Essentials: Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind | Dr. Sam Harris
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Overview
Andrew Huberman, a Stanford professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology, speaks with Dr. Sam Harris about meditation, consciousness, the sense of self, emotional regulation, psychedelics, and the pursuit of happiness.
Harris argues that the ordinary feeling of being a separate subject—an “I” located behind the face, observing and controlling experience—is an illusion or, at minimum, a construct that is not what it appears to be. Meditation can reveal that there is no observer separate from experience: sights, sensations, emotions, and thoughts simply arise within consciousness.
For Harris, meditation’s deepest purpose is not merely stress reduction, improved focus, calm, or other possible health benefits. It is recognizing consciousness as it already is, becoming less identified with thought, and finding psychological freedom that does not depend entirely on circumstances or future achievements.
Key ideas
- The word “self” has several meanings. Harris does not deny practical identities, personalities, relationships, or context-dependent roles. His target is the felt “subject self”: the apparent inner observer who seems to exist in addition to experience.
- People typically experience the body and world as objects while feeling like a passenger inside the body. They can control some voluntary movements but not processes such as heartbeat or hormonal secretion, reinforcing the impression that a separate self occupies and partly controls the organism.
- When beginners meditate, they may preserve this dualism by imagining themselves as an observer directing attention toward the breath or watching consciousness from a riverbank. Harris’s stronger claim is that there is no observer on the bank: metaphorically, “you are the river.”
- Meditation does not create selflessness or eliminate a real inner observer. Harris claims that the observer was never there in the first place. Practice makes this absence perceptible, potentially like a bistable image whose alternative interpretation becomes easy to recognize once seen.
- Conventional meditation benefits may include reduced stress, greater focus, calm, smoother emotional states, and possibly reduced cortical thinning. Harris accepts that some benefits may be real but emphasizes that the supporting science for many claims remains provisional.
- Meditation is often presented as changing consciousness’s contents: reducing anxiety or cultivating calm, unconditional love, and prosocial feelings. Harris says its deeper, roughly 2,000-year-old insight concerns the nature of consciousness regardless of whether its contents are pleasant or unpleasant.
- Flow states offer temporary examples of non-separation. During absorbing athletics, art, sex, surfing, emergencies, or other peak experiences, self-monitoring may disappear and there is simply unified activity. These moments feel rewarding partly because the person is no longer looking over their own shoulder, anticipating the next moment, or micromanaging performance.
- Such naturally occurring moments are rare—Harris estimates perhaps one one-hundredth of one percent of life. Meditation aims to reveal the same underlying absence of separation without requiring an exceptionally pleasurable, dangerous, or salient event.
- Thought repeatedly pulls people away from direct experience. A beautiful sunset, for example, can be interrupted by commentary about how wonderful it is, how to reproduce the experience, or whether one could live nearby.
- Internal speech is paradoxical: people continually tell themselves things they already know, as though one inner person were informing another. Language was evolutionarily useful, Harris argues, but evolution did not provide an “off switch” for constant self-talk.
- Evolution did not design humans to maximize happiness, become mathematicians or musicians, build healthy democracies, understand extremely large, small, or ancient phenomena, or regulate emotions optimally. Humans repurpose primate cognitive and emotional machinery for goals evolution did not directly select.
- Harris describes the self as “what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.” An unnoticed thought appears not as an event in consciousness but as “me.” The mind contracts around it, even though inspection reveals thought to be brief, insubstantial, and spontaneously arising.
- A passing thought—such as one expressing self-hatred—can define an entire mood when it is not recognized as a thought. Mindfulness creates distance from that automatic identification without requiring thoughts to be blocked.
- Harris claims that most untrained people cannot attend continuously to the breath, a hand, a clock, or another object for 30 seconds without becoming lost in thought—even if the stakes were extremely high. Some may mistakenly believe they succeeded because they do not yet detect their brief distractions.
- Intensive retreats expose this distractibility. A participant might spend roughly 12 hours a day in silence, alternating seated attention to breathing with walking meditation focused on lifting, moving, and placing the feet. Sounds, sights, sensations, and eventually the full field of experience can be incorporated.
- Retreat participants may initially believe they maintained attention for five minutes at a time. Later—even 10 days into a retreat—they may feel unable to remain attentive for more than five seconds. Harris interprets this apparent decline as improved resolution: they are detecting distractions that previously passed unnoticed.
- Mindfulness means careful attention to consciousness’s contents without being lost in thought. Thoughts and mental images are allowed to arise, but they are recognized as spontaneous appearances rather than mistaken for the self.
- Training attention can produce a “frame-rate change”: practitioners notice more of the rapid alternation between distraction and deliberately returning attention. Yet this process can reinforce the sense of an agent controlling a spotlight, so Harris recommends questioning that assumption early.
- Concentration meditation deliberately focuses on one object while other perceptions fade. Strong concentration may reduce awareness of sound or the body and produce subtle, expansive, drug-like states. It may build useful focus and calm, but Harris considers it a specific, somewhat brittle skill and, at best, a tool for deeper insight rather than the final goal.
- Non-dual mindfulness is more open. Its aim is equanimity toward all changing experiences: neither grasping at pleasant or interesting events nor resisting unpleasant or boring ones. Harris compares the ideal to a sky-like mind that permits everything to appear without clinging or reacting.
- A Tibetan Buddhist analogy compares thoughts to thieves entering an empty house: there is nothing for them to steal. Once identification relaxes, a thought no longer necessarily means that meditation has failed or that the thinker must be emotionally captured by its content.
- The self is better understood as a process or activity—“selfing”—than as a fixed entity. Context produces recognizable states of self: customer in a store, student with a teacher, parent with a child, or spouse with a partner.
- Sensitivity to these transitions can loosen rigid self-concepts and concern about how others evaluate them. Harris describes the resulting resilience not as a heavily defended identity but as an identity that has partly “evaporated,” making scorekeeping less compelling.
- This is not an argument for passivity. Harris practices martial arts and self-defense and says people should resist mistreatment when appropriate. Anger, fear, and psychological contraction can function as valid salience signals that orient someone toward a real or possible emergency.
- Negative emotion may be useful as an alarm but is often not the best state for handling the emergency. Harris argues that calm is generally more effective once action is required. The relevant question is not whether anger can ever be justified, but how long remaining angry stays useful.
- Mindfulness can reveal the link between repetitive thought and emotional physiology. Continuing to rehearse why one is angry prolongs anger. Noticing the thought can provide relief and a choice about whether remaining angry for another minute, five minutes, or longer serves a purpose.
- Without this awareness, a person may remain hostage to brooding, repeated storytelling, and the natural course of their thoughts. Distraction through entertainment can sometimes help, but mindfulness directly exposes the mechanism and can allow a person to leave the cycle intentionally.
- Harris describes two major, nonlinear shifts in practice. The first is clearly distinguishing being lost in thought from being aware of experience, including awareness of thought itself. The second is recognizing that no separate person is performing the awareness and that consciousness has no observable center.
- At the non-dual stage, mindfulness is no longer experienced mainly as effortful attention aimed from somewhere. It is the open condition in which sensations and thoughts appear, especially once identification with a thought is recognized and releases.
- Harris says psychedelics were initially indispensable for him because they demonstrated that first-person investigation of mind was worthwhile. At age 18, before taking MDMA, “meditation” had little meaning for him.
- Psychedelic or MDMA experiences may reveal unfamiliar possibilities, such as unconditional love or a form of psychological health the person had not imagined. However, the experience ends, sometimes leaving only a dim, dream-like memory because it was so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness.
- Peak experiences can become misleading if a person merely tries to accumulate them in the hope that they will create lasting change. Each is impermanent, and the goal cannot realistically be to remain intoxicated continuously.
- Harris stopped using psychedelics for 25 years after they led him toward meditation, which he found more conceptually coherent and practically effective. He does not deny that repeated psychedelic journeys could contribute to personal development, but insists that anything valuable must ultimately be integrated into ordinary waking life.
- The relevant aspiration is stable freedom of attention, love, and fulfillment within ordinary, chaotic, and psychologically difficult circumstances—not only during chemically altered peaks. Harris links this possibility to recognizing the illusory nature of the separate self.
- Goal achievement has a mirage-like quality. Harris is not opposed to goals and says he has many, but most life is spent pursuing them, while the moment of completion is brief and begins receding as new goals appear.
- Wealth, fitness, optimized sleep, marriage, family, career success, fame, and other achievements can provide relative happiness, but none guarantees well-being. A person can possess everything others appear to want and still be miserable.
- Much striving reflects a hope that, once health, relationships, work, housing, finances, and immediate problems are sufficiently arranged, attention can finally rest in the present. Yet people can obtain favorable conditions while continuing to regret the past and fear the future.
- Without insight or training, people remain dependent on circumstances to make the present feel acceptable. They attempt to engineer the external world so it will produce an internal state of fulfillment.
- Harris says meditation reverses this causal direction: it can make fulfillment available before the next favorable event occurs. This does not require abandoning goals or struggles; it means finding a point of rest within them and reducing the extent to which happiness is postponed.
Practical takeaways
- Test attention directly: choose the breath, a sound, a visual object, or a bodily sensation and observe how quickly unnoticed thought takes over. The exercise is diagnostic, not a demand for perfect concentration.
- During seated practice, attend to breathing or another sensory object. When thought appears, neither suppress it nor follow its story; recognize it as language, imagery, or another transient event in consciousness.
- Pair seated practice with slow walking meditation. Notice the sensations of lifting, moving, and placing each foot, then gradually widen attention to sounds, sights, emotions, and other experiences.
- Expect practice initially to reveal more distraction rather than less. Feeling more distractible can indicate that perceptual resolution has improved.
- In moments of anger or fear, notice the thoughts repeatedly renewing the emotion. Ask whether the feeling still supplies useful information or whether calm would now support better action.
- Cultivate equanimity rather than chasing only pleasant meditative states. Allow boredom, discomfort, calm, excitement, thoughts, and sensations to arise without grasping or resistance.
- Examine the supposed location of the observer. Look for the thinker separate from an arising thought or the subject directing attention. Harris’s proposed insight is not a conceptual answer but the experiential inability to find such a separate center.
- Treat concentration-induced calm, bodily disappearance, vastness, or drug-like subtlety as possible experiences, not proof of final insight or achievements that must be reproduced.
- Become more process-oriented. Since pursuit occupies far more of life than completion, practice allowing attention to rest in present activity rather than postponing fulfillment until a goal is reached.
- If altered-state experiences provide insights, evaluate whether those insights can be expressed through attention, behavior, relationships, and well-being in ordinary consciousness.
Caveats and limits
- The nonexistence of a separate subject is Harris’s philosophical and experiential claim; the discussion does not present a localized brain finding that conclusively establishes it. Huberman notes that no single brain region has been identified as fully accounting for awareness of self.
- “The self is an illusion” refers specifically to the felt inner observer, not to the denial of bodies, personalities, responsibilities, relationships, or useful social identities.
- Scientific evidence for many advertised meditation benefits remains provisional. Harris does not dismiss those findings, but he distinguishes them from meditation’s deeper contemplative claims.
- Meditation does not require eliminating thought, becoming irrational, or losing the ability to plan. The proposed change is recognizing thoughts clearly and using them without automatic identification.
- Equanimity does not mean tolerating abuse, ignoring danger, or refusing appropriate resistance. Fear and anger may carry important information, although remaining captured by them can impair effective action.
- Psychedelics and MDMA can involve substantial risks and are not presented as universally necessary or sufficient. Huberman explicitly frames any use as needing to be safe, responsible, age-appropriate, context-appropriate, and ideally supported by clinical or other qualified guidance.
- Drug-induced insight is temporary and may not transfer automatically into lasting psychological change. Repeated pursuit of peak experiences can become its own form of seeking.
- Progress in meditation may be nonlinear, and apparent worsening can reflect greater awareness rather than reduced ability. Harris’s strong claims about what most people can or cannot do with attention are based on his interpretation of subjective experience, not a study described in the conversation.
中文翻译
概述
斯坦福大学神经生物学与眼科学教授安德鲁·休伯曼与山姆·哈里斯博士探讨了冥想、意识、自我感、情绪调节、迷幻药以及对幸福的追求。
哈里斯认为，通常那种身为独立主体的感觉——一个位于面孔后方、观察并控制体验的“我”——是一种幻觉，或者至少是一种并非如其表象那般存在的建构。冥想可以揭示，并不存在一个与体验相分离的观察者：景象、感觉、情绪和思想只是直接在意识中浮现。
对哈里斯而言，冥想最深层的目的不仅是减轻压力、提高专注力、获得平静或取得其他可能的健康益处，而是认识意识本来的样子，减少对思想的认同，并获得一种不完全依赖环境或未来成就的心理自由。
核心观点
- “自我”一词有多种含义。哈里斯并不否认实际身份、人格、关系或因情境而异的角色。他所针对的是被感受到的“主体自我”：那个看似除体验之外还存在的内在观察者。
- 人们通常把身体和世界体验为客体，同时感觉自己像是身体里的乘客。他们可以控制某些自主动作，却无法控制心跳或激素分泌等过程，这进一步强化了这样一种印象：有一个独立的自我居住在这个有机体内，并对其进行部分控制。
- 初学者冥想时，可能会把自己想象成一个将注意力引向呼吸的观察者，或是站在河岸上观察意识，从而保留这种二元对立。哈里斯提出了更强的主张：岸上根本没有观察者；用比喻来说，“你就是河流”。
- 冥想不会创造无我状态，也不会消除一个真实存在的内在观察者。哈里斯声称，这个观察者从一开始就不存在。练习会使这种缺席变得可以被感知，可能就像一幅双稳态图像：一旦看出另一种解读方式，之后就很容易再次认出它。
- 冥想的常规益处可能包括减轻压力、提高专注力、获得平静、使情绪状态更加平稳，也可能减少大脑皮层变薄。哈里斯承认，其中一些益处可能是真实的，但他强调，支持许多相关主张的科学证据仍属初步。
- 冥想常被描述为改变意识的内容：减轻焦虑，或培养平静、无条件的爱以及亲社会情感。哈里斯说，冥想更深层、约有两千年历史的洞见所涉及的是意识的本质，无论意识内容是愉快还是不愉快。
- 心流状态提供了暂时性的非分离实例。在令人全神贯注的体育运动、艺术、性、冲浪、紧急情况或其他高峰体验中，自我监控可能会消失，只剩下统一的活动。这些时刻之所以让人感到有益，部分原因在于，人不再像站在自己身后审视自己，不再预期下一刻，也不再对表现进行微观管理。
- 这种自然发生的时刻非常罕见——哈里斯估计，它们可能只占人生的十万分之一。冥想旨在揭示同一种根本性的无分离状态，而不需要借助格外愉悦、危险或显著的事件。
- 思想会反复把人从直接体验中拉走。例如，一场美丽的日落可能会被各种评论打断：它多么美妙、如何重现这种体验，或者自己是否可以住在附近。
- 内在言语具有悖论性：人们不断告诉自己那些自己已经知道的事情，仿佛一个内在的人正在向另一个内在的人传递信息。哈里斯认为，语言在进化上具有实用价值，但进化并没有为持续的自我对话提供一个“关闭开关”。
- 进化并没有把人类设计成能够最大化幸福、成为数学家或音乐家、建立健康的民主制度、理解极大、极小或极古老的现象，或者以最佳方式调节情绪。人类把灵长类动物的认知与情绪机制改作他用，以追求那些并非由进化直接选择的目标。
- 哈里斯把自我描述为“在不知道自己正在思考时，思考所带来的感觉”。一个未被察觉的思想并不会被体验为意识中的一个事件，而会被体验成“我”。心智围绕它收缩，尽管仔细观察就会发现，思想十分短暂、缺乏实体，并且是自发浮现的。
- 一个转瞬即逝的思想——例如表达自我憎恨的思想——如果没有被认作思想，就可能定义整个情绪状态。正念可以使人摆脱这种自动认同，而不需要阻止思想出现。
- 哈里斯声称，大多数未经训练的人都无法连续30秒把注意力放在呼吸、一只手、一个时钟或其他对象上而不陷入思想之中——即使利害关系极其重大也不行。有些人可能误以为自己成功了，因为他们还无法察觉那些短暂的走神。
- 密集禅修会暴露这种注意力易分散的特点。参与者可能每天约有12小时保持沉默，在专注于呼吸的坐禅与专注于抬起、移动和放下双脚的行禅之间交替。声音、景象、感觉，以及最终完整的体验场域，都可以被纳入其中。
- 禅修参与者最初可能认为，自己每次能够维持五分钟的注意力。后来——甚至在禅修进行到第10天时——他们可能会感觉自己连五秒钟都无法保持专注。哈里斯把这种表面上的退步解释为分辨率的提高：他们正在察觉那些过去未被注意到的走神。
- 正念意味着仔细关注意识的内容而不迷失在思想之中。思想和心像可以自由浮现，但它们会被识别为自发出现的现象，而不会被误认为是自我。
- 训练注意力可以产生一种“帧率变化”：练习者会注意到，在走神与有意识地把注意力拉回来之间存在更加快速的交替。然而，这一过程可能会强化那种有一个行动者在控制聚光灯的感觉，因此哈里斯建议尽早质疑这一假设。
- 专注冥想有意识地把注意力集中在一个对象上，同时让其他知觉逐渐淡去。高度专注可能会降低对声音或身体的觉察，并产生微妙、广阔、类似药物作用的状态。它可能有助于建立实用的专注力和平静，但哈里斯认为，这是一种特定且有些脆弱的技能，充其量只是获得更深洞见的工具，而不是最终目标。
- 非二元正念更加开放。它的目标是对所有不断变化的体验保持平等心：既不抓取愉快或有趣的事件，也不抗拒不愉快或无聊的事件。哈里斯把理想状态比作天空般的心智，允许一切显现，而不执著或作出反应。
- 一个藏传佛教的类比把思想比作进入空屋的盗贼：屋里没有任何东西可供他们偷走。一旦认同有所放松，一个思想的出现就不再必然意味着冥想失败，也不意味着思考者必须在情绪上被其内容所俘获。
- 与其把自我理解为一个固定实体，不如把它理解为一种过程或活动——“自我化”。情境会产生可辨认的自我状态：商店里的顾客、老师面前的学生、孩子面前的父母，或伴侣面前的配偶。
- 对这些转换保持敏感，可以放松僵化的自我概念，并减少对他人如何评价自己的担忧。哈里斯所描述的由此产生的心理韧性，并非来自一个受到严密防御的身份，而是来自一个已经部分“蒸发”的身份，使计较得失不再那么具有吸引力。
- 这并不是主张消极被动。哈里斯练习武术和自卫，并表示人们应当在适当时反抗不当对待。愤怒、恐惧和心理收缩可以充当有效的显著性信号，使人注意到真实或可能发生的紧急情况。
- 负面情绪作为警报可能有用，但它通常不是处理紧急情况的最佳状态。哈里斯认为，一旦需要采取行动，平静通常更有效。关键问题并不是愤怒是否永远有正当理由，而是保持愤怒多久仍然有用。
- 正念可以揭示重复性思想与情绪生理反应之间的联系。持续反复思索自己为什么愤怒，会延长愤怒。注意到这种思想可以带来缓解，也让人能够选择：继续愤怒一分钟、五分钟或更长时间，是否仍然有意义。
- 如果缺乏这种觉察，一个人可能会一直受制于反刍、反复讲述同一套故事，以及思想的自然进程。通过娱乐转移注意力有时可能有所帮助，但正念会直接揭示这一机制，使人能够有意识地离开这个循环。
- 哈里斯描述了练习中的两个重大的、非线性的转变。第一个是清楚地区分迷失在思想中与觉察体验之间的差异，其中也包括对思想本身的觉察。第二个是认识到，并没有一个独立的人在实施觉察，而且意识并不存在一个可被观察到的中心。
- 到了非二元阶段，正念不再主要被体验为从某个位置出发、费力地投向对象的注意力。它是感觉和思想得以显现的开放状态，尤其是在对某个思想的认同被识别并随之松开之后。
- 哈里斯说，迷幻药最初对他而言不可或缺，因为它们向他证明了，从第一人称角度探索心智是值得的。18岁时，在服用MDMA之前，“冥想”对他几乎没有意义。
- 迷幻药或MDMA体验可能会揭示一些陌生的可能性，例如无条件的爱，或一种当事人此前从未想象过的心理健康状态。然而，这种体验会结束，有时只留下一段模糊、如梦般的记忆，因为它与普通意识之间过于不连续。
- 如果一个人只是试图积累高峰体验，希望它们能带来持久改变，那么这些体验可能会产生误导。每一种体验都是无常的，而目标不可能现实地设定为持续处于药物作用状态。
- 迷幻药引导哈里斯走向冥想之后，他停止使用迷幻药长达25年，因为他发现冥想在概念上更连贯，在实践上也更有效。他并不否认，反复经历迷幻药旅程可能有助于个人成长，但他坚持认为，任何有价值的东西最终都必须被整合进普通的清醒生活中。
- 真正相关的追求，是在普通、混乱和心理上困难的情境中，稳定地拥有注意力、爱与满足感的自由——而不是只在化学物质改变意识所产生的高峰中拥有这些。哈里斯把这种可能性与认识到独立自我的幻觉本质联系起来。
- 实现目标带有海市蜃楼般的特质。哈里斯并不反对设定目标，而且他说自己有很多目标；但人生的大部分时间都花在追求目标上，完成目标的时刻却十分短暂，并且会随着新目标的出现而开始远去。
- 财富、健康的体魄、经过优化的睡眠、婚姻、家庭、事业成功、名望及其他成就可以带来相对的幸福，但没有任何一种能够保证幸福安康。一个人可以拥有别人似乎想要的一切，却仍然痛苦不堪。
- 许多努力都反映出一种希望：一旦健康、关系、工作、住房、财务和眼前的问题得到充分安排，注意力终于就能安住于当下。然而，人们可能已经获得了有利条件，却仍不断后悔过去、恐惧未来。
- 如果没有洞见或训练，人们仍然依赖环境来使当下显得可以接受。他们试图改造外部世界，使其产生一种内在的满足状态。
- 哈里斯说，冥想逆转了这一因果方向：它可以让人在下一个有利事件发生之前就获得满足感。这并不要求放弃目标或奋斗；它意味着在目标与奋斗之中找到一个休息点，并减少把幸福推迟到未来的程度。
实践要点
- 直接测试注意力：选择呼吸、声音、视觉对象或身体感觉，观察未被察觉的思想会多快占据主导地位。这项练习用于诊断，而不是要求达到完美的专注。
- 坐禅时，把注意力放在呼吸或其他感官对象上。当思想出现时，既不要压制它，也不要跟随它的故事；要把它识别为语言、意象或意识中的另一种短暂事件。
- 把坐禅与缓慢的行禅结合起来。注意抬起、移动和放下每一只脚时的感觉，然后逐渐扩大注意范围，把声音、景象、情绪和其他体验都纳入其中。
- 要预期练习在初期会揭示出更多、而不是更少的走神。感觉自己更容易分心，可能表明知觉分辨率得到了提高。
- 在愤怒或恐惧时，注意那些不断使情绪重新出现的思想。问问自己，这种感觉是否仍在提供有用的信息，还是平静现在更有助于采取更好的行动。
- 培养平等心，而不是只追逐愉快的冥想状态。允许无聊、不适、平静、兴奋、思想和感觉浮现，既不抓取，也不抗拒。
- 审视那个所谓观察者的位置。寻找一个与浮现的思想相分离的思考者，或一个正在引导注意力的主体。哈里斯所提出的洞见并不是概念性的答案，而是在体验中无法找到这样一个独立中心。
- 把专注引发的平静、身体感的消失、广阔感或类似药物作用的微妙感受视为可能出现的体验，而不是最终洞见的证明，也不是必须重现的成就。
- 变得更注重过程。由于追求目标占据的人生远多于完成目标的时刻，应练习让注意力安住于当下的活动，而不是把满足感推迟到目标达成之后。
- 如果意识改变状态下的体验带来了洞见，应评估这些洞见能否通过普通意识中的注意力、行为、关系和幸福安康体现出来。
注意事项与局限
- 独立主体并不存在，是哈里斯在哲学和体验层面提出的主张；这场讨论并未提供能够确证这一点的、定位于某处大脑的发现。休伯曼指出，目前尚未发现任何一个能够完全解释自我觉察的单一脑区。
- “自我是一种幻觉”特指被感受到的内在观察者，并不否认身体、人格、责任、关系或有用的社会身份。
- 许多被宣传的冥想益处，其科学证据仍属初步。哈里斯并不否定这些研究发现，但他把它们与冥想更深层的观照性主张区分开来。
- 冥想不要求消除思想、变得不理性或失去规划能力。它所提出的改变，是清楚地识别思想，并在不自动认同它们的情况下运用它们。
- 平等心并不意味着容忍虐待、忽视危险或拒绝适当的反抗。恐惧和愤怒可能携带重要信息，但持续被它们俘获可能会损害有效行动。
- 迷幻药和MDMA可能带来重大风险，这里并未将其描述为对所有人都必要或充分的手段。休伯曼明确强调，任何使用都需要安全、负责任、符合年龄、符合具体情境，并且最好获得临床专业人员或其他合格人士的指导与支持。
- 药物诱发的洞见是暂时的，未必会自动转化为持久的心理改变。反复追逐高峰体验本身可能会成为另一种形式的追求。
- 冥想进展可能是非线性的，表面上的退步可能反映出觉察增强，而不是能力下降。哈里斯关于大多数人在注意力方面能做什么或不能做什么的强烈主张，是基于他对主观体验的解释，而不是基于这场对话中所描述的某项研究。
Full transcript
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Sam Harris. Dr. Sam Harris, what is this thing that we call a self? As far as I know, we have not localized the region in the brain
that can entirely account for our awareness of self. The problem is we use the term self in so many different ways, right? And there's one sense of that term, which is the target of meditation,
and you'll hear it from me, that this self is an illusion, right? And that there's a psychological freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering it to be an illusion.
And some people don't like that framing. Some people would insist that it's not so much an illusion, But it's a construct and it's not what it seems. The thing that doesn't exist, certainly doesn't exist as it seems, and I would want to argue that it actually is just a proper illusion, is the sense that there is a subject interior
to experience, in addition to experience. So most people feel like they're having an experience of the world and they're having an experience of their bodies in the world. And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body. Most people feel like they're behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought
and intention. It's almost like you're a passenger inside your body. Most people don't feel identical to their experience. They feel like they're on the edge of experience, somehow appropriating it from the side, kind of on the edge of the world, and the world is out there.
Your body is, in some sense, an object in the world, which is different from the world. The boundary of your skin is still meaningful. You can sort of loosely control your body. You can control your gross and subtle voluntary motor movements, but you're not controlling everything your body is doing.
You're not controlling your heartbeat and your hormonal secretions and all of that. There's a lot that's going on that is in the dark for you. Then you give someone an instruction to meditate, say, and you say, okay, well, let's examine all of this from the first person's side, let's look for this thing you're calling eye.
They're going to close their eyes very likely, and now they're going to pay attention to something. They're going to pay attention to the breath or to sounds, and it's from the point of view of being a locus of attention that is now aiming attention strategically at an object like the breath, that there's this dualism that is set up.
And the ultimate promise of meditation, I mean, there are really two levels at which you could be interested in meditation. One is, you know, very straightforward and remedial and non-paradoxical and very well subscribed and it's the usual set of claims about all the benefits you're going to get for meditation.
So you're going to lower your stress and you're going to increase your focus and you're going to, you know, stave off cortical thinning and there's all kinds of good things that science is saying meditation will give you. But from my point of view, the real purpose of meditation and its real promise is not in this long list of benefits, and I'm not discounting any of those, though the science
for many of them is quite provisional, it's in this deeper claim that if you look for this thing you're calling I, if you look for the sense that there's a thinker in addition to the mirror rising of the next thought, say, you won't find that thing, and you cannot find it in a way that's conclusive and that matters, right, and it has a, there's a host of benefits that follow from that discovery which are quite a bit deeper and more interesting
than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits, you know, de-stressing, increasing focus and all the rest. Many people think meditation is about changing the contents of consciousness. There's some contents you want to get rid of, like anxiety, other contents you want encourage like calm and you know unconditional love or you know some other you know classically
pleasant pro-social emotion and that's all fine that's all possible but the real you know wisdom of you know the 2000 year old wisdom of meditation that really is the you know the chewy center of the the tussey pop is a recognition of what consciousness itself is always already like regardless of the contents and the changes in contents and classic flow experiences have this quality where there's, and this tends to be why they're so
rewarding, where there's just, if you're in some, you know, athletic activity or, you know, an aesthetic one, or you could be having sex, or you could be whatever it is, some peak experience, its peakness usually entails there being some brief period where there was no distance between you and the experience, right? For that moment, you were no longer looking over your own shoulder or anticipating the next moment or trying to get somewhere where you weren't or, you know,
micromanaging errors or, you know, like this, you know, there's not, there's just the flow of unity with whatever the, you know, whatever the experience is, you know, a surfer on the wave, right? And we love those experiences. We are continually abstracted away from them by our thinking about them. We'll think, oh my god, that was so good, or how do I get back to that? Or, you know, you're looking at a sunset, it's the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen,
and then you're continually interrupting the experience of merely seeing it with a commentary about how amazing this is, and I wonder, you know, what are real estate prices here? I mean, is it possible that we could move here? Your mind is just continually narrating a conversation you're having with yourself, however paradoxically. I mean, you're telling yourself things that you already know, as though there were two of you, rather often, right? Like, you know, you're just,
you know, I'm looking for, you know, which is the water, and I say, oh, there it is, right? But, like, I'm the one seeing it. Who am I saying, oh, you know, there it is, too, as though there's There's someone else who needs to be informed about the thing I already saw, right? So there's something about our internal dialogue that is paradoxical, and that's what ultimately meditation is.
I mean, this kind of meditation, you ultimately learn to recognize that there's no separation from you between you and your experience, right? There's not the experience on the one hand and the self on the other. There's just experience. It's not that you're on the riverbank, and this is how it can seem in the beginning,
even when you're practicing meditation fairly diligently, it can seem like you're on the riverbank watching the contents of consciousness flow by, and meditation is the act of doing that more and more dispassionately, so you're no longer grabbing at the pleasant or pushing the unpleasant away, you're just kind of relaxing and in the most non-judgmental frame of mind just witnessing the flow, right? But if you're doing that dualistically, you feel like the
meditator. You feel like the subject aiming attention, and so now you're on the riverbank watching everything go pass. But the truth is, you are the river. There's a process by which you would eventually recognize that there's no distance between you and your experience. And again, you can wait for those moments in life where experience gets so good or so terrifying, you know, or it's just so salient, right? Your amygdala is driving so hard. I mean,
so you're in a war and you can't think about anything because, you know, the enemy's shooting at you and this is the most thrilling video game you've ever played in your life and your life is on the line or you're, you know, at the peak of some, you know, athletic event where there's just, you don't know how you're doing the things you're doing, but it's all happening automatically, right? But those are one one-hundredth of one percent
of one's life. And what I'm calling meditation is a way of simply understanding the mechanics of attention, whereby you are denying yourself that unity of experience so much of the time, and recognizing that that's, you know, it's based on a misperception of the way consciousness that always already is. Something about our developmental wiring
and the algorithms that these neural circuits run tend to bias most people, the non-practice meditators, to live a somewhat functional life, at least, without this awareness of actor and observer. And so what you're really talking about
is a deliberate intervention to understand and resolve that gap in the algorithm. So what are your thoughts about the organization of the circuitry to essentially, under normal conditions, to not reveal what seems to be one of its more important and profound and, dare I say, enlightening features? It's almost as if that we have to intervene in the self in order to reveal the self. We are not set up by evolution to be as happy as we possibly
can be and to do almost anything that interests us well. I mean, we're not set up by evolution to be mathematicians or musicians or to create democracies that are healthy. We are doing these things based on cognitive and emotional hardware that we are leveraging in new directions, right?
I mean, we are primates and we are, you know, we're communicating with, you know, small mouth noises. language using primates and all of that is clearly evolved and we're doing these amazing things including science you know however improbably where you were actually able to to you know almost entirely with language uh understand reality that at a scale that exceeds
us in both directions i mean the very the very vast and the very small and and you know also temporally the very old it's amazing that we can do all those things but evolution is blind to all of that. We have flown the perch that was created for us by evolution. I mean, we're just not, it's not just the primate things. So, so it is with learning how to regulate our emotions and, and, you know, punch through to a self-concept or beyond a self-concept that is more normative
psychologically that allows us to, you know, not be terrorized by our APISH genes. Evolution never thought to build us an off switch for this. Language is so useful and it gets tuned up so strongly for us. And there was never a reason to shut it off. There was never a reason to give you this ability to say, wouldn't it be nice to have four hours of quiet now and no self-talk? For most of us, we are covertly talking basically all the time. And there's
an imagistic component of this for many people. You're visualizing things as well. But there's just a ton of white noise in the mind that feels a certain way. And what you discover in meditation ultimately is that the self is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking. So like you and I are talking now, people are listening to us, they're struggling to follow the train of this conversation because it is competing
with the conversation that's happening in their heads. So it's the first discovery people making meditation is that it's just so hard to pay attention to anything, the breath or mantra or sound, whatever it is, because you're thinking. You're thinking about the thing you need to do in an hour, and, oh, it's so good that I downloaded this app.
I'm like, oh, this is really good. This is going to be good for me. But that chatter isn't showing up. You're not far back enough in the theater of consciousness so as to see it emerge. is just sneaking up behind you and it feels like me again. When someone is thinking the thought,
what the hell does that mean? They're not seeing it as an emerging object in consciousness, it just feels like me. Subjectively, it's like the mind contracts around this appearance in consciousness and it really is just a sound with the voice of the mind. If If you actually can inspect it, it is deeply inscrutable that we ever feel identified with our thoughts.
I mean, how is it that we could be a thought? These thoughts, a thought just arises and passes away, and when you inspect it, when you go to inspect it, it unravels, it's the least substantial possible thing, but yet it could be a thought of self-hatred. hatred. It could be a thought that unrecognized totally defines your mood.
If you could elaborate a bit on this notion of internal chatter and external stimuli, is just the recognition that there's a dialogue ongoing internally, is that itself valuable? Yeah. Here's a claim I would make that some people might find surprising, but I think I think this is an objectively true claim about the subjectivity of most people, which is that unless you have a fair amount of training, unless you just happen to be some kind of
savant in this area, which most people by definition aren't, I believe this is a true claim that if we just put a stopwatch on this table and people could just watch it, 30 seconds elapse, and I said, you know, I said all of our listeners or your viewers the task, for the next 30 seconds, just pay attention to anything, your breath, you know, or, you know, the sight of your hand or the sight of the clock, or any object without getting lost
in thought, without getting momentarily distracted by this conversation you're having with yourself. A couple things would happen. One is no one would be able to do it. This is not just a superficial inability. I mean, if your life's dependent on it, you wouldn't be able to do it. I mean, if the fate of civilization depended on it, none of our listeners would be able to do this. And yet some percentage of them are so distracted by thought that they would think that they will
actually try this experiment and think they succeeded, right? And for these people, what happens is you put them on a meditation retreat and you have them spend 12 hours a day in silence doing nothing but this, right? So the practice is just pay attention to the breath when they're sitting and then eventually, you know, you incorporate everything sounds and other sensations and then you interleave that with walking meditation where they're paying attention
just to the sensations of lifting and moving and placing their feet. And then, you know, once the practice is going, you incorporate sounds and sights and everything. So you can pay attention to everything, but the goal is for every moment you are going to cultivate that what this this faculty of mind which you know increasingly is known as mindfulness right so and mindfulness is nothing other than this very careful attention to the contents of consciousness
but the crucial piece is it is not a moment of being lost in thought right you're not you you're not blocking thoughts thoughts themselves can arise but in those moments of being truly mindful you're noticing thoughts as thoughts whether they're whether it's language in the mind or images, you're noticing those two as spontaneous appearances in consciousness. Most people, certainly anyone who thinks they can pay attention to something for 30 seconds
without being lost in thought, you put those people on a meditation retreat. What they're going to experience is on the first day they're going to feel like, oh yeah, I was with the breath or I was walking, I was with the sensations of walking, and I'd be there for like five minutes, solid, and then I would get lost in thought, then I'd back, you know, five more minutes, it'd be lost in thought and then get back. But as the day has
progressed, you know, even, you know, 10 days into a silent meditation retreat, they're going to experience more and more distraction. They're gonna, it's gonna seem like, okay, wait a minute, now I can't pay attention to anything for more than five seconds, right? Because what they're discovering is just how distractible they are. If you train your attention in this way to notice the particularities of sensory experience and emotional experience, like you're looking for
the atoms of experience, you know. You get better and better at that and certain things happen, but one thing that I really do think happens is there's a kind of frame rate change in the data stream where you really are just you're just noticing much much more this whole dance of I've lost in thought now I'm now I'm strategically directing my attention again all of this seems to ramify this sense of self the sense of of there's one to be doing this
there's there's somebody holding the spotlight of attention and getting better at coming back to the object of meditation but the thing I like to do when I talk about all of this is undercut the false assumptions that are anchoring all of that as early as possible. Because where I think you want to be is recognizing that there is no place from which to aim attention. This whole dualistic setup of subject and object is the thing that is already not there.
And it's not that it's there and you meditate it out of existence successfully, it's really not there. And if you learn how to look for it, you can see that it's not there and feel that it's not there. And it no longer seems to be there, right?
It's like it's not, and it becomes like, again, like a bistable percept where you looked at it long enough and you thought, okay, now I see the vase and the face and I can't unsee it. And every time I look, it's there again. If we were to break it down meditation into some basic component parts, what are the component
parts and where I'm really going with this is why would those component parts eventually allow for the realization that there is no distinction between actor and observer and so on? Ultimately, meditation is not a practice that you're adding to your life. It's not a doing more of anything, it's actually ceasing to do something.
It's ultimately non-distraction. I mean, ultimately, you're recognizing what consciousness is like when you're no longer distracted by the automatic arising of thought. It's not that thoughts don't arise. It's not that you can't use them. It's not that you've become irrational or unintelligent. You still have all of your tools, but everything is in plain view. There's an analogy in Tibetan Buddhism, which I
love, which is thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house. There's nothing for them to steal. So, in the usual case, there really is something in jeopardy. Every time a thought comes, I'm not meditating anymore, and not only that, I feel terrible because of what I'm thinking about most of the time. So it's totally understandable that thought seemed like a problem in the beginning, and
for certain types of meditation, they are explicitly thought of as a problem because you're trying to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, including thought. And that's a training that can be good to do. It becomes a tool that you can use for other kinds of insight. But it's a very specific and kind of brittle skill in the end.
I mean, it's a skill, just like I'm going to pay attention to one thing and I'm going to do that so well that everything else is going to fade out. Meditatively, if you have a laser focus on any one thing, whether it's the breath or whatever it is, you can lose all sense of everything. You can lose all sense of hearing and your physical body can disappear.
literally can become incredibly subtle and vast and drug-like. And many people approach meditation thinking, kind of climbing the ladder of those changes into subtlety and vastness, that's the whole game, right? And it can be a deeply rewarding game to play. And it also does come with all kinds of ancillary benefits, I mean, all the focus and the calm
and the kind of smoothness of emotional states. I mean, all of that comes with greater concentration, and it can be quite wonderful. But again, at best, that's a tool to aim in the direction that I'm talking about now with respect to meditation, which relates to more what I would call, you know, mindfulness generically and ultimately kind of non-dual mindfulness.
The underlying goal is to be more and more equanimous with changes, so not to grasp at what's pleasant or interesting and not to push what's unpleasant or boring or otherwise non-engaging away, what you want is just a kind of a sky-like mind that just allows everything to appear and you're not clinging to anything or reacting to anything. This applies not just to something like mindfulness but even to something like the self, right?
So the sense of self is also a process. It's a verb. It's a work. We're selfing more than we are selves, right? And even appropriate uses of the term self that don't go away even when you recognize
that the core subject self is an illusion, there are states of self where you can recognize in your life that you inhabit very different modes of being depending on the context. So like there are moments where you just by walking into a certain building, you suddenly transition into a different state of self. Like suddenly you pass through a door and now you're a customer in a store, right?
So we know what that customer feeling is, like you're now the person who's getting the attention. It's a very kind of formalized type of attention from the person who's running the store. You can be a student in the presence of a teacher, you can be a parent in the presence of a son or a daughter, you can be a spouse in the presence of your spouse.
The change in context really does usher in some fundamental psychological changes in just the states of consciousness that are available. More and more as you become sensitive to these changes and you become sensitive to what it's like to actually not be psychologically reactive and not be definable by your own self-concept. You're not identifying with anything.
You're not hanging your hat on anything. You're not thinking about yourself in the kind of terms that you would export to others and then care about what they think about you, right? There's a kind of invulnerability that arises that's not born of being well defended. It's born of being evaporated, right?
It's like you're no longer keeping score in those ways. You can leave aside all those circumstances where it's appropriate to react to someone and, you know, I'm into martial arts and self-defense and yes, you're not supposed to be just this puddle of goo out in the world who can be just mistreated by people and, you know, never put up, you know, resistance, but it's psychologically, you know, even if a state like anger or contraction
is sometimes normative and appropriate, the question is, how long is it normative and appropriate for? Like, how long do you want to stay angry for? In my experience, kind of classically negative emotions like anger and fear are appropriate as salience cues, you know, they orient you to an emergency or a potential emergency.
But then in dealing with the emergency, they're almost never the state you want to be in. It's better to actually be calm in an emergency. Would you say that meditation as a practice done for a few minutes each day or with the app that it's a kind of a step function is a very nonlinear in terms of people's progress? What does the meditation practice look like over time?
The first step function is to very clearly experience the difference between being lost in thought and being clearly aware of any part of experience, including thought. And to notice the freedom that compared to psychological freedom that gives you, right? So you can like, you're, something's made you angry and now you're thinking about all the reasons why you should be angry and have every right to be angry and what you're going
to tell that person when you see them. And then you notice your thinking, right, and you notice the connection between the thought and the anger, right, like the minute spent lost in thought about what's making you angry is the thing that drags through the physiology of anger. And from the point of view of the one who's being mindful, this is tremendous relief.
And at minimum, it's a degree of freedom. You can, at that point, decide, well, how long do I want to be angry for? Right? Is it useful to stay angry? angry for one minute, two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, or because before you have that
capacity to be mindful, you're going to helplessly be as angry as you're going to be for as long as you're going to be that way just based on the kind of the time course of your thinking about it, brooding about it, telling your wife about it. You are going to be the hostage of that for as long as you'll be the hostage of that. You have nothing you can do apart from just deciding to, you know, check out and watch
Game of Thrones again for the third time, right? Like it's just you can divert your attention to something else, which is sometimes a good thing to do, but mindfulness, even dualistic mindfulness gives you this capacity to just observe the mechanics of this and then get off the ride whenever you want. The other step function is noticing that there is no one who is doing that.
I mean, this is the non-duality, the selflessness, the centrallessness of awareness, right? The fact that there's no place from which the mindfulness is being aimed, but the fact that there's just this open condition in which everything is appearing, thoughts included. At that point, your mindfulness no longer becomes, it's no longer this dualistic effort to strategically pay attention to anything as opposed to being lost in thought.
It's just what's left when the present recognized thought unravels. Even before it unravels, what's recognized is you are simply identical to the condition in which everything is appearing. Could you tell us why psychedelics can be useful? You safely and responsibly, age appropriate, context appropriate, ideally with some clinical
or other type of guidance, all that stated, what are your thoughts about psychedelics in terms of how they intersect with the discussion that we've been having and what utility do they play in recognition of the self or in other sorts of brain changes. I would just say that for many of us, I mean, certainly for me, psychedelics were indispensable in the beginning in proving to me that the first person interrogation of the mind was
worth doing. For somebody like me at 18, the noun meditation meant absolutely nothing to me before I took my first dose of, in this case it was MDMA. One of the limitations of a drug is that obviously no matter how good the experience, the drug wears off and then you're back in more or less your usual form and now you have a memory
of the experience. And it can be a fairly dim memory. Some of these experiences are so discontinuous with normal waking consciousness that it can be like trying to remember a dream. Where you recognize, okay, there was a way of being that is quite different than what
I'm tending to access by default. And it is different in ways that are obviously better and psychologically more healthy. It's possible to be healthy psychologically in a way that I never imagined. Once you have one of these experiences on psychedelics or on a drug like MDMA, you know that there's a there there.
You know that unconditional love is a possibility. If your only framework is the good experiences, the good feels you had on whatever drug it was, I think you can be misled to just seek lots of peak experiences. You're just trying to string together a lot of peak experiences, hoping they're going to change you.
Every one of which, by definition, is going to be impermanent. What everyone really wants, whether they know it or not, and their right to want, is a type of freedom that is compatible with even ordinary states of consciousness. I hadn't done psychedelics for 25 years, because again, they were super useful for me in the beginning, then I discovered meditation on the basis of those experiences, got really
into meditation and realize, okay, this is a much more, you know, conceptually this makes much more sense to me. This is delivering the goods, you know, in terms of my experience. There's no need to keep having these, you know, seeking these peak experiences with drugs.
So what I think people want is a way of having free attention and unconditional love in this, know, totally ordinary and potentially chaotic human experience, you know, which can be psychologically fraught and you can meet, you know, iterations of yourself that you don't like that are not equipping you to be the best possible person in that relationship. And what we want to do is cut through all of that and actually, you know, be in love
with our lives and with the people in our lives more and more of the time. I'm not saying that repeated psychedelic journeys can't be integral to that project, but you know that the project can't be being high all the time. So whatever is extractable from the occasional psychedelic trip has got to be mappable into ordinary waking consciousness, and the real point of contact does kind of run through
this what I've been calling the illusion of the self. And again, that part is discoverable without any changes in contents. None of this can really be solved in a single practice, it sounds like, but it does seem to me, based on what you've told us today, is that only through a deep understanding of the self as it really is, as opposed to this illusion that you framed up, could we
actually arrive at some answers about what's actually right for each and every one of us? There's one generic answer that I think can be extracted both from psychedelics and from meditation, and just from just thinking more clearly about the nature of our lives, and it's to become more process-oriented and to be more and more sensitive to the mirage-like character of achieving our goals.
Right now, I'm not against achieving goals. I have a lot of goals. I'm very busy. I'm very busy, there are lots of things I want to get done, and I'm as satisfied as anyone to finish a project.
But if you look at the time course of all of that fulfillment, and there are a few lessons that everyone, I think, has to draw. One is most of your life is spent in the process. The moment at which the goal is fully conquered, that has a tiny duration. It has a very short half-life, and the moment you arrive at it, it begins to recede because
in the meantime, you have all these other goals that have appeared on the horizon. And in some sense, if you're focused on goals, you can never arrive. I think what we're all looking for in life, we're looking for good enough reasons to let our attention fully rest in the present. That is the logic of success, the sense like, I've got all these things I want to do.
If I could just get rich enough or fit enough or dial in my sleep well enough or improve my life in all these ways, get the right relationship, wouldn't it be great to be married? I want to start a family. I want all of these things, right? I'm not discounting those relative forms of happiness or sources of happiness, but one
One thing is absolutely clear. It's possible to be miserable in the presence of all of those things, right? And you can add great wealth and fame and everything on top of that. It's possible to be absolutely miserable having everything anyone could seemingly want. So what is it that we actually want in all of our seeking to arrange the props in our
lives and the story to have a convincing enough story to tell about ourselves that we're doing the right thing? What is all of that effort predicated on? It's predicated on this desire and this expectation that if we could get all of this stuff in the right place and not have anything terrifying to worry about, everyone we love is healthy
for the moment, and we're healthy, and we've got something to look forward to on the weekend, and there's not a plumbing leak in the house that we have to immediately respond to. We like our house, and our career is going fine. Now can we just actually give up the war, right? Can we fully locate our sense of well-being in the present moment?
Can we relax the impulse to brood about the past or think anxiously about the future for long enough to discover that all of this here is enough? Even if we're guarding our time to do the things that are most important to us, we can spend all of that time regretting the past or anxiously expecting the future and just bouncing between past and future in our thinking about ourselves and our lives and basically
just dancing over the present and never making contact with it, right? So I think what we want is a circumstance where attention can be located in the present in a way that's truly fulfilling. And unless you have had some kind of radical insight that allows you to do that on demand, you are in some sense hostage to the circumstances of your life to do that for you.
You're constantly trying to engineer a state of the world that will propagate back on a state of self that will make the present moment good enough. And what meditation does, and psychedelics to some degree does this, but meditation very directly does this, it reverses the causality and lets you actually change states such that you can be fulfilled before anything happens.
Your happiness is no longer predicated on the next good thing happening. You can be in the presence of the next good or bad thing already being fulfilled. How much can you puncture that seeking happiness project with the recognition that you're already free? It's not that you just need to be a pushover when you learn how to meditate or you work
on yourself in any of these ways. But what I think you want to find is you want to find your point of rest in the midst of any struggle. I feel very blessed in no small part because of our conversation today. Thank you so much.
Nice. Well, to be continued. To be continued. We'll do it again and again and again.