American Mussar with Greg Marcus

(upbeat music) (dramatic music)

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. (dramatic music) (dramatic music)

Welcome to synchronicity. My guest this week, that's right. I have a guest. Greg Marcus wrote a book about American Musar. You will hear all about that in this episode. You do not want to miss it if you're struggling with any internal issues. If life is not being plain cooperation with you, if you're noticing yourself getting unhinged or upset or impatient or greedy or selfish, all of these things, this is a really good episode to listen to. And of course, I'm saying this facetiously because who isn't dealing with those issues on a regular basis? I don't know those people, do you? But this episode is gonna be a real treat for you.

And it's also, right, before the episode is nothing to do with cryptocurrency at all. Speaking of crypto, did someone mention cryptocurrency? Did someone mention it? Oh, that was me. I want to let you know very quickly about something that's going on in this Discord server I have started. So here's the deal, it started as a free server. We have well over 100 people in there now. We are really helping people out. People are making money. They're having a good time, they're learning, they're understanding, they're getting less afraid, they're getting more certain. And the doubt is being erased. We're upsetting the economic paradigm.

We are helping each other out and it's really fun. Now here's the thing that's going on. Right now I'm recording this, it's the middle of January, early January. Starting in February, this server becomes a paid server. Meaning if you want to get in, it costs money just to be in there. Why does it cost money? Because we're doing free voice chats, we're doing signal alerts, when to buy things, when to sell things. We're doing oracles. We have signals coming out about very specific events and things you might want to look at. We have coin specific research. We have independent fundamental and technical analysis and marketplace dynamics research that you're not going to find even on other paid servers.

Because we have personally and collectively done really fucking well over the past month and a half. There's no other way to say that. So if you're interested in getting now, for the entire month of January, if you join the Discord server, there will be a link on this episode page, there will be a link on this podcast. If you join, you are grandfathered in, meaning you will have access to the premium server or reba. Until I change my mind, I'm just kidding. If you're in, you're in the gates for good. You'll be one of the early founding members and you don't have to pay. Starting in February, you want to know what the moment it's going to cost?

I'll let you know. It's going to cost 0.03 Bitcoin per month or 0.13 Bitcoin a year. So if you want to go look at the exchange rates and see how expensive that is and realize holy shit, has no one lost his mind, he's charging a lot of money to get in there, no having lost my mind, that's probably too good of a deal. We'll see how the price goes. So get in there now, it's free. You're getting this deal because you listen to this podcast and hopefully you've been listening for a long time. And I really appreciate that. And I want to send some of the love back. Speaking of love, thank you to everyone who contributes on Patreon.

I really appreciate it. I'm going to be linking that with Discord and some interesting ways coming up too. So stay tuned for that. Patrick Nemchik, you're the man. I usually mention him on the episode. End of the episode. I'm going to mention him upfront. You're the best. Okay, let's get to this episode. American Musar, what is this? So Greg has, Greg Marcus, who's today's guest, has been working on this for about eight years, I believe, my memory is correct. And it's essentially a Judaic practice of mindfulness, but before we really even knew what mindfulness was, and especially before the buzzword was coming around, and it's how to investigate your own internal with key refers to, and they refer to as soul traits, there's 13 of them, and try to figure out where the imbalances may be based on your perception of yourself and the world around you.

What I like about it is it is something that honors the divine and magical aspects of reality, but is also a very practical down-to-earth thing, and that's kind of what we like to focus on on this podcast. So it hits those, it checks those boxes. So I don't want to babble on any much more grip. This is what happens. My sentences start to break down when I've been talking too much. You're going to like this episode. There are more guests coming up, don't worry. I've got, in case you haven't figured it out, there's a lot of shit going on in my life, but I will make this promise that I will continue to do this podcast through all of this.

I'm also going to be upgrading the podcast. Don't worry, music, new music is coming for all my Patreon babies. Don't worry, it's coming, I'm working on it. I, it's coming. Just trust me. Let me do what I got to do for a couple months. It's going to work out, trust me on that. Okay, that's it. Oh boy, it's been quite the week. Without further ado, here is Greg Marcus. (upbeat music) Thank you so much for coming on. I really, really appreciate it.

Oh, you're welcome. It's my pleasure to be here.

So I think a great place to start is, can you tell me, and I don't want to butcher the word, Musar, is it Musar?

Yes.

Well, American Musar, tell me, tell me a little bit, assume I know nothing. I know something, I've done some reading, but assume I know nothing about what this is. How would you describe what American Musar is?

Right, so Musar is a thousand-year-old Jewish spiritual practice that teaches us how to find those things inside that causes to get stuck in the same situation again and again, and it offers a path towards balance and healing through mindful living. So really, like some people look at it and they say, oh, so the Jews invented cognitive behavioral therapy a thousand years ago, which, and it does have a lot of similarities to that, but it also, it's very firmly grounded within the Jewish tradition. So, like a traditional Judaism you're supposed to learn, like the holy books, like the Torah, and those present guidelines for how to live your life.

Well, Musar is like an experiential way of doing that, rather than kind of memorizing all these laws and rules, it says, how do we develop our character? How do we become the kind of person who just intuitively, in our bones know how to react and be present and be a good person, be a man, should put an outstanding person, a person about standing character, whatever life throws out this?

It sounds a little bit kind of like the tantric path from our Eastern friends in terms of going into the world to try to understand what's happening rather than just conceptually taking kind of aphorisms or axioms and applying them to your life. I really like that 'cause we were just talking about what would my audience enjoy. It was like practical things that would help them. So, where did it come from? Where did it originate? I'm Jewish, so I have some familiarity with the Torah and the Zohar and some of the more mystical aspects, but where did this kind of emerge or originate from?

Right, so there were elements of the Musar tradition that go way, way back. I mean, there are stories in the Talmud, which is a commentary on the Torah, which is Rabbi so-and-so was so pious that he would never, this is actually a really funny story, he would never urinate within 10 feet of where people were sleeping. (laughing) You know, which kind of tells you a little bit about what, you know, which kind of tells you about what life was like back then. Like, you know, obviously if that was like a story of pious behavior, then no one would think twice about doing it. (laughing) Like, you know, so I think like my own personal, so I look at that story and I say, well, how would that apply to me?

Like, you know, for me, my story is if I'm going first in a buffet, I'd never fill my plate because I don't want to like pig out on the salmon or the lox and then not have some for somebody else at the end of the lox. So that's like...

I love that. Well, so I know something I was reading on your website talked about, you know, the true meaning of being Jewish is, you know, kindness and compassion and helping others, which to me, whether that's Judaism or any other thing, that's what my religion and life philosophy is. It's specifically why I think a lot of us incarnate here is to learn and experience those lessons for ourselves and both the good and the bad. So what... I guess I've never heard Judaism actually describe that way. I was far mitzvahd, I was confirmed even. I've, you know, done some reading on my own. I've actually never heard it put so simply what...

How do you get to that kind of succinct description of what Judaism is or being Jewish is?

Right, well, I think like where Judaism is today in this country, that's like a whole other topic. It was like the best kept secret about Judaism. There's really a lot of cool stuff in this religion that you would never come across. But there's a story like, I'm sure you've heard of Hillel, like every college campus has a Hillel. So those are named after a famous rabbi, Rabbi Hillel. He was asked, you know, there's a story in the Talmud where someone came to him and says, "Look, if you can describe Judaism "while standing on one foot, then I'll convert." And so he said, you know, that which is hateful to you, don't do to another.

The rest is just commentary. And so that is... And there was another teaching by Rabbi Ikeba, which said something similar. It's like the whole of Torah is summarized and love your neighbor as yourself.

Right.

So these teachings are out there, but it gets lost in the noise of the detail.

Yeah.

I was gonna say I get it because that's the golden rule, another really good one. But Judaism has made such a religion out of commentary and analysis. And it's built into the core of it, which I think is actually a great thing. You shouldn't just blindly be doing what something in a book says. So the commentary is useful, but the perils of that is it can get overly intellectualized and analyzed to a point where you do kind of forget that core message is like, don't be a jerk. I mean, Jesus was saying the same thing. It was not too different.

No, it's not different at all. And so going back to your earlier question, where Musar came from, there's been these threads within Judaism about, you know, and there's this, Musar is really cool because it's kind of this counter-cultural thread which keeps appearing within Judaism where there's the main line, which is there's all this commentary, there's all this rules, there's all this intellectualizing. And then there's this, oh, but you gotta be kind. You gotta be a good person. It's not enough to memorize the 10 levels of charity that doesn't make you a giving person, actually need to do this.

So the first books about this appeared about a thousand years ago. Like the first one was called The Duties of the Heart, which was written in the 11th century in Spain. It was actually written in Judeo-Arabic. So it was like kind of in this golden age where the Muslims and the Jews were living together in this beautiful poetry and coexistence in Spain at the time. And in the introduction, he said, you know, some people become rabbis because it gives them a lot of status and juice in the community. And they'll spend 25 years memorizing all these laws but they'll never once work on their own character.

Right.

And I want a book to say, well, how do we become this person? It's like, it's great to say, yeah, I want to be kind and generous. But the trick is what is holding me back from doing that? In the real world, I have some dark things inside or I have some things which I think I'm doing the right thing but I'm actually rationalizing and I'm not and I'm being selfish. And so the question is, well, what is really going on? What's happening in this internal world? Which is, you know, like all the commandments are there but we have a really hard time following them. I mean, I came hardly good day without screwing up until somewhere, the day, like an hour getting really smart.

I wish it was a day. Well, I love that you brought up dealing with the dark stuff. I have two things about that. One, I'm a huge Carl Jung fan, you know, identifying with archetypal patterns and energies and your shadow side is critical to understanding, you know, his kind of conception of the collective unconscious. But I was just talking last night to my dad about this which is, you know, you have to deal with your dark side stuff. If you don't, when you actually get into a position of actually having some sway or influence or power, you're gonna be overwhelmed by these things that you haven't dealt with.

And I think that's, you know, that says a lot to kind of where we are in the world today is a lot of people who have risen to the tops of our power structure world haven't dealt with their shadow sides and it consumes and it dominates and it's not comfortable for people either. Like, you know, we look at someone just to take the caricature example, like Donald Trump, that's not a happy man, you know? Like, that there's nothing about him where someone's looking at him saying, that guy seems really satisfied and happy about everything in life. They may think whatever, whatever your opinion of it is, I don't think that's what's coming out.

So I love that you bring up dealing with kind of these sticky internal dark situations or potentially dark situations. What are some of the approaches that Musar authors, people in terms of actually, you know, being mindful about what's going on inside? What are some of the techniques or approaches that provide some, you know, insight into that or, yeah?

Right, so one of the things I articulated for American Musar, which is kind of my 21st century take on Musar, which is to try to bring it to a much wider audience. You know, you don't need to go to a Yeshiva, you don't need to know Hebrew. And so I create these assumptions to each kind of gives you the backstory. And one of the assumptions is, is that we're driven by this conflict between the good inclination and the evil inclination. And the evil inclination, it's not like the Voldemort evil, it's not like the Al-Qaeda ISIS evil. It's like, it's what Freud would call it, it's these shadow things.

It's our sexual drives, our anger, selfishness. And all of those happen to map to the amygdala. And then the good inclination, it's our compassion, it's our social impulses, it's our wanting to connect and to be with others. And those all happen to map to the prefrontal cortex. And if you look at the brain, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex actually are in conflict with each other. And if you drink alcohol, it's right. It's, it's, so, so it's understanding that if we're not conscious, we're just gonna automatically kind of float through life. And we might do the right thing by habit, we might do the wrong thing by habit.

And what a Musar approach does is it helps us recognize that we have choices. It helps crystallize around choice points, which are these times when it could go either way. You know, I could do the right thing, I might not do the right thing. And it's more and more often bringing that into focus. So let me pause there 'cause that's, that's not at the practical level yet, but I think it's an important part of the bat.

Absolutely.

You're tracking with me so far?

I am, and I'm seeing your lovely kitty, who reminds me of my lovely kitty, who lives with my mom now, who, my cat's name was Isis, which the name has been ruined. But that is a beautiful kitty. No, it's the same, I mean, it's a brother named Fox.

Love it, love it.

So I love that you brought up kind of these choice points and these kind of, let me ask you this, where does this, this is a conversation that I, I've, I've copped to this. So oftentimes when I ask questions, I have an opinion that I'm waiting to hear what the other person says, go figure. But on this next question I'm gonna ask, I haven't settled on my bully structure. Where does the concept of--

I feel the pressure.

No, yeah, feel the pressure, feel the pressure.

Yeah. Where does the concept of free will and like destiny and fate fit into these choice points when, you know, you're identifying these internal things where you have basically, you know, you take this one or the past. So maybe it's not a direct conflict of the good wolf and the bad wolf, but there is some decision that needs to be made. How does free will kind of fit into this picture for you?

Oh, I love that. So that's another one of the assumptions. And that we all have free will, but it's not always accessible. So, you know, I, a year ago started doing Musar Parenting 'cause I have two teenagers. They know that you're the young son. So you're not quite there yet. But with these 15 daughters, I'm like, I need some help 'cause I'm, you know, like trying to do this practice, trying to be a good person, but like stuff is coming out of my mouth and I'm getting pissed off and things are coming out of my mouth, which in theory I had free will, but they are out of my mouth before I could save them.

And so what Musar does is what Rabbi Paracal's creating some additional space between the match and the fuse. It's just, it's almost like creating a muscle memory for how we act or how we show, or how we view the situation. (drumming) With the view of the process, different level of choices. Can I share, let me share, can I share an example or did you wanna?

No, no, please share. You have free reign to speak as long and about whatever you want. Don't take my constant chattering as anything other than me just having that habit.

Okay, so once when the kids were younger, so one more piece about how Musar works and then I'll share this example. So what we do is we focus on a particular soul trait for usually two weeks at a time. So these are things like patience, humility, trust, honor, and the idea is that having too much of one of these soul traits is just as bad as having not enough. So if we have two little patience, we're angry and frustrated all the time. If we have too much patience, maybe we're staying in a bad job, we're staying in a bad relationship, or not taking action. And so we'll start the day with like a little mantra for our meditation for two minutes to help frame the day.

Our psychologist tells us when we frame our day, then all of a sudden throughout the day, we're noticing when our patience is being challenged. And then we write down at night how we responded. Maybe we met the challenge positively, maybe we didn't. But either way, in a non-judgmental way, we write it down. And each time, and then we pick one area where we're going to try to act. We're not going to boil the ocean, we're not going to, like I'm not suddenly going to become the Dalai Lama and the alternation. You know, I'm just trying to become a little bit more patient. Okay, see you with me so far.

So I'm also with you.

Okay, all right, so here I was. This was maybe five years ago. And just trying to get the kids out to school in the morning. And being young kids, they're farting around. They're not putting their shoes on. And I used to get really pissed off. So I had places to go and things to do. And I was working on patience. And suddenly I kind of like envisioned them as like these two little divine spots. And they were like, and my whole like attitude just changed. And all of my anger and frustration just melted away. And I saw them as, you know, young kids who were just kind of having fun and interacting with the world.

And so rather than yelling at them to put their shoes on, I just started interacting and joking with them. And you know, you can't get them out the door and fast. You really can't because if you start yelling at them.

Oh, I think you're covering your mic. I think you're covering your mic.

Oh, okay.

All right. So you really can't get them out the door any faster. You know, like going at them is they're crying and we're happy. So anyway, it just changed who I was. And it gave me a different choice. And by making that different choice and showing up differently, you know, they were happier. I was happier and we got out the door in the same amount of time.

It's interesting. There's two things that popped up in my brain when you were saying that or call it the mind. One was, is this idea of too much of any one good quality or good quality in air quotes can actually turn into a bad thing. Reminds me of kind of a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, which is every negative perceives like anger, we're gonna say is negative. Actually in its purified form, it's just a kind of more obscured purified quality, which in anger, for instance, it would be awareness or tension. I have awareness that I need to get somewhere. And then your reaction to that is, you know, the thing where we take our own karma and do what we want with it.

The other thing that was very interesting that when you were talking that popped up in my head is it used to be very much into neuro-linguistic programming, which I have not really, you know, investigated too much in the past 10 years. But this idea of framing is something they're very big on. You know, you can actually, you know, do a lot of very interesting things with neuro-linguistic programming. If you, you know, frame certain things in a different way. And this idea of this early morning mantra framing your day, again, so many of these things seem just like mindfulness and meditation or even, you know, Vedic mantras.

I don't find it surprising because I fundamentally believe this is all talking about the same stuff. The one question that first popped up in my head though for you was 13 soul traits. I would love to hear what they are. You name some of them. Why 13? 13 is my favorite number. That's why I ask.

Oh, okay. So there are 13 that I cover in the book.

Right.

And the team is often a number that people use. So the short answer is if you study, if you cycle through 13 soul traits and you spend two weeks on each one, when you finish the 13, if you go back to the first, you spend another two weeks on each one, that is 52 weeks.

Right.

So in the course of a year, you spend four weeks on each soul trait. Now the origin of that, believe it or not, is Benjamin Franklin. So Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography, he talked about these 13 virtues, and he would have like a little phrase he recited in the morning, and he had a little checkbox he would do at night, and each week he would focus on one, and he would cycle through it. So how does this say about the namussah world?

Yeah.

Franklin's autobiography somehow made it to the Ukraine and was read by a rabbi, whose name was Minachim and 11. And he wrote a book that was called Heshbon Hanafesh, which was the counting of the soul, about 13 soul traits, and you did this practice and these mantras. He doesn't cite Benjamin Franklin, but they're almost exactly the same soul traits. It's almost exactly the same. So in his letters, he talks about Franklin, and says, "Oh, I read this American, and he had this great, but he was a very virtuous Gentile, and so why didn't he talk about him?" Because the other Jews wouldn't have listened to a Gentile's way of doing things.

The same craziness that we sometimes say today existed back then as well. So it's now many modern mussah practitioners do these sorts of practices which go back to Benjamin Franklin.

That's super interesting, and obviously I never would have been able to figure that out. And it makes sense that they would have obscured, the rabbi would have obscured where the origins was, because that is something that unfortunately persists, not obviously just in Judaism, in many religions and traditions, where if it comes from somewhere else, you're not gonna listen to that. That's not our thing, how could we? Which probably I imagine is at odds with the practice of mussah, which is probably not an exclusionary, they're not like us, so don't help them. I just can't imagine that's made it in there.

Well, I mean, it depends if you're kind of in the orthodox world of Judaism, then it's very, and there are certain mussah organizations and institutions which are, it has to be not only from a Jewish source, but from a mussah source. If you're from the liberal branch of Judaism, then we'll, from just about anybody except Jesus, that's kind of, so yeah, it's, I don't know, I don't personally have a lot of patience for that. There's wisdom to be found everywhere.

Yes, I think that for those of us who have done some comparative analysis, when it comes to wisdom traditions or just religions or whatever it is, it gets harder and harder to deny the fact that there are core principles that are underneath all of them. And so, if you get to the point where you wanna start excluding some things, you create this schism in your mind, in your psyche, which I think eventually has to be addressed if you're trying to come up with a clear perspective of everything that's going on, so it's just, it's almost like, I agree, I don't, I wouldn't describe myself as not having patience for it.

I clearly understand and can empathize with people who feel that way, but I just, again, I don't, it's like someone telling me that the sky is falling, the sky is absolutely falling, the sun is not gonna come up tomorrow. I respect your opinion, but I'm not gonna take the time to buy into that as a reality that I live in. So I totally get that. Let me ask you this, how did you get into this? Where are you, like how long have you been studying or interested in Musar?

So I have been practicing and facilitating Musar for about six years. So my, you know, I'm a bit of a serial reinvester, so I started as a scientist and then I became a marketer and I was a workaholic and ended up writing a book, kind of describing how I got out of my workaholism and the method I use was small gradual changes, kind of inspired by values. So when I learned about Musar and a family education program, I really resonated with it. At this point, I already written my first book and it was all about these small gradual incremental changes. And I loved it and so for two years, I thought about it and finally went to the rabbi and I said, "Do you know, I really wanna teach Musar here."

And she said, "Great." And I said, "And I need to learn Musar first." (laughs) And she said, "Okay, fantastic." And so she paid for me to take this online Musar class and I just read everything I could get my hands on and two months later, I had created my own class called Work Life Balance to Musar. And I was supposed to be, you know, myself and like six or seven other people that I knew and we were gonna meet five times and then after five, this is fantastic, let's keep going. So we met five more and we met five more and suddenly, you know, after three years, I had this body of teachings that I was using and that's what I used to turn into the book.

It's so cool and I'm sure you can appreciate the feeling that when you're doing something with not the specific intention of having it be a big, ambitious project and if you're in Reinventor, we're used to getting into those mindsets but when something just organically kind of snowballs and grows into this thing and then you see that that thing is helping people, it's hard to find better feelings in life than that. You know, maybe hugging your kids, that's pretty good too but you know, that's to me what life is about. Were you interested in other philosophies or wisdom things before getting into Musar?

Like did anything peak your interest?

Yeah, I was in the corporate world and I thought I was living like my dream life that I was getting promoted, things were going great, it was putting charges stuff and it all came crashing down when I became a scapegoat for a product launch that went back. I was publicly humiliated by the president of the company. I had at the biggest like meeting in my field of the year, my best customer presented terrible data and my product. So I had to spend all day tap dancing, saying how everything was gonna work out and then that night my grandmother died.

Holy shit.

I was so wrapped up in like this work stuff, I was working 90 hours a week and I was like totally frantic and wrapped up in this though I was gonna skip the funeral and they held the funeral for a day so I could quote, finish my work and get to the funeral. Now that's a big deal in Judaism, you know.

Yeah.

So this is kind of how wrapped up I was. So two weeks later was Yom Kippur. And that's the holiest day of the year, Jews don't eat or drink, many go to services, you reflect on your life. So here I was three in the afternoon, feeling really woozy, they're chanting the Torah up at the front, I don't understand the word of it. I glanced down at the translation and these words jump out at me, don't turn to idols or molten things. My first thought was really dismissive. I'm thinking my life has fallen apart and here we are starting in with the statues again. Nobody has missed for thousands of years.

What is, you know, can't we like retire this? And then this phrase popped into my head. This is like this quiet voice that said, you need to do what's best for the company. And when I heard that, my stomach clenched and my palms got sweaty. And I started thinking about, well, what is a corporation? It's this amorphous thing. And I thought about, I was in marketing. And I thought about the time that I tried to create an ad using the company logo and everyone was really mad at me 'cause I was profaning the logo. And it hit me that I had turned my employer into a false idol and doing what's best for the company is not the same as what's doing best.

So when it wasn't best for me, it wasn't best for the customers, it wasn't best for anybody. And I decided that day I need to start putting people first. I need to reconnect with the values that I was raised with and put myself first and my family first. And within a year, I cut my hours by a third without changing jobs. And a year later, I cut my hours by a third again. And that was, I didn't really understand what happened at the time, and some people might look at that and it's like, okay, well, you have a moment of clarity and you withdraw from the world and something came into your head, but I don't believe that now.

I believe I heard I got a message from the divine.

Yeah. - And I listened. And it wasn't guaranteed that I listened. But I listened, that I made changes that day and I'm absolutely convinced that if I hadn't, I would have had a major health issue. I might have died, I might have had a stroke. I don't know what would have happened. I might have gotten divorced. But that really set me on a spiritual path and over time, as I've grown and learned more and accepted more, it's really changed the way that I show up and then I see the universe.

Yeah, I mean, how can it not, right? I mean, once you start delving into things that maybe we didn't grow up thinking about reality or maybe we did when we were very young but quickly got stamped out of us as we became adolescents and older. Yeah, I mean, it's hard. This is the, the jokingly I referred to as the blessing of the curse of being aware. It's harder to take wrong action when you know it's wrong. If you're just doing it ignorantly and habitually, it may take some time for you to figure out what's going on. But if you have a decision in front of you and you know one is not the ethical or right action to take and you do it, good luck.

That's not gonna be a fun experience for you. No matter how great you think you are at justifying things, it is not gonna work. I mean, I love that you refer to it as a call, you know, a message from the divine because this is something that I believe, you know, very deep inside of myself that I think those messages are constantly around us. The omnipresent, for lack of a better word, omnipresent, these things are being communicated to us and it's up to us to figure out how to clean kind of our earpiece or, you know, filter to get these things through that they do make sense to us. And the other thing that you mentioned, I'm glad you brought it up too.

Like when you deny these calls, you know, whether you wanna call it the hero's call, you know, just put it in Canbellian language, you know, when you deny these things, it can have serious consequences, not just from like your life's trajectory, from just like, oh, I'm doing this now, put from a health standpoint, you know, from a relationship standpoint, these things ripple out these decisions we make, which again, puts the emphasis on specifically what you're talking about with Musaar, which is how do we get to the point where we can actually identify and work with some of the things that are sticky for us?

So let me bring this to, I'm gonna be so selfish right here. My biggest issue has been listeners of the show know this. I can get angry when I get frustrated, I get very angry and take very poor action, you know, especially the closer people are to me, the relationships, you know, the more they know how awful I can actually be when I get angry, what's some advice you could give me or someone else dealing with anger that Musaar offers in terms of how we could actually actively deal with that or investigate it?

Well, no, that is one of my big issues as well. And, you know, dealing with anger and when I've had, you know, people who are close to me have learned to deal with it, I've had people like professional relationships where I was working with someone I got pissed off and it was like, okay, that was it, you know, we're not gonna work with you anymore, which was really too bad because once you kind of get to that, 'cause then I'll calm down, but they're like--

Exactly, yeah.

I don't know what happened to you, but I don't want any part of that.

Yeah, and then it's really painful, of course. And then it's, or if, you know, I yell at my kid or get angry at my wife, and then you feel like crap afterwards. - Yeah.

So the question is like, anger is a soul trait, but usually that's not, it's not something you can deal with head on. It is learning to, and it's not like there's a magic bullet. It's like, well, just stay this mantra, okay, angry, just be patient, you know.

Serenity now, yeah.

Yeah, no, that doesn't do any work, you know, 'cause the free will, so what you can start to do those, you can start to, you know, as you work through multiple soul traits, and it's kind of like, you know, anger is a symptom, and so like, what's causing your anger, you know, for one person, it might be an imbalance, like there's some kind of underlying spiritual imbalance that's going on. And identifying that and working to heal that, the anger will start to go, will start to become less of an issue. So for one person, it might be like an honor imbalance, which means honor is not, is not honoring the divine, it's about honoring the divine spark in other people.

That like focusing on the needs of others, and so it might be, you know, just not sufficiently honoring others, or it might be a humility imbalance, which is being a little bit too self-centered, and they're kind of honoring humility or kind of related to each other, 'cause often we get angry when someone else is in our way. It's like, I want the world the way I want it, or an obstacle to the world being the way I want it to be. And since I cannot control you, I'm going to get pissed off, and all of this happens, like very viscerally, very quickly. And so we might do, sorry, you're tracking, am I making sense so far?

You're making an abundance of sense, my friend.

So the question is, we try to find ways when we're not angry of like, I had one student who was a rage-holic driver. She got angry in a lot of parts of her life, and she was a rage-holic driver, and so when she was working on patience, she said, "You know what I'm going to do? "I'm going to let every car emerge in front of me. "Anyone who wants to merge, I'm just going to let them in. "I'm going to go out of my way to let these cars in." Came back to class two weeks later, she was a transformed person. She said, "I am now the commas driver in California. "You know, I listen to podcasts in my drive.

"I'm smiling and everybody, I'm letting them in." And it started spilling over into other parts of her life. Because when we're developing our character, when we're balancing our soul traits, we're really healing that part of the soul inside. So suddenly in other parts of her life, people no longer became a barrier.

Right.

Like this car and I, we're fighting, we're competitors to get there. Now it's like, "Hey, I'm going to honor this other person. "I'm going to help them on their journey." And suddenly you're helping everybody on their journey.

You're blowing my mind right now because with my therapist, they often bring up the example of me not having patience or me getting rationally upset when I drive and my wife will testify to that pretty much forever. I've never, I've tried to actively suppress, which I know really isn't the best technique when I feel the rage building when someone makes a bone head move. And most of my anger when driving, I've recognized is more a fear based, safety based issue. I don't actively try to do crazy things on the road because I think I'm better than people. It's because I know how bad people can be at driving.

So I put myself in this agitated kind of anxious state. However, the reason you're blowing my mind is I've never once thought that I'm going to make the change that I'm going to let everyone do whatever they want. If they're going too slow, that's fine. If they want to get over, no big deal. But I could see how something is seemingly as simple as that if that's your kind of launching pad rather than trying to stop the trigger once it happens, would have a tremendous impact on not only your driving and your anger related to driving, but how that would of course seep into other aspects of your life.

So you plucked it right out of my brain. So it inadvertently gave me like the best tip ever.

Right, well, I'm so happy to hear that, Noah, because that's like why Moose are so magical. Like I do one-on-one coaching with someone and I was talking to someone yesterday and said, "Well, what are you know you want to work on?" And she said, "Well, I want to understand why do this." And I really want to understand. I'm like, "No, we don't try to understand a few things." It's like there's really nothing to understand. What you understand is you do it and it causes your suffering. So what we want to do is we want to find an action that we can take which is going to nurture that positive aspect of our stuff.

Yeah, that to me is the practical benefit. I mean, that's what it's about. And this is what we referenced at the top of the episode before we started recording it. There are a lot of mystical and amazing and magical things that are happening at any given time. But if you get lost in that and can't actually have those principles or ideals work for you and serve you in your life, what's the point? It's just like watching a movie. It's going to have the impact maybe when you're watching it, but the chances of it full sale changing your entire life afterwards probably won't be that high. It's fascinating.

So I'm going to wrap it up, but I asked three questions at the end and then one longer open format one. So here we go. And also, just, I want to say before I get to the questions, thank you so much for introducing me to this because I'm going to really delve in and I encourage everyone listening if this is speaking your interest. Pick up Greg's book just before I get to the questions, remind people where they can purchase your book and your website and anywhere else you want someone to check out.

Sure, so my website is americanmusar.com, Musar's M-U-S-S-A-R, or you can search Greg Marcus Musar, you'll find me there. The book is called The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions, Finding Balance Through the Soul Traits of Musar and a little more than a year. We've gotten over 50 reviews on Amazon, 4.8 stars. It's very accessible. So you can find it at Amazon, find it in Barnes and Noble, and then libraries carried as well. And I want to say that there is a place for the mystical and one of the soul traits is awe and just as Noah was saying, if you get too wrapped up in the awe, you lose touch with the everyday life.

I've been in there.

And then, but when you are doing these sort of actions like the traffic and the other stuff, you're bringing the spiritual to everyday life. It's not like in some place else, it's like why not make driving a holy activity?

You touched on one of the, another key concept that I like to remind myself and other people of which there is no difference between the sacred and the mundane. We like to draw that barrier between the two. Oh, this was so amazing. And oh, I gotta go wash the dishes. But there really is no difference. It's your approach and perspective that you bring to that. When you imagined you're, not imagine, when you realized your children were divine sparks, you just shifted. You just shifted your entire mental and conscious state to something else. And who's to say it's not any less or more real than what we typically view reality through the lens we view it through.

So I love that you pointed that out again. I have a feeling that if we kept talking for another six hours, we would keep pulling out these fundamental truths over and over again. So I'd love maybe at another point to have a follow-up conversation because this has just been beyond enjoyable for me.

Oh, I would love to.

Definitely.

Yeah, oh, without a doubt, we'll stay in touch. Don't worry about that. Okay, questions. What is your favorite color?

My favorite color is blue.

Mine too. What's your favorite number?

My favorite number is 18.

Very interesting. Why 18?

18 is the holy number in Judaism.

Yes, it is.

If you take, Hebrew is an ancient language, there was no separate number. So every letter represents a number. And if you take the word for life and change it into numbers, it's 18.

Interesting. Also, geometry, I know it adds up to nine, another very mystical number. What is your favorite animal?

My favorite animal are cats, as we had of yesterday in our call.

I love cats too. So last question. What's a practical tip, I almost said that wrong, what's a practical tip that has helped you in your life that you could share with other people listening right now?

So a practical tip I would say is, as someone who's still a recovering workaholic, I would say, set a time and you're gonna stop working and set it two hours before you need to go to sleep. So I've got a bed at 11, turn off your computer and all your devices in social media at nine o'clock and just light yourself unwind for two hours. Social media might be a little harder, but work for sure. It's no text, no email, no nothing. No, just light yourself unwind and sleep.

That's great advice. I'm dubious I will be able to follow it, at least in the short term. But it's really good advice. I could see just how powerful that would actually be, but man, I'm plugged into the vortex these days. It's hard to do, but I'm gonna give it a shot. Greg, thank you so much for coming on and speaking about Musar and just sharing your wisdom. I'm looking forward to doing this again.

Me too, Noah, this was a total blast. I love your show and love what you're doing, so thanks for having me on.

Awesome, thanks, Greg. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

Thank you for listening to that episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Greg's a really cool guy. Go check out his website, americanmusar.com. That's American. Gonna trust you know how to spell that. Musar, M-U-S-S-A-R.com, his book, Musar Book, the spiritual practice of good actions. Go pick that up on Amazon, on his website. He also has a free soul quiz that you can take a soul trade profile quiz. I took it, it was very interesting. Just a really nice down to earth cool guy. I'm gonna be scheduling a session with him 'cause he offered it and just what a nice guy. So thank you for listening or a reminder if you wanna join that Discord group, the one that's gonna be paid in February.

Find that on this podcast page. Email me, even know@syncpodcast.com if you want in. I'll get you in there. Also, I've never really big up this but my Twitter is becoming a more active place for some of the things related to cryptocurrency and the server that I mentioned. So if you wanna follow me on Twitter, feel free, no press, no big deal. Okay, that's it. I will see you next week.