Sam Harris On Consciousness, Meditation, Misinformation, AI, & What Ails The Modern World

29:53It is just a confession of a worldview. And if you doubt that, you're just uninformed about what jihadism is and how it has leveraged the sincere religious beliefs and spiritual aspirations of many, many people. Now, how many people we're talking about is anyone's guess. It's certainly not a majority of Muslims worldwide, but it's not an accident that this is very hard to talk about in a Muslim context because it is not a distortion of Islam, right? It's not like you can read the Quran and the Hadith and the biography of Muhammad and say, oh, it's totally obvious where Hamas is going wrong or where the Islamic State is going wrong because it's not obvious, right?

30:42And that's a problem. It's a problem for the entire world. It's a problem for the Muslim world. Most of the victims of jihadist atrocities are Muslim, right? So the Muslim world has to sort this out. They need to win a war of ideas with themselves. They need to win a civil war on, you know, dozens of fronts. There's something like 55 majority Muslim countries. There's a score of countries that are living with this kind of unendurable jihadist, you know, terrorism. that we don't even think about because it's just, it's not affecting us. It's just Muslim on Muslim violence. You know, Boko Haram uses children as suicide bombers in Nigeria, right?

31:22I mean, it's like no one hears about it, but it's the same logic. It's got nothing to do with Israel. It's got nothing to do with Jews. It's the same death cult behavior. If you interview any of these guys, they expect to get to paradise, right? It's a belief system. And we have to figure out how to inspire a proper reformation and renaissance in the Muslim world such that the belief system becomes more and more anathematized. And, you know, Christianity would seem pretty crazy too if we were dealing with the Christians of the 14th century, right? But we're not, you know, because Christianity has been, you know, apart from a few pockets, beaten into submission by enduring a slow motion collision with modernity for hundreds of years, right?

32:10It's just been steadily bracketed by scientific insight and democratic politics and secularism and more and more Christians more of the time realizing they just don't want to live that way. They don't want witches being burned for their witchcraft because they think probably witches don't exist and they don't want anyone being burned for thought crimes. So we're not in the 14th century anymore. Right, the criticism that gets levied in your direction on that perspective is that there are, how many Muslims are there? A billion? About two billion. Two billion Muslims worldwide. And the jihadists and the bad actors and the violent cohort is a tiny radicalized sliver of this gigantic, you know, religious movement that is global.

33:04Except, I mean, there's many caveats I would add to that darken the picture. But there's this larger subset of what I would call Islamists around this radical core of jihadists, people who still want Islam to determine politics and to determine the character of society. But they're not willing to blow themselves up on a bus to advance that cause. They want to bring this about through democratic processes or some nonviolent means in many cases, most cases. But they still have a vision of life where they want to live under Sharia law. They would agree that blasphemy and apostasy are killing offenses, certainly if they become too pronounced.

33:48These are the people who think that Salman Rushdie should have been killed for his novel and the Danish cartoonists. right? They should have been killed for drawing those cartoons, right? How large is the population of people that would raise their hands in favor of Sharia law? Yeah, it's a lot bigger than you would want. It depends on which polls you trust and where those polls are run. But in the UK, the polling on this is, it's never a tiny segment. I mean, it's like, you know, 25 % say they want to live under Sharia law. Draw a stark line between, between the principles of an open democratic pluralistic society and something quite a bit more theocratic, you get much higher percentages.

34:35So if you ask, and these are old polls because now we're talking about the Danish cartoon controversy, so we're back in, I guess, 2006. The Charlie Hebdo thing. Yeah, but if you ask, should the cartoonists have been punished for drawing those cartoons and punished, you know, I don't know that punished was spelled out in the poll, but punished was probably, you know, thrown in prison, right, at a minimum. You know, then you get like, you know, 60, 70 % of Muslims in the UK saying, yes, they should be punished, right? So there are a lot of opinions need to change to be able to be sanguine about the attitudes of these 2 billion people, right?

35:16It's just not, it's not an accident. You got 55 Muslim majority countries. None of them are free places to live, right? Comparatively free places to live. I mean, you know, there's places like the UAE where you can, you know, you and I could go there and have a very free experience. But still, even there, you can be thrown in jail for effectively thought crimes. I think there are many Western societies that have a problem with a kind of an ambient level of Islamist public opinion. you know, America is not, we're not where Western Europe is. Western Europe really has a problem. London really has a problem.

35:56I know people who say the kinds of things I'm saying now in public and, you know, the, the metropolitan police in London tell them not to go to London, right? Because they can't keep them safe, right? When was the last time you went to London? It hasn't been that long, but, you know, I'm less famous in London than the people I'm thinking about, you know, so.

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39:50With respect to this, you know, fire hose of moral confusion and this lack of institutional trust and conspiracy mindset that seems to proliferate, are you sanguine about the power of conversation to you know heal what ails us like as somebody who's been a podcaster for over a decade when did you start probably around the same time i did i think yeah i don't when i i started in a kind of piecemeal way i can't even tell you when i was formerly podcast probably about 10 years ago yeah a long time you know somebody who's offering your thoughts in monologue form, but also hosting guests and engaging with other public intellectuals around the ideas that we're grappling with.

40:42Do you have a sense that this is curative? Is this a fool's errand? Is this a drop in the ocean? I don't spend any time trying to figure out how optimistic or pessimistic I am. I mean, there are many things that worry me and I talk about them a lot. I mean, conversation is all we've got. I've repeated this many times on my own podcast and elsewhere, but I just think we, it's a choice between conversation and violence, right? And when conversation fails and things really matter, we resort to force, right? And again, like bring it back on an airplane at 30 ,000 feet. If the guy next to you won't stop doing the crazy thing that's making everyone worried, someone's gonna choke him out and duct tape him to the seat, right?

41:25for the rest of the flight. I mean, that's what happens. That's the world we're living in. But it should be simple enough to converge ultimately through conversation. I mean, it's just, it's, we're misled to believe that everyone at bottom wants the same thing because that's just not true. I mean, again, you know, jihadists don't want the same thing. It's just, and if you think that they do and that the extremity of their behavior is just a symptom of how badly they've been treated, you are guaranteed to be confused about what's happening in the Middle East or anywhere, jihadism is a problem. You literally have people dropping out of medical school in London to go join the Islamic State so that they can cut the heads off of Yazidis and crucify them and take sex slaves.

42:09It's just, it is not the same program that you and I are running or anyone we know is. But most people want more or less the same thing. Most of us, most of the time, can converge on shared values, right? We don't want to be radically out of touch with what's really going on in the world, right? We don't want our children to get sick and for us to be completely confused as to why, right? And we don't want there to be real remedies for that problem and for us to not be able to figure them out or to be wrong about what they are. We want to be healthy and happy and surrounded by healthy and happy creative people who are well-intentioned toward us with whom we can collaborate more or less effortlessly where we're trust, we wanna be in high trust societies, right?

43:01And we know a lot about how to build all that up and we know a lot about how to tear it down. There's a lot we don't know, but we know what an open-ended good faith explorative conversation is on, you know, a hundred fronts. And we know the variables that make it harder and harder to collaborate in that way. One of them is dogmatism. You know, I mean, dogmatism is just, it's a problem everywhere, except in religion, it's celebrated, right? I mean, literally dogma is a good word in explicitly a Catholic context. But we know that, you know, if you come to the table with very strong opinions, which you cannot actually defend, right?

43:46Because you got them in a dream or on mother's knee or you don't know how, but you didn't get reasoned into them and you claim you can't get reasoned out of them because you're actually closed to evidence and argument, right? This is what I'm not gonna talk about. And if you persist in talking to me about it, I'm gonna get angrier and angrier and the conversation is gonna end, right? Many people come to the table with a set of those opinions, right? And again, religion is the, in my view, the prime offender here because it's the only space in which we don't immediately recognize how pathological that is, right?

44:25It's like we've carved out this kind of walled garden of taboo where we've just agreed, okay, he's a Catholic, she's a Jew, he's a Muslim, don't challenge their most cherished beliefs, right? That's just, it's indecent to do so. I think that's dangerous bullshit. I think our core values, our expectations about what's going to happen in the future, even about what's going to happen after death, our prime motivations, these are things we have to be able to talk about and we have to be able to converge. And when we have differences of opinion, they can't be in the center of the map where it's crucial to navigate, right?

45:07Like it's just someone has to win in the center. because we have to figure out what to do next. I mean, I view morality as a navigation problem and we're always faced with this forced choice of what to do next, right? We're always gonna do something. Even when we decide, okay, let's just do nothing, but just take a wait and see attitude. That itself is a decision, you know? So you're always doing something individually and collectively. And we have, you know, vast numbers of people who have very strange ideas about how to navigate. And one of the strangest is we have these dogmas that have come down on high that we've been forbidden to challenge for thousands of years.

45:53And they make less and less sense when juxtaposed with all that we've come to know about the world in these millennia. And yet we are going to use them to backstop every decision of real consequence. You know, should we legalize gay marriage? Well, you're gonna have something like 40 % of the population say, absolutely not. And here's why, and here's why is a 2000 year old book, right? That's becoming less and less serviceable. I mean, it hasn't been serviceable for centuries, but now in the presence of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, I mean, what does the Bible have to tell us about what to do about AI, right?

46:37It's just nothing, absolutely nothing. What we need are smart, well-intentioned, well-educated people who are willing to draw from all the best ideas, whatever their provenance. And if, you know, some of them come from the Bible, great. But to be hostage to a, you know, an Iron Age conversation, which is what any religious dogmatist is. I mean, they're basically saying, there's a conversation that was had here in the seventh century or in the first century AD or in 600 BC, where the wisest things that were ever said were said then, they can suffer no editing or bowlerization. They're just, they're so good, I'm gonna say that they were dictated by the creator of the universe.

47:23Right. And that takes precedence over any good idea with the brightest minds and the latest breakthroughs in science and understanding that we have today. And there's nothing, you know, CRISPR, AI, stem cell research, there's nothing that can come over the transom, stuff that could not possibly have been foreseen not only 2 ,000 years ago, it couldn't have been foreseen 150 years ago. Nothing is going to supersede this source code that we're attached to. And it's something strange. I mean, this is a point I made long ago in my first book, The End of Faith, And we've gotten so used to the idea that the creator of the universe wrote or dictated books, right?

48:11That somehow doesn't seem strange to people. But it would immediately seem strange if someone thought that there were – that they had a CD-ROM that had been produced by the creator of the universe or a film. Just imagine a film that is now going to be totally unchallengeable around which a cult of people is going to organize because they think the film is the product of omniscient intelligence. It's just these are human artifacts. We know they are. And so what we need is a, again, and I'm not saying they're all useless. I mean, there are things in the Bible like the golden rule that contains a tremendous amount of wisdom.

48:53And we would ignore that wisdom at our peril, right? I mean, I think the golden rule is almost always a great heuristic. You know, it's kind of the moral core of most moments, you know, certainly in society. And it has exceptions, but it's not, it's deeply wise. It's not unique to the Bible, but it's certainly there, right? So I just think we don't have the luxury anymore of being provincial. We have access to the totality of human knowledge now and non-human knowledge as it's soon to be produced. And so the idea that people who had literally could never have foreseen anything that you currently know that constitutes your most basic education on any topic, right?

49:50I mean, we're talking about people who didn't know about electricity. They didn't know about, you know, information technology, computation. You know, I mean, just this, there's nothing that fills your mind that would constitute even the rudiments of a seventh grade education at this point that they were aware of, right? Or that they could have foreseen. And yet most people in most places, most of the time think that's the most important literature on earth for moral guidance, right? It's literature that doesn't even get slavery right. It's incredible. These are books that refute themselves when you see that they literally, I mean, slavery on balance is supported in both the Bible and the Quran, right?

50:35It's not that you can't cherry pick parts of the Bible and find a reason to no longer keep slaves, but you barely can do that. And if you wanna keep slaves, you find endless justification. and not endless, but straightforward justification. And that's the simplest moral problem we have ever faced. It still exists to some degree and it's horrific. You know, the Houthis who are being celebrated on college campuses, you know, from coast to coast now, they avidly keep and sell slaves. But you find one who looks like Timothee Chalamet and they're celebrated at Harvard and Columbia. to your point that conversation is all we have behind that is another thing that you repeat often which is that truly all we have is our mind so i want to shift gears a little bit and kind of enter this world which i think is the world you enjoy exploring more than these other political hot button issues.

51:41Well, it's also the world from which or the view from which all of this seems so unnecessary. Like everything we've just talked about is such a massive opportunity cost, right? I mean, the fact that we even are tempted to talk about it is an opportunity cost, but the fact that so much of our lives have to be spent cognizant of all of the dangers and dysfunction born of everything we've been just indicating in the conversation thus far. It just, none of it has to happen this way. It's all just a symptom of confusion. A function of the mind and consciousness. And so the conversations that matter require an up-leveling of our mind and an elevated sense of consciousness, which I think is at the core of your work and central to not just the podcast, but the waking up app itself.

52:44So I wanna explore that a little bit, but I wanna go really to the beginning. You and I were in the same freshman class at Stanford. You knew that, right? Yeah, yeah. And I don't think we ever met. Yeah, I think we're trying to figure this out and we couldn't figure out whether - Yeah, we have a whole bunch of friends in common, friends that we both have stayed in touch with to this day, but for some reason, I don't think we ever crossed paths. And then after your freshman year, that's when you decided to stop out and go to India. Is that correct? Yeah, well, it became that. I initially stopped out because I thought I was gonna write a novel and I was gonna write the great American novel.

53:24It just didn't matter if you were in school or had finished school, if you're gonna be a novelist. That was the original idea. Yeah. You were gonna literally write a book. I had both things going on at the same time because I had gotten interested in meditation and esoteric topics like that too, but I was also writing. And so I just, I thought I had a kind of career path in mind that was just me being a novelist. And then I was also gonna explore these topics of meditation and Eastern philosophy and et cetera. So what was the introduction to meditation? Like that happened prior to college? No, it happened during my sophomore year through books.

54:08It was the summer after my sophomore year that I sat my first meditation retreat. So you were at Sanford for two years before you. I didn't re-enroll in the fall, but it was during my sophomore year. It was like spring, winter, spring of my sophomore year that I had had an MDMA experience that was really just completely changed my view of the world. I mean, that was the main domino that fell. And then I was just reading a lot of, you know, kind of relevant material around meditation and Eastern philosophy. And then sat a meditation retreat in the summer. I guess I would have been 87. And then just got really into, you know, sitting silent meditation retreats.

54:54And I went to India and studied with various teachers. And I never spent that long in India. I mean, I never spent more than a couple of months. I never lived there, but I made, I think, seven trips to Nepal and maybe six trips to India in that period of a handful of years. And how did you decide where you were going to go or who you were going to study with or meditate with? Did you just locate various ashrams and show up? Well, it was kind of an accident. And then it was the first book I read after I had this experience with MDMA was Ram Dass's book, The Only Dance There Is. That was his kind of a short book, which I think was a transcript of some talks he gave.

55:43And Ram Dass was this figure who I didn't know anything about at the time. He was a former Harvard professor who with Timothy Leary, his name had been Richard Alpert when he was at Harvard. They both got fired for having fully democratized the research on LSD and psilocybin by giving it out to undergraduates. Ironically, Andrew Weil was the student crimson writer who got them fired. I had him here. He told that whole story. Yeah, yeah. So he and I have spoken about it, but I forgot where he landed on this. Maybe does he feel guilty about having done that or does he feel like that was the right thing to do?

56:16I don't remember what. I don't recall, but he was on the whole cannabis thing before anybody writing about that. Yeah, he was, was he editor of the Crimson? I don't know if he was editor, but the article he wrote came out in the Crimson and it got them fired. Summary dismissal of those figures. But he sort of catalyzed the Ram Dass that we know today as a result of that. Technically, I don't think Ram Dass or Richard Albert, I think he was given a choice. He could have saved himself, or at least to hear him tell it, he could have saved himself. But Timothy Leary was definitely getting fired. But Ram Dass just basically just went down with the ship because he just agreed that that was the right thing to do.

57:04And then he went to India and he met his guru and he became, you know, he changed his name to Ram Dass and he became a teacher of people. And, you know, some years later and had a very colorful career as a spiritual figure. He wrote this book, Be Here Now, which was, you know, a huge bestseller back in, I think, where he came out in 1970, 71, maybe. And so I guess he'd been teaching very actively for maybe close to 15 years when I met him in 87. Did you go to Massachusetts where he has that farm? No, that was Millbrook. That was before my time. But he was like teaching at various retreat centers.

57:45And so this one was up at Brighton Bush in Oregon where I went since I think burned down in one of these recent fires we've had on the West Coast. at least partially burned down. And he was teaching at that point just in a very eclectic range of practices. He had this kind of Hindu background with lots of guru yoga and devotional chanting. And so there was like kirtan of a sort that people recognized from singers like Jai Uttal and who was, or Bhagwan Das. I mean, those are also people. Christian Das. Christian Das. They were all in the same scene with the same teacher. Maharaji in India. But then he was also a student of Buddhist meditation, Vipassana meditation, which has given us this mindfulness revolution, which is very different than kind of the Hindu side of things because there's really nothing you need to believe or take on as religious in any sense.

58:48I mean, there's nothing to worship. There's nothing to, There's no artwork, associated artwork. You don't even have to be interested in the Buddha as a figure. You know, it's just mindfulness is just paying attention closely to your experience, right? And you start by paying attention to the breath. But even that, you know, in most systems, very soon it gets expanded to, you're just paying attention to everything you can notice as you can notice it. You know, just the sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and emotions are arising continuously. And you're just noticing what you notice systematically.

59:27And every time you get lost in thought, which is to say every time you're distracted by thought, you're thinking without knowing you're thinking, you just come back to noticing the breath, sounds, sensations. There's really nothing to believe. it's just the only thing you have to believe is that it makes sense that if you want to know more about what it's like to be you it makes sense to pay attention you know it's like why not pay more attention to your experience if you really want to see what you are as a mind body system from the first person side so that was the the other practice the main practice he was teaching on this retreat so I left that first retreat with a lot of, you know, ideas in my head about just, you know, how I wanted to kind of recapitulate the 60s for myself.

1:00:14and part of that was going to India and studying with various teachers, you know, Hindu and not, and just, you know, seeing what happens there. Part of that was continuing to experiment with psychedelics. I actually, on that first retreat, I actually took acid for the first time. It turns out my roommate on that retreat had acid. Who would have thought? And I had a, you know, lucky for me, I mean, because I now know it can go very differently. I've had, you know, horrific experiences on acid too. but that first trip was about as good an acid trip as, you know, I could imagine having. It was just a pure bath in the beatific vision.

1:00:52I mean, it was just, you know, I could not imagine, you know, if you told me that bad trips were possible after that acid trip, as I had heard, you know, or had read in the literature, I just had no idea, you know, what that could possibly mean. I mean, what I had experienced there for 12 hours was just as close to psychological freedom as I could imagine. And it was just the beautification of everything, right? It was just complete merging with nature, again, in a way that was totally affirming and magnifying of every pro-social emotion you want to dial up. I mean, if you could just reach into your own mind and get a hold of the dials that you want to turn to 11 and the others that you wanted to turn to zero, you know, it was just perfectly doing that, you know, gratitude and love and awe went to 11 and fear and neurotic, you know, self attachment and, you know, egocentricity and envy and all of that got turned to zero.

1:01:54And if you had told me, okay, well, this is what it was like to be the Buddha or this is what it was like to be Jesus. Well, then I would have, you know, had no doubt that that's pretty close to the center of the bullseye. I've since become a more you know, weathered and sophisticated, you know, connoisseur of these states and, you know, kind of student of the mind. And so I have slightly different opinions about what I had experienced there. But it launched me into a decade of kind of inner exploration, wherein I absolutely knew that there was a there there, right? Like the thing that I couldn't, Having come down from that first acid trip, I knew beyond any possibility of doubt that the states of mind I was tending to live in were profoundly limiting and just mediocre, right?

1:02:48And needlessly so. And I couldn't figure out how to get back to where I was, you know, in the center of the bullseye of that trip. But the trip proved that it was possible to have that kind of experience. of oneself and one's being in the world. It was a state of the brain that was in fact possible. And also there was something very instructive about the coming down part of it. I mean, have you done psychedelics? No, I've never done it. I've never done it. I mean, I don't know if I feel this way as much currently, given all the meditation practice I've done subsequently. But at the time, coming down was such a grotesque re-education into selfhood.

1:03:33I mean, it was just, I mean, it was pretty brutal, but it was just, it was deeply instructive. Like I could see my defenses and my neurosis, just this carapace of armoring. It just reassert itself. You could almost hear the ratchets and the gears and it was just, it's very poignant and painful. And so like your confinement to self kind of reasserts itself. And at that point, you know, I hadn't done enough meditation practice to know that this, you know, freedom from self was really a very different thing than I was then believed because it's actually coincident with even just the most ordinary states of consciousness.

1:04:17The false picture of spirituality that psychedelics can give you, apart from all the good things that they can give you when things go well, it's very easy to get the impression that freedom is elsewhere, right? You start out, and especially, you know, someone like me on a first trip like that, you start out with this sense of, okay, it's just me here. I'm trying to figure all this stuff out. I know I'm not nearly as happy as I want to be or should be. I find it very difficult to meditate. You know, I try to pay attention, but I'm immediately distracted. You know, my mind wanders and five minutes later, I wake up remembering I was trying to meditate.

1:04:53So I'm not like a prodigy at meditation. I know I'm not nearly as happy as I could be or as, you know, 20 % of the population already are for whatever reason. And I'm just stuck. And now I'm taking this chemical in the hopes of learning something about it was possible for my mind. And then you get shot into the stratosphere of positively valenced being, right? Where the present moment opens up and just discloses a depth and beauty that you really, I mean, you just couldn't imagine was ever there. And, you know, it's obvious you're stoned because you remember having taken a drug. But what is also obvious is that on some level, this is more true than what you've been living.

1:05:54Even when you come down and you're back into sort of normal waking, the cramp of normal waking consciousness, at least part of what you experienced on the trip, Again, there's other sort of pyrotechnics that are not fundamental to the inside. I mean, so like the changes in, you know, the visual field, like the colors, right? Just seeing beautiful colors everywhere. It's not like you think, okay, well, this sort of shocking iridescence of everything, that's more true. That's how my visual system should really operate. That's not what I'm talking about. But just the absolute freedom from self-concern and an ability to locate the profundity of mere being in the present.

1:06:42Like there's a well of being that you fall into. There's an associated clarity with that where it's just like you're not – I mean there are many different ways to be stoned where it's just obvious. it's okay, this is a drug experience. You're less functional than you normally are. It's good you're not driving a car. You're, you know, you can barely have a conversation. I mean, this has some components of it. You shouldn't, obviously, you shouldn't drive on acid or, and when you're really, you know, fully immersed in what I'm talking about, it could be impossible to have a conversation, right? Language is just the wrong tool for the job of trying to get a hold of what you're experiencing in that moment.

1:07:21But there are aspects to it that are clearly more true or more real than what we tend to experience. And the crucial insight is that virtually all of our suffering is a matter of our entanglement with thought and are not noticing that machinery and not seeing an alternative, right? So we're continually defining ourselves and losing our purchase on the present moment and desiring and fearing and regretting and manufacturing disappointments and animosities and defending an empty core of experience that doesn't need to be defended, right? Like there's a hallucinatory aspect to our thing or even very normal thinking that is quite analogous to being asleep and dreaming and just not noticing that you're dreaming.

1:08:18And most of us are having a bad dream most of the time. And so what happens on psychedelics for, you know, again, when things go well, you know, again, things can go very badly, is you can have a very clear experience of waking up from the dream of self. This sense that the deepest gratification of one's desire is to be seeking something, to be seeking happiness in the next moment, to be seeking to arrive in the future. It's the experience of a full arrival in the present, right? which very few people tend to have. I mean, even when things are going great and you're getting what you want, there's always this superficiality.

1:09:01Again, it comes down to our incapacity to really pay attention and really make contact with experience. You're just skating across the top of experience and grabbing more, more, more, whether it's a meal or you're getting a massage or whatever the pure pleasure experience is, there's a way in which you're not really dropped back into the present. You're leaning forward and you're just trying to extract this next moment of pleasure. And then also your mind is wandering to the next thing you're gonna do. It's just the mirage-like quality of even the best experiences is so amazing to notice because you never quite get there.

1:09:43It begins to fall apart. Your mouth is full of the thing that you've been waiting to eat and you still can't quite arrive. And in the next instant, you need a drink of water to offset the thing that is just too cloying and it's just too much and now you're uncomfortably stuffed and you're like, there's always a problem. The problem has never gone. Ruminating on the past, anticipating the future, lost in thought. I mean, it's very eloquently articulated, especially given that it's an experience that defies languages capacity to truly capture right

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1:12:09What's interesting to me about you is that, listen, there's lots of people that have had LSD experiences and great trips. Most of them just return to their lives. Some of them go and follow the Grateful Dead, but there was something inside of you, like a switch was flicked. And this inner seeker within you that wanted to better understand what this was all about, like the idea of exploring the nature of mind itself and this sense that we're capable of having a better conscious experience of life that led you to go on all of these kind of adventures in India and explorations with meditation. Yeah.

1:12:51The other piece of this is suffering. Right? It's like, what do you do with psychological suffering? The suffering you've already had, the suffering you're going to fall into today, the suffering that's guaranteed to be coming, right? The reality that not only are you going to die, but if you just live long enough, everyone you love is going to die. the unavoidability of all of that, as much as we try to keep it out of sight and out of mind, I saw this experience as the antidote to that. And I really wanted an antidote to that. I had some moments of real suffering as a teenager and as a, like my best friend died when we were 13, right so like as a 13 year old i i realized wow this this is not the game i thought i was playing right like the worst thing i can imagine can happen at a moment's notice and you know from an angle that you know i didn't even you know know was possible i mean if you told me if you'd asked me as a 13 year old do you think it's possible that you know one of your friends might die well yeah obviously i would rationally said yes but you know the fact that it was really on the menu and it's on the menu every moment of the day came crashing down.

1:14:10So I spent a lot of time thinking about death from that moment forward. Then my dad died when I was 17. Then I got to Stanford and I had a girlfriend break up with me after my freshman year. My freshman year girlfriend broke up with me. And that hit me really hard. I mean, I was like, I think the first months of sophomore year, I was, I mean, I was like clinically depressed. I mean, I just was, you know, all I was, I was just perseverating on having lost this relationship. I was so bummed about myself and, yeah, I was just in a black hole. And the moment I had this experience, this first experience on MDMA, I realized, I just, I saw the mechanism.

1:14:58I saw how it was entirely self-imposed, right? I was just thinking in this endless loop about how much I wished I had this relationship that I no longer have, how I'm not gonna have it tomorrow, how good it was, how I'm still not gonna have it. You know, it was like I was pinching myself and then wondering why I was uncomfortable. And until you can meditate, the profundity of psychedelics for most of us is that it shows you, again, I have to keep issuing this caveat because it can show you frank psychosis too. But in the best case, it shows you a different possibility. But in my view, it's not the method to actualize that possibility.

1:15:43You can see the grass is greener on that. Yeah, and you can't be in doubt about that. But you actually need a practice to change your habits of attention moment to moment. The really profound thing about meditation is that it shows you that there's something very misleading about the high of psychedelics in that the real freedom can be found in ordinary states of consciousness. You don't actually have to feel this incredible onrushing of energy that causes your body to disappear and for you to feel like you're one with the cosmos. You can actually just – you can look for yourself and fail to find it conclusively even when you're checking your email.

1:16:29Nothing suddenly becomes like a 400-microgram acid trip. It's just your – the clarity of there's no – there is no ego in the middle of experience. There's just experience, right? And we can talk more about how that's possible and how one might find that. But it's a very different discovery. It doesn't require any physiological change. It just requires you to break the spell of thought. Right. So I was suffering a lot before I'd had that first experience on MDMA. And so it was a revelation to me that I could suddenly see everything from this other perspective where just me getting endlessly wrapped around the axle of self was my problem, right, and past and future.

1:17:17You know, the truth is I was practicing something very diligently. I was practicing a meditation on loss and disappointment and loneliness. And like, I mean, I was fully immersed. I had deep concentration in those states of mind. And it was a thought-based reflection that was going on from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep for months. I mean, everyone has had, or most people have had some version of this experience. And there are instructive moments that you can find, even, you know, short of psychedelics and short of meditation. You can find these moments where, for instance, many people have had this experience.

1:17:57You know, someone has died or, you know, they've gotten a divorce or some, you know, some huge cataclysm in their life has happened. But, you know, there's often this moment where you wake up from sleep and there's this interval where, you know, if you've woken up and you haven't yet, the memory of how fucked up your life is has not come online yet. And you just have this open, you know, attention and awareness. And then you remember the problem, right? And the blows to you are meted out by thought, right? It requires the thought to feel that miserable in the next moment. But more accurately, it requires having no perspective on the thought.

1:18:37It requires being identified with the thought. And that's the spell that meditation breaks. I'm reminded of this story. I don't know if it's apocryphal or not. And I can't remember whether it's Ram Dass or Bhagavan Dass, but one of them decided to give LSD to the guru, the Maharishi. Yeah, it's a Ram Dass. You know this story? Yeah. He was like, let me try it, right? And then he took some massive dose and it did nothing. Yeah. And so what we take from that is that this is a person who's already existing in that state of heightened consciousness, of presence. Truth is, I don't know what I think about some of those stories.

1:19:18There are a lot of crazy stories around Maharaji, but there's no question that it's possible to have a mind that doesn't cling to thought, right? And that's a big deal, right? Even if you can only experience it for short stretches at a time, just punctuating your life with two seconds of truly open, free attention, doing that a hundred times a day, it's a very different day and a very different life than never doing it at all or having it happen to you by accident once a week when you're surfing, right? And then you come away thinking surfing is so good, right? Like it's all about the surfing, right?

1:20:03No, it's about the capacity of the mind to become fully immersed in the present moment such that you're no longer abstracting yourself away from experience and looking over your own shoulder and constructing a self that is in relation to experience. I mean, most people feel like they're having an experience. They're appropriating it from some place outside of experience. But that whole thing is an experience, right? There's just, subjectively speaking, I'm not talking about the metaphysics, right? We can talk about how all of this relates to the brain and the body and the cosmos. But I don't follow people like Deepak Chopra into, you know, making metaphysical claims about, you know, how what you experience on acid or in meditation tells you a lot about cosmology or about what happened before the big bang, et cetera.

1:20:58But when you're talking about the character of experience, there's only experience, right? There's only consciousness and its contents. And there is no, there's no ego in the middle of it. And there's no ego on the edge of it. And what you feel your ego to be in each moment, the feeling of I, the feeling there's a subject in the middle, that's part of the contents of consciousness. Right, that is but another experience within the context of consciousness. So consciousness itself doesn't feel that way. This is a mind fuck. There's a lot of threads I wanna pull on this, but I think before we go further, it might be instructive to define what you mean when you say consciousness, like what is consciousness by your estimation?

1:21:44Right, there's a lot of debate about this, much of which is not especially productive in the sciences of mind, in neuroscience and cognitive science, psychology, etc., and in the philosophy of mind. I happen to think that consciousness is conceptually irreducible. There are people who want to, who have tried to reduce it, and I think those efforts have been unsuccessful. How it arises in the physics of things is an open question. You know, it may very well be just a matter of information processing in brains or in any system like a brain that can process information in these specific ways. You're on very firm ground scientifically if you're biased in that direction.

1:22:31It may push deeper into the physics of things or it may be, you know, a fundamental constituent of reality. I mean, there's just – really the jury is out on that. nothing in my account of the first person side hinges on any of those stories being true or false. I mean, it's just, if it's just what brains do and when you're dead, you're dead, that's all, none of that changes what I'm saying about the power of meditation or the nature of conscious experience. Consciousness from the first person side, and again, I think this is irreducible conceptually, it's just that it's the fact that there's something that it's like to be you or to be any system that is conscious, right?

1:23:11So if there's something, and this is a definition that the philosopher Thomas Nagel came up with in a very famous article, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? They published in the 70s. Again, there are people on the other side of this debate who think this is just a wrong turn in philosophy and science and we should have a different definition of consciousness. But it seems obvious to me that the right definition of consciousness is that there is something that it's like to be that system. So on Nagel's account, if there's something that it's like to be a bat, right? Even if we can't know what it's like, bats are, that is consciousness in the case of a bat, right?

1:23:51You know, the question is, if you could trade places with a bat, is that the same thing as trading places with this table? Or is it different? Do the lights go out in every possible way that they could go out? or is there something that is like to be a bat, right? And if there is, that's consciousness in the case of a bat. Now, it's a kind of circular definition, but any of our most fundamental kind of brute facts are circular in how we define them. I mean, defining causality is circular. There's no definition of a cause that is in some sense circular. The notion of cause and effect is a basic constituent of our thinking about anything.

1:24:38I would argue that the difference between there being nothing that it's like to be and there being something, however inscrutable, however minimal, however weird, however undefinable, the transition from something to nothing subjectively, that is the transition from unconsciousness to consciousness. And it's very much analogous to the transition in third-person terms or objective terms, the difference between there being nothing and something. I think it was the philosopher Schelling who gave us this initial question, why is there something rather than nothing? But the concept of nothing is very hard to get your head around.

1:25:23I mean, nothing is not just empty space because space is already something. Nothing is not just this void pregnant with the laws of nature because the laws of nature already have to be something or otherwise they couldn't do their work. Nothing is really nothing. The concept of zero is very hard to get your mind around. But the moment you got something more than zero, this transition from nothing to something, it's a conceptually irreducible intuition we have that allows us to form any other intuitions about anything happening or not happening or, I mean, it's bedrock epistemologically for us.

1:26:01And I think so it is with consciousness. Consciousness is the fact that something seems to be happening. And the crucial point to make here is that it is no less present, it's no less true, it's no less real, even if we're confused about everything. Even if we're, you know, we're all psychotic or we're all brains in vats, we're all in the matrix, you know, Our physics is totally wrong because all of this is just a simulation on the hard drive of an alien supercomputer. We're not in touch with the base layer of reality in any way. This is a pure illusion, right? The presence of illusion is just as much a demonstration of consciousness as the presence of any kind of veridical perception of anything, right?

1:26:43So on my view, consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion, right? But to say that consciousness might be an illusion is just pure non sequitur. It's just not what we mean by consciousness, and it's not what we mean by illusion. It seems to me that consciousness either exists on some sliding scale that is calibrated with the complexity of a brain. How many neurons do you have? Or it's endemic to everything, what's known as panpsychism. psychism. And it sounds like you're relatively agnostic on that and that exploring the truth behind that isn't necessarily the best use of time and energy.

1:27:30Because at the end of the day, we have this experience and that's what you're interested in trying to better understand. Yeah. And I think the gradations of consciousness are more a matter of the contents of consciousness, right? So what you obviously get as you scale up in an information processing and intelligence is more mind, right? You get more distinctions you can make, you get more, you know, you get ideas. I mean, we get language. I mean, just having language is an enormous difference, right? You know, it's just like everything about us that's recognizably human is a matter of us leveraging the power of language, right?

1:28:09And are being able to conceive of a past and a future in explicit terms and to plan across that time horizon. I mean, that's, you know, that's something that, you know, chimpanzees can't do. You know, I have no doubt that chimps are conscious. There's something that it's like to be a chimp. Some of that would be recognizable to us, but the fact that they're not language using in any deep sense deprives them of so much that is, there's so much mental real estate that can't be actualized without language. Much of the experience you have on psychedelics is about more mind, right? You get pushed into areas of conscious contents that most people wouldn't suspect are there.

1:28:54And it's very easy to get enamored of all that and to think that profundity is a matter of more, of changing the contents of consciousness and expanding them and having more of that, you know, having more of those experiences and bigger experiences. But I mean, the crucial thing to notice is that all of these experiences are impermanent, right? I mean, you, you, first you, you don't have them and then you have them and then you don't have them. And so if there, if there's a more fundamental freedom to recognize about the nature of consciousness, it should be not at the level of changing experience.

1:29:31It should be coincident with all experience, right? I mean, that's certainly the hope. And that's, I think, what meditation, at least certain kinds of meditation, appropriately targets, right? It's just not making a fetish of the highs of experience. They certainly can be explored with psychedelics and without. I mean, there are styles of meditation that get you very high in a drug-like sense. And they're very goal-oriented. I mean, these are people who are becoming, through their training, kinds of spiritual athletes who are really trying to get somewhere. And there's a logic of seeking to change experience through the practice.

1:30:10But that's not what I'm recommending. kind of the wisest traditions within Buddhism and the Indian tradition are, you know, draw a very clear line between that style of meditation practice where you're seeking to have more and more ethereal, you know, temporary experiences and what's called wisdom practice. There's a clear, you know, firewall or disjunction there. The first step in a mindfulness practice is to notice that there is some distinction between what I guess you could deem higher awareness or perhaps you could call it the self and the ramblings and vicissitudes of the mind and thought, right?

1:30:59And I think that that awareness like, oh, there's me and then there's me observing all of these thoughts that are passing on the surface of consciousness. And I think that that creates this dualistic sense that there is a self that's observing the mind. And the practice that you teach and advocate through your app and through the talks that you give, et cetera, your books, is characterized as non-dualism. This idea that you referenced earlier, that this sense of the self that is very indelible is in fact an illusion and just yet another appearance in consciousness. Yeah. And that's a very, like when I'm doing your daily guided meditations, no matter how I've been doing it for a long time, like that's a steep mountain to climb to get to that place where you can really embrace that as truth.

1:31:59Yeah, yeah. I mean, it took me a while too. I mean, I think I had spent, about a year on silent meditation retreats before. What was the longest that you sat in silent meditation? Three months. Wow. But I did that twice. All day long, every day. Yeah. Two, three month retreats, and then a lot of shorter retreats, two months and one month and three weeks and things like that. But then all the way down to like just one day. They're very powerful. I mean, going into silence is a real crucible. And it's not for everyone. It's a little bit like psychedelics in that it's not for everyone. But it can be incredibly useful.

1:32:41It can also be a little misleading, right? I mean, so it really is a two-edged sword here. And this is the difference between a dualistic conception of the goal and a non-dual one. I mean, it's easy to form the impression under a certain style of practice. And it's certainly the way I was practicing mindfulness at that point. that, again, freedom is elsewhere. And here it's not at the heights of something you're achieving through LSD. It's at the heights of the mountain you've climbed very systematically on retreat through concentration. You're born of very intensive practice. You go into silence.

1:33:22You're formally sitting probably 12 hours a day. but every waking moment is a moment where you're trying to string each moment together with a continuity of mindfulness, where the moment you get up from meditation to walk to lunch, you're walking to lunch is a walking meditation, and the eating of lunch in silence is an eating meditation. And all you're doing is trying to bear down on the present moment such that you can notice everything. You just want to notice the finest grained distinctions. Again, you're not thinking about it. It's not a matter of understanding anything conceptually more.

1:34:03What you're noticing, at least in this system, what's being emphasized, and this is very standard Theravada, Buddhist, Vipassana, mindfulness, of a sort that we also teach in Waking Up on the app. It's held in a slightly different context. what you're noticing are the so-called three characteristics within Buddhism of impermanence unsatisfactoriness and selflessness and so you're noticing impermanence you're noticing that that the more closely you look the more fleeting experience becomes right so it's like when you start and you have very little concentration and you know you're told to just feel your body sitting in the chair or sitting on the cushion, well, you just have this kind of gross feeling of, okay, I just feel my body.

1:34:52I feel like basic proprioception. I feel the energy of my body. I feel my knee. I feel my shoulder. I feel my back. I got a pain in my neck. I hope that goes away. Okay, I'm back to the body. As you do this hour by hour by hour, you get more concentration. The difference between being lost in thought and being really present with your sensory experience becomes clearer and clearer, such that eventually the present moment gets enough kind of gravity to it where your attention more and more naturally rests there and you can actually pay attention to the breath and to sounds and to sensations. And the moment that begins to happen, you begin to notice impermanence just reigns, right?

1:35:38Like nothing is solid, nothing is stable. You thought you had a body, but when you pay attention, You just have this cloud of fleeting sensation. You have these tiny points of pressure and tingling and temperature and pain and tightness and movement. And, you know, your hands disappear into this pointillist painting, you know, of sensation. And so it is with everything you can pay attention to. Sounds, everything becomes very punctate and fleeting. You begin to pass through this layer of concepts where you're no longer hearing traffic and birds and the rustling of somebody's rain jacket. You're hearing just the raw data of sound.

1:36:26You haven't become a moron. You can still think about what you're hearing, but you notice that automatic conceptualization is something you can relax. And you get more into the flow of just raw data of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thoughts arise and try to grab hold of it. And you just notice them too as appearances in consciousness. But for the longest time, it can feel like there's a subject doing this. Right. There's still you, there's still a meditator, you know, aiming at objects. Right. And even if the aiming becomes effortless, even if you're just noticing attention go out to the sound or go down to the feeling of pressure in the body or whatever it is.

1:37:12The locus of which is in the head. Yeah. I mean, most people start with a very clear sense that there's a, you know, they're up there in their head and now they're paying attention to the body and the body is down there. rather than aiming attention to sensations in the knee, say, or when you're doing walking meditation, you're aiming attention down to the sensations in your feet or your legs. But it can become very effortless and it can become, you can notice so much impermanence that you can begin to extrapolate from this kind of just blizzard of change that there can be no stable self to be made out of all of this, right?

1:37:49There's just this next moment of hearing, this next moment of seeing, this next moment of sensing, sensation. There can be a lot of great feelings of freedom that come with this because there's just like a real relaxation into the flow of the present moment. And you're not trying to do anything with it. You're not trying to change anything. The goal here of noticing all of this is to, at least in this system, to increase the mental factor of equanimity. because you're noticing the pleasant stuff disappears. There's nothing to hold on to there in a pleasant taste or a pleasant sound. You're also noticing the unpleasant stuff disappears the moment you notice it.

1:38:27So there's no problem. There's nothing to push away, even in very strong feelings of physical discomfort. I mean, you can get to a point where you can have really strong pain in your body, you know, excruciating pain in your body. It certainly would have been excruciating yesterday. day, but now you've got such equanimity that it's just, it's just change. Just changing, you know, it's twisting and burning and stabbing and, but it's just like, there's no there there even. Like the moment you try to find the stabbing sensation that was a problem a moment ago, it's not there. There's something new, but it's gone the moment you notice it, right?

1:39:09So everything's just falling away from attention, the more you pay attention. And there's an immense freedom that comes with that. I told you about the three characteristics. The second characteristic is what's often translated as suffering, but that's not quite right. It's more, the Pali word is dukkha, but it's unsatisfactoriness is a better translation. And it's, again, it's this principle that there's no there there based on change, right? Like it's just, No matter how good it is, no matter how bad it is, there's just nothing to hold on to. And so there's nothing worth clinging to. There's nothing worth pushing away.

1:39:46There's nothing worth grasping. Just let everything flow. And the third characteristic is selflessness. But again, under this system, it's more an extrapolation based on impermanence. It's like because everything's changing, there really can't be a subject. and the more you pay attention, it begins to feel like even subjectivity itself is just arising by itself almost as a kind of punctate thing. You know, it's just going, it's the sound, it's just seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. It's kind of this piecemeal aspect and impermanent aspect to everything and it's all just part of the flow and when you have a lot of concentration on retreat, especially, you can have the experience of in brief moments, the self really seems to disappear because in this moment of hearing, the normal moment of hearing is just this kind of subject-object perception.

1:40:51There's a subject doing the hearing, there's a thing heard, and there's this operation of hearing between them. What you have more and more with concentration is just hearing. It's just a pure experience of hearing. It's not two sides to the thing. There's just hearing. There's just seeing. There's just sensation. And so that begins to break through. And that happened to me when I was on some of these long retreats. How long did it take for you to have that type of experience? Well, for the longest time, it was just lots of impermanence with still a fairly strong sense of there being a subject experiencing all.

1:41:33the impermanence, right? I think on some of my longer retreats, I mean, what's interesting about doing retreat is that with the next retreat, you sort of start where you left off in the previous one. Like if you do a one month retreat and then, you know, a few months later, you decide to sit a, you know, a week long retreat, day two of that second retreat is a lot like, you know, the third week of that month, you know, like you can just ramp up very, very quickly because it is a skill. You're learning a skill. And so you can just drop in. And that's pretty amazing because it's almost like you've discovered that there's this other world.

1:42:15There's like this kingdom of silence that you can only reach by going into silence and deciding to go on retreat. But once you do, you know, you've discovered that the transition from kind of normal life to this new place is very, very brief. I mean, like, you know, some of the, some of my retreats, I felt like, you know, in a few hours, I had just gone, crossed over into the, into the land of silence. It's really, it's really quite beautiful. That's on the back of having, having learned to do this, having done previous retreats. And is it something in your daily practice now that you can drop into?

1:42:53quickly and relatively effortlessly? Or is it a chore or more elusive because there's time and distance between you and the last time that you sat for great periods of time? Yeah, well, so now we're getting to the difference between practicing dualistically and practicing what I would call non-dualistically because that framing changes for me. So again, much of what I just said about retreat is still holding retreat aside as a very special, kind of precious, different experience than normal waking life. And it is somewhat analogous to a drug experience, right? Like this is just a non-standard neurophysiological displacement from the ordinary.

1:43:41And you clearly can't live this way, right? Like, I mean, you can, you can decide to spend, you can become a monk, decide to spend, you know, years on retreat. And I know people have done that. I know people have done you know, 10 years on silent retreat, right? And I've studied with people who've done, you know, double that. But from a non-dual perspective, there really is, the center of the bullseye is available right here in the middle of this podcast, right? Like the thing that I'm really paying attention to and that I recommend people pay attention to as their meditation practice, once they can recognize it, really does equalize these different occasions, right?

1:44:18It equalizes retreat and non-retreat. It equalizes, you know, the work day and the time you spend actually meditating. The boundary between formal practice and the rest of life is really at the bottom just a concept. I mean, it's just, it's a story you're telling yourself. Very often it's a story you're telling yourself about why it makes sense to not expect this moment to be it, right? I mean, to be good enough and to be fully actualized with your pious wisdom, right? And it's a cop-out on some level to close that chapter on retreat. So the best moments that I experienced on retreat and after even a collective year I spent on retreat were not moments that allowed me to recognize selflessness on demand, you know, as my practice of mindfulness.

1:45:10Like I could recognize sensation on demand. I could recognize impermanence on demand. And if, you know, I could hear a sound and notice, you know, I could notice the hearing of it and notice that it just came and went. That's a kind of a mini insight into impermanence. But it wasn't a clear insight into selflessness unless I had just a ton of concentration on retreat, you know, having done nothing but meditate, you know, not talking to anyone for weeks and months. And now I'm having these kind of breakthrough experiences of just hearing, just seeing. but from a non-dual side, you can actually just take a modicum of that concentration and look for the self in such a way as to notice that it's not there and to have the sense of subject-object dualism drop out of any experience.

1:46:01And it doesn't take a heroic act of continuity of mindfulness. It doesn't take some extraordinary concentration. It just takes enough mindfulness so that you can not be lost in thought for that moment. And you can look and notice that there's just experience and there's no center to it. You're not on the edge of it. And so, I mean, we can talk more about how to do that. But once you can do that, then there's just, it's always a story of this next moment being an opportunity to do that, right? There's no imperative that you frame it out as, okay, this is going to be a retreat. This is my formal practice.

1:46:48I'll get to that when I pull over. You can do this while driving. You can do this while having a conversation. This is compatible with any possible experience. And the freedom that it gives you isn't a matter of suddenly having a different experience. It's not a matter of, okay, I now no longer feel pain in my body. Okay, the physiology of anxiety has totally changed and I don't feel any of that energy in my chest that a moment ago was a problem. From the point of view of non-dual awareness, none of those experiences are a problem. None of those experiences implicate a self as the hostage that has to be rescued.

1:47:35There is no hostage here that has to be rescued. There's just experience. And once you allow the center to drop out of any experience, even if a moment ago you were anxious, you know, let's say you're – I mean the example I always use is public speaking because, you know, people are so worried about it. And I used to be very worried about it. You know, the anxiety of stepping out on stage, right, is a problem. If you're fighting it, you wish you weren't this person, you wish you were more comfortable, you're thinking thoughts about how to change it. I wish I, you know, should I have taken a beta blocker?

1:48:12If you could just let the center of that drop out, that does solve the problem even before the physiology changes. The physiology of anxiety or any other emotion changes over the course of seconds and, you know, tens of seconds. But it's downstream. Yeah, it's all downstream of this initial clinging to self and this initial being lost in thought. And it does change. I mean, if you can keep punctuating your experience of anxiety, say, with these moments of clear seeing of no center, well, then it does dissipate because you're no longer building the machine of anxiety or running those gears, or at least you're interrupting it.

1:48:58you know, to tens of times over the course of a minute. But the thing you recognize and the thing that's really is a kind of a non-dual insight is that your freedom from self and from suffering, psychological suffering, isn't actually predicated on the contents of consciousness changing. Like the anxiety doesn't have to go away for you to be free of it, right? It will go away if you're no longer manufacturing it, but you can actually drop your problem faster than the physiology, will dissipate. The issue with that is that, I mean, from a dualistic perspective, one would say, well, the way that you cure your stage fright is to disidentify the self with the fear or the anxiety, but that presumes a self.

1:49:48The non-dualist would say, there's no self to be anxious to begin with, everything just is. And the idea that there isn't a self defies every intuition and instinct we have about what it means or feels like to be alive, which makes it very difficult. I mean, you have, I've had very kind of fleeting flirtations with, you know, very brief momentary experiences with this, they go away quickly, but they're the result of conscious prompts that you have in the meditations, like look for the looker, like who is doing the looking right now? And the more you can kind of focus on that, like pretend you're looking on yourself and like what are you seeing?

1:50:33The idea that there is no head. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That one's very useful, that comes from this really self invented teacher, Douglas Harding. He was influenced by Zen, but he was an architect who - Like on having no head or something like that. He wrote a book called on having no head, which is quite, it's this beautiful little primer on his method. But yeah, so it's, I mean, just this technique is especially powerful because it can easily be mapped on to a social situation like this. I mean, so when you and I are having a conversation, very much of your sense of self is born of a feeling that you're behind your face, you're in your head, I can see you, I'm looking at you.

1:51:14And you're four feet away. Yeah. But so you feel in relationship to me, because you feel like you're behind your face looking out across space at me, right? But if you look for your head, if you look for yourself, this is the only face you can see, right? Like you see my face. Yeah. You can't see your face. I mean, I can see my nose if I... Some of us with big noses can get part of the nose in there. But the way Harding described it is that when you look for your head, you find that in place of where your head is supposed to be, there's just the world, right? There's just this open space in which everything's appearing and including the heads of other people.

1:51:59It's not that you think you've been decapitated or you think, you know, you don't have a head. You understand you're a person, but your actual raw experience is of this openness and the other person is part of this field of openness. I mean, I have a visual field in which you're appearing. And the sense of self is born of you and I are making eye contact. There's two modes I could be in here. I could follow your gaze back to where I think I am. I could feel implicated by your gaze. Right. And sometimes that could be tempting. Like you could, you know, you could say something or you change your expression.

1:52:44I'm talking and you could look confused or you could look like it sounds like you don't agree with what it looks like you don't agree with what I'm saying. So there can be this facial play that I can be cognizant of that could cast me back upon myself in a way where I feel I'm no longer freely just looking at you, right? Because you're lost in thought trying to understand the signals that I'm giving you through my facial reaction. Yeah, I mean, it could be born of something you say or it could just be born of, again, a change in your facial expression. The sense of being in relationship, the sense of being scrutinized by another, seen by another, the sense that I'm an object in the world for you, right?

1:53:34That is constantly being imposed upon us. It seems like it's imposed upon us all the time by other people in the world. Actually, Jean-Paul Sartre, the existential philosopher in his book, I think it was Being a Nothingness. And he describes what he considers the primal circumstance of the voyeur. I mean, I don't agree with much of his philosophy, but this is kind of a brilliant thought experiment or example. Imagine being a voyeur. You've crept up to somebody's bedroom window. You're looking at the object of your lust through the window, just fully, just 100 % committed to the experience of seeing.

1:54:17and then you hear someone stepping up behind you, right? Like at that moment, you don't even have to turn around. You don't know, but the moment you know someone's behind you, you suddenly feel this collapse into selfhood. You now know you're the object of another, right? There's another perspective that has just taken you as this object. It's that recoil from pure experience. in this case, the pure experience of seeing, into this kind of collapse into self. That again, this is happening to us a thousand times a day. In fact, it happens to us so often that we think it's our default condition. It's real.

1:55:00We're selves. I'm over here. But it is a kind of collapse. It's a kind of action. And it's not really coming from the other. It just seems that way. It's something you're doing with your attention. Now, and you cannot do it, and the way to kind of roll it back is this kind of method, you know, one method is, you know, this Douglas Harding technique of just looking for yourself, looking for your head. And you cannot find it in a way that perhaps just for a moment opens you to the realization that there's just this pure seeing, right? So if I'm experiencing this pure seeing of you, it doesn't matter what your eyes are doing and what your face is doing.

1:55:44I'm just noticing that. It's not forcing me to recoil back into this feeling of, oh, my God, I'm over here and he sees me, right? Like it's like I'm vulnerable. Like it was kind of a different structure to the realization. But it was very much what happened to me on MDMA the first time, which was such a revelation. I was just totally free of self-concern. I was just, I mean, the experience was, I was just talking to one of my best friends and we were just sitting across from each other on two couches having a conversation. And at one point in the conversation, I realized there wasn't a cell in my brain that was concerned about what he thought of me.

1:56:28It's like, I just recognized that he's my best friend. I love this guy. I just was feeling nothing but love and admiration and gratitude to be with my best friend. And I was just seeing him, right? Just like I was just free to see him. The part of me that I didn't even know was there, which was constantly cycling on how am I being perceived by even someone who ostensibly was one of the closest people to me in my life. How am I being perceived? That just went offline and I was just free. to just see him. And that preoccupation being a barrier to true experience. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also just, it is the source code of neurosis.

1:57:15It is the thing that makes you uncomfortable with other people. It's the thing that makes you, every part of it, I mean, whether it's shyness or, you know, any kind of social anxiety or just interpersonal fears and weirdness, Every wrinkle of just feeling less than comfortable in the world, in your own skin, has this character of this reassertion of self in the midst of what's ever happening. And it's the thing that prevents you from – I mean, it's the antithesis of the classic flow experience where you're in the middle of an athletic event or whatever it is. you're just, there's no distance between you and the thing you're doing.

1:57:59You're just doing it. It's just, it's just, you're a part of the flow. When there is a distance. It's usually in the mode of either you're distracted, you're just lost in thought and you're thinking about all the stuff you have to do after the bike ride ride or whatever it is. or you could be in some sort of error correcting mode where things are not going the way. You've imperfectly learned the skill. You know, you don't really know how to swing a golf club, so you're always thinking about what you should be doing. You're making errors. You're not performing the way you want to perform. So there's just, there's all kinds of, you're grinding your gears over the actual, the performance of it.

1:58:32But when things are really in the flow, when you're just throwing the football or you've thrown the Frisbee or whatever it is, and it just, everything feels great and you're not looking over your own shoulder, you're just having the experience, that's what people want out of life. You know, certainly it's much of what they want out of life. That's a quality of attention. It's not the thing you're doing. It's just that certain things we do are more optimized to pull that out of untrained minds. But training your mind, you can actually have that experience in any arbitrary context. It doesn't matter what the experience is.

1:59:12The idea that when you look for the looker and there's nothing to be found or this sense of self that we're convinced resides within our heads is nothing but an appearance in consciousness begs the question of what is reality? Like what is base reality? Like I have this sense that you're sitting four feet away from me, that we're having this conversation in a certain space at a particular time, but you're just an appearance in my consciousness. Yeah, yeah. Everything that I'm experiencing right now that I can hear, taste, feel, smell, the thoughts are nothing but appearances in consciousness, including that intractable sense of self.

2:00:01Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So then what is reality? Like that's the question that comes to mind. If everything is but an appearance in consciousness and consciousness is truly all that there is from our point of view, it becomes, you know, another intractable question to answer. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so from my point of view, nothing of importance for our wellbeing hinges upon our answering that question. So I remain agnostic with respect to the metaphysics. So everything you said is true. So just purely as a matter of neurology. So whatever, let's just say that the standard, you know, physicalist, materialist picture of the mind is true, right?

2:00:52So there's just, what we have is an unconscious universe wherein certain systems process information in such a way that the lights come on, under some conditions of complex information processing. Remains to be seen what those are. In my view, if that's true, it's always gonna seem like a miracle. It's never gonna be self-explaining. We're never gonna say, oh, yeah, so it makes sense that functioning at 40 hertz in a system of 100 ,000 units is sufficient for consciousness, but otherwise not, right? That's just gonna seem like a miracle. But let's just say that it is just at bottom a matter of information processing, It opens the question as to whether or not this could be substrate independent, so whether we can build conscious AI is a question that follows from that.

2:01:39Based on the fact that intelligence and everything else, any other consequence of information processing we know about is clearly substrate independent, I would say that if consciousness is born of information processing, then we certainly should expect conscious machines because I just don't see what is important about having the computer made of meat. And a sufficient facsimile or approximation of consciousness at some point becomes indistinguishable from consciousness as we understand it. So is there... Well, from the outside. Yeah. But at some level, does that even matter? Like the question of sentience in an artificial intelligence.

2:02:18Well, let's table that. I think it does matter. That's a whole other thing. We might not have time to get to that today. I mean, I think it's super interesting. I think it's consequential, but I guess I can actually deal with it pretty briefly. If we build machines that are conscious, then we've built machines that can actually suffer, right, or be made happy. We've built machines that are really having experiences, right? They're not just seeming from the outside to be having experiences. My concern is that we won't actually know whether or not we've done that. What's very likely is that we're going to build machines that seem conscious because we're going to build them that way.

2:02:54We're going to want them to, at least with certain kinds of machines, we're going to want them to seem conscious. And the more intelligent they get, the more they're going to pass the Turing test in that sense. So certainly you just imagine what it would be like to have something like, you know, truly humanoid robots that are out of the uncanny valley. And so it's like Westworld where these people look like people, but they're robots. They're being driven by these amazing large language models and they know everything and they can notice how you're doing. I mean, they've read all your email and you've got this perfect robot companion.

2:03:27That's going to drive all of your empathy circuits such that it's just going to feel like you're in relationship to a conscious being. And we will build them so as to seem that way, right? So if we don't understand how consciousness actually arises or if it does arise on the basis of information processing, we're at bottom not going to know whether that system is conscious. but it will be very important to know if it's seeming to suffer is real suffering, right? Like, are you committing a murder when you turn off your conscious robot? If its portrayal of suffering or happiness is so thoroughly convincing to the brightest human mind, we will interface with it accordingly.

2:04:09Yeah, and that's why I think I actually published an op-ed in the New York Times with the psychologist Paul Bloom back when Westworld came out. We were both fans of the show. And I mean, the insight we had there is that Westworld's impossible because in the presence of humanoid robots this compelling. No human would treat them the way that they are treated in the show. You will not only seem like a psychopath to other humans. You would have to be a psychopath to want to behave that way. It's like to really rape Dolores. But isn't that part of the premise, though, that these are psychopaths? these rich psychopaths who go there to live out their sort of dark fantasies.

2:04:52But like it's just either, so Westworld would act like a bug light for the world's psychopaths. Right. The non-psychopaths among us would look at this and say, I mean, you wouldn't be able to say, yeah, I just went to Westworld and I just raped and killed children, right? It was just awesome, right? Everyone who's a non-lunatic would say, dude, you've just lost your mind, right? We no longer respect you. You need to get help, right? So there's no way we would behave this way. So my concern is we will lose sight of the interesting problem as to whether or not they're conscious because they're just going to seem conscious.

2:05:27And in truth, we won't know, right? But I agree, they certainly will seem conscious if we keep making progress. But to go back to your question about reality here, if the mind, including consciousness, is really just what the brain is doing, It's just purely a product of brain chemistry. And obviously that means when you're dead, this disappears. You know, the candle goes out. It's not like there's some continuity of consciousness because this really was just what your brain was doing. The brain's not a receiver of consciousness from somewhere else, right? It's the pure physicalist vision. And even under those conditions, everything you're experiencing right now is just a vision produced by neurophysiological changes moment to moment in your brain.

2:06:19So you're already a brain in a vat in some sense. You're already – it's like I'm not saying there is no world out there impinging upon your neurophysiology through your senses. There's every reason to believe there is. but it's your experience of it really is this visionary phenomenon. It is very much like what you experience in a dream. You know that it's possible to have a dream in which you're taken in by the illusion that you're in relationship to some other person who you're now talking to, who you might now feel neurotic in the presence of. You know, so you're meeting some famous person who you're a fan of in a dream, and you're embarrassed that you can't get the words out and they're looking at you like, well, who is this moron?

2:07:07And now you feel like, fuck, I wish this was going better. And none of this exists. This is all just a fantasy, right? But you're not having a lucid dream. You haven't recognized your circumstance. We know that the brain is a kind of hallucination machine like this where you can abstract self into an experience in relation to someone else who doesn't even exist, right? you're doing this all the time whatever status i really have out in the world your version of me is very much a a neurophysiological vision for you that is its ontology the cash value of everything is in you as a in the in the theater of your neurological changes right and so it's never really out there in the world, again, there's some correlate to it in the world, very likely, that is syncing up with the changes you're experiencing, but rather often not, right?

2:08:08Rather often, you're having an experience that is pretty uncoupled to the world. And I would argue, in almost every case, the experience of being unhappy, the experience of being in conflict, the experience of worrying about what's happening next, the experience of feeling, you know, that the thoughts of others are really, you know, mattering in a way that is diminishing your well-being, all of that is, again, much more of the dreamscape of unnecessary suffering than it is, you know, here is something that really came from the world and imposed itself on you. And, you know, the cash value was, yeah, you bumped into a hard object in the dark that you didn't know was there.

2:08:54And it's real. It's outside of you and it's real. And you are reformulating your acts of attention aren't going to change matters. The leverage is because you and I are both having visionary experiences all the time based on the fact that, again, it's all happening on the hard drive over here that is not the world, right? It's just part of the world. It offers an immense freedom to change your experience. You can try to change the world, right? I'm not saying there aren't things in the world we shouldn't want to change and we should work to change them. But so much of the story of being happy or happier than you are tending to be is not a matter of changing the world.

2:09:40It's a matter of changing your response to the world. it's interesting that we all live in a prison of our own mind and the suffering that we experience and the unhappiness etc is all a function of our consciousness and yet there is this key that if we insert it in the lock and turn it appropriately we can liberate ourselves from so much of that suffering and yet this path feels elusive to so many we see gyms all over We know we go to the gym if we wanna get stronger, if we wanna feel better in our bodies, we need to exercise them. And I think we're growing into this awareness that we can do the same for our minds.

2:10:28But I feel like there's still a long way to go for people to truly understand the level of liberation that exists and the downstream consequences, for a devotion to this type of practice as individuals, but also as a collective. I mean, we opened this podcast talking about the many problems that we face as a society and the solutions to all of those problems reside in the quality of our minds. Yeah, when we started this chapter, I said so much of what we had previously talked about is just this massive opportunity cost, including the talking about it. right? And the fact that we have to spend our time worrying about war and our abject failures to solve all these collective action problems, you know, in the face of pandemics or any other challenge.

2:11:19I mean, it's just, it's, you know, bad ideas are ascendant and so many bad ideas are captivating. But again, we're talking about human beings and their thoughts, right? And they're and they're having no perspective on thoughts, right? Strong opinions without any sense that you don't necessarily have to be identified with your opinion. These thoughts are coming out of nowhere, really. You don't know what you're gonna think next. And the ability to step back and not be identified with your sense of what you think, right? Like, which is, again, the stream of thought, right? It is analogous to kind of waking up from a dream, right?

2:12:08And it has the same kind of, it's not to say that there are no thoughts that are, you know, no thoughts are better than any other thoughts, right? Yes, it's, you know, the cure for cancer when it arrives will be, you know, a very important thought for somebody to think and communicate as widely as possible, right? I mean, information has consequences, but we're spending basically all our time talking to ourselves and not noticing it. I mean, that is the state. That's the default state for every person you see out there. And so much of that story we're telling ourselves is a story of delusion and fear and hatred and a litany of self-justifications and anchorings to bad ideas.

2:12:57And it's just like at the end of the day, there's very little that ails us that seems necessary. right like the cure for cancer is like cancer is one thing that's like we haven't figured it out yet right so that's there's a lot of profitable work that could be done to do that there's no reason in principle why we we shouldn't be able to cure cancer there's a lot of suffering on this side of not having cured it like that that's there's a lot that we should do there where i would never say it's just totally unnecessary that we got so you know spun up over cancer and it's lack of cure. And, you know, it's like, there's a lot of work to be done, but so much of our suffering is totally self-imposed.

2:13:42And there are many layers of this, but if you just look at lying alone, it's just a single variable, just like a capacity to lie. The numbers of people on earth who feel no compunction in lying, right? You know, it just, the lack of penalty for lying now in the culture, right? People seem to manage to maintain their careers and reputations, even being shown to lie again and again and again on even the most consequential topics. Just closing the door to that would be such an immense societal change. You know, I have hope that at the end of the day, you know, conversation is eventually going to converge on the wisdom of doing that, but it does seem a long way off.

2:14:27Did you read Three Body Problem or watch the series? I did. I got sidetracked. I didn't finish it, but I'm an unreliable reader of science fiction because I, I don't know, I guess it's the literary snob in me just recoils from some of the, you know, some of the dialogue and the writing. I tend to hit in that genre where I just feel like this is actually not as good as a book should be for me to be spending this much time with it. Well, you can short circuit it and watch the limited series. So I thought of that simply because, you know, the alien who is going to be arriving on planet earth and is trying to figure out whether they can cooperate with humanity is all on board until they realize that humans lie, which was a great revelation to them.

2:15:14And they immediately shift their perspective and decide that they're gonna have to destroy humanity. Right, yeah. Because of their incapacity or their relationship with truth. I saw, I kind of get it. I mean, it is such a, it is a night and day difference in dealing with people and as a culture, as a cultural difference. I mean, it's just to have as a norm that people are basically lying, you know, if not all the time, a lot of the time, certainly when they're, you know, when strangers are talking to one another, to have that as just a norm of business. and obviously we cut through it with laws around fraud and we punish people if it gets too egregious.

2:15:56But for us to always, just to be walking around with that layer of dishonesty gumming up everything, it just, yeah, it seems starkly dysfunctional. This distinction between lying and bullshitting, which is very interesting and useful and fun. I don't know if you ever read Harry Frankfurt's short, very short book, just an essay on bullshit. but he published this book, which became, actually, it's a proper work of philosophy, but it became a bestseller maybe 20 years ago, 30 years ago, on bullshit. But the distinction he made is that the difference between a liar and a bullshitter is that at least a liar is trying to craft his misrepresentation of the truth in such a way as to meet the logical expectations of his audience.

2:16:45Like, I know what you think and believe. I don't want my lie to be detected. So it has to, like, the math has to work out. I have to insert the lie carefully into the space provided so that you don't detect anything wrong logically or historically or, you know, your memory is not playing tricks on you, et cetera. So the liar has to be cognizant of the truth and of the kind of the truth processing of his audience, the bullshitter doesn't do any of that. Bullshitter is just talking. So Trump, in addition to being probably the greatest liar anyone has ever seen, he's even more guilty of just bullshitting all the time.

2:17:27He's not even keeping track of what he's saying because he's contradicting himself from mere moments before. And so it's just this stream of bullshit that honestly is even more destabilizing than lying with respect to what is done to our kind of information landscape and our expectations of political norms. And the way that it's so welcomely received by so many at the same time, you know, I think it speaks to this conundrum. On the one hand, human beings have this, you know, sort of outsized capacity to think that we are the pinnacle of intelligence, that our brains are so developed that there is absolutely nothing that we can't fathom, make sense of, or understand.

2:18:15no problem that will go unsolved. But in truth, we're pretty rudimentary animals in a lot of ways. And I often wonder what would happen if another life form or perhaps human being suddenly developed like a giant extra lobe on their brain that suddenly allowed them to perceive, conceptualize, and understand multidimensionality or time-space as it actually exists, not in the linear construct that our limited brains understand it to be. And what that would mean in terms of how we would evolve as a conscious species. But we're limited. We don't have that capacity, but we have this hubris, right? I think we need a little more humility around our capacity.

2:19:07And what's curious about you, Sam, is that you're somebody who's thinking a lot, spending a lot of time thinking about these great mysteries of what it means to be human and what consciousness is or isn't, and is there a self, all of these things that to me provides room for some level of faith in the unknown or what can't be known. But as this very famous atheist, This is something that you resist. Like the more mysterious the universe is and consciousness, et cetera, to me makes it feel like there's all the more terrain to have some kind of spiritual relationship with that which we can't understand, but which we know on some level must be true.

2:20:05Yeah, no, I don't doubt that at all. I just, I locate it in a different spot than classically religious people would locate it. So... Yeah, religion aside. Yeah. I'm talking about awe and wonder. Yeah, yeah. So I don't think we get rid of mystery. I think mystery is intrinsic to being, right? I think consciousness, even if we understood it conceptually, you know, in a third person way or in any other way, the experience of it is mysterious. I don't know what this is. This experience, this moment's experience is, as much as I can understand it conceptually, the conceptual layer doesn't actually purge it of mystery.

2:20:54It's like you're basically like hurling thoughts at it, but it's not removing the sort of the suchness of it. I mean, you can take the most ordinary object. You can just say anything, the cup. Like I have the word cup, right? And I can say cup over and over again. And I can then form thoughts about how this was probably manufactured. But as an appearance, if I actually pay close attention to anything, you know, the most prosaic object, it's as mysterious as anything. You could produce something that I've never seen, right, for which I have no name, right? But as an experience, as a raw experience, everything disgorges its intrinsic mystery if you pay attention.

2:21:49The level of our conceptual understanding doesn't actually banish that experience. It just kind of sort of tiles over it and causes us to take it for granted, right? Like this is a total, like I can say cup, I will never have this exact experience again, right? Like this moment, this encounter in consciousness, as consciousness, with the objects of consciousness, this is only superficially like any other in that I have, you know, I can have two ideas that I could juxtapose. Like I say, well, you know, I was holding a cup on Rich Roll's podcast and, you know, I've certainly held a cup before. You know, it's like this is yet another experience of holding a cup, right?

2:22:37But, I mean, the details of anything are, I mean, it's completely unique. I mean, there's a sameness to everything in the sense that, again, we're talking about consciousness and its contents, right? That's always the ground truth of any experience. and insofar as consciousness has a perennial quality, you know, and I think it does. I mean, there's likely the, again, centerlessness, openness, clarity, the fact that things are appearing, but the mystery doesn't go away, right? You're just adding thoughts to a condition that is at bottom prior to thought. It's like if you're married, it's like trying to reduce your spouse to their name, right?

2:23:24It's like you could say their name over and over again, but that doesn't reach into, like that doesn't explain them. The actual experience of sharing your life with a person, it's not at all one thing. Like to call it, like to wrap it up in a concept and say, yeah, she's my wife. You know, Annika's my wife. You know, she was born in 1976. You know, I could write a paragraph about her that summarizes her biography. that's the level at which we conceptualize everything right and and any given thing any given experience when you're actually going to collide with it fully prior to concepts prior to thinking about it prior to sort of disregarding it by just telling yourself the story of it as opposed to actually having the experience it is it is all just this kind of this visionary phenomenon on that can't be explained.

2:24:19You know, it's like you can know everything there is to know about the brain, the neurophysiology of language production or of motor engagement, right? And you still don't know from the first person side, you know, I have no idea how I do this. Like I can talk to you about acetylcholine. I can bathe this whole experience in the thoughts about neurophysiology, but the actual experience of moving my arm is a total mystery. It's intrinsically mysterious. It doesn't get less mysterious the more language you can hurl at it. And so what do you make of that? The thing to really make of it is to experience that more and more, to experience that layer more and more.

2:25:11It's not to think anything about it. It's not to make religion of it. It's not to say, well, this is what Jesus was talking about, so maybe Christianity might be right. The reason why I'm an atheist, effectively, with respect to the world's religions, certainly the major Western religions, is that each of them rests on a claim about specific books. These are claims about the divine provenance and the omniscient authorship of, in the case of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, we're talking about the Bible and the Quran. And you just look at the books and you just know that can't be true. I mean, I would argue that you cannot be a smart person and honestly think that there's anything in those books, apart from your desire to believe it to be so, that announces their omniscient authorship.

2:26:07Any remotely educated person in 10 seconds could recognize two things. One is it would take them about a minute to improve these books, right? I mean, just by editing. You just take out all the parts that seem to support slavery in these books, and you've already improved them morally. So that's a problem. If these are the product of omniscience, it shouldn't be trivially easy for anyone, literally anyone you know, to improve these books. But on the other side, just think of how good a book would be if an omniscient being wrote it. If we just wanted to blow the minds of the people of the first century, you and I could put in, it could insert a page of text into the Bible that would give them like a thousand years worth of stuff to work on.

2:26:56Right? Like, hey guys, we just spent a lot of time telling you how to sacrifice goats. and urging you to kill your neighbor for working on the Sabbath. But here we're going to drop in something that's even more interesting than that. And we're going to tell you about DNA, the amount of information that's encoded in the nucleus of your cells. You don't know what cells are yet, but you're going to figure that out. And literally, in a thousand words, we could just map out the next 2 ,000 years of science and math, right? An omniscient being could have done that in such a way so that the smartest people currently alive in any subdomain of a subdomain would still be finding stuff that was a pointer to a pointer to a pointer that they don't yet even understand, you know, that's going to disgorge the next century of science, right?

2:27:45That's what an omniscient being would do with a book. And at minimum, it would be the book that would be most conducive to human flourishing that we could possibly conceive. And these books aren't anything like that. Literally, the Bible tells you to kill your neighbor if he works on the Sabbath, right? I mean, that's the bottom line. Yeah. I mean, your atheism, atheism is, you know, anti-anatheistic notion that relates to a dogma or a religious institution. but I would contend that your perspective and what you teach is very Buddhist in its origins and its nature. Like, I think you're sort of Buddhist adjacent in most things.

2:28:32If you had to identify with some strain of spiritual lineage. Yeah, I disavow Buddhist, sort of the organized religion, faith-based aspect of Buddhism. I don't think there's anything you have to take on faith. And I don't call myself a Buddhist. I've certainly been influenced by Buddhism more than any other tradition, but there's the Advaita non-dual tradition within what's nominally called Hinduism, although it's kind of a misnomer. But I mean, the other thing here is that there really is just an asymmetry between East and West with respect to the kind of wisdom and empiricism we've been talking about.

2:29:09I mean, you know, this is a claim I've made before and it's just true. It's like you can literally walk blindfolded into the sort of the Buddhist section of a bookstore and open a book at random. and you are likely to hit a page that has a much more useful and non-dogmatic glimpse of the possibility of awakening and wisdom and training attention, i.e. meditation, you're much more likely to find that than exists in any place in the Bible or in the Quran. And literally, you could look at random in the canon of any part of Buddhism. It's not to say you're not gonna find some stuff about magic and miracles and some stuff that's just frankly boring and not especially important, but so much of what you find in Buddhism is just a very patiently and, you know, granted fairly boring kind of endless repetition of a recipe for living an orderly examined life that is ethically scrupulous and increasingly wise with respect to the profundity that's there to be found in experience in the present moment and doesn't require belief in anything.

2:30:40This comes back to us not having the right to our provincialism anymore. I just think what we need, what we have to recognize is that whatever's true in Buddhism or any other spiritual tradition is true at a deeper layer than culture. It's not, it's not, certainly not Burmese or Thai or Indian or Sri Lankan or in the same way that physics isn't, you know, Christian or English or American. The Christians really did effectively invent physics. I mean, physics as we know it, you know, it's like Newton did, I mean, something like a century or two of scientific work on his own in like 18 months. I mean, it's just, he's a Christian.

2:31:20He was a Christian imbecile on many levels. I mean, it's just, he spent half his time trying to cash out biblical prophecy. I mean, he really was confused about a lot of things, but he was brilliant and he invented, you know, physics for all intents and purposes. There's an East-West asymmetry with respect to science. And I would put like science and medicine in the West is real and it's really in touch with principles of knowledge gathering and deepening in a way that it never quite was in the East. I mean, the real science in the East and the real medicine in the East is not Eastern science and Eastern medicine, it's not Ayurveda, it's not, I mean, whatever is true in Ayurveda or any other Eastern modality conforms by, you know, by some principle that very likely they're confused about with something that we're increasingly understanding in the context of Western science and, you know, biological science, Western medicine and biological science.

2:32:24It's not to say that we don't make terrific mistakes in science and biology, in biology in medicine, but there's a similar shocking asymmetry spiritually running in the other direction with respect to the power of introspection in particular, you know, specific techniques like meditation and in what is to be found there. And I just think Abrahamic religion, you know, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have so confused us for centuries. The dogmatism, the intolerance, the fact that science and all of our emergent rationality and, you know, secular politics had to fight its way out from under all that dogmatism and intolerance, you know, that the dialectic there, you know, between Galileo and the Inquisitors, right?

2:33:15You know, the fact that they're showing, you know, one of the brilliant minds of science, the instruments of torture and getting him to recant his theses. The fact that we had that experience fucked us up so royally with respect to integrating the wisdom of contemplation and spiritual insight into a rational picture of the world that we've had to import it from the East. Again, I think it's at a deeper layer than culture. It's like it's a human universal now. We need to talk about the capacity of the human mind to be increasingly free, and we have to talk about it in the same space, in the same trans-cultural, trans-racial, trans-national, trans-everything space where we do science.

2:34:06Well, the great barrier or challenge, of course, is the fact that this art and science of self-transcendence that is the legacy of the East becomes a very difficult message to deliver to a Western culture that puts the self at the center of everything. The primacy of self is sort of the defining nature of our culture and our society. And the wisdom of the East requires a dismantling of that on some level, which is a, it's like an identity threat. Yeah, and I think there are reasons to, for us to take this a la carte and pick the good and bad parts of both East and West. Because, you know, I think the – I don't think it's an accident that, you know, Eastern society has not produced a political regime that we admire, right?

2:35:07I mean, I think the groupishness of Eastern culture, you know, the lack of a focus on individual rights has not been a good thing. And I don't think we'd want to emulate it. So paradoxically, you know, though there is no self, taking individual rights as primary politically is a very good algorithm to run. And taking the benefit of the group as primary is, it's not to say it doesn't have its moments, but it shouldn't get primacy. I mean, I just think the dysfunction of groupishness, of sacrificing the one to the many, the interest of the one to the many, it's so easy to see how that goes wrong.

2:35:45I mean, there's so many historical examples of it going wrong, that that tendency is something we should worry about. But some synthesis. But there's a synthesis, yeah. And our failure to cooperate with one another under the shadow of a pandemic, that's one of those examples where to have a norm of being a good citizen is something we should have more of. to be willing to make sacrifices because you know that if it's not strictly rational for you selfishly to optimize your own life to make the sacrifice, there's a free rider problem. There's a coordination problem to solve. It's better for all of us to agree to implement something fairly as a group that isn't optimal necessarily for any one of us because it's much better for all of us.

2:36:37And if we all defect in a piecemeal way, the system breaks. Sure. This is what's fractured right now. This overemphasis on personal liberty without an adequate appreciation that the liberties that we enjoy are premised upon some level of collective responsibility. Yeah. It's hard. This is the level at which thoughts and arguments and conversations that converge are super important because it's a, it's not a matter of all of us just being successfully mindful in the middle of the ruination of everything, right? Like that's possible, right? It's possible to be a monk who's happy and, you know, the people around you are living on a dollar a day.

2:37:26Not helpful though. Yeah. To the common good. No, but it could even be helpful to the common good in a certain sense in that you can meet very happy, poor, sickly people. You go to Northern India, you hang out with the Tibetans. I was just there. I just came from Dharmashala. So very happy people. I don't know if you had that experience, but Tibetans have a very high level of kind of natural happiness. We want to win this game at each level at which we're playing it. Like I think we do want longer lives, disease-free lives. We want to have discovered, you know, the seatbelt that kept us from flying through our windshields when we, you know, have car accidents, right?

2:38:13Like those are all good changes. and there are presumably millions of changes we could make at every level of our living that will make human life better, you know, incrementally better. And I don't think we should forsake any of that, but it's nonetheless possible. And this is just, this is how much freedom we have in our minds. It's possible to have almost nothing, right? To have a body that's not working, to have a society that's not working around you, to have everyone you love already dead and to be happy, right? It's literally possible to be happy in a cave alone with no other life prospects.

2:38:56That experiment's been run and people have found that that is possible, right? It's just, it's based on the quality of your attention. Conversely, it's also possible to have everything. I mean, to literally be a billionaire on a mega yacht surrounded by beautiful people who love you and to be so miserable that you're going to kill yourself, right? It's not that you're just thinking of killing yourself. You're actually going to kill yourself, right? Like that's possible. It's possible to be that unhappy and have everything. That just articulates the reality that spiritual insight, ethical depth, real profundity from the first person's side is in some basic sense at every moment, however we want to improve our lives or the world, and I think we should want both of those things, the real opportunity to be happy and to be at rest is orthogonal to all of that.

2:39:58It's just like at any, wherever you are in that spectrum of good and bad luck, it's possible to recognize that consciousness is open and already free of self and there is no problem to solve in this moment, in this precise moment where you feel the pain that is in the next moment is true. It's rational to call your doctor because you've had this pain for a week and it seems somehow, you know, inauspicious. And you read online that this sort of pain can mean this sort of thing. And now you're worried and now, you know, you should go get an MRI. Like that's the frame, at every moment along the way, it's possible to drop that problem and just be at rest and just leave space.

2:40:44Recognize that you are simply the open space, this open condition in which this thing you're calling pain is appearing all by itself and changing in every moment. And it's not even one thing. It's not even, you have a name for it, but it's already changed. and, you know, the mechanism of your worry about the results of the MRI that you haven't had yet, that's a thought arising in this moment from who knows where. And the moment you notice it, it disappears. And there's no one really who's noticing it. It's just appearing in this open condition, right? And you keep dropping back. You can be free at every moment along the way.

2:41:26and yet still the frame is in place. You're still gonna get that MRI. You still should get that MRI. It's still important that you get that MRI because there may be something to do about your pain, right? So we can play this game at both levels, but the difference between playing at both and playing at only one is night and day. I mean, it's just, there's no, you know, that's, it's everything. And the portal to that liberation is meditation. It is, again, with the caveat that that word can mean many, many things. Yeah. Before we completely end it, though, if you had to grade yourself on a scale of one to 10, your level of mastery with respect of what you just shared, what is your honest assessment of your own ability to practice what you just articulated?

2:42:25Well, again, that plunges us back into paradox because this reminds me of a very funny moment I had with my friend Joseph Goldstein, who's a great meditation teacher. He's one of my first meditation teachers. And the truth is that when you can practice in the way that I've been talking about in the second half of this conversation in a non-dual way, the evidence of your unenlightenment is always in the past. I mean, it's always a memory, right? It's always that thing you screwed up a moment ago. It's the moment of contraction that happened that now you notice. And now it's just appearing in this open space of consciousness with no center.

2:43:04So there's no problem. But a moment ago, you were the uptight guy, right? And presumably a Buddha wouldn't have been that guy. So you can only keep score with reference to what happened a moment ago. Now, before you can practice non-dually, when you're practicing dualistically, you can seem to find the evidence of your unenlightenment in the present moment. Like it's like your mindfulness can actually reveal, no, I'm still stuck, right? But once you can practice in a non-dualistic way— It then becomes impossible to grade yourself because every moment passes. But it's always just a memory. It's always a memory.

2:43:40It's always just a story you're telling yourself about who you've been up until the moment. But I mean, if you ask my wife, you'll get one answer from my wife, Annika, and it's just, I'm not doing so good. But that's just a story also. But the truth is it's not, it's also her experience of living with me, right? Which is attesting to the character of my experience much of the time in the past. So what's her grade of you? Oh, I think it's not good. There we go. That'll be the next podcast you have her on. Well, I have a great app that you should check out. It might be helpful with that. It's called Waking Up.

2:44:15I love Waking Up. I subscribe to all the apps, but Waking Up truly is the one that I find myself using the most. And I love it because not only do you have these daily meditations, it's just this amazing robust library of all kinds of fantastic wisdom. Yeah, there's some great people on there that have nothing to do with me. The app is in the process of outgrowing me, which is great. It's really a special thing. Thank you for creating it. And particularly, thank you for acquiring that incredible collection of talks by Alan Watts, which I find myself revisiting all the time. I just love that stuff.

2:44:51Yeah, it's really cool. Yeah, we got the whole cat. That was one of the things I lost, back in the days of cassette tapes, I had like a whole 150 hours of him. And in some move, I lost all those tapes. They just, the box didn't arrive. And so it was, yeah, it was personally, it was just a great fun to acquire the digital. And it is, how many hours total? It's like 150 hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's extraordinary. Well, there were so many other things I wanted to talk to you about, veganism, AI, all kinds of other stuff. So please come back and let's keep around too. Thank you. Excellent, peace.

2:45:39That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment.

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2:47:36Thank you.