Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris A Radical Question To Put Your Problems Into Perspective | Annaka Harris About this episode How to think about consciousness without breaking your brain.
Annaka Harris https://annakaharris.com/ is the New York Times bestselling author of CONSCIOUS: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Brief-Guide-Fundamental-Mystery/dp/0062906712 and writer and producer of the audio documentary series, LIGHTS ON https://annakaharris.com/lights-on/. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Nautilus Magazine, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and IAI Magazine, and she is also an editor and consultant for science writers, specializing in neuroscience and physics.
In this episode we talk about:
What consciousness is—and why we should care about it The question of whether or not consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe (so literally—is consciousness embedded in the chair I'm sitting in?) Why thinking about this mystery can create a sense of awe (a reliable antidote to suffering) Meditation techniques for exploring consciousness The illusion of the self The importance of challenging our intuitions And much more
Related Episodes:
The Fundamental Mystery of the Mind | Annaka Harris https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-fundamental-mystery-of-the-mind-annaka-harris/id1087147821?i=1000468718797 Susan Kaiser Greenland and Annaka Harris, Teaching Mindfulness to Kids https://www.danharris.com/p/susan-kaiser-greenland-and-annaka-8f2 #469. A Mystery That Matters | Anil Seth https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/anil-seth-469 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist Jennifer Egan On: Panic, Awe, Fetishizing Authenticity, and Our Possible AI Futures https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/jennifer-egan
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Additional Resources:
wakingup.com/tenpercent http://wakingup.com/tenpercent LIGHTS ON https://read.macmillan.com/lights-on-9781250396778/?utm_source=Podcasts&utm_medium=&utm_term=Authorinterviews&utm_content=-other-listen-buynow&utm_campaign=9781250396778 The Candy House https://www.amazon.com/Candy-House-Novel-Visit-Squad/dp/1476716765 The Case Against Reality https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Reality-Evolution-Truth/dp/0393254690 On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious https://www.amazon.com/Having-No-Head-Rediscovery-Obvious/dp/1878019198 Ten Zen Questions: Susan Blackmore https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Zen-Questions-Susan-Blackmore/dp/1851686428
Transcript 13,225 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:18 Dan Harris? Okay, folks, today, we have a conversation that will, I strongly suspect, put your problems into perspective. For me, at least, when I'm engaged in my lifelong habit of ruminating on my stuff, that mental activity, that noise, blots out the sun, driving me further into my head and cutting me off from the world in all of its mundane glory, from the beauty and horror of this whole being alive thing. Anyway, my guest today is one of my favorite people, Annaka Harris. We are not related, despite sharing the last name, but she is an old friend and somebody I really respect and admire. Annika is a writer with a long and abiding fascination with the subject of consciousness.
1:01 Dan Harris? Do not worry if you don't understand right away what that word means. Annika will explain it. For now, just know that consciousness is one of the most enduring mysteries in all of science, and that it's a mystery that can have profound, practical implications for you and your psychological well-being. Just to sum up what I'm trying to say here, we're going to talk about the mystery of consciousness, a subject so head-swimming and brain-breaking and fascinating that it is very likely to put your problems in perspective. Moreover, discussing this mystery is going to lead us to discussing some practical meditation techniques that can genuinely change your experience of being alive. Just to say a little bit more about Annika before we dive in here, she's the author of the bestselling
1:45 Dan Harris? book Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind, which came out a few years ago. Now, she's back as the writer and producer of a new audio documentary series called Lights On, which I listened to and blurb'd, "It's awesome." In this conversation, we talk about what consciousness is and why we should care about it, the question of whether or not consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe. So, literally, is consciousness embedded in the chair I'm sitting in, for example? Why thinking about this mystery can create a sense of awe, which is a reliable antidote to suffering, meditation techniques for exploring consciousness, the illusion of the self, the importance of challenging your intuitions, and much more.
2:26 Dan Harris? Before we get started, I want to make sure that you know about all the good things we've got going on at danharris.com. That is my new-ish online community built in partnership with Substack where paid subscribers get cheat sheets and transcripts for every podcast episode. Plus, I do regular live AMAs, that's Ask Me Anything sessions, where I take your questions and more. It's a lot of fun. You'll also get to meet virtually lots of other folks who take all of this stuff seriously. Go to danharris.com. Annaka Harris, coming right up.
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3:59 Dan Harris? Annaka Harris, welcome back to the show.
4:01 Speaker 03 Thank you. Great to be back. Great to see you.
4:04 Dan Harris? It's great to see you. It's always great. Yes, absolutely. Most of our communication is trading cat pictures via text.
4:12 Speaker 03 I was just gonna mention that, too. That's funny. I usually see your cat, not you.
4:17 Dan Harris? All right. So I just love this work. I mean, I've been, as you know, a fan and follower of your work for many, many years, and I really love this new project, this audiobook. Is that the right way to describe it, audiobook?
4:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, it's a new genre, really. So we're calling it an audio documentary. It really, that's the most natural term that fits it best. It really is a documentary. It's almost as if you were watching a documentary with the video turned off. So yeah, I mean, I'm narrating the documentary and then I have all the people I interviewed and it follows my path of asking all of these questions and where they led me and who they led me to speak to. And so I'm kind of telling this story of a path I took over the course of four or five years.
5:00 Dan Harris? That's really palpable and listening to it and I-
5:02 Speaker 03 That's good to hear.
5:03 Dan Harris? I blurbed it and one of the things I was saying is that it has the feel of a mystery, kind of a rollicking, good time, scientific mystery, and it really does tie to like, you know, how we live our lives and how we can do that better and organize our mind and train our mind. So there's kind of a center of the bullseye for my interests.
5:25 Speaker 03 That's really wonderful to hear because that was the intention. And yeah, when you spend that long on a project, you just don't know.
5:32 Dan Harris? Yeah.
5:32 Speaker 03 You get lost in it and you don't know, you know, how it will be received. But that was the intention. So that's wonderful to hear. Yeah.
5:38 Dan Harris? Before we get to the specific kind of mind bending question that you're chasing in the audio doc, let me just ask a broader question. What is consciousness and why does it matter? Like, why should I care what consciousness is?
5:55 Speaker 03 That's a great question to start with. So people use the word in a variety of ways and many people, when they use the word consciousness, think about human consciousness. They think about very complex brain processing, self-awareness, complex thought. But I'm using the term in the most basic sense. And so the thing that I am so fascinated by and that is still completely mysterious to the sciences is just the fact of felt experience. And so if you can- Imagine the most minimal felt experience in an insect or a worm. If there's some feeling of moving through the dirt, if there's some sensation, you know, when a bee is flapping its wings.
6:39 Speaker 03 Obviously, we don't think a bee is self-aware or thinking any thoughts or, you know, it's a very simple system, but we can imagine it's possible that there's an experience from the inside of being that system. And so the mystery and the thing that I love thinking about and that I, you know, hope we learn more about in the future is how is it that this universe seems to be composed of all this non-conscious matter? But in some cases, this matter gets arranged in a way that the matter itself has an experience from the inside of being that matter. So if you think of what it's like for us to see the color green, green, the seeing of green, that experience of you know what it's like when you see the color green,
7:23 Speaker 03 that's an experience that arises in the universe, but there is no green property out there. The thing we're seeing is inside. It's the felt experience. We can talk about how the light waves, certain wavelengths of light are bouncing off a leaf and some are getting absorbed and then they enter the retina and get processed by the brain, and that's how this experience of green materializes. But the fact that that experience is there, which is separate from anything else we can say about it, it's that felt experience, the internal experience of the system. And that's how I'm using the word consciousness. That's what I'm calling a mystery. I hope that answers.
8:01 Dan Harris? Yeah, I mean, I once heard it articulated in this way by our mutual friend, Jack Cornfield, and I don't know if this is his phraseology or he was quoting somebody else, but the question was, how did we go from rocks on this planet to singing opera?
8:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a nice way of illustrating it, although computers could sing opera. You could imagine a version of singing opera or of music. You know, when I play music over a Bluetooth speaker, I don't think there's an experience there. We can get into how, how far my thinking has gone and how I now have question marks about that, but you know, the way we typically experience the world, there's almost nothing you can imagine, behavior that you could see from the outside. That we can't imagine happening without consciousness. It's almost like you only know it when you feel it. We only know it by our experience of it. And I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, but that's one of the areas of questioning
9:02 Speaker 03 that got me to become more interested in this is the realization at some point, after many years of working with neuroscientists and many years of thinking about this, it had never really dawned on me that there is no way to know for sure about any conscious experience, except the one you're having yourself. It's a unique, unique thing about consciousness.
9:26 Dan Harris? And so you are sort of hinting at the tip of the spear in terms of what you're exploring in this new audio doc. But before we get to that, let me go back to the second part of the question, which is, who cares? Like, is this just a supremely academic exercise?
9:42 Speaker 03 That's a good question. I could answer it many ways. I think one is, the only thing we actually know at all that is real and know firsthand is our conscious experiences. I mean, if you think of trying to name something that you care about, but it's something that you don't experience, that's not conscious, I mean, it doesn't, it actually doesn't even make sense to utter that phrase, right? So, everything we experience by definition is a conscious experience. It is everything. So, we could be, you know, there could be many explanations for the universe and the structure of the universe. And I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with this thought experiment of a brain in a vat.
10:24 Speaker 03 Everything we think is true about the universe could be wrong, but the one thing we know is this experience I'm having right now is happening. Whatever is causing it, whatever the outside description of it is, when I touch this table, I know that that experience of touch is happening. That's real, whatever is causing it, whatever the outside reality is. And so, in some sense, I think almost everyone is interested because everything that we're interested in takes place in our conscious awareness. And then beyond that, I think as a scientific investigation and question, it really does cross over into all of the areas of science.
11:05 Speaker 03 And then, you know, to the extent that the general public is interested in black holes, in understanding, you know...
11:14 Speaker 03 More about our solar system and understanding more about how the brain works. And I think there's this innate curiosity that the vast majority of people have where understanding our world better, especially something that relates so closely to our personal experience is always just something we want the full story on. We want to know everything that the scientists know.
11:36 Dan Harris? Yes, to all of that. And I think what you explore in this audio doc is how investigating for ourselves, the nature of consciousness can have some profound impacts on our experience of being alive and our happiness levels. Can you just say a little bit more about that?
11:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, and that's been a very interesting path for me personally, because I've been practicing meditation for 25 or so years now. My practice in meditation for the longest time did not actually seem relevant at all to my work in the sciences. At some point, I got very excited when the neuroscientists I was working with became interested in what's happening at the level of the brain in meditation. And so they were, I'm sure you've talked about these a lot, there are all these FMRI studies. And so neuroscientists started to study people's brains during meditation. But that was the most crossover I ever thought there would
12:35 Speaker 03 be. And then, you know, as you heard in my story in the documentary, at some point, these things started to completely overlap, where I realized there are certain experiences had in meditation that might actually inform the science beyond neuroscience. And that remains to be seen. I don't know. But suddenly, the work I was doing, the personal work I was doing, the psychological and spiritual work I was doing with my meditation practice.
13:08 Speaker 03 Had all this crossover with the science I was studying. And so I was mentioning to you earlier that actually doing this work now kind of has a similar effect on me as my meditation practice used to, where it actually all feels more conducive to well-being. It feels like therapy when I'm going through a hard time focusing on these subjects. I'm finding that they all kind of point in the same direction in terms of human well-being. And that's interesting and unexpected.
13:38 Dan Harris? Yeah. How exactly is it like therapy for you specifically? And then how is it that they're all pointing toward human well-being?
13:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, so we might need to get more into the weeds before that picture becomes totally clear. But, you know, I can loosely say that where most science, you know, when you get deep enough in, whether you're talking about biology, neuroscience, physics, what you find at this bottom layer of it all is that it's very clear, it's hard to find separations between things. There's a sense of oneness. There's a realization that we're all literally made of the same ingredients, that it's almost impossible to find boundaries between things. The most recent thing I was reading about with our microbiome and how, you know, bacteria
14:28 Speaker 03 in our gut affect our brain. Once you look at the details, the more we learn about the underlying science, the more we realize this universe is one thing. And there are kind of these ever-changing fluctuations and evolutions and things arising and passing away, which is exactly what you realize. It's one of the main insights in a meditation practice is that that is the truth of the universe. And so it's kind of these two very different ways of arriving at a truth that's not only satisfying because you have a deeper understanding, but it's a truth that is beautiful and awe-inspiring and kind of an antidote
15:09 Speaker 03 to most of our human suffering. And most of our human suffering comes from this feeling of separation. And so in the type of science that I've been involved with for this project,
15:22 Speaker 03 It continually comes back to this point that this is, in some sense, all one system, taking on different forms.
15:32 Dan Harris? That's beautiful. And it reminds me of this, I was on a retreat several years ago with this meditation teacher who I really love. Her name is Spring Washam. And she's been on the show many times. I'll put some links in the show notes. She's quite a character. And at one point during the retreat, she said, you know, think about it like a beach. You have all this sand. It's all, it's all the sand. But then one grain of sand says, no, I'm Janelle, and I'm not part of this. And like, that's how the suffering begins.
16:01 Speaker 03 Yes, that's right. Yeah, that's, I love, I love that image. I actually use the image of an ocean wave to talk about the illusion of self. I mentioned it a few times in the documentary and have just been using it more and more because I think it gets at that point very viscerally, that our experience of being a self is actually more like an ocean wave than a static object like a rock. And so the illusion is that there's something static inside of all of us that moves throughout our life from moment to moment, that's unchanging and somehow separate from the rest of the world, not connected to the universe, completely isolated. And even after, you know, years of meditation practice and dropping this
16:46 Speaker 03 illusion a lot, I still, you know, the intuition I have most of the time in my daily life is that I'm in here somewhere. And I'll talk about, you know, my thoughts, my brain, my body, as if the my of that situation isn't all those things, is somehow separate from them. And an ocean wave is an interesting thing to contemplate and look at because we can talk about, in the same way, we can talk about the self and say useful things about it. We can talk about an ocean wave. We understand the phenomena. We can point them out. We can talk about how one wave is different from another. But there's no sense in which an ocean wave is a static thing. It's a phenomenon in nature. It's a continually changing dance of molecules, right? And so that is
17:35 Speaker 03 Closer to the truth of what our experience of self actually is and what our conscious experience actually is, is just an ever-evolving, ever-changing, arising and passing away of conscious experiences. And there's no center to it. There's nothing that's separate from everything else. We're completely embedded in the universe and are part of the universe and not separate from nature, not separate from each other. We're kind of all part of this larger thing.
18:02 Dan Harris? You are nature. Every embarrassing thought that skitters through your mind is nature.
18:07 Speaker 03 Right.
18:07 Dan Harris? Okay, so we've given a tantalizing sense, I think, to listeners about how this can matter to them. And we'll come back and dwell in these things in more depth later. But let me get to the specific question that you're chasing in this documentary. And I'll see if I can frame it correctly, because I find that this subject kind of breaks my brain a little bit.
18:27 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:27 Dan Harris? In a good way. You, so you had written a book and you came on the show to discuss it back in 2019, I believe, called Conscious. And after writing that book, you started to have some conversations about an issue that you had touched on in the book but didn't fully explore. And it's, it's the question of whether consciousness is fundamental, meaning, I think, that all matter in the universe has some degree of consciousness, which can, the listeners are probably thinking, oh, is this chair no my butts on it?
19:02 Speaker 03 Sounds insane.
19:02 Dan Harris? Yeah, exactly. So can you just take it from there and also correct any mistakes I made?
19:07 Speaker 03 Yeah. So, no, you didn't make any mistakes. I would just take one step in between, which is my first questions were more about, does consciousness go deeper in nature than the sciences and myself included had previously assumed? So, you know, how far down can we take it? I mentioned worms and insects earlier. There's still debate among neuroscientists about whether worms and insects are conscious, even though they have brains and central nervous systems. But, you know, once you grant that, then, again, in my work and in science in general, the closer you look, the harder it is to find boundaries between things. And so my first exploration was just... How far down might this go?
19:50 Speaker 03 And how would we know? How could we prove or disprove this? And that in and of itself became fascinating because I realized there were all these questions I didn't know we had and all these questions that no one has answers to. And that once you start to ask them, you realize that our intuitions about consciousness, many of them are wrong and turn out to be based on illusions. But most of them just have no evidence to support them. And so we're kind of relying on, even science has been relying on these very deep ingrained intuitions as if they're truth, as if we have evidence for them. And when you dig in, you realize we are actually just making an assumption
20:35 Speaker 03 based on everything we can sense and tell from our human experience. So the first question was just about whether it can go deeper and the fact that we are always relying on self-report. And so there's this very interesting thing about language and how language relates to conscious experiences and how, I can't give you my conscious experience. I can explain it to you. And because we're such similar systems, you see green and I see green. And so we can talk about that pretty seamlessly. But if you imagine trying to talk to someone who was born blind about something you're seeing, there is nothing you can say that will generate the experience for them. That experience isn't there. And so the more things like that you take away,
21:20 Speaker 03 the less you have in common, the less there's any ability to communicate because we have to share the qualia. This is a philosophical term. Qualia is the type of conscious experience you're having. So the felt sensation I'm having right now when I do this on my fingertips, the experience of seeing blue, any quality of any type of experience we can have is called qualia, referred to as qualia. And there are other animals that have qualia that we don't have. So animals that experience the earth's magnetic field, they're feeling something that we don't feel. They have a qualia that we don't have. And that's actually a good example for certain animals. Even if we could discover a common language, we couldn't talk to fish about the earth's magnetic field and what that feels like and our intuitions about it
22:05 Speaker 03 because you have to have the experience in order to be able to communicate about it. And so this became clearer and clearer to me as I did these investigations, realizing
22:17 Speaker 03 We have assumed that consciousness is a complex phenomenon in nature because we are the most complex things we know of in the universe. The human brain is the most complex thing we know of in the universe. We're complex. We do all of these things. We're conscious. And it's pretty obvious that all the humans around us are conscious. It's also obvious that the cats and dogs are conscious. And then the less like us a system is, the less we can have any behavior that tells us about conscious experience. And so I just started wondering, are there other, you know, somewhat complex systems in nature that we have no common experiences with? If they're experiencing something, how would we ever know?
23:01 Speaker 03 I actually talk about this. I've named this the strong assumption. And the strong assumption is what I'm talking about, that consciousness only arises in complex systems like human beings, or potentially AI that we might create one day, but something that is as complex as a human being, that that's where consciousness arises. That's kind of the strong assumption out of really only two assumptions we can make. I just had this thought one day. You know, if you're just standing and you're looking out at the universe and you're just a scientist and you want to figure out, okay, which of these systems that I'm observing have conscious experiences associated with them and which don't? And your starting point has to be broad. And the starting point either has to be some of them do, or all of them do.
23:45 Speaker 03 We know it can't be none because we have evidence of our own conscious experiences. So conscious experiences exist in the universe. Of everything I can perceive, either some of them have conscious experiences or all of them do. And so we're so limited by the science at this stage that it makes perfect sense to begin with this assumption that only some do. And that's the only evidence we can acquire is from these, you know, other systems like us, like other human beings. But I think it's important for Scientists and the public at large to realize that is purely an assumption based on our limited access to information. And we could do science, especially at this point, and it's what I'm advocating for.
24:28 Speaker 03 We could conduct science with the other assumption, not not getting rid of the first assumption we made, but starting with this other assumption. What if consciousness is actually a basic feature of the universe? What if it's more like gravity? And that doesn't mean it's not special or incredible, but we are just assuming that it arises out of complex processing and we don't really have good evidence for that. And so there's this question about whether it's actually a very basic feature and whether very simple systems have very simple types of qualia that arise in them and complex ones just have much more complex content arising. I started answering one question.
25:10 Speaker 03 I think I answered four other questions, but I'll stop and let you interject now.
25:15 Dan Harris? That's all, it's all good. So are you saying, I'm going to ask a simplistic question. Are you saying that this microphone into which I'm speaking may have some degree of conscious experience?
25:28 Speaker 03 I can't believe that my answer to that is yes, but the short answer to that is yes. But I would say that we are misled when we put it in those terms. And this is another place where the illusion of self becomes an obstacle. So we think of consciousness as being a self because that's how we experience consciousness. It's a little bit easier for experienced meditators who've dropped this illusion to follow me here, but you know, you can intellectually follow me even if you haven't had the experience. If consciousness is fundamental, there are conscious experiences arising in every point in spacetime across the universe all the time. I think my best guess, based on the atoms that compose this microphone,
26:12 Speaker 03 there's nothing to suggest that it's a integrated system like a brain, that it would feel like a self, that there's even a microphone as a, you know, it's like we can talk about. Human beings kind of is being one system. But the truth is, if consciousness is fundamental, there are many other conscious experiences arising in my brain and body right now that I am not aware of. So the I that I can report on is kind of a stream of memories that get created because of the way my brain works. Right? So I have access to many different conscious experiences in the past because memory strings them along. But in the same way that, you know, I have many, I've had many experiences that I don't remember, right?
26:56 Speaker 03 And so those are experiences that arose and passed away in the universe. And there may be a very minimal conscious experience that arises out of the processing that's happening in my liver, out of blood flow, out of cells connecting and disconnecting, out of, if consciousness is fundamental, it truly is like an infinite number of experiences arising and passing away in each moment. And as you know, that actually is the truth of our own experience as well. There is no self that carries the experiences along. What we have is memory. Memory is a huge part of what creates the illusion of self because even though we are more like waves, our conscious experience is more like waves
27:39 Speaker 03 in that things are coming into and out of being. Some of the things that come into being are other conscious experiences from the past. So we have, it's interesting to think about in this other way that we are connected to our previous selves. Like if you think of yourself as a five-year-old kid, right? The truth is physically, your brain is probably more similar to my brain right now than it is to your brain as at five years old. But you have this connection through time to this other person at this other time, this other place in time and space because memory has given the conscious experience you're having now access to conscious experiences that happened to that person a long time ago.
28:23 Speaker 03 And conscious experiences can't be shared in the same moment, but they can be shared across time. And we can get into some crazy thought experiments I've been having about, you know, maybe future technologies will actually change this. I think it's not unlikely that in the future there will be technology that potentially gives us an ability to share conscious experiences. Not perfectly, but your memory of your five-year-old self isn't perfect either. So but in that same way that You can conjure up an experience of being yourself many years ago. You have that memory, you've, you know, broke your knee and the pain of that experience. In the same way that you have access to that, we might be able to live in a future where
29:06 Speaker 03 you could have access to my experience right now, looking at you from over here. I think that type of thing will really help dispel this illusion of self. But yeah, that's another rabbit hole.
29:19 Dan Harris? I think it's a part of the plot of Jennifer Egan's book, The Candy House, right? I might be, you didn't read it?
29:26 Speaker 03 I don't know it.
29:27 Dan Harris? Okay, Jennifer Egan.
29:28 Speaker 03 I'm gonna write it down.
29:29 Dan Harris? Yeah, she wrote a book, she's been on the show too, I'll drop a link to that. She wrote A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I believe won a Pulitzer. And then she wrote a later book, I think it's called The Candy House or something. I'll probably, I'm probably screwing it up. But one of the people in the book invents this technology where you can experience other people's consciousness.
29:47 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:48 Dan Harris? Okay, so let's just go back to some of the points you made earlier. When you're talking about consciousness is fundamental, you are saying this far out thing that yes, there may be some level of consciousness experience in the table I'm leaning on right now, the chair I'm sitting in, the microphone I'm speaking into. It's not consciousness the way we as complex systems would experience consciousness, where we experience it as a self who's existed through time, which again is an illusion, but it's still.
30:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's any experience of being the microphone.
30:23 Dan Harris? Yes.
30:23 Speaker 03 You know, I think that wouldn't make sense, yeah.
30:25 Dan Harris? But there's a, you know, and one of your interviewees in the audio documentary talks about this and he uses it, because this is a guy, the scientist you're talking to, has done no small amount of Buddhist practice. And he talks about the fact that some of these, what we would call inanimate objects, have. What a Buddhist might call bare awareness, meaning that there's just some raw knowing faculty available, unhindered by this sense of self or my motion.
30:55 Speaker 03 My guess is, and the way I view things now, but this is jumping a lot of steps, is that anywhere we're perceiving mass structure, things in the universe, that is kind of a warping or shaping of consciousness so that there would be some kind of content and that consciousness is kind of what everything actually is at bottom. That consciousness is what the universe is made of. And so, you know, if there is something like pure consciousness, we wouldn't, if we're perceiving something, that's not where we would find it. It's probably much closer to that. But I think wherever we see matter, I often use the analogy to spacetime.
31:38 Speaker 03 Einstein gave us this incredibly brilliant, you know, new way of viewing the situation we're in, which is that gravity is not a force in the way we used to think about it, but it's a warping of spacetime, that there's kind of this fabric of spacetime and it gets warped and that explains how things move and why mass changes the shape of spacetime and then changes the direction of objects. And so if consciousness is fundamental, for some reason, it takes these different shapes and forms and causes all of these different types of qualia to arise. What we are perceiving, when we perceive anything, a pencil or tree, you know, even sound waves, that to me, my guess is that's part of the structure of some type of warping that is causing these experiences to happen
32:23 Speaker 03 and that if there is truly something in the universe that is bare awareness or pure consciousness, that is kind of the fundamental stuff. That's what consciousness is. And then content arises when it takes these different shapes and forms.
32:38 Dan Harris? Okay, so let me represent the listener here for a second. If it's true that consciousness is fundamental, what does that have to do with my life?
32:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, so in many ways, nothing.
32:51 Speaker 03 I think it's like many other paradigm shifts. So you could say the same thing about Einstein's discoveries and intuitions. What does it matter to me that it's not three dimensions of space? And then, you know, time is this other thing. These paradigm shifts, I think, truly end up affecting everyone because they almost literally change the universe we live in. Right? So if you imagine living 300 years ago, that like every time we get new information, we feel different in the world. We don't feel like we live on a flat earth. We don't feel like, and of course, most of the time, these things aren't relevant.
33:36 Speaker 03 But I think in the big picture, they are, and they kind of seep into the way we, we live our lives. It's also, I think, many of these scientific truths are a source of awe and inspiration for so many people. So it is getting out of your daily life and lying out on a field and looking at the stars at night that gives you that feeling of awe, partly because you know that the vast universe is out there and you have a sense, you know, the more we understand about the situation we're in, in many ways, the more awe inspiring things become. And so in the same way that I think everyone would want to know the, the truth of our situation, that we're, we're orbiting the sun and this is how things work.
34:21 Speaker 03 And there are these things called black holes that we don't understand and don't affect my everyday life. But what is that? And how is it possible that light disappears and we don't understand how things work in those zones in the universe? I think if it's true that consciousness is fundamental, and, and I really don't know, and I'm not claiming that it is, I think it's a valid path of inquiry, scientific inquiry. But if we become more and more convinced that is the case, to the point where we think it's more likely than not, that is a completely paradigm shifting thing. And if you, you can, I mean, I, I now spend a lot of my time doing this, running through these thought experiments, but if you just. Think about the fact that we now understand that
35:03 Speaker 03 everything you see, everything, not just the people, not just the dogs and the cats, not just the mice, but everything you perceive in the world is actually a representation of conscious experiences. I think that changes the way we live our lives. I think it changes how we think about ethics. I think there are things we couldn't even possibly imagine now that it will change about the way we feel and behave and conduct science and all the rest. I think it will also just lead to many new discoveries because we haven't gone down that path. And so I think, once some really brilliant scientific minds start with this assumption and see where it leads, it's like anything else, like any other scientific discovery,
35:48 Speaker 03 the discovery comes first and then it leads to all these things that you never could have dreamed of. I guess that's another, that's a further point in how it's not necessarily relevant now, but eventually this becomes relevant for our everyday lives because, you know, the discovery of quantum mechanics gives us quantum computing. Once you learn more about how the universe works, there are just these inevitable, you know, new ideas and technologies and sciences that come out of it. So I, I find it very exciting to, to imagine this paradigm shift happening.
36:20 Dan Harris? Well said. And Zoe, yes, I can imagine that it would matter to us, as you said, because it could lead to scientific developments that would have, you know, everyday implications. But there is even just at the level of the mind, and I think this is probably available now to most of us, this contemplation of, I was thinking about, a friend was telling me about another friend who had taken some psilocybin, you know, eaten some chocolate with a little bit of mushrooms in them and just a microdose. And she was sitting in her backyard and, and all of a sudden felt like, oh yeah, the trees are breathing back at me.
36:53 Speaker 03 Connected, yeah.
36:55 Dan Harris? And, and so if you're lying, just to go back to the scenario you posited earlier, you're lying on the ground on a summer night and you're looking up at the stars to think that what you're lying on and what you're looking at, it all has some level of experience to it.
37:11 Speaker 03 Well, beyond that even, that that's what actually everything is at bottom.
37:17 Speaker 03 That the things we perceive as being out there, you know, the atoms and the ways that they appear to us in our conscious awareness are actually not things in the way we think of them at all. They are our view on other conscious experiences, that that's all there really is. And yes, I think there's something very profound. And I think it significantly shifts the way we feel in the world. And I would say for the better, for the most part. And so I would actually invite your listeners to just run that thought experiment. You know, you don't have to believe it, but just spend a little, a little bit of time. I walk the listener in my documentary through this process of an experience I had of when I was going for a jog.
38:02 Speaker 03 And I'm around a lot of people and birds. And I just started letting my intuition for understanding that other conscious experiences exist in the joggers around me and the dogs and the mice and then maybe the ants. And then I kind of let that intuitive understanding I have that there are these other. I mean, the truth is even doing that, like we're so, we're usually so stuck in our own experience. It's almost surprising to us that other people are having their own conscious experiences. Right? Like, it's amazing that it's surprising to us, even to someone like me who thinks about this all the time. And actually, it's the way, I'm getting a little off topic, but I'll come back. But I love, my daughters often have this experience where it's, it's a little bit of like a spiritual epiphany where,
38:47 Speaker 03 and I think it's in moments when they're really connected. And I've noticed this too, this happens to me with Sam sometimes or close friends when we get connected. You feel like you're sharing a moment, you feel so connected that you're in this moment together. And then you realize, but wait, they're in this perspective. They're over there having this experience with me. That's not my experience at all. I think it's spiritually useful. It's useful for our wellbeing to actually focus on this anyway. The places where we know conscious experiences exist, to just kind of be in the world and realize. These lights are on all around us, this ineffable and mysterious and beautiful light of consciousness, this experience I'm having, that there are many of them all around me. And there's something, I think, quite beautiful about that. But then, the deeper
39:32 Speaker 03 you let that sink in, I think the more of that feeling starts to overcome you. And I think it's interesting just to see, how would you feel if you knew that you can let that thought experiment you're doing with the cats and the dogs, assuming they're all having their experience, probably something you can hardly imagine what it's like to be a dog, what it's like to be a mouse, what it's like to be an ant. And then suddenly, it's grass and trees and plants and flowers and the earth. And, you know, it's all just teeming with this sense of being. I think it's a pretty big shift.
40:10 Dan Harris? Coming up, Annaka Harris talks about why thinking about consciousness can do wonders for your well-being, the illusion of the self, and how meditation might inform science.
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41:01 Dan Harris? My mind's going in two directions with this. One is at the shallower level, not that any of this is shallow, but on the easier to access level, just thinking about other people's consciousness experience, never mind the conscious experience of a blade of grass.
41:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
41:16 Dan Harris? Is, kind of pushes you in a Copernican direction, like you're no longer the center of the universe. There are lots of centers, there's no center. And then the other thing that's coming to mind is I interviewed a few months ago, Sebastian Younger, and I know Sam on the Waking Up app also interviewed Sebastian, who's a journalist and had this near-death experience and-
41:36 Speaker 03 I've been in touch with him about this, actually.
41:38 Dan Harris? Oh, you have? Okay.
41:39 Speaker 03 Yeah.
41:39 Dan Harris? And so one of the things he was saying, and this is me summarizing his non-scientific summary of what scientists actually think, so this is probably a lot that's going to get lost in this translation, but roughly speaking, the idea, it's funny, you know, in spiritual circles, you sometimes hear people referring to source energy, like the source, and that always kind of rubbed me the wrong way, just because it sounded highfalutin, or just kind of, I don't know, it just felt off to me. And yet, I think what Sebastian was saying, and you'll correct me slash him, is that there's an intuition among scientists that there may just be one bucket of consciousness that we're all getting a share of.
42:21 Dan Harris? And so that goes right to oneness and not being isolated and separate and lonely in this world, you know, navigating a cold, indifferent universe.
42:33 Speaker 03 Yes. No, I think you said it well, I think that's right. I mean, I frame it a little differently, but that is the takeaway if consciousness is fundamental. I think we always have to be careful to not anthropomorphize it, especially with the experience of self, because for most people, I mean, I even can fall into this, I have to kind of keep breaking my intuition so that I can think clearly. For most of us, we almost feel like self and consciousness are the same thing. So when we imagine consciousness being pervasive-
43:10 Speaker 03 It's very hard for us to do that without adding a self. And this is where, you know, I have to be very careful with my terminology. And I also have to be careful to be clear that I'm not advocating a whole wide range of new age claims that have some crossover here because I'm really coming at it from a scientific standpoint of this is something we truly don't understand. And there's this other option that we haven't yet investigated and we don't know. But I think we need to think very carefully if we're moving forward with an assumption that consciousness is fundamental and what does that mean about the universe? What does that mean about the physics and the math that we see around us?
43:52 Speaker 03 I think the way to think about it, I often, I've been using two analogies. I often use the analogy of a pot of boiling water, you know, where water is the fundamental stuff, where everything is essentially water and the bubbles represent different conscious experiences arising and passing away. And it's not that water has a mind or a personality or anything like what we experience. Right? It's just that the answer to the question, you know, when you break things apart and break things apart and you get to the atoms and you get to the quarks and you get to the bottom of everything, what is this stuff? What is the stuff of the universe?
44:32 Speaker 03 And the answer to that, if consciousness is fundamental, is that stuff we perceive isn't stuff out there. It is how one conscious experience affects another conscious experience. And so it's these molding of qualia and felt experiences that arise. And again, I'll go back to this analogy of seeing green because I think it's useful here too, where in the same way that we feel that green is something that's out there and scientists fell for this for a long time too. Now, you know, scientists understand what the mechanism is that causes us to see green and that there's no greenness out there in the universe. Our intuitions are very hard to get past there. Right? Like we're, especially if we're just human beings without a lot of science trying to,
45:17 Speaker 03 you know, I see green, you see green, we can all talk about green, like the leaf is green and there's a green leaf and it's right there and I know it's there. Right?
45:26 Speaker 03 It is how my brain responds to light waves that come in this direction and get processed and so on. And so, you know, it's interesting where physics, where fundamental physics is headed now, most physicists are on the same page about agreeing that space is not fundamental, that space is something that's emergent. So I've been thinking a lot about this lately, too, to help kind of rattle my intuitions. Is it possible that there's an analogy to the scene green with space, where space isn't even something that is real? There's no space out there. Our brains are mapping something where we're getting a sense of the structure of reality. But is it more like energy frequencies? And George Messer, who I interview for the series, speaks about this beautifully
46:11 Speaker 03 and gives an analogy about music and about, I won't go into the details there, but that's in the chapter on space and time. But he gives a really interesting ways of conceiving of how it's possible space is not space in the way that green is not green. And it is our experience of something that we're interacting with. And it's a very good approximation of a map of whatever our brain is mapping for us. But the idea that space is a real thing, the way we perceive it, I think, is very likely false. This actually comes back to a question you had earlier, which is
46:51 Speaker 03 how insights in meditation might inform science. And I want to be very careful here, too, because I think there's no reason to believe that any insight you have in meditation is necessarily a scientific insight. I think it's interesting to me because there are a few key insights in meditation that have been had over and over and over again, that clearly map on to what we understand about the physics of things. And so I think it's possible that there are ways to get a clearer sense of reality to and it actually is a great tool for breaking intuitions. So, you know, seeing through the illusion
47:33 Speaker 03 of self, having experience that is spaceless and timeless. I think there's a way in which meditation breaks our evolved patterns that have evolved to keep us alive, but have not necessarily evolved to get us to see the truth clearly, that it's possible that meditation can be used as a tool in some cases to gain deeper insights about the true nature of reality, largely because it's short-circuiting all of these evolved tools that actually create illusions for us that are useful for our everyday lives, but that create illusions in terms of being able to see the underlying reality clearly.
48:12 Dan Harris? So many things I want to talk about. You brought me right to where I was hoping to get, which is, I think we should talk about some of the practical meditation things we can do that to help us, you know, knock on this door ourselves or really explore this mystery. But let me just pick up on the evolution thing, because I sometimes think about how evolution bequeathed us these minds that kept us alive, but kept us unhappy.
48:34 Speaker 03 Yes.
48:34 Dan Harris? Because in order to stay alive, we needed to constantly be in a state of anxiety and desire. And, and so what's called for now at this moment in human history, when we have these ancient brains wielding these very modern weapons in terms of nukes and AI and bio weapons and whatever, and never mind the, the climate crisis, what's called for now is kind of the next step in evolution, which is, in my view, to be able to see through some of the illusions with which we've been wired so that we can do smarter shit going forward. Does that all land for you?
49:11 Speaker 03 Yes, it does. I actually talked to Joseph Goldstein, who is our mutual friend, but I spoke to him a few times for my, for my documentary series. And one thing, it was one of my favorite parts of our conversation, is he said that he had a conversation with another friend of his once, talking about how meditation is essentially going against evolution.
49:36 Speaker 03 I mean, if, if you really follow your meditation practice perfectly, you won't eat or, you know, you won't do any of the things that are going to keep you alive. And, you know, that also makes sense. We are entropy fighting machines. And in order to fight entropy, it takes energy. And inherent in that is competition and pain and injury and death and desire. And all, all the sources of suffering are just part of the energy and structure it takes to maintain life. And so, yeah, I mean, this is something I, I struggle with in my own practice, really, is just finding this balance of not leaving this world completely and finding a way to be in it with the wisdom that can be gained
50:21 Speaker 03 from seeing how much it all is just a suffering generating machine, really.
50:28 Dan Harris? The spiritual traditions do have an answer to this, which is that it's a balance, that two things are true at the same time. One is that at the level of subatomic particles, it's, you know, mostly this chair isn't really a chair. It's just empty, you know, particles spinning in empty space. And the same is true of yourself. Like, if you look for Annaka behind your eyes, you won't find some homunculus of Annaka. It's all just conscious experiences arising and passing away in the present moment. That's all true, but it would be a mistake to arrive at a nihilistic conclusion that none of this matters, because it is also true that on the day to day level, you are Annaka and I am Dan, and I should be nice to you.
51:15 Speaker 03 And a lot, and a lot of the happiness and wellbeing depends on, yeah, how we use these systems.
51:21 Dan Harris? So in the, you know, in some of the famous Buddhist art over time, the, the final stages of enlightenment include a return to the marketplace. You know, that, that we, we can have these big insights into the nature of reality, but it's not that none of it matters.
51:38 Speaker 03 No, and they, they help relieve the suffering that, that exists, that is inherent. Yeah.
51:42 Dan Harris? The suffering that prevents you from being useful, from being in the marketplace or sort of in the world as a useful, helpful human being.
51:51 Speaker 03 Yes, helping to alleviate suffering.
51:53 Dan Harris? Correct. Yes.
51:55 Speaker 03 So Donald Hoffman wrote a book and also has a great TED Talk on this subject where he argues that evolution actually works to hide the truth from us. And so the more evolved a system is, and the better at survival it is, the less it sees the truth of the underlying reality. Of course, it sees the truth of how to survive, but the better you are at surviving, the less you are able to see the truth, which makes a lot of sense. And his work is really worth checking out. I'm still trying to remember the name of his book. But so I had just had a conversation with Donald Hoffman when I then had
52:38 Speaker 03 that conversation with Joseph, and it made clearer for me why meditation can actually be such a useful tool for scientists, especially scientists interested in fundamental science and in consciousness, because we can use it as our tool to break through all of the intuitions we have evolved that make us think, for instance, that there is green out there in the universe, right? So a lot of scientific breakthroughs and paradigm shifts cause us to, I would say probably all the ones I can think of, cause us to shift our intuitions or shatter an intuition we have.
53:19 Speaker 03 And I think that the cool thing is that we are able to shift our intuitions, we're able to remold them. And so through understanding, I still, on a day to day basis, feel like green is out there in the world, but I feel differently about it now that I understand the mechanics of how that happens than I did when I didn't understand that. In my series, I talk about the germ theory of disease and how Intuition-shattering that was for people. I mean, it's, and this goes again back to how we almost live in a different world after we have new information about it. You know, people used to live in a world that did not include microscopic things. We didn't know they existed.
54:03 Speaker 03 We didn't know that's how people got sick. There were many theories about how people got sick. It was confusing. We were trying to figure it out. Then this theory came along and eventually of microscopes and we can actually see them for ourselves. After that invention and after the acceptance of this scientific breakthrough, we now live in a new world where there are microscopic things that we can pass to each other through the air that we can't see or feel or taste or touch that can make us sick and ultimately kill us, these harmful things that are, that are invisible. And so meditation can be used to further that process. And in some cases, I think to begin that process of breaking through the intuition that is preventing us from seeing a deeper truth. And I can give a couple of examples.
54:48 Speaker 03 So self is an obvious one. It can break through intuitions, I think, in a way that doesn't necessarily give us true information, but is just useful to break the intuition. So the fact that people can have an experience of a spaceless, timeless form of consciousness. It turns out that space is very likely not fundamental. And so that is kind of an insight into a truer version of, of the situation we're in. But even if that weren't true, I think being able to sit in an experience of no space and no time opens up your ability to think creatively about how the universe works in
55:29 Speaker 03 a way that is almost impossible when you're stuck in these evolved intuitions. And I think the same is true for psychedelics. It so drastically changes the way we experience the world that it gets you to realize how different things could be.
55:48 Speaker 03 So for someone like Einstein to be able to think about the universe and to think about the forces we understand and to reframe the whole thing as not that that large, massive bodies are like magnets pulling things in, but that the fabric of spacetime is curving and things are falling towards it. He was gifted with an incredibly creative and brilliant mind. But part of what that brilliance and creativity came out of is an ability to let go of the way we typically experience things, to not trust that the way we experience things in a day to day way is the true, is the true way things are.
56:30 Speaker 03 And so that's my answer to how meditation can be scientifically useful. I mean, I think there also are now some insights that we know, which are in fact truer.
56:44 Dan Harris? Coming up, Annika talks about some practical meditation techniques to explore consciousness and the importance of challenging your intuition.
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57:36 Dan Harris? What I keep wanting to drive us to is like actual practices people can do to help them like experience this. And by this, I mean, the illusion of the self, the nature of consciousness in ways that will improve their actual lives. I know you posted on your blog for a while ago, years ago, some of Joseph's exercises for looking at like, what is a thought? Or, so anything that comes to mind that can help us really experience this for ourselves and see the liberative potential of seeing through this illusion?
58:07 Speaker 03 Yeah. I mean, I think regular meditation practice.
58:13 Speaker 03 Is really all it's about. And, and I will say, I'm sure your listeners have heard this a million times, but I will say, sitting a meditation retreat, the reason I made you sit a meditation retreat is because I do believe there's something that we don't yet understand at the level of the brain about spending that kind of time. I think it's very different from even if you practice an hour a day for years and years. I think there's a different shift that happens. That's very likely physical at the level of the brain. When you commit to just days of the practice all together in one go. I know that that's where I've had my biggest shifts and insights have been on meditation retreats.
58:56 Speaker 03 So I cannot recommend that highly enough. I force as many of my friends as will let me to sit a retreat.
59:04 Dan Harris? I remember there was a time when you and the girls were at our apartment back when we lived in New York City and we were talking about meditation retreats. And I asked your older daughter, would you be okay if mommy went on a meditation retreat? And she said, no, no, she can't leave it. I said, what about daddy? She's like, oh, yeah, he can go.
59:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, fine. Yeah. I have sat some retreats now since I had children, but it's definitely, it's definitely harder. But I'm so grateful, actually, for those long ones I had before I had children, because those feel like permanent changes. I don't quite understand how that's possible. But, and I'm not the only one who says this, but it feels like a permanent lasting change, those shifts that happen on retreat. Even after a year, I didn't go on retreat probably for 10 years after we had kids. Those shifts and insights remained stable. So I think there's something really to be said for many days at a time of practicing.
1:00:02 Dan Harris? For sure. One thing that works for me, and I just want to run this by you, in terms of being able to experience, you know, very sort of accessible level, to me, this doesn't work for every mind. So I'll just say it out loud. But there's this kind of progression that I do in my meditation practice. And it's particularly when I'm doing walking meditations, so my eyes are open, where, and this is a Joseph Goldstein technique, where I will use the passive voice. So seeing is being known, or hot or cold is being known, pressure is being known. And then you ask, By what? And you don't have to look too hard, just like simply what, what, what is knowing all of this? I know all, I know I'm seeing a bunch of stuff right now and I know I'm hearing my own
1:00:46 Dan Harris? voice, which is slightly grating, like, but who is taking delivery of those packages? And, and the not finding is the finding?
1:00:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting that, that works for me now. Before I had the insight myself, that type of instruction was not helpful to me. So maybe I can help the listeners who don't find that helpful.
1:01:09 Dan Harris? And I think there are a lot.
1:01:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, because for me, and you know, I don't know if it has to do with how active an imagination someone has, but when I would look, I would see that the image that would come up for me is an image of myself. So I found it.
1:01:28 Speaker 03 And it almost went again, like it was almost bad for my practice because it was pushing me more into the feeling of self. It was just bringing back the illusion for me. It was like kind of accentuating the illusion in a sense. The thing that, the first thing that really worked for me was Harding's work on having no head. I think that's the name of his book.
1:01:51 Dan Harris? Yeah, the book is called On Having No Head. And I forget his first name, but Harding is his last name.
1:01:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, I'm forgetting his first name too. Yeah. And before I even read the book, just hearing the title of the book was hugely transformative to me because in my meditation practice, I just kind of took the advice from the title, like imagine you have no head. And that was almost instantaneous for me. So I recommend that to, to people who have a hard time looking for the looker and that doesn't really shift their, their feeling at all. For me, it feels more of, of an experiential practice in the moment of the idea of your head is also an idea. And so you can reframe the way you imagine yourself to be in the world. And when you drop that, To me, that does something really interesting. It just shows me the truth immediately.
1:02:41 Speaker 03 So I would highly recommend reading that book and trying that practice.
1:02:45 Dan Harris? That's what did it for me.
1:02:47 Speaker 03 On having no head?
1:02:47 Dan Harris? Yeah, your husband recommended it to me and then I brought it with me on a meditation retreat.
1:02:52 Speaker 03 Interesting.
1:02:52 Dan Harris? The thing about this is that, and Sam is really good in his guided meditations on this, like, he writes about this in his book, also called Waking Up, like, don't look too hard, because it's actually right there on the surface. And don't expect white lights and like string music. It's not that kind of insight. It's like, just super obvious and right there.
1:03:10 Speaker 03 Yes. Yeah. The other thing I was gonna say, actually, before you mentioned that practice and dropping of self at all as an intention or goal of some sort. One practice that I used to do kind of intuitively and spontaneously before I learned formal meditation practice, I think when I was just purely in this mode of being intensely curious about consciousness and what we are, what our place is in the universe, closing your eye, you know, in the same posture that you would for meditation practice, sitting in a quiet space, closing your eyes. And actually, you know, it's funny, I never thought about it. It's kind of a continuation of the having no head imagery.
1:03:52 Speaker 03 So what spontaneously came to me was imagining that I was just floating in outer space, coming into being for the first time. So trying to let go, just start with the bare minimum. Try, and anytime I had a concept, so like, you know, I'd have a sensation in my right hand. And, you know, when I first started this practice, I'd imagine it would, then I would kind of like, see in my mind's eye a right hand, right? Like, then I'm in a body again. And I'd try to, every time that happened, I'd try to drop it and just be like, no, what is that? What is that sensation actually? Because it doesn't feel like a hand, you know, what is it? It's a, it's a kind of pressure. And where in space is it? It's not so clear. And the more time you spend just on...
1:04:38 Speaker 03 Your perceptions, imagining you're just this being that's almost like a brain in a vat that's kind of just being connected one module at a time. I'm actually realizing now, I did a version of this in my book, kind of walking the reader through this type of thinking. But I think I find this to be a very useful meditation practice. Just try to drop all of it and you're just born now as this, you know, conscious being, maybe no body, you know, just outer space. And then what are those feelings? And do they happen in space? It can really get you to feel like consciousness is kind of all over and it takes on these different forms and you can really lose the sense of having a body and then therefore a self. And yeah, I mean, again, I think because our only
1:05:22 Speaker 03 direct contact with reality is through our conscious experiences, through our felt experience, the rest of it is just kind of ideas that we map onto it. And many of them are incorrect or based on illusions. And so I think getting closer to what the actual experience is, I don't know, clears the mind in a way and opens us up for different ways of thinking about our circumstance.
1:05:47 Dan Harris? I do want to say to the listener that, you know, these practices where you're kind of gently putting the sense of self through a cheese grater and like, you know, it's so that you're not so stuck in your own head. For many people, it can just take a while and just don't get sweaty about it. Try it out, be gentle. If it's not working, back off and do your quote unquote, regular meditation practice where you're watching the breath. And then every time you get distracted, you start again. This, it comes for some people slowly, it comes for some people quickly. Just play with it.
1:06:20 Speaker 03 I agree with all of that. And I would say, coming from a place of curiosity rather than having a goal, really covers everything because, and that is, I mean, I'm lucky that that's kind of where I started with my interest in all of this. You and I talked about this the last time we spoke, that the first time I really found myself doing what was essentially a meditation practice was when I was young and having incredibly intense migraine. So I was in severe pain as a child and just forced to sit and be with the pain. There's something about getting curious. I mean, even for just a science minded person, the scientist in me finds this practice so interesting. Forget about whatever goal I might get to. Just like I said, you're in outer space.
1:07:04 Speaker 03 You're, this is your first experience. What is the experience? We so rarely do this, but it's pretty wild to realize everything is so amorphous. It's hard to know what a sound even is, what a feeling of pain is, what, you know, I, I love to focus on the more amorphous emotions too. Like touch is more concrete, sight, hearing is more concrete. But when you think about the moment you feel hungry in meditation, what, what is hunger? Like where, how do you know what hunger is? It's really interesting. And so just from a scientific, curious human perspective, it's a great practice to kind of let go of all of the goals and just say,
1:07:47 Speaker 03 I want to understand my experience better. I want to know what these things actually are. I think I know what they are, but when I look at them, they're more interesting than I thought.
1:07:59 Dan Harris? Yes.
1:07:59 Speaker 03 And actually there's, I have a conversation with Susan Blackmore in the chapter on meditation and she wrote a book called 10 Zen Questions. And that's mostly what we talk about in my conversation with her. She talks about sitting a minute, this book 10 Zen Questions is essentially created out of her journal on a Zen meditation retreat. And she talks about her interest really coming from a scientific perspective. She went in kind of as a scientist with this journal, just wanting as, and she writes about consciousness, she wrote a textbook about consciousness. She is a neuroscientist, is very interested in the mind and the brain, and just went on this retreat with open curiosity. Like I, I know that what I think I experience isn't exactly what I'm really experiencing
1:08:44 Speaker 03 and I want to know what I'm really experiencing. Her book is great for that, but I think it's, it's just a great way to approach a meditation practice because there's no way to fail.
1:08:53 Dan Harris? Yes, exactly. Well, last question I want to ask you, and I think it's related, which is the, the value of challenging your intuitions. I mean, this is, now we've talked about it within the context of consciousness being fundamental possibly, but just as a life practice, what, how do we do it? And what's the value?
1:09:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, I actually am noticing, as you say that, I want to give one disclaimer, which is that we have a lot of incredibly useful intuitions. And I spend a lot of time actually talking about how unconscious processing gives us intuitions in circumstances where we might be in danger. And so, you know, there's a whole realm of situations where you want to follow your intuitions because they're probably picking up on all kinds of unconscious cues that are giving you good information about the world. And, you know, one circumstance can be you feel like you're in a dangerous situation, but you can't point to why. And so you kind of shrug it off. But it turns out, you were noticing all kinds of cues from the environment you weren't aware of. And so, there's kind of,
1:09:54 Speaker 03 there's that side of honoring your intuitions and using them the way they're meant to be used and listening to them when they're useful. But I guess it's also part of it is just understanding that an intuition, all it is really, is a feeling that something is true, a strong feeling that something is true, like you hold that you know the truth, but not knowing why, not having the answers, not having the logical reasoning behind it. So, you know, in the case of a dangerous situation, your body may be even adrenalized, you can feel like, I am in a dangerous situation, but you just consciously, you have nothing to point to. It may, it may be true, it may not be true. And so, there, you know, on
1:10:37 Speaker 03 the useful side of breaking intuitions and shattering intuitions and messing with them, that's kind of more, not on the survival side of things, but more just on the how we perceive the world around us. And I think it's incredibly interesting, on many levels, how the things we feel are true in any given moment. And this can be relationship wise, this can be a feeling about how you're being perceived by someone else, all the way down to feeling like I'm on a flat earth and the sun rises, the sun is the thing that's moving and rises and sets, and getting a understanding and deeper truth so that you can be more in touch with the reality of your situation. I think it's, it's useful to always
1:11:23 Speaker 03 Be open to the fact that the things that seem to be true may have a different reality when you look closer.
1:11:32 Dan Harris? Yeah, and this can be true on a very mundane level of like, yeah, that guy's an asshole, or, you know, I don't like this, and I've never liked plums, or whatever, you know, it's about not being so locked in your certainties and biases.
1:11:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
1:11:47 Dan Harris? Thanks for producing this audio documentary. It's really cool, and thanks for making time to come on here and talk about it. I really appreciate it. Just remind everybody again, please, of the name of the audio documentary and where people can get it.
1:12:00 Speaker 03 So the audio documentary is called Lights On, and it's available to purchase as an audiobook. So wherever you buy audiobooks, on Spotify, on Audible, on Apple. So most publishers now are creating audio originals, and those can be audiobooks, but they can also be documentary series, like the one I created. So this world of audiobooks has now expanded, and there are many different types of audio original content that you can get in the audiobook category.
1:12:31 Dan Harris? Yeah, it's really cool, actually.
1:12:33 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:12:33 Dan Harris? Also, and I'll put links to all of this, including the audiobook slash documentary in the show notes, but your website, socials, you know, what else are you putting out there that if we want to follow you?
1:12:44 Speaker 03 Lights On, the audio documentary, can be purchased wherever you purchase audiobooks. You can also get more information about it on my website, which is just my name, Annaka Harris dot com. You can also go to lights on documentary dot com, and that will take you to information about the series. We also have The Way You Would for a Podcast. We have show notes, chapter notes for every chapter, and so there are a lot of links to the relevant science and information for listeners who want to go deeper.
1:13:15 Dan Harris? And I will say, Anika has guided meditations, including guided meditations for kids, and also some loving kindness meditation on the waking up app.
1:13:23 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:13:24 Dan Harris? Well, it was great to talk to you. It's a pleasure, always.
1:13:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, thank you.
1:13:33 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Anika. Check out Lights On, available wherever you get your audiobooks. Also want to say, Anika guides a bunch of meditations over on the Waking Up app, specifically some meditations on loving kindness and also some meditations for children. If you want to sign up for the Waking Up app, you can do so at wakingup.com/tenpercent, T E N P E R C E N T. Just so you know, if you buy a subscription to Waking Up through that URL, you are directly supporting me and my team because we have a really cool partnership going with Waking Up. So, check it out, wakingup.com/tenpercent. I really do think of it as a great complement to what I'm doing over on Substack, danharris.com,
1:14:17 Dan Harris? where you can get access to me and my producers and my guests and one another. We've got this real community vibe going. You can also get ad-free versions of this podcast. But if you want a more traditional meditation app experience, Waking Up is awesome. Just before I go here, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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