Spirit in Action
Drunk With Wonder - Steve Ryals
A visit with Steve Ryals, author of Drunk With Wonder: Awakening to the God Within, former speed freak and alcoholic, and activist with Challenge Day.
Music featured in this program:
How Could Anyone Ever Tell You - Peaceful Women
- Broadcast on:
- 18 Jan 2008
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - My guest today for Spirit in Action is Steve Riles, author of Drunk with Wonder, a wakening to the God within. He's got a powerful personal story of his near death encounter with drugs, his decades of alcohol use, but most importantly, what led him out of these addictions. He's an active advocate of challenge day and circles of change and an inspirational personal teacher. And he joins us today from his home in California. Steve, thanks so much for joining me today for Spirit in Action. - You're welcome Mark, it's great to be with you. - Tell me a little bit about where you're sitting over there in California. - I'm sitting in a pan-built home on 40 acres in the mountains of Mendocino County, West of Ukiah. Clear day, which is not today. I can see a strip of ocean to the west for about 20 air miles west of the ocean. And my beloved wife Joanne and I go out to the coast quite a lot. We have our spiritual community, the religious science community out on the coast and just love going out there. - Let me see, you're off the grid, aren't you? - Yes, as a matter of fact, we are. We're operating right now on battery power and I have a hydro running. Our pond is full and so hydro is running. At the moment, we're running on rain power, essentially. - In your book Drunk with Wonder, you talk about something like 15 years of working with the spiritual insights, which are the real substance of this book. Is that some kind of phase in your life that began some 15, 16, 17 years ago? - Yes, it's a particular phase that started in 1991. That was a seminal year for me. I mean, I was raised in the Unitarian church and had some kind of a spiritual orientation, essentially all my life. Although in the '60s, I was very down, very down on organized religion and thought it contributed a lot to many of those religions contributed a lot to war instead of peace. I've been someone who's a vigorous proponent of peace all my life. I was a student in Riverside, California and I was counseling other young men against the draft and I did my own little bit to help get the peace and freedom party on the ballot in California and to help make it possible for 18 year olds to vote whether they actually wanted to go to war or not, things like that. So that's been a life for me. Most of my life, I'm 58 now. - I think it's really important to go back to those foundational experiences of your teens when you're just reaching adulthood. You start out the book with something that happened when you were 17. That was a seminal step in your consciousness racing. Could you outline that experience for our listeners in particular your experience with drugs and coming back from the edge? - Sure, Mark. Well, like many people, I suppose, being raised in the '50s and in the '60s, my parents who loved me very much and all of my brothers were still quite rigid in many ways and quite stern and they expressed their rage and their disapproval physically and emotionally. And I did not take well to that. I found myself depressed and suicidal and around the time of my 16th birthday, I discovered drugs in the form of marijuana. Got very confused around feeling good. I realized I had never felt very good or hadn't very often felt very good in my life 'cause I've spent so much of it terrified. And so when I started getting high, I thought, "Oh, this is great, this is great." So I coincided with starting with the whole hippie thing and being against the war and being pro-civil rights and as people who know that time are aware, it was a very heady time to be on the planet, be in this country. So I just took off with that. I found myself making friends and, of course, lovers and so on and I dove head first into the music and into the culture. You know, looking back on it now, literally 40 years later, I think what I was thinking at some level was this was the way I was gonna kill myself. And literally because I was suicidal, I had already attempted suicide. I didn't see any way to justify my father, his rage and his disapproval. And I just didn't wanna be who he wanted me to be. And I couldn't square that really strong wish on his part for me to show up in a certain way, like a straight businessman, with my own desire to be a writer. 'Cause I'd known I was gonna be a writer, wanted to be a writer on the age of six. Anyhow, I took off into this whole world and I wound up leaving home. Found myself in San Francisco in Haidashbury, Easter Sunday, and there was a huge peace march that day. My memory is not clear enough how I got into this old Victorian crash pad, but I found myself in this place when these guys were sitting around shooting, methodoring, quite specifically, speed, which is still a scourge, of course, in many parts of the country, including here. And I was repulsed by it at first. I actually, I actually was physically ill, I threw up. I thought that was so revolting and scary and over the top, crazy. And for whatever reason, by later that afternoon, I tried it myself. I think it was because I wanted to show I was tough and that to me was showing I was tough. If I could shoot drugs that nobody would think I was a wuss. Believe me, I have looked back at that a thousand times and thought, what could I have been thinking? And of course, I don't think I was really thinking at all. So anyhow, I did it. It was an incredibly intense rush and I kind of fell into that lifestyle, went in and out of what they called speedruns for the next year. Started shooting LSD, not just dropping it but shooting it. And other things that don't try this at home, kids, kind of adventures and wound up in this crash pad out in Riverside, California, east of L.A. I had lost a bunch of friends and I was down to 135 pounds and my gums were rotting. Your typical speed stuff. And that was also chain smoking cigarettes and on and on and on and on. And this one night, I shot a bunch of speed and it was really too much and I was over amping is what it was called, over amping. Which meant I had tunnel vision and 200 beat a minute pulse and was on the edge of blacking out from the intensity of the rush. And it was right at the edge of killing myself. And a dear friend of mine, Carl Happy walked in the room for a visit. I didn't know he was coming or if I did, I had forgotten. And so it was kind of a surprise to happy walk in the room. I was very embarrassed and ashamed of the condition I was in. And he got very angry with me because he was seeing a dear friend of his killing himself. And so he grabbed some LSD. It was what was known in the jargon of the time as an eight-way purple Ozzly, which meant that eight people could get high on it and shoved it in my mouth and made me swallow it. And people say, oh, that's awful and whatever. He thought he was trying to save my life because he wanted me to find some way to get a perspective on myself that might help me decide whether I wanted to live or die. Really. And then he just stormed out. So I was just-- I just fell awful for a second and then the drugs took over again. And I forgot all about him even being there. And the next thing I remember clearly is that I felt my consciousness bumping along the ceiling like a helium balloon. And I kind of rolled over and looked down at myself, my body. Clear as a bell that it was an out of body experience. And I realized that I was indeed killing myself, that I was right at that cusp, that nexus point of saying, OK, you know, just keep doing what you're doing. You're going to be dead within hours of days. Maybe one more big hit will do it. And I kind of a voice said, well, is that what you going to do? I said, you got a choice here. And in that moment, I said, you know what? I think I want to live. I think I want to see what's coming. I can always die and always kill myself. Maybe something better will come. So I came down from that experience. And I called my parents. And the next day, I moved home. I moved out of that crash pad, just abandoned that whole world. Never took speed again. I moved back home and started coming around. I was going through a court procedure-- this was-- you know, he kind of understand the perspective of this day, that what was going on. This happened within days of Martin Luther King being assassinated. And that was part of my sense of absolute bleakness and torment and feeling like the powers that be were going to keep doing the Vietnam War and keep drafting us. And there was-- you know, it felt really powerless. And when he was killed, it was like a body blow to millions of us, certainly, to me. Anyhow, so he had been killed. I was on this speed trip. I got on this acid, decided that I wanted to live, moved home. And within two or three weeks of moving home, this friend, who had-- as far as I'm concerned, saved my life by doing what he did, was killed in a motorcycle accident. A few weeks later, the night of the California primary of 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot dead. And so in a less than 60-day period, I had these three huge experiences that changed my life completely. I was so devastated by my friend's death. I was also devastated by these other two deaths. And what happened that summer was that my friend Carl started visiting me in my dreams. I mean, absolutely, this is Carl. I'd wake up from the dream, and I was absolutely convinced that I'd been with him, absolutely sure. And we talked about his death, and we talked about what he was up to, and he talked about how beyond perfect it was to be where he was, and not to worry, and not to mourn, and so on and so forth, not to be down, because there was nothing bad in any way that was going on for him. And that he recommended that I start celebrating life. So that was a huge-- I had been an atheist for several years. I was so down on the Christian, and a grandmother was an evangelical Christian, and tried scaring me into believing in Jesus and so on. And I reacted very negatively to that. I was being raised in the Unitarian Church by my parents, and I just got very secular and very humanistic. But I just couldn't imagine a spirit that could-- just like a lot of people couldn't imagine a supreme being who would allow this planet to be, and could allow this suffering and all this stuff. And it took me many years to come to some kind of understanding of how it might be that we were here, and there would still be an infinitely loving presence that was the creator of all. And anyhow, that's another conversation. So that was my early part of 1968. I mean, by June, all of that had happened, and I had pulled out of the speed stuff. But I was still using drugs. I was still smoking cigarettes. I discovered alcohol a couple of months after Carl died. I hadn't really been into it before then. But got into cold beer and learned very quickly that alcohol is an incredibly potent numbing agent. No wonder it's so rampant in our culture. With so many unhappy people, you do some drinking, and you don't remember your name, let alone that you're unhappy. So I went off into that world. Before we go too much further in your experience, I want to probe a bit the nature of your near-death experience and what led you back. Was it-- words kind of fail me. I guess what I want to ask is, was it a spiritual experience? I mean, you talk about Carl's attempt to shock you back. You're out of body experience, the dream encounters with Carl, the assurance of the loving all presence. But how did you experience that loving all presence in Carl's and other's deaths, and in the turmoil that was surrounding you? I didn't so much get it at the time, Mark. But starting in 1991, an awareness of a higher consciousness within me became more apparent in my life. And I began to look at my life through that lens. And I could say, oh, oh, when this happened, my higher self was looking out for me. Oh, when I went through this, that's why I was-- that's why I lived through that. That's how I lived through that. Again, part of it is looking back on my life and seeing so many times when a spiritual presence, a very profound, profoundly loving, profoundly kind, presence was always available and is always available. And through my years since 1991, I've come to understand and believe deeply that this presence is available to everyone. There isn't anyone anywhere who is ultimately cut off or would be completely unable to connect with this presence that they so chose. I take it you went through a significant involvement with drug and maybe still continuing with smoking? Yeah, I went on and on. I mean, I quit smoking cigarettes in 1972, the beginning of my senior year at UC Berkeley. But I continued to drink and gradually got farther lost in it. Until 2001, I'm just near my seventh anniversary of stopping the use of alcohol completely. So that didn't happen previous to the 1991 experience that you had? No, I tell you, Mark, I was like to use an analogy. Most people are familiar with it, kind of a jekyll and hide. I got more and more involved with workshops and reading books and having all of these different experiences. And I would be a drug and alcohol free during these experiences. And then I would come home from a weekend at a workshop and would just immediately start drinking and smoking dope again. And I wondered about it myself at the time. Why am I doing this? What is going on? And despair the number of times that I just felt I was in the grip of this addiction, that it was outside of my control. I noticed from my own reading and talking to many people that many people feel this way. And so it really feels like grace, in some level, that I finally begin to deeply understand that addictions are symptoms. All addictions, in my experience, are symptoms of a larger issue. At least every time I've ever spoken to anybody about this, and they've been willing to drop the water line and get real with me, the answer is always the same. And that answer is always that there are buried emotions, uncelled feelings that people have been unwilling, unable, too terrified to deal with. Or just did not have the tool sets to deal with these feelings. And so they pack them away, bury them under drugs and alcohol, under overwork. You can just name almost anything. And people become experts at using whatever to not feel their feelings. Trying to stop an addiction without dealing with this underlying issue is like playing whack-a-mole. It just, you know, a deal with this addiction and another one pops up. Deal with this addiction and another one pops up. And the reason why this is so important to me, and if I can see if I can bring this into the context of what I understand of your show spirit in action, is that until we can really get a handle on and come to some compassionate appreciation for all of who we are and deal with some of these emotional blockages, it's pretty challenging to step out into the world as spirit in action, being able to make a difference. And so my little piece, my little niche, what I feel as though I came here to do this time, is to support people in getting a larger perspective about what's going on and that they are really at choice. They really have a choice about the lives they wish to live and the stories they wish to tell themselves about their experiences. Until they realize they have that choice, they're being run by or at the effect of the emotional traumas they've experienced in their lives and the stories they've made up to make sense of that emotional turmoil. Does that make sense to you? >> It does and it helps that I've read your book, Drunk with Wonder, so I understand completely where you're coming from and it does make sense. What I'm wondering is, is this understanding of being able to make choices of how we create our own story? Is this something you have to wait until you're 50 to get a perspective on or could you have had it say back when you were 17, instead of being an atheist who was disconnected from the higher self, the wisdom that you could have had access to, could that have happened earlier? And are you working with young people who are experiencing that? >> Could it have happened? Probably not to me unless I had been introduced to this kind of understanding or awareness, this perspective back then. I was given pieces of it, but the emotional component was almost completely missing. I mean, I was in therapy by the time I was 18. It's one of the first things my parents did when I moved back home if I got into therapy. And it was helpful on some levels, but over the years I came to understand that from my perspective, most conventional therapy is really designed to help people cope with their dysfunction, to cope with the pathology that they live with these emotional traumas. It's not really designed to help us move completely beyond our stories of being a victim and being at the effect of our parents or at the effect of government or the church or, you know, fill in the blank, you know, I'm wounded, therefore I am. I'm a minority or I'm a woman or I'm an old fat bald guy, therefore I'm a victim. As long as we're running at that level of consciousness, we are pretty helpless or it seems as though we're pretty helpless to effect change in the world. And I am all about creating a world where every single being feels safe and loved and celebrated, which brings me to the part of your question about am I working with young people? Yes, I work with an organization, have worked as a volunteer, paid staffer for a while for an organization called Challenge Day, and they've been on Oprah, Richney Vaughn, or the founders, and dear friends, and they touch the lives. Now their organization touches the lives of tens of thousands of young people a year, all across the United States and Canada. And it's all about emotional literacy. Daniel Goldman wrote a wonderful book about emotional literacy and he's written some other books since. I can't recommend it highly enough. We're visiting today with Steve Riles, author of Drunk with Wonder, Awakening to the God Within. This is Spirit in Action, seeking out the roots and fruits of people working to heal the world and its inhabitants. I'm Mark Helpsmeet, your host, and you can check this program in links and a lot more out at our website northernspiritradio.org, including links to Steve Riles' book. Steve is also a dedicated proponent of Challenge Day. Steve, what do you actually do as part of this Challenge Day? How is it set up? Challenge Day goes into high schools and middle schools all over the country with a lot of planning and a lot of work. They have leaders that they very carefully train. I'm not one of those leaders. I'm an adult volunteer in our community here and our little circle of change, the Mendocino County, Lake County Circle of Change, is helping to get Challenge Days into most of the high schools in Mendocino and Lake County. And I'll be volunteering at 1 or 2 next week, as a matter of fact. It was at 1 last month. And so the idea is that we go into a school with up to 100 youth and 20 or 30 adult volunteers. We just had one in Lower Lake High School where there was the police chief in the probation department and teachers and parents as well as all kinds of youth came. And it was incredible. And what we do is we present a day full of activities and games and exercises designed to help people break free of their clicks and their stereotypes of other people. And to see that in many, many ways, people are much more alike than different. And that guy in that click over there, who you won't have anything to do with because you're a skater and they're a punk or whatever it might be. And you have all these stories developed. You realize that, oh, golly, he's got a problem with his alcohol and his family as well. And he's lost somebody that he loved very much to cancer or whatever it might be. We sit in terror of being seen as who we really are because we've been taught that the people take opportunities to attack when we're vulnerable and open. And so we tend to sit in our little clicks and our comfort zones and are terrified to reach out and make a difference. And so what we do is going into public schools is to show everyone who is interested the possibility of living life completely differently. Is there a theological, spiritual, religious background or framework that's part of Challenge Day's conceptualization? Not specifically. You realize, Mark, that this is going into public schools and there's a very strong, at least in theory, separation of church and state. What tends to happen in conservative areas is that evangelical Christian groups get very scared of what we're doing because we're promoting not just tolerance, but celebration of diversity. So we want every individual to be respected, honored and celebrated for who they are, whether they are gay or lesbian or black or Hispanic or Asian or whatever. We would hope that they would choose to feel good about themselves no matter what their orientation is. And we have a number of Christians who work for our organization. You know, if you went to one of our three-day workshops, you might see a Christian have an opening prayer in the morning and have someone who's in a vow opaque and closes it to the end of the day. The idea is not to propose or insist that one particular belief system is right, but simply the celebration of every possible belief system that supports and promotes peace and tolerance and diversity. Actually, my first reaction was not that the parents were going to be the stick in the muds about Challenge Day. I was thinking that there was going to be a lot of young folks out there saying, hey, you want us to do this so that we don't have the same fun that you had. So we don't have fun in the way like we would like to have, experimenting with drinking, with drugs, or just doing whatever we're into ourselves, our sports, our biking or whatever. You want to tear us away from our focus. Do you get that kind of reaction from kids? Not really, because we're not telling people what not to do. We're suggesting that they take a good look at why they're doing what they're doing, and is that really working for them? I mean, we highly encourage people, if they're into sports, be into sports. We have our personal beliefs, and then we are, how can I love unconditionally? We've had people who've been very strong supporters of Challenge Days as youth elect to go into the military, elect to become police officers. I mean, I could have my own story about that, and I do, but that's none of their business. What I think, it's not my job to try to make them wrong and try to fix them. My job is to love them unconditionally, and through my example, hopefully inspire more love in the world. But it doesn't happen by making other people wrong. So their whole point is to move away from that whole mindset of, you know, this group is doing it right, and all these other groups are doing it wrong. So we have very, you know, a dear friend is a very devoted Christian, and she's running a circle of change up in Washington State. And she's doing a fabulous job, and she's, this isn't about whether you have a religion or not, and if you do, what it is. It's about loving one another, starting with loving yourself. One of the issues I know we run into, and you just crystallize something for me as you were speaking, for some people in their agendas, they need other people to react, not from love, but from fear, and that gives the manipulators more power or control. So even though internally it makes more sense to live from love, the other people out there don't want some people to live from love, because that would take away their control. - Does that make sense to you what I just said? - It makes complete sense, Mark. I couldn't agree more that that's the way of it in the world, that, you know, many thousands of years ago, some people figured out that if you scared the holy living, whatever, out of people, that that would encourage them to feel separate and alone. And then it was, it's pretty easy to manipulate people when they feel separated and alone and scared. I see it in a youth, and if you read my book, you know that I devote a significant amount of it just to the way that advertising and marketing in our culture plays into this idea, that we're not good enough as we are. By birthright, I maintain that we have all of the beauty and joy and divinity of God as God inside of us, that that's our birthright, that we don't need a special car or a special kind of clothing or to be recognized as pretty in some vacuous, insipid, outer way, that our true beauty and our true worth comes from the character of our hearts. It's not a new story, of course, in a sense that's the same old thing, is we live in a culture, we live in a country where fear has been, is on steroids. And that has resulted in some, from many people's perspective, and I live in a very progressive part of the world, a lot of really insane behavior. And I want to back up from just making the insane behavior wrong and look at its origins and see that those origins, even though they come across as angry and domineering and forceful, those people are also very scared and that we live in a fear-based culture and that to flip a fear-based culture into a love-based culture is no overnight feat that it's gonna take all of us giving it everything we have to make a difference in the world, just like Gandhi talked about. Be the change you wish to see. Be it. So I'm doing what I can to be it by working with Challenge Day and getting this program into the schools here. Does it reach every kid? No, it does not. We still have kids committing suicide in our schools. We also have kids who said they would have committed suicide if they hadn't been through the program. And we have a Chinese girl who came over when she was 13, knowing no English and happened to get involved through my wife's teacher at the time and happened to become friends. And at 20, she's now the president of the student body at our local junior college and still comes to our Challenge Day meetings. I know I can make a difference. I know I do make a difference. And so instead of spending my life and I spent some of my life completely in overwhelm about how huge the problems seemed and how intractable. They still seem huge and they still seem intractable in some ways. And yet, as I've gotten older, I realized that conflicts that seemed like they were gonna go on forever can resolve. But we have to be able to hold it in our hearts and in our intention that it's possible that it can be resolved. I think at Northern Ireland, for example. And it seemed like they were gonna be killing each other and bombing each other forever. And now there's a unity government. I believe in my heart that the same thing as possible for the Israelis and the Palestinians, for example. - What you're talking about, you mentioned the word before grace, I would use the word perhaps miracle, what you're talking about with Challenge Day. And even though it's not religious, spiritual language that you're using, you're talking about some having some kind of view that at least in my words is at least spiritual, that it transforms the way that you see what is possible and gives you a way to extend what is possible. You mentioned that back when you were 17, you were an atheist. And I presume that you aren't an atheist now, especially since the name of your book is Drunk with Wonder, awakening to the God within. Is there some crucial step, a crucial understanding, which I think has to be called a spiritual understanding, that is a necessary step to achieving what you're aiming at? - I don't think that it is necessary to have a belief in spirit in order to make a difference in the world. I know a number of secular humanists who are very passionate about peace. I've taken a long look at science. I'm fascinated by science. I'm particularly fascinated, as you probably know, from the book in quantum physics and cosmology. And the latest epigenetic information about DNA and how our physical beings are altered in real time by our environment. I mean, all this stuff is just fascinating. I go on and on about that. I've been interested all my life in being part of radically changing this world from being fear-based and war-based and scarcity-based to being love-based and abundance-based and peace-based. And I have devoted much of my life to understanding the is-ness, as I call it in the book, of what's going on and looking for solutions, looking for ways to do it differently. I can only report that in my own life, and I came down to it and I looked at the universe and I looked at our understanding of our planet and the feedback loops that are built in and the laws of physics and the way the laws of physics make life not only possible, but in my belief. And I'm sure we're going to be born, this is going to be born out more and more, that life is everywhere. Life is inevitable. You know, ten years ago, Mark, scientists were still saying, "Well, we're not sure if there are really "many other planets elsewhere in the universe." My attitude was, "Are you kidding?" But because they couldn't physically see them, you know, they were saying, "Well, I don't know." Now, of course, we're finding them just about every day and we're going to put more powerful instruments out and they're going to find many more. And we are going to find Earth-like planets. And we are going to find Earth-like planets with life on them. It's just, that's what's going to happen. So in an infinite loving universe, we've got this gift of life from an infinitely loving heart. I believe that the laws of physics make life inevitable. So in this very grand scale of, we can make a choice about whether we think the universe and therefore ourselves and life on this planet is random or whether there's some intelligence behind it. People can say, "Well, you're talking about intelligent design "and I'm, yes, at some level, I believe the laws of physics "are in essence an intelligent design." No, I don't think we're only 6,000 years old and on that kind of stuff. I'm quite happy with the way our understanding of evolution and so on. But I also, from a very, very high perspective, where there is no time, as we can understand it or appreciate it, setting in motion a universe like ours with the laws of physics that make life inevitable, that's the ultimate unconditional gift of love. It's life itself. And then as life wakes up to being alive, we get to make choices about what we want to do with it or how we want to be with it or how we want to celebrate it, et cetera. - I agree with you. Love is the fundamental. It's the glue, the center. It's the generative point of the universe. You and I are on the same page. I've also heard it argued. And as a scientist, I've taught physics and other math and science courses at college level, for instance, as a scientist, I've had to consider the other arguments and theories. And one of the ideas I've had to sit with is to answer the question, is the highest truth that what succeeds wins or might say might makes right or in terms of evolution, survival of the fittest or natural selection? Is that the highest truth or principle, that that which succeeds and persists is therefore the truth of the universe? That might be another version of God, if you will, as opposed to the spiritual loving God at the center of the universe. How does that compare or contrast with the loving God as the ultimate truth? - Well, now let's see. If I've got the name correctly, I think it's Richard Dawkins is a vociferous proponent of that viewpoint, that in essence, we got here randomly. We got here through natural selection. It just the universe happened for no reason to show up with the laws of physics the way they are. And life happened for no reason to come to earth and go through its evolutionary process. And ultimately, how can I know whether that's so or not? I thought for years that was so. And what I've come to feel in my heart as I have matured and as I have gone through so many workshops and spent so much time with people and deeply examined in decades of meditation and writing and so on, my own heart, I have come to the conclusion for me that the universe is not random. Can I prove it to you? I can't. That would be absurd to try. It seems to me that by stacking up the statistics and the understanding of what's going on on our planet, the whole Gaia hypothesis, flovelock and so on, the idea that this planet has been in an essential equilibrium for hundreds of millions of years and that that equilibrium supports life, where you probably know all of this. I don't know how many of your listeners do, but the idea if we had 1% more oxygen in our atmosphere than we do would be very hard to put fires out. If we had 1% less oxygen in our atmosphere than we do, it would be very hard to start fires, et cetera, et cetera. There are just so many different pieces of this that we can measure, that we can see objectively. This is the way of it, that the idea that the entire thing is set up completely randomly seems more far-fetched than that there was some mindfulness, if you will, in creating this stage. And I know I'm making it up, I know we're all making it up, and this is just the way I choose to make it up. I think there's a proof that we can each give to ourselves basically as a thought experiment, like Einstein used to do, if you accept as your premise that it's all mechanics, that there's no intelligence to the universe, that life is random, survival of the fittest, interaction of molecules, atoms, chemicals, enzymes, that there's no purpose behind it. If you do this thought experiment and look at it personally, all the way down to your core, and I did this experiment and I came to the NUB, the fundamental alternative, that if I accept that it's all mechanical in the universe, then nothing makes sense, that there is no real value of alternatives, that a chemical reaction does or doesn't take place, and that there's certainly no ultimate, no ethical, no moral imperative in our choices, only a functional outcome. I don't know if I'm making this clear. So there's no important reason for me to continue to live at all. I might feel like it mattered, but that would just be a functional attitude for evolution, but I don't accept that at the base. I do believe that love and meaning do exist and do matter, and that's incompatible with the universe's all mechanics, not intelligence. So when I confronted that and I decided which way I couldn't go, a number of other values and understandings came out of that, and this was a logical and scientific understanding, I think a lot of people believe that when you get involved with something spiritual, you just give up your thinking mind, and clearly from this book, Drunk with Wonder, you don't give up your thinking mind. I wanna come back to the book, Drunk with Wonder, and I wanna let people know they can check it out on the web at drunkwithwonder.com. This book is a kind of extended socratic instruction that you, Steve, are receiving from your higher self. Tell me about the dynamics of how this book came about and where this wisdom came from. - The wisdom is a great question, and so much fun to play with. I first became really conscious that this wisdom was available to me in a session of hypnosis back in 1991 when the hypnotherapist who's also and remains a friend got the notion to ask if there was any awareness or consciousness specifically who wanted to speak through me. While I was in it, while Steve was in his trance, this hypnotic trance, and this energy came through pretty much immediately. We have all this stuff on tape. We have a couple of dozen tapes, maybe, of some of these early years. So this energy began speaking and could talk and answer questions and all that kind of stuff, and has a perspective and just about anything. So I came out of that trance, and she played the tape back for me, and I was dumbfounded, to say the least, and not a little bit scared. And I then spent a lot of time. I'd go play with this energy. I'd learned how to hypnotize myself. We had people come through and talk to this energy and so on and so forth. And that's where the genesis of the writing came from. And I began to look at the whole idea of non-dual consciousness as opposed to duality. And gradually, over these last 17 years now, became aware that what I had been saying was this channeled energy. People have such a strong reaction to that word, where this higher self or this other is really in fact the energy of who I really am, and that there is no separation. They're just, when we're raised with the stories, most of us are raised with, we have systematically beaten out of us, either metaphorically or physically or both, any idea of our own innate divinity. That it's somehow you gotta get it through Jesus, or you gotta get it through Allah, or you gotta get it through somebody, but you are a worthless piece of crap, excuse my French, by yourself, you have to have an intercessory of some kind. And what I've come to realize by the subtitle, "Awakening to the God Within," not awakening to God, but awakening to the God within, that beats all of our hearts, is in fact the highest form of worship, because that's stepping into the truth of who we really are, which is God-informed. I could go on to some length about what all of this has meant to me, because part of it was, when I was still, and he called himself a Rondaho, when I was channeling a Rondaho, then a Rondaho would come forth with all this wisdom, and Steve got to keep drinking and carrying on, and abusing his body, and not really bringing home, and living the truth that a Rondaho was speaking. Since I have quit drinking, as I quit almost seven years ago, this sense of this other, this energy out there, who was giving me received wisdom, has almost completely disappeared, and it's just me, and I'm nobody any more special than anybody else is, and whenever I choose to sit and listen to this still small voice, the wisdom is available, and so my life is very different than it was 15 years ago, 'cause I'm not attached to my addictions. I don't drink anymore. I'm not in that world of, gotta have it, gotta do it, gotta be it, gotta prove it. I'm not good enough, the way I am, so it's only by my doing that I have any worth. My teaching is that, and many teachers, teach that it is our being, that is our intrinsic worth, the I am that I am. - You're listening to a Northern Spirit radio production called Spirit in Action, and I'm your host, Mark Helps-Meet. We're talking today with Steve Riles, who is author of Drunk with Wonder, and it's a wonderful visit to a possible way forward to wholeness and integrity. Steve, I find it very helpful for myself, and I think for most folks, to have a community that supports, and that helps remind us of the path, that suggests ideas. And of course, it's all a personal decision as to what we accept and which way we go. What kind of community of support do you have? It sounds like you've got a wonderful wife, but where else do you get your support? - Well, we're part of the Science of Mind community, the Church of Religious Science in Mendocino, so we have a strong spiritual community there. In fact, I just finished teaching, or co-teaching an eight-week class based on my book that went very well. We're also part of the Challenge Day spiritual community. I call it a spiritual community, even though ostensibly it is not. Many people, individuals within the Challenge Day community, have similar spiritual beliefs, even though we don't use Challenge Day to propound those beliefs. We just seem to share them. This general sense that God goddess is all there is, and that we are all exquisite, precious expressions of that divine love, just the way we are. And so I'm blessed to have this set of friendships and the community organization that we have here, the Mendo Lake Circle of Change, as I was mentioning to you. And then through the years, I have had virtually every one of my dear friends, and most of my family members, including my mom and three of my four brothers, have all been through some of the Challenge Day workshops, and many of our neighbors here. So I live in a world that I've helped create where we have some basic skills around emotional intelligence, and shared beliefs and experiences around the innate divinity of all life. It is enormously helpful to me. In fact, it's crucial that I not live in a vacuum that I not live by myself, in that sense, that I have friends and family, that we are interdependent. And I think that that is a perfectly valid way to be in the world, this idea of the loner and the independent, a hugely, completely independent person. I mean, if that's what floats someone's boat, go for it. It just didn't work for me. - Even though I've talked to some participants of religious science, science of mine churches, I'm afraid I know relatively little about their ideas. In Quaker circles, it's very common to talk about that of God in everyone or also we talk about the inner light. And I think that that must be the same kind of thing, perhaps as the God within that you speak of. Is that the phraseology that's used typically in science of mind circles? - Very similar. One of the most common phrases in science of mind is God is all there is. God is all there is. And that, and you change your thinking, change your life, is another common expression. And so, if you think about the movie that seems to have had quite a lot of impact and has gotten widespread showings in various circles called the law of attraction, the whole idea that what you think about expands, including if you have fear-based thoughts, that experience for you is going to expand. So to change our thinking will change our life. And the point of my book, again, is that in order to truly change our thinking, we need to straighten out our emotional baggage. We need to be willing to deal with it and release the pent-up energy. Because my research, as you know, from Drunk with Wonder, Mark, is that adrenaline walks trauma into cellular memory. And that talking about those traumatic experiences doesn't release that trauma. You have to at some level be willing to bring it up because adrenaline also unlocks the cells and allows that trauma to dissipate. It's particularly apropos, I think, to talk about it right now because we have so many of our young people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan who are at least as battered emotionally as they are physically. And to know to that, something like between a quarter and a third of all of the homeless people in this country are Vietnam veterans. And that we just don't have a mechanism, haven't had a mechanism for owning the truth of the horror of war at the level where, at the very least, we're going to work with people who have been wounded in this way and helped them heal. Of course, knowing something about the Quakers, I know we share a common vision of a peaceful world where it is no longer necessary to have to work with people who had severe emotional trauma because we aren't doing that to each other anymore. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So Steve, I'm sure that this one hour just won't be enough to answer all of people's questions. I want to recommend to our listeners that they check out DrunkWithWonder.com about your book. Where can they best find out about Challenge Day? >> A challengeday.org. Challengeday.org, they were on Oprah and they just rebroadcast that show on the first. We're on track to touch the lives of probably 100,000 people this year. >> That's a lot of young folks. And next year, maybe we can double that and then double that and then pretty soon, this world can be a much better place. A good first step might be to pick up your book by Steve Riles, Drunk With Wonder, see if the ideas there ring true within ourselves, within each reader. And I think that the answer is there within us. >> Absolutely, I think so, Mark. >> Thank you, Steve, for taking your time today to help point us in some directions that I think can bear a great fruit in our lives. And also, thank you for your work with Challenge Day. Older people certainly need the attention, too. But our young people are just so, they're so preciously poised, ready to make some really good world-changing decisions. So thank you for that work, also. >> You're welcome, if there's nothing quite like seeing the light come on in a young person and seeing the light of possibility, the light of hope when there had only been despair. It's an amazing experience. I feel very blessed to have that experience in my life. >> Thanks again, Steve. >> Thank you, Mark. I really appreciate the time today. You've been a great interviewer. >> That was Steve Riles, author of Drunk With Wonder, and one of a number of dedicated workers with Challenge Day. Let's take you out with a song by a wonderful, sweet acapella group from Northern Wisconsin by the name of peaceful women and their version of how could anyone ever tell you a message that young folks and all the like could use in our very centers. 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