Essentials: Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind | Dr. Sam Harris

Summary

Huberman Lab Essentials: Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind | Dr. Sam Harris
Date: July 23, 2026
Host: Andrew Huberman
Guest: Dr. Sam Harris

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Episode Overview

This episode of Huberman Lab Essentials features Dr. Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, and meditation teacher, in a wide-ranging conversation with Andrew Huberman. The discussion centers on the nature of the self, the mechanics and benefits of meditation, how meditation can deepen self-awareness and unlock psychological freedom, and the interplay between meditation and psychedelics. The dialogue also explores practical tools for cultivating mindfulness and examining consciousness, with a focus on actionable advice and philosophical insights.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Nature of Self and Consciousness

What is the "self"? Is it real or an illusion?

• Harris explains that the "self" most people feel—an internal subject behind the eyes and separate from experience—is an illusion or, at best, a psychological construct.
  • Quote:

    "I would want to argue that it actually is just a proper illusion...the sense that there is a subject interior to experience in addition to experience." – Sam Harris [00:32]

• Most people experience life as if they're a "passenger inside their body," separating themselves from their experiences, which meditation helps to deconstruct.
• The core of meditation is not simply about reducing stress or increasing focus (though these are benefits), but about investigating and ultimately seeing through the illusion of a separate self.
  • Quote:

    "The real purpose of meditation and its real promise is...if you look for this thing you're calling 'I'...you won't find that thing...there’s a host of benefits that follow from that discovery which are quite a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits." – Sam Harris [02:14]

2. Meditation and Direct Experience

Meditation as a Tool to Investigate Consciousness

• Meditation helps us recognize that the running internal commentary (“self-talk”) is not the sum of our being—often, we're simply "thinking without knowing that you're thinking."
• Harris distinguishes between changing the contents of consciousness (e.g., cultivating calm, reducing anxiety) and recognizing the nature of consciousness itself (“the chewy center of the Tootsie Pop").
  • Quote:

    "The real wisdom...of meditation...is a recognition of what consciousness itself is always already like, regardless of the contents and the changes in contents." – Sam Harris [03:12]

• Moments of "flow" in athletics, art, or intense experiences illustrate what it’s like to lose the sense of separateness between self and experience, which meditation can help generalize beyond rare moments.

Key Insight:

• True liberation comes from dissolving the dualism between observer and observed; you are not on the "riverbank" watching your experience but are, fundamentally, the river itself.
  • Quote:

    "But the truth is you are the river. There's a process by which you would eventually recognize that there's no distance between you and your experience." – Sam Harris [07:02]

3. Internal Chatter, Attention, and Mindfulness

Attention as the Basis for Mindfulness

• Most people cannot pay full attention to any object or sensation for even 30 seconds without being distracted by internal dialogue.
  • Quote:

    "If we just put a stopwatch on this table...for the next 30 seconds, just pay attention...without getting lost in thought...no one would be able to do it...if your life depended on it." – Sam Harris [14:55]

• Meditation trains us to notice when we're lost in thought and to separate from the content of our thoughts.
• There’s a progression from dualistic mindfulness (“I am watching”) toward recognizing there is no fixed point from which to observe—"the whole dualistic setup of subject and object is the thing that is already not there."
  • Quote:

    "You want to be...recognizing that there is no place from which to aim attention." – Sam Harris [18:33]

4. The Mechanics and Progress of Meditation

What are the basic parts of meditation?

• Meditation is about “ceasing to do something,” namely, ceasing to be distracted by thought.
• There are stages:
  1. Noticing attention lost and returning to the object (often breath or sensation).
  2. Observing reactions and developing equanimity: letting go of clinging to the pleasant or aversion to the unpleasant.
  3. Recognizing that both the “observer self” and the “target of observation” are constructs—there is no fixed observer.
  • Quote:

    "We're selfing more than we are selves, right?" – Sam Harris [23:51]

• Emotional states such as anger or fear are contextually appropriate sometimes but quickly become maladaptive; meditation can help shorten the duration and impact of these states.
  • Quote:

    "How long do you want to stay angry for?...They're almost never the state you want to be in. It's better to actually be calm in an emergency." – Sam Harris [25:49]

Progress:

• Initial progress is nonlinear (step function): the first breakthrough is realizing the difference between being lost in thought and being aware, which brings relief and psychological freedom.
  • Quote:

    "Before you have that capacity to be mindful...you are going to be the hostage of that [emotion] for as long as you'll be the hostage of that.” – Sam Harris [27:43]

• The next leap is recognizing there is “no-one” who is observing; awareness is centerless.

5. Meditation, Psychedelics, and Personal Change

• Psychedelics (used responsibly) can be a catalyst for appreciating the value of direct first-person inquiry, but their transformative effects fade—true change must be integrated into ordinary consciousness.
  • Quote:

    "For many of us, I mean, certainly for me, psychedelics were indispensable in the beginning in proving to me that a first person interrogation of the mind was worth doing...But...the project can't be being high all the time, right? So whatever is extractable from the occasional...psychedelic trip has got to be mappable into ordinary waking consciousness." – Sam Harris [30:17]

• Meditation provides a route to accessing well-being and insight in everyday life, independent of peak experiences or altered states.

6. Process-Oriented Living & Present Awareness

• Both meditation and psychedelics point to an important lesson: lasting fulfillment is found not in achieving goals but in resting attention fully in the present.
• The nature of seeking is perpetual; lasting happiness comes from learning to locate well-being in the now, not just at the moment goals are achieved.
  • Quote:

    "I think what we want is a circumstance where attention can be located in the present in a way that's truly fulfilling." – Sam Harris [37:27]

• Meditation flips the script: instead of needing to change external circumstances to feel fulfilled, one can work directly on consciousness itself to access freedom and contentment.

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Notable Quotes & Insights

• On the Illusion of Self:

  "You cannot find [the self] in a way that's conclusive and that matters...There's a host of benefits that follow from that discovery which are quite a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits." – Sam Harris [02:14]

• On Attention and Thought:

  "The self is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking." – Sam Harris [12:34]

• On Mindfulness and Emotional Freedom:

  "Mindfulness, even dualistic mindfulness, gives you this capacity to just observe the mechanics of this [emotion] and then get off the ride whenever you want." – Sam Harris [27:43]

• On Psychedelics and Meditation:

  "Whatever is extractable from the occasional...psychedelic trip has got to be mappable into ordinary waking consciousness." – Sam Harris [31:51]

• On Fulfillment:

  "So I think what we want is a circumstance where attention can be located in the present in a way that's truly fulfilling." – Sam Harris [37:27]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• The Illusion of Self, Meditation’s Deeper Purpose: [00:32] – [08:37]
• Internal Chatter and Distraction: [10:45] – [14:43]
• The Mechanics and Practice of Mindfulness: [14:55] – [21:23]
• Components of Meditation Practice: [21:23] – [27:08]
• Nonlinear Progress & Mindfulness Milestones: [27:08] – [29:53]
• Psychedelics, Meditation, and Transformative Experiences: [29:53] – [35:31]
• On Present Awareness and Process over Goals: [35:31] – [40:35]

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Memorable Closing

• Huberman:

  "I feel very blessed, in no small part because of our conversation today." [40:35]

• Harris:

  "To be continued. We'll do it again and again and again." [40:41]

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This episode serves as both a practical guide and philosophical exploration of meditation, consciousness, and the self. Through clear explanations, illustrative analogies, and actionable advice, Harris and Huberman illuminate how mindfulness is less about altering experience and more about seeing through the constructed boundaries of self—pointing toward a lasting sense of freedom accessible in every moment.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Sam Harris. Dr. Sam Harris, what is this thing that we call a self? As far as I know, we have not localized the region in the brain that can entirely account for our awareness of self.

[B]

The problem is we use the term self in so many different ways, right? And there's one sense of that term which is the target of meditation. And you'll hear it from me, that this self is an illusion, right? And that there's a psychological freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering it to be. And, and some people don't like that framing. Some people would insist that it's not so much an illusion, but it's a construct and it's not what it seems. The thing that doesn't exist, it certainly doesn't exist as it seems. And I would want to argue that it actually is just a proper illusion is the sense that there is a subject interior to experience in addition to experience. And most people feel like they're having an experience of the world and they're having an experience of their bodies in the world. And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body. Most people feel like they're behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought and intention. It's almost like you're a passenger inside your body. Most people don't feel identical to their experience. They feel like they're on the edge of experience, somehow appropriating it from the side. You're kind of on the edge of the world and the world is out there. Your body is in some sense an object in the world, which it's different from the world. The boundary of your skin is still meaningful. You can sort of loosely control your body. I mean, you can't control. You can control your gross and subtle voluntary motor movements, but you're not controlling everything your body is doing. You're not controlling your heartbeat and your hormonal secretions and all of that. So there's a lot that's going on that is in the dark for you. Then you give someone an instruction to meditate, say, and you say, okay, well, let's examine all of this from the first person's side. Let's look for this thing you're Calling I they're going to close their eyes, very likely, and now they're going to pay attention to something. They're going to pay attention to the breath or sounds. And it's from the point of view of being a locus of attention that is now aiming attention strategically at an object like the breath that there's this dualism that is set up and the ultimate promise of meditation. I mean there are really two levels at which you could be interested in meditation. One is, you know, very straightforward and remedial and non paradoxical and very well subscribed. And it's, it's the usual set of claims about all the benefits you're going to get from meditation, right? So you're going to lower your stress and you're going to increase your focus and you're going to, you know, stave off cortical thinning. And there's all kinds of good things that science is saying meditation will give you. But from my point of view, the real purpose of meditation and its real promise is not in this long list of benefits. And I'm not discounting any of those, though the science for many of them is quite provisional. It's in this deeper claim that if you look for this thing you're calling I if you look for the sense that there's a thinker in addition to the mere arising of the next thought, say you won't find that thing and you cannot find it in a way that's conclusive and that matters, right? And there's a host of benefits that follow from that discovery which are quite a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits. You know, de stressing increasing focus and all the rest. Many people think meditation is about changing the contents of consciousness. There's some contents you want to get rid of, like anxiety, other contents you want to encourage, like calm and unconditional love or some other classically pleasant pro social emotion. And that's all fine, that's all possible. But the real wisdom of the 2000 year old wisdom of meditation that really is the chewy center of the Tootsie Pop is a recognition of what consciousness itself is always already like, regardless of the contents and the changes in contents. And classic flow. Experiences have this quality where there's. And this tends to be why they're so rewarding, where there's just. If you're in some athletic activity or an aesthetic one, or you could be having sex or you could be, whatever it is, some peak experience, its peakness usually entails there being some brief period where there was no distance between you and the experience, right? For that moment, you were no longer looking over your own shoulder or anticipating the next moment, or trying to get somewhere where you weren't, or micromanaging errors or there's just the flow of unity with whatever the experience is. A surfer on the wave. And we love those experiences. We are continually abstracted away from them by our thinking about them. We're thinking, oh my God, that was so good. Or how do I get back to that? Or you're looking at a sunset, it's the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen. And then you're continually interrupting the experience of merely seeing it with a commentary about how amazing this is. And I wonder, what are real estate prices here? I mean, is it possible that we could move here? Your mind is just continually narrating a conversation you're having with yourself. However, paradoxically, I mean, you're telling yourself things that you already know as though there were two of you rather often, right? Like, you know, you're just, you know, I'm looking for, which is the water. And I say, oh, there it is. Right? But like, I'm the one seeing it. Who am I saying? Oh, there it is too? So there's someone else who needs to be informed about the thing I already saw, right? So there's something about our internal dialogue that is paradoxical. And that's what ultimately meditation is. I mean, this kind of meditation, you ultimately learn to recognize that there's no separation from you, between you and your experience, right? There's not the experience on the one hand and the self on the other. There's just experience. It's not that you're on the riverbank. And this is how it can seem in the beginning. Even when you're practicing meditation fairly diligently, it can seem like you're on the riverbank watching the contents of consciousness flow by. And meditation is the act of doing that more and more dispassionately. So you're no longer grabbing at the pleasant or pushing the unpleasant away. You're just kind of relaxing in the most non judgmental frame of mind, just witnessing the flow, right? But if you're doing that dualistically, you feel like the meditator, you feel like the subject aiming attention. And so now you're on the riverbank watching everything go, go past. But the truth is you are the river. There's a process by which you would eventually recognize that there's no distance between you and your experience. And again, you can wait for those moments in life where experience gets so good or so terrifying or just so salient. Right. Your amygdala is driving so hard. I mean, so you're in a war and you can't think about anything because the enemy's shooting at you. And this is the most thrilling video game you've ever played in your life, and your life is on the line, or you're at the peak of some athletic event where there's just. You don't know how you're doing the things you're doing, but it's all happening automatically. Right? But those are 1/100th of 1% of one's life. And what I'm calling meditation is a way of simply understanding the mechanics of attention whereby you are denying yourself that unity of experience so much of the time and recognizing that that's, you know, it's based on a misperception of the way consciousness always already is.

[A]

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[B]

We are not set up by evolution to be as happy as we possibly can be and to do almost anything that interests us. Well, I mean, we're not set up by evolution to be mathematicians or musicians or to create democracies that are healthy. We are doing these things based on cognitive and emotional hardness hardware that we are leveraging in new directions, right? I mean we are primates and we are, you know, we're communicating with, you know, small mouth noises. I mean we're language using primates and all of that has clearly evolved. And we're doing these amazing things, including science. You know, however improbably, we're actually able to, you know, almost entirely with language, understand reality that at a scale that exceeds us in both directions. I mean the very vast and the very small and also temporally the very old. It's amazing that we can do all those things, but evolution is blind to all of that. We have flown the perch that was created for us by evolution. I mean, it's not just the primate things. So it is with learning how to regulate our emotions and punch through to a self concept or beyond a self concept that is more normative psychologically that allows us to not be terrorized by our apish genes. Evolution never thought to build us an off switch for this, right? I mean, language is so useful and it gets tuned up so strongly for us. And there was never a reason to shut it off, right? There was never a reason to give you this ability to say, wouldn't it be nice to have four hours of quiet now? Like no self talk. For most of us, we are covertly talking basically all the time. And there's an imagistic component of this. For many people you're visualizing things as well. But there's just a ton of white noise in the mind that feels a certain way. And what you discover in meditation ultimately is that the self is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking. So like you and I are talking now, people are listening to us. They're struggling to follow the train of this conversation because it is competing with the conversation that's happening in their heads. So it's, you know, the first discovery people make in meditation is that it's just so hard to pay attention to anything. The breath or a mantra or a sound, whatever it is, because you're thinking every. You're thinking about the thing you need to do in an hour. And oh, it's so good that I downloaded this app. I'm like, this is really good. This is going to be good for me. But that chatter isn't showing up. You're not far back enough in the theater of consciousness so as to see it emerge. It is just sneaking up behind you and it feels like me again. It feels like when someone is thinking the thought, well, what the hell does that mean? Right? They're not seeing it as an emerging object in consciousness. It just feels like me. It just feels subjectively. It's like the mind contracts around this appearance in consciousness and it really is just a sound with the voice of the mind. If you actually can inspect is deeply inscrutable that we ever feel identified with our thoughts. I mean, how is it that we could be a thought, these thoughts, a thought just arises and passes away. And when you inspect it, when you go to inspect, unravels, it's the least substantial possible thing. But yet it could be a thought of self hatred. It could be a thought that unrecognized, totally defines your mood.

[A]

If you could elaborate a bit on this notion of internal chatter and external stimuli, is just the recognition that there's a dialogue ongoing internally, Is that itself valuable?

[B]

Yeah. So here's a claim I would make that some people might find surprising. But I think this is an objectively true claim about the subjectivity of most people, which is that unless you have a fair amount of training, unless you just happen to be some kind of savant in this area, which most people by definition aren't, I believe this is a true claim that if we just put a stopwatch on this table and people could just watch it, 30 seconds elapse and I set all of our listeners or viewers the task. For the next 30 seconds. Just pay attention to anything, your breath or the sight of your hand or the side of the clock or any object, without getting lost in thought, without getting momentarily distracted by this conversation you're having with yourself, a couple things would happen. One is no one would be able to do it. This is not just a superficial inability. I mean, if your life depended on it, you wouldn't be able to do it if the fate of civilization depended on it. None of our listeners would be able to do this. And yet some percentage of them are so distracted by thought that they will actually try this experiment and think they succeeded. Right? And for these people, what happens is you put them on a meditation retreat and you have them spend 12 hours a day in silence doing nothing but this, right? So the practice is just pay attention to the breath when they're sitting. And then eventually you incorporate everything, sounds and other sensations. And then you interleave that with walking meditation, where they're paying attention just to the sensations of lifting and moving and placing their feet. And then once the practice is going, you incorporate sounds and sights and everything, so you can pay attention to everything. But the goal is, for every moment, you are going to cultivate this faculty of mind, which increasingly is known as mindfulness. And mindfulness is nothing other than this very careful attention to the contents of consciousness, but the crucial pieces. It is not a moment of being lost in thought, right? You're not blocking thoughts. Thoughts themselves can arise. But in those moments of being truly mindful, you're noticing thoughts as thoughts. Whether it's language in the mind or images, you're noticing those two as spontaneous appearances in consciousness. Most people, certainly anyone who thinks they can pay attention to something for 30 seconds without being lost in thought, you put those people on a meditation retreat, what they're going to experience is on the first day, they're going to feel like, oh, yeah, I was with the breath or I was with the sensations of walking. And I'd be there for like five minutes solid. And then I would get lost in thought. Then I'd come back, five more minutes, I'd be lost in thought and I'd get back. But as the days progressed, even 10 days into a silent meditation retreat, they're going to experience more and more distraction. It's going to seem like, okay, wait a minute now I can't pay attention to anything for more than five seconds. Right? Because what they're discovering is just how distractible they are. If you train your attention in this way to notice the particularities of sensory experience and emotional experience, you're looking for the atoms of experience. You know, you get better and better at that and certain things happen. But one thing that I really do think happens is there's a kind of frame rate change in the data stream where you really are just, you're just noticing much, much more. This whole dance of I'm lost in thought now, I'm strategically Directing my attention again. All of this seems to ramify this sense of self, the sense of there's one to be doing this. There's somebody holding the spotlight of attention and getting better at coming back to the object of meditation. But the thing I like to do when I talk about all of this is undercut the false assumptions that are anchoring all of that as early as possible. Because where I think you want to be is is recognizing that there is no place from which to aim attention. This whole dualistic setup of subject and object is the thing that is already not there. And it's not that it's there. And you meditate it out of existence successfully. It's really not there. And if you learn how to look for it, you can see that it's not there and feel that it's not there. And it no longer seems to be there, right? It's like it's not. And it becomes like again, like a bistable percept where you looked at it long enough and you thought, okay, now I see the vase and the face and I can't unsee it. And every time I look, it's there again.

[A]

I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Waking Up. Waking up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga, NIDRA sessions, and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 515 years old and it made a profound impact on my life. In recent years, I started using the Waking up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the Waking up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from and those meditations are of different durations. So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice. Both from the perspective of novelty. You never get tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation. And you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate. If you'd like to try the Waking up app, please go to wakingup.comhuberman where you can access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.comhuberman can to access a free 30 day trial. If we were to break it down meditation into Some basic component parts. What are the component parts? And where I'm really going with this is why would those component parts eventually allow for the realization that there is no distinction between actor and observer and so on.

[B]

Ultimately, meditation is not a practice that you're adding to your life. It's not doing more of anything. It's actually ceasing to do something. It's ultimately non distraction. I mean, ultimately you're recognizing what consciousness is like when you're no longer distracted by the automatic arising of thought. It's not that thoughts don't arise. It's not that you can't use them. It's not that you've become irrational or unintelligent. I mean all of that, you still have all of your tools, but everything is in plain view. There's an analogy in Tibetan Buddhism which I love, which is thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house. There's nothing for them to steal, right? So in the usual case, thoughts are. There really is something in jeopardy every time a thought comes. I'm not meditating anymore. And not only that, I feel terrible because of what I'm thinking about most of the time. So it's totally understandable that thoughts seem like a problem in the beginning. And for certain types of meditation they are explicitly thought of as a problem because you're trying to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, including thought. And that's a training that can be good to do. It becomes a tool that you can use for other kinds of insight. But it's a very specific and kind of brittle skill in the end. I mean, it's a skill just like I'm going to pay attention to one thing and I'm going to do that so well that everything else is going to fade out meditatively. If you have a laser focus on any one thing, whether it's the breath or whatever it is, you can lose all sense of everything. I mean, you can lose all sense of hearing. And your physical body can disappear. I mean like literally. It can become incredibly subtle and vast and drug like. And many people approach meditation thinking, kind of climbing the ladder of those changes into subtlety and vastness. That's the whole, that's the whole game, right? And it can be a deeply rewarding game to play. And it also does come with all kinds of ancillary benefits. I mean all the focus and the calm and the. And the kind of smoothness of emotional states. I mean all of that comes with greater concentration and it can be quite wonderful. But again, at best that's a tool to aim in the direction that I'm talking about now with respect to meditation, which relates to more what I would call mindfulness generically and ultimately kind of non dual mindfulness. The underlying goal is to be more and more equanimous with changes. So not to grasp at what's pleasant or interesting and not to push what's unpleasant or boring or otherwise non engaging away. What you want is just a kind of a skylike mind that just allows everything to appear. And you're not clinging to anything or reacting to anything. This applies not just to something like mindfulness, but even to something like the self, right? So the sense of self is also a process. I mean, it's a verb. It's not. It's a work. We're selfing more than we are selves, right? And even appropriate uses of the term self that don't go away even when you recognize that the core subject, self, is an illusion. There are states of self, right, where you. You can recognize in your life that you inhabit very different modes of being depending on the context. So like there are moments where you just by walking into a certain building, you suddenly transition into a different state of self. Like suddenly you pass through a door and now you are a customer in a store, right? So we know what that customer feeling is like. You're now the person who's getting the attention. It's a very kind of formalized type of attention from the person who's running the store. You can be a student in the presence of a teacher. You can be a parent in the presence of a son or a daughter. You can be a spouse in the presence of your spouse. The change in context really does usher in some fundamental psychological changes in just the states of consciousness that are available more and more. As you become sensitive to these changes and you become sensitive to what it's like to actually not be psychologically reactive and not be definable by your own self concept, your own idea. You're not identifying with anything. You're not hanging your hat on anything. You're not thinking about yourself in the kind of terms that you would export to others and then care about what they think about you, right? Like there's a kind of invulnerability that arises that's not born of being well defended. It's born of being evaporated, right? It's like you're no longer keeping score in those ways. You can leave aside all those circumstances where it's appropriate to react to someone. And you know, I'm into martial arts and self defense. And yes, you're not supposed to be just this puddle of goo out in the world who can be just mistreated by people and never put up resistance. But it's psychologically. Even if a state like anger or contraction is sometimes normative and appropriate, the question is, how long is it normative and appropriate for? How long do you want to stay angry for? In my experience, kind of classically negative emotions like anger and fear are appropriate as salience cues. They orient you to an emergency or a potential emergency, but then in dealing with the emergency, they're almost never the state you want to be in. It's better to actually be calm in an emergency.

[A]

Would you say that meditation as a practice done for a few minutes each day or with the app, that it's a kind of a step function? Is it very nonlinear in terms of people's progress? What does a meditation practice look like over time?

[B]

The first step function is to very clearly experience the difference in between being lost in thought and being clearly aware of any part of experience, including thought, and to notice the freedom, the comparative psychological freedom that gives you, right? So you can like, something's made you angry, and now you're thinking about all the reasons why you should be angry and have every right to be angry and what you're gonna tell that person when you see them. And then you notice your thinking, right? And you notice the connection between the thought and the anger, right? The minute spent lost in thought about what's making you angry is the thing that dragged through the physiology of anger. And from the point of view of the one who's being mindful, this is tremendous relief. And at minimum, it's a degree of freedom. You can at that point decide, well, how long do I want to be angry for? Is it useful to stay angry? Do I want to be angry for 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or. And before you have that capacity to be mindful, you're going to helplessly be as angry as you're going to be for as long as you're going to be that way. Just based on the kind of the time course of your thinking about it, brooding about it, telling your wife about it, you are going to be the hostage of that for as long as you'll be the hostage of that. You'll have nothing you can do apart from just deciding to check out and watch Game of Thrones again for the third time. It's just you can divert your attention to something else, which is sometimes a good thing to do. But Mindfulness, even dualistic mindfulness, gives you this capacity to just observe the mechanics of this and then get off the ride whenever you want. The other step function is noticing that there is no one who is doing that. I mean, this is the non duality, the selflessness, the, the centerlessness of awareness, right? The fact that there's no place from which the mindfulness is being aimed, but the fact that there's just this open condition in which everything is appearing, thoughts included. At that point, your mindfulness no longer becomes, it's no longer this dualistic effort to strategically pay attention to anything as opposed to being lost in thought. It's just what's left when the present recognized thought unravels, even before it unravels, what's recognized is you are simply identical to the condition in which everything is appearing.

[A]

Could you tell us why psychedelics can be useful, used safely and responsibly, age appropriate, context appropriate, ideally with some clinical or other type of guidance. All that stated, what are your thoughts about psychedelics in terms of how they intersect with the discussion that we've been having? And what utility do they play in recognition of the self or in other sorts of brain changes?

[B]

I would just say that for many of us, I mean, certainly for me, psychedelics were indispensable in the beginning in proving to me that a first person interrogation of the mind was worth doing. For somebody like me at 18, the noun meditation meant absolutely nothing to me before I took my first dose of. In this case, it was mdma. One of the limitations of a drug is that, you know, obviously no matter how good the experience, the drug wears off and then you're back to in more or less your usual form, and now you have a memory of the experience and it can be a fairly dim memory. I mean, some of these experiences are so discontinuous with normal waking consciousness that it can be like trying to remember a dream where you recognize, okay, there was a way of being that is quite different than what I'm tending to access by default. And it is different in ways that are obviously better and psychologically more healthy. I mean, it's possible to be healthy psychologically in a way that I never imagined. Once you have one of these experiences on psychedelics or on a drug like mdma, you know that there's a there there. You know that unconditional love is a possibility. If your only framework is the good experiences, the good feels you had on whatever drug it was, I think you can be misled to just seek lots of peak experiences. You're just trying to string together a lot of peak experiences, hoping they're going to change you. Every one of which, by definition, is going to be impermanent. What everyone really wants, whether they know it or not, and their right to want is a type of freedom that is compatible with even ordinary states of consciousness. So I hadn't done psychedelics for 25 years because, again, they were super useful for me in the beginning. Then I discovered meditation on the basis of. Of those experiences, got really into meditation, and realized, okay, this is a much more, you know, conceptually, this makes much more sense to me. This is delivering the goods, you know, in terms of my experience. There's no need to keep having these, you know, seeking these peak experiences with drugs. So what I think people want is a way of having free attention and unconditional love in this, you know, totally ordinary and potentially chaotic human experience, you know, which can be psychologically fraught. And you can meet, you know, iterations of yourself that you don't like that are. That are not equipping you to be the best possible person in that relationship. And what we want to do is cut through all of that and actually, you know, be in love with our lives and with the people in our lives more and more of the time. I'm not saying that repeated psychedelic journeys aren't. Can't be integral to that project, but you know, that the project can't be being high all the time, right? So whatever is extractable from the occasional, you know, psychedelic trip has got to be mappable into ordinary waking consciousness. And the real point of contact does kind of run through this, what I've been calling the illusion of the self. And again, that part is discoverable without any changes in contents.

[A]

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[B]

I mean, there's one generic answer that I think can be extracted both from psychedelics and from meditation and just from just thinking more clearly about the nature of our lives. And it's to become more process oriented and to be more and more sensitive to the mirage like character of achieving our goals. Right now I'm not against achieving goals. I have a lot of goals. I'm very busy. There are lots of things I want to get done and I'm as satisfied as anyone to finish a project. But if you look at the time course of all of that fulfillment and there are a few lessons, everyone I think has to draw one is most of your life is spent in the process, right? Like the moment at which the goal is fully conquered. That is just, I mean that has a tiny duration and it has a very short half life. And the moment you arrive at begins to recede because in the meantime you have all these other goals that have appeared on the horizon. And in some sense if you're focused on goals, you can never arrive. I think what we're all looking for in life, we're looking for good enough reasons to let our attention fully rest in the present. That is the logic of success. The sense like I've got all these things I want to do. If I could just get rich enough or fit enough or dial in my sleep well enough or improve my life in all these ways, get the right relationship, wouldn't it be great to be married? I want to start a family. I want all of these things. I'm not discounting those relative forms of happiness or sources of happiness. But one thing is absolutely clear. It's possible to be miserable in the presence of all of those things. And you can add great wealth and fame and everything on top of that, it's possible to be absolutely miserable having everything anyone could seemingly want. So what is it that we actually want in all of our seeking to arrange the props in our lives and the story to have a convincing enough story to tell about ourselves that we are doing the right thing? What is all of that effort predicated on? It's predicated on this desire and this expectation that if we could get all of this stuff in the right place and not have anything terrifying to worry about, right? Everyone we love is healthy for the moment, and we're healthy and we've got something to look forward to on the weekend. And there's not a plumbing leak in the house that we have to immediately respond to. And we like our house and our career is going fine now. Can we just actually give up the war? Can we fully locate our sense of well being in the present moment? Can we relax the impulse to brood about the past or think anxiously about the future for long enough to discover that all of this here is enough? Even if we're guarding our time to do the things that are most important to us, we can spend all of that time regretting the past or anxiously expecting the future and just bouncing between past and future in our thinking about ourselves and our lives and basically just dancing over the present and never making contact with it. So I think what we want is a circumstance where attention can be located in the present in a way that's truly fulfilling. And unless you have had some kind of radical insight that allows you to do that on demand, you are in some sense hostage to the circumstances of your life to do that for you. You're constantly trying to engineer a state of the world that will propagate back on a state of self that will make the present moment good enough. And what meditation does, and psychedelics to some degree does this, but meditation very directly does this. It reverses the causality and lets you actually change state such that you can be fulfilled before anything happens. Your happiness is no longer predicated on the next good thing happening. You can be in the presence of the next good or bad thing already being fulfilled. It's like how much can you puncture that seeking happiness project with the recognition that you're already free? It's not that you just need to be a pushover when you learn how to meditate or work on yourself. In any of these ways. But what I think you want to find is you want to find your point of rest in the midst of any struggle.

[A]

I feel very blessed, in no small part because of our conversation today. Thank you so much.

[B]

Nice. Well, to be continued.

[A]

To be continued. We'll do it again and again and again.