Pico Iyer | The Search for Paradise Within Yourself

Srini: Have you ever heard our podcast guests say something that you wanted to remember? Or maybe you read something in a book and then the day goes by and you can't remember what it was or where you heard it, or where you read it. And in the world we live in, there's so much competition for our attention. We're constantly inundated with blogs, social media posts, text messages, emails, Netflix, whatever it is.

And if you ever tried to build a second brain, you probably noticed that you end up spending a lot of time maintaining and organizing folders, which ends up becoming a part-time job in and of itself. But what if there was a better way? Our new Ultimate Guide to Building a Second Brain and I will show you how to build a second brain that allows you to capture everything and find anything without creating any folders or spending any time organizing the information you need.

If you wanna be able to put the information that you consume to use and organize your digital life, be sure to check out our Ultimate Guide to Building a Second Brain And Me. You can learn more@unmistakablecreative.com

Pico Iyer: Slash's brain. Everything important in our lives lies far beyond our explanations. When you fall in love, when you are moved by a sunset, when a forest fire suddenly wipes you out, when a virus suddenly forces you to stay at home, we can't really explain any of that, and yet it's the main force that's shaping most of our days.

Explanations are almost like little boxes we place on this tidal wave of life, that have nothing to do with anything and can't begin to explain the flood or stop it in its flow. So that's the shortcoming of religion, I think, if it's trying to put a box on eternity or if it's trying to give a reason for something that's only inexplicable, and the fact that it exists far beyond the reach of our explanations.

Srini: I'm Srinivas Rao, and this is the Unmistakable Creative Podcast, where you get a window into the stories and insights of the most innovative and creative minds who have started

Srini: Movements have built thriving businesses, written best-selling books, and created insanely interesting art. For more, check out our 500-episode archive@unmistakablecreative.com.

Pico Iyer: I'm really happy to be here. Thank you.

Srini: Oh, it's my pleasure to have you here. You have a new book out, The Half-Known Life in Search of Paradise. I've known about your work for quite some time. I read your other book, The Art of Stillness, and absolutely loved it.

Having dug into your body of work, I wanted to start by asking what I think is a very relevant question, given the nature of your work. And that is, what spiritual or religious beliefs were you raised with, and how did those end up impacting the choices that you have made with both your life and your work?

I've been traveling with my delma for 48 years. So I've learned a little bit about Buddhism and then at one point spent four years trying to educate myself on Islam. So I'm a sort of typical global creature, insofar as I've never actually given myself entirely to one tradition, but I feel I've been lucky enough to learn from many of them.

And so in terms of my life now, I go back and forth between always spending the autumn in Japan because I find Buddhism is a great teaching about impermanence and suffering and even death. And the beauty of the Japanese autumn is you have blazing blue skies, 70 degree cloudless skies, even in the middle of November.

And all around this festival of reds and gold that are turning leaves even though the days are getting shorter and darker. So it's a sort of emblem of what they say in Japan that life is about joyful participation in a land of sorrows. How do you make the most of the fact that nothing lasts?

And then in the spring, I come back here to California, which I know you know well. Of course, Big Sur is already this radiant place, and in Easter time, I'm learning about light and resurrection

Srini: Raised by Hindu parents in another country, one thing I always wonder is how your parents retained a sense of culture and integrated the culture while also allowing you to experience the culture that you grew up in. One thing that I have often thought about is how things get passed on from generation to generation. Like my sister is married to a Bengali guy, but we're from South India, and I keep thinking about their son and what language he will speak. And I think to myself, if I don't marry an Indian girl, probably the first thing to go will be language. So I wonder, how do you, how did your parents retain and instill cultural traditions, but also allow you to experience your own in the country that you grew up in?

Pico Iyer: Yes. Such a good question. And actually, I think I'm very different from many Diaspora Indians, as it were, insofar as my parents were theosophists. So although they were born into Hinduism, theosophy is about steeping oneself in all the traditions of the world. And beyond that, they were both philosophers. And my mother explicitly was a professor of comparative religions, so she knew everything about Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity.

And the other curious aspect, maybe, of my parents, as a generational thing, is that they grew up in British India. So my father came from South India, my mother from North India, and the only language they had in common was English. All their education was at the hands of Christian or Catholic nuns and teachers.

And they knew the Bible inside out. They had to learn all that stuff growing up in India. So I didn't grow up in a very Hindu household, except that my parents were both vegetarians and they didn't drink by choice. But I didn't get so much of Hinduism. But what I did get was that my parents were friends with the Dalai Lama and my mother could answer every

Srini: Something that I often find when I talk to people like you and many of the people that have been on the show is that they were exposed to this kind of teaching, whether it's self-improvement or spirituality, at an early age. And yet I always wonder at that age, what your perception and your experience with this kind of knowledge were, as versus now when you look back in retrospect with age.

I'm an avid surfer, which you may have known, and I found that I saw surfing as a spiritual experience, but I see kids in the water and I always wonder, do they just see the spiritual aspect of this or are they just playing? How has your understanding of the things that your parents have taught you about both spirituality and religion, and the experiences you've had, of course, changed with age?

Pico Iyer: So you're absolutely right and, of all the times I was growing up, I didn't realize what it had is to have Tibetan Buddhist monks in my living room and all these amazing books around the wall, and I probably was running in the opposite direction until life caught up with me.

Which I suppose is the way it, as you said, it often happens I remember when I was young, I really felt I'm gonna make my own destiny and I'm going to create it utterly separate from my family and my schooling and everything I grew up with and I didn't have any need for religion and really felt I knew it all.

And one thing I've enjoyed about getting older is to find, I don't know, a thing, and that life has much richer and more interesting plans for me than I ever could have had for life. And that as we all find in the midst of loss and challenge and everything that life brings to us, we turn for guidance and sustenance.

One of the interesting things that happened in my life was that when I was in my twenties, I was living in New York City and I was really leading the life I might have

Srini: That quote you just said, "Life has better plans for us than we have for ourselves," really struck me because, I think that, and maybe this is a very Western thing, from an early age, we start asking kids, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And we start making plans. And to your point, those things never turn out the way we think they will. If there's anything that I've learned from the life I've lived, it's that it has turned out nothing like I thought it would. And in many ways, that's been a blessing. But what is it about human beings that makes them want to try to control what is inherently uncontrollable, particularly when it comes to making plans for life?

Like we sit down at the beginning of the new year, we set all these goals. We write in all these journals, we sign up for workshops, and yet there's this sort of serendipity that happens and we resist that so much.

Pico Iyer: Much. Yeah, no, you I think it's in nature, it's, it makes sense for every human being when young to chart out a course and when young we do assume we're in control and that things can go very much the way we want them to be.

And that's, I think, not a terrible thing. I remember I grew up in the age before GPS, so any day if I wanted to go to the airport, I'd get out a map and I'd work out exactly which roads to take to get there. And almost certainly I would get lost, but the illusion of control and the illusion of knowledge and the thought I imagined I had a sense of how to get to the airport actually helped me then compared with if I were just starting blind.

It's just as a writer, I will often make a plan and I will often make an outline for a book, even though deep inside me, I hope, and I'm confident that as soon as I begin writing, the outline will be overturned and the book will take on a life of its own. And our lives take on a life of their own, as it were.

Srini: And speaking of trajectories, I just, from talking to you, I don't get the sense that you were raised with sort of the stereotypical Indian child narrative of Dr., lawyer, engineer as the trajectory to a good life, a stable life. And I realized the value of that, of course, in retrospect, because as I've discovered with age, my parents really didn't have much of a choice because in the time they grew up in, and probably very much similar to your parents, their sort of outcomes in life were fairly binary. It was either poverty or stability. So for you, knowing that you're going to pursue this life as a writer, which is inherently uncertain, where nothing is guaranteed and anything is possible. What was your parents' narrative about making your decision?

Pico Iyer: Way back then. I'm really grateful to my parents because they shared, I think, the characteristic of many Indian and perhaps Asian parents: education was very important to them. And I realize now they spent a large percentage of their salary making sure that I could go to very good schools. So they made that investment. They weren't thinking in terms of medicine, business, or law. But I think secretly because they were both academics, they were hoping that I would become a professor.

And so I was determined at an early age I would never become a professor and never become a lawyer. And then, I think you are too young to understand, but there will come a moment when you look in the mirror and you hear your mother order at a restaurant and you'll suddenly realize, whatever I thought I was doing in my life, I can't run away from my blood and my DNA.

And so here, all these years later, it seems like my interests are fairly philosophical. I was a professor for three months a couple of years ago, and probably I've become exactly the person my parents would have hoped for, but through a very zigzagging course. But I'm sure they were never concerned with

Srini: Yeah, no it's funny you say that because my dad is a professor and he had a lot of ways I realized what I do when I just speak to audiences when I do the show and to some degree, I'm a teacher.

Pico Iyer: Yes. Same thing. Exactly. Yeah. I love that.

Srini: So you had mentioned not belonging to any one religion and kind of steeping yourself in multiple traditions. I had Gregory Roberts, the guy who wrote Shantaram here, and I was asking him about the difference between religion and spirituality. And the thing that struck me so much about what he said was that religion has borders and lawyers, and spirituality has none. And so in a lot of ways I wonder, you've been exposed to all these traditions, yet at the same time, so many sources of conflict in the world are often the byproduct of religion. For example, in India and Pakistan, Kashmir, which I know you wrote about in the book. A couple of questions come from this. One, why is that, why do we have these sorts of sources of conflict as a byproduct of religion? Two, what do we do about it? And three what are the commonalities that you have found between each of these traditions that you have stepped in?

Pico Iyer: What are you immersing yourself in?

Yeah, I think I'll probably concentrate on the first two of those three questions, and as yeah. I almost conclude my book with a line from the very wise Franciscan father Richard. Who says, as a priest, says, "Remember, the point of life is not to be spiritual. It's to be human." And as I said before, I've spent 48 years regularly talking and traveling with His Holiness.

And I'm always impressed by many things about him. But one of them is that he's one of the most revered religious presences on the planet. And yet he brought out a book a few years ago called "Beyond Religion". And, as everybody knows, he always stresses science, and the word that he emphasized over and over again is secular, precisely because, as you said, he's had a front-seat view on all the ways in which religion can tear us up and can divide us, even though each religion hopes to bring us together.

And I think he knows that really what brings us together is our human experience, our human hearts, something that lies beyond doctrine and text

Srini: Yeah. Yeah. It makes me wonder so many things about this despite that you have somebody like the Dalai Lama, talking about, his religion as kindness, yet, we have wars, and we have conflict over religion often. And is there any solution to this? Like, why is it that the rest of the world doesn't think like this? And I think that the thing that struck me most about the section on Jerusalem was when you mentioned the sign that says, "No explanations inside the church, please."

Srini: I was just contemplating yesterday as I was journaling, and it's this idea of what I don't remember who came up with the phrase, the "unexamined life". You may probably be because you might have read more books about this kinda stuff than I have. But then I remember thinking, okay, we have an "unexamined life" and then you have an "examined life".

And, my conclusion was that the unexamined life leads to a lack of self-awareness, but the examined life leads to an abundance of anxiety, which I think is very common in sort of personal development circles and among people who are looking for self-improvement. We often turn outward for answers as opposed to inward until we hit a point of diminishing returns.

But we don't even recognize that we have reached that point of diminishing returns. Why do

Pico Iyer: Thank you. Thank you. That's the central sentence in that chapter and in the entire book. And that's why I called that book The Half-Known.

Because, again, the older I've gotten, the more I see that everything important in our life lies far beyond our explanations. When you fall in love, when you are moved by a sunset, when a forest fire suddenly wipes you out, when a virus suddenly forces you to stay at home--we can't really explain any of that. And yet it's the main force that's shaping most of our days and explanations are almost like little boxes we place on this tidal flood, having nothing to do with anything and can't begin to explain the flood or to stop it in its flow. So that's, yes, that's the shortcoming of religion, I think, if it's trying to put a box on it or if it's trying to give a reason for something that's only paralyzed by the fact that it exists far beyond the reach of reason. So you're absolutely right.

And in terms of the divisions of the world, my thought, especially in this book, is that our only hope is to realize we don't know very

Pico Iyer: You think that? I love that phrase, the "over-examined life". And I absolutely agree with you. I remember when the pandemic broke out, my friend who is the abbot of this Benedictine monastery in Big Sur, sent round a message to everybody and he just said, "Remember, the best cure for anxiety is taking care of others."

Don't in this instance, don't live in your head. Don't dwell on the many things you have to be anxious about. Reach out to somebody else because that person is in need. And again, these are all clichés, but they're clichés 'cause they're true. When you were asking before about what, what cuts across our divisions when we're walking down the street and we see somebody in full on the...

Many of us will reach out to help her. And we're not asking if she's Jewish or Muslim or Christian or Buddhist. We're just responding to her at a human level. And I think that speaks for the deepest part of us that sometimes the mind compromises by starting to create these divisions. And I think it's a mind that makes the divisions that we're generally trying to escape

Srini: It, you mentioned a loved one in the ICU and I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people like yourself, people who've lost parents, and one thing I have always realized from talking to these people and reading all these books is that something as painful as losing a parent, no book will ever help me to understand that until I experience it. And I remember somebody who was looking at translating our content into another language, had heard a couple of episodes, and she said, you must be the most self-actualized person in the world. I was like, that's hilarious. The reason I do this work is that I'm probably the least self-actualized person in the world.

Speaking of escaping reality, you say in the book that our one task is to make friends with reality. I could imagine them whispering, which is to say, with impermanence and suffering and death, the unrest you feel will always have more to do with you than with what's around you. And then you go on to say, the notion of external paradise is one of the main illusions and projections we have to sweep aside as we might ascend the mandala.

It made me wonder, speaking of

For her to recover for me in my early thirties, then it was much more the possible liberation that you mentioned, that suddenly I've been given a blank sheet and I can start afresh and create my life much more along lines that I'd always had, as you said. When it came to replacing my things, I realized I didn't need 90% of the books and the clothes and furniture I'd had.

I'd lost all my notes and my next three potential books were gone. But I realized now I'm, I have to write without notes, which is much deeper. I'll have to write from my heart, from memory, from imagination. I lacked a physical home but of course, my true home, which is my mother, my wife-to-be, the books I love, and the songs that go through my head--I hadn't lost all of them. But also losing my physical home in California made me think of the place where I really feel at home in Japan. And so actually in the absence of a house here in California, why don't I move to a two-room apartment in Japan? So in so many ways, the forest fire woke me up and did in fact allow me to live the way

Srini: I think there's one other thing that really struck me, this idea of external paradise, and you actually say, it was a feature of paradise that it had to be observed laws that the outsider couldn't fathom. Any place of angels, as Bali initially seemed to be, has to contain darker sides too, not to mention serpents as well. Thomas knew that paradise exists not in any place, but only in the mind, one brings to it. There's this sort of notion of paradise as being somewhere on a beautiful beach. If you think about the way we advertise vacation travel, it's "come to paradise", we're always looking for a sense of paradise.

Pico Iyer: I think we are. And I think as we grow older, our sense of paradise is refined a little, but you're right. If you go into a travel agency, every place is presenting itself as a Shangri-la or paradise. And you mentioned Bali. Actually, I remember now as we're speaking, I first went to Bali in my twenties while I was living in New York City, and I got on a plane and it took this long series of flights and I arrived in the dark and I went to this little cottage.

And when I woke up in the morning, a young guy with a beautiful smile came and brought me fresh mangoes and a cup pot of strong tea. On the terrace of my cottage and there were kids playing all around with these angelic faces. And a 45-second walk down this palm-shaded lane with this golden beach. I was paying $2 a night for the cottage.

I thought I am in heaven. This is the world it was meant to be. And then a few hours later, of course, night fell and I began to hear the dissonant, eerie clanging sound of gamelan orchestras

Srini: It's funny when you mentioned the idea of, it's not paradise to a local. I lived in Costa Rica for six months and like most people, I thought it would be the paradise I had a much better time when I went there for vacation three years later than I did when I was living there, because when I was living there, it felt like anything but paradise, everything took forever. Yeah, there's no sense of urgency. I remember going into a cell phone store. The girl sold me a cell phone, and after she finished the entire transaction, she says, oh, we don't have any SIM cards. I'm like, you sell cell phones? How do you not have SIM cards? She's like, my boss forgot to order some. And then, our local restaurant said they were out of rice. I'm like, rice is one of your main staples. How are you out of rice? That would be like going to an Indian restaurant and having them say they're out of rice. They're like, oh, the guy who brings the rice didn't show up today. I was like, oh my God. This is anything but paradise.

Srini: There's one thing, and this is probably my favorite wine in the entire batch. You said in this vision of an afterlife, the fact of things passing was not a cause for grief so much as a summons to appreciate all the light or beauty we could find, we had to find right now. The fact that nothing lasts is the reason why everything matters. And I just loved that last line so much. Can you expand on what you mean by that?

Pico Iyer: Perfect example. And the other thing I wouldn't be surprised if you found was that when you turn to the Costa Ricans, they said, oh yeah, we know what paradise is: in Santa Monica, New York, and where things work well and there's always rice in the restaurants. And they would have some justification for saying that. Yeah.

Pico Iyer: Again, Rinni, thank you. You've hit the other most important line in the book, apart from the one I explain, and in fact, my agent had wanted me to title the book with it. The fact that nothing lasts is the reason that everything matters, cuz she said this is exactly what the whole thing is about. So thank you again for picking out exactly the heart of it. And it's so nice of you to read these sentences, cuz in some cases I've forgotten I wrote them, but I still agree with them amazingly.

So again, I was writing this during the pandemic, staying with my mother who is 88 years old and entering the last few months of her life. And as I was sitting with my mother, as her only child, and she was growing close to death, I was still trying to think: how can we find everything we need in the midst of this difficulty?

And one of the beauties of the pandemic for me was it was the season of taking nothing for granted. And it was easy to be agitated, and of course, everybody was anxious, but every day I woke up and I was so grateful as I wouldn't be

Srini: I have two final questions for you. You have been an author and a writer long before the age of the internet and social media.

And I think it is apparent in the way you write because I think there is depth to the way that you both speak and write, which I don't see as very common in the modern world. And so I wonder, as a writer, what have you noticed about how the profession has changed with the internet - for better or worse?

Pico Iyer: It's changed of course, as everything has very dramatically, and I think my mandate to myself is that writing has to claim the inner world. It has to find those parts of experience and feeling that a camera or multimedia device can't catch better. I remember when I began writing about, let's say Cuba or Tibet in the 1980s, I thought none of my friends was likely to go to these places. None of them could even see live images of it. I went and gathered all the sights and sounds and smells of those places to bring back to people who would never see Cuba or Tibet. Now, every single reader of one of my books can see online or on their TV screen, more of Cuba, or Tibet than I could ever see. If I go to those places, I have to convey memory and silence and inwardness and all those things that they couldn't get on the screen.

And the other part of it, perfectly singled out is attention span. And of course, we're living in a world in which every minute is cut into a thousand bites now, or texts or tweets or whatever it is. And so I try very hard just as you intuited to stretch the attention span because I feel we're

Srini: I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Pico Iyer: I think everyone is unmistakable and there's no question that everyone is unique. And again, I would say no explanations, please. In the church, it doesn't matter where it comes from. If you and I and everybody who listens to this conversation were to walk to Times Square or Pixar or the Taj Mahal tomorrow, every one of us would be different.

And that's the way it should be, because of our experiences, our passions, and our blood. So everyone is unmistakable and the only mistake is to assume you're not special or not unique or like everybody else. Because we have so much in common. But we'll never be entirely alike.

Srini: Beautiful. This has been absolutely breathtaking, poetic, insightful, and thought-provoking as I thought it would be. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book, and everything else that you're up to?

Pico Iyer: Again, thank you so much for inviting me and for having a podcast that invites such conversations. And thank you for reading my book so carefully and extracting all those sentences. Probably the best way to find out about my book, Half-Known Life, is through the website of my publisher, Riverhead. I do have a website, picoiyerjourneys.com. I think the book is the best way to talk to me or to find out who I am.

You mentioned The Art of Stillness, which is a very nice small book that some people have enjoyed. And I hope the book gives more information than I could myself.

Srini: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that. Have you ever heard our podcast guests say something that you wanted to remember? Or maybe you read something in a book and then a day goes by and you can't remember what it was or where you heard it, or where you read it. And in the world we live in, there's so much competition for our attention. We're constantly inundated with blogs, social media posts, text messages, emails, Netflix, and whatever.

And if you ever tried to build a second brain, you probably noticed that you end up spending a lot of time maintaining and organizing folders, which ends up becoming a part-time job in and of itself. But what if there was a better way? Our new Ultimate Guide to Building a Second Brain in Mem will show you how to build a second brain that allows you to capture everything and find anything without creating any folders or spending any time organizing the information.

If you want to be able to put the information that you consume to use and organize your digital life, be sure to check out our Ultimate Guide to Building a Second Brain and Meb. You can learn more@unmistakablecreative.com slash brain.