Rainn Wilson explains how a Julianne Hough headline inspired his new book on spirituality

It was a 2020 headline that caught actor Rainn Wilson’s attention. A celebrity (Julianne Hough, he confirms) went through a spiritual transformation in Davos, Switzerland in which “stuck” energy was removed from her body by John Amaral, an energy practitioner featured on Gwyneth Paltrow's The Goop Lab. Headlines circulated describing her treatment as an "energy exorcism" that made her "scream and writhe."

“I'm like, ‘How is this spiritual?’” Wilson, 57, tells USA TODAY from his Washington state home. “To me, that has nothing to do with spirituality. It's not about ghosts and shamans and demons. So it was important to define our terms.”

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The terms Wilson sought to define eventually turned into his new book, “Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution” (Hachette Go, 288 pp., out now). And he believes regardless of how you practice spirituality, anyone can lead said revolution.

“The most important of the seven pillars for a spiritual revolution is to foster joy and squash cynicism,” he says. “It's super important that if we want change, that we start in our own hearts and we stay optimistic.”

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Through life experiences and his Bahá?í faith, which embraces an essential unity of all religions and the unity of humanity, Wilson takes readers on a 10-chapter journey that touches on how spirituality can be found in everything from official religious texts to quotes from Captain James T. Kirk, the “Star Trek” character.

Wilson is plenty introspective in the book too, reflecting on his bouts with materialism (like when he panic-purchased Japanese soybeans during 2020 lockdown shortages) to the death of his father later that year.

“(My father’s) body was just a vessel,” the actor says he realized. “He rode around in this really wonderful, silly, fun, handsome vessel for all of his life. Why are we here riding around in these meat suits on planet Earth? Those are the kind of big questions that I love to ask.”

Perhaps you’re asking why is Dwight Schrute, beloved Dunder Mifflin employee from the hit show “The Office,” making the case for a spiritual revolution? Wilson made it a point to address that in the book’s preface.

“If I hadn't written that introductory chapter that talks about why the hell is the guy who played Dwight from ‘The Office’ writing a book about spirituality, I think that people wouldn't know what to do or what to think of it,” he notes. “Also along the way, the book is a little bit funny and fun to read, I hope.”

In one such instance, Wilson finds a bit of humor in the sweaty circumstances after his father’s death. It’s a Bahá?í custom to carefully wash the body after a person dies. But the funeral home didn’t have a clean bowl for the water. So Wilson hightailed it to the nearest Target, on a humid day.

“This is truly absurd, I thought to myself: A minor television celebrity is jogging through a Target the size of an airport in a black suit, sweaty hair pressed to his head, trying to track down a bowl nice enough to use to wash his father’s dead body, which is laying on a table in a basement a few miles away,” Wilson writes in the book while noting that the story exactly fit his father’s sense of humor. But while striking lighter notes, the author also believes to see the world through spiritual glasses, we must start with death.

“I feel like in contemporary America, (death is) not something we know how to talk about,” he says. “It's something we're afraid to talk about. I wanted to start with death because death frames everything. If we're able to effectively look at death through a spiritual lens, it can make our life richer.”

And Wilson hopes to accomplish that by reframing the idea of spirituality.

“We need these spiritual tools of compassion, of forgiveness, of healing, of creating unity, of love at its maximum possible level, and we need to put them to work in our organizations, in our companies and in our government systems,” he believes. “And that might seem like pie in the sky and highfalutin and impossible, but I truly believe that it's possible and it's doable. And not only that, it is crucially necessary.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rainn Wilson reveals Julianne Hough inspired new spirituality book