Big Think

Question: Are Americans suffering from an over-abundance of spiritual practices?

Gilbert:    There is a danger, I think.  Look, we’re a young country, you know.  And the more you travel out of America, the more you see that, right?  There’re so much that’s great about youth.  There’re so much that’s great about the youngness of America.  There’s a certain energy here.  There’s a certain willingness to try stuff.  There’s a certain ambition, an eagerness, and excitement.  I mean, I had friends during the Obama campaign who called me from Europe and said, I cannot even imagine what it would feel like to actually believe in things like hope, to believe in… to believe that a politician can change things, to actually have… They were envious, you know, of this huge enthusiasm that was sweeping across America.  That was really real, you know, and really passionate and really fresh in a way, you know.  That doesn’t exist everywhere, you know.  The downside of that youth and that enthusiasm and that freshness is a certain shallowness, a certain inability to stick to, you know, one path, a certain longing to drink out of every well.  You know, certainly the new age movement has a lot of that in there where you’re kind of like cherry picking… like, I want a dream catcher and I want a crystal and I want something tantric and I want, you know, the chakras and I also want to go to mass and I also… And… I’m not necessarily against that because I think there’s… You know, I think, certainly the willingness to experiment… There’s something very beautiful about that.  And there’s something wonderful about a culture that permits you to do that.  That doesn’t say there is one church, there is one belief, there is, you know, one dogma and everybody must march and lock step.  But, you know, it does get… it does get a little goofy.  I’ve been guilty of it myself so I have to say it with a measure of compassion and affection because, you know, I could easily have been accused of every single piece of flakiness that I sometimes judge, you know, when I see that out there.  But its part of who we are.  And consumerism and a profit margin is also a part of who we are, you know.  So you get things in America like competitive yoga, which, you know, I still can never hear without laughing.  Maybe the idea of going to a yoga competition does seem like… Maybe the point is being somewhat missed.  But… I don’t know, you know.  I don’t know what experiences the people in the yoga competition are having.  I don’t know what they’re… You know, I don’t know enough about what their internal world is.  It could be just a big breakthrough for them, winning first place in the meditation price.  I don’t know but it’s… it’s… I don’t know.  To me, I still feel like the benefits of that kind of freedom, the benefits of the excitement that people in this country are willing to feel about things outweigh the goofiness that, sometimes, a little too easy to be snide about.    

Question: What does spirituality mean to you?

Gilbert:    Well… Look, something happened to me but even saying that, kind of puts it in a little bit too passive of a voice, you know.  I set out to… I set out looking for something very specific.  And through a pretty rigorous search and a pretty rigorous set of practices, I got that thing that I wanted, which to put it really simply and perhaps oversimply is a certain calmness, you know.  It’s… Life is an extremely agitating event, you know.  And I vibrate at a slightly higher frequency than is necessarily healthy, you know, than I always have.  I’ve always been kind of anxious.  I’ve always been super motive.  I feel things harder than is good for me.  Indecision has been part of my life, you know.  And I could see, after a certain age, how that was destructive not only to myself but to people around me.  And… You know, I just think you get to a point where you don’t want to be in other people’s way.  You know, you don’t want to be taking up… You don’t want to be taking up other people’s space and energy to sort of take care of you.  And I longed to be a different kind of person.  You know, I longed to be just a little more at ease, a little more relaxed, and a little more wise, you know, because it seems to me that wisdom is the beginning of serenity, you know.  And, you know, aside from people who are very heavily medicated, the calmest people that I know tend to, also, be the wisest, who are quickest, you know, or most instinctively, able to put things into perspective, that takes away the urgency of the moment.  And there’re practices that you can do to get there, you know.  And those practices, you know, as my friend Richard from Texas always says, the shit works, you know, those practices work.  And people do it in different ways and they do it… they do it in different places.  But I think that the end result and desire was always the same, you want peace, you know, if not in the world, then, at least, within your own mind.  This is not to say that I glide to the world now on a sort of cushion of serenity at all times because I am, you know, exactly as capable of anybody else at experiencing road rage and sidewalk rage and customer service representative, putting you on hold rage, and all the other sorts of rages and jealousies and frustrations and self-pity.  I mean, all these things are not foreign to me, you know, but I’ve just… I don’t know.  It’s like there’s an engine that works within me, now, that much, much, much more efficiently processes all of that.  And I… You know, I’m believing now that that’s a direct result of the work that I did for a whole bunch of years, you know, trying to get to that place.  And when I find myself kind of spinning out of orbit, you know, there’s like a tether, you know, that I braided, you know, myself from my own beliefs and my own studies and this work, you know.  And that tether sort of pulls me back and reminds me, do you really want to go, you really want to make a big production out of this, or would it be better for you and everybody around you if you just found a way to accept what’s going on.  And that’s just made life very much more pleasant.  And I feel like my… You know, if I can define my spiritual practice today, it is the maintenance of that.  It is doing whatever is necessary to keep that healthy and to keep that system working.  And you have to be a little bit nimble and a little flexible to kind of figure out what each day requires in order to keep that going. 

Question: What practices help you maintain spirituality?

Gilber: I find, to be perfectly honest, a lot of it has to do with napping, you know.  I just think… You know, I’m alarmed by reports of how little sleep Americans are getting anymore.  You know, even in the last 10 years, people are getting, on average, you know, an hour to 2 hours less sleep a day.  It’s making people really frazzled and really fragile and I just… I kind of feel like, you know, if there’s a new religion that needs to be founded, it’s a religion about, like, naps.  You know, something happens when you take a nap.  You go into another state.  You know, your pulse goes down.  Your blood pressure goes down.  It’s a kind of meditation… kind of lose meditation.  And I do a lot of it.  It seems to help, seems to make me more pleasant for people around me.  I would prescribe it to anybody.  I think every nation that has any civility incorporates napping into their day in a kind of official way.  So… You know, rest, rest.  I say no to a lot of things that’s become a kind of active spiritual practice for me.  I turned down a lot of things, not just professional invitations but personal invitations and social invitations.  I think saying no is something we’re really bad at in this culture.  I spent years not saying no to anything because I was afraid that if I said no to people, they wouldn’t like me as much and they will be disappointed.  And I’ve learned in my old age that when you say no to people, they don’t like you as much and they’re disappointed.  Nonetheless, you know, there are times that it has to be done in order to protect whatever small sanctity of serenity you have build up in your life. It’s inhumane, the pace at which people live in this society.  And when I came back from traveling for “Eat, Pray, Love”, I was truly sort of jaw droppingly shocked to see it a new… from fresh eyes and to see the amount of stress and the amount of work that we have, somehow, decided is normal.  And it is so warped.  And, you know, fear is that we’ve exported that, you know, and we’re sort of exporting that idea all over the world all the time and sort of spreading it like a virus.  And it’s just… There is no… There is absolutely no way you can defend it as healthy, normal, safe, or wise.  And yet, it’s really hard to resist.  And you have to push really hard against it, you know.  And I don’t always succeed.  You know, I find myself at the end of my rope all the time, I’m like, how did I end up… how did I end up with a 14-hour day today, like… you know, how did I let that happen.  And so, there’s a sort of vigilance against that that I would really strongly argue as part of, like, the main spiritual practice in my life right now.