Lawrence Pintak is the author of the new book Lessons from the Mountaintop: Ten Modern Mystics and Their Extraordinary Lives. His other books include America & Islam. He is a former CBS News Middle East correspondent and is the founding dean of The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University.
Q: What inspired you to write Lessons from the Mountaintop?
A: I covered my first war at 22 years old. I have been writing about conflict and politics – often the same thing – ever since. Sadly, religion is also usually part of that deadly equation. We don’t need to look any further than the Middle East to see that.
While that was the focus of my professional life, spirituality has been part of my personal life since I was drawn to Tibetan Buddhism three decades ago. The book came because I had reached a point in my career where I wanted to shift my entire focus from my head to my heart, jettison all that negative energy and immerse myself in what felt good.
Q: How did you choose the people to include in the book?
A: Some I had known for decades; others were the result of a long search. The book was inspired by one of the individuals I profile.
Shems Friedlander was a friend and colleague at the American University in Cairo. I knew Shems was a very devout Sufi and had written several books on Rumi, but it wasn’t until a few years ago when my wife and I visited him in Istanbul that I discovered that he was the right-hand to one of the most revered Sufi sheikhs in Turkey and had been instrumental in bringing Sufism to the U.S.
At first, we wanted to do a documentary about him. We couldn’t get the financial backing. I briefly thought about a book but quickly realized that a book profiling a series of people like him was the perfect approach.
In Bali where I was living in the mid-1990s I had met Tenzin Palmo, a British-born Tibetan Buddhism nun who spend 12 years meditating in a cave, and we had stayed in touch. I had written a short profile of one of the others in the early ‘00s.
What they had in common was that they were ordinary people who had gone down a profoundly spiritual path – each in their own tradition – and remained largely under the radar. They weren’t on the Spiritual 100 list or the retreat circuit. They quietly lived their lives of compassion and grace.
The challenge, of course, was to find others like them. By definition, if they are under the radar, they are hard to find.
I am lucky enough to know various spiritual figures who are well-known, as well as many dedicated practitioners of various traditions, so I started there, asking them if they had come upon individuals who fit this description in their travels, and working out through those networks.
I spoke with many of the people who were proposed as candidates for the book; they were all amazing and inspiring human beings, but for various reasons did not quite fit all the parameters – or they were not interested. As one sent word through a contact, “God knows who I am, that’s enough.”
I am a firm believer in synchronicity. And that came into play in several cases.
For example, at breakfast in Kathmandu a few years before, my wife and I had been introduced to two American sanyasis in the TM movement. As we chatted, I learned that one of them had first been introduced to meditation a half century before at the university where I was then a dean. I don’t consider such things a coincidence.
We stayed in touch and when I began my search for modern mystics they urged me to consider a man they knew named Ram Alexander, and he ultimately ended up in the book.
Q: The author Kabir Helminski said of the book, “Lawrence Pintak has so beautifully reminded us that the real story of religion may be found in the lives of those faithful souls who seek realization in everyday life.” What do you think of that description?
A: It sums up so well what these amazing individuals represent. They have gone down profound spiritual paths, they have ventured deep into the mystic depths of their respective traditions, but most of them are living completely ordinary lives – a university professor, a publisher, a businessman – and infuse the sacred into the mundane each and every day.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: No tradition has a monopoly on Truth. There are many paths. Your tradition will lead you up one side of the mountain and mine will take me up the other, but we all meet at the top.
There is no one Truth – at least not one we ordinary beings can comprehend – but there are a set of truths found across traditions. They may use different names for the Divine, they may have different practices, but when the scaffolding of doctrine falls away, what remains is the sense of compassion and the belief that we are all part of something greater.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am back at work on a spiritual memoir that has been a long time coming; doing preliminary research on a couple of ideas for other spiritually-focused nonfiction books; and doing a bit of a left brain-right brain juggling act.
Despite my best efforts to focus solely on the spiritual, I had a new edition of my book America & Islam: Soundbites, Suicide Bombs, and the Road to Donald Trump (Bloomsbury) released Oct. 30. The day after the 2024 U.S. election, my editor at Bloomsbury called asking for a new, updated edition of the book.
I really didn’t want to plunge back into the Middle East’s whirlpool of negative energy, but I had just completed Lessons and I realized that the primal scream from Gaza called out for me to update America & Islam. So now I am doing interviews about mysticism and Middle East violence, sometimes in the same day.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’ve been living in Scotland for the last five years, working on projects to safeguard media freedom and bolster journalism education in various parts of the world where the media is under siege. That includes helping the American University in Armenia launch the country’s first professionally focused master’s degree.
I’ll be back in the States at my home campus at Washington State University for the Spring semester.
I’ll continue to post about spirituality and post readings from Lessons and books that I think contain mystic themes on Instagram (lpintak), YouTube (@Lawrence.Pintak-25) and my other social media platforms, and I’ll be curating a bookshelf of mystic “must reads” on my website www.pintak.com.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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