Andy Johns: disagreement

Transcript context

…I want to close the loop on these four steps that you shared, and the one we haven't talked about yet is the last one, which is building compassion towards others. How do you go about that just broadly? I know we're not going to solve that problem for people in the podcast. For me, my experience was that it happened automatically. When you do the first three, it is the result. It's the thing that comes out of step number three itself because, again, when you dig deep enough and you keep searching for the truth, you're like Captain Ahab going down with the white whale in Moby Dick. That is what that book is about. It's not about a fisherman going after a whale. This is the author himself through a story talking about his own journey of emotional and spiritual liberation. There are many people that would, experts and historians that might disagree with that, and I would disagree with them that it's a story of seeking the truth at all costs to liberate oneself, including being willing to die for that whale, metaphorically, because at the end of the book, they don't really reveal. Did Ahab actually go down with the whale and never come back? Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. So when you have suffered enough and the search for the truth becomes the only thing that matters and that truth leads you to understanding that, "It's okay. I can accept myself for who I am and it's not all my fault," when that has been done in earnest and when you feel those moments of love for yourself, it suddenly changes how you see everybody else. For me, step four was the easiest because it just happened. It happened after eight years, nine years of my own on and off mental health journey, but it finally happened. People who are listening to this say they're a VP of Product and they're like, "I don't want to become a spiritual teacher. I want to stay on this path. I want to have a successful career. I want to continue to make a bunch of money." How often do you find there's a path to stay on that path with a rejiggering of how you see the world or does it, if you're suffering enough, does it almost always lead to something completely different in your experience?…

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