5 Ways to Find Your Faith

Sponsor message

0:00Have no fear. Chosen Foods is here to defend your favorite foods from the forces of seedy oils and sketchy ingredients with cooking oils, salad dressings and mayo, all powered by the good fats from 100% pure avocado oil and simple, delicious ingredients. Chosen Foods. Why is it in your late 40s and early 50s, maybe before, that you find a pull to religion when you didn't have one before? That might seem weird because we're talking about faith here, which is a belief in things unseen. The faith in things unseen that you had from a kid, they don't grow as you get older. You don't like, you know, at 49 years old, you're like, you know, I do believe in Santa Claus. I think they're making a good case for the tooth fairy, said no 49-year-old ever who's of sound mind.

0:41I myself was raised in the evangelical Christian tradition. I converted to Catholicism as a teenager, probably as an act of adolescent rebellion. My parents didn't like it at first, but they finally conceded that it was probably better than drugs. So there you go. This idea of religious exploration, this kind of pull that people often have toward faith or spirituality, maybe even to change what they thought of as faith. What's behind that? What's the psychology and even the neuroscience behind these urges and what can you do about it? That's today's episode.

The pull toward faith in midlife

1:12Hi, everybody. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about love and happiness, how you can get more of it in your life and bring more of it to the lives of other people. And that's my mission, professionally and personally, to lift people up in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. I'm really honored that you're with me and grateful to you for that. Thank you for sticking with the show. If you're a longtime viewer, listener, and thank you for joining us for the first time. If this is indeed your first time, I hope you enjoy it.

1:43This is today a show about a question that I often get. And as the show goes on over the months, we're getting more and more and more questions. And when I see questions kind of piling up around a certain topic, well, that's when we'll schedule an episode around that particular question. And this is a question that I get from a lot of people who are not super young.

They're proceeding in years, not as old as me, but, you know, people in the 30s and 40s often say, you know, I've never been religious, but I'm feeling like I'm more open to it than I've been in the past. And I don't understand this. People who are on kind of a religious quest. This is related to a common question I do get from very young adults as well, which is, you know, I was raised in a faith, but I kind of wandered away and I'd like to make my way back.

2:26This idea of religious exploration, this kind of pull that people often have toward faith or spirituality, maybe even to change what they thought of as faith. What's behind that? What's the psychology and even the neuroscience behind these urges? And what can you do about it? How can you live better as a result of it? Should you deny it? Should you lean into it? How do you do that? How can you navigate a change of faith or a surge of faith in your life? That's today's episode. Now, as always, please do feedback as much as you possibly can and are comfortable doing. Write to us at officehours at arthurbrooks.com. That's the email address for the program. You can also leave a comment. We read all the comments, even the negative ones. Those are really useful to us too. So thank you for giving us your thoughts. And do us a favor here.

3:13One of the things that we've noticed is that a lot of people listen to the show. It's getting more popular, but most people who listen or watch the show don't subscribe to the YouTube channel or to the podcast on Spotify or Apple. It just kind of comes across their feed. And that's not a great way to get this if you want to keep doing it over and over again. It also doesn't help us in the algorithm of these platforms to spread it to new people. So do us a favor here. Hit the like and subscribe buttons on that. You'll get it automatically and more people will get it as well.

3:45Think of this as paying it forward to other people who are going to like this show who haven't seen it yet. As always, if you want more on this and the things that we're doing, do subscribe to my free newsletter. It comes out every Friday morning. It starts off with updates and my stupid dad jokes, but it goes on to something of real substance. There are usually 300 or 400 words on a topic that I might or might not be covering here in the podcast. A way to end your week and go into the weekend perhaps. A lot of people are subscribing to this now. We have more than a quarter million people who are getting this every single week with a very, very high open rate because we're always experimenting to make that as useful as possible.

4:21So to get that, go to arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter. If you'd like to start thinking about these ideas in person and community, one place you might look at that is to see where we're doing retreats. We're actually doing in-person retreats as well. Sometimes I'm involved and members of my team are doing it and there are all different ways to interact with other people interested in these ideas of the science of love and happiness. For that, go to retreats.arthurbrooks.com. Right now, you're like Neo in the Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life, or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit.

4:55It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system. Just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings. You're addicted. You don't like it, and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it. That's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Well, here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to use less data.

5:29It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data. Earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life. And you're going to like how it feels.

A personal journey through traditions

5:44Okay, now on to the main theme of today's program, which is how to find your faith. How to re-find your faith. How to deal with this weird surge in an interest in spirituality that you didn't quite recognize and might be disconcerting to you. That's what I want to talk about. Now, I was raised personally in a Christian family. Those of you who follow my work, you know that this is the case. I have actually missionaries on both sides of my family. My great-grandparents were missionaries in Africa. My grandparents on the other side were missionaries in the Navajo Nation and later were very involved in evangelical Christian education.

6:19I myself was raised in the evangelical Christian tradition. I converted to Catholicism as a teenager, probably as an act of adolescent rebellion. My parents didn't like it at first, but they finally conceded that it was probably better than drugs. So there you go. And as a result of that, you know, since the age of 16, I've been a Catholic. And it's very important to me. My wife, Esther, and I, we practice our faith every day. As a matter of fact, I go to Mass every day, which is one of the ways that I try to experience transcendence. The data are really clear, and you've heard me talk about in this program, and you'll hear me talk about more,

6:52that the idea of being able to zoom out on your life, whether it's spiritual or religious or just philosophical, is really great. And, of course, my faith does that for me. Now, there's metaphysics behind it that are more important than just that. My faith is a commitment to me for other reasons than just the big benefits that it gives me. But the benefits are real, to be sure. And I really love my faith. That said, I also have a deep love and respect for other faiths and a real interest in other faiths around the world. And that's a lifelong interest for me. It started fundamentally when I was in high school, as a matter of fact, and I started studying North Indian classical music.

7:29I came upon an international music store, a record store in those days, in the University District in Seattle. And I started buying albums of North Indian, Hindustani classical musicians like Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan and some of these great musicians. Later, when I was 18 years old, I took tabla lessons. That's North Indian classical drumming. And in the Indian tradition, Hindustani classical music has great religious significance, which led me to start reading more from the philosophers and the theologians and the great spiritual teachers from that part of the world.

8:02As a young adult, I came across a great book that influenced me greatly called Autobiography of a Yogi by Pramahansa Yogananda, who was a Bengali sage, a Bengali yogi. He was mostly responsible for introducing ideas of Hinduism to the West in the 1920s. And you might say to yourself, wait, it took till the 1920s? And the answer is, yeah. I mean, Hinduism didn't penetrate out of India for a long time, especially into the United States. It's a relatively late entrant, despite the fact that Hinduism is 6,000 years old.

8:34It's a really ancient thing, but it took a long time to leave the Indian subcontinent in terms of the way that it would influence other people around the world. And so when Pramahansa Yogananda came to the United States in the 1920s, he wrote his autobiography, which was really an autobiography of faith. It wasn't just, you know, I was born here and did this and that. It talked about, you know, the essence of what Hinduism, deep Hinduism meant. And it enchanted a lot of Americans. It captivated their imagination. And I was one of those Americans, not from the 1920s, obviously.

9:04It was much later than that. But it was a really helpful book to me. It didn't shake my Christian faith. What it did was it deepened my understanding of, you know, ways to, for example, meditate. And meditating in the Catholic tradition is an ancient thing, too. It just, it helped me. And it's sort of cross-training, if you'll do, if you'll, if you'll, you'll forgive the metaphor. It's really good for you to cross-train if you're an athlete. And I felt that it was kind of religious cross-training for me. As the years went on and I got more interested and read more and more, not just by Yogananda, but by other Hindu sages,

9:38there was a particular concept that I got very interested in. And by the way, around the time that I was getting exposed to Indian thinking, I made my first trip to India. So it's not like I was just doing a, you know, from, from the comfort of my Seattle home. I went to India for the first time on tour as a musician when I was 19. And I had the weird mixed fortune of actually having a, um, a snafu in my travel that stranded me in, in, in Chennai, in Southern India, in, in the capital of Tamil, Tamil Nadu, in the deep heart of the, probably the most spiritual part of India.

10:15I spent three days off the grid because all the telephone lines were down. And this is in the early 1980s and just kind of wandering around, um, Chennai and some of, and I was, I had a hotel room, a very cheap hotel room in, in, in a not so great part of Chennai. But it was a very interesting, full experience for me. From there, I went to Calcutta and from there to, um, Mumbai. And, and that experience really solidified my deep, deep interest and respect and fascination and love for what I consider to be the most interesting country in the world, which is India. I want a lot of interest. Look at the money.

10:46The rupees have, I think, 22 alphabets on them, um, from the different languages of India. It's a, it's a complex place, uh, religiously as well as everything else. Well, as time went on, there was one particular concept, especially as I became, I left music and became a behavioral scientist.

Learning the ashramas in India

11:02As a behavioral scientist, there was one concept in Hinduism I needed to understand better because I had heard, I had it on good authority from a, from an Indian scientist that if you wanted to understand the changes in human behavior that proceed naturally in the course of life, you needed to understand the idea of ashramas. Now, ashramas, or it's a concept, and that's a, that's a word from Sanskrit that means the, the sections of life. It really means the quarters of a well-balanced, perfect life.

11:34And the theory of the ashramas is that people proceed over the quarters of life. And if they understand it and they understand how they're naturally changing and where they need to go, their life will be much better. And there'll be more spiritually adroit, physically healthier, happier as people, and bring more love into the world. I'm like, I want that. I want to understand that because it's a predictive theory of how people change, but it's, it's a prescriptive theory on how people can change well, if they understand it. So I, I, I asked everybody I knew, tell me about the ashramas. And I, and I knew some people that, that were, you know, deeply versed in, in Hindu philosophy and Vedic philosophy that would explain it to me who are from India, but I wasn't getting as much as I needed.

12:16At one point I decided I really needed to go there and, and find somebody, find a teacher who could teach me about this idea. So what this really was, was research for a behavioral scientist, but a behavioral scientist with a deep love and respect for, for Hindu religion and Indian culture, and somebody deeply committed to my own religion. It was a, it's a weird amalgam of, of motives for why I was doing this, but I did in February of 2018. This was one of my annual trips. Now for a long time, for, you know, decades now, I've been going every year to India and this was one of my annual trips, but it was, uh, with a motive, a key motive of finding a teacher for me about the ashramas.

12:58So that was in February of eight, 2018 that I did that. I was staying in Kochi, which is in Kerala in Southern India. Now, actually, interestingly, Kerala is the most Christian region of India where 25% of Keralan Indians are, are Christians, uh, about half of them Catholics. And, uh, I, I venerated the wrist bone in a, in a, in a Catholic ashram of St. Thomas, the apostle, doubting Thomas. As a matter of fact, Thomas is believed to have left the, the Holy Land after the death of Jesus and gone to India and, and evangelized and, and, and set up seven churches across Southern India.

13:36And it was martyred in Chennai. You know, that's a pretty interesting point because that was in about the, the year 52, according to this belief. And if that's the case, that means that Indians were the receivers of early Christianity before any Europeans, before St. Paul actually made it to the Thessalonica, which is the first part of Europe that, that received the message. Um, and, and when you go there and you meet Christians in India, they'll tell you that, you know, they speak in their, in their churches, Syriac, which is, um, related to Aramaic, the, the language.

14:08That Jesus actually spoke when he walked the earth and, uh, it's their ancient liturgical language. And it's like, well, wow. I mean, they're getting the language effectively a dialect of what Jesus was speaking. It is pretty ancient. That's, that, that's obvious. And they'll tell you, we were the OG Christians outside of the Middle East, outside of the desert regions. And, and, uh, it's, um, they have a, they have a plausible claim to that distinction. I have to say, anyway, so I started off in the city of Kochi and I had some, you know, veneration of, of, of some Christian relics and icons.

14:39Uh, but the real reason I was there was to meet a guru that I had made contact with. I had heard about, and who is quite well known in India, but not well known outside India. His name is Sri Nocharvenka Charaman. He's a, a Tamil guru who is a descendant, a spiritual descendant of the, one of the greatest gurus of the past hundred years, uh, several hundred years in India named Ramana Maharshi. Um, he's considered to be even an avatar of Ramana Maharshi, who died before he was born because it was, he was really alive in the, in the 1950s.

15:11Um, he was in, at the time in Palakkad, which is a city on the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Um, it's a kind of an indistinct Indian city, largely agricultural town, uh, that's agricultural. It took me hours and hours to get there by car. I got up at four o'clock in the morning and traveled for hours to, to get there to this unremarkable town and unremarkable house that, that we were given the address of. Um, I got there, I, you know, I, I, it was actually kind of hard making contact with, with this great teacher.

15:44Uh, I had it on authority that he could explain this idea to me in very deep terms, but you know, this is not somebody who's doing a lot of marketing of his work. Uh, a lot of Indian gurus who are well-known in the West, it's because they have these big, you know, platforms, you know, even on social media, et cetera. Uh, this is not this man, um, this teacher, this guru, uh, Nochra Venkataraman, on the contrary, very quiet, humble man, simply dedicated to helping people attain spiritual growth. He spoke English, thank goodness, because I don't speak Hindi or, or Malayalam or Tamil, but spoke perfect English as, as, as most well-educated Indians do, but he'd never been outside India or he's certainly never been to the West.

16:25Why would he, I mean, and he, he wanted to bring his students closer to God. That was his whole purpose. Well, I got to this house, I took off my sandals, of course, and I went in and, and, and he was sitting on the floor with devotees arranged around him silently waiting for me. And, and he, he looked at me and made this sort of the, the traditional namaste greeting with his hands. And he said, I've been waiting for you, this intense, deep love and humility.

16:55And I sat down in front of him and I was silent and immediately I was filled with a complete sense of peace. And what proceeded over the next two hours was his explaining to me, this ancient Indian concept of a proper life, my proper life, maybe all of our proper life that's lived in four stages, the ashramas. Now, as he explained it to me, the ashramas are ideally 25 years long. And what that says is the symmetry of the perfect life is it's lived over a hundred years.

17:29Now, of course, that's not realistic in the fact that only one in 6,000 Americans lives to be a centenarian, um, a lot less in India where public health isn't as good as it is in the United States. They're catching up, which is great. But right now the average American life expectancy is 82 and the average Indian life expectancy is 72. The idea is the ideal. It's not, you know, the empirical regular, uh, regularity of what's actually going on. And the ideal is 25 year cycles in life in which we fulfill certain function and we graduate onto the next one using the knowledge that we've gained in the part of life, the quarter of life that preceded it.

18:08So let me tell you what the quarters of life are and what their functions are.

The four quarters of life

18:11And then I'm going to relate it back to this key part of life where people weirdly start feeling more spiritual, more philosophical, and even more religious. And if that's you, this theory is going to explain some things to you about you. The first quarter of life, the guru taught me, it's called brahmacharya. And brahmacharya is the, is, is youth, young adulthood and learning. And this is, you know, birth until about age 25. This is where you're a kid and you're living with your parents and you're going to school.

18:42And if you go to university, you're doing that. And you're learning about your job and your vocation and figuring out what you're going to do for the rest of your life. This is basically human capital development. This is the accumulation of skill and learning. That's the brahmacharya. And brahmacharya means the student phase. This graduates in your mid-20s to grihastha, which is known as the householder phase. This is when you form a family. This is when you make a living. This is perhaps when you start a business. And this is where you make money. This is where you have a lot of what, what cognitive neuroscientists call fluid intelligence.

19:17I've written a lot about this in my own research. Fluid intelligence is based on, on working memory. It's based on brand new ideas, autonomous problem solving, mental facility. It's highest in your 20s and 30s. It goes up all the way through your 20s and 30s. It peaks in your late 30s and starts to fall in your 40s, which is one of the reasons people tend to burn out on their jobs in their 40s. As a matter of fact, more on that here in a second. But that fluid intelligence makes it possible for you to learn a lot and do a lot and have lots of energy and be really ambitious.

19:48And this is when you get kind of hooked into worldly goals, money, power, pleasure, honor, admiration, prestige, all the rewards of the world. That's what Thomas Aquinas, the great Western sage in the 13th century, called the world's idols, as a matter of fact. But they're not evil per se. There's nothing wrong with money per se. Nothing wrong with power per se. It's a question of whether or not we worship those things. That's when they actually become an idol. And that's the great danger of Grihastha.

20:18The second phase, the second quarter of the ideal life is we get stuck there. According to Vedic wisdom, we get stuck in Grihastha. There's two more to go, but we get stuck there because we love the money, power, pleasure, and fame. We love those worldly idols. We can't get away from those worldly idols. We're beguiled by them, but they don't give us true satisfaction, which means that we search for something that will give us more flavor in our lives. And we go in one of two ways. What is to say, I guess I needed more of that? You know, typically what a billionaire says when she or he earns their first billion is I, I'm not feeling what I thought I was going to.

20:55I guess I need another billion. And they stay on the wheel. So that's what we in behavioral science call the hedonic treadmill. We run and run and run. Because according to the Hindu sages, we're stuck in Grihastha. You see how it all hangs together. And my friends, one of the things I want to emphasize here is that when I look at neuroscience, Western theology, Eastern wisdom, behavioral science, it all hangs together. It's very rare that you see discrepancies between these ideas. The question is how the puzzle pieces fit together.

21:25And doing what I do for a living is a thrill because I get to work across all of these areas, just kind of like I'm doing now. Okay, so people get stuck in Grihastha and they're kind of hungry ghosts in their way, going through the world, the sense of a lack of satisfaction. Because they want something and what they use to satiate that appetite isn't what they really want. It's as if you wanted a really nutritious meal, but all you have is another plate of Twinkies in front of you. Like, okay, well, I guess I'll have some Twinkies.

21:58That's the money, power, pleasure, and fame. What you want is to break that cycle. And to break that cycle is to move into the third phase, which some people do. That's when they go into what's called Vanaprastha. Vanaprastha. And again, these phases are going to be, you know, the words are going to be on the screen so you can see them. Vanaprastha is actually an amalgam of two Sanskrit words. Van and Prastha. Van is to retire. I don't mean that literally like quitting your job. That means like backing up.

22:29And Prastha is forest. Backing up into the forest. Obviously, it's a metaphor. And you're backing up out of the worldly world of worldly idols into the forest of quiet and calm and coolness. That's what that's supposed to evoke. Now, people have a natural tendency, a natural appetite for that. And one of the things, one of the signals for that that we would see in Western social science is the tendency for people to burn out on their jobs.

22:59Now, again, related back to this fluid intelligence idea I talked to you about, it peaks in your late 30s and it declines in your 40s. And the reason that people are burning out in their 40s is not just because they've worked too hard all these years and they're workaholics. It's because what used to be impossible or it used to be hard is now impossible. You know, these cognitive puzzles, they tend to get harder. You tend to feel like you're getting rusty even though you've never stopped working. Well, that's normal. It's the normal functioning of the prefrontal cortex of your brain and your fluid intelligence declining. The good news that most people don't understand is there's a second intelligence coming in behind it.

23:33And that's crystallized intelligence based on wisdom and pattern recognition and deeper concepts and goals in your life. Deeper knowledge, intuitive knowledge. If you follow my work, this is right hemispheric knowledge. Things about love and happiness, mystery and meaning, the meaning of life. That starts to come in much, much stronger in your late 30s, early 40s, through your 40s. But if you stay on the wheel of these worldly idols, you're stuck in Grihastha. You're trying to stay on the fluid intelligence curve.

24:04See how I'm mixing west and east there. And you're going to be really, really frustrated. That desire that you have for something deeper, something deeper. That's the calling of Vanaprastha, which is supposed to start really taking over in your late 40s, in your early 50s, according to the quarters of the perfect life where you live to 100 years old. You can see how the pattern is working here. That's also known in Vedic wisdom as the second adolescence, because you're going from being sort of a kid of the world to an adult of the world.

24:34To have a world, a deep, deep, deep, wise understanding of the world. That's what you're supposed to develop in Vanaprastha. It's like being a young adult in your body, but in your brain and mind and heart. That's supposed to be happening in your late 40s and early 50s. You're saying, yeah, I used to think that was cool. I used to think that was important. And I used to really care about that sort of ridicule. Now what I care about is this. And it's something deeper that the young'uns can't quite get. Now, those of you who are young adults, and if you have a yearning for what I'm saying here now, good. Because one of the things that Sri Notra Venkataraman, the guru I was studying with that day, taught me,

25:09is that this doesn't have to go with the exact years. On the contrary, very spiritually adroit people can go into Vanaprastha much earlier and have these yearnings at a much earlier age. A lot of people who follow this work, I know because I hear from you. I know because I know a lot of you. That you are these people who have an accelerated set of ashramas. And I admire that. And it's normal and good. So if that's what you're feeling, don't say, well, it's a mistake. I've got to wait until I'm 50. No. If you're 25 and you're feeling this, it just means that you're advanced, is what that means.

25:41Now, Vanaprastha, when people actually follow this, when they retire into the forest metaphorically, when they go to deeper things, typically in Vedic wisdom, that means they're getting a lot more serious about their spiritual lives. They're getting a lot more interested in their religious lives. And that's a period of elite spiritual training. The idea is it's kind of a spiritual apprenticeship that people undergo starting in their 40s and 50s. And in this spiritual apprenticeship, they're still making a living. I mean, you've got to make it late. You've got to pay the rent, man.

26:13But you put it in proper perspective and you're spending more of your time actually thinking about these deeper things. Typically, in the case of people who are married, which is the majority of adults, you're doing that with your spouse. You and your spouse are in Vanaprastha together. You're getting more spiritual, religious, or more philosophical, talking about deeper things together. You're in deep training for something, something, something. And that something comes in the fourth quarter, the fourth ashrava, which is called sannyasa. The sannyasa is dedicated to the fruits of the enlightenment, to live in the numinescence of what you've been training for in that third quarter.

26:52Vanaprastha is your elite training. Now, a lot of people that I talk to, they say, yeah, you know, I'm fundamentally a religious person. But, you know, when I get older, I'll go back to church. I'll go back to synagogue. I'll go back to temple. I'll go back to, you know, I'll start practicing my religion again seriously when I get older. And they kind of imagine themselves at 75 years old going to church. Well, if you'd never did it before, you probably won't because you didn't do the training to actually appreciate that numinescence, the import of sitting in the divine light.

27:24That's the idea that actually comes from this theory of the ashramas. And it kind of makes sense because I've seen this pattern again and again and again in people where they always wanted to practice their religion. But when they're in their 60s and 70s, they find that they just kind of can't. And I've had a lot of people tell me this. A lot of people in their 60s and 70s and 80s tell me this. And they'll say, you know, you're a religious person. I envy that. I wish I could feel that, you know. And the truth is that that feels unavailable to them because they kind of miss the window. Now, again, it's never too late, folks.

27:54I mean, if you're in your 70s or 80s and you're feeling this and you haven't done it before, what you need to do is you need to study. As the kids these days say, you got to do the work. And that means do your vana prastha is what it comes to. It means reading the Holy Scriptures and studying with people and practicing and learning what it means such that you can get to sannyasa at some point in your life. But that's the goal. And trying to do sannyasa without ever having doing vana prastha, according to these Vedic thinkers, would be like going to the Olympics without having trained.

28:27You know, showing up for the, you know, the 100-yard dash, 25 pounds overweight. Good luck to you. And I would, you know, it'll be a fun blooper reel watching you do the hurdles or something. And it'll be hard, right? You, you know here that you're being pulled in this particular direction of vana prastha. Why? Because you're being pulled towards something that is your ultimate beautiful fate. It's the goal of your life. Now, again, this transcends all the religious traditions, because what we see is this idea of the point of being old is being able to enjoy, to sit in the presence of God, to be able to explain it to other people.

29:09That's what old people are really, really good at if they did the work. What I'm really talking about in this episode is vana prastha. I talked about when you're feeling a pull, whether you're advanced and you're doing it in your 20s, or whether you're right on time in your late 40s, or somewhere in between, maybe you're doing it a little bit late in your 50s or 60s. Why, you know, neurobiologically, why is this happening? And how can you best accommodate it? There are very few books out there that say, so you're feeling religious. You know, here's what you do.

29:40Well, that's what this is for, because I've actually done the work pursuant to this beautiful, beautiful visit. And writing about this. If you want to hear more about a lot of what I'm talking about here, this is in a book that I wrote in 2022 called From Strength to Strength. And we'll put the book cover up and put it in the show notes here. You can get that if you want and you like listening. I read it and you can get the audio version and I will read it to you with the dulcet tones of my reading voice. So however you want, you can go deeper, deeper, deeper, much more than I'm doing here by getting From Strength to Strength.

30:12Okay, so the truth of the matter is that a lot of people are, they feel this pull because, because of Anaprasta.

Data on religious observance by age

30:19But there's a ton of research from the West that shows that this is not just an Indian theory. This is not just Eastern philosophy on the contrary. For example, there's a bunch of data out from 2018 from the Pew Research Center. Again, probably in the United States, one of the three or four most reputable sources of survey data on human behavior in the United States, around the world for that matter. And it's a survey from June of 2018 called Why Do Levels of Religious Observance Vary by Age and Country? And there's a lot in it. Go look at it.

30:50I'll put it in the show notes. You can go click on it. But here's the key point that I want to give you that they show very clearly in those data that people feel that they do, in fact, tend to feel pulled toward faith in midlife. Not everybody. Your results may vary. I know some who don't. I know some avowed atheists are like, no. But, I mean, it's a kind of a natural thing. It's this progression of the fluid to crystallized intelligence curves. Maybe it's the workings of the universe. You decide. You probably don't have to decide, but it is an empirical regularity.

31:21And I think that's really weird. Why is it in your late 40s and early 50s, maybe before, that you find a pull to religion when you didn't have one before? That might seem weird because we're talking about faith here, which is a belief in things unseen. The faith in things unseen that you had from a kid, they don't grow as you get older. You don't like, you know, at 49 years old, you're like, you know, I do believe in Santa Claus. Huh. You know, I think they're making a good case for the tooth fairy. Said no 49-year-old ever who's of sound mind.

31:52On the other hand, there are all these other things that require faith, things as unseen as the tooth fairy. As the Bible clearly says in the first letter of St. John the Apostle, no one sees God. No one sees God. No one sees the tooth fairy either, folks. But there's something different about these experiences. And this is a really compelling explanation, or at least argument, for the idea that there's something different about these mythologies. That there's something different at the level of human consciousness between these mythologies.

32:25One's just a story you tell a kid. Something else has some weird truth behind it, man. And I can't quite say what it is, but I'm getting this pull as I'm naturally tending toward vanaprastha in the changes, the neurophysiological changes in my brain, in the changes of my heart, maybe my soul. But that is absolutely the case, and we see it very, very clearly in the data. Now, sociologists have observed this in the West as well, by the way. There's a great sociologist, James Fowler, who talks about the phases of religious observation.

32:57And he talks about, you know, he categorizes them. When you're a little kid, you believe what you're told. When you are, you know, in elementary school, you believe what your parents believe. When you're in high school and college, you're starting to question a lot of things. In your 20s and 30s, that's when people, they tend to kind of pull away from their childhood beliefs. And those who have very traditional Western religious beliefs, especially Christian religious beliefs, that's when they tend to fall away. For one very fundamental reason, this might be why you fell away, which is that bad things happen to good people.

33:28I mean, it's just, you know, the great book by Rabbi Kushner, why do bad things happen to good people? But that's a big question. You see kids suffering, and you see famine and pestilence, and you say, okay, I learned in Sunday school that there's a good God, a merciful God, a loving God. But then this, really? Sorry. Cognitive dissonance. I hear this. I see that. I'm going to go with what I see, you know. I'm not going to follow Groucho Marx and say, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? No. You're going to follow what you see. And what you see is a lot of misery, and that's inconsistent with the idea of a loving, merciful God.

34:01And so you leave it behind. You question it. You fall away. So that's very, very common in the 20s and 30s. Maybe it's your experience as well. But then a funny thing happens as you start to move from your fluid to a crystallized intelligence, as you move from your Grihasta toward your Vana Prastha, you realize something funny about life, which is there's a lot of things you don't understand and don't make sense. And you're never going to understand, and they're never going to make sense. What you learn at a certain point in your life is that life is a dog's breakfast.

34:31It's a huge mess. And you're not going to sort it out. You have to make decisions on the basis of inconsistency a lot. You honestly believe naturally. And again, this is a theory of how people develop neurocognitively as much as anything else in your 20s and 30s that life doesn't make sense, but it's going to. That life has an internal consistency, and you're going to figure it out. And that somebody does understand what it is. And then you realize, as you proceed through the years, that nobody has it figured out.

35:02No.

35:04And so the result of it is that you've got to make peace with that. And one of the ways that you make peace with that is to say, in this messy world, there can be truths that I don't understand, but that feel right. They feel right, and I can't say why. And that's where a lot of faith and spirituality starts to come in for people at this juncture in their lives, according to the data, the best studies, and perhaps according to your life, and also according to these religious theories that go across traditions.

35:36That's a lot of prostitutes. Now, the problem is this.

Five steps for your spiritual journey

35:41If you're feeling that pull, many people don't know what to do. Now, maybe it's as simple as, you know, you're married to somebody who's religious, and you say, I'm ready, I'm ready, right? Or, you know, going back to the faith of your youth wholesale. But for a lot of people, it's not so simple. Either they weren't raised in a tradition, even though they want one, whatever the tradition might be, they might feel a lot of pride in having, or sort of a sense of, vulnerability, about saying something that they knew was wrong might be right.

36:14I mean, we hate going back on our commitments, man. We hate that. And so people find all these barriers, and there are very few resources out there to do that. Just to retire into the forest is not just enough to say, I'm going to go read some holy books and start hanging out and, you know, praying, and then all is going to be well. You need a more structured approach to it. So what I want to do is I want to give you a few ideas. I want to give you a few ideas on some things that you can actually do if you're feeling this pull. Now, this is not an exhaustive list. Again, read from strength to strength, which actually has a whole lot of references in that book to other tools.

36:50And other books that are written as well have done that. But here's some ideas, and let me see how many ideas I wrote down here that I want to share with you on your journey. Here's four. Maybe I'm going to give you five, as a matter of fact. So number one is this. Loosen your commitments to not believing the nun. It's interesting because one of the least frequent religious commitments that people used to make as recently as the 1970s and 80s was nun. I don't mean nun like a nun, a Catholic nun in a habit, N-U-N.

37:21I mean N-O-N-E. What is your religious tradition? What is your religious commitment? And when I was born in the mid-1960s, 1% of people said nun. Now it's 33% of people say nun. As a social scientist, man, I never see dynamics like that. That's really unusual. So that's a huge run up. But that's a commitment like anything else, and people hate going back on their commitments. It makes them feel bad about themselves. It makes them feel like they lack integrity. It makes them feel vulnerable, as a matter of fact. And there's tons of literature on why that would be the case, but you can imagine why that is.

37:54But loosening an old commitment is very different than adopting a new one. So if you're a nun, but you're having these yearnings, don't let your nun status, your nun identity define you. So the first thing that I recommend in loosening that is, if somebody says, what's your religion? You say, well, nun for now, right? Hedge a little bit. Give yourself a little wiggle room. Because when you do that, then cognitively, you'll be able to grow into the space that you've created for yourself.

38:24And that's a very, very important behavioral technique that you actually have. It's one of the things that we see when people are starting to change their political views. The first thing that they do is they start, they don't abandon theirs, but they start defending people in arguments who don't share their political views. That's a sure sign they're trying to get some wiggle room for themselves, which is great, by the way. That's fantastic. So that's how to do it. No, no, no, no, I don't practice, no, no, no, but for now, but I'm kind of open. That's a pretty interesting commitment right there.

38:55The second is to think of your religious life, your spiritual life, your philosophical life, if it's not traditional or not even religious, for that matter, as an entrepreneurial endeavor, as a new thing that you're actually trying to create, something that you're starting fresh on, something that you've actually never done before, which is a pretty fun and interesting thing to do. You know, I don't mean to trivialize faith at all, but it's sort of your hobby. It's sort of your side hustle is what you're trying to do with your soul, which is super fun and interesting.

39:28The reason for that is because there's so much out there that you can learn. And again, this is with, you still have the commitment of none now, but you're very interested in this thing. Take an intellectual interest in the faith that you're examining or the faiths that you're actually considering. That's the process of entrepreneurial reinvention, behavioral reinvention, is starting fresh, a clean slate with an agenda to learn, to be excited about something.

39:58That's the second thing. That's the second approach to it. It's not like, I'm going to go believe something. No, I'm going to go learn about something. I'm going to learn about that. Learning is so interesting because it feeds into the positive basic emotion that humans have of interest. And this is, if you're going into Vana Prosta, you're going to know it. It's interesting to you. So feed the interest. Don't worry about anything else. Feed that interest. Number three is I recommend doing something physical that actually can open up your soul.

40:29And here's what I recommend. Many of you, if you follow my work at all, you know that I recommend a pilgrimage. Why? Because every religious tradition, every religious tradition has pilgrimages. Pilgrimages are walking journeys where people are dedicating themselves to thinking, contemplating, prayer, practice while they walk. Why? Because there's something about the human species. Ambulation, walking, is the most natural thing. We walk and walk and walk. We're a walking species.

41:01I've probably mentioned it before, but anthropologists have found it really interesting that one of our great feats as predators, as hunters, is the ability to walk long distances. You can literally, if you can track an animal, which I can't, I mean, I can't even track myself. I can't even, I can't read a map. I can't even read my GPS for Pete's sake. But, you know, if you can track an animal, you can walk it to death. You can, you can hunt a gazelle with a spear. You don't have to hit it. You don't have to, you don't have to throw it, you know, 300 yards.

41:32Just walk and walk and walk, track and track and track and track. And you can walk more than it can run. And, and, and, and that's how, you know, early hunters in the Pleistocene, they hunted game, was with this great ambulation. That's a natural human thing to do. And we walk ourselves toward our prey. We walk ourselves metaphorically toward what we actually seek. And in many cases, that's a sense of truth. And that's one of the reasons that every religious tradition, many philosophical non-religious traditions have it as well as a pilgrimage. And so I recommend finding a way to do that, to get away from your ordinary life

42:04on a fairly regular basis and do a pilgrimage. Maybe you're going to walk a couple of sections of the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Coast Trail. I've walked the Camino de Santiago across Northern Spain twice. Maybe you're going to take a walking or hiking vacation, but with a spiritual intent. I want to learn more. I want to listen more. I'm going to maybe do a little bit of prayer. I'm going to read, but do the walking. Because walking has this, not magical, it's quite earthbound, but it has a real effect on your mind, on your brain, maybe on your soul.

42:38I can't prove that one. Now, fourth, I recommend that you get a partner in this, a buddy in this. You know, one of the things that you'll find is that when you've got this, you've got a project, you're trying to learn something important and improve yourself. It's better when you have a buddy because of accountability, but also because it's more fun, which is why people who, you know, the data say that if you're trying to, you know, get into the gym and improve your health, it's better early on if you have a training

43:09partner. Some people will hire a coach. That's the new thing. But I find it's less fun than somebody who's also actually trying to learn alongside you. Now, I've been working at it for 30 years. I don't need that. And besides, no person in their right mind is going to get up and work out with me at 445 in the morning, which is when I'm hitting the gym. But early on, for sure, I wanted to be around people. I wanted to make it social. When it comes to what you're actually trying to do in the gym of your soul, take a partner with you. And this is one of the reasons that ancient Vedic wisdom said that the vanaprastha,

43:40that third quarter, is best done with the spouse. Now, again, your results may differ. Maybe you're not married. Maybe your spouse is like, no, right? But a lot of times, spouses are going through this together. And Esther and I, we deepened our commitments, our religious commitments together in such an incredible way that just was so great for our marriage as we moved through our 40s and 50s. And we're practicing, and we're believers and all that. But our vanaprastha was a deepening thing. And it was very profound.

44:10We learned a lot more. My wife wound up getting graduate education in theology, and she teaches me as a result of that. And you can do these wonderful things together. Get a buddy, get a partner, not necessarily your spouse, but certainly that's a great way to do it. And number five is think about a teacher, is think about actually how you can get a teacher. I've encouraged a lot of people to get a rabbi, to get a teacher, and a lot of my Jewish friends to do that. A lot of people who are not committed to their Christian faith, but to get somebody who really

44:47knows a lot with whom they can actually meet and talk about this, who's not going to put pressure on them, but who's actually going to teach them and who has some authority and who can actually answer questions. These are five steps that I recommend, and there's a lot more that goes along with it. But if you did these five steps with an open mind and with an open heart, not saying, okay, I promise I'm going to convert and it's all going to be... You don't have to have this maudlin, dramatic, religious experience, weeping at an altar call. This is just you, and this is you building your life is the way that this works.

45:19You've got the call inside you, and you're answering the call in this subtle way, the still, small voice that's calling to you through perhaps these five steps. Because don't put it off, and don't put it off because of obstacles in your path. The journey of spiritual discovery is a normal thing, and it's really one of life's greatest delights. Let me leave you, before we go to some questions, with the words of the Indian yogi and poet Sri Aro Mindo, whose work, really a great poet, how he describes faith as an adventure.

45:52All the things we're talking about here. A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell, and take the charge of breath and speech and act. And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns, and every feeling of celestial thrill. Well, celestial or not, the thrill is real. Lean into it. Do a couple of questions, and then we're done.

Evolutionary benefits of dark triad traits

46:14Here's one from an anonymous correspondent who wrote into the website. What are the evolutionary benefits of dark triad traits? A really popular episode of Office Hours is when I talked about the dark triad, and I'll remind you that that's the constellation of three personality characteristics, just simply to be above average on three personality characteristics of narcissism. It's all about me. Machiavellianism. I'm willing to trick and hurt you to get what I want. And psychopathy, psychopathic traits, which again, just above the population average of low

46:46remorse and low empathy. Okay, so those three things together is called the dark triad, and dark triads can wreak havoc in your life. As I often say, that's everybody's first husband. So what are the evolutionary benefits of dark triad traits? And I love this question because this is a question of somebody who obviously watches the show a lot and knows that I'm always relying on evolutionary biology. I mean, it's not the be-all and end-all. It's not the only explanation. But good explanations often start with the human brain in the middle Pleistocene. So, you know, what did it serve? Why is it still here?

47:18What does it serve? Right? An example of this is, why is depression part and parcel of the human experience? And it almost certainly has to do with the fact that depression is characterized by rumination, which is a hyperactivity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain. And that rumination is what we use to learn, to get past something that's hurt us, that's grieved us, that's been a mistake. Like, the learning process requires doing the work, and your brain naturally does that, which can be maladapted and turn into depression.

47:49It's an example of why it still exists according to evolution. Why would dark triads still exist? And the answer to that is almost certainly that being a dark triad brings short-run benefits, short-term benefits. Dark triads, in the very near term, before they get caught and kicked out, they get a lot of resources. I mean, when you trick people and you double-cross them because you only care about yourself, you will see success, at least initially. And the truth is that the ancient world was all short-run because people didn't live very long. You know, it was getting from here to sundown, or here to tomorrow, or here to my next

48:21mate. There are very few long-run benefits. There's mostly long-run costs with respect to isolation and destroyed relationships. And so what we find is that it has evolutionary benefits to the circumstances from a long time ago, but in the modern era, it's largely maladapted. And that's characteristic of a lot of things that we see. Thanks for that question. It's a great social science question.

Reconciling a relationship with God

48:48James Wilday writes into the website, on the Modern Wisdom podcast with Chris Williamson, love Chris Williamson, great podcast, Modern Wisdom. I go on it pretty frequently. You're talking about the difference between totally virtual friends versus those you meet in person. My question is, oh, that's a good question for today. If we only have what is essentially a one-sided virtual relationship with God, how do we reconcile that with him being real? Isn't he just a Facebook friend? That's a really, really good question.

49:19And the truth of the matter is that your faith is insufficient if it feels one-sided to you. Okay, now there are, no, don't get me wrong. There are days when I feel like I'm the only one talking in my prayer. There are days that I feel like that. And that has largely to do with emotions. But it also has to do with the depth of my relationship with God, the depth of my, the sense of my communion with the divine. And that's one of the reasons that most religious traditions have something that's called listening prayer, where you're not doing all the talking.

49:49This has a meditative thing. And, you know, the Eastern Orthodox monks, they pray the Jesus prayer, which is a repetitive prayer that says, Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner. And they say it again and again and again a thousand times. And they believe as they state this prayer, they're not just babbling, you know, unilaterally to God. They believe that they're opening a channel of communication to God. And so learning more mystical techniques is the essence of what listening prayer is all about. So James, check that out. Think, learn a little bit more about that.

50:20I think you'll get a lot of benefit from it. Well, that's enough for today. I've gone on a long time. I'm sorry that this has been a little bit longer, but you can tell I love it. And I'm going to do more episodes on this because I'm passionate about my own religious commitments, but also about your spiritual journey, which can be some of the best parts of your life. So I hope you've enjoyed it. Please do share this with a friend or loved one. If you find it interesting, write in and tell us if you agree or if you disagree or anything else that you want me to be talking about, because that's how we build our episodes at this point. Write in at officehours at arthurbrooks.com.

50:51Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple. Leave a comment. We'll read it. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, all the other platforms, and order The Meaning of Your Life, my newest book, to talk about many of these issues and more. I'll see you next week.

Closing and sponsor message

51:06Have no fear. Chosen Foods is here to defend your favorite foods from the forces of seedy oils and sketchy ingredients. With cooking oils, salad dressings, and mayo, all powered by the good fats from 100% pure avocado oil and simple, delicious ingredients. Chosen Foods.