[00:04] Jennifer Wu: Hi everyone, thanks for listening to The Founder Spirit podcast. I'm your host, Jennifer Wu. In this podcast series, I interview exceptional individuals from all over the world with the Founder Spirit, ranging from social entrepreneurs, tech founders to philanthropists, elite athletes and more. Together, we'll uncover not only how they manage to succeed in face of multiple challenges, but also who they are as people and their human story. 

For this season of the Founder Spirit podcast, I’m partnering with the Villars Institute, a non-profit foundation focused on accelerating the transition to a net-zero economy in restoring planetary health.

If my podcasts have been beneficial or valuable to you, feel free to become a patron and support me on Patreon.com. That is P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com. 

You can find us on Apple, Google, Amazon and Spotify, as well as social media and our website at TheFounderSpirit.com. 

“God is more like light than anything else. And light is, of course, a form of energy. So these texts suggest, especially the one I love best, the Gospel of Thomas, that if we are created in the image of God, there is, within each one of us, access to a certain kind of divine energy. Call it light as a metaphor, which gives us a secret line, a secret connection, with the divine source. But it's not obvious that we have it. We have to look for it through meditation, through prayer, through whatever means possible.”

“In the Gospel of Thomas, (the) Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, (the) Gospel of Truth, and then this wonderful poem you mentioned, women appear not as secondary, but as spiritually developed people.”

Joining us today is the prodigious Professor Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion at Princeton University and a Trustee of the Aspen Institute. A distinguished scholar known for her groundbreaking work in the field of religious studies, Professor Pagels has dedicated her life to researching the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of early Christian and Gnostic texts, discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945.

A prolific writer, she is the author of several influential books on Gnosticism and early Christianity. The Gnostic Gospels was selected by the Modern Library as one of the best 100 non-fiction books of the 20th century. Her most recent book, Why Religion?, is one in which she tells her own story of love and struggles to survive after the devastating loss of her son and her husband.

For her lifelong work on Gnosticism and its profound impact on religious studies, challenging traditional narratives and offering new perspectives on the development of Christianity, Elaine is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades, including the MacArthur “Genius Grant”, as well as the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.

Hello Professor Pagels, welcome to the The Founder Spirit podcast! I’m so grateful that our paths crossed again after many years today. It's wonderful to have you and thank you for taking the time.

[03:23] Elaine Pagels: Thank you. I'm very happy to speak with you again, Jennifer, so wonderful.

[03:27] Jennifer: Professor Pagels, growing up in the Bay Area, religion was considered somewhat obsolete in your household, at least by your father, who was a biologist at Stanford. 

But at the age of 15, you attended an event in San Francisco. Can you tell us a little bit more about this event and how it changed your life trajectory?

[03:48] Elaine: Yes. As you said, growing up in Palo Alto, my father was a research biologist, who had been raised in a ferociously Presbyterian household, and he really disliked the way people argued about religion in his family. 

So he said, I'm done with all that, as soon as he discovered Darwin. I was told that religion is silly old folktales, and so I didn't think about it much. We were nominally Christian, but it didn't matter. 

The encounter in San Francisco occurred when some friends invited me, and I really didn't know what it was, but I thought, anything going on there is better than Palo Alto on a very sleepy Sunday afternoon. So we ended up at the Billy Graham crusade. I didn't know who this man was or what I was getting into, but there were 18,000 people packed into Candlestick Park sports stadium and 6,000 in the parking lot trying to get in. It was a mob scene and amazing.

And then there was this preacher who said things that were very strange to me. He challenged America, and having had immigrant grandparents who thought America is the greatest country in the world with the highest standard of morality and justice, he was calling it a sinful nation. And I was really surprised by that, taken aback.  

And then he said, this country is trying to build even greater nuclear weapons after destroying over 100,000 people at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and now they're trying to build even bigger bombs. I was shocked. I mean, that was obviously true, but I hadn't thought of it that way, as worship of science without any critical engagement with what it might mean. 

And then he talked about Christians using the Bible to justify segregation and slavery. Being a Southerner, he knew what that meant. It wasn't something I'd thought about either, having grown up in Palo Alto. 

And then he talked about being born again and you could have a new life and everything could start over and it would be marvelous and God would love you. And I was 15, so I thought, wow, okay, that sounds wonderful. And it was also very powerful because there was enormous choir singing, Graham was very charismatic. 

So I went down with thousands of people to get born again. And it was a powerful experience - the music, the emotional power, what he was offering, the idea of a new life, a spiritual life that engages God as your personal father and Jesus as your friend and all - it was wonderful. 

My parents were really shocked. My father was angry, like you did what? But actually, in retrospect, although it didn't last too long for me, an Evangelical Church in Palo Alto, and I was engaged with it, with other high school students, and it was an important experience for a while, but then I had to get out of it. 

And I wrote about this only because people ask me, well, why do you study religion and why do you do it the way you do? Well, there was something there that was very compelling and powerful that I didn't understand. And I was told (that) it didn't exist. 

But it certainly opened my sense of some kind of spiritual power of what you might call the imagination, but what I also think of as a basic human capacity to engage other realities beyond the material ones. Well, you know, he (Billy Graham) said, it will change your life. Well, it did, but only for about a year and then I had to leave that church. 

[07:22] Jennifer: Right, because your friend Paul passed away.

[07:25] Elaine: Well, he didn't just die, he was 16 years old, he was suddenly killed in an automobile accident. One moment, the most vivid person I knew, fully alive and extraordinary, and then he was dead and you think, how does that happen? 

So I went back to this little church and I said, my friend who’s 16 years old, just got killed. And they said it's terrible, was he born again? And I said, no, he was Jewish. And they said, well, then he's in hell. And I was so shocked, I... 

You sort of laugh or you cry at that moment, I just felt like I'd been socked in the stomach and I couldn't even answer. So I just walked out of there alone and I never went back.

[08:06] Jennifer: One thing that I wanted to ask you, something that I find quite curious, because as a rebellious teenager, you also chose the company of artists, musicians and poets.

And one thing that always fascinated me was one of your favorite haunts in Silicon Valley in the 60s is called Kepler's Books. And from what I understand, it was considered as the cultural epicenter at the time… of the counterculture…

[08:35] Elaine: Counterculture, yes (chuckles)

[08:36] Jennifer: That’s right, maybe not the culture, but the counterculture of the 60s. (chuckles) What was it like, Elaine, tell us about… 

[8:43] Elaine: Yes, my family would have said the culture is Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. This was rock and roll and questions about the Vietnam War and politics and race and all of the things that were so intensely going on at the time. And those are the people to whom I retreated after I left this evangelical church. 

And we were focused around a musician from Oakland who was Latino, just discharged from the army, didn't go to college, and he could play the twelve string guitar with 9.5 fingers like you cannot imagine - charismatic.

That was Jerry Garcia, except that he wasn't yet Jerry Garcia. He was just this guy we knew. And five years later after I left California for graduate school, he started a group called the Grateful Dead. And I didn't see them after that. But there were friends that are still my friends from that time.

[09:33] Jennifer: And also, curiously enough, after Stanford, you pursued a career in modern dance in New York City, But somehow, as you mentioned before, you found your way back to religion, but this time, not as a fervent believer, but as an academic. 

So after having left the Evangelical Church a few years earlier, what rekindled your fascination to study religion at graduate school?

[10:00] Elaine: Well, they were just questions. I thought, wait a minute, I really love literature and poetry and music, but What was it about religion that was powerful when I was told it was nothing? Freud says delusion, future of an illusion, just a childish fantasy. But it was a powerful experience, and I knew something had happened. 

And here are all of these traditions that have grown up for thousands of years all over the world, whether it's Islam or Buddhism or Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism. These are cultural systems which articulate different values in powerful ways, and it's not, obviously, nothing. And what was it that hit me? I thought, what if it were Buddhism? Is it Christianity? Is it about Jesus? What’s that for? So I decided it wasn't just as an academic, because the academic and the believer are not that separate. 

But I just thought, what's going on there? And I thought Harvard was (a) secular school, which it primarily is. And they had a program in which you could study Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or Christianity, and I decided to go there and find out, not from a place where anyone was going to try to talk me into being a Christian. But what was it about? What do we know about Jesus? What do we know about how the movement started? Why did this movement become so successful?

[11:19] Jennifer: Elaine, do you think it's important for a religious scholar to be somewhat non-religious? 

[11:25] Elaine: No, actually, Jennifer, I think there's a place for all kinds of people. Many scholars of Islam or Buddhism or, for example, my colleague Jonathan Gold, who's an expert on 11th century Tibetan texts, is profoundly engaged in the meditation practice and the philosophy, though he's New Yorker and from a secular Jewish family. 

And there are many people who study Judaism who are participants, orthodox or Catholics who study Christianity, all of that. But there's also a place for standing and looking at it and saying, what is this about? More like an anthropologist. 

I was thinking of Clifford Geertz, who was an anthropologist I heard speak at Columbia (University). He was talking then about death rituals in Indonesia. But to look at the Christian movement and say, what is this about? That's what I wanted to do - what do we actually know?

[12:20] Jennifer: It was while at Harvard, you discovered the Gnostic Gospels, also known as the Nag Hammadi Library. Can you tell us what they are? And also the fascinating story behind how these ancient texts reemerged in 1945.

[12:35] Elaine: Yes, I wish I could say I discovered them. They were actually discovered in the same year as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and that was 1945. But nobody knew what this was. It was a library of 51 ancient secret texts. And they aren't just Christian; there's Jewish and there's some that speak of the goddess ISIS and Greek religion. But they are about 2,000 years old, they're about as old as the New Testament. 

We started to read not only familiar Christian texts like the gospels in the New Testament, but we found these secret gospels, which the bishops had actually destroyed and buried nearly 1,600 years ago when Christianity became allied with the Roman state. Because they said, oh, these are bad gospels, these are heresy - it’s a word, actually, that means choice. And apparently the bishops didn't think choice is what they wanted people to have, they wanted to tell them what to think - that's just my bias, sorry. 

But the point is, we kept saying, wait a minute, what are these secret gospels? They claim to be secret teaching of Jesus, not just what he taught thousands of people sitting on the hills of Galilee, but what he talked about privately with certain disciples. They might be that because Jewish rabbis in the first century did usually teach publicly one way and a different way to their more learned disciples. And they still do, right? I mean, people in every tradition do that. 

So Buddhism has esoteric forms of Buddhism, and Islam has mystical forms of Islam that aren't taught ordinarily, and so does Judaism, it has kabbalah, right? And Christian mysticism has been carefully filtered by the Catholic Church. If you look at, say, Teresa of Avila or St. John of the Cross or Meister Eckert much later, that's 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th century. 

But in the early movement, it looks as though Jesus had secret teaching that he taught to certain people, and I think the reason the churches didn't like it, the bishops didn't like it, is that they were saying the only way for salvation is through the Catholic Church. Outside the church, there's no salvation - that's a quote. 

But these texts suggest that you, being a human being and I, any of us, are created in the divine image. And what that means, of course, it's a metaphor, because you can't really make an image of Israel's God - it's forbidden, not supposed to picture him, if it was (a) he.

But the image that the prophets used, like the prophet Ezekiel, he said “I saw the Lord on the throne. Well, I didn't really see somebody, but what I actually saw was rainbows and sapphires and jewels and brilliant light pouring forth from heaven.” So the image he could use of the Lord God of Israel was not a human shape, but light. God is more like light than anything else. And light is, of course, a form of energy. 

So these texts suggest, especially the one I love best, the Gospel of Thomas, that if we are created in the image of God, there is within each one of us access to a certain kind of divine energy. Call it light as a metaphor, which gives us a secret line, a secret connection with the divine source. 

But it's not obvious that we have it. We have to look for it through meditation, through prayer, through whatever means possible. And if we find it, we don't need a church or even Jesus or anyone else, except that connection, which they suggest is innate. So that's the kind of teaching the church didn't like.

[16:21] Jennifer: …denounced as heresy.

[16:23] Elaine: Heresy. And because they offered an alternative to the institutional church and its sacraments, which claims to be the only access you can get to God. And I love these texts. I thought, wow, these are amazing, because they suggest a freelance possibility. 

[16:41] Jennifer: You know, it's interesting because I grew up in China, so religion was always something that seemed out of touch for me. And when I first moved to the US, we moved to Salt Lake City, the center for the Church of Latter Day Saints.

[16:59] Elaine: Where the angel came, yes. How old were you?

[17:02] Jennifer: Yes, I was twelve.

[17:03] Elaine: Oh, that's a very impressionable age.

[17:05] Jennifer: Yes, it was. And I remember that my high school friends tried really hard to convert me; but as a rebellious teenager, I rejected it. Religion in my family didn't exist at all, because my parents had suffered through the Cultural Revolution, and we didn't have any religion during that time.

I think over the years, I don't say that I'm a religious person, but I'm  becoming a much more spiritual person. And I think that you probably see this movement, and you're probably one person that's practicing it as well. Like you said, there's energy and this inner light inside of us. And that's actually one of the Buddhist teachings - Buddha said that everybody has this Buddha nature inside.

And one thing that really struck me when I read the Gnostic Gospels was that you specifically mention your favorite excerpt from the Gospel of Thomas, which is number 70. Can you tell us what it is and what it means to you?

[18:06] Elaine: Well, that was the first one that really stopped me cold. The Gospel of Thomas doesn't have any stories in it, it's just a list of the sayings of the living Jesus. And many of them would be familiar to anyone who knows the Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of Luke - “love your brother, blessed are the poor,” things like that. 

But some of them are really different and much more resonant with Buddhist teaching, as you say, or with Jewish mystical teaching, too. The one that stopped me, Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

And I was sort of stunned. I took it psychologically, and I think psychologically it's powerful when people suppress who they are or hide what's going on within them, that can be very destructive to a human being. And it works on that level, but now I see it was a spiritual comment.

It was also about, as you said, a kind of access to a spiritual path, which is within you. And if you find that, it delivers you from many other things. And if you fail to find that, it almost shrinks you. Like you, I think of it as a natural human quality, just something innate to nature that we need to find a sense of meaning and a sense of engagement in our lives. 

And that's what this spoke about, and I just thought, wow, that's what I'm here to do. 

[19:38] Jennifer: So in finding your true self, in living an authentic life, you bring forth this inner light, this spiritual energy that's inside. 

Is this the key to Gnosis? Is this the key to how to live a more fulfilling life… is finding that energy, that inner light inside of each (and) every one of us?

[20:00] Elaine: I think exactly that. And, you know, Jennifer, it's also fundamental to Jewish mysticism, which speaks of this light, and it speaks of created in the image, that same story. 

But also the Gospel of Thomas was written probably around the year 100 of The Common Era, in which the teachings of the Buddha were being written down as well. And there were Christians in Egypt who were quite aware of Buddhist teaching, and there were others, Greek philosophers, for example, who wanted to go to India and learn about what they could from Hindu teachers, from Buddhist teachers - and they were aware of that. So this could have been influenced by Indian tradition as well. 

Thomas, they say, is a disciple, catholic tradition says, who went to India after the death of Jesus. And there's a Church of St. Thomas where he allegedly went, which is now a pretty orthodox church. But in the beginning, it may not have been that, if Thomas went there and taught this kind of thing. Or here's another suggestion, maybe he taught what started as a Jewish mystical image, the divine light within you. And it would be shaped, influenced by the teachings he found there.

[21:17] Jennifer: Very interesting. 

In your research, you also examined the role of women in early Christian communities and their participation and potentially influence on shaping religious traditions. I wanted to ask you along that line about this mysterious poem, which I love, called “The Thunder, Perfect Mind”, which was discovered along with the Gnostic manuscripts in Nag Hammadi. 

And it's narrated in the voice of a female divine power. Can you tell us, how do you interpret this puzzling but marvelous poem?

[21:58] Elaine: Well, that's a great question, Jennifer, because when I first started teaching after graduate school, somebody said, why don't you tell us what you know about women in the early Christian movement? And I said, well, I'll tell you what I learned at Harvard - nothing, women don't write and they don't read, so we don't know anything about that. Well, of course that's not true. 

The secret gospels, unlike the ones in the New Testament, the ones in the New Testament say all the disciples are men, and then there were the women. In the Gospel of Thomas, (the) Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, (the) Gospel of Truth, and then this wonderful poem you mentioned, women appear not as secondary, but as spiritually developed people. 

The poem you mentioned is just beautiful, isn't it? It's not a Christian poem. It’s a poem probably patterned on the worship of the goddess ISIS in Egypt, because it uses the kind of formulae that are in her praise - she is the one who creates the universe, she is the one. And she says, I am many of these.

And that poem, as you said, it's a feminine divine power, a feminine emanation of God seen in many forms. And the poem suggests she's seen as ISIS in Egypt. She's seen as Eve in Jewish tradition. She’s seen as divine wisdom, because that's a feminine word in Hebrew, Hochma. Or she’s seen as spirit, which is also a feminine word in Hebrew, Ruach. Or she's seen as Shekinah, which means the presence of God in God's feminine form. 

So that literature, which was hidden, all of these texts, has lots of images of feminine divine beings and speaks also about women participating in ways that shocked Orthodox Christians. Those women, they think they can baptize people, they think they can teach, they think they can act like men, but they can't. Well, in some of these other groups that use these other gospels, they were. 

So we're finding out that feminism (was) not invented in the 18th and 19th centuries, of course. These women were aware and functioning that way some thousands of years ago in Egypt, in Greece, in Rome, and they were creating that kind of poetry.

[24:17] Jennifer: And it's interesting because after reading the Gnostic Gospels, I kept wondering, had we not suppressed these texts in the early Christian period, how might we have built a different society today?

[24:36] Elaine: Very good question. But these are shaped by the society in which those people are living and that we know now that some were dissidents and were advocating for women and for their power to be recognized, spiritual power, as well as social power. And that they were absolutely suppressed, that literature was gone.

[24:57] Jennifer: And also, in your interpretation, as you mentioned, the word “Spirit” in Hebrew is actually feminine, and so is the word “Wisdom”. So in saying that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, does that suggest that God is both masculine and feminine? And dare I say, in this day and age, maybe non-binary?

[25:21] Elaine: (chuckles) Ha yes, because one of my favorite teachers in this group of people who were part of a Gnostic movement… Gnostic simply means people with spiritual insight. The word comes from the word gnosis - people say knowledge, it’s not mental knowledge, it's heart knowledge, recognition. 

And so actually the first statement of God manifest in three forms occurs very early: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now, if you say that in Aramaic, which is Jesus's language, or in Hebrew, it would be a masculine, a feminine and a masculine. So the earliest statement we have would suggest that one of the elements of the Trinity is a feminine presence, if you're going to be gendered. 

But one of the great teachers of these secret texts, Valentinus, said, well, God, of course, is not gendered; the divine is not gendered; we don't have language for what we call the depth of the universe or the source. 

But if we use anthropomorphic language, if we say Father, then we should also say Mother. And understand that the beginning of Genesis says, in the beginning, what was there? Well, the Spirit moved on the face of the deep. And the Spirit would be a feminine in Hebrew. So he spoke of the divine being as masculine and feminine emanations of energy coming down from above creating the universe. 

And that picture is very much something you find in Jewish mystical thought to this day with the so-called sephirot, which are the divine waves of energy seen as masculine and feminine, respectively, combining to bring forth new life into the universe. So that's what it looks like.

And then I asked one of my Professors at Columbia, Alex Wayman, who's a specialist on Tibetan Buddhism. I said, what happens if you translate these words into Sanskrit? And he said, oh, well, then you get some of the Sanskrit terms for the Buddhist reality, including the feminine goddess like Tara. I said really? Well, yes. 

So I suspect that pattern of thought, the idea of masculine feminine energies combining and transforming is part of Tibetan thought as well as of ancient Jewish thought. And who knows how those streams mingled?

[27:39] Jennifer: And speaking of energies, I want to take us back more towards your most recent book, Why Religion?, which is a personal memoir interwoven with an exploration of how religious traditions have shaped how we understand ourselves. And the energies come in because your late husband, Heinz Pagels, he was a theoretical physicist and wrote this book called The Cosmic Code. 

And I loved reading this book because of the love that was present in your writing of your family, of your late husband, Heinz, as an explorer of the physical world, and you as an explorer of the invisible spiritual realm. Your union seemed like a perfect match. 

And you had a beautiful boy named Mark. But tragedy struck multiple times in your life. And first you lost your beautiful son Mark due to illness. I know you don't like that word lost.

[28:39] Elaine: Well, no, he died. Yes, at age six, a very rare illness.

[28:44] Jennifer: And then a year later, or rather 16 months later, your husband Heinz died in a hiking accident. And while you were grieving, you were also raising two very young children, Sarah and David. 

And it's been now 35 years since those unimaginable events in anyone's life. How did you find the strength to get up and carry on?

[29:10] Elaine: I don't know. If you had told me that was going to happen, I could not even imagine it. Because I was closer to those two than to anyone else ever, and here I still think about them both because this is where we lived in the summer. My husband was a total New Yorker, but he loved to be out in the wilderness, just climbing up in the forest, in the mountains. 

I don't know, I didn't think I would get through it, except that by then we had two small children - one was three months old and one was a year and a half. If I weren't there, who would take care of them? So I just probably owe my own survival to having to take care of those people who are now in their 30s.

And somehow, the other side of it, Jennifer, is that I wanted to write about this. First of all, I never would have thought I would write about any of that because it was so incredibly painful - I just put it all out of my brain for decades. But then things come back to you when you get older and you can't just suppress them, you have to bring them forth. So I decided, okay, I have to do this. 

But doing that I didn't want to write just about grief - there was plenty of that, but also about how people get through things they think they can't survive. Many people do, you know. Something happens that is so catastrophic. 

And I'm aware that what I went through, there are worse things, when something happens by violence or intentional violence, other things happen, people in war. And you wonder, how could they ever survive? I don't know, later I called it Grace.

But somehow I think human beings have suffered losses ever since there's been a species, and lots of them. I mean, maybe close to half the children born for thousands of years probably died before they were five. So we may have more resilience potential than we thought. And I'm very grateful for that and to the people who helped - there were some wonderful people.

[31:06] Jennifer: In your book, you mentioned that one of the things that helped you through these difficult times was the meditation that you did with the Trappist Monks in Colorado.

[31:18] Elaine: Yes, these are Roman Catholic monks, a tradition that I wasn't disposed to engage. But I met these monks and they were meditating very deeply. There was a quality about some of them that was very powerful and profound. And they were very helpful, too. Those people have spiritual depths that I didn't know about, and they were very sustaining. 

Also, I had a sense that was helpful in a kind of experience of a vision, not a physical vision; I didn't see something up there. But I had a sense of the connectedness of all beings. Then I thought of humans, all people in the world, because I felt if I didn't feel connected with other people, I would have just not wanted to survive. But I had a sense that we were all one in this together, in this network of living beings. And of course, now we know and include the butterflies, the buffaloes, whatever, the ants, the air and the plants. 

The Gospel of Thomas has a line, in which Jesus says something that sounds kind of mystical. He says, “I am the light that is above all things, before all things. I am all things - split a piece of wood and I am there; lift up a rock and you will find me.”

It is as though this energy, this… call it light, but energy which brought the universe into being, connects all beings. And that when we understand that, we feel much more grounded. We all understand that in moments, it’s not necessarily something we feel all the time.

[32:50] Jennifer: It's interesting because you also wrote about having multiple mystical experiences in your life. Once when Mark had his surgery when he was a year old, and then also at the time when he passed away. And also after Heinz died, you had one of these mystical experiences during your meditation session. What do you make of these mystical experiences, Elaine?

[33:15] Elaine: Well, that's a very good question, I wish I knew. I didn't call them mystical, I called them experiences I can't explain. How does one come to sense the presence of someone who's died. I didn't expect that - I was brought up a rationalist, okay, you die, your molecules are distributed into the universe and you're totally gone.

Instead, there were experiences of the presence of those people and even they appeared to some other people. My son, I'm told, was walking with his favorite other adult in San Francisco the day he died; he died in New York. She just said, Mark was walking down the street with me for a moment. It wasn't a hallucination, it was just a sense that his presence was there. And she didn't know that he died that afternoon, I don't know how that happened.

I don't know how, after my husband died, I felt that he spoke to me. (I) didn't expect it, not at all. I don't know what to make of it. But it makes me aware that there's a lot of experience which we can't explain if we're open to it. Many people have those experiences and some people say, well, oh, that's just a hallucination. What do you make of it? Do you have… I'm sure you've thought about this.

[34:23] Jennifer: Well, there is a dimension of the world that we cannot perceive with our senses. I think people call them hallucinations and I like to call them visions. 

I also believe in life after death, I can't give you any scientific evidence of that, but maybe it also is easier for me in terms of facing mortality. Luckily I still have my parents around. But maybe ten years from now, they might not be around anymore, but this sense that they will always be around with me, in some form, gives me a lot of peace.

[35:00] Elaine: Well, the physicists would say that there's not just one other dimension that we don't perceive, but many dimensions. I was just at the Physics Center yesterday listening to some of them talk. Many dimensions that we don't recognize and cannot perceive. It's just that we can't explore them within the way we explore the visible world. 

So we don't have the kind of evidence scientists can use. But people do have such experiences and they often have a quality of reality, which is powerful and palpable. So, like you, I now know that people have those and they're often fundamental to the way we understand ourselves. 

[35:37] Jennifer: So much good has come out of your book because in life's many unexplained synchronicities, I understand that you got married earlier this year. 

[35:48] Elaine: (chuckles) Now, that was unexpected, I tell you. What happened was I wrote this book about what happened when I was in high school and about (the) car accident in which my friend was killed - I mentioned that. And in that car, Jerry Garcia was in it and another close friend of his. 

And I also wrote about that event that after I left California and Jerry started a group called the Grateful Dead. I thought, oh, it's about the accident, in which he was thrown out the windshield, just crashed through it, and his friend went out the side door and they both survived. And they picked up an ancient Jewish folktale about a dead man who's grateful because he's given the gift of burial. It's an ancient book called the Book of Tobit in the Hebrew Bible. I thought, oh, it's about the accident. 

So somebody called the other person in the accident, Alan Trist, who by then had been on the team of the Grateful Dead for 35 years, and said, this person on the radio said something about how the group got its name, but she doesn't know.

And he said, actually, you don't know the story because Jerry and he didn't talk about the accident much, except they both knew that it was a reminder of mortality and that it's time to get serious about music. And so he (Alan) wrote to me and came to visit. And we got married, yes, eight months ago. So that's the last thing I expected, but it's wonderful.

[37:12] Jennifer: It really is, it’s Grace. So not only can heart heal and recover, (it) can blossom too.

[37:18] Elaine: Yes, isn't that amazing? 

[37:20] Jennifer: It really is amazing.

[37:22] Elaine: Alan is a lovely person who has very different characteristics and wonderful that came out of his experiences with that music. 

[37:29] Jennifer: I love that, I love that. What's next for you, Elaine? Are you writing another book, or do you just want to enjoy marital bliss?

[37:36] Elaine: I do want to enjoy marital bliss, which I do, but that doesn't exclude writing books. 

I finally decided to write a book about a subject I've never spoken about directly, and that's Jesus, of all things. Because I usually write about the movement, I thought, well, why do people keep telling these stories? Why do people talk about Jesus? I mean, there are a lot of ancient people we don’t know about, (like) Socrates. But you don't sit around thinking about Socrates or Zeus - another culture that's way back there. 

So I started writing about what we do know about how these stories were written, and how they were changed, and what was left out of the New Testament because the secret gospels were shunned and banned. And what the critics of the movement said, and what the fans of the movement said, and what the political and social conditions were, in which this movement ends with a charismatic healer and teacher who's crucified and dies in a horrible way. And then they say, he comes back to life. It's a very unlikely start for a successful religious movement. 

I mean, the Buddha got to live for 80 years and teach a whole sangha of people and thrive. And by the time he died, he had hundreds of followers, and his teachings were written down. 

Jesus had none of that, it’s a very short life. I have a class with my colleague that would teach Jesus and Buddha together. But the story is still somehow compelling. 

So I'm just finishing that now, I hope. (chuckles) I hope that book is getting done because it will be called “Who Was or Is Jesus?” The second part of the title means still people are getting converted to Christianity, and artists are using stories of Jesus in films - I can think of three in the last few years that are quite powerful. So I'm wondering how they do that and why, and I've had a lot of fun with this book.

[39:18] Jennifer: Well, we can't wait to read yet another book by Elaine Pagels. 

Elaine, I feel like you embody the Founder Spirit because you've lived through so much devastating losses or tragedies, (but) you had the resilience somehow to survive it, to go forth, to continue. And yet, you remarried again because you wrote this book, so it's a lovely story that continues.

[39:45] Elaine: Well, I'm so glad, thank you for that and for your generosity. It's lovely to speak with you, because I really feel that we understand each other on that level. And it's wonderful, and it's one that I think we all need. 

[39:59] Jennifer: We're now coming to the end of our interview, and as you know, we end every episode with a quote. And for this episode, we have a quote from Rumi, a 13th century Persian poet, Islamic scholar, and a Sufi mystic. 

“I looked in temples, churches and mosques, but I found the divine within my heart.” 

Elaine, many thanks for coming on the podcast today and taking us one step closer to our inner light.

[40:25] Elaine: Thank you so much. It's a joy to talk with you, Jennifer.

If my podcasts have been beneficial or valuable to you, feel free to become a patron and support me on Patreon.com - that is P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/TheFounderSpirit

You can find us on Apple, Google, Amazon and Spotify, as well as social media and our website at TheFounderSpirit.com.

[40:47] END OF AUDIO