Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Today our show is just a little bit different because we're going to explore a story behind the story in the news. But the story in the news is just the basic idea of crisis. In recent weeks, the United States has felt like a nation in crisis, and then that national crisis is repeated out at the individual level for hundreds or thousands, or maybe even millions of people, each of whom is struggling with the core questions of how to live, to talk about crises, and how we can draw on the resources of spirituality to address them. I'm joined today by Professor Michael Alexander. Professor Alexander is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and he's the author of an extraordinary new book called Making Peace with the Universe, Personal Crisis and Spiritual Healing. I've known Mickey since we were graduate students together, and I had the pleasure and the privilege of hearing him talk through and work on the ideas that went into this book for years. When the book finally emerged. It moved me tremendously. It's written accessibly, it's written beautifully, and it's written in a way that can affect the reader at an individual, personal level. In other words, it's nothing like an academic book usually is. Mickey, Thank you so much for being here for me. This is like the culmination of a little dream to get you onto this podcast to talk about this amazing book and making peace with the universe. So first of all, just thank you for doing it, and thank you for being here. Yes, you've been involved with this for a long time. I cried on your shoulder many nights trying to figure this thing out, and it's great to finally see it in the world. Your book starts with a crisis, and then it's going to give us more people's crises, but it starts with a crisis of your own, and the crisis takes place on Sardinia, which you call a playground for Europe's richest people, which is not the obvious place for a crisis. But maybe start, if you would, by telling the listeners what that crisis was, because that will help us understand why you wrote the book. The original inspiration for the book is older than the crisis. I've been teaching religion and religious studies now for twenty years and have been studying it professionally for thirty. And I got my first job at the University of Oklahoma in nineteen ninety nine, having moved there from the East Coast. And I turned on the radio and I heard this song, a country song that I'd never heard before, because I'd never really listened to country music before. And it was by this supergroup called the Highwaymen, and it had Willie Nelson and cut Johnny Cash. The song is about the spirit of adventure. The first verse is sung by Willie Nelson and it's about a pirate on the seas, and the second verse is about some kind of other adventurer. And I got in my head that someday I would like to write a book about the spirit of spiritual adventure. And it just sat there for ten years, and then I came to my own crisis. As it were, I was having family trouble. It was nothing exceptional, in fact, it was just sort of very typical domestic chaos. But I did wonder, after all these years of studying about the care of the soul, how come I wasn't able to sort of take care of my own. And at that exact moment, I was called upon by a good friend who was getting married on the island of Stardenia, to say some words at his wedding. And I didn't have anything to say. I was on the airplane, I had a yellow pad in front of me that was completely empty of any notes to say about the reality of marriage. And off I went to try to say something to these people. While I myself was contemplating getting out of my own up on the dais, a verse from the Upanishads returned to me, and that's what I talked about. And the verse is a fascinating verse from the Kathopanishad, which is a very old text roughly the period of the Hebrew Bible, and it's the story about a person who was given a favor or a gift by the gods. They're given the opportunity to ask death any question that you could possibly think of, and so the person who's given the gift thinks through what would you ask of death? What would you ask of the entity that has seen the course of every life and knows what a life amounts to? And he asks the question essentially, is there anything in life that is ever feels like you amounted to anything? Is there anything that's worth doing? That's the question. Death responds with a verse which is very terse or succinct, and the verse is there is a path of pleasure and there is a path of joy. Both attract the soul or a person. Those who seek joy come to find it, and those who seek pleasure never come to the end. That's the verse that I quoted for him, and then said a little couple of words about it, and then got off the dais and was completely mortified that I'd said something inscrutable and meaningless at my friend's wedding. But afterwards people came up to me and we talked about it, and I reali that I needed to look more at the classic sources that for so long I had treated as a scholar but had not treated for my own journey, essentially, and so I made on the island of Stardiny, I made this kind of pact with myself to put all my other research on hold, and to start to relook at all the verses and aphorisms and myths and rituals, everything that I'd ever looked at as though I was kind of a zookeeper at the zoo watching other people, and I realized that in fact I was I needed to help myself, and so that began this journey, which turned out it would be a ten year journey in which I had started to very deeply look into those sources. Not as an academic, although it's academically solid and actually all accurate, but really for me, there's something about being an academic that kind of splits us into two parts. Even if we study something that's about the human condition, like you do, you say, a religious study, what could be more fundamentally about the human condition or about the relationship of the human to the divine, We nevertheless get so trained in thinking about history, sociology, philosophy, anthropology that we tend to split what we're studying apart from our actual individual daily lives. And I think, in some ways what's so fascinating to me about your whole project here and about the book that came out of it, is that standing there in Sardinia, you had the realization that there's no point in doing all of this scholarship and study about the human condition if we can't turn it to ourselves and apply it to ourselves. And I think a lot of academics response to that would be no, no, don't don't go there and make you step back. It's too hard and it'll be too hard to be objective. Why did you in that moment think no, I gotta take it the other way. I've got to do the thing that actually non academics imagine we're all doing all the time, namely, if we're looking for the answers to the world's questions, try to look for those answers to use them for ourselves. Well, I can't answer the question in the arena of the law or in the arena of medicine, where somebody can potentially die on the operating table as a result of kind of a method that is unorthodox. But I think I'm liberated by the fact that it is religious studies and that if somebody should fail one of my classes, nobody dies on the operating table. Besides the marital aspect of it. I did have kind of a crisis regarding what am I doing teaching religion, because so much of it, as you're well aware from your own work, is you know, just the crassest justifications of nationalism and sexism and racism, and so I would be standing up in front of my students sort of thinking, what is the value here? Why are we studying all of this old stuff? And it became clear to me that for myself it was the value of it was in the arena of therapy, personal therapy. And that's actually I came to the insight in reading and teaching all these confessions confessional literature for so many years. I realized that most of the great confessions, from Augustine down to the present, to Tulstoy or whoever else, had been the result of somebody having a personal freak out in their lives. And because religion had been the form for therapy before there was modern therapy, people turned to it when they had nowhere else to turn to, when they needed to take one step forward. And I just realized that all of these confessions were, in fact, case histories of spiritual therapy, as it were. But I came to that realization actually as somebody who was seeking. In other words, when I was reading Augustine, I wanted to figure out how he'd figured out his life so I could figure out my life. When I read Tulstoy's Confessions, I was doing the same thing. I stopped reading it as a third person and I started reading the stuff as though it were self helped literature, because I think that's what it was the fastest growing category of quote unquote religious affiliation in the United States. Its people who say, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual. And it really strikes me that your book is partly about how there's really no difference between those things. I mean, in the end, the religious traditions were all designed from the beginning to address spirituality, and the people you write about in your book are on spiritual journeys. I mean, what we have is people tend to associate with religion the institutionalism of it, and that's not why your book is about at all. And that's not what the book is about at all. And I felt liberated and sort of going to the spiritual because there were precedents, and the greatest precedent was actually the founder of American psychology and the founder of American religious studies, William James, who himself had gone through a tough marriage and he was in his late thirties early forties, had never published a book. He was up at Harvard near your offices, sucking down nitrous oxide canisters in his office and calling it research. He was in a bad way, and he started to return to some of the spiritual masters that he had read about it in his youth more seriously, and the result of that work was The Varieties of Religious Experience, which you published in the early part of the twentieth century, and it really turned his life around. So he makes a distinction about religion as an institutional function and religion as a person or private function. And I think a lot of my colleagues have a lot of problem with putting those blinders on it, and I do too, because I think that if you're missing the nationalism and the sexism and the racism and all of that, you're missing a lot about how religion functions. Nevertheless, I still felt this spiritual curiosity, and I felt that there was this essential thing driving people to either religion or spirituality that was not simply them getting pushed around by power politics. That was people looking for something, and I was looking for something. Let's turn now make you too the thing you found. And of course this is part of why people should read the book. But I'd like for listeners to get a flavor of your core observation, the thing you found in the different spiritual traditions that you explored, each of which, in one way or another, picks up on the idea that you began with, the idea that there's a path of joy and a path of pleasure, and you can find the path of joy, but the path of pleasure has no end. That insight simply rang true to me, meaning that when I thought about my own life and instances of pleasure, I thought about all the conquests of Saturday night, that Sunday morning receded into darkness and blackness, and you know, all the times that I was on an internet browser, you know, in four hours later getting up and asking myself what kind of a black hole was I just down? In other words, there it felt like a path with no end. And then I thought about other episodes in my life in which they seemed edifying, the episodes that I would call joyful, and even the words seemed old fashioned to make joy, who even uses it? But the episodes that I would use as joyful or think about as joyful had a kind of edifying aspect to it. And I use the word edifice building up. It meant that after you did that behavior, you felt like you built yourself up, like there was something left standing after you had done it, which was so different from pursuits of pleasure, where they almost receded while you're doing it, if not just shortly thereafter. And I started to think about what's the mechanism by which joys are created. Both of these are flavors of happiness. They're also deeply related to one another. One can enjoy pleasures in a joyful aspect, even something as basic as sexual relations done within the context of a meaningful relationship, it doesn't feel empty. It feels like something has been edified by the act. So I wanted to get to the mechanism of what that was, what transposes pleasures into joys? And sometimes when pleasures aren't available, how do you have joys even in the worst and hardest of circumstances, as we all sometimes have to do. It's not just about chasing pleasures. Sometimes you're alone with your best friend in a hospital gurney and they're passing away, and so those moments that have these intense feelings of connection that are not necessarily related to pleasures but sort of give you a kind of they throw you into a spiritual mood. I wanted to find out how that happened, and I read the sources, and it was pretty clear to me that the obvious statement that we talked about before was the mechanism that made all those things happen, which is that religion was the forum, or is the forum in which people thinking about the weight of the world. And when I gave myself over to the fact that the world has weight and meaning at all, that's when the joy started to arise. What I heard you saying was that when you feel the weight of the world on you, that the key thing to be able to do is to embrace the idea that the world has meaning, and by doing that, you're able to give what you call in the book, giving your assent to the universe instead of fighting back against it, to be at peace with the weight that the world has on you. And so what I wanted to ask you about that because that feels to me like it's very close to the heart of your proposal in the book, very close to what you've derived from these religious traditions. For me, sometimes when I'm feeling that weight, the weight of the world, that's exactly when it's hardest to believe that the world does have meaning. But I heard you to be saying the key is acknowledged that the world has meaning. But for me at least, that's often the hardest part. So what's the trick, as it were? How does one move from feeling the weight of the world to thinking, well, the weight of the world does have meaning, and through that meaning, I give my assent to the universe. Weight and gravity are a metaphor that I use, the reason being that there's no language that can really pin it down. I avoid the word meaning because I'm not sure that joyful moments necessarily have meaning. In other words, I just remember when my kids were young, there was an episode in which my youngest, who might have been three or four at the time, took a piece of saran wrap and pulled it over the toilet bowl as a trap for the next person who would use the toilet, and when I saw it, I felt joy. Now, I don't know what the meaning of the situation was, but I don't think it had significance beyond the fact that the little kid was playing a trick. And yet there was something that about the act that made the world feel like it was revolving on well oiled hinges, that I was at one with a universe that was okay. Sometimes that occurs in very hard circumstances. I used the word gravitoss or gravity, because the idea of it is that things feel like they have weight. I mean, things feel like people are born and people die, and these things matter, and that when I fall into the trap of thinking that these things don't matter, that's usually when my own pain and agonies are actually exacerbated and are the worst. In other words, if one went ahead and tried to do something about those difficulties in the world and embrace them as important or everything about it the world is important, that's when the joys came. So it seemed to me it was emotion. It was an emotional response as opposed to an intellectual one, meaning that recognizing just the reality that I feel that the world and things in't matter, started to feel good. Why do you think that your kids prank had this effect on you? I mean it's almost like a zen cohon of you know, the surround rap or for the toilet pull seed. You know, part of me wants to try to analyze it symbolically and think that it's about out death and that it's about transparency, and you know, but this is clearly the wrong way to go about thinking of this story. The question is why did it do this for you? Why did it give you that feeling of the world having wait in a good way? I think because I saw my kid, who was two or three years old, participating in joy and laughter, and it was a kind of pleasure at the fact of watching a young kid come into themselves and grow old and watch their intellect developed to the point that they were ready to set a trap like that. It was watching the world turn the way it's supposed to, as it were. Something that I find really hard in the context of spiritual growth is making the move from the isolated experience like you're describing, where you have that feeling of connection, you have that feeling of the world doing what it's supposed to do and mattering, and then translating that into a dane feeling of well being. Sometimes I feel very lucky and I am able to experience a moment of what you're calling joy, a moment of connection. Yet I still find it difficult to, as it were, regularize that sentiment or make it feel good over time. What are the traditions that you've studied, in the examples that you've studied, and we're going to turn to some of those examples in a moment, What do they say about that, about that move from a moment of recognition to actually being able to live well and in peace with the universe over time. First of all, it's always moment by moment, and you always slip an in and out of it. There's always a tension with seeing a meaningless universe in which you only want to run away from the problems of it. So it's simple to recognize, but it's never easy to do. A regiment of prayer is a means by which basically all the traditions remind a person to sort of think about how the world is turning. There are greater holidays and lesser holidays, but typically most traditions really advocate taking a break every couple of hours, and for things that you do regularly, such as wash your hands or take a meal, in which it's the time to stop and basically say I appreciate this. I know the alternative it throws you back into a position of gratitude and also of responsibility, by which I mean when you recognize the way to the world, you realize that your job is to pay it forward. The metaphor that I like so much about gravity is that it's not about you, it's about something else. It's about throwing in your chips with some function or power that is not of just about poor me. And the amazing and ironic aspect of doing it is that almost as soon as you stop thinking about poor me and throw one's focus to things that are more important than me, your own therapy or my own therapy was achieved almost instantly. A lot of my own self pity really came exactly from that poor me, poor me. Not that I don't have my own problems, or that other people don't have very, very substantial problems, but paying it forward is a pretty substantial way of digging oneself out of that hole. And I think that the religions really do try to offer ritualized opportunities to do that. We'll be right back, Michael. In your book, you've got amazing chapters which are sort of spiritual biographies in miniature of figures who had crises and engaged with them. They're all amazing, But I want to ask you about two in particular one because it was the one that I maybe knew the most about to begin with, and I was fascinated by to it, and the other because it was the one I knew nothing about. So the one I knew a little bit about was the story of the great Muslim philosopher and critic of philosophy of Mohammad al Hazali. I wonder if you'd start with his tale and what it was about his experience that resonated for you. I came across a title of his I didn't know anything about him, and the title was The Alchemy of Happiness. It was written in Persian. It was a Persian pressus of a larger Arabic work that he had been working on for a long time. And I didn't know anything about any of them. And so I started digging in into who is Ghazzali and what is the Alchemy of Happiness? And I happened upon his autobiography, his amazing confession and autobiography The Deliverance from Error, And as I read it to be perfectly honest, I thought a lot about you because you and I go back a long time. I was in graduate school with you when you were in law school, and Gazzali was a lawyer. He was the top lawyer for the sultan in a period in which the sultan ran everything practically from India to Turkey, and he had a really good job. He was the top of the law profession. The things that he said and the ink strokes of his pen really changed lives, hundreds of them, thousands of them. And then one day or over a period of a couple of weeks, all the top people were dead. There was either a coup or bad things happened, and everything that Gazzali had worked towards and had become a part of crashed into the sand, and there was a huge power vacuum that occurred in the region. And Gazzali didn't know what to do. He basically had a Cartesian moment of saying, where did we go wrong? How do we start this from the beginning, step by step? And were there calculations that we achieved that we thought we were doing in the name of God that in fact read to the complete devolution of society? And so he took a step back. He did whatever responsible adult would do in the situation. He runs away. He runs away from Baghdad because he's had since he was a kid's spiritual curiosity. He'd heard about the Sufi's his whole life. They had been on the street corners, he'd heard the things they said. They made very little sense to him, but there was something about them that rang like they could be true. These simistics the Sufis are the muslimistics. Yeah, yeah, the Sufis are the great mystics of Islam. So he took the opportunity to go finally, to follow his spiritual curiosity. He and a friend go to Damascus, which at the time was the center of mysticism. It's still a great mystical city. Christianity and Islam have great practices from there. All the great Sufi texts seem to have been published from there. So he gets up and he goes there to study, and his life is turned around on account of it, and he finds grounding, he finds spiritual grounding, and so he really became my intellectual hero. I mean, to this day, I think about Gazzali as the greatest of all time, as it were, you know, because of the bravery of that, because of the bravery of basically being at the top of your profession, feeling like you're not where you need to be and going for it, Which isn't to say that people need to leave their professions or anything like that, but it's as though. I mean, I think Gazzali in particular gave me the permission to look at my own spiritual curiosity because he had done so himself so explicitly and so carefully. I mean, my God, I can't think of an intellectual that really pierced through to the most essential issues more clearly than Gazzali. The other person whom I really wanted to ask you about is the extraordinary jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, and I knew her only as a name and perhaps a little bit of I'd heard a little bit of her music, but I had no idea of the extraordinary story of her crisis. An awakening tell us a little bit about Mary Lou Williams. So I've been trying to teach myself jazz quitar for at least as long as I've been trying to study religion. I'm probably successful in both of them, which is not very much. So. I'd heard about Mary Lou Williams as somebody who had written a conceptual piece in the nineteen forties, called the Zodiac Suite, and that's how she sort of entered the cannon I somehow, I guess, just scratching around, I learned that in nineteen fifty four, when she was at age forty four, she had a mental breakdown and walked off the stage in Paris and decided she was never going back again. And so I became very interested in the life of Mary Lou Williams and why that happened, and so I dug in deep. It turns out that Mary Lou Williams was a piano genius of the rank of Count Basie. It's amazing as a female instrumentalist. She was the piano player that basically swung the Andy Kirk Band in the ninth thirties. So she was a cant partner of a Kansas City group that was there with Count Basie and Benny Goodman and all of them, and she made her bones in the thirties. In the nineteen forties, she moved to New York and became part of the bebop generation and became the teacher to some towering giants of piano, including Thelonious Monk and the great Bud Powell. And so she was kind of recognized as this real heavyweight in the scene. Miles Davis was always trying to record with her. Dizzy Gillespie was essentially her best friend or one of her best friends. And she walked off the stage at age forty four. And when I heard about that, or learned about that, I just felt the same visceral reaction as many of us do, which is the desire to just walk off the stage. And so I investigated as deeply as I could and saw yet another person able to turn their life around. In her case, she was completely desponded in Paris, shows up to get her back to New York and tells her to start praying the Psalms. And Mary Lou Williams had always had a spiritual curiosity, and this opened up in her again the permission to go ahead and look into it. She gave up the piano and she started to pray, very very fervently. And then, even though she was an African American woman raised essentially in Baptist circles in New York City, as she was kind of wandering around in Harlem on a Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon looking for somewhere to sort of pray because she'd become quite fervent in it. She noticed that the Catholic church was open, which is such an amazing aspect of Catholicism, which is that the churches, where the cathedrals, are just there for people to walk in to get a little bit of rest and to have maybe a private chat with the Creator or whoever or however you want to conceive of divinity. And she started to do that very very regularly, and at some point she started to hear things, specifically music on her knees praying before her suffering Savior. She started to get sounds in her head, and she decided, I have to put this into music for other people to appreciate the same feeling of prayer that I have more with than reading my book. I recommend people go and listen to Mary Low's Mass. That's the first thing I would tell them to do. It's a stunning work. It's not Bach or Mozart. It swings. Her genius was the recognition that the swing rhythm brings people together. Rhythm is one of the most profound and ancient aspects of the religious or spiritual life. I mean, all traditions essentially have it. We have native American traditions from fifteen thousand years ago. Very likely there are these architectural circles that are created in North America that are currently reflected in sundance rituals. But these rituals are all around the world of people getting together with rhythm together and then commuting with one another and something larger than themselves. And she wrote that she realized that that's what jazz could be, and she became absolutely committed to writing a jazz mass and having it performed at the Vatican. It's a great story. I could talk about it forever. It's an extraordinary story, and I agree with your recommendation. That's what I did when I was reading that chapter, is that I immediately went and downloaded her music and listened to it while I was reading the chapter, and the combination was really, really extraordinary. I wanted to ask you, Mickey, finally, about whether the process of writing the book, struggling with the ideas in the book, and finding some kind of piece through the book worked for you. I mean, I found, I have to say, reading the book to be extremely powerful and it really helped me in my own journey, clearly an unfulfilled journey in my case to try to come to terms with the weight of the world. And I'm wondering if it was full for you. I wonder if you know when you think about where you are now as a human being in relation to the universe, relative to where you were when you began thinking about this project and struggling with it and putting it through the draft after draft, and the efforts to try to make sense of it and to experience it, do you feel that you are in a different place now? Was writing the book a journey for you in a way that reading the book at obviously a much more modest and small scale, feels like a journey to me? Yes, the book, I mean the answers, Yes, I'm in a better place. I was given permission to follow my spiritual curiosity by Ghazzali, by Mary lou Williams, by the other figures in the book, and that was it. That was the Keys of the Kingdom. And I wanted to you know that earlier desire to write a book about the spirit of spiritual adventure is really what I was trying to achieve, that other people and myself could just see how it had played out in people's lives and worked for them, and just to give people the idea that, hey, you could potentially work from. I feel like, you know, for listeners who may ask themselves practically speaking, Okay, I've got spiritual curiosity, what do I do next? Right? I think the answer is follow it. I think that I think that's the answer. That there's no particular thing for you to do. Everyone has to run their own experiment. And so if you've always wanted to read the Bog of Adida, then pick it up. And if you've always wanted to sort of learn cantatas or whatever your curiosity is, it's worth pursuing in its own right. That earlier distinction between pleasure and joy is a distinction that I make for myself now daily and regularly in a ritualized manner that we were talking about before, which is that I'm constantly asking myself whenever I have enough sort of sentience to be able to ask myself this question, which is what I'm about to do the path of pleasure or is it the path of joy? Is it something that's going to just to pate as soon as I do it, or is it something that's going to be edifying and help me to build myself up, and typically my inner voice is staggeringly clear when I'm aware enough to ask the question. Something tells me when I'm on the right path, and when I'm doing something that is edifying, and when I'm on the wrong path, and when I'm doing something that is going to feel really bad. And spiritual curiosity, I've never seen an instance in my life in which it has led to conditions which I severely regretted. I do have to say that, you know, we do face the problem that people do use religion for all kinds and spirituality for all kinds of terrible things, and I don't know what their inner voice is tell them. I don't know, but for me, that distinction between what is edifying and what is not is clarifying to the very end. Michael Alexander, you can't say it any better than that. Thank you very much for that formulation. I think, especially in times as crazy and as polarized and as intense as the ones we're going through, to try to keep that distinction between pleasure and joy and mind is really revelatory. Thank you. What a pleasure. I'm a longtime listener but a first time caller, so thanks for having me on the show. Thanks Mickey, you well, Okay. Talking to Professor Alexander really brought home for me just why I found his book so powerful. We all encounter and face crises. Sometimes those crises are not of our own making and come from the state of the nation, the way things have felt in recent weeks. Other times, those crises feel like they emerge almost unbidden, out of our own limited human spiritual capabilities and resources. When that happens, we need help, and we need to be able to turn to wise friends and deep thinkers, and as it happens, Mickey Alexander is both for me. The takeaway from our conversation and from his book is that we can look inside ourselves and seek after a path of joy, which doesn't mean that we have big smiles on our faces all the time, but rather that we're able to embrace the experiences of making meaning that we encounter at every minute and every day in our lives, and that can help us make better choices. It can help us move away from the path of transient pleasures or transient pains and in the direction of those things that matter most to us and that therefore enable us to feel the weight of the world and give our assent to it. Until the next time I speak to you. Be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Gencott, our engineer is Martin Gonzalez, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Theme music by Luis Gera at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash feld To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a frat This is Deep Background.

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Today our show is just a little bit different because we're going to explore a story behind the story in the news. But the story in the news is just the basic idea of crisis. In recent weeks, the United States has felt like a nation in crisis, and then that national crisis is repeated out at the individual level for hundreds or thousands, or maybe even millions of people, each of whom is struggling with the core questions of how to live, to talk about crises, and how we can draw on the resources of spirituality to address them. I'm joined today by Professor Michael Alexander. Professor Alexander is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and he's the author of an extraordinary new book called Making Peace with the Universe, Personal Crisis and Spiritual Healing. I've known Mickey since we were graduate students together, and I had the pleasure and the privilege of hearing him talk through and work on the ideas that went into this book for years. When the book finally emerged. It moved me tremendously. It's written accessibly, it's written beautifully, and it's written in a way that can affect the reader at an individual, personal level. In other words, it's nothing like an academic book usually is. Mickey, Thank you so much for being here for me. This is like the culmination of a little dream to get you onto this podcast to talk about this amazing book and making peace with the universe. So first of all, just thank you for doing it, and thank you for being here. Yes, you've been involved with this for a long time. I cried on your shoulder many nights trying to figure this thing out, and it's great to finally see it in the world. Your book starts with a crisis, and then it's going to give us more people's crises, but it starts with a crisis of your own, and the crisis takes place on Sardinia, which you call a playground for Europe's richest people, which is not the obvious place for a crisis. But maybe start, if you would, by telling the listeners what that crisis was, because that will help us understand why you wrote the book. The original inspiration for the book is older than the crisis. I've been teaching religion and religious studies now for twenty years and have been studying it professionally for thirty. And I got my first job at the University of Oklahoma in nineteen ninety nine, having moved there from the East Coast. And I turned on the radio and I heard this song, a country song that I'd never heard before, because I'd never really listened to country music before. And it was by this supergroup called the Highwaymen, and it had Willie Nelson and cut Johnny Cash. The song is about the spirit of adventure. The first verse is sung by Willie Nelson and it's about a pirate on the seas, and the second verse is about some kind of other adventurer. And I got in my head that someday I would like to write a book about the spirit of spiritual adventure. And it just sat there for ten years, and then I came to my own crisis. As it were, I was having family trouble. It was nothing exceptional, in fact, it was just sort of very typical domestic chaos. But I did wonder, after all these years of studying about the care of the soul, how come I wasn't able to sort of take care of my own. And at that exact moment, I was called upon by a good friend who was getting married on the island of Stardenia, to say some words at his wedding. And I didn't have anything to say. I was on the airplane, I had a yellow pad in front of me that was completely empty of any notes to say about the reality of marriage. And off I went to try to say something to these people. While I myself was contemplating getting out of my own up on the dais, a verse from the Upanishads returned to me, and that's what I talked about. And the verse is a fascinating verse from the Kathopanishad, which is a very old text roughly the period of the Hebrew Bible, and it's the story about a person who was given a favor or a gift by the gods. They're given the opportunity to ask death any question that you could possibly think of, and so the person who's given the gift thinks through what would you ask of death? What would you ask of the entity that has seen the course of every life and knows what a life amounts to? And he asks the question essentially, is there anything in life that is ever feels like you amounted to anything? Is there anything that's worth doing? That's the question. Death responds with a verse which is very terse or succinct, and the verse is there is a path of pleasure and there is a path of joy. Both attract the soul or a person. Those who seek joy come to find it, and those who seek pleasure never come to the end. That's the verse that I quoted for him, and then said a little couple of words about it, and then got off the dais and was completely mortified that I'd said something inscrutable and meaningless at my friend's wedding. But afterwards people came up to me and we talked about it, and I reali that I needed to look more at the classic sources that for so long I had treated as a scholar but had not treated for my own journey, essentially, and so I made on the island of Stardiny, I made this kind of pact with myself to put all my other research on hold, and to start to relook at all the verses and aphorisms and myths and rituals, everything that I'd ever looked at as though I was kind of a zookeeper at the zoo watching other people, and I realized that in fact I was I needed to help myself, and so that began this journey, which turned out it would be a ten year journey in which I had started to very deeply look into those sources. Not as an academic, although it's academically solid and actually all accurate, but really for me, there's something about being an academic that kind of splits us into two parts. Even if we study something that's about the human condition, like you do, you say, a religious study, what could be more fundamentally about the human condition or about the relationship of the human to the divine, We nevertheless get so trained in thinking about history, sociology, philosophy, anthropology that we tend to split what we're studying apart from our actual individual daily lives. And I think, in some ways what's so fascinating to me about your whole project here and about the book that came out of it, is that standing there in Sardinia, you had the realization that there's no point in doing all of this scholarship and study about the human condition if we can't turn it to ourselves and apply it to ourselves. And I think a lot of academics response to that would be no, no, don't don't go there and make you step back. It's too hard and it'll be too hard to be objective. Why did you in that moment think no, I gotta take it the other way. I've got to do the thing that actually non academics imagine we're all doing all the time, namely, if we're looking for the answers to the world's questions, try to look for those answers to use them for ourselves. Well, I can't answer the question in the arena of the law or in the arena of medicine, where somebody can potentially die on the operating table as a result of kind of a method that is unorthodox. But I think I'm liberated by the fact that it is religious studies and that if somebody should fail one of my classes, nobody dies on the operating table. Besides the marital aspect of it. I did have kind of a crisis regarding what am I doing teaching religion, because so much of it, as you're well aware from your own work, is you know, just the crassest justifications of nationalism and sexism and racism, and so I would be standing up in front of my students sort of thinking, what is the value here? Why are we studying all of this old stuff? And it became clear to me that for myself it was the value of it was in the arena of therapy, personal therapy. And that's actually I came to the insight in reading and teaching all these confessions confessional literature for so many years. I realized that most of the great confessions, from Augustine down to the present, to Tulstoy or whoever else, had been the result of somebody having a personal freak out in their lives. And because religion had been the form for therapy before there was modern therapy, people turned to it when they had nowhere else to turn to, when they needed to take one step forward. And I just realized that all of these confessions were, in fact, case histories of spiritual therapy, as it were. But I came to that realization actually as somebody who was seeking. In other words, when I was reading Augustine, I wanted to figure out how he'd figured out his life so I could figure out my life. When I read Tulstoy's Confessions, I was doing the same thing. I stopped reading it as a third person and I started reading the stuff as though it were self helped literature, because I think that's what it was the fastest growing category of quote unquote religious affiliation in the United States. Its people who say, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual. And it really strikes me that your book is partly about how there's really no difference between those things. I mean, in the end, the religious traditions were all designed from the beginning to address spirituality, and the people you write about in your book are on spiritual journeys. I mean, what we have is people tend to associate with religion the institutionalism of it, and that's not why your book is about at all. And that's not what the book is about at all. And I felt liberated and sort of going to the spiritual because there were precedents, and the greatest precedent was actually the founder of American psychology and the founder of American religious studies, William James, who himself had gone through a tough marriage and he was in his late thirties early forties, had never published a book. He was up at Harvard near your offices, sucking down nitrous oxide canisters in his office and calling it research. He was in a bad way, and he started to return to some of the spiritual masters that he had read about it in his youth more seriously, and the result of that work was The Varieties of Religious Experience, which you published in the early part of the twentieth century, and it really turned his life around. So he makes a distinction about religion as an institutional function and religion as a person or private function. And I think a lot of my colleagues have a lot of problem with putting those blinders on it, and I do too, because I think that if you're missing the nationalism and the sexism and the racism and all of that, you're missing a lot about how religion functions. Nevertheless, I still felt this spiritual curiosity, and I felt that there was this essential thing driving people to either religion or spirituality that was not simply them getting pushed around by power politics. That was people looking for something, and I was looking for something. Let's turn now make you too the thing you found. And of course this is part of why people should read the book. But I'd like for listeners to get a flavor of your core observation, the thing you found in the different spiritual traditions that you explored, each of which, in one way or another, picks up on the idea that you began with, the idea that there's a path of joy and a path of pleasure, and you can find the path of joy, but the path of pleasure has no end. That insight simply rang true to me, meaning that when I thought about my own life and instances of pleasure, I thought about all the conquests of Saturday night, that Sunday morning receded into darkness and blackness, and you know, all the times that I was on an internet browser, you know, in four hours later getting up and asking myself what kind of a black hole was I just down? In other words, there it felt like a path with no end. And then I thought about other episodes in my life in which they seemed edifying, the episodes that I would call joyful, and even the words seemed old fashioned to make joy, who even uses it? But the episodes that I would use as joyful or think about as joyful had a kind of edifying aspect to it. And I use the word edifice building up. It meant that after you did that behavior, you felt like you built yourself up, like there was something left standing after you had done it, which was so different from pursuits of pleasure, where they almost receded while you're doing it, if not just shortly thereafter. And I started to think about what's the mechanism by which joys are created. Both of these are flavors of happiness. They're also deeply related to one another. One can enjoy pleasures in a joyful aspect, even something as basic as sexual relations done within the context of a meaningful relationship, it doesn't feel empty. It feels like something has been edified by the act. So I wanted to get to the mechanism of what that was, what transposes pleasures into joys? And sometimes when pleasures aren't available, how do you have joys even in the worst and hardest of circumstances, as we all sometimes have to do. It's not just about chasing pleasures. Sometimes you're alone with your best friend in a hospital gurney and they're passing away, and so those moments that have these intense feelings of connection that are not necessarily related to pleasures but sort of give you a kind of they throw you into a spiritual mood. I wanted to find out how that happened, and I read the sources, and it was pretty clear to me that the obvious statement that we talked about before was the mechanism that made all those things happen, which is that religion was the forum, or is the forum in which people thinking about the weight of the world. And when I gave myself over to the fact that the world has weight and meaning at all, that's when the joy started to arise. What I heard you saying was that when you feel the weight of the world on you, that the key thing to be able to do is to embrace the idea that the world has meaning, and by doing that, you're able to give what you call in the book, giving your assent to the universe instead of fighting back against it, to be at peace with the weight that the world has on you. And so what I wanted to ask you about that because that feels to me like it's very close to the heart of your proposal in the book, very close to what you've derived from these religious traditions. For me, sometimes when I'm feeling that weight, the weight of the world, that's exactly when it's hardest to believe that the world does have meaning. But I heard you to be saying the key is acknowledged that the world has meaning. But for me at least, that's often the hardest part. So what's the trick, as it were? How does one move from feeling the weight of the world to thinking, well, the weight of the world does have meaning, and through that meaning, I give my assent to the universe. Weight and gravity are a metaphor that I use, the reason being that there's no language that can really pin it down. I avoid the word meaning because I'm not sure that joyful moments necessarily have meaning. In other words, I just remember when my kids were young, there was an episode in which my youngest, who might have been three or four at the time, took a piece of saran wrap and pulled it over the toilet bowl as a trap for the next person who would use the toilet, and when I saw it, I felt joy. Now, I don't know what the meaning of the situation was, but I don't think it had significance beyond the fact that the little kid was playing a trick. And yet there was something that about the act that made the world feel like it was revolving on well oiled hinges, that I was at one with a universe that was okay. Sometimes that occurs in very hard circumstances. I used the word gravitoss or gravity, because the idea of it is that things feel like they have weight. I mean, things feel like people are born and people die, and these things matter, and that when I fall into the trap of thinking that these things don't matter, that's usually when my own pain and agonies are actually exacerbated and are the worst. In other words, if one went ahead and tried to do something about those difficulties in the world and embrace them as important or everything about it the world is important, that's when the joys came. So it seemed to me it was emotion. It was an emotional response as opposed to an intellectual one, meaning that recognizing just the reality that I feel that the world and things in't matter, started to feel good. Why do you think that your kids prank had this effect on you? I mean it's almost like a zen cohon of you know, the surround rap or for the toilet pull seed. You know, part of me wants to try to analyze it symbolically and think that it's about out death and that it's about transparency, and you know, but this is clearly the wrong way to go about thinking of this story. The question is why did it do this for you? Why did it give you that feeling of the world having wait in a good way? I think because I saw my kid, who was two or three years old, participating in joy and laughter, and it was a kind of pleasure at the fact of watching a young kid come into themselves and grow old and watch their intellect developed to the point that they were ready to set a trap like that. It was watching the world turn the way it's supposed to, as it were. Something that I find really hard in the context of spiritual growth is making the move from the isolated experience like you're describing, where you have that feeling of connection, you have that feeling of the world doing what it's supposed to do and mattering, and then translating that into a dane feeling of well being. Sometimes I feel very lucky and I am able to experience a moment of what you're calling joy, a moment of connection. Yet I still find it difficult to, as it were, regularize that sentiment or make it feel good over time. What are the traditions that you've studied, in the examples that you've studied, and we're going to turn to some of those examples in a moment, What do they say about that, about that move from a moment of recognition to actually being able to live well and in peace with the universe over time. First of all, it's always moment by moment, and you always slip an in and out of it. There's always a tension with seeing a meaningless universe in which you only want to run away from the problems of it. So it's simple to recognize, but it's never easy to do. A regiment of prayer is a means by which basically all the traditions remind a person to sort of think about how the world is turning. There are greater holidays and lesser holidays, but typically most traditions really advocate taking a break every couple of hours, and for things that you do regularly, such as wash your hands or take a meal, in which it's the time to stop and basically say I appreciate this. I know the alternative it throws you back into a position of gratitude and also of responsibility, by which I mean when you recognize the way to the world, you realize that your job is to pay it forward. The metaphor that I like so much about gravity is that it's not about you, it's about something else. It's about throwing in your chips with some function or power that is not of just about poor me. And the amazing and ironic aspect of doing it is that almost as soon as you stop thinking about poor me and throw one's focus to things that are more important than me, your own therapy or my own therapy was achieved almost instantly. A lot of my own self pity really came exactly from that poor me, poor me. Not that I don't have my own problems, or that other people don't have very, very substantial problems, but paying it forward is a pretty substantial way of digging oneself out of that hole. And I think that the religions really do try to offer ritualized opportunities to do that. We'll be right back, Michael. In your book, you've got amazing chapters which are sort of spiritual biographies in miniature of figures who had crises and engaged with them. They're all amazing, But I want to ask you about two in particular one because it was the one that I maybe knew the most about to begin with, and I was fascinated by to it, and the other because it was the one I knew nothing about. So the one I knew a little bit about was the story of the great Muslim philosopher and critic of philosophy of Mohammad al Hazali. I wonder if you'd start with his tale and what it was about his experience that resonated for you. I came across a title of his I didn't know anything about him, and the title was The Alchemy of Happiness. It was written in Persian. It was a Persian pressus of a larger Arabic work that he had been working on for a long time. And I didn't know anything about any of them. And so I started digging in into who is Ghazzali and what is the Alchemy of Happiness? And I happened upon his autobiography, his amazing confession and autobiography The Deliverance from Error, And as I read it to be perfectly honest, I thought a lot about you because you and I go back a long time. I was in graduate school with you when you were in law school, and Gazzali was a lawyer. He was the top lawyer for the sultan in a period in which the sultan ran everything practically from India to Turkey, and he had a really good job. He was the top of the law profession. The things that he said and the ink strokes of his pen really changed lives, hundreds of them, thousands of them. And then one day or over a period of a couple of weeks, all the top people were dead. There was either a coup or bad things happened, and everything that Gazzali had worked towards and had become a part of crashed into the sand, and there was a huge power vacuum that occurred in the region. And Gazzali didn't know what to do. He basically had a Cartesian moment of saying, where did we go wrong? How do we start this from the beginning, step by step? And were there calculations that we achieved that we thought we were doing in the name of God that in fact read to the complete devolution of society? And so he took a step back. He did whatever responsible adult would do in the situation. He runs away. He runs away from Baghdad because he's had since he was a kid's spiritual curiosity. He'd heard about the Sufi's his whole life. They had been on the street corners, he'd heard the things they said. They made very little sense to him, but there was something about them that rang like they could be true. These simistics the Sufis are the muslimistics. Yeah, yeah, the Sufis are the great mystics of Islam. So he took the opportunity to go finally, to follow his spiritual curiosity. He and a friend go to Damascus, which at the time was the center of mysticism. It's still a great mystical city. Christianity and Islam have great practices from there. All the great Sufi texts seem to have been published from there. So he gets up and he goes there to study, and his life is turned around on account of it, and he finds grounding, he finds spiritual grounding, and so he really became my intellectual hero. I mean, to this day, I think about Gazzali as the greatest of all time, as it were, you know, because of the bravery of that, because of the bravery of basically being at the top of your profession, feeling like you're not where you need to be and going for it, Which isn't to say that people need to leave their professions or anything like that, but it's as though. I mean, I think Gazzali in particular gave me the permission to look at my own spiritual curiosity because he had done so himself so explicitly and so carefully. I mean, my God, I can't think of an intellectual that really pierced through to the most essential issues more clearly than Gazzali. The other person whom I really wanted to ask you about is the extraordinary jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, and I knew her only as a name and perhaps a little bit of I'd heard a little bit of her music, but I had no idea of the extraordinary story of her crisis. An awakening tell us a little bit about Mary Lou Williams. So I've been trying to teach myself jazz quitar for at least as long as I've been trying to study religion. I'm probably successful in both of them, which is not very much. So. I'd heard about Mary Lou Williams as somebody who had written a conceptual piece in the nineteen forties, called the Zodiac Suite, and that's how she sort of entered the cannon I somehow, I guess, just scratching around, I learned that in nineteen fifty four, when she was at age forty four, she had a mental breakdown and walked off the stage in Paris and decided she was never going back again. And so I became very interested in the life of Mary Lou Williams and why that happened, and so I dug in deep. It turns out that Mary Lou Williams was a piano genius of the rank of Count Basie. It's amazing as a female instrumentalist. She was the piano player that basically swung the Andy Kirk Band in the ninth thirties. So she was a cant partner of a Kansas City group that was there with Count Basie and Benny Goodman and all of them, and she made her bones in the thirties. In the nineteen forties, she moved to New York and became part of the bebop generation and became the teacher to some towering giants of piano, including Thelonious Monk and the great Bud Powell. And so she was kind of recognized as this real heavyweight in the scene. Miles Davis was always trying to record with her. Dizzy Gillespie was essentially her best friend or one of her best friends. And she walked off the stage at age forty four. And when I heard about that, or learned about that, I just felt the same visceral reaction as many of us do, which is the desire to just walk off the stage. And so I investigated as deeply as I could and saw yet another person able to turn their life around. In her case, she was completely desponded in Paris, shows up to get her back to New York and tells her to start praying the Psalms. And Mary Lou Williams had always had a spiritual curiosity, and this opened up in her again the permission to go ahead and look into it. She gave up the piano and she started to pray, very very fervently. And then, even though she was an African American woman raised essentially in Baptist circles in New York City, as she was kind of wandering around in Harlem on a Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon looking for somewhere to sort of pray because she'd become quite fervent in it. She noticed that the Catholic church was open, which is such an amazing aspect of Catholicism, which is that the churches, where the cathedrals, are just there for people to walk in to get a little bit of rest and to have maybe a private chat with the Creator or whoever or however you want to conceive of divinity. And she started to do that very very regularly, and at some point she started to hear things, specifically music on her knees praying before her suffering Savior. She started to get sounds in her head, and she decided, I have to put this into music for other people to appreciate the same feeling of prayer that I have more with than reading my book. I recommend people go and listen to Mary Low's Mass. That's the first thing I would tell them to do. It's a stunning work. It's not Bach or Mozart. It swings. Her genius was the recognition that the swing rhythm brings people together. Rhythm is one of the most profound and ancient aspects of the religious or spiritual life. I mean, all traditions essentially have it. We have native American traditions from fifteen thousand years ago. Very likely there are these architectural circles that are created in North America that are currently reflected in sundance rituals. But these rituals are all around the world of people getting together with rhythm together and then commuting with one another and something larger than themselves. And she wrote that she realized that that's what jazz could be, and she became absolutely committed to writing a jazz mass and having it performed at the Vatican. It's a great story. I could talk about it forever. It's an extraordinary story, and I agree with your recommendation. That's what I did when I was reading that chapter, is that I immediately went and downloaded her music and listened to it while I was reading the chapter, and the combination was really, really extraordinary. I wanted to ask you, Mickey, finally, about whether the process of writing the book, struggling with the ideas in the book, and finding some kind of piece through the book worked for you. I mean, I found, I have to say, reading the book to be extremely powerful and it really helped me in my own journey, clearly an unfulfilled journey in my case to try to come to terms with the weight of the world. And I'm wondering if it was full for you. I wonder if you know when you think about where you are now as a human being in relation to the universe, relative to where you were when you began thinking about this project and struggling with it and putting it through the draft after draft, and the efforts to try to make sense of it and to experience it, do you feel that you are in a different place now? Was writing the book a journey for you in a way that reading the book at obviously a much more modest and small scale, feels like a journey to me? Yes, the book, I mean the answers, Yes, I'm in a better place. I was given permission to follow my spiritual curiosity by Ghazzali, by Mary lou Williams, by the other figures in the book, and that was it. That was the Keys of the Kingdom. And I wanted to you know that earlier desire to write a book about the spirit of spiritual adventure is really what I was trying to achieve, that other people and myself could just see how it had played out in people's lives and worked for them, and just to give people the idea that, hey, you could potentially work from. I feel like, you know, for listeners who may ask themselves practically speaking, Okay, I've got spiritual curiosity, what do I do next? Right? I think the answer is follow it. I think that I think that's the answer. That there's no particular thing for you to do. Everyone has to run their own experiment. And so if you've always wanted to read the Bog of Adida, then pick it up. And if you've always wanted to sort of learn cantatas or whatever your curiosity is, it's worth pursuing in its own right. That earlier distinction between pleasure and joy is a distinction that I make for myself now daily and regularly in a ritualized manner that we were talking about before, which is that I'm constantly asking myself whenever I have enough sort of sentience to be able to ask myself this question, which is what I'm about to do the path of pleasure or is it the path of joy? Is it something that's going to just to pate as soon as I do it, or is it something that's going to be edifying and help me to build myself up, and typically my inner voice is staggeringly clear when I'm aware enough to ask the question. Something tells me when I'm on the right path, and when I'm doing something that is edifying, and when I'm on the wrong path, and when I'm doing something that is going to feel really bad. And spiritual curiosity, I've never seen an instance in my life in which it has led to conditions which I severely regretted. I do have to say that, you know, we do face the problem that people do use religion for all kinds and spirituality for all kinds of terrible things, and I don't know what their inner voice is tell them. I don't know, but for me, that distinction between what is edifying and what is not is clarifying to the very end. Michael Alexander, you can't say it any better than that. Thank you very much for that formulation. I think, especially in times as crazy and as polarized and as intense as the ones we're going through, to try to keep that distinction between pleasure and joy and mind is really revelatory. Thank you. What a pleasure. I'm a longtime listener but a first time caller, so thanks for having me on the show. Thanks Mickey, you well, Okay. Talking to Professor Alexander really brought home for me just why I found his book so powerful. We all encounter and face crises. Sometimes those crises are not of our own making and come from the state of the nation, the way things have felt in recent weeks. Other times, those crises feel like they emerge almost unbidden, out of our own limited human spiritual capabilities and resources. When that happens, we need help, and we need to be able to turn to wise friends and deep thinkers, and as it happens, Mickey Alexander is both for me. The takeaway from our conversation and from his book is that we can look inside ourselves and seek after a path of joy, which doesn't mean that we have big smiles on our faces all the time, but rather that we're able to embrace the experiences of making meaning that we encounter at every minute and every day in our lives, and that can help us make better choices. It can help us move away from the path of transient pleasures or transient pains and in the direction of those things that matter most to us and that therefore enable us to feel the weight of the world and give our assent to it. Until the next time I speak to you. Be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Gencott, our engineer is Martin Gonzalez, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Theme music by Luis Gera at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash feld To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a frat This is Deep Background.