Global Spirit

Marz Attar and the Attar family.

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Hello, I'm john Cleese, and I'd like to ask you a question.

Do you feel that you're on some kind of spiritual quest?

If so, my advice is, don't switch channels.

And if not, well, you might nevertheless be interested in a question like, "is there another reality behind this reality that we so casually call "reality"?

Either way, if you feel that you might need a road map for something like this, you are in good hands with our guests Karen Armstrong and Robert Thurman, two of the world's finest enquiring minds.

So pin back your ears and join our host and guide, Phil Cousineau, on this most intriguing episode of Global Spirit, the first internal travel series.

[percussive music] My name is Phil Cousineau.

Along with being a writer and a family man, I consider myself to be a spiritual seeker, searching for what is real, the truth-- or perhaps more accurately, the truths--of life.

Certainly, the great religions and wisdom traditions have all addressed these questions, mostly through the study of sacred texts, rituals, and ceremonies.

To help us explore some of the nuances of the spiritual quest, we've invited two well-respected seekers for a unique conversation.

Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun, is now a scholar and author of many books on world religions.

A recent recipient of the TED award, her work has been translated into over 40 languages.

Tenzin Robert Thurman is a professor of Indo-Tibetan studies at Columbia University.

A world-class scholar and thinker, he is also a close friend and advisor to his holiness the Dalai Lama.

Dr.

Thurman was also the first westerner to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk.

Preparing for the show, my mind is, of course, racing with countless questions and ideas that I would like these two to discuss.

But I will also trust in the gods of serendipity that some conversational magic will spontaneously erupt when these two extraordinary people have a chance to meet and converse for the first time ever.

Welcome to The Spiritual Quest.

It's a delight to have you here.

You're two of my favorite thinkers and authors, and it's a joy that we get to speak about one of my favorite topics, which is the spiritual quest.

Karen, can you go back for us and tell us about the origin of your quest, the moment when you realized you were about to embark on a spiritual journey?

- well, I mean, I decided I wasn't going to embark on any spiritual journeys at all.

I had made it quite clear.

After I left my convent where I had tried to embark on this kind of quest and failed completely-- I couldn't do this-- it was the wrong place for me at that time, and I was too young, and it was a bad time to enter the religious life, and after that, I wanted nothing to do with religion ever again.

And for 13 years, I went completely away from religion, nothing to do with it at all.

Felt remotely quite ill when I saw people reading religious books on the underground, for example, never thinking that one day, I'd be writing these things.

So--and it took me by surprise.

It was--it was-- I had fallen unawares after a series of career catastrophes into television.

And as I always say, I said to bill Moyers that once, and he said, "oh, we take anybody."

So... [laughs] and I was making very critical and almost Dawkinesque programs about religion, writing very critical books about religion.

Then my television career folded completely in its usual dramatic way, and I found myself alone, washed up, with nobody to egg me on to be outrageous about religion, and silence all around.

And then the relationship between me and the texts started to change, because the silence-- you can't read a poem by Rilke at a party.

And theology is poetry.

You've got to have silence and a certain receptivity.

And then I started finding that I was relating--I had-- I found a footnote, a very dusty, dry footnote in a very wonderful but academic book about Islam saying that a historian of religion had to-- could not approach the spiritualities of the past from the point of view of post-enlightenment rationalism.

They must--you must leave yourself behind, get rid of that self, put it to one side, and by--in a scholarly way, reproduce all the social, political, intellectual circumstances in which this spirituality arose, and then you can begin-- and not leave it until you could imagine yourself feeling the same.

So he called this the science of compassion.

Sciencia, science, meaning knowledge, and compassion, meaning to feel with, experience with the other, leaving yourself behind.

And that is the essence of the spiritual life: leaving your false self behind and trying to discover an authentic self but not being too worried about that, because you can spend a lot of time polishing your ego and yourself, but being-- you see, what I wrote about Mohammed, however skeptical I was, I had to enter the life of a man who lived in appalling conditions that we can hardly imagine who believed he'd been touched by God.

And not--leaving clever, oxford-educated Karen on the back burner.

Enter the mind of a man who believed he'd been touched by God.

That started to change me, but it was unawares that I fell into that.

And then religion started to make sense.

It's practice.

You start practicing; then it makes sense, rather than a lot of theory first.

- Robert, what about you?

Does this make sense?

- well, but if I could just ask Karen one thing.

But you said you started in the nunnery.

How did you get there?

In other words-- - well, yeah, it was a good question but of a bit of an adolescent rebellion.

- aha!

- I was only 16 when I decided to become a nun, and of course, that's just a ludicrous age.

- iI's often an omniscient age, actually.

- Well, you're idealistic.

And it was the '60s, early '60s.

And it was a bit like sort of dropping out, in a way, you know, and joining a commune.

And I wanted nothing to do, in this awful adolescent sort of high-minded way, with the materialistic lifestyle I saw all around.

My parents were appalled, and that was probably part of it.

- Right.

- But I'm now very sorry for what I put them through, because if I had a daughter that's 17 years old doing something like that, I would be out of my mind with worry.

And I'm now very-- 'cause we weren't religious particularly at all.

- So you were doing the opposite.

- I wanted to-- I wanted to get rid of all this adolescent confusion and become wise and Buddha-like and inspired, and, of course, because I was so young, I thought it would happen very quickly.

[laughter] and it didn't happen at all.

- It's still wonderful that you were able to make that break.

- Yeah, but I had a slightly idealized, inauthentic view of what I would become.

I imagined myself floating down the cloister with a serene expression, and nothing would perturb me or distress me at all, and this would happen immediately, and everyone would say, "oh, look at that holy soul."

[laughter] and, of course, that didn't happen at all.

I--it was-- and I had all this adolescent turbulence sort of.

And it was a bad time to enter the religious life.

But I still am glad I did it.

It was because I went there that I'm here tonight.

It's been one thing leads to another.

- mm-hmm.

- Robert, I remember you saying that your adolescent rebellion started even earlier than that.

When you were baptized, you kicked over the baptismal font.

- Uh, yes.

My mother said when I became a Buddhist monk at the age of 23 or 24-- I actually started being a Buddhist monk about 21, but I was ordained formally at 24, I think.

And when that happened, then that's when my mother said, "I should have known," she said.

And then she told me about when, at the protestant church where I had been taken with those long dresses that you have, you know, and they have-- of course, the Protestants are not very into immersion, you know?

It's not very ritualistically.

It's very, very sparse.

So they have, like, a dish, like a metal basin, and I was just cutting up a terrible fuss, and I kicked the basin over and drenched the priest, who was very annoyed.

He was quite put out.

So he wrung a few drops out of his wet cassock on my flailing feet, and then she said, "so you were just already rebelling," she said, my mother said.

"Should have known," she said.

But actually, when I was 16--17, in my senior year in prep school, I suddenly, to everyone's shock, in April, already admitted to Harvard and so on, a Mexican friend of mine and I left campus to join Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba.

But lucky for us-- talk about a failure-- lucky for us, we were rejected by the recruiters, the Cuban recruiters, 'cause they said I was very skinny-- much skinnier then-- but I was 6'3", and my Mexican friend was 5'1" and quite rotund, so they said, "Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, we can't--we can't use you."

And they said, "your blond head would be blown off immediately."

They said, "it would be no use."

And so we went to Mexico, you know, so it wasn't exactly a spiritual, but it-- I was always looking for-- to try to be something real, you know.

I didn't really buy the whole American thing, you know, the Philips Exeter, Harvard, and then what?

Then what do you do?

You go become president or something or a diplomat or wall street or whatever.

I never really thought it was that useful.

I didn't like it in a similar way.

And then eventually, I went on and I found Buddhism not out of religious interest, actually.

I was not looking to believe anything.

I was very against believing things.

I wanted to see the truth.

I wanted to reason my way to it.

I wanted proof.

I wanted, really, a solid-- I didn't want blind faith, you know?

I could use maybe faith in the universe, but it had to be with some good reason.

- and when I met Nagarjuna, you know, in the Tibetan language, when I was around 20, it just-- I was just carried away, 'cause after coming back from Cuba, then I went to college for a while and then went to India, and that's where I did it.

And actually, Hermann Hesse was a big help with that, you know.

Siddhartha and Journey to the East, he was a big help.

And Jung and Hesse, these people.

So that was my thing.

It wasn't spiritual.

Even I had been a Buddhist monk, I think for-- we call it "monk."

Really, it's a mendicant.

It isn't really a monk.

He's not a lone person, very communal thing, being a Tibetan Bhiksu or a Gelong, as they say in Tibetan.

And I was just looking for enlightenment.

That's all I wanted, was to know reality.

- Is there a paradox, then, at the heart of the spiritual quest?

Because on one level, it's a search for transcendence, a move beyond this level of reality.

But as our good friend Houston Smith says, religion is really a search for the deeply real, that there is a reality behind this reality that compels us, that pulls us on.

- Yeah, I think that's true.

I define nowadays, Buddhism-- people ask me, "what is it?"

I say it's engaged realism, because Buddha's insight was that reality is all right.

It's Nirvana, you know.

Not the theravada version, but the mahayana version, non-dual.

That this reality right here now is Nirvana, if you really know what it is, and by not knowing it, it's a suffering, you know?

- Yes, and did you-- when you decided to be a monk, you were ordained, and was it difficult to accept a different cultural-- - Not really, no.

Because the Buddhist thing is, like, it's a way--i like to say, to become a Buddhist mendicant, when you're really enthralled and you want to meditate all the time and you want to study all the time-- there's a lot of study involved, actually; it's not just no mind, you know, as some people think-- and you just want to get there, sort of thing, idea, it's like having-- I like to say it's having a lifelong MacArthur fellowship, you know, but it's not that very handsome.

But, you know, you just have your begging bowl, and people fill it.

And then you can just study or do anything.

You don't have to have-- don't worry, no family, no children, no tuition payments, no career, no pension.

You just put out your bowl, and they give you lunch.

- But what about meditation?

- Yeah, then you have all the time because you have no other preoccupation.

You don't have to earn a living.

You are just cared for by the society.

- You see, I couldn't meditate.

- Aha.

- When I was in my convent, I could not meditate.

- Really?

- It was the wrong kind for me, I think.

- Yes, I follow you there, in the sense that I was not into meditating in the sense of emptying the mind.

In a way, I was, like, after I studied a little bit.

The Tibetans don't encourage meditating right away, actually.

They are different from some other Buddhists.

They insist that you know something.

They say, "listen, if you go meditate right away as an ignorant person, you will deepen your ignorance."

[laughter] Because meditation is a neutral tool.

It will heighten whatever your state is, whatever your understanding is.

So that's what they would say.

So you learn something.

But then, it's very interesting-- and you were talking about transcendence-- because when I did get to the parts in the books that my original teacher, an old Mongolian gentleman who, strangely, lived in New Jersey, not India--very funny story-- but when he was reading it to me and I got to the parts on dhyana, on contemplation, and I was into doing whatever Nagarjuna said, whatever was in the book.

So I started doing that, and I would get into sort of abstracted states pretty easily, actually.

And that man had a diabolical sense of when I'd-- I think he must have been clairvoyant or something.

Every time I would begin to a little bit float out of the body, float out of the world, he would show up-- if it was 2:00 a.m.-- and he would say, "why aren't you sleeping?

You better come have some yogurt with me."

But if it was the daytime, he would say, "let's go do some work in the garden.

You're just sitting around."

And he would always interrupt me.

And even when we got to that part of the text, he would say, "you don't need this part," and, "more study," you know?

And I think--because I would have become attached to a certain quietism that I think a lot of Buddhists and a lot of spiritual people get into where they find the world jangly and bothersome, and then they withdraw into a place where they don't have to think about that.

It's like a wonderful kind of prozac.

They get a lot of endorphins going, I think.

And you really transcend, but isn't a true non-dualism.

It isn't-- there's no compassion in it.

It's a self-centered, you know, kind of thing, a narcissistic thing, I think, actually.

Great danger in meditation, I think.

- Yeah, I mean, I-- we used to have to, every morning, meditate for an hour in a Jesuit setting.

- Oh, so you were ordered to do it.

- We had to plan it the night before and write out notes and a plan of meditation and a three-- and I'd start, and immediately, my mind would go off.

And thinking about anything but God.

- Right.

- And I found that study, again, was the thing for me.

When I started studying in my-- and immersing myself-- losing myself in what I'm doing.

And you get moments when you'd say, "oh," or, "ah," but that's it.

That's it.

That's it for me, I think.

And I agree with you that you could fall in love-- - when you write, or once you have "aha"-- and you have studied so much because of all that you have written and researched-- then your writing is a kind of meditation.

- Yes, and it's changing you, and it's-- But there's something there, and I quite agree with you.

Going into the void can lead you up some garden path or-- - Yes, yes.

Well, it can be helpful, but the most important-- and there are two types of main meditation in Buddhism.

One is called, you know, Samantha, one Vipassana.

Samantha is that just empty your mind and just be still and silent.

But Vipassana is critical, thematic, and it engages thinking, actually, to an intensive degree, so much so that it almost outruns words, but it's still penetrating, something like that.

And that's where study leads you, and you have to have study to lead yourself to that and use doubt and so on.

And you are obviously tremendous rebel, I can see.

So you would've rebelled-- I can see you rebelling, first your family and then rebelling against mother superior.

- well I was a-- Don't think of me too much as a heroic rebel.

I was a cowed little creature in those days, looking with big, scared eyes looking--and crying.

I cried like a broken water spout, continually.

And it shows-- either that, or we were in paroxysms of giggles.

A sort of sense of hysteria there, I think.

But we weren't allowed to study.

- Aha.

Oh, dear.

- We weren't allowed to read and just sort of-- we were supposed to be finding contemplation while we swept and cleaned, and I've never been able to do that while I'm sweeping or hoovering or cleaning.

It just isn't me.

So study, I think, it fills the mind, it takes you out of yourself-- and it is a compassionate thing in that you feel with something other than yourself, takes you beyond yourself.

- Absolutely.

- I remember you saying, Robert, that there's an old Tibetan saying that the best teacher is three valleys away.

- Yes, well, that's the thing that, um... The best initiating teacher is three valleys away.

In Buddhism, the teacher figure was somewhat de-authoritarianized from the Indian patriarchal family.

So in Mahayana Buddhism, they say kalyana mitra, which means, like, a virtuous friend.

So the model of a teacher is that of a friend and a model rather than an authority, you know, guru.

But guru comes back in Buddhism with the tantric esoteric practice, where the modeling is sort of more deep and it's initiatory.

It has a ritual element.

And there, you make an individual into an icon, you know?

And you see your teacher as if he was the Buddha.

But since the teacher may be an ordinary human vessel in a way, like, you know, a statue of Buddha is actually bronze or brass or wood or whatever it is, or plaster.

So the teacher has their plaster side, and that's why they say the best initiating teacher lives three valleys away, which, in tibet, is, like, San Francisco, you know?

It's like 3,000 miles away, 'cause, you know, it's hard to travel there.

So that means you can visualize that person as if they were a channel of the Buddha's energy to you rather than see their human failings too easily.

And also, I think it saves the teacher in Tibetan society from the temptation of having too much power over the disciple and telling them, you know-- interfering in elements of their life that they really have no business doing, as we have noted has happened in the west quite a lot.

- Yes, quite a lot.

And the--in kabbalah, in Jewish kabbalah, it's a similar thing where you imagine your teacher within you, but he's not necessarily there.

- Right, right, right.

- And I agree with you about the domination and the-- - Yes, it can be abused.

It certainly can.

- Yes, it can.

And also you can start making an idol of your teacher.

- Absolutely.

- And it's transcendence.

There's always-- as Paul Tillich said, we are idol-makers.

We are endlessly creating idols and fetters as for ourselves, absolutizing finite things like teachers or ideas or ideals.

- It seems liberating to consider the possibility that our teachers don't have to be living.

Our teachers can be found in books, in music, in history itself.

Is this what you found when you were resisting the Mother Superior and all those Jesuits, but you found the real voice of instruction in poetry, Wordsworth and Eliot?

- Well that was after I left.

I loved poetry.

Poetry speaks to me deeply, and theology is poetry.

It's a way of saying something that can't be expressed easily and that points you to something beyond, that touches you within, lifts you beyond yourself, but you don't know what or can't tie it down.

And I would say, too, that after I really began studying about religion-- I've never had a teacher, you see.

I've never had someone to pop in and say, "stop doing that."

So it's been a rather odd quest, and without a community too, and that is--that's a flaw, I think, because I think community is immensely important, because it knocks the corners off you and eccentricities off you and the ego out of you, because however wonderful the community may be, there'll be people who drive you up the wall, and you have-- and this is good for you.

I live in this lonely-- not lonely.

I'm never lonely.

But my little house.

- Solitudinous - But--and I learn from the people I'm reading.

But then, you see, here I am, surrounded by people.

I know we're not supposed to say that on TV, but here they are.

And it's almost as though-- I read a book once about hermits.

I had to review it.

And they said the more solitary people become, the more they're called out.

- Thomas Merton and the early Egyptian monks used to go off into the desert, and the crowds would come to them from the cities to be around them.

So even though you stop being alone and not-- I was washed up in aloneness after the collapse of my career-- then you're called back into-- I suppose there's another community for me now.

But my teachers have been people I've read rather than-- it's been a reading quest for me.

- Alone together with the old voices, the old wisdom tradition.

- I suppose so.

I do-- There are certain people that I love to read, and their voices resonate in my mind, and they've now become a part of me.

- I've noticed this in his holiness' writing, that he always pairs the twin wisdoms of compassion with selflessness.

Not just one or the other, but they must be intertwined.

- Well, wisdom and compassion are non-dual, finally, of course.

But there is this trend in Mahayana Buddhism exemplified very much by Shantideva's writing-- Nagarjuna, Shantideva, and his holiness as sort of this living representative of that, where before you've even generated that much of a wisdom, you do what is called-- you exchange self and other.

In other words, instead of-- you abandon self-cherishing.

You see that's-- the only demon in the universe, actually, is self-cherishing, what they call-- or self-preoccupation, sometimes I like to say, and that other-cherishing is the root of all enlightenment and all everything, you know?

And you--even before you are sort of really able, you just replace them.

And Shantideva's the most radical one.

He has this--i use it with my students in classes, even though we're not studying Buddhism in an academic classroom; we're studying about it.

But to get them to understand the Buddhists, I always use this verse.

And I have a challenge, which is Shantideva's famous verse.

It says, "all suffering in this world "comes from wishing your own happiness, "and all happiness in this world comes from wishing the happiness of others."

- and I say, "see if you can defeat that argument or that statement," and then of course I get all kinds of things, you know?

And of course, in an undergraduate class, it eventually gets down to sex, you know?

[laughter] and then they say, "I get there by wishing my own happiness!"

And then I recommend them to a sex therapist.

[laughter] - Compassion would seem to be the most natural of human impulses because we were meant to live together, and yet there's so much resistance.

Why do we resist compassion?

Is it fear, fear of the other?

- Well, I often--when I'm talking about compassion, I often see in the eyes of my audience-- when I'm allowed to look at them-- [laughter] a kind of-- a kind of mutinous look.

You know, they know they're supposed to be compassionate, but they don't really want to be, because it's hard.

Each-- the golden rule, for example: don't do to others what you would not like them to do to you.

That's the essence of a lot of religion because you have to look into your own heart, find what gives you pain, and then refrain under any circumstance from inflicting that pain on anybody else.

And that's hard.

People often want to be right rather than compassionate.

And it means you have to put yourself to one side.

And that--people often use religion to make them more so.

- oh, yes.

- More me-- and instead of, "how am I getting on?"

One of the problems with my convent was that we were so endlessly preoccupied with our own performance that we were obsessed and trapped in the ego that we were supposed to transcend.

So we were stuck in a kind of sterile prison of self-dissatisfaction instead of letting it go and getting beyond.

And concentration on the other takes you out of yourself.

It's ecstasis, as the greeks say, stepping outside the self, which isn't a glorious sort of trance or anything.

But gradually, you become looser.

I'm still very self-obsessed, of course.

I mean, I'm not there yet, but I have little glimmers of it, especially in my study.

- James Carse, who is a theologian here at New York university, has a new book, the religious case against belief, in which he says belief is the end of thinking in the sense that if you believe this, you believe that, you will do anything you can manage to try to protect that belief rather than follow what could be a natural instinct towards compassion, towards reaching out to the other.

- Well, you see, you've just stumbled neatly into one of the main subjects of my new book.

- Oh, good!

- You know, so quick commercial here.

Because this is something that's happened to us.

The word "belief," originally, it meant "to love" in english.

Beleven.

It's associated with leber, the german leber, or libido, desire in latin.

Jesus, when he says, you know, "have faith," he's not asking them to believe in his divinity.

He didn't believe he was divine, but to be committed, to give up their families, to follow him, to look after the poor, to be kind to everybody.

And in the late 17th century, belief changed its meaning and started to mean the intellectual acceptance of a proposition.

So now, in the west, we tend to think-- call religious people "believers," as though that's the main thing that they do, whereas this is a peculiar thing.

Religion is a practical activity, and you learn by doing, not by thinking or accepting doctrines.

And one of the meanings of "credo," credere, means to engage yourself, to involve yourself, to do it, and then you'll understand.

Then you'll-- but--and most of Buddhism is about doing, studying, being compassionate.

Judaism, it's about doing.

Islam, five pillars, all doing things, not accepting certain propositions.

- Right.

- Okay, I'd like to turn now to an intriguing parallel between the two of you, and that is, you both come from a monastic tradition.

You've both spent intense time within that tradition.

- Yes.

- Now, I went to a French-Catholic high school-- school for nine years, studied under Jesuits.

I've been haunted by dreams about being a medieval monk all my life, but then I read about what the two of you endured, and you've struggled through with the monastic life, and I realize that wasn't the path for me either.

So can you share with us how the monastic tradition itself has actually affected your spiritual quest?

- Well, first of all, what I want-- what the Dalai Lama likes to say to me, in joking, after taking about 15 years to forgive me for resigning my monkhood-- he was not happy about it at first, and he felt-- he ordained me.

I wasn't a Tibetan refugee.

I was a Manhattan refugee, though.

He didn't realize that was a refugee.

And he--so I'd sort of voluntarily done it as a-- you know, over 20, 21, 23, I had taken that, and then I did resign in a few years, and he was upset for some time because-- and he also thought-- he likes me a lot, but he felt that he couldn't be so close, because then others would say, "well I can quit too, and he'll still be close with me."

So, until about-- it doesn't matter nowadays.

He completely got over that.

But he likes to-- kidding, to say that I'm the most enthusiastic about monasticism for an ex-monk than he can possibly imagine.

[laughter] And that's because after studying the history of Buddhism and studying-- and that's why I like your books so much about Buddha, because you put it in its setting in India, and actually, I noted that in your study of islam, you also put the social thing of unifying the tribes and getting-- very, very beautifully and very sociologically, if I may say.

I hope you don't think that's an insult.

Very sociologically wonderful, I thought.

And it's interesting.

That's the same time as the Tibetans were becoming Buddhists, in that same century, the seventh century, seventh and eighth century.

When the arabs were doing that.

Quite interesting.

But that's just a footnote.

But anyway, monastic is something really important I rediscovered through history, through studying the history of different religions, because what is the biggest disease on our planet today?

You know, talk about a charter of compassion, but what is the opposite?

Militarism.

- yes.

- and militarism is tying up huge resources on the planet that really should be going to all kinds of environment and schools and children and everything, you know, health.

And it has this huge lock on all these resources.

And then if you look at history-- one sociologist actually challenged me once when I was in a peace march.

He challenged the whole crowd.

He said, "you guys are amateurs, you know, you peace marchers.

"it's nice, and you get a little result, get some press.

"you know, maybe if you surround the pentagon, "they won't go to their office for a day, "but then you have to go home to your day job, "and their day job is war.

"so where is the peace industry?

Where is the peace job?"

And look in history.

And at first, you want to say, "well, the university," but it isn't.

University does war research everywhere.

You know, the physics and it's all-- Leonardo da Vinci made war machines for the guy in Milano.

And so--but the only time in history when societies have demilitarized has been by the force of monasticism, and it's always been incomplete and imperfect.

Tibet, the reason it's extraordinary, it was most complete.

It was so complete that they lost all their defenses, actually, and then they did this to the Mongolians.

And the Mongolians, who had been the most ferocious warriors and militarists, they became, like, monks, you know, like, "om mani padme hum."

The men, you know, and some of the women.

And so monasticism as an institution is the only bulwark that human beings have invented, whether Christian or Buddhist or Sufi or whatever, that creates a kind of person who's like a soldier of compassion to match the soldier of hatred.

And somehow, therefore, we have to reproduce it today to demilitarize in either an educational way or in some way.

And so protestantism made this terrible mistake, I feel, because Luther didn't like being a monk.

You know, he would hallucinate-- he would hallucinate, you know, satan in the john all the time and freak out, you know?

He then became a layman and calmed down, and some good woman took him under her tutelage.

- But he didn't like her much either.

He didn't like women much either.

- Oh, really?

But didn't he marry and so on?

- He did, but he still said that marriage was a hospital for sick people.

- Oh, dear.

Well, maybe he was, maybe, himself sick, and he needed that cure.

I'm sure he had a nurse, you know.

- Did you ever feel a sense of resentment when you were in the nunnery if you or any of the other sisters talked about an actual experience of God?

- Oh, we didn't talk about that kind of thing.

No, no.

[laughs] no, no.

We didn't talk to each other at all about anything of that sort.

- That's part of my point, that we were discouraged from this.

In my experience, you couldn't talk about dreams.

You couldn't talk about the ecstatic experience whatsoever.

They thought that this was demon-induced.

- No, they didn't think that.

But I was hopeless, 'cause I never had any spiritual experiences.

And I would say to them, you know-- I would say to my superior "i, you know-- I've never experienced..." I knew that it was an aesthetic thing that I was manufacturing.

And that's fine.

Now I see it's fine.

But I was expecting some kind of glimmers of something from something outside myself.

I had a very-- - how long were you there?

How long did you last?

- seven years - How much?

- Seven years.

- Seven years.

From 16 to 23?

- 17 to 24.

- Wow.

But it must have also helped your mental discipline in a certain ways and your creativity.

- Yes, and I wouldn't-- I wouldn't have missed it, and i-- What I remembered-- what the best bit of it for me was the liturgy, the ritual.

Again, not a Protestant thing.

- Yes.

- But the way we used to do the ritual was beautiful, and there was a lot of singing involved and doing, again, and that took you out of yourself into something that was deeper than any doctrinal understanding of the ritual.

So that I remember enormously important, and moments.

But the ideal of getting beyond yourself, not living just by getting and spending and self-gratification.

And with the idea that you were struggling towards a sort of enlightenment, that, I think, is valuable.

And it's important to have it in this world.

Now, some of these nuns, what they-- the best of them is that they know how to listen because they're in silence.

And people come and talk to these-- some of these women-- who are not religious at all, but they come because they know how to listen, these-- they're in silence.

We don't listen much in our world outside.

We're too busy talking or thinking of the next clever thing that we're going say.

So there are places there where people can go or even stay a few days to be out of the hurly burly just to think, and all that's valuable as an--there's something other than our normal, mundane experience.

- What about the family?

What about marriage as a bona fide spiritual path?

What used to be called "the house holder's path?"

- Right.

- Last week on the phone, you told us you wanted to talk about how marriage can whittle away at the ego.

- Well, that's-- that's me in theory, but I've never done it.

I've never married.

But I often think that every day in marriage, you have to forgive somebody something.

- Indeed, and you have to be forgiven, I think, to some extent.

- and be forgiven.

Or you have to accommodate yourself to something else.

- Absolutely.

- That there is a sort of endless built-in chipping away at pure ego, I would think.

- Yes, I can certainly say that I learned as much from my wife and my children, actually, as I did from being a monk and from the books.

But I don't think I would have if I hadn't had the four or five years of that internalizing effort, you know?

If I had just--because what happens in the family, what you do is, you start, without realizing it, from your unconscious, these patterns from your own parents and grandparents start to repeat themselves.

Even if you thought you long left that behind, and in the way you treat your children and everything, these things emerge.

And so if you didn't have some ability to watch yourself and be mindful and try to restrain it or redirect it, or you hadn't gotten rid of some layers of it, you know?

So that's--monasticism is defined also there by saying it's... [speaking foreign language] it's, you emerge from the family.

It is actually-- you did escape from the family.

I escaped in other ways, but, you know, it isn't the family.

They're individually good people, but it's reproducing these inherited patterns, that this was the one way of breaking free from in the--2,500 years ago.

It was.

- Yes.

And your experience would have made a hiatus between what you experienced as a child in the family, and then when you were making your own.

- That's right, and the extraordinary person can go straight into marriage and do that.

But then in our society, for example, we do see that usually, the second marriages are usually work better than the first one, very often.

And, of course, in fundamentalist communities, they keep getting divorced.

That's the highest divorce rate in America.

I don't know if you know that.

- I didn't.

- They're all worried about the family.

But they're the ones who have the worst divorce rate and the worst family abuse things, in those red states, by far.

[laughter] No, the statistics are by far.

They're worried about some gay people in New York and San Francisco, but they should worry about themselves.

[laughter] - Plus Christianity is actually not very friendly to the family.

I mean, I think that's part of it, because at least you had the house holder system in Buddhism, and this is recognized in islam.

The prophet said, "no, the family is important."

But until the reformation, until the 16th century, the top vocation was chastity, and marriage was denigrated, so that therefore, there's a-- Jesus said some harsh things about family.

- yes, of course.

- "get up and leave them," he said, you know?

Or, "who are my parents?

Who are my sisters?

Leave your wife and children.

Follow me."

So--and it was an eschatological faith.

- Yes.

- So this has made a kind of worry, I think, about the family.

People are overcompensating for the fact that very few preachers could get up in the pulpit and preach what Jesus says about the family today.

- I think that's true, and don't you think there was a certain selection in the nicene council?

Thomas gospel, for example, is much rougher on the family than any of the accepted four.

He's constantly interrupting these weddings in a very Buddhist-like way.

He's crashing in the middle of the wedding, and then the poor bride and groom are monks in a minute, you know?

Remember, in Saint Thomas?

And then he went off to India, interestingly, where, of course, that was more easy to do because the economy was richer.

- But also it was-- people believed that the end was nigh.

- Yes, sure.

- That's-- Jesus and Paul, they really thought that this was-- Paul--it wasn't against marriage, but he said there's no point in getting down with a family when the lord is coming, the world is going.

As the world didn't come to an end, then there had to be some kind of a combination there with all that.

- Robert, you've been speaking recently about something rather startling that we're hearing from the Dalai Lama that perhaps we should stick with the tradition we were born into.

- Oh, yes.

Well, the Dalai Lama, that's not recent for the Dalai Lama.

He always said that.

And the Dalai Lama has always said that before fundamentalism was so powerful and there were these sort of global dangers that are now happening, he's always said that in the modern period, it is not because of the pluralism that everyone is all-- there's no pure society so to speak, more or less, really hardly.

There's maybe one or two still somewhere.

But pluralism is there, and therefore, it's too dangerous for people to do crusades and to think that-- and even it's a bad thing for people to go around thinking that theirs is the superior way.

And so he said that we should strive to-- we should share our things with each other in different traditions, but then people should implement them within their own tradition, because there's a lot of elements of a tradition that are cultural, have to do with your family and your society, and you can get that egotism that, you know, one can attach to one's religious belief, which we've already discussed.

When it then is attached to another belief where one has switched to, it can be even worse, actually.

And so he's very against that.

As I say, he's sympathetic to someone like me, and he tends to say, "well, some people just can't help themselves."

But they do switch or something, or they weren't really very religious beforehand and so on.

But basically, it's not a good idea, and he--and he reassures people that they should try not to.

And some Buddhists find-- you know, convert Buddhists find that frustrating that he does that.

But it's good for them, you know, and he especially cautions them.

He says, "and if you have switched, "never be contemptuous towards your original tradition "and realize that it was just, "you didn't find what you wanted there, "but that doesn't mean it isn't in there.

So he's very good about that.

- And I think I agree.

I think that is the best way.

I can't do it myself.

I just--when--i can see when I'm in a christian setting, when I'm studying christianity, I can really appreciate the symbolism and how it works.

When I'm surrounded by it, however, that old sense of utter failure comes crashing in upon me.

All those-- when I was trying to pray, trying to meditate, couldn't.

And I have a sense of absolute exhaustion.

Plus, Catholicism is different in the U.K., and Catholics in the U.K.

Give me a very hard time for leaping over the wall, and, you know, telling my-- all the stories of the nunnery.

And so I don't want to get back into that antagonistic environment where I'm constantly warding things off.

So--but who knows?

I see myself as convalescent... [laughter] so I don't-- and studying.

But I agree.

It's best to stay with one tradition in which you're comfortable, if you can, if you can.

- Can you bring us up to date with your charter of compassion project?

- Well, I won a prize from the ted community-- ted meaning technology, educ-- entertainment, and design-- I always want to say "education."

- Me too.

- And they give a prize to people whom they think have made a bit of a difference to the world, but with all the resources of these people who go to these conferences, could make even more.

And i--it was very daring of them to give me this prize, because they're so secular, up until that point.

And Chris Anderson, the curator, was a bit nervous when I went onto-- you know, was hovering in the wings to whisk me off in case they started throwing dingbats and things.

But my wish--they give you a wish for a better world.

This is not the time to ask for a villa in the Bahamas.

[laughter] But i--so--and I knew exactly what I wanted, because all my study, in every tradition that I've studied, brings me back to the essential nature of compassion, not feeling sorry for people, not pitying people, but feeling with the other.

The golden rule that we mentioned earlier: don't do to others what you wouldn't like them to do to you; it's been articulated in every major tradition as the root to enlightenment, the root to Nirvana, God, because it makes you dethrone yourself.

And yet you'd never know it sometimes when you get religious people together.

They talk a lot about, you know, whether gay people can be priests or bishops or who can be saved and who can believe what, but you rarely hear them speaking about compassion.

And it seemed to me that this is a huge lack.

We need to bring it back into the center of-- the focal point of religious life and make people aware of it.

So I wrote a draft charter for compassion, saying that anybody of faith or even of non-faith can identify, that compassion is the core of civilized life and enlightenment.

- Absolutely.

- And unless we manage to create a global community in which people of all persuasions can learn to live together in harmony, we are not going to have a viable world to hand on to the next generation.

- We're at that point.

- And that the religions that should be-- that have this wonderful ethos, should be making a major contribution to this task of our generation, are seen as part of the problem.

But so we want to bring back that compassion.

It's no good waiting for somebody else to do it.

We must do it ourselves.

So the--i wrote a draft charter for compassion to be like the charter for human rights, that people could refer to, that i-- and it went online, and people contributed to it all over the world on a wonderful website ted set up for me.

And on--next week, a group of sages, including Desmond Tutu and Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu will meet in Geneva and will write the charter together.

And then-- - wonderful.

[applause] - Then we have to make it work, find ways-- it can't just be a good-- feel-good thing where we all, you know, swallow a lump in the throat and have a great signing ceremony and then go back to our uncompassionate lives.

Somehow we have to find ways of incarnating it in society, and that is what we're all focused on and what the sages and TED and everybody--to make it.

We're thinking at the moment-- the latest idea is to create cities of compassion where people will-- a Tedster in San Carlos has-- San Carlos will be the first city of compassion.

And we'll devise criteria, doable criteria.

It's no good setting the bar too high or too low.

And that discussion will be part of the whole process of what we mean by a compassionate society.

But we are hoping to have compassion, but to start off with about six or seven, eight compassion cities in all parts of the world.

Lahore, for example, is one city we've thought about.

And that people within these compassionate cities, the youth can be encouraged to blog each other, to have exchanges, to talk to one another, to get to know one another, as the koran says, because unless we get to know one another, we will continue to fall back into our old patterns of divisiveness and hostility.

- Absolutely.

- Do you have some closing words on compassion?

- Closing words on compassion?

Well, she said it all, but although I guess I could add from the Buddhist thing that the way of achieving compassion in Buddhism, it requires the achievement of wisdom, because it is the--they have a concept, actually, in Buddhism of what they call a sentimental compassion, a notional compassion where you're really still seeing the other as really very other, but you think, "well, I should-- I wish they would not suffer," you know?

And compassion and love are defined as: love is the wish for the other to be happy; compassion is the wish for them not to suffer.

And when it begins to become real compassion is when, through wisdom, the boundary between self and other begins to dissolve.

And then ultimate compassion, of course, is where one does not perceive an other.

And it's like, for example, when your own hand is on a hot pot on the stove or something, you just don't want it to hurt.

You remove it really quickly because you don't want it to suffer, but you don't think you're being compassionate to your hand.

So when you feel the feeling of other beings like that-- I mean, that's the extreme-- that's the fulfilled compassion.

So their suffering is intolerable, simply.

It's just natural, it becomes.

And then there are stages and grades of that.

And so the wisdom that erodes the rigidity of the self-identity that feels that one doesn't have to be involved with the other is key to opening it up.

So maybe in the cities of compassion, there could be-- there must be ways where people are taught to mutually identify, you know, where their own sense of identity is questioned or they're given aid in how to question their own sense of identity.

And then that opens them to embrace the other in a different way, I think.

- I do want to cite, though, a favorite writer of mine, Philo of Alexandria, first century.

I'm sure you both know him.

I found a little saying by him that I have on an index card right above my computer: "be kind to everyone you meet, because he or she is also enduring a great struggle."

There's the core of compassion right there.

Assume that others are also involved in the struggle and in this quest.

So thank you very much, Karen.

Thank you, Robert.

I always know I've had a wonderful conversation when I've been challenged, inspired, and catalyzed to make a little change in my own life.

So thank you very much.

- Thank you.

[applause] - Thank you, Karen.

- Yes, thank you.

[applause] - Hello again.

I'm still John Cleese.

So did you enjoy the journey-- I mean, the inner journey of these extraordinary lives, with their joys and sorrows and revelations and so on?

And where do we end up?

With compassion.

I hope you are going to love this Global Spirit series, and if you've learned or discovered something for your own spiritual quest tonight, join us again soon for another episode of Global Spirit, the first internal travel series.

Marz Attar and the Attar family.

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