In this episode, Douglas Westerbeke, explores how to find the balance of adventure and spiritual growth in his writing and life. With a focus on resilience and a balanced approach to life transitions, he offers a valuable perspective for those seeking to understand and adapt to the inevitable changes in life. Through his compelling narratives, he brings a wealth of knowledge to the complexities of personal growth and change.
Key Takeaways:
- Mastering techniques to manage anger and its impact for a balanced life
- Unveiling the profound concept of enlightenment for personal growth and fulfillment
- Discovering the pivotal role of libraries in expanding knowledge and fostering personal development
- Understanding the profound effects of travel for adapting for resilience and growth
- Navigating life changes through powerful storytelling for inspiration and empowerment
Douglas Westerbeke is the author of A Short Walk Through a Wide World. Before that, he worked at one of the largest libraries in the U.S. and has spent the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award, reading current literary novels and nominating the best for selection. Though he has a background in screenwriting, the Dublin experience inspired him to write his own novel.
Connect with Douglas Westerbeke: Website
If you enjoyed this conversation with Douglas Westerbeke, check out these other episodes:
How to Tap Into the Longings of the Heart with Sue Monk Kidd
Exploring the Healing Potential of Spirituality with Abraham Verghese
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Episode Transcript:
00:01:44 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Douglas, welcome to the show.
00:01:46 – Douglas Westerbeke
Hi, how are you? It’s good to be here.
00:01:48 – Eric Zimmer
I am very happy to have you on. We are sitting together in a studio in Columbus, Ohio. It’s very rare that I get to do interviews in person in Columbus, so this is a real treat. You live in Cleveland for people who don’t know, 2 hours away from here. So thank you for coming down. We’re going to be discussing your novel, which is a great adventure story called a short walk through a wide world. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do, with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
00:02:51 – Douglas Westerbeke
So my first thought goes to Carl Jung, because he always used to talk about, he had these twelve archetypes, and one of them was the shadow. And this is the first thing I thought when I hear this is, so the shadow is this part of you that you bury. You just bury it your whole life, like, way down there, because it’s really the darkest side of you. And a lot of people just don’t even realize it’s there and live in denial of it, so on and so forth. Everybody ignores this, and most people aren’t even aware of it. Although every once in a while, you know, you catch yourself thinking something or you lose your temper or whatever, and you. It’s there, and we all kind of know it’s there, but you bury it, so you never know. But what Jung used to say was that you really want to know it. You really want to be familiar with it. You really want to make friends with it. So, like, the impulse is say, yeah, you want to feed the good wolf, and you should. Because I remember, you know, for a long time, my writing wasn’t getting me anywhere. And I was just on the sidelines and I was living, you know, whatever, my domesticated life. And I would see even friends of mine who had all this success, and I could have been really embittered. And I remember making the conscious choice, I’m not going to be that person. I don’t want. I’m going to be very happy when someone else, like, gets wherever they get to because they’re living the life they want to live. And that’s great for them, and I want them success. But on the other hand, the other wolf, the one that you impulsively don’t want to feed, might not be the best idea because you think about even the best people out there, like, you can imagine. Like Mother Teresa, right? She goes down to Calcutta and she wants to feed the poor. And I think a lot of people picture this, like, this kind old lady handing out treats to the kids. And it’s not the way it was. This is a huge undertaking, right? It’s like running a corporation or something. It’s huge. And from what I understand, Mother Teresa was tough. She was not easy to work for. She was really demanding. She did not put up with fools, all that kind of stuff, because she had to do this incredible job. So it takes a certain amount of ruthlessness and relentlessness to get that done. And if she hadn’t tapped into that, maybe she would not have been able to do the incredible, miraculous things that she did.
00:05:05 – Eric Zimmer
She was an inveterate gambler too, I heard.
00:05:07 – Douglas Westerbeke
I did not.
00:05:08 – Eric Zimmer
No, no, I’m making that up.
00:05:10 – Douglas Westerbeke
I was like, what?
00:05:11 – Eric Zimmer
I was trying to think of what insult I could lob at Mother Teresa that wouldn’t get me, like, permanent, wouldn’t infuriate the entire audience and not, the gambling’s not serious. But, no, that’s not true. Go on. Sorry. I couldn’t resist.
00:05:24 – Douglas Westerbeke
That’s a good one. But, yeah, I think that was my whole point. This darkness in you kind of helps propel you forward. It kind of helps you get your task done. It kind of makes you focus. It kind of, like, cuts out the distractions around you. It can do a lot of good for you. So you don’t want to starve it to death, but you want to be aware of it, and you want to use it where it’s applicable, I suppose, is how I guess you’d say it. That’s the first thing I thought of.
00:05:49 – Eric Zimmer
Anyway, interestingly enough, I was having a conversation. Just. Was it yesterday, day before, with another novelist? I don’t talk to novelists often, but a friend of mine, Matthew quick, and we were talking about this very idea, the jungian idea of the shadow.
00:06:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
Oh, really?
00:06:06 – Eric Zimmer
And we were talking about it in the context of that as particular type of men in the eras in which we’ve been raised. And by type, I mean maybe more liberal. And recognizing the overreaches that men often have had a. That there was a certain amount of trying to be the good boy. And that what that did for both of us was the thing that we couldn’t face in ourselves was anger. It was the thing that got shoved way down. My father was a very angry man all the time. And so I spent my whole early, like, adolescence through early adult years going, I’m not gonna be like that. I’m not gonna be like that. Shove it down. Shove it down. Right. And I think there’s been a cost to me for that. And it’s not that I’m even conscious of it anymore. Cause I think I’ve shoved it down for so long that it really is deep down there. But you see occasional flashes of it.
00:07:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. Yeah. I’m the same way. You know, I love my dad and all that, but he was really short tempered.
00:07:10 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.
00:07:11 – Douglas Westerbeke
And it made it really tense to be around him. It was like. It’s like living next to a volcano because you never know when he’s gonna go explode and all that kind of stuff. And so I mean, I was kind of raised to be angry. And I feel. I mean, like, sometimes I’m an angry driver, and sometimes, you know, I get. And I remember every time I’ve been angry, though, it has never helped me. And so I learned really quickly not to be so angry. I’m trying to think, actually, is there ever a time where it’s helped me? And I’m trying to think of one and I really can’t, but I remember really well the times where it just totally undermined what I was trying to do.
00:07:45 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah. And I think this gets back to talking about the two wolves, which is making a distinction between an emotion and the behavior that that emotion causes or pushes you to. So to try not to be angry. Like, the emotion of anger, I think, is probably destructive. Do not recognize, like, I’m angry. Like, shove that down. Don’t. You can’t feel that. You can’t feel that.
00:08:12 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right. Right.
00:08:13 – Eric Zimmer
However, it does seem perfectly reasonable to me. And part of being a good person in the world of then not letting that emotion go to whatever it wants to do. And I think that’s an interesting thing. When we think about emotions, there’s almost always an urge with them. Like, the emotion is causing us to want to do something. And that’s often the place for me where I’ve tried to learn to separate. Don’t repress the emotion, but don’t indulge the action either. That’s sort of the ideal. Now.
00:08:47 – Douglas Westerbeke
It’s not the actual emotion of anger. I mean, you should be angry about certain things. You should be angry about whatever slavery, the holocaust, whatever it is. How you manifest that anger, though, is something you can control, and you’ve got to do it wisely. You’ve got to do it so it’s actually a productive thing as opposed to something that undermines you.
00:09:04 – Eric Zimmer
Right. Yeah, it’s the whole respond rather than react idea.
00:09:08 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah.
00:09:09 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s turn to your book. I’m going to let you maybe tell us for a minute or two your description of what the book is about, just to give listeners a sense of the type of book we’re discussing.
00:09:21 – Douglas Westerbeke
Well, I mean, I can give you my elevator picture for people who don’t know. So it starts off with Aubrey Torvell. She is a nine year old girl in 1880s Paris, and she gets really sick at the dinner table one night. So all her parents are all freaked out, her family’s freaked out. They rush her to the doctor, and the doctor tries to fix her, but gets to the doctor, and she’s totally fine. And the doctor’s like, I don’t see anything wrong there. And so she goes back home and she can’t even get inside the house, she’s so sick this time. And they take her back to the doctor, and now she’s even sicker. And the doctor has no idea what’s wrong with her. And he’s poking and prodding her, trying to figure it out, and she gets so frustrated, she just runs off into the streets of Paris at night and she feels fine. And she realizes that it’s this active exploration of being somewhere she’s never been before that cures her. And so she spends the rest of her life wandering around and around the world, constantly on the run from this disease. And so it’s an epic adventure. She’s going to climb the himalayas and cross the Sahara and raft down the Amazon. All these amazing things. And so that’s the exciting part. It’s a huge, epic adventure. That’s the fun part to read. But on the flip side, I mean, this is a girl who has lost her family, has nowhere to call home. She can’t fall in love because they’re all doomed. She just lives this life that seems to have no meaning. So how do you find a meaning in a life that feels like an eternal punishment? And that’s the dilemma that she’s facing here. It seems like it would be a great adventure. Terrific excuse to get out of there. A lot of people admire her and are envious of her because they see this woman who’s having this grand adventure, perfect excuse to do it, can’t hold it against her. But really, you know, it’s not so easy if you’re there. And I love to travel. Most people do love to travel. But I remember I was traveling. My wife is from China. We were traveling through China. I think we spent, like, three weeks there, maybe four. And we started in the south, moved our way north. By the time we got to Beijing, me and my kids were exhausted. And we didn’t, you know, there was no forbidden city, no great wall. We just slept for three days, you know, so, I mean, that was only four weeks. Imagine doing this for a lifetime. So it can be brutal. My dad used to travel all the time for his work, you know, so he hates to travel now. My wife is kind of similar. She’s a musician with the Cleveland orchestra, and they’re very much traveling or touring orchestra, and you get tired of it. You just want to stay home with your kids and enjoy your life and stuff like that. But so there’s a flip side. There’s the adventure of travel, which is why we go on vacations. But, I mean, most people don’t take a vacation. That’s more than, you know, a week, ten days, something like that. Then they come back home. If that goes on forever, it’s a whole different story.
00:11:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It’s ironic that we’re having this conversation, because in about ten days, I’m about to embark on a three month trip.
00:12:04 – Douglas Westerbeke
Oh, my God.
00:12:04 – Eric Zimmer
To Europe. Now, it’s not a vacation.
00:12:07 – Douglas Westerbeke
I didn’t mean to spoil. I don’t interrupt you.
00:12:08 – Eric Zimmer
No, no, it’s not a vacation. I mean, parts of it will be vacation, but I will be working while I’m there. I’m working on a book myself, so I’ll be writing, I’ll be doing interviews. So it’s not a vacation, but it is three months of us moving our way, you know, covering a fair amount of ground over that time. And as we were planning the trip, I had sort of been reading your book a little bit. Not in preparation for the trip, but just they sort of aligned. But certainly thinking about that, like, how long do we want to stay in one place versus how many different places do we want to see and what’s the pace that you’re on? Right. Because to your point, like, when you’re always moving, that gets to be exhausting.
00:12:46 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. I planned some vacations where it was like, okay, we’ll spend one or two days there, one or two days there. And that’s never the best way, really, the best way do it is to pick a spot, stay for a while, so at least you feel like you’ve gotten the feel of the place and so on. And because otherwise it’s hectic, it’s constant moving, you never get a break, and you need a break and just to enjoy the place, really. I mean, it’s not enough to just stop and see.
00:13:09 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, we’ve interspersed a week here, a couple weeks there, but then there’s a couple weeks where, you know, we’re seeing multiple places where there’s a lot more movement. So I’m so fortunate that my work allows me to work from anywhere and get a chance to go do this. But it’s ironic that we’re talking about an epic journey when I feel like I’m going on. For me, what is an epic journey?
00:13:28 – Douglas Westerbeke
That is an epic journey.
00:13:29 – Eric Zimmer
Right. So you refer to the book as an adventure story. You’ve also referred to it as a spiritual journey. That’s a term that means all sorts of things. To all sorts of people. When you use it, what are you referring to? What do you mean?
00:13:45 – Douglas Westerbeke
I think I mean it actually pretty literary. So this has a backstory to it. So when I was a kid, tell you the whole story, it doesn’t make me look good, but when I was like, I don’t even remember how old I was, like seven, eight years old, maybe, maybe not even. And I remember getting into a big fight with my little brother. I had four brothers. I had one little one. And it was over something stupid, too. It was like, what are we going to watch on tv? Or I wanted to watch a Godzilla movie and he wanted to watch. Knowing him, it was like 60 minutes or something. And I’m like, no, I want to watch Godzilla. And he got his way, and I went out into the backyard and I sulked. And I remember sitting under the tree in the backyard thinking, God, if you’re out there, just wreak total, unabashed revenge on my little brother. And weeks went by and nothing happened. And I was like, and because of that, I became an avowed atheist from like the age of like seven. I was like, you know, you really let me down. I’m not believing in you anymore. That’s my revenge, you know, my petty revenge. As I got older and I stuck to this, you know, my arguments got a lot more sophisticated than that. But as I got older, I started noticing that all the stories I was writing, not all of them, but a lot of the stories I was writing were about these characters who were either very atheistic or they didn’t like God, but God loved them anyway. And I was like, why am I writing these stories? I’m not that person. And then, of course, cursed me. Well, geez, maybe I’m not nearly as atheistic as I thought I was, and maybe there’s a lot more going. So these are the types of characters I write now. And because of that, I started studying the religions. I started studying all of them. But the Old Testament had these great stories that I loved. A great one would be Jonah, because Jonah’s given this task, he has to go down and convert Nineveh, right? And which is an insane thing for, you know, this guy who’s just minding his own business, and God comes down, says, go to Nineveh and convert him. And he’s like, I don’t want to go to Nineveh. I want to stay home. I was enjoying myself. I was perfectly happy before you came along. And he does everything he can to get out of that situation. And I’m thinking, well, you know, if you just do it, he says, your life’s going to be a lot easier. But he refuses. And in retrospect, because we all know how the story ends, he would have just been smarter just going along and doing as he was told. But you got to admire the guy who, like, butts head with God and says, no, not going to do it. Like, you’re going to lose this battle. You have no chance of winning this one. But he fights it anyway. And there’s something kind of admirable about that, even if he’s wrong. And I know, like, the bigger moral of the story is that it’s trying to show that if you turn your head away when evils are happening in the world, you’re not helping the world. So I get that. But at the same time, there’s something really admirable about a guy who’s fighting a completely futile war against something bigger, impossibly bigger, than he’ll ever be. He cannot comprehend how big this thing he’s up against is, and he fights it anyway. And I always thought that was admirable. And I think Aubrey Torvell is going through the exact same adventure because she’s stuck with this disease. She’s traveling around the world. She has no idea why she’s been singled out for this. She’s the only one in the world that has this thing and maybe the only one ever will, and she doesn’t know why, and it makes her miserable, where if she kind of embraced her fate, she would have been a lot happier. But people come up to me all the time. I love that character of Aubrey Torivell. She’s a great character. It’s because she’s making this futile fight. She’s very feisty, she’s very single minded. And there’s something about that that people admire. I think. I think that’s what it is. I’m off on a tangent there, but that was my idea, is that she’s up against this. It’s not until she kind of learns to look back on her life and say, you know what? That wasn’t so bad. And I saw things no one else gets to see. And there is something to that. She kind of comes around. This idea kind of manifests through a story. I don’t kind of say it outrightly, but there’s a voice in her head. There’s all kinds of other things happening, going on. And what does that mean? I don’t spell it out, but in my mind, I knew what it was, and I hope the readers get that this is also a story about enlightenment. There’s a lot of discussion between her and the prince in the middle of the story, and they’re talking about what it means to be enlightened, and how do you know? And it’s, you know, the idea is it’s kind of like waking up from a dream, from a dream life to your waking life. And enlightenment is when you’re waking up in your waking life into something even higher than that, and you see her go through that process, by the end, you’re there. So it’s a story of enlightenment as well. And to me, that’s all the way through the book, and that’s where the spiritual element comes in.
00:18:17 – Eric Zimmer
Right. Because it’s not a book about God in a direct way. Right. There’s no divine being. There’s no her taking on. But what you’re saying is this person fighting their fate being sort of one of the core themes there. And I always think it’s so interesting, and I think it’s one of the fundamental dilemmas that we face, particularly in today’s day and age, where choices are unlimited and every view of the world and every way to live is shown to you. You can actually see it all, is this question of what do I accept about my life being the way that it is, and what do I change? Because that’s the first question. Like, if you’re going to fight your fate, on one hand you look at that and go, well, it’s admirable. And on the other hand, you go, well, it’s a completely losing battle. Like, why? It’s obvious that if there’s something we can’t change, then accepting it is the reasonable course of action. And I think most people are wise.
00:19:19 – Douglas Westerbeke
Enough to know that that’s a very taoist take. You don’t fight the universe.
00:19:23 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, but that even shows up in, like, if you look at, like, parents who have children who have disabilities, if there’s just no chance of fixing it, in many ways their life is easier because they don’t have to try and figure out whether to fix it, how much time and energy to put into fixing it. They just accept. They get on with the business of, like, all right, how do we build a life with this thing that we’ve been given that we can’t do anything about? Andrew Solomon, who’s a great writer, wrote the noonday Demon, which is called the Atlas of depression. He also wrote a book called Far from the Tree, and it’s about children who are different than their parents. Maybe they’re blind, they’re autistic, but they’re different. And it was one of the main points I really took away from that book was this idea of these parents whose children, there might be a way to make them better, and they are caught in this pull. Like part of them is going just, all right, this is what we have. Let’s deal with it. But then there’s another part of them that’s going, it could be different. It could be different if you just did this. What if you tried this? So I think most of us in the modern world are closer to that ladder thing I was describing, which is we look at our lives, and if we just knew there were things that couldn’t change, like, I know my height isn’t going to change, right? I mean, I could do some crazy surgery that breaks all my bones and. But all intents and purposes, I’m the height. I am. And so you go about accepting that. I go, well, I’m not going to dunk a basketball. I just kind of move on.
00:20:47 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right. If you’re raising kids, you’re dealing with this dilemma daily, right? Because you want your kids to be as perfect and ready for the world when it comes to them and all that. So you want them to be perfect at everything thing, and there’s just certain things they’re going to be good at and certain things they’re not going to be good at. And it takes time to, like, figure, maybe not time, patience and understanding to realize this is what they’re like. And the more you try to push them into being this ideal, the less of a credit they’re going to be to you. If you want your kids to turn out well, let them be them, and they’ll figure out their own way, and they’ll figure out their pluses and minuses. Yeah, it’s a lot like that.
00:21:26 – Eric Zimmer
There’s a line in the book where you’re talking about. Aubrey once believed it was possible to control the world, to make it bend to her personal sense of justice. What a child she was, how foolish she’d been, how haughty, and then goes on to say, without a doubt, she knew she did not command the world, but was at the mercy of it. It’s a lesson most people learn at some point in their lives, that the world is a bigger and more powerful thing than you.
00:21:53 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah, that was a lesson I learned. It’s a lesson I see a lot of people learn. You start off young, you’re idealistic, and then you realize, I remember my dad telling me when I was a kid. You know what? You’re young, you’re full of energy. You’re idealistic. This is the time to try to do the things you want to do because when you’re older, you’re going to be crushed.
00:22:13 – Eric Zimmer
Wise. Wise, right.
00:22:15 – Douglas Westerbeke
That’s true. Right.
00:22:16 – Eric Zimmer
I mean, I think that is wise and generous. Right. Instead of telling you not to be idealistic and not try that stuff, it’s like, go. That’s appropriate for this phase in your life of where you’re at.
00:22:30 – Douglas Westerbeke
I remember thinking of me when I was a kid because I was very idealistic. I have lots of other friends who are like that. And eventually life gets to you because I had already been planning to write books and make movies and do all this stuff by the time I was 20. It didn’t work out that way.
00:22:47 – Eric Zimmer
And yet here you are. I don’t know how old you are with a novel.
00:22:50 – Douglas Westerbeke
I ain’t 20.
00:22:51 – Eric Zimmer
You’re not 20? You’re not 60 either?
00:22:54 – Douglas Westerbeke
No, no. But this is my next stop, though.
00:22:57 – Eric Zimmer
It’s your next stop. Really?
00:22:58 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah.
00:22:59 – Eric Zimmer
So you’re older than 55?
00:23:00 – Douglas Westerbeke
I don’t know, actually.
00:23:01 – Eric Zimmer
I’m 54.
00:23:02 – Douglas Westerbeke
You must think I might be 54. No, I don’t. I forget these things.
00:23:06 – Eric Zimmer
All right, all right.
00:23:07 – Douglas Westerbeke
Genuinely forget.
00:23:08 – Eric Zimmer
I forget, too. But my birth year was 1970, so it’s always easy to figure out because I can just go, oh, well, what year is it? 2024. Add 30 to it. Okay, I’m there. Oh, crap.
00:23:17 – Douglas Westerbeke
So then I’m. No, no, I’m older than you. I didn’t even realize. I really, genuinely forgot.
00:23:22 – Eric Zimmer
Well, you look very young, by the way. You look very young. But my point with that was not to compliment you on your age. My point was to say you had this idealism of all these things you were going to do when you were young, and they didn’t happen.
00:23:36 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, right.
00:23:37 – Eric Zimmer
And yet here you are with a novel that has done. I mean, I don’t know how you gauge how well a book does, but it’s been in windows of Barnes and noble. That’s good enough, right? I mean, that’s something. So, tie together this early disillusionment with creating art and lack of success with where you are today, how did that happen? How did you stay with it to get to the point where you were able to do it? How did you keep creating art in that period?
00:24:06 – Douglas Westerbeke
Well, so, I mean, I’ve been doing it since I was little. I mean, I started writing stories when I was in, like, third grade. Maybe even before that. I remember, me and my friends in third grade would get together, we would all write stories together, and we had all these imaginary characters and stuff like that. And mine was a blue raccoon. I think my friend had these family of pickles around, talking and stuff like that.
00:24:28 – Eric Zimmer
And the raccoons and the pickles get together, they did.
00:24:30 – Douglas Westerbeke
So we have all these joint stories. It was like Marvel’s universe, and they would all, like, intersect and stuff like that. They would rob banks and stuff like that together. They’re always getting into these. Well, doesn’t matter. Point is, I kept writing these stories after they had stopped, and I couldn’t stop. So I was totally writing for pleasure. But I think around 6th grade, I was like, okay, this is what I want to do. And so I just started writing stories and more and more. And, see, I went to school for it. Afterwards, I would submit screenplays to competitions, and they did really well, and it would just always be enough to keep me going. Like, enough, like, encouragement. But it never happened. So I was optioned, like, you know, four times, I think, in Hollywood, but none of them ever got produced. And, you know, which is crushing after a while. Then you had kids and you take a break. But even when I had kids, I was like, oh, my God, I have to find time to write. You get the shakes when you don’t write. I mean, it’s like a physical reaction to not writing. And I’ve always had that. And so, I mean, I just constantly wrote. I probably have, like, 50 screenplays and five or six novels already, just because just yesterday, I’m working on a novel that I know is unpublishable. It’ll never be published. It’s insane. It’s a total vanity project is what they call it. But in between books, I’ll take off a month, and I’ll work on this thing just for fun. And all that time, I wasn’t doing it because I thought it would have, like, this tremendous, incredible payoff or anything. I’m doing it because I can’t stop. I don’t know any other way to live. Right.
00:25:52 – Eric Zimmer
It’s just an obsession, Aubrey.
00:25:54 – Douglas Westerbeke
Am I.
00:25:55 – Eric Zimmer
Well, in the sense of, she can’t stop moving, or she gets worse than the shakes. You just described your inability to stop writing.
00:26:02 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah, I guess so.
00:26:03 – Eric Zimmer
Without getting some sort of.
00:26:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
I never made that analogy. This is going in my next story.
00:26:10 – Eric Zimmer
There’s another Aubrey connection that I picked up, which I don’t know. You may or may not know, but one of the things that appears to potentially be an inciting. Incident for her is when she’s young, she fails to take a certain act towards God.
00:26:29 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right. A selfless act.
00:26:31 – Eric Zimmer
Right. It was sort of a battle with God. And you describe being a young child having a revenge fantasy and swearing off God because he didn’t take out your little brother. That’s another sim. I don’t know if you’ve connected that dot either to an extent. Okay. Okay.
00:26:48 – Douglas Westerbeke
Maybe not quite so consciously, but I mean, that one I totally feel.
00:26:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah.
00:26:54 – Douglas Westerbeke
Like, I can get that one right away. So it’s also a setup, like you get from, you know, the Garden of Eden set up. Right. Don’t eat that apple. Yeah, of course they’re gonna get it. Yeah.
00:27:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.
00:27:04 – Douglas Westerbeke
So, yeah, throw out the puzzle ball. Of course she’s not gonna throw it out at that point. Oh, no. I’ve got to see what’s inside it so she doesn’t.
00:27:09 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.
00:27:10 – Douglas Westerbeke
And that’s what sets her off in her journey. And it’s like she was set.
00:27:31 – Eric Zimmer
So there’s another line in the book that says, the best way to survive some things thought Aubrey was not to understand. Do you believe that?
00:27:40 – Douglas Westerbeke
So I read this great book called deep Survival. Lawrence Gonzalez, I think, wrote it because I love to write survival stories. So he was writing all about how people survive, what they survive. There are some situations people just can’t survive, but in certain situations, it is a kind of a personality that gets you through it. And I remember so many aspects of it. One was to just act, and the other one was, people who tend to survive tend to admire their situation. Like, there was a story about a plane crash, and the plane broke open in midair, and this girl strapped to her seat was literally tumbling through the air into the jungle. And, you know, because there was a jungle, she landed in the trees and actually survived this fall from an airplane. A bunch of them did. The airplane was low, I guess, but she describes it as, oh, look at these trees. They look like broccoli. She remembers this incident, and when she’s on the ground, she’s like, this is a beautiful jungle. And she’s admiring this like everyone else is. A lot of other people are looking at this like this is their grave. You know, this is. This is the worst thing that could happen to me. This is miserable. She’s actually admiring the place she’s in. She’s the only one that survived because everyone just froze, sat still, and she’s like, you know what? I’m just going to follow this river. I’m going to walk, because if I stay here. They’re not going to find us with all that. And so she just did something, whereas everyone else said, no, no, wait, they’ll find us here. She’s like, I don’t know, she took off. No one else will go with her. And she is the only one that lived. She eventually was picked up, and there’s a, I don’t remember where I heard this, a soldier saying it was a combat soldier, and he says, look, if you’re ever lost in the woods, just walk, because it’ll take you somewhere. I mean, you can stand there and freeze out of fear, and you can just sit there and not do anything, or you can take some steps and maybe it won’t help, maybe it will, but at least you’ll know more than you did before because you’re starting to see the place you’re at, and maybe you’ll come across something. Maybe you get a little lucky. Maybe you’ll find some food, maybe you’ll find a river you can follow, so on and so forth. But if you just stay in one place, you’re not improving your situation. So when Aubrey is saying that, I mean, Aubrey is not necessarily a great intellect. She’s an action oriented person. For her, you got to keep moving. First of all, she has to keep moving anyway. If she thinks about her plight too much, it’s going to make her miserable. And that’s what one of her flaws is, right? I mean, I hate to advocate mindlessness because I don’t think it’s quite there, but sometimes if you just do something, it’s the best antidote there is. And so instead of just sitting there feeling sorry for yourself, just get out there and walk. And maybe things, maybe they won’t improve. Maybe they will, and it’s certainly going to improve a lot more than just sitting there, you know, doing nothing.
00:30:17 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. I feel obligated to tell listeners we do not offer survival advice on this show. So the other amazing thing about that book, just if you’re in the. The show has no opinion on whether you should stay put or walk. Just.
00:30:32 – Douglas Westerbeke
But the other thing was, like, he actually broke it down by demographics. Kids under the age of six were more likely to survive than kids between the age of 17 and, like, 13, because the kids between 17 and 13, you know, teenagers, these young teenagers who don’t know how to control their emotions yet tend to get really panicky or they tend to get really depressed. Their emotions get ahead of them and take them over, and they tend to curl up and die, whereas under six, they’re like, oh, I’ll just look for food. And they go off and just do the things they have to do. They’re very practical. They don’t get hung up on emotions at all because they just don’t have that life experience, and it doesn’t mean much to them yet. They just do what they have to do. That’s why you hear, like, little kids being raised by wolves and monkeys and things like that, because they just let it happen, whereas these older group of kids, they’ll be freaked out. They’ll have self doubt. All these kind of things just undermine them. And then as you get older, the chances get better. Then you get to a certain age, and your chances drop off, and it’s all in the mind, and it’s because of where your mind is at that age. It was really fascinating, though.
00:31:37 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that’s wild. That is adventure novels or survival novels. I may not get this right. The author, Lauren Groff. Is that Lauren Groff?
00:31:48 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah.
00:31:48 – Eric Zimmer
She has a new book. Her latest book is sort of a survival story about a woman who wanders off from, I’m gonna say, a medieval village where it’s just a bad place to be. And so, anyway, she’s an amazing writer. Her prose is incredible. And so you might really enjoy that.
00:32:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
I’m gonna look for that now. Yeah.
00:32:06 – Eric Zimmer
Back to this idea of Aubrey’s life as being both a blessing and a curse in that she has to keep moving. And we talked about how sometimes that may not be ideal. You make an analogy in the book between imprisonment and exile. Right. Somebody’s making the point that, like, punishment is to be imprisoned.
00:32:29 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.
00:32:30 – Eric Zimmer
He can’t move. And she makes the point, well, people are often exiled. Also another type of punishment. And as I was thinking about this idea, it seems that either of those things or really any condition in the extreme, becomes really difficult. Right. Like, if you’re imprisoned in a prison cell, that’s awful. Horrible, right. You can’t go anywhere. You can’t, I mean, like, nothing. And to be forced to move to a new place you’ve never been every three days, as Aubrey is, is also a form of torture in its own way. So it seems like there’s this. And I don’t know if you think about this, but there’s a case being made for sort of a middle way here, that the middle way is ideal.
00:33:20 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. I love Taoism, and that’s the philosophy there.
00:33:23 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. For sure.
00:33:24 – Douglas Westerbeke
But I have to admit, and this isn’t true for everybody, but I know for me, I would prefer exile, because at least you’re out there and you’re moving.
00:33:31 – Eric Zimmer
Agreed.
00:33:31 – Douglas Westerbeke
And then there are. But there are people I know, and I’ve met them, who would prefer to be in the prison because they can relax and they can just, you know, people are taking care of them, feeding them, and they just have to sit there.
00:33:40 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. To make it a little bit more realistic, because I think almost anybody would choose exile over prison cell because that’s so extreme. But we might.
00:33:49 – Douglas Westerbeke
One guy who didn’t.
00:33:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Okay, well, and it’s interesting, some people who are out of prison, or I have a friend who was in prison, he just got out in the last six months. He was in prison for 20 years.
00:34:00 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. That’s a tough adjustment.
00:34:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I mean, all of a sudden your life is completely structured in to a degree you would never want your life to be structured. And then suddenly there is nothing as far as structure goes. Anyway, I was sort of making the middle way point there a little bit. For most of us, somewhere in between those two things is going to be the ideal.
00:34:22 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. Well, that’s how most of us live our lives. Right. Because we’re not sitting at home all day doing nothing. We’re out and about. We go on vacations once in a while and so on, so on and so forth. And most of us don’t cloister ourselves inside a room all the rest of our lives. And most of us aren’t wandering the world forever and ever either. There are people now, you know, hearing about these, what, digital nomads? And they do it for like a couple years, and then you go on YouTube and you read, well, what are they up to now? I was like, I broke down. I couldn’t do it anymore.
00:34:49 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I’ve known a couple people who’ve tried the digital nomad lifestyle, and it a seems to like you’re saying to be great for a while until all of a sudden it’s not.
00:34:59 – Douglas Westerbeke
One guy said something really interesting to me because he was going around the world seeing all these beautiful things. They stopped becoming beautiful to him. And he missed that. He missed the idea of going somewhere and being stunned by the landscape or the culture, whatever it is he was after. Or he missed being stunned and knocked bowled over by that because it was becoming routine for him. And that’s something that, it didn’t actually occur to me.
00:35:24 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, we habituate to almost anything, right? We habituate to almost anything.
00:35:28 – Douglas Westerbeke
Imagine habituating. Imagine habituating to, like, natural beauty. I can’t even imagine that, but I guess it would happen.
00:35:35 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Well, I think that raises a question that I think is at the heart of a lot of spiritual journeys or spiritual work, which is, how do you continue to see the extraordinary in what has become very ordinary? How do you continue to enliven your life even though it’s not changing much?
00:35:58 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. Oh, my God. It’s like you want an answer from me.
00:36:00 – Eric Zimmer
No, no, no. I’m not looking for an answer so much as yes. I’ve been hoping.
00:36:07 – Douglas Westerbeke
How do you do that?
00:36:08 – Eric Zimmer
600 episodes in. I figured you were the guy was going to solve this problem.
00:36:13 – Douglas Westerbeke
The other theme of the book is that our happiness, our sense of wonder, whatever it is that makes us happy, depends on the stories we write for ourselves, because we’re always writing a story. You have this internal monologue in your head all the time, right? You’re talking to yourself constantly. Although I’ve heard there are people who don’t have this internal monologue, and I never knew that was even possible.
00:36:34 – Eric Zimmer
I’ve heard that also, and I remain skeptical.
00:36:37 – Douglas Westerbeke
I can’t.
00:36:37 – Chris Forbes
I can’t.
00:36:38 – Douglas Westerbeke
How do you even think creative?
00:36:41 – Eric Zimmer
Exactly. Anyway, I’ve heard the same thing, and I’m like, obviously, that’s self reported, because we can’t hear inside anyone else’s head.
00:36:49 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. I mean, do they just walk in this kind of, like, vacant void? I don’t get it.
00:36:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. A little thought experiment I like to do sometimes, though, to this end, and it’s pretty much impossible to do, but it’s a little bit like a zen co op, is to try and process the world without language. Like, just imagine you don’t have language. I mean, I can’t turn language off it, because, again, I think in language. In words.
00:37:15 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.
00:37:16 – Eric Zimmer
But it is an interesting sort of way of trying to put your brain on tilt, so to speak. Right.
00:37:21 – Douglas Westerbeke
I’ve wondered the same thing. I do like our way, way early ancestors. You know, the trove magnum. And how do they. How do they do it? How do they play? Put everything together? I mean, they were slowly getting there. I mean, is it visual? Is it. I have no idea how they do it. Frankly. It’s hard to imagine. It’s like trying to get inside the head of your cat.
00:37:36 – Eric Zimmer
100%. If there was any one thing that I like, if there was a God, and I could get to ask God a question, I think my question would be something like, can you put me inside the head of a dog for a few days? Or an octopus? Or pick your creature? What is consciousness like for a creature that doesn’t have language in the way that we do? I look at my dog all the time. And just what must that experience be like? Yeah, it’s just mind blowing, but it would be great to know.
00:38:08 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. So. But what I was saying before I got onto that was so everybody tells them their own stories, and they’re constantly building this in their head. They talk to themselves. They imagine their futures. They rewrite their past. I mean, you can do all kinds of stuff to yourself in the book. There are these libraries that Aubrey comes upon. They’re scattered all throughout the book, and it’s a recurring place that she visits these books. They’re not in a language, so she can read them anywhere in the world. They’re all in pictures, and they’re people’s stories. So she’s reading all these people’s stories. It becomes a major theme in that. Well, what’s her story? And what story is she telling herself? Because, like we were saying, she comes off, she’s miserable in the beginning, and what she’s got to do is she’s got to learn to change her story, or she’s going to be miserable till the day she dies. And so people can find their happiness by finding the right story. And a lot of people can get that story wrong. They will tell themselves the wrong story. I’m thinking of, what’s that movie, zone of interest where they run? Auschwitz. But to them, it’s just a day job, right, and a way to promote themselves and further their career, and they are totally telling themselves the wrong story. I don’t want to give away the ending, but at the end, that staircase scene, it manifests itself. This is not a guy who’s, well, right, and that’s because they’ve completely told themselves the wrong story, as long as you can make it. And this isn’t my idea, by the way. I’m not an intellect by any stretch of the imagination. But Viktor Frankl came up with this because he survived Auschwitz and he saw it happening firsthand. He would see people sitting there saying, you know what? I have a feeling we’re going to be liberated by the end of March. And then it wouldn’t happen, and that person would die. They would just curl up and give up hope and just die. And he saw this again and again. People telling themselves the wrong story, and sometimes it costs them their life. His. I shouldn’t say philosophy. He was a psychologist. His theory was that, look, you’ve got to tell yourself the right story. That story can change. It can adjust over time. If you get it wrong, it can have disastrous results. If you get it. Right. You can really make a meaningful life for yourself.
00:40:15 – Eric Zimmer
Fascinating. I have a bunch of responses to that. I mean, one is. I mean, there’s a type of therapy called narrative therapy, and the whole point of it is to do exactly what you’re saying. You rewrite your life experiences to tell a different story. Right. Because we’re making up the story. We’re making up the meaning. Right, right. In most cases. Right. There’s a fact, and then there’s interpretation. We’re making it up. And if you’re going to make it up, why not make it up in a way that leads to you being happier, healthier, and of more service to other people in the world. Right. Like, I mean, I think about this all the time. Like, I’m telling myself stories all the time. Most of them are about how something is going to turn out, and I don’t know how something’s going to turn out. If I did, I would be an inveterate gambler. Right? Like, I would take after mother Teresa, and I would be gambling all the time because I would know what was going to happen. But I don’t. And yet, predominantly, my stories, when I’m not careful, are ones of impending failure. And so I just try and remind myself, you don’t know the future, so if you’re going to make up a story, why not make up one that is a little bit more useful?
00:41:30 – Douglas Westerbeke
So I was almost the opposite. I mean, you have everything can end in failure kind of thing going on. And I had a, like, everything is going to be great. I can’t wait. You know, that’s a bad story to tell yourself, too, because you’re divorcing yourself from reality, right?
00:41:44 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I guess I have my versions of those, too, where everything’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to be fine. Which I think is like, a cognitive bias, where you just believe what you want to believe, and you’re right, that is an equally damaging story. If you have an infection and you just say to yourself, well, sure, it’s going to be fine. It’s going to be fine.
00:42:02 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, right.
00:42:02 – Eric Zimmer
And next thing you know, you have sepsis. Right?
00:42:04 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I know people have gone through, like, terrible divorces, and then that reshapes their narrative, and now they’re, like, depressed all the time because, you know. Cause that’s the ultimate betrayal right there. And how do you survive something like that?
00:42:17 – Eric Zimmer
Absolutely.
00:42:18 – Douglas Westerbeke
Rewrite your whole world right there and then. And you could either, like, say, okay, I’m gonna survive this, or this is gonna kill me?
00:42:25 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.
00:42:25 – Douglas Westerbeke
And you choose it?
00:42:26 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I mean, as a recovering addict and alcoholic, that’s a pivotal point for people who I think get better. Much, much better. There’s a rewriting of that story that happens very often with people when they’re able to help someone else with the thing they’ve gone through, because all of a sudden, it goes from this thing I endured to now this gift that I can give to others.
00:42:50 – Douglas Westerbeke
The story becomes the gift.
00:42:51 – Eric Zimmer
No. Well, in a way, in a sense. So my alcoholism or my addiction went from being this terrible thing to when I realized that now I had that power to help other alcoholics and addicts. Now this thing that was a curse or a burden, this addiction is now. I mean, a gift is a strong word for it, but is now it has a purpose and a use.
00:43:15 – Douglas Westerbeke
No, I don’t think that’s a stronger word. I think that’s exactly right.
00:43:18 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, I know where I wanted to go with this. I kind of just ended up there in a roundabout way. But we’re talking about this idea of rewriting your own story and how Aubrey has to do that. And what’s interesting is that the way that she’s able to do that is very often by other people helping her see her story differently. Right.
00:43:38 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. Well, we get an example of someone who tells the wrong story to himself and who’s there. One of the setups of the book is that I was thinking, okay, well, here’s a woman who can’t actually settle down and marry anybody. She’s going to go through a series of lovers just because that’s the situation she’s in. Nobody can hold it against her. So I just went for it. So she’s going to have, you know, she’s going to fall in love with a very possessive man, and then she’s gonna have a very romantic affair, and then she’s gonna have a very platonic relationship, one relationship without words. One’s just unreciprocated, all kinds, one in old age. But one of them is the guy who’s telling himself, and they actually say this, he’s telling himself the wrong story. He thinks he can cure Aubrey. He can’t. He’s telling himself the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, too, because he’s very possessive and wants to hold onto her. And later on, we get people who are telling themselves various versions of themselves, and they have it in their head, and so we see that manifest through a lot of other characters. Yeah, I think the prince really helps her along because he kind of, like, opens her up to other possibilities. Vicente, at the end, very patient. He’s very much a curmudgeon, but he’s actually very patient and very, really good hearted guy, and he helps, good listener, too, and he helps get her through. You were saying the gift, you’re describing it as you’ve rewritten your story and that you can help others, and that’s exactly what ends up with Aubrey at the end. Because I was thinking at the end, because she goes through this whole enlightenment thing, she sees the world in a whole different way. But how do you explain that to other people, and how do you make them see it, too? And towards the end, it’s very much intimated that she’s going to help these kids, that she’s taken care of. She’s going to lead them through life, and she’s going to help them try to get there as well. So she’s kind of the same way. She’s been there. She’s seen enlightenment. She’s going to help others try to get there, too. And, like, you’re saying, it’s kind of like her gift to them, too. She has rewritten her story now, and that’s what she’s gonna. I just gave away the ending of the book, but that’s what’s gonna happen.
00:45:32 – Eric Zimmer
Well, not exactly.
00:45:33 – Douglas Westerbeke
Not exactly. There’s a whole lot to get there.
00:45:53 – Eric Zimmer
So you’ve alluded to Aubrey finding enlightenment or experiencing enlightenment a couple times. Describe that a little bit more in whatever way you want. What is it that she sees?
00:46:06 – Douglas Westerbeke
So it’s hard to articulate because I’ve never been enlightened, and I don’t know anybody who has. I’m using a lot of creative license here. I’m using it in a way that I don’t think is actually representative of what is typically what people will call enlightenment. I don’t think enlightenment is a state of being, for starters. I think it’s just like you have a moment of clarity, and then it passes, and you have to go back to washing the dishes and raising your kids and everything else. It’s kind of like an epiphany. You have an epiphany, and that’s your moment. I’ve done it differently in the book. It’s a fictional book. It’s magical realism or speculative fiction, whatever you want to call it. So what I did in the book is that she actually had a moment. It’s in one of the libraries, and she has decided she’s not reading anymore. And there’s one last book sitting there. She has this moment where that book has been left out for her and she knows it, so she looks at it, and I wanted to get that feeling of the prince described it as enlightenment, as waking up from your dream world into your actual world, and then enlightenment will be a wake up. Further then. So she reads a story about a blind kid. It’s all black and white, just pencil drawings. And then he goes blind, and it’s page after page of just blank pages. And then all of a sudden, she flips to one. It’s all in color. And that’s what I was getting at there. And then she has a moment where the prose itself becomes scattered across the page because it’s really hard to articulate. You don’t articulate enlightenment, right? You just kind of, like, create this impression. After that, she’s a different woman. She’s terrified. Because I’m thinking if you have a moment where it’s so clear and so precise that you think you see the whole universe in a nutshell type of thing or the face of God or whatever it is, that must be terrifying. So she is terrified and she can’t look people in the face. And she’s this terrified little old lady walking through the woods and scared of everything. And she has to get over this. And she gets over this because she has to take care of these children at the end. So she has no choice. She gets over it, but it lingers there. She knows she has seen something that no one else ever gets to see. And it a worldview that no one else ever has because she was one on one with whatever it was, whatever you want to call it, that’s been pushing her through the world and showing her all these wonderful things, things that she doesn’t necessarily think are all that wonderful. But now, in retrospect, now that she’s older, she can look back on it and say, you know what? That was pretty freaking amazing. And she’s been rewarded by it with this book or this moment, this beyond articulation. So to her, she’s gone through all that, and she doesn’t know what to do with it at first until she realizes, well, here I am. I’ve gotten what I always wanted. I have kind of a bit of a home here in the jungle, and I’ve got all these children to take care of, and I’ve got to somehow figure out a way to pass this on. And it’s a bit like there’s a branch of Buddhism. There’s several. One is, you know, you try to reach Nirvana, and then Nirvana is a kind of heaven. And then the other one is, you know, you reach nirvana. You see it. It’s beautiful. Now you go back to earth, try to help others get there. And that’s Audrey’s approach at that point on. Yeah. So, yeah, that’s where I was going with that.
00:49:15 – Eric Zimmer
It’s interesting that you describe her enlightenment in that sense of seeing, you know, with the mind of God or because I was reading very arcane thing the other day about what the different schools of Buddhism believe about omniscience and enlightenment. Is enlightenment a type of omniscience where you know everything, you see everything, or is that not what was meant in the book?
00:49:47 – Douglas Westerbeke
I think I was hinting at that. I don’t think that’s actually how it works.
00:49:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah.
00:49:51 – Douglas Westerbeke
So I was taking a lot of dramatic license.
00:49:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.
00:49:53 – Douglas Westerbeke
For me, enlightenment is a moment of epiphany about anything. It doesn’t have to be, like, world shattering or anything like that. You know, you have an epiphany about, you know, your kids or your marriage or, oh, that’s what a cat thinks. Like, something like that. All of a sudden you figure it out. Oh. Or something occurs to you and you have that moment and you can glide off that moment for a while because, you know, but then there’s reality, and you have to deal with reality and you have to cook dinner and you have to do this and that, and it’s gone. But you can remember it. You remember what you thought, but you don’t necessarily have the same feeling. And it’s not necessarily this gigantic worldview or anything. It’s not like you have stepped outside the universe and can see it all. Maybe if you’ve taken certain mushrooms, you can do that. I don’t know.
00:50:34 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Well, as someone who studied and practiced really diligently in Zen Buddhism, which is very focused on enlightenment, I mean, Zen’s sort of considered like the direct train. And so I’ve had a couple of those experiences, and I would say that I agree in that they were like waking up and yet they were very ordinary in another way. It was just sort of a like, oh, of course, they were what would be described as sort of oneness or unitive experiences. Right. Where, like, I truly felt like I was connected to everything else. And my personal sense of me as this limited individual was just kind of gone. I ran my life into the ground chasing heroin. And, you know, it was better than that. And I do think there’s a lot of debate in spiritual communities about does somebody become permanently awakened? What does that even mean? You know, let me be clear. I’m making no claim to that in my case at all. And for me, it was this really dramatic experience that really shook up my psychic landscape. I’ve had a few of them, but I really shook it up in ways that never went back to the way it was before. But then ordinary life and ordinary consciousness does very much reassert itself.
00:52:00 – Douglas Westerbeke
It’s like an infusion of love for everyone, I would suppose. Is that.
00:52:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah.
00:52:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
That’s what it feels like.
00:52:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. As you’ve read enough about them to know and what you did in your book, I love the way you had the words scatter across the page, because that is the nature of these experiences. They call them ineffable. Right. Meaning you can’t. Anything you say about them is trivial compared to the experience. So it was a oneness experience. The great Zen teacher Suzuki said, and I love this, he said, not two, but not one describing this experience. So, like, it’s not like I thought I was you exactly. I could tell the difference between you and me, but on some deeper level, there was no difference.
00:52:42 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.
00:52:42 – Eric Zimmer
It went from being something I intellectually sort of think about, like interdependence and interconnection, and know to like the experience of it. But yeah, it was one of amazing amount of love and freedom and just, ah, shit. Like all that stuff I’ve been worried about really makes no difference. I think a lot about these things. Having had a couple of them and study them. It’s interesting. In the Zen tradition, they describe this, as they call it Kensho, which means a moment or satori, a moment of awakening. Boom. This flash, like you’re describing. There’s one Zen teacher who makes this description of, it’s like you’re in a room that’s all enclosed, and you have this moment and it’s like, boom, somebody punches a hole in the wall and now there’s light coming through there. And over time. And this is what Koan practice in Zen is intended to do. Do is that it keeps punching more holes in that wall until eventually the whole, finally, one day, the whole structure completely crumbles.
00:53:42 – Douglas Westerbeke
Does that happen for people?
00:53:43 – Eric Zimmer
I think to the degree that it is ongoing is hard to know. But I do think people can have pretty radical fundamental changes in the way they experience the world. But again, I also do believe we habituate to anything. I don’t think that you get out of that. I often think of enlightenment as a sudden jump in consciousness, meaning you’re here and then all of a sudden you’re way up here and it happens like that, and you’re like, whoa, whoa. Because it’s so different versus a gradual thing where you change a little bit. A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. I’ve joked before that if you put the 23 year old homeless heroin addict version of me in my brain today, he might think he was enlightened. And again, I’m not saying I’m enlightened. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying the difference between the level of psychic torment of where I was then and now would have seemed completely revolutionary to that poor kid. But it’s totally normal to me, right? Because I’ve gotten here little steps, I mean, with a couple what felt like sort of big jumps, but it’s been much more incremental.
00:54:55 – Douglas Westerbeke
So the wall coming down, would that be because you’re punching holes a few at a time until the whole thing comes down? Would that be the same as kind of, like, habituating to this sense of oneness?
00:55:05 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a good question. I think what they’re trying to get to there is that you have these flashes where you see the world in a certain way, and then ordinary consciousness reasserts itself. And then you have another flash, and then ordinary consciousness reasserts itself, actually. And then eventually the thing crumbles and ordinary consciousness isn’t there. But I think there’s an element of consciousness that things become ordinary. But I do think there is a degree of psychic freedom that is available that some people achieve in a pretty ongoing way. But what the experience is like for them, ongoing, I don’t know. Meaning if you or I were to suddenly drop into that head, we would be like, holy. But I don’t know what it’s like to them.
00:55:55 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.
00:55:55 – Eric Zimmer
And then you get into the whole question of people who are in the business of selling. You could become enlightened. And so thus they have snake oil. And I don’t even necessarily mean snake oil, but I do mean, I don’t know. Enlightenment seems like it sometimes can turn into a contest with people like I am and you’re not. I don’t just mean straight out charlatans, either. I mean, people have had some degree of insight.
00:56:18 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right. I was thinking that if you ever do habituate to that, like, this is your normal state of being now, then does it become really difficult to fit in society? And are you in danger because you’re kind of disconnected? I don’t know.
00:56:31 – Eric Zimmer
I’m just wondering, what’s the nature of that phrase? Chop would carry water.
00:56:35 – Douglas Westerbeke
I’ve never heard this really, really chopped would carry water. What?
00:56:38 – Eric Zimmer
It’s funny because you alluded to, like, doing. Going back to just doing the laundry and doing things like that.
00:56:44 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, okay, right, right.
00:56:46 – Eric Zimmer
The zen phrase, you know, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Meaning you just do the basic same things.
00:56:53 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, right.
00:56:53 – Eric Zimmer
I don’t think so, because again, to me, it wasn’t. I mean, I’ve done hallucinogens, right. I know what it’s like to be in an altered state where you’re like, whoa, I can’t function.
00:57:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.
00:57:05 – Eric Zimmer
This was not that at all. It was. It felt.
00:57:09 – Douglas Westerbeke
No, I wouldn’t think it would be quite that bad.
00:57:10 – Eric Zimmer
But I’m thinking I’m at danger here of pretending that I know what enlightenment is about. So that’s. I want to. I want to just caveat the question, just really careful. But I’ve talked to a lot of spiritual teachers who seem to have some degree of that, but, you know, you wonder what any of that is worth or mean when you find these, you know, so called enlightened teachers that are sexually abusing their students.
00:57:32 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.
00:57:33 – Eric Zimmer
Anyway, let’s change directions and end this. This. Libraries. You’re a librarian or were a librarian. I don’t know.
00:57:40 – Douglas Westerbeke
I was. Yeah.
00:57:40 – Eric Zimmer
Okay. I love libraries.
00:57:42 – Douglas Westerbeke
It was awesome being at one.
00:57:44 – Eric Zimmer
Nicole, who works with the one you feed, who’s a producer of the show and helps us do some other things, was a librarian. She actually left a job at the library to come work for us. So libraries are near and dear to our hearts. In the book, libraries play a big role, and they seem to be the one place that Aubrey can stay.
00:58:03 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, right.
00:58:04 – Eric Zimmer
So they seem like a sanctuary to her. Was that the intention of her being able to stay without having to move?
00:58:11 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. It’s the only place where she can go where she doesn’t have to worry about rushing off to the next place. Although she actually travels through the libraries, too, so she doesn’t actually notice this for a while. But if the idea is that, look, you’re set off on this journey, you’re wandering around and around the world. If the idea is that something out there wants to show you the world, and particularly these libraries, because the whole history of everything is in these libraries, and he’s showing off. He wants somebody to know, right. This is a very old testament idea of a divine being where he’s kind of proud of what he’s done. He’s got his own mood swings and so on and so forth, and he wants, like to show off his creation is the idea or not his. But whatever it is, I never specify. I’m very open about it. So there are these libraries, and the idea is, well, look, this is what the end goal is, to get into these places and see what’s in there. Why would he chase her out? Or whatever it is. Why would the world chase her? If the world wants you to see what’s in these libraries, why would the world chase you out again? So the idea is to take that away. It made no sense to have her finally find these places and then get sick and have to leave them because this would was the whole endpoint of her journey, really. And really, that kind of is where the whole journey kind of ends. And then there’s an epilogue in the Amazon. Just logically speaking, that’s where it would go. And why chase her out once you’re in, you know, this is the part that you were meant to see.
00:59:38 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It’s interesting, in a sense, to say that on one hand, assuming there’s some force that is directing things in this novel, on one hand, I’m gonna force you to keep going around the world to see places like, I’m not gonna let you stop. You’re gonna just have to keep going. And at the same time, also then saying, but you can also get everything that you need to see from a book is an interesting juxtaposition there. Right?
01:00:09 – Douglas Westerbeke
It is. And I bring that up. She has a near death experience where she’s thinking this stuff through while she’s dying, and she’s realizing, you know, I’ve spent all this time, I spent, like, the past, you know, so many years of my life just reading books when, you know, there’s a whole library out here in the actual world.
01:00:25 – Eric Zimmer
Right.
01:00:25 – Douglas Westerbeke
I think about this often because, you know, I love to read books and stuff like that, but it’s a very solitary existence.
01:00:30 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.
01:00:31 – Douglas Westerbeke
It’s not like going to the. You can go to the movies with your friends or the theater or concert. But a book, reading a book is something you just do by yourself. You can’t share it. It’s an antisocial behavior, actually. I hate to say it about, you know, the thing I’m in, but it’s true, is there’s no way around it. And so I often think about that because there’s a kind of a. Not a disconnect, a kind of conflict.
01:00:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah.
01:00:51 – Douglas Westerbeke
I’m a bit both. I can be very introverted. I can be very extroverted. And I suppose a lot of us can, which is why we do these things. We can be very sociable but then take time out for ourselves to read these books. So I’m not knocking it, but I am saying it is inherently an antisocial behavior. And so she does the deep dive and she doesn’t see anybody for years and she’s just doing this and she learns a lot and she sees everything else, but she misses a lot at the same time. You got to have a foot in both places and she doesn’t for the longest time. And then when she’s out in the world, she has to readjust to it and she has to learn how to talk to people again. She’s coming out like a hermit and she has to totally get used to the world all over again. Those are the thoughts that she’s having. And she realizes, you know what? I’m reading the stories of all these individuals around the world, but I’m a story too, and I think I make a pretty good book. As at the end, that’s where that was going.
01:01:43 – Eric Zimmer
Wonderful. Well, Douglas, thank you so much for coming down. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed the book. We’ll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book, and it’s a real treat. I hope listeners will talk.
01:01:55 – Douglas Westerbeke
Thank you very much. You know, you do these interviews all the time, so you’re used to it. But I never get to talk like this to anybody, so I enjoy this way more than you, I think.
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