Arthur Brooks

Until people started pointing to me at my car.

And I realized that I had driven away with the hose in my gas tank and I pulled it out of the gas pump and I was dragging it behind me, the whole mechanism behind me.

Clankety, clankety, clank, right?

And so I thought somebody else was doing a thing that I had actually done.

I'd confused the me-self and the I-self.

I was in this like weird fugue state.

It got real, real fast when I took it back to the gas station and these four Iranian dudes were standing around the gas pump really mad.

like who destroyed our pump.

I also found out how much it costs to fix a gas pump.

It's expensive.

But the whole point is that what we want is not to get into a fugue state.

We want to have these experiences where we can be in the I-self, where we can stand in awe, where we can get outside ourselves.

which is religious experiences.

And that's spiritual experiences and philosophical experiences and experiences of service and love toward other people unbidden by any self-interest.

And that's where life gets really interesting and beautiful.

And when you do that, when you truly are in a transcendent state, that's when you're in the right hemisphere of your brain and you don't find meaning, meaning finds you.

which is why I'll often recommend to people, it's like, I don't know how to find the meaning of life.

Go volunteer.

Go volunteer.

Go pray.