Ep. 252 | Everything's Spiritual (with @Rob Bell)

this episode of the minimalist is brought to you by nobody because advertisements suck minimalists [Laughter] hello everybody welcome to the minimalist podcast where we discuss what it means to live a meaningful life with less my name is joshua fields milburn and i'm ryan nicodemus and together we are the minimalists we're here with our returning champion rob bell is in the studio this is his victory lap you know uh there were earlier laps you were our first ever guest on on the minimalist before then i think we did like 100 episodes alone and then we did a a um live event with you in los angeles and we put that up and you were that was the first guest on on the minimalist seriously yeah and now you're the last guy i was just gonna make that joke anyway we're here on the occasion of rob's new book everything is spiritual rob let me just say this this is the book i was hoping you would write oh wow i just gotta take that in for a minute that's good you know it's uh i mean i've read past books really really enjoy you know uh how to be here velvet elvis loved ones etc but but this book in particular it feels in many ways like well it couldn't have happened until now yeah and well it's a history it's also looking forward at the same time yeah well done there yeah that's all baked into it let's talk a bit about this book why now you have to own every square inch of your story otherwise you have all these like bits and pieces you don't know what to do with the embarrassing stuff the awkward stuff the heartbreaking stuff the stuff that's like locked in a black box at the bottom of the ocean um but everything is spiritual like spirit is in all of it and when you look back on your life the awkward embarrassing heartbreaking tragic stuff is often where the new life came yeah like you crashed you hit the wall you ended up face down you know what i mean yeah and then you look back and you're like oh wait in that grief and pain were all these seeds of imagination of a new life yeah so there are all these categories that most people live enslaved to good bad right wrong winning losing success failure of these binaries these dualities and yet there's something lurking in all of it there's something under it through it there's like a like an electricity like a charge like i mean in the ancient tradition spirit and that's where the new creation comes you don't avoid you don't try to get rid of your anxiety you listen to it because it's telling you something about who you are and what's off uh it's a restlessness that there could be more yeah so in some senses that's why now as you get to a point where you realize it was all okay and it wasn't just okay it's like a to be here is like a wondrous glorious experience yeah and senate we tried cynicism you know what i mean a bunch of people moved to brooklyn you know what i mean rolled their eyes we tried all that you know what i'm saying we tried cynicism yeah yeah didn't work yeah standing at a distance pointing out everything's wrong with everything some people still need to like try that out for themselves we gave that a good shot but innocence wonder aw the sense that you're wide-eyed and you're here we're doing this that's where it's at so yeah that's why now there's a line in the book that stood out to me there's quite a few that i have underlined but this one i wrote down my understanding of god was suddenly shifting something less out there and more right here right now um how has your your faith evolved a lot of people will know your backstory some people won't we could cover it briefly but um how has your your faith evolved because ryan and i have two different belief systems i think we have the same values but but we we believe something different but i think those beliefs are are ever evolving as as we learn as we go through some of those crashes as well how do you feel like uh you've evolved since say 98 or 2011 in what ways well is the book 300 pages so there's a start to the answer yeah um from from when i was a kid i remember having the sense that there's more going on here this thing the universe is not a cold dead place it was even the earth i tell these stories about soil and water and trees and rocks like some sense that this thing is alive or it's humming or something that's really important because for so many people their intuitive understanding of the nature of this thing um they were right on like how many people for how many people religion actually jacked up their understanding it gave them a bunch of things that weren't helpful but they intuitively the whole time had a sense like we're all connected this thing does matter you know what i mean i'm here for some reason if that's even the word you'd use for it so uh i had that sense at a young age and sort of followed it and in the world i came from well that's religion and then i was like i love talk i want to help people like with these mysteries so that became like go be a pastor study i got a master's degree in divinity a master's in divinity let's pause for the absurdity of that a master of deep mysteries you see what i'm saying all right you are like if you don't see the absurdity baked into that minimalism so it's like i followed those i i because our tribes like give us like a path like this is how you do it and every group tribe family system has like its ladder climb this way but uh it was always like that wasn't it was always the thing in here that was like it's good it's good to be here keep going keep following it yeah so sort of just keep following it everything is spiritual i mean the the title comes from a talk you gave a few years ago right and um um when someone sees that title they're going to start getting all kinds of conceptions in their mind right um what why choose this title because there are other titles you could have used to describe the same exact book yeah yeah the first everything is spiritual tour was in 2006 it was about quantum physics and mysticism and dimensional theory all the sort of what like what we know from science about the world is what is we're not a ball a rock hurtling through space at 67 000 miles an hour um and then the second tour was in 2015 which expanded on this and talked about it this evolving universe that never stops expanding it's omnicentric every place in the universe is actually the center of the universe because it never stops expanding so i was i had some ideas about the third one which would be just more like mind-blowing ideas about science and spirit and what's happening here and what this what we know about this experience we're having but i kept coming back to their just ideas where did how did i come to these ideas you know what i mean because it's easy to be stuck in your head and and just minds talking to minds you have information you ever be i say this you say this we just trade but there's like what shaped our souls um what were those experiences and i found myself like wait how did i come to see the world the way that i do um what what shaped me and it was the strangest thing because suddenly i was like oh my grandma used to keep cash in her bra which is the first line of the book yeah and i'm suddenly i'm back on the porch with my grandma because we would sit out on her farm on the porch and the wind would blow across the tops of the feet across the corn in the fields and sometimes we would just sit for a while in silence and i realized that was my first experience of the wordlessness of grace when the presence of another person communicates to you that everything's fine even if it isn't i remember just i burst out like in tears like oh sitting on the porch with my grandma like that did something to me and then suddenly that became what was interesting so i just followed it into my the generations before me um yeah so then it became oh that's the new because those tours had giant whiteboards that i would fill in right oh we're the white board like you josh are you ryan like that's the greatest mystery that's as mysterious your interiors are as fascinating as the exteriors of the solar system you know what i mean yeah so it became could i write a book that captured what it's been like to be me in such a way that it was holding a mirror up to you and what it's like to be you because the universal is found in the particulars so you go far enough into the aches and pains and details of your life that's how we all will find ourselves yes that's what happened yeah it was unbelievable to write it you know the first time i met you i remember telling you how you helped me hold place for god essentially and i was so on the fence of like having you even talk about in your book with the woman and her husband who committed suicide that god yeah having that death of the god that you believed in some gods die yeah and that happened to me and i had no idea where to go and um you really helped me hold space for at least possibilities but i bring that up because you did a masterful job of doing this with spirituality it's like uh i'll use the word energy sometimes all the energy in the room or like the energy of a city and every time i say it i cringe a little bit yeah because i'm like you have a woo reflex yeah exactly there's a little reflex and i'm like i don't know another word for it but i'm just feeling something right now but it's r and it's real it is real and i think now i can look at it as a spirituality in a way that energy absolutely yeah and this is the great quandary of the modern world is as soon as you had the birth of scientific materialism which is we can measure this world we can go in a lab and study it which was incredibly important because we have microphones and airports and hospitals and like the modern world was built on this rigorous rationality but the underside of that was it tended to value things that could be empirically measured things you can access with your five senses things you can hold in your hand and so realities of life that can't be accessed in those ways inevitably diminished soul spirit even this phrase people use like woo-woo like i don't know um it's yeah but for thousands of years that's just as real so something can have form like this cup um but something can have zero physical form and be just as real an idea love hope so in some senses we're like children of a system that's so heavily prized one dimension of the human experience the exterior objective and that you can like win that game now in the modern world and know next to nothing about interior subjective what's it like to be ryan aches desires yeah so spirituality has always been the naming of that because it's just as real and you can see people rediscovering this because you have to essentially the rediscovering thing is fascinating because i as soon as i read this there were all kinds of people i thought were the appropriate audience for this but i found them like all over the place like it wasn't a particular demographic right it was like oh i know this guy or gal who has there's always this pendulum that swings right it's like and you talk about this a little bit in the book where where you go from you know uber religious to uber atheist or you know hedonistic to to ascetic right and and it leaves very room very little room for the giant spectrum in between these two poles but to me this book is like it's the room in between which is where all the interesting stuff is yeah like the people will tell you a story like and then i like was was talking to them and i mean we found all this common ground and i mean i'm a whatever and they're from whatever and then they refer like they're shocked because they walked into the situation with these labels about their this and this person's this but then i mean we found out we have all this stuff in common it's like yeah so how about next time just start there yeah we're humans we do have some questions about labels we got some other questions and this is an audience driven show so i should probably dive into some of these questions here we've got one from kat in savannah georgia i was just wondering if you guys tend to use the law of attraction to help manifest minimalism and or any sort of success or whatever it is that you want in your life and how that has been for you rob when i hear kat's question why do i i tense up when i hear two things i hear law of attraction and all of a sudden i and it's my own uh negative response it's the woo-woo radar it's the woo-woo there's something there but then also the word manifest like it's another woo alarm bell for you for whatever reason it is it's nails on a chalkboard for me and it shouldn't be and i should be more open-minded to things like this um because when i hear it i almost don't even know what it means notice is that a question [Laughter] was there a question at the end of that sentence yeah what uh why do i have this allergy there we go allergic to woo-wooiness uh my guess is you have a instinctual reflex against something that seems to take this vast mysterious extraordinarily generative universe and boil it down to one law it actually feels to you too minimalism too simplistic so the impulse in the question is wonderful how you think about things profoundly shapes what they even are so that's why her her question is so powerful is she has come into a way of understanding the power of how you choose to name the experience because that shapes what the experience even is so an example would be uh recently i was talking to this guy who said to me and he was he was lovely he was talking about his own life and he now has a daughter and he's married and he's exploring how he's going to live he's young um businessman and he said you know every generation wants to one-up the generation before it hmm i was like okay first off totally understand the impulse but let me say that word back to you and tell me how your body hears that word one up he's like oh tense it's like yeah one up is what he said uh competition i said fall that competition meaning what he's like oh win or lose oh and then you evaluate yourself whether you want or lose so that phrase sounds wonderful each generation wants to one-up the one before it but what it actually the experience of it is a tense experience of scarcity so there's all of these energies hidden in a statement like that that can just fly right under the radar like oh yeah every generation um so the the power of thinking about how you think about the world is it alerts you to all the ways that you're actually framing your experience in ways that aren't going to take you anywhere you want to go yeah the the language is so powerful you can improve upon that you can even use the word improve upon you could say each generation wants to improve upon the previous and all of a sudden you've give more there you go hand less to unlearn yeah yeah wonderful impulses so underneath the question let's go back to why you threw up in your mouth at the question the truth is there are these extraordinarily subtle shifts in how we view everything so one example was you can view life through a lens of scarcity and lack or you can view life through a lens of abundance and generativity generosity and these are they exist almost so deep in the self that you can't even see them you know i mean they're so close in here but they're actually what you look through the gift of something like law of attraction it simply alerts people to if i am operating from a place of scarcity and lack then i'm going to see everything is competition the goodness that comes to others will always be a threat to me which leads to jealousy and envy and it ultimately shrinks heart and soul if i see the earth and this world believing in is abundant and can provide for all and i'm going to be fine that's going to profoundly shape things how's that yeah look at you he's twitching less well i do think about the language with with my daughter in particular so uh our our the way we end every episode is love people use things because the opposite never works and and the problem is we often say we love something like i love ryan but oh man i love these chairs right and same word for chairs and ryan right and we have a language problem really right and every new chairs can be that awesome and ella always argues with me she's like but i love my robe and i'm like and it made me realize like oh like this is what children do is they love things and they get confused with you know the things that they love and and it's misplaced priorities and all these other things it's because they're children they don't have a fully developed prefrontal cortex and and but we as adults don't we do the same thing i still say i love this chair and i i get attached to to these things i give meaning to things that don't deserve that meaning right well it's interesting because you know if i say i love you versus i love that chair it's too completely different emotions right and and it's interesting how i mean this goes back to the language thing if you're looking at just the language the law of attraction sounds really silly but like when i think of the law of attraction it's it's very emotional for me like it's not like oh if i think i'm gonna make a million dollars it's gonna drop on my lap it's more like uh what would i do with that why do i want a million dollars what am i gonna do with that oh what i really wanna do is i want to be financially free i want to be able to give to others so then i start to focus on that which leads to actions to do that which really even in the movie what is it called the secret the law of attraction movie i mean every single one of those people who they interviewed there was so much action that went behind their law of attraction but that like i feel that though when i see hear the law of attraction it's like i feel the action that comes along with it so yeah i uh yeah you and i kind of disagree on that the love thing um i agree with you and i try to use it that way that we talk about um but if someone says it like i don't let it interrupt their moment that they're experiencing you know i don't know yeah yeah cut ella some slack man cat i'm gonna send you a copy of everything is spiritual uh rob bell's new book it just came out today by the way if you're listening to this the day that this episode came out we have another question from luis in sao paulo brazil how do you guys relate to religion to the lifestyle of minimalism well rob when ryan and i talk about minimalism we're talking about minimalism as a lifestyle in particular i mean there are other forms of minimalism obviously when i talk about donald judd or brad easton ellis and laurie moore um when we talk about minimalism as a lifestyle it's you know living a meaningful life with less trying to figure out the things that truly add value to our life getting rid of that which is superfluous to make room for that which is important and so how do you how do you relate that to religion or spirituality well historically if you think about the word religion in the middle is this l-i-g it comes from the latin the latin is this word root is this lig is this word lagare which means to bind or connect so so that's where ligament comes from because it binds these two things together so if you think about the etymology like the structure of the word religion religion is what holds you together so that that's its intent otherwise life pulls you in a hundred different directions you like disintegrate so religion was always what are the practices or rituals what are the things you do that hold you together so what you all have been doing with this message of minimalism is very religious at its core you're inviting people to be held together by something other than unthinking uncritical consumerism just the accumulation there's more to life than the accumulation of dead objects um so when people talk about religion is a bad thing but then they say but my friend they do that religiously yeah they do that on a regular basis because it helps give coherence and holds them together now the problem in modern culture for many people is religion did the opposite it actually split things apart it created tribes not community yeah yeah yeah so it like collapsed in on itself for many people that was their experience which is fine but it doesn't mean that we won't just find other things to be religious about so the person's like i walk my dog every morning i take a jog training for yeah of course you do yeah i have a meal with my kid every day yeah of course you do there are these things that you do that hold you together they bind you bind you to a sense of larger purpose meaning divinity um binds you to other people yeah yeah so what you all do is actually very religious wow you didn't see that coming no you made me you made me feel good about it well because you know what's interesting is like when we first started this people were like what are you doing starting a cult and i was like no not a cult because because cult leads itself you know because once a cult gets big enough it becomes religion but uh but you know i actually really like what we do because there's no dogmatics to it in religion and the sense that you talked about i can actually own that and be like yeah i i totally there there is a religious thing going on as far as looking at something greater than what's in front of us absolutely this is and it wasn't just well you think about it in terms of religion for many people was a head game what do you believe like you said no dog what do you believe how is your mental furniture arranged that became but historically religion was always a path like how do you live yeah like it was economic it was political it was a way of ordering your life and ordering the world like in the bible over and over again the bible is about how does the world get ordered um if there's a widening gap between rich and poor that's destructive for everybody if you don't live with the earth in the earth in a sustainable way everything falls apart so the question is how does the world get ordered and in some senses what you've done is create a space that raises questions for people about how do you order your world because there are ways of ordering the world that just lead to despair and a sense of empty what is going on here and there are ways that lead you to community and love and connection and all that you guys are way more religious than you realize that is a great tagline minimalism the philosophy on how to order your world i was thinking you're gonna say minimalism we are way more religious i think that's that's number two this is from uh the criticism section on the minimalist wikipedia page um so a few things in here about religion according to the dallas morning news more than a few have ascribed religious underpinnings to the minimalist work but milburn insists the minimalists are not a faith-based business and we don't believe in the law of attraction here's one that rob will appreciate in an article titled your minimalist lifestyle is quasi-religious anti-poor vice magazine condemned the minimalists as quote glowing examples of as asceticism as solution ascribing deeply religious motives to their movement because they are quote a pair of white dudes who travel the world to proclaim the joys of simplicity and just happen to be close friends with evangelical legend rob bell just so evan yeah this is this is what is where is this coming no this is an article that was written about us uh the article goes on to claim yeah blah blah blah anyway um i guess what rob is saying is yeah we the vice is right yeah damn we didn't even know it they knew it before we knew it pretty much pretty much every wisdom tradition had in it some space for uh i was gonna say that's not the right word for living i would call it closer to the earth you generally find these polarities of feasting and fasting sometimes what is needed is a celebration of the abundance of life a big table with lots of food and everybody comes to it yeah sometimes sometimes you need to feast yeah but other times fasting which would be simply going without is how you realign how you awaken um and so you can see anytime somebody parks themselves at one of those two you've missed that sometimes it's time for feasting and sometimes it's time for fasting so so the aesthetic the one who withdraws or the one who intentionally goes with less or without that's always been one of the ways that people found their soul lived with integrity realigned re-centered experienced rebirth so it's funny when the aesthetic is spoken about of derisively because that's like a thousand-year-old human pattern of one of the ways that people have helped check themselves and realign themselves you know what i mean yeah it's just fascinating to see it seen as like sort of trivial or something when yeah the witness of like the cloud of witnesses across history has been yeah sometimes you need to go live in a cave for a bit sometimes you need to give away your stuff that's that's all part of the thing i think any new idea or i mean minimalism isn't a new idea but maybe an an old idea for a new any old idea that appears unfamiliar yeah what's interesting it gets criticized so the the problem now that we have you know especially around 2008 we had this whole collapse is we we realized for the first time like massive amounts of debt we spend 1.2 trillion dollars a year on non-essential goods uh in the united states alone and and so you look at something like that and you realize like oh we're wasting our money which we have to work a lot of time to get to buy things we don't want or need we're going into debt we have this huge problem with over indulgent over consumption and i think around the crash it was a reset it was a crash for people to realize like oh maybe the way that we're living is is wrong some people made some changes around the time ryan and i um we we stumbled across this whole minimalism thing but then over the last decade i think we faced a new problem with social media and and 24-hour news cycles every minute of every day now we're facing this over we're overly distracted as well so not only are we over over consuming stuff but we're over consuming discrete inputs and you know we're we're being bombarded with hundreds of thousands of discrete inputs every single day and what we're saying is you don't have to be an ascetic and go live in a cave but maybe you can look at what what their recipe is and tweeze out a few ingredients and see what's appropriate for your own life yeah yeah maybe like one day a week you don't check your email and for many people that creates a low grade panic but 20 years ago you didn't have emails so a thing that you didn't have like think about that feeling when you misplaced your phone and just what that sends like neurochemically through your body the agitation level of a thing that you didn't use to know existed yeah like a tiny little machine you carry in your pocket you now if you misplace it my whole life is on that phone yeah you start going through the things so this is brand new immediately this is brand new humans haven't ever had this sort of experience that we're having with these machines makes me think about how you brand new you talk about the molecules being brand new and the atoms being brand new at a certain point and uh yeah where is technology going to take us it's like we're in it right now we're in the brand new right now yes yes and we're just now learning like you think about how the algorithms and social media are bent towards the outrageous yeah so this person comments hey i really enjoyed that the algorithm is like whatever this person's like you suck heat center throbbing heat center you know what i mean and then this person piles on i mean the machines are literally tilted towards the outrageous i mean if you if you understood that you could become president [Laughter] wait a minute that the machines are bent in a particular direction so every person who's like how did 2016 happen much better question how aware are you of your role in that because every time you click something outrageous yeah you are reaffirming that the algorithms are bent in the proper direction and that's the the biggest problem with with the advertising model i i appreciate that you don't do advertisements in your podcast and um there are a few other people out there who don't and and the reason we don't is when we want people to support us for the right reasons you know thank thank you to our patreon supporters who who support us and keep us in this podcast space but what what i've realized with the advertising model is it's only about aggregating eyeballs because the more eyeballs that are on your newspaper or tv show or whatever it is the more they can charge for advertising and so they no longer need to add value to an audience they simply need to aggregate or herd an audience to their platform and in doing so they make more revenue well how do you do that you you amp up the the outrage and then of course as you say we are complicit in in the clicking and the viewing and then not turning it off yeah so yeah going back to spirituality spirituality is a heightened awareness of what these forms that we have created are doing to us because spirit animates forms so we are surrounded by these forms and these new forms are shaping us so you can see people waking up to wait these machines and the algorithms are actually doing things to us and we have tremendous power to shape them to resist to form neural pathways there's always an empowerment of they're doing this to us but they don't have to yeah we can set it down we can not click all that it's interesting it makes me think like i look at uh like my dad right now who's like very devout jehovah's witness it's the it's evil in the world it's this evil you know it's satan and his demons and they're affecting the world and i have that also that world died for me too and the way i look at it now is a perfect example is social media we look at it and we say oh man look at all the evil look at what satan's doing with the technology and all this influence but it's us who is doing it as my dad switches to fox news and then he goes to their website and then he looks at all the bad going on he is becoming part of it and it's interesting because the way i look at evil now is like i can take responsibility for my own evil yeah instead of making it a spiritual thing and saying oh there's an entity that's making me do this it's like i can look at it like that's actually coming from here right you don't need to project your shadow onto some external character right you could just own your part in it and take responsibility and grow up absolutely and then when lots of people do that things change yeah ryan what time is it you know what time it is it is time for our lightning round where we answer questions well from your from your text messages you can text your questions and comments to 937-202-4654 yes indeed those texts go to both of our phones because we're a little bit crazy um and we do respond to some people from time to time but we also respond to your questions here on the podcast now rob i don't know this is the lightning round yeah i don't know i think i've been on this podcast twice all i'm going to say is all of my memories are that your lightning rounds are longer than the regular rounds everything we do is steeped in irony okay good yeah yeah i remember last time the lightning round was like this is not a lightning this is like a take a walk around the lake round yeah okay during a lightning storm really yeah it's our lightning storm so rob i don't know if you remember but what we try to do during the lightning round and we fail every time but we um we fail beautifully uh we try to answer questions with a short shareable less than 140 character response but in the real world what we do is monitor on a bit until we get something that is tweetable we've also had a couple days of prep for this so uh sean tweezes out our pithy phrases we call them minimal maxims he puts them in the show notes so the audience can copy and share our our pithy answers on social media ryan we got a question from simba simba is rob bell still a christian [Laughter] rob thought i think he would say i wrote a 300 page book about to answer your question and this literal question he answers in the book which is great yeah um well i mean i'll give you a pithy answer and then maybe we can expand on it labels are useful but not as powerful as everyday actions um yeah doesn't it mean would you maybe answer that question with a question like what do you mean by christian two characters of course that's the pithiest answer ever that is all i did you could tweet of course too and like it would just like people would just like i needed that today especially like the entire west coast is on fire and rob just tweets of course of course often what presents itself as religion is actually a fairly sophisticated egoic structure in which the ego grasps and clings to labels for a sense of safety a sense of identity a sense of division us against them yeah uh a false sense of security about some coming doom or judgment so what's really interesting in the teachings of jesus he's constantly inviting you to the love that doesn't need to cling or grasp because it's been belonged the entire time yeah so litmus test questions um questions that have a hermeneutic of suspicion in them which is um the the world is sliding off a cliff and are you i think you're part of it or are you it's all built it's not built around trust it's not built around a big buoyant sense that the whole thing is headed in some fascinating new direction oh wow it's birthed out of mistrust or distrust in a way so like hermeneutic is how you read something right so a hermetic of suspicion is uh and then you think about for many people for roughly 1400 years in western culture you've had this idea of original sin which is that which is deepest within a human is wrong off broken sinful so no wonder people end up not able to trust their own inner knowing they've been taught that if you look far enough inside of yourself all you'll see is evil and darkness but what's fascinating is the actual tradition begins genesis 1 all human beings bear the divine image that which is deepest within you is good yeah of course you we have tremendous capacities to make a mess of things nobody's fuzzy on this but you can see often this hermeneutic of suspicion that reads are you still what are you what are you i i need you to give me certain words so that i can feel is um rooted in a way of viewing what it means to be human that uh you need labels and things to redeem you as opposed to you you belonged the whole time yeah are you on my team or are you the enemy yeah the underlying question quite often it's always funny when religious people especially people in the jesus tradition their dominant energies are moving away from the very things jesus invites us to be liberated from he comes to liberate us from questions that take us in the direction we don't actually want to be going that aren't freedom joy peace non-violence [Laughter] i love the uh you talked about the story in your book of the farmer who like hired the workers and they showed up at different times during the day but they all get paid the same the same and uh that doesn't make any sense you cannot divide the infinite and there's no pun he doesn't and jesus doesn't say and here's the punch line right he just goes on right and uh there's also a story that you don't talk about in your book it reminded me of the guy who like dropped everything when he found the pearl yeah and i'm like and every time i read that story i'm like this makes no sense to me like it has many different meanings i guess i've heard it explained different ways but ultimately um what that helped me do that part in your book is start to be comfortable with not understanding things and you start off with the quantum physics how you know there's basically chaos going on like unexplained chaos and then you you know there's a macro view of it of like well we have unexplained chaos that goes on in the world and uh and i think religion helps people find an answer to all that chaos sure and helps them organize it yeah yeah holds it together but the secret is and you you talk about this with you know the buddha and jesus and all the priests and the monks they got this smile on their face because they get it they're like yeah there's a lot of stuff going on yeah blessed is the one who's in on the joke yeah everybody shows up at different times and gets paid the same amount yeah yeah yeah all right before we get into our listener tips and our added value segment today it looks like we have a bunch more surprise questions this week yes indeed questions like does rob bell believe in an afterlife also um when is the best time to move on from a good situation plus we've got questions about the death of god we've got questions about whether prayer is useful also questions about the problems with fundamentalism and a million more questions for rob bell and the minimalists and if you want to hear all that subscribe to our maximal episodes on the minimalist private podcast it's a completely separate podcast and it's the most honest way for the minimalists to earn an income because we don't believe in ads by the way if you're not a private podcast subscriber you are literally missing two-thirds of our show we do this minimal episode but then every week we have that maximal episode ryan what is a good reason if someone who has never listened to and we'd want to say you know what try this out for three weeks see if it's right for you it's just two bucks but what's the what's a compelling reason to at least try it out because there's only like 500 spots left [Laughter] no man i mean this is where we get to talk about things that we normally wouldn't talk about so for example with today with rob we get to talk about the afterlife we get to talk about the death of god we although that might have came up a little bit in the minimal episode but there are ideas and things that we haven't quite fleshed out that we get to flesh out on these private episodes with a smaller audience and i think rob actually is a really good example of that today yes indeed so if you want to check that out theminimalists.com support just try it out for a few weeks we think it'll add immense value to your life if it doesn't of course just walk away from it you can still listen to these minimal episodes whenever you'd like but the minimalists.com support when you subscribe you'll get a personal link so that our private podcast plays in your favorite podcast app ryan what else you got for us here are some voicemail comments and tips from our listeners check them out hi my name is jeanette and i'm from los angeles and this message is for the person that was on beco the becoming episode asking about what to do with religious items that she wants to get rid of but she doesn't want to just throw in the trash the there are a lot of hospitals catholic hospitals that have gift shops and they would probably be happy to have a donation of a cross like hers that she could donate and somebody else would be happy to have hi josh and ryan this is heather from san diego and i have a tip for beth bev asked for advice about dealing with beauty products as a minimalist i've been able to pare down my product collection quite a lot since i started my minimalism journey about a year ago one thing that has helped me so much is joining the project pan community this is a community on the internet you can just search for project pan on youtube and instagram that makes games and challenges out of using up your makeup everyone is very supportive people get really excited when they hit pan on products and eventually use them up doing project pants has taught me how long it takes to use up products and help me to buy a lot less being aware of expiration dates of makeup also helps to pare down your collection knowing that a foundation only has a year-long shelf life and takes about six months or more to use up will prevent you from buying or owning more than two at a time i know ryan mentioned the 2020 rule which doesn't always work especially if you don't own only drugstore makeup products most makeup does cost more than twenty dollars however the 90-90 rule works pretty well for some makeup products when considering their expiration date remember that open tubes of mascara should be thrown out after three months every time you use it more bacteria gets into the product which is pretty dangerous considering how close the wand gets to your eye also think about how you like to use makeup do you like to keep it simple or do you like to have choices if you like that choices there are so many versatile products on the market that many people already have in their collections consider rotating through your eyeshadow palettes to doing a one month one palette challenge to give your older palettes some love you can do this with lip products too challenge yourself to wear a different shade every day for a week finally beth you mentioned wanting to purchase more ethically i recommend looking into the cruelty-free movement cruelty-free kitty and logical harmony are great resources online best of luck on your journey all right y'all thanks again to rob bell for joining us today check out his new book it is the book that really we've been waiting for him to write it's called everything is spiritual i'll hold it up if you're watching on youtube uh you can check it out audiobook ebook print book it comes out today the day this podcast comes out september 15th 2020. everything is spiritual by rob bell for added value this week it's something else by rob bell since he's been here and uh something that i got immense value from sean and i podcast sean and i went uh bex was out of town and rob was giving this talk when was that 2018 sean 2019 early 2019 maybe it was in the old world yeah it was and so it was early 2019 and so sean was my date for this robel event uh he was practicing this talk called an introduction to joy which is a phenomenal title by the way and he practiced his talk it was great the live event was one it was like a stand-up comedy show but it was also like a uh inspirational ted talk and it was everything and none of that it's hard to even label what it was although i can tell you that time just sort of faded away when we were going through it and i came out of it and i i really had some key takeaways i don't want to ruin it for you so i encourage you to check it out it's free it's on youtube it's called an introduction to joy because he took that talk all around the country and then he came back to la and filmed it uh it was andrew morgan actually directed it he was on our podcast with rob last time with the documentary he did and so it is filmed in this theater but it is hilarious you'll want to share it with your friends and family as soon as i showed it to bex she was sending it off to her parents you've got to see this and they were sending it off to other people this thing is really going to take off check it out it's called an introduction to joy it's on youtube we'll put a link to that in the show notes and real quick for right here right now here's one thing that's going on in the life of the minimalist ryan and i have a little side project we talk about from time to time it's called minimalism life the website is minimalism.life you can follow minimalism life on instagram minimalism life or on twitter at minimalism on twitter and what we what we've done is we partnered with our friend carl from minimalissimo and our friend alberto from five style and then us the minimalists and also a team of writers where we what we try to share is the best of minimalist travel the best of minimalist design so travels five style design is carl and how dare his website be more better than ours more better more better i like this how to write more better.com no and so minimalism.life is this place where we curate the minimalist well-being minimalist travel minimalist uh design minimalist aesthetics the instagram account is beautiful but we also try to do is it's not just minimalism we're trying to add value to your life so we have a team of writers who right there as well you can subscribe to the newsletter also minimalism life has published its first book i've got an essay in there and a bunch of other writers have an essay in there so you can check it out it's just called inside minimalism you're welcome to check that out we'll put a link to that in the show notes or you can just go to minimalism.life you can check it out what i like about this side project is ryan i think you and i have figured this out over the years whenever we work on things with people together there's it's more difficult you don't get there as quickly so to speak but you accomplish something greater where if you and i just started minimalism life on our own hey let's start a little side project you know it wouldn't be nearly as good as what it is now no because we do the minimalist well-being thing but if you and i were trying to do minimalist design and uh highlighting architecture like we could learn about that yeah but we have experts in that area that we've partnered up with and so what we have is this beautiful side project and within there you can check out inside minimalism you can check out the free wallpapers over there as well some minimalist wallpapers for your phone and desktop minimalism.life you can follow the minimalists on facebook twitter and instagram at the minimalist come to one of our live podcast shows visit theminimalists.com tour to find a city near you by the way rob is doing a virtual tour for his book everything is spiritual find that at rob bell.com it's really fascinating model what he's doing is he's going to like a dozen cities cincinnati and brooklyn and and la and uh a bunch of other places see uh seattle but he's not going there he's gonna be in his front yard doing these events with people who he he's gonna have certain people he really admires read the book and he's going to do the event with them to sort of talk about what they got from the book and and so this is going to happen in a bunch of different cities but the good news is you don't have to be in seattle to go to that seattle stop where you don't be in brooklyn to go to the brooklyn stop you can be at home so it's coming to a computer screen near you it actually starts the day this episode comes out robbell.com for details on that you can comment on this episode at youtube.com the minimalist if you want our show notes in your inbox sign up for our email list over at theminimalists.com you'll also receive our simple sunday emails and if you have a question comment or minimalism tip for our podcast email a voice memo to podcast at theminimalists.com and if you leave here today with one message we hope it's this love people and use things because the opposite never works thanks for listening y'all see you next time every little thing you think that you need every little thing you think that you need every little thing that's just feeding your greed oh i bet that you'll be fine without it

Channel: The Minimalists Podcast

Views: 20,300

Rating: 4.8865786 out of 5

Keywords: the minimalists, the minimalists podcast, health & wellness, podcast, minimalists, minimalism, minimal, less, Ryan Nicodemus, Joshua Fields Millburn, JFM, 30 day mins game, 90 90 rule, stuff, clutter, declutter, meaningful life

Id: ytKDjokGp80

Length: 52min 12sec (3132 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020