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 at 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 changing 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 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 important 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 and 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 to be more functional.
We also discussed 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 intellectual 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 arrive at a clear and better understanding of a meditation practice that we can each and 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 Podcasts 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 wakingup.com slash 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 one's consciousness. I also asked Sam about his views and practices related to social media, prompted in no small part by his recent voluntary decision to close 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. And now for my discussion with Dr. Sam Harris. Dr. Sam Harris.
You're just talking about this. You are indeed a doctor. I cannot save your life, but I might save your non-existent soul if we talk long enough. Well, neither of us are clinicians, but we are both brain explorers from the different perspectives, some overlapping.
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 waking up app. Nice.
And has spent a lot of time over the last few years. He's in his late 70s. He's in almost 80s. So 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. He kind of toggles back and forth and even I shouldn't say even, but yes, even in his late 70s has reported that it is significantly shifted his awareness of self and his conscious experience of things happening in and around him. And he was somebody who I think already saw himself as a pretty aware person thinking about quantum mechanics and the rest.
So a thank you from him indirectly. 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 there are 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, but when we talk about sense of self, I have to remember this kind of neuroscience 101 thing that we always say, you know, when you teach memory, you say, you know, 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, yeah, well, big question. I mean, the problem is we use the term self in so many different ways, right? And there's one sense of that term, which.
Is the target of meditation and it's the target of deconstruction by the practice and by any, just any surrounding philosophy. So you'll hear and you'll hear it from me that. This self is an illusion, right? And that there's a psychological freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering it to be an illusion. And some people don't like that framing. Some people would would insist that it's not so much an illusion, but 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 selves 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, yourself as a whole person and, you know, as psychological continuity with your past experience as being distinct from the person and psychological continuity of some other person, right?
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, you know, demand some explanation.
So the illusoryness of the self doesn't cut against any of those obvious facts. So the sense of self that is illusory. And again, we might want to talk about self and other modes because there's just a lot of interest there 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, the 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 an experience of their bodies in the world. And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body and are very likely in the head.
Most people feel like they're behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought and intention and, and that it's almost like you're a passenger inside your body. Most people don't feel identical to their bodies and they can imagine this is sort of the origin, the psychological origin, the folk psychological origin of a sense of that there might be a soul that survive the death of the body.
I mean, most people are what my friend Paul Bloom calls common sense dualists, right? You, you, you're just the default expectation seems to be that whatever the relationship between the mind and the body, there's this, there's some promise of separability there, right?
And whenever you really push hard on the science side and say, well, no, the mind is really just what the brain is doing that begins to feel more and more counterintuitive to people and there still seems some some residual mystery that you know at death, maybe something is going to lift off the brain and go elsewhere, right?
And there's a sense of dualism that many people have and obviously that that's supported by many religious beliefs. But this feeling, it's a very peculiar starting point, the people feel that in it, you know, 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're kind of on the edge of the world and the world is out there, your body is is in some sense an object in the world, which you, you know, it's different from the world, you know, the boundary of your skin is still meaningful, you can sort of loosely control your body.
I mean, you can't control, you can control your gross, you know, 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 the dark for you and then you, you give someone an instruction to meditate say and you say, OK, 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.
And now they're going to pay attention to something, they're going to pay attention to the breath or sounds and it's from the point of view of being a locus of attention that is now aiming attention strategically at an object like the breath. That there's this dualism that is set up and ultimately the ultimate promise of meditation, I mean, 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, 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 there's 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 its real promise is not in this long list of benefits and 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 I, 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 cannot find it in a way that's conclusive and that matters, right? And it has a, there's a host of benefits that follow from that discovery, which are quite a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits, you know, de-stressing, increasing focus and all the rest. And a 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, et cetera.
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 meditations, which I these days view more as perceptual exercises, you know, talked about this on the podcast before, but for those haven't heard before about, you know, perception, you can have extra reception extending.
And it's, you know, it's a lot of things beyond the confines of your skin, interoception, which is also includes the surfaces of the skin, but everything inward. And meditation through eyes closed, typically involving some sort of attentional spotlighting something we'll get into to more interoceptive versus extra receptive events, et cetera, including thoughts.
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 have ourselves as passengers within those containers.
And so, 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 sit a few centimeters below the surface, or that sit 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 the nervous system, and that can get us into trouble in terms of coming up with real, real directions and definitions.
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, another organ systems that the nervous system binds, 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 couple of square millimeters out of my parietal cortex, it's an open question as to whether or not I would still seem as much like Andrew to other people into myself even. And so there is something fundamentally different about the real estate in the cranial vault.
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. Whereas, and this doesn't, I think, just apply to memory systems. I mean, I think there are reasons of the frontal cortex that when destroyed have been shown to modify personality and self perception in dramatic ways.
It's sort of an 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.
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 you or is me. And now I need to get this thing, the whole container and me to someplace of safety in whatever form. This is also true, I think, in ecstatic states. Yeah.
I 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. I mean, maybe our sensory experience is not truly at the bodily surface, but sits below the bodily surface, more at the level of organ systems and 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 include all 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 or describing the self. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot there.
The first on the point of the brain being, you know, the the locus of of what we are as minds. Yeah, I mean, there are people who will insist that sort of the whole nervous system has to be thought of as they will be talking about our emotional life and you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the insulas connection to the gut and just the sense of self extends beyond the brain.
But 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 and a vat. I mean, we essentially are already, you know, the vat is our skull and we're, you know, virtually in that situation.
The horrible movie, I'm sorry, I can't help but interrupt when I was a teenager my sister and I used to go to the movies every once in a while we trade off who could pick the movie and. She took me to see once the movie boxing Helena the David Lynch film 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 me and said.
I'm so sorry and the question there and was whether or not two siblings should actually persist in a movie like that we decided to persist in the movies 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 her 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 etc could there be love could there be these other affections anyway a rather extreme example but one that I that still haunts me and I'm thinking about still.
Yeah well so 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 expect but you just sitting in your chair. That you you've retained the knowledge of how to write a bike right like a procedural memory is different from semantic or episodic memory if I asked you.
You know do you know your address yes you can recall your address just sitting there but. If you 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 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 if you are you know 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 you know personhood which. Seemed to only cut you know only get invoked when we're you know out there moving in the world and you know we have the limbs etc and. But yeah no it's the seat of.
Of consciousness I mean 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 world. And our internal experience is is illuminated that it has a qualitative character. And then there's a 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 to different states of a rousal 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 can add drugs to the mix you had psychedelics that you read radically transform the contents of consciousness from my point of view consciousness itself is simply the cognizance the awareness that that is the flood lights 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 whether some some contents you want to get rid of like anxiety other contents you want to to encourage like calm and you know unconditional love or you some other you know classically pleasant pro social emotion.
And that's all fine as all possible but the real you know wisdom of you know the 2000 year old wisdom of meditation that really is the you know the chewy center of the to see 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 what we might talk about this but this is why they're mutually compatible.
Psychedelics and meditation for me are somewhat orthogonal because psychedelics is all about making wholesale changes to the contents of consciousness and 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 is enormous but
disjunction here is that there really is something to recognize about ordinary waking consciousness that the consciousness that's compatible with my driving a car to get here on time right you don't have to you don't have to have the pyrotechnics of being on lsd to see the the the the the the transcend the central illusion that I'm saying is is the thing to be transcendent which is the sense that there is a duality between subject and object in every moment of experience.
And to take it back to do something you said about just all of our different modes in ordinary life. And the interesting thing is I think people are constantly losing their sense of self and they're not aware of it and there there's a probably an analogy to the visual system here which is to a visual saccades which they perhaps you've spoken about at some point on your podcast not enough so please yeah so so what happens with our you know every time we move our eyes this is called a
cod and we do that about you know three times a second or so just normally there is a you know the the region of motor cortex that 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 moved your eyes it would seem like the visual scene itself was lurching around and people can experience this for themselves if they just you know touch one of their eyeballs on the side you know not all that hard and kind of jiggle it you know you can roll it around you can jiggle it from side to side you can see that a a a movement of the eyeball that's not governed by your ocular motor system delivers a jiggling of the world
it's not your brain is not anticipating it in the same way and it's not you're not producing it that same you know predictive copy of the movement it's a little bit like some action sports filmers on our staff here that the gimbal you know that holds a an iPhone like you see the kids with serve boards or skateboards or something they're going to hold a phone while moving around or the people who are the vloggers
and even still use that for you know moving around into its image stabilization essentially that keeps the camera steady and these are more than cameras of course the 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 perhaps where you're going with this that that
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 well 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 you're you're effectively going blind and you're not noticing it and this is very fast yes it's very fast now there's an analogous suppression I would say of the sense of self that occurs every time attention gets absorbed significantly in its object right so like we even have this concept of you losing yourself in your work or you know you losing your I mean 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 in some you know athletic activity or you know an aesthetic one or you could be having sex or you could be whatever it is some peak experience its peakness usually entails there being some brief period where there was no distance between you and the experience right 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 you like this you know this you know this not there's just the flow of unity with whatever the you know whatever the experience is you know a surfer on it on the wave right and we love those experiences and then we are continually abstracted away from them by our thinking about them well we think oh my god that was so good
and 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 what a real estate prices are here I mean because it's a possible that we could move here and like you your your mind is just continually narrating a 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 which is the water and so there it is right but I'm the one seeing it who am I saying oh there it is too as though there's someone else who needs to be informed about the
thing I already saw right so it's it's something about our internal dialogue that is paradoxical is there any neurologic condition close electomy or anything like that where somehow people feel more unified with the self on a continual basis the observer and the actor within whether it
is a more more as a complete sentence is there any known neurological syndrome makes it sound like a bad thing but could be a good thing whereby people feel that the actor and the observer within them are unified continually there's not a pathological one some of
them the work on the default mode networks suggest 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 psychedelic literature but it's 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 his default state these
midline structures would would increase their activity and then they would then they would reliably diminish whenever the person in the scanner was was on task and usually that meant some kind of outward looking you know visual discrimination task I mean but it could be could be
you know it could be visual it could be semantic it could be but there tends to be their eyes are open and their 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 the general insight was there these midline structures in the brain that seemed to be increasing their activity when the brain is just kind of idling between task waiting for something to happen and then further experiments found
tasks that actually upregulated activity there beyond baseline and those tasks seem to be self-referential so that when you ask people you know you give them a list of words and you say would do these any any of these apply to you right you know and so people are or you
ask people to think about you know actually 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 up regulation 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 you know 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 explicit acts of self-representation right so could we say that they are somewhat autobiographical because they access memory
systems and in the way you're describing them and in the way that a colleague of mine who's been a guest on this podcast I don't know if you've interacted with him before but I think you'd very much enjoy whatever interaction you do would have his David
Spiegel he's our associate chair of psychiatry he's not he and his 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 default mode network he talks about this a lot and I always wonder as we take down activity within the default mode network what surfaces it in its place and is what surfaces in its place
does that somehow reflect 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 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 what I'm quote it seems it seems to be fighting for for our attention unless we give ourselves a visual targeted 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 out we're going attention is not even if you're having the kind of egoic saccade 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 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 you know to wind back to the original point I was making and the reason why I drew the the analogy to visual saccades I do think there's a
continuous interruption in our sense of self that goes unrecognized and but but the conscious acquisition of of the understanding that the self is an illusion is a different experience and it's because you're 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 you know in both eyes we have what's called the blind spot which is a consequence of the optic nerve transiting through the retina I mean unlike cephalopods I think I think I mean I think cephalopods have their optic nerve you know as you know a a 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 retino but our photoreceptors on the outside exactly humans whatever reason put photos well I was I was in consult the design phase something put a
photoreceptors combination of things but photoreceptors in the back and so you actually have to send the high wave information through through the pixel center of the of the eye yeah 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 yeah but it gives me good analogy so I'll take it.
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which you can you know 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 then when I returned to their screen time but anyway
you can take a piece of paper and you make you know two marks on it and then you cover one eye and you fixate on on one mark I mean you can look this up online if you need details about how to do this and you while 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 and if and you know you can run this experiment long enough to satisfy yourself that there is in fact a blind spot in your visual field which you with one eye closed you don't normally notice the reason why you have to cover cover one eye is because each eye compensates for the blind spot of the other so but what 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 ahead 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 there and you're I mean the 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 that you described before I guess I should say that the the the saccade analogy of about transiently and repetitively erasing the self works perfectly here because indeed microsecodes smaller saccade curl
the time also prevent our eyes from fixating at one location long enough to observe our blind spot even if one eye is closed right right so if we the experiments done with paralytics to essentially lock eyes at one location basically things just start disappearing yeah it just it's all up to the end that we start losing but actually we start going blind right and those experiments have been done and on humans I hear they're quite terrifying yeah yeah yeah yeah
yeah but I mean you can do that for yourself they're just you know it begins to just all of the melt away and and go in a warm glow no psychedelics required but the the interesting point there is that when you ask yourself okay so this because of 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
or at least that deep within or is that in some sense right on the surface of experience and there's this expectation that people have again I think conflating meditation with with a search for changes in the contents of consciousness they're looking for
you know much more subtle things to 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 you just get the this full you know the Pacific vision
and you know you get you know not only visual changes but you know emotional changes and you get synesthesia where like you're just you have much more mind in in in so many ways so they begin to you 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 coincidence with the ordinary awareness that can it will let can see this coffee cup clearly and that can just transition
attention to you know reading an email you know with with the full sobriety of just you know ordinary waking consciousness but the truth is this insight into selflessness this 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 go anywhere you just have to set up that the
the experiment correctly such that you know you 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 I mean if it's at all hard to notice it because it's because it's so close rather than it's you know deep within or far away and there are other analogies like I don't remember those minds I pieces of artwork that were the random dot stereo grounds where you have an image that pops out I always find it very
difficult to see those because I have a very dominant eye you know but some people can't see those these are these images that used to be at the kind of like touristy shops of a but people say oh there it is the whale I'm thinking I don't see it you know kids that swim a lot when they're younger and they're I tend to breathe just to one side I don't know if this was you this is definitely the tend to will keep one eye close you
set up a pretty strong ocular dominance and by seeing your vision to one or the other eye 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 one eye for even a couple of hours can set up a permanent a symmetry in the waiting of visual flow of in for flow of visual information from
the eye to the brain it's reversible but only through the reverse gymnastics of covering up the other eye intentionally so I actually be I had to be reverse 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 random yeah that's very good which is kind of ironic because I did my PhD on binocular circuitry right right nonetheless yet 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 a bit by stable percepts yeah by stable percepts and then there's sort of um ocular competition you show two different images to the eyes each of the two eyes
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 these seem to be fundamental features about the way the neural circuits are organized that they don't want to stable you 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 and I 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 it's sort of a different path for this I mean for the only point I was making is that the seemingly paradoxical claim that something can be right on the surface
uh and yet hard to see right so like the their things that are because it's and again this this this seems to justify the expectation held by I would think you know the vast majority of people who get interested in these you know spiritual things relax for a better word that the truth must somehow be deep within right like that like there's really like a there's some distance between where you're between the one who is looking and the thing that has to be found right and 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 base 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 you're between your starting point and the goal and what I'm arguing at you know and 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 coincident right that there's a there that you have to unravel the logic by which you would seek something that's outside of you the you know the present moments 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 if you want to be a pianist or if you want
to speak Chinese or like like the you 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 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 to be able to do that reliably and insight into and really the core insight I mean the the insight that is either the core of you know the Buddha's teaching to take one one historical example of this really is available now and it is not I mean you know granted it can be very hard one for people I mean I had probably spent a year on silent retreat in in you know one week
to three month increments before I sort of got the point I'm making now right so like I you know it's quite I mean literally and this is these are you know is a retreats where he's been you know twelve to eighteen hours a day just meditating trying to to you know unpack the kinds of claims I'm you know making now so there is it's possible to rigorously overlook this is 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 trying to argue here is that there's a fair amount of leverage you can get with with better information which can kind of cut the time course of your 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 it's possible to get bad information and to
have a bunch of experiences you know you go you go and do an I wasca trip and you know you're going to be able to be really valuable and is valuable for all the ways in which it changed the contents of your consciousness in you know start in ways and you had insights into your past and into your relationships and into why you're not as loving as you might be and there's lots to think about and you're like yeah that's all great that's all something that you know you can talk
about but there is it's it truly is orthogonal I mean if it makes a point of awareness at the point where this sense of subject object division in consciousness is illusory and vulnerable to investigation and if you investigate it that's 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 optic blind spot experiment in just the right way so that you can see that you know it's actually not the data is not there or I mean the by stable percept is great because you know when you see one of these images like the
vase face diagram or you know the Dalmatian you know that it looks like 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 I mean well like once you have the
conceptual you know anchor to it then every time you look you're going to find it again and eventually becomes effortless and that's what ultimately meditation is I mean this kind of meditation you you ultimately learn to recognize that there's no separation from you between you and your
experience right there's not the experience on the one hand and the self on the other there's just experience right there's just seen hearing smell and touching thinking feeling you know appropriate exception add add whatever channels of information you want to that but there's just the there's just
the totality of the energy of consciousness and its contents and there's no it's not that you're on the river bank and this is this is how it can seem in the beginning even when you're practicing meditation fairly diligently
it can seem like you're on the 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 at the pleasant or pushing the unpleasant away you're just kind of relaxing and in the most
non-judgmental frame of mind just witnessing the flow right but if you're doing that dualistically you feel like the meditator you feel like the subject aiming attention and so now you're on the river bank watching everything go go pass 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 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 you're a meekdala is driving so hard I'm saying you're in a war and you can't think about anything because the
you know the enemy's shooting at you and this is the most thrilling video game you've ever played in your life and your life is on the line or your your you know at the peak of 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 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 for a fair amount since I was in my teens but more along the
lines of just paying attention to breath and you know recognize thoughts sort of observer open observer type meditation or focused attention I would suppose more of the focused attention type we'll get into these a little bit
layered but I 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 sits so close to us that that might be one of the reasons why we miss it I go right to a visual system example of me if you don't you're wearing corrective lenses and there's a spec on your lens you know typically you're looking out through the lens and so you wouldn't observe that
spec any number of different analogies could work here the the fact that there are states however few positive and negative at ecstasy eight extreme ecstasy and extreme fear being that the two I think most obvious ones that seems like we agree on that allows to capture the sense of completeness of
self or that the unity of the observer and the and the actor the fact that those are our seldom for the non trained for the non-meditator suggests 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 and 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 and we mantis shrimp sea
an enormous array of color hues that we don't right there map their maps and representations of the world are fundamentally different pitvipers in the infrared we're restricted to some what 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 pitviper can see for moments would be informative perhaps sensing heat emissions as a human might be invasive that maybe that's why we don't do it so the question is to just make it straight forward is why would the system be designed this way again neither of us
were consulted the design phase but that brings me to perhaps the more valuable 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 that we're talking about which is that a young child feels anxious because it needs a diaper change this doesn't really know it needs its diaper change or it's cold where it's uncomfortable or it's hungry
or it's overly full and so it vocalizes and then some external source comes to us and relieves that hopefully right and 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 buy us most people the non-practice meditators to live a somewhat functional life at least without this awareness of actor and observer and so what you're really talking about is a deliberate intervention to understand and resolve that gap in the algorithm. Is that do I have that right?
I'm more or less restating what you said in a way that I'm hopefully will serve as a jumping off point is that you know why questions are always very dangerous in biology or any you know and in relationship.
What's that or in relationship or in relationship right exactly although I think it all does really harken back to this early developmental wiring which of course is modifiable that's the beauty of 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 it's what seems to be one of its more important and profound and for you know 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 we sort of 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 the at these things without having to go through one year or three year long solid meditation retreats.
So if you just elaborate from home before we move on about you know what are your thoughts about how the circuitry is arranged by default versus that then 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 it's important to recognize that evolution doesn't see our deepest concerns about human flourishing and human well-being you know it's all about the else.
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 revealed themselves to be flaws in the present time when we're trying to build a viable global civilization but you know they they were down to the advantage
of our ancestors somehow or they just there's there's things about as that were not selected for they just kind of came along for the right you know the you know what Stephen Jake will call a spandrel you know so we are not set up by evolution to be as happy as we possibly can be and certain 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 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 are leveraging in new directions right and we have we are primates and we are you know we're communicating with you know small mouth noises and we were language using primates and all of that is clearly evolved and we're doing these amazing things including science you know however improbably we're you were actually able to to you know almost
entirely with language understand reality that at a scale that exceeds us in both directions I mean the very the very vast and the very small and you know also temporarily the very old we have you know visions of the far future we can figure out you know where and you know an asteroid is going to you know cross earth orbit a thousand years from now if we just do the math and it's amazing that we can do all of 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 what's 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 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 mean and that is you know increasingly dysfunctional and very soon we're going to 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 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 minds we have the minds we can build the minds we can change you know we can we can metal with our own genomes now and and that will produce its own consequences you know in ourselves and in future generations if we've metal with the germline and again all of that is just 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 the you know mother nature has just has
simply not had our best interests at heart right and it's we might die off and 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 but when you're talking 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 this time of immaturity and that becomes has become functional for us is that it's just we were far more
flexible and we can learn based on the needs of of an environment to do you know so much more than a gazelle can and languages part of that and you know in the last 10,000 years or so culture increasingly has been more and more part of that and there's a probably a layer at which we can plausibly
talk about cultural evolution you know and cultural evolution interacting with biological evolution to to changes when you're talking about the development of an individual each of us comes into this world I think not recognizing ourselves in any in any sense that it would make sense to
to reify I mean it's not that there's nothing there I mean there could be a kind of proto self differentiation but I think it's it takes a it takes a long while and there is very likely a coincidence between really recognizing others we recognize others first and we're in certainly in
relationship immediately and we orient the human faces and we you know even detect other humans as good and bad moral actors very early I mean certainly recognize ourselves in a mirror we the 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 at this point they push it down all the way to like six months of of age where you'll get these infants staring at kind of a puppet show and they'll they'll show a and a a greater
interest in you know in a classically good actors versus bad actors you know cooperators 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 languages 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 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 cheering 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 if you take the psychological literature you know 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's a kind of narcissistic structure there
where it's 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 you're you know what you're you're completely absorbed in and you've lost your sense of self I mean this is to talk
about to you yet another example of what it's like as a grown-up to lose our sense of self and one of the things I think we find so fascinating by about television and 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 this in the classic social circumstance we're presented with with you know the the facial displays of other people in fact with you know we can get some of the sometimes these people are 10 feet tall right or their faces are 10 feet tall you really but close up in a
movie theater so it's like this super stimulus 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 unimplicated socially you can't be seen and you and something about 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 unimplicated the the facial minutia and the mimetic facial play of people from at a very close range I mean you're seeing people close I mean you have to be you know physically just you know about to kiss your your spouse like that's what a close-up is in a film right like that
you never get that close to people right and yet hear you're in a situation where you're unobserved and you know that and so I mean this is a bit of a lot of attention but the it's the other side of what's happening developmentally for a kid when you're in a movie theater watching a movie you are truly invisible and yet you're right there seeing you know the however harrowing the human drama is you're seeing a play out and you're seeing it you're seeing it up close and
it is a it is in principle a social encounter that your genes 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 we learn to play with others 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 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 stop 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 say I wouldn't be nice have four hours of quiet now like no self talk and so for most of us I mean I think there are people who for whatever neurological reason or you know idiosyncratic reason undoubtedly there's there'd be a neurological 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 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 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 unexpected and seems to just become you
right so like you and I are talking now and you know so you're you know 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 they'll be saying something and a person listening will say well what does that mean or like oh boy do you just contradicted himself or like you're and there's a voice in your head that is also vying for your attention
much of the time and so it's you know the first discovery people make in meditation is that it's just so hard to pay attention to anything the breath or mantra or the sound whatever it is because you're thinking every you're thinking about the thing you need to do in an hour and oh it's so good that I downloaded this app I'm like this is really good this is going to be good for me but and you're but you're that that chatter isn't showing up you're not far
back enough in the in the kind of the theater of consciousness so as to see it emerge it is just sneaking up behind you and it feels like me again 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's it is it the you know subjectively it's like the mind contracts around this appearance in consciousness and it really is just it is just as 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 I mean how is it that we could be a thought these thoughts that I thought just arises and passes away and when you inspect it when you go to inspect it it's it you know it unravels it's it's it's 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 defines your mood you know it's
like I mean just again this this all comes in kind of abstract but well no but I but I think it it's extremely concrete from the perspective of the neural circuits that will return to in maybe in a few minutes if you could elaborate a bit on this notion of internal chatter and external stimuli and
the bridge between them because that's I think that for some people that might be intuitive I think for others it's not so obvious that language is ongoing right backdrop yeah because sometimes I think some people are more tuned into that language for some people it's it's louder volume for some
people it's more structured I have a colleague at Stanford who's been on this like I guess called Diceroth is like one of the premium like bioengineers is all psychiatrists and he has a met he doesn't call it a meditative practice he
has a practice where each evening after his five kids are down sleep you know they're older now but and in the quiet of the 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 right because of the very fact that you're having 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 for himself to do it in his head but for many people including myself that's 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 and I've been able to do that there are certain pharmacologic states that we could talk about that facilitate 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 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's a dialogue ongoing internally is that itself valuable yeah and that also can take some time so
so I mean 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 you know have a fair amount of training let's you just happen to be some kind of savant in this area
which you know most people by definition aren't or you have a remarkable amount of training in what's called you know concentration practice and in meditation 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 you know
the 30 seconds elapsed and I set you know I set all of our listeners or your viewers the task for the next 30 seconds just pay attention to anything your breath you know or you know the site of your hand or the site 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 and not just this is not just a a superficial inability I mean if your life's dependent on it you wouldn't be able to do it I mean
if the fate of civilization dependent on it none of none of our listeners would be able to do this and yet some percentage of them are so distracted by thought that they would think that they will actually try this experiment and think they succeeded right and for these people what 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 that you know you incorporate everything sounds and other sensations and then you interleave that with walking meditation with our paying attention just to the sensations of lifting and moving and placing their feet and then you know once the practice is going you incorporate sounds and sites and everything but so you can pay attention everything but the goal is for every moment you are going to you're going to cultivate that what
this this faculty of mine which you know increasingly is known as mindfulness right so and mindfulness is nothing other than this very careful attention to the contents of consciousness but the crucial pieces it is not a moment
of being lost in thought right you're not you you're not blocking thoughts thoughts themselves can arise but in those moments of being truly mindful you're noticing thoughts as thoughts whether they're whether it's language in the mind or images you're noticing those two as spontaneous appearances
in consciousness so if most people you know certainly anyone who thinks they can pay attention to you know to 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 what they're 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 walking 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 then I come back you know five more minutes it'd be lost in thought I think it but as the days progressed you know even you know ten days in to 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 distractable they are right
and you know for some people that will be immediately obvious for some people it will actually take a lot of practice to realize just how distracted they're 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 somewhat explain but still incomplete incompletely 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 object movements and therefore they are well they're 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 slower frame rate you're going to get more of a strobe type effect if the frame rate is tough 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 seem to be moving slowly this is the way the visual system in time perception interconnect at some level
you're up on a 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 the it's a distance effect you see a plane is could be going 300 miles now or exactly and it's not because of the lack of resolution the 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 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 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 untrue either 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 there are ways to practice where practice mindfulness in particular where
the frame rate really does seem to go way way up right and there's actually been some research done on this we take people you know before and after a three month silent meditation retreat and you give them some kind of visual discrimination task where they have to like detect I think they used to
to kiss to scope is that the tool for there's some some some they presents you know like very quick pulses of light 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 making these fine grain discriminations more and more and do nothing else for you know three months which is which is a way of practicing so you're so the classic you know mindfulness practice in what's called the pasta meditation is to pay scrupulous attention to seeing hearing smell and tasting touching in a way that breaks everything down into the it's 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 microseensations of pressure and temperature and movement such that the feeling of hands completely disappears you realize that the hand as a concept and all you have is this cloud of of punk tape and and very brief sensations and so so anything you think you you you have as a datum of experience as you as you bore into it with your attention it it resolves into a
a this kind of diet that diaphanous cloud of changing sensation and that can be even even something is as as captivating as like a you know a serious pain in your body and you can have like you know you could have injured your neck you know and so you have some excruciating pain in your neck if you just are willing to pay attention to it you know and just pay a hundred percent attention to it your a couple
of 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 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 you're thinking about it you know you think like well well you know why did I do this to myself or when should I see a North of Peter's or why how long is this going to last and and you're you know 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 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 in the presence of pain is the result of resisting it worrying about it thinking 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 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 you can achieve a level of equanimity even in the presence of really
unpleasant you know physical sensation and this is true of mental sensation as well as it's true of emotions you know it's a classically negative emotions like anger or depression or you know fear the moment you become willing to just feel them in all of their you know punctate
uh uh and changeable qualities they cease to be what they they were a moment ago they're just they're and they when you're talking about emotional states they cease to map back on to 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 it was it had psychological meaning it felt like you know okay I'm anxious how do I get rid of this you know why am I this sort of person what you know should I have taken a beta blocker you know this is the the
the conversation you're you're having with yourself the moment you just become willing to feel it as the pure energy of you know the physiology of you know of cortisol release it ceases to have any meaning it just it's it's ceases to be a problem in that moment because it's no more
it no more maps onto the kind of person you are than a feeling of indigestion or a pain and your in your knee maps onto the kind of person you are it's just it's 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 of sensory experience and emotional experience like you're looking for the atoms of experience you know you get better and better at that and certain things happen but one thing that you know one thing that I really do 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 a very interesting way of training it's not what I tend to recommend now I'm just it's a great preliminary practice for what I do recommend because it gives you
it really really teaches you the difference between being lost and thought and not it really teaches you what mindfulness is but it tends to be done you know by you know 99.9% of people in a dualistic way which you again you're you're set up to think okay I'm over here as 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 of I've lost in thought
now I'm now I'm strategically directing my attention again all of this seems to ramify this sense of self the sense of there's one to be doing this there's there's somebody holding the spotlight of attention and getting better at coming back to the object of meditation 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 when I talk about all of this is undercut the false assumptions that are anchoring all of that as early as possible because where where 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 meditated 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 it's not and it becomes like again like a by 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 it's there again right and um so yeah that means that so to come back to the the example you gave with your your colleague a Stanford whose book I know I have I haven't read it is this is the he wrote a book projections
right uh Deserothia so it's it's on my stack to read but um 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 common daring the you know the the the the machinery of thought and attention uh in a way that I would imagine I'm not be interested to talk to him about it but I would imagine he really feels like he's doing that
right and there's there's an engineer it's uh 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 um right you know I haven't
been in uh Carl's mind um yeah but if we got him talking on that we would get I'm sure we would get a yes that would we'll do that conversation at some point but but it's exactly opposite what the exact opposite would be to 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 right 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 a free will which uh we might want to touch 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 famous people
you you can you know remember exist or uh think of nouns or you know you know anything um and just watch what comes percolating into consciousness right now there's there are things you can't think of right there are things you don't know the name of you know their languages you don't
speak there's there are famous people you've never seen or never heard of right so like that like so you have no control over that part like that those those names and and faces are not going to suddenly come streaming into consciousness but of of the totality of facts and figures and
faces and names that you do know right only some will come vying for inclusion right and they're not and there's there's a sort of you know we could um make guess that we know something about the neurology of this but we you know depending on what channel your your um you're waiting for
thoughts in I mean it's gonna be different if it's visual or semantic or or um episodic memory I mean all of these things are different but um wherever you kind of point your inner gaze of attention and wait for the next face or name uh certain things are going to come and certain
certain things aren't going to come and how you land on one right there'll be this process if you're paying attention to you you might think we'll say we'll say we go with names of cities right you just you say you'll you'll think of Paris you'll think of London you'll think of Rome you'll think of
Sedona you'll say so these these names will come and if I ask you to just say one right so just Minneapolis is what came to mind for me it was very straightforward it was 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 about 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 confabulatory storytelling
mechanism even in an intact brain where we just you know we we all seemed to never lack for the reasons why something came to mind and we know we can know we can manipulate people in ways it proved 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 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
just get all the synapses and the synaptic weights and you know everything in the the state it was in to produce Joe strummer and Minneapolis right you're going to if we 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 to that process as you want it still doesn't get you the freedom
people think they have there's another conversation to have about you know why none of that matters and why 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 die and 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 like there is just there is just this fundamental mystery at our backs that is discouraging everything that we experience and what 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 what I'm saying not something else I 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 us the illusion I think that we somehow have more command over
our thoughts yeah well you have a script I mean it's like there are things you know a lot about and you've talked you've talked about them a lot and 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 in a grammatically correct way and and again all of this subjectively this whole process is mysterious to you right like you you don't know how you
follow the rules of English grammar right like the like you're just 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 gonna worry I had a stroke and you know if it stops I'm I'm gonna you know I'm not gonna worry about it so it's still mysterious even when you're doing it in a very um wrote deliberative and repetitive way but when when you're talking about something
you've talked about a lot and you know you sort of know where you're gonna go right like and this is you know we we have many conversations like this um um it is somewhat analogous to like a golf swing where it's like you know how you want to do it
it's gonna be all kinds of errors that are gonna creep into your execution of it in real time but there's like you basically have a pattern and so you you have certain linguistic patterns which you're following um again none of this is a proof of of free will but I will grant you that
you know phenomenologically it feels different than just waiting for the next thought to come um but my point is is that even if you're um I mean you can trim it down to the simplest possible thing and 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 and and the question is you know which you know or I hear I've got water and I've got coffee which am I gonna drink next it's it's incredibly it's the simplest possible decision and no matter
how long I make this decision 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 going to be a final change in me that's gonna be the approximate cause of me deciding one over the other and that no matter how laborious I can make it seem in in terms of my reasoning about it um it is going to be fundamentally mysterious as to why I went with one rather than
the other right whatever story I have because it's like it's 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 it's like it's it's fundamentally
mysterious like there are people who are even more famous than Joe Strummer to you right who who I mean I'm sure you you know you maybe somebody who you have thought a lot about but but there there are people who like if we could just inventory you know your conscious life going back
the last ten years there are people who you've 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 um and what 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 if the story is oh well I went for the water because um I you know I think I've been drinking too much coffee you know I listen to Andrew Hubertman's podcast and he was saying talking about caffeine and I think I probably good for us but
you don't want over yeah yeah 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 a persuasive 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 now 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 and and this subsumes even moments of real resolve and efforts 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 you 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 your last diet right and why did it arise now to precisely the degree that it did why 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 well could we give a as we did before an evolutionary and a developmental explanation and evolutionary explanation might be that directed attention and action
is metabolically demanding it would be inefficient or impossible for us to be in constant you know deliberate action 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
the metabolic the great metabolic requirements of having ideas that are related to goal-directed action or that goal-directed action is expensive that's one idea the other idea would be and we know this as a fact which is that initially the brain is fairly crudely wired that's not
true within the neural circuits the control breathing heart rate etc but within the neural circuits of sensory perception thought etc 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 directed as in free will I mean just that that can I can decide to imagine an apple and imagine that apple for instance well your decision is to be some maintenance of the the random fine random wiring in systems I mean
we've seen this even in 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 now some electrodes into the brains of humans macaques carnivores and mice
and in every case most of what you hear is called hash and it has nothing to do with hashish is just a modio monitor which is picking up a bunch of action potentials right here listening to a chorus of action potentials but it's rare to find a neuron that faithfully gaw fires to represent
some sensory stimulus in 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 to 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 um 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 or motion is going to be expensive right it's a metabolically expensive we're going to begin with and so you just have to evolution has arrived at a place where um spontaneous geysering up of things um uh upon which like deliberate thoughts and action are superimposed
is the best arrangement overall for this very metabolically demanding organ is that is that if I mean what I basically gave was just kind of a biological description of 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 admittedly I'm forcing a little bit of a strip tease 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 we're now set up of sort of a almost like a uh 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've perhaps have ever heard and it inspires me to go further down this path of meditation because I've never experienced that um not deliberately and
certainly not through meditation um if I ever experienced it it was transient enough that I you know I'm intrigued to to experience it more 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 um a profound gap that really does exist which is that you know we we believe that our thoughts are um somehow from us um and indeed they're from in in the cranial vault someplace maybe in the
body a bit as well but that we over uh attribute the degree to which we are that and that is us in a way that's volitional that we control and so uh 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 in in a in an unimportant way that seems only important to me but somehow I I can't resolve these two and maybe the thing to do then is 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 I'm hearing the problem the I there's this um well let me like kind of brag at the whole free will discussion because it's it's it really is the flip side of this coin that I'm you know the the the obverse of which is the
illusion the illusion of the self okay so at least I so I might be on the right track yeah yeah they are the opposite sides of of a corner okay yeah because to me they seem very different in in essence no because because what I'm calling the sense of cell 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 I like who's doing this who's reaching for the cup I am right I I intended this and now I'm
doing the thing my and my intent my conscious intention is the proximate cause of my reaching right so I'm the author 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 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 uh with with almost you know the authorial intent right like I'm thinking like what the hell is this guy talking about I'm I know I'm think you know I know
I you know who's 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 it's like what the fuck is this guy talking about like I like I know I'm here I'm a cell 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 happened 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 um so obviously everything
I'm saying about meditation and the cell up 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 a deliberative you know voluntary motor action um
and uh you know and the things you do volitionally are different not just psychologically and behaviorally but they just have different implications for 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 it 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 you're someone who did it by accident well then you know you may be uh culpable for for the level of negligence that uh allow that to happen but you're you're a very different person
and we we treat you differently and we we're wise to um so anyway we can those let's bracket all of that there's this I mean there's some fundamental there's there's some false assumptions about the underlying logic of this process which I think it's worth addressing and it is actually
that it was a kind of found object in the news that I I talk about at one point I forget where it is in in the waking up app but there's a story that I stumbled on on the internet um I think it's about 12 or 13 years old of a um a tourist bus in I think was in Norway it was somewhere
in in northern europe and it had about 30 people on it and one person was it was a described as an Asian woman uh and they all they went to a rest stop and everyone got off the bus uh and they you know shopped and had lunch and and this Asian woman changed her clothing uh for whatever reason
and they all got back on the bus um I think the relevance of it being an Asian woman is a you know there were language barriers that that that explained what later happened um so everyone gets back on the bus the Asian woman has changed her her clothing and the bus is about to leave but
then someone notices hey there there's a there's an Asian woman who got off the bus who isn't it hasn't come back yet and they tell the driver this um 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 and was not recognized by her fellow travelers um so everyone gets concerned as this this 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 formed and the Asian woman because of the whatever language barrier
um thought it heard that there was a missing tourist so she joins the search party which in fact is looking for her right and this goes on into the night and they're ready in helicopters at you know for a dawn patrol to find the mission missing tourist um now at some point along the way I think
was it like three in the morning this tourist realizes that she is the object of this search right and obviously the whole thing unravels she you know she confesses that she changed her clothes and you know 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 in the way that was expected right because the missing tourist was never lost the missing tourist 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 search party she's looking for the missing tourist not knowing that the 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 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 the meditative journey we in precisely in again not talking about all the changes and the possible changes in the contents of consciousness
they could be good which again they 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 the string upon which
all of my conscious states mostly unhappy ones are strong right it's it's the thing that is at the center of my anxiety it's the it's the it's the it's the it's the thing that I don't feel good about it's the thing that when criticized I sort of let implode it's the center of my problem
and now I'm trying to feel better and meditation has been handed to me as a as a possible you know remedy for my situation and it and it's built as a remedy and in fact it's it's 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
you know or as I thought it was so now I'm going to look right and so again you're you're 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 unenlightenment right I can feel my problem I feel that I'm distracted
and distractable and I feel as this sort of cramp at the center of my life that 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 distractable than I want to be and now I'm paying attention to the breath right this is what 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 the 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 we all get into
this situation but you know it's useful to continually try to under undercut it and recognize that the the thing that's being looked for is is actually right on the surface which is you know the there is no one looking there is no place from which you are paying if you're paying attention
to the breath or to 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 be an unexpected in that moment and so there is just a there's a continually looking for the mind a looking for the center of experience a looking for the one who is looking which again which is the kind of the the the orienting practice here and there's a lot more I say about this
obviously over waking up but it's the it's the experiment you have to perform in order to get as that this whole the search party you know was formed in in error essentially and the 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 like you drop out the bottom of this thing in an unexpected way it's not there's actually another kind of a similar parable or or anecdote that I don't I don't remember if it's Zen or Sufi or I mean I'm sure it's
been reappropriated in many different ways but or by many different traditions but there's this you know the the case of somebody who's lost in a town and they're they're asking for directions you know you could put put this in in in Manhattan you could let's say 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 where a central park and the person thinks for a second they says oh yeah unfortunately you can't get to central park from here right now that is a very strange I mean we think about that
for a second you realize okay that's a that's an absurd I mean there is no place that you can't get to from the place you're starting you know on earth right that's the failure 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 it's but but on some level that is true of meditations 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 you're 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 intentional fist you know it's it is a contraction of energy again it's it's so much bound up in thought for for most of us most of the time that is and it get when 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 get concentrated enough focused enough you know if I austere enough of I renounced enough if I desire less if I you know you know enough with enough good
intentions this fist is going to move into some sort of sublime condition right that's not the logic of the the process I really appreciate these models and analogies for conscious experience both as most people experience them and harbor them and it's 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 perceptual awareness to see if it survives the filters that you've provided but first just
even if briefly and then we could 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 I 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 component parts as we have broken down normal perceptual experience in some of its component parts yeah I can just throw out some things that I associate with meditation and maybe you can elaborate on 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 it seems like sitting or lying down and perhaps 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 the realization that there is no
distinction between actor and observer and so on yeah yeah also to answer that second question first ultimately meditation is not a practice that you're adding to your life it's not it's not doing more of anything it's actually ceasing to do something it's ultimately non-destraction I mean
it's ultimately you're recognizing what consciousness is like when you're no longer distracted by the 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've become irrational or or you know unintelligent I mean all of that you
still have all of your tools but there everything is in plain view I mean there's an analogy in Tibetan Buddhism which I love which is you know kind of in the final stage of meditation uh thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house you know there's nothing for them to steal
right so you know in in the usual case thoughts are there really is something in jeopardy every time a thought comes I'm not meditating anymore and not only that I feel terrible because of what I'm thinking about most of the time right and so it's totally understandable that 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 a kind of 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 the other kinds of of insight but it's a very specific and it's kind of brittle skill in the end I mean it's it is it's a skill just like I'm going to pay attention to one thing and I'm going to do that so
well that everything else is going to fade out and it's somewhat analogous to what you you described in the visual system if you if you you know if you have a laser focus to one fixation point everything else in your visual field begins to to fade out but 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 or whatever it is not only does it mean let's let's use the breath for you know for a second because your eyes are can be closed I mean you can lose all sense of everything I mean 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 kind of climbing the ladder of those changes into subtlety and vastness that's the whole that's the whole game right and
it can be a deeply rewarding game to play and it also does come with all kinds of ancillary benefits I mean all the focus and the calm and the and the kind of smoothness of emotional states I mean all that comes with greater concentration and it can be quite wonderful
but again at best that's a tool to aim in the direction that I'm talking about now with with respect to meditation which relates to more 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 in the beginning dualistically is just the practice of paying careful attention to whatever is arising on a zone 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 you know over the course of even you know your first week of doing this people you know teachers and you know various sources of information will recommend that once you get some facility once you want to know the difference between being lost and thought
and actually paying attention to the breath well then you can open it up to everything you can open up to 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 and again it can get very expansive I mean you can you know you can lose you know as you get anything just a monochrome of concentration
you know it becomes very drug-like and you get you know your the boundaries of your body dissolve and your feeling of having a body can disappear and and you you know if your eyes are closed you know your visual field I mean 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 not quite dark there is this sort of scintillating some field of of color and shadow that's there in the darkness of
your closed eyes and that can become a sky-like domain of kind of vast uh uh 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 in meditative
practice um 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 what the the underlying goal is is to
be more and more equanimous with changes so it's 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 um 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 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 and you're describing and the reason bring this up is that as you know
and I know everything in biology is a process you know we we would never ever say oh you know the perception of that red line on a painting is um is a noun right I mean it's an event in the visual system you're you're abstracting some understanding about that thing in the outside world and I think
it's very useful in thinking about the brain um and people will notice I notice I excuse me actively avoid the use of the word mind because I figure out especially with you sitting across from me that I'll I'll step in it if I if I do but the brain 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 is an arc of processes aging as an arc of perception as an arc of process they just exist on different time scales and so a little bit of what I am hearing is that inside of
an effective meditation practice there's a little bit of a of a um certainly non-judgment but discarding of the the noun and the adjective uh 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
you know 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 that that just reveals how um diminished languages to describe the
workings of the brain at some level um 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 um what is revealed to the meditator over time is some sort of macroscopic principle about um the way perceptions work at a deeper level right that there's that there's sort of a deeper principle 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 then maybe that verb maybe the word to describe that
verb is mindfulness maybe mindfulness is is really just a verb to describe that I don't know but is there anything here am I creating my yeah I don't know if I'm 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 train um broad in the time domain and think in terms of verbs not nouns or adjectives yeah yeah yeah no that 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 dualistically everything is still a process right and we're misled by the the reification that noun talk gives us so and this 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 it's a verb it's not it's a work we're selfing more than we are selves right and and there you know I even even appropriate uses of of the term self that don't go away even when you when you recognize that the this the core subject self is an illusion there there are states of self right where you you can recognize in your life that you inhabit very different modes of 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 like suddenly you pass through a door and now you are a customer in a store right so we know what that customer feeling is like you're now the person who's getting the attention is a 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 and a restaurant right that's a just remember something that's kind of funny that's it was born of a mismatch of this so I'll come back to that in a second but so there are so we we go through you you can be
you know you 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 shading of like the change in context really does usher in some fundamental psychological changes in
just the states of consciousness that are available to you I mean and it's and some of this is really I mean I'm sure we can understand a lot about this you know personally and you know generically but it is pretty mysterious I mean 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 like I can't be that I'm effortlessly one way with them and there's no way I could be that way with somebody else right like it's just
I don't know if it's the pheromones or they're you know they're facial they're just the way they are they're facial expression but I mean they're people with whom I'm really kind of effortlessly funny and they're people with whom you know I couldn't even it 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 with these people you know so like it's just very you know all that's very mysterious but anyway the the difference there is is not in this core sense of subject in relationship to all the objects
it's in kind of the the states of self and but and all of that is just is very verbi right like all this is 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 the memory I just had which I hadn't had had a long time but it was one of these these moments where I realized the power of these shifts in context for states of self so I once I was a a young man I think was I was probably 22 or so and single and like you just like trying to
figure out how how how do you how do you meet women and like how does how does one get confident to do this well and I am I walked into a restaurant and a kind of a woman was walking toward me at you know you know toward the front door of the restaurant but she was walking toward me in a
way where I just by default assumed she was the hostess in the restaurant but she wasn't the the hostess she was just a you know someone who just eaten there I guess so I walk through and she comes out so it's a fundamental misunderstanding in me that's set up by literally just this change
in architecture and I and so I just set high to her in a way that I would I presumably I would say high to any hostess who was coming up to ask me whether where I wanted to sit but what it actually happened is I had said high to a total stranger in a way that I tended at that point never to say
high to total strangers because I was shy and you know just like but apparently I gave her like a 10,000 watt high you know high of like all of the confidence you would have if you 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 and this
woman I came back into the restaurant like 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 wasn't right and so anyway that among the understanding
us among the misunderstandings that one can have and then action and gauge in life I I've said that that was a somewhat of a doubtful one yeah yeah but but then you realize that okay but then there are certain people who recognize this machinery to whatever degree or have net kind of
natural aptitudes for bringing certain things online or not such that okay they can make these they can consciously make these states of self you know this kind of this level of gregariousness say available to them in different you know in the circumstances where it's actually useful to them
so like if you if you're single and you want to meet people well it's it's actually very helpful to to feel confident enough to just say hi to strangers now somehow they're doing and to and to be to be you know online you know in that way where at that point in my life in that circumstance
you know by 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 you what state states of self would be more normative to have given what you want in life and 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 situations you're 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 in graduate school is somebody to talk 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 graduate student I had taken eleven years off at Stanford you between my sophomore and junior year right so I like I
when I went back to school I'm talking about a leave of absence yeah no it was yeah yeah but I mean this is Stanford had this you know you might know this they have the stop out policy where you never really drop out you just stop out so you're like and 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 eleven 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 as just as I had finished my coursework you know getting my
my PhD I was just getting into my research but 9-11 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 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 you a grad school but I was also becoming kind of a famous you know 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 a writer and so I was 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 some I think that
time is right maybe I had just finished graduate school when I gave the TED talk but um um anyway so I was in rowing in two 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 I work in Surndabatch you but on the other hand I was like becoming a you know a quasi celebrity in that world too um you know with at least in a world that was overlapping so I was having the experience of like going in I mean the the moment where this crystallized
would form me in a in a fairly peculiar way was I had a meeting at like three o'clock with my advisor who was 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 like 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 um so I have a meeting with him at like three o'clock and I'm
just kind of wilting you know under my you know you know his gaze and my own imagined you know inner gaze of his um 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 Norton you know and he's he's coming to me for advice um and so I'm ricocheting between two diametrically opposite self-states that are again this comes down to architecture it's literally
like the state I was in walking into one building and then leaving and walking into another building on the same campus um and they were completely opposite self-concepts like in one in one context I am a fuck up in another context I'm a celebrity who's and you have mastery and
virtuosity and yeah and and we're developing it very quickly yeah and but so again this is kind of a stark version of that but everyone has some version of this just in balancing between talking to their mom and then talking to their best friend and then talking to a stranger then and talking
to someone who's who's very successful talking to someone who's not very sick like all you notice your vulnerability to all of this stuff and ultimately what you want is a level of psychological integrity that that is truly divorceable from that now that you I'm not I'm not saying you're
ever going to get it perfect you know there's there's always going to be some I mean I can't I can't talk about the ultimate fulfillment of this process like I'm not you know I'm not a Buddha I'm not saying I've finished the project but um I think there's more and more you you know as you
become become sensitive to these changes and you become sensitive to what it's like to actually not be psychologically reactive and 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 in in the in the kind of terms that you would export to others and then care about what they think about you right like you're there's a kind of invulnerability uh that arises that's not born of being well defended it's born of of being evaporated right it's like you're
no longer keeping score in those ways once again we're we're at that I really appreciate that description because I these days I'm I'm really intrigued by um something we've known for a long time that I'm you're certainly familiar with is prefrontal cortex's ability to establish context
dependent rule sets you know a strup task will be you know basic example of you know reading numbers or letters on on cards and then switching to having to report the colors that the letters of members are written in it's a basic task but prefrontal cortex obviously important for
setting context dependent thought and behavior and directed action in it and but within the context of all these different variations of the self depending on graduate school or you know relationship or sitting alone in one's room yeah they're different rules sets arise but and
somehow we 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 the extent that it's um 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 right or forgot to realize that the context on social media is near
infinite but the context that existed in their head might not be clear in the way that they communicated something and they lost their jobs by saying what were perceived as insensitive things in some cases were in fact offensive and insensitive things in some cases is 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 sensor 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 born a wetsuit you wear a complete wetsuit with the hood and this idea you know if you were born into that wetsuit you might think that yeah you you know nudge up or lean up against a
wall and you experience it one way right and um but were you to shed that wetsuit you how wow there's this incredible landscape of some out of sensory experience that I had no idea no that goes way beyond levels of sensitivity right now you're talking about 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 of action steps and what I think what we're migrating
towards here is a set of for most non-intuitive or non-reflexive action steps that reveal to us that in fact we're not wearing this wetsuit now you raised one um topic which I think is an allegace to this wetsuit which is this notion of distraction the normally distraction is masking
what would otherwise be a better experience of life um 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 alleyways and avenues of my of my brain and my thoughts
and my experience and then the other would be um and 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 is reasonable to include if for instance I'm being impulsively yanked to something on social media I'm being impulsively yanked to someone else's pain and experience and somehow confusing that with my own experience this is an empathy but just getting yanked around my attention as a spotlight is
kind of 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 right 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 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 ability 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 get well this distraction is is one component of it the other aspect of it is identification with thought and identification the feeling of self is bound up in the sense that that I'm the thinker I'm the one attending I'm the one vulnerable I'm the inner kind of the inner
homunculus that's vulnerable to experience and then it can be gratified by it or not and it's constantly trying to improve it or 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 the top this illusion of control etc so to go all the way back to the to the question you asked about just what is in it you know what I recommend as a starting point for meditation some of your assumptions are in fact true yes it's it's you know I often recommend
to beginning people close their eyes and you do a sitting practice and that's different from a walking practice I mean you can do both but people tend to start you know sitting with their eyes closed but again ultimately where this is going is it's not an art of meditation properly
recognized is not an artifice 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 you know 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 in each moment is consciousness and its contents whatever you're doing so
so in the beginning you know you'll 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 10 minutes when you're you know spilling out onto
your to do list and you're trying to figure out you know 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 it's 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 it's the level it's at the level of what's happening in your relationship to thought you know like what what can you notice when when
you know it's the transition from you know the by the by stable percept you know you're looking at the at the the image and you see nothing let's say this 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 the images pops out and then you see it it's the transition from nothing to something right that you the practice becomes the transition from being lost in thought and then waking up and break you know 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 it's like that that transition the whole like you're having a dream and there's a couple things are true there I mean it 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 you know 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 you know getting tried for murder in a court of law or whatever the thing is that you're completely delusional about right that is psychosis right and it's 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 conscious life like now you know you're in bed you're safely in bed all 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 that the mind is larger than then 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 um so there's all all to say that that ultimately meditation I mean so again there's another
apparent paradox here many people don't know much about meditation we'll say things like you know what you know for me running is my meditation or skiing or rock climbing or playing the guitar or 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 you know the chaos of their lives or the the you know their time on Twitter or whatever it is and virtually every case it's 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 getting and getting no matter how good you get at any of those things you're not going to learn it by doing those things but paradoxically
when you're 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 guitar or skiing or you know 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 is 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 centralistness of consciousness the the non-selfhood of consciousness you should experience it when you're playing your favorite sport or when you're having a conversation with somebody and
then the reason then to come back to your initial assumption about eyes closed a lot of practice even formal practice can be done eyes open and it's important to do it eyes open because so much of our anchoring of our sense of self is is based on visual cues I mean like we just we we know
that you can 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 know 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 of you they create an avatar for you and then your bodily movements generate the movements of the avatar and you start gaining presence as they
call it in the VR lingo very quickly and then pretty soon you lose sense of your own bodily representation and yeah and it's a little eerie what's eerie is to me is I'm 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 right so exactly what you describe this translocation of notions of self through visual experience and but conversely when you lose the sense of self the sense of self
I'm talking about it can be especially vivid and salient with eyes open because because so much so many of your reference points to selfhood are delivered visually right especially in a social situation so 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 behind my face implicated by your gaze like so the sense that you're looking at something is the sense of self in that social context right and so and if you're if your facial expression changes like I'm saying something and if you kind of
throw your brow like what the hell you know and I can read into that facial change some interstate of yours that is you know salient to 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 that's changing the way I'm feeling about what I'm
that that's that's the you know the the purview of you know every neurosis everyone didn't want right and every relationship I had a girlfriend when I was a postdoc who was who was very very she was brilliant really still is and she always said that every relationship
is there four arrows she used to say she's a neuroscientist still is and said you know there's the arrow of you know she was talking to me so she said you know me to you and kind of what you perceive coming from me and then there's you to me and then there's an arrow from the middle going
right back at 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 of relationships and it's probably an under-description of the total number of arrows but I think it's
exactly what you're describing 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 rules sets about what we're going to say and not going to say it's a very dynamic right yeah so but the the freedom that I think we want and people can sometimes experience this just have hazardly but the the thing that the center of the bullseye from the meditative point of view is to get off that ride
entirely and to so so the losing the sense of self in this context of of a social encounter is to is to give up your face essentially like your like so and what what that entails is or what that gives you is the free attention to actually just pay attention to the other person
right 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 and and actually you know Martin Boober the the kind of mystical Jewish philosopher talked about the kind of the i-thal relationship and this
I think it's you know it's been long times and I've read Boober but and I don't know if he goes you know far enough to be truly non-dualistic but this distinction between i i and now because the the vow part of it is is I think potentially this or I mean 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 you're no you no longer care what they think about you you don't feel ironically implicated by their gaze
you don't feel you you're you're simply the space in which they're appearing right and so you're free you're like it's like there's just there's no and and people can feel and so you're you're by definition you're no longer self-conscious right and when it's and this phrase self-consciousness
really does get at this what I'm calling the self the the the elucary self as a kind of contraction and 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 the the the the proximate cause of
this you know very almost invariably is suddenly recognizing that somebody's looking at you right so like you're in a Starbucks and you're you know you're alone and you're reading the newspaper whatever it is and this is now sounds highly anachronistic it's been three years since I've
held a physical newspaper I think in a Starbucks but you know you're you're you're you're just mind your own business and you look up and you're just 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 in the world for that other person that recognition is a the tightening there the kind of contraction there is a is a a a further ramification of this this feeling most of us have most of the time
of being the center of experience like the the place you feel like like it's it's like you know we're all walking around with a fist and in moments of self-consciousness the fist gets really tight you know and that's and that's um that's the thing that gets fully relaxed when you discover this
this what I'm you know at 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 or it's it's actually an experience of greater relationship because you're no longer you're no longer defended 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 in the presence of another person whatever your relationship because you're not contracting right and then when you do when
you have that again and 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 that that it becomes like the the unsatisfactoriness of that psychologically becomes more and more salient right and it's um
because that's not one that's not the way you want to be and that's like it's the antithesis of being as comfortable as you were a moment ago but two it's it's something you're doing unnecessarily right like it's like you're you're like again you're making a fist when you don't have to make a
fist right and it's um again we can leave aside all those circumstances where it's appropriate to react to someone and you know um 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 and you know never put up you know resistance but it's um psychologically you know even even if a state like anger or contraction is sometimes normative and appropriate the question is how long is it normative and appropriate for like how how long do you want to stay angry for
um in my experience these you know it's 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 you know you like it's it's better to actually become in an emergency you know so absolutely i think that um and again the language is is insufficient to describe what um what you're telling us but i think uh what comes to mind for me is this
a distinction between situational awareness and self-awareness and we we need both but under conditions of emergency true emergency um or motivated desire we need to um dial down the amount of self awareness in order to be more effective within the situational awareness um but you said something
very important in my lab has been working on uh fear like states for a long time so i'm gonna i confess i'm gonna um rob this from you but i'll credit you every time i describe is that that the that the the fear of the threat detection state or set of events acts as a as a flag
but is not meant to persist in the way that uh the flag went up right if one is to be in their most adaptive state actually jacquo willink and i were talking about this he has it talks a lot about detachment and open gaze things that my lab is interested in visual system and autonomic
interaction so white broadening the gaze literally broadens the time domain of thinking you come up with new solutions to complex problems in real time and so on and um and you're describing every day 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 that like it 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 um 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 um kind of a step function is a very non-linear in terms of people's progress um you know i'm certainly going to go um start doing more meditation based on this
discussion truly um because anytime someone describes that um that there's kind of a myth that we've been living in i i become obsessed with the idea of dissolving that myth that's a very seductive great so thank you for using 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 um yeah what what is the process like is it do some people make progress very quickly do some people
um the experience kind of step functions towards progress uh what is the meditation practice look like over time um 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
etc yeah also just to come back to just to talk about the myth for a second so they they're really what you just enunciated was a kind of a second doorway into this whole project so like the the usual door is through the door of suffering for lack of a better word i mean 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 this is explicitly built as a remedy for for unhappiness and uh 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 i mean just wanting to know what's real so about the mind subjectively you know in a first person way and and there's no contradiction between those two things i'm motivated by both of them but um you know it's a totally valid doorway into this
um there are definitely step functions i mean i would say they're they're at least two i mean the and they really are articulated along the lines of of um the framework i've been describing of of dualistic and non dualistic mindfulness right so in the beginning you're going to start out
you know 99.9 percent people start out dualistically paying attention and and noticing the difference between being distracted by thought and then 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 the and there's still this fluctuation between being distracted and then being mindful of whatever and the fact that it's opened 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 suicide you know those are other paths of practice that are more concentration based um and interesting but the the benefit of mindfulness is that very quickly you realize it's by definition compatible with all possible experience because you're not
artificially contracting your attention down to something you're you're just being aware of the next thing a site a sound a taste a thought um so the first step function is to very clearly experience the difference between being lost in thought and being clearly aware of any part of
experience including thought and to notice the freedom that compared a psychological freedom that gives you right so you can like your something's made you angry and now you're thinking about all the reasons why you should be angry and have every right to be angry and what you're going to
tell that person when you see them and and then you notice your thinking right and you notice the connection between the thought and the anger right you like like the 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's just the language and the imagery just you couldn't hold on to it if you wanted to and then you notice the physiology of the anger is just this
you kind of meaningless uh you know kind of 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
the one who's being mindful this is tremendous relief I mean and at minimum it's a degree of freedom you can at that point decide well how long do I want to be angry for right is it useful to stay angry you don't want to be angry for one minute two minutes five minutes ten minutes or because
but and before you have that capacity to be mindful you're going to helplessly be as angry as you're going to be for as long as you're going to be that way just based on the kind of the time course if you're thinking about it brooding about it telling your wife about it you know like well it just
that the you know it's just going to be this conversation based misadventure in you know negative states of mind uh and you are you are going to be the hostage of that for as long as you'll be the hostage of that you have nothing you can do apart from just deciding to you know check out and
watch game of thrones again for the third time right like 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 there's a time before you could do that and then there's a time after what 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 centrallessness of awareness right the fact that there's no place from which the mindfulness is being aimed but the fact that there's just this open condition in which everything is appearing 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 the present recognized thought unravels even before it unravels what's recognized is
you are simply identical to the condition in which everything is appearing again this is not a I'm not making a a a depock trochobra 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 and I'm not making any broad claims about metaphysics I'm just talking about as 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 a 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 right so consciousness is not in your body what you're calling
your body is in consciousness you know visually appropriately it's 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 is 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 you know hoping to to unravel it through meditation
consciousness is not going to get any more selfless any more central is any freer than it all 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 that recognition again and again and then it becomes yeah it becomes compatible with anything you would do and so they answer your question yes I still practice you know formally you know sometimes you know frequently but not you know I definitely miss days and I don't do it for
I mean I you know I don't rule out the the possibility that I will go back on retreat at various times just to you know check in with that and see if that makes a difference but you know I you know I tend to sit for I mean I tend to I've designed my life
so that I can spend a lot of time meditating without having to be formally meditating like so you know I'll 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 I'm gonna get the I'm very I'm very interested in erasing the boundary between what people are calling meditation and the rest of life and that so that's in teaching these things I tend to emphasize that from the beginning because I
think it's it's very easy to set up to get get 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 I'm meditating two hours a day diligently and you know this is
going to be really good for me and then over here is the rest of my life which is not nearly as wise or as useful or as like this is the stuff that is still the area of my problems and um 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 and you know you're 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 of conscious experience and in a different podcast that you were on heard you say something to the effective that normally we are in our daily experience and unless we are trained in meditation
um 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 a very long fast um 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 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 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 etc all that stated it was psychedelics to me are an experience of altered perception internal and external perception altered space-time relationship somewhat dreamlike I think it was
Alan Hobson at Harvard for a long time talked about the relationship between psychedelic like states and dreamlike states um because of this distortion of space-time dimensionality um and I haven't uh experimented with them much um I've been part of a clinical trial three doses
of MDMA which certainly altered my the the quality of my conscious experience in ways that led to a lot of lasting and at least for me valuable learning yeah yeah so what are your what are your thoughts about psychedelics in terms of how they intersect with the discussion that we've been
having and um what utility do they play and recognition of the self or in other sorts of brain changes well so uh yeah let's just price in all those caveats that people can anticipate um these drugs are not without their risks and 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 immense therapeutic value and it actually was my gateway drug to this this whole
area of concern um fetamine pathogen right it's sort of an emphetamine and a pathogen yeah yeah I mean it's often called pathogens yeah an empathogen yeah not pathogen yeah no pathogen yeah an empathogen or an antagonist it's it's been called um but it doesn't tend to change
perception in the way that classic psychedelics do and it's it's it's also serotonergic but it's it's not um uh it has to be in some part differently so then me even LSD and psilocybin which are much more similar in classic psychedelics both are also serotonergic but they're not merely so
and they're they're also different um and the and the higher dose you take of these drugs the more you you know at lower doses everything can kind of seem the same at higher doses they you know they they they begin to diverge um and we can talk about the the pharmacology if you wanted to but um
the uh I would just say that for many of us and certainly for me psychedelics were indispensable in the beginning in proving to me that this was uh the the the the the first person interrogation of the mind was worth doing you know because you know I was somebody who at you
know age 17 or 18 before I had any real experience with um with MDMA or LSD or psilocybin um 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 um cerebral in my just my
engagement with anything I was so skeptical of any of the the spiritual the religious and spiritual traditions that that have given us most of our meditation talk you know um that I think I just would have um and I know many of these people like I you know I have I have tried to teach you
know Richard Dawkins to meditate and Daniel Dennett to meditate I've ambushed them with meditation and very you know both both in a group setting and and one on one uh not not not Dan but uh but Richard I I I ambushed on my own podcast with a guided meditation and he just you know
from his he you know he closes his eyes he looks inside and there's nothing of interest to see right like it's just it's like it's not he doesn't have the um 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 or MDMA I know that if I gave him 100 micrograms of LSD or five grams of of mushrooms or you know 20 you know 25 milligrams of psilocybin that's probably not the analogous dosage to the five grams of mushrooms five grams of mushrooms
would be more than that um I forget what it is of of MDMA maybe 120 milligrams I think the maps dose is uh which is the one that's under clinical trials is 125 milligrams with an option of a 75 milligrams brush right right funny yeah yeah the facts that come to hand but uh there's not
there's just no possibility that nothing's going to happen right now something with with a psychedelic I mean with with MDMA most people tend to have a certainly under any kind of guidance tend to have a very positive you know pro social experience um but you know with a psychedelic you might have a
a a somewhat you know terrifying experience if you have quote a bad trip you know and I've certainly had those experiences on on LSD and and to some of the rinse psilocybin but um the prospect that nothing is going to happen is just in you know a million you know nearly a million
cases out of a million just not in the cards I mean just just neurophysiologically something's going to happen with the requisite dose of uh of one of these drugs and if if that thing that happens is 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 and guidance um 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 a perclivity for schizophrenia or
you know bipolar disorder this is almost certainly not for you you know and anyone doing a the the the studies at like Johns Hopkins for for therapeutic effects of of any of these drugs they're they're ruling out people with you know first degree relatives with with any of these clinical
conditions um but so for somebody like me at 18 who didn't know that this was an area of not only interest but would have be that you know the 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 um 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 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 um 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 um 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 I that just wouldn't have computed for me at all right and if you had so I just I and I literally have I had no one ever gave me a book to read or I never had I don't know if you the noun meditation
very likely meant absolutely nothing to me before before I took my first dose of in this case it was MDMA um so what the drug experience did for me is it just proved I mean so the the one of the limitations of a drug is that you know obviously no matter how good the experience the drug wears off
and then your back to you know more in more or less your usual form and now you have a memory of the experience and it can be a fairly dim memory I mean 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 that it degrades you know of 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 um you know there's some psychedelic experiences that are now
this 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 quite vivid um where you recognize okay there there was a way of being that is quite different than what I'm tendin to access by default and it is different in
in ways that are just uh you know obviously better and and and psychologically more healthy I mean it's possible to be healthy psychologically in a way that I I never imagined right and that then when you 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 of religion and you know as as you know and I think your listeners probably know I've spent a lot of time criticizing all that but there is a baby in the bath water to all of that right so 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 we're all conscious frauds or you know temporal lobe epileptics or I would like there's 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 is a possibility right you know that that feeling truly one with nature right I mean just so one with nature that you're 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 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 that's ever happened to me right and now I can just only dimly remember what that was like um so how do I get back there on some level and that's so that invites again a logic of changes a logic of seeking
changes in the contents of consciousness which sets someone up for this this um protracted or seemingly protracted and and you know fairly frustrating search to you know game their nervous system so as to have those kinds of experiences more and more um 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 you know 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
it's given it you voice to it the most in the most articulate way um 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 uh under the rubric of meditation is at this point of okay once you realize there's a there there what do you do and what's the logic by which you're led to do it and it's possible
with like if if your only framework is the good experiences the good feels you had on on whatever drug it was and a further discussion of of like what that path of changes you know can look like and that can come in a religious context it can come in just a purely psychedelic context or
you know some combination of the two um I think you can be misled to 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 by definition is going to be
impermanent right I mean it's 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 what I think it's what everyone really wants whether they know it or not and they're right to want is a type of freedom that is compatible with even
ordinary states of consciousness which which can ride along with them into extraordinary states of consciousness I mean so what I hadn't done psychedelics for 25 years because I mean again they were super useful for me in the beginning then I discovered meditation on the basis of those
experiences got really into meditation and realized 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
with drugs but it had been you know 25 years since I had done that and there was this resurgence 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 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'd been out in nature and interacting with you know you know it's been a very transformed sensory experience of the
world and of other people but I'd never done it alone blindfolded just purely you know inwardly directed and at a high dosage I'd 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 and it'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 but it was what was what was doubly useful was my mindfulness training in the context of that explosion of the 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 gonna try to resist this you know it was like it was it was it was it was in truth irresistible because it was just so much
but there were moments where I was aware of okay this is like letting go of self you know you know in this context is is the thing that is going to you know turn to make the difference between heaven and hell here you know and because there's there are experiences that are so extreme
that you can't even tell if it's agony or ecstasy it's just it's just this everything is turned up to 11 right and the difference 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 know you can just fall to one side
or the other and yeah so what I think people want is um they certainly want to be able to extract from the psychedelic experience wisdom that is applicable to ordinary states of consciousness it's 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 way of being having free attention 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
being loved with our lives and with the people in our lives more and more of the time yeah and um that's there's I'm not saying that's the psyche you know that repeated psychedelic journeys aren't can't be integral to that project but but you know that it can't the project
can't be being high all the time right so whatever is extractable from that the the the occasional you know psychedelic trip has got to be mapable into ordinary waking consciousness and the point of 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's there to be had right means there's no doubt but this the truth is I mean 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 know want to recognize
right share the experience that MDMA significantly altered my perception of what's possible in terms of an emotional stance towards self and others yeah including animals right something that runs very deep for me and that I had been kind of actively suppressing in anticipation of having
put my dog down but also I 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 and I was always very conflicted about it yeah 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 lab work I've worked on many species I've worked on mice and rats I've worked on it admittedly I've worked on I've done some cat experiments I've worked on large non-human primates including macaques
I no longer work on any of those species I've worked on cuddlefish saffelopods a discussion for another time brilliant little creatures maybe maybe as 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 and MDMA didn't set that transition that transition actually had been set a lot earlier you know something I really grappled with it 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've strong feelings about this and maybe it's a topic for 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 and I trust their answers I think that MDMA in its role as an impathogen 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 assist the transition to purely human research as opposed to animal research the other thing that I noticed it 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 gained some understanding I've still amazed at how answers arrive 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 some pseudo structure 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
right 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 and 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 I experienced for the first time what really feeling like a isolated container was in the difference between and how empathy and being bounded having in other words good boundaries and
empathy could be symbiotic I experienced that for the first time there and I I do think that there is learning inside of these states that translates into everyday life when one is not on these states and 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 that the three as 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 particular 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 I mean there's lots of experiences that can still have a kind of center to them but be you know very novel and and transformational and one can reify those as a kind of goal state right and
it's sort of the there's a concept in in Buddhism that I think is useful it doesn't translate well to English 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
disparate in English but it's um what it the what it's it's sort of cognate terms are are things like unconditioned unconstrained open centralists right so it's it's um there's a a and and that is so when I'm talking about non duality when I'm talking about the will
you the loss of a sense of subject and then what's left in Buddhism that they would often describe what's left as emptiness but it emptiness is not a something it's not a it's and it's and it's importantly it's not the same thing as unity right so it's not it's not a one this right
because it's it's what's what's let one that when the center drops out of experience it's not like you are suddenly merged with the cup right it's but now granted that you know this is where psilocybin and other psychedelics can give a false impression of I think what the goal is
you can have kind of seeming merging experience you can have unity experiences on psychedelics which can be quite powerful especially with nature with other people and with nature where you can just feel like you know the the the energy of your body becomes incredibly vivid and powerful
it's just like like you're just you know 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
and again this is a just a 20 megaton change in the contents of consciousness right this is not non-ordinary state of consciousness but like this is a give some indication of what of how this happens I when I back in the day when I was in my 20s and I was experimenting with
with this was LSD but some friends and I decided we had this brilliant idea we would we would camp above mere woods and then take some some LSD had dawn and then walk down you know but like a mile I think from the campsite into the into the actual proper grove of trees and
you know commune with the giant red woods 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 I mean we got nowhere near the woods and we got stopped by a tree that was just like an ordinary
you know 20 foot oak tree like the most boring tree in the world and that tree absorbed like the next next six hours of our of our conscious attention because it was just you know it was the tree of life I mean it was just it could be you could be no better tree so these we're talking about
non-ordinary states of consciousness wherein a emerging with life and with with the world is possible and that is a so I'm not 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 egoity that sort of goes along for the ride as well or can go along for the ride and the real insight into emptiness the real sort of centralist you know center of the bullseye is a recognition that that in some ways equalizes all experiences and again it's 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 this is you know the this is the whole universe and so it's it's the it's the equality of those two experiences that
this concept of emptiness captures which a 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 somethingness right emptiness is just no center right and then everything is in
its own place right there's still sites 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 this is so pleasant and unpleasant get sort of strangely equalized and there's this very it's 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 that's possible from the state of no center right and and and on my you know that my reason now not so reason three years ago it's 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 you know at the peak there was no me to remember any of any of this stuff but you know insofar as I could experiment with is this really different from anything else you know there is a kind of equalizing
to the emptiness recognition even in the in the presence of a completely transformed neurophysiology and and so that's um again there's there's a point of contact I mean the 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 um and there are other aspects of the project it's not just having this insight into selflessness it's 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 what what is a good life altogether when you are talking about relationships and you know political engagement and the changes you can make in the world or not make or it's 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 mean as you discovered you know an experience on MDMA can really both both expand your model of what is possible and what is desirable what is normative I mean 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 you you're 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 um once these learnings take place these
understanding take place inside of psychedelic journeys and um I do believe they translate to neuroplasticity I do want to highlight the point for people oftentimes people say you know this mushroom or this psychedelic it opens plasticity but of course plasticity has to be directed some
place plasticity is just a process like like walking or anything else underlying neural process and I 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 um a deeper realization of the love for learning and sharing information you know I won't go so far as to say this podcast is happening because of that particular session but these things um they split out into multiple domains of the self and I do
think that um the key features that feel most important to me to mention are that um it really identified uh true loves things that I truly love and made me less um less cautious about feeling how intense those loves really are and then also uh lower the inhibition point of exploring like
well what that what what would that mean right you know and the one of the reasons I bring this up and why I think it's so important that you mentioned you know uh some issues around politics and ethics and many things have displayed out from your exploration with psychedelic 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 um 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 in people for which I radically accept the fact that I want nothing to do with
them yeah and does that some am I 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 it with with things even if they're you know and my goal is to somehow um surpass 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 I you know I think notions of radical
acceptance and radical honesty and and any number of different sayings that one can find out there are really the the most salient beacons and guides that most people have in order to try 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 the
based on what you've told us today is that only through a um a deep understanding of the self as it really is as opposed to the solution that you framed up could we actually arrive at some answers about like what's actually right for each and every one of us yeah I mean 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 of our lives and it's it's to become more process oriented and to and to continue be more and more sensitive to the the marrall the
the marrall 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 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 fulfillment and you just there's a few lessons that everyone I think has to draw one is most of your life is spent in the process right like the call like the moment at which the goal is you know fully conquered that is just I mean
that has a you know it's a tiny duration and it has a very short half life and you're it the moment you you arrive at it it begins to recede because in the meantime you have all these other goals that 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 focused on goals you really 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 we're ever thinking about sighting taking 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 I mean that that is the logic of success like the sense like I've got all these things I want to do if I could just get rich enough or fit enough or you know dial in my sleep well enough or
you know improve my life in all these ways 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 it is completely valid to want those things but in the present it's for 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 possible it's possible to be absolutely miserable having everything any anyone could seemingly want right I just have to open a newspaper to see people living out that predicament
right you know that's spectacularly wealthy famous healthy successful people who could do anything they want in their in life apparently and yet they're doing this thing that is completely dysfunctional and making them needlessly miserable I won't name names there are enough of 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 mean you might not have met these people but you know I
have met people who have spent you know 10 years alone in a cave right you know and they come out of that cave not floorly neurotic or psychotic they come out of that cave beaming with compassion and joy and I mean it's like they've been taking MDMA for 10 years essentially and they come out of the
cave and that 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 be beaming with 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 that's we've got something to look forward to on the
weekend and there's not some 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 can we fully locate our 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 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 absolutely have the finite resource of time but within this the finite resource the continuum of time we have the even more precious resource of free attention that is that that can find our our our 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 regretting the past or you know anxiously expecting the future and telling it to just balancing 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 attention can be located in the present in a way that's truly fulfilling and unless you have had some kind of radical insight that allows you
to do that on demand you are in some sense hostage to the circumstances of your life to do that for you you're you're you're constantly trying to to engineer a state of the world that will propagate back on a state of self that will make the the present moment good enough and what meditation does
and psychedelics to some degree does this but meditation very directly does this it reverses the causality and and and lets you actually change change states such that you can be fulfilled before anything happens right nothing you're 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 at peace you know I mean there's a there's a I think they're misleading nouns we can we can throw it at what is left there but it is you know you know tranquility peace freedom
lack of contraction lack of conflict I mean like all of that is they 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 I mean it's not it's not that you need
to be somebody who who accept it to your point you can notice all of these non optimal things because no matter how much you meditate you know you're very likely 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 normativity in your life right and it's just the question is what can you what can you locate when I the question it's really it's like how much can you puncture that seeking happiness project with the recognition that you're already free right
that I 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's it but it is still compatible like you can me working out as a great frame in which to look at this because
I mean we're working out when you when you when you really work out you know I'm thinking you know mostly it's really anything but it's you know resistance training or cardio or something like your gits who you're you're intentionally putting yourself in classically unpleasant
circumstances physiologically I mean so if you if you were you know if you imagine what it's like to do anything to failure right well if you just check in and what the on what that is like at the level of sensation I mean that is is basically a matter it feels like a medical emergency right I'm
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 gonna 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 you like doing right and you can you can 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 you're
owning a kind of a like you're you're actually transforming a a classically negative experience into something that's in almost intrinsically positive right certainly the net on it is positive you can do that and when being able to do that is more and more the experience of being actually
at peace even while exerting a really intense effort in one direction so you can be straining and I'm sure physiologically showing a lot of stress I mean I'm sure the you know cortisol is up and like you know you know blood pressure 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 of 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 you do any you work on yourself in any of these ways but
um what I think you I think you want to find is you want to find your point of rest in the midst of of any struggle yeah I would say that the certainly mdma but and again I have less experience with meditation and but they really I think put us ultimately in positions of what can only refer to
as real strength you see can 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 in some other way and be able to lean into those with with open eyes 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 there's definitely something real they are 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 um you still have an instagram account I noticed but I've never I mean my team manages that I've never I love friendly over it Instagram I've been there a lot I've never even seen it so it's pretty good actually
considering imagine what would happen if you did a deep hate that they're doing a good job with it um but your decision to close your account on twitter um I think grabbed a lot of eyes and ears and um there's a lot of questions about why it was a very large account you know um it correlated
with a number of things that for the outsider people might be wondering about um 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 uh you are certainly not obligated to explain your behavior to me uh
or anybody else um for that matter but I'm curious if you might share with us um what the motivation was um for taking the account down and and how you feel in the absence of uh I mean your thumbs presumably are freed up to do other things yeah I was getting like an arthritic right thumb
I think yeah if you don't mind sharing I think there's a there's a lot of curiosity about you and your your routines you've been very generous in sharing that your knowledge um and but also kind of like what what makes what makes you tick what motivates um pretty big decisions like that
it wasn't a major platform for you right yeah yeah it was it was the only social media platform I've ever engaged I mean like you said we I have an Instagram I have a Facebook account but I never never use those as platforms right I've never on them I never thought I've never followed people and I've never and all the posting has just come from it's just marketing you know from my team um but Twitter was me I mean I was you know for better or worse and um I began to feel more
and more for worse and it was um it was interesting because it was very you know I've you know I've you know 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 it had 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 of content um and then it was also a place where I was I genuinely wanted to communicate with people and
react to things and and you know you know I would see some article that I thought was great and I would signal boost it you know to to my the 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 are people who I've raised lots of money for on Twitter just by you know signal boosting there go fund me and and so I was engaged in a way that seemed productive um 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 respond into and taking seriously that was out of proportion to its its representation of any opinion or set of opinions that I I should be taking seriously so I was noticing that that um and again this evolved over years I mean this this long before
long long long predated recent changes to Twitter um 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 um it's just so much of it it's either it's Genesis was Twitter or it's the the uh 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 and just and it was just okay this is a mess right and so at that point
you know I 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 ghost you know just due to having and there's like Joe Rogan sat me down and tried to get you know
give me a talk into it I said Bill Maher um and both of them engaged Twitter in that way I mean they I think they basically never look at their ad mentions they never see what's coming back at them they just you know they use it effectively the way I use or don't even use Instagram or Facebook
I don't even see what's going out there in in my name um and so I I could essentially do that for myself on Twitter presumably and I did that for some periods of time but then I would continually decide okay now it's all balanced again maybe I can just communicate here because it was very
tempting for me to communicate with people because I would see somebody you know clearly misunderstanding something I had said on my podcast and I think like why not clarify this misunderstanding right and and my efforts to do that almost invariably produced a um
this I mean sometimes it was a kind of a meandering uh 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've never meet these people in life
right um and yet I was meeting these people by the tens of thousands on Twitter and so the thing that began to worry me about it and again this I understand that people have the opposite experience on to I mean depending on what you're putting out and what you're you know the kinds 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 you know I'm 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 right so and it's very different if you're only criticizing the left you hate I'm you know that 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 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 who are just going to reflexively defend you if you're in the center criticizing the left as hard as anyone on the right ever criticize 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 reflex reflexively and tribally defending you because you pissed them off last time you're like you might be getting hate from the left now and the people on the right agree with you but they can't forget the thing you said about Trump on that podcast
you know you know two podcasts ago so they're not going to defend you and so what I basically created hell for myself on Twitter because it was um I just you know it was just a theater of it was just pure cacophony most of the time and what I was seeing was I mean there's
no way there's this many psychopaths in the world but I was seeing psychopaths everywhere I was seeing like the most malicious dishonesty and you know just goalposts moving and hypocrisy and and I mean it was just I mean some of it's trolling and some of it's real confusion and some of it
is psychopathy but it's like it was so dark that um I worried that it was actually giving me a very negative and sticky view of humanity that was I mean one it was you know I think it isn't an inaccurate but two 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 were some days where 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 funhouse mirror in which I was looking at the the most grotesque side of humanity and feeling you know implicated in in ways that were important important because it was just it was reputationally important or seemed 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 you know 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 have had dinner with that was way more negative 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 that'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 gaslighting and weird right as as was what was happening hourly on Twitter right and so I just began to become more
sensitive to 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 you know previously in the in the previous hour and there was some residue of that you know if you know in my interaction with them you know it's like what you know what he's stressed out about what do you annoyed about what do 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 I mean literally a hundred percent of that was Twitter and and so I just at one point it was
actually on Thanksgiving day I just looked at this and I just just I mean there was very little thought went into it I mean literally I mean you know it was more thought in involved in you you know whether I wanted coffee when you asked me when I showed up here I'm just like at a certain
point I just I just saw it and I just I just ripped the bandaid off and yeah so and to answer the other question it's been almost wholly positive as you might expect given the the litany of pain and discomfort I just ran through but I mean it's also it's it's it's surprising
to recognize how much of a presence it was in my life given the sense of what is now missing I mean it's like there's there's it was there's no question there was 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 mean I'm not you know I've got a lot to say about you know the choices he's making for the platform but just his personal use of it is just 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 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 me because I know Elon and I just you know he's from you know 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 well it is not if this is what is 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 actually you know a good idea and you know optimized to my well-being and the well-being of the people around me and 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 I mean there's some there times I pick up my phone and I realize this is like the old me picking it up my phone for a reason that no longer exists because there's not that much you know I 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 in so far as it actually matters what happens on Twitter
or in so far 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 one to 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 I think I said I you know it's like I amputated a phantom limb right it was not a real limb but it was it was a this continuous presence in my life that that it is it's weird it actually relates to the concept of self in in surprising ways because
I felt there was a part of myself that existed on Twitter and I you know I I just performed a suicide of that itself rather like that's this is ending right now and you know there's no residue there's nothing 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 I mean Twitter what in my timeline would have been a kind of journal I could have gone back to a specific hour in a specific day and looked at what I was paying attention
to I mean that could have been an interesting record of just who I've been for a decade and I and I'm probably a pretty humbling record of who I've been for a decade in terms of the kinds of things that captivated my attention but I didn't even you know it didn't even think to go
in the state you know nostalgicly just look at any of that or see if any of it was worth saving or archiving or thinking I just just delete you know and it was some and so my my actual sense of who I am and my engagement with with my audience my you know the 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 exist digitally my sense of of all of that got truncated in a in a way that 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 says of what I'm going to say on your podcast what I'm going to say on 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 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 mean I think all of that's to the good
but even more important than that is there's not I'm not getting this continuous signal that is always inviting a response whether on Twitter or 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 it definitely feels better right just that's a hundred percent better I'm happy to hear that I know a number of people miss you there but you sound happy I sense the genuine happiness
in it several things come to mind first of all thank you for sharing your your rational there and how it went I think for a lot of people I think oh he must have like walked around in circles for hours talking about him as many good decisions are executed right yeah you know I'm a big fan of Cal
Newport's work deep work in many ways cows I've never met him but we know each other through the 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 really
extreme so he had I mean he deserves some credit because he had been somewhat approximate cost of this he had been on my podcast and he had encouraged me to delete to Twitter because I had been I had been sort of in reaching some kind of you know crisis point with it prior to that
podcast and so we've 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 it so you know my podcast with him you know in the intro to it I then give a post mortem on my
to deleting it but he was he was one of the last people who was in my head around these issues and I had I you know it was that 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 and I 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 I tend to avoid high friction confrontations online but Instagram is a much friendlier place by the way if you
want to come over to wear like the nice kids like the cool kids actually hang out strange I'm not looking for a substitute okay well you know that's I didn't I don't let me entice you over there you do but I think that this notion of really being able to access what Cal calls deep work what
um Rick Rubin talks about you know being able to touch the source of create 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 and we only have so much energy yeah neural energy to devote um and in many ways what you describe um bears 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 um so powerful that has such a gravitational pull and that we think this is experience this is life 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 yeah that was available all along for that we uh for whatever reason um we're intervening in by way of our reflexive distracted behavior so I think there's a there's a there's a poetry there I was a hard case but uh yeah I got religion on this point and it's uh it's a good change
we'll say I want to say a couple of things first of all um 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 um when you talk about
philosophy or uh or meditation or psychedelics and even politics some a topic that I'm you know woefully undereducated in but um you have this amazing ability to to blend and synergize across things and I think today what what occurs to me is that um not only is that no accident because
of your training and your the rigor and the depth that 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 and our inner landscape um your description of meditation I have to say is and if 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 it as
something to to do for these various benefits the benefit set of more focus at your stress etc of which certainly exists but what you described today has a um as such an allure and a um holds such a promise that um 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 and 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 um in fact there's probably only just one and so I feel very
grateful to be sitting across the table from them for these last hours. Nice nice why I really enjoyed this and I want to congratulate you on what you built here because your podcast is everywhere I just come you know I'm a fan and even more than that I've continually seen the evidence
of you reaching people and benefiting people and it's just it's really I mean 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 length that goes into you know nitty-gritty scientific detail on you know hormones I mean like who would have thought that was even possible and so yeah I was just congratulations it's fantastic to see and I'm just very happy for the opportunity to talk to you and 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 so much. Nice going to
be continued. To be continued we'll do it again 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 that Dr. Sam Harris has made free to any Huberman lab listeners
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