Co coc coeditor discusses their book and then boats and hitler and the link is discussed. And we conclude the programming at 11 p. M. With the author of the wreckening financial accountability and the rise and fall of nations that happens tonight on cspan2s booktv. And now on booktv. The quest to find out the truth of the world around here. I have the privilege of being the president of book passage, your locally owned, fiercely independent bookstore [ applause ] with a reach that is international. We have customers who order from all over the world. But tonight i want to introduce you to to amazing people. Michael krasney is the first. It isnt all that seldom someone comes in and tells me about how much the professor meant to her when he taught her at San Francisco state. We feel very lucky he also hangs out here. Many of you know him from his very lively radio show forum that is on 88. 5 kqed every morning from 9 to 11 weekday mornings. He has guest who range from president s to someone who is upset about trying to raise their rent with good reasons. You never know what you will hear from week to week. He is very generous with the community. He is the moderator for the National KidneyFoundation Annual authors luncheon which we are privileged to be part of. Next week is is going to be at a university in a conversation with someone else there as well. He has written numerous scholarly articles and books but two of them i can understand and one is called off mikeand his latest book is also a favor as well. We are going to have a fantastic evening. And our other guest has written over 20 times and everything time her ideas make you say why didnt i think of that. I could go on and on and list them all but i think most of us were not all that shock but very shocked when we read nickeled and dime and saw what happened when barbara went to work at several low income jobs. She wrote bright side and how positive thing thinking is undermining america. If you have been given a pink ribbon or teddy bear you know the themes in this book. Dancing in the streets is a history of collective joy all the way up to the current times to coming together and be exciting about life. Bait and switch if you have looked at elizabeths warrens latest book you might want to look at bait and switch i bet when Elizabeth Warren was st studying the situation she read this book. Living with a wild god is a m memoir. And she get to hear her voice as she try toies to figure out if e is a got god or something and asks once she was a child and all the way to now. And whatever your religion is you will find lots of questions in the book and start to think about the profound thinks we all think about from time to time but somehow then worry about what we will make for dinner. I promise you you would have a profound experience if you read the book. Thank you for being here tonight. [ applause ] thank you for being here. Thank you barbara and good to be with you. We will be together on Forum Tomorrow and that is to plug that and hope it is lively here tonight and tomorrow. I would like to go right to god because it is in your title and yet you were an athiest and still are. But you had a mystical experience and i want you to describe it. But it didnt involve god. Nothing about god. I have gotten grief about the title from some of my relatives. My family was dogmatic atheist but the alternative title atheist would be living with an unknown being in the universe didnt have the ring, you know . So this was pretty much dictated to you by the publisher . Putting god in the title . No, it was a chapter title and the editor said that is a book title. You didnt find god. But you found something and barbara is a trained scientist and has been a formidable thinker for many years. This was an experience that was an altered state. And it was something that published you puzzled you and you had to almost keep it a secret because of the your roots. It is easy to read about the transfo transforming experience. I sturdy child, rationalist atheist had what i later learned. Some people must have said that must be god. I am a believer now. Not me. I spend the rest of my life other than doing a few other things trying to figure out what that was. Because i am the answer god or it is a mystery or it is beyond never sat well with me. But i am interested to hear what you want to read here but there is something that is referred to as the unepitable and words we use to transform what this experience is and it struck me that it aligned you with nature and you feel something animating everything around you. A spiritual experience. Watch it with those words. This maybe a little path logical but the word spiritual creeps me out. I know i should be careful saying that in this geographical territory but i can remember going to years ago and being interviewed for something and the interviewer special education spreading out all of these crystals on the table and i said i dont belong here. But you said you are interested in speirituaspiritua . Michael learner, hi. I didnt say i was interested in spiritual hearing. Did i misunderstand you . We are both hearing impaired so we can say anything. Just to back up a little bit. When i was 12 years old, i formed my lifes mission. And that was that i would understand everything and figure out why we are here on earth, what is going on, what the purpose of it was and the whole thing. I didnt know where to look. I had high hopes for Library Books but they let me down. I didnt know how to go about this so i went every way i could think of. I figure if i could focus on this i could answer the questions in a couple months but that turned out to be hard. That is the background. I am a girl at that time who is on a secret quest. I dont tell anybody of the quest because i know it will sound crazy. So i keep it to myself but i am utterly zoned in. The world to me is a mystery that has to be solved. Then, i am going to skip to the biggy, the strange experience which i find it easier just to read two paragraphs than to try to make up the words again. Because it only took 50 years to say anything about this. This is the time period . Yeah, i was showing signs then, i guess. But, no, i think that is the important thing to realize about this book. I have published a book about things i never said a word about to anybody. Best friends, children, lovers can i stop you there. I know you were fighting Breast Cancer and going through disillusionment about politics. Did anything take you back to the little girl who wrote the journal entries . You write a strong suitable auto autobiographical memoir. There is nothing in here or very little about most of the things you might have known about me or what i do or the things i write. Or my family. Well the family i created you dont know about. I am wondering what was the catalyst . Anything that brought this out . Because it was a secret your whole life. Partly, i wanted my children to know some of this. I had a journal i kept from the ages of 14 and it trails out to 1820. And the point of the journal was to keep a record of my findings as i moved toward the universal truth about everything. So you would not find High School Gossip in this journal. Not that i knew any. But it is all philosophy, science and literature. That is what i am learning about at that time. When i came across the journal, which i had not forgotten about, but not thought about much either. I came across it in 2001, my papers were being collected for a University Library and this was in the heaps of things this library was boxing up and i snatched it out of the way. I thought future generations of graduate students can snicker at love affairs and such but cannot have this. This is my big secret. And then it took me four years before i sat down and read it and transcribed it. My first thought was journal entries with context so my children, my intended audience, would have where we lived at the time and what was going on in the family. Family itself is quite dramatic and in its rise from poverty and working class in montana to little class suburbs. And then its decline into alcoholism which was, you know, pretty much finished it off at a certain point. That in and of itself was a story. But it was the central experience that the book hangs on. Did it have anything to do for example with maybe what became some of a disillusionment with science on your part . I never became disillusioned with science. I will admit i wasnt good in the lab. I wasnt cut out for bench work. Anybody do it here . Okay. Yeah. I am too messy and too impatient. I want other people to do that and i will read about it. But i will not you know it wasnt for me. No. You want to read a passage . This is about the uncanny, mystical socalled and that is not a good word experience. I am wondering around, we dont need to know the context here because there is a back story to this back context. I am wondering around in company before dawn, i have slept much or eaten much, very exhausted. As i said i am not giving you the context but it isnt like i ran away from home. In the next few minutes on the empty street i found whatever i was looking for since the start of my quest or perhaps given my mental state it found whatever was looking for me. Here we leave the jurisdiction of language where nothing is left but the vague gurgles of surrender expresses in words like transcend. If there is no words for it, then dont say anything about it has been my general thought. Otherwise you risk slopping into spirituality which is a crime of reason but also of no more in the to you than people of your dreams. There is one thing handed down to seems to be what applied to what happened. That is the image of fire. At some point in my predawn walk, not at the top of the hill or at the exact moment of sun rise, but in its own good time the world flamed into life. How else to describe it . There were no visions. No prophetic voices or visits by animals. Just blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and i poured out into it. This wasnt the pass of merger with the all as promised by the eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once. And one reason for this terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it. Whether you start as a twig or a beautiful tapestry you will be recruited into the flame and cant be told apart from the rest of the blaze. Here is this cognitively something going on. There is ectasy here but not unles you separate it from Something Like rapture or bliss. You have to ectasy is the word but only if you are willing to acknowledge that it doesnt occupy the same spectrum as h happiness but represents loss and resembles violence. So this is the variations of religious experience . When you read the book and talked about your family and how much freud influenced your family. You read others and you describe what you talked here and the world in flamed in something that can not be expressed and word have no language for it. I had no knowledge of how common this experience is. None what so ever. And one of the reasons for that is so many records or accounts of sarexperiences are cloaked i religious language. It may not be that common either. I wrote a book called spiritual envy and it was about not having an experience but wanting to feel it but being too cerebral because it closed any option of that. You are lucky to have that. But also being able to describe it is amazing. It took a long time. I didnt know much about this. I was divided by whether this was a good or terrible experience. On the one hand, i felt that i now new some answers to my many questions. On the other hand, i knew i had no words for them so big help that is. How long did you stay in the sense of limbo do you think . I dont know. This trails on to other phases of life that comes along. On the other hand i was shattered after this. I think i was acting crazy for the first three months after. Very selfdestruction. And look at phillip kay dick. He is a detective writer and realist writer. Sciencefiction writer. Realistic and grounded. He had an encounter and i cannot remember his exact words but he called it a selfdisclosure by the divine. And he said it was less like embracing the budha than being the victim of a hitandrun accident. He earned a month stay in a locked ward as result of his behavior following his experience. Reminds me of Christopher Hitchins who said when dying of cancer if i get into the mode of talking about god it is the chemo talking not be. You are still in the atheist camp . Yes, how much more can an atheist be tested . There was nothing in my experience that showed god. There was no sign of benevolence. All of the religious imagery i was exposed to in my life which was catholic and baptist friends, none of that was presented in what i saw. Nothing was pulling me in that direction. It give you a different cognition about what is maybe invisible to us. We didnt know there was a world of bacteria and a new world is around us. That is the conclusion you have come to . I love that analogy. There is a tendency in science to not see agencies or consciousness in anything except humans. Only 20 years ago did science begin to come over to the idea which any ordinary person knows that nonhuman animals have feelings, consciousness and agency. That is still being fought in science. On another front, questions are coming up about plants. You might have read michael pollins wonderful article in the new yorker about the potential awareness and feelings of plants. This is all new to think of the world you know of ourselves as not the center of everything and in the monotheistic world view we are the only beings paying attention to but we look just like the great big guy which i thought was the ultimate in human narsacism. If you had a god, what would that god me like . When i enter an airport and i see delayed showing up i start playing. I cannot tell you who it is. There is my special airport diety. There was a book about how there wasnt much violence when the god was poll poly as much as when god went to one. I wanted to write about the disaster that is monotheism. It decimated indigenous religions. Nowhere more cruelly and violently than in the 18th century western expansion throughout the world. All of the poly systems crushed and had to be replaced. A way i am asking you why play the cards out . Why say there is no god as opposed to there may be some force in the universe, or divine . Guest there may be many beings other than ourselves which are invisible and currently in detectable to our instruments such as microbes were 200 years ago or so. If you are looking at a kind of daddy or a moral force or recovering moral force host something i can find language for like you are and i am also interested in taking this to another level. Because a friend of mine who you may know, some of the people know, a colleague and longtime friend of mine, philosophy professor who has written scads of books about religion, makes a distinction between external empiricism and internal empiricism, a good bifurcation for me. What you experienced has truth to it and therefore they can come for something automatic, and therefore it is a strange way of thinking. But as opposed to being able to prove it scientifically or empirically from gathering data for observation, from your senses, everything turns out okay. All things are going to be providence they can. You can name the airport whatever you are praying to or people feel gratitude but dont know what they feel grateful to or gratitude for. A lot of that has to do with the kind of inner sense in us, in terror inner empiricism and people give it validity that they experienced it. You have to give validity to what you experience. Guest i dont know what that is to do with your notion of god. Host people saying internal experienced god in a way of you experience when you experience so therefore it validates the notion of see is some more my idea of pie in the sky or whatever it may be. Guest in open the two possibilities to me. One, that i was crazy, and that was a very vivid possibility when i was in my teens. For one of my readings, said if you do not think like everybody else, and more or less and see the same things as everybody else, this is in the 1950s, you are crazy. And i did not want to be revealed host guardian language . Guest not yet. I had not reached host you might have had guest it was very dangerous to let on to that. That was one possibility and the other possibility was that there had indeed been an encounter with something other than myself. Not, quote, god, but i wanted to know and still want to know what that was. Guest could it just be from yourself and therefore that kind of interior world of yours that manifested in that way . Guest you can say that about just about any perception. Host this is a special perception. Guest it was so intense that it seemed to me to say it wasnt something i could have made up so easily. I am not i am very interested in materialist basis for this kind of thing. What goes on with the neural activation channels on Something Like that . Is it like an epileptic fit . I want to know that. But the subject of experience is what i have and that is the mystery. Host it is technical. Guest i hope not. Even wild speculation that the end of the book. Host it is fascinating to read. Can you really verify . Can you really prove what your guest i dont have a hypothesis. This is not an argument. Memoir is not an argument. So there is nothing i am eligible to prove. I am pushing on the possibility that there are more conscious beings than we know of and some of them sometimes interact with us. Host you have devoted your life to making people more conscious of haves and have nots and the social justice, identify with justifiably. If you were like a preacher or something along those lines or even being didactic would you want people to explore these mysteries as opposed to ameliorate poverty . In the scheme of it what is more important . That is a mean question. It is like which is more important . Art and science or feeding the poor . Obviously feeding the poor comes first. No question that our moral responsibility is to other people are in a moment, always primary. Host how do you justify that with someone reflexively without any kind of thing grounded in religion . Guest my moral itos is probably rounded in atheism because there is as i explained to my children when they were growing up, wanting to raise questions about religion, is that nobody is going to take care of things unless we do. If we walk by somebody who is collapsed on the sidewalk, no god or angel is going to come and pick him or her up. Is going to be up to us to intervene. There is a piece of old jewish wisdom my wish i could find again but i have lost, the learned rabbi says if you really need help, go to an atheist. They are not going to pass the buck. That is my moral core is atheist. And that same moral core means that the monotheistic god, what materializes manifests, i would be pretty this off at him. I have a long bill of particulars. Tsunamis, it is all the same. Host i routed this in the questions you are raising right now and in my book, the question that if god allows a child to be beaten. And its evil is permissible, where is god. At least you got them when you were 17 years old. We go to you in the audience at any questions you might have, bring the mike to the middle. How long did it last. A matter of seconds this particular experience . I dont know. The problem with my guest would be it is 4 or 5 minutes but then as the chapter goes on, it continues to happen in different forms throughout the day and there are flashbacks. I consider myself a rationalist and i did have a mystical experience when i was in my 20s that i told people about once and there was silence. I dont understand this, you must be crazy sell i stopped talking about it but it was here. I wanted to write a book talking about it so my question to the audience is among the people who consider themselves rationalist, how many of you, the percentage of people who have had inexplicable experiences like this. She is asking the audience to consider yourself rationalist but having an ecstatic experience. I think you said in the middle. Inexplicable. Whatever you want to put on it. Extraordinary, out of the ordinary. Not explainable by scientific, what we know in science now. Host i saw more hands. [inaudible question] guest nor drug induced. Thank you for asking that question because if there is any point to this book, it is to break the taboo and let us talk about these things. It was very, very difficult and still kind of is to talk about it. But i want this to be something that is not constantly, people becoming embarrassed by, fear that theyre going to be judged as a religious fanatic or whenever. This is for us to figure out. Thank you very much. You havent felt any shame about this or people attacking you, have you . Yes. Host i was trying to phrase that in a positive way. Scientists and friends of yours . Guest no, no. I am not going to name any names. I dont read the reviews. No. It was an interviewer who was extremely hostile. And this is so odd for me because i spent so many years dodging christians and christians really went after my book, nickel and dime, because probably for some other reason too but i say in it that i am an atheist and i described jesus very admiringly as kind of a wine guzzling hit the vagrant which is true. Give me an address for that man i will be very surprised. I had hole audiences of christian host last sunday. I dont know about now. Guest suddenly i have atheists going up against me. That is really interesting. Thank you for being you and for being the voice crying out in the wilderness and saying the emperor has no clothes as many times as you have. One more thing as far as designation goes. Someone told me something about being anti atheist, you dont know what happens but you know all organized religion is full of shift. Guest thanks very much. And here is the expert. First of all i want to tell you having read your book, i dont agree with it. I find it very brilliant, beautifully done, why is in many places, very exciting in the way that you do it so congratulations on that. Guest what do you mean you dont agree with it . It is the memoir. [laughter] some of the best memoirs have some very interesting ideas in them and you have in this book. I wanted to mention to you that there have been for several thousand years religious people who knew about evil and some of the problems you are talking about and whereas what was absent from the book from my perspective is an understanding of groups like spiritual progress of think about god which is not big man in heaven, up there waiting to feel like as abraham issue a set in his book, is not a cosmic bellhop ready to intervene and take over and answer your prayers and eliminate evil, from the standpoint of the spiritual progressives, the test was given to human beings to do that but the conception of god that has developed among spiritual progressives is one that is more sophisticated than that. Understanding the consciousness of the universe, to imagine a universe could have consciousness is a few steps beyond what you were talking about when you said up to a certain point in science, we didnt understand that other parts of the universe besides human beings could have consciousness. The question of how the integration of spiritual consciousness perry and material clearly this has been a question that science has not been able to answer and i predict will not answer in your lifetime or 9. In other words theres a way of understanding god that is quite different than the one that you rightly, i think, reject. And that other way of understanding god in which we are all part of that god and yet that god is way more, the entirety of the universe those in its material and consciousness face is something that i think you might want to explore in the future. Guest i do explore briefly i do talk about what science has been finding which is that a lot of things we thought to be totally inanimate are not totally inanimate. I suppose you could talk about a living universe. Why calls that god . Wait a minute. Why not sam . Whatever god is is that which evokes in human beings a sense of awe, wonder and radical amazement and that universe that has consciousness and an ethical dimension to it is something that evokes in people that level of wonder and radical amazement that is traditionally associated with god and religion. And nature and art and music and so many things we could cite, with all due respect but also you bring up a question, the one question that i think the greatest moral minds have grappled with and not been able to explain in terms of the benevolent ethical loving municipal and got. The ultimate question and the question even in a benevolent universe can never be answered. Guest of time may intervene on the question of evil. Our notions of morality as human beings are evolution airily rooted in our very social nature as animals. You dont get much more social, no primate is socially bound together and you have to get down to the insect level to get real anything beyond us because you have been through mutually dependent in their small bands for so many millions, and ideas of things like altruism or self sacrifice for others, in that situation where the survival of the individual is dependent on the survival i dont see what those notions which are human and shared by some animals to some degree have what they would have to do at all with a universe, the universe that we see. I dont see that and i dont see what they would have to do with the fact that jane goodall discovered the chimpanzees actually prayed upon and killed another group of chimpanzees, they were very friendly toward each other, human beings are capable of slaughtering, killing and wreaking great carnage it is all in the universe picture. It all has to be in the scene to attribute this to some schematic notion of things. Let somebody behind you, other people want to talk. I want to say it is not that theologians today havent thought about this and addressed it. That is an element that is absent from the book, the ways in which a variety of progressive theologians have attempted to address these he shoes. Host i will respect your beliefs and thank you. I just want to say i really have admired your book and your mind, it has really been, i read this book and truly been a pleasure, as a narrow psychologist to follow the evolution of your beliefs and your intellect. It is an extraordinary book and very courageous. I know from the book that you have looked at the rather extensive literature about epilepsy and seizure disorders and i want to bring up the possibility, there are all kinds of seizure disorders, big ones, small ones, strange ones and the typical experience of temporal seizure is a religious experience or a very personal sense of otherness and from burning bushes to pauls ecstasy on the road to damascus to joan of arc or whenever, these are examples, probably, of epileptic events. I want to raise the possibility. Can i ask what you said about joan of arc . That is new to me. Like son of sam but where was epilepsy posited in all that . Epilepsy is a natural event which brings on these kinds of experiences and barbaras experiences were often brought on by a certain kind of light. You didnt have those experiences in seattle where it was gray and dark. I am trying to put what i could find, you may know more, the kind of epilepsy that is photosensitive, usually driven by flashing lights, strobe lights. I never had anything like epilepsy but the quality of light does have a big effect on me. Typical experience 2 experience flaming and that kind of the ecstasy, that kind of being hit by a truck or whatever, you say at the end the designated function of your mind is to condense all the chaos and mystery of the world into a probable other or others because we have no choice in this matter and the function of the human mind is to make sense of the world, a very strong drive that we have but neurologically speaking the schizophrenic has a very authentic experience of the voice in his head. A person with cat grass syndrome looks at her husband and recognizes him but has no connection to the Emotional Experience of her husband, considers him an imposter because if something is inexplicable we have to find a way to explain it. There are lots of examples in the psychological literature. So i am suggesting that maybe the intense desire to explain comes from this neurological experience. My question, my question, one question is why do we have to explain . Why do we have to explain, what happened to me . You mean in book form . Or to myself . Yourself. Guest that is what i am. Iman answers seeking machine. The other part of the question is you say i had the impression growing out of the experience chronicled here that it may be seeking the south and i want to know what you mean by that. This is a risky last sentence of the book. Where i am saying we need to find out about this other or others that may share the universe with us, not necessarily because we love it and certainly not out of any intention to worshiped it and by the way a fine may just expand parenthetically on that, one of my lessons here that im trying to convey is if socalled god comes to you, angelic courses and special effects, lightning, the usual stuff he does when he wants to get attention in the old testament, if he shows up like that, do you fall on your knees . Ask questions. As a lot of questions and try to get a blood sample. Just because something is big and shiny and that we worship it . That is pathetic. We want to know and not because we want to worship and i say this is ridiculous. We may ultimately have no choice in this matter. I have the impression growing out of the experiences chronicled here, my experiences, that it may be seeking to us out. That is qualified. I am just saying that is my impression. I wanted to attach you if i may, there were a lot of people who believed they had been abducted by spaceships. This is not a mean question, this is a serious question. Studies in harvard with people when they were put under hypnosis and even when they werent to revisit this in their minds, it was probable they had been through some kind of experience or so it appeared. Everything was showing, the neuroscience, the testing was done, there were also people who felt they had repressed memories of sexual molestation and in many cases these repressed memories proved to be fraudulent. Is it possible that you had something along those lines . A kind of artistic moment out of time because you wanted answers . You were hungry for answers and thought you were going to discover them. I know you are heading with us. Of course it is possible, michael. But i am putting forth here at the end of the book the even stranger possibility that there was something to encounter. It has been a few decades. It is wonderful to see you and be here with you. I am hearing your tendency to validate or invalidate a psychological, experiential happening. And is distressing to me to pick and choose whether it is a seizure or not a seizure or psychedelic or shame in the amazon, or the exploration of the unconscious, there is no reason to invalidate such experiences. All you can do is experience them and the trouble comes when we try to explain the source, the reason for things that generate religions and control and explanations that drive many of us crazy, it is a subject of unity that we cant get out of and say that didnt happen to you. There may because asians and backgrounds. And that is not a valid experience. It is not a mystical lori lawless experience. What do you think of that . Im glad you said that. My feeling is if somebody wants to say to me whatever happened to you is ultimately a matter of sodium ions flowing in and out of their cells, it can all be reduced gluten do you think . [laughter] all reduced to the actions of ions and electrons and so on. So they estimate my response would be you know what a calcium ion is . It is a concept in my mind. That is what it is. It is Something Else the we observed objectively, i have to take my subjective experience seriously. One more question. First of all, i do think the universe is calling to us as i said. Having had spiritual experiences myself that is exactly what it is. It leaves me unsettled, you are leaving us in a dichotomy of either or. Either there is science or there is not anti dont know that there is i am not experiencing that dichotomy in the worlds and i want to experience a unity of the possibility for both ends. I dont mean to set up a dichotomy between science and god. I am saying do not surrender your rationality in the face of a mystical and apparently inexplicable. Because then what . Because this is what we are. This is my sense of dignity, of being human, a sense that goes back to my father who was a copper miner at the time he said this, always ask questions. Dont except anything, keep pushing, keep asking. That is how i was raised. I dont stop when we get special effects that signal the arrival of the deity or something. We want a quote hunt that. A quote from einstein, always ask questions. I do have an answer and that is this is a courageous book, so much of your book has been courageous, may be in this one is in some ways the most courageous and maybe i am speaking for most people here when i thank you with real gratitude for the work you have done and you have people who are steadfast and devoted fans and for them good reason so thank you all. [applause] [applause] you are watching booktv, nonfiction authors and books every weekend on