Sam Harris On: Equanimity in Turbulent Times; Compassion for Difficult People; And Dualistic vs Non-dualistic Mindfulness

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Sam Harris On: Equanimity in Turbulent Times; Compassion for Difficult People; And Dualistic vs Non-dualistic Mindfulness"

Released on April 14, 2025, the episode of "10% Happier with Dan Harris" features an in-depth conversation between host Dan Harris and guest Sam Harris. The discussion delves into maintaining equanimity during crises, fostering compassion amidst political polarization, exploring the illusion of free will, and distinguishing between dualistic and non-dualistic mindfulness practices.

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1. Introduction

Dan Harris opens the episode by introducing Sam Harris, highlighting his role as a neuroscientist, philosopher, author, and creator of the popular "Waking Up" meditation app. He sets the stage for a comprehensive discussion on handling adversity, cultivating compassion, and the nuances of mindfulness.

Notable Quote:

Dan Harris [00:19]: "This is a wide ranging and fascinating conversation that covers how to maintain equanimity in shitty situations."

2. Personal Experiences: The LA Fires and Equanimity

Sam Harris recounts the experience of the Palisades fire, detailing how his family had to evacuate their home due to the threat of widespread destruction. He reflects on the role of meditation in helping maintain composure amidst such uncertainty.

Notable Quotes:

Sam Harris [06:07]: "In situations like this, you realize that impermanence reigns. And it's all rented and it's all subject to entropy."

Sam Harris [07:13]: "Mindfulness by another name. There's something almost perversely satisfying about having to deal with a moment like that."

3. Compassion in Polarized Times

The conversation shifts to the current political climate, specifically addressing the challenges of feeling compassion for individuals with opposing political views. Sam Harris emphasizes viewing such individuals not as personal adversaries but as part of a larger, often uncontrollable, societal force.

Notable Quotes:

Dan Harris [24:26]: "Compassion for the people you disagree with so strongly."

Sam Harris [19:43]: "I view all of these people, even the people who are hardest to feel compassion for... as like everyone's a kind of a force of nature."

4. The Illusion of Free Will and Its Impact on Hatred

Sam Harris elaborates on his perspective that free will is an illusion, arguing that understanding this can reduce feelings of hatred. By perceiving actions as outcomes of prior causes and conditions, individuals can foster a more compassionate outlook.

Notable Quotes:

Sam Harris [30:09]: "There's nothing to untie. All you're doing is recognizing the lack of a free will."

Sam Harris [34:11]: "Dispensing with the belief in free will is a direct antidote to hatred."

5. Dualistic vs. Non-Dualistic Mindfulness

A significant portion of the discussion is dedicated to differentiating between dualistic and non-dualistic mindfulness. Dualistic mindfulness involves observing thoughts and emotions as separate from oneself, while non-dualistic mindfulness transcends this separation, recognizing the inherent unity of consciousness.

Notable Quotes:

Sam Harris [46:21]: "Consciousness is already free of an ego. It's not like there's an ego, really, and you somehow get rid of it through diligent practice."

Dan Harris [76:14]: "What is the increase in freedom if we're going from dualistic mindfulness to non dualistic mindfulness?"

6. Practical Meditation Practices

Sam Harris offers practical insights into achieving non-dualistic mindfulness. He discusses techniques such as looking for the "seat of attention," open-eyed walking meditation, and the concept of "having no head," which encourages practitioners to recognize the absence of a central self in their experiences.

Notable Quotes:

Sam Harris [47:31]: "Look for what is looking. It's looking for the seat of attention."

Sam Harris [88:46]: "Walking meditation with eyes open is a very good way to do it."

7. The Waking Up App: Creation and Features

The conversation concludes with Sam Harris discussing the "Waking Up" app, emphasizing its role in providing accessible and effective meditation practices. He highlights the app's features, including guided meditations, theoretical discussions, and courses on various life skills.

Notable Quotes:

Sam Harris [94:39]: "Audio is just so much better as a vehicle for teaching this practice and the concepts and more importantly, guiding people in a moment to moment meditation practice."

Dan Harris [99:12]: "If you buy a subscription via that URL, you'll get 30 days free. And you will be doing me and my team a solid."

8. Conclusion

Dan Harris wraps up the episode by thanking Sam Harris for his insights and reiterating the availability of the "Waking Up" app for listeners seeking to deepen their meditation practice. He also mentions upcoming content featuring other contemplative teachers.

Notable Quote:

Sam Harris [98:32]: "Thank you for making time."

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Key Takeaways:

• Equanimity in Crisis: Meditation can provide stability and clarity during emergencies, helping individuals navigate uncertainty with a balanced mindset.

• Compassion Over Hatred: Understanding the lack of free will fosters compassion, reducing negative emotions like hatred, especially towards those with differing viewpoints.

• Mindfulness Practices: Transitioning from dualistic to non-dualistic mindfulness offers deeper freedom and a profound understanding of consciousness, beyond the limitations of self-identity.

• Technological Aid: The "Waking Up" app serves as a comprehensive tool for individuals seeking to enhance their meditation practice and philosophical understanding of mindfulness.

This episode offers listeners a rich exploration of mindfulness, compassion, and the philosophical underpinnings of human behavior, providing both theoretical insights and practical applications for personal growth and societal harmony.

Transcript

[Sam Harris]

Foreign.

[Dan Harris]

This is the 10% Happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody.

How we doing today? I'm talking to an old friend and somebody I honestly really look up to. Somebody who has played a critical role and formative role in my contemplative career, Sam Harris. This is a wide ranging and fascinating conversation that covers how to maintain equanimity in shitty situations.

We recorded this not long after the.

Fires in LA which forced Sam and his family out of their home for an indefinite period of time. How to have compassion or at least non hatred for people you disagree with politically in these highly polarized times. The illusion of free will and the relationship of that concept to compassion. The difference between dualistic and non dualistic mindfulness. We spend a lot of time on that. The concept of having no head which is fascinating and weird. Why meditating with your eyes open can be super helpful and much more. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Sam, even though he's been on this show many, many times, I will say briefly that he's a neuroscientist, philosopher and author of five bestsel selling books. He hosts an extremely popular podcast called Making Sense and he is the creator of the excellent app Waking up which offers a modern approach to living a more examined life through both in depth mindfulness and meditation training and secular wisdom. It's really quite a rich experience. Lots of guided meditation but also really cool courses on various life skills from cognitive behavioral therapy to wise approaches to time management. Speaking of the Waking up app, Sam and I, the Harris Brothers.

Even though we're not actually brothers, I guess not biological brothers, more spiritual brothers.

Anyway, we are now teaming up. Since I am no longer part of the app Formerly known as 10% Happier, I am now experimenting with a whole bunch of new projects. As you know, I launched a newsletter slash community over on substack called danharris.com where you can get ad free versions of this podcast and twice monthly live sessions with me where I guide a meditation and take your questions. However, for those of you who want a full meditation app experience, I heartily recommend Waking up and you can sign up for the [e-mail] 10% that's T E n p e r C e n t wakingup.com 10% I will put a link in the show notes Just so you know, if you buy a subscription via that URL you will get a 30 day free trial and you will be supporting me and my team as well because we will get a portion of the proceeds from any of the subscriptions generated through that link. And just to say, if money is an issue, Sam offers scholarships. That's the same policy that I have over on danharris.com if you can't afford it, we'll give it to you. Okay, enough out of me. Sam Harris Coming up right after this. If you're in healthcare, you've probably heard of figs. And if you haven't tried them yet, let me just say total game changer. These scrubs are made specifically for awesome humans. Designed to handle long shifts, constant movement and everything the job throws at you so you can perform at your best. I'm married to a doctor, Both of my parents are doctors. I have many friends in the medical world and the reviews that I've heard on figs are very positive. Another person who I don't know but I have one degree of separation from our producer Tara Anderson. Her husband wears figs like every day and loves them. Anyway, a couple more things to say about figs. They are engineered for comfort and performance. FIG scrubs are lightweight, breathable, stretchy and antimicrobial, built to keep up with long shifts, back to back patients and whatever the day throws at you. They're also modern tailor fit without sacrificing function. These are not your boxy, one size fits all scrubs. They're designed with precision. They come in flattering styles and colors with smart pockets, secure zippers and thoughtful details so you can perform at your best. So wherever you wear figs in the er, on rounds at the clinic, or even just running errands after a shift, make it count. Go to wear figs.com and use the code FIGS RX to get 15% off your first order. That's where figs.com code FIGS RX for 15% off your first order. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace gives you everything you need to offer services and get paid all in one place. From consultations to events and experiences. Showcase your offerings with a customizable website designed to attract clients and grow your business. Get paid on time with professional on brand invoices and online payments. Plus streamline your workflow with built in appointment scheduling and email marketing tools. You can get discovered quickly with integrated Squarespace SEO tools. Every website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions, an auto generated sitemap and more. So you show up more often on search engines and bring in more of your ideal customers. I know personally how difficult and exciting it can be to run your own business, the digital space and I understand.

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Sam Harris, welcome back to the show.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, thank you.

[Dan Harris]

You've had a year so far.

[Sam Harris]

This month has been a year. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dan Harris]

There's been a lot of shit that's happened with you this year. Let's just start with the fires. Can you just tell the basic story of what happened in your neighborhood?

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. Well, we were part of the Palisades fire, not the real epicenter of it, where people have seen photos of, like, Nagasaki level destruction on the periphery, but four houses burned very close to our house. So we're in a neighborhood that is remarkably untouched. And life will be, in fact, has returned to normal there for most people. But we were close enough to burned homes that we decided we can't come back to our home yet. And who knows when. I mean, it might be a year. I mean, we're just waiting for the cleanup. We've been dislocated by that whole process. Much of our lives were in the Palisades. Our daughter's school burned down. I mean, lots of things changed about daily life as well. And obviously, we know scores of people at this point who lost their homes. Right.

[Dan Harris]

This is, you know, we're a couple of weeks away from it as we're recording it, and we're talking about it in a reasonably light way. But I have to imagine it was really hard on you, on Annika, your wife, and on the girls. To what extent did meditation help?

[Sam Harris]

Oh, a lot. I can't say it helped the girls that much, but, I mean, it helped us with the girls. I should acknowledge, by comparison with many other situations, we were in a very fortunate situation. Although for about 12 hours, I was actually sure we had lost our home. I got some false information online that convinced me at midnight the night of the fire that our home was burning at that moment. And that was really kind of an amazing experience just to kind of let go of all that in real time. Because when I left the house, we left pretty early, and I felt like we were being very conservative to leave. And then Annika picked our daughter up at school. It was quite clear the extent of the emergency. But when I was leaving the house, I took virtually nothing. I mean, I didn't really think it was. I guess I knew it was in the realm of possibility, but it did not seem likely that the fire was going to reach our house, our neighborhood, and much less seem to burn down half the city. I mean, it was just at a certain point the fire was such that why doesn't the entire city burn down? Clearly, we can't stop this. It's now in the flats of Los Angeles and in multiple places. And there was many cases of arson and it was just, it was Armageddon of some sort in Los angeles. But after 12 hours, I realized our house hadn't burned down. And then I recognized we were in a very lucky situation. Compared to many, many people, thousands of people.

[Dan Harris]

Yeah, it's a lucky situation, but it's incredibly stressful. And it really is a collision with the notion of impermanence.

[Sam Harris]

The Buddhists win. In situations like this, you realize that impermanence reigns. And it's all rented and it's all subject to entropy. There's nothing stable. Your body isn't stable, your health isn't stable, your relationships aren't stable, your career isn't stable, your house isn't. I mean, it's just constantly being shored up by effort to maintain it and improve it and diminish the chaos. But in a situation like this, you realize you just can't take anything for granted, really. I mean, what you can take for granted is it's all unstable and it can change at any moment.

[Dan Harris]

By what mechanism can one achieve some equanimity in the face of ceaseless change and entropy?

[Sam Harris]

Well, recognizing what you actually have in each moment, which is this moment of conscious experience and your ability to locate a feeling of well being in the midst of that or your failure to do that. What you're constantly experiencing, whether you think of it in these terms or not, is this alternation between some state of contraction where you're unhappy, grossly or subtly, and you're responding to the world as though you have a problem that you must solve. And sometimes you do have a problem you must solve. I mean, in this case, we had the problem of having to evacuate and having to find another place to stay, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not saying that you can just meditate your way blissfully out of a situation without having to solve problems. But the question is always, how unhappy do you have to be to respond to this challenge in the world? And most of us, most of the time, even after we learn to meditate, are by default far more contracted and unhappy and perseverative and ruminating, self lacerating, et cetera, et cetera, than we need to be. And there are ways to have this epiphany or provoke this epiphany every time you lose it. One is meditation, but one is just a kind of reframing that many people are familiar with now based on the growing popularity of stoicism. You can just recognize just how much worse things can be or could have been in this moment. And you can easily imagine a situation where, if you were in that situation, you would consider your prayers answered, if you could only be restored to the problem you are confronting right now. You don't have the cancer diagnosis or the amputated limb to come back to the fire. You didn't lose everything you own. You just now have a different problem to solve. And if you had been in one of those buckets, you'd be desperate to get out of it and into the one you're in now. There's a way to actually just kind of reset and feel okay. This is so much better than an adjacently possible alternative. And in this case, with the fire, it's so much better than what I thought I had the night of the fire, which was I was meditating on the evaporation of everything we had built. Honestly, I was surprisingly. Perhaps not surprisingly, but I was quite equanimous in the midst of that experience, thinking, at that moment, I'm lying in bed. I hadn't yet told the girls or Annika, but I had looked at my phone and I got information that convinced me it was around midnight or one in the morning, that, okay, our house is burning right now. Then I would just meditate on that phone. It was just like kind of one of those Buddhist graveyard meditations where you're just kind of meditating on the decay of the body or meditation on impermanence. There's something quite beautiful about it. Just to recognize that it would only be attachment to the idea of those things that would allow me to suffer in this moment.

[Dan Harris]

But non attachment, it makes sense. Absolutely makes sense. When you hear Sam Harris or Joseph Goldstein holding forth on it. And when your house is burning.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. With no one you love in it. I mean, that's an important consideration.

[Dan Harris]

Fair enough. But I think we feel some legitimate attachment to our possessions. Hopefully not too much, but I can make some defense of caring about the.

[Sam Harris]

State of your home, just to give some more color to that. In this case, when I was thinking about it, it wasn't so much the possessions, but it was also just the amount of sunk cost with respect to time and attention that they represent. It's like we had designed the house, we had built the house. That was a whole process. When you think about just the thousands of books you collected and I mean all the choices that created that material circumstance is there's so much time in retrospect when you imagine it all evaporating, you just think, wow, that was, you know, I spent a lot of time gathering all that stuff. Obviously at the end of our lives we're all going to have that analogous reflection. You know, we don't need a fire for that. The fire is burning in our bodies at this very moment. It's kind of a reset. It forces a reset of your priorities. I mean, what you have is your time and attention.

[Dan Harris]

Yeah. So just drilling into that moment, you're lying in bed, you've gotten this information, which thankfully turns out later to be wrong. I can hear two things thus far in this conversation and I can imagine a third that would at least a third that would help you manage it after 40 years of contemplative practice in your own life. I might be wrong about my math.

[Sam Harris]

On this, but that's exact actually. Exact math. Yeah.

[Dan Harris]

One is the stoic cognitive reframe of yeah, from a certain perspective. This bed was in a hospital and I had an IV drip of chemo. I would much rather be in the bed. I'm actually in contemplating the destruction of my home. The second is reverting back to your Buddhist training of yeah, well this is just a reminder of what is non negotiably true. Everything is impermanent. And just touching in on that truth of the universe can turn down the volume on hysteria. And then the third, and I can imagine there's possibly at least one more, would be mindfulness of your emotions. So you can allow the fear, the anger, the frustration to come. But if you're not re upping it compulsively, it does pass and you're able to make better decisions. On the other side of that, is that third hypothesis correct about what was happening in your mind in that moment?

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, well, actually in that moment I didn't have much fear or anger or anything to meditate on. There was much more equanimity. I was surprised at just how easy it was to let go of all our material possessions. Again, I'm an incredibly fortunate circumstance. Unlike many people, we had fire insurance. So I knew this isn't like you're losing all of your actual wealth because the fire is burning everything you own and nothing's insured. There are people in that situation too. There's something once you have this module installed in your brain once you've thought about impermanence as much as we have, and use that thought to motivate a practice which allows you to let go of thoughts of past and future, moment by moment. Mindfulness by another name. There's something almost perversely satisfying about having to deal with a moment like that. Honestly, I expect the same experience when I get some terrible health diagnosis. On some level, we're training for those moments where I more reliably fail. This is actually, on some level, much more consequential because it's much more frequent. I fail in all the little moments in life where it's just completely petty to which you should be psychologically impervious. But it is just annoying to have this thing happen, whatever it is. For me, it's something like I'm out in the world and I spill food on a shirt and I now have to spend like four hours out in the world with like tomato sauce on my shirt. That's the kind of thing that just jams a stick into every gear in my emotional brain. That's worse than believing that everything in my house, everything I own is burning up at that moment. Then I'm going to have to tell the girls the next morning that that happened. Honestly, in terms of my departure from what I consider a normative state of well being and kind of recognition of psychological freedom, the tomato sauce on the shirt is worse for me.

[Dan Harris]

I relate to that. I'll hazard a theory about why that is just for myself. It's the volume of the mindfulness bell. So when something huge is happening, the mindfulness bell is a gong. It gets rung, you wake up.

[Sam Harris]

This is it. Yeah. This is the dance.

[Dan Harris]

Exactly. Tomato sauce. At least for me, it just doesn't. It's not a wake up moment, right?

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. You stay in the dream of your dualistic reactivity to whatever's happening. And for me, I think the leading edge of practice is not so much the big moments, it's the little moments making the ordinary glitches in life more and more salient as mindfulness bells that they goad you to pay attention more reliably. Because I know the big moments are more consequential in many ways, but there's so many more of the other. I mean, that really is the tissue of our lives. So I'm constantly impressed by how much of the day I can spend in this kind of mediocre orbit of just reacting to little things and being just a complaining jerk. And sometimes in the privacy of my mind, and rather often to my wife and anyone else who will listen, or not listen, as the case may be. That's the missed opportunity. Right. I mean, because then you spent half your day that way.

[Dan Harris]

I'm with you, brother.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah.

[Dan Harris]

The next thing I wanted to talk about, which, again, is all under the aegis of this year, 2025, being an interesting and tumultuous one for you and many other people. The other thing that you're writing and talking a lot about is the Trump administration and the role of Elon Musk and et cetera, et cetera, your former friend. And you've pulled no punches that I'm aware of. My question is, this is not designed to get you to hold forth on your view of where we're going politically. More from a contemplative standpoint. What role is there for you, and what role would you recommend for others in compassion? Can you conjure compassion for the people politically with whom you disagree so strongly? And what would you recommend to the rest of us?

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, it's worth remembering that that is something that one can do. Right. Because it's not. The first order of business is to figure out how to feel compassion for the people who are, at least in my view, busily tearing up the framework of the liberal international order. I mean, there's so many wires being cut that the likelihood that they're going to cut the wrong ones seems almost certain. So there's a lot at stake, and there's a lot I'm worried about happening that may well happen, compassion or not. I view all of these people, even the people who are hardest to feel compassion for. I mean, these are just analogies, but it's like everyone's a kind of a force of nature. I'm not really personalizing this. It's like I'd be worried about a hurricane or the fire we just spoke about. I didn't like the fire, but I didn't spend any time feeling hatred for the fire. Right. Like, hatred was not the mode. I wasn't seething with hatred thinking about this fire. Right. And yet I was well aware of just how much destruction it was causing. I mean, Donald Trump is somebody who is at the center of all this. And as you know, I'm not a fan. I don't spend a lot of time hating Donald Trump as a person. I hate what I consider his influence to be very much in the way that I would hate the effects of a fire or a hurricane or some force of nature. That is, to personalize it would be an extra step and to think that it could be other than it is is an extra step that in some ways I might take with other people, but I'm definitely not taking with Trump. Trump is someone who's behaving exactly as I expect him to behave. I've never met him, but I feel like insofar as I can understand someone from the outside, I feel like I do understand him in a coarse grained way. The way I understand a fire or a hurricane. Like this is just going to keep fucking things up for predictable reasons. And we want to contain the damage. Right. I mean, I can be worried about possible outcomes. I can be outraged in some ways. I certainly can be outraged by the people who are enabling Trump. I mean, they're almost like the arsonists who are adding to the already existing fire. But on some level, when I look at someone like Trump, I do view him as kind of a malfunctioning robot. A wild animal has gotten loose in the house, and you've got a problem. But it's not one that I'm attributing authorship in some way where I'm spending a lot of time thinking he should be doing other than he's doing. He has free will. And you know my position on free will. I actually don't think anyone has it. And I think everyone is just kind of playing out the causes and conditions of their mental lives and their entanglement with the world. So it's like it's genes and environment and neurochemistry, and you can add karma if you want to add metaphysical categories from Buddhism, but it's like it's still all the universe doing its thing, but I still have a very clear preference for certain outcomes over other outcomes. And I think it's rational to have that preference. And it can be agitating. I know a lot of people would think it was certainly based on what I've said and written, that I hate Trump, that hatred is the emotion. And no, I would be happy to never think about him again. It's astonishing to me that he is a person who has occupied a decade of our lives collectively and has become this sort of black hole for human attention that we haven't been able to escape. Right. But it's impermanence once again will eventually reign here. There will come a day where we don't have to think about Trump anymore, but it's going to be a while.

[Dan Harris]

Just to echo something you said, I've had some pushback on social media when I talk about the value of compassion in this divisive Context, I think that's because people hear that word and think it's synonymous with approbation or giving them a hug or inviting them over for dinner or being a doormat. And I actually, I think of it as non hatred at the very least. And the hatred doesn't help you stand up or take action. What's called for now is for all of us to do our best to be useful in this situation. And I don't think the hatred is an asset in this regard. I think it actually is a reason why we talk about blind rage.

[Sam Harris]

Actually, with Trump, it's trickier to navigate psychologically and socially. Trump is such an odd object. He really is just a sui generis case of, again, this is me imagining what it's like to be him, because I really don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't suffer in the ways you would think any human being would suffer. He seems to me he's just missing something. He's missing a moral, a moral and emotional architecture somehow in his mind such that I just don't think he's processing relationships and life outcomes the way normal people are. If we could scan his brain and discover actually he doesn't suffer. His lack of connection to people and any sort of Buddhist imagining that he's on some level he's in pain is actually not true. There are people who don't feel pain, physical pain, and it's a very bad outcome because they bang their hands into the corner of a table or whatever and get an injury and they don't feel it. Maybe there are people who don't feel psychological pain in ways that would surprise us. I certainly wouldn't want to be him. I would feel very unlucky. So on that level, I feel that he's an appropriate object of compassion. And that's a very strange thing to say about the most powerful person on earth and one of the most famous people in human history. He's just not a normal person. Was that enough? Trump deranged him for you? Just when I thought I ran out of things to say about Donald Trump, you ask a question.

[Dan Harris]

Coming up, Sam talks about the illusion of free will and its relationship to compassion. Why decision dispensing with free will might be an antidote to hatred. Mindfulness as a tool for freedom. Dualistic versus non dual mindfulness, we go pretty deep on that one and much more. Hey, before we get started, I want.

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You invoked free will and I'm going to bring this back up with some hesitation because it could take over the rest of this conversation. You and I have talked. You probably don't remember it, but we've had many discussions about free will and I still don't understand your point fully. So let me just ask it from a very basic standpoint, just because I'm trying to represent the listener who might have heard you say, within the context of discussing compassion, that we don't have free will. So then if I've made the decision after listening to this conversation, to practice more non hatred in my navigation of the American political landscape, or if I, after listening to this conversation, make the affirmative Decision to download the Waking up [e-mail] 10%. If I make those decisions, are those predetermined, or do I have some agency and deserve therefore, some credit for having done the right thing?

[Sam Harris]

Well, it's not that they're predetermined. I mean, so there's some question about whether there's an important contribution of randomness in this clockwork universe or if it's deterministic or some combination of the two. I mean, at the scale at which we live. Right. I mean, leaving kind of quantum indeterminacy aside, at the scale of our living, there's obviously a lot of determinism, right? There's a lot of just one domino hitting the next, and they go down in predictable ways.

[Dan Harris]

Can I just jump in on that for a second? I apologize. So by determinism, you mean there's this incalculable gumbo of past causes and conditions that have led us to this moment, and we are acting out our past conditioning without much agency whatsoever?

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, yeah. Or just that even what you're calling agency is just more dominoes fallen. Right? So your preference for certain outcomes is what it is. We know you're going to choose the chocolate over the Vegemite because you hate Vegemite, right? So are you free to choose the Vegemite? Well, yeah, but you hate Vegemite. Did you pick that? No. Right. So you can always step back one domino prior and realize, okay, I didn't choose that. This landscape upon which my choices seem to be emerging and becoming effective is already built for me by prior causes. And these causes are genetic and environmental, and that's really the totality of causes materially, in the case of a human being who's deciding things. If you want to add something ethereal to that, a soul or a mind that is in some way divorceable from the workings of the brain, that's fine. But again, you didn't create those things either. The you that is the experiencer didn't pick your soul. You can't account for the fact that you don't have the soul of a psychopath or the soul of somebody who's crazy enough to prefer Vegemite over chocolate. You have the causes and conditions you have in this moment, mental and physical, locked and loaded, ready to go. And now you're confronted with the next apparent choice. And you will do what you will do. 99 times out of 100, you make the decision one way, but one time out of 100, you decide to just do something new, do something out of Character like, oh, I'm going to go for the Vegemite now, just because Sam said I wouldn't Even that maneuver is coming out of something that you can't inspect, that you didn't create, that is a prior condition, some state of your to bring it back to its material antecedents. Just some state of curious neurochemistry in your brain in that moment, which again, you didn't author yet we know it is the effective thing that is leading to this one in a hundred choice in this case. So, yeah, if our conversation has an effect on a listener and they want to do something as a result or not, they're not choosing that outcome. If I say something persuasive and someone is persuaded by it, they're not choosing to be persuaded. If I say something that is interesting and someone finds it interesting, they're not choosing to find it interesting. If I say something that's deadly boring or confusing or what, however it strikes the listener, the listener hasn't chosen to have that reaction. And if they decided to say, oh well, fuck you, I'm going to choose a different reaction right now. Samuel Johnson's famous retort to philosophical idealism, like he just kicked a stone and said, I refute him. Thusly, he was refuting the idealism of Bishop Barclay. That's not really an adequate response. Right, because that too is subsumed by this same analysis.

[Dan Harris]

I mean, all of that actually does make sense to me. I am relentlessly practical though, and I'm always thinking about what, especially on the part of the listener, what does this have to do with my lived experience and improving my life? And so if free will is, as you describe it, an illusion, and you make a very convincing case, you are the proprietor of an app that purports to be a kind of workout for the brain and the mind. We are sitting here talking about the power of cultivating non hatred in the face of what many people find to be outrageous and equanimity in the face of non negotiable impermanence and entropy. Is there no free will in any of that? That seems like affirmative decisions to train the mind and the heart in order to get better at life.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, yeah, well, let me answer that question in a second. But the low hanging fruit in your question is seeing things this way. But dispensing with the belief in free will is a direct antidote to hatred. Because the moment you see people acting out, they're just helplessly acting out the prior causes and conditions of their mind streams. You do view Them like you'd view a fire or a hurricane or a wild animal. They can't do even though you wish they would do otherwise, they can't do otherwise on some basic level, or they couldn't do otherwise until that moment. The obvious difference between a person and a fire is some people you can reason with, some people you can intrude upon their behavior with ideas, with conversation, or just with other inducements. I mean, with incentives, you can punish them, you can fine them, you can threaten them with prisoners. People can be influenced in the way that forces of nature can't. And that's, on some level, one of the things that makes us human. I mean, that's how we're different from wild animals. But yet those influences are still more mechanism. Whether or not the conversation is going to work is still left to this mix of causes and conditions, right? But I do find it to be, when I put this lens on my view of human events, hatred is the first thing that drops out. Hatred makes no sense, even for the worst person doing the worst thing directly to me. Again, the moment I think in these terms, now I'm dealing with a grizzly bear. On some level, it's like, okay, you can fear a grizzly bear, you can run away, you can kill a grizzly bear, all kinds of things that are relevant to that emergency. But hatred is not one of those things. It just makes no sense to hate a grizzly bear no matter what it's doing. Because a grizzly bear, of course, is going to act like a grizzly bear. But in terms of deciding to meditate or deliberately reminding yourself to pay attention, that seems like I often talk about it in these terms. It gives you a degree of freedom that you wouldn't otherwise have. So the moment you can be mindful, you have this superpower where on some level you can decide, well, do I want to stay angry right now, or is anger actually not useful? And can I just decide to get off the ride right now? When you have a practice, you can actually do that. But again, earlier in this conversation, we were talking about all these moments in life that are not functioning like mindfulness alarms, sufficient to remind us to pay attention. It's always mysterious what causes you to wake up in the midst of your life. You're going along and you're going along not noticing much of anything, just reacting to everything. You're lost in thought, and then a moment of mindfulness comes online and you recognize, okay, well, a thought's a thought and you just let it pass away. And you see that the emotion that it was connected to is this separate pattern of energy in the body. And you notice that it's changing, and that gives you this distance from just the mere reactivity. And it gives you an opportunity to deliberately pay attention to something else or to continue to pay attention just to the flow of your experience. And to feel the freedom in that, to feel the distance from the reactivity, in this case, anger. To notice that the mind is a wider space in which anger is appearing. There's more to you than just this contraction. The moment you notice that the behavioral imperative, the need to sound angry and look angry and act angry, that relaxes. And so all of a sudden you have this choice that you wouldn't otherwise have had. You can decide, okay, maybe I'm not going to say that thing that's just going to derange my relationship with this person, or maybe I'm not going to honk at the driver ahead of me because I'm pissed off. So there's this degree of freedom that opens up based on having that practice. But again, the occurrence of that remembering or that salience or that recognition of the character of experience in that moment is still mysterious. You didn't author that moment of recognition. It just came. It's like a sound. It's a visitation on your mind stream. It's a change that you didn't author. And yet it follows causally from things that happened before. All the practice you did, before all the books you read, before all the conversations like this you had before. The mechanics of remembering to be mindful that you have built into your life is the thing that is going to make you more mindful in the future. So the causality is demonstrably true. I mean, we just know that if you hit your hand with a hammer, your hand's going to be injured and you'll have pain in your hand tomorrow. Mindfulness is just as causally integrated, actually, in your physical body as all that. On some level, the practice of mindfulness, the propensity to remember to be mindful, is just a physical change that has been introduced in your brain at some point in the past. And it's getting ramified the more you do it. But again, the sense that there's this separable you from that, is the locus of an ethereal freedom of will that is something other than the causal mechanism of everything else and somehow loosely integrated with it. It's like riding around in the pineal gland or somewhere in the brain where it's pulling these very gossamer levers and Biasing experience one way or the other while not itself being just merely part of the causal clockwork. There's just no reason to believe in the existence of such a thing.

[Dan Harris]

Right? There's no will that's free from the universe, that's free from again, this ocean of causes and conditions that we're all riding on at any given moment. But just on a very practical level, free will may be an illusion for the listener. What they need to know is ride what feels like your agency to make good decisions to improve the quality of your life that may actually lead you to a visceral experience of the illusion of the self and free will.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, I would say that it's totally appropriate and natural to think in terms of growing more free to live the way you want to live the more you practice. Because so much of our failure to be happy is not a matter of our not knowing how to be happy on some level. It's a failure to take our own advice on some level. It's very easy to give other people advice. If your friend's unhappy and he comes to you with like, he puts the disorder of his life in front of you, right? His relationships, his career, his habitual ways of responding to stress, his diet, his exercise, all of it. It would take you five minutes to give him very sound, wise, actionable advice that if he could only follow it would materially improve his life. It's not to say that you could solve anyone's problems perfectly, but the best practices are so obvious. 90% of the time we know exactly what's good for us. We know the thing that we could do that we wouldn't regret, and we know the thing that we could do that we will regret. So it's not a mystery and we have the information. But so much of our day to day frustration with ourselves and our lives and just kind of the sense of inadequacy and the sense this day was not nearly as good as it should have been is a result of our failure to do what we know we wanted to do anyway, right moment to moment. It's a failure to have made our minds our friends. We treat ourselves. Again, I'm using language that can't really be justified because there's not many of us in there. But on some level we live in relationship to ourselves and we treat ourselves in ways that we would never treat a friend. You would never talk to your friend the way you talk to yourself about the thing that just happened or the thing that you just did. So practice is a matter of becoming Your own wise, compassionate best friend. More and more of the time, you're riding shotgun with yourself and always giving good advice and putting your hand on the wheel in a way that actually solves the problem rather than just makes it more excruciating. It's appropriate to think of all of that as becoming freer, being granted more choice, a greater range of choices in each moment. You're not condemned to be the schmuck you were a moment ago. If you can practice, if you can't practice, the half life of schmuckery will be whatever it is in your case. And maybe you'll get diverted by an ice cream cone or something else will happen and you'll have a different experience. But if you have no perspective on the flow of thought as just an appearance in your consciousness, if you've never seen an alternative, but to be identified with the next thought that arises, if you don't know anything about meditation, what I just said makes absolutely no sense. What does it mean to be identified with a thought? What? Mindfulness is a practice that allows you to break that spell of identification. It's very much analogous to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing it's a dream. If you're asleep and dreaming, leaving lucid dreams aside, you don't know you're dreaming. You are condemned to experience whatever your imagination is going to have foist on you for that period, Right? Like you're going to meet whoever you're going to meet. They're going to be as scary or as desirable or as whatever as they're going to be. You're going to have whatever reaction you're going to have. You're going to be completely psychotic for this period because you don't know you're dreaming like you're safely in bed. And you simply don't know that you have no reality testing going on at all in your mind. I mean, it really is. If you map it into the waking state, it's pure psychosis. Every time you're lost in thought, identified with thought, thinking about the conversation you're about to have, about what you're anxious, or the thing that's going to happen tomorrow that you're not looking forward to, or the thing that happened yesterday that you regret every time you are just thinking that you're the person just in the grip of that thought, it's very close to being asleep and dreaming without knowing that you're dreaming. And so this notion of waking up, we called the app Waking up because it's more than an analogy, obviously, It's a traditional reference to Buddhism and every other contemplative path that has had something like meditation at the heart of it. I mean, the Buddha was the Awakened One. I mean, it's like the notion of waking up from the dream of normal life is very direct. It's not wrong to think of all of this in terms of getting more freedom to live the way you want to live, to pay attention to what you want to pay attention to, to have the experience you want. And yet at the core of this practice and this path, there's an insight that can seem to subvert all of that, but it subverts it in a very beautiful and happiness producing way, which is there's no you doing this. There's no separate self. There's no rider on the horse of consciousness pulling the reins and making these choices. There's just experience, there's just the flow of experience. And on some level, all of this is the universe waking up where you are. The universe is aware of itself in your case, and you're not separate from it. And the sense that you are separate from it is another instance of what it's like to not recognize a thought as a thought.

[Dan Harris]

You've really beautifully articulated the fact that you're sort of riding the flawed horse of ego all the way to seeing that the ego or the sense of I doesn't exist in the first place. We have now arrived at a point in this conversation that we arrive at every time we have a conversation, which is this sense that a lot of people find deeply counterintuitive, that the self is an illusion, which you're arguing, in many contemplative traditions argue is not only true but also deeply helpful. And on the Waking up app, you, in taking your introduction course, you start off with very traditional mindfulness teaching. It's I, Dan, am watching my breath coming to go in meditation. And then over the course of this four week introduction, you start to switch things so that we're investigating what is this sense of I, Dan, that's watching this breath? For those of us who haven't had a chance to take the course yet, are there any simple instructions that would allow us to maybe just get a glimpse into this illusion so that we have some sense of what the fuck you're talking about?

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, well, I mean, it can be frustrating for people. So there's a very straightforward, easily understood and not at all, at least in principle, frustrating version of the path. The ordinary, what I call dualistic mindfulness practice is very easy to teach. It's Very easy to learn. It can be frustrating to practice because your mind is out of control, right? You try to meditate and you get lost in thought and then five minutes later you remember you were supposed to be meditating and you come back to the breath. But there's nothing paradoxical about it. You understand your mind's out of control. You're now training attention on an object of meditation like the breath. And eventually you can pay attention to anything, sounds and sensations and moods and even thoughts themselves. But it's a practice. It's like learning the piano. Your first day on the piano, you understand you don't know how to play the thing. And it's going to take many, many hours and lots of repetitions to learn how to do it. It's a very kind of linear, progressive path. You start in ignorance and you gradually accumulate skill and knowledge. You can see and feel and hear the consequences of all that. And so it is with meditation. You can build concentration, you can build, become a more seasoned student of your own mind and notice progress again. There's nothing strange and hard to understand about that whole process. It can take longer than you want, it can be harder than you want. You may feel like you don't have the natural talent for it that you wish you had. Again, you can map this onto piano or sports or anything else. These are all things you learn. And gradually, sometimes all too gradually, very, very slowly and with great effort, you get better. But the real truth of this path, I mean, the thing you really ultimately wake up to, the thing you get glimpses of, even dualistically along the way, subverts all of that. Because unlike piano and unlike sports and unlike anything else, you learn the thing you are becoming acquainted with in meditation. The goal of the practice, the thing you're trying to recognize and, and ultimately never lose sight of, is already here, right? It's already the nature of your mind. It's already what consciousness is like. Prior to your identification with thought. It can seem dualistically that you're in the self improvement business. We now have a practice very much analogous to physical exercise. You start out, you're not in shape, you go to the gym and you meet a trainer. And now there's a path by which you could actually get to be in shape and even in great shape. And you can see the posters on the walls of all the people who got there before you, who just are in fantastic shape. And so there's no illusion. However hard it is, it's possible to get there. And so it is with the Mind, you can become, if not the Buddha, something very much like the Buddha, right? You can become free. You just have to gradually train your mind. But the thing is, the punchline of this is that it really isn't this progressive thing. In the end, there's this reality to the mind. Consciousness is a certain way, and meditation is recognizing it to be that way. A really successful moment of meditation is just a recognition of what is already the case. So there is a paradox here. You're not actually going anywhere. You're not schlepping up to the top of the mountain. You're not really at the base of the mountain, and the peak isn't really far away. And there isn't really a path from here to there. And on some level, if you think about it in those terms, you can never get from here to there. Thinking about it in those dualistic terms in more and more subtle ways becomes the impediment to actually making progress. And the progress is to recognize that the path is already accomplished in this moment, that the goal that you would otherwise seek is not only available now, it is the thing that would be doing the seeking. It is what you are in this moment. I mean, it is the nature of your mind. It is what consciousness is in this moment. Consciousness is already free of an ego. It's not like there's an ego, really, and you somehow get rid of it through diligent practice. No diligent practice or some combination of happy accidents will get you to recognize that the ego is an illusion, right? And to say that it's an illusion is to say that it's not actually here in the way that it seems to be. So it's not a matter of getting rid of it. That's where all of this becomes harder to understand. But it's nonetheless true. And the promise of this paradox is that you're actually not far away from your goal. The sense that you might be condemned to just never get there. Effectively, that will be the case for some people, obviously. But we don't stand in relation to this spiritual insight in quite the same place that we might be with respect to these other things I just mentioned, like piano. For someone like myself, it would be totally rational for me to wonder, well, even if I just devoted my life to playing the piano, maybe I just won't be able to play it. We'll play it so badly. It will be objectively true to say, well, that was a waste of your time. You had so little aptitude for that project that you just. You basically wasted your Life trying to do something that would be very easy for somebody else, but it's just. It was going to be insuperably hard for you. Right. That's my, you know, not having tried the piano, but that would be a fair bet for my own musical aptitude. Again, this is the nature of your mind already. There's already no ego in the center of your experience, and the sense that there is one is a misperception. And meditation is the process, seemingly gradual in the beginning, but in some sense not even a process in the end by which that becomes more and more obvious. And I think everyone is in that condition whether they know it or not. You can make a lot of progress very, very quickly, which is to say you can suddenly become a great pianist every time you sit down at the piano, at this piano. It is rational to believe I might actually just blast into Rachmaninoff today. Yesterday, I didn't even know what the notes were. But the full performance is, in fact possible in principle. Right now, we all have different spiritual biographies here. But the step change in practice that many people have experienced carries with it the insight that, oh, this could have happened a long time ago. There was no good reason it took this long. If waking up is unusual as a curriculum, I think this piece is unusual from the very beginning. I'm trying to communicate the fact that this paradoxically close, already accomplished reality to this whole project is there from the very beginning. This may seem hard, and it may in fact be hard for most people most of the time, but you can get to the punchline far sooner than you would expect. And in the end, there's no good reason why it didn't happen sooner.

[Dan Harris]

Much more with Sam Harris coming up right after this. This show is sponsored by Better Help.

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What makes waking up unique is that you are front loading with the punchline and, and arguing that instead of this bottom up process of climbing arduously, this mountain of dualistic mindfulness, I'm, I'm going to grit my teeth and, you know, with mad dog intensity and try to be aware of every breath to the best of my ability that actually what you're looking for, this insight that we're looking for is close at hand. You really, I think, quite skillfully get us there. Although as you were saying before we started rolling, sometimes there's a moment in the intro course when people, you know, revolt a little bit because you're asking us to turn our attention back at, oh, who's the self that's feeling the breath? So I guess my question is kind of a repetition of the question I asked earlier for the listener. Now, what is the mental move we can make that might get us in the neighborhood of this maddeningly close realization that we should have had years ago?

[Sam Harris]

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.

[Dan Harris]

Let me just jump in on that for a second. Let's take a moment of anger or a moment of spaghetti sauce on the shirt or whatever that might be setting.

[Sam Harris]

The bar too high.

[Dan Harris]

Dualistic mindfulness. So the way most of us experience mindfulness, which is, oh, okay, I can see this has happened, I can notice that I'm angry. Maybe I can summon some investigative powers like, oh, I can see that anger isn't a monolithic thing, it's a compound. It consists of buzzing in my chest, self righteous thoughts, years turning red, whatever, and in that putting of anger through a cheese grater, we're less owned by it. What's the difference between that dualistic mindfulness, I am doing all of that, and a non dual mindfulness where we're having the same anger. What is the increase in freedom if we're going from dualistic mindfulness to non dualistic mindfulness? Mindfulness?

[Sam Harris]

Well, the first thing to say is that Even the dualistic mindfulness is a very important stage and an amazing thing to have accomplished. And it's all too rare in this world. I mean, most people out there don't have this practice and would benefit from it. You're in a very rarefied position. Just to be practicing and to know the difference between being lost in thought and identified with thought, and just to be able to get off the ride for a few moments is an enormous change in one's capacity to be happy and to not suffer unnecessarily, which is so much of the real antithesis to being happy in our lives. You're continually waking up to the fact that you're suffering in a way that simply not needed. It's like it's not adding anything, it's not giving you a capacity to do anything different. It's just extra pain. But the difference is with dualistic mindfulness, certainly in the beginning and even for the longest time, even what we call dualistic mindfulness, much of it isn't even mindfulness. On some level, it's a stratagem to change your experience, right? To make that concrete, you feel anxious and you don't like feeling anxious. And one of the reasons why you've learned to meditate is the promise that you'll feel less anxious if you actually get good enough at this practice and you can use it as an antidote to anxiety. That's part of the reason why you're playing this game to begin with, is you don't like anxiety and you want less of it, right? That contains within it the germ of aversion that is going to ride along with you for the longest time, which is itself a corruption of the whole project of becoming mindful. Because mindfulness is dualistic. Mindfulness by definition, just from the Buddhist Abhidhamma side of it, is not compatible with aversion. It is a state of non aversion. You really need to be just accepting of experience in order to successfully be mindfully paying attention to it. So the game, and it really is this continually fascinating game of noticing counterfeits to mindfulness, continually catching yourself paying attention to experience in order to change it. However covertly you think you're just being open and accepting and mindful, but what you're really doing is subtly pushing away your experience. You're trying to be less anxious. You're waiting for the anxiety to disappear or the anger. Whatever it is that covert agenda is in fact corrupting to the practice. It is itself a very standard way of just practicing aversion or greed or whatever, depending on the context or ignorance or all three. You're practicing the core kind of faults that mindfulness is the remedy for. And you're not noticing that. And you're calling it mindfulness. That's the predicament that many of us are in a lot of the time as meditators. We're trying to pay attention, we are paying attention. I'll be damned if I'm not paying attention. But there's competing thoughts and you're not noticing them. And then they'll. Then you notice a thought, you let go of it. Fuck, I was supposed to be paying attention. Now you're back to the breath and there's a pain in the knee and I'm a little anxious about this thing I have to do later. Yesterday the meditation felt really good. And I'm not even getting a good meditation. It's just been 20 minutes. I've got 15 more minutes and I haven't really sunk into the meditation yet. Okay, now I'm really going to try. And what happens to almost any meditator is there are certain states of experience that you associate with good meditation, successful meditation, feelings of calm and tranquility and rapture and bliss. If you've gone on retreat and gotten any level of concentration, you've probably touched really kind of drug like experiences with meditation, it really feels good to be concentrated. And the moment, the first time that happens to you on a retreat or sometimes it'll happen before retreat. If one has any capacity for concentration, the pleasure of a concentrated mind is just a pure drug experience. I've never taken heroin, but I can imagine heroin's probably a lot like that. I mean, I've had propofol or whatever. So yeah, it's like it has this anesthetic drug like Blissful. The body's disappearing. Oh, the body's gone. There's just awareness. It's fantastic, right? But it's temporary. Causes and conditions bring it about. When causes and conditions change, it disappears. I mean, the bell rings, it's time for tea. They don't have the tea you wanted. Where the fuck. How did they run out of tea? I'm paying good money to be on this retreat and they don't have any black tea. That's you in that next moment. And five minutes ago you were Johnny Bliss, who didn't have a body, right? There's something deeper or paradoxically even just more on the surface to recognize, which is consciousness already doesn't have a center. There's no you in the middle of it doing any of these things, noticing any of these things. And so to come back to why dualistic mindfulness is different from non dual mindfulness, dualistic mindfulness always allows for this corruption of having this agenda to improve experience. I didn't really notice it at the time, but I was paying attention so that I would feel less anxious. Of course I wanted to feel less anxious. I mean, why am I doing this in the first. There's a sort of Gordian knot there that can't be untied, but it just has to be cut. You're going to have an agenda, at least from time to time and in many moments that you can't recognize. Unless you can actually just arrive at the destination in this next moment, unless your mindfulness begins to feel like freedom, actual freedom, it's always going to seem like this remedial antidote to a problem that really exists. The anxiety is really here. It's really a problem. Even though I know it's not supposed to be a problem because it's just something I can be mindful of. I'm being mindful of it, but still sort of waiting for it to disappear. Maybe it's just disappearing a little bit now and that's progress, that's better. And I'm sort of liking that direction this is going. And so that's a little greed. And like that machinery, it's very hard to. It's not impossible. I mean, you can really, you can get to a place of dualistic equanimity, there's no question. But being able to practice in a non dual way allows you just to cut through that with each moment of mindfulness, which is in this moment even the energy of anxiety has no center. There's no me over here with the problem anymore. It's like free fall. For a moment there, there's just. Okay, there's just no gravity. Like you're now falling at 1,000 miles an hour. Through the anxiety, there was structure. It was really me pressed against the wall here for a moment, dualistically trying to be a quantumist with all of this. But the non dual practice just. You realize there's no wall. There's nothing at your back. You just turn around and it's just open and nothing needs to have changed. And so from my point of view, it's only in non dual practice that you can honestly say a moment of mindfulness is a moment of freedom. Whatever the character of the experience, it's no longer a practice. You're not actually meditating on anything. You're just recognizing the way consciousness is in waking up. And it's not just me, it's other teachers in there as well. Most of us are teaching dualistic mindfulness, all the while encouraging a non dual view of it along the way and trying to provoke that insight into non duality at the soonest opportunity and trying to keep one foot on either side of this thing, which is to keep conserving that iterative, incremental, linear, non paradoxical message of like just keep paying attention to the breath, just come back to the breath, come back to sounds and notice impermanence. I mean, impermanence is easy. There's nothing paradoxical about impermanence, right? Everything that arises, passes away. Every thought, every emotion, every sensation. There's a radical freedom in just noticing that, right? I mean, just noticing that every time you've ever been angry before, it's always disappeared, just like nothing is permanent. And to notice that on a more microscopic level, even in the presence of anger in this moment, you notice that it's not even just one thing, it's a composite of things. And that all these things are changing, all the sensations are changing, it's a cloud of sensation. You keep all of that going. But I'm still trying to remind people that on this other side there's this paradoxical message and opportunity which is you can wake up from the dream that any of this is a project, any of this is a problem that has to be solved.

[Dan Harris]

I spent many years building a competitor app and in that time notwithstanding, our friendship never really dove too deeply into waking up, but have, now that I don't have that app anymore, have now spent a lot of time on waking up. And you execute what you just described very well. You and the other teachers of yeah, you're getting a lot of what most of us would recognize as like a kind of garden variety mindfulness with a consistent gentle push toward.

Oh yeah, actually just see if you.

Can notice what it's like when you look for what's noticing everything. My sense in my practice, and you tell me if you disagree with this, you want to knock on this door consistently, but without a lot of sweatiness. For some of us, it can take a minute to see this thing you're pointing to and it can be maddening because what you're describing sounds great. And then I look for the looker and I don't even know what the fuck you're talking about. But my experience with this, which dates back to 10, 15 years ago when you recommended I read on having no head And I brought it with me on a retreat when you're not supposed to read, but I was reading it anyway, and I just started it gently once in a while, looking for my head in the midst of my. My regular meditation practice. And every once in a while, it's much more on the surface and readily available than you would think. It's not something that comes after excavation. It's just kind of like looking in the right way with the right attitude. You just see, yeah, this head is a concept. Right now, all that's left is the world. And again, I know that's frustrating for some people to hear, but my recommendation, which I'm floating to you to see if you agree, is just play with it. Play with it consistently over time. Don't get too worked up about it. And eventually you might see something interesting.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. And also, walking meditation with eyes open is a very good way to do it.

[Dan Harris]

Huge. We were talking about this before we started rolling. For me, I do a lot of walking meditation as an insomniac. It's my way to get myself ready for bed. And if I can't sleep in the middle of the night, I'll get back up and do it again. Just asking myself as I'm walking, what is knowing all of this? And who's even asking this fucking question?

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dan Harris]

Gets me right into this sense of, oh, yeah. There's this yawning chasm of knowing here. I can't claim it as my own. In fact, the thoughts of being a self are appearing within that. Within that space. But for something. There's something about having the eyes open that makes that easier. And I know you emphasize that on the app.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. So this can be confusing for people because they associate meditation with eyes closed because it just seems like it's more restful. Many people have a preference for closing their eyes. It's just often taught that way that if you're going to focus on the breath or sounds, all that gets heightened when you close your eyes. But there's a reason why. I think there's a reason why the Dzogchen teachings emphasize eyes open practice when they're targeting this non dual insight. And it's because so much of our sense of self versus other in social space, the sense that you're in relationship to another person or just you're differentiating yourself from the physical environment, so much of that is a visually referenced impression. The effect of vision is so strong that you can actually get very artificial laboratory conditions. You can get what's called a body swapping. Illusion, like if we put a headset on. On your head and one on my head, where my eyes get the input from your goggles and your eyes get the input from my goggles, and then we stand looking at each other, we can get the impression of being in the other's body. Our sense of being in the world is just so overwhelmingly a visual sense most of the time. So that when you recognize non duality with eyes open, it can be that much more vivid. The shift from duality to non duality can be much more salient with eyes open, whereas with eyes closed, you can do it with eyes closed. And once you've learned how to do it with eyes open, it becomes easier to do it with eyes closed. But there's something much more subtle about it because when you close your eyes, you're just kind of. There's just a sense of just being inside, kind of interior. And the sense of subject object dualism is less pronounced. But when you're looking at the world of objects with eyes open, it's like there's a glass over here. I'm reaching for it, I'm picking it up. It's obvious that this is a dualistic occasion. And so when I drop the dualism, it's just a very clear shift. Douglas Harding noticed that, and he used this on having no head paradigm. But with walking meditation, you can do a nice thing because you're moving through space. You can notice that the default sense of subjectivity is that you, you're over here, you're in your head, moving through the world of objects. So as you walk, you are moving toward static objects. If you're walking toward a tree, you are this locus of consciousness that is moving toward the tree. But you can also flip that and just feel like you're not moving on some level, even while you're walking. And everything's just moving toward you. Like you're just this still point and everything's coming toward you. And you can toggle between those two impressions that you're moving through space or that everything is moving toward you. And you can do this even more easily. On some level, if you're like a passenger in a car, like you're looking out the windshield, you can get the sense that you're hurtling through space and there's the world is rushing by, or you're still and just the world is rushing toward you. You can toggle between those two sensations. And they're kind of equivalent, but they're different. It's almost like a necker cube where one side pops out and the other side it reverses. And it's that bistable percept. But in toggling between those two senses of you moving through space and just space rushing toward you, you're actually kind of passing through the fulcrum of this non dual inside of having no head. The thing you're doing to toggle between those two is kind of very quickly passing over the still point, which when you recognize it on some level, motion is a concept for that moment. Everything is just in its own place. There's just the world, there's not you moving through it. There's no place from which you're the thing that's moving toward the static objects. And when you reverse it, there's no place toward which things the movie of the world can be rushing. Or it's like there's nothing to reverse. Right. The point you're passing through is just everything is in its own place. And there's kind of an inscrutable openness and suchness and there's no two sides, there's no, you're not over here with everything else out there. There's just everything, there's just the world. But walking meditation or eyes open, moving. I hesitate to say do it while driving because when you're actually at the wheel, you have to have other things to pay attention to. But as a passenger, you can play with this with open eyes and yeah, it's a useful way of getting this insight.

[Dan Harris]

Before I let you go, my two habitual final questions. One, is is there something you were hoping to talk about that we didn't?

[Sam Harris]

I don't think so. I think we covered a lot of many sides of this.

[Dan Harris]

Yep. Finally, can you just say more about Waking up and what went into creating it and why you recommend it?

[Sam Harris]

I feel like an incredibly fortunate beneficiary of this change in technology. So I wrote a book called Waking up, which came out in 2014. The same kind of content in it. It was my best effort to present these ideas in book form. But audio is just so much better as a vehicle for teaching this practice and the concepts and more importantly, guiding people in a moment to moment meditation practice. In my view, it's the perfect technology to do it. And I don't think video adds anything important to it. I mean, video is obviously useful for its own reasons, but in terms of actual meditation instruction, I just think audio is king. It's much more intimate. You don't have to be looking at anything in order to receive it. I mean, so you can be listening as you walk, or you can be listening with eyes closed. It's just the perfect technology for it. So we kind of stumbled upon the opportunity to build an app. Right. I mean, this was just not a thing before. I'm not sure which year I mean, we had. Because the iPhone came out in 2007.

[Dan Harris]

Yeah, seven.

[Sam Harris]

But the app ecosystem gradually got built out there. But it just. After I wrote the book, I saw an opportunity to create this audio version of it, which is just, in my view, so much better than a book ever could be. So there's the introductory course, which is my best effort to lead someone from the very first experience of meditation through everything we've been talking about. And then there's what's called the daily meditation, which is just me kind of continuing in that vein. But then there's just many other teachers and practices now in the app and different categories of content. There's the practice category, which has me and many other teachers teaching guided meditations. And then there are. There's the theory category, which is much more of a discussion along the lines we've been having here. Just how can we understand the practice in the context of just various concepts we have about psychology or philosophy or a scientific understanding of what it is to be a person in a world or politics or anything else? And then there's a life track now, which we're in many other topics, even beyond meditation and enlightenment, or any of the other things we've been talking about are now available to talk about. So you got someone like Oliver Berkman teaching time management or the illusion of time management in his own inimitable way. The app is well in the process of outgrowing any of my contributions to it. There's just a lot in there. Cognitive behavioral therapy and stoicism and many things that are not mindfulness practice per se, or meditation per se.

[Dan Harris]

And now, of course, with me, you and Joseph Goldstein.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, three of us did this mini retreat, or I had this brilliant idea that you and Joseph should do a mini retreat and have conversations to extract his wisdom. And then I realized, why would I miss this retreat? So the three of us had a mini retreat in Maine, and we'll be. If we haven't released them yet, when you release this, that audio will soon be on the app.

[Dan Harris]

By the time this is released, the Eightfold Path course that we recorded with Joseph will be on the app, and the first of the four parts will have played on this podcast feed.

[Sam Harris]

Nice. Yeah. Well, I'm just listening to that now. And that was a Lot of fun. We had a lot of laughs.

[Dan Harris]

Yes. More fun than one would think talking about Buddhism would be.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, we're doing the final edit now, but I mean, there's very little being cut out. So I think that's eight hours of conversation with you, me and Joseph.

[Dan Harris]

It was a good time, as was this. Thank you for making time.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, great to see you. Yeah, lots of fun.

[Dan Harris]

Thanks again to Sam Harris. Always love talking to him. Just a reminder, if you want to check out the Waking up app, which I heartily recommend, you can sign up at Waking Up. That's T E N P E R C e n t wakingup.com 10% As I mentioned earlier, I put a link in the show notes. And just a reminder, if you buy a subscription via that URL, you'll get 30 days free. And you will be doing me and my team a solid because we will.

Get a portion of any proceeds from.

The subscriptions that are generated through that link. And as I said earlier, if money's an issue, don't worry about it. You can go to the Waking up website and ask for a scholarship. That's the same policy I have [e-mail]. if you can't afford it, we'll hook you up. Before I go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

Laura.

Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands.

Wrote our theme.

[Tara Anderson]

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