Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. Today, my guest is dr. Sam Harris, dr. Sam Harris. Did his undergraduate training in philosophy at Stanford University, and then went on, to do his Doctorate in neuroscience at the University of California. Los Angeles. He is well known as an author who has written about
Everything from meditation to Consciousness. Free Will. And he holds many strong political views that he's voiced on social media and in the content of various books, as they relate to philosophy and Neuroscience. During today's episode, I mainly talk to dr. Harris about his views and practices related to meditation, Consciousness and Free Will. In fact, he made several important points about what a proper meditation. Practice can accomplish prior to this episode. I thought that meditation was about deliberately change.
One's conscious experience in order to achieve things, such as deeper relaxation, a heightened sense of focus or ability to focus generally elevated memory. And so on what Sam taught me and what you'll soon, learn as well. Is that while meditation does indeed hold all of those valuable benefits. The main value of a meditation practice, or perhaps the greater value of a meditation practice is that it doesn't just allow one to change their conscious experience, but it actually can allow a human being
Going to view Consciousness itself. That is to understand what the process of Consciousness is and in doing. So, to profoundly shift the way that one engages with the world, and with oneself in all practices, all environments. And at all times, both in sleep and in waking States. And in that way, making meditation perhaps the most potent and import and portal by, which one can access novel? Ways of thinking, and being and viewing one's life experience. We also discussed the so-called
Mind-body problem and issues of Duality and Free Will Concepts from philosophy in Neuroscience that. Fortunately, thanks to valuable experiments and deep thinking on the part of people like dr. Sam Harris. And others is now leading people to understand really what free will is and isn't where the locus of free will likely sits in the brain. If it indeed resides in the brain at all and what it means to be a conscious being and how we can modify our conscious States in ways that allow us
Us to be more functional. We also discuss perception, both visual perception, auditory perception and especially interesting to me and I think as well hopefully to you time perception which we know is very elastic in the brain, the literal frame rate by which we process, our conscious experience can expand and contract dramatically depending on our state of mind and how conscious we are about our state of mind. So we went deep into that topic as well. Today's discussion was indeed, an
Deep dive into all the topics that I mentioned a few moments ago. But it also included many practical Tools. In fact, I pushed Sam to share with us what his specific practices are and how we can all arrived at a clearer and better understanding of a meditation practice that we can each in all apply so that we can derive these. Incredible benefits not just the ones related to stress and focus and enhanced memory. But the ones that relate to our Consciousness that is to our deeper sense of self and to others several times.
During today's episode, I mentioned the waking up app The Waking Up app was developed by Sam Harris. But I want to emphasize that my mention of the app is in. No way a paid promotional rather. The Waking Up app is one that I've used for some period of time now and find very, very useful. I have family members that also use it. Other staff members here, the huberman Lab podcast, use it because we find it to be such a powerful tool. Sam has generously offered huberman, Lab podcast listeners, a 30-day completely free trial of the waking up app. If any of you want to try it, you can simply go to waking.
Dot-com huberman to get that 30 day free trial. During today's discussion, we didn't just talk about meditation Consciousness and Free Will, we also talked about psychedelics both their therapeutic applications for the treatment of things, like depression and PTSD, but also the use of psychedelics and we discussed Sam's experiences with psychedelics as they relate to expanding ones conciousness. I also ask Sam about his views and practices related to social media prompted in. No small part by his recent voluntary, decision to close down,
Down his Twitter account. So we talked about his rationale for doing that how he feels about doing that and I think you'll find that to be very interesting as well. Before we begin. I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is levels levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and behaviors affect your health.
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Can I save your life? But I'm might save your non-existent soul if we talked long enough,
well neither of us are clinicians but we are both bringing explorers from the different perspectives, some overlapping. Yeah and I'm really excited to have this conversation. I've been listening to your voice for many years learning from you for many years and I'd be remiss if I didn't say that. My father who's also a scientist is an enormous fan of your wake.
Yup, app nice and has spent a lot of time over the last few years. He's in his late 70s. He's almost 80. It's a theoretical physicist walking to the park near his apartment and spending time, meditating with the app or sometimes separate from the app. But using the same sorts of meditations in his head. Yeah, to going to toggles back and forth and even shouldn't say even. But yes, even in his late 70s has reported, that it is significantly shifted, his awareness of self.
And is conscious experience of things happening in and around him. And he was somebody who I think already saw him self as pretty aware person thinking about, you know, quantum mechanics and the rest. So a thank-you from him. Indirectly, a thank you from me now, directly, and I really want to use that as a way to frame up what I think is one of the more interesting questions and not just science and philosophy and
Psychology, but all of life, which is, what is this thing that we call a self? You know, as far as I know, we have not localized the region in the brain that can entirely account for our perception of self. Their areas, of course, that regulate proprioception, you know, our awareness of where our limbs are in space, maybe even our awareness of where we are in physical space. There are such circuits as we both know. Yeah, but when we talk about sense of self,
I have to remember this kind of Neuroscience. 10 one thing that we always say, you know, when you teach memory you say you know you wake up every morning and you remember who you are, you know who you are. Most people do even if they lack memory systems in the brain for whatever reason, pretty much, everyone seems to know who they are. What are your thoughts on what that whole thing is about? And do we come into the world feeling? That way? I would appreciate answers from the perspective of any field. Yeah,
Neuroscience of
Yeah. Well, big question. The problem is we use the term self in so many different ways, right? And there's, there's one sense of that term, which is the target of meditation and, and it's the target of deconstruction by the practice and by adjusting any surrounding philosophy. So, you'll hear. And you'll hear it from me that this self is an illusion, right. And and that there's a psychological Freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering it to be.
An illusion and some people don't like that. Framing some people would insist that. It's not so much an illusion. But I say it's a construct and it's not what it seems. Right. But it's not that every use of the term self is illegitimate. And there are certain types of cells that are not illusory. I mean, you know, I'm not saying that people are Illusions. I'm not saying that you can't
talk about yourself as distinct at yourself as the whole person and you know with as psychological continuity with your past experience as being distinct from the person and psychological continuity of some other person, right? And obviously we have to be able to conserve those data. It's not fundamentally mysterious that you're going to wake up tomorrow morning still being psychologically continuous with your past and not my past right? And and you know if we swapped lives, you know, that would do
Demand, some explanation. So the illusory nature of the self doesn't cut against any of those obvious facts. So that the sense of self is illusory. And again, we might want to talk about self and other modes because there's just a lot of interest there are psychologically and, you know, ultimately scientifically, the thing that doesn't exist, certainly doesn't exist as it seems. And I would, I would want to argue that. It actually is just a
proper illusion. Is this sense that there is a subject interior to experience, in addition to experience? And most people feel like they're having an experience of the world and they're having their inexperience with their bodies in the world. And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body in a very likely in the head. Most people feel like they're behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and
I thought and intention, and, and that are is, it's almost like they're your passenger inside your body. You don't. Most people don't feel identical to their bodies and they can imagine. This is sort of the origin, the psychological origin. And you know, the folks psychological origin of a sense of that. There's there might be a soul that could survive, the death of the body. I mean most people are what my friend, Paul Bloom calls Common Sense. Duelists, right? You used to the default expectation.
Has to be that whatever the relationship between the mind and the body. There's this there's some promise of separate bility there, right? That the and whenever you really push hard on the science side and say, well known that the mind is really just what the brain is doing. That begins to feel more and more counterintuitive to people and they're still seems some, some residual mystery that you know, at death, maybe something is going to lift off the brain and go elsewhere, right? So there's this sense of duel.
Them that many people have. And obviously, that's supported by Many religious beliefs. But this feeling, it is a very peculiar starting point. People feel that in a, in a, they don't feel identical to their experience, right? As a matter of experience, they feel like they're on the edge of experience somehow appropriating it from the side, you kind of on the edge of the world, and the world is out there.
Your body is in some sense, an object in the world, which, you know, you it's different from the world. You know, the boundary of your skin is still meaningful. You can sort of loosely control your body and you can't control, you can control your gross, you know, and and subtle, you know, voluntary motor movements, but you can't you're not controlling everything. Your body is doing, you're not controlling your heartbeat and your, you know, your hormonal secretions and all of that. And so there's a lot that's going on that is in
Dark for you. And then you take its, you give someone an instruction to meditate say, and you say, okay, let's examine all of this from the first person side. Let's look for this thing, you're calling. I and again, I is not identical to the body. People feel like their hands are out there and they're good when they're going to meditate, they're going to close their eyes, very likely, another going to pay attention to something, they're going to pay attention to the breath or two sounds. And it's from the point of view of being a local.
Focus of attention that is now aiming attention strategically at an object like the breath that there's this dualism that is set up and ultimately the ultimate promise of meditation and they're really two levels at, which you could be interested in meditation. One is, you know, very straightforward and remedial and non paradoxical and very well subscribed. And it's the usual set of claims about all the benefits you're going to get for meditation, right? So you're going to lower.
Your stress and you're going to increase your focus and you're going to, you know, Stave off cortical thinning and others. All kinds of good things. That science is saying meditation will give you and none of that entails really drilling down on this paradoxical claim that the self is an illusion or anything else of that sort. But from my point of view, the real purpose of meditation and it's real promise is not in this long list of benefits and you know, I'm not discounting any.
Of those though. You know, the science for many of them is quite provisional. It's in this deeper claim that if you look for this thing, you're calling eyes. If you look for the sense that there's a thinker, in addition to the the the mirror rising of the next thought. Say you won't find that thing. And and you can what's more, you can not find it in a way that's conclusive and that matters, right? And and it has a, there's a host of benefits that
Follow from that discovery which are quite a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits. You know, distressing increasing focus and all the rest.
The number of questions related to what you just said. And first of all, I agree that the evidence that meditation can improve focus, reduce stress, Etc. It's there, it's not an enormous pile of evidence, but it's growing and I think that especially for some of the shorter,
Our meditations, which I these days view more as perceptual exercises, you know, talked about this on the podcast before. But for those who haven't heard of before about perception, you can have extra reception, extending things beyond the confines of your skin interoception, which is also includes the surface of the skin. But everything in word and meditation through eyes closed, typically involving some sort of attentional. Spotlighting, something will get into two more interoceptive.
Extra receptive, events, Etc, including thoughts. And so I think of at a basic level meditation as a somewhat of a perceptual exercise, you can tell me where you disagree there and I would expect and hope that you would. But I would like to just touch on this idea that you brought up because it's such an interesting, one of this idea that our bodies are containers and that we somehow views ourselves as passengers within those containers. That's certainly been my experience.
And the image that I have is of, as you say, that is of myself or of people out there, that's it, a few centimeters below the surface, or that's it entirely in their head and of course, the brain and body are connected through the nervous system. I think sometimes a brain is used to replace a nervous system and that can get us into trouble in terms of coming up with real real directions and definitions but
The point is that there is something special about the real estate in the head. I think for as much as my laboratory and many other scientists are really interested in brain body connections through the nervous system and other organ systems of the that the nervous system bind that. If you cut off all my limbs, I'm going to be different, but I'm fundamentally still. Andrew, whereas if we were to lesion a, you know, a couple mm2 out of my parietal cortex, it's an open question as to whether or not, I would still seem as much like and
Two other people in to myself even. And so, there is something fundamentally different about the real estate in the cranial Vault, right? Even remove both of my eyes. I'd still be Andrew. And those are two pieces of my central nervous system that are fundamental to my daily life. But I'd still be me your as, and this doesn't, I think just apply to memory systems. I mean, I think there are regions of the frontal cortex that when destroyed been shown to modify personality and self-perception in dramatic ways. So, it's
It's a sort of obvious Point once it's made, but I do think it's worth highlighting because there does seem to be something special about being in the head. The other thing is that
sitting a few centimeters below the surface or riding in this container makes sense to me. Except I wonder if you've ever experienced a shift, as I have, when something very extreme happens. Let's use the negative example of, you know, all of a sudden you're in a fear State. All of a sudden, it feels as if your entire body is is you or as me and is and now I need to get this thing, the whole container and me to some place of safety, in one, whatever.
One. This is also true. I think an ecstatic States we can feel really when people say embodied, I wonder whether or not, we normally oscillate below the surface of our body. When I say oscillate, I mean, in neural terms of Me, Maybe our sensory experience is not truly at the bodily surface but sits below the bodily surface. More at the level of organ systems in within our head and then certain things that jolt us, our autonomic nervous system into heightened States. Bring us into states of you know bring us closer to the surface and therefore
Udall of us. Again, I don't want to take us down a mechanistic description of something that doesn't exist, but does any of that resonate in terms of how you are thinking about are? Describing the self?
Yeah, yeah. There's a lot there. If first, on the point of the brain being, you know, the locus of what we are as mines. Yeah, I mean, there are people who will insist that sort of the whole nervous system has to be thought of as the ability to talk about our emotional life. And you only know the
The the insula is connection to the gut and you just the the sense of self extends beyond the brain. But I am I totally take your point that a brain transplant is a coherent idea and you would expect to go with the brain rather than with the viscera. And so in that sense we really are the the old philosophical thought experiment of being a brain-in-a-vat mean, we essentially are already, you know, the vadas are skull and worrying.
Virtually in that situation,
horrible movie. I'm sorry, I can't help it interrupts. When I was a teenager, my sister and I used to go to the movies. Every once in awhile, we trade off who could pick the movie and she took me to see once the movie Boxing Helena, the David Lynch film, whatever saw, where he amputates, the limbs of a woman who he's obsessed by and keeps her. It's a really horrible film and about 20 minutes into it. My sister just turned to me and said, I'm so sorry and the question there and was whether or not two siblings should actually persist
Movie like that, right. We decided to persist in the movie so that we could laugh about it later, but it was rather disturbing. I don't recommend the movie, nor do I recommend seeing it with a sibling but in that movie that the woman, he takes her as a container and restricts our movement, right? Quite sadistic and horrible thing. Really David Lynch, interesting mind, perhaps. But the idea was that was to question. How much of the person persists in the absence of their ability to move at cetera? Could there be
He loved could there. Be these other affections anyway? Rather extreme example but one that I, that still haunts me and I suppose I'm thinking about still.
Yeah, well, so but just to follow that point there's a, there's a lot about us that we don't have access to unless we enact it physically. Like, you know, if I ask you, you know, do you still know how to ride a bike, right? There's no place in your memory where you can you can inspect by
Just sitting in your chair that you've retained the knowledge of how to ride a bike, right? Like I said, procedural memory is different from semantic or episodic memory. If I asked you, you know, do you know, do you know your address? Yes, you can recall your address just sitting there but if you had had a micro stroke that neatly dissected out your ability to ride a bike, you know, and left everything else intact. You know, you might think you could ride a bike but suddenly you stand up next to one and you have no idea what to do with it and that would be a discovery that would only happen.
Happen. If you were motorically engaged with that, you know, object and I'm sure there's you know we could probably come up with a hundred things about us that really seem core to us and we and I'm not separable for our, you know, from our personhood which seemed to only cut. You only get invoked when we're out there moving in the world and you know, we have limbs etcetera and
but yeah, no, it's the seat of
Consciousness. I mean it is the right framework to talk about all of this. From my point of view is consciousness and its contents, right? So we have Consciousness, the fact that there's something that is like to be us, right? The fact that the the world and our internal experience is illuminated that it has a qualitative character. And then there's the question of what is that qualitative character? What is it? You know, what, kinds of information do we have access to? What does it feel like to be us? How do how different states?
Dates of arousal change that. So you talked about fear. Yeah I mean fear can change a lot of things but and you know various neurological deficits or you know you know you can add drugs to the mix, you had psychedelics that you are radically transform, the contents of Consciousness. From my point of view, Consciousness itself is simply the, the cognizance the awareness. This that, that is the, the floodlights by which any of that stuff appears, right. So,
Consciousness doesn't change, but its contents change. And to come back to meditation for a second, many people think meditation is about changing the contents of Consciousness. You were there some kind of some content, you want to get rid of like anxiety, other contents, you want to to encourage like calm and you know, unconditional love or even some other, you know, classically Pleasant pro-social emotion and that's all fine. That's all possible. But the real
The wisdom of the two-thousand-year-old wisdom of meditation that really is the, the chewy center of the toasty pop is a recognition of what Consciousness itself is, always already like, regardless of the contents, and the changes in Contents. And this is why. I mean, we might talk about this, but this is why they're mutually compatible psychedelics and meditation from here somewhat, orthogonal because psychedelics is all about making wholesale change.
As to the contents of Consciousness and there's a, you know, some wonderful consequences of doing that there can be some heroin and terrifying consequences of doing that. But generally speaking, I think you know, used used wisely they can be incredibly valuable and and the therapeutic potential. There's enormous. But the crucial disjunction here is that there really is something to recognize about ordinary waking consciousness. The Consciousness that's compatible with my driving, a car to get here on time, right.
You know, you don't have to, you don't have to have the pyrotechnics of being on LSD to see the the the to transcend, the central illusion that I'm saying is the thing to be transcended, which is this sense that there is a duality between subject and object and every moment of experience and to take it back to something. You said about just all of our different modes in ordinary life. The interesting thing is I think people are constantly
Seeing their sense of self and they're not aware of it. And that me there, there's a probably an analogy to the visual system here, which is to visual saccades which a perhaps you've spoken about at some point on your
podcast, not enough. So please. Yeah.
So what happens with our, you know? Every time we move our eyes, this is called a saccade and we do that about three times a second or so just normally there is a, you know, the region of motor
Cortex that affects that movement sends, what's called an efferent copy of that motor movement which is which is used as information that propagates back to visual cortex that suppresses the data of vision. While the eyes are moving because otherwise if you weren't doing that every time you move your eyes, it would seem like the visual scene itself was lurking around and people can experience this for themselves if they just you know touch one of their eyeballs on the side.
I'd, you know, not all that hard and kind of Jiggle It, you know, and they can roll it around. You can jiggle from side to side, you can see that a, a movement of the eyeball, that's not governed by your ocular motor system delivers a jiggling of the world because it's not your brain is not anticipating in the same way and it's not you're not producing that that same you know predictive copy of the movement.
It's a little bit like if some action sports filner's on our staff here, that
The gimbal, you know, that holds a, an iPhone that you see the kids we on surfboards or skateboards or something there to hold a phone while moving around or the people who are the vloggers. Does anyone even still use that for a lot of time moving around and to its image stabilization? Essentially that keeps the the camera steady and these are more than cameras. Of course the for those listening point at my eyes but they do far more than just what a camera would do. But yeah this internal system of image stabilization. Yeah, I can see
See a perhaps where you're going with this, that, that it allows us to remain in a self-referencing scheme as opposed to sort of paying attention to, just how confusing it is to track the visual world at some level.
Why would you actually where I'm going? Is it? So people are having this suppression of vision three times a second on average and they're not experiencing it, right? So like you're like you're literally like you're effectively going blind.
And you're not noticing it and
is very
fast. Yes, it's very fast. Now there's an analogous suppression, I would say of the sense of self that had occurs every time.
Attention gets absorbed significantly and it's object, right? So like we even have this concept of you know losing yourself in your work or are you losing your admit the classic flow experiences have this quality where there's and this tends to be why they're so rewarding, where there's just, if you're in some, you know, athletic activity or, you know, an aesthetic one or you could be having sex, or you can be whatever it is, some Peak experience, its peak.
- usually entails there being some brief period where there was no distance between you and the experience right there for that moment, you were no longer looking over your own shoulder or anticipating the next moment or trying to get somewhere where you weren't or you know, micromanaging errors or like this that you know, there's not there's just the flow of unity with whatever the you know, whatever the experience is, you know, a surfer on on
Way of, right? And we love those experiences and then we are continually abstracted away from them by are thinking about them. We would think, oh, my God, that was so good. Or how do I get back to that? Or you're looking at a sunset, is the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen and then you're continually interrupting, the experience of merely seeing it with a commentary about how amazing this is and I wonder if what a real
Estate prices are here. I think it's possible that we could, we could move here and like your mind is just continually narrating. A chi conversation you're having with yourself. However, paradoxically, I mean, you're telling yourself thing yourself things that you already know as though there were two of you rather often, right? Like, you know, you're just, you know, I'm looking for, you know, which is the water and it's oh, there it is, right? But like I'm the one seeing it. Who am I saying? Oh the you know, there it is too. Is there someone else?
Who needs to be informed about the thing I already saw, right? So it's, it's, there's something about our internal dialogue. That is paradoxical. Is
there any neurologic condition? Also, like to me or anything like that? Where somehow people feel more unified with the cell phone, a continual basis, The Observer and the actor with him, whether it stayed more more as a complete sentence is there.
There, any known neurological syndrome may sound like a bad thing but it could be a good thing. Whereby people feel that the actor and the Observer within them are unified
continually. There's not a pathological wine. Maybe some of the, the work on the default mode Network suggest, that that's at least part of the story, right? So the default mode Network, which has been talked about a lot of late because it has come up both in the in the meditation literature and in the
Literature but its original Discovery, was that, you know, and the reason why it was called the default mode was that in virtually, every neuroimaging experiment, ever run, they found that between tasks when the brain was just in its default State, these these midline structures would would increase their activity and then they would then they would reliably diminish whenever the person in the scanner was on task and usually that meant some kind of out.
Word looking, you know, visual discrimination task, I'm it, but it could be, could be could be visual, it could be semantic, it could be. But there tends to be their eyes are open and they're paying attention to something that's being broadcast to them through, you know, monitor goggles. Or, you know, they're looking at a mirror that showing them a computer monitor. But the so the general Insight was there these midline structures in the brain that seem to be increasing their activity when the brain is just kind of
Line between tasks waiting for something to happen. And then further experiments found tasks that I actually up regulated activity there Beyond Baseline and those tasks seem to be self-referential. So that when you ask people, you know, you give me a list of words and you say would do these any of these apply to you right? You know, and so people are or you ask people to think about actually in one experiment I did when
You know, when you're challenging people's beliefs, when you're challenging beliefs, that that have more of a personal significance like political or religious beliefs, you get an upregulation in these regions as opposed to just generic beliefs about. You know, you're in Los Angeles. This is a table. You know, there's something to which people are not you know holding fast as a matter of identity. So anyway, both meditation and psychedelics seem to suppress.
Activity in these in these regions, which we know are associated with both, self-talk mind-wandering and and explicit acts of self-representation, right?
So should we say that they are somewhat autobiographical because they Access Memory systems and in the way you're describing them and then, the way that a colleague of mine who's been a guest on this podcast, I don't know if you interact with him before, but I would very much enjoy whatever interaction you'd would have, is David Spiegel. He's our associate chair of Psychiatry is now, huh? He and his father.
Father actually his father then he founded hypnosis as a valid clinical practice in Psychiatry and hypnosis which is obviously a heightened sense of attention with deep relaxation is known to dramatically suppress the, the default mode Network. He talks about this a lot and I always wonder as we take down activity, within the default mode Network. What surface is in its place and is what surfaces is in its place. Does that somehow
Like that, the two are normally in a push-pull because that's not necessarily the case, right? When I fall asleep, I can hallucinate. But that doesn't mean that during the day, my the fact that I'm looking at objects is, is what's preventing me from hallucinating? I close my eyes. I can get imagery. But, you know, there's this kind of a different illusion. The illusion of antagonistic circuitry sometimes, I don't want to take us off course, but the default mode Network seems to want to be there quote unquote. It seems to be fighting for for our attention.
Unless we give ourselves a visual Target at an auditory Target or some Salient experience of some kind, it sounds like and then if I'm surprised to hear that meditation reduces activity, in the default mode Network, at some level because meditation to me, oftentimes involves paying attention to a some sort of perceptual Target. Yeah. Maybe you could eventually explain as to how it might do that or why it might.
Yeah. And I don't think it's the whole story because obviously,
How we're going to tension is not.
Even if you're having the kind of ego akkad that I'm talking about where you're like, you're actually not clearly aware of yourself. You're not clearly defining yourself as separate from experience for the moment of paying attention you so you are sort of losing yourself in your work. That's not the same thing as having the clear meditative Insight of selflessness that I'm claiming is the goal of meditation but there is a due to wind back to the original point. I was making it the
reason why I drew the referee the analogy to visuals of God's. I do think there's a continuous interruption in our sense of self that goes unrecognized and the but the conscious acquisition of the understanding that the self is an illusion is a different experience and it's because it your then you're then focusing on this absence. Actually, there's another analogy to
The visual system that applies here, which is to the, the optic blind spot. I mean, it's like, so which is a good analogy for me because it cuts through a bunch of false assumption, as to, we kind of where that you would look for this, or how this relates to ordinary experience. So, as many people know that we have in both eyes, we have What's called the blind spot, which is a consequence of the optic nerve transiting through the retina. Unlike cephalopods, I
Camille, I think cephalopods have their optic nerve, you know as you know ape an omniscient being would have engineered it, connecting the retina from the back and therefore there is no blind area of blindness associated with its Transit back through the retina,
Roberto receptors on the outside. Exactly. Yeah, humans whatever. Reason put photos. Well, yes, I always say I wasn't consulted, the design phase something put photoreceptors combination of things but photoreceptors in the back and so
You actually have to send the highway of information
through
through the pixel center of the, of the eye. Yes, cephalopods and drosophila basically invertebrates. Right. The design is more at its face. Logical. Mammals very illogical design. At least as far as our judgments,
but it gives it gives me a good analogy. So I'll take
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So in any case we have this blind spot which you can I think most people learn this in school although my daughters had not been taught this in school. I just showed them this for the first time like a month ago which and they were briefly fascinated and they want to return to their screen time. But anyway, you can take a piece of paper and you make, you know, to marks on it and then you cover one eye and you fixate on on one mark.
You
can look this up online. If you need details about how to do this and you boss staring at one fixation point, you move the paper back and forth and you can get it to a place where the other Mark disappears and that it and if and you know you can run this experiment long enough to satisfy yourself that there is, in fact, a blind spot on your visual field which you with one eye closed, you don't normally notice the reason why you have to cover your cover one eyes because each eye compensates for the blind spot of the other. So, but which is to
Say that. If you close one eye and and Survey the visual scene, something really is missing whatever you're looking at, if you're looking at a crowd of people, somebody is missing a head and you're not noticing it and it's not it's not easy to notice because you know the brain doesn't tend to vividly represent the absence of information. I mean it's just like this is part of the game that's not being rendered. It's not, it's not showing up as a break in your, in the visual field. It's just not
Are and your people have argued that there's a kind of filling in phenomenon that happens, but I think that can be, you know, misunderstood or
exaggerated but the eye movements themselves you described before, I guess I should say that the the secod analogy of about transiently and repetitively erasing. The selfie works perfectly here because indeed microseconds little smaller. So God's occur all the time. Also prevent our eyes from fixating in one location for long enough to observe our blind spot.
Even if one eye is closed. Right, right. So if we add that the experiments done with paralytics to essentially lock eyes at one location, basically things just start disappearing. Yeah. It just pays all of them that we start listening but actually we start going blind, right? And those experiments have been done and on humans hear they're quite
terrifying. Yeah Batman. You can do that for yourself. Do it just begins to just all Melt Away in a goal and a warm glow no psychedelics required.
But the interesting point there is that, when you ask yourself, okay? So this because of the, as a consequence of the eyes Anatomy, there's this this thing you can see that is absent from your experience. But the question is, where is that in relationship to the rest of you to your mind please, that deep within or is that in some sense right on the surface of experience? And there's there's an expectation that people have
Again, I think conflating meditation with, with a search for changes in the contents of Consciousness there looking for, you know, you know, much more subtle things to notice about the mind or much, you know, vaster things to notice psychedelics sets up. This this expectation that, you know, you do, you know, a massive dose of mushrooms or LSD and everything changes. I mean, just get the, this full, you know, beatific vision and
You know, you get not only visual changes but you know emotional changes and you get synesthesia where you like you're just you have much more mind in so many ways. So they begin having these experiences or reading the mystical literature, you begin to think. Okay, well then freedom is is really elsewhere or is it is really it's deep within. It's like, it's not, it's not coincident with the ordinary awareness that
Cannibals. They can see this coffee cup, clearly, and that can just transition attention to, you know, reading an email with it with a sort of full sobriety of just, you know, you know, ordinary waking consciousness. But the truth is this insight into selflessness is insight into the non-duality of subject. And object is as close to ordinary Consciousness as this insight into the optic blind spot. Like what, where do you have to go to have this insight into the blind spot?
No, you just have to see if they're go anywhere. You just have to set up that the the experiment correctly such that, you know, you can see the data.
But the data is right on the surface. It's like it's almost too close to you, to notice if it's at all hard to notice it because it's because it's so close rather than its, you know, deep within or far away. And there are other analogies like I don't remember those Mind's Eye pieces of artwork that were those, like the random-dot stereograms where we have an image that pops out. I've always found it very difficult to see those because I have let you know, very dominant eye, you know, but some people people
can't see those. These are these images that used to be at the kind of like touristy.
Obstacle but people say oh there it is. The whale I'm think I don't see it. You know, kids that swim a lot when they're younger and there tend to breathe just to one side. I don't know if this was you this was definitely me. They tend to will keep one eye closed. You set up a pretty strong ocular dominance biasing your vision to one or the other I early in life, whether you're learning how to be a bow hunter or you're learning how to throw darts or shoot Billiards or anything involves selectively viewing the world through 10.
Knife or even a couple of hours can set up a permanent asymmetry in the waiting of visual flow in flow of visual information from the eye to the brain. It's reversible, but only through the reverse gymnastics of covering up the other I intentionally. So actually be, I had to be reversed patched for a while, because I was seeing double because I lost binocular vision. I don't stand a chance in hell of seeing an image pop out of a random. Yeah, scary. Yeah. Just kind of ironic because I did my PhD on binocular circuitry.
But nonetheless if people can see these or if they can't what I think they provide a really terrific example of what you're talking about it as a larger theme which is that perceptually you see a bunch of dots and then all of a sudden right? What you thought wasn't there suddenly there but can just disappear again or there are certain visual Illusions. If we were to include others that once you see them, you cannot unsee them, right? So there's the faces, vases, you know, figure ground type stuff. Yeah, it's very
It's bi-stable
perception. Yeah, bi-stable percepts and then there's sort of ocular competition. You show two different images to the Oz. Each of the two eyes rank. It is near impossible for people to perceive them. Both simultaneously. Yeah. So it's a little bit of what you're describing. I mean you seem to be fundamental features about the way the neural circuits are organized. That they don't want to stabili, they don't want to stay fixated on any one thing for very long to do. So, either takes training, intense, interest intense, fear, intense excitement,
My say intense, I guess I come back to this idea that the autonomic nervous system is somehow governing our ability to Spotlight at any one location for very long. Does that is that a useful framework or is that going to take us down a
different ways? It's sort of a different path for this. I mean the only point I was making is that the seemingly paradoxical claim that something can be right on the surface and yet hard to see, right? So like there are things that are because it's and again, this this
This seems to justify the expectation held by thinking you know, the vast majority of people who get interested in these, you know, spiritual things for lack of a better word, that the truth must somehow be deep within, right? Like there's really like a, there's some distance between where your between the one who is looking and the thing that has to be found, right? And that you have to go through this this long evolution of changes. I mean, the many metaphors that set this up it's like you're at the
It's of a mountain and you have to climb to the top and so you have to find the PATH. However secure secure does to get you there but there really is a distance between where your between your starting point and the goal and what I'm arguing. You know, in this is a kind of a non-dual to use a term of jargon is a non dual approach to meditation as opposed to a dualistic one, that there really is a
The path. And the goal are are coincident, right? That there's a there that you have to unravel the logic by which you would seek something that's outside of your, you know, the present moment experience. You know, IE not available, really, not available to you now because so many things worth having so many. So many skills worth acquiring really are not available to you now. It's like it's like you know you want to be a Pianist or if you want to speak Chinese or
Like the there's something you don't know and then you want to learn that thing and there's a whole process, right? And you might not be capable of doing it, right? You might and and real Mastery is far away, right? If you've never hit a golf ball and you want to hit a golf ball 300 yards straight, right? You know, I can pretty much guarantee you're not going to do that initially and you're not going to do it, you know, on day two, and you're not going to do it reliably for the longest time and there's real training, you know, in front of you to be.
Able to do that reliably.
An insight into and really the core Insight. I mean that the Insight that is the core of, you know, the Buddha's teaching to take 11 historical example of this really is available now and it is not, I mean granted it can be very hard 14 people and I had probably spent a year on silent retreat in one week, the three-month increments before
So I've got the point I'm making now, right? So like I, you know, it's quite as I mean, literally and this is, these are, you know, he's a Retreats where you spend, you know, 12 to 18 hours a day, just meditating trying to unpack the kinds of claims I'm you know, making now so there it's pot, it's possible to rigorously overlook this. It's possible to stand in front of the Mind's Eye image and stare in a way that is guaranteed not to give
you pop out, right? And to be to be Adept at, you know, staring in that way. So, it's possible to be misled. And so what I'm what I'm trying to argue here is that there's a fair amount of Leverage you can get with, with better information which can cut the time chorus of you are searching for this thing and and kind of cancel your false expectations about just where this is in relation to your ordinary waking consciousness and as possible to get bad information and to have a bunch of experiences, you know,
Go you go and do what I wasc a trip and you have it's incredibly valuable and is valuable for all the ways in which it change the contents of your Consciousness in, you know, startling ways and you had insights into your past and into your relationships and into wire not as loving as you might be. And there's lots to think about and you're like okay that's all great. That's all something that you know you can't we can talk about but there is it truly is orthogonal and if it makes a point of contact to what I'm talking about it's really just at one point, you know and
it's at the point where
this sense of subject-object division in Consciousness is illusory and vulnerable to investigation. And if you investigated at sort of the right plane of focus, you know, you pick the analogy you want from, you know, whether it's you know, setting up the the the optic blind spot experiment in just the right way so that you can see that. You know, it's actually not in the data is not there or in the bi-stable. Percept is great because
You know, when you see one of these images like the va's phase diagram or the, you know, the dalmatian, you know, that the looks like it just a mess of dots. And then you see the image of a Dalmatian dog, pop out. Once you see it, you really can't unsee it. Maybe we'll like once you have the requisite conceptual, you know, anchor to it, then every time you look you're going to find it again and and and it eventually becomes effortless, and that's what ultimately meditation is. I mean, this kind of meditation
Shinu, you ultimately learn to recognize that there's no separation from you between you and your experience, right? There's not the experience on the one hand and the cell on the other there's just experienced right. There's just seeing hearing smelling tasting, touching thinking feeling, you know proprioception add whatever channels of information you want to that but there's just the just the totality of the energy of
Yes. And its contents. And there's no, it's not that you're on the riverbank. And this is, this is how it can seem in the beginning. Even when you're practicing meditation, fairly diligently can seem like, you're on the River Bank, watching the contents of Consciousness Flow by and then and meditation is the act of doing that, more and more dispassionately. So you're no longer grabbing at the pleasant or pushing the unpleasant away. You're just kind of relaxing and an in the most non-judgmental.
Name of mind, just witnessing the flow, right? But if you're doing that dualistic Ali, you feel like the meditator, you feel like the subject aiming attention. And so now, you're on the River Bank watching everything, go go past, but the truth is,
You are the river, right? Experience itself is that there is just experience itself. You're not, you're not on the edge of experience, and everything you can notice is part of the of the flow, right? And there's, and there's no point from which to abstract yourself away from the flow to stand outside it. And to say, okay, this is, this is my life. This is my experience, this is my body. Yes, you can do that. I mean, those are all just thoughts, but that's more of the flow, right? And so there is a
There's a process by which you would eventually eventually recognize that there's no distance between you and your experience. And again you can you can wait for those moments in life, where experience gets so good or so terrifying, you know? It's just so Salient, right? Your amygdala is driving so hard. I mean, so you're in a war and you can't think about anything because they, You Know, The Enemy is shooting at you. And this is the most thrilling video game you've ever played in your life and your life is on the line or your your
You know, at the peak of some, you know, athletic event where there's just, you don't know how you're doing the things you're doing, but it's all happening automatically right? But you know, those are those are, you know, one one hundredth of one percent of one's life, you know? And you know what, I'm calling meditation is a way of Simply understanding the mechanics of attention whereby. You are denying yourself that Unity of experience so much.
at the time and recognizing that that's, you know, it's based on a misperception of the way Consciousness always already
is well, if there wasn't an incentive to learn how to meditate properly,
That was one and I've been meditating a fair amount since I was in my teens but more along the lines of just paying attention to breath and recognize thought sort of Observer open Observer type meditation or focused attention. I would suppose more of the focus attention type will get into these a little bit later but have a number of questions related to what you just said. Sure.
I love the idea that
this thing that we would all do well to understand, to observe Consciousness itself as opposed to trying to alter the contents of Consciousness, May sit much closer to us than one. Might think that it and that because it's so close to us. That might be one of the reasons why we miss it. I go right to a visual system example. I mean, if you don't you're wearing corrective lenses and there's a speck on your
As you know, typically you're looking out through the lens and see when to observe that spec any number of different analogies could work here. The the fact that there are states however, few positive and negative ecstasy 8, extreme ecstasy, and extreme fear being the to. I think most obvious ones that seems like we agree on that. Allow us to capture the sense of completeness of self or the unity of the Observer and the and the actor.
The fact that those are are seldom for the non trained for the non meditator suggest to me two things. I think one perhaps worth exploring more than the other, but one is that what's really being revealed in the states where we can feel the unity of the observer. In the actor is understanding something, fundamental about the algorithm, not the online algorithm but the algorithm that is our nervous system. Just, as a mentioned cephalopods, I mean mantis shrimp, see an enormous.
Array of color Hues that we don't write their map, their maps, and representations of the world are fundamentally different pit viper. See in the infrared, we restricted to somewhat of a limited range within the color spectrum, but still more vast than that of dogs or cats. Okay. So understanding that for seeing what a pit viper can see for moments would be informative, perhaps sensing heat emissions as a human might be invasive.
Maybe that's why we don't do it. So the question is to just make it straightforward is
Why would the system be designed this way? Again, neither of us were to consulted the design phase, but that brings me to perhaps. The more tractable question was, which is about development. I mean, I'm a great believer that the neural circuits that encouraged healthy parent-child relations or unhealthy parent-child relations, as the case may be in childhood stem from the initial demands of internal versus external states. Which is exactly what we're talking about which is that a young child feels anxious?
Cuz it needs his diaper changed. It doesn't really know it. Needs its diaper change, or it's cold, or it's uncomfortable or it's hungry where it's overly full and so it vocalizes. And then some external Source comes to us and relieves that hopefully, right? So the fundamental rule that we first learn is not that we have a cell for that. Things fall down not up, but is that when uncomfortable externalize that discomfort? And it will be relieved by an outside player, and then, of course, there's a repurposing of that circuitry for adult romantic
Attachments, I don't think anyone doubts that and that can explain a lot indeed about attachment and so forth.
So something about our developmental wiring and the algorithms that these neural circuits run tend to bias most people than on practice meditators to live a somewhat functional life at least.
Without this awareness of actor and observer. And so, what you're really talking about is a deliberate intervention to understand and resolve that Gap in the algorithm? Is that, do I have that, right? Yeah. I'm at more less. Restating what he said in a way that I'm hoping will serve as a jumping off point, is it, you know, why questions are always very dangerous in biology, where any, yeah, you know,
and one relationship. What's that? We're in? A relationship
for a relationship, right? Exactly.
Lee, although I think it all does really hearken back to this early developmental wiring, which of course is modifiable. That's that's the beauty of the, the nervous system is, it's the one organ. That seems to be able to change itself at least to some degree. So, what are your thoughts about the organization of the circuitry to essentially, under normal conditions to not reveal its what seems to be one of its more important and profound and dare I say enlightening features right? It's almost as
If we are potentially like mantis shrimp, we can see so many more colors than we actually see. And yet, we don't, we serve up most people opt not to, and I would argue that one of the great strengths of the waking up app, for instance, that it essentially walks you through the process of being able to arrive at these things, without having to go to one year or three year long, silent meditation, Retreats. So if you could just elaborate for
Mon before we move on about, you know, what are your thoughts about how the circuitry is arranged by default versus that the and what that means for there to be an intervention that we have to intervene in the self in order to reveal the
self. Well, so the two big questions there, one about Evolution one about development. So with respect to Evolution and it's important to recognize that Evolution doesn't see our deepest concerns about human flourishing.
Shane and human well-being, you know, all about the office. It's just, you know, you we are set up to spawn and to survive long enough to, to help our progeny spawn if we can do that and that and that that's it, right? And so anything that was good for that including, you know, tribalism and xenophobia and, you know, you know, all kinds of hardware and software flaws that are that are reveal themselves to be flaws.
In the present time when we're trying to build a viable Global civilization. But you know, they they redounded to the advantage of our ancestors somehow. Or they just, there's there are things about is that we're simply not selected for, they just kind of came along for the ride, you know, the you know what, Stephen Jay Gould, called a spandrel, you know? So we are not set up by Evolution to be as happy as we possibly can be and certain and and to do almost
Anything that interests us? Well, I mean, we're not set up by Evolution to be mathematicians or musicians or to create democracies that are healthy. I mean, Evolution can see, none of this. And we're doing these things based on cognitive and emotional Hardware that we're leveraging in New Directions, right? And that we have, we are primates and we are, you know, we're communicating with, you know, small mouth noises and we were languishing.
I was using primates and all of that is clearly evolved. And we're doing these amazing things including science, you know, however, in probably where you were actually able to, you know, almost entirely with language, understand reality, that at a scale that exceeds Us in both directions. I mean that the very, the very vast and the very small. And you know, also temporally the very old we have, you know, visions of the far future we can figure out, you know.
Where and a, you know, an asteroid is going to cross Earth's orbit a thousand years from now. If we just do the math and it's amazing that we can do all those things, but evolution is blind to all of that, right? And so we have in terms of what we care about and certainly in terms of what we was going to ensure our survival as a species, we have flown the perch that was created for us by Evolution. I mean, we're just not, it's not just the primate things and so it is with learning
and how to regulate our emotions and and, you know, punch through to a self concept or Beyond a self concept that is more normative psychologically that allows us to, you know, not be terrorized by our apish genes as fully as we seem to be even in the presence of more and more destructive technology. That I mean like, you know, we're we're still practically chimpanzees armed with nuclear weapons, right? I'm and that is, you know, increasingly dysfunctional.
And very soon we're gonna be in the presence of minds or apparent Minds that we have built, you know, that are as intelligent as we are or and very quickly, you know, it probably 15 minutes after that far more intelligent than we are. And so, what we do with all of that is again, something that we have to figure out based on the mines, we have the mines, we can build the mines, we can change, you know, we can, we can metal with our own genomes now and and that will produce
Deuce its own consequences, you know, in ourselves and in future Generations, if we metal with the germline and again, all of that is just, you know, you know, evolution is just sort of the womb we came out of but it's not, it didn't anticipate any of that, right? So so that, you know, Mother Nature has simply not had our best interests at heart, right? And it's we might die off and from the point of view of Mother Nature, that's that's fine because 99% of every species dies.
Off, you know.
So there's that, what? But when you're talking about, when you're talking about the individual developmentally. So, you know, we all come into this world again as a as a fairly hairless primate, that needs a tremendous amount of Care by others and the logic of that is that, you know, you know, the reason why we're not a gazelle that can run, you know, 45 minutes later, and then basically do all the gazelle things perfectly.
Soon. Thereafter, the reason why we have, you know, we have this time of immaturity and that becomes has become functional for us. Is that it's just we're far more flexible and we can learn based on the needs of an environment to do a, you know, so much more than a gazelle can and language is part of that. And, you know, in the last
Ten thousand years or so, culture, increasingly has been more and more a part of that. And there's a, probably a layer, which we can plausibly, talk about cultural Evolution, you know, and cultural Evolution interacting with biological evolution to change us. When we talk about the development of an individual, each of us comes into this world. I think not recognizing ourselves in any, in any sense that would make sense to reify.
Um, it's not that there's nothing there, I mean, there could be some kind of Proto self differentiation, but I think it's it takes it takes a long while. And there is probably very likely a coincidence between really recognize it recognizing others. We recognize others first and we're and certainly in relationship immediately and we Orient to human faces and we, you know, even detect other humans as good and bad moral actors. Very early May certainly long.
Before we recognize ourselves in a mirror, we their experiments run. Again, this is Paul Bloom and, and colleagues experiments run on kind of the moral hardware and software of developing toddlers. But I think this point, they push it down all the way to like 6 months of age where you'll get these infants staring at kind of a puppet show and they'll show an a greater interest in, you know, in a classically good-looking.
Good actors vs. Bad actors. And Co-operators versus, you know, defectors in various, you know, puppet show games.
So, there's, it's not that we have no mind and no, Proto awareness of others and, and of self. But what eventually happens certainly, as we become at all facile, with, with language use, is that we become aware that. That not only are we in relationship to others, but we are an object in the world for them. Right. So that like we have enough people pointing at us in our cribs, right?
And impinging Upon Our experience, right? You know that you you're being physically moved and prodded and touched and consoled or not consoled. And just imagine what all of these you're on the receiving end of 10,000 interventions, right? And you're completely helpless for the longest time. And all of that attention, you have all of these people coming up, you know, to the crib and making faces at you sheer, you know? And yeah, and it's all pointed at you, right? So there's a, you know,
there's a classic magical narcissism that gets constructed there if you take the psychological literature or at least a certain strand of it seriously. And I think it's largely apt to, to think of a child at that age as a kind of
There is a kind of narcissistic structure there where it's all kind of going Inward. And at a certain point, you realize, okay, I'm I'm the center of all of this, right? Like it's not just, it's not just a movie that you're that you're, you know, where you're at. You're completely absorbed in and you've lost your sense of self. I mean, this is talk about the yet, another example of what it's like, as a grownup
To lose our sense of self. And one of the things I think we find. So, fascinating by about television and film, is that when we get totally absorbed in it, we're in this very unusual circumstance, where we're, you know, our brain is basically reading it as we're in a, in the classic social circumstance work presented with with, you know, the facial displays of other people. In fact, what, you know, we can get some of those. Sometimes, these people are 10 feet tall, right? Or their faces are 10 feet tall. You really have a close up in a movie theater, so it's like a super
In terms of evolution and they could make it, they could be making direct eye contact with the camera. Right? So you have this gigantic face staring at you and yet you're totally on implicated socially. You can't be seen and you and something about that. You, you know, you can't be seen. And so, you're completely, you completely lose self-consciousness. And yet you're, you're able to examine with completely free attention again because you're totally on implicated. The, the
Facial minutiae and the mimetic facial play of people from at a very close range. I mean, you're seeing people close to me, you two have to be, you know, physically just, you know, about to kiss your spouse. Like, that's what a close-up is in a film, right? Like that, you're never get that close to people, right? And yet here you are in a situation where your unobserved and you know that. And so this is a bit of a tangent but the it's the other side of what's Happening. Developmentally.
Kid when you're in a movie theater watching a movie you are truly invisible and yet you are right there. Seeing the, you know, the however harrowing the human drama is you're seeing it play out in your seeing it, you're seeing it up close and it is a, it is in principle a social encounter that your jeans are ready for, but they're not ready for you to be invisible, right? And so that's what's so magical about it. But what happens developmentally for a kid is that you're not invisible.
You are an object that is constantly being being overrun, the boundaries of your, you know, your sensory engagement with the world are constantly being impinged upon by others. And at a certain point you recognize, okay? I'm at the center of this. And the way this gets enshrined as a self, I think is probably coincident with our learning The Language game. We learn to play with others. What? We're
Talking to others, people are talking to us. And at a certain point we're talking to ourselves even when the other people leave the room, right? So, and you can hear it anyway. If you ever have been with a toddler when they're, when they're, when they're externalizing, their self talk, you know, you hear them talking to themselves, they're playing and they're and they're, they're having a conversation, they were talking to you the parent. But then you left the room and they're still talking, you come back in and they're still, they're still talking, right? And what happens to us, strangely,
And this comes back to the logic of evolution.
We never stopped because Evolution never thought to build us an off switch for this, right? I mean, the language is so useful and it gets tuned up so strongly for us and there was never a reason to shut it off, right? There's never a reason to give you this ability to. I wouldn't be nice to have four hours of quiet. Now, a like, no self talk. And so for most of us and I think there are people who, for whatever neurological reason or you know, idiosyncratic reason undoubtedly there's a good be an Earl.
Logical reason for it. Don't have any self talk but for the for most of us we are covertly talking basically all the time. And and that there's an imagistic component of this for many people, you're visualizing things as well, but there's just a lot of ton of white noise in the mind that feels a certain way. And, you know what I like and what you discover in meditation ultimately, is that
The self is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking, right? A thought arises uninspected and seems to just become you, right? So, like you and I are talking now and he was that your people are listening to us, they're struggling to follow the train of this conversation because it is competing with the conversation is happening in their heads, right? So I'll be saying something and a person listening will say well what does that mean? Or like, oh boy to me he just
Seated himself or like a your and there's a voice in your head that is also vying for your attention, much of the time. And so it's the first discovery people make in meditation is that it's just so hard to pay attention to anything the breath, or Mantra, or a sound, whatever it is because you're thinking every if you're thinking about the thing, you need to do in an hour and all it's so good that I downloaded this app, I'm like, oh this is really good, it's gonna be good for me. But anyway but your that
Her isn't showing up at you. You're not far back enough in the in the kind of the theater of Consciousness. So, as to see it emerge, it's, it is just sneaking up behind you and it feels like me again. It feels like when someone is thinking the thought, what the hell does that mean, right? They're not seeing it as an emerging object in Consciousness. It just feels like me. It just feel that that that's it. Is it the the subjectively.
Lee is like the Mind contracts around this appearance in Consciousness and it really is just, it is just a, you know, it's just a sound with the voice of the mind. If you actually can inspect it it is.
It is deeply. Inscrutable that we ever feel identified with our thoughts me? How is it that we could be a thought? These thoughts that I thought just arises and passes away. And when you inspect, when you go to inspect it it's it, you know, it unravels, it's just it's it's the least substantial possible thing and it could but yet it could be a thought of self-hatred, you know, it could be a thought that that unrecognized totally
mine's your mood, you know, it's like
Let me just again, this is all can seem kind of abstract but well,
no, but I but I think it's extremely concrete from the perspective of the neural circuits that will return to. And maybe in a few minutes, I'd like to take a brief break and thank our sponsor inside tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform. The analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals. I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your
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It's not so obvious that language is ongoing right backdrop. Yeah it is. Sometimes I think some people are more tuned into that language for some people, it's louder volume. For some people, it's more structured. I have a colleague at Stanford has been on this podcast called dicer authors illegal in the preeminent, like, bioengineering is also psychiatrist and he has a med. He doesn't call it a, meditative practice the other.
Bacchus where each evening after his five kids or put down sleep, you know, yeah, they're older now. But and in the quiet of the late hours of the night, early morning, he sits and forces himself to think in complete sentences with punctuation for an hour. This is the way that he has taught himself to structure his thinking, because of the very fact that you're describing, which is that ordinarily, there is an underlying structure to what's internal, but it's disrupted by external events and it's and these are
It typically it's not coherent enough to really make meaning from. So it's almost like somebody sitting down to write in complete sentences but forced himself to do it in his head. But for many people including myself, that's it that's a foreign experience and we only experience structure through our interactions with the world and other people that if I were, I've taken the time to try and explore ideas with eyes closed and you know I've been able to do that there are certain pharmacologic states that we could talk about that.
At that and know, those are not amphetamines. Those do exactly the opposite, by the way, but I think people exist in varying degrees of structured and x and unstructured internal dialogue and in varying, depths of recognition of that internal dialogue. And so the question I suppose is, is just the recognition that there is a dialogue ongoing internally. Is that itself valuable?
Yeah. And that also
Sometime. So so so here's a claim. I would make that some people might find surprising, but I think this is an objectively true Claim about the subjectivity of most people, which is that, unless you have a fair amount of training, let's hear just happen to be some kind of savant in this area, which mean, a most people by definition aren't, or you have a remarkable amount of training in what's called concentration, practice. And in meditation,
I think, I believe this is a true claim that, you know, if we just put a stopwatch on this table and and, you know, people could just watch it, you know, the 30 seconds elapsed, and I set, you know, set all of our listeners or viewers the task, for the next 30 seconds just pay attention to anything. Your breath, you know, or you know the the sight of your hand or the side of the clock or any object.
Without getting lost in thought without getting momentarily, distracted by this conversation, you're having with yourself.
This couple things would happen, one is no one would be able to do it, right? And not just, this is not just a superficial inability. I mean, if your life depended on it, you wouldn't be able to do it may if the fate of civilization depended on it, none of none of our listeners would be able to do this and he had some percentage of them are, are so distracted by the thought that they would think that they will actually
We try this experiment and think they succeeded, right? And for these people, what happens is you put them on a Meditation Retreat and you have them spend 12 hours a day in silence doing nothing, but this, right? So the practice is just pay attention to the breath when they're sitting and then eventually they do you incorporate everything sounds and other Sensations. And then you interleave that with walking meditation, where they're paying attention, just at the sensations of lifting and moving and placing their feet. And then, you know, once the practice is going, you incorporate sounds and sights and everything, but you can pay attention everything. But
Goal is for every moment. You are going to, you're going to cultivate that. What this this faculty of mind which you know, increasingly is known as mindfulness, right? So in mindfulness is nothing other than this, very careful attention to the content of Consciousness. But the crucial piece is it is not a moment of being lost in thought, right? You're not you can you're not blocking thoughts, thoughts themselves can arise, but in those moments of being
Being truly mindful, you're noticing thoughts as thoughts, whether they're, whether its language in the mind or images. You're noticing those two as spontaneous appearances in Consciousness. So, if most people, you know, certainly anyone who thinks they can pay attention to, you know, to who could they can do the experiment successfully that I just suggested pay attention to something for 30 seconds without being lost in. Thought you put those people on a Meditation Retreat.
Going to experience is, you know, on the first day they're going to feel like oh yeah. I was, you know, I was with the breath or I was walk. You know, I was with the sensations of walking and I'd be there for like five minutes, you know, solid and then I would get lost in thought, and I come back five more minutes to be lost in thought and get back. But as the day's progressed, you know, even, you know, 10 days into a silent Meditation, Retreat. They're going to experience more and more distraction. They're going to it's going to seem like okay, wait a minute, now I can't.
Pay attention to anything for more than five seconds, right? That is progress right? Because because what they're discovering is just how distractible they are. Right? And you know something for some people that will be immediately obvious for some people it'll actually take a lot of practice to realize just how distracted there
what you just said which was that at some point? We
Can start noticing our thoughts. I can notice my thoughts, but what you're talking about is as a goal state is not is not being distracted by thoughts. But actually seeing the relationship between thoughts, self and other types of perceptions and here. I think recognizing and seeing thoughts is a form of perception. It's just an internally directed perception. This raises a topic that I'm also obsessed by which I think Neuroscience can
What explain, but still incomplete in completely that the circuits and mechanics Etc are not yet known which is about time perception. And you know, a simple analogy would be that. There are a lot of small objects flying around in the space that we happen to be having this discussion, but they're moving so fast that I can't perceive them or they're entirely stationary. So I can't perceive them because of the reasons we talked about before in the visual system.
My eyes are moving in perfect concert with these with these small objects movements and therefore they are there. I am blind to them right? A slight shift in time perception think of this perhaps as a change in the frame rate camera frame rates. Faster frame rate you can capture slow motion. It's lower frame rate. You're going to get more of a strobe type effect. If the frame rate is low enough, right?
Could it be that our time? Perception is not one thing. But we have one rate of perceiving time for external objects at a given distance which we know is true, another frame rate for objects that are up close. We know this to be true even if those objects are moving at the exact same speed, right? I mean, this would be the sitting on a train, the rungs on the fence seem to be going by very very fast but the ones in the distance seemed to be moving slowly is the way the the visual system and time perception interconnect at some level you're up.
Skyscraper. The little ants of cars and people down below, you know, they're moving much faster than you perceive them to move. Yeah. But it's a distance
of means. You see a plane is, could be going 300 miles an hour?
Exactly. Yeah. And it's not because of the lack of resolution. Their lack of resolution is incidental. We know this, because in animals such as Hawks that have twice the degree of Acuity as far as we know, they have the same distance Associated shifts in time perception. So could it be that
We are running multiple streams of time, perception, multiple cones of attention, that include cones of attention to our thoughts. And that somehow through meditation, we start to align the frame rate for these different streams of attention. So that they all fall into the same. They all fall into the same movie, if you will, although it's not just a movie with visual content, what I'm doing, here is a clearly, I'm becoming a lumper rather than a splitter. I'm sure this violates certain rules of time, perception neural circuitry, but I'm not sure that it's entirely.
True either. Hmm. And does it survive at all as a possible model for what you're describing? And if the answer is no, I'm perfectly comfortable with that. Well, it's say
It's dependent on what you mean by meditation. This is where you sort of the particularities of what one is doing. With one's attention under the, you know, the frame of meditation really matter. Because their ways to practice, where is practice mindfulness in particular, where the framerate really does seem to go way, way up, right? And there's actually been some research done on this. We take people before and after a three-month, silent Meditation Retreat and you give them
M, some kind of visual discrimination task where they have to like detect. I think they used to kiss the scope is that the tool for? There's some some some of the presents, you know, like very quick pulses of light and in any case you can you can discriminate just in any in any sensory Channel. I would imagine you can make finer grain discriminations if you're practicing mindfulness in a very specific way, which is to be made,
Making these fine grain discriminations more and more and do nothing else for, you know, three months, which is a, which is a way of practicing. So, you're so the classic, you know, mindfulness practice in in What's called the pasta meditation is to pay scrupulous attention to seeing hearing smelling tasting touching
in a way that
breaks everything down into this kind of microscopic sensory moments. So, you know, you're rather than feel your, you know, your hands pressing together. What you're trying to feel with your attention and you're feeling more and more is all of the micro sensations of pressure and temperature, and movement, such that the feeling of hands completely disappears. You realize that hand is a concept and all you have is this cloud of
Punctate and and very brief Sensations. And so, so anything you think you you have as a datum of experience as you as you bore into it with your attention.
It resolves into a this kind of diet that diaphanous cloud of changing sensation. And that can be even even something that is as captivating as like a, you know, a serious pain in your body and you have like a, you know, you could have injured your neck, you know, and it's you have some excruciating pain in your neck. If you just are willing to pay attention to it, you know, and just pay 100% attention to it. You're a couple things happen. One is
Your resistance to feeling it goes away by definition because you're now, your goal is to just pay attention to it and you recognize that so much of the suffering associated with the pain was born of a of the resistance to feeling it. You're kind of you're bracing against it and all of your thinking about it, you know, you're thinking like, well, you know, why did I do this to myself for wanting? Should I see an orthopedist or how long is this going to last? And, and you're maybe I herniated a disc like all of that self talk is producing anxiety and you know, I'm not saying there's never anything.
Thing to think about there. But, you know, either you can do something about it in the moment or you can't. And so much of our suffering in the presence of pain is the result of resisting it worrying about it think it's just all of the everything we're doing with our minds but just just feeling it, right? So when you just feel it again, it it breaks apart into this, this ever change ever-shifting collection of different
Sensations. And it's not one thing and it never stays the same. And it's and so there's two things happen there. One is, there can be a tremendous tremendous amount of relief that happens there where you you can achieve a level of equanimity even in the presence of really unpleasant if you know, physical sensation. And this is true of mental sensation, as well as was true of emotions. You know, the classically negative emotions like anger or depression, or fear, the moment you become willing to just feel them.
In all of their, you know, punctate and changeable qualities. They ceased to be what they were a moment ago. They're just there. And they, when you're talking about emotional states, they ceased a map back onto you and your self concept as meaningful in the same way. So that suddenly, you know, the anxiety, you feel, let's say before going out on stage to give a talk, you know, a moment ago it was it had psychological meaning.
Felt like oh, you know, I'm anxious. How do I get rid of this? You know, why am I the sort of person? What you know, should I have taken a beta blocker? You know this is a the conversation you're having with yourself, the moment you just become willing to feel it as the pure energy of the physiology of, you know, of cortisol release it ceases to have any meaning. It just it ceases to be a problem in that moment because it is no more, it no more maps onto the kind of person you are then.
A feeling of indigestion or a pain in your, in your knee maps onto the kind of person you are. It's just it's just sensation anyway. But back to the main point here which is that if you train your attention in this way to notice the particularities of sensory experience and emotional experience is like you're looking for the atoms of experience. You know you get better and better at that and certain things happen. But one thing that
that one thing that I really do think happens is there's a kind of frame rate change in in the the data stream where you really are just you're just noticing much, much more. All of that is in a very interesting way of training. It's not what I tend to recommend now and it's a great preliminary practice for what I do recommend because it gives you it really teaches you the difference between being lost in thought and not. It really teaches you. What mindfulness is but
It tends to be done, you know, by 99.9% of people in a dualistic way which again you're set up to think. Okay, I'm over here is the locus of attention, you know, and I'm continually getting distracted by thought and the project is to not do that anymore and actually pay attention to the breath and sounds and Sensations and and every time I get lost in thought I'm going to go back here but this whole dance.
Dance of Lost in thought. Now, I'm now I'm strategically, directing my attention again, all of this seems to ramify this sense of self the sense of, there's one to be doing this. There's somebody holding the spotlight of attention and getting better at coming back to the object of meditation. Again, it's inevitable, that 99.9% of people are going to start there and stay there for some considerable period of time. But the thing I like to do
do when I talk about all of, this is undercut, the false assumptions that are anchoring, all of that as early as possible, because we're I think you want to be
Is recognizing that there is no place from which to aim attention, right there, this whole dualistic setup of subject and object is the thing that is already not there, and it's not that you it's not that it's there and you meditate it out of existence successfully, it's really not there. And if you if you learn how to look for it you can see that it's not there and feel that it's not there and it no longer seems to be there, right? It's like it's not and it becomes like again like a bi-stable percept where you?
Looked at it long enough and you thought, okay, now I see the vase and the face and I can't unsee it. And every time I look it's there again, right? And
So yeah that might have said. So to come back to the, the example you gave with your your colleague at Stanford whose book, I know I have I haven't read it as this is the he wrote a book projections, right? Desiree, Thea so it's on my stack to read but
It's the opposite that what I'm recommending essentially, the opposite end of the Continuum of the sort of internal exercise. He was he was doing so rather than so you know he's doing something very deliberate and controlled and he's you know he is deliberately thinking in complete sentences and kind of commandeering the you know the the Machinery of thought and attention in a way that I would imagine a man I'd be interested to talk to him about it but I would imagine
He really feels like he is doing that right? And
there's an engineer. It's a you know it's as you describe it in this way, it reminds me. He's he's a physician but he's also an engineer. So it's really about taking the the raw materials of thought and Engineering something structured from it. Right? Right. You know I haven't been in Carl's mind. Yeah.
But if we got him talking on that, we would I'm sure we would get a yes. What
else will do that conversation at some point the exact opposite of what the exact
opposite would be too.
Recognize that.
The sense of control. Is a total illusion right there. It could because you don't know what you're going to think next, right. And even he in the most laborious way, I mean he could he could just get as muscular as he wants with it. He still doesn't know what he's going to think next. I thought because thought simply arrives, right? Like you know me you know you can run this experiment for yourself and this connects up to the topic of Free Will which we might want to touch.
CH. But, I mean, just think of any category of thing, you know, if I asked you to think of, you know, the names of cities or of, you know, friends you have or a famous people, you can, you know, remember exist or think of nouns or, you know, you know anything and just watch what comes percolating into Consciousness. Right now, there's there are things you can't think of other things, you don't know the name of, you know, their languages.
Don't speak. There is there a famous people? You've never seen or never heard of right? So like that. Like so you have no control over that part, like those those names and faces are not going to, suddenly come streaming into Consciousness but of the totality of facts and figures and faces and names that you do know, right? Only some will come Vine for inclusion, right? And they're not and there's, there's a sort of, you know, I'm sure we could make guests and we know something about the
LG of this. But we, you know, depending on what Channel you're, you're you're waiting for thoughts in. I mean, it's gonna be different if it's visual or semantic or, or episodic memory and all of these things are different. But wherever you kind of Point, your inner gaze of attention and wait for the next phase or name, certain things are going to come and certain certain things aren't going to come and how you land on one, right? They'll be this
Says, if you're paying attention though, you might think a little say, we'll say, we go with names of cities, right? You just so, you'll think of Paris, You'll Think of London, You'll Think of Rome, You'll Think of Sedona, you'll take laser, these names will come. And if I ask you to just say one, right? So,
just Minneapolis is what came to mind for me is very straightforward as Minneapolis. The famous person was Joe Strummer and they just like, I can give you reasons why I think they, those came to mind recent conversations. Okay.
So so, so whatever.
So, we know, we know, a fair amount of a fair bit about much of this. So one we know that your reasons, you know, obviously could be right or wrong. They're very likely to be wrong because we have this sort of confabulate ettore Storytelling mechanism even in an intact brain where we just, you know, we all seem to never lack for the reasons. Why something came to mind and we know, we can know. We can manipulate people in ways that prove that people are just reliably wrong and confident, you know, confidently. So about the reasons why they thought of things or did things.
But leaving that aside even if you're completely accurate right there are there are people's names who you know and cities names that you know that inexplicably just didn't come to mind. And if we ran this experiment again and again again they wouldn't come to mind if your brain was in precisely the state. It was in a moment ago. If we could return your brain to the state. It was in a moment ago, correcting for you know all the deterministic changes and all the random changes that would have to, you know, be corrected for it, it just to get
All the synapses in the synaptic weights and, you know, everything in in the state, it was in to produce Joe Strummer and Minneapolis, right? You're going to rewind that movie that, that part of the movie of your life, you are going to say Joe Strummer and Minneapolis a trillion times in a row, right? So this is why in my view, the notion of Free Will makes, absolutely no sense, right? And you can add as much Randomness that process as you want. It's still doesn't get you. The freedom people think they have. There's another conversation to have about, you know why? None of that?
And while things only get better, once you admit to yourself that Free Will is an illusion and yes, you can get in shape. And you can diet, you can do all the things you want to do. And you don't have to think about free will. But the from a, from a contemplative meditative point of view, the thing to notice is that everything is just springing into view, right? You're like there's no place from which you are authoring your next thought because you would have to think it before you think it right. Like I like it like there is just there is
Is just this fundamental mystery at our backs that is disgorging everything that we experience and it would
if I'm speaking. So, if I'm talking about something and I have some command of that information, I can often sense what I'm going to say next, and then find myself saying it. Hopefully that's worse, and not something else. I've certainly said things I didn't intend to say or never, thought I would say in life, but when engaged in speech or action, it at least gives
The illusion. I think that we somehow have more command over our
thoughts. Yeah. Well, you have a script and he's like, either there, things, you know, a lot about and you talk to, you've talked about them a lot and you hit, you know, you have the things you want to say about those things, and the things you, you don't want to say or you wouldn't want to say and, you know, you can, you know, it still is a bit of a high-wire act because you can miss speak or you can fail to get to the end of a sentence is grammatically. Correct way. And it is again, all of the subjects.
Actively this whole process is mysterious to you, right? Like you don't know how you follow the rules of English grammar, right? Like they like you just you just missed your tongue is doing it somehow. And you know and when it fails it fails and you're just as surprised as the next guy that it failed and you know, you mispronounce a word and okay, I don't know what happened there but it's, if it keeps happening, I'm going to worry. I had a stroke and you know if it stops I'm going to be, you know, I'm not going to worry about it.
So it's still mysterious even when you're doing it in a very wrote deliberative and repetitive way. But when you're talking about something, you've talked about a lot and, you know, you sort of know where you're going to go, right? Like and this is, you know, we we have many conversations like this.
It is somewhat analogous to like a golf swing was like, you know, how you want to do. It is going to be all kinds of errors that are going to creep into your execution of it in real-time, but there's like you basically have a pattern and so you have certain linguistic patterns, which are following again. None of this is a proof of free will, but I will grant you that, you know, phenomenologically. It feels different than just waiting for the next thought to come. But my point is that even if you are
Our.
You can trim it down to the simplest possible thing. I'm like you take two things you like to drink, right? You may you like you like coffee and you like tea and you're deciding which to have right? Both are on offer. You've got two cups in front of you, you? And, and the question is, you know, which you know, are here. I've got water and I've got coffee, which am I going to drink next? It's incredibly, it's a simple as possible decision and no matter how long I make this,
Asian process, I could literally sit for an hour trying to figure out which to reach for next and I could have my reasons why and I could have my all myself talk.
There's there's there's going to be a final change in me. That's going to be the proximate cause of me deciding one over the other and that no matter how laborious I can make it seem in terms of my reasoning about it. It is going to be fundamentally mysterious as to why I went with one rather than the other. Right. Whatever story I have liked it because it's like, it's still going to be as mysterious as
You thinking of Joe Strummer, when you absolute like, you know, of the existence of Marilyn Monroe, just as much. And yet, she simply didn't occur to you, right? Like it's fundamentally mysterious, like they're people who are even more famous than Joe Strummer to you, right. Who? I mean, I am sure. You may be somebody who have thought a lot about, but but there are people who, like, if we could just inventory, you know, your conscious life going back the last,
Last 10 years there, people who you thought about more than Joe Strummer yet, they didn't appear, right? So, and that's, that is mysterious, right? And they could have, but they didn't. And so, and what I'm saying is that this mystery never gets banished in our experience, whatever stories we have to tell about it. Like because if the story is, oh well, I went for the water because
I, you know, I think I've been drinking too much coffee. You know? I listen to Andrew hubermanns podcast and he was saying talking about caffeine and I think I probably
good for us but you don't want to over
here. Yeah, okay. So let's say that is actually the causal chain. Like I listened to your podcast, you said something about caffeine. Now I'm now I'm self-conscious about my coffee intake, right? But that's just just adding a couple of links to the chain. There's still this fundamental mystery of. Well, why did I find that persuasive? And why, what why did I find it persuasive?
Of now and not five minutes ago, when I was drinking the coffee, right? Like why did I just remember it now? Or why was it effective? Not like what? Like you, you only have your experience in every moment.
Is precisely what it is and not one bit more like and and this subsumes even moments of real resolve and effort and, you know, picking yourself up by your bootstraps and changing everything. It's like you're on a diet and you're tempted to eat chocolate and you think you're about to reach and say no I'm not I'm not breaking this diet. This diet is actually going to stick, right? Okay, why did that arise in that moment and not at this analogous moment on.
Ask diet, right? And why did it arise now to precisely the degree that it did? Why will it be as effective as it will be and have the half-life that it will have? And not, you know, 10% more or less like all of those are always mysterious to you. What
could we give a as we did before and evolutionary and developmental explanation and evolutionary explanation might be that directed attention and action is metabolically demanding.
Would be inefficient or impossible for us to be in constant you know deliberate action and with access to all the relevant information as to why we would do anything. So our ideas literally spring to the surface at the last possible moment. In order to offset the metabolic, the great metabolic requirements of having ideas that are related to goal, directed action or they goal-directed action is expensive. That's one idea. The other idea would be, and we know this as a fact
Is that initially the brain is fairly crudely wired. That's not true. Within the neural circuits that control breathing heart rate etcetera but within the neural circuits of sensory perception thought etcetera, they're fairly crudely, wired and then across development, there's a progressive, pruning back. And also in parallel to that a strengthening of the connections, that underlie directed action and thought and here I don't mean direct it as in Free Will I mean, just that can I can decide to imagine an apple and imagine that apple.
For instance.
But you're just, there seems to be some maintenance of the random fine random wiring in systems. I mean, we've seen this, even in worms, in flies in, in, you know, in a so-called lower invertebrates and lower vertebrates. And we see this in humans and it seems to be that there's a lot of background spontaneous activity. I mean, I've sunk electrodes into the brains of humans macaques carnivores in mice, and in every case, most of what you hear is called hash and it has nothing to do with hashish is ditch.
Audio Monitor, which is, are you picking up a bunch of action? Potentials Rosie here listening to a course of action potentials. But it's rare to find a neuron that Faithfully cough fires to represent some sensory stimulus and the world and you can arrange that marriage experimentally so that you can arrive at those strong signal to noise events, but I was always struck by how much noise there is in the system. All around all the time and people argue is the noise, really noise, Etc. And is it, you know, there's still a lot
Debate about that. But I can imagine that some of the, the spontaneous nature of thoughts just relates to the fact that there's a lot of background spontaneous activity in the brain. Now, why that is, is a whole other discussion. But but if I were to sort of set up two constraints that there's a lot of spontaneous activity, it's going to Generate random thoughts, thankfully, not much random action, although there's a little bit of random action in our daily lives and then against that, say, well, any deliberate thought when motion is going to be expensive, right? So,
Berkeley expensive or going to begin with. And so you just have to Evolution has arrived at a place where spontaneously geysering up of things upon, which like, deliberate thoughts and action are superimposed, is the best arrangement overall, for this very metabolically demanding organ, who's that is that if I mean, what? I basically gave was just kind of a biological description of one just one narrow aspect of it, but can we get comfortable with that? And the reason I say get comfortable is that, you know, I'm
Here I am madly I'm forcing a little bit of a striptease towards what? I think I and everyone else wants to know which is how to meditate and why in particular meditation convinces us. That something doesn't necessarily have to be eliminated, but that was actually never there. I feel like we're now set up a sort of like almost like a. You're not contradicting yourself by any means but in my mind there's a contradiction and here's the contradiction.
I love this statement that meditation over time or done properly reveals to us that we're actually not trying to make the gap between actor and observer go away. It was actually never there to me that's one of the more important statements that I have ever heard and it inspires me to go further down this path of meditation because I've never experienced that not deliberately and certainly not through meditation. If I ever experienced it, it was transient enough that I, you know, I'm intrigued to to experience him.
So on the one hand, you're telling me something was never there and there's a profound experience to be had by anyone that's willing to do the work to arrive at that experience of the loss of that illusion. On the other hand, I'm hearing that there's a profound Gap that really does exist, which is that, we believe that our thoughts are somehow from us and indeed, their, from, in in the cranial Vault someplace, maybe in the body a bit as well.
Well, but that we over attribute the degree to, which we are that. And that is us in a way that's volitional that we control. And so, once I'm hearing that there's something, there's an illusion that we can eliminate. And on the other hand, I'm hearing that there's an illusion that we can't eliminate, and maybe these are unrelated, and I'm bridging them. And in a, in an important way, that seems only important to me, but somehow I can't resolve these two.
And maybe the thing to do then is, can we separate them in terms of a practice to witness them? That would allow us to resolve them separately.
Right. So yeah, I think I am hearing. The problem is there's this, let me kind of bracket the whole Freewill discussion because it's it really is. The flip side of this coin that that I'm the obverse of which is the illusion, the illusion of the self, okay? So at least, I think I might be on the right track. Yeah. They are the
opposite sides
of a Cora. Okay? Great. Because to
me, they seem very different in yeah, in essence? No.
Because it because what? I'm calling the sense of self.
And what people, what I think, most people feel as their core sense of self is the, this feeling of. I mean, it's the feeling of being the locus of attention, but it's also the feeling of being the locus of agency, like I can do the next thing. I like, who's doing this, who's reaching for the cup? I am right? I intended this and now I'm doing the thing, they might and my intent, my conscious intention is the proximate cause of my reaching, right? So I'm
The off. And so I'm the author of my thoughts and actions essentially. And I'm, and my and my specific uses of attention, right? So I can pay attention to the breath. I get lost in. Thought I come back to the breath but you know the law that the ins on some level, the thoughts themselves are more of my doing something with all with almost so you know, authorial intent, right? Like I'm thinking like oh, you know, what the hell is this guy talking about? I'm I know I'm that, you know, I know, I know, you know who
Thinking these thoughts I am right. Like, that's that's the person who really doesn't get what I'm saying. Is thinking something like that, right? Like, what the fuck is this guy talking about? Like, I like, I know, I'm here, I'm a self. I'm, you know, I'm a body, I'm a mind. I can reach for things that these are these intentional actions are different from things that happen to me, right? A voluntary action is different from an involuntary one, you know? So having a Tremor is different from consciously deciding to pick up a glass, right? So
Obviously, everything I'm saying about meditation and the self and Free Will in order to be a sane picture of a human mind, and of reality has to conserve the data of experience such that. Yes, I can acknowledge the difference between a Tremor and a deliberative, you know, voluntary motor action. And you know and the things you do volitionally are different, not just psychologically and behaviorally but they just have different implications.
Like they differ in a court of law, you know, you accidentally hit someone with your car or you did it on purpose. That's still a distinction that matters, right? It's importantly, it tells us a lot about the global properties of your mind. Such that, you know, we have a sense of what you're likely to do in the future. If you're someone who likes running over people with your car, you know, you're a psychopath who we need to worry about your someone who did it by accident. Well then, you know, you may be culpable for the level of negligence that allow that to happen but you're a very different person and we
we treat you differently and we were wise to. So anyway, we can those with bracket all of that.
there's this, I mean, there's some fundamental there's some false assumptions about
Out the underlying logic of this process, which I think it's worth addressing and there's actually, there's a kind of found object in the news that I talked about. At one point, I forget where it is and in the waking up a pie. There's a story that I stumbled on the internet things about 12 or 13 years old of a tourist bus in, I think was Norway who said somewhere is in northern Europe and I had about 30 people on it. And
One person was it was described as an Asian woman and they all the what they went to a rest stop and everyone got off the bus and they, you know, shopped and had lunch. And, and this Asian woman changed her clothing, for whatever reason, and they all got back on the bus. I think the relevance of it being an Asian woman is that, you know, there were language barriers. That explain what later happened. So everyone gets back on the bus station woman has changed her clothing and the bus is about to leave, but then someone know,
Otis has. Hey there's a there was an Asian woman who got off the bus, who is it hasn't come back yet and they tell the driver this and this poses a problem. So now everyone's waiting for this person to return but in fact, everyone was on the bus that this woman had just changed her clothing. It was not recognized by her fellow Travelers, so everyone gets concerned as this tourist doesn't, you know, show up and they start looking for right, and they can't find her. And so a search party is for
Armed and the Asian woman because of the whatever language barrier heard that it was a missing tourists. So she joined the search party which in fact is looking for her, right? And this goes on into the night and they're readying helicopters at, you know, for the dawn patrol to find the mission missing tourist. Now, at some point along the way, I think it was at like 3:00 in the morning this tourist realizes that she is the object of the search, right? And obviously
The whole thing, unravels. She she confesses that she changed her clothes and you know that the problem is solved, but the problem is not solved by the the logic that the Seeker is expected, right? So it's like, it's not true to say that the missing tourist was found in the way that was expected, right? Because the missing tourist was never lost the missing. Tourists was part of the search party, right? And so when you think about it, from her point of view, like what happened, she's part of the
The search party she's looking for the missing tourist not knowing that she in fact is the missing tourist. So what happens at the moment she realizes
That everyone's looking for her, right? Like, what, what is the search isn't consummated in the way that is implied by the logic of, everyone's use of attention. And yet the problem evaporates, and there's something deeply analogous about the structure of that. And the, the meditative Journey. We in, in precisely, in again, not talking about all the changes in the possible changes in the contents of Consciousness that could.
Be good which again cut the come along for the ride. Anyway, when you, when you do the thing I'm talking about
It's not on this point of looking for the self and not finding it and there is this sense that, okay, the self is here and it's a problem. It is the string upon, which all of my conscious States mostly unhappy ones are strong, right? It's the thing that is at the center of my anxiety. It's the, it's the, it's the thing that I don't feel good about is the thing. That one criticized I sort of let implode it's the center of my problem. And
I'm trying to feel better and meditation has been handed to me as a possible, you know, remedy for my situation and and it's billed as a remedy. In fact, it's I'm hearing from this guy that this is the thing that is going to cause me to realize that myself isn't where are you know? Or as I thought it was. So now I'm going to look right and so
Again your the sense is I start out far away from the goal here, I start out with a problem. I'm now meditating on the evidence of my own Enlightenment, right? I can feel my problem. I feel that I'm distracted and distractible and I feel as this sort of cramp at the center of my life and it's me and I'm not as happy as I want to be. I'm not as confident as I want to be, I'm more distractible than I want to be and now I'm paying attention to the breath right. This is what the
the search party feels like this is what the the confused tourist feels like in her own search party and she's she's looking, she's looking for the missing person. And so the sort of the, the angle of, you know, the inclination of all of this is and the logic of it is all wrong, you know, understandably. So given how we all get into this situation, but, you know, it's useful to continually try to under undercut.
and,
Recognize that the thing that's being looked for he is actually right on the surface which is either the there is no one looking. There is no place from which you are paying if you're paying attention to the breath or two sounds or noticing the next thought arise.
This sense that you are over here doing that thing.
Is actually what it's like to be thinking and not knowing that you're thinking you're not. There's a there's a thought there's an undercurrent of thought that's going to uninspected in that moment. And so there is just a, there's a continually looking for the mind, a looking for the center of experience, looking for the one who is looking, which again, which is the kind of the orienting practice here and there's a lot more I say about this obviously, over at waking up, but
It's the experiment you have to perform in order to get ready to recognize that this whole is the search party. You know, was formed in error. Essentially and the problem that you're trying to solve with this practice does evaporate in in a similar way, which is like, you don't actually get there.
In the way that you're hoping for, right? It's like it. Like you drop out the bottom of this thing and in an unexpected way it's not there's actually another kind of a similar Parable or anecdote that I don't remember if it's Zen or Sufi or I mean I'm sure it's been really appropriate in many different ways but we're by many different Traditions. But there's this, you know, the case of somebody who's it lost in a town and they're asking for directions, you know, you can put this in Manhattan, you can listen.
You're wondering Manhattan and you're you're a tourist. You don't know where anything is and you stop and ask someone, you know, what you wear is Central Park and the person thinks for a second, they said, oh yeah, unfortunately you can't get to Central Park from here right now. That is a very strange. I mean, we you think about that for a second, you realize okay, that's a, that's an absurd claim. There is no place that you can't get to from the place you're starting, you know, on Earth. Right? I
saw the earlier to describe the physical relationships between
Anything
in the world. Yeah, that's just not the world we live in, right? So, but it's a funny thing is but on some level that is true of meditation. It's like you can't get there from here. Like the sense of you the sense of you as subject isn't brought along to this thing you're looking for, right? Like you're like you're you know it's almost like it's almost like you're making a fist and you're trying to get to an open hand.
The fist doesn't get to take that Journey as a fist, right? Like you don't the fist doesn't go along for the ride. The fist comes apart, right? And and on some level that our subjectivity is a kind of an attentional fist. You know, it's it is a contraction of energy. Again, it's so much bound up in thought for for most of us, most of the time that it's and it get when properly inspected.
There's just this, you know, evaporation of the starting point, but there's not this, there's not this fulfillment of I'm going to get this fist is going to just going to if I you know, if life gets good enough, if I could concentrate enough focused enough, you know if I austere enough if I renounce enough, if I desire less, if I, you know, you know, enough with enough good and intentions, this fist is going to move into some sort of sublime condition, right? That's not
The logic of the process,
I really appreciate these models and analogies for conscious experience both as most people experience, them, and harbor them in its as a way to frame, what's possible through a, through a proper meditation practice. I do want to talk about what a proper meditation practice. Looks like a bit, but at some point, I do want to raise a model of maybe even just perceptional awareness.
Us to see if it survives the filters that you've provided. But first just even if briefly and then we can return to it. You know, what does this meditation practice or set of practices? Look like obviously the app is a wonderful tool. I've started using it as a mentioned, the beginning my father's been using it for a while and many people have Drive great benefit from it. But if we were to break it down, meditation into some basic
On in Parts, as we have broken down normal perceptual experience and some of its component parts. Yeah, I can just throw out some things that I associate with meditation and maybe you can elaborate on how these may or may not be applied. For instance, There is almost always a ceasing of motor, robust motor movement. I know they're walking meditations and so forth, but seems like sitting or lying down and perhaps,
Soooo not always but often limiting our visual perception closing the eyes, right? Directing a Mind's Eye someplace. Is there a dedicated effort toward generating imagery? What are the component parts? And where I'm really going with? This is why would those component parts eventually, allow for this dissolution of the Fist or the realization that there is no distinction between actor and observer and so
on? Yeah.
He also did answer the second question. First, ultimately meditation is not a practice that you're adding to your life. It's not it's not a doing more of anything to say, actually ceasing to do something. It's ultimately non distraction, I mean, it's ultimately recognizing what Consciousness is like when you're no longer distracted, by the automatic arising of thought, it's not the thoughts, don't arise, it's not that you can't use them. It's not that you become irrational or
Or or, you know, unintelligent Mei, all of that. You still have all of your tools, but they're everything is in plain view. I mean, there's an analogy in Tibetan Buddhism, which I love, which is, you know the kind of in the final stage of meditation thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house you know there's nothing for them to steal. Right? So it in the usual case, thoughts are there really is something in Jeopardy. The every time I thought comes I'm not meditating
More and and not only that, I feel terrible because of what I'm thinking about most of the time, right? And so it's totally understandable. Thoughts seem like a problem in the beginning. And for certain types of meditation, they are explicitly thought of as a problem because you're trying to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else including thought and that is H what I called concentration practice earlier.
And that is a you know it's a that's a training that can be good to do, it becomes a tool that you can use for other kinds of insight but is a very specific and kind of brittle skill in the end. I mean it is to skill just like I'm going to pay attention to one thing. I'm going to do that. So well that everything else is going to fade out and it's somewhat analogous to what you described in the visual system. If you, if you have a laser focus to one fixation Point, everything else in your visual field begins to to
Fade out but meditatively if you have a laser focus on any one thing. What whether it's the breath or or you know, a candle flame, whatever it is.
Not only does it, let us use the breath for a, you know, for a second because your eyes are can be closed and you can lose all sense of everything. Maybe you can lose all sense of hearing and your physical body can disappear. I mean like literally can become incredibly subtle and vast and drug like and many people approach meditation thinking climbing the ladder of those changes into subtlety.
And vastness, that's the whole, that's the whole game, right? And it can be deeply rewarding game to play. And it also does come with all kinds of ancillary benefits. I mean, all of the focus and the calm and the and the kind of smoothness of emotional states and all that comes with greater concentration and it can be quite wonderful but again at best that's a tool to aim and the direction that I'm talking about now with with respect to meditation which relates to more
Or what I would call you know, mindfulness generically and ultimately kind of non-dual mindfulness. So mindfulness generically and for most people certainly in the beginning dualistic, Ali is just the practice of
paying careful attention to whatever is arising on its own right now. In the beginning, it's natural to take a single object, like the breath, as a starting point, it's kind of an anchor, but, you know, very, very quickly. Oh, you know, over the course of even, you know, your first week of doing this people can, you know, teachers. And, you know, various sources of information will recommend that, you know, once you get some facility once you once, you know, the difference between being lost in thought and actually paying attention.
The breath will, then you can open it up to everything. You can open up the sounds and other Sensations in the body and, and moods and emotions and even ultimately thoughts themselves. And so, very quickly you can recognize that
Thoughts are not intrinsically the enemy to this practice. They are also just spontaneous appearances in Consciousness that can be observed, but for some considerable period of time. People will feel that there is a place from which that observation is happening, right? There is just, you know, I'm now the one who's being Mindful and however, attenuated that sense of self can be a met. Again, it can get very expansive and you can, you know, you can lose
As you know, as you get anything, it just a modicum of concentration, you know, it becomes very drug like, and you get, you know, you're the boundaries of your body dissolve and you're feeling of having a body can disappear and and your, you know, if your eyes are closed, you know, your visual field can be most people when they close their eyes. Initially, they just forget about their visual field. But, you know, it's if you close your eyes right now, you notice your visual field is fully present and you know, it's you we call it dark but it's
White dark. There is a sort of scintillating some field of color and Shadow, that's there. Be in the darkness of your closed eyes and that can become a sky like domain of kind of vast. You know, visual expression that opens up as you as you get more concentrated with, you know, with your eyes closed, right? So you're so you can very much be aware of seeing with your eyes closed in.
meditative practice, but from the point of view of mindfulness,
The logic is not to care about any of the interesting changes and experience that come as a result of practicing in this way. Because what you're with the, the underlying goal is is to
Be more and more equanimous with changes. So as not to grasp at what's Pleasant or interesting and not to push what's unpleasant or or you know boring or you know otherwise not engaging away what you want. Is just a kind of a sky like mind that just allows everything to appear and you're not clinging to anything or or reacting to anything.
Could I ask you what your thoughts are about, the differences between nouns, adjectives and verbs in the context of what we're talking about in, you're describing. And the reason I bring this up is that as, you know, I know everything in biology is a process. You know, we would never ever say, oh, you know, the perception of that red line on a painting is, is a noun, right? I mean, it's an event in the visual system, your abstracting some
Understanding about that thing in the outside world. And I think it's very useful in thinking about the brain and people will notice, I notice, I, excuse me, actively avoid the use of the word, mine, because I figure out, especially with you sitting across from me, that I'll step in it if I if I do, but
The brain and generates a series of perceptions or what-have-you by through processes not nouns. And so when thinking about biology, I think of development is a generic of processes, aging is an arc of perception is in our capacity. They just exist on different time scales. And so, a little bit of what I'm hearing is that inside of an effective meditation practice, there's a little bit of a, of a certainly non-judgment, but discarding of the, the noun, and the adjective,
Modes of language like, red apple. Okay? It's a red apple, but then you sort of need to eliminate some other adjectives about. It's a rotten apple, it's a ripe apple and instead view the appearance and disappearance of that apple as a it's just a thing a process as opposed to an event and now events could we could really get into the language aspect of the that just reveals how diminished languages to describe the workings of the brain at some level.
I don't know if any of this resonates but it but it seems to me the goal or one of the goals is to start to understand the algorithm. That is the fleeting nature of perception but to not focus on any one single perception. And then to not even focus on one single algorithm but to at some level there's a what is revealed to the meditator overtime is some sort of macroscopic principle about the way perceptions work at a deeper level, right? That there's a
they're sort of a deeper principal there. That sits below are certainly our normal everyday awareness, but that in paying attention to the mechanics of all this stuff and not judging those mechanics, not naming those mechanics or just naming them and let them pass by that. There's some action function, some verb is revealed and that maybe that verb, maybe the word to describe that verb is mindfulness. Maybe mindfulness is really just a verb to describe that. I don't know. But, is there anything here or am I pretty?
I've been
creating just like useless straw or if there's if there's actually a seed here of something real. But to me, anytime I want to understand something in biology or psychology. I trained brought in the time domain and think in terms of verbs, not nouns or adjectives.
Yeah, yeah. No. That's very useful, and that's somewhat adjacent to this distinction. I'm making between dualistic and non-dualistic ways of experiencing the world. So even dualistic lie.
Everything is still a process, right? And were misled by the reification that now and talk gives us. So and this applies not just to something like mindfulness, but even to something like the self, right? So the sense of self is also a process. I mean, it's a verb, it's not. So we're selfing more than we ourselves right? And and they're, you know, I even even appropriate uses of
The term self that don't go away. Even when you when you recognize that the the core subject self is an illusion, there are states of self right? Where you you can recognize in your life, that you inhabit, very different modes of being depending on the context. So like there are moments where you just by walking into a certain building you suddenly transition into a different state of self, like suddenly you pass through a door and now you are
Customer in a store, right? So we know what that customer feeling is like, you're now the person who's getting the attention, it's very kind of formalized type of attention from the person who's running the store and, you know, or a restaurant, you're a customer in a restaurant, right. That's a I just remembered something. That's kind of funny that it was born of a mismatch of this all come back to that in a second. But so there are
So we go through you, you can be a you know, you can be a student in the presence of a teacher. You can be a parent in the presence of a son or a daughter. You can be a spouse and presence in presence of your spouse and all of those shadings of like the the the the change in context really does Usher in some fundamental psychological changes in just, the states of Consciousness that are available to you and and it's
And some of this is really, I mean, I'm sure we could understand a lot about this, you know, personally and, you know, generically, but it is pretty mysterious. I mean like, I mean, there are people who I know who I, you know, I'm with them in a certain way and, like, based on something, I'm getting off of them. I can't be that. I'm, I'm effortlessly one way with them, and there's no way I could be that way with somebody else.
Like, it's just, I don't know if it's pheromones or their, you know, their facial just the way they are their facial expression. But there are people with whom I'm really kind of effortlessly funny and they're people with whom, you know, I couldn't even would never occur to me to be funny, no matter what happened. You know, it's like, and, and I have, like, long-standing relationships with these people, you know? So, like it's just very, you know, all that's very mysterious. But anyway, the difference there is, is not in this core sense of
subject in relationship to all the objects. It's in kind of the states of self and but and all of that is just very ver, be right? If I call this a pattern of changes it's a pattern of what's available and what's not available the capacities that are you know that are they come online or not in those various contexts but no the memory just had which I had had a long time.
That was one of these moments where I realized the power of these shifts in context for states of self. So I once I was a young man, I think it was, I was probably 22 or so, and single. And, like, you just like trying to figure out how, how you how do you meet women and like, how does, how does one get confident to do this? Well, and I walked into a restaurant.
And a kind of a woman was walking toward me at, you know, to toward the front door, the rest. A walking toward me in a way where I just by default assumed. She was the hostess in the restaurant but she wasn't that the hostess. She was just a you know, someone who just eating there, I guess. So I walk through and she comes out and so that there's a fundamental misunderstanding and me that set up by literally just this change in architecture. And I and so, I just said, hi.
Hi to her in a way that I would. I presumably, I would say hi to any Hostess who was coming up to ask me whether I wanted to sit. But what it actually happened is I had said hi to a total stranger in a way that I tended at that point, never to say hi to total strangers because I was shy and, you know, just like but apparently I gave her like a 10,000, watt hot, you know high of like with all of the confidence you would have if you were that sort of person and it just ushered in a complete like you know this is so I went to my table.
This woman, I came back into the restaurant, I gave me her phone number, right? Which was something that was just completely foreign experience to me, you know, and it was based completely on my misunderstanding of the situation I was in, right? And so, anyway, that among
the understanding, among the misunderstandings that one can have and then action engage in life. I think that was a somewhat of death of
one. Yeah. You know, but, but then you realize that okay. But then there are certain people who recognize this
Machinery to whatever degree or have natural aptitudes for bringing certain things online or not such that, okay? They can make these State, they can consciously make these states of self. You know, this kind of this level of gregariousness say available to them in different in the circumstances where it's actually useful to them. So if you if you're single and you want to meet people, well, it's actually very helpful to feel confident enough to just go, say hi to strangers, and ask them how they're doing and, and to be
Be, you know, online what, you know, in that way. We're at that point in my life. In that circumstance, you know, by how, you know, by default I was going to ignore this stranger who I was passing by, in the doorway of a restaurant but thinking she was the hostess I was engaging her, you know fully. So anyway, you can consciously again. This does not invoke Free Will at all but yes, you can consciously decide to play with this with these mechanisms such that you can decide what states states have self.
Both would be more normative to have given what you want in life and you can become increasingly, you know, attentive to the ways in which you get played by the world. You know, you're a kind of instrument your mind, is a kind of instrument. Your brain is a kind of instrument that is continually getting played by the Situation's. You are in, and you can become more of an intelligent curator of your conscious States and your conscious capacities just by noticing the changes in. You like, I'm in graduate school is
I talked about, I think at some point in waking up, this became very Stark for me because I had, you know, I was a, you know, an old graduates do and I had taken 11 years off, at Stanford, it between my sophomore and junior year, right? So, I like, I was when I went back to school, talk about a leave of absence, I know it was. Yeah, but a minister Stanford had this, you know, you might know this, they have the stop out policy where you never really drop out. You just stopped as a year, like can always go back, you don't have to write letters saying that you still exist.
Every, you know, two years as you do in other schools. So, anyway, I showed up after 11 years and but, you know, so I was really on a deadline and I felt late for everything. So I'm kind of, you know, finishing my degree, you know, as quickly as I can as an undergraduate. And then I jump into graduate school and I'm an old graduate student. And I'm, you know, there's a real sense of kind of urgency like, I'm late. I want, I should have done this earlier, I want to get the stuff done, but then 9/11 happened. And I ask just
As I had finished, my course work at, you know, getting my PhD. I was just getting into my research but 911 intersected with my life in such a way that I just had to drop everything and write my first book and I did that and then I just had to drop everything and write my second book because of the response to the first book. And so essentially, I had like four years where I was a wall doing my PhD.
But I was still had a toe in the lab and I was still showing up occasionally, but I was becoming this kind of cautionary tale from the point of view, of grad school. But I was also becoming kind of a famous, or semi famous writer because my first book had been a New York Times bestseller. And I just, I was, you know, so I was getting some notoriety as or writer and he's always doing things like, you know, I was giving a TED talk, but I still hadn't finished graduate school, right? So like it was just, it was think that time is, right? Maybe I had just finished graduate school when I gave the Ted talk but
Anyway, so I was in rowing into boats and one boat was sinking or you know showing every sign of being damaged and I was literally like, you know getting letters from the head of the department saying, you know, we're concerned about you. But on the other hand I was like becoming a you know a quasi celebrity in that world to you know at least in a world that was overlapping. So I was having the experience of like going in the moment where this crystallized with for me and
In a fairly peculiar way. Was I had a meeting at like, 3:00 with my advisor, who is just this guy Mark Cohen and the brain mapping Center and UCLA was a fantastic guy, great advisor. I did not extract as much wisdom from him as I should have brilliant scientist and you know, he's for him. I'm late right. At least in my head. I he is not that he was riding me so hard but like in my head I'm very self-conscious about how I'm not
Living up to his expectations at this point. So I have a meeting with him at like 3:00 and I'm just kind of wilting, you know, under my, you know, you know, his gaze and my own imagined, you know, in her gaze of his, you know. But that two hours later I have a meeting with his boss, you know, a dinner meeting with his boss. Who wants to meet with me to get advice on launching his book. We have the same publisher but I'm like the much bigger author at, you know, at
Certain you know, and he's coming to me for advice and so I'm ricocheting between two diametrically opposite self states that are. Again this comes down to architecture is literally like the state I was in walking into one building and then leaving and walking into another building on the same campus and they were completely opposite self-concepts. Like in one in one context I am
I'm a fuckup in another context. I'm a celebrity
who and you have Mastery and virtuosity. And yeah. And we're developing a very quickly.
Yeah. And and but so, again, this is kind of a stark version of that, but everyone has some version of this, just in bouncing between talking to their mom and then talking to a, their best friend, and then talking to a stranger, and then, and talking to someone who's very successful talking to someone who's not very sickly. I call, you notice your vulnerability to all of this.
And ultimately, what you want is a level of psychological Integrity, that that is truly divorced ssible from that. Now that you're, I'm not saying you're ever going to get it, perfect. You know, there's always going to be some I mean, II can't. I can't talk about the ultimate fulfillment of this process. Like I'm not, I'm not, you know, I'm not a Buddha, I'm not saying I've finished the project but I think
There's more and more you you know as you become sensitive to these changes and you become sensitive to what it's like to actually not be psychologically, reactive and not be definable by your own self concept. Your own idea, you're not identifying with anything, you're not hanging your hat on anything. You're not thinking about yourself in terms in the kind of terms that you would export to others, and then care about.
I think about you, right? Like your, there's a kind of invulnerability that that arises, that's not born of being well defended, it's born of being evaporated, right? It's like you're no longer keeping score in those
ways. Once again, we're at the, I really appreciate that description because I these days I'm really intrigued by something. We've known for a long time that I'm your certainly familiar with is the prefrontal cortex is
Ability to establish context-dependent rule sets. You know, Stroop task will be basic example of, you know, reading numbers or letters on a cards and then switching to having to report the colors of the letters. And numbers are written in its basic tasks. But prefrontal cortex obviously important for setting context-dependent thought and behavior and directed action and and but within the context of all these different variations of the self depending on,
Graduate school or, you know, relationship were sitting alone in one's room. Yeah. They're different rule, sets, arise. But and somehow we are able to have a sense, a coherent sense of self that encompasses all of those functional people can toggle between them as needed and not overlap them inappropriately. At least not to the extent that it's career failing or life failing. Although, there are sad examples of that many of which exist in the Twitter space. I know
Several colleagues not directly of mine, but people who through mistakes made with their thumbs, where they forgot context or forgot to realize that the context on social media is near infinite, but the context of the existed in their head might not be clear. And the way that they communicate something and they lost their jobs, right by saying, what were perceived as insensitive things, in some cases, where, in fact, offensive in sense of things. In some cases, it's debatable right. In any
Case, I think that the the image that now comes to mind relates to something. You said several times that it's not about eliminating something, it's about revealing that something was never actually there. And then in terms of sensory experience and this, these different aspects of the self, I have this image in my mind of, not an experienced scuba diver, but I've done enough of it, you know, want a wet suit. You wear a complete wetsuit with the hood. And this idea, you know, if you were born into that wet suit, you might think that, yeah, you know.
Job / lean up against a wall and you experience it one way, right? And but we're you to shed that wet suit, you know. Wow. There's this incredible landscape of somatosensory experience that I had no idea that goes Way Beyond levels of sensitivity right now your time out fine two-point discrimination and light strokes and this could be positive or negative pain in other ways too. But what you're describing is essentially that the wetsuit was never really there. It but was created through a series of in of actions,
Steps. And what I think, what we're migrating towards here is a set of four most non intuitive or non reflexive action steps that revealed to us. That, in fact, we're not wearing this wetsuit now, you raised one topic which I think is analogous to this wetsuit, which is this notion of distraction? The normally distraction is masking, what would otherwise be a better experience of life?
I can think of distraction as falling into two different bins. One would be the kind of distraction that is internally generated, like the fact that thoughts arise and pull me down different alley ways, and avenues of my, my brain, and my thoughts, and my experience, and then the other would be and that that would compete with my ability to really focus on something.
And then another form of distraction, which captures my ability to focus intensely but has me focusing on the wrong things. And here, I think the Judgment of wrong is reasonable to include if, for instance, I'm being impulsively, yanked, to something on social media. I mean, impulsively Yang to someone else's pain and experience and some how confusing that with my own experience, this is an empathy, but just getting yanked around my attention as a spotlight is gone like over
Here over there. I'm not feeling as if I'm the one standing behind that Spotlight. Controlling or I'm not the spotlight just to keep with the what we've been building up here. So could you tell us a little bit about distraction and tell me whether or not these two forms are in any way accurate or inaccurate? I'd be happy for them to be inaccurate and whether or not there are other forms of distraction that we need to be on the lookout for. And again, I think what most people are seeking is, what is the way to not just enhance our
Need to focus but to shed this wetsuit like cloak that limits, our experience that I'm calling and that you've called distraction.
Yeah, I got one. This distraction is one component of it. The other aspect of it is identification with thought it identification. This is the feeling of self is bound up in the sense that that I'm the. I'm The Thinker. I'm the one attending. I'm the one vulnerable on the inner kind of the inner homunculus. That's vulnerable to experience.
And I think it can be gratified by it or not and it's constantly trying to improve it or in mitigate negative aspects of it. It's the, it's the sense that there's kind of a rider on the horse of Consciousness as opposed to just Consciousness and its contents. So it's again, it rides atop. This illusion of control, Etc. So to go all the way back to the to the question you asked about just
What is in a, you know what, I recommend as a starting point for meditation, some of your assumptions are, in fact true. Yes. Um, it's, you know, I often recommend beginning people close their eyes and you your do a sitting practice and in this different from a walk in practice and you can do both. But people tend to start, you know, sit in with her eyes closed. But again ultimately where this is going is it's not an art of meditation properly. Recognized is not an artificial
That you're adding to your life. It's not it's not even a practice. It is it is less rather than more you know it. And and therefore it is also coincident with potentially every waking moment. There's nothing, there's nothing that you can do with your attention, once you know how to meditate that in principle excludes meditation because meditation is just a recognition of an intrinsic character of Consciousness in each moment. And all you have
and each moment is consciousness and its contents, whatever you're doing so
So, in the beginning, you know, you'll be very deliberate and precious about deciding to practice meditation and you'll set aside 10 minutes in the morning and you'll do that. And then, and it'll seem very different from the next ten minutes when you're, you know, spilling out onto your to do list and you're trying to figure out what the day looks like, right? But ultimately you want to erase this boundary between formal practice and the rest of life such that there's is just not remotely findable and
And and that, that's, that's achievable. And I think, even from the very beginning, you can relax, this conceptual distinction between meditation and its antithesis because it's not, it's not at the level of anything you're doing is to level. It's at the level of
what's happening in your relationship to thought, you know, like what can you notice when you know, is the transition from
The bias bias table percept. You know, you're looking at the at the the image and you see nothing they'll say this the, you know, the dalmatian, you know, it's just the spots on the paper and you just, you don't see you don't see anything. And then all of a sudden, the dalmatian or the face of Jesus, or whatever the images pops out, and then you see it. It's the transition from nothing to something right at. You, the practice becomes the transition from being lost in thought, and then waking up and Britt.
it's very much like we're breaking the spell of thought identification with thought is very much like waking up from a dream and having like that that transition the whole like you're having a dream
And there's a couple things are true there. I mean it really is a kind of it's a it's a psychosis that is just not we don't problematize because you're safely in bed and you're not moving or even unless you've got some kind of sleep disorder, you're not walking around harming yourself or anybody else, so but to be in bed and to not know it, and to think you're, you know, running along a beach or, you know, you're in, you know, getting tried for murder in a court of law.
Whatever the thing is that you're completely delusional about, right? That is psychosis, right? And say, like, you're fundamentally unaware of your circumstance and then you the two things can happen there, you can either become Lucid within the dream, right? Which is interesting and that's a whole there's a whole phenomenology of that which can be practiced but more commonly. You can just wake up from the dream and all of a sudden the problem you thought you had is no longer there and and you have a completely different context for your
your conscious life. Like now you know you're in bet you were safely in bed. All the while there really is something analogous. When you break this identification with thought, right? You're just you're having a thought that seems to be some kind of, you know, moral or psychological emergency and and yet you can you can the moment you see daylight around at the moment, you see that the
And is larger than this mere appearance, right? Then you have it suddenly you have a degree of Freedom that that a moment ago was just Unthinkable, right? And you're also you recognize, you sort of come to in a way you recognize your circumstance in a way that you weren't a moment ago. When you were just talking to yourself, when you were just identical to that conversation. So this is all to say that, ultimately meditation.
So again, there's another apparent Paradox here. Many people don't know. Much about meditation will say things like, you know. Well, you know, for me running is my meditation or skiing or rock climbing or a plain, the guitar, we something they like to do. That gives them an experience of flow. That's what, that's what they go to to feel better. And that's that's the opposite of all the, the chaos of their lives or the, you know, their time on Twitter or whatever it is.
In virtually every case it's not true to say that that is effectively meditation. You're not going to by learning to play the guitar. You're not going to learn what I'm calling meditation and you're not going to learn it by, you know, cycling or get it and getting no matter how good you get it. Any of those things you're not going to learn it by doing those things but paradoxically when you not really but it can seem like a paradox once you know, how to meditate, then you can meditate doing all of those things, right? Meditation is totally compatible with playing the
Are skiing or doing any ordinary thing you like to do, right? So once you know how to meditate and again, it's totally natural in the beginning to formalize it and to set aside time each day to do it because it is a, it is a training. I mean, it's something that in the beginning, you have to get used to. But once you have once you're getting used to it then there is no good reason not to be experiencing this thing, I'm calling meditation. This insight into the the centerless nests of
Of Consciousness. The the non selfhood of Consciousness, you should experience it when you are playing your favorite sport or when you're having a conversation with somebody. And then the reason to come back to your initial assumption about eyes closed, a lot of practice it, even for malpractice, can be done, eyes open, and it's important to do it is open because so much of our anchoring of our sense of self is based on visual cues. I mean,
We just we know that you can eat, if you give people the right visual cues, you can translocate their sense of self. You can give them an out of body experience, you know, with a, with a video display where you can literally make them feel like you go, there's a body-swapping illusion. You can make them, you can make them feel that they're in another person's body looking back at their body. If you, if you run the cameras, the right way,
I've done this in VR seeing an image of, they create an avatar for you and then you're probably movements, generate the movements of the Avatar and
You start gaining presence as they call it in the ER lingo very quickly and then pretty soon you lose sense of your own bodily representation. And yeah, and it's a little Eerie. What serious to me is going back into, of course, never left. But back into your actual body, when the VR goggles pop off the world, seems almost overwhelming. The number of sensory stimuli that are in a like a laboratory room, which is actually quite sparse.
Um so exactly what you described this, translocation of Notions of self through Visual experience
and but conversely, when you lose the sense of self the fence to the self, I'm talking about it can be especially Vivid and Salient with eyes open because it because so much, so many of your reference points to selfhood are delivered visually, right? And especially in a social situations like, you know, I'm talking to you, you're looking back at me, right? So you're the implication of your gaze is that I'm over here?
Here behind my face implicated by your gaze. Like the so the sense that you're looking at something is the sense of self in that social context, right? And so, and if your, if your facial expression changes like I'm saying something, and if you kind of furrow your brow like what the hell's he and I can read into that facial change some inner state of yours that is, you know, sailing into me all of a sudden we've got this sort of dance of. Like, I'm noticing you reacting to me and I'm that's changing the way I'm feeling about what I'm
that. That's, that's the, you know, the purview of every Neurosis, everyone didn't want,
right? And every relationship I had a girlfriend when I was a postdoc. Who is it? Who is very, very she was brilliant. Really still is, and she always said that every relationship, the referring is therefore arrows used to such as a neuroscientist still has and said, you know, there's the arrow of you know, she was talking to me. So she said you me to you and kind of what you perceive coming for me and then there's you to me and then there's
Arrow from the middle. Going right back out of each one of us right? Which is our own perception of what the other person is thinking about us. And it's feeding back on the other arrow and she gave me this very clear, but model of basically relationships, the relationship failed. But it was good while it lasted. I should say, and but the four arrow model of relationships, actually shows up in every type of one one-on-one relationship and is probably an under description of the total number of arrows, but as I think it's exactly what you do.
Crime is that perception of self Through The Eyes of other whether or not we're empathic or not strongly shapes. The way that we access different context, dependent rule sets about what we're going to say and I can say it's very Dynamic, right?
Yeah. So but the freedom that I think we want and people can sometimes experience this just haphazardly but the thing that the center of the bullseye from the meditative point of view is to get off that ride entirely and to so that losing the sense of self in this context of a social
You'll encounter is to is to give up your face, essentially like, you're like so and and what, what that entails is or what that gives you is the free attention to actually just pay attention to the other person and the other person is now no longer quite an object in the world for you. There's really just a kind of a totality of which that person is a part.
And actually you know, Martin buber the, the mystical Jewish philosopher talked about, the kind of the eye that our relationship and this I think is, you know, it's been a long time since I've read boober. But I don't know if he goes, you know, far enough to be truly non-dualistic, but this distinction between I, uh, I am now because the vowel part of it is I think potentially this or remember again. It's been several decades.
Since I read read him but there's a there's a there's a way of beholding, another person where you have the free attention to Simply behold them, right? Like you're no longer your know, you no longer care what they think about you. You don't feel neurotically implicated by their gaze. You don't feel you're simply the space in which they're appearing, right? And so you're free, like you, like there's just, there's no, and people can feel and
So you're by definition, you are no longer self-conscious, right? And when it was and this phrase self-consciousness really does get at this, what? I'm calling the self the, the illusory self as a kind of contraction and you can you can notice this for yourself. Just imagine what it's like to go from not being self-conscious to suddenly being self-conscious and the the the proximate cause of this, you know, almost
Glee is suddenly recognizing that somebody's looking at you. It's like you're in a Starbucks and you're, you know, you're alone and you're reading the newspaper or whatever it is and this is now sounds highly anachronistic. It's been three years since I've held a physical newspaper. They you know Starbucks but you know your you're just mind your own business and you look up and you're seeing you know a room full of strangers. But then you notice that someone is just looking at you, you know. And so like that moment.
Of eye contact, right? Suddenly that throws you back on yourself as a kind of suddenly you're the object in the world for that other person that recognition is.
A the tightening. They're the kind of contraction there is a, is a further, ramification of this, this feeling most of us have most of the time of being the center of experience like the type that the place you feel like it's like, you know, we're all walking around with a fist and in moments of self-consciousness, the Fisk is really tight, you know? And that's and that's, that's the thing that gets
Fully relaxed. When you discover this this, what I'm, you know, in various points called the nature of mind or the, the non dual nature of Consciousness is just that there is no Center to this experience and when you recognize no Center, then even when your gaze is aimed at another person's gaze, there is no implication going back to the center because there is no center, right? And, and rather than that being an experience of weird Detachment or confusion or
Yeah. Or it's is actually an experience of Greater relationship because you're no longer you no longer defend it. You're not you're not defending anything over here. Like you're not you're not braced against anything, you're just the space in which that person is showing up. And so it's a it's a, an experience of being much more comfortable. In the presence of another person. Will you whatever your relationship because you're not Contracting, right? And then when you do, when you have that again and this
This is meditation, right? This is meditation, that is totally compatible with having a conversation with somebody. And then when you notice yourself Contracting, like, when you notice, you're not doing, you're not meditating anymore, you're just, you're actually reacting, like, they just said something or looked a certain way, and now, your cast back upon yourself in relationship to them.
That becomes a kind of mindfulness alarm, right then, you know, that bit that it becomes like, the, the, the unsatisfactoriness of that psychologically becomes more and more Salient, right? And it's because that's not one, that's not the way you want to be a mess. Like it's the antithesis of being as comfortable as you are a moment ago, but to
It's it's something you're doing unnecessarily, right? Like it's like, you're like again, you're making a fist when you don't have to make a fist, right? And, and it's again, we can leave aside all those circumstances where it's appropriate to react to someone and you know, I'm you know, I'm into martial arts and self-defense and yes you're not supposed to be just this puddle of goo out in the world who can be just mistreated by people and you know, never put up, you know, resistance but it's psychologically.
Even if even if a state like anger or contraction is sometimes normative and appropriate, the question is, how long is it normative inappropriate for? Like, how long do you want to stay angry for in my experience?
These kind of classically negative emotions like anger and fear are appropriate as salience cues. You know. They they Orient you to, you know, an emergency or a potential emergency but then in dealing with the emergency they're almost never the state. You want to be in you know it's like you don't like it's it's better to actually be calm in an emergency you know.
So absolutely I think that and again the language is insufficient to describe what
What you're telling us, but I think what comes to mind for me is this distinction between situational awareness and self awareness? And we need both but under conditions of emergency true emergency or motivated desire. We need to dial down the amount of self-awareness in order to be more effective within the situational awareness, but you said something very important in my lab has been working.
Working on fear like States for a long time. So I'm going to confess. I'm going to rob this from you, but I'll credit you every time I described is that, that the, that the fear of the threat detection, state, or set of events acts as a flag, but is not meant to persist in the way that the flag went up, right? If one is to be in their most adaptive State actually Jocko willing. And I were talking about this, he has it talks a lot about Detachment and open gaze things.
My lab is interested in visual system, in autonomic interactions. So why broadening the gays literally broadens the time, domain of thinking you've come up with new solutions to complex problems in real time and so on and and you're describing everyday set of interactions where that could be very useful. And yet there seems to be something about the way you describe meditation and what you've managed to arrive at and what practitioners of meditation can arrive at which is something more than
In that like it's not just about being effective or optimizing. All the language we see thrown around a lot in the space that I live in these days but but something fundamentally more important about how to experience life and the self. This this realization that what you thought was there was never really there there but that there are constraints that limit that and so to try and Fracture, those just constraints one by one. Would you say that meditation?
As a practice done for a few minutes each day or with the app that it's a kind of a step function, is a very nonlinear in terms of people's progress, you know? I'm certainly going to go start doing more meditation based on this discussion truly, because anytime someone describes a, that there's kind of a myth that we've been living in, I become obsessed with the idea of dissolving that myth, that's a very seductive, so thank you for using the
That one, there is no better marketing tool which is I realize what you're not trying to do here but that's for me to capture my my efforts. You tell me that there's a myth that I'm living in and that it can be dissolved and that opens up a better landscape. Yeah. What is the process like is? Do some people make progress very quickly. Do some people experience kind of Step functions towards progress? What is the meditation practice look like over time? Do you still meditate or do?
You have you just threaded it through your Jiu-Jitsu? You're writing your daily life, your coffee, your time with your wife at
cetera. He also just to come back to talk about the myth for a second. So they're really what you just enunciated was a kind of a second doorway into this whole project. So like the usual door is through the door of suffering for lack of a better word when people feel unhappy in a variety of ways and they get more sensitized to the mechanics of their own unhappiness.
And meditation is one of the things on the menu. The scene is explicitly billed, as a remedy for unhappiness, and, and it is. And that's, you know, I think that's probably the most common path to this, but another path is just intellectual interest. Me just wanted to know what's real. So about the mind subjectively in a first-person way and and there's no contradiction between those two things and I'm motivated by both of them but you know, it's a totally valid doorway into this.
There are definitely step functions. And I would say there are at least two, I mean, and they really articulated along the lines of the framework. I've been describing of dualistic and non-dualistic mindfulness, right? So in the beginning, you're going to start out, you know 99.9% of people start out dualistic Lee, paying attention and noticing the difference between being distracted by thought and
And being on the object of attention. Whether it's the breath or sounds or whatever and eventually that, you know, that opens up to all possible objects of attention, including thoughts, and there's still this fluctuation between being distracted and then being mindful of whatever, and the fact that it's open to all possible objects differentiates, this type of practice from anything that is narrowly focused on one object like a mantra or a visualization or Society, you know, those are other
As of practice that are more concentration based and interesting but the benefit of mindfulness is that very quickly you realize this by definition compatible with all possible experience because you're not artificially Contracting your attention down to something, you're just being aware of the next thing a sight, a sound a taste, I thought. So the first step function is to very clearly experience the
Between being lost in thought and being clearly aware of any part of experience, including thought. And to notice the freedom that compared to psychological Freedom that gives you, right? So, you can like, your somethings made you angry. And now you're thinking about all the reasons why you should be angry and have every right to be angry and what you're going to tell that person when you see them. And and then you notice you're thinking, right? And he noticed the connection between the thought and the anger, right? You like like the
Minute spent lost in thought about what's making you. Angry is the thing that dragged through the physiology of anger, right? And the moment, you notice that once you're mindful, once you can be mindful, you can notice thought as thought and how quickly that dissipates that just the language and the imagery. Just you couldn't hold onto it if you wanted to. And then you notice the physiology of the anger is just this you kind of meaningless.
Inner incandescence that has its own Half-Life and degrades very very quickly when you're no longer thinking about the reasons why you should be angry, you can't hold on to the anger the anger itself. Dissipates. Right. And from some, from the point of view of the one who's being mindful, this is tremendous relief. I mean, and at minimum it's degree of Freedom you can at that point. Decide well, how long do I want to be angry for, right? Is it useful to stay angry? Don't want to be angry for 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes or because been before, you have that capacity,
Aditi to be mindful. You're going to helplessly be as angry as you're going to be for. As long as you're going to be that way. Just based on the kind of the time course of your thinking about it brooding about it telling your wife about it you know, likely just the you know it's just going to be this conversation based misadventure in you know - states of mind and you are going to be the hostage of that. For as long as you'll be the hostage of that, you'll have nothing you can do apart from just a side.
I tend to you know, check out and watch Game of Thrones again for the third time, right? Like like it's just you can divert your attention to something else, which is, you know, sometimes a good thing to do. But mindfulness, even dualistic mindfulness gives you this capacity to just observe the mechanics of this and then get off the ride when you when you whenever you want. So that really is a step function. Like first there was a time when the time before you could do that and then there's a time after which you can do that.
The other step function is.
Noticing that there is no one who is doing that. I mean, this is the non-duality, the selflessness, the Central Business of awareness, right? The fact that there's no place from which the mindfulness is being aimed, but the fact that there's just this open condition in which everything is appearing, you know, thoughts included to have you as at that point your mindfulness no longer becomes
It's no longer this this dualistic effort to strategically, pay attention to anything as opposed to being lost in thought. It's just what's left. When thoughts when when they present recognized thought unravels even before it unravels. What's recognize is you are simply identical to the condition in which everything is appearing. Again, this is not a I'm not making a
Deepak Chopra like metaphysical Claim about the mind. You know, this is not, I'm not saying the mind isn't what the brain is doing. I'm not saying that you're recognizing the Consciousness that gave birth to the universe. I'm a not not make any broad claims about metaphysics. I'm just talking about a matter of experience.
There is just this condition in which everything is appearing, right? And what you're calling your body again. As a matter of experience, I'm not saying that we can't have third-person conversations about, you know, physical bodies in the physical world. But as a matter of experience the only body you're ever going to directly encounter as your own is an appearance in Consciousness. So Consciousness is not in your body. What you're calling your body is in Consciousness, visually
Lee proprioceptive Lee is like everything is just appearing in this condition. And again you're not aiming that you're not, this is not a spotlight that you're aiming at the body or at you know there's just this condition in which everything including anything you could call yourself as appearing and so yeah. So that's the second step function is to recognize that
This is all this is already true. Consciousness is already without this thing, you've been calling your ego hoping and hoping to, to unravel it through meditation.
Consciousness is not going to get any more selfless anymore centerless any Freer than it always already is recognized as such. And so that's that's the that the step function at that point, is your mindfulness at that point. The thing you come back to when you're no longer distracted, is that recognition again and again and then it becomes. Yeah, it becomes compatible with anything you would do. And so, to answer your question, yes, I still practice, you know, formally.
Lee, you know, sometimes, you know, for frequently but not, you know, I definitely miss days and I don't do it for me, you know. I don't rule out the possibility that I will go back on retreat, at various times just to check in with that and see if that makes a difference. But
You know, I tell, you know, I tend to sit for men tended, I've designed my life so that I can spend a lot of time meditating without having to be formally meditating. Like so y'all, you know, I'll go for a hike for two hours, right? And what I'm doing, when i'm hiking is identical to what I'm doing when i'm quote meditating, you know, sitting in a chair you know, doing nothing but meditate. So it's yeah. I mean I just again
I'm very, very interested in erasing, the boundary between what people are calling meditation and the rest of life and that. So that in teaching these things, I tend to emphasize that from the beginning because I think it's is very easy to set up.
To get to get gold by a bunch of assumptions that cause you to be very split in your sense of what your life is about. And like, I'm sort of banking my meditation over here because I'm meditating two hours a day diligently. And this is gonna be really good for me. And then, over here is the rest of my life, which is not nearly as wise or is useful, or is like, this is the stuff that is still the area of my problems and
I think it's useful to recognize, you've got one, you've got one life, you know, and you've got this, this this single condition of Consciousness and its contents in every mode of life and there's something to recognize about it and you're always free to recognize that truly even in your dreams, right. I mean it's just not this it never stops. So that's that's what I tend to
emphasize. So earlier, you told us that meditation is not about changing the content.
Conscious experience and in a different podcast that you were on. Heard you say something to the effect of that, normally, we are in our daily experience. And unless we are trained in meditation, unless we've dissolved, this illusion of the gap between actor and self and observer that we require certain sensory events to create collisions within us and with the natural,
World that sort of, you know, blast us into a different mode of being, I want to use that as a way to frame up this idea that some things such as psychedelics, but also a very long hike, very long fast, you know who knows a banquet, you know, different types of Life Experiences do exactly the opposite of what you're describing meditation does, which is that they actively change the content of our conscious experience?
It's so much so that we often remember those for the rest of our lives. Yeah.
Could you tell us why psychedelics?
Can be useful. And here I'll give the caveats that maybe you'll feel obligated to give as well. But this, we're talking about, you safely and responsibly age appropriate context appropriate, ideally with some clinical, or other type of guidance, legality issues obeyed etcetera. All that stated, it was psychedelics to me are an experience of altered perception, internal and external perception altered. Space-time relationship somewhat dream like I think it was Alan Hobson at
I've heard for a long time, talked about the relationship between psychedelic, like States and dreamlike States because of this Distortion of space-time dimensionality. And I haven't experimented with the much. I've been part of a clinical trial, three doses of MDMA, which certainly altered my, the quality of my conscious experience in ways that led to a lot of lasting and at least for me, valuable learning. Yeah. So what are you, what are your thoughts about psychedelics in terms of how they intersect?
Sect with the discussion that we've been having. And what utility do they play? In recognition of the self or in other sorts of brain changes?
Well, so yeah, let's just price in all those caveats that people can anticipate these drugs are not without their risks. And as it's one problem, is that we have this single term, drugs or psychedelics, which names, many different types of substances and they're not all the same and they're not. So, like MDMA is not even technically a psychedelic. I think it has an immense therapeutic value, and it actually was my gateway drug to this.
This, this whole area of concern
feta mean pathogen. Right. It's a sort of an amphetamine and a
pathogen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's often called pathogen. Yeah. And a pathogen, not
pathogen and I'm pathogen.
Yeah. And in pathogen or an intact ajan, it's been called, but it doesn't tend to change perception in the way that classic psychedelics do. And it's also serotonergic but it's not, it has to be in some part differently so than me, even
LSD and psilocybin, which are much more similar and classic psychedelics, both are also serotonergic, but they're not merely so and they're they're all so different. And the higher dose, you take of these drugs. The more you at lower doses, everything can kind of seem the same at higher doses. They they they begin to diverge.
And we can talk about the the pharmacology if you wanted to. But the I would just say that for many of us may certainly for me psychedelics were indispensable in the beginning, in proving to me that this was the they first person interrogation of the Mind was worth doing, you know, because I was somebody who at age 17 or 18.
even before I had any real experience with
With MDMA or LSD or psilocybin. If you had taught me how to meditate at that point. I think I would have just bounced off the whole project. I think my mind was, I was just, I was so cerebal in my just my engagement with anything. I was so skeptical of any of the, the spiritual, the religious, and spiritual Traditions, that have given us, most of our meditation,
Talk, you know that I think I just would have. I know many of these people like I, you know, I have to I have tried to teach, you know, Richard Dawkins to meditate and Daniel Dennett to meditate have of ambushed them with meditation and very, you know, both they both in a group setting and one-on-one not not Dan, but but Richard, I am pushed on my own podcast with a guided meditation, and
He just, you know, from his Heap, you know, he closed his eyes, he looks inside and there's nothing of interest to see, right? Like it's just, it's like this not it. He doesn't have the, the conceptual interest in him. That would, that would cause him to persist long enough to find out that there's a there there right now.
This is not a problem with LSD or psilocybin and MDMA, and I know that if I gave him 100 micrograms of LSD or 5 grams of mushrooms or, you know, 20, 25 milligrams of psilocybin. That's probably not the analogous dosage. To the 5 grams of mushrooms, 5, grams of mushrooms. Would be more than that. I forget what it is of MDMA, maybe 120 milligrams of thing, the maps
doses which
Is the one that's under clinical trials is 125 milligrams with an option of a 75 milligrams Brewster, right? Funny. I will remember you asking strange,
the facts that come to hands but there's no there's just no possibility that nothing is going to happen right now. Something with with a psychedelic, it with MDMA, most people tend to have certainly under any kind of guidance tend to have a very positive, you know, Pro social experience
but, you know, with a psychedelic you might have a a
Somewhat, you know, terrifying experience, if you have will quote a bad trip, you know, if you and I've certainly had those experiences on LSD and to some degree of psilocybin, but the prospect that nothing is going to happen is just in you know a million nearly a million cases out of a million just not in the car. It's I mean just just neurophysiological e. Something's going to happen with the requisite dose of one of these drugs.
and if that thing, that happens is psychologically at all normative and you know, Pleasant and interesting and valuable which it is so much of the time and certainly under the appropriate, you know, set and setting and guidance, it can be, you know, a lot of the time for, you know, virtually everybody again, there are caveats, if you if you're prone, if you think you have, you know, proclivity for schizophrenia
Nia or you know bipolar disorder this is almost certainly not for you you know and anyone doing a wheelie. The studies at like Johns Hopkins for for the therapeutic. Effects of any of these drugs, they're ruling out people with first-degree relatives with with any of these clinical conditions.
But so for somebody like me at 18 who didn't know that this was an area of not only interest, but would it be that, you know, the center of gravity for the rest of his life? If only, he could pay attention clearly enough to see that it could be right. I was someone who very likely again, I don't know. I don't have the counterfactual in hand. I don't know what would have happened if someone had, you know, forced me to meditate for an hour at that.
Point. But
I know I wasn't interested in it until I took MDMA. I know I wasn't having these kinds of experiences spontaneously that get that showed me. That there was an inner landscape. That was worth exploring. I was a very hard-headed skeptic who was very interested in lots of things but there was no alternative to me just thinking more about those things, right? I mean, the idea that there's some other way of grasping cognitively
At the interesting parts of the world, Beyond thinking about the world, right? I just that just wouldn't have computed for me at all, right? And if you had, so, I just and I literally, I had no one ever gave me a book to read or a never had. I don't know if you the noun meditation, very likely meant. Absolutely nothing to me before it. Before I took my first dose of this case was MDMA
So what the drug experience did for me, is it just proved you make it. So the limit one of the limitations of a drug is that, you know, obviously no matter how good the experience the drug wears off and then you're back to immoral and more or less your usual form. And now you have a memory of the experience and it can be a fairly dim memory me. Some of these experiences are so discontinuous with normal waking consciousness, that it can be like trying to remember a dream, you know, that
Just disappear, the two grades, you know, over the course of seconds and then it could have been the most intense dream you've ever had. And for whatever reason, you can barely get a purchase on, you know what it was about. And you know, there are some psychedelic experiences that are analogous to that. But for most people, most of the time, there's a residue of this experience. And with something like MDMA, they can be quite a quite Vivid.
Where you recognize. Okay, there there was a way of being that is quite different than what I'm tending to access by default. And it is different in in ways that are just
Obviously better and psychologically, more healthy. I mean it's possible to be healthy psychologically in a way that I never imagined, right? And then when you big then when you link it up to the traditional literature around any of this stuff again. So much of it is shot through with with Superstition and other worldliness of religion and you know, as you know and I think you're listening listeners. Probably know. I've spent a lot of time.
Resizing all that, but there is a baby in the bath water to all of that Rice, I guess. It's not that
Somebody like Jesus or the Buddha or any of the matriarchs and Patriarchs of the world's religions. It's not that they are were all conscious frauds or you know, temporal-lobe epileptics? Or like there's a there's a pathological lens that you can put on top of all that. But once you have one of these experiences on psychedelics or on a drug like MDMA, you know that there's a there there, you know that unconditional love is a possibility.
Right. You know, that that feeling truly one with nature, right? I mean, just so one with nature that your you could spend 10 hours in front of a tree and find that to be the most rewarding experience of your of your life, right? That's a possible State of Consciousness. Now, it may not be the State of Consciousness, do you want all the time? You know, you don't want to be the crazy guy by the tree, you know who can't have a conversation about anything else, but
Once you have one of these experiences you recognize, okay? There's
there's some reason why I'm not having the beatific Vision right now, and I can't even figure out how to aim my attention. So as to have anything like it, and that's a problem, right? Because it's, it's available, right? And it's, it's the best, you know? It is among the best things as ever happened to me, right? And now, I'm condition only dimly. Remember what that was like. So how do I get back there on some level? And that seems so that invites again, a logic of
Changes a logic of seeking changes in the content of Consciousness, which set someone up for this.
Protracted or seemingly protracted and, you know, fairly frustrating search to, you know, game their nervous system. So as to have those kinds of experiences more and more, and again, it's not that that's in principle fruitless. But it is from the point of view of the kind of the core Insight of the core wisdom of, you know, what I would take from a tradition like Buddhism, which is not, you know, it's not the only tradition that has given voice to this, but it's
I would argue is given it you boys to it the most in the most articulate way again leaving aside any of the Superstition and and other worldliness and miracles that you know we don't have to talk about at the moment and you certainly don't need to endorse in order to be interested in this stuff.
And so that's the the bifurcation between
the all of the utility of psychedelics and what I'm talking about under the rubric of meditation is at this point of okay, once you realize there's that there there, what do you do? And what's the logic by which your led to do it? And as possible with like, if you're only framework, is the good experiences, the good feels you had on whatever drug it was. And a further discussion of like,
That path of changes, you know, can look like and that can become in a religious context, it can come in just a purely psychedelic context or some combination of the two. I think you can be misled to a. You can just be, you can be misled to just seek. Lots of peak experiences. You're just trying to string together. A lot of peak experiences, hoping they're going to change you. Every one of which by definition is going to be in permanent, right? I mean
it's first. It wasn't there then it's there and then it's no longer there and then you've got a memory of it, right? The question, what I think it's what everyone really wants whether they know it or not and their right to want, is a type of Freedom that is compatible with even ordinary States Of Consciousness which can ride along with them, into extraordinary, States Of Consciousness. And so what I hadn't done psychedelics for 25 years because I made again, they were super useful for me in the
And then I discovered meditation on the basis of of those experiences got really into meditation and realize, okay, this is a much more. This really is the, you know, conceptually this makes much more sense to me. This is delivering the goods, you know, in terms of my experience, there's no need to keep having these, you know, seeking these Peak experiences with drugs, but it had been 25 years since I've done that. And, and there was this
surgeons in research on psychedelics, and I was being asked about psychedelics and I was talking about their utility for me. But again, these were Distant Memories and so I and there was also one type of psychedelic experience. I was aware that I had never had, I had never done a high dose of mushrooms blindfolded, you know, every mushroom trip I'd ever had. I've been out in nature and interacting with, you know, you know, it has been a very transformed sensory experience of the world and of other people.
But I've never done it alone, blindfolded, just purely, you know, inwardly directed and at a high dosage. I done high doses of LSD, but but not mushrooms. So I did that, you know, and it was very useful. And I spoke about it on my podcast. There's actually, there's I think if you search Sam Harris. Mushroom trip on YouTube. You get the, the 19-minute version of that. My describing that trip, it was incredibly useful and
It. What was it? What was doubly, useful was my mindfulness training in the context of that explosion of synesthesia. I mean it was it was, it was such an overwhelmingly strong experience. And there were so many moments where it could have gone one way or the other based on my sense of just, okay, I'm going to try to resist this, you know, it was it like it was it was it was in truth irresistible because it was
it so much. But there were moments where I was aware of, okay, this is like letting go of self in this context is is the thing that is going to, you know, to make the difference between heaven and hell here, you know? And because there's their experiences that are so extreme that you can't even tell if it's Agony or ecstasy, it's just, it's just everything is turned up to 11, right? And it, and the
It's between the two is like, you know, the Tipping Point. It's just it's on. It really is kind of a high-wire act, in some sense you could just fall to one side or the other and yeah, so what I think people want
Is, they certainly want to be able to extract from the Psychedelic experience. Wisdom that is applicable to ordinary States Of Consciousness. Like what is the thing? You can realize in a moment of having a conversation with your child that isn't distracting? You from that relationship, it's not a memory of when the world dissolved or, you know, when you were indistinguishable from the sky. But it's just a way of a way of be having free.
Ian and unconditional love in this, you know, totally ordinary and potentially chaotic Human Experience, you know which can be psychologically fraught and you can meet, you know, iterations of yourself that you don't like that. Are that are not equipping you to be the best possible person in that relationship. And what we want to do is cut through all of that and actually you know, be in love
our lives and with the people in our lives, more and more the time and
That's probably there's, I'm not saying that's the psych, you know, that repeated psychedelic Journeys, aren't can't be integral to that project, but but, you know, that, a, the project can't be being high all the time, right? So, whatever is extractable from that the, the occasional, you know, psychedelic trip has got to be mappable into ordinary waking consciousness. And the point of caught the real point of contact, does kind of run through this. You know what I've been
Calling the illusion of the self. And again, it is that part is discoverable without any changes in Contents, right? So, you don't have to suddenly feel the energy of your body, be rush out and be continuous with the, you know, the ocean of energy that is not your body, right? Like that's an experience that is there to be had, right? Means there's no doubt, but this, the truth is just looking at this cup.
Is just as formless and as mysterious as that, right? When it's seen in the right way. And that's and that's, that's what, you know, meditation encourages to you, no one to
recognize, what? Share the experience, that MDMA significantly, altered my perception of what's possible. In terms of an emotional stance towards self and others including animals, right? Something that runs very deep for me and that I had been kind of actively suppressing in
Patient of having put my dog down but also, you know, I'm not, I don't know how to frame it except to say, you know, my lab did animal research for years. I was always very conflicted about it. Yeah, because I love animals and yet I wanted to understand the brain and we need to work on animal brains and we rodents, or what? Yeah, I'll be very direct about this. My laboratory, I've worked on many species. I've worked on mice and rats. I've worked on admittedly. I've worked on done, some cat experiments.
Worked on large non-human primates including including macaques. I no longer work on any of those species. I've worked on cuttlefish cephalopods a discussion for another time. Brilliant little amazing creatures. Maybe maybe a smart as us or who knows? Maybe smarter. And now, I work on humans because I couldn't reconcile the challenge inside me, which was my love of animals and working on them. I just couldn't do it any longer. Yeah.
And an MDMA didn't set that transition that transition actually had been set a lot earlier. You know, something I really grappled with didn't keep me up at night, but it was always in the back of my mind, right in any event. I hope what we discovered was was worthwhile, but this is a, that's a bigger debate. And I have strong feelings about this and maybe it's a topic for a another podcast, but I'm very happy that now. I work on humans and they can tell me if they want to be part of the experiment or not and I trust them.
I trust their answers, I think that MDMA in its role as an empathic and I think really did set an understanding of what's Real and True. So, think truths, like that become. They don't, I felt that they didn't hit me square in the face. I just could the feeling behind the conflict made itself, evident and what to do about it made itself evident. So I suppose MDMA did did assist the transition to purely human research as opposed to animal research on the other thing that I noticed,
Did, is it made it not scary to confront things that were scary to confront in my conscious life? And I could think about things in my conscious life but it made you know, it brought them close in a way that I could get closer and closer to the flame and then gain some understanding. I've still amazed at how answers arrived both during the session, and then the weeks and months that follow, if one puts the attention to it, I think that's why it's important to have a guide of some sort or to have some pseudo.
Picture because otherwise you can one can get attached to the Sounds in the room and just and there's probably meaning there but I wanted to do some deeper work. I have not had experience with psilocybin at least not since my youth and I don't recommend young people do it. I regret doing LSD and psilocybin as a young person. I don't say that for politically correct, reasons, or liability reasons, I just think my mind was not developed and but I'm intrigued by something. So, here's the question.
How is it that psilocybin in particular, in high-dose psilocybin and the ego dissolution that people talk about on psilocybin? How do you think that lines up with some of the experiences that you've been describing for a adequate meditation? Practice? Because that's something that I did not experience on MDMA. In fact, if anything I experienced for the first time, what really? Feeling like a isolated container was in the different speech and how empathy? And
And being bounded having in other words, good, boundaries and empathy could be symbiotic. I experienced that for the first time there and I do think that there is learning inside of these states that translates into everyday life. When one is not only States, the last thing I'll say is no, I don't feel the the impulse to go and do 20 more MDMA sessions. I think the three is part of this study were very effective for me. And, you know, as they say if you hear the calling again, you might do it. But I'm very curious about psilocybin in
And this notion of ego dissolution because we've been talking about the
self. Well. So there are different ways in which the sense of self can be eroded or expanded or if there's a lots of experiences that can still have a kind of Center to them, but be very novel and transformational and one can reify those as a kind of goal state, right? And it's sort of a, there's a
Concept in Buddhism that I think is useful. It doesn't translate well.
To English and or it can set up kind of false associations in English that are unfortunate. But so there's a concept of emptiness in Buddhism. Which sounds again kind of gray and dispiriting in English but it's what it do. What it's it's a cognate terms are things like unconditioned unconstrained open.
Enter lists, right? So it's there's a and that is. So when I'm talking about non-duality, when I'm talking about that, with the loss of a sense of subject and then what's left in Buddhism, they would often describe what's left as emptiness. But emptiness is not a something it's not a it's and it's importantly, it's not the same thing as Unity, right? So it's not, it's not a Oneness, right? Because it's, it's
What's what's left when the center drops out of experience? It's not like you are suddenly merged with the cup, right? It's but now granted, you know, the this is where psilocybin and other psychedelics can give a false impression of. I think, what the goal is, you can have kind seeming, merging experience. You can have Unity experiences on psychedelics, which can be quite powerful, especially, with nature, with other
People in with nature where you can just feel like you know, the the energy.
Of your body becomes incredibly Vivid and Powerful. It's just like you're just everything is just, you know, buzzing with, you know, life energy. And then when you, you know, touch another person's hand or you touch a tree, there can be this sort of continuity of energy, which can be this overwhelming experience of. Again, this is a, just a 20-megaton change in the contents of Consciousness, right? This is like, this is not.
An unordinary State of Consciousness. But like this is, this is a give some indication of what, of how this happens when back in the day, when I was in my 20s. And I was experimenting with with this was Ellis Tate, but for some friends and I decided we had this brilliant idea. We would we would Camp above Muir Woods and then take some some LSD at dawn and then walk down, you know, spoke like a mile. I think from the campsite into the into the actual proper.
Grove of trees. And, you know, commune with a giant redwoods, the tallest trees on Earth. And so, we dropped the acid at dawn and we start walking, but the acid came on, you know, almost immediately. And we didn't get a movie, got nowhere near the woods. And we got stopped by a tree that was just like an ordinary and 20-foot. Oak tree, like the most boring touring the world and that tree absorb like the nests next six hours of our of our reason conscious attention because it was just, you know, it was the tree of life. I mean, it was just, like, could either could be no better tree.
So these are talking about non-ordinary States Of Consciousness, where in a merging with life and with with the world is possible and that is a. So I'm not saying that kind of experience isn't possible but there's a sort of expanded self reification. It is, it is a kind of ego dissolution but there's a there's a kind of It Go a tea that sort of goes along for the ride as well or can go a long.
For the ride, and the real insight into emptiness, the real sort of centerless, you know, center of the bullseye is a recognition that that in some ways equalizes, all experiences. And again, it's just as available now in the, this ordinary, you know, podcasting experience as it is when you're merging Hands-On with an oak tree and you know, on, you know, 400 micrograms of acid. And
And this is, you know, the, this is the whole universe. And so, it's the, it's the equality of those two experiences that does this concept of emptiness captures, which a common concept of Oneness doesn't quite capture because Oneness is really this. This peak experience of being dragged out of your you know your somethingness into a much bigger. Something this right emptiness is just no center, right? And then everything is in its
Own place right there. Still sights and sounds and Sensations, and thoughts and feelings, but there's just there's no there's no Center and there's no clinging to anything. There's no clinging to Identity, there's no clinging to the good stuff. There's no, there's no resistance to the bad stuff. There's no. It's so pleasant and unpleasant, get sort of strangely equalized and
There's this very it's very expansive and and most importantly it doesn't block anything. So yeah, if for whatever reason if your nervous system is set up to have the, oh my God, I'm now merging with the tree experience. That's a that's possible from the state of no center, right? And then and, and on my, you know, my recent now, not so recent. Three years ago is right before covid but my last, you know, big psychedelic experience.
You know, there was I was very much experiencing that whereas, you know, insofar as I, you know, at the peak, there was no me to remember any of you, any of this stuff. But, you know, in so far as I could experiment with, is this really different from anything else, you know, there is a kind of equalizing to the The Emptiness recognition even in the in the presence of a completely transformed neurophysiology. And and so that's
Again, there's a point of contact in the real point of contact between psychedelics and meditation for me is, but for my experiences on psychedelics, there's I think there's just no way. I would have had the free attention to be interested in in the in the project at all. And there are other aspects of the project. It's not just having this insight into selflessness. It's all of the ethical ramifications of that. It's just like, what kind of person do you want to be? What are your values? What's
So what is a good life all together when you are talking about relationships and, you know, political engagement and the changes you can make in the world or not make or if it's just, you know, what kind of person do you want to be? There's there's there's a much larger consideration and I may as you discovered, you know, an experience on MDMA can
Really both expand your model of what is possible and what is desirable, what is normative and me just what kind of, you know, what kind of self do you want to be in the world? And it can also help you cut through things that are inhibiting. Your actualizing, any of those possibilities in ordinary waking consciousness.
I've certainly found that to be the case, I mean, you raise a really important point, which is, that once
These learnings take place these understandings take place inside of psychedelic Journeys and I do believe they translate to neuroplasticity. I do want to highlight the point for people. Often times, people say, you know this mushroom or this psychedelic, it opens plasticity. But of course plasticity has to be directed someplace. Plasticity is just a process like rocking or anything else. Underlying neural process and I think it's impossible for me to understand what
compartments of my life have been impacted by these three MDMA sessions. But I in some ways I wonder whether or not not just the transition away from animal research, but also a deeper realization of the love for Learning and sharing information and I won't go so far as to say this podcast is happening because of that particular session, but these things they splay out into multiple domains of the self. And I do think that the key features that feel
Important to me to mention our that it really identified true love's things that I truly love and made me less less cautious about feeling how intense those loves really are and then also lower the inhibition point of exploring like, well what that? What would that mean? Right, you know, and one of the reasons I bring this up and why I think it's so important that you mentioned, you know, some issues around politics and ethics and many things have a splayed out.
From your exploration of psychedelics meditation Neuroscience philosophy. You know, all the things that are you and of course that's only a subset. Is that so much of what I hear and see so much of what I hear and see in the kind of self-help space.
Contradicts itself and leads back to the origin without a lot of progress. And and for instance we hear you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder. But then out of sight, out of mind, you hear about radical acceptance. But then what if it's radical acceptance of non-acceptance, right? I mean there are some experiences and people for which I radically accept the fact I want nothing to do with them. Yeah. And does that some in my supposed to transcend that. So these are the questions. I think that keep a lot of people from exploring things like meditation.
Because they feel like well is the idea to just be okay with everything is radical acceptance. Just like we'll just, you know, bulldoze me with with him with things even if they you know, and my goal is to somehow surpassed the idea that they're harmful. And I don't think that's actually the way any of this stuff is supposed to work. Although I don't claim to be the authority on it either, you know, I think Notions of radical acceptance and radical honesty and and any number of different sayings that one can find out the
There are really the most Salient beacons, and guides that most people have, in order to try and navigate tough areas in their life, including the relationship to self, but, others, and political orientations. And so I feel like, almost all those things can be used to anchor down in a stance that may or may not be informed, or to open up to ideas. And so, I think the none of this can really be solved in a single practice, it sounds like, but it does seem to me based on what
Told us today is that only through a deep understanding of the self as it really is, as opposed to this illusion that you framed up. Could we actually arrived at some answers about like what's actually right for each and every one of us?
Yeah, I mean if there's one generic answer that I think can be extracted both from psychedelic psychedelics and from meditation and just from just thinking more clearly about the nature of our lives. And it's
It's to become more process oriented and to, and to continue to be more and more sensitive to the Marilla. The Mirage, Mirage, like character of of achieving our goals right now, I'm not I'm not against achieving goals, I have a lot of goals. I've, you know, I'm very busy. There are lots of things I want to get done and, and I, you know, I'm A Satisfied as anyone to finish a project. And, but if you look at the time course of all of that, you know,
And you just ther few lessons. Everyone, I think has to draw. One is most of your life is spent in the process, right? Like the court, like the moment at which the goal is, you know, fully conquered, that is just mean that has a, you know, it's a tiny duration and it has a very short, half-life and your it, the moment you arrived at it. It begins to recede because in
the meantime, you have all these other goals that are have appeared on the horizon. You've got people asking what you're going to do next and you in some sense, if you're, if you're focus on goals, you really could you can never arrive, right? And
I think what we're what we're looking we're all looking for in life, you know, whether wherever thinking about citing taken psychedelics or or practicing something like meditation, we're looking for good enough reasons to let our attention fully rest in the present right now. Like it's hope. And that that is the logic of success. Like that the scent, the scent. Like I've got all these things I want to do, if I could just get rich enough
Fourth it enough or, you know, dial in my sleep, well, enough, or improve my life. And all these was get the right relationship. Wouldn't be great to be married or maybe, you know, I want to start a family. I want all of these these things. Why do I want these things? Right? I want these things because I'm telling myself this isn't. It's not that all of those things are wonderful, right? I'm not, I'm not discounting those relative forms of happiness, or sources of happiness, because it's all completely valid to is completely bound to want those things. But in the present,
one thing is absolutely clear. It's possible to be miserable in the presence of all those things, right? It's and you can add, you can add great wealth and fame and everything. On top of that, it's impossible, is possible to be absolutely miserable having everything. Anyone could seemingly want, right? And just have to open a newspaper to see people living out that predicament, right? You know, fence spectacularly, wealthy famous, healthy successful, people who could do anything they want in there in life, apparently. And yet, they're
This thing that is completely dysfunctional and making them needlessly miserable. I won't name names, but are enough of them. So some people come to mind at the moment. So so there is a, there is a clear dissociation between having everything and happiness, that's possible. And it's also possible to have very little, you know, and almost nothing and to be quite happy. I met you, you might not have met these people. But, you know, I have met people who have spent
Meant you know ten years alone in a cave, right? You know, and they come out of that cave not fleur-de-lis neurotic or psychotic they come out of that cave beaming with compassion and joy. And that's like they've been taking MDMA for 10 years essentially and they come out of the cave and now they're going to talk about it, right? So and I'm not necessarily recommending that project anyone, but I'm just saying that is that is a psychological possibility. So you have a double dissociation here, whether you can have everything and be miserable, you can have nothing and Bebe.
Beaming with happiness. So what is it? That we actually want in all of our seeking to arrange the props in our lives and our and our, and the story to have a convincing enough story to tell about ourselves that we're doing the right thing. What are, what is all of that effort predicated on is predicated on
This desire and this expectation that if we could get all of this stuff in the right place.
And not have anything terrifying to worry about. Right? Everyone, we love is healthy for the moment, right? And we're healthy, and it's you, we've got something to look forward to on the weekend. And there's not something, there's not a, you know, a Plumbing Leak in the house that we have to immediately respond to and we like our house and you know, our career is going fine. And there's something good to watch on Netflix and we have all of it right now. Can we just actually give up the war right? Can we can we, can we fully
Kate are our sense of well being in the present moment is it can we relax the impulse to brood about the past or think anxiously about the future will for long enough to discover that all of this here is enough, right? Because our life, our life is we have this finite resource of. I mean we we absolutely have the finite resource of time but within this the finite resources, the Continuum of time
we have the even more precious resource of
Free attention that is that that can find.
Our fulfillment in the present, right? And because even if we're even if we're guarding our time to do the things that are most important to us, we can spend all of that time.
Worried you're regretting the past or, you know, anxiously expecting the future and telling it to just bouncing between past and future in our thinking about ourselves and our lives and basically just dancing over, the present and never making contact with it, right? So what we, I think what we want is a circumstance where a tension can be located in the present, in a way that's truly fulfilling. And unless you have had some kind of radical
Tickle in site that allows you to do that on demand. You are in some sense Hostage to the circumstances of your life to do it do that for you? You're just you're constantly trying to engineer a state of the world that will propagate back on a state of self that will make the present moment good enough and what meditation does and psychedelics to some degree? Does this but meditation very directly does this, it
Versus the causality and lets you actually change change State such that, you can be fulfilled before. Anything happens, right? Nothing. Your happiness is no longer predicated on the next. Good thing happening you can be in the presence of the next good or bad thing already being fulfilled and already being a piece you know. I mean Lee there's a there's a
I think they're misleading now and we can we can throw at that, what is left there, but it is, you know, you know, Tranquility, peace, freedom, lack of contraction, lack of conflict with I got all of that is they ate can be more and more of a default and all of that is also compatible with deciding, you know. Yeah. Why not get in shape? Why not engage this project? Why not, you know, change your career. Maybe it's not. It's not that you need to be somebody who who
Except to your point, you can notice all of these non optimal things because no matter how much you meditate, you know, you're very light, very likely going to spend a lot of your time still lost in thought, still identified with it and still wanting still caring about the difference between dysfunction and and normativity in your life, right? And it's the question is, what can you what can you locate, when
The question is really like, how much can you puncture that seeking Happiness Project with the recognition that you're already free? Right? That mean that, that is that's what that's what meditation makes possible. You can keep just a thousand times a day letting some daylight into this search space and so it but it is still compatible like you can be working out as a great
Frame in which to look at this because we're in working out. When you're when you, when you really work out, you know. I'm thinking of, you know, mostly Miss really is anything, but it's in a resistance training or cardio or something like Jiu-Jitsu. You're intentionally, putting yourself in classically, unpleasant circumstances physiologically. And so if you if you were, you know, if you imagine what it's like to do, anything to failure, right?
If you just check in and what the on, what that is like at the level of sensation, I mean, that is basically a meta. It feels like a medical emergency room like that. If you were having that experience for some other reason, like if you woke up in the middle of the night and felt what it feels like to be deadlifting, you know, on your 10th rep on a set where you're going to, you know, you would fail at 11, right? Like that is just, you know, that's an emergency. But because you understand what you're doing in the gym and you've sought it out and like, it's actually, it's actually something.
Like doing right and you can even get a real dopamine, you know, hit from from doing it.
That what what you're doing when you're doing that is you're owning a kind of a cut, you like you're actually transforming a classically negative experience into something that's almost intrinsically, positive, right? Certainly the net on, it is positive, you can do that and went and being able to do that is more and more the experience of being actually.
At peace even while exerting really intense effort in One Direction so you can be straining and I'm sure physiologically showing a lot of stress and I'm sure the cortisol is up and like you know you know blood pressures up. Heart rate is certainly up. So it's like it's as far as the body is concerned is stress as far as the eye can see but you really can be deeply. Equanimous and at peace because again because
The frame around it because of the concepts attached to it because you know what you're doing, you know why it's happening and you want it. You so that that that's an attitude, you can bring into other stressful things that take effort to accomplish. And so it's not it's not that you just need to be a pushover. When you learn how to meditate, or when you take MDMA, or do any work on yourself in any of these ways. But what I think you, I think you want to find its you want to find your point of rest in the
Amidst of of any struggle
would say that the certainly MDMA but and again I'm less experience with meditation and but they really I think put us ultimately in positions of what can only refer to as real strength. He's gonna make what before seem like impossible decisions or even Concepts or emotional states to even think about for any period of time without deliberately distracting or avoiding. And some other way and be able to lean into those with with
Open honest. And I think that's to me, that's my definition of strength. I don't know what other people consider, but yeah, there's a, there's definitely something real there in each case.
This may seem like a Divergence, but I, and many other people are very curious about a recent decision that you made, which was to close your account on Twitter.
You still have an Instagram account, I noticed. Yeah. But
whenever, I mean, my team manages that I've never, I
love friendlier over it and so, yeah, I've been there a lot
of everyone. See it seeing it.
So, it's pretty good actually, considering imagine what would happen if you did you paint that they are doing a good job with it, but your decision to close your account on Twitter. I think grabbed a lot of eyes and ears and there's a lot of questions about why it was a very large account, you know. It correlated with a number of things that for the outside.
Other people might be wondering about, you know, new leadership new, you know, people who had been booted off brought back on, or at least invited back on, right? And so on, you are certainly not obligated to explain your behavior to me or anybody else for that matter. But I'm curious if you might share with us what the motivation was for, taking the account down, and how you feel in the absence of
I mean your thumbs presumably are freed
up to do other things. I was getting like an arthritic right thumb I think of it and I think
if you don't mind sharing I think there's there's a lot of curiosity about you and your routines. You've been very generous in sharing that your knowledge and but also kind of like what what makes what makes you tick? What motivates pretty big decisions like that? It wasn't a major platform for
you, right? Yeah, yeah it was the it was the only social media platform. I've
Never engaged, make like you said, we have an Instagram, I have a Facebook account but I never never used those as platforms, right? I was never on them. I never thought I've never followed people and I've never and all the postings just come from, it's just marketing, you know, from my team, but Twitter was me, I mean, you know, for better or worse and I began to feel more and more for worse and it was, it was interesting because it was very
You know, I've talked about it, a lot of my podcasts about just my my love hate relationship with Twitter over the years, many good things. Came to me from Twitter and I was, you know, I was following a lot of smart people and it become my newsfeed. And my first point of contact with with information each day and I was really attached to it, just for that reason. Just as a consumer of content.
And then it was also a place where I was at. I genuinely wanted to communicate with people and react to things. And, you know, I would see some article that I thought was great and I would signal boost it, you know, to my people following me on Twitter and that was rewarding and I was I could literally help people on Twitter. Like I mean there was a there were you know, there people who I've raised lots of money for on Twitter just Buy Signal boosting their GoFundMe is and and so I was engaged in a way
It seemed productive.
But I was always worried that it was producing needless Conflict for me. And was, was giving me a signal in my life that I was being lured into responding to and taking seriously, that was out of proportion to its representation of any opinion or set of opinions that I should be taken seriously.
So, I was noticing that that, again, this evolved over years. I mean, this this long before long long, predated recent changes to Twitter, but I was noticing that many of the worst things that had happened for me professionally were first born on Twitter. I mean, just like, you know, some, some conflict. I got into with somebody or something that I felt like I needed to podcast about in response to on Twitter.
It is so much of it was either. Its Genesis was Twitter or it's the, the further spin of it that became truly unpleasant and dysfunctional happened on Twitter. Like, it was just Twitter was part of the story when it was got really bad. And I've had, you know, vacations that have gone sideways just because I got on Twitter and said something and then I had to produce a controversy that I had to respond to and then I had to do a podcast about that and but just and it was just okay, this is a mess.
Right? And so at that point, you know, I have friends who, you know, also had big Twitter platforms, who would, who would say you know why are you, you know, why are you responding to anything on Twitter, just tweet and ghosts, you know, just do to heaven. And this me like Joe Rogan, yes. A lie down and go try to get get, you know, give me a talking to as to Bill Maher and both of them engaged Twitter in that way. I mean, I think they basically never look at their @mentions. They never see what's coming back at them. They just, you know, they use it effectively.
Actively the way I use or don't even use Instagram or Facebook and I don't even see what's going out there in my name and so I could essentially do that for myself on Twitter. Presumably and I did that for some period of time, but then I would continually decide. Okay now it's all balanced again. Maybe I can just communicate because it was very tempting for me to communicate with people because I would see somebody
Clearly misunderstanding. Something I had said on my podcast and I think it's like why not clarify this misunderstanding, right. And in, and my efforts to do that almost invariably produced a
This admit sometimes it was a kind of Meandering process of discovery but often it was just kind of a stark confrontation with what appeared to me to be just lunacy and malevolence on a scale that I never encounter elsewhere in my life. Like I never meet these people in life, right? And yet I was meeting these people by the tens of thousands on Twitter and so it was the thing that began to worry me about it.
And again, as I understand that people have the opposite experience. I thought, maybe depending on what you're putting out and what you're, you know, the kind of topics you're touching, you could have just nothing but love coming back at you on Twitter, right? But because I'm very essentially in the center politically and because I'm on my own, this is now on my podcast, this is not in the waking up app. I'm often criticizing the far left and criticizing the far, right?
I'm basically pissing off everyone some of the time rice and it's very different. If you're only criticizing the left,
You hate, no doubt. You get hate from the left, but you have all the people on the right who just reflexively and tribally are expressing their solidarity for you, right? And who are who are dunking on your enemies for you. And you know, when your enemies come out of the woodwork, and if you're only criticizing the right, I'm sure you get a lot of pain from the right. But you've got the people on the left who are tribally identified with the left who are just going to reflexively defend you if
Or in the center criticizing the left as hard as anyone on the right ever criticize, the let criticizes the left, and you're also criticizing the right. As hard as anyone on the left, criticizes the right? You're getting hate from both sides all the time, and no one is reflects a 4-foot reflexively and tribally defending you because you pissed them off. Last time you might be getting heat from the left now and the people on the right, agree with you, but they can't forget the things you said about Trump on that podcast, you know, you know to
It casts ago, so they're not going to defend you and so what I do. But I basically created hell for myself on Twitter because it was
I just, you know, it was just a theater of which is pure cacophony, most of the time and what I was seeing was like there's no way there this many psychopaths in the world but I was seeing Psychopaths everywhere I was seeing like the most malicious dishonesty and you know, just goalpost moving and hypocrisy and it was just I mean some of his trolling and some of its real confusion and some of it is psychopathy but it's like it was so
So dark that I worried that he was actually giving me a very negative and sticky view of humanity. That was, I mean one it was, you know, I think it is an inaccurate, but to I it was it was something I was returning to so much. Because again, I was checking Twitter, you know, at least a dozen times a day and I'm sure there was some days
Well I checked it a hundred times a day. I mean it was it was again it was my main source of information as constantly reading articles and and then putting my own stuff out that it became this kind of fun house mirror in which I was looking at the, the most grotesque side of of humanity and feeling, you know, implicated in ways that were important important because it was just, it was reputationally important or seem to be important. I know a lot of
these people, it's not. These weren't just faceless trolls. These are these are people with whom I have had relationships and in some cases friendships who because of what, you know, largely Trump and covid did to our political landscape in the last, you know, half a dozen years, we're beginning to act in ways that that seemed starkly dishonest and you know, crazy-making to me. So I was just noticing that I was forming a view of people who I actually.
We've had dinner with that was way more - based on their Twitter Behavior than I think would ever be justified. By any way, they would behave in life with me. You know, I mean, it's like, it's never. I was never going to have a face-to-face encounter with any of these people that was this malicious and dishonest and gas lighting and weird. Right? As was, what was The Happening hourly on Twitter? Right? And so, I just began to become more sensitive to
Two.
What this was, you know, just the residue of all of this in my life and how and just how often the worst thing, that the worst thing about me in my relationship with the people in my life, you know, they just talking to my wife or my kids was just the fact that I had been on Twitter at some point in the previously and the me the previous hour and there was some residue of that you know you know in my interaction with them, you know like what you know what are you stressed out about? What are you annoyed about? What are you
Pissed off about, you know what can't you get out of your head? What is the thing that you now? Feel like you need to spend the next week of your life focused on because it went. So sideways for you, all of that was Twitter, you know, a little bit, maybe literally a hundred percent of that was to order and. And so, I just one point I was actually on Thanksgiving day. I just looked at this, I just just, I mean, it was very little thought went into it. I mean, literally, I mean, you know, it was more thought in involved in.
You know, whether I wanted coffee, when you asked me when I showed up here and I was just like a certain point. I just I just saw it and I just, I just rip the Band-Aid off and yeah. So and answer the other question. It's been almost wholly positive as you might expect given the Litany of pain and discomfort, I just ran through but
I think it's also it's surprising to recognize how much of a presence that was in my life, given the sense of what is now missing. I mean, it's like there's it was there's no question. There was a, there's a kind of an addictive component to it. And when you see, I'm like, when I look at what elon's doing on Twitter, forget about his ownership of it and I'm not, you know, I have got a lot to say about the choices he's making for the platform but just his personal use of it is
So obviously an expression of, I mean, I don't know if addiction is the, you know, clinically appropriate term. But you know, his dysfunctional attachment to tweet to using the platform. Forget it again. Forget forget about changing it, and owning it, but just hit, the just the degree to which it is pointlessly disrupting the life of one of the most productive people in any generation.
I that was also instructive to make so I because I know Ilan and I just, you know, he's from you know, of kind of a friend's eye view of the situation. It's so obviously not good for him. That he's spending this much time on Twitter that I just brought that back to me. It's like all of his not if this is what he's doing to Elon and he's got all these other things he could be doing with his attention. How much of my use of Twitter is
Really, you know, a good idea and, you know, optimized to my well-being and the well-being of the people around me. So anyway, it was, there was an addictive component to it. I think. And so when that got stripped off,
I, you know, I do notice that there's there's some there times, I pick up my phone and I realized this is like the old me picking up my phone for a, for a reason that no longer exists because there's not that much. You know, I have a slack Channel with my team and I've got email obviously, but it's like that is not much of what I was doing with my phone really in the end. And so like it's just my phone is much less of a presence in my life and so it's, it's almost wholly. Good. But yeah. It's you know,
There's I think there is some danger in or some some possible danger in losing touch with certain aspects of culture, which again, I'm not even sure. I mean, there's this question of, you know, how much is Twitter real life and how much is it? Just a mass delusion? I don't know but insofar as it actually matters. What happens on Twitter or insofar as I was actually getting a news diet which I'm not going to be able to recapitulate for myself or I'm just not in fact, Wonder
Rich recapitulate for myself, even if I could, if any of that matters I haven't discovered that yet. But it's yeah, I mean there's it was taking up an immense amount of bandwidth and it's impressive. And I think I said I, you know, it was like I amputated at a phantom limb, write it like, it was not a real whim but it was it was a continuous presence in my life. That
That it is. It's weird. It actually relates to the concept of self and in surprising ways because I felt there was a part of myself that existed on Twitter and I, you know, I just performed a suicide of a that self rather like that's this is ending right now. As you know, there's no residue, there's nothing to go back and check. There's just it's gone. And I didn't even, I didn't go back and look at my like what's interesting to consider is that, you know, I've been on Twitter for 12 years
I don't keep a journal on Twitter, what you my timeline would have been a kind of Journal. I could have gone back to a specific hour and a specific day and looked at what I was paying attention to him. And that would have been an interesting record of just who I've been for a decade and I probably have pretty humbling record of who had been for a decade in terms of the kinds of things that captivated my attention. But I didn't even, you know, I didn't even think to go in the state, you know of nostalgic Lee just look at any of that or see if any of it was worth saving or archiving or
They get I just just delete, you know, and it was and so my actual sense of who I am and my engagement with with my audience, my you know, the world of people who could potentially know me like what does it mean to be to have a platform? You know, where do I exists? Digitally my sense of of all of that got truncated in a in a way that
At.
Is much less noisy. I mean, it's amazing how much.
Can't get fucked up now in my life like it's like with Twitter.
Almost anything could happen, right? Like, like the next tweet was always an opportunity to massively complicate my life. There is no analogous space for me now. And you know, so the what I'm going to say on your podcast, what I'm going to have my own podcast, what I'm going to write next, that's much more.
You know, deliberative and the opportunities to take my foot out of my mouth or to reconsider all, you know, whether the anything any of this is worth it. Is it worth, is this the hill? I really want to die on. Now, it's much more can be much more considered and I may, I think all of that stew the good. But even more important than that, is that there's not
I'm not getting this continuous signal that is always inviting a response weather on Twitter on my own podcast, or, you know, anywhere else. And
It's just much less noisy. I mean life is much less noisy and and cluttered and that's, you know, that that is definitely feels better. Just it's 100% better.
I'm happy to hear that. I know a number of people miss you there but you sound happy. I sense, a genuine happiness in it, several things come to mind. First of all, thank you for sharing your your rationale there and how it went. I think for a lot of people I think all you must have like walked around in circles for hours talking
About everything delete as many good decisions are executed, right? Yeah. You know, I'm a big fan of Cal Newports work deeper work in many ways Cal's I've never met him but we know each other through the Internet space. He really ahead of his time with this notion of deep work and limiting distractions. I think he's even got a book about a world without email or something I really extreme. So
he had, I mean he deserves some credit because he had been somewhat approximate cost to this. He had been in my
Gasps and he and it had encouraged me to delete Twitter because I had been I had been sort of in the reaching some kind of, you know, crisis point with it prior to that podcast. And so we talked about it and I had I had recorded that podcast but hadn't released. I actually recorded the podcast the day before I wound up deleting Twitter, but hadn't yet released its own, you know my podcast with him in the intro to it. I then give a post-mortem on my deleting it but he was he was one of the last
Most people who was in my head around these issues and I you know, it was not by accident. I had invited him on the podcast because I increasingly wanted to think about you know, whether this was totally dysfunctional.
Well, I'm a big fan of Cal Newport Santa and I am on social media. I'm on Twitter. I had some you know High friction interactions there and I have a process for dealing with those tend to avoid High friction confrontations online, but Instagram is a much friendlier place, by the way, if you want to come over,
Everywhere, like the nice gift. The cool kids actually hang out
strains, really? I'm not looking for a substitute. Okay. Well, you know,
it's a, I didn't, I don't let me in dice you over there you do, but I think that this notion of really being Yak able to access. What Cal calls, deep work, what Rick Rubin talks about, you know, being able to touch the source of great, creativity and focus. And on a regular basis does require that one have certain types of and in some cases zero interaction with certain
Platforms that merely being on a platform and blocking people that would just won't provide. I think a lot of energy opens up and I'm fascinated by this concept of energy. We only have so much energy. Yeah, neural energy to devote. And in many ways, what you described, there's really, I think, striking parallels to what I'm talking about all along these last hours, which is that sometimes the thing that feels so, so powerful that has such a gravitational pull and that we think this is experience. This is like this.
Is just the way it is actually is an illusion. And when you step away from it, you realize that there's this whole other dimension of interactions that that was available all along that we for whatever reason we're intervening in by way of our reflexive, distracted Behavior. So I think there's a there's that there's a poetry there. I
was a hard case, but yeah, I got religion on this point so it's a good change.
I want to say a couple of things. First of all,
Every time you talk, I learn so much, and that's, you know, in the dimensions of Neuroscience, even hardcore neural circuitry type stuff, which I'm, you know, sort of my home when you talk about philosophy or, or meditation, or psychedelics, and even politics. Some, a topic that I'm, you know, woefully under educated in, but you have this amazing ability to blend and
He's across things. And I think today, what occurs to me is that not only is that no accident because of your training and your, the rigor and the depth at which you've explored these different topics, but also your openness to it. But I think at least For Me Above All is because I think you are able to encapsulate this idea of the self and, and the different ways in which we each, and all can potentially interact with the environment and our inner landscape your description of meditation after
Is now has forever changed the way I think about meditation. I would no longer just think of it as a perceptual exercise. I on the podcast I've been talking about is something to do for these various benefits. The benefits set of more Focus, their stress that seller of which certainly exists. But what you described today, has a such an Allure and a, a hold such a promise. That as I mentioned, I'm certainly going to change my behavior and I know I'm speaking on behalf of
Many, many people. I just want to extend, my thanks for your coming here today to teach us even more because of course, you have your podcast and the app, The Waking Up app and the fact that regardless of the political Landscapes, regardless of the what Neuroscience feels about psychedelics or the where things are at any point in time, you strike me as somebody who is very committed to sharing knowledge and
Thoughtful deep discourse so that people can benefit and there are very few people like you. In fact, there's probably only just one. And so I feel very grateful to be sitting across the table from him for these last
hours. Nice, nice. Why I really enjoyed this. And I want to congratulate you on what you've built here because your podcast is, is everywhere. I just come can, you know, I'm a fan and even more than that, I'm continually seeing the evidence of you reaching people and, and benefiting people. And it's just
It's really a me, like, this is the one of the best examples of, you know, New Media. Just carving out a space. That people didn't really know existed, you know, because like this is not television, it's not radio, it's not and and all of a sudden people have time to hear a conversation of Great Lengths that goes into, you know, nitty-gritty scientific detail on hormones. I mean like who would have thought that was even possible and so yeah I was just
Relations is fantastic to see and I'm just very happy for the opportunity to talk to you and your people.
Thank you. It's very gratifying to hear. And I feel very blessed in no small part because of our conversation today. Thank you. Science want to be continued to be continued. Will do it again. Yeah. And again, and again, thank you for joining me today for my discussion with dr. Sam Harris. I hope you found it to be as enlightening as I did. And be sure to check out the waking up app. The dr. Sam Harris has made free to any human.
Uberman lab listeners for 30 days by going to waking up.com hubermann. Please also check out his incredible podcast, the making sense podcast and you can find any number of Sam Harris has different books on meditation, Consciousness, philosophy, Neuroscience politics and more you can find links to those books by going to Sam Harris dot-org. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's the best zero cost way to support us in addition. Please subscribe to the podcast.
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