Rainn Wilson's Spiritual Journey | Big Think — Transcript

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1. 0:00Question: How did your experiences growing
2. 0:01up in a sort of unconventional  family inform who you are today?
3. 0:03Rainn Wilson: Well, I grew up a very dorky,  weird looking kid in suburban Seattle and to
4. 0:10make matters worse another way in which I didn’t  fit in was my parents were Baha’is, members of the
5. 0:16Baha’i faith, and I grew up a member of the Baha’i  faith. And one of the great things about that was
6. 0:25that I had a very Catholic—from the original use  of the word Catholic—view of religions. We soaked
7. 0:34in all kinds of different beliefs. Jehovah’s  Witnesses would knock on the door. We would
8. 0:39invite them in and discuss the Bible with them. We  would have Buddhist monks traveling through town
9. 0:44stay with us. We had books on Sufism and Sikhism  and I knew about all of these things and I was
10. 0:50raised to think about philosophy and religious  thought and the soul and the spirit of humankind
11. 0:56in a different way, also really socially  progressive teachings of the Baha’i faith,
12. 1:00the equality of men and women, the elimination  of racial prejudice, the equality of science
13. 1:05and religion, so it was a big cauldron of big  ideas in my household. And we were weird and
14. 1:14unhappy family, but nonetheless that was a  really positive thing that came out of it.
15. 1:19Then when I moved to New York in my 20s, I really  abandoned all that—and so many people do that grow
16. 1:24up in religious households. They just abandon the  way of their parents. I decided there couldn’t
17. 1:34be a God, that there was so much suffering in  the world. Religion perpetrated so much evil.
18. 1:38I wanted to do my own way and take my own journey  and what I did was I became an artist and I just
19. 1:44focused on being an actor and all of my attention  just went to... and my kind of my fervor went to
20. 1:55theater and acting and I really thought with my  friends that went to school down at NYU we would
21. 2:01do little basement productions of Hedda Gabler or  whatever and we really thought we could change the
22. 2:06world. If we did the right piece of theater in  the right way with the right audience we could
23. 2:12touch people’s hearts and we could just blow  their minds and just open things up completely.
24. 2:16And I also focused on my career as an actor  a great deal and I became very me-focused and
25. 2:23me-centered, just myself and my career and what is  next and how do I get a better agent and how do I
26. 2:28get into TV and movies and then I you know I felt  a yearning. I came to a crossroads. I hit bottom,
27. 2:40in a way. I was really unhappy, and realized  that I just wanted something more about....
28. 2:48from the experience of being alive. I was like  I was doing great plays. It wasn’t changing the
29. 2:54world. I was getting good agents and doing film  and TV and I wasn’t happier. I was like "Wow,
30. 3:00there is an unease inside of me." And that led  me back on my kind of more spiritual path to the
31. 3:10Baha’i faith in a new and fresher way and a more  realized way and I came to also understand at
32. 3:18that point that there was no difference between  being devout and being an artist. There is no
33. 3:26difference between creativity and spirituality  and philosophy and that is what Soul Pancake,
34. 3:30the book, and SoulPancake.com are about is: it’s  all about human expression and it’s all about
35. 3:41seeking to transcend. It’s about that yearning  and whether it’s through science or through art,
36. 3:47through service, through worship it’s the human  experience of longing to connect with people,
37. 3:55to connect with the energy throughout  creation and we compartmentalize all of
38. 4:03these things and I realized it’s all the  same thing. I play Dwight. That is just
39. 4:08much me being of service and worshiping as  if I'm on my knees in some temple somewhere
40. 4:15or bowing my head in prayer to God in some  way. It’s really all just the same thing.
41. 4:21Question: What keeps you up at night?
42. 4:21Rainn Wilson: Boy, I sleep like a log.  I always have. I just I hit the pillow
43. 4:29and it’s like [snore sound]. What keeps my  wife up at night is my horrific snoring,
44. 4:35which I got to get taken care of.  I need to get those nose strips.