Soul Boom

At six, my son was asking questions about Hinduism, the religion I was raised in but which now lives in our house as chipped statues battling Star Wars figurines. His inquiry finally pushed me off of autopilot. My mom appeared in my mind, telling me what to say to him. Then my forehead touching cold ground in temples an ocean away. Images of women circling prayer beads in delicate fingers. None of it was an answer, and I wasn’t really looking for one, not one I could hand him anyway. But the question stayed. What’s more solid than “spiritual” without being weighed down by do’s, don’ts, and duty? Something he could build on if he chose to.

Soul Boom was a light entry point into a vague topic. Rainn Wilson uses humor, pop culture, and his personal experience as a Baha’i to make a strong case for a return to spirituality and the cultivation of a shared moral character.

Who should read it

• Spiritual seekers
• People who have given up on religion
• Community builders

How this book changed me

We traded separation for self-improvement. The retreat from organized religion is known across cultures. We’re quick to blame extremism, war, and injustice on religiosity. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari makes the point that religion existed to organize the mob and establish a social hierarchy. I remember reading that book thinking religion just accelerates separation. Instead of oneness with nature and each other, we were off proving our oneness with our own version of God. Rainn points out that the conversation many of us are stuck in is one of individuation. Spirituality has been reduced to personal development: becoming a better person, reaching my potential. But something is missing in doing this individual work while the world is increasingly falling apart.

Spiritual values vs. spirituality. The book pushes spirituality past “belief in some larger mystery” and onto values you can actually practice: compassion, generosity, wisdom, patience. The missing pillar, he argues, in spirituality and in religion for that matter, is the bettering of humanity. Doing better for and with each other. Compassion is what Rainn lands on, because it sits between the divine and the practical. It builds bridges between groups that wouldn’t otherwise intersect.

“The greatest illusion in this world is the illusion of separation.” — Albert Einstein

As the Lakota say, “All my relations.”

Prayer as dialogue. Prayer is the center of most faiths but a loaded term for me. Whether in our family’s temple room or in my Catholic neighborhood, I grew up seeing prayer and meditation as quiet rituals, less a back and forth and more asking for As, a bigger house, a promotion. As a daughter, sister, and mom, it felt natural to pray for the health and joy of loved ones. But asking for things when I felt so privileged felt off to me. I was never able to build ritual around it in ways that felt nourishing. The book started to seed for me the idea of prayer as a dialogue. Prayer as more about listening than asking.

Top quotes

“In the Baha’i Faith… we call it our ‘twofold moral purpose.’ … Spirituality and religion should make our lives better and show us a path toward personal peace and enlightenment. If it doesn’t do either of those two things, then we should all jettison it. The wisdom of faith either makes our lives better, increases serenity, and makes us better people, or there is really no reason to have it in our lives.”

“I was speaking to Dr. Varun Soni, chaplain at the University of Southern California, and he had an outrageous comparison for God that truly made me chuckle. He suggested that perhaps we should think of God as being like the internet. What precisely is the internet? Can you point your finger at it? Is it circuits? Servers? Websites? No, it’s so much more! It’s a plane of being unto itself. Think Tron. Think The Matrix. It’s beautiful and horrible. It contains love and hate and the beauty of human expression. It’s both a tool and a destination. It can be harnessed for good or twisted for evil. It’s a world of malignant hackers and imaginative digital artists. It’s a world of ones and zeros and also of scintillating pixels. Mindless diversion and unifying, gorgeous entertainment. But there is power there. Running in it, through it, behind it. A microcosm and shadow of our physical universe.”

“New York Times political and cultural commentator David Brooks, in his recent (magnificent) book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, says of this shift to online community, Living online often means living in a state of diversion. When you’re living in diversion you’re not actually deeply interested in things; you’re just bored at a more frenetic pace.… Such is life in the dizziness of [online] freedom. Nobody quite knows where they stand with one another. Everybody is pretty sure that other people are doing life better.… When a whole society is built around self-preoccupation, its members become separated from one another, divided and alienated. And this is what has happened to us.”

“All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind.” — Max Planck, Nobel Prize winner

“God is not separate from the world; He is the soul of the world, and each of us contains a part of the Divine Fire. All things are parts of one single system, which is called Nature.” — Zeno, founder of Stoicism

“The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.” — Basho