Soul Boom: Rainn Wilson shares his take on spirituality in new book

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Through life experiences and his Baháʼí faith, which embraces an essential unity of all religions and the unity of humanity, Rainn Wilson takes readers on a 10-chapter journey that touches on how spirituality can be found in everything from official religious texts to quotes from Captain James T. Kirk, the “Star Trek” character.

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Rainn Wilson on Twitter

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Ralphie Aversa:

Hello and welcome to a special edition of Five Things. I'm Ralphie Aversa, host and producer of Entertain This for USA Today. Thanks for joining me. Today we're speaking to Rainn Wilson, a man best known for playing the Awkward but beloved character, Dwight Schrute on NBC's long-running hit show The Office. Rainn is also the author of the newly released Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, a book that explores how spirituality can help us create solutions to an increasingly challenging world. Rainn, welcome to Five Things.

Rainn Wilson:

My pleasure. Thanks. Thanks so much.

Ralphie Aversa:

You write, "I believe that to see the world through spiritual glasses, we have to start at the very end." You talk about consciousness and about how death has been on our minds. COVID-19, no question. Just for me, being somebody in my mid-thirties, my parents aren't getting any younger. I'm starting to think about that. Why did you feel it was necessary to address death in the manner that you did in this book?

Rainn Wilson:

I feel like in contemporary America, it's not something we know how to talk about. It's something we're afraid to talk about. It is a topic that everyone will deal with it, and now that I'm in my mid-fifties, as I know people that are passing away, I lost my father a couple years back. I talk about that in the book, several friends recently. I wanted to start with death because death frames everything. If we're able to kind of effectively look at death through a spiritual lens, it can make our life richer, and that's ultimately why I start with this most important topic.

Ralphie Aversa:

How did the death of your father help you deal with this topic and then write about it so others could read it in this book?

Rainn Wilson:

When my father died somewhat tragically, he was 79, he was getting a multiple bypass heart operation, and his heart just failed. I was struck to my core. We'd been very, very close throughout my life. And when I was with his body, I just had a very deep visceral realization that, oh, my father was not this body. This body was just a vessel. He rode around in this really wonderful, silly, fun, handsome vessel for most of his life or well, all of his life. But his essence is not that. Why are we here for 60, 70, 80, 90 years riding around in these meat suits on planet earth? These are the kind of big questions that I love to ask. I finally had the chance over COVID to write this book and to dig deep into some of the biggest questions that face us as humans.

Ralphie Aversa:

You wrote that no one else was really talking about these topics. Obviously there's books on spirituality and death and God, what did you see missing from the bookshelves?

Rainn Wilson:

I wanted to kind of, and I hope that I succeeded throughout the course of the book, to reframe the entire idea and conception of spirituality. Some people think of spirituality as something very new age, and some people think of spirituality as only having to do with their particular church or their synagogue or their shrine. Spirituality runs through everything. It courses through everything, whether you're religious or you're not religious.

The subtitle of the book is Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, and this is what I don't feel is being addressed out there, that there are spiritual tools that are practical and profound that can transform our lives personally, but can also transform our society. And it's what we need more than ever at a time when we're so divided and there's so much ranker and disunity, especially in the political sphere, but culturally as well, we need these spiritual tools of compassion, of forgiveness, of healing, of creating unity, of love at its maximum possible level, and we need to put them to work in our systems, in our organizations, in our companies, and in our government systems. And there might be some eye rolls around that, but I truly believe that it's possible and it's doable. And not only that, it is crucially necessary.

Ralphie Aversa:

For those that are listening and are wondering if we're going to address what maybe could be perceived as an elephant in the room. That is the fact that Rainn Wilson, this great actor who most people know as Dwight from The Office is writing a book about spirituality and really getting deep on it. You really went out of your way to say, "Yep, I get it guys. I'm Dwight from The Office. I understand, but listen to me for a second here." Why was it important for you to really just get that out of the way from the start?

Rainn Wilson:

I hadn't written that first chapter, that introductory chapter that talks about why the hell is the guy who played Dwight from the office writing a book about spirituality? I think that people wouldn't know what to do or what to think of it. Also, along the way, I should mention, I try and be funny and the book is a little bit funny and fun to read, I hope.

Ralphie Aversa:

I chuckled when you mentioned that during COVID, this was kind of spurred on by reading a headline about a celebrity who had gone through a spiritual transformation in Switzerland.

Rainn Wilson:

Yeah.

Ralphie Aversa:

And I'm thinking to myself, there's no way Rainn Wilson would lie about this, right? Let me see what's actually going on here. So I got on the old Google and I looked and sure enough, the Women's Health June, 2020 cover story was on Julianne Hough, recently named co-host of Dancing with the Stars, talking about how she had went to Switzerland and had some demons exercised from her and had had this spiritual transformation. Now, when this story came out, it's again ...

Rainn Wilson:

Wow, you are a hard-hitting journalist.

Ralphie Aversa:

Yeah. This is USA Today,

Rainn Wilson:

You went right from the source. Okay.

Ralphie Aversa:

Rainn, this is USA Today, we don't mess around.

Rainn Wilson:

You don't mess around. It's USA Today.

Ralphie Aversa:

What's going through your mind, especially when you read that headline and maybe dive a little more into that story?

Rainn Wilson:

I was on this train in Switzerland traveling with my wife, and there was a headline and it said, actor had a spiritual transformation. I was like, "Oh, fantastic. I love spiritual transformations. Let me read what happened." And then it was like a shaman exercising demons from them. I'm like, "How is this spiritual?" To me, that has nothing to do with spirituality. It's not about ghosts and shamans and demons. So it was important to define our terms.

Ralphie Aversa:

I know you have a memoir as well where you've been very open about your life. You do address some of the issues you've had in this book, specifically when it comes to addiction. How are you able though to get from that point where you're suffering from these issues, you move past those issues and then also now can talk about those issues and these other really bigger topics in our world?

Rainn Wilson:

Back in the nineties when I was in my 20s and early 30s, I was very, very unhappy. And when I look back on it now, I realize like, "Oh, I was in a mental health crisis myself." We just didn't have a language for mental health crisis at the time. I was racked with anxiety, I was suffering great depression. I'd even had periods in my life where I'd considered what suicide would look like. I never got to that point, but I was ideating about it, certainly. I had addiction issues, certainly have had periods with drugs and alcohol that were very dark. And so my quest for finding a spiritual path forward out of depression, anxiety, addiction, out of mental health issues was practical as well. Just like I grew up a member of the Bahai Faith and I had discarded all of that in my 20s to just go be an actor in New York City.

And then I thought to myself, "Maybe I've done myself a disservice here. Maybe I need to re-explore those ideas about God and life and soul and the meaning of life and purpose and the nature of suffering because I'm so very unhappy maybe this will help me." And it did. It hasn't always been easy. It's been a very difficult, arduous road with a lot of ups and downs in it. But that is what really sparked my deep and abiding interest in these gigantic topics was they personally affected me and in the exploration of them, they made my life better. And I believe they can make other people's lives better, and I believe collectively they can make our lives better.

Ralphie Aversa:

We've talked about a number of topics that you've explored in the book. What did you learn either if it was a thing about a topic or about yourself in writing this book?

Rainn Wilson:

Wow, that's a great question. I learned that I really love to write and although when I was in the midst of it, in the thick of it, especially in the ending and trying to tie it up and wrap it up, and I was under a deadline with my publisher and they're like, "Where's those final pages?" I thought it was hell. I told my wife, "I'm in hell. I'm in over my head. I'm never doing this again." And of course I finished the book and then I'm like, "Oh, I have another idea for a book. Maybe I'll write that." So I really love writing and I love writing about these topics and I think they're much needed and I hope readers and audiences feel the same way.

Ralphie Aversa:

Last question, which of the pillars that you end the book with do you think is most possible?

Rainn Wilson:

Great question. So I end the book with, we're talking about a spiritual revolution. So I wanted to leave the audience, the readership, with some tangibles, not to make things all just airy fairy and say, "Hey, be loving to one another." That's obvious. But some actual specific things that we can do. The most important one of the seven pillars for a spiritual revolution is to foster joy and squash cynicism. That's something I think that we can do. Everything in the world, the way it's set up wants us to be cynical and wants us to be negative and pessimistic, and it's an easy fallback position. It's harder to be optimistic and to foster joy, to bring joy to the world, to bring people together, to unite people, to light hearts and to squash that impulse towards cynicism. And that's something we can all do because if we stay cynical and we stay pessimistic, we're not going to make any changes. Everything is just going to stay the same. So it's super important that if we want change, that we start in our own hearts and we stay optimistic.

Ralphie Aversa:

The new book is called Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution. Mr. Rainn Wilson, thank you so much for the time today.

Rainn Wilson:

Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.

Ralphie Aversa:

A big thanks to Rainn Wilson for coming on to the show. Also thanks to Shannon Ray Green and Taylor Wilson for editing this episode. Tell us what you think about the show. Review us on your favorite podcast app or send us an email podcast@usatoday.com. For all of us at USA Today, thanks for listening. I'm Ralphie Aversa.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Soul Boom: Rainn Wilson shares his take on spirituality in new book