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 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

You can find that in a youth group, in a therapy session, in a 12-step room, in a church basement. You can find that at a synagogue. You can find that in a meetup.org hiking group on a Sunday morning. You can find that in a meditation group. You can find it in a nonprofit that's really trying to make a difference.

You can find it in a group of people that are addressing injustices and imbalances in your neighborhood or community and are actually doing something about it. Align yourself, hang your hat on the forces of integration. Disintegration is going to take care of itself. You know, the doom scrolling, the headlines, the outrage headlines and outrage clicks, that's all happening. We get to let that go.

And in these brief, beautiful, sacred days that we have left, align ourselves with integration, with people coming together and building community.

I guess, I don't know. I mean, that's such a great question. And that would be a great question If you or someone were conducting a workshop or something like that, there could be a written meditation. You know, I did one when I was in a therapy retreat where we had a conversation with our wise self.

It wasn't necessarily an older self necessarily, but you put in an empty chair, you put your wise self. Yeah, spiritual gestalt. Yeah, yeah, it's spiritual gestalt. It is. And then you... You know, you talk about what's going on with you and then you sit in the chair and you become your wise self and then you speak to yourself from the wisest part of yourself.

So I guess it's, you know, there's more work to do. What's coming up for me right now, just on a gut level, is ways that I limit myself, right? And I think that we all limit ourselves. Part of my spiritual journey my 12-step recovery journey, my therapy journey, has been to let go of my limiting beliefs.

And if you had asked that pimply, awkward teenager who at age 13 was watching Mike Wenzel slap John Valadez on the shoulder and ask him about his weekend, if you had said, hey, 45 years from now, You'll be writing books. You'll be having fascinating conversations. You'll be a successful actor. You'll have a successful and beautiful long-term marriage. You'll have a family. You'll be healthy.

You'll have something to offer. You'll be working in...

philanthropy like that would be beyond my wildest dreams but what was it about me that limited myself in my in my 20s and 30s and and held me back from believing that i could bring a great deal of light into the world i'm not trying to put myself as some kind of guru or anything like that i'm really not i'm just i'm an actor i've suffered i've read a lot that's it but

Can I continue to shed self-limiting beliefs that are holding me back from maximizing my divine possibility? So that would probably be the conversation. What does that look like? I don't know what that looks like. Could it be... more books and bigger podcasts and larger conversations with more people. Maybe it looks like that. Maybe it looks like getting smaller.

You know, maybe it looks like letting that stuff go and turning inward a little bit more and spending kind of more intense time in a deeper contemplation to try and get at something even more true and more deep and more internal. Maybe it's both. I'm not sure.

You really want to crack this nut, don't you? I want to crack it. Yeah. I think I have a lot to offer, especially young people that are suffering right now in the mental health epidemic, because I've suffered a lot in that way. I've suffered in anxiety and depression, and I've thought a lot about these issues.

And I think it's really important for me to excavate that stuff and share it as widely as I can, because hopefully it can help some people. And at the same time, pay the bills maybe by making people laugh a little bit on the side. So that's where my hunch is, is part of the reason I have struggled as much as I have is because I get to share my struggle with others and maybe help a few people.

And that doesn't mean I have everything figured out. It just means I have some experience. I've gone through some shit. I have some wisdom resulting from those conflicts.

This next book I'm working on has something to do with the meaning of life. It's like the meaning of life according to Rainn Wilson or something like that. I don't know what it is. I just recently took a note, I'm not even kidding you, three days ago. I was like, practice versus belief. There's a lot of talk in spiritual realms, like what do you believe? What do you believe?

Do you believe we have a soul? Do you believe in reincarnation? Do you believe in a god? Do you believe in multiple gods? Do you believe that life after death? Do you believe we can talk to angels? That's all fine and good, but ultimately who cares? What do you do? What do you do? My wife became a Baha'i not that long ago. And she would always ask the question, what do Baha'is do? What do they do?

You know, okay, you believe this, you believe that. But what are they doing? What are you actually doing? And hopefully Baha'is are doing actual good shit out there. I think they are, for the most part. So... I practice gratitude. I have a daily gratitude list and a group of guys that I send a gratitude list out to. It's a very small thing. It's an incredibly powerful shift.

I'm sure you've talked about gratitude on this show dozens of times. But we will always live in a kind of mental place and spiritual place of deficit, of lack of, and of an unsettled anxiety. And when we turn toward, hey, what do we have and what's working? It's a tiny little subtle shift that makes a huge difference. So I have a daily prayer and meditation practice.

Meditation is very simple for me. It's like 15 minutes. It's just a quieting of the mind. And it's opening my wise self to the reality, to greater reality. Prayer is an important part of my practice. I believe that there is an unknowable essence out there that is... approachable by prayer, that is connectable. Is that a word? Connectable with by prayer? It's not.

And I believe that prayer and meditation are in a dance together. It's reaching out, it's beseeching, it's longing, it's connecting, and it's being open and it's listening and it's being still. This is a very important part of my practice. As a Baha'i, I say a daily obligatory prayer every day that kind of grounds me and reminds me of... my place in the universe.

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