Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today I speak with Roger Housden. Roger has spent decades traveling the earth studying the teachings of both Eastern and Western masters. He has published 20 books, as well as the bestselling book Ten Poems to Change Your Life. With Sounds True, Roger is releasing a new book and a companion audio series called Keeping the Faith Without a Religion.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Roger and I spoke about our increased access to the wisdom of all of the spiritual traditions of the world alongside our society’s increasing distrust of authority, and how this has led to a migration away from traditional religion. We also talked about what it might mean to have faith when terrible things happen in our lives and the relationship between faith and having an unconditional trust in life itself. Finally, we talked about the connection between poetry and faith, and poetry and a non-denominational, universal language of the spirit. Here’s my conversation with Roger Housden.
Roger, I want to begin by talking with you about something we could call a phenomena in our time. Really, it’s the phenomena that the title of your new book encapsulates—Keeping the Faith Without a Religion. The phenomena of so many people feeling distanced [and] disconnected from traditional religion, yet feeling this deeply spiritual sense, longing, or desire to have a spiritual life and not quite knowing, “Where do I fit in this new landscape?” So I’m curious how you would describe this phenomena in our time.
Roger Housden: Yes, thank you for that, Tami. I would begin by thinking of the word “faith” itself and it’s so normal, really, in our language to equate faith with religion. But I think faith is prior to religion. In fact, it’s essentially part of who we are as human beings. I don’t think “faith” necessarily means a faith in something or in someone. Rather something I feel that is, again, part of our humanity: we do, at times, if not always, have what I call an “non-rational intuition” of both life itself and the way it’s going, but also of the organic, natural truth and beauty life holds alongside all the darkness and the difficulty.
That intuition—which is not irrational, I would say, but non-rational, beyond the rational—really connects us more deeply, even in times of great difficulty, to a trust in life that is part of who we are as human beings. Of course, we lose it and we regain it and we lose it and we remember it. As long as we can remember in recorded history, religion has been the repository for that kind of faith. But I would suggest that faith is simply intrinsic to our humanity.
There are people throughout history who have spoken of it in that way. Walt Whitman is one. Wordsworth is another one. And it’s no surprise that they are poets. They speak out of an inspiration themselves that connects them to that sense of faith.
So with the breaking down of traditional forms, not just in religion, but in politics, in nationalities, in the global world we’re really fully in now and only going to be more fully in—with the breaking down of these traditional realms and repositories for belief and faith, we have returned essentially to ourselves, which can be very frightening and feel at times very lonely. But it does return us in a way that offers us the potential to stand in our own knowing, stand in our own faith. I think that’s what these times are calling us to—these times of a more global community.
It’s a paradox, really, because the community that we’re living in, in one way is getting larger and larger, primarily through the online media which connects us around the world. On the one hand, we’re moving into an increasingly global community, and yet on the other hand, being returned progressively more to ourselves, because the traditional, more local communities are beginning to fall away. That’s an interesting paradox, to be living in a global society as an individual. That paradox, I think, calls us to a deeper, inner faith both in ourselves and in life, that I think is our heritage as human beings.
TS: Now, Roger, maybe to ask a question that seems obvious to you, but is not exactly obvious to me. Why is it that in our time, traditional religious structures don’t seem to be holding up? Why is it that this is happening right now, at this time in history?
RH: Oh, gosh, [there are] so many different strands, I think, to respond to that. First of all, clearly the development over the last 50 years of global communications brought communities, traditions, and institutions together, rubbing shoulders together, in a way which has never really happened to this degree before. People and communities have always been in contact with each other. Surprisingly, even 2,000 years ago, the East and the West were much more in contact with each other than we tend to think. But nothing like today, where at the flick of a switch or the press of a button or a key you can see what’s happening anywhere in the world. That is dissolving borders by itself. That alone is enough.
Along with that, economically, the world no longer consists of individual communities or even nations who are self-sufficient economically. Economic demands of a global community demand much greater contact and connection with everyone else, essentially. Political difficulties play that part.
For example, in the early 1950s, Tibet was overrun by China, which brought about the Tibetan diaspora. Inevitably, when a tradition is uprooted from its native soil and needs to find new ground, it’s going to have to, at least over time, adapt to the new ground that it finds itself in. Tibetan Buddhism is an excellent example of that. The teachings that were so secret 50 years ago and given only to other high lamas high in the mountains, are now available in any small town in America for the price of admission. That is also an illustration of what in a positive sense we might call the democratization of religion and the increasing distrust of authority—political authority and also religious authority. And it’s being greatly challenged by events. Of course, the Catholic Church and the Christian church in general is an example of the way in which doctrine which has been held sacred for one or two thousand years is now routinely questioned because the institution itself is having to face the much more democratic times that we live in.
The Vatican is not a democratic organization. The Catholic Church is essentially an aristocracy—an entirely male aristocracy. That may have worked in the Middle Ages, but it’s no longer working now—and actually the current Pope recognizes that and is attempting to do something about it in terms in of his shift and change of message.
The authority of the Church is now under question, because it’s no longer in sync with the democratizing momentum of cultures in general, which simply are not going to stand for or accept the authority of someone who not only tells you what God wants of you and what you must do and must not do, but also feels they have an immunity and a sense of power relationship. This is what has brought about the sexual abuses which are common actually not just in Christianity, but in all traditional religious cultures where men and women are segregated.
The spirit of the times is very different to the traditional spirit of these religions—of all religions—which, after all, came into being 2,000 years ago in a very different climate.
TS: Interestingly, Roger, just this afternoon in reading your book preparing for this conversation, I was sitting in a diner and as I sat down, the waitress looked at the title of the book Keeping the Faith Without a Religion, and she was so excited to talk to me. She practically sat down next to me in the booth and told me her whole confessional life story of her religious upbringing and where she is now. It was obvious to me this is really a question in our time. The question of: how do I keep the faith without a religion?
When you were describing your definition of faith, you said, “It’s a non-rational intuition about the world.” You distinguished “non-rational” from “irrational.” Tell me what you mean by that—why you’re distinguishing “non-rational” from “irrational” when talking about faith.
RH: I’d say that “irrational”—and “irrational” for me implies an emotional response not necessarily based on anything deeper than one’s own reaction to whatever it is one’s having the response to. “Non-rational” for me implies a form of insight or understanding that is coming through you, but not through normal, rational intellect. Of course, we know of intuition. You could call intuition a non-rational knowing.
I would go even further with the word “faith” than intuition, although they’re very close, I would say. The notion of intuition—and I think intuition is generally accepted as something we all have and do all have from time to time and that is non-rational. But the faith I’m speaking of comes, I think, from a different dimension in us, even than intuition. It’s been shown that intuition actually doesn’t necessarily come out of nowhere. It comes out of long experience in a particular field.
If you’ve been a firefighter for 25 years and you’re right there in the middle of a fire and suddenly you say to everyone else, “We’ve got to get out of here in 30 seconds. The roof is going to come down.” There’s no obvious sign why you’re saying that at that moment. You just know that you’ve got to get your men out of there. That knowing or that intuition comes from long experience and it’s not a rational thing. You sense it in that instant and you get your men out of there.
Faith, I would say, comes from somewhere even deeper than that. Actually, it comes not from a store of knowledge, not from a store of experience, but, I think, from part of us that is actually connected to life in a broader, larger sense—the part of us that connects the personal in us to the universal. I think that connection is homing in on what faith is and where faith comes from.
TS: There are so many things, Roger, that I want to talk with you about this topic. But as you’re speaking, the one that occurs to me right now are people who at one point had a sense of faith in the way that you’re describing. Then something terrible happened in their life—something just terrible where they felt betrayed in some way, if you will, by God, by the universe, by life. How could this happen?
I’m curious what you would say to a listener who feels some of that. Like, “Yeah, I used to have faith, but now I think that’s for people who need to put a pacifier in their mouth. It’s not the way things are.”
RH: Right. So again, I’m not using “faith” in the sense of faith in something or someone, but rather faith as a well of trust, if you like. Trust in what? Not trust that things are going to be fine. Not trust in the fact that everything is going to work out the way you want it. Because all of us know that life just does not happen in that way. It does sometimes, but as much, or often more, it doesn’t.
What is this trust in then, if it’s not trust in a result, in an outcome? Well, I would say it’s trust or faith that what is happening in any one given moment is what needs to be happening. Not from some prior design, but simply from the fact that if this is what I’ve got in this moment, this is what I need to respond to, to the best of my ability and with the depths of myself.
For example, change. I had money last year. I have no money this year. I was married last year. I divorced last month. These things happen. Change, for example, is a fundamental given of our existence. It’s not anybody’s fault that things change. It’s not God’s fault—if there is a God. It’s not our fault. It’s that that is intrinsic to life itself.
I think the trust I’m speaking of is a trust that the process of life, which includes change, includes suffering, includes darkness, includes our imperfection—it includes all of these—it also includes joy, love, wonder, beauty. Those light and dark aspects are all woven in to any one human life. I don’t know, Tami. I can’t help but see some kind of broken perfection in that tapestry of light and dark that my life is, anyway, and I think most people’s life is.
There’s actually a couple of great lines by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado that points to this—that things are never quite how we see them. He says, “The golden bees are making white combs and sweet, sweet honey from all my old failures.” [Repeats] So what we thought were failures, what we thought were disasters actually, in the fabric of time, don’t necessarily turn out to be like that at all. They turn out to be an inherent and actually even essential part of the painting of our life.
The trust, the faith that I’m speaking of is something about that—about the trust in the whole process, not in a very particular outcome or result that we think we either deserve or don’t deserve.
TS: Now it’s interesting that you are bringing forward this word “trust.” We could maybe say [it’s] a kind of unconditional trust you’re pointing to. Do you feel that this type of unconditional trust in life is synonymous with faith, the way you’re using the word “faith”?
RH: Yes. Yes. Because, again, it’s not faith in something or someone—it’s a ground of trust, if you like, that I’m speaking to here. A ground of trust that somehow knows, but knows without knowing that the way it is this very moment inexplicably is somehow all right, somehow the way it is meant to be. It’s almost as if there is an intelligent process at work in our lives, but not an intelligent process that is being dictated from someone or something on high outside of what is happening. No.
Rather, the very workings of our life in this instant or moment themselves seem to have an intelligence that is beyond our knowing but conveys a kind of quality of rightness however difficult it may be. That is the trust I’m speaking to. We can only bow down to that, you know? I love that line by W. S. Merwin, the poet, when he speaks of needing to—we can only bow down, “not knowing to what.”
The impetus to bow down is not really just a religious impulse. It’s a human one. All the beauty that’s in any religious tradition is there because of our humanity, not actually because of the religion. It’s been channeled into the religion, which is a beautiful thing. But it’s our birthright.
TS: Interestingly, the way that you’ve structured the book Keeping the Faith Without a Religion, you have 10 sections and you talk about “trusting the knowing, trusting the mystery, trusting the dark, trusting the joy, trusting the changes, trusting the imperfection, trusting the letting go, keeping faith with beauty, keeping faith with kindness and love, and keeping faith with the human spirit.”
I just want to say, Roger, that I think your table of contents is in and of itself a beautiful inspiration. I just want to say that.
RH: Thank you.
TS: The point that I was making about speaking to someone who has lost their faith or lost their trust, I would put into the third section of the book, the section about trusting the dark. I wanted to start there, because what I’ve seen is people who perhaps had a type of openness, innocence, faith, or trust at one point in their life and then, for some people, when something terrible has happened, they’ve shut down after that. That’s it. Forget it. I’m not on the side of life anymore, because life did this thing to me. It took my child or something like that.
I would love for you to speak to that person who has this longing inside that you’re talking about—this universal human longing—but at the moment feels outside of that faith because of whatever has happened to them in their life.
RH: I think the golden rule for me and for anyone else is to start where we are—to start with whatever is there, both in us and outside of us, now. If we’re feeling despair or grief, it is not going to help to try and turn away from that and look to some light, or think positive thoughts or try and trust. No. Because a real trust in life as it is happening implies that we embrace what is happening, not intellectually nor conceptually, but with our felt sense, with our body, heart, and soul, allow ourselves—and this is scary stuff. This can be really scary.
I do write about my ex-wife, Maria, whose child of four years old died of cancer. And yes, of course, Maria was in immense and intense grief, and actually for a few years allowed herself to fall into that completely to such a degree that she was really, at moments, on the edge of suicide. There was no reason to live with her daughter dead. I mention in the book the moment that she speaks of, being by a main road and hearing a car coming and feeling this desire in her simply to throw herself in front of the car.
She says, “All my life, whenever I’ve been faced with a problem, I’ve done what I could to control the situation. I had read about it, made lists, planned my response.” Now, she was dismantled. She was standing there in tears by the side of the road about to throw herself into the wheels of this vehicle. Then she could feel her body—not her mind, but her body—telling her, “No, I actually don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t need to control my life, deny my feelings, or try and get better. I only need to allow myself to be as I am. Let me be this. Let me be this grief.” And she stepped back in that knowing that that’s what she had in that moment. She had this overwhelming grief.
So I think the challenge to us is to be willing to embrace these moments of darkness, of fear, anxiety, and hatred, without pouring them onto the exterior world. These are our feelings. Therefore, if these are our feelings and our experience, they’re valid. But they’re valid for us in that moment and they’re asking us to claim them. That is, own them and feel them deeply.
What can happen in that feeling deeply of any dark or difficult emotion is that it changes, not by you trying to make it change, but by having the trust to know that if you allow yourself to feel that—to feel whatever it is—that in itself, by that allowing itself, that trust in the process itself, will take you somewhere beyond it.
That’s what happened to Dante at the beginning of The Divine Comedy. The first two or three lines of The Divine Comedy, “I woke to find myself in a dark wood, the right way truly lost.” He starts the whole thing with an acknowledgement: I’m totally lost. I have no idea where I am in my life or what I’m doing. I’m in the middle of my life, and even now, I have no idea what I’m here for or what I’m doing.
He falls to the ground in the dark wood. And it’s only then, when he falls to the ground, that he looks up and there, far in the distance, he sees the sun just before it sets. And the sun, of course, is in that instance a symbol of his own true self and the light in him. And something turns.
But he had to fall into that darkness—the acceptance of it, the embrace of it—first for that to happen. There’s no easy fix.
TS: I’m curious Roger, in your own life, if you’ve had something that you might describe as a “crisis of faith,” and, if so, how you got through it and what you learned from it.
RH: I don’t know that I’d say “crisis of faith.” Like anyone, I’ve had crises—deep, dark, unsettling times—that have really challenged who I thought I was and what I thought life was. For example, three years ago, I was in Iran. I was writing a book on Iran and [wanted] to give a human face to the culture of Iran. Everything went wonderfully until I left after eight weeks to go to the airport to fly home. As I turned up with my passport, I was taken by the security, the intelligence people, back to Iran and I was interrogated for three days.
It looked very much like I was going to be thrown into jail for five years as a spy, which I was not, by the way. In those three days of interrogation, everything that I thought was solid and substantial—my life, you know. Who am I? I’m a guy living in San Francisco and I write books. And I do this and I do that. And my family is here, my friends are there. All of those images and ideas of who I thought I was started to fall away, because it really looked as though my life was about to take a very different turn.
There was a period there when the three of them who had been interrogating me actually left the room and said they’d be back in five minutes, and they came back two hours later. In those two hours, I really got that everything that I thought was my life on the one hand was my life, but on the other hand could evaporate in a second, and that fundamentally my story of who I was, really was not who I am. In that moment in that interrogation room in Tehran, I really did experience almost a liberating experience of knowing that whatever happened to me, whichever way my story went from then on, there would no harm ultimately and intrinsically to who I was. Because who I was, was not my story. Who I was, who I am, is fundamentally untouchable, actually—ungraspable, even. It simply cannot be grasped.
So that was a moment really, if you like, of deepening faith in a very challenging situation. And I think that happens to people fairly commonly in very difficult situations. They are thrown into a realization of themselves far deeper than they’ve ever known. That’s the closest I can come. That was certainly a crisis. But in fact, it was not a crisis of faith. It was a crisis that generated or deepened my faith in the way in which life was living me. And it’s really rather that way round—the way life is living me, rather than me, the person I’m used to—Roger—deciding to live his life this way and that. There’s that, but underneath that, I experienced in that interrogation room that at a deeper level, life was living—and is living—me. And that’s what I trust.
TS: In the book, Roger, you begin the very first section [by talking] about “trusting the knowing.” I wanted to talk about that, because I’ve heard people report, “You know, I don’t know which inner voice to trust. Is this voice of my ego or is this the still, small, silent voice that I can trust? If I’m not going to trust a tradition any longer—I’m going to trust myself—I’m thrown back on myself here. How do I know that what I’m knowing is trustworthy?”
RH: Great question. And ultimately, we never do, do we? That’s part of the trust. There’s no guaranteed answer to that. But there are two things I will point to. One is the reflection of one’s peer community. In other words, how do your friends and other people respond to you and your faith in your knowing whatever it is—the way your life is moving, the direction your life is taking—the faith you have in that. Is that reflected in some way? Is your authenticity, the sense of authenticity that you feel, reflected in any way by your community?
The second thing I would say to that is that when something is true—when something both feels true and is spoken truly—there’s a quality of presence that is almost tangible in the room when that happens. It’s as if sometimes you may be with someone you can feel is deeply authentic in the moment they’re in. You just know. You know without knowing why you know. But you know that what they’re saying is true. And the same goes for us.
So there is that quality of presence. That, by the way, is not the same as charisma. I think charisma—it’s a fascinating subject really, the difference between them—but I would say that charisma is more connected with our persona or outer self. Presence is not something we generate, but really something that lives through and in and as us as we speak and act authentically. That is an indicator.
But at the same time, that’s part of the faith. We do what we do and there is an element of unknowing always. There’s an element of unknowing. If everything was as clear as a bell, then it would be really as if we were living almost by rote. But, no, there’s an unknowing. I think even people with the deepest faith have doubt.
TS: I wonder if you think there’s any danger, if you will, in this time that we’re in where people are distancing themselves from traditional religions. The danger being that peoples’ own sense of knowing might be distorting teachings, not honoring certain ethical ideas in a certain way, or avoiding certain shadow issues that people would be confronted with, like “I’m going to trust my own knowing, so I’ve created my own religion, if you will, and it works really well for me. I have social proof because I’ve surrounded myself with people.” But there’s no challenge coming into the system in the same way that a tradition might challenge someone. I’m curious what you think about that.
RH: I completely agree with you. That’s part of the danger and opportunity, really, of the time we’re living in. That was always one of the great concerns of traditional religion about an individual response to religion. That’s why the parameters were always very strict. You followed specific rules, because the idea was your individuality was to be subsumed in something greater than itself. So your ideas and your thoughts are not of value. What is of value is the teaching itself and you align yourself to that teaching.
And that did have some value. Of course, many abuses. But, yes, what it was aiming to eradicate really was not only people who strayed from the true faith by having their own opinions and ideas, but also, yes, that tendency to personalize a spiritual experience, for example. To have a spiritual experience and to claim some authority because of it. This is why, again, every tradition that I know of is very wary of spiritual experiences. Because we’re rather prone generally as human beings to inflation when we [have] something special happen to us. We ourselves begin to feel rather special. Whereas, of course, spiritual practice is wanting to take us in the opposite direction of essentially and eventually becoming invisible.
So, yes, there is a danger. There is a danger also because we live in a time of great individualism which accentuates specific personal experiences. So we can make a whole curriculum of these and pass them onto others as the truth. However, when you think about it, there have been a lot of traditions, certainly Western ones or [those] originating in the Middle East, really they’ve all come from personal revelation. Islam comes [the] from personal revelation of Mohammed. Actually, Jesus too.
It really is a delicate issue, but something I think is really important to be aware of, that to which degree is our so-called knowledge or spiritual experiences—to what degree are they being used to feed the fire of personality and not the fire of the soul?
TS: How do you think we can address this danger, if you will? You could say it’s a danger of keeping the faith without a tradition, without a teacher or community to be checking on you and creating checks and balances in the system. How do we address these dangers?
RH: Well, first of all it’s difficult. It’s not easy, because our personality, our sense, our story of who we are is so all-pervasive that it will take anything as food. Any insight, any experience always has the potential to be taken up and used to the advantage of our story. Let’s begin by saying that is a challenge.
I think the greatest teacher is life. In other words, what goes up comes down. Life itself can be an incredible teacher. Often precisely through the very dark times that we were speaking of a few moments ago, or through an awareness of our own imperfections, or through the way in which change happens and suddenly takes away the rug from under our feet when we were least expecting it. Life can humble us at any moment. And humbling, really—T.S. Eliot said that of all the qualities, humility is endless. We are not likely to want—and it wouldn’t really be humility anyway—to make ourselves humble, but life is quite likely to do it for us sooner or later if we’re willing to pay attention and to see life’s events in that way and in that light—as teachers.
TS: There’s a very interesting section of the book that I quite liked. It was the part on “trusting the letting go.” In it, you talk about how you don’t think that people really need to have a set of intentions for how to make their life better. They don’t need a set of prescriptions so that this faith that you’re talking about can happen in the midst of even letting go an orientation towards, “These are my intentions for my life.”
I wonder if you can speak to that, because that’s a different point than you often hear people talking about.
RH: Yes, it is. First of all, let me say that it’s not that I’m saying intentions are wrong or useless, because of course intentions have value. What I’m putting forward here is the other side of the picture.
So, yes, intentions can be useful, but at the same time, we live in such an intentional culture where everything is by the book in some way. You get up and [say], “What’s my intention for the day? Which tasks am I going to get done for the day? How much meditation am I going to do for the day?”
The intentions themselves can be in danger of working against this fundamental flow of life that has its own intention for us. What I’m saying is not that intentions have no value. Of course, they do. But I am wanting to put the other side of the equation here. The other side of the equation is that—let’s replace for a moment the word “intention” by the word “doing.”
This is a very results-oriented, “doing” culture. What would it be like to allow oneself to do nothing for a while—for an hour, for a day. I don’t mean to go and meditate, because that’s doing something. Just to allow yourself to have no particular plan for the hour. You may just lie on the sofa for an hour. Whatever it is. You may sit in a café. The point of this is really to allow life itself to emerge and have its way more in you.
Jung said these wonderful few lines in his Red Book: “You teem with intentions and desirousness. Do you still not know that the way to truth stands open only to those without intentions, letting things happen, the action through non-action, the letting go of oneself? This became the key for me that succeeded in opening the door to the way. One must be able to psychically let things happen.”
That’s a very countercultural suggestion. I think it’s one that’s really valuable. And I certainly found that absolutely invaluable in my own life—to have times of “do nothing.”
TS: How do you think those times of doing nothing relate to this question of faith? What’s been your experience with that?
RH: It relates to that because in letting go of one’s own will—which is what we’re speaking of here—one can begin to feel a willingness, which is distinct to “willfulness” or “will.” One can begin to feel a willingness to allow life to move you to the next action. And by doing nothing I don’t mean that there is no action. I mean that you’re not consciously planning your next hour or your next day or filling it with this or that task. Then you are being willing to let go of those intentions for a while and to let the feeling of life restore you to your own presence.
The faith in life—the trust in life—emerges in that spaciousness when you are just giving life time to show you what it wants to do with you.
TS: Now, Roger, I know that one of your most well-known books is a book called Ten Poems to Change Your Life, and that you’ve written many books that draw on the poetic tradition. I’m curious to know what you feel is the connection between poetry and keeping the faith.
RH: This is certainly something that I’m really interested in, but I think there’s currently a general interest. As the authority of religious traditions begins to fade and somewhat merge one into the other, other languages also come to have a place in the expressing of our deepest sense of being human or being alive. One of those languages is the scientific language. Science, I would say, now holds more wonder than religion does. It’s opening the doors to wonder every day. The language of science is well on its way to being used as a vehicle for these deepest human feelings and aspirations.
So too is the language of the arts. I would see, actually, the language of the arts and poetry in particular as the universal language of the spirit. I think that is actually what we are gradually moving towards now—a language of the spirit that is non-denominational. It even crosses boundaries of human endeavor, study, and research. Science, the arts, and religion sort of merge and connect with each other in an evolving language of the spirit.
Poetry, in particular—first of all, of course, literature in general and poetry in specific—is using language. Here we have a voice, a language of the spirit that seems to be relevant now to more and more people. So many people now actually read poetry as a daily inspiration and even instruction. I think there are several reasons for that.
One is that a poem—a good poem—reaches down into the essential of who we are to the essential dimensions of our humanity. It expresses that essentiality in the most concise form possible. It’s not a discussion. A poem is the essence, if you like, of an experience. Because of that, a poem can enter us like an arrow or a sword even, and strike deep into our heart and mind in a way that a discursive essay might not. Or at least a discursive essay moves through it in a different way. But a poem is immediate and direct, and, again, if it’s a really good poem, it carries a seed of truth. And that seed of truth is what we recognize as readers when it strikes us and we go, “Oh, yes.” As if that poem has articulated something that we knew but did not quite have the words for ourselves.
So that is one way poetry is a form that can help us connect with that fundamental faith in being human. It returns us to that place. It returns us to the depths of our humanity. So, too does art, of course, but in a non-linear way, without words. But great art can do the same thing.
TS: Roger, you pointed out that as we move away from traditional, organized religion, there’s this responsibility that moves to the individual. In the book, you draw this distinction between individuation and individualism. I thought that was a very interesting distinction. Could you explain that to our listeners?
RH: Yes. I’d say “individualism” is first of all the cult on which this culture has grown. Individualism I would say is the means of living a life that is primarily concerned with one’s own goals and aims. That really everything becomes food for that—for getting what you want, essentially. Essentially, individualism is the heart of capitalism.
Individuation—which I think might have been used first as a word by Jung, I’m not sure—is to do with a maturation of the individual person. So it’s not so much in what the person can gather towards themselves in terms of acquisitions, talents, and knowledge, but more the journey of maturation of this individual through life that allows them to integrate their inner life with their outer world. Without integration, the individual himself or herself is not the sole interest. The individual becomes part of the larger whole because through that maturation process that happens through life, one comes to see one’s inherent interconnectedness with everybody else.
That is quite different to individualism where you simply are not aware of your connection with others—or with the planet for that matter—so everything is fair game. If you want to extract oil until the earth collapses, it doesn’t matter as long as you get the oil and make the money, because you don’t have a sense of your inherent connection with the earth or with other people.
Individuation does have that awareness. And that awareness happens over time through that gradual process of maturation, which happens through the ups and downs of life with a quality of interest and curiosity applied to those ups and downs of life, so that you’re not just a ball in the wind, but actually paying attention to what life is telling you and showing you as you progress. That is the maturing soul that I would call individuation.
TS: I think this is a related question and it’s one of the questions I have about this time that we’re in, this time in which people are interested in keeping the faith without a religion. [It’s] the community function of organized religion played in peoples’ lives.
It seems like that’s a lot of [the] value that people received from traditional religions: I get to be part of a community. Here, I’m an individuated, let’s say, being and I’m connected to other people, but it’s not really like a religious community in the same way. How might that need get filled, or will it not? Or will it just look differently?
RH: Well, I think it will certainly look differently. And by the way, religions will always continue to exist. There will always be religious communities to which people can belong or join. So it’s not that religions are going to disappear. But certainly their influence is diminishing by the week and other alternatives are emerging.
I would say Sounds True is an alternative in itself, actually. That it’s offering a platform and context for people of like mind and interest to come together out of curiosity and interest to open themselves to ideas, to perspectives, to other people’s experiences. There are many, many platforms like this, both concrete ones—that is, live ones—where people come together for a common interest or question, or where people—even yoga. Yoga is a huge community all over the country. One is not to judge the values of these different kinds of communities. This is in process. The people are looking for, exploring, and also creating different kinds of community, usually around a particular theme.
Actually, one form of community I’ve been very surprised by is the online community. I’ve recently, over the last several months, have begun teaching some online writing courses around themes to do with the examined life. I was very skeptical, actually, of any online work in the beginning. Now, after four or five months, I really see it quite differently.
I’ve been amazed at the way in which people really have—in a virtual world—developed a sense of community around a particular subject or theme of personal growth or inner maturation. That community happens through the way in which people share their feedback with each other. I ask people to write on a particular theme each week for six weeks. When they write, they post in a Google group room where everyone else can see it and can respond. It’s the responses and people’s feedback to each other that creates this sense of community. People are very engaged.
We’re really still very much at the beginning of the whole online world, which I and I’m sure many others, looked at originally with great wariness and suspicion. I think we just still don’t know what value it has for us. And in terms of community, I think there’s definitely a potential there along with everything that happens in, shall we say, real life.
TS: OK, Roger. I’m just going to ask you one final question. It’s not a small question. It’s the note that you end the book on, Keeping the Faith Without a Religion, which is keeping faith with the human spirit and how we might look at this question of keeping faith with the human spirit in the midst of the news reports and atrocities that we hear about so regularly. How do you do that? How do you keep faith with the human spirit of terrible reports of absolute violence and stupid, selfish, incredibly harmful human actions?
RH: Has there ever been a time when that has not been so? I don’t think so. After one lives a certain amount of time, one begins to realize and acknowledge and see that violence and terrible acts of cruelty and misfortune are all simply part of what happens here on Earth and probably always will be. It really harks back to what I was saying a while earlier: that this is part of the fabric of life, both in our individual life and also in our collective life as human beings. It is really imperfect.
I mean, for a start, we all die. We’re not going to be here much longer. Any of us. If we really get that, that changes things. We actually have an in-built defect, which is: we’re not built to last. All the other defects and imperfections are also inherent, really, in this life that we’re living.
It’s terrible. And we cry. And we weep. I cry. I weep. I feel helpless at times in the face of some of the things I know that are happening in this world. And yet, I know, too, that at the same time, the most remarkable things are being done by human beings everywhere all over the planet. The faith that essentially is in the knowing that this is intrinsic to this life. This weaving of light and dark is the nature of things. It is how it is.
That does not mean it’s all OK. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. It does matter. We matter. And we feel it. I feel it. But feeling it is not to mean that it should go away. Because I think we’ve had enough time now in human history to realize it’s not going to go away—violence, suffering, sadness, sorrow, loneliness, abandonment, are intrinsic. The deeper we fall into our own lives, the deeper we can come to acknowledge that as part of the picture.
I love this quote by Diane Ackerman. She says of life, “It began in mystery and it will end in mystery. But what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.” That’s what I hold to, Tami.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Roger Housden. He’s written a new book with Sounds True called Keeping the Faith Without a Religion. And there’s also a companion audio series of the same title.
Roger, [it was] beautiful, really, to speak with you. Very inspiring. Thank you.
RH: Thank you so much, Tami.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
