TRANSCRIPT
*Transcripts are auto-generated and reviewed for accuracy, but there may be some errors in punctuation or words. Listen to the podcast at https://rabbidaniellapin.libsyn.com/ for clarification
The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: 3 Sound Strategies To Bring God Into Your Life
Date: 11/29/24 Length: 01:07:45
Daniel Lapin 0:00
Greetings, Happy Warriors, and welcome to the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show, where
Daniel Lapin 0:05
I your rabbi, reveal how the world
Daniel Lapin 0:13
really works. That's right,
Daniel Lapin 0:17
and
Daniel Lapin 0:18
we're going to today do a little bit of an unusual show. It is entitled three sound strategies to bring God into your life. And the reason in the the subtitle is for non believers or for halfway believers, it hardly needs a show like this for believers, right?
Daniel Lapin 0:47
But I wanted to respond
Daniel Lapin 0:50
to a question that has come a number of times. Happy Warriors on the Happy Warrior website have repeatedly, I've seen so many times people have said, you know, I talk about the necessity for building up your family, your finances, your faith, your friendships and your fitness. And people say, I mean, I know how to work on all those, but what do I do about the faith? And I, you know, I just don't have God is just not really a part of my life, but from the book The Holistic You in which we lay it all out, I've got a sense that it's needed, what's needed, some connection with God, the three sound strategies for bringing God into your life, for non believers and for halfway believers, people, I think, are beginning to understand that I'm not going to be talking about proving the existence of God. That's not what this show is about. But wait a second. Am I saying that one can bring God into one's life without believing absolutely sure, you know, there are many areas of life where you don't necessarily have to believe in it, to accommodate to it and adjust to it. Gravity is one of those things I think I can guarantee that you do not understand gravity, neither do I obviously you certainly know the formulae. They're easy to find out, but exactly what gravity is, and no, we don't really have any clarity on that, and nonetheless, we're still going to use it. Now you might say, Well, yeah, but I believe in Greg. No, you don't. You believe that it does exist. You don't believe in it. And regardless of whether you believe it exists or you don't, you could still learn all the necessary physics and applied mathematics. You could just use it, and then you could go ahead and design a bridge or a machine or a car, and it would be able to operate within a gravity environment, which, by the way, is completely different from operating in a non gravity environment. So the point I want to make is that it really is not that important to begin with, whether you believe in God or not, and I'm not going to be trying to prove that. I also believe it is impossible. I think it is absolutely impossible to believe that God exists. I think that you can have faith that God exists. And I think it's okay that after a period of time when you've really invested some energy in studying how the world really works, you arrive the conclusion. You say, can I prove that the sun will rise tomorrow? The answer is, actually you cannot. The fact that it rose yesterday and the day before doesn't guarantee it's going to do that tomorrow. Past performance, no guarantee for future results, and, but you got a pretty good idea. Same thing, proving that God exists not going to happen. If it could happen, there would be no intelligent atheists, right? Because everybody would have seen the proof that God exists. There isn't such a thing. So that being the case, the idea is that
Daniel Lapin 4:29
part of how the world really works is knowing that there is a God element in it, and that's what we have to look at. That's what I need to help you understand. A lot of people have asked about it and the reason is because so much of wisdom depends on the spiritual. So much of wisdom depends on non material things, knowing what motivates people, and even more importantly, knowing what. What goes on inside your heart and my that's, what's really useful to do. But before we go there, let me as I do usually, thank you for being part of the show. Let me ask you to please subscribe. If you haven't yet subscribed, please go ahead and do that. And if there is a like button on the platform you listen to the show on, please tell them you like us. It makes a huge difference. You all know how web internet metrics actually work, and there would be in the algorithms. It's important that the audience acknowledges that there is value in it to them. So please do go ahead and do that. And I also want to mention that we have a wonderful opportunity for people to become Happy Warrior members, and I encourage this all the time for a lot of reasons. Firstly, you've got access to a vast body of material. Secondly, you are able to communicate with other Happy Warriors around the world. And from time to time, I'm going to interview a Happy Warrior member on the show to introduce him to you or her to you. So as you get to meet somebody else that is part of the same community that you are. So please go ahead. But here's the nice thing, we've got a Cyber Monday sale, and that is 20% off a We Happy Warriors annual membership, 20% that's one for thought, pretty decent. And if you are thinking of becoming a Happy Warrior member, just get yourself an annual membership. Knock off 20% use the coupon code Cyber2024, C-Y-B-E-R-2-0-2-4, that'll be the coupon. At wehappywarriors.com so, at wehappywarriors.com go ahead and become, if you aren't yet a Happy Warriors member, get yourself an annual membership. I will welcome you on board. And we're, pretty cool band of Happy Warriors. It's supposed to be a 24 hour sale. I see, however, I am told by our team that we're going to start it earlier on Friday the 29th that's the Friday of the Thanksgiving weekend for podcast listeners. The podcast, the offer expires midnight on Monday night. This is so it's for an annual basic or Special Access Plus memberships. And you'll find all about that at the website. WeHappyWarriors.com Okay, alright, so that is taking care of business. You've gone ahead and you're subscribed, if you're not yet a member of the Happy Warriors community. Join us. Join us soon, and then we can go right into things like, can there be a decent and upright atheist? Let's just get our nomenclature clear. Here. Am I saying that atheists are terrible people? Absolutely not. Some of my best friends are atheists, but there's no question. However, I'll tell you what there's also no question of, and that is, there is no such thing as, pardon me, as three generations of atheists. In other words, you won't find a grandfather saying, I'm an atheist, and my son or my daughter is an atheist and my grandchild is an atheist. Because what happens is that atheism has no present preservation device within it, and so if Grandpa is an atheist, his child is going to be utterly indifferent, because at least atheist is grappling with God on some level. And you can tell that because of the intensity you know, the late Christopher Hitchens spent a lot of time and energy emphasizing how bad religion is and how bad God is, wrote a book, God isn't great. That's not the attitude of somebody who's indifferent to something, right? I am largely indifferent to hiking in the Gobi desert, and so you won't find me. Running it down. You know, anybody wants to do it? God bless you. I couldn't care less. I just don't care. It's not a factor for me. And so there are a lot of people for whom God and religion are simply non factors. And some of those people are people who've written and who've asked, you know, how is there a way? And yes, there is a way. A connection with God is not something you get by an injection at birth. It's not like your parents arrange. Okay, now you got a belief in God. That's not how it works at all. People who want it have to work at it. It doesn't come naturally. It's not that, oh, I just happen to become a believer. No, not at all. It's actually quite tough. It's a lot easier to be a non believer than it is to be a believer. It's much more intellectually challenging to be a believer than a not to have a relationship with God. Actually takes work, and so you'll find that that Grandpa is an atheist, so he really cares. I mean, he gets all agitated, and he's busy writing books about against God, and he's busy talking to people about how bad religion is. He really cares. He's in the battle, but his son somewhat indifferent. His grandson probably lost the decency factor at that point, there's very little encouraging the grandson to be connected with anything. And so Grandpa is an atheist, decent man, honest man, wonderful, but it goes down or how about grandson says, I'm a third generation atheist. I'm a committed atheist. My father was an atheist. But you know what? He's wrong about his grandfather, his grandfather, who was probably a God fearing Jew or a God fearing Christian, he's the son the next generation became somewhat lukewarm about it. Grandchild became an atheist. Three generations of atheism. I've not met. Now tell me I'm wrong, but I've not met and I talk to people all the time, I mean people who tell me they're atheists, always ask, Are you like first generation atheist? Second nobody's third generation atheist. If somebody's an atheist. Their grandparents were God fearing religious Christians or Jews. I mean, that is just how it is. And so there can definitely be a decent, upright, honest atheist. No question about it. Can there be a wise atheist? No, good, decent, honorable, yeah, wise atheist, no, that's something to happen, because wise requires an understanding of the spiritual. Wise does require an understanding of how much of human affairs, both with respect to the development and decline of cultures and civilizations, as well as things that go on with inside myself, all of those things, in order to understand them, do require God in the equation, and so wisdom means a deep understanding of how the world really works.
Daniel Lapin 13:32
Does an atheist know how the world really works? Probably not. That would be very, very unusual, very, very unlikely. But yeah, intelligent. Atheist, sure. Caring. Atheist, yeah, honest. Atheist, absolutely, wise atheist, I'm sorry that doesn't work, educated and intelligent, yes, but that's a very, very different story from being wise and so intelligent and educated atheists might well say, look, there is a category of citizens in the United States who have been wronged, and therefore the way to make it up to them is to render their criminal acts such as they are to be non crimes. And so what we're going to do is, since the majority of
Daniel Lapin 14:30
street crime, the majority of shoplifting, is perpetrated by this group of people, we are going to declare shoplifting to no longer be a crime. That's what an intelligent, educated atheist went through. Got a master's degree at university, and maybe got a degree in criminology or social studies or whatever it is, and he could well decide that. That is the way to solve it. A wise person with or without degrees, with or without a formal education, would say, You're nuts. If you make shoplifting no longer a crime, you're going to get more shoplifting, a whole lot more. And the result will be there will be stores that can no longer sustain the losses, and they will close you will cause great social damage to the very people you wanted to help. That would be an example of what a wise person might say. An intelligent person, an educated person, would make the mistake easily, so that to try and give you an idea. And if you have any thoughts on the definition between wisdom, being wise and being intelligent, feel free. You're now a member of the Happy Warrior community. Go ahead and do let me know. I don't have a clear definition yet, but I'd love to work on it together with you, and I'm sure we'd be able to arrive at a clear definition. But for now, for today, the really important thing is that you understand within yourself clearly what is wise and what is intelligent. Two different areas, and a highly intelligent person could be very unwise. A wise person is probably of average intelligence. You don't need super intelligence to be very wise indeed. And you know what's the best thing about wise and IQ? IQ is much less valuable than wisdom IQ you're stuck with, you know, it's if you have an high intelligence quotient. You lucked out, you won the ovarian lottery. Your parents imbued you with a good IQ. And it is what it is. It can't be substantially changed or improved. It is what it is. But here's the good thing, you can become wiser. You can improve your wisdom. You can gain in wisdom all the time. So that's great. What really matters in life is to be wise, not to be intelligent. Oh, you gotta be of average intelligence, right there in the middle of the bell curve distribution, obviously, like most of us are, but wise, oh, you can improve that all the time. And that's a lot of what we're we're doing on this show is discussing ideas and topics that will teach you how the world really works, which is a lot of what wisdom is all about. And so if you want to study cosmology and you want to tackle questions of what is the chemical makeup of distant stars that has very little to do with wisdom, because it isn't of any use in understanding how the world really works. So I wanted to tell you about partially to try and understand why there is so much hostility towards the idea of God, and it's difficult even people who've asked me to help with a way to build and bring God into your life, even they are a little bit ambivalent about it, a little well, there, there.
Daniel Lapin 18:47
There are two main reasons. The first reason that there's ambivalence about God is that there has been a very successful indoctrination campaign since the Enlightenment before the beginning of the 20th century, but very much intensified during the second half of the 20th century. And that is to increase the idea that people who are connected to God are little bit stupid, slow, uneducated, primitive, tribalistic, not sophisticated people. As a matter of fact, the war the Washington Post, back as a long time ago, back in the 80s, did an article entitled it was written by called Michael Weiscoff. I think I don't know why I remember his name, but I did called religious Christians are poor, uneducated and easy to influence. And there was such an uproar that. They had a shoot apology I wrote to the newspaper at the time my letter was published and but, but that sort of persists, that smart, educated, intelligent people are beyond God. God belongs to the primitive times. It's olden days, people who didn't know everything we know today. They were. So there's that part of it that, you know, you sort of feel a little self conscious. Do you believe in God, yes, but it's it can be a little bit uncomfortable. The second thing is that there has been so much effective indoctrination along those lines that it's actually hard for ourselves. Now, we're not talking about how we feel vis a vis other people, but even with respect to ourselves, we sort of say, I mean, really, am I not a child of the 21st century? Do I not? I mean, really, and I want to tell you a quick story about a man called Doctor Ignaz Semmelweis. Doctor Ignaz Semmelweis must have been a remarkable man. Is actually a statue to him in a park in Budapest. Uh, he was Hungarian. Ignaz Hungarian, aim largely, and he, Dr Samuel Weiss was a doctor in in Hungary, and he noticed that people, particularly mothers, in giving birth, the death rate in some of the hospitals was 20% then he noticed that in a unit where they don't have doctors, they're just midwives, there, the death rate was very low, almost non existent. But in hospitals where everything should have been better because it's all qualified doctors, death rate approaching 20% of women. Women used to rather give birth in the street than be taken to the hospital. The hospital was known to be a place that killed mothers, and there were various nobody could put their finger on what it was. Semmelweis Ignaz Semmelweis figured it out, and he realized that what was happening was that doctors were going straight from treating very ill people to another ward where they were assisting in giving birth, and there was a movement of germs by the doctors hands from the sick person they were attending to. They would also be doing autopsies in the hospital, and the cadaver has certain germs and bacteria. They would move straight from there to doing a delivery. And women would catch diseases, and there was a name for it, and they died, Dr Semmelweis, by the way, this is now what 3040, years before Lister and Pasteur, those scientists who begin began to understand infection and germs. Dr Ignaz Semmelweis had no money. He did not know at all what the mechanism was. He just decided there must be some connection. And then he set up a routine where he asked doctors to wash their hands in hot water and soap, or he wanted them to wash their hands just before they attended to the death rate drops. But many doctors opposed this. They opposed it very strongly indeed, so much so that they canceled Dr Semmelweis. Dr Semmelweis is in the mid 1800s and so it's fascinating. He actually - doctors resented the idea that their colleague was telling them to wash their hands. The implication was they were dirty. They were not having any of it. And so although he proved the results, doctors really canceled him. They put him down. They got him, excuse me, they got him fired. He lost his job at the hospital. He tried to get a job somewhere else. They actually had him committed to an insane asylum
Daniel Lapin 24:28
just to get rid of him. They were so angry that this person was coming up with a new idea, and around about the same time, by the way, very interesting. You know how, like reinforced concrete was thought of by two disconnected people at the same time the process of producing aluminum from ore, two different methods by two different people at the same time in history, disconnected even. The theory of natural selection, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace on other side, different sides of the world, they didn't communicate with each other until Wallace sent his work to Darwin. Darwin stole a lot of it and published it at his own but this is a very interesting thing, how frequently it's almost as if God pulls aside the curtain, obscuring some new development, and whoever happens to be looking in the right direction, as it were, catches it and produces that new breakthrough, that new discovery, that new invention, oh calculus, Isaac Newton and Leibniz, two different people. No communication between the two of them. They both figured out calculus same time. So here as well, in yugas, in Hungary, Ignaz Semmelweis understood that people were dying because of the transfer of germs from sickness and from cadavers to mothers giving birth, same time in the United States of America. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a physician and a poet, the poem Ironsides, famous poem about the US Constitution, the battle, the early wooden hull battleship, the anyway, Oliver Wendell Holmes had a son, also called Oliver Wendell Holmes, who became a very famous justice on the United States Supreme Court. But the father, at exactly the same time, comes up with the same notion. And in America, they were a little bit more open to it than they were in Europe. And then, of course, before long, it became absolutely standard practice. That's what people did. The physicist Max Planck made a note of something that he wrote is really beautiful. I've often quoted it. The new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light no but rather, because its opponents eventually die off and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it and accepts it. It's wild, but it's really important to understand the current obsession with gender surgery, that it's okay to do surgery on people because they have a mental condition that persuades them that they're of the other gender, and that the best way to solve this is to cut off their body parts. I don't know if it's going to need a generation of doctors to die out before the sheer insanity, the madness and the lunacy of this becomes obvious to everybody. It just could be that this generation of doctors is too heavily committed to that line of thinking. The same thing with COVID. Nobody could hear the truth about COVID, and so we all went crazy and did very harmful things because they couldn't hear something different to what they'd already committed themselves to. And I say they but there are probably areas in which you and I are committed to opinions we have and that we're just locked into those opinions, and we're going to keep them for the rest of our lives. They probably are, but in medicine, there certainly have been cases like that. The God's decision to keep the Israelites in the desert for 40 years. That only happens after they send spies into the land, and the people get intimidated. And God realizes, as it were, he says, you know, it's easier to take the Israelites out of Egypt than it is to take Egypt out of the Israelites. And we're going to have to wait for the generation to die off, and so we'll spend 40 years in the desert, and only when everyone who is in Egypt, everyone who is alive in Egypt, is dead, then we'll be ready to push on into the land of Israel. So this is an important idea, how deeply ideas are held and retained. And again, the idea that secularism is more scientific somehow that you are a more enlightened person by having a secular view of reality. It may take a while for that to die out, but it does have something to do with why you may acknowledge that. Yeah, you know what? Faith does belong. It's got something to do with life. It's too important. And yet, there's a part of you that's going to be resisting that, wanting to push that away, that is is very understanding. So I said earlier that as an atheist, without God, you know you can be a decent person. You can be a Right person, not wise, you'd probably be a fairly good neighbor and friend. And here, I know that it's going to sound mean, and I don't mean it that way, but I've just become aware lately of too many instances of otherwise good, decent people, people who think well of themselves, people who consider themselves to be good, people who have done this. I was going to say an atheist or a secular person can by all means, be a good neighbor and a good friend, but I would say with the one proviso, unless your neighbor or your friend has a beautiful wife who's expressed and indicated to you some openness to your advances. In other words, there is nothing in your IQ that tells you not to have an affair with your neighbor's wife or your friend's wife, particularly if she tells you, hey, you know what, my husband and I have an open marriage. The wise person says that's irrelevant. Sleeping with a married woman is a huge problem. It's a huge problem because the way God created us, No man can overlook being cuckolded by another man. And this has always been recognized and understood, and that is one of the reasons that law systems, legal systems in several countries around the world, have been known to be somewhat lenient, accepted as alleviating circumstances, if a murder occurred when a husband found somebody else with his wife and shot him. And a number of courts have understood, we kind of get it and it's, it's, it's sort of understood, because it's almost a comical feature of these scenarios, that while the adulterous couple are at it, the husband arrives, and in most cases, the other man jumps out of the window as these things are often portrayed, because he realizes that he's so in the wrong here that he has no right to even defend himself, and he's going to be confronted with almost uncontrollable fury. That's how God created us, that a man has feelings of deep commitment and deep connection to his woman that nobody else should intrude upon. And so now this is nothing that has to do with intelligence. You know, an intelligent person may know that, may know that, or may not know that. A wise person says, I'm not going to do anything which would contribute to the collapse and destruction of my society. Adultery does exactly that won't do it. Big difference between wisdom and intelligence. I'll tell you something else that's very interesting. I just became aware of that during October last month, the highly intelligent people are actually more likely than ordinary intelligent people to be scammed or to be the victims of con Artists. Forbes Magazine ran a story two years ago for a year, exactly two years ago, Forbes magazine. And again, if you don't mind, I'm just going to quote most scans depend on a psychological technique that's now called social engineering. People make bad decisions when an emotion becomes so strong that the higher level thinking parts of the brain essentially shut down strong feelings of fear, anger and greed can cause people to make decisions they wouldn't make at other times. So
Daniel Lapin 34:12
so the article goes on to explain that it you can be as high level thinking as you like. You can be highly intelligent, but if you're not wise, you do not have understanding about how your emotions work, and you become susceptible to the con artist. There's a book published few years ago called The confidence game by Maria Konnikova. Listen to her. I think sometimes people who are more intelligent actually make better victims than people who aren't quite as sophisticated, who and are not quite as educated. She said, essentially, if you're absolutely certain you're too clever to fall for a scam, you are actually the perfect mark. So it's wise to know that it's worthwhile guarding against arrogance. Now that's not something that a university education will teach you. It's not something that that an intelligent person would necessarily know, but a wise person would know the dangers of arrogance. So what does high IQ let you do? Solve mathematical problems, play chess at a very high level. It lets you fly jet planes to be a fighter pilot, you do need high IQ. It lets you design skyscrapers and bridges and airplanes, but intelligence is no help in building a business or building a marriage. Do you hear what I'm saying in working with things or with numbers or with abstract ideas, intelligence, very helpful in working with people, not so much, right when? When people design an airplane or a bridge or a skyscraper, in virtually all cases, virtually 100% the skyscraper stands, the bridge stands, the airplane flies, but not every business succeeds, not every marriage succeeds. Why? Because we're not dealing with things or ideas. We're dealing with people. And for people, you need wisdom. Intelligence is not good enough
Daniel Lapin 36:54
with people. Whenever you deal with people, much more than IQ, what you need is wisdom. As a matter of fact, as I've often taught, very high IQ, very high intelligence, can be an impediment in dealing with customers, work, associates, employees, spouses, siblings, children. You're actually at a disadvantage if you're super smart, but what you really need is wisdom. Wisdom is connected to God. Wisdom is connected to spirituality and people who deal mainly with things and with abstract ideas, can easily fall into the trap of thinking that they live in a world with no spirit, no soul, no God. If your life revolves chiefly around things and ideas, you could fall into the trap of believing that the spiritual is not real. But if you have to deal with human beings, a lot of the mysteries of life vanish as soon as you know that the lens to look through it at is the lens of spiritual because we are not only body, we are soul. We're not only soul, we're body, the two together, but so influential is our soul that if you aren't aware of the soul, much of what you see happening in your own life and in the lives of others is incomprehensible, and one of the ways we answer that is by medicalizing the soul and saying the person has a brain disorder, a mental disease. There's a lot of that going on. And so that is a really important aspect, and I want to just clarify this. This is fairly recently, fairly 100 years or so until that time, it was always known that the spiritual side of our lives needs to be nurtured and cared for and protected just as much as the physical. And so people know if you maltreat your liver by imbibing too much alcohol, it's going to be a problem. If you want to look after your liver, the doctor might say, Hey, cut back on the alcohol. But nobody is saying if you want to protect different aspects of your soul, cut back on this or cut back on that, because what we've done is we've turned the same thing affecting the body. We are saying that that's true for the mind. So we're saying that spiritual disorders. Are caused by pathologies in the brain, but here's the problem. When we speak about physical disorders, doctors use the definition something along these lines and illness is when a cell, cells or tissues or organs in your body are altered pathologically into something that isn't functioning properly. And you can always diagnose that. You can go in with a microscope, or you can do tests on urine or tests on blood, and you'll find out you know which organ is has been altered by a disease in a destructive way, and how can we undo that? That's how it is. The trouble is that when people are diagnosed with mental disorders, there is absolutely nothing that can be pulled from the brain. No test would reveal anything changed in the brain. And what's more, different, psychiatrists can look at the same set of psychiatric symptoms and come up with entirely different diagnoses. And so for that reason, they came up with a book called the diagnostic and statistical manual of the mental health profession, and its purpose is to try and help different psychiatrists all agree on the same diagnosis. But this idea that it is our soul that produces the symptoms of what is called mental disease used to be known and understood. And I'd like to read to you just a few lines from ACT five of Hamlet. You've got to hear this. This man, Shakespeare, was wise. I don't know how intelligent he was. May have been very intelligent, but wise. Oh, we know he was wise. It's really rather remarkable. If I can, I hope I can find it. Yeah, listen to this act five of Macbeth. We're going to be looking at pieces from scene one through scene three, but basically, Lady Macbeth has done a terrible thing and the Macbeth once called the doctor and wants him to cure his wife. And the doctor responds to Macbeth and basically says, This is not a medical condition. The woman is manifesting aspects of what we call madness. But the doctor is wise, and he says, and I'll reach you in Shakespeare's words, this disease is beyond my practice, unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles. Get that and that doing things that go against nature, against God, against the laws of nature, doing those things breed unnatural troubles. Infected minds to their death. Pillows will discharge their secrets. More needs she the divine than the physician. She needs God more than she needs a doctor, I think. But dare not speak. This is the doctor saying people don't want to hear that. People don't want to hear. They want to hear they have a disease. Nobody. The whole idea of addiction has moved in that direction, where addiction used to be cured spiritually, because that's what it is. It's a spiritual disorder, and God was a part of the cure for addiction, which is something, by the way, the huge success of Alcoholics Anonymous was partially due to this idea that of the 12 steps, one of the steps was acknowledging the divine. These are spiritual problems, but we much prefer to medicalize it. And instead of saying, you know, I feel terrible. I'm a really bad human being. I've allowed myself to become addicted to something. We don't want to say that. We want to say, I got a disease. I have an addiction disease. And there's even medical specialties in that area. There are people who are addiction disease specialists, because it's all a disease. I'll tell you something in a moment, if I remember, I'll tell you something that Joe Biden did before he was President, before he was Vice President, when he was a senator. But anyway, Macbeth comes to the doctor and says, How does your patient doctor? Her, how's my wife? Doctor says, not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick coming fancies that keep her from her rest. Macbeth says, cure her of that Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raise out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet, oblivious antidote, give her a medicine, cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart. And the doctor responds. Therein, the patient must minister to himself. It's not my job. I can't do this. This is between the patient and God, that's the truth. That is how it is. And listen to this, I found this.
Daniel Lapin 46:13
So during the Clinton ministry, this would be in the 90s, the White House issued research in the last decade proves that mental illnesses are diagnosable disorders of the brain. By the way, not true. As you know, it sounds so bizarre, you're not going to want to believe me, but check it out for yourself. Mental disease cannot be diagnosed by an examination of the brain, nothing there. The surgeon, the Surgeon General at the time, David Satcher, was his name, issued a statement just as things go wrong with the heart and kidneys and liver, so things go wrong with the brain. In other words, turning the brain into lungs, liver, kidney. But it isn't Joe Biden. This is going back to 27 2007 Joseph Biden was a senator, and he said addiction is a neurobiological disease, not a lifestyle choice, and it's about time we start treating it as such. We must lead by example and change the names of our federal research institutes to accurately reflect this reality. By changing the way we talk about addictions, we change the way people think about addictions, both of which are critical steps in getting past the social stigma too often associated with the disease. That's right. When somebody used to gamble away the rent money and his wife was in danger of having the family evicted, the community spoke negatively. There was a stigma. The guy was he didn't have a disease. He had fallen into a bad habit and become addicted to it. And the way out as the as the doctor said in Macbeth, the way out was not through a doctor, but through God. So I want to now give you three sound strategies for bringing God into your life. The first one, just keep reminding yourself that you are body and soul. Think about what a soul without a body is, got it. What is a soul without a body? It's us after we die, at that point, we're souls without bodies. What do you think a body is without a soul? I'll leave that one for you to think about, and you can go into the we happy warrior site and tell me what you think that might be. I should mention talking of the We Happy Warriors website for the holidays coming up, if you want to give anybody a book with a personalized message and a sign, a signed book from Susan and me with a personal message to a loved one. You can do that, and you need to order them fairly soon. In time for the holidays. You go to www RabbiDanielLapin.com and the books that are available for personalization and signature, The Holistic You, Buried Treasure and Business Secrets from the Bible. The new edition just came out, by the way, all right, so just be aware of that. That's a unique present, and it worked really well. People loved it. Last year, we got a lot of email from people who were recipients of those gifts and who really appreciated it. So that's good.
Daniel Lapin 50:08
So what is a soul without a body after death? A body without a soul? I'll leave that to you to think about, and I them, and just sort of be aware of this Shakespeare truth, this this reality as you, as you talk to people and look around at people and interact with people, and you hear somebody being prescribed Paxil or Prozac or Zoloft. Lot of people are being prescribed that stuff in America. So you and I definitely know people who are on those psychotropic medications ask yourself, is there anything in this person's life that could be adjusted in terms of lifestyle? There would be a better solution than Zoloft or Paxil or Prozac. You know, maybe, the person needs meaningful work in their lives. It's an interesting thing, but most people who go to psychiatrists and have deep therapy sessions are not people who are working hard to make a living. Working is a necessary thing. God put us in the garden to work. That's right. The goal is not to retire and stop working. The goal is to keep working all the time, because it is a necessary part of you want to call it mental health. I'll call it soul health. Maybe the person who's busy medicating himself really just needs work, meaningful work. Maybe the person needs meaningful connections in their life. Maybe they need family. For many people, it's too late, they let the locusts eat the years during which they should have built families, and they're going to be the worthy recipients of psychotropic drugs, because for our mental health, our spiritual health. For our soul health, we do need connections with friends and with family, and we do need work. So just keep yourself open to the idea of looking for spiritual explanations for things rather than only physical. Be alert to how often people you interact with are being motivated by spiritual things, not physical things. When somebody buys a new car or somebody buys new clothing or somebody goes on an expensive vacation, ask yourself whether what is being supplied is physical or spiritual? Is it just transport? Is it just being able to get around rather than having to walk? Is that the reason for the car purchase, or is there something else the clothing? What kind of clothing? Why just be alert, be open to training yourself to look out like an alert detective for every clue that what is motivating people in your life, people with whom you come into contact, what is motivating them is spiritual, not Physical, just sort of see many of these things as examples of the soul yearning for something, not the body even eating. A lot of the time we eat what? Because our bodies yearn for something, but there's a lot of the time we eat to satisfy our souls comfort food where we're eating more than our body needs. So you can't say you're doing it for your body. So why are you doing it? Then there's a hunger in your soul, which can get alleviated. You can feel better by eating something ice cream. So that's number one, just be an alert detective, looking out for the examples and instances that are really spiritually driven, not physically driven. Number two of the three, the second sound strategy for bringing God into your life is very hard. This one, I should have made it number three or number one, but it's in the middle number two. It is hard. There's no question about it. All I can do is promise you that it will not injure you or harm you physically in any way whatsoever, and it's not going. Cause you any pain, but it is going to be very hard to do. If you feel difficulty doing this, done this one number two, you should still make yourself do it if you're interested in this exercise, but you should know that what is making it hard for you to do is validation of strategy number one. In other words, there's no physical harm or pain that comes to you from doing what I'm going to suggest, you're still going to find it hard to do because of spiritual reasons. What is it
Daniel Lapin 55:41
set yourself 10 minutes three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or whatever day you want. Set aside 10 minutes three days a week, and make sure you're alone, that you can't be disturbed, that you can't be overheard. You're not going to be interrupted and talk to God, yeah, the God you don't believe in, that's right, it doesn't matter. Talk to God anyway. Now you're going to feel stupid doing this. But so what? Probably not. The first time you feel stupid, not going to be the last time we're human beings. We make mistakes. We feel stupid because there are no smart mistakes. We make stupid mistakes this time. It's not a mistake, it's an experience that you may not have ever heard had before. If you are a non believer or a half believer, you may have never tried this before. So go for it. It'll be fascinating, as long as you have the ability to make yourself understand that you have to in life, to progress, to move into new areas of achievement and new areas of understanding, you've got to move yourself out of your comfort zone. We all have comfort zones. They are things we are accustomed to. You're not accustomed to doing what I'm about to suggest or what I am suggesting. It's going to feel uncomfortable. There's no question about it, but there's no constitutional protection to avoid you ever feeling uncomfortable, and if you focus on making sure you are always being massaged with warm butter. You'll never grow, you'll never achieve, You'll never change. Put yourself in places outside your comfort zone, and this is one of the biggest ever. Just go for it. And so you might find it interesting, actually, to even get on your knees. Now, this is very common to Christian believers, and it's a little less common for Jewish believers, because about 2000 at the start of Christianity, somewhere about 300 or 400 Jews began to remove kneeling from prayer, and they restricted it only to the days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. And one of the reasons was, well, I guess this is a distinction between the way Christians worship and Jews worship, but it's actually a legitimate part of worship for Jews as well as for Christians, so much so that the word kneel in English, K, N, E, E, L is obviously, as you know, derived directly from the word knee, Because kneeling means you get down on your knee, and in Hebrew the word [Hebrew spoken] blessing, which is part of what we do in prayer, is a direct etymological link to the Hebrew word for knee [Hebrew spoken]. And so this is a deeply rooted concept, and that's why I say it may make sense to do this on your knee. And if, you are Jewish and you're uneasy about it, just go to the first book of Kings. And that would be chapter eight, verse 54 listen to it. When Solomon had finished all these prayers and supplications to the Lord He rose from before the altar of the Lord we where he had been kneeling, perfectly natural, perfectly normal. So I know this is hard, and I I've, I've walked a lot of friends through this, and it is truly it's a very exciting thing to experience. But are you able to do it without a spiritual coach? I don't know if you can. It'll save you some money and save you some time, and you just do it by yourself. Like I said, set yourself at the beginning of the week, set yourself 310 minute slots. During the week that's all just set it early so it's on your calendar, and make sure you can't be interrupted. You can't be overheard. There's nobody, total privacy. And get on your knee. Get on your knees, go down on your knees, and then talk to God. That's what you to do. What about? Well, talk to him about your worries, talk about your hopes, talk about your fears. Talk to him about how you feel about yourself. Talk to him about your hopes and aspirations. Talk about changes you'd like to make in yourself. Now, I repeat. I know how hard this is. You're gonna you talking to. I mean, I'm asking you to talk to somebody you suspect doesn't exist. Go ahead and do it anyway. Let me, let me explain something the supplicant always has to open communications. So you know, if, if, if a guy is at a social event or a party or even a bar, and he spots a girl he'd really like to meet, and how many guys you know, you may even recognize this from your youth. How many young guys have in that situation stood paralyzed, rooted to the spot, desperately hoping that somehow this girl is going to come over you and start talking with you? It never happens. You have to initiate communication. You'll never hear from her otherwise, I'm telling you something that is relevant here as well. I know it's hard I keep repeating that because I have no reservations. I'm asking you to do something that takes huge willpower and strength of character to subject yourself to an experience that bothers you, but the results of which are going to surprise you mightily. It's extraordinary. So there it is, three times a week, 10 minutes, key that you have privacy, because it's bad enough. You feel stupid to yourself. The last thing you want to do is be seen or caught or overheard by anybody. That's it. If you've never tried this, you'll thank me. Maybe not today, but maybe it'll take a month, and I'd love to hear from you. Tell me honestly, how this worked out for you. I won't be surprised. You will. That's number two. Talk to the God you don't believe in. You
Daniel Lapin 1:03:05
uh, it's I should warn you of just one more thing, and that is that there may be a period, especially after you've done this for two or three weeks, you might start feeling that you're hearing a response, and then you say to yourself, I'm really going nuts. No, you're not. It's okay. Third strategy I've given you, I want to give you three sound strategies for bringing God into your life if you are a non believer or a halfway believer. The third one is read the book of Psalms. This one is easy. Again, set yourself another three times a week, not for not for very long, maybe 10 minutes. Again, you realize this very dramatic program in your life requires an investment of all of an hour a week, right? I mean, there are plenty hours in the week that go away without any accounting. You have no idea where the hour went right. Well, here's the way of spending three times 10 minutes a week on talking to God, three times a week, 10 minutes a time on reading the book of Psalms, just for 10 minutes, however far you get. It's not a case of how many chapters you cover, because sometimes the words will talk to your soul and you'll go slowly, you might reread them. So eventually you'll you'll get through 150 chapters of the book of Psalms. But initially, just do 10 minutes reading of Psalms three times a week. That's all you need to do. Start with Book of Psalms, chapter one, verse one, and then just keep going from there, second session that week, the third session that week, on to the next week. And look, all of this stuff is again, I'll bring us in for a landing by. Reminding you it is difficult. There's no question. I want to tell you why it is it's difficult because this requires a surrender. That's really what it is. We retain a very strongly held fixed conviction of secularism that I don't function in this world of God. It's all, it's something. And now I'm recommend if you're somebody who said to yourself, I'm not a believer, but I kind of see that faith belongs in the family, finance, friendship, fitness, it is one of the five. It's got a role there. You know, what am I supposed to do about that? Today's show is for you that I tell you that it requires a surrender. You're kind of now this is easier for women to do than for men to do so, one of the reasons that women generally do more praying than men, and you'll find there are many churches that I've been in that have more women than them than men. For this reason, it's harder for us guys to surrender. It goes contrary to our masculine nature. We prefer to conquer. We prefer to be surrendered to. But it's no shame to surrender to God, surrendering to a woman, surrendering to another man, but surrendering to God, yeah, that's okay. That is just fine. So feel okay with that, and you'll find that it's even liberating in a good sense. So that Happy Warriors is as far as we're going to go today in terms of understanding and deploying a very exciting program, deploying three sound strategies for bringing God into your life. You'll be astounded, but please don't forget to let me know how it goes with you. I won't be surprised at what you tell me, but you will until next week. I am your rabbi. I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin, wishing you a week of moving onwards and upwards with your five F's, your family, your finances, your fitness, your friendships, and yes, your faith. God bless you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
