Essentials: Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind | Dr. Sam Harris

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent [00:00:05] and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. [00:00:11] I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford [00:00:16] School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Sam Harris. Dr. Sam Harris, what is [00:00:22] this thing that we call a self? As far as I know, we have not localized the region in the brain

[00:00:29] that can entirely account for our awareness of self. [00:00:33] The problem is we use the term self [00:00:35] in so many different ways, right? [00:00:37] And there's one sense of that term, [00:00:41] which is the target of meditation,

[00:00:43] and you'll hear it from me, [00:00:44] that this self is an illusion, right? [00:00:47] And that there's a psychological freedom [00:00:50] that can be experienced on the other side [00:00:52] of discovering it to be an illusion.

[00:00:54] And some people don't like that framing. [00:00:55] Some people would insist that it's not so much an illusion, [00:00:58] But it's a construct and it's not what it seems. [00:01:01] The thing that doesn't exist, certainly doesn't exist as it seems, and I would want to argue [00:01:06] that it actually is just a proper illusion, is the sense that there is a subject interior

[00:01:14] to experience, in addition to experience. [00:01:16] So most people feel like they're having an experience of the world and they're having [00:01:20] an experience of their bodies in the world. [00:01:23] And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body. [00:01:29] Most people feel like they're behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought

[00:01:34] and intention. [00:01:35] It's almost like you're a passenger inside your body. [00:01:39] Most people don't feel identical to their experience. [00:01:41] They feel like they're on the edge of experience, somehow appropriating it from the side, kind [00:01:46] of on the edge of the world, and the world is out there.

[00:01:50] Your body is, in some sense, an object in the world, which is different from the world. [00:01:57] The boundary of your skin is still meaningful. [00:01:59] You can sort of loosely control your body. [00:02:02] You can control your gross and subtle voluntary motor movements, but you're not controlling [00:02:08] everything your body is doing.

[00:02:09] You're not controlling your heartbeat and your hormonal secretions and all of that. [00:02:13] There's a lot that's going on that is in the dark for you. [00:02:16] Then you give someone an instruction to meditate, say, and you say, okay, well, let's examine [00:02:21] all of this from the first person's side, let's look for this thing you're calling [00:02:24] eye.

[00:02:25] They're going to close their eyes very likely, and now they're going to pay attention to [00:02:28] something. [00:02:29] They're going to pay attention to the breath or to sounds, and it's from the point of view [00:02:34] of being a locus of attention that is now aiming attention strategically at an object [00:02:39] like the breath, that there's this dualism that is set up.

[00:02:42] And the ultimate promise of meditation, I mean, there are really two levels at which [00:02:47] you could be interested in meditation. [00:02:51] One is, you know, very straightforward and remedial and non-paradoxical and very well [00:02:56] subscribed and it's the usual set of claims about all the benefits you're going to get [00:03:01] for meditation.

[00:03:02] So you're going to lower your stress and you're going to increase your focus and you're going [00:03:05] to, you know, stave off cortical thinning and there's all kinds of good things that [00:03:08] science is saying meditation will give you. [00:03:12] But from my point of view, the real purpose of meditation and its real promise is not [00:03:17] in this long list of benefits, and I'm not discounting any of those, though the science

[00:03:23] for many of them is quite provisional, it's in this deeper claim that if you look for [00:03:28] this thing you're calling I, if you look for the sense that there's a thinker in addition [00:03:33] to the mirror rising of the next thought, say, you won't find that thing, and you cannot [00:03:40] find it in a way that's conclusive and that matters, right, and it has a, there's a host [00:03:47] of benefits that follow from that discovery which are quite a bit deeper and more interesting

[00:03:52] than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits, you know, de-stressing, increasing [00:03:56] focus and all the rest. [00:03:58] Many people think meditation is about changing the contents of consciousness. [00:04:02] There's some contents you want to get rid of, like anxiety, other contents you want [00:04:07] encourage like calm and you know unconditional love or you know some other you know classically

[00:04:12] pleasant pro-social emotion and that's all fine that's all possible but the real you [00:04:19] know wisdom of you know the 2000 year old wisdom of meditation that really is the you [00:04:25] know the chewy center of the the tussey pop is a recognition of what consciousness itself [00:04:31] is always already like regardless of the contents and the changes in contents and [00:04:36] classic flow experiences have this quality where there's, and this tends to be why they're so

[00:04:42] rewarding, where there's just, if you're in some, you know, athletic activity or, you know, an [00:04:49] aesthetic one, or you could be having sex, or you could be whatever it is, some peak experience, [00:04:54] its peakness usually entails there being some brief period where there was no distance between [00:05:02] you and the experience, right? For that moment, you were no longer looking over your own shoulder [00:05:08] or anticipating the next moment or trying to get somewhere where you weren't or, you know,

[00:05:14] micromanaging errors or, you know, like this, you know, there's not, there's just the flow of unity [00:05:20] with whatever the, you know, whatever the experience is, you know, a surfer on the wave, [00:05:25] right? And we love those experiences. We are continually abstracted away from them by our [00:05:32] thinking about them. We'll think, oh my god, that was so good, or how do I get back to that? Or, [00:05:37] you know, you're looking at a sunset, it's the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen,

[00:05:41] and then you're continually interrupting the experience of merely seeing it with a commentary [00:05:48] about how amazing this is, and I wonder, you know, what are real estate prices here? I mean, [00:05:52] is it possible that we could move here? Your mind is just continually narrating a conversation [00:05:58] you're having with yourself, however paradoxically. I mean, you're telling yourself things that you [00:06:04] already know, as though there were two of you, rather often, right? Like, you know, you're just,

[00:06:10] you know, I'm looking for, you know, which is the water, and I say, oh, there it is, right? But, [00:06:14] like, I'm the one seeing it. Who am I saying, oh, you know, there it is, too, as though there's [00:06:19] There's someone else who needs to be informed about the thing I already saw, right? [00:06:25] So there's something about our internal dialogue that is paradoxical, and that's what ultimately [00:06:30] meditation is.

[00:06:31] I mean, this kind of meditation, you ultimately learn to recognize that there's no separation [00:06:39] from you between you and your experience, right? [00:06:42] There's not the experience on the one hand and the self on the other. [00:06:46] There's just experience. [00:06:48] It's not that you're on the riverbank, and this is how it can seem in the beginning,

[00:06:53] even when you're practicing meditation fairly diligently, it can seem like you're on the [00:06:57] riverbank watching the contents of consciousness flow by, and meditation is the act of doing [00:07:04] that more and more dispassionately, so you're no longer grabbing at the pleasant or pushing [00:07:09] the unpleasant away, you're just kind of relaxing and in the most non-judgmental frame of mind [00:07:16] just witnessing the flow, right? But if you're doing that dualistically, you feel like the

[00:07:23] meditator. You feel like the subject aiming attention, and so now you're on the riverbank [00:07:27] watching everything go pass. But the truth is, you are the river. There's a process by which [00:07:34] you would eventually recognize that there's no distance between you and your experience. [00:07:40] And again, you can wait for those moments in life where experience gets so good or so terrifying, [00:07:47] you know, or it's just so salient, right? Your amygdala is driving so hard. I mean,

[00:07:52] so you're in a war and you can't think about anything because, you know, [00:07:55] the enemy's shooting at you and this is the most thrilling video game you've ever played in your [00:07:59] life and your life is on the line or you're, you know, at the peak of some, you know, athletic event [00:08:06] where there's just, you don't know how you're doing the things you're doing, [00:08:10] but it's all happening automatically, right? But those are one one-hundredth of one percent

[00:08:15] of one's life. And what I'm calling meditation is a way of simply understanding the mechanics [00:08:22] of attention, whereby you are denying yourself that unity of experience so much of the time, [00:08:29] and recognizing that that's, you know, it's based on a misperception of the way consciousness [00:08:35] that always already is. [00:08:37] Something about our developmental wiring

[00:08:39] and the algorithms that these neural circuits run [00:08:43] tend to bias most people, the non-practice meditators, [00:08:47] to live a somewhat functional life, at least, [00:08:54] without this awareness of actor and observer. [00:08:58] And so what you're really talking about

[00:08:59] is a deliberate intervention to understand and resolve [00:09:05] that gap in the algorithm. So what are your thoughts about the organization of the circuitry [00:09:10] to essentially, under normal conditions, to not reveal what seems to be one of its more important [00:09:16] and profound and, dare I say, enlightening features? It's almost as if that we have to intervene in [00:09:25] the self in order to reveal the self. We are not set up by evolution to be as happy as we possibly

[00:09:32] can be and to do almost anything that interests us well. [00:09:36] I mean, we're not set up by evolution to be mathematicians or musicians or to create democracies [00:09:43] that are healthy. [00:09:44] We are doing these things based on cognitive and emotional hardware that we are leveraging [00:09:52] in new directions, right?

[00:09:53] I mean, we are primates and we are, you know, we're communicating with, you know, small [00:09:58] mouth noises. [00:09:59] language using primates and all of that is clearly evolved and we're doing these amazing [00:10:03] things including science you know however improbably where you were actually able to [00:10:08] to you know almost entirely with language uh understand reality that at a scale that exceeds

[00:10:17] us in both directions i mean the very the very vast and the very small and and you know also [00:10:22] temporally the very old it's amazing that we can do all those things but evolution is blind to all [00:10:27] of that. We have flown the perch that was created for us by evolution. I mean, we're just not, [00:10:32] it's not just the primate things. So, so it is with learning how to regulate our emotions and, [00:10:38] and, you know, punch through to a self-concept or beyond a self-concept that is more normative

[00:10:44] psychologically that allows us to, you know, not be terrorized by our APISH genes. Evolution never [00:10:52] thought to build us an off switch for this. Language is so useful and it gets tuned up [00:10:59] so strongly for us. And there was never a reason to shut it off. There was never a reason [00:11:04] to give you this ability to say, wouldn't it be nice to have four hours of quiet now [00:11:08] and no self-talk? For most of us, we are covertly talking basically all the time. And there's

[00:11:17] an imagistic component of this for many people. You're visualizing things as well. But there's [00:11:22] just a ton of white noise in the mind that feels a certain way. And what you discover [00:11:31] in meditation ultimately is that the self is what it feels like to be thinking without [00:11:38] knowing that you're thinking. So like you and I are talking now, people are listening [00:11:42] to us, they're struggling to follow the train of this conversation because it is competing

[00:11:47] with the conversation that's happening in their heads. So it's the first discovery people [00:11:52] making meditation is that it's just so hard to pay attention to anything, the breath or [00:11:56] mantra or sound, whatever it is, because you're thinking. [00:12:02] You're thinking about the thing you need to do in an hour, and, oh, it's so good that [00:12:06] I downloaded this app.

[00:12:07] I'm like, oh, this is really good. [00:12:08] This is going to be good for me. [00:12:09] But that chatter isn't showing up. [00:12:13] You're not far back enough in the theater of consciousness so as to see it emerge. [00:12:21] is just sneaking up behind you and it feels like me again. When someone is thinking the thought,

[00:12:28] what the hell does that mean? They're not seeing it as an emerging object in consciousness, [00:12:34] it just feels like me. Subjectively, it's like the mind contracts around [00:12:44] this appearance in consciousness and it really is just a sound with the voice of the mind. If [00:12:50] If you actually can inspect it, it is deeply inscrutable that we ever feel identified with [00:12:57] our thoughts.

[00:12:58] I mean, how is it that we could be a thought? [00:13:01] These thoughts, a thought just arises and passes away, and when you inspect it, when [00:13:04] you go to inspect it, it unravels, it's the least substantial possible thing, but yet [00:13:15] it could be a thought of self-hatred. [00:13:18] hatred. It could be a thought that unrecognized totally defines your mood.

[00:13:25] If you could elaborate a bit on this notion of internal chatter and external stimuli, [00:13:31] is just the recognition that there's a dialogue ongoing internally, is that itself valuable? [00:13:37] Yeah. Here's a claim I would make that some people might find surprising, but I think [00:13:43] I think this is an objectively true claim about the subjectivity of most people, which [00:13:49] is that unless you have a fair amount of training, unless you just happen to be some kind of

[00:13:54] savant in this area, which most people by definition aren't, I believe this is a true [00:14:00] claim that if we just put a stopwatch on this table and people could just watch it, 30 seconds [00:14:07] elapse, and I said, you know, I said all of our listeners or your viewers the task, for [00:14:14] the next 30 seconds, just pay attention to anything, your breath, you know, or, you know, [00:14:20] the sight of your hand or the sight of the clock, or any object without getting lost

[00:14:26] in thought, without getting momentarily distracted by this conversation you're having with yourself. [00:14:32] A couple things would happen. One is no one would be able to do it. This is not just a [00:14:36] superficial inability. I mean, if your life's dependent on it, you wouldn't be able to do it. [00:14:41] I mean, if the fate of civilization depended on it, none of our listeners would be able to do this. [00:14:49] And yet some percentage of them are so distracted by thought that they would think that they will

[00:14:56] actually try this experiment and think they succeeded, right? And for these people, what [00:15:00] happens is you put them on a meditation retreat and you have them spend 12 hours a day in silence [00:15:05] doing nothing but this, right? So the practice is just pay attention to the breath when they're [00:15:09] sitting and then eventually, you know, you incorporate everything sounds and other sensations [00:15:14] and then you interleave that with walking meditation where they're paying attention

[00:15:17] just to the sensations of lifting and moving and placing their feet. And then, you know, [00:15:21] once the practice is going, you incorporate sounds and sights and everything. So you can [00:15:25] pay attention to everything, but the goal is for every moment you are going to cultivate [00:15:33] that what this this faculty of mind which you know increasingly is known as mindfulness right [00:15:37] so and mindfulness is nothing other than this very careful attention to the contents of consciousness

[00:15:45] but the crucial piece is it is not a moment of being lost in thought right you're not you [00:15:52] you're not blocking thoughts thoughts themselves can arise but in those moments of being truly [00:15:56] mindful you're noticing thoughts as thoughts whether they're whether it's language in the [00:16:01] mind or images, you're noticing those two as spontaneous appearances in consciousness. [00:16:07] Most people, certainly anyone who thinks they can pay attention to something for 30 seconds

[00:16:11] without being lost in thought, you put those people on a meditation retreat. [00:16:15] What they're going to experience is on the first day they're going to feel like, oh yeah, [00:16:21] I was with the breath or I was walking, I was with the sensations of walking, and I'd [00:16:24] be there for like five minutes, solid, and then I would get lost in thought, then I'd [00:16:28] back, you know, five more minutes, it'd be lost in thought and then get back. But as the day has

[00:16:33] progressed, you know, even, you know, 10 days into a silent meditation retreat, they're going to [00:16:38] experience more and more distraction. They're gonna, it's gonna seem like, okay, wait a minute, [00:16:44] now I can't pay attention to anything for more than five seconds, right? Because what they're [00:16:49] discovering is just how distractible they are. If you train your attention in this way to notice [00:16:57] the particularities of sensory experience and emotional experience, like you're looking for

[00:17:02] the atoms of experience, you know. You get better and better at that and certain things happen, [00:17:10] but one thing that I really do think happens is there's a kind of frame rate change in the data [00:17:19] stream where you really are just you're just noticing much much more this whole dance of [00:17:26] I've lost in thought now I'm now I'm strategically directing my attention again [00:17:31] all of this seems to ramify this sense of self the sense of of there's one to be doing this

[00:17:37] there's there's somebody holding the spotlight of attention and getting better at coming back [00:17:42] to the object of meditation but the thing I like to do when I talk about all of this is [00:17:48] undercut the false assumptions that are anchoring all of that as early as possible. [00:17:54] Because where I think you want to be is recognizing that there is no place from which to aim attention. [00:18:03] This whole dualistic setup of subject and object is the thing that is already not there.

[00:18:08] And it's not that it's there and you meditate it out of existence successfully, it's really [00:18:13] not there. [00:18:14] And if you learn how to look for it, you can see that it's not there and feel that it's [00:18:19] not there. [00:18:20] And it no longer seems to be there, right?

[00:18:22] It's like it's not, and it becomes like, again, like a bistable percept where you looked [00:18:27] at it long enough and you thought, okay, now I see the vase and the face and I can't unsee [00:18:33] it. [00:18:34] And every time I look, it's there again. [00:18:36] If we were to break it down meditation into some basic component parts, what are the component

[00:18:42] parts and where I'm really going with this is why would those component parts eventually [00:18:47] allow for the realization that there is no distinction between actor and observer and [00:18:53] so on? [00:18:54] Ultimately, meditation is not a practice that you're adding to your life. [00:19:01] It's not a doing more of anything, it's actually ceasing to do something.

[00:19:04] It's ultimately non-distraction. [00:19:06] I mean, ultimately, you're recognizing what consciousness is like when you're no longer [00:19:11] distracted by the automatic arising of thought. It's not that thoughts don't arise. It's not that [00:19:17] you can't use them. It's not that you've become irrational or unintelligent. You still have all [00:19:25] of your tools, but everything is in plain view. There's an analogy in Tibetan Buddhism, which I

[00:19:30] love, which is thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house. There's nothing for them to steal. [00:19:36] So, in the usual case, there really is something in jeopardy. [00:19:42] Every time a thought comes, I'm not meditating anymore, and not only that, I feel terrible [00:19:47] because of what I'm thinking about most of the time. [00:19:49] So it's totally understandable that thought seemed like a problem in the beginning, and

[00:19:54] for certain types of meditation, they are explicitly thought of as a problem because [00:19:58] you're trying to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, including thought. [00:20:03] And that's a training that can be good to do. [00:20:05] It becomes a tool that you can use for other kinds of insight. [00:20:10] But it's a very specific and kind of brittle skill in the end.

[00:20:14] I mean, it's a skill, just like I'm going to pay attention to one thing and I'm going [00:20:18] to do that so well that everything else is going to fade out. [00:20:21] Meditatively, if you have a laser focus on any one thing, whether it's the breath or [00:20:26] whatever it is, you can lose all sense of everything. [00:20:29] You can lose all sense of hearing and your physical body can disappear.

[00:20:33] literally can become incredibly subtle and vast and drug-like. [00:20:39] And many people approach meditation thinking, kind of climbing the ladder of those changes [00:20:45] into subtlety and vastness, that's the whole game, right? [00:20:49] And it can be a deeply rewarding game to play. [00:20:53] And it also does come with all kinds of ancillary benefits, I mean, all the focus and the calm

[00:20:58] and the kind of smoothness of emotional states. [00:21:01] I mean, all of that comes with greater concentration, and it can be quite wonderful. [00:21:06] But again, at best, that's a tool to aim in the direction that I'm talking about now with [00:21:11] respect to meditation, which relates to more what I would call, you know, mindfulness generically [00:21:18] and ultimately kind of non-dual mindfulness.

[00:21:21] The underlying goal is to be more and more equanimous with changes, so not to grasp at [00:21:27] what's pleasant or interesting and not to push what's unpleasant or boring or otherwise [00:21:34] non-engaging away, what you want is just a kind of a sky-like mind that just allows everything [00:21:42] to appear and you're not clinging to anything or reacting to anything. [00:21:47] This applies not just to something like mindfulness but even to something like the self, right?

[00:21:51] So the sense of self is also a process. [00:21:56] It's a verb. [00:21:57] It's a work. [00:21:58] We're selfing more than we are selves, right? [00:22:01] And even appropriate uses of the term self that don't go away even when you recognize

[00:22:09] that the core subject self is an illusion, there are states of self where you can recognize [00:22:17] in your life that you inhabit very different modes of being depending on the context. [00:22:23] So like there are moments where you just by walking into a certain building, you suddenly [00:22:29] transition into a different state of self. [00:22:31] Like suddenly you pass through a door and now you're a customer in a store, right?

[00:22:37] So we know what that customer feeling is, like you're now the person who's getting the [00:22:41] attention. [00:22:42] It's a very kind of formalized type of attention from the person who's running the store. [00:22:45] You can be a student in the presence of a teacher, you can be a parent in the presence [00:22:49] of a son or a daughter, you can be a spouse in the presence of your spouse.

[00:22:54] The change in context really does usher in some fundamental psychological changes in [00:23:01] just the states of consciousness that are available. [00:23:04] More and more as you become sensitive to these changes and you become sensitive to what it's [00:23:09] like to actually not be psychologically reactive and not be definable by your own self-concept. [00:23:18] You're not identifying with anything.

[00:23:20] You're not hanging your hat on anything. [00:23:22] You're not thinking about yourself in the kind of terms that you would export to others [00:23:26] and then care about what they think about you, right? [00:23:30] There's a kind of invulnerability that arises that's not born of being well defended. [00:23:40] It's born of being evaporated, right?

[00:23:42] It's like you're no longer keeping score in those ways. [00:23:45] You can leave aside all those circumstances where it's appropriate to react to someone [00:23:49] and, you know, I'm into martial arts and self-defense and yes, you're not supposed to be just this [00:23:55] puddle of goo out in the world who can be just mistreated by people and, you know, never [00:23:59] put up, you know, resistance, but it's psychologically, you know, even if a state like anger or contraction

[00:24:10] is sometimes normative and appropriate, the question is, how long is it normative and [00:24:16] appropriate for? [00:24:17] Like, how long do you want to stay angry for? [00:24:19] In my experience, kind of classically negative emotions like anger and fear are appropriate [00:24:25] as salience cues, you know, they orient you to an emergency or a potential emergency.

[00:24:32] But then in dealing with the emergency, they're almost never the state you want to be in. [00:24:36] It's better to actually be calm in an emergency. [00:24:39] Would you say that meditation as a practice done for a few minutes each day or with the [00:24:43] app that it's a kind of a step function is a very nonlinear in terms of people's progress? [00:24:48] What does the meditation practice look like over time?

[00:24:52] The first step function is to very clearly experience the difference between being lost [00:24:58] in thought and being clearly aware of any part of experience, including thought. [00:25:03] And to notice the freedom that compared to psychological freedom that gives you, right? [00:25:09] So you can like, you're, something's made you angry and now you're thinking about all [00:25:13] the reasons why you should be angry and have every right to be angry and what you're going

[00:25:16] to tell that person when you see them. [00:25:19] And then you notice your thinking, right, and you notice the connection between the [00:25:23] thought and the anger, right, like the minute spent lost in thought about what's making [00:25:29] you angry is the thing that drags through the physiology of anger. [00:25:35] And from the point of view of the one who's being mindful, this is tremendous relief.

[00:25:40] And at minimum, it's a degree of freedom. [00:25:42] You can, at that point, decide, well, how long do I want to be angry for? [00:25:46] Right? [00:25:47] Is it useful to stay angry? [00:25:48] angry for one minute, two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, or because before you have that

[00:25:53] capacity to be mindful, you're going to helplessly be as angry as you're going to be for as long [00:25:58] as you're going to be that way just based on the kind of the time course of your thinking [00:26:03] about it, brooding about it, telling your wife about it. [00:26:06] You are going to be the hostage of that for as long as you'll be the hostage of that. [00:26:09] You have nothing you can do apart from just deciding to, you know, check out and watch

[00:26:14] Game of Thrones again for the third time, right? [00:26:17] Like it's just you can divert your attention to something else, which is sometimes a good [00:26:21] thing to do, but mindfulness, even dualistic mindfulness gives you this capacity to just [00:26:27] observe the mechanics of this and then get off the ride whenever you want. [00:26:34] The other step function is noticing that there is no one who is doing that.

[00:26:40] I mean, this is the non-duality, the selflessness, the centrallessness of awareness, right? [00:26:45] The fact that there's no place from which the mindfulness is being aimed, but the fact [00:26:49] that there's just this open condition in which everything is appearing, thoughts included. [00:26:55] At that point, your mindfulness no longer becomes, it's no longer this dualistic effort [00:27:04] to strategically pay attention to anything as opposed to being lost in thought.

[00:27:09] It's just what's left when the present recognized thought unravels. [00:27:16] Even before it unravels, what's recognized is you are simply identical to the condition [00:27:21] in which everything is appearing. [00:27:23] Could you tell us why psychedelics can be useful? [00:27:28] You safely and responsibly, age appropriate, context appropriate, ideally with some clinical

[00:27:34] or other type of guidance, all that stated, what are your thoughts about psychedelics [00:27:38] in terms of how they intersect with the discussion that we've been having and what utility do [00:27:43] they play in recognition of the self or in other sorts of brain changes. [00:27:48] I would just say that for many of us, I mean, certainly for me, psychedelics were indispensable [00:27:53] in the beginning in proving to me that the first person interrogation of the mind was

[00:28:00] worth doing. [00:28:01] For somebody like me at 18, the noun meditation meant absolutely nothing to me before I took [00:28:09] my first dose of, in this case it was MDMA. [00:28:13] One of the limitations of a drug is that obviously no matter how good the experience, the drug [00:28:18] wears off and then you're back in more or less your usual form and now you have a memory

[00:28:26] of the experience. [00:28:27] And it can be a fairly dim memory. [00:28:29] Some of these experiences are so discontinuous with normal waking consciousness that it [00:28:33] can be like trying to remember a dream. [00:28:35] Where you recognize, okay, there was a way of being that is quite different than what

[00:28:41] I'm tending to access by default. [00:28:43] And it is different in ways that are obviously better and psychologically more healthy. [00:28:50] It's possible to be healthy psychologically in a way that I never imagined. [00:28:57] Once you have one of these experiences on psychedelics or on a drug like MDMA, you know [00:29:03] that there's a there there.

[00:29:05] You know that unconditional love is a possibility. [00:29:08] If your only framework is the good experiences, the good feels you had on whatever drug it [00:29:14] was, I think you can be misled to just seek lots of peak experiences. [00:29:19] You're just trying to string together a lot of peak experiences, hoping they're going [00:29:22] to change you.

[00:29:24] Every one of which, by definition, is going to be impermanent. [00:29:27] What everyone really wants, whether they know it or not, and their right to want, is a type [00:29:33] of freedom that is compatible with even ordinary states of consciousness. [00:29:38] I hadn't done psychedelics for 25 years, because again, they were super useful for [00:29:44] me in the beginning, then I discovered meditation on the basis of those experiences, got really

[00:29:51] into meditation and realize, okay, this is a much more, you know, conceptually this makes [00:29:55] much more sense to me. [00:29:57] This is delivering the goods, you know, in terms of my experience. [00:30:02] There's no need to keep having these, you know, seeking these peak experiences with [00:30:06] drugs.

[00:30:07] So what I think people want is a way of having free attention and unconditional love in this, [00:30:18] know, totally ordinary and potentially chaotic human experience, you know, which can be psychologically [00:30:25] fraught and you can meet, you know, iterations of yourself that you don't like that are not [00:30:31] equipping you to be the best possible person in that relationship. [00:30:35] And what we want to do is cut through all of that and actually, you know, be in love

[00:30:43] with our lives and with the people in our lives more and more of the time. [00:30:46] I'm not saying that repeated psychedelic journeys can't be integral to that project, but you [00:30:53] know that the project can't be being high all the time. [00:30:58] So whatever is extractable from the occasional psychedelic trip has got to be mappable into [00:31:05] ordinary waking consciousness, and the real point of contact does kind of run through

[00:31:11] this what I've been calling the illusion of the self. [00:31:14] And again, that part is discoverable without any changes in contents. [00:31:21] None of this can really be solved in a single practice, it sounds like, but it does seem [00:31:26] to me, based on what you've told us today, is that only through a deep understanding [00:31:31] of the self as it really is, as opposed to this illusion that you framed up, could we

[00:31:38] actually arrive at some answers about what's actually right for each and every one of us? [00:31:43] There's one generic answer that I think can be extracted both from psychedelics and from [00:31:50] meditation, and just from just thinking more clearly about the nature of our lives, and [00:31:56] it's to become more process-oriented and to be more and more sensitive to the mirage-like [00:32:04] character of achieving our goals.

[00:32:08] Right now, I'm not against achieving goals. [00:32:10] I have a lot of goals. [00:32:11] I'm very busy. [00:32:12] I'm very busy, there are lots of things I want to get done, and I'm as satisfied as [00:32:15] anyone to finish a project.

[00:32:17] But if you look at the time course of all of that fulfillment, and there are a few lessons [00:32:26] that everyone, I think, has to draw. [00:32:27] One is most of your life is spent in the process. [00:32:31] The moment at which the goal is fully conquered, that has a tiny duration. [00:32:41] It has a very short half-life, and the moment you arrive at it, it begins to recede because

[00:32:49] in the meantime, you have all these other goals that have appeared on the horizon. [00:32:53] And in some sense, if you're focused on goals, you can never arrive. [00:32:59] I think what we're all looking for in life, we're looking for good enough reasons to let [00:33:05] our attention fully rest in the present. [00:33:09] That is the logic of success, the sense like, I've got all these things I want to do.

[00:33:15] If I could just get rich enough or fit enough or dial in my sleep well enough or improve [00:33:21] my life in all these ways, get the right relationship, wouldn't it be great to be married? [00:33:24] I want to start a family. [00:33:26] I want all of these things, right? [00:33:29] I'm not discounting those relative forms of happiness or sources of happiness, but one

[00:33:34] One thing is absolutely clear. [00:33:37] It's possible to be miserable in the presence of all of those things, right? [00:33:41] And you can add great wealth and fame and everything on top of that. [00:33:46] It's possible to be absolutely miserable having everything anyone could seemingly want. [00:33:50] So what is it that we actually want in all of our seeking to arrange the props in our

[00:33:55] lives and the story to have a convincing enough story to tell about ourselves that we're doing [00:34:01] the right thing? [00:34:03] What is all of that effort predicated on? [00:34:06] It's predicated on this desire and this expectation that if we could get all of this stuff in [00:34:13] the right place and not have anything terrifying to worry about, everyone we love is healthy

[00:34:19] for the moment, and we're healthy, and we've got something to look forward to on the weekend, [00:34:24] and there's not a plumbing leak in the house that we have to immediately respond to. [00:34:30] We like our house, and our career is going fine. [00:34:33] Now can we just actually give up the war, right? [00:34:37] Can we fully locate our sense of well-being in the present moment?

[00:34:43] Can we relax the impulse to brood about the past or think anxiously about the future for [00:34:50] long enough to discover that all of this here is enough? [00:34:55] Even if we're guarding our time to do the things that are most important to us, we can [00:35:00] spend all of that time regretting the past or anxiously expecting the future and just [00:35:08] bouncing between past and future in our thinking about ourselves and our lives and basically

[00:35:13] just dancing over the present and never making contact with it, right? [00:35:17] So I think what we want is a circumstance where attention can be located in the present [00:35:24] in a way that's truly fulfilling. [00:35:26] And unless you have had some kind of radical insight that allows you to do that on demand, [00:35:34] you are in some sense hostage to the circumstances of your life to do that for you.

[00:35:41] You're constantly trying to engineer a state of the world that will propagate back on a [00:35:47] state of self that will make the present moment good enough. [00:35:52] And what meditation does, and psychedelics to some degree does this, but meditation very [00:35:57] directly does this, it reverses the causality and lets you actually change states such that [00:36:05] you can be fulfilled before anything happens.

[00:36:10] Your happiness is no longer predicated on the next good thing happening. [00:36:14] You can be in the presence of the next good or bad thing already being fulfilled. [00:36:19] How much can you puncture that seeking happiness project with the recognition that you're already [00:36:28] free? [00:36:29] It's not that you just need to be a pushover when you learn how to meditate or you work

[00:36:34] on yourself in any of these ways. [00:36:36] But what I think you want to find is you want to find your point of rest in the midst of [00:36:45] any struggle. [00:36:46] I feel very blessed in no small part because of our conversation today. [00:36:51] Thank you so much.

[00:36:51] Nice. Well, to be continued. [00:36:52] To be continued. We'll do it again and again and again.