‘The Office’ star Rainn Wilson talks about spirituality and his new book

Wilson’s conversation with Bush Hager wrapped up around 9:30 p.m. local time, marking an end to of a jam-packed Monday at Ideas Fest.

Follow NBC News for more coverage of the festival the rest of this week.

Wilson said he’s on a mission of service, and believes everyone has been given gifts.

”Whether it’s writing, teaching, creating laughter, building a business, whatever it is that we do that makes the world a better place,” he said.

He said he himself is on “a constant mission to both make myself a better person and to try and make the world a better place using the qualities that God gave me: Storytelling, humor, service to others.”

While Wilson was on “The Office,” he said he did “a really deep dive into spirituality” and founded his company SoulPancake.

While he enjoyed acting and became an actor to “buy a house,” he said, he didn’t get into the profession to “bestow upon the little people some laughter to enliven their meaningless, petty little lives.”

But, he said, “it’s been really gratifying and as I’ve moved along in my life and gained a little bit more wisdom, I realized that to act in grace, to act in divine light is something that we all do more of.”

Fans often come up to him to share stories about how much “The Office” means to them and how the show has helped them.

“That’s really what we’re doing on ‘The Office,’ is we’re telling stories, we’re making people laugh.”

Wilson gets candid in his book, touching on the times he was at his best in his career, yet felt unhappy in his life. He said that he is all about being honest and vulnerable to have better communication with other people.

“As I’ve been on this book tour, people are like, ‘Wow, you’re just so open talking about your dysfunction and everything. I can’t believe how honest you are,’” he said. “And it’s like, ‘Well, yeah, isn’t that what we should do? Isn’t that what we can do as human beings? Can we just talk about our vulnerability and our struggle and stop pretending so much?”

He added, “how is the younger generation going to learn and heal if they don’t see the raw honesty” from the older generation?

In his conversation with TODAY’s Jenna Bush Hager, “The Office” star Rainn Wilson discussed how his book, “Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution,” came to be.

The book touches on how embracing spirituality can help people navigate increasingly challenging times and global issues such as racism, sexism, materialism and climate change. The opening of his book asks the question: Why is the actor who portrays Dwight Schrute writing a book on spirituality?

“There’s a number of different reasons,” Wilson said. “One, is I grew up a member of the Baha’i faith … people don’t know this but I have a secret inner Oprah.”

The second is he left his faith in his 20s as he moved to New York to study acting. But the move prompted “a kind of mental health crisis,” he said, so he spent many years reading all the holy books of all the major religions.

It eventually led him back to the Baha’i faith, which he said brought “a lot of meaning and a lot of solace.”

Check out a video clip from the discussion between Kara Hurst, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide sustainability, and Kristen Siemen, General Motors’ vice president of sustainable workplaces and chief sustainability officer.

There aren’t many panels left in Monday’s agenda. Coming up at around 8:15 p.m. MT (10:15 p.m. ET), “The Office” star Rainn Wilson will chat with Jenna Bush Hager to discuss his new book and travel show.

In April of next year, Towles told Bush Hager that he plans to release a book with a collection of short stories.

Six of the stories set in New York and “most of them are kind of in around the year 2000,” he said.

The other half of the book, he said, is called “Eve in Hollywood,” and was inspired by the character Eve in “Rules of Civility.” She is Katie’s best friend “who’s very independent minded, sort of hilarious kind of character.”

“Katie talks about seeing a picture of Eve in Hollywood, leaving a nightclub with Olivia de Havilland in the spring of 1939,” he said. “I was really intrigued by what is Eve doing in Hollywood in 1938?”

The story begins with her on the train and readers learn what happens to her in the “first few months of being in Los Angeles,” followed by “other things that would happen to her…with murder and blackmail.”

Thinking even farther ahead, Towles said a year later (in 2025), “if all goes well, another novel will show up.”

When writing his book, Towles knew he wanted to have it spend 10 days with the crew and have his character Billy bring his collections.

When deciding on what the collection should be, he recalled how how his great grandmother’s 100th birthday she gave her great grandchildren a U.S. silver dollar minted in 1882, the year she was born.

“I had carried this with me throughout my life and it sits on my desk. And so as I’m sitting there thinking, what is the collection that Billy is going to carry?” he shared, thinking of classic collectable like toy soldiers, baseball cards or comic books. “And suddenly, I’m like, No, that’s it. It’s going to be the silver dollars. He’s going to try to collect one silver dollar from every year between, whatever, the Civil War and the 1950s and that’ll be his collection.”

Towles said that at no point when he was outlining and designing the story did it mention “Lincoln Highway.”

“The book was called ‘Unfinished Business’ and in the story where it said that the characters are going to leave the farm and instead of taking a left to go to California, they would take a right to go to New York City, it said, ‘They took Route X.’”

When he began writing the novel in full swing, he finally had to decide what he would call the road and “broke out a map of America,” looking at the roads that went through Nebraska. He found one called Route 30, formerly known as the Lincoln Highway.

“It was the first highway that went from all the way across the United States,” he said. “It begins in Times Square and it ends in the Pacific Ocean in Lincoln Park in San Francisco.”