Robert Sessions

have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf h thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Robert's Sessions. Robert is a native of South Dakota and earned a b a. From Drake University and a PhD

in philosophy from the University of Michigan. Before focusing on photography for more than four decades. He taught at Kirkwood Community College, Grinnell College, Luther College and the University of Minnesota and Duluth. As a photographer, he works frequently with his wife, travel writer Lorie Erickson. Together they produced Spiritual Travel as a website describing holy sites around the world. Robert's most recent book is Becoming Real Authenticity in an

Age of Distractions. He has also published several dozen articles on environmental philosophy, the philosophy of work, ethics, and the philosophy of technology. Here's the interview. Hi, Bob, welcome to the show. Thanks Eric, and I'm glad to be here. Your book is called Becoming Real Authenticity in an Age of Distractions, which we will get into in a little bit as we get deeper into it. But I'd like

to start like we usually do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, 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 grandson stops. He thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says grandfather, which one wins, and

the grandfather 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. Well. It's a wonderful traditional parable. Uh. And I'm a firm believer that one of the most important things that boys like this is that they contain truth that can't be cat feared entirely with discursive factual references. You know, they're sort of fathomless in the sense of being bottomless barrel with truth. Um, what does it mean

to me? I've spent a lot of time thinking about, reading about, and writing about the development of the self, and I'm a firm believer that while yes, we have something to do with how we turn out and who we become, that I really take a more sociological or social philosophical perspective and believe that human beings are probably the most hyper social creatures on the face of the planet, and that we, to a great extent, in our very being,

our identities are very selves are social through and through. And so what that means for me, at least in part, is that if we want to learn to feed the good wolf. We need to be embedded in really the right kinds of social relation and ships, families and communities and so long, and that much of the bad wolf comes from bad culture, bad society, bad families, bad philosophies that are far beyond our individual capacities to too much shaping. Well,

that's a great way to lead into your book. So it's as I said earlier, it's called becoming real authenticity in an age of distractions. And you say, I'll just read this here. You say, what people desire is authenticity, a deep sense of being real. I believe that many people cannot attain this elusive quality of being because of the myriad distractions that keep them from a genuine quest

and keep them looking in the wrong places. What leads you to believe that authenticity is the thing that we're after. I think that people have, in an ape desire not just to be recognized, which I think is very very strong, but also to be the person that we might be. And you see this coming out in a thousand different ways. Certainly, the paradigm example is uh, teenagers who you know rebail against everything people say and they want to be their own person and so on. I mean, it's just a

very very strong desire that people have. And so then I came at it in my book from kind of the downside, Well, what prevents this from happening to the extent that people wanted to? And how do people get lost? There many many people who, for example, have midlife crises. And I don't like that word crisis because I think often experiences of difficulties can be great opportunities or growth

and development, a discovery. But the reason people have that, I think often is because they've been pursuing someone else's version of themselves, someone else's dream for them stereotypical example, but I think it's a powerful one. Unfortunately in our culture is that people get convinced that to be the person who is going to be recognized for themselves and viewed as authentic, the way to do that is through material possessions. I mean, that's the major drumbeat in our culture.

If you only get enough money, you're going to get recognized and paying us until on and of course legions of stories of people who finally realize that doesn't do it no matter how much you have. So one of the things about the book that you talk a lot about is. I think when we think about authenticity, we tend to think of that as being a uniqueness that is inside of us. It has something to do with

finding ourselves. And you say that being authentic has as much to do with what occurs in the world around us as it does with what we experience internal to ourselves. Can you explain that a little bit more? Yeah, again, that's that's very complicated, but I'll try to say it's straightforwardly. The tells that we come have again, a huge amount to do with the models around us. That's why having good mentors, good role models, and form is so absolutely crucial.

A sense of what our possibilities are have to do with the stories we read, the people we experience, the events that we perceive, and so figuring out who I am has a great deal to do with the world around me. One other aspect of this is what a

social philosopher called the looking glass self. We see very little and dim light when we simply naval gaze, when we look inside a great extent to really know who I am, how I'm coming across, what I'm like as a as a human being, we need to see ourselves reflected in other people's responses to us believe in that very process of recognition and certainty. The process itself for nation is a relational phenomenon. You name three main distractions that you think get in the way of us being

more authentic work, technology, and nature. Let's talk about work for a minute. In what ways does the current culture and the way we approach work leave us feeling less real? I actually wrote a couple of other books on this topic, so I had a lot to say about it, in fact that people are interested in. My major book on it is called Working in America. It's a humanities reader

on work. And usually when people write about work is from the point of view of economics and labor relations and so on, and mine is a humanity philosophical look at work. Um work is something that people think we really don't want to do. I mean, think about the Monday morning syndrome. God, I just didn't have to go to work. I'm retired now, and what I'm seeing in my retire friends, uh, is that in the whole variety of ways they have to find something to give meaning

to their lives now that work is over. And so the problem I don't think is work per se. I think it's a variety of things about how we do work. It's not our work system. Yes, work is a way to produce products, and it's a way to create wealth, and I don't at all the manage the importance of that, um But it's also the context are a major context

within which we discover and express ourselves. And if we don't have meaningful work, if we don't have ways to contribute to our own lives, but equally importantly and more importantly perhaps to contribute to the lives of our communities of our world, uh, then our ability to discover, to create, to develop, an advance and mature in ourselves gets tremendously diminished. And so work per se is not the problem. It's how we do work where we emphasize that what work

is about is simply making the living. And again I don't diminish the importance of that, but work is much more than that, and we don't really value those other aspects of work except for a few people. For example, creative artists. Their work is their products, but they are allowed, in fact, they're encouraged to develop themselves by doing their work. Very few other people do that. Most jobs do not

involve very much self discovery and so on. My son, my oldest son, who is a biochemical engineer, works for a wonderful company that encourages the engineers at least to make some long term plans where they want to be ten fifteen years from now, and not so much in terms of money, but in terms of keeping them interested

in what they're doing, keeping them creative. And they realize that if if people aren't developing and having the opportunity to really be creative and express themselves, their capacity to do the kind of work that they're doing becomes very, very compromised. So again we're talking about a bigger cultural issue here, the way that the culture values work that

people do. How can those of us that are working find ways to make our own work that we're doing whatever that is more meaningful to us, so that so that we don't fall into this trap that you're describing. Yeah, that's an excellent question. Uh. Certainly. One of the things I've, for example, taught at the community college for a quarter of a century and one of the things that we had available to us was a union. And it's it's

not a close shot union. It was an open shop union in the sense that people didn't have to join, but we in the union encourage the development not just of good salaries and benefits and so on, but of working conditions, not just in terms of safety and so on, but that really provided opportunities for the faculty in this case, to to develop their art, to explore, to go to conferences, to take time off and do writing, and so on.

Uh and so part of my answer again is that you know, we're social beings, and we depend heavily for our very beings on our our social context. So a lot of the main things I'd recommend for people to make work better is to work with their fellow employees, not necessarily to create unions, but to create copathetic working conditions where everyone is fed, where everyone has the opportunity to be created, to explore, to do things differently. And I'm convinced that this can happen in if you will,

the lowliest of occupations. I've done a lot of handyman work, a lot of painting and house building and so on, and I've seen I've seen it done poorly where people are just assigned, they don't have any responsibility except hammer the nails in the right place and on the other hand, I've seen people who really do some wonderful things as carpenters and painters and so on, because they're given recognition for the importance of uh this this, uh, you know,

the creativity and exploration that I'm talking about. I've seen a lot of different places. I think it can happen in restaurants or An example is the difference between working at Walmart and working at Costco, both working big box ain stores. The morale in Costco is huge, not just because they pay twice as much as as Walmart does and have benefits, but because they really encourage people to participate in creating better products and better displays and new

lines of products and so on. Another things that you talked about, and I thought this was really interesting because when we think about going off the wrong you know, going down the wrong path, we tend to think of it as these really perilous things that happened, these big things. But you talk about how most of us in America stray from developing and becoming ourselves because of what seemed like pretty benign distractions. And my example in the technology

chapter UH University plays to that. Let me think about the much commented upon phenomenon of people socializing walking down the street or sitting in restaurants or whatever on their phones. They're not with the people there with they're not living in the moment and so on. And that's a very small kind of thing, but there's a kind of accreation to it. It adds up, it despoils significant relationships, but it also creates some people a set of mental habits.

It's kind of like a drug. They need that fix of constant distraction. And we all know that if if you really want to be clear on who you are and do something significant with your life, you've got to be able to focus and concentrate and be fully in the moment. And picking up those habits that we do from our technologies can lead us to see you're like, okay, all that matters is like the proverbial pigeon poking at the petrough in the pen. Uh, you know, constantly wanting

another sunflower. And it looks like that's too often. And I don't want to just pick on phones here, I am talking on one. I think they're turned in his technologies. But people need to understand that we need to learn to use our technologies so that they maximize the things who really care about that. I could just go on one more step in this line. There's a wonderful book out now that's the best seller and lots of people

are reading it. It's really a very simple idea, the book on Tidying Up by a Japanese American woman uh, And what she basically is saying is that everything in our lives, everything in our lives should be something that really brings this meaning. And if we don't get that from something, then we need to get it out of

our lives. But do it in a in a ceremonial way, that is, to pay homage to whatever it is idem of clothing or a plate or whatever, and say, well, you said me, well, and I want to put you somewhere where someone who really will find you meaningful can have me. And that would help in a whole variety of ways. For one thing, it would clear up people's lives so they aren't so tied to their stuff. It would also help people be much better materialists. You know,

everybody talks about how Americans are too materialistic. In a different sense, I think people in America are lay too little materialistic. That is, we really cared about the material world, we would take better care of it. But in our false materialism, we end up despoiling the world, whether it's garbage or the way we treat the land or air. Uh,

you know, pick your favorite example. You talk a lot in the book about how nature is a really important and powerful way to bring us back to ourselves, to become more real, to become more authentic. What is it about nature that has that power? A lot of things about nature, um. First of all, one of the things that it's easy to forget, especially in this internet laden world, this electronic laden world, is that we are natural beings thrown through or biological beings from dust to dust and

so on. Secondly, that we are part of an ecosystem. This is not an abstraction. Uh. This is one of the major concrete things about it. You know, if you read Castholie noticed his book Da Coda, but if you read stories about people who live in different places in the world, different climates and geographies and go on, people really are different based on the world around them. Um. You know that that world affects us in all kinds

of profound ways. We also in our society, with our tremendous cultural artifacts are our cities and buildings and so on. We have taken people away from experiences with the natural world. So the most people do is to watch a YouTube video that cute cuddly panda bear the other day and in the snow playing in the snow, a wonderful video. My gracious, that's not an animal in the wild, and that's not an ecosystem that's intact. I mean, that's an

implication that it's not intact. And so if we're not familiar with it, we don't love it, we don't understand it, we don't value it. So much of the ecological crises that we have in our world have to do with that abstraction from the natural world. But my point of view is that we need the natural world for our very selves. The lives are of our souls. There's a wonderful book about nature deficit disorder children who you don't

have any encounter with nature. And it isn't just that kids aren't as healthy because they're not eating up dirt and so on, or they don't their immune systems don't develop because they don't have off encounters with bacteria. But it's that um much of what we are as natural beings doesn't ever get triggered and developed as a result of this isolation that we have one other way, of course,

that's been much discussed. That's so important. If you study the biographies of the great spiritual people throughout human history, the major place where they go for their encounters with the holy is out into the desert, into the world, that is, into the mountains, you know, the famous hermit up in the cave and so on. Because what's what's there is a lack of human distractions, and it opens you up to a variety of things that are a sent for as I say, people's spiritual development in life.

For one thing, you get perspective that, hey, my life is short. I'm only one being among many, I'm only one species among many. I'm part of this larger community. You know. It puts you in perspective and helps you realize that my life is not all about me. I see. Now that's another distraction and terrible cultural message I think that we've gotten in our society, and that's that your life is all about you with regard to happiness. If I can use that word, you know, as a way

of describing the good wolf. I think a major ingredient is to learn to diminish the ego and to give it away. Not to give the ego away that gives give your life away, give yourself to other people and lone behold, the more people you help in really genuine ways, uh, the happier you end up being. I mean, it's it's one of the most remarkable phenomena that you can come across as people just don't realize that if you look at every religious tradition, that's a major part of the

formula for happiness is to live unto others. I think the nature pieces the sort of thing that I natively would sort of think, well, I don't know about that. It just doesn't It doesn't resonate with people I think who are a more sophisticated crowd or But one of the great teachers of my life was a gentleman named lou Dwine who founded a place called Niches, which was founded on that exact idea that basically, um, it's lack of contact with nature that is one of the things

that that makes us sick as a culture. And I wouldn't have believed it until I experienced it so well. But I found that to be so true. And I think even a little bit of time five minutes, ten minutes, because a lot of us live in areas where there's not a lot of nature around. But if we can find just small bits of it, even that is really helpful.

I recently had the experiences not in the book, of spending over an hour with a rin Pochet, a holy man from Tibet whose second in the world to the Dalai Lama in terms of his verity, as he's from Mongolia, but he was a captive in Tibetan China for the first twenty five or thirty years of his life, and tortured and so on. And the man was just so peaceful and just exuded this happiness. But he clearly had

transcended the Eagle in so many ways. And yet he was very straightful, and he wasn't wasn't at all off putting. He was as welcoming as he could be, and he spent the time with us that felt good, and then we parted. But we were so privileged to spend that time with him and to realize that much of his spiritual depths had come from time that he spent in

nature meditating. One of the things that you talk about is that in our current world, it's called the postmodern world right now, we have choices in everything, um, whether I mean whether it be the obvious things like oh I could buy thirty brands of cereal, or more profound and fundamental things about like who do I want to marry, and where do I want to live, and what kind of job do I want to have to do? And what are my beliefs and and and what is important?

And I think that we're in this place where those are all good things in some ways. But you make the point that there's two issues. One is living up to our values and our ideals and to our culture. And you say that you know that's always been a problem for human beings to live up to that, but that in in earlier societies, the idea of having to figure out who you were wasn't there. All you had to do was work to live up to the culture.

To do that, you didn't have to figure out who you were on top of that, And that that's one of the lenges we as a modern society ar wrestling with. Yeah, And I think that's a really really important point. It's the underside of freedom. If you want to use that kind of language. It's wonderful to have choices, and it's awful to have so many choices, and you can think

of all sorts of examples. One social psychologist called this the cytophobia is standing in front of a rack of tooth paste and say, oh my god, which one I'm going to choose? And we end up chose in the same moment which those last time, just to get out of there. Uh, it feels oppressive rather than the breathing.

But as you say that, this is true about every aspect of our lives, and I think the only way to traverse this gauntlet of choices at every turn well is first of all, to have help, you know, good parenting, good modeling, good friends, good teachers, and reading good stories. I can't emphasize that enough, you know, to really get your belly full of uh, the absolute best stories that are available. If that's a major job of childhood, so that when it comes to making these decisions, you've got

some models. You know that this way of doing things that that such and such a character tried out isn't a good idea. And there it is right in front of you, a different version of it, but the same same dilemma and so on. Uh, And so I think that it takes a lot of training. Was as you said, in the past, Uh, you know, you didn't have any major choices about who you were going to be, what you're gonna do in your life. And you belonged to a certain class. Your father was a miller, so you're

going to be a miller. You're going to stay in the same village you were born into, and so on, And you know that that can be oppressive, especially for certain kind of personalities, but it also is a tremendous relief from all of these pressures to make decisions. They put several children through college, and that whole syst choosing the college. It is so crucial and so difficult to that extent because it involves knowing who you are, and of course why you go to college, too, good extent

is to figure out who you are. And we've even on a number of people, and it's very very costly mistakes where it turned out. Now they thought that was the right choice. They went to take two different schools and went on campus tours and so on, and chose one and by golly, that didn't work, and the one that they should have chosen wasn't as fancy or as expensive or whatever, and so they end up with a year lost in fifty dollars of tuition. It can be

very costly. And I'll multiply that people choosing the wrong mate and the wrong career twenty years later to be eze. Oh No, I didn't want to be a jazz musician. I wanted to be a mathematician. Uh, and so on. You talk in your book a lot you reference another book which is one of my favorite books of all time, which is The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Hate, and he talks about in that book. I don't think he came up with it. Um, but this idea of a happiness formula.

Could you share with us what that formula is? Yeah? Well Hate. There's another book, by the way, that I highly recommend me to Ricard, who is one of the great students of the Dalai Lama, who is French and his father is a French philosopher, and he goes off. I think he was a chemist student. And he went off after getting his PhD to Tibet and came back thirty five years later with his advanced ability. Um, he's got a book called happiness that just has great insight.

So I highly recommend that happiness hypothesis. Uh, you know is complicated in some ways, but pretty straightforward in other ways. That happiness is first of all, something that you can't get it you pursue it, Okay, it comes as a as an epiphenomenon, comes along with doing something else. And that something else has to do with some of things

I've been talking about. Uh, you know, if if you're clear about who you are at a given point, and you're doing things from that identity, you're acting from that identity, then you're gonna be much happier than if what you're doing doesn't fit who you are. So that's one aspect. Is self discovery and self expression, you know, in your daily life and your work. In your personal life. Part of happiness comes from having good relationships, again, something I've

been been talking about. If we don't have may their spouses or lovers who really fit us and understand us and can help us discover ourselves and call us up short when we make mistakes and so on, we're going to be less happy. A certain amount of wealth is important, and maybe that's the wrong word to use because people immediately think of being rich. You know what I'm talking

about having enough. What they've found is up to a certain point so that you don't have to worry every day about key, where's the next meal going to come from? Where where am I going to stay tonight because it's cold outside, and so on. Uh, that increases your happiness after a certain point. More wealth doesn't really improve your

happiness much. In fact, it can be a little detriment to your happiness because achieving and maintaining that wealth, and then maintaining all the stuff and the lifestyle and so on that go along with that can keep you away from doing things that are much more valuable to your happiness. Being rich is is not all it's cracked up to be. It's act. It's it's contrary to to well being. There's a wonderful book by a woman who talks about her

work with Mother Teresa's Salvation in India. And she had the job of going fundraising and she would go to wealthy people, uh, you know, executives and CEOs and people with millions and billions of dollars and tell them that their lives would be a lot richer and more meaningful and happy. If they would give it away, and she said over and over again, she gives example after example of how that was the case that people had had thought hoarding and you know, having a big bank account

was a way to go. That's a major ingredients again of letting go giving it away. In the book, I was struck by how both you and Jonathan Hate kind of came to a very similar place, him with happiness, you with authenticity. And I think it was that what really struck me was with both of those things. The Western approach has very much been it's about me, you know, it's it's an internal find yourself, go inside, self discovery, all of that stuff, And what you both came to

was a sense that it's not. You know, we say happiness is an inside job, which is such a cliche, and there's there's some truth in it, but where you both landed was that it's both. Happiness is both an inside job. We have to be doing things working internally, and it's what's happening in the world around us. It's the people around it's the life we've constructed, the conditions we have, and you kind of landed in the same place with authenticity. Part of it is who we are

internally and not being distracted by all these distractions. And part of it is the culture of the circumstances the people that were around. I have landed again in Christianity. I was not for a while, and I have explored a lot of different legis traditions. But one of the things that I want to say about Christianity is I've discovered how incredibly your cultural Christianity it's it's not about well, it's not about individual salvation as much as it's about relationships.

You know, God is love, uh, you know, if if you really get it, it happens because of opening your heart and loving relationships. It's relational and like I say, that's very countercultural. It's not all about me, It's all about us, right. I think that's one of the things that just comes up over and over and over again on the show that has struck me that I don't think I was as aware of before we started doing it,

was that second aspect. I was certainly aware of the meditative aspects and the going inside and then knowing yourself. But over and over and over people we have on the show, very wise people talk about this idea of relationship and other people and the culture and the people are around and I'm you know, more and more recognizing

what a critical part of a good life that is. Yeah, and I really appreciate your program that you're that you're finding that because, um, you know, the message is so much by a lot of self help gurus that it's all about me, it's all about going in myself and so on. And like I say that that's an important part of it, but it's it's only a small part

of it. There should be and can be what I would call a good creative tension between you know, being pulled towards um internal focus and taking care of yourself and all those things, and at the same time UM, giving to and being connected to the world outside. I think a good creative tension pulls you into the middle with that where a lot of us tend to get to one extreme or the other, and a lot of the self help that's out there, various programs, encourages to

go one direction. Yeah. And one of the ways that people come out is in much of the literature about workings on is about work life balance, and I think that's a less adequate way of talking about it. But I think it's you know, it's getting a something similar. One of the things I wanted to mention I mentioned Christianity minutes ago. I don't know how many people you've you've talked to use this language, but I really do think what you're after in this program is a spiritual quest.

This is really a spiritual issue through and through UH. And I know it sounds kind of funny to use that language and talking about work and technology and uh and so on, but it seems to me that that's at the heart of why it is people end up

with difficulties, losing their way and so on. Uh. And one of the things that I like that using it as a spiritual quest is that spiritual quest if you look at every tradition, are about getting lost or about wandering on the way to use the Dallast terminology, about Cohen's and in the paradoxes and uh, you know, getting mired down in of having the strug hole and being

challenged and so on. And I think that's that's a really really helpful lesson to people who think that this is all just about finding roses and see something's wrong. If I'm having a difficulty, I would put it the other way around, something's wrong if you're not having some difficulties. You know, the greatest atheists all time have not been the arm chair atheists that abound these days. It's people who are very, very spiritual beings who have doubts as

they go because they're developing. They're discovering new relationships to the Holy and new understandings of the Holy. Yep, I agree, well, I think that is a good place for us to wrap up. So thank you so much, Bob for taking the time to come on. I really enjoyed the book. You cover a lot of ground, from Eastern philosophy to Western existential philosophy. It's there's there's a lot in it. I really enjoyed reading it, so thank you so much for taking the time. Well, thank you for finding it.

And I enjoyed this too. Thank you. Okay, take care by Okay, bye m You can learn more about Robert Sessions and this podcast at one you feed dot net slash Sessions