Rainn Wilson

speaker

3,063 appearances 12 recordings 7 series first heard Jul 2024 last heard 7 Jul

Rainn Wilson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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Know Thyself · E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution · 21 Jan 2025 podcast

When I had this YouTube channel, SoulPancake, we commissioned a show from a young filmmaker, Justin Baldoni, also a member of the Baha'i Faith. Good friends with his sister. Oh, really? Yeah. You know Sarah? And their family. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's great. We commissioned Justin Baldoni to do a show about death that was his idea called My Last Days. And... It was a viral hit.

These shows had hundreds of millions of views, and they were all about lessons about life from people at the end of their life. Who better to learn from than someone who's facing their own mortality? And every episode is just gorgeous and touching and heart-wrenching and uplifting.

And we had people writing in saying, I watch an episode of this every single day because it reminds me how precious life is. So I think facing death and mortality is crucial. It's not something we do very often in Western society. Death is something you don't really talk about. We live in a denial around death a great deal.

In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, there's several meditations on death that are, you can Google them. Trust me, look them up. They're incredible. I forget the name of the meditation, but it goes from like meditating about being in pain, meditating about taking your last breath,

meditating about people around you grieving, meditating about passing on, meditating about your body, meditating about your body going into the ground, meditating about your body dissolving into the earth. And it just goes from step to step to step that you do a deep meditation on all of the pieces of your mortality. It's incredibly powerful. I've tried it before.

Have you ever tried one like that?

Yeah. Powerful. When you go into the nitty-gritty of what is that going to be like if your family was around you at a hospital bed when you passed? What would it be like for you? What would it be like for them? What would happen to your body then? Like, then the IVs are unplugged and your arms are folded and the blanket goes over.

And then step by step by step, it's incredibly powerful and revitalizing. And guess what? Life is short, it's precious, it's beautiful. And this is, again, why we need a spiritual revolution, because... The hours are short, my dear friend, and we have much to do with them. We have much to do with them.

I have. I think, you know, one of the aspects of death meditation and looking at one's mortality is, you know, are you good with God? You know, have you cleaned up your messes? That's a great thing the 12-step program gives you. You know, this idea that when you're wrong, you promptly admit it. And you, you know, you clean up, you make amends for people that you have hurt.

You practice forgiveness. You know, are there people we have yet to forgive? Forgiveness is a tough one, right? You know, are there amends that we owe people? Is there wrongs that we need to right before we die? But also the famous quote of like, no one goes to their deathbed wishing they had worked more. You know, are we connected enough? Could we be connected more?

What about that family member that if you were going to your deathbed, you wish you could have given one final hug to? or connected with, those kind of regrets and remorses we don't want to be saddled with. You know, we want to go joyfully. And so I feel good right now. You know, I've made some big mistakes in my life. I've done some messed up stuff. I've hopefully cleaned it up.

Hopefully I'm good with folks, pretty much. And I feel good. I feel incredibly grateful for the life that I've had. I mean, I have been blessed. I don't know why. I don't exactly know why I have gotten to

work at my dream job, that dorky, weird kid in the high school, you know, skit, you know, getting those accolades from pretty young women and deciding to become an actor, you know, getting to be on one of the great TV shows, living my dream, and then getting to share and have conversations with on Soul Boom about spiritual conversations that help make the world a better place. I mean,

I'm so blessed, you know, it's just it's up to me to not fuck it up and to just kind of continue to try and spread the light.

I'm reading the new book by Father Gregory Boyle, who's one of my favorite human beings on the planet. Have you had him on your show? No, not really. The founder of... Homeboy Industries. He's taken thousands, tens of thousands of people off the streets from gang activities and out of prisons and put them into the working world.

And his books are... His most famous one's called Tattoos on the Heart. And his new one is called Cherished Belonging. And... And he's getting up there in years, you know, and you can kind of tell in his writing. And he is one of the most radiant, beautiful human beings on the planet. Jesuit priest, founder of Homeboy Industries.

And he's taken tens of thousands of gang members, you know, out of prison and off the streets into, for lack of a better word, rehabilitation. But that's a gross word. In Cherished Belonging, he just talks about God and just really rethinking God. And he said, God is there when you're kind. God is there when you're tender. God doesn't have time to be judging you. God is too busy adoring you.

God is spending all of his, her, its time in wonder and adoration every single last one of us. There's no time on God's calendar to be judgmental or disapproving or, you know, moralistic or anything like that. We're unrepeatable miracles of the universe. And God looks at us with the adoration that we look at if you have a child of a toddler, you know, taking his first steps.

That's how God is with us all the time. And he hits this point over and over again. Sometimes you roll your eyes and then sometimes it's just like, oh, it just gets you.

And it's been so beautiful for me to just read this and be reminded of that idea of the divine, that there's not a disapproving, sky daddy, patriarchal, bearded, mean guy in the sky who's like Santa Claus checking off who's naughty and nice. But there is just this force that loves us, beyond all measure and is there for us at any second in time. It's just there. It's absolutely there.

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