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I have the privilege and of being the president of your locally owned bookstore [applause] with a reach that is internationally and people follow us all over the world. The first one is teeeighteen a professor at San Francisco that how much the professor mitt to her. So we are lucky that he hangs out here. Also with his very lively radio show. Every morning between nine and 11. And those that arrange those that are upset when somebody is trying to raise the rent with good reason. So with those exciting things that you will hear. He is the moderator with the authors legend dash luncheon. Next week he will be at the dominican panel. And has written numerous scholarly articles and books and the first one what hed does when the interviews people and what they do when they dont think anybody is listening. Which is one reason why we will have a great night. Barbara has written over 20 books every single time you say why didnt i think of that . I could go on and on but we were not all that shocked but very shocked. But when she went to a minimumwage job with several different companies. But but if youve never been given that the new kid know what is in the book. With the history of collective joy to coming together to be excited. If you look get Elizabeth Warren ince latest book ibex that when she studies this situation she can say that barbara nailed it. In her book living with a wild god is a memoir. With her voice as a young teenager. As she tries to figure out is there a god or is there something . Since she was a child all the way to now. You will find a lot of questions in this book. It to think about those profound things that we all think about from time to time but somehow we then worry about that barbara will not let you do that. I promise you will have a profound experience when you read the book. [applause] thank you for being here. We will also be together tomorrow through the forum id hopefully it will be a lively conversation as well. I would like to begin because of god is in your title but yet you were pretty much in the fiesta and still are but had this experience and i want you to describe what you went through but it does not involve god. Nothing. I have got some grief about the title from my relatives. [laughter] my family is dogmatic atheist but the alternative title which would be Something Like living with the while possibly conscious but other known been in the universe did not have the same token. [laughter] host so this was dictated to you by the publisher . Guest no, no, no. It was a tester title and the editor said that is a book title. Host you did not find god but Barbara Ehrenreich is a trade scientist and as a steadfast and rational search all these years. Something i suppose in altered states something that puzzles you because of the dogmatic atheist routes. Yes. Do we have a copy of the book . It is easier to read a couple of paragraphs about the transformative experience. Briefly put, i as a child a rationalist and an atheist what i later learned was called a mystical experience. I did not know that experience expression. But some people who might have said that must have been god i can maybe lever down. Not to me. I spent the rest of my life other than doing a few other things trying to figure out what that was. Because the answer of god or it is the mystery never sat well with me. Barbara ehrenreich. There is something that is known as the transcendent that we bandy about it for what this kind of experience is. Is struck me that it was a experience where you feel something animating everything. A spiritual experience. Watching it with those words. [laughter] this may be a little pathological but the words spiritual half freaks me out. I should be careful to say that but i remember years ago to be interviewed and my interview were put out all the crystals on the table. No. I do not belong here. But you said to me Michael Lerner is here and i am interested in spirituality. And and you are. To signify no meaning. I did not say was interested in spirituality. We are both hearingimpaired so we can say anything and. Anything. [laughter] okay. To back up. When i was 12 years old i formed my lifes mission that i would understand everything. I would figure out why we are here on earth, blood is going on, and i did not know where to look. The Library Books let me down. So i went every way i could think of. If i could just focus i could answer the questions in a couple of months. It turned out to be a little harder. That is the background. I am a girl at that time who was on a secret quest. I dont tell anybody it is a quest because i know it will sound crazy. I keep it to myself but the world to me is a mystery that has to be solved. Then i will skip to the big part this strange experience to which i find it easier just to read it they and to say it or make up the words again because italy took me 50 years that is important to realize i have published a book about the things i never said one word about to anybody. Best friends friends, children, lovers. Host i am wondering i know you were fighting Breast Cancer and disillusionment with radical politics the angus he emerged that to a key back to find that young girl . Anything the you can pin down . It may not be suitable. But it is a memoir of a particular bridge in my life which is this quest. There is very little if your of the things you may have known about me or what i do or what i write or my family. The family that i created. You dont know them. Host what was the catalyst . This had been a secret your whole life. Partly i wanted my children to know some of it. So i had the journal. Did i mention that . I had a journal i kept from the age of 14. And the point was to keep a record of my findings as they move to the universal truth. No High School Gossip not that i knew any but this philosophy andi j 1 scienced literature. When they came across this journal. I have not forgotten about but not thought about much either. I came across in 2001. My papers were collected for a university library. These are the things that the librarian was getting and i snatched it away. Future generations of graduate students can snicker at my political ideals or by love affairs but they cannot have this. This is my big secret. Then it hit before years before i sat down and read it and transcribed it. My first thought was to imitate journal entries with some context so my children, my intended audience would know where we lived at the time for what was going on. With its rise from poverty to the middleclass suburbs and then declined in 20 alcoholism. So that in itself was a story but the central experience that the book hangs on. Host didnt have to do with the disillusionment of science . Guest i was never a disillusioned with science. I will admit i was not very good in the lab. I was not cut out for laboratory work. Anybody here do it . I am too messy and to impatient. Other people can do that. I will read about it. Host did you want to read a passage. Guest this is about the uncanny or mystical experience. We dont need to know the context here. I am wondering around before dawn in california. I have not slept much or eaton much. In the next few minutes i found whenever i had been looking for or perhaps given my mental passivity for the moment it had been looking for me. Where nothing is left with the surrender expressed like transcendence. Host what the words that you told me to watch out for. Guest for the intervening years that if there are no words for it and then dont say anything about it. Otherwise the risk of bumping into spirituality witches a crime of treason then reference to other than your dreams. But there is one image handed down and that is the image of fire as in the burning bush. At some point night at the top of the hill or at the moment of sunrise but in his own good time is bring into light. How else to describe it . No prophetic voices justice blazing everywhere. Something poured into the and i poured out to into it. This was not the merger as all promised it was the living substance coming at me through all things at once. And one reason for this terrible worthlessness of the experience is you cannot observe fire without becoming a part of it started as a twig you will be recruited into the flame to be made in distinguishable. Cognitively i have an amazing thing going on. The best way to describe it is there is ecstasy here. But not unless you separate in your mind is the head does not occupy euphoria but it participates in the english of law and can resemble the outbreak. Host this is the aesthetic experience. In talking about your family how influential may be made that is essentially the interpretation. A lot of what you just described. Event and fortunately i had no knowledge in that one of the reasons for that is for such experiences is the religious language. But it must not be that, in either to never have a mystical experience but to b2s cerebral to foreclose the idea of anything like you described but the to have a great deal of respect for. But that is a longtime. I did not know much. I was totally divided is this was a good experience or terrible. On the one hand i felt i now knew some answers. To my many questions on the of their hand i knew i had no words for them. So a big help that was. Host how long do you stay in limbo . I dont know which trails on into other phases of my life for so long. But i was pretty shattered. I think i was acting crazy. Very selfdestructive if my parents paid any attention would have thought i needed professional help. But philip k. Dick the the lead detective writer, a sciencefiction writer, and he had an encounter he called it a self disclosure. And it is less like a bracing the buddha them the victim of the hitandrun accident. And i completely understand that. As a result of his behavior. Like the late Christopher Hichens he said when he was dying of Esophageal Cancer that into talking about god it is the kilo talking. So you are still in the atheist camp. Gore hall more severely could the eighth esp tested . [laughter] writes . I know lot of people but that must have been god . But i did not have that in my vocabulary is nothing in my experience that suggested there was no sign of benevolence in all the religious imagery i had ever been exposed to it my life nothing polygamy in that direction. Host a gave another cognition to use the analogy we did not know there was a world of microorganisms or bacteria but then we discover them and all whole world opens up to us. That is the conclusion you have come to. I love that analogy. There has been a tendency in science to not see consciousness and anything except humans. Only 20 years ago did science come to the idea which any ordinary person already knows that nonhuman animals have feelings come consciousness. But meanwhile on another front the questions to wear a the wonderful article in the new yorker about the potential awareness. But this is all new to think of the world as not the center of everything. In the monotheistic world view not only are we the only beings worth paying attention to but we look just like the great big guys. With the ultimate of human narcissism. [laughter] if you had a god but would that be like if you could invent the guide when i enter the airport and i see this thing showing up on the monitor i start to pray. There is my special little airport deity. [laughter] no. A monotheistic god . Host what ever. There is a whole book how there was not nearly as much violence it is not as much from the one god. Interesting. Writing about the disaster it sounds counterintuitive but it just decimated indigenous religion. No more than in the great wave of the 18th and 19th century western expansion around the world. With the Belief Systems that crashed in had to be replaced by monotheism. We lost a lot. And the great studs dr. Cole said i am agnostic that means diana collegeage yes. [laughter] how is it especially after this experience . What i wrote is the uncertainty if there is a guide it may not be benevolent to have so much Knowledge Beyond us to talk about a string theory but we have no idea nor could we conceive of infinity so in a]qbp way why play the cards out that there may be some force in the universe. Why call that got . There may be many beings other than ourselves which are invisible in currently undetectable to our instruments but if you are looking for a daddy or a moral force or comforting moral force. Something that i can find a language for. I interested also to take this to another level with you. Because a friend of mine as people here now and philosophy professors know that they make a distinction between external id internal. People believe what they experience has truth therefore they can do something automatic that times i think it is so so therefore it is so. But has opposed to prove it scientifically or empirically from gathering data the observation from your senses that everything turns out okay it is a providence that you cannot name the airport. And you dont know what they feel braddish four gratitude for but people give its validity on the basis of they experience it. You have to. But what does that have to do with your notion of god . People say they have experienced god or whenever it is you have experience so that validates the notion or the idea of pie in the sky or whenever it may be. Guest and opened up to possibilities. One, that i was crazy and that was a very vivid possibility. It is something from one of my readings said if you do not think like everybody else, more or less and see the same things as a buddy else in the 1950s, you are crazy. I did not want to be revealed as crazy. Host so you thank you had a mental breakdown . Guest yes. It was very dangerous to let on. That was one possibility. The other was indeed had a and encounter with something other than myself. Not god but i still wanted to know what that was. Host could it have been from yourself with that world of yours to manifest itself . Guest you could say that about any perception. But this is a special perception. But i would say it was so intense but it was not something i could have made up. I am interested in the basis of life goes on with the narrow activation when Something Like that happens. Like the epileptic fit. I want to know that but the subjective experience and that is the mystery. I hope not. Fed is wild speculations that the end of the book. And it is fascinating to read but can you really verify your hypophysis . No. This is not an argument. It is not an argument. But there is nothing that i am now to prove but just on the possibility that there are more conscious beings the and we know of and some of them sometimes interact with us. Host and offthewall question you devote your life to make people more conscious of social justice. So to identify with justifiably so if you were a preacher would you want people to explore these as to ameliorate the poverty . Which is more important . That is a mean question. [laughter] mike which is more important . Arts and science or feeding the pork . Obviously feeding the for. No question. Our moral responsibilities are in the moment. How do you justify that . Without grounded in religion . My moral ethos is crowded with atheism. Because there is a deal when i raised questions about religion is that nobody will take care of things. If we walk by somebody collapsed on the sidewalk know god or angel will pick him or her up. It is up to us to intervene. There is a piece of the jewish wisdom i wish i could find it again where the rabbi says if you really need help, go to the atheist. They will not pass the buck. [laughter] my save atheistic moral code means somebodys got the monotheistic god i would be pretty passed off at him. I have a long bill of particulars. [laughter] host i alluded to this question that you are raising right now and to it is the question of god allows a child to be beaten said how can he be seen as loving or benevolent . That question has been asked if evil is permissible . I have looked for the answer but have not discovered them. But you have discovered them in 12 years old. So now we will go to the audience. How long did it last . Guest this particular experience . I dont know. My guess would be four or five minutes. But as it goes on it continues to happen in different forms throughout that day. And there are flashbacks. Civic i consider myself a rationalist and i did have a mystical experience in my 20s. I told people about once in there was silence. So i stopped talking about it. But i wanted to write a book to talk about it so my question to the audience is among the people that consider themselves how many of you have an experience like this . She is asking the audience. Whenever a label that you put on its. Not explainable by scientific methods. Nine drug induced. Think you for asking the question. Because if there is any point to the book it is to break the taboo to let us talk about these things. It was very, very difficult and still kind of is for me. But i want this to be something that is not constantly where people are embarrassed or fear they will be judged as a religious fanatic or what ever. This is for us to figure out. Thank you for that. Host you have not felt any schaede or people attacking you, have you . Guest yes. [laughter] host i tried to frame that and a positive way. Scientist or friends . Guest no, no, no. I will not name names but i dont read reviews. It was an interviewer who was extremely high style from a rationalist cents. This is so id for me because i spend summiteers daiichi christians but they really went after my book nickel and dime to because i do say i am an atheist in the book it i describe jesus admiringly as as so wine puzzling hit the vagrant which is true. Just give me an address for that man. I will be very surprised. [laughter] ive had all audiences of christian. Host maybe black sunday. [laughter] now i have atheist . 84 being you to come here to be the voice to say the emperor has no clothes. One more thing with designation not the fee is the list or agnostic you dont know what happens but thank you here is the expert [laughter] first of all, having read your book i dont agree with that but i find a brilliant it is very wise in places and exciting the way that you do it. Congratulations. Guest but you dont agree with that knowing that it is a memoir . [laughter] believe it or not there have been some great ideas did you have them in this book. I want to mention that for several thousand years religious people about evil and some of the problems that you talk about. Whereas what was absent from the book for my perspective is the understanding of the way that groups like spiritual progress is think about god which is not a big man in have been up there waiting he is not a cosmic bellhop ready to intervene to takeover to answer your prayers sandy eliminate the evil. You are right to for those with a spiritual progress since the test was given to do that. But the conception of god that has developed among the spiritual progressives is more sophisticated in to to understand it in part as a consciousness. To imagine a universe could have consciousness is a few stepsenmsjo o beyond what you we talking about when you said to a point in science we did not understand other parts of the universe could have consciousness. The question of how the integration of the spiritual consciousness area and material clearly this has been a question that science has not been able to answer and i predict it will not answer in our lifetime so in other words, there is a way to understand god that is quite different than the one that you rightfully reject. And that other way in which we are all parts of that god but yet as the entirety of the universe in the consciousness phase is something you might want to explore in the future. About what science has been finding a lot of things that we thought were totally in intimate are not. The you could talk about a living universe. Why call that got . God . Why not sam . [laughter] that evokes a sense of of shot in the universe that has consciousness and the ethical dimension evokes in people that level of radical amazement traditionally associated with god and religion. Did with nature and art and music and other things with all due respect. But it is the one question that the greatest minds wrestle with with of god is the question even with the benevolent universe if i may intervene our notions of morality are rooted in our very social nature. You dont get much more social. No primate is bound together you have to get at the insecta level. Because humans were hugely dependent for so many and ids like culture is some or self sacrifice of rose in that situation. I dont see those that are shared by some animals to some degree that had to do at all with a universe that we seek. Host id go see what that has to do about the fact about a group of chimpanzees preyed upon and killed another group as they were friendly to each other and humans are responsible. But it is all in the big scheme. Michael let somebody behind you there are others. It is not that theologians today have not thought about this and address it and that is an element absent from the book white a ways the progressive theologians have attempted to address these issues. Host we respect your beliefs. Thank you. I just want to say i have the admired your book and your mind. I read this book and it has been a pleasure as dave burrows psychologist to follow the evolution of your belief. It is extremely courageous. With the literature about epilepsy and seizure disorders. I want to bring up the possibility there are all kinds of seizure disorders but the typical experience with a personal sense in some burning bushes these are examples with the epileptic events bob. So i want to raise that possibility and also. Host what did you say about joan of arc . He had voice is like son of sam but where was epilepsy . Is a narrowly event that brings on these experiences. And her experiences for often brought on by a certain kind of light. You did not have those experiences in seattle where it was great and a dark. From one i can find but the epilepsy is those sensitive is driven by frappe flashing lights. And i have never had anything like epilepsy but there is the experience of flavorings that ecstasy to be hit by a truck. Whenever. You say at the end it is to condense all the chaos and to of culpable others in the function of the human mind is to make sense of the very strong drive that we have but neurologically speaking with us schizophrenic has an authentic experience a person with this syndrome who looks at her husband and recognizes him but has no connection to the Emotional Experience considers him an imposter. Because if something is inexplicable we have to find a way to explain it. There are a lot of examples in psychological literature. Items adjust suggesting that intense desire to explain comes from this neurological experience. Guest dont diagnose me. [laughter] my question is why do we have to explain its . Guest what happened to me . You read in the book form or to myself. To yourself. That is what i am. I know. The other parts of the question is you have the impression growing and the experiences chronicled here so what you mean by that . This is the risky last sentence of the book where i say we need to find out about the others to share the universe with us. Not necessarily because we love it is certainly not out of any intention and if i could expand parenthetically if this socalled god comes to you with all kinds of special effects when he wants to give his attention if he shows up like that do not fall on your knees. Ask questions. Ask a lot of questions and try to get a blood sample. [laughter] what is the stuff to us because it is big and shiny that we worshiped it . That it is speculative that we may have no choice in this matter. Said i have the impression growing at of the experience is chronicled here that it may be seeking out. But that is my impression. [laughter] host i just had a stray thoughts to ask. if people believed they were abducted. This is a serious question. With people when they were put under hypnosis to revisit this it was probable they had been through some kind of experience all the testing that was done. Also people felt they had repressed memories of sexual molestation but in many cases they proved to be fraudulent. Is a possible you had something along those lines with that autistic moment out of time because you wanted answers in for hungry for answers and thought you would discover them so not trying to do a psychoanalysis to a new boat. Guest i know we were headed. [laughter] of course, it is possible. But i am putting forth at the end of the book the even stranger possibility that there was an encounter. It has been a few decades since we have been friends. It is wonderful to be here with you. Guest hi. I hear a tendency to validate your psychological experiential happenings in is distressing to me to pick and choose whether a seizure or not for my dreams or is the exploration of the on conscious. There is no reason to validate but just experience them but when we come to explain the source of light or the reason for it we get into all the things that generate religion and explanation. I think the experience was subjective that we cannot get out of to say that did not happen. There is a reason for that experience. Maybe causation, a background or inducements like taking a drug but to reduce it it is not valid of great substance and power was a mistake. I am glad that you said that. My feeling is if somebody wants to say to me would ever happen to to you is ultimately a matter of calcium and sodium going in and out of immerse sale sells. [laughter] it can be reduced to the actions of electrons. But my response would be what a calcium ion is . It is what we observed objectively but seriously. One more question. But the universe is calling to wes as he said it is exactly what it is a and it saves in the unsettled. Always ask questions. Top accept anything. Keep pushing in asking. So i dont stop just when we get to a special effects that signal the a rival of the dealers something. Always ask questions. I do have an answer, and that is that i think that this was a courageous but. Think so much of york has been courageous. This one is the most. In committee speaking for most of the people here i think you with real gratitude for the working of the. Obviously you have people here who are steadfast and devoted fans. Cspan2 providing live coverage of the u. S. Senate floor proceedings and keep Public Policy events in every weekend book tv abcafifteen years in a Television Network devoted to nonfiction books authors. Cspan2 created by the cabletv industry and brought to you as a Public Service by a local cable or satellite provider. Watch us on hd, like us on facebook and falls on twitter. Iraqi war veteran next on book tv discusses in his short story collection allows soldiers fought in the experiences they had. This is about 45 minutes. All right. Thank you. There we go. Thank you so much for coming here. Good to be here

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