185 words about Spiritual Unfoldment With John Butler

Feet on the ground, bottom on the chair

The skeleton key to John Butler’s meditative practice is the episode titled “If more to life than meets the eye, what earthly use am I?” The octogenarian Brit receives by way of his amiable foil Phil a question perhaps most fundamental to human existence: What are we doing here? Butler follows a line of thinking that starts with how we’re all born small but quickly talks himself into a dead end. After another significant pause, he hesitates, redirecting to tell you what amounts to his life story. Far from any lapidary concision, Butler meanders through the logic of his past, meditating aloud in tender tones to a perfectly placed mic on everything from his time as a farmer in South America to the history of the Christian church to Lewis Hamilton — and what you start to realize by the end is that Butler’s given you the skeleton key to surviving this tainted orb, that he hasn’t so much told you the answer to the initial question as shown it: What are we here for if not the stories we tell ourselves, and each other?