Pico Iyer: In Search of Paradise
Pico Iyer began his career teaching writing and literature at Harvard, before he joined Time as a writer on world affairs. Since then, he has published 15 books, many of which are bestsellers. His books have been translated into over 23 languages, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism to the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. Perhaps known best for his travel writing, his most recent book, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, is the culmination of a lifetime of experiences in the outer world, intertwined with a deep and beautiful look at his inner world, as he asks himself, and the reader, how we might come upon paradise in the midst of the reality of our lives.
Most of us are steeped in a culture which views paradise as eternally elusive—we live our lives with a deep longing to return to the Eden from which we have been evicted, to a place where the struggles of the human experience melt away. But it is in our struggle that we find paradise, Iyer tells us, if only we have the eyes to see it.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
Recalling what we have forgotten…13:26
Utopian longings and viable dreams…34:07
Creating a life that matters…41:29
MORE FROM PICO IYER:
The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise and other books by Pico Iyer
Pico’s website
Watch Pico Iyer’s TED Talks:
Where is home? (2013)
The art of stillness (2014)
The beauty of what we'll never know (2016)
What ping-pong taught me about life (2019)
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Let's talk about Paradise, which I didn't realize was a Persian word, right?
PICO IYER:
Yes. Paradisa, originally brought from Persia by Xenophon when he was serving in the army there. And many of my friends wouldn't believe that of all my travels among the most paradise of places even now, is Iran. You go out into these garden restaurants, you stretch out on divan, these colored lights, and they bring you slices of watermelon, and tea. And it's as heavenly an earthly place could be imagined.
ELISE:
I mean that's what I loved about the underlying thesis of the book too, is that these places, paradoxically, as you just mentioned, are in some ways hellscape, right? They're this combination of the most sought after land and these vortexes of shadow and light where the two just coexist.
PICO:
Beautifully said. Exactly. So I'm so glad you caught exactly the heart of that book and that's why a book about paradise has on the cover a picture of a graveyard in the dead of night in mysterious Japan. And I suppose that sense that we all know we can find paradise in Hawaii and Big Sur, but how do we find it in the thick of real life and in the face of death? And I think I probably, like you and so many people during the pandemic were thinking, well this is the reality we have to live with. This is the home we have to decorate and how can we make this very difficult world of uncertainty as paradisal as possible? So during the pandemic, it seemed too unseemly a luxury to dream of being in some ravishing place without a care. But how in the midst of our cares could we find something sustaining?
ELISE:
And it's amazing to that there's this idea throughout, and obviously this is a bigger, more universal concept, I mean this is the concept: That we've actually been evicted from paradise. We've all been kicked out of the Garden of Eden and we're desperate to reclaim that place or find that place which inherently has to be anywhere but here or that paradise is always outside of us or somewhere else and that's one of our strivings, really.
PICO:
Yes. Again, I love the way you put that. And my favorite line I think in Paradise Lost is that at the very end when Adam is being escorted just to the gates of Eden to be pushed out and the angel says you have to find a paradise within happier far. And so I think all of us know at some level our paradise has to be inside us. But as you said, it's so tempting to put paradise in the past, that golden moment we had when we were kids and in love or in the future in this beautiful never, never land we're going to find and not try to find it here and now, which is probably the only place we could ever find it. And I think we all know too, that paradise like happiness or contentment or peace, can't be fun by looking. But nonetheless, at some level we want to imagine that we are there in the place that the best possible place within. So yes, how we've all been exiled from paradise. And then I was thinking too, the first human beings produced a killer and the killer's victim, which is not such a good beginning. That's what Adam and Eve gave us. So how do we find a durable paradise in the midst of the serpents? How do we find a paradise where the serpent is right there? But nonetheless we think things are as they should be.
ELISE:
Yeah. And what's the cloud of unknowing? Because you mentioned a quote from it a few times and I guess it's an anonymous 14th century guide, but this one quote, “By our love the divine may be reached and held by our thinking, never.” And again, going to that same point, it's not an intellectual concept or a place to go to.
PICO:
No, you don't get to heaven by reasoning and you don't get to love by reasoning. The beauty of love in all its forms, whether it's love of a parent or love when you fall in love with somebody, there's no explaining it away. And it comes in the face of explanations usually. So yes, a cloud of unknowing, as you say, anonymous text, we don't know if it was written by a man or a woman, but I've always been haunted by that title, a great mystical text. And I think in the Zen tradition they say that not knowing is our true self. No, not knowing is a kind of intimacy. And I feel that as I'm sitting here, my wife is across the room and we've been together 35 years. But I think what gives life to our relationship, as any relationship, is we can't assume that we know the other. She's gonna surprise me today and continue surprising me every day we're together. And I hope the same in reverse. And I almost think of what we know as this little illuminated tent up in the Himalaya surrounded by vast darkness and stars and snow cups, but something so much bigger and we hang on to what we know, but really it's what we don't know love or faith or terror wonder that that's what defines our lives. And I know in your blog, you wrote a piece I think a few weeks ago about morality as being a cudgel. And I love that. And that's sort of the theme with this book now, that more and more people on every side in every tradition saying I know more than you and I know better than you. And actually it's what we don't know that unites us. That illusion of knowledge is what's cutting us up and keeping us apart, I think.
ELISE:
Yeah. And those inherent values that are hard to articulate. But yes, and even thinking about so many of the paradises that you visit throughout this book and describe whether it's Jerusalem or being an Iran, there is talking about morality as a cudgel, right? And morality police. But this idea of this externally prescribed list or moral code that's clearly, it's not lived, right? You're not supposed to kill people. And yet it's interesting culturally how we continue to give overpower to external authorities rather than abiding by our own moral codes. We don't have a collective moral code. That's what I think is so interesting, right?
PICO:
That’s a really, really good way to put it. Yes, exactly. And so very center of this book, as you said, is Jerusalem and the center of Jerusalem is the church of the Holy Sacrament by some reckoning, the holiest spot in Christendom, six Christian orders sharing the same space and they're going after one another with brooms and actually waging war on one another cause the Franciscan’s have one reading of the Bible and a Greek Orthodox another. And of course outside that Sunne fighting which sheer and out orthodox rule fighting against secular Jew. And it's a sort of reminder that our ideas really separate us even as our human experience joins us. And I felt that very much during the pandemic, which is that almost everybody on the planet was living with the same fears and anxieties, maybe hopes, too, that we were really joined together collectively at that level, and yet Democrat and Republican or believer, non-believer were contesting their ideas, which are the least important thing as a cloud of unknowing points out. And as you said about collective morality, I guess that's why I began the book in Iran is fascinating place. As you said, it's where the word paradise came into being. But what's so interesting right now is that the Muellers have their version of paradise, which as you said is they're trying to impose a collective morality. And the place called Zhara's Paradise in Tehran is actually a graveyard. So for them, paradise is especially reserved for Martys who give up their lives for Islam. And meanwhile individual citizens have their vision of paradise, which is kind of probably sex and drugs and rock and roll, what's going on behind closed doors. And both sides while competing are actually invoking the Sufis who speak for that mystical truth that paradise is within. And it's only something we can find almost beyond morality. Rumi said "There's a place beyond good and evil, let me meet you there” in the sense that beyond morality, and as you said, beyond thinking is where paradise exists and where love exists. Love is the place that no thought can reach, one hopes.
ELISE:
Yeah and I don't know Sufism incredibly well, but isn't the idea too that there's this deep yearning to be rejoined with the beloved or this idea, of course we're not home, like we will return at some point.
PICO:
You do know it well no, exactly. The religion is a love affair and as intimate and soulful and as hard to put into ideas as the way we feel about the person that we love. Exactly so. And at one point at the heart of the book, I had a Sufi woman Saint Rabeer of Basra, who apparently walked through the streets with a flame and a pale of water and she said she wanted to pour the flame on anybody who said that you get to paradise by good deed or that anyone who is hoping for paradise or anyone who is fearing hell, that's not what religion is, it’s about love. It's about the surrender and surrender to what we don't know and can never know. And as you said, longing, I like that word longing because it speaks first something we can't put words to really.
ELISE:
Such a beautiful word as is belonging. The two together I think are so stunning and something that I think is a big theme in Susan Caine's book, Bittersweet. But that sort of gentle, subtle melancholy that drives so many of us, that desire to return somewhere, or return to ourselves, that I think anyone can really identify. And again, I'm not someone who is like, Oh, I'm gonna go to heaven someday there's a better place to be. I think it's really that deeper returning to source, or returning to the earth, or returning back home rather than going someplace else.
PICO:
Finding who we are all along and recalling what we've forgotten and realizing as you say, that we don't have to be anywhere except right here with our eyes wide open. But yes, I actually was corresponding with Susan when she was writing that book, especially about Leonard Cohen whom we both admire, who's the crown prince of longing and actually has that song take this longing but put himself through all these spiritual disciplines to try to cut beyond that. So here, as I say that, I'm remembering two things here where I sit in Japan, when you walk around a temple in Kyoto sometimes, have you been to Japan?
ELISE:
Sadly, no. I know, I'm coming.
PICO:
Good. <laugh> When you walk around certain temples in Japan, as you enter, you look down and it's written, look beneath your feet saying just what you were saying, Don't look for heaven out there or in the never, ever or in the future right here. And just last week I went to the famous temple Rio Angie, which is the one with the dry rock garden and the 15 stones and nobody's been able to figure out what they mean. But just around the corner from that most celebrated of rock gardens is a water basin and it has four characters on them. And really what it says is, what I have is all I need, just that, we don't need more, we don't need to be elsewhere than we are. And then we have that in our own tradition. I have a lot of Thoreau in the book and I think he said heaven is under our feet as much as above our heads. But as you know, it's hard to banish those visions of an external paradise and hard to realize that it maybe isn’t as easy to grasp as in Maui <laugh>.
ELISE:
Right. No, it's so true. I wanna talk about Jerusalem again a little bit, but opening the book in Tehran, the way that you take us to all of these destinations and I think you describe yourself as unaffiliated, which is how I think of myself as well. I'm spiritual person, I'm not religious, I'm unaffiliated. But as you travel and feel the energy of these places, can you talk a little bit about that driver in Tehran? That was such a stunning story.
PICO:
Yes. And then we'll come back to energy cause that's such a beautiful word to use, magnetism. So yes, my very first day in Iran, I'd been dreaming of the place for 40 years. I finally made it there a few years ago. My first night I stroll down to the taxi desk in the lobby and I left my official guide and driver behind and I said, can you find somebody to take me into the city, to the central shrine? And a young guy, maybe 30 years old, very friendly speaking unexpectedly good English showed up and we went into his battered compact, we started driving through these streets illuminated with golden green and blue lights. And he said, have you come for the festival? I said, No, What festival? And apparently it was the celebration of the birthday of the saint who's buried at the center of the shrine, which is the largest mosque in the world. Five million people had come from every corner of the sheer world to celebrate this. And so when we got to the main mosque, which is seven huge marble courtyards, we could barely move. Everywhere there were people sitting on the ground sleeping cause they were spending seven days and seven nights there eating, releasing doves into the blue black sky. And they were surrounded by huge screens in which these turbine diatol’s were delivering sermons. And we came to the central in Nemo Sanctum where the saint was buried 1100 years ago. And my driver who I just met, I figured this guy's sincere, he's come to learn about our cultures, he invited me in, it was jam packed, we could barely move and people were sobbing and pushing little kids to the front so they could touch the grill in front of which the saint lay.
And at one point I looked across the room and I saw the driver's hand was on his heart and he was walking backwards. He never presented his back to the long dead saint. And there were these tears welling in his eyes. So I thought, my goodness, this is what a beautiful picture of Islamic piety. And then we left and we walked back to his car and as we walk back to with car, and as we walk back, he told me that he had a wife who was expecting his first child and was waiting for him in England. And then he told me how he had stolen out of Iran and paid a human trafficker $2,500 to smuggle him into England in the back of a truck breathing through a tube so he wouldn't be detected. And then the British government had very magnanimously spent three years giving him a court appointed solicitor and translate so he could get asylum. So he was now able to live in England. But having risked his life to steal out of Iran, he was stealing back every summer, risking his life again to see the mother and the mosque and the hometown that he missed so much.
And so when he dropped me off my hotel at the end of that first night in Iran, I thought, I don't know a thing about this place. And what was striking was, as I said, I'd been thinking about it for 40 years. I'd written long articles on for Time Magazine about Iran that I'd never been, I'd financed my first book at a 20 page article for the Smithsonian about Iranian history. And then I'd published a whole novel partly set in Iran, though I'd never been. So I thought I'm pretty well prepared for this place. I'd done four years of research and after 16 hours I found I didn't know a thing. It was very useful, humbling, how even in the age of information we know so little and what we get through screens or at a distance cannot begin to compensate for the reality of actually encountering a place in the flesh. And when he dropped me off, I thought, gosh, Iran's been in our headlines every day for these last many years. And I'd never heard about a very devout Islamic soul who didn't want to live in this Islamic republic. And I'd never read about somebody, a dissident stealing back into the country he had stolen out of in order to stay in touch with the things that he loved. And so it just reminded me, I don't have a clue. And that's how most of us are with most of the world. And so you're right, that's the starting point of the book that even the places we think we've read up about and we've researched for years and years have a reality endlessly surprising. And that's the beauty of life, it never fails to surprise us.
ELISE:
Never. I mean, I’m not as knowledgeable about Russia as what you just described, but I had always wanted to go. I've read so much Russian literature and I went, probably 10 or 15 years ago, with my mom on a trip and same thing I was so, I thought, emotionally prepared for Russia and then we get to Moscow and I was like, whoa, this is nothing like what I thought that the emotional tenor of this place would be. And I found the country impenetrable. I did not understand it at all. And it was shocking to me. It was the first time I'd really had that experience of complete disconnection and dislocation from a country and culture that I thought I would love because I thought I understood it. And it's so different.
PICO:
So different. And I love that word impenetrable cause I think that's really what life is. And I mean I often feel I've lived here in Japan 35 years and I feel like in many ways no less than when I first arrived. And that's grateful for that I'm freed from the illusion of knowing this. And I think, for me, one reason I brought out this book and called it the Half Known Life was I think we need that humility more than ever, for many reasons. One is that in the age of Google, it's easier than ever to assume we know something. I think in my grandparents' day they didn't assume they knew anything about Iran or Russia. But now you or I can sit in Los Angeles and see every detail of the festival I was describing online and go to parts of Russia on TV or on screen that would be very hard to get to in person. And so we feel we're armed with this knowledge, so to speak. And yet it's really an illusion or a delusion of knowledge. D.H. Lawrence, a hundred years ago said, Our grandparents knew the world better than we do because we think we know it essentially.
ELISE:
Yeah, we really do. So talk to us about the energy of places and the sensation. You talked about it in Jerusalem how moved you were by that physical location, but in all of these holy places and Australia, that was stunning particular part of the book. But talk to us about the energy of these sacred holy zones.
PICO:
Yes, they have magnetism and we often respond to people who have charisma, I've spent a lot of time with His Holiness the Dali Lama or his great friend, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It's hard to be in the room with somebody like that and not feel happy and uplifted and cleansed of many of our worries and places in a different way have this extraordinary power. So you said perfectly, I'm unaffiliated. So when I went to Jerusalem, I'm not Jewish, I'm not Muslim, I'm not a Christian. And I thought I can be a detached observer watching the frenzies and passions of all these different traditions, but I could feel that place. And to this day, sometimes I'll be walking down the street in Santa Barbara and I feel this pull to Jerusalem even though I have no official connection with it or any of its traditions, it’s got me under its spell.
And I sometimes think of places like that. Sometimes you'll be walking down the street and you'll see a kind of bera old man in a curtain and he's shouting out wild prophecies and you can't help listening. And he's not necessarily the person you want to be seated next to at the dinner table. But he's got a power and a truth and an intensity you can't turn away from. And so Jerusalem is a perfect example. And sometimes I tell friends who like to travel, they're somewhere, it's not particularly safe or comfortable or pleasant or reassuring, but it's irresistible and it gives me more than when I go to beautiful Hawaii because I throw up all these questions that lose me unsettled and humbles me. And so I remember in Jerusalem, in particular, every morning I would wake up at first light or before first light four in the morning, sometimes I'd go to the Church of the Holy Saper and I would sit in this little back corner. There's nothing there. The stone ledge, sometimes a tiny flickering candle. It couldn't be a more unassuming place, absolutely nothing to worship. And yet I felt there was a presence there even though I'm not a Christian, I couldn't stay, keep away and went back again, again and again.
So it was a reminder of how again, the ideology you officially subscribe to is ultimately immaterial to what moves. You said that I was moved and that's exactly the word to use. I was moved and transformed and almost brought to tears just going again and again to this empty broken place. And I couldn't put an explanation to it, nor would I want to. But that's why it's the reason people keep going back to Jerusalem or Varanasi, a crazy, mad engulfing, Holy city in India or many of these places. And with Australia it also brought up that unsettling question that here I am in a holy place, but I'm an outsider and I know so little about it and I can't read it. I'm likely to trample over the holy text. I'm likely to profane it. And so probably it's better if I stay away. And I think the indigenous people in Australia probably feel this keen sense that outsiders should stay away because we don't know how to work with those forces. And for them, the land itself is a kind of scripture over 60,000 years and we bumble in and are likely to face everything in our ignorance. And that's a question that paradise often arises. And as you know, I have a chapter about Ladak, this beautiful kingdom in the Himalayas. And when you get there it's peaceful and it's, it's preserved this Buddhist culture for centuries and it's easy to feel that you're in Shangri La. And then the second question is, if this is perfection, what am I doing here and what can I bring to it? I'm probably only likely to undo this paradise. I'm the serpent being imported into Eden and probably it'd be better if I went here at all. This place has everything it needs and it doesn't need somebody like me who might only need disrupt things. So we all know how if you do find a paradise, sometimes you want to be quiet about it. So nobody else will come and spoil it. But sometimes you also think, well I'm in danger spoiling it just by my presence. And the more impressed by it I am, maybe the further I should stay away.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well it's interesting, it's interesting too to think about land and these places, as you described in Australia where the scripture is written in the soil versus these shrines, temples, churches where we expect to find God. And not that the two can't coexist, but it's interesting the vortex or energy of these specific places. Then the people who are there and you write about Jerusalem it had long been too easy, you say that “Jerusalem is our world in miniature the family home in which everyone is wobbling with his siblings over a late father's will.” Because then there's that too, right? There's this idea of Abraham, the patriarch, the father of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, the fact that we are all, at least that particular part of the world, siblings, or related and yet completely unable to bridge differences within a family.
PICO:
Yeah. Whose land is this? And again, it goes back to what you were saying about collective morality. My sense is if there is a paradise, it basically has to belong to everybody. It's not a place where you, are I going to be kept out cause we voted for the wrong person or even that we happen to be born to the wrong tradition. This land belongs to you and me. And yet, there's no question that certain places just have this power inherent in. And I think you've spent time in Sedona and it attracts people. It feels like a vortex of energy. I'm constantly going to Big Sur and other my friends go to Ojai. So these places stand out cuz they've got something that Beverly Hills doesn't have necessarily.
ELISE:
No Vortex in Beverly Hills.
PICO:
I don't think so. No <laugh> and other places. I mean inner Australia does have that land almost vibrates with it.
ELISE:
I think it's as you said, this land, when we think about claiming sacred or holy land, how do we actually come to share it and recognize it's beyond each of us? I mean this is the problem that's as old as time, right?
PICO:
Yes, yes. And that's why, and you probably saw that almost I'd say the two central figures in this book at Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama. Thomas Merton because he's a Trappist monk for 27 years who found his great realization when he saw some Buddhas in Sri Lanka. And it was famously open to other traditions. In fact he'd been brought to Catholicism by a Hindu Swarmy, of all things. And then the Dalai Lama, who's probably one of the most respected religious figures in the world. And he published a book called Beyond Religion precisely because he's had a front seat view on what we were talking about, how much cruelty and intolerance can be practiced in the name of religion. And he says he's a defender of Islam, he learns from rabbi’s, he's delivered lectures on the gospels and most of all he bows before science, which offers us these kind of universal truths. And I think he has this sense after 40 years of traveling the world constantly and meeting every country and interesting person that the kindness and responsibility are perhaps more important than religion. And that religion can often take us into complex and divided places, whereas human responsibility is what brings us together.
And again, during the pandemic, I was thinking how physicians and nurses, I think so heroically were responding to people regardless of whether they were Democrats or Republicans or Jewish or Muslim or nothing at all. And just as the virus and forest fires and hurricanes attack us all, as kind of equal opportunity employers, they're not making divisions between us. And I think we all are feeling it more and more. It's the divisions we humans make that get us in trouble. Forgetting about the so many things that join us together,
ELISE:
Is it the origin story of Kabbala or is it Sufism, but that there was this great shattering and these points of light? The light was distributed everywhere. Which I thought was such a beautiful metaphor that you can think of certain places, is having maybe more light than others. But that in the way that the Dalai Lama thinks about the world, his reverence for science or Judaism or any other faith that everyone's holding these discrete, disparate parts of this puzzle. And I think it's a Kabbala story and that all of the pieces together make God's face, but that we're all holding different parts of this whole and each part is required. And so to just deny another person's experience is to make us less than.
PICO:
So beautifully said. Exactly right. So a thousand points of light really. But we take it out of the political domain and really as a human truth. But you're absolutely right and I think, I'm not a Buddhist, but the core notion of Buddhism is interdependence. Our circumstances are shaped by everything around us. And again, we saw that in a virus time, somebody sneezes in Wuhan and somebody in California gets sick. And we know that in the global world. And so exactly as you were saying we can't cut out any of the world because we're knit together in a kind of web and depend on each other the way our right hand depends on our left hand in many ways.
ELISE:
Will you tell the story about the Dalai Lama? Cause I know you traveled with him for a long time. You were writing about Intras net, this idea of interdependence, and that when someone would stand up and ask him about being disappointed in a dream, and I think it was these are big drains and can you talk about his response to that? That made me laugh. It was wonderful.
PICO:
The essence of him so practical. So yes, as you say, I'm lucky cause I've known him for 48 years and for 10 straight Novembers, I traveled with him across Japan by his side literally every minute there having lunch with him every day, stopping off at convenience stores to buy cans of tea to drink. And also he was nice enough to sit, let us sit in me and my wife on all his private audiences, as well as attending his public addresses. And almost every day there'd be a public address and at almost everyone, somebody would get up and ask us very heartfelt, sincere question, What do you do when your dream doesn't work out? When you dream of reversing climate change, bringing peace to the Middle East, helping your kids grow up in a fruitful way and it just doesn't work out.
And every time he'd look over them to that person with great kindness and a kind of uncle's warmth and say, Wrong dream. And then he would say, You have to be very realistic and rigorous in fashioning your dreams. You have to research and analyze and really think about what is a viable dream. If your dream is to marry bad Brad Pitt, it's not gonna happen. That if your is defined in your partner something that Brad Pitt would envy and many qualities Brad Pitt could never have, that could happen tomorrow. That's very, very doable. So when we talk about our disappointments or when we have utopian longings that don't work out, the fault is not in the universe, it's in us. And we haven't been clear sighted enough in organizing our dreams. And he's such a perfect example of that. I remember I saw him the day after he was awarded the Nobel Prize and typically he was in Newport Beach at the time engaged discussion with a group of scientists and he just staying at a host house, regular house in Newport Beach.
And I intruded on him at this exciting moment when he just seemed to receive the realization of his dreams being recognized by the Nobel Committee and all the Tibetans were celebrating and everyone who cared about Tibet thought this is the end of our problems. And he didn't begin to think about that. And I said to him, Congratulations your holiness. And he said, I really wonder if I've begun to do enough. And this isn't the end of any story, it's the beginning and doesn't really suggest anything. He said, All I can do is that every day take one step and try my best. And in the hope that as time goes on, more and more people will walk the same path and then finally maybe there will be a better outcome. But it was very striking to me that at maybe the happiest moment of his life, or the one that seemed the best validation of what he was attempting, he was so realistic. And it was as if he were saying, I have to be practical in my hopes and aspirations and I'm not gonna be able to change the world. I'm not going to be able to reverse China's policy. I'm not going to be able to bring peace everywhere overnight. All I can do is take these tiny steps.
And again, I remember one time a few years after that I was was staying across from his home in Dharamsala. I'd go to see him every afternoon, we'd have a long talk. When he was at the height of a celebrity having won the Nobel Prize, Hollywood was making a couple of movies about him. Everyone was coming and celebrating him and helping Tibet. And at one point he said, one time I was in Sowento, near Johannesburg and I asked to meet just a regular person and I was taken the little house and I met a man there and he had no hope. And he said, We're living under apartheid. We have no power. I just don't think my life is worth anything. And the Dalai Lama spoke to him for maybe an hour. And at the end of that hour the Dalai Lama told me that man really seemed to have confidence. And then the Dalai Lama looked across at me and he said, I really feel I made some contribution. I did something significant that day. I gave one person more confidence than he had before. From the Dalai Lama's point of view, winning the Nobel Prize or the relevance of the world, none of that really counts for anything.
But if you can have one genuine, intimate encounter with somebody and make that person feel a little better, that's as great an achievement as he is capable of. And so it's another example of being realistic about what one hopes to achieve. But it was so touching to see this man that the world idolizes and his great point of pride was he'd had one talk with a regular guy and made that guy feel better. Which I suppose is, I always think of the Dalai Lama and the Buddha as physicians, basically doctors and they know they can't save us forever and they know that their diagnosis are not always going to be right. But if one point they can see somebody who's suffering a lot and send them away with less suffering, oh that's okay, there's something really to be happy about.
ELISE:
There is, and it's interesting, and I don't know whether this is a more modern affliction or this has been humanity always, but it's certainly now, right? We live in this age of influencers and followers and this idea that you have to amass this incredible amount of, I don't know, power, I guess it's influence to have a difference and that you should be influencing people, millions of people in order to have a life that matters. And how did we get here? Jesus had 12 disciples, 12 <laugh>.
PICO:
Perfect. Yes. And truly, if you look at many of the people who do have 3 million followers, they're not ones that all of us would want to be emulating. And you're right, I think the world is crying out for leaders that we can really cherish and as you say, the numbers are the least of it. And it's just, again, I know that in your blog you told the story of I think it's a Chinese person and the horse and that you don't know what's a good blessing or a curse. You don’t know what's a good experience or bad experience. And certainly through the older I get in life the more I see that I can't begin even to tell whether something that happened to me was a good thing or a bad thing. Suddenly when I was quite young I got the job of my dreams and then I saw that could be a golden prison and it really, the most important thing was to leave that job otherwise I could wake up and I was 70 years old and I'd never really lived. And then another time, so many nowadays my house and family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground and I lost everything I had in the world. And now these many years later I probably wouldn't say that was a bad thing. It actually opened the door to many things I wouldn't have done otherwise. I could live more simply and I had a clearer sense of direction. I realized I didn't need to replace most of things I lost. And it made me remember what really I did have and what wouldn't get lost. I just read, actually again from the Sufis, they say the only thing that's yours is what can't get lost in a shipwreck. In other words, none of the material stuff. But maybe the people you love or the values you cherish these, they're still with you after you've lost everything in the world. So in the same way, our sense of who's a person worth emulating and who isn't seems to be in disarray.
ELISE:
In disarray, yeah.
PICO:
We quantify it in exactly the wrong way. And it's so interesting that the people most worthy of admiration are probably the ones who are not seeking it out. And who as with the Dalai Lama are only thinking of the one person across the room, rather than receiving 20 million followers on Twitter. I once saw Pope Francis give a talk at TED and he said very pointedly, the more power you have, the more you need to be humble. And I think he was speaking to many world leaders, but he was speaking as a man of great power and authority himself. And he radiated humility and modesty. His presence was as much a teaching as his words and very good lesson, I think.
ELISE:
As is the one from the Dalai Lama. And I'm so flattered that you read anything on my website that's very sweet and I love that parable that you mentioned essentially of this man who, I can't tell it because I'll butcher it, but it's on my site that this idea of you don't a long game and something that might seem good or bad in the moment shouldn't be judged. And often those boxes of darkness bear the greatest gifts,
PICO:
Boxes of darkness. Wonderful. Yes, exactly. It's a long game and it's also a super complicated game. And you saying a minute ago, interconnected game, which is why you can't judge things in isolation and that So my house burnt down, taken in isolation, that's a terrible thing, but it's part of a much larger story that features many other things. And I felt that during the pandemic too, that it made so many things impossible. I tried to think what things has it made possible? And there were many really, really good things that opened the door to things that otherwise I was sleepwalking past. And I think it helped many of us think about what we really cared about and think about how we could stay closest to what we care about and just sharpened our priorities. Because the rest of the time we were in such a rush, we couldn't really see what was important and we couldn't sift what was trivial from what was essential. And suddenly hitting the pause button, if you were lucky enough to survive, you could see, oh, maybe I wasn't living in the best possible way before and maybe I could live in a better way going forwards. We think back on the pandemic for all the terrible suffering and grief and loss, economic and physical every other way, many of us will see that gave us things we wouldn't have got otherwise. Good things.
ELISE:
Yeah, certainly it was a paradox training and having to hold multiple realities at the same time. And oh this is awful and this is great and this is great and this is awful. And recognizing that all of these things can coexist and part of the human experience is not to deny the one or the other, but learn how to let them mutually exist together. Cause I have so many friends, too, who had a great Covid and then they have so much shame about that. And so then they're trying to of suppress that reality, if that makes sense. And it's like, no, this is life. This is life. This is both and the two need to come up and exist together.
PICO:
And if you did have a great Covid, that means you have so much to share with other people, many of whom had a really hard Covid. And it's like almost a question of privilege. I feel that those of us who are relatively fortunate, as you said, shouldn't be embarrassed about that. But just be mindful that we have all these advantages, not everybody has. And it's our ability to share those. Of course as you were saying that I was thinking as I end my book in Varanasi, which is the craziest place on earth that feels like a Hieronymus Bosch on psychedelics. It's so going on. And yet the city of death and it's a place where people are going to be buried is a city of joy. And that in some ways that's where in this book I find what I have to take as paradise. The place where sacred and profane and the good and bad, every possible thing is thrown together. And it made me think that holiness is the place where you stop making a division between sacred and profane and actually see just what you were describing now in describing the pandemic, this, you're throwing your arms around the whole confused complex reality.
ELISE:
I love that. I love too that your parents warned you away from Varanasi and that they'd never been. That's so wild. <laugh>.
PICO:
And they're both Hindus and they're both professors of compared religion and deep in the wisdom of every tradition, including Hinduism. But you'll see why the reality of Varanasi was too much. Have you been there by any chance?
ELISE:
No, no. I've only been to Rishikesh. And I really need to go back to India.
PICO:
Well Rishikesh, I mean you've tasted India, how intense it is, no need for therapy or LSD to India, <laugh> and Varanasi is India to the max. I’ve never been to Rishikesh, but I think that would be a very powerful place.
ELISE:
It's stunning and all of it, I mean it's so human and sacred and one of those places that you can't totally process, like you are just part of it and you're just there. You're just part of the ritual and sitting and watching and letting it all unfold. It's not a place, or at least in my experience, where you do a lot of thinking. It's not like a quiet processing place. It's an “in it” place.
PICO:
You just described the ending of my book and the point of my book perfectly, as you said, you can't process it, you just have to be part of it. And at the end of my book, I am walking around and around the stupor with the Tibetans. And I'm not a Tibetan or a Buddhist, but as you said, all it's all one can do just be part of the pageant and the carnival. Understanding it. There's no getting on top of it. You're always the bottom of it probably, but fine.
ELISE:
I loved how you also at the end brought it back. You talk about the Franciscan priests Richard Rohr and how he says, “Our goal in life is not to become spiritual but to become human.”
PICO:
Wow. That's beautiful. And that's from the seemingly very spiritual person, a Franciscan priests for 60 years or whatever. I keep on thinking back that sentence and again, Thomas, his colleague in a way says “you suffer most if you try to avoid suffering.” And if you turn your face away from the difficulty of the world, then you're really in trouble, probably. And then of course the other central sentence and that final chapter is from a Zen teacher, I think he was in Los Angeles actually when he said that. And wonderfully he was thinking about Jesus on the cross and the three people who are being crucified together. And I think he probably shocked his Western students by saying, “in your struggle is your paradise. That's where your paradise is,” in the crucifixion. Which just you could sort of imagine a Christian person saying that, but from a Zen teacher that was an embracing paradise is not shambala, it's a struggle.
ELISE:
And do you think he meant by that there's in that moment of allowance or letting it be that that's where peace comes from?
PICO:
That's where we have to make our piece, maybe. Yes. I loved allowance and letting it be and assuming that you can't control or anticipate anything. Stephen Mitchell, your wise translator from Zen tradition, I think he says something, I paradise his being at ease with the joy and sorrows of the world. And so that's probably equivalent to what Ada Roshi was saying there. Yes, at peace with or an accepting of the fact that all this stuff is happening, we can't process it or make sense of it. The message of the book of Joe too, probably. I often think, and I was thinking a lot during the pandemic, but reality is our partner. So it's like our spouse and our spouse is difficult much of the time and impossible some of the time. But we've chosen her or him and we know that's the person. We have to find a way to work with that. And I think that's how reality is. It's often going to be exasperating and confounding, but we can't look away from it and we have to come to our convivial agreement with it so that we can produce something useful as in any human partnership. And maybe that's also what Father Richard Rohr was saying, we sometimes distract ourselves by looking at the spiritual stuff or things with capital letters or abstractions rather than the human reality, which is where really everything has to take place.
ELISE:
We like to bypass. It's true. It's easier to go out there, again, it's easier to go and find that external paradise than it is to sit with ourselves.
PICO:
Yes. And we're all seeking transcendence, but really our lives have to take place in the untranscendent life. And Jesus, whom you mentioned, and the Buddha, they were human beings just trying to better way of navigating the world really.
ELISE:
Yeah. I mean you could argue that Jesus came to have a human experience, if you believe he is, well, I think we're all spiritual being having a physical experience and he is no different. And to be human is quite amazing, if we could come to accept that.
PICO:
Yes. And then what you were just saying remind me of, I think Teilhard de Chardin said, and this is probably what you were almost quoting, “We are not humans having a spiritual existence, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Something like that. I was remembering how when I end the book in Varanasi, as you know, but six miles away from this chaos is a very peaceful place of sonar where the Buddha delivered his first discourse. And when I was in Varanasi, the Dalai Lama happened to be giving talks and in sanna and his talks there were on the Bodhisattva way of life. And just that notion of Bodhisattva, for the Maana Buddhist, a really enlightened person is not somebody who's found paradise, but somebody who leaves paradise behind to help the rest of us that the Bodhisattva is one who turns his back on the gates of paradise cause the rest of us are still in confusion and suffering. And that's where he has to serve, rather than just sitting in the heaven and he feels enjoying his mellow or whatever it might be.
ELISE:
Enjoying his reward. I love that. That's beautiful. Alright, so before I let you carry on with your day, where do you wanna go next? Are there any earthly paradises you haven't explored yet? Or do you feel like you've seen the entire world?
PICO:
No, I'll never see the entire world <laugh>. I'll never see the entire anything, as the half known life. But no, I mean I've been very lucky to grow up in a generation and in a situation where I've been able to see a lot of places. There are many places I'd love to see and I know I would learn from. But if I never see them, I won't be sorry. I mean I'm so happy just being here in my little rented two room apartment in the middle of nowhere, Japan, where we've been for 29 years. And I would be so grateful if I could spend almost every day here. And again another thing that the pandemic reminded of, I couldn't travel as much as usual. I don't think I really missed it. What I did find was I'd take a walk along the road behind my mother's house and it's in the hills of Santa Barbara and my parents had lived there more than 50 years.
I'd never walked to the end of the road just 20 minutes away before. And I did. And I'd look around and there a golden light of early morning and there's a Pacific ocean in the distance with the sun sentient above it. And I said, this is as beautiful as anywhere somebody would go to Capri or Rio de Janero, to see this right in my backyard. And I'd never thought to look at it before. And so too, with this little apartment, my wife and I just start taking walks in every direction. And we came upon bamboo forests and cherry blossoms, all kinds of wonders. And we'd never in 29 years in this apartment looked around us. And so it was a reminder that all the beauty of the wonder of the world is right here. If only I have the eyes and motivation to see.
ELISE:
There's no place like home.
PICO:
There's no place like home. It's true, especially at my age, I've chosen the home that agrees with me. It's not just the home where happen to be born or grow up, but of the place that I visited Japan was the one that answered some longing in me, I guess. And a place of great kindness and beauty and grace and also as you said, impenetrable and unfathomable. And if I were here for 40 more years, I still wouldn't understand it. And that's a wonder, too. So yeah, I'm lucky, those of us who get to choose the places where we live.
ELISE:
Yeah, certainly. Or who come to understand the culture of those places deeply in a way that's felt, that's part of the experience, or that's that can really understand what it feels like to go home here.
PICO:
Yes. And the beauty of travel is it helps you appreciate home more and all the things you take for granted. I mean I used to travel to very difficult places and then when I would return to Santa Barbara, how lucky we are in Southern California to live in such relative comfort and ease for all the difficult assists and how easy to forget that when you are in the traffic jam on the 405.
ELISE:
I don’t know, it rained here this morning, which was actually such joy and a gift to wake up to. I'm like a raincoat. How about that? We need rain.
PICO:
So in California right now, rain is the great blessing, not sunshine, but that's a reminder, what we're saying. You don’t know what is good or bad, we're actually chasing against the constant sunshine. Longing for great days and drizzle <laugh>.
ELISE:
Exactly. Well thank you so much.
ELISE:
“Boxes Full of Darkness,” that’s from the poem The Uses of Sorrow by Mary Oliver, which goes: “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness, it took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” Such a beautiful sentiment. I really loved Pico’s latest book, it’s so beautiful, he is an incredible travel writer, but he also is spiritually gifted with his ability to, in a very nuanced way, decipher spaces and places. And as he describes himself, because he is unaffiliated with any religion, he also has an objectivity to be able to take in what’s around him without judgment and distill wisdom and observe what’s true. He talks a lot Thomas Morton in this book, and finding him in various places around the globe. I am sure many of you are Thomas Morton fans. And he writes: “It was striking to me that Morton had found what he needed in the cessation of all questions, even if that would never be the same thing as answers. I remembered how he has written that to have all the answers might be proof that you weren’t asking the right questions; uncertainty was perhaps the place where all of us, even a monk, would have to make our home, but I was also moved that a man who had devoted his life to the Christian God had been so stirred by faces by the Buddha, as if heaven was not the private property of any group.” I loved that, because it suggests, as so much of the book is about, that Heaven, paradise, really belongs to all of us and these places can’t be claimed. Alright, I’ll see you next week.
