Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 71: Sam Harris, 'Waking Up' Podcast Host, Neuroscientist

Episode Date: April 12, 2017

Sam Harris, who has no relation to our beloved host, is a scientist, a controversial skeptic and the author of several New York Times bestsellers, including "The End of Faith," "The Moral Landscape" and "Waking Up" (also the title of his popular podcast). During our interview, Harris hosts a clinic on deconstructing "consciousness and its contents" with the help of meditation, and recognizing how getting lost in thought can be tied to suffering. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUT [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ this week is Sam Harris. I have to explain this all the time. Sam and I are not related. Although I really do love the guy. He's a phenomenal human being. He is, let's just say, from the outset, extremely controversial. He's known as an atheist, and he takes all sorts

of controversial stances on public issues. Interestingly, though my relationship with him is mostly centered around meditation and our lives we know each other's wives and Hang out personally so the same I know is very different from the Sam who a lot of people get angry at and Just by way of backstory. I met Sam several years ago when I was moderating a nightline debate the primary antagonist in that debate were Sam Harris and Deepak Chopra, and actually it's worth going back and looking at some of the YouTube clips of that debate. It's gotten a lot of attention in the years

that have passed since the debate. Anyway backstage at that debate, Sam and I were hanging out getting to know each other a little bit, and he mentioned that he was a daily meditator that which I took really seriously because I was just at the beginning of my practice and thought well If a skeptical guy like this is doing it a guy who's a neuroscientist It must there must be something here and he introduced me to the guy who ultimately became my meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein and Joseph and Sam are old old friends and just as a side note I know it's crazy that after more than a year of having a podcast, Joseph has not been on but I plan to remedy that soon. Long way of saying that Sam Harris is somebody I count as a real friend. And just as another side note, you can actually hear a podcast that we did together with Joe Rogan a couple days ago. That's a three hour podcast. This one's a and much more focused on sam uh... himself and his work

so without further ado here is sam Harris all right so we ask the question i'll ask everybody to start with was just how did you get into meditation well it was uh... first there were a couple of psychedelic experiences which convinced me that naturally occurring or uh... drug induced are are which convinced me that naturally occurring or drug induced.

Are there naturally occurring? I don't know. Not for me. No, this was pharmacology enabled. But as a kid, well, the one that meant something was as an 18-year-old, and that was MDMA. Otherwise known as ecstasy, or molly to the kids. Yeah, yeah, and this was before the kids were into it I think I was the only person I knew of my generation who had tried it at that point So it was this was kind of an export from the psychotherapeutic community. I was told you were in the cutting edge of I will

Yeah drug users But yes, I mean I took it in a context that was not at all likely usual Was usual now it wasn't a rave or or I wasn't that something like burning man I was just sitting on a couch waiting to discover something about the nature of my mind and Man we were different because when I was 18 year old eight years old I had no desire to understand anything about the nature of my mind. Yeah, well, when I was 17, I guess I wasn't, but something changed.

And I had had a few experiences before that. I had taken mushrooms as a teenager, and I never saw any greater implication of what I experienced there. I mean, looking back on those experiences, they were psych, you know were appropriately psychedelic and interesting, but it never suggested to me that there was a different way of experiencing the world off of drugs. It just seemed like, well, that's an interesting drug experience. Whereas on MDMA, the lesson really was that I'm not feeling this way by virtue of my habit patterns and automaticities.

And the experience was of being really sane for the first moment in my life. That's how I came out of it. And it's just no longer self-concerned, no longer preoccupied with the voice in my head. And it just seemed like a much more, it was a truer version of myself. I mean, that's what I came away feeling. And the implication of that was that I had to find some way to feeling and the implication of that was that I had to find some way to actualize this experience and just over the course of my life. And obviously I couldn't take MDMA every day. I mean, that was not, that never was part of the plan. But I did take, I took LSD, I took a few other psychedelics and then meditation also became, you know, it was recommended and I tried it,

and obviously that was a more durable path. Right, so already, unsurprisingly, since I'm talking to Sam Harris, we're in something of controversial area here, because this is a family podcast, so I suspect some people will be like, drugs are illegal. I personally have had panic attack on national television

as a consequence of doing certain sorts of drugs. So drugs can have all sorts of pernicious effects. Do you have any compunction about talking so openly about your driving as to the positive impacts of drugs. Yeah, and when I have written about this and spoken about it in the past, there's another side to the story that I tell, and I'll tell that now. I mean, I don't take psychedelics anymore, I certainly haven't for many years, because I've acquired a very healthy respect for just how bad an experience you can have on them.

And this is independent of whether they're physically unhealthy. And I think that story is different depending on the drug you're talking about. I think MDMA is probably not good for you. There's certainly some evidence that it's neurotoxic. I mean, there's controversy there. There's debate about whether the dosages in those experiments were analogous to the dosages that people take. But I think taking MDMA a lot would worry me purely for physical reasons.

I don't know that there's any evidence that something like LSD is neurotoxic. But the experiences you can have, particularly on stronger psychedelics like LSD, can be so psychologically destabilizing. And whether or not you have a good experience or a bad experience is not really in your hands to control.

And so my experience with LSD, which I took more than anything else, was of the first 10 times I took it, I just didn't even see a glimmer of how you could have a bad experience. So I'd heard about bad trips, I heard that certain people had them. I just didn't see how that was possible. You know, it just, it just, it was like a non-sequitur. But you know, trip number 11 or thereabouts, it's just the door to hell got kicked open. And then it was always a jar. I mean, then, then, Then that possibility was always on the table when I would take anything, whether it was mushrooms or LSD. And some of those trips, I only did it a few more times after that, but I came away from

a few of them feeling like the after effects of having endured a truly harrowing encounter with, you know, psychosis is really the appropriate word. Those lingered for me for months. I mean, I just felt like, yeah, this is not a good thing to be doing with your mind or with your brain. And but conversely, the positive trips, the effect, those effects lingered for months. You know, so I think the think the effect it has on you is, unfortunately, a role of the dice.

So the meditation is much more easily governed in that way. It's not that I would never do it again, and it's not that I would never do it again, and it's not that I wouldn't recommend it, but you can only really recommend it with a proviso that you can't be totally sure what's gonna happen. And the real benefit for me and for many people is that whether you have a bad trip or a good trip, this is true, but certainly on a good trip,

it proves that a very different experience of the world is possible. And I was the kind of person who probably wasn't going to realize that any other way. I think if you had taught me how to meditate when I was 18 or 20, and I had never had any drug experience. I think I probably wouldn't have been especially good at it, which is to say I wouldn't have noticed something immediately that was compelling. And I would have come away probably feeling

that it was just, it was boring or it was just, I looked inside and didn't see much of interest and then just wanted to get on with my life. And that happens to a lot of people. I mean, there's so many people who are just not even interested in any form of introspection. So psychedelics are really a kind of sledgehammer

to take to the normalcy of your own distraction and self-concept. And it's, again, it can be extraordinarily pleasant or the opposite. You write about this in a really compelling and often extremely funny way in your excellent book, Waking Up, which I've read maybe four of us. Yeah, I would be embarrassed to show you my copy because it has notes all over it. And I'm going to be asking many, many questions based on those notes. So moving on with the chronology here, you're 18, 1920, you've done a few experiments, some of them as you describe in your books, a little bit disastrous, with psychedelics.

And then you get into meditation in a pretty deep way, and if I recall, you were a student, an undergrad at Stanford at the time, and you dropped out and really dove into the meditation world, the Dharma scene. Yeah, yeah, I had dropped out. This was after my sophomore year, but I was still living at Stanford for what would have been my junior year, and I did a retreat with Ramdas up in Oregon. Can you tell everybody who that is? Ramdas was originally known as Richard Alpert. He was a Harvard professor and the colleague of Tim Learies, who who the two of them got fired I think they were the first professor is fired from Harvard and living memory and

they got fired for being too loose with the their LSD protocol and basically giving acid to everyone who showed up and Yeah, I mean obviously And, yeah, I mean, obviously there are many, many people and many, many, very successful, smart people who are grateful for the way they disseminated LSD into the culture. But you could certainly criticize what they did and there was a kind of schedule one backlash against what they did, certainly. Schedule one meaning illegal. Yeah, so classified them as illegal drugs.

Yeah, so psychedelics became from the point of view of the law, indistinguishable from heroin or methamphetamine or anything else that's illegal and can send you to prison and research on these drugs, more or less stopped entirely for for generation and half yeah, though it's really psilocybin coming back to the lab so it's finally come back and that's all to the good but it's say there was a there was a backlash but anyway Richard Alpert became Ramdas when he went to India and met his guru and got really into meditation and yoga and then

started just teaching meditation for the most part. And mostly taught Vapasana. So that's where I learned Vapasana meditation on the first retreat. Can you define Vapasana for people? Well listen to your podcast probably have heard about Vapasana. Let's assume nothing. Yeah, yeah. It's the, I suspect people will be listening to this for the first time because you're on

your show. Let's give it to them. Okay. Well, Vipassana is the poly term, the vernacular Sanskrit term for insight. And it is, you know, by the Buddhist tradition that teaches it, consider the oldest and truest and most essential teaching of the Buddha, where meditation is concerned. And the kind of awareness you cultivate in this practice is now, you know, widely heard under the name of mindfulness. And it's a little more to Vipassana than just mindfulness, but mindfulness really is the

center of the technique. And mindfulness is just a very uncluttered, unconceptual ultimately and open awareness applied to anything that you happen to be experiencing. So there's nothing you're adding to your experience in order to do it. You don't have a mantra, you're not visualizing anything. You're just you paying attention to whatever it is you happen to notice. And initially the technique is trained as a, what traditionally is more of a concentration style practice where you're just focusing on the breath. And so if you go out of a pasta retreat, you'll be taught to do sitting meditation and the breath as an object of attention

will be recommended to you. But very quickly, as you begin to learn to pay attention, then that opens up and you pay attention to anything. So it's sites and sounds and sensations, and ultimately even thoughts and emotions themselves. So there's nothing in principle excluded from the practice of a pasta or mindfulness. So you're not trying to get rid of your thoughts, you're not trying to get rid of your emotions, you're actually trying to feel and perceive everything as clearly and as fully as possible without being lost and thought about these things. So what we tend to do is we tend to view our experience

in each moment through this really unacknowledged scrim of discursivity. We're having a conversation with ourselves in the midst of everything else we're experiencing. And this conversation tends to have the character of judging our experience, criticizing our experience, remembering what we wish we had said, anticipating the thing that's coming next, and we're bouncing back and forth, we're not really going anywhere because there really is only the present moment with thoughts arising and passing away, but we don't see that. We feel identical to each thought that comes feel identical to each thought that comes corining into consciousness.

And these thoughts, you know, whether, if they're unpleasant, they're kindling unpleasant emotions. And if they're pleasant, they're kindling pleasant ones. And we just get buffeted around by this. And the practice of mindfulness is the practice of just suddenly in each moment for maybe only for a moment at a time, becoming aware of this whole wheelworks and seeing thoughts and

moods and sensations as appearances and consciousness arise in and changing and passing away in each moment. So it's what's great about mindfulness as a technique is that it, because it doesn't entail any eastern concepts or iconography or ritual, I mean, there really is nothing, I mean, traditionally it's a Buddhist technique, but there's nothing Buddhist about it. You're just paying attention.

And it's just a very, it's training it, it's just a very rigorous way of, and a systematic way of paying attention to the contents of consciousness. Well done. So you are on of a, of a pasta in a retreat with Ram Das, interesting because Ram Das is a Hindu name, and I associate him with sort of Hindu meditation, but he was teaching

a Buddhist form of meditation on the retreat. Yeah, well, when he was teaching, he may still do this, but he was teaching retreats where he would give you a kind of s'morgas board of spiritual practices. So there was Vapasana, there was chanting, there was yoga, there was Sufi dancing, I mean, there was a lot of stuff, but Vapasana was the kind of center of it in terms of meditation. And you were cool with the chanting and the Sufi dancing and all that stuff? Yeah, yeah, it was all fun. I mean, it was all and I must confess, I think I dropped acid on my first rumbaster treat, so. Well, that changes it entirely, but you know, you were thought of as this famous atheist skeptic guy

So I have a hard time imagining you spinning around Sufi dancing or you know chanting Sanskrit and and you know Krishna. Yeah So it was there a change before or after or am I Misunderstanding the nature of these experiences? You what I none of those practices require that you believe anything spooky. I mean, it's just, it's a, and I, you know, it's not, I mean, I still love, I don't mean, I don't, I don't, Sufi dance, or it's been a, it's been a long time, but the, I think

I could do any of those things without any problem. They're just, they're very interesting rituals and the energy of it and the, many of those are collective experiences. If you're chanting, you're often chanting in a room with a hundred people, and that can be very intense, and it's not something that you need to do in a kind of propititorial prayer way. I mean, you don't have to actually think you're talking to Krishna, right? You can just be, and so it doesn't even matter

what the sound would be, it just happens to be Krishna, but it could be anything. So yeah, I could do mantra practice, I don't happen to do it, but there'd be no, I'd see no problem doing it. So it's just a technology, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a kind of exercise.

It's a little bit like, I mean, it's like any physical exercise, really, where you could, I mean, you could second get like, like, lifting weights, you know, you could think, well, why am I lifting these arbitrary, heavy objects? You know, and why are they shaped this way? And why, you could get wrapped around the axle on all that stuff, but anything as good as anything else in that space, if you're just connected with the fundamental aspect of the project, which is to get stronger.

When you're chanting, it is a concentration exercise. And it is a, if you're chanting to the ideal of enlightenment, whether it's personified by the Buddha or any other historical or even imaginary figure, you are, there's this kind of aspirational, devotional, it's very positive mood that is that you're getting anchored to. And yeah, I mean, you just, in my view, you don't have to believe you know anything you don't know or accept anything on bad evidence to do that. Now, the caveat, of course, is that most of the people

who are doing these practices and most who have done them historically have believed a lot of, unjustifiable nonsense in the service of these practices or the practices were put in the service of an explicitly religious and dogmatic worldview. And so, you know, as you know, I really think we have to get out of the religion business. And most people doing, quote, spiritual practice, don't quite see it the way I see it. So, you know, if you go to the Hari Krishna's and chant and ask them why they're, you know,

why are we doing this? They will have a story to tell you about Krishna and his real existence in some invisible realm and the usefulness of praying to him and all of that. And obviously that's something I think is quite crazy. You were going to deviate a little bit from the story of your life, but I promise you and our listeners that we will get back to it, but you've brought us up to a point, which I think is worth exploring, which is one of the main Theses of the aforementioned excellent book Waking Up, which is that we can, that it is possible to have a kind of spirituality without religion.

Yeah. The floor is yours. Well, it should be obvious that this is possible because people from all different religions have the same spiritual experience or importantly similar spiritual experiences. A unitive experience. Yeah, so let's just take the experience, let's take two experiences. The experience of unconditional love or unconditional compassion, just having your emotional doors

just blown open and you feel just boundless commitment to the happiness of other sentient beings. This is a universal experience that mystics and contemplatives and just people have testified to for thousands of years. And this is very much the character of the experience that many people have on ecstasy or MDMA. And just to amplify your point, these are people utterly disconnected

by geography and chronology, claiming the same sorts of experience. Yeah, yeah, so, and this is, whether you're gonna talk about Jesus or the desert fathers or any other saints and contemplatives in the Christian tradition, or it's people like Rumi among the Sufis, or the numberless Buddhists and Hindus,

devotees of Krishna, these Krishna's the God of love. And this is the state of consciousness that many people are aiming for. Shamans in ancient cultures, and today's cultures, and then again, people on drugs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the language can be a little different. I mean, there are traditions that don't emphasize love

to the same degree as others, right? But it's just obvious when you pay attention to the literature that people in, in more or less every tradition have testified to this experience, to one degree or another. And so, too, with the experience of self-transcendence, just losing the sense of self, losing the sense that there's an ego riding around in your head that is the center of the stream of consciousness, or this kind of bobbing along on the stream of consciousness.

People can lose that sense and just experience pure consciousness. So there's consciousness and it's contents, but the self is not among the contents. There's just thoughts and emotions and sensations and perceptions. And so that's a different experience. It's not the same as boundless love. Oh, there is a connection there. Yeah, but you can definitely have one without the other. You can have the experience of boundless love and still feel like an eye. So still feel like a

self that's, you know, loving, incredibly loving. And you can experience a loss of the sense of self without anything really changing at the level of your affect. So it's not like love, just tsunami of love comes flooding in, although it can, but it's just your selflessness is not predicated on being overwhelmed by a feeling of love or compassion. So they're distinct, but again, these are experiences

that are widely testified to in various traditions. And so you can know our religions are not the best repositories or interpretations of that experience because all these religions are mutually canceling. They're mutually, they're logically incompatible. You know, if you are a Christian, the central doctrine is there is no way to make significant progress and certainly no way to be saved, but in the name of Jesus, right? And Jesus was divine. And if you don't believe in Jesus' divinity and the fact that he was raised from the dead, well, you're doomed. And everyone from St. Paul onward has said that. Now, of course, there are Christians who relax their adherence to that dogma to one or another degree, but there's no, there's no way around the fact that Christianity

is logically incompatible with Islam and Islam is logically incompatible with Hinduism, and they're all incompatible with Buddhism. And so there has to be a deeper principle here. There's that, I mean, none of these, given that people from all traditions have these experiences, none of these, none of these experiences are data points in support of any one of those parochial worldviews. So, and yet every Christian who has the experience of unconditional love or the loss of a sense of self

of unconditional love or the loss of a sense of self. We'll interpret that in the framework of Christianity as evidence of the truth of Christianity. So a Christian who is in church praying who suddenly gets flooded with love for all humanity will feel like this is the downpouring of the Holy Spirit or this is the grace of God, or Jesus, is somehow touched their lives. And so, and a Muslim will have his story, and a Hindu will have her story, and these are totally incompatible stories. So we know these traditions, so we know that these experiences are not data points in favor of any of these faiths. And I mean, so there are many other ways to see why that should be obvious, but the mutual incompatibility of these faith claims is enough to get us to a point of saying, well, there has to be a more universal account of what's going on and i can't have of the furthest reaches of positive psychology

that is not held hostage to accidents of culture and just that the the mere fact that someone happened be born in india as opposed to pakistan or japan or somewhere else where they would have been handed a different world view uh... okay so i'm I'm laughing just because I often, no, I always go into

podcasts with this idea that I'm going to let people tell the story of their lives and then go from there. But now I'm officially dropping that here because you said too many things that I need to follow up on. Okay. So I will get back to the story if you're like, I don't think you care what I do, but I'm selling that to the listeners. You talked about selflessness, dropping the eye. I think that is such a hard concept for people to grasp. So let's take it on now, because it is another of the principal thesis in waking up

that the self is an illusion. This is so hard for people to get. I think most people have never even thought about the self is an illusion. This is so hard for people to get. I think most people have never even thought about the self at all. So help us understand A, what you're talking about here and B, how would be at all useful for us in our daily lives. Well, so the utility is kind of a separate question. It is useful because when you look at the nature

of your suffering psychologically, the self is really the string upon which all of these negative states, mental states are strong. I mean, I think a lot of people listening to this might feel like I'm not suffering. We're talking about that, no, no, there are no crows pecking out my inner zone, fine. no, there are no crows picking up my innards. I'm fine. Yeah, and so those people are difficult to reach with an argument that suggests that if

you'd only look more closely at your life, you would discover that you are, you're moved in each moment by a sense of dissatisfaction that may in fact be unacknowledged, right? So like you're just moving on to the next thing, but there's a stress in your life that is motivating more or less everything you do. Your life has the character of a kind of long emergency. And yet, either people who are happy enough, or lucky enough, or positive enough, that if you ask them, well, are you stressed out, are you moved by a profound sense of dissatisfaction, are you overlooking the present moment,

kind of compulsively trying to get on to the next thing, even if the present moment is full of the thing you thought you wanted a moment ago. next thing, even if the present moment is full of the thing you thought you wanted a moment ago, they're kind of, they're deeply insensitive to the dynamics of what's happening. And if you have a satisfying enough life for long enough, yeah, you can spend years and just seeing no point to this kind of consideration. Well, that's fine. You're a very happy person, very lucky,

and not in a lot of physical pain, and no one's died, that you, and you're not, you're one of these people. You're probably not Jewish, but you're probably one of these people who don't think about death, right? You're not actually thinking about the possibility of your parents dying, or your kids dying,

or I mean, you know. Just for those of us, anybody wondering there, you're a half Jewish. Yeah. Between us, we make one Jew. Right. Right. And by the way, we're not related. We're not related. No, it's a different strand of Judaism.

But so yeah, you're not, there are people like this who just, and there are many good ways, I mean, this is a psychologically strong way to be, it's nice to be resilient, right, and not to suffer much. So, you get frustrated, but the thing you were counting on doesn't happen and you spend two minutes being disappointed rather than two days or two weeks. So, there are people who are very lucky just by dint of genes and upbringing and they're

not shopping for a path to enlightenment because they don't see a problem. It doesn't mean there isn't a problem, it doesn't mean that they're not going to crash and burn sometime. So a lot of what spiritual life is and contemplative practice is, is a kind of training for the bad times. So you're kind of getting ready for the worst day of your life. And the worst day of your life is coming. If it hasn't happened already, it will happen eventually. And now, with any luck, your bad times

will not be as bad as humanly possible. It's possible to have just an unendurably bad life. And we're all hoping we get luckier than that. But, and if you have the free time to listen to this podcast, you probably are luckier than that. But there's just no telling what's going to happen to any of us in the future. And in the future, as in the present, your mind is all you have, And your mind is all you have, right? Your ability to be happy or be at peace in the midst of what is happening is whatever it is in this moment. And if it's untested in this moment because you have everything you want and you're comfortable,

well, then you don't really know what tools you have to work with when the wheels start coming off. And people who have thought a lot about this have discovered that there are some tools that are worth having in hand. And when you become sensitive to how it is you suffer, it's, there's really there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, not a lot going on there. They're not novel processes. It's just, whenever you're suffering, you know, really suffering, you are lost in thought. I mean, you are thinking.

And the, these blows are meted out by your own mind on itself through this, this automaticity of just thinking, without knowing that you're thinking. So the next thought arises, and it just, it seems to be you. It seems to be what you are, and you feel that you're the thinker of your thoughts. And this is kind of paradoxical.

You think that you think your, the author, the thought just arises, right, from who knows where. You certainly don't see it arise. And you certainly don't author it, but being identified with it carries with it the felt sense that you are the thinker. It seems to create a thinker that is separate from the thoughts. So if you're listening to me now and you don't really get what I'm saying, you might be thinking,

well, what is this guy talking about? Right, so that thought, what is this guy talking about? Just emerges and it feels like you, right? The sense of self is a product of not seeing a thought as a thought arising in a larger condition of consciousness or the mind. And meditation training is a way of recognizing the prior condition in which thoughts, sensations, and everything else arises. And at a certain point, you can notice thoughts themselves arise and not be any more identified

with the voice in your head than you are with my voice. I mean, so I'm in understanding what I'm saying now, just notice you. So, you know, if you're a speaker of English, you are through no intention of your own, helplessly decoding the sounds I'm making now and understanding them. Right? So, these, like, you can't, it's interesting to consider. I mean, you have absolutely no free will here. So, you can't decide not to understand what I'm saying. I mean, that's the word, the sound is coming in and it's meaningful to you.

If you don't understand something, I said, well, then you just, you don't understand it through no free will of your own. You just, you're just, you can't, this is, this is being imposed on, on your mind, one way or the other. And your own thoughts are just like this. They just arise. Right? And you don't actually know what you will think next. Any more than you know what I'm going to say next. Right? It's just, it feels like you in a way that my voice doesn't feel like you. But it is, if you pay attention, fundamentally, just as surprising, just as novel, it's just as ungoverned by you. It's just, you're not choosing it. You can't, to choose what you think

would require that you think it before you think it, right? I mean, how can you, I mean, there's a simple way to demonstrate this. So, but can't you, I'm sorry to interrupt, but can't you direct your thoughts? Can't you say, okay, I'm gonna sit down and think about Pastrami sandwiches now. Yeah, but where did Pastrami sandwiches come from?

You can do that, but of all the things, like you were shared. You're right, exactly, yes. But so you had a choice there or an apparent choice. You could have said anything, right? You didn't know, so like, what, why did you pick of all the food stuff you know? I mean, you know, you know, probably hundreds of things you could

have said there. You can't even explain why you went to food as opposed to cities or movies or relationships or famous people or I mean, you could have gone to anything, right? Any category of thing to think about, but you went to food and then you went to pastrami, but you could have gone to anything else that you're aware of. So, and we know, for instance, if we were scanning your brain at that moment, and, you know, with the brain scanner of the future, but this is virtually possible now, we could have told you, we would have known in the lab that you were going for food and pastrami before you knew you were doing that. So the consciousness is not the first to know that the word pastrami is going to come out of your mouth. Your pastrami sandwich circuits were already firing probably for at least a second before. and if you had sampled your experience during that second,

you would subjectively have felt that you were still in the process of making up your mind, searching for an example, right? So, I certainly didn't know coming into the podcast that the word pastrami would eat up this much bandwidth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm glad it did, for the record.

But our minds are always like this. They seem familiar, but in each moment, it is deeply mysterious how any of this is happening. Just how you understand what I'm saying, how I get to the end of this sentence is something that is mysterious. And when I fail to do it, if I make a grammatical error, that's also mysterious. I mean, the successes and the failures are both mysterious. And again, there is no one in the driver's seat here. There are simply more, the thoughts and sensations and moods and all of the phenomenon of conscious life are simply arising and passing in each moment. And the sense that there's a rider on the horse is again, that's what it feels

like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking, without recognizing the next thought emerge in consciousness. And when you can do that, what you find, and this comes back to your question of why any of this matters, is that you find that it's impossible to suffer the kind of classic, negative mind states for more than a moment at a time. So like, let's say you're angry, right? Or terrified or really anxious about something you have to do. Those mental states, again, are are born aloft in each moment by thinking. And if you, you know, if you, if you have very strong mindfulness and can just, you could just like a laser beam shine your attention on the process of thinking.

It's a really notice, thoughts arise and pass away. And you can focus very clearly on an emotion like anger or fear. The half-life of these emotions, when you're no longer thinking about them is just moments, right? I mean, you couldn't stay angry for, I mean most people think they can stay angry for an hour, right? Or even longer. It's impossible without just thinking about all the reasons why you have every right to be angry. Just re-upping. Yeah, you just gotta keep, you have to keep producing this emotion based on the thoughts that are justifying it. And the only way to do that is to be lost in those thoughts.

You can't actually, if you see the thought as a thought, it's just, it's like my voice in your head. You know, it's just an object in consciousness. It's not, it's not, it doesn't have the same imperative. It doesn't, it doesn't link to emotion in the same way. And so, I mean, this can't, so, this way of being in the world cancels, you know, all of the, you know, classical, negative emotions and the things we do as a result of them. So just think of the difference between being angry. If someone does something that makes me angry and I can be reasonably mindful, I might

stay angry for a few moments and then notice how angry I am. And then it begins to just fall off. Because I then notice that I'm suffering for no reason. There's no gu- like, it's not equipping me to do anything useful, and I'm the one meeting out this negative experience to myself. But so the difference between that and staying angry for an hour or a day and acting, speaking and acting on the basis of that anger, is enormous.

I mean, just think of how people destroy their lives and their relationships and their reputations based on just their negative mental state. So if you want to, just again, back to the pure utility and taking this out of metaphysics or philosophy or even grand goals like enlightenment. If you want, being able to decide to drop your anger or drop your embarrassment or drop your anxiety because it's not useful is like a superpower in this world. I mean most people don't have it. And most people are just lived by that, like they're full commitment. You know, they're going to be as angry as they get. And then the time course is who knows what and they will have said or done who knows what in the meantime. And you can see the consequences in people's lives

to decide, and again, what this way of talking about is a little misleading because free will is not, the flip side of selflessness is free will is also an illusion, right? So it's not like there's a self who can, who's deciding, but to speak, you know, very kind of conventionally about this, to have the choice to no longer indulge this negative emotion that is leading nowhere worth going is a hugely empowering and hugely useful skill to develop. Meditation is the way to develop that.

But beyond that, it's just a fact that to become more and more sensitive to the character of your own thoughts begins to reveal that for the most part, they're not being lost and thought is not making you happy. It's not making you, it's like the way you want to be, the moments in life that come upon you, that are your peak moments, the moments you keep trying to get back to, do tend to have this character of not

being moments when you were just ruminating about your life. You're in the zone. The moments of just, you know, they've been called flow or peak experiences. These are moments where whether it's through athletics or music or just creativity or sex or drugs or something. Something has caused your mind to just go full immersion into whatever it is. It's like the best food experience you've ever had.

Like the first bite of your favorite dish, whatever it is, it's collapsing the distance between observer and observed. And people crave that for good reason. But meditation is a way of having that experience on demand regardless of what's happening. So even in the midst of technically unpleasant experience, there, I mean, there's kind of an equalizing function here where meditation can equalize pleasant and unpleasant experiences because you realize

that the thing that is aware of pleasure is the same thing that's aware of pain, or joy and sadness, or you know, is it not a thing? It's not a thing. It's not a thing. And if you keep falling back into that position of just being the space in which these experiences arise, well then that distance between,

I mean, it just so happens. This is just kind of a happy accident that being concentrated, which is really opposite of being distracted by thought, has a kind of intrinsic pleasantness to it. And one of the things we like about flow experiences is this concentration of mind. And because when you look at it, it's kind of strange that

many of these things that are so satisfying when we're in the zone are satisfying at all. I mean, what is satisfying about what should be satisfying about any of these athletic experiences, say? So like, you know, shooting a basketball, right? Like if you just feel like you're completely at one with this experience. I've grabbing the ball jumping shooting dribbling. I mean, this is totally arbitrary I mean like what could be possibly pleasant about any of that right but being in the zone for that is Incredibly pleasant

But so it is with everything else dancing or I mean like what why why would moving your body in this way Be pleasant at all right but now it's not pleasant at all if you're you know uncomfortable if you're yourself conscious you don't have a dance people are looking at you you're just you're neurotic well then it's not pleasant but if you know how to dance and you feel great doing it and you're then now doing it in a way that is where you're totally at one with it, where you're not a step ahead or a step behind. You're not thinking about the strongly. Yeah, and you're not thinking about even, you're not even thinking about dancing, right?

Right. You're just, there's just no distance. You're being danced. Yeah. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai.

And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans formed the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans,

a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. That is, it's a completely arbitrary thing to do, but it's magically pleasant to do it. And the component that is delivering the high for the most part, I mean there may be other things,

but certainly part of it is just concentration. It's just this feature of mind of just being, just not being distracted anymore. Being distracted is a kind of stress that most people only overcome in a very haphazard way. They think it was the dancing or the basketball or the surfing or the sex or whatever it was that where they got there for a second and a half. But meditation is a way of taking responsibility for this process and dissecting out the variable

that is actually universal, which is just, you know, the distraction versus the alternative. And then it's just the practice of non-destruction, whatever your pain attention to. But let me just go back to the idea of selflessness or not self or whatever you want to call it. The fact that the self is an illusion. I mean, I, I just worry that people still are going to struggle with it because I know they do because I have for seven years of looking into it. Right. Because we feel we feel very much like they're I'm here, you know, and I see myself in the mirror

and I have to put my pants on in the morning and I gotta make a net disappointments under my name. So it's counterintuitive at the least to say that the self is an illusion. Yeah, well we use this term self in a few different ways and their ways, there are certainly selves that are not illusory. So the self as just the person,

I'm not saying that people are illusions, right? So yeah, to talk about Dan Harris, the person is not a sign of confusion. And your biographical self is distinct from somebody else's. And on that level, yourself is synonymous with your physical body, the whole body and it's history right and we can talk about the the subject of our objective side of that but it's the totality of you that's not the self that people feel they have moment to moment and so for instance most people don't feel identical to their bodies they feel feel like they have bodies. They feel like they're riding around in a body as though we're a kind

of vehicle. I don't really feel like I have much relationship with my appendix. But even like your hand, you can imagine being without a hand. And you feel like you're in control of it, but you're not down there in the hand really. You're up up here in your head and you look down at the hand and you say, well, that's my hand. But so the body, most of it at any rate, is being appropriated from some point of view that is inside the head.

It's not identical to the head. I mean, it feels like you're inside your head. And when someone looks at you, you feel like they're looking at you, but you feel like you're behind your eyes in some sense. You're not really, you're not just your body. It's not that your body is being looked at. You are, you're in relationship to your body to some degree. you don't like your body or your body is malfunctioning or it's getting old or you're parts of it hurt and yet you're at some distance from all of that. So if there's a pain somewhere, you are this subject in your head that's aware of the pain and if you're going to pay attention to it or try to ignore it, you're doing all that

in this point of view of being related to the rest of what's happening in your body. And obviously most of what's happening in your body, you're totally unaware of. So like your appendix, you're not even aware of actually having one directly. You just happen to know that you probably have one. But you're, and most of your body is like that.

So the self as the ego, the lived sense of self, is not the same thing as just being your body, or having a history, or being a person in the world, or being the autobiographical self. You have this, the memories you may or may not have about your past, right? So there are, there are experiences that you have had that you know you've had just by dent of,

I mean, just logically you must have had them, but you may not remember anything about them, right? So it's not that they happen to somebody else, but you can't summon any episodic memory about it, but it's just, you know, like I'd say, you don't remember what you had for breakfast three weeks ago. You know that there must have been something, right? But you just can't recall, obviously most of your life you can't recall, but still that

was you in this sort of autobiographical self. But again, most of the cells in your body have changed over a time course of weeks or years depending on the organ system we're talking about. And you have a microbiome, which is a bunch of other cells being your gut. Exactly, so yeah, most of the cells in your body aren't even human, and yet this whole constellation of parts seems to be you.

And so it's not illusory to talk about you, the person, in that sense, because you're still, you know, we can locate you in space, and the boundary between you, your skin and the rest of the world is, it's not totally arbitrary to talk about you as being separate from the world, even though, again, it is, you're perme separate from the world. Even though, again, it is you're permeable to the world. I mean, your microbiome is the next thing you eat is populating you with bacteria from the world and now they're you, right? So it is, to some degree, a convention even to differentiate you as a physical system from the world. I mean, you are permeable to the world and giving yourself back to the world

and consuming the world. And it's, I mean, you're part of this river of chemistry and biology that doesn't have clear boundaries. But if we ignore all that, talking about a person makes sense, talking about this self that is interior to the person, which is the self people really feel they have, that doesn't survive analysis. And when you look for that self, there's nothing to find. And that's the punchline of meditation. I mean, you can do is find it to be absent in a way that is conclusive. So you can look hard enough and long enough and

carefully enough and discover that the thing you thought was there isn't. And then that, then your experience of meditation changes, subtly, but significantly, because then you're no longer meditating from the point of view of the meditator who's paying attention in a calculated way to the contents of consciousness. There's no longer the sense that, okay, I'm up here, and I'm being mindful, okay, I'm up here and I'm being mindful and now I'm on the breath, now I'm hearing a sound. So all of

that, again, that subject object dichotomy, that's the thing that breaks down if you look carefully enough for the subject. I'm going to stop you here because you've gotten into what I have an agenda in my real not-so-secret agenda is to get at what you're talking about right now. It wasn't pastrami. It wasn't pastrami, although I will allow myself to have many agendas. This is a hobby horse of yours. That within the meditation world, the word meditation is,

as my friend Richie Davidson likes to say, like the word sports. There are lots of different kinds of meditation, but for you, the highest form of meditation is really to see through the illusion of the self. However, most of us, when we're tired to meditate, are especially at the beginning, it's, as you said, we're just watching the breath coming in and going out, and then we get lost, and we start again, and we get lost,

and we start again, and again, and again, and again, and many times you get lost, it's totally fine, just start again. So you were the first one to recommend to me that I go on a meditation retreat where I was taught this kind of meditation, but then I read your book waking up, and you're actually saying, ah, but the real, the real juice is in, is seeing that the self is an illusion. So that gets me confused. It makes me think that I'm doing it wrong. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it can take a while to notice this. I mean, again, it's, it's not, there's nothing wrong with doing dualistic subject object meditation, because it's the only place for most of us to start. I mean, it's where, you have to start somewhere. And dualistic object, subject object meditation, you mean me, what feels like me watching my breath, feeling my breath coming in and going out. Yeah.

So that's, there's dualists, there's two parts, that's what you mean. Yeah, I mean, so the sense of being, yeah, I think of this as kind of two stages of mindfulness. So initially, the clear distinction between mindfulness and its counterfeits is an ability to just notice what is in fact arising in consciousness in that moment, whether it's the sound or sensation or the breath, and to notice the difference between that and thinking about what's happening and viewing everything

through this screen of concepts. So like, you know, there's something that Joseph Goldstein teaches a lot when he's... My meditation teacher and dude that you introduced me to. Yeah. And somebody who's going to come up in a big way in this conversation because you recorded a bunch of podcasts with him that have confused the crap out of it. Right. So we're going to get to that.

Yes. So Joseph, Joseph, I think, is the best meditation teacher around. He's just fantastic and he's an old friend. So he'll talk about, for instance, if you, let's say you're being mindful of the, the sensation of your hands. So, you can, you can, you can, you can press your two hands together and you feel that sensation and the most people who don't really know how to meditate will say, okay, well, I can feel that, I'm, you know, I can feel my hands.

But if you, if you've done, the post-nailce for any length of time, you'll know that if you really pay attention, the idea of the concept of hands just goes away. I mean, it is just a concept. And if you pay closer attention, you'll see that you don't really feel hands. You feel this cloud of sensation that is just buzzing with heat and cold and vibration and pressure and there's constituents, kind of atoms of perception that are none of which are hands, right? And so you can just, so Joseph will say something like, well, see if you can let go of the shape of your hands and just pay attention to the sensations.

And people with a little bit of concentration can do that. But and so that's mindfulness, right? So that you and you can do that with pain in the body. You can do it with an emotion like anger, right? So you feel anger. You feel worried and you bring your attention to, you can ask the question, well, how do you know you feel angry? I mean, you must be feeling something.

So what does it feel like in your face? What does it feel like in your chest? And then that pattern of energy that is anger just begins to resolve itself into just pure energy in the body, right? And it just, it no longer, at least in that moment, it no longer has the implication it had a moment ago when you were just busy being angry. Right, now I get all this,

this is the way most of us practice mindfulness. Yes, but you're talking about an additional level. Exactly, yes. Yeah, so that's kind of the first order of mindfulness where the difference is, because I'm no longer lost in thought, I'm no longer bewildered by the conceptual mask of hands and anger, and I'm actually connecting with raw sensation,

right? And there's a liberation that comes with that because you can become very patient with physical pain under that, kind of attention, and you can break free of negative emotions like anger by just paying close attention to them and getting out of your thoughts. But most people do that for the longest time from a position of still feeling like they're the one doing it, right? So it's not synonymous, it's cutting through the concept of hands and connecting with just raw sensation for most people is not synonymous with the insight that there is no observer separate from the observed.

There's no Dan feeling the sensations in what we would conceptually call the hand. Right. So it's possible to feel like you're Dan doing that and still notice that there's the shape of the hands disappears or that anger just diffuses into a cloud of meaningless stimuli. So the next stage of mindfulness is one where you notice that there's actually no, again, this is not something other than what is taught in Vipassana, it's just that people don't necessarily get it on demand or anytime soon, there is no observer apart from just the raw observing. There is no seer apart from just seeing. And that collapse of subject object, I mean initially we start out feeling like there's a seer and the

thing seen and then the action of seeing. And all of that can collapse into just pure seeing, or pure feeling, or pure hearing. And that, in the Vipassana language, that insight that there's no one there doing it is the polyword Anata, which is selflessness, and no self. And technically speaking, from the point of view of Buddhist psychology, an insight into a Nata is there to be had. Because the self is not like the self is there and you

want to destroy it through the process of meditation, it's actually not there. So if you're paying close enough attention, it should seem like it's not there. Yeah, it's Santa Claus. Yeah, yeah. So it's like, it shouldn't be surprising that it's possible to pay attention closely enough to have it feel like there is no self doing the attendant. Okay, so how do we break out of what you call first order of mindfulness to this, I want to say deeper,

but you are going to have a quam with, you're going to have a problem with that because actually you point, your argument, I think is a very good argument, is that actually seeing selflessness does not require you to go deep, per se, it's actually right there to be seen on the surface of experience. How do we go to second order of mindfulness. How do we go to second order mindfulness?

How do we go to the more superior insight? Right. Well, it's a little tricky. There are useful pointers to it, and the way I did it was through what's called Zogchen practice, which is a Tibetan teaching. And that was so I had to go, personally, I had to go outside of the Vapasana and find another way of engaging meditation. Let me just interrupt you briefly just to point out that you have an amazing podcast, also called Waking Up, available wherever you get your podcasts. And you have a lengthy conversation with Joseph Goldstein.

The title of that podcast is the path and the goal or the goal and the path. you have a lengthy conversation with Joseph Goldstein. The title of that podcast is the path and the goal or the goal and the path? Yeah, that's one of them. Yeah, you have a couple, but the one where you really go at this, the path and the goal, and you gently and in a very friendly way, but harang him about the type of meditation he teaches of a Pasena and it's demerits as it pertains

to this insight that you believe is so important, which is the illusion of the self. So carry on what you're saying. But I do recommend that everybody go listen to that because it's completely fascinating. And it is what is motivating a lot of the questions I am going to proceed to ask you. Yeah. So Joseph and I have been fighting about this for years in a good, nature way. He tells the story about being stuck on a plane trip to Australia with you, you corner

him and you take it out. So I was, I was Joseph's student. I mean, Joseph was one of my first compositor teachers and I did many retreats with him and then did retreats where we were both sitting with other great composinate teachers. Like, the side I opened it to several times for... Famous Burmese teacher. Yeah, so for a couple months at a time. And so I was, I was Joseph's student

and then Joseph's co-student with other composinate teachers. And then, under some degree, and then Joseph's co-student with other Vapassana teachers. And then, under some degree, my inspiration, but a few other people involved. I got Joseph and Sharon and other Vapassana teachers to go sit with. Sharon Salzburg. Yeah.

Great teachers from other traditions. So it was a great Soakchen teachers in the Tibetan tradition. We went and saw this Hindu guru, Pungiji, who was roiling the Vapasana scene for a while with his emphasis on the really that there was no reason to meditate. This is the teaching of Advaita Vedanta, where it's basically, it's the steepest possible path. It's just either you can recognize there's no self or not, but if you can't, there's nothing to do about it.

There's nothing you just have to sit here in the room with me and listen to what I'm saying until you get the point. And if you get the point, there's no reason to meditate. If you don't get the point and if you get the point there's no reason to meditate if you don't get the point Meditations hopeless you're not gonna polish a brick into a mirror, you know, so just recognize that you're already free That's but you know, that's a the shorthand version of this Advaita non-dual

teaching in what is nominally Hinduism, but it's it doesn't really entail any of the and what is nominally Hinduism, but it doesn't really entail any of the panoply of gods and goddesses you associate with Hinduism. So we went and saw Pungiji, and then we also went to see Tukururgan Rippocche, who is a very famous Zoggen is the teaching within Tibetan Buddhism that is most like a fusion of Advaita Vedanta and Zen, I mean, for lack of a better reference. It's totally, it doesn't have any of the garishness of that you associate with Tibetan Buddhism, which is kind of the Buddhist version of Hinduism in terms of how, how, how, Baroque-ly, religious, it seems, at least if you go through the front door, but if you go through the back door, as we did,

you meet these really just pure teachings about non-dual awareness, which, I mean, yes, I mean, there's more to betten Buddhism that people kind of urge upon you in that context, but really that the core teaching is just pure selfless awareness. The technique is really there's a very little technique apart from recognizing that looking for the looker, looking for the one who thinks he's trying to meditate and recognizing that there is no center there.

There's no one who's paying attention, there's just attention. But did you do right there? Didn't you just kind of answer the question that set us down this route, which is how does one go for first order, mindfulness, the second order, mindfulness? If one is just to go back to what you said,

if you're holding your hands together, and you're feeling the cloud of sensations, you might notice that it feels like you feeling them, then all one has to do is look for the feeling of you that is feeling it. And you can see, fleetingly, there's no but nothing to find. Is it more complicated than that?

Not necessarily. It's, it's a, but that can be confusing. People can waste a lot of time or be genuinely uncertain whether they have glimpsed this thing that they should be paying attention to. And, I mean, so the thing that Joseph and I fight about, this is the thing that I have always felt is misleading about the path of a posse-na.

So if you're paying attention to, let's come back to the hand. So you start out feeling like, well, I'm just distracted all the time. I don't know how to meditate. I'm not good at this. And now I'm paying attention strategically to sensation.

You start with the breath and other things, but let's say you're now your pen attention to the sensation of your hands. And your Vapassana teacher says, well now just get closer and closer, really just dive into the sensations there. And you'll notice that the shape of the hands disappear and you'll get into all of this

subtlety, which is in fact, truer. So it's just pressure, just tingling. You can, your attention can become kind of laser-like and you can just, you really can discover a wilderness of change in anything you pay attention to. And that can become incredibly pleasant and that becomes altogether different than being lost in thought. And in fact, if you do that, if you get concentrated enough, for periods of time where thoughts don't even rise.

So you're just pure witnessing of raw sensation. And that begins to feel like, well, now meditation is really working. This is not making progress. But it carries with it the implication that the truth is somehow deeper in experience. So you have to start from where you are as the one who's paying attention and get deeper into the things you're noticing, kind of plunging deeper into sensations or moods or images

in your mind or whatever you're paying attention to. And that's actually a false view. Certainly from the, if the goal is to notice that there's no self, subtlety and the, grabbing a hold of the microscope and putting on the strongest powered lens and looking at more and more subtlety in your experience. That doesn't get you any closer to this truth of no self. In fact, no self can be realized whatever you're noticing, no matter how vaguely you're noticing it without any, you know, whether you feel your hands or not, right?

and It is in the direction of looking for the one who's looking. So it's like, it's what I described before. Exactly what you described before, but the thing that people don't realize is that they expect, again, there's a kind of a gradualism that gets assumed by the usual course of meditation where you can sort of great you can sort of gradually get closer to this thing You can build up momentum you can go deeper and then people try to do that it turn

They try to turn that same tool onto the subject and again They're trying to go deeper. They're trying to plunge into something they know not what I mean it's not clear What there is to plunge into there when you start looking for the looker or looking at the mind. But the sense is, well, there's it in the first moment or you've already overshot the mark. Right? So it's like, it is not gradual. It's like, it is instantaneous.

And so it's sort of the moment you turn, there can be this open space of neither subject nor object. So you look for the look for the looker, you see that there's nothing to see. It's like ironically the best metaphor for this that comes outside of any tradition. But it's from this man who since died, Doug was Harding. I think he was initially a student of Zan, but he was an architect who was exploring various different methods of meditation and came upon his own metaphor here, which is really a little more than a metaphor, but he wrote a book called Unhaving No Head. And he came to this experience where he was in the Himalayas and he was looking at,

I think it was at Nagar Code, which is near Kathmandu, but it's a place where it gives you a huge view of the mountains. And he was looking at Everest and all the mountains, and noticed for a moment that he didn't see his head. Right? His head wasn't part of the scene. Right? It was just the scene. And where his head was, where he knew his head to be, there was just the world. Right?

And given how predicated or a sense of self is on the sense that we're inside our heads. This feeling of headlessness is a pretty good marker for this loss of a sense of there being a center to consciousness. I mean, it's possible it's not totally the same thing. It can be kind of, it's not clear to me that everyone who follows Harding's path takes it quite as far as someone who's practicing zogchen within their framework. But I think it... Let me just signpost that book for a second.

On having no head. On having no head, yeah. Which by the way, you recommended to me, and then Joseph also recommended to me. I've read it many, many times. It's slim volume. And basically all he asked you to do is look out at the world in a given moment, try to find your head. Right. Can't find it. And then it becomes, and at first this feels very stupid.

You know, to me at least it felt like either dumb or then totally obvious, then after a while I found trying it and not expecting to go deeper, but just seeing what happens in those first instances of looking for the looker. Right. I'm gonna borrow some phraseology from you. You start to notice that's all that's left is the world. Right. It's like boom, all that's happening here

is not me peering out at the world through my eye sockets, but actually this yawning chasm of knowing, just like raw knowing of whatever's there. And that is actually readily available anytime you look for it, and really very, very interesting, and it can untie the knot of suffering that comes anytime you're angry or frustrated or whatever. It's all super useful, and yet, and yet, I feel like people don't get it often.

And Max, who's in the next room over here, my friend who came because he's a fan of yours, not because he's a fan of mine, to watch this interview, I love you, Max. You know, he was saying to me recently, like I love Sam's book waking up, but I tried to headless this, headless this thing and I just can't get it.

And I fear as I sort of genuinely move into the world of talking about what's beyond first order mindfulness, that people just aren't going to get it. And I don't know if you have any thoughts about how to make this clearer to people or how it can become clearer to people through practice. Yeah, you know, it's a little mysterious because it's not, I've been with, I've studied with many Zogchian teachers and there's some who, in my mind, clearly point out this centerlessness or this headlessness in a way that I really, I couldn't imagine someone not getting it if they stayed long enough in that dialogue.

But you're saying we need to go find a teacher because I can learn a mindfulness in a book. Yeah, I mean, that's, it, well, to take the zochan, I mean, there's something, something a little doctrinaire about this, but from the zochan teaching side, you absolutely need to find a qualified zochan master to point this out to you right now. To my, you know, I feel in my gut

that there's a little bit of religious mumbo jumbo sneaking into that edict, right? It's because this is just the nature of consciousness. It shouldn't, you shouldn't need a, you know, a someone who holds the trademark of Zochin to deliver the truth to you. But the truth is, I needed, apparently I needed a particular zokshin teacher to point this out to me. I had read all the books. I had considered the

nature of subject-object awareness. I had done months and months of aphasina practice on retreat. I had studied with Pungiji, this non-dool, Advaita Guru, who was teaching the same thing, but there was a precision to what the way in which Tukurigan was teaching it, where I got it in a way where it was no longer... I mean, what had been true before is I had had experiences in meditation and with people like Pungiji where I had been this loss of self for a moment at a time, but it just came and went. It was not something that I could just do on my own. It was just I just had to hope it would happen to me.

In the next time I meditated by virtue of concentration, by virtue of who knows what, but it wasn't mindfulness or just paying attention, it wasn't synonymous with this insight that there's no self. Now, the way I would define zokchen in Vapasana terms I would say that zokchan is just the practice of non dual mindfulness It's where it's where mindfulness becomes synonymous with the practice of no self and so then it really doesn't matter what you pay attention to you can be looking at the sky you can be feeling your breath you can be walking down the sidewalk and Then you're just you're just wherever you

And then you're just wherever you, the alternation is not between being lost and thought and then being very focused on the object of meditation, it's the alteration between being lost and thought and there being no self. So how do you meditate? It's just, I notice I'm lost and thought. You know, everyone who's meditating, the antithesis of their meditation, whatever their practice is, whether it's a concentration practice, whether they're, you know, chanting to Krishna, whether they're doing TM or doing Fapasana or doing Zogchen, it's what you do the moment you're lost in thought, right? You're lost in thought. You're lost in thought you're thinking about You know

Watching West what whether you set the DV Arctic to record Westworld tonight or whatever it is But so you're you're thinking about something that has nothing to do with with your practice right and you don't know You're thinking right and then then then then there's that moment where you realize a wait a minute. I'm thinking about Television Now what do you go, well then now what happens to your attention, right? If you're an ordinary mindfulness yogi, you will see the thought itself as language and image and images just sort of disappear in some strange way, right? So you'll be like, who knows, where does the thought go when it's no longer there? It's something mysterious there.

But you'll see it just kind of fade away. And then you can pay attention to your, you can go back to the breath or back to sensations in the body or go back to the mantra that you were chanting if you're repeating silently if if you're doing TM, but there can still be the sense that there's someone in the center of consciousness, someone riding the horse.

And with Zogchen, you have looked for the rider, mindfulness has been a matter of looking for the rider on the horse and not finding him. And so then there's just, so when the thought disappears, what you're left with is just consciousness and its contents without the sense that there's a center to it, there's a centerless, this to it.

And- I don't understand that. Well, so it's, again, the feeling of a center is the feeling that consciousness is kind of emanating from a locus in the head. I mean, there's a few ways to flip this around. So, for instance, I mean, most people, I mean, if you close your eyes and, and just try to pay attention to whatever it is, the sound of my voice or your breath or just feel your body sitting there. You'll probably feel that you're, again,

you'll feel that you're in your head in a way that you're not in your knee, right? So there's a, the center of your head is closer to where you are as a subject. And you might feel that your consciousness is in your head, right? But what you're calling a head, right, the sensation of having a head, the pressure, the temperature, any signature that you can notice that is telling you you have a head,

all of that's in consciousness, right? It's not, consciousness is not in not in now speaking. I'm not speaking as a matter of physics. I'm speaking as a matter of just experience. Anything you can experience, including your head is in consciousness. So there's just there's just consciousness and its contents. Right? Include, which includes your head, which includes the world, which includes. And so there's which includes and so there's not too, like the place you see with your eyes open is the same place you are with your eyes closed. It's the same place you're thinking, right? So like if you're looking with your eyes open and you think, well, that's the world. And my thoughts are not out in the world. My thoughts are in my head, right? But no, your thoughts are in this same place you see

with your eyes open. And you could actually superimpose a thought into your visual space. So you could just, you know, in the table in front of us, I could visualize something, you know, whatever, pastrami sandwich. I can visualize that now. Now, some people are better at visualizing things

than others. So, you know, some people can only dimly sort of flash an image that is somewhat pastrami-like, but some people can really visualize very clearly, but whatever your ability is there, there's likely a difference between visualizing a sandwich and visualizing a crocodile, right? So there's just, when I say it,

when I said, before I said crocodile, there was nothing there. If I said crocodile, you probably got some image of something. Now, that image was, if your eyes were open, was superimposed on whatever you were seeing. It's the same space as your visual world, and neurologically speaking, it's all happening in the same part of the brain. I mean, when you visualize something, your occipital lobe is doing that work in

the same way that it's doing the work when you are seeing something with your eyes open. It's just not as vivid., your waking life has very much the character of a dream, both neurologically and phenomenally, because it's the same brain process as delivering this movie. You can experience it. Most of us experience that there's this dichotomy, there's the stuff that's happening in the head, and then there's all the stuff that's out in the world. But the experience really is of just consciousness and its contents all the time. And so the sense of a center is, there's a logical way to see how there can't be a self too. So, if there's, this sense of self has to feel like something.

Otherwise people wouldn't think they had it, right? And you would never be able to say you felt like you lost it. I mean, there's got to be a difference between feeling able to say you felt like you lost it. There's got to be a difference between feeling like a self and feeling like you have no self. So there's some perceptible, however inscrutable it is, there's something different that can be noticed. Well, if there is some signature of the self, well, then that must be appearing in consciousness in some way.

Right? This got to be something showing up. Well, if it, if something is showing up, it is an object in consciousness. It is in consciousness. And then for consciousness is prior to it. I mean, just in the same way, consciousness is prior to the sight of this cup, I'm holding in my hand, or my seeing you across the table. I mean, there's consciousness and its contents. And so if so conscious has must transcend this thing that you're taking yourself to be, right? So the self is this feeling in the chest or this feeling on your face or, you know,

this, like just think of what happens when self consciousness gets magnified. So there's moments we're going through life where we don't feel especially self conscious. We may not feel selfless, but we don't we're not you wouldn't describe yourself as being self conscious, but then there those moments where all of a sudden you notice someone's looking at you or you've just done something embarrassing or whatever it is and all of a sudden you notice someone's looking at you or you've just done something embarrassing or whatever it is and all of a sudden there's this kind of recoil into your personhood where you just feel like something is kind of a cramp. It's like it all gets intensified. Whatever you are taking yourself to be, that's like whatever that muscle is,

that's what it feels like when it really contracts, right? Really, you're flexing yourself when you become self-conscious. You know, someone points at your face, or it's like, oh, you got something on your, you got something on your corner, your mouth, they're down. Right, so whatever it is, it makes you like, like, oh, no, it's me, I'm the problem, right? So like that sense of, okay, everyone's looking at my face, it's that thing.

Again, that's all appearing in consciousness. The energy of that is an object in consciousness. Consciousness is the prior condition of that, right? So it consciousness is just the empty space. And you are, you, so in the same way that you can recognize that you are not identical to your breath, because you're aware of your breath, and you're not identical to your breath because you're aware of your breath and you're not identical to me because you're aware of me. You're not identical to my voice because you're just aware of it. It's not your prior condition of any of this appearing.

And that is true of this thing. It's certainly true of self-consciousness, right? The energy of that, and it's true of the central fact of just feeling like there's a center. And I don't know the only way to discover that is to look for the center, and whether you want to look for your head or you look for the thinker of the thought or you look for in the moment of I really have a persistent wife. Well there's your phone. So I'm glad you brought up your wife because we are at an interesting juncture here because both of our wives are going to be sitting down at a restaurant in 15 minutes, a restaurant where I'm pretty sure they will not be serving pastrami and I am like

an eighth of the way through the questions I had listed for you. So I'm long-winded. No, you're interesting. So what I think we should do is close with the promise that you will come back or I will come to you at some point, because the last thing we want to do is leave our wives a dinner. No, well, they would plot against us, and also it would maybe make our lives unpleasant to have them angry at us. But before we go, just tell people where they can find out more about you and hear more from you because I've mentioned waking up the book and the podcast, but are there other places people should

go? No, well, just my website, samherris.org, not.com. That'll get you the singer. And yes, podcasting is most of what I'm putting out there now, although I have a blog and I am developing a meditation app that will eventually come out. I've just underestimated how difficult it is to build an app. Let me tell you, I feel you know about that.

Yes, I do, it's very hard to build an app. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you very much. Pleasure. Really appreciate it. Yeah, super fun. To be continued.

Let's not anger our wives. Okay. Okay, there's another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. If you liked it, please make sure to subscribe, rate us, and if you want to suggest topics we should cover or guess we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. I also want to thank Hardly, the people who produced this podcast and really do pretty much all the work. Lauren, Efron, Josh Kohan, Sarah Amos, Andrew Calb, Steve Jones, and the head of ABC News Digital Dance Silver.

I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.

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