I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source with writer world's exotic traveler and truth-teller, Pico Iyer.

You've been the Dalai Lama's friend from your boyhood, Pico. You've been our friend, too,

in years now of reading and talk. In your new book, A Flame, subtitled Learning from Silence, I think we catch you at a turn

in your thinking. Your fresh question, I think it's for all of us, might just be how do we

surface our spiritual reality, one by one, before we'll ever grasp the troubles of our world of 2025.

This book is bigger than you, if I may say, Pico.

There's a book here that lots of people would love to be writing called My Spiritual Awakening.

In the new book, Your Awakening happened over the last 30 years

in and out of a Benedictine monastery

on the California coast at Big Sur, and you kept notes on all of it.

Who knew? And who else did it?

Who led you to Big Sur and this contemplative life?

Necessity led me there, and the fates and the heavens led me there, because, as you probably

remember, I'm so happy to be talking to you again, Chris, continuing our conversation of 20 years.

Suddenly, one day, 34 years ago, in my home in California, I looked up, I saw our house was

encircled by 70-foot flames,

and by the end of that evening, we'd lost our family home and every last thing in it.

And so for many months thereafter, I was sleeping on a friend's floor, as my mother and I slowly

reconstructed our lives. And another friend saw me on this floor, and he said, come on,

Pico, you can do better

than this. And he told me as a school teacher how he took his students every spring up to a retreat

house, three and a half hours up the California coast. And he said, even the most fidgety, phone-addicted,

...