My failed mission to find God -- and what I found instead | Anjali Kumar

A few years ago,

I set out on a mission to find God.

Now, I'm going to tell you right up front that I failed,

which, as a lawyer,

is a really hard thing for me to admit.

But on that failed journey,

a lot of what I found was enlightening.

And one thing in particular gave me a lot of hope.

It has to do with the magnitude and significance of our differences.

So, I was raised in America by Indian parents -- culturally Hindu,

but practicing a strict and relatively unknown religion outside of India

called Jainism.

To give you an idea of just how minority that makes me:

people from India represent roughly one percent of the US population;

Hindus, about 0.7 percent;

Jains, at most .00046 percent.

To put that in context:

more people visit the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory each year

than are followers of the Jain religion in America.

To add to my minority mix, my parents then decided,

"What a great idea! Let's send her to Catholic school" --

(Laughter)

where my sister and I were the only non-white,

non-Catholic students in the entire school.

At the Infant Jesus of Prague School in Flossmoor, Illinois --

yes, that's really what it was called --

we were taught to believe that there is a single Supreme Being

who is responsible for everything,

the whole shebang,

from the creation of the Universe to moral shepherding to eternal life.

But at home,

I was being taught something entirely different.

Followers of the Jain religion

don't believe in a single Supreme Being

or even a team of Supreme Beings.

Instead, we're taught that God manifests

as the perfection of each of us as individuals,

and that we're actually spending our entire lives

striving to remove the bad karmas

that stand in the way of us becoming our own godlike, perfect selves.

On top of that, one of the core principles of Jainism

is something called "non-absolutism."

Non-absolutists believe that no single person

can hold ownership or knowledge of absolute truth,

even when it comes to religious beliefs.

Good luck testing that concept out

on the priests and nuns in your Catholic school.

(Laughter)

No wonder I was confused

and hyperaware of how different I was from my peers.

Cut to 20-something years later,

and I found myself to be a highly spiritual person,

but I was floundering.

I was spiritually homeless.

I came to learn that I was a "None,"

which isn't an acronym or a clever play on words,

nor is it one of these.

It's simply the painfully uninspired name

given to everyone who checks off the box "none"

when Pew Research asks them about their religious affiliation.

(Laughter)

Now, a couple of interesting things about Nones are:

there are a lot of us,

and we skew young.

In 2014, there were over 56 million religiously unaffiliated Nones

in the United States.

And Nones account for over one-third of adults

between the ages of 18 to 33.

But the most interesting thing to me about Nones

is that we're often spiritual.

In fact, 68 percent of us believe, with some degree of certainty,

that there is a God.

We're just not sure who it is.

(Laughter)

So the first takeaway for me

when I realized I was a None and had found that information out

was that I wasn't alone.

I was finally part of a group in America

that had a lot of members,

which felt really reassuring.

But then the second, not-so-reassuring takeaway

was that, oh, man, there are a lot of us.

That can't be good,

because if a lot of highly spiritual people are currently godless,

maybe finding God is not going to be as easy as I had originally hoped.

So that is when I decided that on my spiritual journey,

I was going to avoid the obvious places

and skip the big-box religions altogether

and instead venture out into the spiritual fringe

of mediums

and faith healers

and godmen.

But remember, I'm a non-absolutist,

which means I was pretty inclined to keep a fairly open mind,

which turned out to be a good thing,

because I went to a witch's potluck dinner

at the LGBT Center in New York City,

where I befriended two witches;

drank a five-gallon jerrican full of volcanic water

with a shaman in Peru;

got a hug from a saint in the convention center --

she smelled really nice --

(Laughter)

chanted for hours in a smoke-filled, heat-infused sweat lodge

on the beaches of Mexico;

worked with a tequila-drinking medium to convene with the dead,

who oddly included both my deceased mother-in-law

and the deceased manager of the hip-hop group The Roots.

(Laughter)

Yeah, my mother-in-law told me she was really happy

her son had chosen me for his wife.

Duh! But --

(Laughter)

Yeah.

But the manager of The Roots

said that maybe I should cut back on all the pasta I was eating.

I think we can all agree

that it was lucky for my husband that it wasn't his dead mother

who suggested I lay off carbs.

(Laughter)

I also joined a laughing yoga group out of South Africa;

witnessed a woman have a 45-minute orgasm --

I am not making this up --

as she tapped into the energy of the universe --

I think I'm going to go back there --

(Laughter)

called God from a phone booth in the Nevada desert at Burning Man,

wearing a unitard and ski goggles;

and I had an old Indian guy lie on top of me,

and no, he wasn't my husband.

This was a perfect stranger named Paramji,

and he was chanting into my chakras

as he tapped into the energy forces of the Universe to heal my "yoni,"

which is a Sanskrit word for "vagina."

(Laughter)

I was going to have a slide here,

but a few people suggested

that a slide of my yoni at TED -- even TEDWomen --

not the best idea.

(Laughter)

Very early in my quest,

I also went to see the Brazilian faith healer John of God

at his compound down in Brazil.

Now, John of God is considered a full-trance medium,

which basically means he can talk to dead people.

But in his case, he claims to channel a very specific group

of dead saints and doctors

in order to heal whatever's wrong with you.

And although John of God does not have a medical degree

or even a high school diploma,

he actually performs surgery --

the real kind, with a scalpel,

but no anesthesia.

Yeah, I don't know.

He also offers invisible surgery, where there is no cutting,

and surrogate surgery,

where he supposedly can treat somebody who is thousands of miles away

by performing a procedure on a loved one.

Now, when you go to visit John of God,

there are all kinds of rules and regulations.

It's a whole complicated thing,

but the bottom line is that you can visit John of God

and present him with three things that you would like fixed,

and he will set the dead saints and doctors to work on your behalf

to get the job done.

(Laughter)

Now, before you snicker,

consider

that, at least according to his website,

over eight million people --

including Oprah,

the Goddess of Daytime TV --

have gone to see John of God,

and I was pre-wired to keep an open mind.

But to be honest, the whole thing for me was kind of weird and inconclusive,

and in the end, I flew home,

even more confused than I already started out.

But that doesn't mean I came home empty-handed.

In the weeks leading up to my trip to Brazil,

I mentioned my upcoming plans to some friends

and to a couple of colleagues at Google,

where I was a lawyer at the time.

And I might have mentioned it to a couple more people

because I'm chatty,

including my neighbor,

the guy who works at the local coffee shop I go to each morning,

the checkout lady at Whole Foods

and a stranger who sat next to me on the subway.

I told each of them where I was going

and why,

and I offered to carry three wishes of theirs down to Brazil,

explaining that anyone going to see John of God

could act as a proxy for others

and save them the trip.

And to my surprise, my in-box overflowed.

Friends told friends who told friends,

and those friends apparently told more friends,

other strangers and the guys at their coffee shops,

until it seemed that days before I left for Brazil

that there was no one who did not have my email address.

And at the time, all I could conclude was that I had offered too much

to too many.

But when I actually reread those messages a few years later,

I noticed something completely different.

Those emails actually shared three commonalities,

the first of which was rather curious.

Almost everyone sent me meticulous details about how they could be reached.

I had told them, or their friends had told them,

that along with the list of the three things they wanted fixed,

I needed their photo, their name and their date of birth.

But they gave me full addresses, with, like, apartment numbers and zip codes,

as if John of God was going to stop by their house

and see them in person or send along a package.

It was as if, in the highly unlikely event that their wishes were granted

by John of God,

they just wanted to make sure that they weren't delivered

to the wrong person or the wrong address.

Even if they didn't believe,

they were hedging their bets.

The second commonality was just as curious,

but far more humbling.

Virtually everyone --

the stranger on the subway,

the guy at the coffee shop,

the lawyer down the hall,

the Jew, the atheist, the Muslim, the devout Catholic --

all asked for essentially the same three things.

OK, there were a couple of outliers, and yes, a few people asked for cash.

But when I eliminated what were ultimately a handful of anomalies,

the similarities were staggering.

Almost every single person

first asked for good health for themselves and their families.

Almost universally,

they next asked for happiness

and then love,

in that order:

health, happiness, love.

Sometimes they asked for a specific health issue to be fixed,

but more often than not, they just asked for good health in general.

When it came to happiness,

they each phrased it slightly differently,

but they all asked for the same specific subtype of happiness, too --

the kind of happiness that sinks in

and sets down roots in your soul;

the kind of happiness that could sustain us,

even if we were to lose absolutely everything else.

And for love,

they all asked for the kind of romantic love,

the soul mate that we read about in epic romantic novels,

the kind of love that will stay with us till the end of our days.

Sorry, that's my husband.

Crap! Now I forgot my place.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

So by and large,

all of these friends and strangers,

regardless of their background, race or religion,

all asked for the same things,

and they were the same things that I really wanted,

the simplified version of the basic human needs

identified by social scientists like Abraham Maslow and Manfred Max-Neef.

No one asked for answers to the big existential questions

or for proof of God or the meaning of life like I had set out to find.

They didn't even ask for an end to war or global hunger.

Even when they could have asked for absolutely anything,

they all asked for health, happiness and love.

So now those emails had a third commonality as well.

Each of them ended in the exact same way.

Instead of thanking me for carting their wishes all the way to Brazil,

everyone said,

"Please don't tell anyone."

So I decided to tell everyone --

(Laughter)

right here on this stage,

not because I'm untrustworthy,

but because the fact that we have so much in common

feels especially important for us all to hear, especially now,

when so many of the world's problems

seem to be because we keep focusing on the things that make us different,

not on what binds us together.

And look -- I am the first to admit that I am not a statistician,

and that the data I presented to you that I just accumulated in my in-box

is more anecdotal than scientific, more qualitative than quantitative.

It is, as anyone who works with data would tell you,

hardly a statistically significant or demographically balanced sample.

But nonetheless, I find myself thinking about those emails

every time I reflect back on the bias and prejudice

that I've faced in my life,

or when there's another hate crime or a senseless tragedy

that underscores the disheartening sense

that our differences might be insurmountable.

I then remind myself that I have evidence

that the humbling, unifying commonality

of our humanity

is that, even when presented with the opportunity

to ask for anything at all,

most of us want the same things,

and that this is true no matter who we are,

what name we call our god,

or which religion, if any, we call home.

I then also note

that apparently some of us want these things so badly

that we would email a None,

a spiritually confused None like me --

some might say otherwise confused as well --

and that we would seek out this stranger and email her our deepest wishes,

just in case there is the remote possibility

that they might be granted by someone who is not a god,

much less our god,

someone who is not even a member of our chosen religion,

someone who, when you look at him on paper,

seems like an unlikely candidate to deliver.

And so now,

when I reflect back on my spiritual quest,

even though I did not find God,

I found a home in this:

even today, in a world fractured by religious,

ethnic, political, philosophical, and racial divides,

even with all of our obvious differences,

at the end of the day,

and the most fundamental level,

we are all the same.

Thank you.

(Applause)