"The Secret to the Whole Thing" with Rob Bell
"The Secret to the Whole Thing" with Rob Bell
Some people have the gift of opening others’ eyes to the beauty and wonder of God and of life. The gift of pulling you out of the mundane, 9 am -5 pm, autopilot mode of life and into the reality that you are a part of a much larger, more epic story.
In my own life, the writing and teaching of Rob Bell, has played that role so many times over. For those of you not familiar with Rob, he has authored ten books, including the New York Times bestselling titles, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, The Zimzum of Love, Love Wins, and What Is The Bible? Rob also hosts a weekly podcast called the The Robcast. He has also toured with Oprah, has been profiled in the New Yorker, and in 2011, was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World in Time Magazine.
Needless to say, I am so honored that Rob took the time to talk with me about authentic beauty. As I had predicted, in my time with him, he totally opened my heart and my mind to the depths and possibilities of true beauty in a new way. I think you’ll like this one. A lot.
The Interview
Audio engineering: Podcast P.S.
THE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Melissa: How are you?
Rob: Melissa, is that correct?
Melissa: That is correct. Yes.
Rob: Here we go. Nice to meet you.
Melissa: Nice to meet you too.
Rob: Where are you?
Melissa: I'm in St Paul, so ... St. Paul Minnesota. So-
Rob: Oh, got it.
Melissa: Yep. It's like 70 today, it's going to snow on Saturday. So it's awesome. It’s just not fair. Because you're in Los Angeles, right?
Rob: I am in Los Angeles, where it is hot.
Melissa: Yeah, I can see those palm trees. It's just not fair.
Rob: Yeah, there's palm ...
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: Yeah.
Melissa: That's awesome. I just want to first of all want to say, this is so cool, that you are giving some time for this conversation and you just have been super influential in my view of God and all of those really important things throughout the years, so thank you for the work you do.
Rob: Oh, that's amazing.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: That's amazing.
Melissa: Cool. All right. So I have a set of questions that I've been asking people about the topic of beauty, and-
Rob: I saw the questions. Why don't you just start in?
Melissa: Sure.
Rob: Start in.
Melissa: Cool. Yeah. So how do you define beauty?
Rob: Actually I do have a question for you. Can we record me asking you?
Melissa: Sure.
Rob: I think this is fascinating. What is so interesting to you about beauty? Because I find it absolutely fascinating, and I'm so glad you want to talk about it.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: What is it for you?
Melissa: Yeah. Okay. So long story short, so I'm a therapist, I've also struggled with an eating disorder more recently than I'd like to admit for being 35. And I just realized how the narratives culturally are very shame based for women in particular, and realized that we need some new narratives for beauty.
And then that got me thinking about, just how culturally bound the idea of beauty is, and then I started thinking about that beauty, I'm defining it as the life of God at work in us and among us. And then as I've been interviewing people ... and I'm also spiritual director, so when I'm talking to people, I'm like, "We're totally talking about God when we're talking about beauty."
It feels like spiritual direction almost when I'm talking to people. And I think what I love about beauty, what interests me, is it's mind blowing and mysterious and I can't get my hands around it. So I just feel like this is a conversation I could have with so many people and come up with different ... if you think about the Jewish Scriptures or the Hebrew Scriptures, it's like the gem or whatever, like different… looking at it from different perspectives, like the glory of God can't be captured by anyone’s perspective. So I love having these conversations and talking to people, because I am learning and growing all the time in this conversation.
Rob: Oh that's fantastic. Yeah. It's funny, when you first mentioned beauty, it's interesting to me how few people have been taught about aesthetics, and the important of aesthetics. So interesting…the most helpful thing for me is to begin with a flower, and how a flower, we all would agree is beautiful.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: And yet flowers evolved over time because, for essentially the created order to function, you have to have the pollination, involving flowers. And birds, bees, and butterflies ... essentially flowers develop their beauty to attract birds, bees, and butterflies.
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob: So what we see, the beauty of a flower, for many people beauty exists, it's like superfluous. It's like an add on. Does it work or not, function, and then it's form is tacked on later.
Melissa: Sure.
Rob: Which was the great leap from Microsoft to Apple. As Microsoft was like, "Does it work?" And this guy named Steve Jobs came along and went, "It's not enough that it just works. It has to be beautiful."
Which, what's fascinating to me, the love people have for Apple products was actually a very deep, ancient bringing together of two realms, form and function. Function and form. So to me, what I've noticed for many people is the giant leap is when they realize, a flower's beauty is not just a thing that ... it's not just nature showing off.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: It's actually absolutely necessary for survival.
Melissa: Hm. Hm.
Rob: So when you're, as a therapist, spiritual director, working with people and you're giving them images of beauty, whether it's internal, external, whether it's just painting a room of your house a different color.
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob: This is not something that's just like well, if you have enough money, you can afford to sort of talk about ... Actually, beauty is absolutely central to human functioning for the universe to even be the way it is.
Melissa: Hm.
Rob: And what's so interesting to me is how many people I've met who have these ideas about how things should be…literally from the color the bathroom needs to be a particular shade of green.
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob: You know what I mean?
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: To the backyard, to working with wood, to cooking and how it gets presented on the plate. And they've always apologized for wanting it to be a particular way. The hem of their pants. The color of the front door and what's ... and it's like they have these deep, deep urges, desires and longings for their physical settings to be a particular way and yet they've been surrounded by people who are like, "It's just whatever. Doesn't matter."
It's like, no it does matter.
Because if you have your external world a particular way, it's shaping your internal world.
Melissa: Hm.
Rob: I love the fact that you're talking about beauty because for many people, they spent their lives apologizing for things to be ... You even think about hot rods and motorcycles and what people do with engines. That's an aesthetic thing. And the reason why this to me is so central is, I've been so shaped by the Genesis poem that the Bible begins with. In the poem, the poet wants you to know that the trees produce all of this fruit, but they're pleasing to the eye.
Melissa: Hm.
Rob: So it's like the poet, in naming the fullness of creation, names the aesthetics of how things look, the design of things, as central to their flourishing.
Melissa: Huh.
Rob: It's like the poet is going form and function, they travel together.
Melissa: Wow, yeah.
Rob: You think about, right down the street in my neighborhood is a CVS pharm ... is a pharmacy.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: And if you walk into this pharmacy, it's a square box that could be anywhere. So the architecture is completely ignorant of it's setting. It could be in St. Paul or central LA, it doesn't matter.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: It's built to be as cheap as possible, there are no windows except for the front door, it's florescent lights, so it doesn't matter if it's day or night.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: When you walk in there's a giant row of tabloid magazines that will swapped out next week for new titles about things that don't matter.
Melissa: Yeah, yeah, right.
Rob: The entire structure of the physical experience is shouting to you, "Nothing matters. Nothing's connected to anything."
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: Everything in this store will probably be in a landfill in no time.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: And so no wonder people begin to go crazy, in a world that doesn't have that sense of aesthetics. Which is why I go back to a strong sense of how things are arranged. You think about that store and then telling somebody, "We're going to be okay."
Melissa: Mm.
Rob: That's an absurd statement. But then I could take you a couple miles past that store to where I was earlier today, to the ocean, and you're looking out at the water and I say to you, "We're going to be okay." It's suddenly a statement that sounds absurd in one space, sounds perfectly reasonable in another space.
Melissa: Yes.
Rob: So, to me, when you talk about beauty, you have to begin for people with, these things that you hold in your hand that you're surrounded by, these colors, shapes, textures of the world, all of this matters and it's working on you at a deep, sort of soul level.
There's a long bit about beauty.
Melissa: No. You've got me thinking about four other questions that aren't on my list. I’m thinking of the time….okay, this one's just burning, I'll just ask it then try to ...
Rob: Yeah.
Melissa: A question about, I'm just thinking about socioeconomic stuff. Like poverty. And how do we reconcile this?
Rob: Right, right right right.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: Immediately you go, "Well what about conditions?" and then you think, "Well, let's begin with the power of graffiti." When you think about the most sort of under-resourced places, you also have images of stunning art, which is in some ways…we have very little but we can afford spray cans.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: And you think about when a school gets properly funded or started in an under-resource area, one of the first things is, make it beautiful. The kids often get uniforms. So part of the development of elevating things, socio-economically, is order, design.
So oftentimes, which is what's huge about aesthetics, is it can be like, “well that's nice for rich people who have,” but it's like wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No no, this is for everybody.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: This is for everybody.
We're not talking about once again meaningless details that you sort of add on if you have ... We're talking about what messages we're sending. It's also interesting… art theory, in very totalitarian fascist oppressive regimes, often the art that gets created is very chaotic. It's very rebellious. It's very all over the place. It's like an explosion or frenetic energy.
But then in settings where the structures of society have eroded…food, water, education, et cetera, you often find art getting created that's beautiful. Which if I ... graffiti is often incredibly explosive colors, it's sort of blowing your mind.
So in art theory, generally people ... oftentimes you'll see art created that gives…too much structure and order, and then you need that chaotic, frenetic explosion of fragments and pieces. Too much lack of order and things are falling apart, you need beauty, design, everything in proper proportion. Yeah.
Melissa: Yeah. Man, I'm so glad you've thought about this stuff. You've gone deep into ... okay, awesome. Thank you for that. I couldn't move on without it. So-
Rob: Yeah, you might as well ask the question, right.
Melissa: That's awesome. Okay. So you've kind of gone to the second question, but I'm still curious to ask it. So where do you see beauty in the world then?
Rob: Well ... it's important when we talk about beauty ... for many people beauty then means the absence of things that ... of ugly. In the same way, that for many people, when they talk about harmony, what they means is the absence of dis-harmony.
But harmony includes dis-harmony, beauty includes the ugly. You think about in our lives, when we say, "Oh, that's so beautiful," what we mean is something that integrated all of the pieces, this side and this side.
So, going back to this Genesis creation poem, it's all declared good, but in the poem there's night and day, light and dark. There are seeds, which produce fruit, but for a seed to produce new life, it has to be buried in the earth, which is quite terrifying.
So it actually…good isn't the absence of dark, night, being buried under the soil. It includes and integrates all of it.
So, when we talk about a beautiful person, what we’re ... “Oh, so and so is so beautiful.”
What we generally mean, is this is somebody who took all of the heartbreak and wounds and loss and betrayal of life, and they somehow integrated and embraced it. They allowed it to make them better, not bitter; it opened them up, it didn't close them down.
Many people, when they say “beauty,” what they actually mean is perfection.
So perfection often ... and perfection makes people crazy. It's a very bleak notion of absence of any defect. It'll make you hate your body, it'll put you in conflict with the work of your hands; nothing will ever be good enough.
So sometimes in my experience, the first thing I do is separate good and perfect.
Melissa: Hm.
Rob: Perfect, is the voice in your head that never stops. It relentlessly punishes you that you don't measure up, you don't get it, you're not as thin as her, you're not as strong as him, you don’t have as much…
Good is dirty, sexy, sweaty, flaws, imperfections.
Good is owning all of life and its messy vitality.
And in my experience, once people get that separated, “oh, I'm not after perfect, I'm after good…” And good can handle the doubt and the angst and like in the Wabi-Sabi, it's the chip on the sculpture or the cup that gives it it's character and it's flavor. It's like that garment that you've worn, not the perfect jacket that you've worn twice, it's the jacket you've worn 1000 times. It's all the little creases in it that you're like, "This is my jacket."
Melissa: Okay. I love that. I haven't heard that before. I'm going to have to sit with that one.
Rob: I think I have a copy of it right here. Yeah, you would love it. Here we go. We’re on the move. Yeah. Leonard Koren wrote a bunch of amazing books.
Melissa: What? Okay. okay.
Rob: But Wabi-Sabi For Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, you would love it.
Melissa: Okay. That sounds amazing. Thank you.
Rob: Yes. I actually have a whole stack of books here that you would love. Oh, you should also know about Christopher Alexander. He wrote a four volume series. He's a ground-breaking architect. ... The Nature Of Order.
Melissa: Okay.
Rob: The first 20 pages will change your life.
Melissa: Okay. Got it. Okay. All right. You're opening up a whole new world and I really like it. Okay.
So the next question kind of speaks to that reality of beauty as kind of the integration of ... I don't know, the dark and the light and all of that. And this is kind of going, shifting to your own personal experience. If you could speak to maybe an experience of brokenness you've had, where in the midst of it you saw this beauty breaking through the midst of the brokenness or integrating it or however, whatever language you want to use.
Rob: Oh yeah. Well I would just say, my wife Kristen and I have been married for 25 years. We have a 21-year-old son, a 19-year-old son, a 10-year old girl…watching my kids go through the very real struggles of being a human being in the world, and being okay…like, “this is how it works.”
As a parent you want to protect your kid from all the heartache, but, you went through heartache, which made you a human. It made you a person.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: So to me, that's an endless, endless, endless ... I can’t protect my kid from the very real heartaches of life, but I can join them in it. And walk with them in it.
Melissa: Hm.
Rob: That is like a recurring ... “oh, you can't fix this one.”
Or your kid goes through something, you work so hard as a parent to give them this wonderful life, so you immediately, there's like a reflex when they go through something negative to start listing all the positives. “Yeah but you're, duh duh duh duh.”
Instead of “yeah, that is tough. Yeah, that is sad. Yeah, sadness is part of it. Yet we have a great life and we're so blessed beyond measure, and we're also sad.”
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: And that's okay. It's all part of it.
Melissa: Yeah, but sitting with them-
Rob: A lot of great art, a lot of great wisdom, a lot of great insight, a lot of great action comes out of sadness, loss, heartbreak, aches, alienation. A lot of beautiful things can come out of that.
But if you just skip over them to, “no, no, no, no, no, we don't talk like that around here,” then you miss the stuff of life.
Melissa: Yeah, that's a great example.
Rob: Yeah, that one never stops.
Melissa: Hm.
Rob: That one never stops for me.
Melissa: Yeah, no. That makes a ton of sense. Okay. Thank you for sharing that, I appreciate it.
So I'm going to shift to the next question if that's okay. I want to make sure I get them all in, if that's cool. I’m like “I have to know your answers.” Lies about beauty. I'm curious what lies you see, this could be in our culture or just in your own life, lies that you've believed or seen about beauty.
Rob: Well obviously, obviously, the sort of “duh” would be just that youth and faces without creases or lines are somehow the most beautiful thing.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: So that right there.
And obviously just cultural ideas about what shape and color and size is beautiful and others aren't are just so absurd.
And it feels like a lot of that has shifted. Is shifting. From there's this one kind of person, temperament, body, set of skills, talents ... it feels to me like we're in a great upheaval where a lot of those notions are being blasted to pieces as ridiculous.
But then secondly, I would say that for many people, the tribal structures they came out of had lists of what was beautiful and what wasn't, and what's permissible to talk about and what's not permissible to talk about.
Melissa: Mm-hmm.
Rob: And oftentimes if there was any religious layer to it, then God or good or worthiness got attached to the things over here. And then the things on the other side, in the other column: angst, loss, hating your body, not believing there even is an ultimate God or goodness in the ... those things just got like, we don't talk about that. They get suppressed, they get pushed down.
And the body will always find ways to speak the truth.
So you think about any family system, any office, any community, there's a list of things that can't be talked about. Those aren't beautiful. We don't acknowledge them. That other column of things will form a shadow and it'll end up shaping the whole thing.
Melissa: Yeah. Yeah.
Rob: People, they go work a new job or they marry into a family and right away they're like, "What the, what is going on this place?" Right?
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob: They're mapping the territory like there's landmines everywhere, it’s like, “Oh, got it. There's a bunch of stuff here that everybody's agreed not to talk about.” And the beautiful thing comes when you drag it all up, as ugly as it is.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: As ugly as it is, and painful and like, "Oh God, I don't want to talk about this." You get it out in the open, and now you actually have a shot at beauty.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: And I interact with a number of people who are like ... they have this stuff they're carrying around, and they have shame, they have guilt, they're beating themself up over how they're not this or not that. And just a little bit of honesty and when you say to them, "Oh this is beautiful, keep going."
“What? No. Not beautiful.” No, getting it out is.
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob: Because we're now becoming fierce with reality.
We're like living in the fullness of who we are and what happened. And the trust that something new can come out of even this, that's beautiful. Yeah.
Melissa: Yeah. I like that.
So you've thought a lot about these things, obviously you have these developed answers.
Rob: I have, actually.
Melissa: Yes, and it seems that you've read a lot about them too. So my last question is... it might be my second to last. But have you had any experiences that have transformed your ideas around beauty? It sounds like I mentioned, you've done a lot of reading and I'm kind of interested to know ... yeah. Around experiences, things that have shaped your ... shaped or transformed your ideas around beauty.
Rob: I remember, my mom and dad always had a strong sense of how things should be. So like, clean and orderly. “A clean car runs better.” I have 1000 phrases in my head.
My mom always had a strong sense of aesthetics. She could sew, she was always sewing things from scratch. When I grew up, kind of on a small farm, and there were giant flowers beds that my parents had built. All the buildings on the farm, my dad had painted with a brush by hand. So there was a strong sense of things having their place. That was not a new idea to me. As I grew up, that there's some sort of order to things. Now that order can obviously then sometimes need to be subverted because it's suppressive, and it forces things into boxes they don't fit in. But that underlying impulse…
And then just noticing more and more that what the modern world did, with the prevalence of the machine, is…and production and efficiency. How hard did you work? How much money did they make? How many units did it produce? That this “up and to the right”… as long as you're expanding. It's built into the American system, up and to the right.
As a pastor, right away I kept meeting people who followed the playbook and checked all the boxes and were winners and yet were miserable.
Melissa: Hmm…
Rob: So the idea that your life had an aesthetic dimension to it ... like, that calendar's too busy. If I just look at that calendar visually, it's messy. You know what I mean?
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob: People were never taught…just go all the time.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: Just run 100 miles an hour, and then collapse. And I think, for especially ... because I started out as a pastor, so people with religious ... had a lot of denigration of the material.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: So, aesthetics, textures, fabrics, colors, was all kind of like “well, you know…” Especially my first job as a pastor, like “we're all going to die and go to Heaven so we don't want to be too attached to this world, lay up your treasures in Heaven.” It was sort of like, we're just hanging out here.
Melissa: Hm.
Rob: But as I sort of learned more about my own tradition, in particular the Jesus movement coming out of the Hebrew tradition that was like, "Wait, this is a very material tradition."
It begins with the assumption that the divine is found in the material, in the details. So how that furniture is laid out and how the food tastes and it's all ... this is one of the ways that you encounter God.
And I noticed how many people ... this is a revolutionary impulse. Because they've known it. They've known it, when they're in beautiful spaces. They're in beautiful spaces and they go ... something happens to their soul. But then they were taught, “oh, we're not into buildings,” you know what I mean? “We're into just spiritual things” or something.
But spiritual things are buildings and cars; all this material is what we do with the spiritual.
So, that's actually, for the listeners to your podcast, to me that's the giant leap; when people come to see the spiritual, doesn't mean leaving behind the material. It's the proper integration of the material.
Melissa: Hm.
Rob: So even with the people that come to you for help.
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob: I assume all the time you're like, "Okay, let's talk about your daily routines. Let's go through your house and get rid of all your crap. Let's start there." You know what I mean?
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob: “Clean up your physical space. Let's give you some rituals and routines each day, that make you feel whole and centered. What's your favorite coffee mug? Okay, let's put it on a shelf. Let's do that.” You know what I mean?
Melissa: Yes, yes.
Rob: Let's do these things, let's do a few things and let's be present and do them well.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: And in my experience, that's almost where you start.
There's a great idea called the concretization of the ideal, which is that a ritual, a daily ritual, takes the highest ideals you have for your life, and puts it in the most everyday manageable task that you can actually execute.
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: So we're trying to get to a life lived with intention in every square inch, in every moment of the day. But let's start with giving away all the dishes we never used that just jam the cupboard. It's just crap. Know what I mean?
Melissa: Yes.
Rob: Start with just a basic, physical space. Let's start there.
Melissa: Yeah. Okay.
Rob: I could talk about this all day, because it's so huge and just now you're seeing people talk about it in new ways.
Melissa: Right.
Rob: Or, yeah.
Melissa: Yes. Okay.
I just can't help but ask, did you have someone that you met or something that ... how did you make that shift? Because that feels pretty ... it almost sounds like the church background you were a part of or the congregation you were a part of, that wasn't a part of their ideology and you shifted. Was there a person you met, or how you came in contact with-
Rob: That's a great question. That's a great question.
I do remember ... Things mattered to me; things being clean and organized in line and shape and the poster on the wall needs to look like this. My mom has said that. She's like, "You always had a deep sense of how it should be."
Like BMX bikes when I was 13. My bike had to be a certain way. Which I always talk to people, what are the places where you're, it has to be a certain way, you don't even know why?
Okay, that's aesthetics. Something within you needs this thing to be in order, because it helps you be in order.
Now obviously that can be taken too far and you end up with all sorts of disorders, but. Yeah I remember, Kristen and I were in South Africa, in our early 30s. And there was a river that flowed through this town, and there was a section where the river was like six inches deep.
And our friends took a table, one night they’re like “okay, we're going to eat at the river,” and they set up this portable table in the river. So we were sitting in maybe like six inches or a foot of flowing water, and these South Africans… it was like wine country with really nice wine, and set up the table like it was in a really nice dining room. And they hauled it all from their backyard, and it took hours. And Kristen and I are just like, “what is going on here?” But they essentially set up an ornate dining table in the middle of a river, in the middle of nowhere.
So Kristen and I had a couple of experiences where people had paid such attention to the details, that the experience became overwhelmingly holy.
And we would talk about it. Like, “What was that? Because that wasn't just food as fuel, that wasn't just…’what's the point of this meeting?’”
We met up with some people and I remember them saying, we were just meeting them, they said in a restaurant, "Before we eat, let's just order drinks and talk for awhile. And then maybe later we'll order some food."
And it was like this thing in time where they were like, "We're not here to get things done. We're here to have an encounter with each other."
And that's like form and function.
This isn't just, “what are we going to accomplish in our meeting?” It was, “how beautiful, let's start with the beauty of it.”
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: And maybe we'll accomplish something but it will flow out of the beauty of the encounter.
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob: We were in a vineyard in Italy, and the vineyard owner gave a speech, it was like a sermon, in a basement of one of the storage rooms. It was the best sermon I've ever heard. He wasn't even trying to have a sermon... he was just talking about the importance of friends and family and beauty, and I saw ... “what is going on here?”
And that for me is when I began to see that the whole thing is a temple, as opposed to ... Because human beings have been building temples for 1000s of years to meet with their gods.
That was when I first began to see the whole world as a temple. The whole, every table is an alter. The whole thing. The ground has been holy the whole time.
That was like early 30s. I can think of a couple specific people, that guy in Italy. It was interesting, it was outside of America. And for Kristen and I it was like, "oh, that's what this is." American culture as a whole became so consumed with up and to the right, production, efficiency ...
Even if you think about the discovery of America, and westward expansion, “well there's already some people here. Well then massacre them. Put them in…marginalize them. We need this land. More, more, more, more.” And it actually makes people miserable at some level.
So all of this was sort of tied in with this, “oh, this culture does some things really well and some other things it didn't do.” Which is obviously why a lot of what your work is helping people reclaim what's been central to the human story, but certain times, certain places gets lost.
Melissa: Yeah. One more question?
Rob: Sure.
Melissa: Okay. So the last question I usually ask people is just, if there's one thing you wish people knew about beauty, what would it be?
Rob: That there's a whole world of beauty right here within this one, if you have the eyes to see it.
And I’ve met…I swear to you 1000s of people over the years who start telling me something…I’m like, "That's beautiful." And they’re like, "Really?"
That these ideas of beauty is a particular color, shape, size, perspective. “Beauty is a particular thing that costs this much,” are so ingrained in people, that the beauty all around us all the time can easily get lost.
And that the great journey into health, wholeness, maturity, enlightenment, whatever word you want to use for it, is coming to see the world around you in a whole new way.
It's never about getting to some other place. In the great way, at the heart of the human experience, for many people is that it, and whatever that is. Happiness, joy, peace, success, meaning, it is over there.
And the great truth is that it's right here.
So, in some ways I've given my life to kind of help people see that which they already are in the midst of.
Because if you can see that, going back to your second question, now you could actually maybe help in under-resourced, broken areas.
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob: Because you're tapping into something universal about the human experiences. Okay now this place, these folks seriously need some help. I'm going to go show them something about themselves.
Melissa: Mm.
Rob: And then together we'll do some work in that space, and we'll discover all sorts of things that are right here in our midst, we just didn't see them.
That's the great, almost like the great secret to the whole thing. And when that happens all sorts of worlds open up.
Melissa: Wow.
Rob: Yeah. Even the people who are beat down, full of despair, discouraged ... yeah but you're here.
Melissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob: At some level, you survived.
Melissa: Hm.
Rob: And especially when people start, “but this happened to me, and this happened to me, and this happened to me.” Yeah, but you're here. Let's start with, there's some powerful survival instinct that you're even here to list off, to give me a list of reasons why everything has been bad for you. You know what I mean?
Melissa: Yeah. Yeah.
Rob: I am going to be relentless in showing you things about yourself you may not even have seen that are beautiful. Look at the instinct. You survived that, and you're here? That's beautiful.
Melissa: Yeah. Yes. Okay. I would have so many follow up questions for you. That was ... yeah. Thank you so much. I seriously can't thank you enough for taking your time to talk about this.
Rob: Great. I love what you're doing. It's fantastic. Keep going.
Melissa: Thank you. So much. Well, I'll stop myself, because I know you have to get going. So I just really appreciate it.
Rob: Let me do this. Do you have one more question that you're like, "I got to ask this question?"
Melissa: I do.
Rob: Okay.
Melissa: I'm curious-
Rob: I could tell. I was like, "Oh, she has one more."
Melissa: I'm just curious …You said “we need new eyes,” and I am curious for you, things that you've noticed. Because I think, I love it, it's so important. And I'm thinking listeners and myself, I'm like, "Well how do we ..." thinking about tangibly, “what are things that you've done to develop new eyes?” I'm thinking of just slowing down, but yeah. What has it been for you?
Rob: Okay. Every person you meet at the UPS store, your kids' school, just changing your assumptions.
This person's a world of mystery and story and history and if you just start with something present in every interaction ... Sometimes you literally just, you have to pay for the thing and then get out of there. But if you just begin with, there's a world between this person and I. People are infinite.
I'm trying to think of an example. Oh yeah, yeah, the store where you mail stuff, right here, a couple blocks over. The guy behind the cash register who like, "Okay, it'll cost this much to mail this box." The other day, I just like… “I love your t-shirt.” I think he had a Pink Floyd t-shirt or something. Somehow he got talking about how he used to work at a pizza place, and then he used to work ... and suddenly this guy is telling me his whole life story. It's just beautiful.
A sort of every day, average trivial example, but in my experience, there's just a world of wonder and weirdness and absurdity and meaning and a good chunk of people are missing it.
So you think about, when Jesus talks about, “whatever you've done for the least of these you've done for me.” He tells this parable about this king. He's essentially saying, "The real path to fullness of life is when in every interaction you're assuming that something else is going on just below the surface."
Melissa: Hm.
Rob: The divine is present in every one of these interactions.
I mean that alone…like the annoying coworker, who could be ... “this person is so annoying, I do everything I can to avoid them.” Or you can just flip it around. “What are they here to teach me? Because they really provoke me. They really make me angry. They have a supernatural ability to get under my skin. Why? Let me turn it around. Instead of being my worst tormentor, perhaps they're my teacher. What have they been sent to teach me?”
Do that, and now you're playing an entirely different game.
Or anxiety, you mentioned eating disorder, addiction. All of these things can be seen as problems to be solved, or they're the truth.
This torment, this anguish, this thing that's making me miserable, is here to tell me some truth.
So I can desperately throw myself into trying to get rid of it, fix it, solve it, make it go away, or I can say, "I choose to view the universe differently. I'm going to begin with the assumption that this is some truth that is speaking to me, so I'm going to listen to it, instead of keep hitting it over the head with a hammer. Something somewhere must not be working, and this is my body, my life's way of telling me."
Because you can get rid of it, and it'll just appear in some other form. Yeah, that's the thing.
So if you move to that kind of universe, where you're loved enough that all of the things that are going wrong may be just another chance to learn something.
Doesn't mean you don't grieve and get angry and rage, because some things just are unfair and painful and wrong and unjust, but that is where the real juice of life is.
Melissa: Hm.
Rob: Whatever this thing is, that you'd do anything to make it go away, I'm going to turn it around and say, "What are you here ..." I'm going to talk to it. "What are you hear to teach me?" And that will actually change your life. That one little turn, change your life.
Melissa: Hm. Wow.
Rob: There we go, beauty.
Melissa: Yes. That was totally amazing Rob, thank you for diving into this hard work, and I know- Yeah. I really, really appreciate it.
Rob: Great.
Melissa: Okay, well cool, thank you so much for the time.
Rob: All the best.
Melissa: Thank you, nice meeting you.
Rob: Thank you.
Melissa: Okay.
Rob: Buh-bye.
Melissa: All right, bye.
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