True Geordie & on The Pursuit of Happiness

Your brothers and sisters in Islam net from Norway are establishing a masjid a Dawa Center. This center this masjid, this educational institution will act like a beacon of light calling the Muslims in Norway back to the essence of the slum. So give generously and Allah azza wa jal Do you even know because when you watch a Jordan Peterson and you said can I say it in the way I would normally say it Yeah, and it sounded like quite nice to listen to you know, almost like singing

what kind of feeling does it give you when you go through the relevant rosters there are a zen like feeling I'll tell you what it is. The Quran states Allah basically Allah He taught to me in LUCA loop, that certainly with the with the remembrance of God, two hearts find rest. So if I had to summarize it in one word, it will be tranquility.

Like, I think a lot of people want to be happy. And like if you ask, there's a film called The Pursuit of Happiness, we all know about right? A lot of people just want to be happy, but I actually submit to you that I don't think happiness is a good prolonged state to be Oh, it's unrealistic. Yeah. And not just that, like if you think of it from a dopaminergic perspective, if you have spikes, dopamine spikes, then you're gonna have crashes usually. I mean, Andrew, hobo Malhotra if you you should have him on the podcast. In fact, suppose he speaks about dopamine and these kinds of a lot. I've been on antidepressants and in the last couple of years, and which ones were you on? I

was on something called sertraline. Okay. Yeah. Not good for your sex life. Oh, yeah. Well, I've heard Yeah.

I came off. I mean, you know, we, you know, you, you've tried, but the point is, is, it made me realize, being a pleasure seeker being someone who maybe doesn't have a lot of self control and is indulgent, that that lifestyle I was living, pre sertraline was very crazy, like a lot of you know, booze and other things and women and just constantly looking for that spike. And it's not a state of mind, you can stay in for a consistent period of time, Happiness isn't isn't where you should be aiming for. It's like neutral, but connect and exactly place. And that makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, I think Peterson has something very interesting on this, where he talks about from a

psychological perspective. And this so you can look at it from a biological or neurotransmitter perspective, like you know, dopamine having these spikes is your is going to be followed by some kind of a crash. Usually that happens, a woman I spoke about speaks about this quite often. But that's one dopaminergic perspective, or from a neurotransmitters perspective, then you have the psychological aspect. So this this idea of trying to seek euphoric moments, ecstatic moments is not something either encouraged, or kind of seen as, as the ultimate purpose from design perspective. And so one of the great scholars of Islam, Islam has given me said that the world is like a shadow,

the more you walk towards it, the more walks away from you. In other words, if you try and seek pleasure from something in and of itself, then you're likely to not get pleasure from it. So from our perspective, if you have a deep sense of purpose, and for us, the transcendental purpose is not a material purpose, but a deeper sense of spiritual purpose, which is to worship the all high, that everything revolves around that. Then you get this state of tranquility forum, Marina Quran, for example, are doing what they called us card, which are the remembrance remembrance of God saying things like Subhana, Allah, or Subhan, as part of the law theme, whatever it may be, Subhan Allah

Glory be to God, praise be to God, I actually feel myself getting relaxed, I calm down, it calms me down. In fact, when I don't do it on a daily basis, if I don't read the Quran, or if I don't do these things, I actually feel more frustrated as an individual, I genuinely are, this is how I feel, I feel more frustrated as an individual, it's kind of like going to the gym, like I'm sure you know a lot about that, you know, it's the kind of feeling that you're gonna get, like the endorphins when you've finished your workout. If you remove that from your daily schedule, your weekly schedule, imagine the kind of impact that will have on you. It's kind of like a spiritual workout in that

sense, and kind of the way you're describing it. It's almost like the, if I was gonna relate it to YouTube, for example, it's like, the goal shouldn't be getting the big views the goal should be enjoying creating the content and the work that goes into it, I guess. And that's the thing like for someone like myself, where I have to be honest with myself, the question I keep posing to myself is to what extent are you doing this for fame to work said I'm doing this for money, which is less less so to be honest, for me that we all have an ego the dragon is the fame for me or the dragon is the recognition the villa Villa validation, I need that validation and I would be lying to myself if I

said, I'm not doing it at all, that would be a lie. Or that would be saying For example,

I don't care what people think when you look at yourself almost in the third person.

It's very hard to do this, obviously. But you know, you've obviously became a massive success and you're interviewing Jordan Peterson and

yourself now.

But you know,

I'm sure you have your detractors and your real big supporters. And then there's those people in the middle. What is the broad sense of how people think about you, in your opinion? I think it's positive. I do think so we'll talk about traditional Muslim community, I think it's positive. But as always, is always going to be the minorities that we look at. Like, for example, if you get 80 to 80% 90%, likes and great comments, you're not you might not pay attention to that you might, you may pay attention to the 10% of negative comments. And that's, that's a part of the human psyche, so neurotic, on the aspect of the human condition. This last week is when you have a certain opinion of

yourself in a way of people come in and just say you're this, you're that you're the other it. You're just like, I'm ah, like, yeah, and it's brutal to the ego. You know, who doesn't have that? And this might sound completely ridiculous. But psychopaths, I'm not sure if you ever see them in interviews, like when they say I don't care what people think I actually believe the Old million person, like what they say, what they think they don't get, like, people and if you're not a psychopath, if you don't have that psychopathy, and I don't think you do, or I do what temperamentally, we do care what people think it's a natural thing. We need to find mechanisms to

try and moderate that. So for me, my mechanism is I asked myself one question, what do you actually believe on this matter? What do you actually believe? What's your belief? And so the first thing I say to myself is, whatever your belief is, do not compromise on that belief, no matter what whoever says, What, because the worst one thing worse than criticism is having cognitive dissonance. And the idea that you have two contradictory belief systems or you're acting a certain way, and you're saying something else, that internal inconsistency produces in the long term or worse psychological outcome. So my first question I asked myself is, what do I actually believe? If what I actually

believe is x and I'm saying it publicly because I believe that that's the right thing to say. And there's a negative impact, then that's just a byproduct of truth, which is you're going to have to and it's quite frankly, so byproducts of success.