Today, I’m featuring a returning guest, my friend, Ray Hollenbach: teacher, blogger, writer, former pastor, and now a facilitator of the Deeper Seminars. Ray trains leaders and any one interested in deepening their spiritual maturity and walk of faith in the Fruit of the Spirit in small group settings so lasting transformation is likely.
Included in the show notes are FREE downloads of Ray’s exercises for you (scroll to the bottom to get those). We hope you enjoy them. Be sure to get his powerful book Deeper Grace.
If you appreciate what you hear today, if you enjoy it or benefit from it at all, please remember that just a few dollars from you helps a lot.
Matt Hutson has a B.S. in cognitive neuroscience from Brown University and an M.S. in science writing from MIT. He has written for Wired, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Discover, Scientific American Mind, Popular Mechanics, Technology Review, Slate, NewYorker.com, NYMag.com, ScienceMag.org, Aeon, Nautilus, Al Jazeera America, The Boston Globe,The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Psychology Today, where he was the News Editor for four years.
MIN 1:30
Matt’s religious and spiritual background and context for writing about magic and how we think.
A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking
MIN 2:30
Cognitive Neuroscience studies
Meaning is filtered through the mind.
MIN 3:30
What is magical thinking and how does it happen all the time in our lives?
MIN 9:00
Humans are very social creatures and we apply our perspective (like thoughts and desires) onto other things that are not human.
MIN 11:30
Some atheists claim they don’t commit mistakes of magical thinking, but Matthew says, “Not so fast, we all do and it’s not so bad!”
Involuntary Cognitive bias
The experiments the tease out the behavioral repercussion of these basis.
MIN 14:30
Instinct and staying safe
MIN 16:30
How does Matt deal with his own magical thinking?
Realizing the difference between correlation and causation.
MIN 18
Learning Critical Thinking
Is there another explanation?
MIN 20
Transcendent experiences and loss of awareness of ego or a sense of awe.
Astronauts often return from space with a new belief in God or spirituality or ecologically-minded or with a renewed sense of awe.
MIN 23
Matt’s transcendent moment in Alaska.
MIN 25
Matt talks about the “The Soul Lives On” and “Everything Happens for a Reason” chapters of his book.
MIN 29
Up loading our brains to live on after us and artificial intelligence.
MIN 31
symbols: such as, people feel less lonely when they watch tv.
MIN 34
Consciousness as discreet states
MIN 35
Verbs most activate our motor system
MIN 38
The movie HER and brain simulation
MIN 40
The psychology of social status. power, prestige, and class how we achieve it. Why we care about getting it and what’s good about it and how it shows our values.
MIN 42
How upbringing can program us for life.
Thank you so much for your interest in this episode. Dig around and listen to other episode and come back each Wednesday and Friday for new ones, or subscribe and never miss a thing.
I like to define happiness as “sturdy joy” and there is some science that shows us that specific behaviors increase it in our lives. Benjamin Hardy’s article on the topic caught my attention and I had to have him on the podcast to share his findings.
Scroll down for detailed show notes and don’t forget to come back every Wednesday for a “Soul School” episode and each Friday for a special guest episode.
Ben is a writer and a PhD candidate in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Clemson University.
SCROLL DOWN for much more about my guest and about this special episode.
If it is not already obvious, on Spark My Muse I feature people and topics I find interesting and important. I feature people from a variety of backgrounds and traditions: people of some kind of religious faith and people without belief in the supernatural are my guests. What they all have in common is that I think they are working on something worthy of attention and conversation. It doesn’t mean I agree or come to the same conclusions with every guest 100% but I appreciate them very much and I want to make space for them here and learn from them. It will spark my muse and yours.
Currently, few people meet that standard more than my guest today: Jennifer Michael Hecht. What I have deeply appreciated about Jennifer Michael Hecht‘s work is her curiosity, investigative way of working and writing, her sense of wonder, and her wonderful and sense of humor that comes out perhaps most often in her poetry.
In our conversation we cover topics in some of her books, her background, and she even reads a poem (swoon), but the main topic covered is extremely important.
In fact, it’s a matter of life and death: Suicide. There are common myths about why people kill themselves and those myths create more deaths. No more.
If you feel the urge to end your life, don’t. Wait out your mood, please talk about what is bothering you, and seek help. Stay alive.
I too have had time of deep darkness and thoughts of taking my life have gone through my mind. I haven’t planned how to carry it all out because the finality scares me and the thought of putting my loved ones through hardship hurts me.
The statistics tell us that having these thoughts are normal, just as any other type of thoughts. Our thoughts our not our identity. They are things our brain does to try to solve problems. Sometimes our brain should not be listened to. We must not listen to any murderous thoughts either, right? (Like the ones we have during road rage moments or when we feel like we want to strangle our child when they sass us or boldface lie.) Our meat-like brains might think bad things. So, if a thought of taking your life is happening now, or ever. Please stay. Don’t be rash. Hang on. AND Thank you for making a choice to stay on.
The best thing we can do during those dark and bad times is to wait it out and support others doing the same. We can also talk to someone to sort things through. If you feel like you are in a desperate mood, try your best to stay until you feel better. Jennifer says it and I concur, your future self will be happy you did. Others WILL be happy you did.
Don’t do anything you can’t undo. First Call 1-800-273-TALK (8255)
To share an audio snippet, click on the red and white icon below.
Thank you for listening. This is a very important episode and I urge you to pass it along to as many people as you can for when a very desperate mood may strike them.
Scroll down for notes of the show listed by-the-minute. More resources are at the bottom.
GUEST: Jennifer Michael Hecht
BIO
Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, philosopher, historian and commentator. She is the author of the bestseller Doubt: A History, a history of religious and philosophical doubt all over the world, throughout history. Her new book is Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, out from Yale University Press. Her The Happiness Myth brings a historical eye to modern wisdom about how to lead a good life. Hecht’s The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropologywon Phi Beta Kappa’s 2004 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “For scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.”
Publisher’s Weekly called her poetry book, Funny, “One of the most original and entertaining books of the year.” Her first book of poetry, The Next Ancient World, won three national awards, including the Poetry Society of America’s First Book award for 2001. Her new poetry book called Who Said, just came out from Copper Canyon in November 2013. Hecht has written for Politico, The New YorkTimes, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirerand The New Yorker. She holds a Ph.D. in the history of science/European cultural history from Columbia University (1995) and has taught in the MFA program at Columbia University and the New School in New York City.
SHOWNOTES
MIN 2:00
Her first love: poetry.
min 3:30
PhD at Columbia in the History of Science
5:00
The hard sciences in her roots influencing her educational pursuits.
6:30
How she came to write the book Doubt: A History
The End of the Soul (her dissertation)
The Society of Mutual Autopsy
Brain dissections (Paris) done to prove the soul did not exist.
The members of this group left records of their atheism and she decided that there was not a good record of atheism and the tradition of it.
15:00
Disbelief is “a kind of atheism”. The splits and religions that come about as people question the prominent god or gods and religion of the time.
16:30
The people throughout history who reject the supernatural and accept only the natural world.
17:30
The mixing of cultural and religions in our times and the current idea of spirituality that you can contact the supernatural inside yourself.
19:00 The secular argument against suicide.
Ages 15-44 3rd leading killer of Americans
Ages 44 and up is the 10th leading killer. It happens in greater number among the older population.
In 2000, 30,00 people per year.
In 2010, 40,00 people per year killed themselves and raising.
There seem to be trends like in other social trends like drug use, and the trend rises when people feel it’s a solution others like them are choosing.
23:00 The Christians who leave suicide notes and say that they think that God will understand (and forgive them.) need to hear the reason why to stay.
The TWO MAIN ARGUMENTS in the book STAY:
Suicide harms community
People close to you, that you may never wish to harm to be harm irreparably (especially children who are 4 times more likely to also commit suicide if their parent does, depending on how old they are).
Neighborhoods, schools, families, groups, communities have increased suicide and trauma statistically after a suicide occurs.
Suicide hurts your future self
28:00
People don’t realize how common it is to have a sudden (fleeting) thought that it might be better if they weren’t lying any longer when things are going badly. It’s a mood. Some people act in the worst way about a bad mood.
95% of people who try suicide, if they live, will never try it again.
29:30
Having faith in your future self.
30:30 This is a worldwide problem. 1 million per year. Up 60% worldwide.
32:00
Suicide is more impulsive and is more impulsive than we’ve realized.
Shame has something to do with suicide. People had suffered a humiliation in romanic, at work, or in some other way.
34:30
Knowing ahead of time to be on guard against the perils of impetuous thinking about suicide.
“Don’t let your worst mood murder all your others. The other moods don’t want to do that.”
“Depression happens to you. Not suicide. Suicide is a behavior.”
36:30
Pain can be a helpful teacher. We are stuck with it and it seems to help us grow.
39:00
On Robin Williams’ suicide.
41:00
The executive function and planning portion of the adolescence brain is not finished until age 25. There are many reasons to wait and see that things get better as your future self.
45:00
Looking for the warning signs in ourselves and stay for ourselves and others. You don’t get to choose who suffers.
50:00
The Wonder Paradox (her new book she’s working on)
About poetry and wonder
The people who do not affiliate with any religion. What rituals do and what people use for marriages or funerals, etc. What Poetry can provide for that.
“American religions have offered meaning and an afterlife, yet millions of Confucians and 5,000 years of Egyptians didn’t believe in an afterlife.”
55:00
“Meaning always came from culture and community.”
56:00
Keats’ tuberculosis poem
57:00
On the universe and vastness of creation and our consciousness.
59:00
“We are the universe seeing itself and marveling.”
1:01
On the darkness and struggle.
1:05
Jennifer reads her poem:
History
Even Eve, the only soul in all of time
to never have to wait for love,
must have leaned some sleepless nights
alone against the garden wall
and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild
and wished to trade-in all of Eden
to have but been a child.
In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace, that she might have a story of herself to tell in some other place.
Plus another poem
As promised, I’m including another of Jennifer’s poems in the shownotes. Below you can click to heard it read aloud and that enhances the experience.
Funny Strange
We are tender and our lives are sweet
and they are already over and we are visiting them in some kind of endless reprieve from oblivion, we are walking around in them and after we shatter with love for everything we settle in.
Thou tiger on television chowing, thou very fact of dreams, thou majestical roof fretted with golden fire. Thou wisdom of the inner parts. Thou tintinnabulation.
Is it not sweet to hand over the ocean’s harvest in a single wave of fish? To bounce a vineyard of grapes from one’s apron and into the mouth of the crowd? To scoop up bread and offer up one’s armful to the throng? Let us live as if we were still among
the living, let our days be patterned after theirs. Is it not marvelous to be forgetful?
Click to hear this poem read aloud–it’s marvelous that way. It was downloaded from the Poetry Foundation. Visit it and read some of her other poems here and visit her page at the Poetry Foundation HERE.
• If you enjoyed this, you will like maybe to hear my personal story in audio I created about six months later:
• In October 2016, I had Ryan J. Bell as a guest, who is a mutual friend. You will also enjoy our conversation that includes a very interesting JMH “girl crush” tangent. Enjoy!
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Soul School Lesson 9 includes selected excerpts of my new book on Discernment.
From December 9th-December 15th 2015, the Kindle book will be on special, starting at just 99¢ and increasing daily back to the original price. Snap up a few copies now and hand them out for the holidays or whenever you notice someone at a crossroads in their life.
Everyone gets forked in life…That point where your path comes to a split and you have to choose carefully which way to go.
Watch the new book trailer and get a taste of what it’s about!
Navigating the territory of crossroad or difficult decisions is also called, in many faith traditions, discernment.
My new book works like a practical pocket guide based on time-tested spiritual exercises that have helped people for over 400 years (The Spiritual Exercises by Ignatius of Loyola, originally written to help men make a wise decision about vocational priesthood).
FORKED: A Discernment Pocket Guide is a guidebook and an integrated process approach that includes all aspects of you: body, mind, and spirit in a prayerful way.
When we find a fork in our road we tend to dis-integrate from our whole and leave out key parts of us when we decide things. Keys things like the intuition, the imagination, the nature talents we have, or the godly passions of the heart that have been germination and waiting to sprout in fertile ground.
Seven key exercises in the book guide you through introspective questions that help you understand yourself and your situation better in a way you’ve never encountered.
There is no one way to accomplish the process. That means, you can progress through all of the the exercises, or pick the ones that make the best fit for you and your situation. Just grab a notebook and pen and begin.
allow you to take a peek inside too.