#408 — Finding Equanimity in Chaos

Dan Harris interviews Sam Harris for Dan's podcast, 10% Happier. They discuss how meditation helped Sam after evacuating his home during the LA fires, why Sam owns a gun, the ethics of violence, how to feel compassion for your political opponents, why it doesn't make sense to "hate" anyone, free will and determinism, psychedelics, the importance of training your mind, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That's why Sam Harris created the Waking Up https://www.wakingup.com/makingsense app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life's most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Sam Harris, welcome back to the show.

• 0:21Sam Harris?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  You've had a, you've had a year so far.

• 0:25Sam Harris?

  This month has been a year, yeah.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, let's start, there's been a lot of shit that's happened with you this year. Let's just start with the fires. Can you just tell the basic story of what happened in your neighborhood?

• 0:36Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, we just, we're, you know, we were part of the Palisades fire, not the, the real epicenter of it, where, and people have seen photos of just like Nagasaki level destruction. But on the periphery, but four houses burned very close to our house. So we're, we're in a neighborhood that is remarkably untouched and life will be, in fact, it has returned to normal there for most people. But we're close enough to burned homes that we decided, you know, we're not, we can't come back to our home yet. And who knows when, I mean, it might be a year. I mean, we were just waiting for the cleanup. So we've, you know, we've been dislocated by that whole process. And our, and you know, we are, much of our lives were in the Palisades. Our, you know, our daughter's school burned down.

• 1:21Sam Harris?

  I mean, lots of things changed about daily life as well. And then obviously we know scores of people at this point who, who lost their homes, right?

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Maybe you, you have a million questions about this, but just remembering the night that this happened, I checked in with you on text. And then you later wrote about this on Substack, on your Substack, that you left with a wife, two daughters, two cats, a jar of MDMA and a gun.

• 1:47Sam Harris?

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure it was in that order, but yeah, yeah.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  This is, you know, we're, we're, we're a couple of weeks away from it as we're recording it and we're talking about it in a reasonably light way, but I have to imagine it was really hard on you, on Annika, your wife, and on the girls. To what extent did meditation help?

• 2:09Sam Harris?

  Oh, a lot. I mean, that's, you know, I can't say it helped the girls that much, but I mean, it helped us with the girls. I mean, we, you know, I think I should acknowledge, you know, by comparison with many other situations, we were in a very fortunate situation, although for about 12 hours, I was actually sure we had lost our home. Like, I got some false information online that convinced me at about midnight the night of the fire that our, our home was burning at that moment. And that was a really kind of amazing experience just to kind of let go of all that in real time. Because when I left the house, you know, we left, we left pretty early and I felt like we were being very conservative to leave. And then when Annika picked our daughter up at school, it was quite clear that the extent

• 2:54Sam Harris?

  of the emergency. But when I was leaving the house, I took basically, you know, virtually nothing. And I mean, I didn't really think it was within the realm of, I guess, I knew it was in the realm of possibility, but it did not seem likely that the fire was going to reach our house or where, you know, our neighborhood. And, I mean, much less burned down, it seemed to burn down half the city. I mean, it was just like, at a certain point, the fire was such that, like, why doesn't the entire city burn down? Like, clearly, we can't stop this, you know, and this is now in the flats of Los Angeles and in multiple places. And it was, as people know, there was, there were many cases of arson and it was just, it was, it was Armageddon of some sort in Los Angeles. But after 12 hours,

• 3:39Sam Harris?

  I realized our house hadn't burned down. And then, you know, then I recognized we were in a very lucky situation compared to many, many people, you know, thousands of people.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a lucky situation, but it's incredibly stressful and it really is a collision with the notion of impermanence.

• 3:54Sam Harris?

  Yeah, the Buddhists win in situations like this, you realize that the impermanence reigns and you know, there's no, it's all rented and it's all subject to entropy, you know, there's just no, there's nothing stable, you know, your body isn't stable, your health isn't stable, your relationships aren't stable, your career isn't stable, your house isn't, I mean, it's just, it's constantly being shored up by effort to maintain it and improve it and diminish the chaos, but in a situation like this, you realize you just can't take anything for granted, really, I mean, what you can take for granted is it's all unstable and it can change at any moment.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  By what mechanism can one achieve some equanimity in the face of ceaseless change and entropy?

• 4:40Sam Harris?

  Well, recognizing what you actually have in each moment, which is this moment of conscious experience and your ability to locate a feeling of well-being in the midst of that, or your failure to do that, right, so you, what you're constantly experiencing, whether you think of it in these terms or not, is this alternation between some state of contraction where you're unhappy, you know, grossly or subtly, and you're responding to the world as though you have a problem that you must solve, and sometimes you do have a problem you must solve, I mean, in this case, we had the problem of, you know, having to evacuate and having to find another place to stay and et cetera, et cetera, so

• 5:21Sam Harris?

  it's, I'm not saying that you can just meditate your way, you know, blissfully out of a situation without having to solve problems, but the question is always, how unhappy do you have to be to respond to this challenge in the world, and most of us, most of the time, even after we learn to meditate, are by default Far more contracted and unhappy and, you know, perseverative and ruminating, self-lacerating, et cetera, et cetera, than we need to be. I mean, and there are ways to have this epiphany and provoke this epiphany every time you lose it. Uh, one is meditation, but one is just a kind of reframing that many people are familiar with now, based on the, the growing popularity of Stoicism.

• 6:05Sam Harris?

  You can just recognize just how much worse things can be, you know, or could have been in this moment. Right. And, and you can easily imagine a situation where if you were in that situation, you would consider your prayers answered if you could only be restored to the problem you are confronting right now.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:21Sam Harris?

  Right. Like, you know, you, you don't have the cancer diagnosis or the, you know, the amputated limb or, you know, everything you, you know, to come back to the fire. Every, you didn't lose everything you, you own, right? You just now have a, a different problem to solve. And if you had been in one of those buckets, you'd be desperate to get out of it and into the one you're in now. Right. So you can, there's a way to actually just kind of reset and feel, this is so much better than an adjacently possible alternative. And in this case with the fire, it's so much better than what I thought I had, you know, the night of the fire, which was, you know, I was meditating on the evaporation of everything we had built.

• 7:01Sam Harris?

  But I was, honestly, I was surprisingly, perhaps not surprisingly, but I was quite equanimous in the midst of that experience, thinking, you know, at that moment, you know, lying in bed. I hadn't yet told the girls or, or Annika, but I had looked at my phone and I got, you know, information that convinced me, again, around, it was around midnight or one in the morning, that, okay, our house is burning right now. Right? And then I would just meditate on that fact. It was just like, you know, kind of one of those Buddhist graveyard meditations where you're just kind of meditating on the decay of the body or, you know, you're just a meditation on impermanence. And it was, there was something quite beautiful about it to just to recognize that it would, it would only be attachment to the idea of those things that would allow me to suffer in this moment.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  But non-attachment, it makes sense, absolutely makes sense. You know, when you hear Sam Harris or Joseph Goldstein holding forth on it.

• 7:56Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  And when your house is burning.

• 7:59Sam Harris?

  Yeah, with no one you love in it. I mean, that's an important consideration.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Fair enough. But, you know, I think we feel some legitimate attachment to our possessions. Hopefully not too much, but, you know, I can make some defense of, you know, caring about the state of your home. And

• 8:19Sam Harris?

  And also, it's not just for, just to give some more color to that. In this case, when I was thinking about it, it wasn't so much the possessions, but it was also just the amount of sunk cost with respect to time and attention that they represent. It's like, you know, we had designed the house, we had built the house, like that was a whole process. You know, and when you think about just, you know, the thousands of books you've collected and, I mean, like all the choices that created that, you know, material circumstance. Is there so much time in retrospect, when you imagine it all evaporating? You just think, wow, that's, that was, you know, I spent a lot of time gathering all that stuff.

• 9:02Sam Harris?

  And we're all gonna have, obviously, at the end of our lives, we're all going to have that analogous reflection. You know, we don't need a fire for that. The fire is burning in our bodies at this very moment. But it, yeah, it's just you, when you think about, it's kind of a reset. It forces a reset of your priorities. I mean, what you have is your time and attention.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. So just drilling into that moment, you're lying in bed, you've gotten this information, which thankfully turns out later to be wrong. I can hear two things thus far in this conversation, and I can imagine a third that would, at least a third, that would help you manage it after, you know, 40 years of contemplative practice in your own life. I might be wrong about my math on this.

• 9:42Sam Harris?

  That's actually exact math, yeah.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  One is the Stoic cognitive reframe of, yeah, from a certain perspective, if I was, if this bed was in a hospital and I had an IV drip of chemo, I would much rather be in the bed I'm actually in contemplating the destruction of my home. The second is reverting back to your Buddhist training of, yeah, well, this is just a reminder of what is non-negotiablely true. Everything is impermanent and just touching in on that truth of the universe can turn down the volume on hysteria. And then the third And I can imagine there's possibly at least one more would be mindfulness of your emotions.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  So you can allow the fear, the anger, the frustration to come. But if you're not re-upping it compulsively, it does pass. And you're able to make better decisions on the other side of that. So my, is that third hypothesis correct about what was happening in your mind in that moment?

• 10:45Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, actually, in that moment, I was, I didn't have much fear or anger or anything to meditate on. I mean, it was, there was much more equanimity than, um, I mean, honestly, I was, I was surprised at just how easy it was to let go of all our material possessions, you know? Again, I'm in incredibly fortunate circumstance. Like I, you know, unlike many people, I, we had fire insurance, right? So like I knew this isn't like, you know, you're losing all of your actual wealth because, you know, the, the fire is burning everything you own and nothing's insured. And there, there are people in that situation too.

• 11:22Sam Harris?

  But there, there's something, again, it's, it's, once you have this module installed in your brain, once you've thought about impermanence as much as we have and, and use that thought to motivate a practice, which allows you to, to let go of thoughts of past and future moment by moment. I mean, you know, mindfulness by another name, there's something, um, you know, almost perversely satisfying about having to, to deal with a moment like that. Right? You know, and I, honestly, I expect the same experience when, you know, I get some terrible health diagnosis. I mean, I, I mean, this is the, on some level, we're training for those moments.

• 12:04Sam Harris?

  Where I more reliably fail, you know, and this is actually on some level, much more consequential because it's much more frequent. I fail in all the little moments in life where it's just a completely petty thing to which you, you should be psychologically impervious. But it is just annoying to have this thing happen, right? Whatever it is, you know, the, I mean, honestly, for me, it's something like, I'm out in the world and I spill, you know, food on a shirt and I now have to spend like four hours out in the world with like tomato sauce on my shirt. That's the kind of thing that just, you know, just jams a stick into every gear in my, in, in my emotional brain.

• 12:45Sam Harris?

  That's worse than having than believing that everything in my house, everything I own is burning up at that moment. Then I'm gonna have to tell the girls the next morning that that happened. Right? Like honestly, in terms of my departure from what I consider a normative state of, you know, well being and any kind of recognition of, you know, psychological freedom, the tomato sauce on the shirt is worse for me.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  You know, I relate to that and I'll hazard a theory about why that is, just for myself. It's the volume of the mindfulness bell.

• 13:18Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  So when something huge is happening, the mindfulness bell is a gong, it gets run, you wake up.

• 13:25Sam Harris?

  This is it, yeah. This is the dance.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Exactly. The tomato sauce, it's for, at least for me, it just doesn't, it's not a wake up moment.

• 13:34Sam Harris?

  Right, yeah. You stay in the dream of your dualistic reactivity to whatever's happening. So for me, I think practice is much, you know, the, the, the leading edge of practice is not so much the big moments, it's the little moments. It's like making the ordinary glitches in life more and more salient as mindfulness bells. More, more just that they goad you to pay attention more reliably. Because I know the big moments are, I mean, obviously the, the big moments are more consequential in, in many ways, but there's so many more of the other.

• 14:12Sam Harris?

  I mean, that really is the tissue of our lives. And yeah, so I'm, I'm constantly impressed by how much of the day I can spend in this kind of mediocre orbit of just reacting to little things and being just, just a complaining jerk, you know? And, you know, if, and, you know, sometimes in the privacy of my mind and rather often, you know, to my wife and anyone else who will listen, or not listen, as the case may be. But, uh, yeah, and that's, obviously that's such a, that's the missed opportunity, right? I mean, because then you spent half your day that way.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  I'm with you, brother.

• 14:53Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  Um, just to say, our wives are on the other side of this wall, affirmatively having chosen not to listen to this conversation so that they can kibbitz.

• 15:02Sam Harris?

  Uh, so we have many similarities in our domestic situations. Um, so I just want to go back to the gun.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  In the moment of choosing, I should say, the other thing you chose as you were fleeing the house was a mala from your days in India and Nepal. And then you write on Substack, "This moment of triage produced a brief reflection on the many years I'd spent traveling along seemingly incongruent paths. How many people understand the value of both a mala, which is a, a, a bracelet with beads on it, and a gun, and can carry each without feeling like a fraud?" So I suspect when I mentioned the word gun early on in this conversation, some people in my audience were like, "What? He's got a gun?" So like, how, how can you, yeah, what is, what is your attitude about having a gun?

• 15:51Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, this, I guess, a larger ethical consideration. So, actually, not that many steps. So, for anyone who's interested, I wrote, at least a decade ago, I wrote an article, which blinds, certainly blindsided most of my audience, titled "The Riddle of the Gun", wherein I kind of talk about what I consider, I mean, the, the ethics of violence more and self-defense more broadly. I wrote a couple of articles. I think I wrote an article, "The Logic of Violence" too, but kind of in quick succession. Part of my midlife crisis took the form of me getting back into martial arts and training with firearms and doing those sorts of things. And, but I had always had, kind of had that gear, I mean, from being a teenager on.

• 16:33Sam Harris?

  Unless you're a pacifist, and I, and I have an argument as to why one would not want to be a pacifist, I, you know, I think, as, as though Gandhian-style pacifism seems to occupy something like a moral high ground in people's thinking about violence and how one can be ethical in the world, especially once one starts taking on, you know, overtly spiritual, meditative, contemplative concerns. It's actually not a high point on the moral landscape, I would argue. I think being a pacifist is really just a way of outsourcing. A real ethical consideration of violence to other people who are not pacifists. You know, you're relying on the police, you're relying on people who are going to shoulder

• 17:15Sam Harris?

  the burden of protecting the people you love when things fail. Otherwise, it's just, in my view, it's a starkly unethical position, and I have some argument about, you know, why that's the case, which we could get into. But, um, so, once you decide you're not a pacifist, then we're just talking about in what situations is the use of force necessary and ethical? And, and then what is your relationship to that? And can you outsource everything or, or not? And I've just been around long enough and read enough books and seen, and news stories to know that there are many situations, in fact, even most, in which you could find yourself

• 17:54Sam Harris?

  threatened by violence, where you can't really effectively outsource your self-defense to the police, you know, which is to say that in, in most American cities, dialing 911 is not a self-defense strategy, right? It's a, you know, we're happy to have the police and, and we're happy to have them respond to crime and we want them to solve crime, but in almost every case, they're responding to the aftermath of whatever situation you were in that you managed to solve or not, you know, before they got there. So, once you understand that, then the question is, even if you think it's a very low probability event, and, and it's, you know, depending on where you live, it, it can be a higher

• 18:34Sam Harris?

  probability than, than you think, what preparation do you want to have made to face a situation where, you know, someone comes into your home for the, the purpose of killing you and your family, right? Which, you know, I'm not worried about people stealing televisions, I'm worried about actual violence, right? People who, you know, come in for the purpose of harming you.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  And, and just to say, sorry to interrupt you, you've had more than your fair share of death threats.

• 18:58Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  I'm not talking to a regular Joe in this regard.

• 19:02Sam Harris?

  Right, right. I mean, I have the same... View of the situation not being a public person, but yeah, when you add that component to it, it's not irrational for me to think about security and self-defense. And that's just, you know, that's been true for 20 years at least. So, but this was a situation where I was anticipating, however dimly, I mean, again, when I left the house, it was not obvious that this thing was going to get totally out of control. But once it was obvious that it was going to get totally out of control, and then a few hours later, I was hearing reports of people looting homes, you know, a few blocks from where we're sitting, right? And, you know, the cops just not responding, like there's just no, the city's on fire,

• 19:44Sam Harris?

  right? And people are looting neighborhoods that are being evacuated or soon to be, will soon be evacuated. There are even reports, whether spurious or not, I never, actually never got to the bottom of them, but there were reports on social media that people were lighting fires so as to provoke an evacuation order so that they could loot the homes, right? There were definitely cases of arson. So, once you're in that situation, then you realize, okay, you really can't rely on cops to necessarily protect you. And so, yeah, and so, and the justification for a gun is, I mean, provided you're trained to use it and you're, you know, you're a responsible gun owner, which is to say, you know how to store a gun safely. And I mean, there's just, there's no excuse for kids picking up

• 20:26Sam Harris?

  guns and killing themselves or killing, you know, other people by accident, because you can store a gun safely and have quick access to it. But the justification for a gun is very much as the, the odious organization, the NRA would allege, it is the only thing that really equalizes your capacity to use force against somebody else. In the absence of a gun, even if you, even in the presence of other weapons, right? Even, everything else becomes an athletic event, right? Like you are, you are wise to expect that the younger, more aggressive, larger,

• 21:04Sam Harris?

  Person is going to win, certainly the better trained person. You stack all of those advantages. Then there's, there's nothing that the little old lady can do to defend herself. Right, you know? There's nothing that the even well-trained, very fit, uh, young man can do to defend himself against multiple attackers. The stuff you've seen, you know, I mean, they're, yes, they're kind of one in a thousand results, you know, and there are a few associated YouTube videos where you see one guy defeat, you know, four attackers because he's, he's a boxer and he just, he's being attacked by bozos and, you know, he manages to defend himself. But normally speaking, you know, it doesn't matter if you're a Navy SEAL.

• 21:47Sam Harris?

  You can't defend yourself against multiple young guys who are not bozos, except if you have a gun. Right? So a gun is an equalizer. And more importantly, it's one of the only weapons and the only, you know, really reliable weapon that gives you range from the problem. Right? Like, it's the only thing that if someone kicks down the door of your house and you're in the living room, 20 feet away from this person, you can defend yourself. Right? You, you get, you can negotiate, you can tell them to leave, and if they don't leave, you can defend yourself. You know, once you're, you know, grabbing, uh, you know, pots and pans or, or kitchen knives, right? Like, this is now, you're, you're very much closer to the state of nature and a, and

• 22:30Sam Harris?

  in a contest with a, with a grizzly bear and, you know, many people don't want to think about these things. Certainly, most meditators, I think, when we're, we're talking about the kinds of people who want to hear us talk about mindfulness, these are probably not the kinds of people who are also obsessing on the details of criminal violence. But, you know, I have gone deeply down the rabbit hole of, of both. And, yeah, I mean, it's just simply a fact that when someone, you know, in the rare case of, you know, like a home invasion by, you know, some sociopath who wants to actually, who's decided that night that he wants to kill someone or rape and kill someone, or, you know, whatever it is, you have many disadvantages stacked against you. Right? Like, this person has done this sort of thing before, in many cases, many times before.

• 23:14Sam Harris?

  This person probably spent years in prison, right? And was released, right? He went to graduate school for criminal violence. And there are people like that in the world. And again, it's, it, depending on where you live, it could be a very low probability consideration such that it could seem completely paranoid to ever worry about it. But it's also paranoid to worry about plane crashes, certainly, you know, and people worry about that. And we want to design our planes and our systems so as to really minimize that, you know, the threat of that kind of destruction. And, yeah, it's just not, it's not a one in a million chance that if you live in a big city, you might be the target of violent crime. It's more like a one in 500 chance, depending where you live.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  On the subject of violence, there was a, again, I was following your writings, I always follow your writings closely, but I was following them especially closely in the wake of what happened here in LA with the fires. And there was a phrase in something you wrote that just kind of stuck out to me, and I'd be curious to hear what your intention was. This is where you're referencing the fact that you, that people are breaking into homes and looting. And you say, "When I later heard that some of these looters may also be arsonists, setting fire throughout the city so that they can plunder the lives of everyone forced to evacuate, I noticed that the phrase 'police death squads' had a nice ring to it."

• 24:35Sam Harris?

  Right, right, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's a little tongue in cheek, but it definitely captures an emotion that I was feeling, which is just like the absolute limit of moral outrage. I mean, just the idea that someone would do that, right? You know, you have this catastrophic fire that is driving people from their homes. The idea that you're going to have people who are setting more fires so as to drive more people, so that they could prey on the people who are fleeing their homes. Yeah, it's just, I mean, that's the complete collapse of civilization, right? And the idea that we're living in a, I mean, and there were so many things that I was noticing, and I think I wrote about in that piece, that was, yeah, kindling a very worried

• 25:20Sam Harris?

  and very kind of cynical view of human nature. I mean, they're like, I think the one that got to me, and it seems somehow, I don't know if this resonated with most people, I mean, I think I wrote about it in that piece, but for some reason, this got to me. I saw when it was reported that Steven Spielberg's house was saved. And I saw people online just trashing him like clearly they would have been happier to hear that his house had burned. And they thought it was somehow sinister that his had been saved, you know, like that, you know, he leveraged his wealth or this, there was some Jewish, you know, conspiracy theory that explained whatever, whatever it was. I mean, there was some nexus of awfulness that explained that response. But the thing that got me was that I know that many of these people, if not all of these

• 26:04Sam Harris?

  people have over decades happily watched his films, right? Like, these are, these are the people who buy tickets to Spielberg's films. And yet they were not even covertly overtly poised to celebrate kind of the ruination of everything he, you know, he had accumulated in life. There's just something so, I guess this goes in this larger bin of just what the internet is doing to us, right? It's like there's, it's selecting for the worst aspects of human psychology, you know, it's like false outrage and schadenfreude and, you know, a complete obsession with fame, but like this subterranean hatred of the people you're obsessed with, like you're like you, you know, you, you build these people up only to gleefully watch them come

• 26:47Sam Harris?

  undone, you know, it's just, it's, there's something just ghastly about this funhouse mirror that we're spending so much time in front of, which is in large measure why I, you know, as you know, we've talked about before, I deleted my Twitter account years ago. And I mean, that was, I'm still embarrassed to say it. I mean, that was like the biggest life hack I've managed to find in more than a decade of, you know, looking at life hacks. And I mean, it was just, it was the highest leverage move psychologically that I found in, in many, many years. It was, it's just a fantastic change to my life because of how toxic I was finding it to be to just see, just to witness who people were on, on social media, you know, and, and,

• 27:31Sam Harris?

  I mean, I certainly wasn't my best self on social media. I, I don't think I participated in kind of pylons or internecine squabbles that embarrassed me in retrospect. I mean, I definitely contaminated my life with, with more controversy than it needed. But it's not that I ever really behaved badly online, at least I'm not remembering anything that I regret. But it was just toxic to see what everyone else was doing and to know that I was, I knew it was a If not an entirely false perception of them, but it was certainly a partial view of these people. And yet, it was turning me into a kind of misanthrope. I mean, I was

• 28:14Sam Harris?

  just, I was getting, it was my view of humanity was getting darker and darker and darker. And, you know, once I stepped away from it, I realized, okay, life is, it's rather often very good. And the people you meet, you know, even strangers out in the world are mostly very, very nice people. And people, not everyone is a psychopath, you know, even though they can appear to be psychopaths on Twitter.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Well, and the algorithms amplify the psychopaths.

• 28:37Sam Harris?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  So Twitter, your invoking of Twitter kind of brings me to the next thing I wanted to talk about, which again, was all under the aegis of this year, 2025, being an interesting and tumultuous one for you and many other people. The other thing that you're writing and talking a lot about is the Trump administration and the role of Elon Musk and et cetera, et cetera, your former friend, and you've pulled no punches that I'm aware of. And I'm just, my question is, this is not designed to get you to hold forth on your view of where we're going politically, more from a contemplative standpoint. Like, what role is there for you?

• 29:18Speaker 00

  And what role would you recommend for others in compassion? You know, can you conjure compassion for the people politically with whom you disagree so strongly? And what would you recommend to the rest of us?

• 29:32Sam Harris?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's worth remembering that that is something that one can do, right? Because it's not the first, it doesn't, it rarely seems like the first order of business is to figure out how to feel compassion for the people who are, at least in my view, busily tearing up the framework of the liberal international order. I mean, like, it's just, there's so many wires being cut, that the likelihood that they're going to cut the wrong ones seems almost certain. And, um, yeah, so there's a lot at stake, and there's a lot I'm worried about happening that may well happen, compassionate or not. But yeah, on some level, I view, you know, all of these people, even the people who are hardest to feel compassion for as, um,

• 30:19Sam Harris?

  I mean, these are just analogies, but it's like everyone's a kind of a force of nature, right? It's like I don't tend to, I'm not really personalizing this. It's like I'd be worried about a hurricane, you know, or the fire we just spoke about. Like, I didn't like the fire, but I didn't spend any time feeling hatred for the fire, right? Like hatred was not the mode. I'm not, I wasn't seething with hatred, thinking about this fire, right? And yet I was well aware of just how much destruction it was causing. You know, when I, when I look at, I mean, Donald Trump is somebody who is at the center of all this. And, you know, as you know, I'm not a fan. I don't spend a lot of time hating Donald Trump as a person. I hate what I consider his influence to be, very much in the way

• 31:03Sam Harris?

  that I would hate the effects of a fire or a hurricane or some force of nature that is, it's a, you know, to personalize it would be an extra step. And to think that it could be other than it is, is an extra step that I'm, in some ways, I'm, I might take with other people, but I'm definitely not taking with Trump. I mean, Trump is someone who's behaving exactly as I expect him to behave. I feel like I understand, you know, I have never met him, but I feel like I, you know, insofar as I can understand someone from the outside, I feel like I do understand him, at least in a coarse-grained way, the way I understand a fire or a hurricane. Like, this is just gonna keep fucking things up

• 31:43Sam Harris?

  for predictable reasons, and we want to contain the damage. So, again, I mean, I can be worried about possible outcomes. I can be, you know, outraged and in some ways, or, you know, but I certainly can be outraged by the people who are enabling Trump. I mean, I can be outraged by anyone, I mean, almost like the arsonists who are kind of adding to the already existing fire. But on some level, when I, when I look at someone like Trump, I, I do view him as a kind of a malfunctioning robot, or a wild animal has gotten loose in the, in the house, and you've got a problem. But it's not one that, where I'm attributing

• 32:24Sam Harris?

  authorship in some way, where I'm spending a lot of time thinking, he should be doing other than he's doing. He has free will, you know, and he's, you know, my position on free will. I actually don't think anyone has it, and I think everyone is just kind of playing out the causes and conditions of their, you know, mental lives and their entanglement with the world. So it's like it's genes and environment and, and neurochemistry and, you know, you can add karma if you want to add, you know, metaphysical categories from Buddhism, but it's like, it's, it's still all the universe doing its thing. But I still have a, a very clear preference for certain outcomes over other outcomes. And I think it's rational to have that preference and it's can be, can be agitating, but it's not,

• 33:08Sam Harris?

  I mean, I know, I know a lot of people would think, and it's certainly based on what I've said and written, that I hate Trump, right? That hatred is the, the emotion. And no, I just, I would be happy to never think about him again. It's like, it's astonishing to me that he is a person who has occupied a decade of our lives collectively and has become this sort of black hole for human attention that, you know, we can't, we haven't been able to escape, right? But it's impermanence, once again, will eventually reign here. There will come a day where we don't have to think about Trump anymore, but it's going to be a while.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  The, just to echo something you said, you know, I, I've had some pushback, some, some pushback on social media when I talk about the value of compassion in this divisive context. And I think that's because people hear that word and think it's synonymous with approbation, or giving them a hug, or inviting them over for dinner, or, or being a doormat. And I actually, I think of it as non-hatred, at the very least.

• 34:13Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  And the hatred doesn't help you stand up or take action. You know, what, what's called for now is for all of us to do our best to be useful in this situation. And I don't think the hatred is an asset in this regard. I think it actually is a reason why we talk about blind rage.

• 34:33Sam Harris?

  And actually with Trump, it's worse, or it's kind of so hard, trickier to navigate psychologically and socially, because when I see Trump on television, again, I've never met him, so I've only seen him on television, I understand what his fans are seeing, right? He's entertaining. He's funny. And that stuff, I mean, he's not persuasive. Like, I see someone bullshitting and lying with, you know, greater velocity than than anyone in human history. So he's not persuasive for me, and he is clearly persuasive for his fans. But he's entertaining, right? And so, and whenever he's hitting those notes, the reward system in my brain is lighting up, too. It's like, I'm not, I'm not feeling hate, I'm feeling the opposite

• 35:17Sam Harris?

  of hatred. I actually like the guy because it's entertaining, right? It's not boring. And so I'm not totally immune to his charm. Like, he's got a charisma that I understand, and that I, some part of my brain responds to it. I'm just continuing to keep track of the other, you know, consequences that I care about, you know? And, you know, I'm worried that we're all in danger of entertaining ourselves to death on some level.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. I part ways with you just slightly there, because, you know, there are moments, I think you and I were talking about this at a dinner we were at recently, and I'm going to mention a current event that is recent for us, but by the time this posts in a month, will probably have been forgotten, and the tsunami of whatever fresh outrages await. Just watching him in the Oval Office with Zelensky, and I'm not saying Zelensky was blameless here, but that was as clear a case, in my view, of bullying as I've ever seen in public. And as somebody who has been bullied in his childhood, and was also a bully, it really jabbed at some of my psyche. I did not find him entertaining or likable in that moment.

• 36:26Sam Harris?

  I mean, I guess I, even in that moment, I find him ridiculous. So like, there's, there's a kind of comic quality to him always. I guess, so I, the person who I found most repellent in that whole scene was J.D. Vance. Like J.D., like, so like, J.D. Vance actually activated my disgust circuits more effectively there than Trump did. I mean, there's just something so contemptible about, you know, everything he was contributing to that and how cynical I know he must be in order to have found that particular orbit through Trump's world. I mean, because I know he's smarter than that. I know he, I know, I actually didn't, I never read his book, Hillbilly Elegy, but I, I saw

• 37:08Sam Harris?

  enough of the coverage of it and I saw enough of him at that point when he was launching it that I, I know that on some level, he knows better, right? He's much more of a cynical Machiavellian operator, just nakedly seeking power and his personal advancement. Trump is like a badly designed mind that is just always seeking the, the reward function of, you know, fame and money, you know? Give me attention and money. How do I, how does this situation give me attention and money? Like, that's, he's just, he's like this, the perfect case of A.D.D. mapped on to a landscape where attention and money are possible outcomes, you know?

• 37:51Sam Harris?

  And so you just set him loose on that landscape and this is what you get. And, and he, he is a ridiculous, you know, he has no imposter syndrome, right? He's, but he's constantly in a situation in which he's an actual imposter. He's even an imposter billionaire, even after having earned billions. He manages to be a fake billionaire even when he's now a legitimate billionaire, or at least on paper, he must be a legitimate billionaire. You know, he was, he used to be a fake billionaire. But like, the guy has lied about every aspect of every part of reality that has touched his life so many times and so incessantly and so incoherently that it's just, he's a fabrication of a fabrication. I mean, he's, he's on some level, and this is why compassion is actually hard to map on to him.

• 38:35Sam Harris?

  You know, it's much easier for me to connect the dots and say, okay, I can feel compassion for this terrible person who just committed, you know, a triple murder, right? Like, I can get that life story and, and say, okay, well, I can understand that if I had that, you know, those genes and that life opportunity, the lack of life opportunity and, you know, been mistreated by my parents in that way, et cetera, et cetera, and growing up in that crime-ridden, you know, neighborhood, whatever, whatever the story is, I too could have been that person, right? And, and there are many cases like that, and then you can easily feel compassion for just this person on some level is unlucky to be who they are, right? And that extends all the way to someone like Saddam Hussein, right? It's just like, this is, on some level, he was unlucky to be who he was.

• 39:19Sam Harris?

  Trump is such an odd object that I find him, he really is just a sui generis case of, you know, I, again, this is, this is just me imagining what it's like to be him, because I really don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't suffer in the ways you would think any human being would suffer. It's like, like, he's just missing something. He's missing a moral, a moral and emotional architecture somehow in his mind, such that I just don't think he's processing relationships and life outcomes the way normal people are. You know, if we could scan his brain and, and discover, actually, he's, he doesn't

• 39:59Sam Harris?

  suffer, you know, his lack of connection to people and he's, you know, you're, you're, any sort of Buddhist imagining that he's, you know, that on some level, he's in pain is actually not true. You know, like, there are people who don't feel pain, physical pain, right? And it's a very, very bad outcome, like, you know, they bang their hands into the corner of a table or whatever and get an injury and they don't, don't feel it, right? You know, maybe there are people who don't feel psychological pain in ways that would surprise us. He's just incredibly odd, you know, and so I do view him more as a... I certainly wouldn't want to be him, right? Like, I would feel very unlucky if I, you know, I would, I would not want to trade.

• 40:40Sam Harris?

  So on that level, I feel that he's, you know, an appropriate object of compassion because I think he's unlucky on some level to be who he is. And, and that's a very strange thing to say about the most powerful person on earth and one of the most famous people in human history. And the person who, if you stand back and look at it, is probably getting more of what he wants than almost anybody. It's like, he, on some level, he's the most successful person I can think of.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:10Sam Harris?

  When you just think of what his appetites are and what he's managed to achieve. Certainly, his comeback politically is without question the greatest political comeback I can think of. I mean, you know, if there are others that even compare, I couldn't name them. It's just astonishing. Like, on some level, we're all living in his dream world. And yet, he is so obviously barely human. Like, he's missing something so fundamental, and it's so obvious. And again, I can't say this of someone like Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden, or people who are just obviously worse people on so many other levels, right? He's just not a normal person, right? And some of those people were, you know, I, you know, I think there are some terrible

• 41:53Sam Harris?

  people who've created immense harm who are psychologically normal people. Yeah. Was that enough Trump derangement syndrome for you?

• 42:01Speaker 00

  I started it.

• 42:04Sam Harris?

  Just, just when I thought I ran out of things to say about Donald Trump, you ask a question.

• 42:10Speaker 00

  You invoked free will, and I'm going to bring this back up with some hesitation because it could take over the rest of this conversation. You and I have talked, you probably don't remember it, but we've had many discussions about free will, and I still don't understand your point fully.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  And I get, so let me just ask it from a very basic standpoint, just because I'm trying to represent the listener who might have heard you say, within the context of discussing compassion, that we don't have free will. So then, if I've made the decision after listening to this conversation to practice more non-hatred in my navigation of the American political landscape, or if I, after listening to this conversation, make the affirmative decision to download the Waking Up app at wakingup.com/10%, if I make those decisions, are those predetermined, or do I have some agency and deserve, therefore, some credit for having done the right thing?

• 43:05Sam Harris?

  Well, it's not that they're predetermined. I mean, so there's, there's some question about just whether there's an important contribution of randomness in this clockwork universe, or if it's deterministic, or some combination of the two. I mean, at the scale at which we live, right, I mean, leaving kind of quantum indeterminacy aside, at the scale of our living, there's obviously a lot of determinism, right? There's a lot of just one domino hitting the next, and they go down in predictable ways.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  And I just jump in on that, so I apologize. But so by determinism, you mean, there's this incalculable gumbo of past prior, past causes and conditions that have led us to this moment, and we are acting out our past conditioning without much agency whatsoever?

• 43:53Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, or just that even what you're calling agency is just more dominos falling, right? So like, like your preference for certain outcomes is what it is. You know, we know you're going to choose the chocolate over the Vegemite because you hate Vegemite, right? So like, are you free to choose the Vegemite? Well, yeah, but you hate Vegemite. Did you pick that? No, right? So like, like, you can always step back, you know, one domino prior and realize, okay, I didn't choose that. Like, this landscape upon which my choices seem to be emerging and becoming effective is already built for me by prior causes, you know, and these causes are genetic and environmental, and that's really the totality of.

• 44:37Sam Harris?

  Causes materially in the case of a, you know, a human being is deciding things. If you want to add something ethereal to that, you know, a soul or, you know, a mind that is in some way divorcable from the workings of the brain, that's fine, but again, you didn't create those things either, right? The you that is, is the experiencer didn't pick your soul. You can't account for the fact that you don't have the soul of a psychopath or the soul of somebody who's crazy enough to prefer Vegemite over chocolate, right? So like you, you, you have, you, you have the causes and conditions you have in this moment, you know, mental and physical, locked and loaded, ready to go. And now, now you're confronted with the next apparent choice. And you will do what you will do. And even

• 45:21Sam Harris?

  if you seem to like, let's say 99 times out of 100, you make the decision one way, but one time out of 100, you decide to just do something new, right? Do something out of character, right? Do like, oh, I'm going to go for the Vegemite now just because Sam said I wouldn't, right? Even that maneuver is coming out of something that you can't inspect, that you didn't create, that is a prior condition, you know, at some state of your, to bring it back to, it's material antecedents, just, you know, some state of neuro, curious neurochemistry in your brain in that moment, which again, you didn't author. And yet, we know it is the effective thing that is leading to this 1 in 100 choice in

• 46:04Sam Harris?

  this case. So yeah, so if our conversation has an effect on a listener, right? And they want to do something as a result or not, they're not choosing that outcome. If I say something persuasive and someone is persuaded by it, right? They're not choosing to be persuaded. You know, if, if I say something that is interesting and someone finds it interesting. They're not choosing to find it interesting. If I say something that's deadly boring or confusing or what, however it strikes the listener, the listener hasn't chosen to have that reaction. And if they decided to say, oh, well, you know, fuck you, I'm going to choose a different reaction right now, right?

• 46:46Sam Harris?

  Kind of, you know, Samuel Johnson's famous retort to philosophical idealism, like he just kicked a stone and said, you know, I refute him thusly. He was refuting the idealism of Bishop Barclay. That's not really an adequate response, right? Because that too is subsumed by the same analysis.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Okay, so then, let me put it, I mean, all of that actually does make sense to me. I am relentlessly practical, though, and I'm always thinking about like what, especially on the part of the listener, what does this have to do with my lived experience and improving my life? And so if free will is, as you describe it, an illusion, and you make a very convincing case, you are the proprietor of an app that purports to be a kind of workout for the brain and the mind. We are sitting here talking about the power of cultivating non-hatred in the face of what many people find to be outrageous and equanimity in the face of non-negotiable impermanence and entropy. Is there no free will in any of that?

• 47:46Speaker 00

  That seems like affirmative decisions to train the mind and the heart in order to get better at life?

• 47:51Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, let me answer that question in a second, but the low hanging fruit in your question is seeing things this way, but just dispensing with a belief in free will is a direct antidote to hatred. Because the moment you see people acting out, that just kind of helplessly acting out the prior causes and conditions of their mind streams, you do view them like you'd view a fire or a hurricane or a wild animal, like even though you wish they would do otherwise, they can't do otherwise on some basic level, or they couldn't do otherwise until that moment. So I mean, the difference between, the obvious difference between a person and a fire is some people you can, you can reason with, right?

• 48:33Sam Harris?

  Some people you can intrude upon their behavior with ideas, with conversation, or just with... You know, other inducements, I mean, with, with, you know, incentives, you can punish them, you can find them, you can threaten them with prison, right? Like, like, people can be influenced in the way that forces of nature can't. And that's what, on some level, one of the things that makes us human. I mean, that's how we're different from wild animals. But yet, those influences are still more mechanism. It's more, it's like, it's, you know, whether or not the conversation is going to work is still left to the, this mix of causes and conditions, right? But I, I do find it to be, when I put this lens on my view of human events, hatred is the first thing that drops out. Like, like, it just, hatred makes no

• 49:16Sam Harris?

  sense, right? Even for the worst person doing the, the worst thing, you know, directly to me, again, the moment I think in these terms, now I'm dealing with a grizzly bear on some level. Right? It's like, okay, you know, you can fear a grizzly bear, you can, you know, you can run away, you can kill a grizzly bear, you have, there's all kinds of things that, that are relevant to that emergency. But hatred is not one of those things, right? It just makes no sense to hate a grizzly bear, no matter what it's doing, right? Because a grizzly bear, of course, is going to act like a grizzly bear. But in terms of, so in, like, taking, you know, deciding to meditate, or deliberately, you know, reminding yourself to pay attention, hey, I mean, the truth is, we, I often talk

• 49:58Sam Harris?

  about it in these terms, it gives you a degree of freedom that you wouldn't otherwise have, right? So like, the moment you can be mindful, you have this superpower where you can, on some level, you can decide, well, do I want to stay angry right now? Or do I, is anger actually not useful? And it's just, can I just decide to get off the ride right now? You know, and, and when, once you, when you have a practice, you can actually do that. But again, we were, you know, earlier in this conversation, we were talking about all these moments in life that are not functioning like mindfulness alarms sufficient to remind us to pay attention, right? And so the, it's always mysterious, what causes you to wake up in the midst of your life? Like, what, what actually, you know, you're, you're, you're

• 50:42Sam Harris?

  going along, you're going along, not noticing much of anything, just reacting to everything, you're lost in thought, and then a moment of mindfulness comes online, and you recognize, okay, well, you know, you, thoughts of thought, and you just let it pass away, and you see that the emotion that it was connected to is this, this separate kind of pattern of energy. In the body and you you notice that it's changing and that gives you this distance from just the mere reactivity and it gives you an opportunity to deliberately, seemingly deliberately, pay attention to something else or to continue to pay attention just to your, the flow of your experience and to feel the freedom in that, to feel the distance from the the reactivity, you know, in this case anger, to notice that the mind

• 51:24Sam Harris?

  is a wider space in which anger is is appearing, right? There's more to you than just this contraction. And the moment you notice that, the behavioral imperative, that the the need to sound angry and look angry and act angry, that relaxes, right? And so all of a sudden, you have this, you have a choice that, you know, quote, "choice" that you wouldn't otherwise have had. You can decide, okay, maybe I'm not going to say that thing that's just going to derange my relationship with this person, or maybe, you know, I don't, maybe I'm not going to honk, you know, at the driver ahead of me because I'm pissed off. So there's this degree of, quote, "freedom" that opens up based on having that practice. But again, the the occurrence of that remembering, or that salience, or that recognition of

• 52:06Sam Harris?

  the character of experience in that moment, is still mysterious, right? Like, you didn't author that moment of recognition. It it just came, right? It's like a sound. It's a visitation on your mindstream. It's a change that you didn't author and yet it follows causally from things that happened before. I mean, all the practice you did before, all the books you read before, all the conversations like this you had before, all the the mechanics of remembering to be mindful that you have built into your life is the thing that is going to make you more mindful in the future. So the causality is demonstrably true. I mean, we just know that if if you hit your hand with a hammer, your, you know, your

• 52:49Sam Harris?

  hand's going to be injured and you're, it's going to be, you'll have pain in your hand tomorrow. And, you know, mindfulness is a, is just as causally integrated in your, actually in your physical body as all that, right? I mean, this, you know, on some level, the practice of mindfulness, the propensity to remember, to be mindful, is just a physical change that has been introduced in your brain at some point in the past, right? And it's getting ramified the more you do it. But again, the sense that there's this separable you that is the locus of a, an ethereal freedom of will that is something other Then the causal mechanism of, you know, everything else and somehow loosely integrated

• 53:33Sam Harris?

  with it, right? It's like riding around in the pineal gland or somewhere in the brain where it's, you know, pulling these very, you know, gossamer levers and biasing, you know, the experience one way or the other while not itself being just merely part of the causal clockwork. There's just no reason to believe in the existence of such a thing.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  Right. There's no will that's free from the universe, that's free from, again, this ocean of causes and conditions that we're all riding on at any given moment. But just on a very practical level, the free, free will may be an illusion, but it is used, for the listener, what they need to know is ride what feels like your agency to make good decisions to improve the quality of your life that may actually lead you to a visceral experience of the illusion of the self and free will.

• 54:26Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. So I would say that it's totally appropriate and natural to think in terms of growing more free, to live the way you want to live, the more you practice. Because so much of our failure to be happy, it's not a matter of our not knowing how to be happy. It's on some level, it's a failure to take our own advice on some level. Like, it's very easy to give other people advice. Like, we know, like, if your friend's unhappy and he comes to you with, like, he puts the disorder of his life in front of you, right? His relationships, his career, his habitual ways of responding to stress, you know, his diet, his exercise, like, all of it. It would take you five minutes to give him very sound,

• 55:11Sam Harris?

  wise, actionable advice that if he could only follow it, would materially improve his life, right? It's not to say that you could solve, you know, anyone's problems perfectly, but, I mean, the best practices are so obvious. Ninety percent of the time, we know exactly what's good for us, right? We know the thing that we could do that we wouldn't regret, and we know the thing that we could do that we will regret, right? And, and so it's not a mystery, right? And we have the information, but so much of our day-to-day frustration with ourselves and our lives and our just kind of the sense of inadequacy and the sense that, you know, this day was not nearly as good as it should have been. Is a result of our failure to do what we know we wanted to do anyway, right?

• 55:56Sam Harris?

  Moment to moment. I mean, on some level, it's a failure to have made our minds our friends. We treat ourselves, again, I'm using language that can't really be justified because there's not many of us in there, but on some level, we live in relationship to ourselves, right? And we treat ourselves in ways that we would never treat a friend, right? You would never talk to your friend the way you talk to yourself about the thing that just happened or the thing that you just did, right? So on some level, it's a practice is a matter of becoming your own wise, compassionate best friend more and more of the time, right? Like, so you're like, you're riding shotgun with your with yourself and like always giving

• 56:37Sam Harris?

  good advice and, you know, putting your hand on the wheel in a way that actually solves the problem, right? Rather than just makes it more excruciating. And that is, so it's appropriate to think of all of that as becoming freer and being granted more choice, a greater range of choices in each moment, right? Like, you're just, you're not condemned to be the schmuck you were a moment ago if you can practice. If you can't practice, you will be that schmuck for as long as that schmuck just has the like, the half-life of schmuckery will be whatever it is in your case. And maybe you'll get diverted by, you know, an ice cream cone or like something else

• 57:20Sam Harris?

  will happen and you'll be, you know, he'll have a different experience. But if you have no perspective on the flow of thought, right? As just appear an appearance in your consciousness, if you've never seen an alternative but to be identified with the next thought that arises. If you don't know anything about meditation, what I just said makes absolutely no sense, right? Like, what do you, what does it mean to be identified with a thought in it, right? But what mindfulness is, is a practice that allows you to break that spell of identification. Like, you know, otherwise you're, it's very much analogous to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing it's a dream. If you're asleep and dreaming, you know, leaving lucid dreams aside, you don't know you're dreaming.

• 58:03Sam Harris?

  You are condemned to experience whatever your imagination is going to foist on you for that period, right? Like, you're going to meet whoever you're going to meet. They're going to be as scary or as desirable or as whatever as they're going to be. You're going to have whatever reaction you're going to have. You know, you're going to be completely psychotic for this period because you don't know you're dreaming. Like, you're safely in bed and you simply don't know that. You have no reality testing going on at all in your, in your mind. I mean, it really is, if you map it into the waking state, it's pure psychosis. Every time you're lost in thought, identified with thought, you know, thinking about the conversation you're about to have that's making, you know, about which you're anxious, or the thing that's going to happen tomorrow that you're, you know, not looking forward to, or the thing that happened yesterday that you regret.

• 58:48Sam Harris?

  Every time you're just thinking that, you're the person just in the grip of that thought, it's very close to being asleep and dreaming without knowing that you're dreaming. And so this notion of waking up, I mean, you know, we called the app Waking Up because it's more than an analogy. It's like, it is, and this is, obviously, it's a traditional reference to Buddhism and every other contemplative path that has had something like meditation at the heart of it. I mean, the Buddha was the awakened one. I mean, it's like the notion of waking up from the dream of normal life, it's very direct. And so, yeah, it's not, it's not wrong to think of all of this in terms of getting more freedom to live the way you want to live, to pay attention to what you want to pay attention to, to have the experience you want.

• 59:32Sam Harris?

  And yet, at the core of this practice and this path, there's an insight that can seem to subvert all of that, but it subverts it in a very beautiful and happiness-producing way, which is, there's no you doing this. There's no separate self. There's no rider on the horse of consciousness, you know, pulling the reins and making these choices. There's just experience, right? There's just the flow of experience. And on some level, all of this is the universe waking up where you are, right? Like, it's, it's, the universe is aware of itself in your case, right? And you're, and you're not separate from it. And the sense that you are separate from it is another instance of what it's like to not recognize a thought as a thought.

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. You've really beautifully articulated the fact that you're sort of riding the flawed horse of ego all the way to seeing that the ego, or the sense of I, doesn't exist in the first place. And so, we have now arrived at a point in this conversation that we arrive at every time we, we have a conversation, which is this sense that a lot of people find deeply counterintuitive, that the self is an illusion, which you're arguing, and many contemplative traditions argue is not only true, but also deeply helpful. And on the Waking Up app, you, in taking your introduction course, you like, you start off with very traditional mindfulness teaching.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  It's I, Dan, I'm watching my breath coming and go in meditation. And then, over the course of this four-week introduction, you start to switch things so that we're investigating, what is this sense of I, Dan, that's watching this breath? For those of us who haven't had a chance to take the course yet, are there any simple instructions that would allow us to maybe just get a glimpse into this illusion so that we have some sense of what the fuck you're talking about?

• 1:01:31Sam Harris?

  Hmm. Yeah, well, it's, um, I mean, it can be frustrating for people, because, so, there's a, there's a very straightforward and easily understood and not at all, at least in principle, frustrating version of the path, right? I mean, like, you can, the ordinary, what I call, you know, the dualistic mindfulness practice, is very easy to teach, is very easy to learn, it's not, I mean, it's, can be frustrating to practice because your, your mind is out of control, right? You try to meditate, and you get lost in thought, and then five minutes later, you remember you were supposed to be meditating, and you come back to the breath. But there's nothing paradoxical about it, right? Like, you, you understand, your mind's out of control, you're now training attention

• 1:02:15Sam Harris?

  on an object of meditation like the breath, and eventually, you can pay attention to anything, sounds, and sensations, and moods, and even thoughts themselves, but...

• 1:02:23Sam Harris?

  It's a practice. It's like learning the piano. Your first day on the piano, you understand you don't know how to play the thing and it's going to take many, many hours and lots of repetitions to learn how to do it. And it's a very kind of linear progressive path. Like you start in ignorance and you gradually accumulate skill and knowledge. And you can see and feel and hear the consequences of all that. And so it is with meditation. You can build concentration. You can, you can become a more seasoned student of your own mind and you can notice progress. And again, there's nothing strange and, and hard to understand about that whole process. It can take longer than you want. It can

• 1:03:08Sam Harris?

  be harder than you want. You may feel like you don't have, um, you know, the natural talent for it that you wish you had, right? Again, so you can map this onto piano or sports or anything else. You, you know, these are all things you learn and gradually, sometimes all too gradually, you know, which is to say very, very slowly and with great effort, you get better at these things. But the, the real truth of this path, I mean, the thing you really ultimately wake up to, the thing you get glimpses of, you know, even dualistically along the way, subverts all of that because unlike piano and unlike sports and unlike anything else you learn, the thing you're becoming acquainted with in meditation, the thing, the goal of the practice, the thing you're trying to recognize

• 1:03:53Sam Harris?

  and, and ultimately never lose sight of is already here, right? It's already the nature of your mind, right? It's already what consciousness is like prior to your identification with thought, right? So it's not, it can seem, you know, dualistically that you're in the self-improvement business, right? Like this, we now have a practice very much analogous to, you know, physical exercise, right? Like you're, you start out, you're not in shape. And you go to the gym and you meet a trainer and now there's a path by which you could actually get to be in shape and even in great shape. And you can see the posters on the walls of all the people who got there before you who just got in fantastic shape. And so there's no illusion, like however hard it is, it's possible to get there.

• 1:04:38Sam Harris?

  And so it is with the mind. You can become, if not the Buddha, something very much like the Buddha, right? You can become free. You just have to kind of gradually train your mind. But the thing is, the punchline of this is that it really isn't this progressive thing in the end. There's this reality to the mind. Consciousness is a certain way and meditation is recognizing it to be that way. A really successful moment of meditation is just a recognition of what is already the case, right? So there is a paradox here. You're not actually going anywhere. You're not schlepping up to the top of the mountain. You're not really at the base of the mountain and the peak isn't really far away and there

• 1:05:21Sam Harris?

  isn't really a path from here to there. And on some level, if you think about it in those terms, you can never get from here to there. Thinking about it in those dualistic terms in more and more subtle ways becomes the impediment to actually making progress. And the progress is to recognize that the path is already accomplished in this moment, that the goal that you would otherwise seek is not only available now, it is the thing that would be doing the seeking, right? Like it is what you are in this moment. I mean, it is the nature of your mind. It is what consciousness is in this moment. Consciousness is already free of an ego, right? It's not like there's an ego really and you somehow get rid of

• 1:06:06Sam Harris?

  it through diligent practice. No, diligent practice or some combination of happy accidents will get you to recognize that the ego is an illusion, right? And to say that it's an illusion is to say that it's not actually here in the way that it seems to be. So it's not a matter of getting rid of it. Again, so that's where all of this becomes harder to understand, but it's nonetheless true. And it also suggests that the promise of this paradox is that you're actually not far away from your goal. Like, the sense that you might be condemned to just never get there, right, is, you know, it's like, I mean, that, you know, that effectively, well, that will be the

• 1:06:49Sam Harris?

  case for some people, obviously, but we don't stand in relation to this, you know, spiritual insight in this quite the same place that we might be with respect to these other things I just mentioned, like piano. Like, for someone like myself, it would be totally rational for me to wonder, well, even if I just devoted my life to playing the piano, maybe I just won't be able to play it, right? Or just like, or I just, but will play it so badly that will, it will be objectively true to say, well, that was a waste of your time, right? Like, you had so little aptitude for that project that you just, you basically wasted your life trying to do something that would be very easy for somebody else, but it's just, it was going to be insuperably hard for you, right?

• 1:07:32Sam Harris?

  But that's my, you know, not having tried the piano, but it, that would be a fair bet for my own, you know, my own musical aptitude. With this, this, again, this is the nature of your mind already. Like, there's already no ego in the center of your experience. And the sense that there is one is a misperception. And meditation is the process, seemingly gradual in the beginning, but in some sense, not even a process in the end, by which that becomes more and more obvious. And, you know, I think everyone is in that condition, whether they, they know it or not, right? So it's, you know, you can make, you can make a lot of progress very, very quickly,

• 1:08:14Sam Harris?

  which is, say, it's like, you can suddenly become a great pianist. Like, every time you walk into, you, you sit down at the piano, at this piano... It is rational to believe I might actually just blast into Rachmaninoff today. Like yesterday, I didn't even know what the notes were, but like the full performance is in fact possible in principle right now. And that is, you know, we all have different kind of spiritual biographies here, but kind of the step change in practice that many people have experienced carries with it the insight that, oh, this could have happened a long time ago, right? Like, there was no good reason it took this long.

• 1:08:58Sam Harris?

  If waking up is unusual as a curriculum, I think this piece is unusual. Like, I'm, even from the very beginning, I'm trying to communicate the fact that this paradoxically close, already accomplished reality to this whole project is there from the very beginning. This may seem hard, and it may in fact be hard for most people most of the time, but you can get to the punchline far sooner than you would expect. And in the end, there's no good reason why it didn't happen sooner.

• 1:09:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I completely get that. And I think what makes waking up unique is that you are front-loading with the punchline and arguing that instead of this bottom-up process of climbing arduously this mountain of dualistic mindfulness, I'm gonna grit my teeth and, you know, with mad dog intensity and try to be aware of every breath to the best of my ability, that actually what you're looking for, this insight that we're looking for, is close at hand. And you really, I think, quite skillfully get us there, although, as you were saying before we started rolling, sometimes there's a moment in the intro course when people,

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  you know, revolt a little bit, because you're asking us to turn our attention back at, oh, who's the self that's feeling the breath?

• 1:10:18Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  So I guess my question is kind of a repetition of the question I asked earlier. For the listener now, what is the mental move we can make that might get us in the neighborhood of this maddeningly close realization that we should have had years ago?

• 1:10:34Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, it's always some version. There are many ways to say this, or not that many ways, but a few ways to say this, and I employ all of them, but it is some version of looking for what is looking. It's looking for the seat of attention. It's turning attention upon itself. It's looking for the looker. It's looking for the self. It's looking for the mind. It's looking for the thinker of thoughts, right? So it's, there's all just a way of saying that the sense that we have, our default sense of being the subject of experience, being a point from which attention can be aimed at experience, you know, that we're separate from experience, right? Like, I tell you, you know, notice a sound, or notice the breath, or notice your visual

• 1:11:18Sam Harris?

  field. Most people by default feel like, okay, I'm over here, behind my eyes, behind my face, paying attention now, now aiming attention at the visual field, right? Visual field's out there. I'm in here, behind my face. Or, you know, if I close my eyes, I can pay attention to the breath. The breath is down there, you know, in the abdomen, or at the tip of my nose, and I'm up here in my head. And I'm this locus of conscious attention that can be, again, and this is also the seat, this is the sense of self, it's where the free will, if it exists, would be hiding, right? Like, this is the feeling of being not just in the world, but in one's body in the world, right? Because most people don't feel identical to their bodies.

• 1:12:00Sam Harris?

  They don't inhabit their bodies down to the tips of their fingers and the tips of their toes. They're like passengers in their bodies. They're mined in a body. And then the body is, in some sense, a part of the world to which you have a relationship, you know, and it can be quite a, you know, complicated and fraught relationship. And your aches and pains are yours, but they're being appropriated from a place that's outside the aches and pains, right? Like, if my hand hurts, the problem is out there or down there, and I'm up here now in this resisting the pain, right? And wondering how to get rid of it. And, you know, should I take more Advil? And just how much Advil can you take in a day without destroying your stomach? And should I call a doctor? You know, like, just what's the name of that bone in the hand that I like, so now

• 1:12:44Sam Harris?

  you're thinking about your hand and you're now in relationship to this whole thing that's that, you know, in the abstract, you say, yeah, well, my hand is part of me, right? I know, I know conceptually that I am my body, say, but it doesn't feel that way. There is this dualism even internal to the body. So if you look for the seat of this dualism, the place from which everything is being measured, there's this sense of being a subject, right? And that is the starting point for 99.99% of meditators, right? Now, that's the one who's going to become a meditator. That's the one who's going to practice. That's the one who's going to be bad at this practice in the beginning and hope to get better at it. And that's the one who's going to remember to be mindful when he remembers. And that's the one who's noticing a thought as a thought and is no longer identical to that thought.

• 1:13:29Sam Harris?

  That thought suddenly becomes like the hand, you know, it's something to which you're in relationship. But there's still this feeling of me over here in the head paying attention, right? That's the thing that has to continually be inspected. And what would do the inspecting? It's that thing. It's like the thing that's paying attention is now being asked to turn to look for itself, right? And in some sense, that turning is, seems impossible, or it's like, how would you do that? Like, how, how would you look for what is looking, right? And it's true, it is a kind of a paradoxical instruction, and it's not like you ever really turn clear around and see, you know, the absence of this thing. There's something about this goad to turning, this, you know, look for what is looking, or look for the mind, or look for the thinker, or look for the self.

• 1:14:14Sam Harris?

  Or to use a more concrete version of it, which we have in the app, Douglas Harding, who is this kind of self-created Zen teacher, he was very influenced by Zen, and he's sort of in Zen, on the Zen shelf of the bookstore, but he's very creative, kind of self-taught teacher. He urged you to look for your head, right? And he wrote this very enjoyable and very short book on having no head. Because he realized, you know, he was, happened to be in India, looking at the Himalayas, and he was... Looking at this vast scene of sky and mountain tops. And suddenly recognized that he didn't see his head.

• 1:14:58Sam Harris?

  Like where his head was supposed to be. There was just the world. There was just sky and mountain, you know, snowy mountains. And, you know, he could look down. He could see his body terminating up into this vastness of the visual field, but he. He realized he never saw his head, right? And. He used that as a kind of anchor point, like you're just looking for your head, you know, like, like you and I are having this conversation now. You can notice that the only head you see is mine, right? Like your, your head is not part of your experience. It's just this. This openness where like my head is appearing and the rest of the world is appearing. But what you're intuiting as to be your head is just this open circumstance where everything else can appear.

• 1:15:41Sam Harris?

  Right? And as you fall back into that sense of just openness, right? You can begin to sense this thing that I'm talking about, which is that. There's no center to experience, right? What we, we have is this default sense. That we're the center of our experience, right? And that we're appropriating everything, sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, emotions. From this place of being the center, this sort of indigestible core of, of conscious experience, but there is no center. If you look for the center, it can drop away and. It's in that dropping away that you recognize something about the character of consciousness prior to identification with thought. Right? Because the, you know, I think it's true to say that this sense of a center is on some level a very subtle thought that is.

• 1:16:26Sam Harris?

  An undercurrent of thought that's always present, right? And it's even a thought in relation to other thoughts. Like you notice you can become mindful of thoughts, but you. If there's still the feeling that you're being mindful of thoughts. That's another thought that's going uninspected, right? So there's this, you know, it's not a verbose thought. It's more like a. Almost like an energetic contraction. It's like, it's like a kind of fist. That is formed in the mind. Whereas there's this alternative, which is just an open hand. You're continually contracting into the sense of identification.

• 1:16:57Sam Harris?

  And reaction, you know, like you're, you feel that you're, you know, you have no perspective on this next arising thought. Like this feels like me, you know, this feels like me, this feels like, like, like suddenly I'm the guy, you know? It's the voice in the head that says like, why did she put it there? Right? Like, like, what the fuck? Like, like that voice is, there's an energetics to not noticing the arising of that thought, to suddenly being captured by it. And it's, it's almost, it's the energetics of a kind of contraction. It's like you're, you know, it's including what you can otherwise be aware of. It's, it's, it's very much like falling back into a dream, you know, like, like all of a sudden, like, why the fuck did she put it there?

• 1:17:37Sam Harris?

  Like, that's the, like, that's an instance of the dream, right? You know, like, you, you didn't see it come. You know, it's, you didn't produce it, you didn't author it, like, this next thought, or you just have this, you know, you'd suddenly remember, oh my God, I just, I left that thing that I was supposed to bring, like, and you didn't see it arise. And again, it's, you just dip back down into the dreamscape of, okay, everything else about your circumstances is now going unnoticed. And you're just in this very brief dream of, fuck, I forgot that thing. It's gonna take me 45 minutes to drive. It's, it's traffic now and I'm out of time. I'm fucking out of time. Like, like, and so that this, that conversation is happening and like you're that, right?

• 1:18:21Sam Harris?

  That's a dream, right? And, and mindfulness is a waking up from that dream. But the dualistic version of waking up from that, which is like, okay, that's just a thought, but it still feels like me over here doing the waking up, right? Like I'm, I'm aware of thought. I'm aware of that reaction. I'm aware of the memory. I'm aware of the tension in my body. I'm letting go of it now and I can let go of it now because I have this degree of freedom. Cause now I know how to meditate, right? But it's still me, the meditator. This turnabout in consciousness where you notice that there is no one who's doing it, that there's no center to experience. That is the first taste of this real, like, un-created

• 1:19:03Sam Harris?

  freedom. Like this is not something you're doing anymore. This is just the way consciousness is. You're discovering an openness that you don't have to produce, that you can't improve, that you're not, it's just what's there prior to identification with thought. Right? It's prior to your contraction. It's prior to your reaction. It's a thing that you can then be mindful of. Because it's always present, you know, in the same way that experience in every other way is always present. But it's, this is the condition of all experience, right? This is the thing, like, and this is what, the reason why it's non-dual and it's, this is now kind of, we're just throwing people into the deep end of the pool here. So, you know, apologies for the confusion that some people might be feeling.

• 1:19:47Sam Harris?

  But, you know, it's non-dual in a variety of ways. It's non-dual because you're cutting through the dualism of subject-object perception, right? Like, you're recognizing there's no subject, so that there's really just experience, right? You're not on the edge of experience, you're not in the center of experience. There's not one who's having the experience. There's just experience and you're identical to it, right? There's just consciousness and its contents, and you are that condition of everything appearing, right? Like, there's just this, whatever this is. So it's non-dual in the sense that the dichotomy of subject and object is the thing you're, you're releasing. And what's left is this, to call it two is wrong. It's not subject and object anymore. But to, even to call it one thing is also wrong. I mean, that kind of reifies it.

• 1:20:32Sam Harris?

  It's not just one thing. It's this inexpressible, open totality of, it's not one, it's not many. And this is why the Buddhists use terms like emptiness, right? And it's a very difficult and confusing thing to translate into English. But the basic concept of shunyata in Sanskrit allows for this inscrutable prior condition of, it's not just one thing, because the full diversity of appearances is present, right? Like, anything can appear. The character of experience is still fully, you know, you're not cut off from anything, right? Like, there's a full energy of sights and sounds and sensations, right?

• 1:21:11Sam Harris?

  So it's not just a gray goo that gets, you know, unified, but sort of allows for many things. But it's not because there's no, there's no subject over here appropriating those things or in relationship to those things, it's no longer dualistic, right? So it's not one, it's not many, it's not two. And so what the Buddhists do, and I think, I think they're right to do this, but again, it's- It's hard to explain. They give this category, this concept of experience, which is usually referred to in negation, right? It's emptiness is a term of negation, or selflessness, or, you know, it's unconditioned, or it's, you know, unconstructed, or it's, in the Tibetan

• 1:21:54Sam Harris?

  tradition, they do allow for some kind of positive conceptions. I mean, they talk about nondual awareness, or they talk about, you know, or the Dzogchen teachings. Dzogchen means great perfection, or great completion, right? So it's, there's some seeming kind of affirmation of what this thing is. But, I mean, the Buddhists are very leery of reifying anything, right? And it's appropriate, because what you're, there are many ways to sort of kind of grasp at peak experience, right? And all of that grasping, all of that trying to hold on to some kind of high, is a deviation point. It is a way of just, on some level, you know, selfing again, in whatever grandiose way one can be doing that. And

• 1:22:39Sam Harris?

  this is one, now to take us even further afield, this is one way in which the psychedelic experience, which many of us have found so useful to this project of learning how to meditate, or, you know, building a contemplative life, it's one way in which it can be profoundly misleading for people, because psychedelic experiences, almost by definition, are characterized by very different expansive experiences. Like, what you've done, when you're having a psychedelic experience, is because you've taken this drug that has a predictable effect, and you've done it for this reason, you have produced a wholesale change in the contents of consciousness, right? And this can give you, in some cases, a clear insight into

• 1:23:22Sam Harris?

  what, into emptiness, into selflessness, into the nonduality of consciousness. But because you got that insight by just changing everything, it's very easy to get the sense that, okay, freedom is a matter of changing everything. It's a matter of having very different sights and sounds and sensations. And, you know, it's got to be, you know, freedom is, you know, to be a Buddha, or to be enlightened, or to be on the, really on the path to any of those things. It has to be a matter of just this very expansive change in the in the energy of experience, right? So, and it could be feeling, you know, much, much more love, or much, much more compassion,

• 1:24:01Sam Harris?

  or bliss, or rapture, or just, you know, a kind of a pyrotechnic change in the visual field. Like if you're, you know, if you're actually thinking of proper psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, well, then everything just looks different, right? Like, everything is just so much more beautiful, right? And like, the trees are breathing and, you know, it's just like the light, this kind of prismatic, you know, incandescent change to everything. Like, it just, light is all of a sudden so much more of a thing, right? And the energy of the world is so much, like, you put your hand on a, on a tree, and like, the, it's just the, like, you can feel that, you know, your, your energy body merged with the energy body of the tree, or it certainly can seem like that's happening, right? And so, like, and you could do that for an hour and a half, and, and, and that's

• 1:24:45Sam Harris?

  the most interesting thing in the world. So you have to have that kind of mind in order to get closer to this thing, right? But all of that, those are all just changes in the contents of consciousness. And the thing that meditation is really pointing to is, it's not that it has no relationship to any of that. And, and you do tend to have those kinds of experiences more and more when you're, the more stable you get in the practice of meditation. But the thing to be recognized, the centrallessness, the emptiness, the selflessness, the illusiveness of the ego, all, you know, all of that stuff, that's here right now in the midst of a totally ordinary experience, right? Like, nothing has to change about experience to recognize that. And so, and that's where these further

• 1:25:30Sam Harris?

  ramifications of nonduality come out, which is to say that, like, let's say you're, you're experiencing, you know, impatience, or anger, or fear, or some, like, classically negative mental state, and then you suddenly become mindful of nonduality. You can do that and recognize it, and it's fully recognized. I mean, the centrallessness of experience, the illusiveness of the self, the freedom of all of that. Is fully present in the first instant, even before anything has changed about your experience. Like if you're angry, or impatient, or annoyed, or whatever the thing is, anxious, fearful, sad, the energy of all of that, of that mental state can be still fully present.

• 1:26:12Sam Harris?

  And that when the center drops out, that the freedom of selflessness, the freedom of emptiness, is fully available even before anything has changed at the level of experience. Right? So your freedom is not contingent upon the subsequent changes that will in fact happen because you know, then you've become mindful, you're no longer thinking about why you're, you know, should be angry, whatever it is. So I'm not saying that there isn't implications for the character of your experience in subsequent moments, but the real non-duality of this is that on some level, anger isn't even anger. Like anger recognized is also just non-dual wisdom. And so it is with any other negative emotion.

• 1:26:53Sam Harris?

  Like it equalizes everything in the end because there's just consciousness and its contents, and there's no center to that.

• 1:27:01Speaker 00

  Let me just jump in on that for a second. Let's take a moment of anger, or a moment of spaghetti sauce on the shirt, or whatever it is.

• 1:27:09Sam Harris?

  Yeah. That might be setting the bar too high, but.

• 1:27:11Speaker 00

  Dualistic mindfulness. So the way most of us experience mindfulness, which is, oh, okay, I can see this has happened, I can notice that I'm angry.

• 1:27:24Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 1:27:25Speaker 00

  Maybe I can summon some investigative powers, like, whoa, I can see that anger isn't a monolithic thing, it's a compound. It consists of buzzing in my chest, self-righteous thoughts, ears turning red, whatever. And in that putting of anger through a cheese grater, we are less, we're less owned by it. What's the difference between that dualistic mindfulness, I am doing all of that?

• 1:27:51Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 1:27:52Speaker 00

  And a non-dual mindfulness where we're having the same anger? What is the increase in freedom if we're going from dualistic mindfulness to non-dualistic mindfulness?

• 1:28:03Sam Harris?

  Well, I mean, the first thing to say is that even the dualistic mindfulness is is a very important stage and an amazing thing to have accomplished. And it's all too rare in this world. I mean, most people out there don't have this practice and would benefit from it. Right? So it's like you're in a very rarefied position just to be practicing and to know the difference between being lost in thought and identified with thought and not. Right? And that's just to be able to get off the ride for a few moments is an enormous change in one's capacity to be happy and to not suffer unnecessarily, which is so much of what is the real antithesis to being happy in our lives.

• 1:28:44Sam Harris?

  And we just, you're continually waking up to the fact that you're suffering in a way that just is just simply not needed. Right? It's like it's not adding anything. It's not giving you a capacity to do anything different. It's just, it's just extra pain. But the difference is with dualistic mindfulness, I mean, certainly in the beginning, and I mean, even for the longest time, even what we call dualistic mindfulness, much of it isn't even mindfulness. On some level, it's a stratagem to change your experience. And so to make that concrete, you feel anxious and you don't like feeling anxious. And one of the reasons why you've learned to meditate is the promise that you'll feel

• 1:29:29Sam Harris?

  less anxious if you actually get good enough at this practice and you can use it as an antidote to anxiety. Right? So, so that's part of the reason why you're playing this game to begin with is you don't like anxiety and you want, you want less of it. Right? So that contains within it the germ of, you know, aversion that is going to ride along with you for the longest time, which is itself a corruption of the whole project of becoming mindful. Because mindfulness is, you know, dualistic mindfulness is, you know, by definition, I mean, just from the, you know, the Buddhist Abhidhamma side of it, is not compatible with aversion. It is a state of non-aversion. You really need to be. Just accepting of experience in order to successfully be mindfully paying attention to it.

• 1:30:14Sam Harris?

  So the game, and it's, it really is this continually fascinating game of, is, is what was one of noticing kind of counterfeits to mindfulness, you know, continually catching yourself paying attention to experience in order to change it, however covertly, like you think you're just being open and accepting and mindful, but what you're really doing is subtly pushing away your experience. You're trying to be less anxious, you're waiting for the anxiety to disappear, right? Your way or the anger, whatever it is. So that covert agenda is in fact corrupting to the practice. It is itself a very standard way of just practicing aversion, you know, or greed, or whatever,

• 1:30:59Sam Harris?

  depending on the context, or ignorance, I mean, or all three. I mean, you're practicing, you know, the core kind of faults that mindfulness is the remedy for, and you're not noticing that, and you're calling it mindfulness. That's the predicament that many of us are in a lot of the time as meditators. You know, we're trying to pay attention, we are paying attention, you know, I'll be damned if I'm not paying attention, but there are competing thoughts and you're not noticing them. And then, oh, then you notice a thought, you let go of it, fuck, I was supposed to be paying attention. Now you're back to the breath and there's a pain in the knee and, you know, I'm a little anxious about this thing I have to do later.

• 1:31:38Sam Harris?

  And it's this meditation is like, yesterday, the meditation felt really good and this was, I'm not, I'm not even getting a good meditation out of, it's been 20 minutes, I've got 15 more minutes and, you know, I haven't really sunk into the meditation yet, okay, now I'm really gonna try. And what happens to almost any meditator is there are certain states of experience that you associate with good meditation, successful meditation, you know, feelings of calm and tranquility and rapture and bliss, like if you've gone on retreat and got in any level of concentration. You've probably touched really kind of drug-like experiences with meditation. It really feels good to be concentrated. And, and the moment, the first time that happens to you on a retreat,

• 1:32:21Sam Harris?

  or you know, sometimes it'll happen before retreat if one has any capacity for concentration. You know, the, the pleasure of a concentrated mind is just a pure drug experience. It's just like, I mean, I've never taken heroin, but I can imagine it's probably, you know, heroin's probably a lot like that. I mean, I've had, you know, propofol or whatever. So yeah, it's like, it has this anesthetic, drug-like, blissful, the body's disappearing. Well, the body's gone, you know, there's just awareness. I mean, that's just fantastic, right? But it's temporary. Causes and conditions bring it about. And when causes and conditions change, it disappears. I mean, certain, the bell rings, it's time for tea, you know, they don't have the tea you wanted. Where the fuck, how did they run out of tea?

• 1:33:04Sam Harris?

  This, I'm paying good money to be at the, on this retreat and they don't have, they don't have any black tea? That's you in that next moment. And you know, five minutes ago, you were, you know, Johnny Bliss who didn't have a body, right?

• 1:33:16Sam Harris?

  There's something deeper and or paradoxically even just more on the surface to recognize, which is consciousness already doesn't have a center, right? There's no you in the middle of it, doing any of these things, noticing any of these things. And so to come back to why dualistic mindfulness is different from non-dual mindfulness. Dualistic mindfulness always allows for this corruption of having this agenda to improve experience. Right? Like, I, I didn't really notice it at the time, but I was paying attention so that I would feel less anxious. And of course I wanted to feel less anxious. I mean, why don't, why am I doing, like, why am I doing this in the first? It's like, there's a sort of Gordian knot there that can't be untied, but it just has to be cut.

• 1:34:01Sam Harris?

  Right? Like, you're going to have an agenda, at least. From time to time, and in many moments that you can't recognize, unless you can actually just arrive at the destination, right? In this next moment, unless your mindfulness begins to feel like freedom, like actual freedom, it's always going to seem like this remedial antidote to a problem that really exists, right? Like, anxiety is really here, it's really a problem, even though I know it's not supposed to be a problem, because it's just something I can be mindful of. I'm being mindful of it, but still sort of waiting for it to disappear, right?

• 1:34:46Sam Harris?

  And maybe it's just disappearing a little bit now, and that's progress, that's better, and I'm sort of liking that direction this is going. And so that's a little greed, and like, that whole, that machinery, it's very hard to, it's not impossible. I mean, you can get to a place of dualistic equanimity, there's no question. But being able to practice in a non-dual way allows you just to cut through that with each moment of mindfulness, which is, in this moment, even the energy of anxiety has no center, right? It's like, there's no, there's no me over here with the problem anymore, right? Like, it's just, it's like free fall. Like, for a moment there, there's just no gravity.

• 1:35:30Sam Harris?

  Like, you're now falling at 1,000 miles an hour through the anxiety, right? There's no, there was structure, there was like, it was really me pressed against the wall here for a moment, dualistically trying to be equanimous with all of this. But the non-dual practice, just you realize, there's no wall, there's nothing at your back. Like, you just turn around and it's just open, right? And nothing needs to have changed. And so, I mean, from my point of view, it's only in non-dual practice that you can honestly say, a moment of mindfulness is a moment of freedom, whatever the character of the experience. It's no longer a practice. You're not actually meditating on anything. You're just recognizing the way consciousness is. So, you know, in waking up, I'm, and it's not just me, it's, you know, other teachers in there as well.

• 1:36:16Sam Harris?

  Most of us are teaching Dualistic mindfulness all the while, encouraging a non-dual view of it along the way and trying to provoke that insight into nonduality at the soonest opportunity and trying to keep, you know, one foot on either side of this thing, which is that to keep conserving that iterative incremental linear, non-paradoxical message of like, just keep paying attention to the breath, just come back to the breath, come back to the sounds and notice impermanence. I mean, impermanence is easy. There's nothing paradoxical about impermanence, right? Everything that arises passes away. Every thought, every emotion, every sensation. There's a radical freedom in just noticing that, right? I mean, just noticing that every time you've ever been angry before, it's always disappeared, right?

• 1:37:01Sam Harris?

  Like, just like, nothing is permanent. And to notice that on a more microscopic level, as you said, you know, even, even in the presence of anger in this moment, you notice that it's not even just one thing. It's a composite of things. And then all these things are changing, or all the sensations are changing. It's a cloud of sensation. You keep all of that going, but I'm still trying to remind people that on this other side, there's this paradoxical message and opportunity, which is you can wake up from the dream that any of this is a project, any of this is a problem that has to be solved.

• 1:37:34Speaker 00

  I, you know, spent many years building a competitor app. And in that time, notwithstanding our friendship, never really dove too deeply into waking up, but have, now that I don't have that app anymore, have now spent a lot of time on waking up. And I think you, you execute what you just described very well, you and the other teachers of, yeah, you're, you're getting a lot of what most of us would recognize as like a kind of garden variety mindfulness with a consistent, gentle push toward, oh yeah, actually just see if you can notice what it's like when you look for what's noticing everything. And my, my sense in my practice, and you tell me if you disagree with this, my sense is you want to knock

• 1:38:18Speaker 00

  on this door consistently, but without a lot of...

• 1:38:23Speaker 00

  Sweattiness. It's like, it takes, for some of us, it can take a minute to see this thing you're pointing to. And it can be maddening because what you're describing sounds great. And then I look for the looker and I don't even know what the fuck you're talking about.

• 1:38:36Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 1:38:37Speaker 00

  My experience with this, which dates back to ten, fifteen years ago, when you recommended I read on having no head. And I brought it with me on a retreat. You're not supposed to read, but I was reading it anyway. And I just started gently once in a while, looking for my head in the midst of my regular meditation practice. And every once in a while, it's much more on the surface and readily available than you would think. It's not some, it's not something that comes after excavation. It's just kind of like looking in the right way with the right attitude. You just see this head is a concept right now. All that's left is the world. And again, I know that's frustrating for some people to hear, but my recommendation, which I'm floating to you to see if you agree is just play with it.

• 1:39:20Speaker 00

  Play with it consistently over time. Don't get too worked up about it. And eventually you might see something interesting.

• 1:39:27Sam Harris?

  Yeah. And also, walking meditation with eyes open is a very good way to do it.

• 1:39:33Speaker 00

  Huge. We were talking about this before we started rolling. For me, I do a lot of walking meditation as an insomniac. It's my way to get myself ready for bed. And if I can't sleep in the middle of the night, I'll get back up and do it again. Just asking myself as I'm walking, what is knowing all of this? And who's even asking this fucking question?

• 1:39:52Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:52Speaker 00

  Gets me right into this sense of, oh yeah, this is, there's this yawning chasm of knowing here. And I can't, I, I, I can't claim it as my own. In fact, the thoughts of being a self are appearing within that, within that space. But for something, there's something about having your eyes open that makes that easier. And I know you emphasized that on the app.

• 1:40:16Sam Harris?

  Yeah, so I mean, this can be confusing for people because they associate meditation with as with eyes closed. I mean, because it just seems like it's more restful. Many people have a preference for closing their eyes. And it's just often taught that way that, you know, you're going to focus on the breath or sounds. All that gets heightened when you close your eyes. But there's a reason why, I think there's a reason why the Zokchen teachings emphasize eyes open practice when they're targeting this non-dual insight. And it's because so much of our sense of self versus other and in social space, you know, you're the sense that you're in relationship to another person, or just you're differentiating yourself from the physical environment. So much of that is a visually referenced impression,

• 1:41:00Sam Harris?

  right? I mean, it's just, I mean, the effect of vision is so strong that you can actually get in, you know, very artificial, you know, laboratory conditions, you can get what's called a body swapping illusion. Like if we put a headset on on your head and one on my head where my eyes get the input from your goggles, and your eyes get the input from my goggles, and then we stand looking at each other, we can get the impression of being in the other's body. Like, it can be just like, our sense of being in the world is just so overwhelmingly a visual sense, you know, most of the time. So that when you recognize non-duality with eyes open, it can be that much more vivid. I mean, it's

• 1:41:42Sam Harris?

  just the shift from duality to non-duality can be much more salient with eyes open. Whereas with eyes closed, I mean, you can do it with eyes closed. And once you've learned how to do it with eyes open, it becomes easier to do it with eyes closed. But there's something much more subtle about it, because when you close your eyes, you're just kind of, there's just a sense of just being inside, you know, kind of interior. And the sense of subject-object dualism is less pronounced. But when you're, when you're looking at the world of objects with eyes open, it's like, there's a glass over here, I'm reaching for it, I'm picking it up. It's obvious that this is a dualistic occasion. And so when I, when you drop the dualism, it's just a very clear shift. And so, yeah, again, Douglas

• 1:42:23Sam Harris?

  Harding noticed that, and he used this on having no head, you know, paradigm. But with walking meditation, you can do a nice thing because you're moving through space.

• 1:42:34Sam Harris?

  You can notice that the default sense of subjectivity is that you, you're over here, you're in your head, moving through the world of objects. And so as you walk, you know, you are moving toward static objects. And if you're walking toward a tree, you are the, this locus of consciousness that is moving toward the tree. But you can also flip that and just feel like you're not moving on some level, even while you're walking, and everything's just moving toward you, right? Like you're just this, this still point and everything's coming toward you. And you can toggle between those two impressions, right? That you're moving through space or that everything is moving toward you. And you can do, do this even more easily on some level and if you're like a passenger in a car, right?

• 1:43:19Sam Harris?

  Like you're looking out the windshield, you can get the sense that you're hurtling through space and just the world is rushing by. Or you're still and just the world is rushing toward you. You can toggle between those two, those sensations and they're kind of equivalent, but they're different. I mean, like it's almost like a necker cube, you know, where one side pops out and the other side it reverses and it's that, that bias stable percept. But in toggling between those two senses of you moving through space and it's just space rushing toward you, you're actually kind of passing through the fulcrum of this non-dual insight of having no head. Like you're like the, the thing you're doing to toggle between those two is kind of very

• 1:44:00Sam Harris?

  quickly passing over this still point, which when you recognize it on some level, there isn't like motion is a concept, like there's, everything is just in its, for that moment, everything is just in its own place, right? Like there's just the world. It's not you moving through it and it's, there's not, there's no place from which you're the thing that's moving toward the static objects. And when you reverse it, there's no place toward which things, you know, the movie of the world can be rushing or, you know, it's like there's no, there's nothing to reverse, right? There's just the, the, the point you're passing through is just. Everything is in its own place. And there's kind of an inscrutable just openness and suchness.

• 1:44:43Sam Harris?

  And there's, again, there's just, there's no two sides. There's no, you're not over here with everything else out there. There's just everything, you know, it's just the world on some level. And so, but walking meditation or, you know, eyes open, moving, you know, I hesitate to say, do it while driving because when you're actually at the wheel, you have to have other things to pay attention to. But as a passenger or as a seasoned driver, or as, you know, you can play with this with open eyes and it, yeah, it's a useful way of getting this insight.

• 1:45:17Speaker 00

  Before I let you go, my two habitual final questions. One is, is there something you were hoping to talk about that we didn't?

• 1:45:23Sam Harris?

  I don't think so. I think we covered a lot of, many, many sides of this.

• 1:45:27Speaker 00

  Yep. Finally, can you just walk us through, you know, just say more about waking up? And, you know, what went into creating it and why you recommend it?

• 1:45:37Sam Harris?

  Well, I, I feel like a, an incredibly fortunate beneficiary of this change in technology. So I wrote, wrote a book called Waking Up, which came out in 2014, which really has the same kind of content in it. And it was my best effort to present these ideas in book form. But audio is just so much better as a vehicle for teaching, you know, the practice. And, you know, the couple of the concepts and actually, and more importantly, guiding people in a moment to moment meditation practice. Right? So it's just, in my view, it's the perfect technology to do it. And I don't think video adds anything important to it. And I mean, a video is obviously useful for its own reasons.

• 1:46:22Sam Harris?

  But in terms of actual meditation instruction, I just think audio is king. I mean, it's much more intimate. It's, it's something you can. You don't have to be looking at anything in order to receive it. I mean, so you can be listening as you walk, or you can be listening with eyes closed, or it's just the perfect technology for it. So we kind of stumbled upon the opportunity to build an app, right? I mean, this was just not a thing before, I'm not sure which year. I mean, we had, you know, the smartphone came out in, because the iPhone came out in 2007. Yeah, seven. But, you know, the app ecosystem gradually got built out there. But it just, after I wrote the book, I saw an opportunity to create this audio version of it, which is just, in

• 1:47:03Sam Harris?

  my view, so much better than a book ever could be. And so there's the introductory course, which is my best effort to lead someone from, you know, the very first experience of meditation through everything we've been talking about. And then there's what's called the daily meditation, which is just me kind of continuing in that vein. But then there's just many other teachers and practices now in the app and different categories of content. So there's the practice category, which has me and many other teachers teaching guided meditations. And then there's the theory category, which is much more of a discussion about, along the lines we've been having here, just how can we understand the practice in the

• 1:47:48Sam Harris?

  context of just various concepts we have about, you know, psychology, or philosophy, or a scientific understanding of what it is to be a person in a world, or politics, or anything else. And then there's a life track now, which we're in many other topics, even beyond meditation and enlightenment, or any of the other things we've been talking about, are now available to talk about. I mean, so you know, you've got someone like Oliver Berkman, teaching, you know, time management, or the illusion of time management, or, you know, in his own inimitable way. And so, yeah, the app is in the process of, is well in the process of outgrowing any of my contributions to it. There's just a lot in there.

• 1:48:29Sam Harris?

  Cognitive behavioral therapy and Stoicism and just many things that are not mindfulness practice per se, or meditation per se.

• 1:48:37Speaker 00

  And now, of course, with me, you and Joseph Goldstein.

• 1:48:40Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, so we have this, three of us did this mini-retreat, or I had this brilliant idea that you and Joseph should do a mini-retreat and have conversations to extract his wisdom. And then I realized, well, why would I miss this retreat? So, the three of us had a mini-retreat in Maine, and we'll be, if we haven't released them yet, when you release this, that audio will soon be on the app.

• 1:49:06Speaker 00

  By the time this is released, the Eightfold Path course that we recorded with Joseph will be on the app, and the first of the four parts will have played on this podcast feed.

• 1:49:16Sam Harris?

  Nice, nice.

• 1:49:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:49:18Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, I'm just listening to that now, and that was a lot of fun. We had a lot of laughs.

• 1:49:22Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, more fun than one would think, talking about Buddhism.

• 1:49:28Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, so that's, I think, we're doing the final edit now, but I mean, there's very little being cut out, so I think that's eight hours of conversation with you, me, and Joseph.

• 1:49:39Speaker 00

  It was a good time, as was this. Thank you for making time.

• 1:49:43Sam Harris?

  Yeah, great to see you, yeah, lots of fun.