On Being with Krista Tippett

I didn't grow up with many books or ideas. What I did grow up with was the Bible.

I spent a lot of time with my Bible and actually found it very empowering.

Like it was a great text to just open up to a page and kind of have a deep conversation with myself and with the universe.

The poor man's son whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition admires the condition of the rich...he sacrifices a real tranquility that is at all times in his power...Power and riches appear then to be what they are enormous machines contrive to produce a few trifling conveniences to the body...

The second book was Henry Ford's International Jew. And of course, immediately after it, I read Mein Kampf.

When I read Mein Kampf, it made so much sense to me. That my reaction to Mein Kampf was not denying Holocaust, but glorifying Holocaust. Saying this guy had a point. I hope somebody will finish the job, unfortunately.

Later when I began to experience the texts of Hinduism, I guess that was what came first, The Bhagavad Gita and the Pana Shads. My whole sense of God blew to smithereens. There was something much vaster than what I had thought that I was praying to.

So it's not the text itself but at what what it's directing your attention to that the text feels as important.

In some of the paths, in the path of devotion for example, pray to Krishna and eventually if with enough love and persistence you become one with Krishna.

So for instance the Bhagavad-gita says just as a river town at the edge of a river doesn't need a well. So somebody who has seen the truth doesn't need this even the greatest written scriptures and and the doubted in likewise will say you know I call it the doubt because for lack of a better word.

you tell a story in your book about your sister reading the diary of Anne Frank and being devastated by that

Nobody can do anything very much really alone. What a child needs, what we all need is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom and listen to them.

Listening is an act of community which takes space, time and silence. Reading is a means of listening.

Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It's an act. You do it.

You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless incoherent gabbling shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you.

Reading a story, you may be told something but you're not being sold anything.

And though you're usually alone when you read, you're in communion with another mind. You aren't being brainwashed or co-opted or used. You've joined in an act of the imagination.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS, the best manual we have, the most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life. Yeah. And why wouldn't that matter so much?

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

in which she traces her harrowing childhood in Southeast Texas with a mother who once tried to kill her with a butcher's knife and her own adult struggles with alcoholism and breakdown.

I sat with Matthew Sanford in 2006 just after he published his beautiful book, Waking, a memoir of trauma and transcendence.

I struggle with this question because everyone does and I end up kind of giving a litany of here's what happened, blah, blah, blah.

Well, just start the story and we'll see where it takes us.

One of the big healing things for me was to recognize that my paralyzed body didn't stop talking to my mind. It changed its voice. It went to a more subtle whisper that doesn't have as much clarity. It's sweeter, it's quieter, and it doesn't as quickly react.

The silence is the aspect of our consciousness that makes us feel slightly heavy. It is the source of our feeling of loss, but also of a sense of awe.

I have never seen anyone truly become more aware of his or her body without also becoming more compassionate.

Matthew Sanford is the founder and president of Mind Body Solutions which is based in Minnesota. His book is Waking, a memoir of trauma and transcendence.

nobody really knows what happens to us when we die?

no, it wasn't in any textbook.

families and here are dying people living through this terror in cognita and I could even spell terror, T-E-R-R-O-R because it is indeed a terrifying terror not knowing what to expect the next day and thinking everything is at a control as the body deteriorates as the mind deteriorates and wouldn't it be wonderful people who really understood what to expect and knew that as bad as things were, this is the way you die of cancer or of heart disease or stroke.

if I told a surgical patient just what to expect, he could tolerate pain much better. He could tolerate a drainage and discomforts and diarrhea because he knew that was what was supposed to happen and it was okay.

thank you so much for sharing your beloved Baba with us I now love her too as I have known her by another name in another time in another place