Death and How to Live it | Rainn Wilson's Reflections

0:04Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

0:43Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Maybe two years ago now, I had Rainn Wilson on the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's Dwight from The Office, one of my favorite shows, which I have watched many, many times and then even watched it now. Well, clips of it mostly with my kids. They're obsessed. So they were very excited that they would get to go meet him when we were in LA back in June. We drove out near Malibu, where he records actually the same studio as Rich Roll. They met him. He was very nice. They were very excited. And then they went to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

1:23And then he and I recorded a nice couple hour podcast. It was a lovely conversation. I don't know if it's out yet. You can listen to his episode on Daily Stoics. I don't know if my episode on Soul Boom is out. If it is, I would have for sure played you this clip because in the middle of it, he goes, he's asking me about the bookstore, The Painted Porch, and he goes, do you carry my book? And I go, I think we do because I thought we'd ordered it when he was on my podcast is whenever we have guests on the show, I usually order their books either because they're going to sign them in person, although we did this remote, or just because I'm going to mention in the intro of the episode and I want to be able to point people to the painted porch.

2:01And so he's like, well, let's see. And he calls the painted porch, Tristan, one of our employees answers. And it was like a Saturday or Sunday. It was busy. So not exactly an opportune time to get this call. And Rain is asking, you know, do we have it? Is it in stock? Tristan's sort of very confused. And he was like, I can order any book you want. He doesn't realize that he's talking not just to the author, but to a very well-known, hilarious individual. So I finally intervened and said, Tristan, make sure this book is in stock and order a bunch of copies, which we did. We now have a bunch of copies of Soul Boom.

2:41The subtitle is Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, which I would agree. I don't think he's not saying we need a religious revolution. We need a spiritual revolution, of which I think a philosophy like Stoicism plays a big part. And he was nice enough to say that Daily Stoic is the model for what he is building over at Soul Boom, which is a podcast, social media, email list, a bunch of other awesome stuff. I thought the book was quite good. He was nice enough to sign my copy. as I was leaving, I said, hey, if you like what we're doing and we like what you're doing, why don't we run an excerpt of your audiobook on the Daily Soap podcast?

3:18Because sometimes on Sundays, as you know, we run excerpts from books I like, and they were really into it. So that's what I'm going to bring you now. This is a very personal chapter, and it Rain is reflecting on life and death as he is preparing his father's body for burial and heavy stuff. He talks about ancient rituals around death, the mystery of consciousness from a scientific and a mystical perspective, and the importance of living a spiritually fulfilling life, something I'm obviously thinking about a lot this week. I just wrote an obituary for my dear friend, George Traveling. He had the special bonus episode with some of his lessons.

3:56I am obviously not preparing him for burial, but the process of grieving and wrestling with the loss of someone you love and you care about, who was a big presence in your life and now is not going to be present in your life. That's what this chapter is about to me. It's a really thoughtful, great book. I think you'll like it. Why don't you sit back and listen to it? Here is the chapter Death and How to Live It from Soul Boom, Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution by Rainn Wilson. You can grab physical copies at the Painted Porch, which I know for a fact we do have in stock. I just went down and checked.

4:31And you can get the ebook and the audio book wherever you get those things. You can follow him at Rainn Wilson. You can follow him on Twitter at Rainn Wilson. That's two N's. You can go to soulboom.com and do listen to the podcast. It's a great podcast. I'll link to that in today's show notes and follow them on Instagram as well.

4:51Chapter three, death and how to live it. Alexander Dumas once said, When you are in doubt as to which you should serve, forsake the material appearance for the invisible principle, for this is everything. Mahatma Gandhi said, Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. I was screwed. My father was dead, and his body was lying on a metal table at a funeral home. We only had an hour to wash it in preparation for burial, according to the Baha 'i funeral rites. However, there wasn't any kind of appropriate bowl to hold the water for said washing. Sweat pouring off of me, I jumped into my deceased father's pickup truck and tore out of the funeral home parking lot on a quest for this holy grail of bowls in the remote farming town of Wenatchee, Washington.

5:48Preparation of a body for burial in the Baha 'i tradition involves ritually washing the corpse, saying prayers, wrapping the body in a shroud, and placing on the deceased's finger a special ring, which reads, I came forth from God and return unto Him, detached from all save Him, holding fast to His name, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Having played the offbeat mortician Arthur on HBO's Six Feet Under, I was actually a little familiar with the strangeness of morticians and the funeral business in general. I did not, however, foresee myself in a situation like this. I had arrived at the funeral home racked with grief and wet with sweat as there was an epic heat wave at the time in that area of central Washington State.

6:33The mortician, Michael, was a very nice and accommodating man with a trim mustache who looked like someone who collected things in his basement, things like wind-up toys and vintage 70s porn. However, when I entered the hushed, air-conditioned sanctuary of the funeral home, he made it very clear that he didn't have an appropriate vessel to put the water in for us to then wash and purify my father's body. I could see if we got a take-out bowl from like a Chinese restaurant in the back or something, he offered kindly, and I agreed to let him look. He shuffled down a dark hallway and started banging around in some cupboards in what was obviously some mysterious hidden mortician's back kitchen.

7:17I had no idea morticians even had or needed kitchens, but I suppose it made sense. I mean, preparing bodies has got to be some tough work, and a mortician's got to eat. What a strange and specific location when you stop to think about it. A good candidate for one of those comedy improv shows when they shout out, okay, we're going to need a location for this next exercise. Next time we all go to an improv show at some college campus, church basement, or rinky-dink theater. Let's all respond, kitchen in the back of a mortuary. Anyway, back to the story. The funeral was in about an hour and a half at a remote cemetery.

7:53The clock was ticking. My new friend Michael the mortician was digging and clattering around in that mortician's kitchen. I heard a female employee enter and say, what are you looking for? A bowl, I don't know, a cereal bowl or a Tupperware one maybe. Let me help you look, Mortician No. 2 said. Then more clanging and clattering. Then it hits me. Wait. I'm going to use an old takeout bowl or Tupperware tub to hold the water to wash my father's now-deceased sacred human vessel as we wrap it in a shroud of sacred white linen and say sacred prayers over him for his sacred eternal soul? Never mind, I shouted down the hallway.

8:32I'll go get a bowl. Hey, how about a teapot? I heard him call back. Would that work? That's okay, Michael. I'll be right back. Okay, but hurry, we have to get going to the cemetery real soon, he yelled after me. I ran huffing across the parking lot and jumped into the truck. After tearing around the sweltering metropolis of Wenatchee, I found a Target store, screeched to a stop and bolted inside. Panting, sometimes sobbing, and masked because of COVID, I asked a lady where they might have some nice glass bowls. Aisle 37B, she chirped at me and gestured toward the far end of an endless fluorescent maze.

9:12I started to jog ever deeper into the bowels of this museum of stuff. This is truly absurd, I thought to myself. A minor television celebrity is jogging through a target the size of an airport and a black suit, sweaty hair pressed to his head, trying to track down a bowl nice enough to use to wash his father's dead body, which is laying on a table in a basement a few miles away. Thank God no one shopping at this Target knows who I am or what's going on. I thought of my dad's spirit, looking down on me and chortling heartily. I smiled. This would have been exactly his sense of humor. He would have loved telling this story.

9:52In fact, he's probably telling it to some weird angels as you're listening to this. Get this, my son, the big TV hotshot, was racing through the Wenatchee Target in a sweaty suit and a snotty mask in order to get the perfect dead body washing bowl from aisle 37B. My father was an amazing man, a painter, a writer, a sewer construction manager, a deeply thoughtful contemplator of spiritual thoughts and ideas. An artist. He died of heart disease a few days before the preceding events. Didn't make it through a major quadruple bypass surgery due to all the blockage in his arteries. My stepmom Carla and I were there when he was eventually unplugged from the machines.

10:34We gave the okay. What struck me about the moment was how it was exactly like one of those scenes in a sappy hospital show. The beeping machines, the hushed doctors and nurses, the squeaking of shoes on linoleum floors, the tangle of wires and tubes descending toward a still, grayish body, the flick of a switch, the emotional goodbye. The doctors were losing him. It was time. They gave a rough estimate of one to two hours before his blood pressure lowered to such an extent that his heart would eventually stop beating. We stood over him, weeping, praying, aching. And, as the breathing tube was removed from his trachea and his lungs stopped lifting in his chest, a small truth about life and death became incredibly clear to me.

11:27It was a lightning strike. Of course. This body, this vessel, was not my father. The reality of Robert George Wilson, abstract painter, sewer truck dispatcher, science fiction writer, Seahawks fan, student of spirituality, he of the twinkling eyes and chuckling laughter, was not contained in or defined by this, for lack of a better word, corpse. Yes, his sweet face was there, his occasional stray eyebrow hair jutting up like some weed from a sidewalk crack. His mustache was there, recognizable scars and moles on his arms and hands. But that wasn't him. That still, vacant body on that hospital bed in the ICU was simply a suit he once wore.

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13:45Stoic at checkout. That's human with two N's dot com slash stoic for an extra 15 % off with code stoic at checkout. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance, the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond. Right. That's stoicism. But it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

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15:24To the materialist or physicalist, our life, i.e. the consciousness that is bouncing around like a neuroelectric pachinko ball in our brains, is physical in reality and electrochemical in manifestation. So when the heart stops, the brain stops, and the electrical impulses stop. That, my friends, is the end of the story. The candle has been snuffed. Personality, life, thought sensation, and all awareness are done with. Lights out, fade to black. I, however, felt there was something more than these scientific theories. Armed with nothing other than thousands of years of mystical writings, a deep gut feeling, a belief in the majesty of the universe, and a wild respect for the mystery and complexity of human consciousness, I knew in that moment that there was something deeper afoot, that a life, mine, yours, my father's, could not simply come to an end because brain-centered activity ceased.

16:25Consciousness, you see, is one of the last frontiers of science. It's kind of like the Big Bang, ultimately unknowable, and yet filled with complexities, revelations, and mysteries that radiate out from it. In fact, scientifically, this fundamental human mystery is often called the hard problem of consciousness. Scientists, try as they might, have a limited understanding of what consciousness actually is, how it works, or more importantly, why it's there. They don't even know some of the basic building blocks, like why our memory seems infinite, or why it resides in multiple parts of the brain, why we dream, why we need emotions.

17:07Yes, researchers can track electromagnetic and chemical pathways and different flare-ups of brain activity when one is, say, playing ping-pong versus reading Proust, but they are still trying to figure out how any of it puzzles together with DNA to make you, you. Your thoughts, emotions, personality, will, are in a constant state of buzzing, bouncing, reflecting, pondering, wondering, and evolving. Yes, that seems to be somewhat attached and related to the big gray human brain matter, but it is also true that human consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries in the known universe. To a scientific materialist, such as scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett, the only way to explain consciousness is to say that it is all an illusory trick of the brain.

17:54For Dennett and many others, this is what happens. A kaleidoscope of impressions incessantly pour into our sensory portals. They are cataloged and sorted, and responses need to be continuously meted out. In order to make sense of all this stimulus and information, including potential dangers, the synapses of our brain fill in the gaps and create the cinematic, emotional, and interactive narrative sensation we call consciousness. All these thousands of stimuli are effortlessly, seamlessly, and instantaneously woven into a single, integrated, emotional, personality-filled, subjective experience.

18:32But it's merely an illusion or delusion of consciousness. And, materialists continue, if this consciousness thing is more than some electromagnetic pulses in our brain, then shouldn't there be, from a purely scientific point of view, an evolutionary reason why it developed? Shouldn't there be some kind of proof that consciousness helps us survive and multiply? Well, oddly, there isn't. There is zero evidence of how contemplation, emotion, self-awareness, reflection, not to mention poetry, art, and prayer, and the internal cinematic experience of consciousness help or have helped humanity propagate and thrive.

19:13Wouldn't we do just as well if we had monkey minds up there? A more limited cognitive perception that might be only slightly more evolved than our closest relatives, the chimpanzees? Respectfully, and without any hard science to back me up, I and many others disagree with this purely physical assessment of the most profound of human experiences. My consciousness, as well as yours, is a mysterious, ineffable, dancing diorama of emotions, memories, perceptions, triggers, and thoughts. We take in, blend, and yet transcend senses, creating a peculiar alchemy of the awareness and sensation of being a human, of having a moment-by-moment experience of living.

19:54In the philosophy and science of mind, these little bites of memorable conscious experiences are called qualia. In one second, my consciousness is making a decision on what kind of tennis balls to buy. The next, it's remembering my first date with my wife. Then it's worrying about something I have no control over, like how late my mother-in-law's plane is going to be. Then, all of a sudden, my uber-mind is still, quiet, and has an all-encompassing spiritual insight. Suddenly it focuses on a bird singing from a cactus. How does it sit on those thorny branches, I wonder? It adds, subtracts, contemplates, and laughs, ponders, and reacts.

20:33It is constantly illumined with the ongoing flickering of feelings swirling around the human heart and peppered by beautiful flashes of memory of qualia. Another aspect of consciousness that science doesn't well explain is that it evolves. What is the mind awareness that a fetus has in the womb? An infant, at birth, a toddler. And how does it differ from the thought awareness and self-reflection of a kindergartner, a fifth grader? Our minds seem not to be fully online until somewhere around our late teenage or young adult years. Does consciousness itself continue to grow throughout our adult lives?

21:10Or rather, does it fade as we age? Does this matterless, energyless, boundless, mysterious experience of beingness continue after our bodies stop working? Would there ever be a way to prove that? All of this human experience would be so much easier to explain if we could definitively conclude that our minds worked simply as cold, predictable, robotic, computer-like tools of perception used only for immediate problem-solving and survival. But unlike what the B.F. Skinner behaviorists might lead us to believe, we don't have fleshy, Spock-like calculators in our head bone, tabulating our next move for no reason other than to procreate, socialize, and feed ourselves.

21:52To quote neuroscientist and philosopher David Chalmers, the king of consciousness studies, why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? Although we have insistent animal-like impulses and reactions that originate deep in our brainstem and pull us toward certain behaviors, our emotions and thought processes are not simply a slightly more advanced version of the cognitive experience of a bear, dog, or ape. These scientific, physicalist explanations of how we perceive and process fail to accurately explain the totality of our living, breathing experience. Scientists might be able to prove that they can locate the feeling of love in the brain, a synapse, a chemical, that little junction in the gray matter that lights up under an MRI or CAT scan.

22:42But that particular electrochemical transaction would simply not be the same as the experience of love. Science studies the notes of consciousness, but what we actually live is the music. We write operas. We hold our babies and weep at the beauty of it all. We smell a leaf and are transported to a time when we were smelling that exact same type of leaf on a dreamy summer's day when we were seven years old. We adore deeply. We are profoundly sad. We commune. We draw, write, create from places of inspiration deep in our essence. We struggle. We ponder our death. We compose books and poetry about all the amazing qualia we've experienced.

23:30The red wheelbarrow of consciousness, glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens of experience. It simply doesn't compute that it all adds up to nothing. In fact, when someone asks about, quote, the meaning of life, aren't they really asking about the meaning of consciousness? What does this complicated, personality-filled life experience mean? Why do we have it? Why were we shambling, goofy mammals gifted with it? Why does it do what it does the way it does? Toward what end shall I use its tools, powers, and perceptions? Does this consciousness really end when my heart stops? Can it be expanded?

24:12If there is a God, what would God's consciousness be like? Is God simply the consciousness of all living things? The questions continue to pile up. If you believe, as many do, that consciousness resides solely in the brain, consider the story of Noah Wall, who was born with only 2 % of his brain and whose survival was deemed by doctors to be impossible. You would think that would limit his consciousness to that of a potato, but little Noah's brain actually grew, which medical science had previously deemed impossible, and his mind, personality, and interactivity are in a seemingly normal range.

24:52He speaks almost at age level, and all this without having a cerebral cortex, which is, according to biological science, considered the seat of consciousness itself. Many studies are finding that a great deal of our decisions and feelings are actually based in our intestines, our guts, and the bazillions of bacteria, and the 200 million neurons that line our digestive tract. In fact, many scientists are now referring to our guts as our second brains. Talk about the advice to go with your gut or the question, what does your gut tell you, taking on new meaning. In the book The Expanded Mind by Annie Murphy Paul, her thesis is that the brain merely acts as the conductor and a majority of our thinking is done by the entirety of our body, internal organs, gestures, and sensory perceptions.

25:44Now why the hell am I talking about all of this? Why did I start out talking about my dad's death only to dive into the mystery of consciousness? Because I believe that to see the world through spiritual glasses, we have to start at the very end. If my previous observation, supposition, is true, and we are not just our bodies, and, in fact, our consciousness transcends our physical limitations, then what does that mean for how we live our lives until the body's final breath? The first evidence of humanity having some kind of spiritual journey is seen in some of the earliest human settlements, more specifically the burial mounds of 30 ,000 to 100 ,000 years ago.

26:27In almost every single ancient culture around the world, including in pre-Homo sapiens species like Peking Man and Neanderthals, bodies were buried in shallow graves, and alongside those bodies were regularly placed items and objects that the deceased individual might need in the afterlife—swords, jewelry, pets, canoes, tools. Why? Why would humans, from the beginning of time, not just toss bodies aside the same way animals do? It's a hell of a lot easier. Plus the time, expense, and difficulty of digging ceremonial graves without backhoes or even shovels, and burying bodies alongside still-usable items makes zero financial sense.

27:10An axe might take months to make, and its materials would have been incredibly valuable. It would be far more useful to the tribe or family to keep and recycle jewelry or weapons, rather than to have them interred with a body and lost forever. Unless the items weren't seen as being lost forever and were instead viewed as essential tools for whatever awaited the dead man on the next chapter of his mysterious, ongoing journey. What kind of rituals or ceremonies were carried out as the dead were placed into the ground? What kind of communion with the souls of the dead took place? This so-called ancestor worship, also commonly known as veneration of the dead, is perhaps the first real religion humanity ever knew.

27:56Archaeologists have documented that Homo sapiens, from every corner of the world, call on the spirits of their ancestors to intervene on their behalf, to send blessings, and to watch over their families. Perhaps this was even a precursor to a belief in gods. Before we would pray to a supernatural sun or rain god, maybe humans prayed to our deceased wise grandfather's soul to aid with the hunt or crops or fertility or help in finding the equivalent of a prehistoric parking space? What is it in our ancient DNA that tells us collectively there is something beyond this physical realm, that we need to ritualize the burial of a body, inter it in a sacred place, and provide items to help it along its journey?

28:40Are we wired for a spiritual connection to our loved ones? And if so, why? I mean, from a sociological perspective, it provides zero benefit to the species. Was this ancient connection to the afterlife due to dreams? After all, dreams are bizarre and surreal, existing outside of the limitations of time and space. One moment you're in a grocery store, the next you're yelling at your mother in your childhood bedroom when she suddenly morphs into your best friend Carl and is wearing a football helmet. They are a window into a world beyond the limitations of time and space. They sometimes contain inexplicable, mystical correlations to what's happening in the real world.

29:21Both consciousness and dreams give us a portal into viewing death in a slightly different context. Here are some other ways of looking at it. Rabindranath Tagore says, Death is not extinguishing the light, it is putting out the lamp, because the dawn has come. Carl Jung once said, What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination nation and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it. The disillusion of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning. The poet Rumi says, Die happily and look forward to taking up a new and better form.

30:04Like the sun, only when you set in the west can you rise in the east. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross says, Death is simply a shedding of the physical body like the butterfly shedding its cocoon. It is a transition to a higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able to grow. Werner von Braun says, Everything science has taught me and continues to teach me strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. Nothing disappears without a trace. And John Lennon once famously said, I'm not afraid of death because I don't believe in it.

30:46It's just getting out of one car and into another. I wonder what car John Lennon is in now. I'm guessing an Aston Martin DB3. The great British documentarian and philosopher Adam Curtis talks about how in Victorian times, people spoke about death constantly, but never about sex. In contemporary society, the reverse is true. We never talk about death, but are obsessed with sex. I think that's why the COVID-19 pandemic was especially terrifying to us. As body bags were stacked and hospitals were brimming, it forced us to seriously examine the topic that, culturally, we least like to face. Yet death is a perfect lens through which to view life itself.

31:31It's the ultimate framing device. It puts everything into perspective. In fact, historically, death has always been used to reframe how we see life in practically every culture around the world. Think of the famous Su saying, proclaimed by Crazy Horse, as he led men into battle, Today is a good day to die. A phrase apparently not only used in battle by many tribes, but also in everyday life, as a reminder of the preciousness of living for today. In early Buddhist writings, the term Maranasati translates as remember death. It's a mindfulness meditation through which the urgency of living in the present moment is cast into focus by contemplating one's mortality.

32:15There's even a meditation where one tracks and ponders the nine stages of a corpse decomposing, from festering in blue all the way to bones turning into dust. In Mexico, there is Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, a wild celebration to help us drink in our mortality, rife with profound and humorous rituals and shrines, and lots and lots of skeletons. The essayist Michel de Montaigne spoke of an ancient Egyptian custom where, during times of festivities, a skeleton would be brought out, and it would be said, Drink and be merry, for when you're dead, you will look like this. Sufi, Muslim, mystics were sometimes referred to as people of the graves because they would spend so much time in graveyards pondering their mortality.

33:03In the country of Bhutan, happiness is a central focus of life and culture. The government doesn't solely measure economic improvement, but also its citizens' well-being, with its tracking of GNH, or gross national happiness. And yet, in the same culture, one is expected to think about death at least three times a day. Incredible for any nation, but especially for one that is so linked to fostering its happiness. In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a long, rich death meditation history. The renowned 11th century teacher Atisa had nine meditations on this theme. 1. Death is inevitable. 2. Our personal lifespan is decreasing continuously day by day.

33:453. Death will come whether or not we are prepared for it 4. Human life expectancy is uncertain 5. There are many causes of death 6. The human body is fragile and vulnerable 7. At the time of death, our material resources are not of use to us 8. Our loved ones cannot keep us from death 9. Our own body cannot help us at the time of our death The Tibetan guru Padmasambhava says, Thine own awareness, shining, void, and inseparable from the ground of radiance, hath no birth, hath no death, and is the immutable light. American poet Walt Whitman supports this idea too. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and to die is different from what anyone supposed and luckier.

34:40Think of the ancient Roman stoic ritual of memento mori, the daily practice of remembering our mortality. When there was a parade through ancient Rome, the general, senator, or Caesar at the center of the procession would have someone following him, holding the laurel crown over his head and whispering memento mori in his ear as the crowds shouted their praise. Translation, remember, you are going to die. But what exactly does death put into perspective? Why the preciousness of life, you big silly willy? At my aforementioned SoulPancake Media Company, we took a big gamble in the early days of launching our programming and produced a show tangentially about death called My Last Days.

35:24We tried pitching it as a TV show and were flat-out rejected. No one did shows about death, we were told. In fact, in many cases, we would pitch the show to a room filled with TV executives who would be sobbing by the end of our presentation, moved and humbled. And then they would mumble something through their tears to the effect of, Sorry, we just can't do a show about death. But thank you. It's so beautiful. So we made it as a short-form docu-series for our YouTube channel, created and directed by the great Justin Baldoni. A show about what we could learn about life from those who are facing death.

36:01This was a huge risk. It was a taboo topic in the media, but we made it. A couple dozen portraits of courageous, radiant, beautiful souls who were in their last days. Was it sad? A little. Was it inspiring? A lot. Hundreds of millions watched. And we did eventually turn it into a TV show on the CW network, because sometimes media executives don't know a damn thing. But back to my point. The show encapsulates so much of what I'm delving into in these paragraphs. The many dozen subjects of this ongoing series would always come back to the exact same handful of essential human truths. The rush of gratitude they felt for every miraculous moment of life they had left.

36:48The flood of love they felt for those who were precious to them. The sanctity and fleeting nature of time itself. Connecting with nature. The need to slow down and breathe into every single invaluable moment, sharing their hearts, increased compassion, and finally, regret for the time spent not being grateful, loving, and in the moment.

37:21Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove in Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

38:07We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you.

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39:30Not a single subject of the My Last Days series said, damn, I wish I had worked more, or spent more time online, or mindlessly scrolling on their phones, or gossiping, or comparing themselves to others, or in a fog of self-interest pursuing superficial carnal pleasures and material comforts. I had a friend named David who was dying of cancer as I was working on this book. He was swimming one day at the age of 50 and felt a pain in his side. Thought nothing of it. It kept coming back. Went to a doctor a week or two later and out of the blue was diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer, the second deadliest and the first most painful of cancers.

40:10Doctors predicted that he would survive about 18 months. He lasted about 24. David had a 10-year-old daughter and was completely devastated. Overcome with sadness and fear, and yet at the same time, living his life with a focus, clarity, and joy that I'd never seen from him before. We used to take weekly walks on the beach, and the thing he kept saying to me is, it's all just static. The noise, the emails, the calls, the bills, the demands, the texts, the to-do lists. You've got to cut through the static. None of it matters. See your life with as much clarity as you can. Life is so short. It should be noted that we're all dying of something, in one way or another.

40:54For many of us, it'll take a grand total of, like, 87 years before whatever it is finally gets us. For David, it was two. For me, who knows? Twenty, thirty, forty if I'm lucky. Shakespeare himself says, vis-a-vis the character of old Capulet and Romeo and Juliet? Well, we were born to die. What is this static David is referring to? Are you in it now? Maybe all this talk about death and perspective has quieted it for a short spell. There's an analogy I heard once about twins in the womb having a conversation, which is ridiculous, I know. I mean, fetuses can't talk. They don't even have working lungs.

41:35One says to the other, I can't wait to get out of here. What adventures await? I bet it's amazing on the other side of that trap door. The other says, are you out of your uterine mind? On the other side of that vaginal hatch is nothing but death and blood and screams and chaos. Enjoy your life in here. Nothing to do but kick back and enjoy this amniotic fluid and poke your elbows around every once in a while. We'll just keep growing our organs and chilling in the sack, bro. Oblivion awaits out there. Fight it. Don't go. Stay inside at all costs. Isn't that kind of what we do in this life when thinking about the next?

42:17Speaking of babies, there is a terrific spiritual metaphor from the Baha 'i teachings that relates babies in wombs to the afterlife. As we know, the fetus, cells splitting like crazy, is growing all kinds of organs, limbs, and various accoutrements that will come in quite handy in a few short months. Now, if you were able, as in the previous womb-versation, to converse with said baby in utero and ask it what it was doing with these newly grown eyelids and elbows and ears and knees, the baby would have zero idea. It is quite content just floating and growing, feeling cared for and connected to the all-encompassing motherly presence that quite literally surrounds it.

42:56It has no idea what its nascent eyes are for, and how important they are, and will someday be. It is utterly clueless that its sensory organs, for the most part, will drive its ability to make sense of the physical world. And not only that, they will be portals through which ceaseless wonders will pour into the consciousness of this ever-expanding little being. Paintings by Cezanne. Sunsets over deserts. Nightingales singing. Loved ones whispering that they love them. The smell of Cinnabon in an airport at dawn. Symphonies of light, sound, color, music, art, and inspiration. And from what? A few mushy, weird-looking organs growing on the front and sides of their little heads.

43:41It should be noted that I don't mean to be ableist here. those born blind or deaf can use other senses to more than make up for their sensory experiences, and when asked, more often than not, would choose not to have missing senses given to them after the fact. I merely use the example of these organs growing in utero to create a larger metaphor. Now let's for a minute examine ourselves in our physical post-utero universe through a similar lens. Imagine, if you will, that we are undergoing a related process while walking, talking, learning, laughing, struggling while in our bodies on womb planet Earth.

44:16What metaphorical organs could we possibly be growing here, and for what use? Well, to carry the metaphor forward, on this physical plane, we are growing what we need for whatever realm or plane lies beyond this physical one. By the way, I'm not talking about heaven or hell. More on that silliness in later chapters. We are continuing the saga of our soul's journey. One transition was from the womb to birth to life in this material dimension, and then we journey forward to the next transition, which is life, to death, which is in itself a kind of birth. In this upcoming metamorphosis, we move onward to the infinite worlds beyond time and space where we suddenly realize why we needed our souls in the first place.

45:03So this world basically has to be viewed as a soul-enriching factory, a physical laboratory for developing and nurturing our spiritual essence. And what will we take with us when we leave? What do we need in the afterlife, the soul dimension, the kingdom of light, heaven, bliss, nirvana, eternity, the happy hunting grounds, whatever you want to call it, what will we use there? Certainly not the stuff we've accrued in our lives, probably not even our personality, at least not how we understand it as so much of who we are is circumstantial. What would the miracle of consciousness need from an earthly experience?

45:44If, and this is a big supposition, the next world is some sort of heavenly, eternity and light-filled state beyond our comprehension, then we will need eternity and light-filled things to function effectively there. What are those things? Well, to carry the metaphor forward, the spiritual eyes and ears and knees and elbows that we are growing on earth are actually the attributes of divine light and power. Love, certainly, but also the qualities of the Creator. By the way, I'm doing a whole chapter on the Creator just a few dozen pages from here. It's called the Notorious G-O-D. Don't let all this God talk throw you.

46:22I know it can be off-putting. We'll get it all sorted out. Relax and have a Cinnabon. Many call these divine attributes spiritual virtues. For some more secular types, they might be referred to as positive qualities or character traits. Virtues are the godlike attributes within us, the same qualities of the saints and the angels, the enlightened and the wise. Here are a few. Compassion, honesty, patience, generosity, forgiveness, humility, kindness. The list goes on and on and on, literally. Mindfulness, decisiveness, caring, creativity, commitment, serenity, respect, detachment, devotion, acceptance, assertiveness, empathy, discernment, appreciation, cheerfulness, grace, and fairness.

47:10Some of these virtues come easily to us, others not as much. In this virtue-nurturing context, we are neither living only for this world, as the atheist materialist physicalist might aspire to, nor living only for the next world, as the heaven-seeking fundamentalist might be. We are living for both, because it seems both are connected, are one, actually. Our overarching purpose is pure and simple, soul growth. Developing our virtues is about cultivating that part of ourselves that is, at its essence, divine. This ongoing growth process requires a complete and total commitment to the physical plane of existence.

47:52This gorgeous, difficult planet, its ups and downs and trials and challenges, its beauty and sorrow. At the same time, it requires a long-tail view of the Eternal, knowing that we're in this whole game of life for a very, very, very long haul. As in, like, infinite worlds of existence. Speaking of the game of life, when I was a kid we used to play the actual game called The Game of Life. It was and still is preposterous, and just a little bit fun. You started on a square called infancy and ended on one that read Happy Old Age. The point was to drive around the board and live a truly American or Western way of life.

48:33You bought a car, got married, went to college, had kids, and worked a job. Money changed hands. A lot of it. You paid bills and taxes. You got revenge against the other players. And how did you win? Well, according to the Milton Bradley official rules, after all players have retired, all players at Millionaire Estates count their money. The richest player takes the four life tiles at Millionaire Estates. All players then count up their money and add the two figures together, Lifetime value plus cash value. The player with the highest dollar amount wins. In other words, everyone retires as a millionaire.

49:12The person with the most toys wins. Game over. And don't even get me started on the most popular American board game of all time, Monopoly. You win by bankrupting all the other capitalists of Atlantic City and owning, developing, and exploiting every single existing scrap of property. Guess what, America? Monopoly, created during the Great Depression, came true. It, the game, won. The Game of Life was America's first parlor game hit. It was originally created in 1860 and eventually rebooted in 1960, the superficiality of the American dream incarnate being unknowingly injected into countless febrile young American minds.

49:55The game is even displayed in the Smithsonian. Now, of course, there's nothing wrong with having a car and getting married and responsibly paying your bills and whatnot. I've done a lot of that in my days, and still do. Perhaps the game is even a trifle educational, and allows fourth graders to begin to understand the complexities and hurdles that await them in the rush toward maturity. But the game of life is a symptom of a much deeper disease of our culture, materialism. Remember that pandemic from Chapter 2? What would it look like to create a theoretical spiritual game of life that also includes the aforementioned spiritual qualities?

50:33In that version, in order to win, it wouldn't be about ending up on a retirement square with the most cash, but instead ending your earthly life with the richest, deepest, and most sincere set of divinely inspired virtues. These could be game cards one acquired through the many ups and downs and highs and lows of navigating the board. And how does this particular version of the game end? There is your little player Peg, stuck in his little car peg hole, moving past the retirement space onto the death section of the board, saying goodbye to all of his little Peg loved ones, and tossing away all of the cash and stocks and bonds and property, only able to take with him his stack of spiritual quality cards.

51:19Cards that read, enthusiasm, truthfulness, joy, wisdom, selflessness, loving kindness, compassion. And that there's your real-life lesson for fourth graders, the true reality of human life is our soul's expedition. My favorite quote of all time, and one of Oprah's as well, is from Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Another great quote, often mistakenly attributed to C.S. Lewis, is, You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. Because what is the real game of life, dear human brothers and sisters?

52:08What is the point of all this sweaty, gooey reality, the obstacles we strive to overcome, the dysfunctional families, the trials we undergo, the horrible jobs we sometimes have to work, the times of tremendous stress and sadness, the annoying people we bump up against, all the tests and difficulties that lay strewn along our life's path. I believe it's to generate these spiritual eyes and ears and elbows that we will need on the other side of this physical dimension, beyond the veil. And the hardships we suffer in this world are what, unfortunately, make us wiser, humbler, softer, kinder, more loving.

52:49Sometimes you meet someone in their later years who has such a kindness, light, and perception in their soulful eyes that it is quite moving. I often make a mental note and think to myself, Rain, strive to be like that. What a cool senior citizen. And sometimes you meet an octogenarian who is flinty and mean, emotionally cut off, shut down and cold. Oftentimes, I'm sorry to say, surrounded by great material luxury, like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. I do the same thing in those instances, say to myself, rain don't end up like that, don't be a flinty old jerk senior citizen. Now, of course, we don't know the road that anyone has walked, and being judgmental is one of my worst character traits.

53:32but I use these examples to make a point. What kind of old human do you want to be? That is, if my perspective is right and your consciousness and its corollary, your soul, exists beyond your physical body, who is the person you are taking with you when the old age segment of your life is finally over? What did my father, Robert George Wilson, who definitely fell into the first category of older folks, take with him? He certainly left behind his 78.5-year-old body on that table near the mortician's kitchen. He left behind a few hundred fantastic abstract paintings, a collection of rare books, his truck, and various drafts of novels and essays, a closet full of old man clothes, a toothbrush.

54:19He also left behind hundreds who loved him and were deeply touched by his spirit, life, service, and art. And what did he take with him? He took his wisdom, that spark of mischievous fun, his positive, inquisitive nature, his gentleness, his vast, colorful imagination, the patience he showed to the octogenarians to whom he volunteered his time and read to regularly, the love he showed to the teens he taught art and painting classes to, the profound, humble devotion he had to his faith. So there we were, back at the funeral home in that back room just off the mortician's kitchen. Water filled the lovely glass bowls I had just purchased at Target.

55:08My father's body was laid on an open white linen shroud on the table. My stepmother, Carla, and I were standing over him, and we read some prayers from the Baha 'i writings. Thou hast joined that precious river to the mighty sea. Thou hast returned that spreading ray of light to the Son of Truth, and led Him who longed to look upon Thee to Thy presence in Thy bright place of lights. We washed His precious body, one dab of water at a time, the human vessel that had held my Father's essence for nearly 79 years before it broke down. We wept. We grieved. We held each other. We placed the ring on his finger and slowly, carefully wrapped his now clean body.

55:58And later that day, that same body, lying in a plain box, was placed into the ground. Rest in peace, Dad.

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