by Pete Holmes
Then there’s the basic question, “Do you believe in God?” Imagine someone at a cocktail party, or on a date, or after a church service, asking you, “Do you believe in a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought including being and nonbeing?” This would change the conversation entirely. I mean, why wouldn’t you believe in a metaphor? It’s 100 percent real. There it is. Write it on a napkin if you want to touch it.
Barry Taylor, the road manager for AC/DC, put it this way: “God is the name of the blanket we throw over the mystery to give it shape.” Come on—shouldn’t I have heard this in church? Why am I hearing this from the road manager for AC/DC?
God had never been a mystery to me! The whole point of God was something to hold on to. Church was certainty worship—we sang songs that celebrated our in-ness as we prayed for and quietly pitied those who were out. God was something to calm the masses, to help us stop asking questions, to tick boxes so we could move on with our lives and think about other things.
But now I was starting to look at the big questions from a different vantage point entirely. Suddenly it didn’t matter if we called the speck of mass that erupted into the big bang “the Singularity” or if we called it “God.” When we concede it’s a mystery, what’s the difference? We’re all trying to put language to something we can’t speak about, something we can’t fully know. Science is trying to photograph it, the mystic is trying to feel it. Are we really going to keep fighting about vocabulary?
I had been told that God works in mysterious ways. Now I saw that the Mystery works in Godly ways—you know, spontaneously creating itself and all—and a metaphor was as close as we could get to understanding that. These things, like my mushroom trip, weren’t meant to be labeled and sorted easily in our minds. The word Campbell uses for this type of thinking is “transrational.” It’s not irrational, it’s beyond rationality. It’s not blueprints to build a bridge, it’s crying at a song that doesn’t have any words.
We’re like dogs trying to understand the internet.
And the best way we can touch the unfathomable mystery is with a myth.
myth about you
THERE’S A BILLBOARD FOR A TV SHOW NEAR MY HOUSE right now that reads, PRIVACY IS A MYTH. Billboards are designed to be read and understood while driving at high speeds, and in that regard this one works. “Privacy is a myth” means “there is no privacy,” which means “watch this TV show and find out what happened to our privacy. Tuesdays at 9:00 on CBS.”
My whole religious life, if someone had told me the Bible was a myth, I would have wanted to punch him in the face (if my very literal God hadn’t already forbidden physical violence), because myth had meant “not true.” I think that’s still what it means to most of us.
But Joseph Campbell offers another perspective. To Campbell, myth doesn’t mean not true, it means an idea so big that it transcends the categories of true and untrue. A myth is trying to crash into you, knocking you out of your thinking mind and into the wider, all-encompassing potential of your heart, and by any means necessary.
I was surprised to learn that this approach doesn’t rob from the stories, but brings them to life. I started to see that dragging “God” out of the mythical realm and into our tangible, knowable reality is doing the idea a disservice, like putting a leash around a fish and taking it for a walk down Fifth Avenue. But when I surrendered my desire to win debates and prove that I was right and others were wrong, I started to come to peace with the less-than-definite nature of myth. (Of course, if your doctor’s medical degree is a myth, get out of there, Diane!) But putting God stories in the mythical category is no cause for alarm. It’s letting that God fish swim, baby!
Campbell taught that the Bible is more like a poem than an explanation, blending myth with history to get you way closer to the divine than a textbook filled with just facts ever could. An explanation gets you only so far. Deeper transformation happens with a feeling—with metaphors, with stories.
This shift made my search for God much more subtle and inward than it had ever been before. I started to see how a spirituality based on facts is only really helpful for making groups, building walls, or stitching flags, but when your spirituality becomes about a feeling, you see how private and personal faith really is. You feel a feeling. No one else can feel it for you. And myth makes the story about you, about you transforming, you seeing how it all really is.
For me, this was like transforming a two-dimensional photograph of a room into a real three-dimensional place, one where you can play, shake, and stomp your feet. Because with myth, you’re no longer just the witness to the story, you’re invited in. It’s no longer a tall tale about someone else, somewhere else, who did something impossible, whom we need to praise for the rest of our lives only to continue praising Him forever in heaven.
Letting go of the exhausting need to defend the historical truth of the Bible—of Jonah and the whale, or Jesus feeding the five thousand (or, depending on which Gospel you read, four thousand), or Balaam’s talking ass—is just a bonus. This new perspective of God as metaphor is about unlocking the deeper meaning and applying it to yourself. And that deeper meaning is “go and do likewise.”
Much of my Christian life was spent debating what was and what wasn’t literally true in the Bible. Usually, the answer was everything is true, and a lot of tense evangelical debates in college were simply won by shouting, “It’s in the scriptures!”
I knew a few people with more liberal interpretations, but even they had their limits. One Bible professor I knew broke it down like this: “Virgin birth, sinless life, physical death, and resurrection—anything else is fair game.” Meaning, we can debate anything in the Bible, but the whole thing falls apart if Jesus wasn’t born of a virgin, wasn’t blameless, and didn’t actually die and rise from the grave. Otherwise, who is it exactly we are pledging our lives to?
Campbell was the first person I read who suggested that these debates, or looking for archeological evidence, or screaming “It’s in the scriptures!” wasn’t anywhere near the point. The story isn’t about fact-checking what happened then, it’s to assist in your inner transformation now. This even applies to something as sacred as the resurrection of Christ. Campbell said:
If you read “Jesus ascended to heaven” in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward—not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the Kingdom of Heaven within. The images are outward but their reflection is inward.
The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, Alpha and Omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body’s dynamic source*.
When read literally, you are excluded from the Bible, cast as a cheering bystander. After all, you can’t come back from the dead. You can’t turn water into wine. You can’t heal the blind. At least not literally.
But you can metaphorically.
It felt so good to take the energy I had been spending on defending the literal truth of the Bible and use it to quietly consider the metaphorical challenges the story was offering me to undertake. Suddenly, I wasn’t here to build a case for someone else’s journey, but to go on one of my own.
According to the normal way of thinking about the Christian religion, we cannot identify with Jesus, we have to imitate Jesus. To say, “I and the Father are one,” as Jesus said, is blasphemy for us. However, in the Thomas Gospel that was dug up in Egypt some forty years ago, Jesus says, “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I shall be he.” Now, that is exactly Buddhism. We are all manifestations of Buddha consciousness, or Christ consciousness, only we don’t know it. The word “Buddha” means “the one who waked up.” We are all to do that—to wake up to the Christ or Buddha consciousness within us.*
The story of Jesus became to me a story about a soul waking up, up and out of the priso
ns we’ve built around ourselves with our minds, with our fear, our greed, and our hate. Jesus died to the illusion of separateness and woke up to the reality of interconnectedness, remembering his place in what mystics call divine union and physicists call the unified field. It is a story of Jesus seeing the code in the Matrix, a man at a puppet show seeing the strings. And all the time He’s pointing and saying, “Don’t you see? This is what-this-is. This is how energy moves in the world. Don’t just celebrate my crossing over, come and join me.”
The story is asking you to go through the pain of change and transformation. You will be persecuted; your friends will sell you out; your mom and your Small Group will not understand. But He’s telling you: “I want you here. Do you want to be here? This is how it works. If you want resurrection, you have to have crucifixion.” Not just me—you. You want rebirth? You must die and rise again.
Stop debating burial sites or looking for DNA on the shroud of Turin. This story is continuing, and the next chapter is about you. You, dying to your lower self, leaving behind your base humanity, and rising to your highest self, awakening to your own interconnectedness with the pulse of the world.
Go and do likewise.
I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT SPORTS, BUT LET ME TRY THIS:
It’s kind of like Jesus is a receiver in a football game. We’re at that kick thing where at the beginning of the game the other team boots it really hard because they lost a coin toss and I think they’re really upset about that so they’re like, “Well, we may have said ‘tails’ where we should have said ‘heads,’ but my foot says you have to start the game waaaaaaaaay over there!” Right?
Anyway, the other team has to run it back.
And get this: Sweet Jesus of Nazareth—number 33—catches the ball on His own 2-yard line. And it looks like it’s going to end right away. It looks like Sweet Jeez will get blitzed and jumped on and His team will have to start the ball tossing line from there. But that’s not what happens.
BOOM! Sweet Jesus of Nazareth runs that pigskin all the way to midfield! He’s spinning, jumping, doing backflips. No one has ever seen anything like it. It’s amazing!
Then, somewhere around the 25-yard white paint markings, Jesus gets tackled and the ball slips out of His hands—fumble, right?!—and soars into the hands of His teammate. And it’s you. Holy shit, you’re on the field! Sweet Jeez is yelling “Go! Go!” The crowd roars with excitement! RUN! BRING IT HOME, BABY! LET’S SEE HOW FAR WE CAN TAKE THIS!
But you just put the ball down so you can clap and woo! and celebrate His incredible return.
Dude.
You’re supposed to run with the ball. Yes, worship. Celebrate. Sure. Fine. But get on with it.
He showed you the plays; you can see how He moved. But so many of us are still standing around talking about how well He did it instead of getting a move on. Don’t just celebrate His ascension, get to ascending yourself.
Go and do likewise.
“But you’re God!” we protest.
I know I am, but what are you?
CAMPBELL CHANGED MY PERSPECTIVE ON LIFE FROM that of a holding room where you wait to meet Christ later to a living room in which to commune with Christ’s consciousness here and now. It’s not just the personal-relationship “Buddy Jesus” I was taught in Sunday school, the Divine Pal we keep in our pockets, sticking His head out of our handbags like a purse dog, ready to offer help finding parking or protection from the flu that’s been going around. It’s an invitation you extend for His essence to pass through you. Active and empowering, not just “please protect me,” but transform me. Merge with me. Help me kill this overactive, critical, limiting brain of mine. Help me escape the dungeons of cultural expectation, familial expectation, all the I shoulds and I shouldn’ts, I cans and I can’ts. Help me take the small person inside me and kick his ass, leave him for dead, and resurrect to my full, connected, light-filled potential.
The story is you being reborn, you getting saved from your basic, boring, limited, mundane, same-story-at-every-party, same-vacation-every-year, same-restaurant-every-birthday, same-river-of-negative-thoughts self-loathing and cruel humanity and awakening to who you really are.
Go and do likewise.
consies o’breezies
WHEN MY WIFE FIRST LEFT ME, I ASKED JOHN MULANEY what being single was like. Without hesitation, he said, “You get a lot of work done.”
Turns out, that’s true. I was on the writing staff of my second TV show, the short-lived Fox sitcom I Hate My Teenage Daughter, and with no girlfriend to indulge my codependence and help me fill my every free moment with dinners and movies and sex and snuggling and rewatching movies we had already seen, I was for the first time in my life free to work.
I got better at stand-up and did more shows; I recorded the podcast; I started exercising and eating plants instead of double orders of lo mein. I stopped drinking nine goblets of freezer vodka every night and bought a juicer and sheets of fresh, green wheatgrass, which I kept on top of my fridge the way a gardener might keep sample squares of sod.
All of this led to doing stand-up on Conan for a second time. My first set had been good, but my second one felt different. I walked out onto the shiny floor feeling like I belonged there, no longer like a kid who had sneaked into Disney after hours. I felt like a real guest, someone with the goods. My cheeks flush with the color nine gallons of kale juice every morning will give you, I waved to Conan at his desk like a pro—a tip Mike Birbiglia had given me—nodded to the band, and hit my mark without looking down.
Afterward, Conan came backstage and chatted with me. We talked for five minutes or so, talking about Boston, our families, and being incredibly tall—if you include his hair, Conan and I are almost exactly the same height. I didn’t think much of it, but the booker, JP Buck, told me afterward that he rarely does that, as he usually is understandably in a rush to get home to his family. A few weeks later, Conan invited me to meet him at his office. We hung out for about fifteen minutes, and it was like two old friends chatting. Before I left, he looked at me as if he was trying to figure me out.
“I don’t know,” Conan said. “Something about you. When I’m around you, my funny tuning fork vibrates.”
I pretended this wasn’t a huge deal, but inside my chest lit up like the Fourth of July. I went home and drew a tuning fork on the back of my parking pass with a Sharpie and hung it over my desk. (It’s still there.)
A week after that, another meeting—this time with Conan and his producers—but this time big news.
“We’re going to go to TBS,” Conan said, “and we’re going to tell them we’ve been looking for someone to host a late-night show after mine, and that we’ve found the guy.” This was the first I had heard of it. So much so, in fact, I didn’t know who he meant by “the guy.” But I just kept my mouth shut, and I eventually derived from context clues that they did, in fact, mean me.
Holy shit. I was going to host a late-night show after Conan.
It was too much. I told Mulaney the next day, and he gave me the only true compliment one comedian can give another.
“Real jealousy,” he said, and gave me a hug.
A MONTH OR TWO LATER, WE TAPED A PILOT EPISODE of what we called “The Midnight Show” on Conan’s set. By this point, I was even more obsessed with Conan’s career and his rise to late-night and couldn’t believe I was following in the same footsteps. I told his producer, Jeff Ross—not the comedian—how moved I had been when I read the story of how Conan taped his own test episode and that after the interview portion, Jeff had handed Conan a piece of paper that read, “You’re killing.” And here I was with the same producer doing the very same thing. It was beyond surreal.
On the day of the taping, I went out before the cameras were rolling and did about twenty minutes of crowd work with the studio audience. I told them how important it was that this taping go well, and how they all held my fate in their hands, coercing them to be a great audience, finally ending by leading them in a joyful cha
nt of “Let’s not fuck this up!”
We didn’t.
The taping went great. I did a monologue of my best stand-up material, we did a few “desk pieces”—jokes you do sitting at your desk, although I had no desk—and we had stacked the deck with an amazing first guest, Bill Burr. I was slightly nervous as Bill sat across from me ranting about Hitler, wondering what he could possibly have been saying in German in all those emphatic speeches we’d all seen footage of. “I don’t know,” I said, “but probably a lot of ‘hear me outs.’” Bill cackled—a thrill!—and the audience cheered as I threw to a commercial break, me masking my elation of hitting a big laugh right as the interview was supposed to be ending. It felt natural, and fun, and the crowd was as great as I had begged them to be.
As Bill waved to the audience and left the stage, Jeff Ross came over to me and handed me a folded piece of paper. Conan constantly makes fun of Jeff on his show for being cold and emotionless, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.
It read, “You’re killing.”
duncan trussell and the harbor of sorrows
ONE FRIDAY A FEW WEEKS LATER, I DROVE TO ATWATER Village in Los Angeles and parked in front of a small house on a suburban street. When I rang the doorbell, what sounded like fifteen small dogs erupted into a chorus of high-pitched, frantic yips and flooded out around my ankles as their owner, Duncan Trussell, opened the door and greeted me with his signature, raspy-voiced “Hey, man!”
Duncan Trussell is mysterious, wild, and a little bit dangerous, like one of those essential movie characters Obi-Wan Kenobi or Morpheus or Willy Wonka, if any of those guys did stand-up comedy and ate impressively large amounts of weed. Wearing a black T-shirt, a beige fedora, and a big brown beard, Duncan kind of looks like Jim Henson if Jim Henson found a way to breathe consciousness into his Muppets while smoking DMT. He’s very hard to nail down, but that day he looked like a marijuana-fueled Merlin, or a retired pirate living on the outskirts of society.