaces where people can discover who they are and what we're all doing here, I'm in.

You could have gone down a couple of routes there, couldn't you?

Yes.

It could have been psychology-

Yes.

... philosophy, physics, mathematics, public service-

Yes.

... in some form or another.

Yeah, and it was interesting. My dad was a judge for 44 years. So he woke up every morning, put on a suit, went to a courthouse, and presided over trials. So, so he had, uh, this ... I'm trying to think of the right word. This old-school sense of public service. You know what I mean? Like, there's this proper dignified role that you play in society. You know what I mean? Where you, you give yourself to the greater good as an act of service. In his case, the ad- administration of justice. So I sort of grew up in this setting where you're here to help contribute. Like, that was, like, baked into the DNA of the home I came in, came up in. Yeah.

Where are you from? Where is home?

I grew up in Michigan, so in between Chicago and Detroit.

Okay. Is that quite typical to have this wholesome, uh, sort of-

(laughs) . Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It was Midwest. You go to, uh, soccer practice, although you properly refer to it as football.

Correct.

Um, you take piano lessons. You go to the, the public school, which for you all, like, like, the school that everybody goes to, not, like, a private thing. You just, um ... you ride your bike to school. You know what I mean? (laughs) Like, there are ... Like, it was, um ...Yeah, you do your homework. You have a dog. Yeah, it was, yeah, it was ... Yet my parents, though, I'm trying to s- think how to say this. There was a- an intellectual restlessness, an intellectual, spiritual restlessness. They were always reading, having interesting people for dinner, like, giving me ... I remember in high school, my dad being like, "There's this guy, C.S. Lewis. You might find him interesting." (laughs) Like, there was this sort of searching, exploring, endless conversations about the big things. It was sort of just normal part of life.