Sam Harris (59:46)
There are many ways to say this, or not that many ways, but a few ways to say this, and I employ all of them. But it is some version of looking for what is looking. It's looking for the seat of attention, it's turning attention upon itself. It's looking for the looker, it's looking for the self, it's looking for the mind, it's looking for the thinker of thoughts. So this is all just a way of saying that our default sense of being the subject of experience being a point from which attention can be aimed at experience. We're separate from experience. I tell you, notice a sound or notice the breath or notice your visual field. Most people by default feel like, okay, I'm over here behind my eyes, behind my face. Paying attention now, aiming attention at the visual field. The visual field is out there. I'm in here behind my face. Or if I close my eyes, I can pay attention to the breath. The breath is down there in the abdomen or at the tip of my nose, and I'm up here in my head and I'm this locus of conscious attention that can be the sense of self. It's where the free will, if it exists, would be hiding, right? Like this is the feeling of being not just in the world, but in one's body, in the world, right? Because most people don't feel identical to their bodies. They don't inhabit their bodies down to the tips of their fingers and the tips of their toes. They're sort of passengers in their bodies, their mind in a body. And then the body is in some sense a part of the world to which you Have a relationship. And it can be quite a complicated and fraught relationship. And your aches and pains are yours, but they're being appropriated from a place that's outside the aches and pains. If my hand hurts, the problem is out there or down there. And I'm up here now in this, resisting the pain and wondering how to get rid of it and should I take more Advil? And just how much Advil can you take in a day without destroying your stomach? And should I call a doctor? And what's the name of that bone in the hand? Now you're thinking about your hand and you're now in relationship to this whole thing in the abstract. You say, yeah, well my hand is part of me. I know conceptually that I am my body. But it doesn't feel that way. There is this dualism, even internal to the body. So if you look for the seat of this dualism, the place from which everything is being measured, there's this sense of being a subject. And that is the starting point for 99.99% of meditators. Now that's the one who's going to become a meditator, that's the one who's going to practice, that's the one who's going to be bad at this practice in the beginning and hope to get better at it. And that's the one who's going to remember to be mindful when he remembers. And that's the one who's noticing a thought as a thought and is no longer identical to that thought. That thought suddenly becomes like the hand. You know, it's something to which you're in relationship. But there's still this feeling of me over here in the head paying attention, right? That's the thing that has to continually be inspected. And what would do the inspecting, it's that thing, the thing that's paying attention is now being asked to turn, to look for itself. And in some sense that turning seems impossible or it's how would you do that? How would you look for what is looking? And it's true. It is a kind of a paradoxical instruction. And it's not like you ever really turn clear around and see the absence of this thing. There's something about this goad to turning, this look for what is looking or look for the mind or look for the thinker, look for the self or to use more concrete version of it, which we have in the app, Douglas Harding on the Zen shelf at the bookstore. But he's very creative, kind of self taught teacher he urged you to look for your head. And he wrote this very enjoyable and very short book on having no head. He realized he happened to be in India looking at the Himalayas. And he was looking at this vast scene of sky and mountaintops. And suddenly recognized that he didn't see his head. Where his head was supposed to be. There was just the world. There was just sky and snowy mountains. He could look down, he could see his body terminating up into this vastness of the visual field. But he realized he never saw his head. He used that as a kind of anchor point. Like just looking for your head. You and I are having this conversation now. You can notice that the only head you see is mine. Your head is not part of your experience. It's just this openness where my head is appearing and the rest of the world is appearing. But what you're intuiting to be your head. Is just this open circumstance where everything else can appear. And as you fall back into that sense of just openness. You can begin to sense this thing that I'm talking about. Which is that there's no center to experience, right? We have as this default sense that we're the center of our experience. And that we're appropriating everything. Sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, emotions. From this place of being the center. This sort of indigestible core of conscious experience. But there is no center. If you look for the center, it can drop away. And it's in that dropping away that you recognize something about the character of consciousness. Prior to identification with thought. I think it's true to say that this sense of a center is, on some level, a very subtle thought. That is an undercurrent of thought that's always present. And it's even a thought in relation to other thoughts. Like, you notice, you can become mindful of thoughts. But if there's still the feeling that you're being mindful of thoughts. That's another thought that's going uninspected. So there's this. It's not a verbose thought. It's almost like an energetic contraction. It's like a kind of fist that is formed in the mind. Whereas there's this alternative, which is just an open hand. You're continually contracting into the sense of identification and reaction. You feel that you have no perspective on this next arising thought. Like, this feels like me. This feels like me. It's the voice in the head that says, well, why did she put it there? What the fuck? That voice. There's an energetics to not noticing the arising of that thought to suddenly being captured by it. It's the energetics of a kind of contraction. It's occluding what you can otherwise be aware of again. It's very much like falling back into a dream. Like all of a sudden, like, why the fuck did she put it there? That's an instance of the dream. You didn't see it come. You didn't produce it, you didn't author it. Like this next thought, or you just have this. You'd suddenly remember, oh my God, I left that thing that I was supposed to bring. And you didn't see it arise. And again, you just dip back down into the dreamscape of, okay, everything else about your circumstances is now going unnoticed. And you're just in this very brief dream of, fuck, I forgot that thing. It's going to take me 45 minutes to drive this traffic now. And I'm out of time. I'm fucking out of time. That conversation is happening and you're. That. That's a dream, right? And mindfulness is a waking up from that dream. But there's the dualistic version of waking up from that, which is like, okay, that's just a thought. But it still feels like me over here doing the waking up. I'm aware of thought, I'm aware of that reaction. I'm aware of the memory. I'm aware of the tension in my body. I'm letting go of it now, and I can let go of it now because I have this degree of freedom. Because now I know how to meditate. But it's still me, the meditator. This turnabout in consciousness where you notice that there is no one who's doing it, that there's no center to experience. That is the first taste of real uncreated freedom. This is not something you're doing anymore. This is just the way consciousness is. You're discovering an openness that you don't have to produce, that you can't improve. It's just what's there prior to identification with thought. It's prior to your contraction, it's prior to your reaction. It's a thing that you can then be mindful of because it's always present in the same way that experience in every other way is always present. This is the condition of all experience. The reason why it's. It's non dual. We're just throwing people into the deep end of the pool here. So apologies for the confusion that some people might be feeling. But it's non dual in a variety of ways. It's non dual. Because you're cutting through the dualism of subject, object perception. You're recognizing there's no subject, so that there's really just experience. You're not on the edge of experience. You're not in the center of experience. There's not one who's having the experience. There's just experience and you're identical to it. There's just consciousness and its contents, and you are that condition of everything appearing. There's just whatever this is. So it's non dual in the sense that the dichotomy of subject and object is the thing you are releasing. And what's left is this. To call it two is wrong. It's not subject and object anymore. Even to call it one thing is also wrong. That kind of reifies it. It's not just one thing. It's this inexpressible open totality of it's not one, it's not many. And this is why the Buddhists use terms like emptiness, right? And it's a very difficult and confusing thing to translate into English. But the basic concept of sanyata in Sanskrit allows for this inscrutable prior condition of it's not just one thing, because the full diversity of appearances is present, right? Like anything can appear. The character of experience is still fully. You're not cut off from anything. There's a full energy of sights and sounds and sensations. So it's not just a gray goo that gets unified, but sort of allows for many things. But it's not because there's no subject over here, appropriating those things or in relationship to those things is no longer dualistic. It's not one, it's not many, it's not two. And so what the Buddhists do, and I think they're right to do this, but again, it's hard to explain. They give this category, this concept of experience, which is usually referred to in negation, right? Emptiness is a term of negation or selflessness, or it's unconditioned, or it's unconstructed, or it's. In the Tibetan tradition. They do allow for some kind of positive conceptions. I mean, they talk about non dual awareness, or they talk about the Dzogchen teachings. Dzogchen means great perfection or great completion. There's some seeming kind of affirmation of what this thing is. But the Buddhists are very leery of reifying anything, right? And it's appropriate because there are many ways to sort of kind of grasp at peak experience, all of that, grasping all of that Trying to hold on to some kind of high is a deviation point. It is a way of just selfing again in whatever grandiose a way one can be doing that. And this is one now to take us even further afield. This is one way in which the psychedelic experience which many of us have found so useful to this project of learning how to meditate or building a contemplative life, it's one way in which it can be profoundly misleading for people. Because psychedelic experiences, almost by definition, are characterized by very different expansive experiences. What you've done when you're having a psychedelic experience is because you've taken this drug that has a predictable effect. And you've done it for this reason. You have produced a wholesale change in the contents of consciousness. And this can give you, in some cases, a clear insight into emptiness, into selflessness, into the non duality of consciousness. But because you got that insight by just changing everything, it's very easy to get the sense that, okay, freedom is a matter of changing everything. It's a matter of having very different sights and sounds and sensations. And it's like freedom is to be a Buddha or to be enlightened, or to be really on the path to any of those things. It has to be a matter of just this very expansive change in the energy of experience. And it could be feeling much, much more love, or much, much more compassion or bliss or rapture, or kind of a pyrotechnic change in the visual field. Thinking of proper psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, well then everything just looks different. Everything is just so much more beautiful. And the trees are breathing, and it's just like the light, this kind of prismatic, incandescent change to everything. Light is all of a sudden so much more of a thing, right? And the energy of the world is so much like you put your hand on a tree and you can feel your energy body merge with the energy body of the tree. Or it certainly can seem like that's happening, right? And so, like, you could do that for an hour and a half. And that's the most interesting thing in the world. So you have to have that kind of mind in order to get closer to this thing. Those are all just changes in the contents of consciousness. The thing that meditation is really pointing to is it's not that it has no relationship to any of that. And you do tend to have those kinds of experiences more and more when you're the more stable you get in the practice of meditation. But the thing to be recognized, the Centerlessness, the emptiness, the selflessness, the illusoryness of the ego, all of that stuff that's here right now in the midst of a totally ordinary experience. Nothing has to change about experience to recognize that. And that's where these further ramifications of non duality come out. Which is to say that, let's say you're experiencing impatience or anger or fear or some classically negative mental state, and then you suddenly become mindful of non duality. You can do that and recognize it, and it's fully recognized. I mean, the centerlessness of experience, the illusoryness of the self, the freedom of all of that is fully present in the first instant, right? Even before anything has changed about your experience. If you're angry or impatient or annoyed or whatever, the thing is, anxious, fearful, sad, the energy of all of that mental state can be still fully present. And that when the center drops out, the freedom of selflessness, the freedom of emptiness is fully available even before anything has changed at the level of experience. So your freedom is not contingent upon the subsequent changes that will in fact happen. Because then you've become mindful. You're no longer thinking about why you should be angry, whatever it is. So I'm not saying that there isn't implications for the character of your experience in subsequent moments, but the real non duality of this is that on some level anger isn't even anger. Anger recognized is also just non dual wisdom. So it is with any other negative emotion. It equalizes everything in the end because there's just consciousness and its contents and there's no center to that.
