TRANSCRIPT
Oftentimes when I’m traveling, especially when I’m traveling on the other sides of the planet, in countries that are so different from mine, in cultures that are so different from mine, people ask me, “What is your religion? What religion are you, Daniel?” And it’s an interesting question.
I was raised without religion. I had no answer. When people asked me what was my religion, I would ask my parents, and they say, “We’re not religious.” They had, yes, ethnic backgrounds, and their grandparents and great-grandparents were religious in various ways, different religions actually. But me, I didn’t have one. I never had a good answer. It was always awkward. I always felt kind of left out.
But in a way, I’m kind of glad for that because once I was in my 20s, I started becoming an independent thinker. I could analyze my life and the world from a perspective from my true self, an adult self. I felt like I got to start with a clean slate. I didn’t have to reject any religion. I didn’t have to reject any background. It’s like I was a lot more free to decide what I believed.
And so I’ve thought about it for a long time, and I can’t say it’s been easy. Often, it’s been a very awkward thing when people have asked me that, especially in my early 20s when I wasn’t specifically saying, “I have no religion” or “I’m an atheist,” because I didn’t know that that was true. How did I know what I felt? It was like basically just starting life as a conscious individual. And so I was collecting data.
And sometimes people were very manipulative with me, pressuring me. “You have to do this. You have to accept Jesus as your savior,” or “this person as your savior,” or “try this. This is the only way you’ll ever get happiness.” And sometimes there was an implicit threat: “You’re gonna go to hell. You’re gonna go to this horrible place, or your life will never fail, you know, never succeed, and you’ll only become a miserable failure.” And look, you’re sad now. See, this is because you haven’t done x, y, and z.
Well, I was sad because I was breaking away from my family. I was breaking away from my past. I was breaking away from all these screwed-up sides of myself, and I cried. What do I say now, decades later, almost age 50? When people ask me on the other side of the world, what do I say when they ask me, “What religion are you?”
And what I’ve come to now is I don’t always say this, but it’s kind of what I believe. If there is such a thing for me as a religious belief that I have, it is karma. And not karma in the Hindu sense of the word. Instead, I see karma in the present tense, karma in our life. What we put out is so often what we get back. Yes, there are exceptions, but often it’s just as simple as what attitude we put out is the attitude we get back.
When we put out kindness to a person, when we feel joy in our soul because we’re connected with ourselves, we bring out the best in others, and it comes right back to us. And when I’m bitter and nasty and go out into the world, when I go out to the streets of New York City and I’m in a grumpy mood for this reason or that, I’m frustrated, I’m in pain, I notice the people where I buy my bagel in the morning often, well, they give me an attitude. They’re nasty to me.
And I go to a different store when I’m in a joyous mood, and I buy a bagel, and people are like, “Hey, how’s it going?” And like, it’s like, what is this? This is not coincidence. And so I say that that’s my religion. Is it connected with God? What is God? Who is God? I don’t know. I still have no answers to that question.
I like this idea of God. Well, I’ve heard it said, God being Good Orderly Direction, G.O.D. Or better yet, sometimes for me, God being “Grow or Die.” Heal your traumas, or there’s no point in living. Sometimes heal your traumas, or you’re actually kind of emotionally dead already. I like that, G.O.D.
But past that, I sometimes do believe in miracles in the universe. Things that I can’t explain have happened to me. I’ve seen things that are miraculous. I think actually life itself is a miraculous thing. How did I end up here, conscious? Why me? I’ve often asked that. Why me? Why am I conscious now? Why am I aware of what I’m thinking and feeling? That to me is a miracle. Was I chosen for this? Have I chosen myself for this? I have no idea.
It’s so funny to live my life for so long and some of these basic questions I don’t know the answer to. I grew up thinking it was all random. I studied biology in college. Certainly, there was an element of randomness in my study of biology, how the world formed, chemicals forming, and everything evolving randomly with just natural selection around it. There’s a part of me that has believed that a lot in life.
But then, well, there’s a part of me that sometimes believes it’s more than random. And I do believe that sometimes there’s a momentum in goodness. And also, that’s another thing. If life was all just random, maybe there is no goodness. Maybe there’s no good and bad. Maybe these are just human conceptions. And then there’s another part of me that feels deeply in my soul that the world is good, and it likes goodness, and it respects goodness, and it respects and honors goodness, and it gives goodness back to people who are good.
That’s not to say that I won’t die. I know I’m going to die. It’s going to happen. I’ve known enough people who have died. I know enough animals that have died, plants that have died, people and creatures and things that I love that have left this earth. And I don’t know what happens afterwards. Sometimes I do think it’s just done.
And I’ve heard people say, “Oh, but if that’s the case, why not be a bad person? Why not do whatever you want?” And I think, “No, why not be a good person and do the things that you want?” That’s my attitude. If I’m going to die, if this is my one brief, quick chance to live here and now, why not make the best of it? Why not be the best person I can be? Because I found that I gained the most pleasure from that.
And how strange, not pleasure in being selfish like my parents were. Like my parents trained me to be, take, take, take, take from other people, get more, build a mass, you know, quantity, money, things like that. Hoard, don’t share, don’t give, take more for yourself, be important. You only live once. And it’s like for me, it’s like sharing is the best thing of only living once. Being altruistic, giving to others.
And what I find is that the world is a generous place, and that I get to enjoy one of the greatest things of being a human being is I get to participate in an optimal way with members of my fellow social species, humanity. And even animals too. Animals are very social. When you give to animals, they give back. If you love an animal, they love you back. If you love a child, the child loves you back. They don’t have to be taught to do this. This is somehow part of our composition in the world.
I think even plants love you back sometimes. And then I sometimes go out in the daytime when it’s not raining, like now, and I look at the sun, and I just think, “Whoa, it’s just sharing.” It’s just sharing its light. But for the sun, I wouldn’t be here. None of this would be here. And it’s just giving from a surplus.
I can understand some of those ancient religions that worship the sun. Even emulate the sun. Be like the sun. Radiate, burn bright, share, give. Don’t be so afraid. And no, yeah, even the sun someday will burn out. It’s going to end. And then there’s the moon, the moon, a dark cold planet floating through the sky somewhere way out there. But even at times, it reflects the light of the sun. And that maybe that’s true about me too, my cold sides, my buried traumas. Maybe I can let a little bit of sunlight in, and they can change and convert and become.
Something special that even can light up the path of my day too. And then I think about my religion in my relationship with myself, my karma with myself, about treating myself well. Not in a fake way, not trying to take and get and feed my false self and feed my grandiosity and feed whatever narcissism I have, but instead to honor me. To not do things like cheat and steal and lie. I did a lot of that when I was a kid. That’s how I was raised. That’s what my parents did. That’s what so many people in the world did. My teachers were liars and cheaters. They cheated my soul all the time.
And I was raised to believe it was a dog eat dog world, a negative karma world. Give bad, and the world’s gonna give you back bad, so take as much as you can. Well, for me, I found that it nurtures my soul to not cheat, to not steal. If I steal something, it’s like I’ve taken someone else’s belonging, and I end up with poison in my possession. I can never look at that thing in a way that feels clean. It’s not a clean object; that’s bad karma. And I’ve learned that along the way, and I’m so grateful that I learned that.
I learned that by healing my traumas. I learned that by realizing that the bad things that happened to me that got buried and became bad parts of my personality were things that I could undo by being honest. That honesty is actually more powerful than lies. The truth that was always within me, the truth that I could have in my self-reflective relationship with myself, those deep inner conversations with myself in my mind, in my journal.
Also, all that time I spent journaling and journaling and journaling, all that honesty that I had with myself, it started dismantling the lies, and that was my good karma. And what I realized is my family had so much bad karma. The more I became honest, the more my parents didn’t like me. How strange! They made all these terrible mistakes that caused everybody so much pain, and when I started doing the opposite, it threatened them.
They didn’t want to think about the pain they caused others, the pain that they were burying inside of themselves, the pain of their own childhood. They wanted to live in a sort of bubble of rigid flexibility of denial, and I realized I was a different religion from them. So when I had my adult chance to really explore who I was and what I really believed, what was the core of truth in this universe, the core philosophy of truth, I realized I was different from them.
And I’m glad that in a way I didn’t have to overcome yet another external religion. I mean, in a way, they raised me with a lot of false philosophy, and the whole part of my healing process was rejecting that false philosophy. And so here I am now, still expanding upon it, still trying to be the best person that I can, and realizing that I haven’t achieved that yet.
I still have a lot of hope that I’m going to grow more, become a better person in my remaining years and hopefully decades of existence, and that maybe I can inspire some other people, maybe people who are a lot younger than me, to become much better than I ever could be.