 Welcome everybody to the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host Rob dial and I'm very excited to have my guest Sam Harris with me today If you guys don't know who Sam Harris is I would say Sam the best way of Me explaining from what I've seen and read and listened to you is you're kind of the bridge for me of science and a lot of the Eastern philosophies that exists and for The analytical Western mind like me makes it more palatable to go. Oh, yeah, this meditation thing does make sense It does it does show how this actually is Does have benefit as well. Do you kind of feel like that's that's the way it is And that's what you hear from other people as well that you're kind of the bridge between the Western Analytical mind and then also the Eastern philosophies and religions and in practices as well Yeah, well that those are definitely two domains. I've been conscious of trying to bridge So I'm happy that it's working for you I guess I I'm building a few other bridges as well, but that is Probably My main focus at the moment and as you know, I have a podcast where I talk about all manner of thing and much of it Can be political and and unrelated to what we're going to talk about but I spent a lot of time in Another wheelhouse, which is which is really Mostly focused on my app waking up at the moment and that's why I talk about meditation and and related brain science and and Find points of contact with Western philosophy, but the truth is there there hasn't been That many points of contact with Western philosophy of late because it's been a couple of thousand years since Western philosophy was explicitly Trying to answer the question of what it means to live a good life, right? How do we live a life without regret so much of philosophy has been totally divorced from that project and devoted to a bunch of interesting but but ultimately not all that consequential linguistic games and So yeah, I you know, I am not I don't think of myself as a as Consciously focused on the East per se, but there isn't a symmetry here Which is that and then this is an analogy that that may shock some people but it you know with respect to Wisdom that's specifically the wisdom born of Contemplation meditation introspection There's this asymmetry where in the east it's a little bit like The asymmetry between Western and Eastern medicine, right? I mean like a real medicine medicine that makes serious contact with a biological understanding of You know what we are as organisms that is Western medicine It's not to say that nothing in Eastern medicine has ever worked or or but but for the most part if it works It has to conform to our understanding of biology as it has been born in the West there really is a similarly extreme and invidious asymmetry between the West and the East with respect to contemplative wisdom and we might talk about that but it's so I just by it's very nature I have drawn a lot of insight from from Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies and methodologies Yeah, and I know I know you got your degree in philosophy and then also you got your PhD in Neuroscience And you've been meditating for 30 years. What what's I guess the first question is how did you get into it? What was like the beginning of it the genesis of deciding that? Hey, I want to meditate and then what what have you noticed over the past 30 years as far as I'm really curious as far as the past 30 years of you meditating the difference in yourself, but also if you've noticed That I guess that that our society is starting to go a little bit more towards mindful It seems like there's at least a little bit of an awakening to this mindfulness and to actually try to be a little bit more President and try to meditate a little bit more. Have you noticed that as well? Yeah, well mindfulness is is certainly in vogue and you know for for good reasons It's you know, there's a superficiality to much of it. So which is you know, you know Worth at least being aware of and and if not criticizing but I think you know even a little bit of mindfulness is is better than none and It's it's increasingly popular now because there is so much Competition for our attention and it's it's so obviously dysfunctional, you know I mean the human mind was painfully distracted 2,000 years ago, right? So, you know at the time of the Buddha the problem, you know, the the explicit problem He was addressing Were the consequences of having our minds be by default out of control But there's no question our situation has gotten worse. We've got the most powerful companies on earth right now doing everything possible to Prior attention away from what matters most to us. Yeah, right? I mean we're what should matter most to us and people I think are becoming more alert to the the The consequences of that both, you know personally and collectively it's it's you know personally We are living lives that that feel more and more fragmented because in fact they are and You know societally we are witnessing a Just the the utterly divisive and deranging consequences of being siloed into Into these bespoke information bubbles and being game to differentially by algorithms You know whether it's YouTube or or just the consequences of a Google search or what comes comes into our timeline on Facebook or Twitter I mean, it's just we're we're we've all been enrolled in in a mass psychological experiment to which no one consented and the consequences of which are Have not really been thought through and it's pretty clear that many of the consequences are bad so Yeah, many many millions of people now are seeing the need to reclaim their attention and you know, I would argue that Our attention really is the true source of our wealth in each moment and you know Therefore each day and over the course of our lives even more than time We all know what it's like to protect our time But then to squander it because our attention is elsewhere, right? You decide to carve out some quality time with your kids and then you find yourself checking your phone and perhaps having to respond to some pseudo-emergency born of you know, you're entanglement with it and so it's We really have to seize more than time To be making contact with our lives. We need we need to be able to pay attention In each moment to what to what is what what actually repays our attention and meditation is really the art of discovering that and training that Hey, let me tell you about my favorite drink that I take a couple times a day It's called athletic greens and how I start my day as I drink it first thing in the morning before I do anything else And then I go meditate and in 30 seconds in just one scoop I get 75 vitamins minerals and whole food source ingredients and it has everything that a multivitamin has plus greens probiotics prebiotics digestive enzymes immunity formula adaptogens and more when COVID first hit I actually ordered this out of my own pocket for my mom because I wanted to keep her immunity up So if you're looking to upgrade your multivitamin or take one nutritional formula that's going to cover all of your daily nutritional bases Check out athletic greens athletic greens makes it so much easier to get high quality nutrition Incredibly easy into your diet without the need to buy multiple products So make an investment today in your health and try out the ultimate all-in-one wellness bundle and support your immunity gut health energy by visiting athletic greens comm slash dial and you'll receive a free year supply of liquid vitamin D for free With your first purchase again that is athletic greens comm slash dial Five years ago Felix gray realized that our eyes were not meant to look at screens all day And they designed glasses to make daily screen time more comfortable in the workday more productive Felix gray lenses Filter 15 times more blue light that can help make screen time tough on the eyes And it also disrupts your sleep if you don't have the right glasses Felix gray offers classic frame styles that are hand-finished They're durable they're lightweight, and they're really comfortable to wear So you can buy your blue light lenses that come standard at $95 or add a prescription at checkout And it comes out to 145 if you can notice that screen time is not right for your eyes Or if you're noticing that the blue light glasses that you're using are not right for you Start with the best in blue light and try Felix gray and went through a 30-day money-back guarantee You have absolutely nothing to lose but your eye strain So get yourself a pair of glasses made for the 21st century that are designed for modern hard-working eyes You have nothing to lose go to Felix gray glasses comm slash dial for the best blue light glasses on the market. That is f e l i x g r a y Glasses comm slash dial you get free shipping free returns free exchanges at Felix gray glasses comm slash dial I love that phrase attention is our true source of wealth and you know as I've Researched and watched some of your stuff and and gone through and done the research for for this episode One of the things that you said is is it's kind of just happiness boils down to our present our level of happiness? Devil you know boils down to our present moment and how present we can be and the reality of your life is always now That's what it is but One thing that I say is that you know if somebody wants to be really good at basketball if they were to wake up They've never played basketball before their entire lives, and they just decide I want to be really good at basketball I'm gonna wake up and I'm going to from the moment. I wake up to the moment I go to bed 16 hours play basketball every single day in six months You're gonna be pretty damn good at basketball and even if you're not gonna go pro But you'd be pretty good what people don't realize and I feel like in the world that we live in right now Is that we wake up and the very first thing that we do is we become distracted and we become distracted for 16 hours we've basically unbeknownst to us become Pros at being distracted we have we have literally distracted ourselves from every single moment from we wake up We literally look in our text messages or emails. We go to Facebook Instagram We wake up with go through all of those motions take a shower and then we listen to something We go to the work and there's people to distract distract distract and literally we become masters of distraction and so for us to be in the present moment number one is so foreign, but it's also hard as hell right now and I'm really curious with you for people who are out there I know there's a lot of people that listen that Meditation is just hard as hell to have to be in the present moment without feeling some Anxiety tends to be really hard So what's the first step for someone that's out there to be able to actually experience the present moment and not be pulled by some distraction? Well, the first step is really to notice how distracted you are and that you know that can come in in Stages, you know the most people when they try to meditate, you know For first, I should say they're different styles of meditation. They're different techniques. There are at least two basic principles that Differentiate various approaches here and But both Entail non distraction as a bit of basic Goal so the the the antithesis of meditation whatever meditation you're attempting Is to be lost in thought is to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking right so you want to be able to place attention on something and notice in fact what you intend to notice in those moments and You can do this narrowly you can try to focus on a single object So this is very common in the beginning. Let's say you're being taught You know form of mindfulness meditation you're told to pay attention to the breath Say and then there's nothing magical about the breath But it's it's always appearing right as long as you're alive you're breathing and it's it's fairly salient you you can notice it and Unlike a mantra or some visualization or anything else you might strategically add to your experience It doesn't require any Kind of but you know kind of buy in with respect to concepts, right? You don't have to you know, if someone gives you a mantra for a Sanskrit syllable as happens in Techniques like like TM You immediately begin thinking well, you know why what's what's so important about these syllables and you know What is it a little little goofy pretending to be a Hindu here? I mean, there's there's skepticism That creeps in there for many of us There's no dogma test your breath Exactly missus like just pay I mean here here's the base basic hypothesis if you want to understand Your mind more deeply if you want to become more sensitive to the mechanics of your Happiness and suffering it makes sense to pay attention, right? So let's see if you can pay attention and The truth is you know, I would invite all of our listeners to try this If you tried to pay attention to something for the next minute say, you know let's say your breath if you try or you know anything in your environment you could just stare at an object and You try to do that to the exclusion of everything else and in particular You tried not to get carried away by thought while doing that Unless you've had unless you happen to be some kind of prodigy of concentration or you've trained significantly The truth is you just won't be able to do that, right? And in the beginning you'll be so distracted and distractible You might not even notice how distracted you are, right? You might come away thinking. Oh, I did it I paid attention to my breath for a full minute And you know, so what what what next, you know, that was easy, right that The reality is that the more you attempt to do that the more you'll discover that there's just There's just torrents of white noise in your mind Which is this conversation you're having with yourself, you know, you're You'll um, you'll try to pay attention to the breath And A voice in your head, you know, we'll say What's that guy talking about I can pay attention to the breath, right? And you're and that's a that's a thought that you're not noticing And it's a thought that feels strangely it feels like Self, right? I mean that there's this identity that That many of us Feel identical, you know, virtually everyone by default feels identical to which is this sense of being a thinker of thoughts or or an Experiencer of experience. So there's most people feel that there's it's not that there's just experience As a matter of their subjectivity they feel that they're they're appropriating their experience They're having an experience from some point of view as a subject inside their heads and that is the The central illusion that that meditation is really designed to inspect and ultimately cut through And it it's it's something that falls away for us all the time haphazardly and those are the moments in life. We most value. I mean the moments of of flow or or You know ecstasy or you know, just just a real connection With the present moment that that seemed to come over us But we can't control that right this it seems to depend on Arranging things in the world So as to be really extraordinary. I mean if you're a surfer you have to be actually catching, you know, the great wave to feel Suddenly slam down Into experience so fully That the wave always has to be bigger and you have to go for something. Yeah every time Exactly and and you know, you know, you have to actually be having sex and it's just a moment that you know in sex that you know May or may not come right? It's like like you're you're you're just You're you're seeking a peak experience for the purpose of getting consciousness to fully coincide with the present moment and And it does you know, occasionally for for everybody and and that's why People value specific experiences and then life becomes a a really a an unending effort to Keep arranging experience such that we can have more and more moments like that and we're constantly trying to get back to our favorite things on the menu What what meditation teaches you is that It's really not about Those diverse experiences. There's nothing nothing wrong with having those experiences and and you know, you'll continue to enjoy them but What what what really is the principle there is The quality of attention, right? It's not the fact that you happen to be in the ocean and covered with salt water And getting pushed around by a wave That that makes surfing so Extraordinary for someone who who's really into it um, it's the Because really we're just talking about a collection of sensations, right? We're just talking about you know, your five senses and proprioception and it's it's just not That is not what is so extraordinary. What's so extraordinary is that it has done something to your mind That you haven't figured out how to do any other way, right and meditation is a technique for directly seizing the reins there and learning to that Paying attention to anything sufficiently yields that kind of of reward and It really can be any arbitrary object even something as simple as the breath you know and something as as apparently boring as the breath so In the beginning you you attempt to do that you attempt to pay attention to the breath and you the first thing you notice is how hard that is and and I mean as you know, as you say, you know on the point of anxiety People you know people can tend to encounter a lot of Resistance they can they can the the mental effort of paying attention can be unpleasant But the reality is is that you can simply just drop back and relax there. There is no Straining effort that is that is actually required to do this What you need to do is is just recognize that you're already Fully paying attention to something. I mean you can notice simply what you're noticing in each moment and This is where the the second type of meditation is is more relevant and this is it's just more interesting ultimately and and It's the one I recommend which is You know, you're not trying you're not trying to focus on one thing not the breath or anything else to the exclusion There of everything else You're simply trying to notice clearly whatever you're in fact noticing so so sounds and other sensations in the body And ultimately even thoughts themselves Are not Are not distractions from meditation as long as you're clearly noticing What's arising in consciousness? And so in the end you you really want your mind to be like a mirror Where everything just is spontaneously reflected You know, but whenever it comes before it and it's there's no there's no effort required the mirror doesn't have to reach out and seize Its objects, right? It just you know, it is just this this luminous context in which everything is appearing and Your mind can be like that and it's not you don't have to make it like that It's already like that but you but meditation is the process whereby you would recognize that And become more familiar with it. Hey, is there something that's interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals? Maybe it's anxiety or stress or worry with how much is going on in the world right now Well, better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist And you can start communicating with them in under 48 hours. It's not a crisis line. 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I I did a vipassana Um about two years ago and it's crazy exactly like you're saying the first Three or four days of vipassana The only thing they tell you to do is just watch your breath go in and out of your nose Just feel what it feels like to have it going out of your nose and you notice that where did you do that? I did it out in in Dallas right outside of Dallas. There's a vipassana center that's out there And it was a a 10 day retreat or yep 10 day retreat and they follow You know the traditional vipassana and you can't look anybody in the eyes. You can't journal. You can't do yoga You can I mean literally all that you can do is you can either meditate or you can go for a walk outside in this little tiny area that they had And what you notice is how many what I notice specifically is is how I could only get to like two or three breaths before my mind was already somewhere else And the thing that they tell you is not to judge the fact that your mind is going everywhere Just bring it back and that's one of the hardest things that people tend to just You know judge themselves. Oh my god. There goes my mind again. No, it's not about that It's just about bringing your mind back and just going okay. Yep. We did it again You know you went off and and now we're going to bring it back and It's funny because After seven days It it started getting you know started getting easier and then eighth day and I remember Eighth or ninth day I was sitting there and I was about two and a half hours into meditation And I just started to cry because of how amazing I felt like the amount of presence and joy I was like I if I didn't have to go to the bathroom I could stay here forever And it was just I've never felt so good in my life Just by sitting there and meditating and it's kind of like the last thing I love about what you're saying is that Whether it's surf or sex or roller coaster or racing that somebody wants to get into that that brings them to the present moment It's really the amount of that they love is the amount of presence that they are feeling in that moment And I guess from what we're saying is that meditation Is allowing you to get rid of all of the distractions and bring as much presence as you possibly can to a present moment So that even just sitting there and Watching your kids play without feeling like you have to check your phone The amount of presence and attention you could bring to that moment makes your life more rich Yeah, yeah, and ultimately it's not about Changing experience. So it's very easy to get the sense that The goal of meditation Is to experience Extraordinarily pleasant states of mind now as you point out that those those states are available, right? You can certainly go on to a retreat And develop significant concentration and along with that concentration Just these amazing Qualities of mind begin to develop right you you can feel bliss and rapture and and And and thoughts can cease to arise and and and you can lose all sense of your body So the mind becomes this Really vast open space And it's very drug-like right it can it's you know, it's very much like Taking, you know, certain psychedelics or mdma or anything. You can you can be in an altered state and It's very I mean it's it's almost inevitable that someone Who has that experience for the first time or even the hundredth time? We'll we'll think okay. This is the the center of the bullseye. I mean, this is this is why I meditate This is why I you know put my put my life on hold to come on this retreat This is Now it's working right. This is the the whole point and if I could just feel more like this most of the time You know, I I'd be good, right? This is you know, this is this is the project to get back here and stay here But the problem is it's another trap. Yeah anything anything any change in the character of experience of that sort Is predicated on Some causes and conditions coming together Which are by their very nature unstable, right? You have to be very concentrated. You can't be you know, you can't be checking your email You can't be your as you said, you know, I could see if I could if I didn't have to go to the bathroom I could stay here, right? But you do have to go to the bathroom and The the the more fundamental insight which is the the ultimate purpose of this kind of practice Is to recognize that that consciousness itself right that the very consciousness that You would use to check your email or go to the bathroom or do anything else that seems to be not meditating That consciousness is already wide open free of self Any kind of impediment, I mean, there's just no there's no problem. There's no problem to solve when you in consciousness as consciousness and That is the that is the thing that is experiencing everything including states of of mind and body like anxiety or anger, right and And so ultimately mindfulness becomes a a practice of recognizing the the openness and clarity and Centerlessness, you know the selflessness of of of mere awareness whatever's arising and You can do that in the middle of in the midst of your ordinary life and in the midst of even you know seemingly undesirable and You know neurotic states of mind the very states of mind you're trying to get rid of Or you know, maybe trying to get rid of by practicing meditations is something like anxiety. So for instance, let's say you're you know, so you're afraid of public speaking and you you need to go out and give a a lecture and You have all this anticipatory anxiety That experience right that that can be punctuated by mindfulness in a way that that really is freeing And it can be freeing Even in the midst of anxiety, which is to say that that you can you can recognize that you're free in some basic sense even before the the physiology of anxiety has dissipated and you can you can also reframe it as as Just energy essentially, I mean like you're you know, because when you're mindful of anxiety like it because there's there's the the physiology of it the sensations in your body and in your face right and At the level of raw sensation it anxiety is very similar to other states of mind that you actually like right? I mean the like the thrill of doing something That you know, it seems to be risky or you know, or going on a roller coaster, you know Or you know going white white water rafting or whatever it is that you that gives you a slightly Adrenalized thrill Right something you would pay to do right That is very close to what you're feeling when you are Having to give a lecture or presentation and are nervous about it. It's just the frame around it is different the the cognitive Summary of the experience is different and but when you get out of this The story you're telling yourself and you just connect with the raw sensations They're not that bad and they're and in fact, they're not even valenced as bad or good I mean they're they're really indistinguishable from again the guy who's about to go on a roller coaster or or get on a jujitsu mat or or something and So breaking that connection is actually stepping out of the thoughts and going to the raw experience can be freeing really freeing Even before the the qualities of experience have changed. I mean they will change because the truth is once you Break the spell of identification with thought it's it's impossible to stay anxious or angry or Any of these Classically negative states of mind for very long at all I mean the half-life of these emotions is very short But they do have a half-life So if you were if you're thinking anxiety producing thoughts and then you suddenly become mindful You can you can break the connection to psychological suffering Instantly, you know and just become interested and open to the sensations in your body But the sensations have a half-life of their own, you know, you know 30 seconds say and so so it's in the The amazing thing is that even coincident with Classically unpleasant experience You can recognize that that your mind is just this open Context in which everything is appearing and find the freedom in that and that freedom is isn't actually predicated on the next Really pleasant thing happening. It's not predicated on Oh my god, this feels so good, you know, that's that's more of a Again, it's more When you're doing that you you leap back on the treadmill of seeking to change your experience And again, it's not that you can't change your experience but all these changes are impermanent and and eventually we have to become interested in what what The context of these changes and that that's what meditation ultimately is. Yeah, I love that and and yeah, there's actually a I did a episode on this not not too long ago about anxiety and excitement You know, there's an actual clinical term called arousal congruent the way it's the Physiola like the actual physiological Feelings inside of your body are exactly the same between anxiety and excitement and it's called anxious reappraisal Whenever you're just really anxious you can actually trick your brain into thinking that it's actually excited And they've done a lot of studies on this but really what you're in that going to it actually is Semi against what you're talking about in the first place, which is Not even trying to change the emotions It's just trying to be free from the emotions and not identify yourself as the emotion, right? Because some people say oh, I'm an anxious person and when you now have the identity of an anxious person the habits the traits the qualities the thoughts that you have are now going to be Congruent with those that identity that you've now said for yourself So what you're talking about is seeing the emotion Feeling the emotion and taking a step back and going. Yeah, but it's going to end one time And I'm free from this emotion and it seems like in that moment is actually where you step back and you're able to give yourself some power Yeah, well, I would recommend both. I think both approaches are very useful and Practically speaking indispensable for most of us. It's not that you couldn't accomplish all of this with just meditation, but I think it's I mean to take the specific case of public speaking, right? I think the way to get comfortable In that circumstance is to get comfortable in that circumstance, right? You can't You know theoretically you could spend 10 years in a cave meditating never Never testing your comfort In public speaking And get over your your hang-ups and then you know then magically find that when you're thrust in front of an audience You're totally comfortable. Yeah, that's conceivable. I think the mind I can certainly work that way, but For most of us The experience would be To to continually meet in ourselves this habit pattern of becoming anxious in response to this particular stimulus and Then they then the the opportunity seems to be okay I can be mindful of the anxiety. I can be compassionate with myself Around the anxiety. I can be I can be non-judgmental I can keep dropping back and relaxing. I can I can decide that This is this is just not a bad experience. This is just just the experience and That's okay But I think it's it's rational to want something more than that which is There's no reason for this anxiety really right and there's and you can you want to be able to to Find some point of leverage in yourself So that it's just this is no longer a problem fundamentally and There the you know techniques of cognitive reappraisal and reframing Are just very useful and it's um And also just the sort of the this is more like, you know cognitive behavioral therapy just becoming just Manageable exposure to the stimulus that freaks you out And becoming more and more comfortable In its presence Right and and this is a kind of you know, it's almost like a a muscle building principle here. I mean you just you're just gradually increasing the load on yourself and becoming more and more comfortable with it and then things begin to shift where you know, you You know, whether or not anxiety, you know, whether or not you're still adrenalized at all It doesn't have the same meaning. I mean, you know, I used to be someone who was Who was truly Afraid of public speaking. I mean it was something that I took steps to avoid right and then at a certain point I it was unavoidable. I was publishing my first book. I realized I had to do a book tour and So I just had to get over it and yes mindfulness was certainly a part of getting over it But I just also had to do it and you know, then, you know, if I if I have to give a speech now I'm sure if you if you were tracking my galvanic skin response and my cortisol levels and and you know, every other physiological measure of anxiety You would detect A change in my state, right? It's not even if I if I have to go out on stage in front of 3000 people It's not exactly the same as me Just, you know, walking down to the kitchen and and making myself a cup of tea, right something I'm sure I'm Adrenalized to some degree, but the whole thing has been So totally reframed for me That there's no problem with any of that. In fact, that energy is Is useful, right? It makes me, you know less of a sleepy guy that I mean, I'm I'm I tend to be a low energy guy Anyway, you know, I can use a little energy so it's um And and a lot of that is more than just mindfulness. It is it is more is simply having the experience and finding the various gears within it and Um, and and just getting, you know, frankly succeeding at it, right? Getting positive feedback for doing the thing in the first place that begins to to rewire your brain and so it's um I mean the basic principle here is that you know Your brain is a machine that changes Based on how it has been used, right? I mean, this is just neuroplasticity Has this as a consequence, you know, you're your brain is continually changing as a matter of its physical structure and and and its moment to moment function And capacity to function in the future it it becomes Uh, what you do with it in some basic sense and this is there's a an analogy here to What we spoke about earlier in terms of our you know our exposure to to social media and media in general it's uh, you know every one of us has noticed that YouTube Is training itself to predict what we will want to see, right? I mean the algorithm is is It's really responding to how we use it, right? And you know and on some in some basic sense you get more of what you click on, right? If you if you keep clicking on on Films about you know bears attacking, uh, you know other animals You you just start seeing animal attack videos being sent your way, right and and they they tend to get more extreme and that is a There's a deep analogy there With our own minds and brains, right? You you you begin to conform to what you pay attention to you begin to conform to what you have found rewarding and uh in some basic sense you can make your mind you mean you can you can intelligently guide and curate uh the contents of consciousness such that you become one way rather than another way and I mean, I think you said this at the at the beginning of our conversation that this you know in some sense each of us is a pro at Remaining distracted and I mean what we're you know, each of us really is the world champion at Remaining similar to who we were yesterday, right and that is not That's not destiny. That's not You know, we're not condemned to be that way. I mean, we're we're making a thousand choices that we're not even aware our choices each day and you know something like meditation practice is a Is a choice seems like a Seems like a real choice that people have to Make I mean they they do feel like they have to sort of get behind themselves and push In order to do it and it takes some discipline, but eventually It just becomes a quality of your mind. I mean it becomes something that's not actually What you're doing with your legs crossed on a cushion and then you stop doing when you go check your email No, it becomes it becomes a kind of default state of your own awareness where you're just this is this is just how you see the world and meditation in that case is Is not something you're adding to experience. It's it's something you're doing less of it really is just Less distraction, right? You just you just just whenever you're not distracted. That is meditation Once you know how to meditate and that's that's not something you could say of somebody who who Doesn't know what they're doing. I mean their way is to be focused and to not be meditating You can be you know hyper focused on on something that you hate, right? And that's that's not meditation, but Once you know how to meditate it's um It's compatible With any other experience. This this can sound a little paradoxical because because people often want to say well You know, I I don't meditate but I jog or I you know, I play music or I you know I listen to music or I I go out in nature And as though those things were substitutes for learning how to meditate And the truth is that they're not substitutes and they're not remotely substitutes. I mean you're no more learning to meditate by Doing athletics or you know walking in nature or playing music or dancing or whatever it is you like to do Then you're then any of those things substitute for any other but The reality is that once you know How to meditate in particular how to be mindful and and non distracted Well, then you can do that doing any of those other things you can do that while while jogging or surfing or whatever it is and And then those things become synonymous with meditation But the bridge can only be walked in in one direction, right? You just can't you can't get there from Just jogging more and yeah Yeah, that's I was really open up to that when I went I was over in Thailand And I spent a couple days with some monks over there and they taught us a walking meditation It's a slow meditation where it's just But you can't just Take it and go well I'm just going to walk and that's going to be my meditation every single day And and I think it's it's almost like escapism for a lot of people trying to find something to do to escape from this present moment I'm curious Your opinion or if you happen to have any any actual data on this as well, but you know Are people running from something that's that's what I'm always so curious of is it is the present moment? So hard because we're running from something like or is it like you said the quality of our mind We don't want to come in contact with that or we don't want to think about Past traumas or we don't want to think about we you know have a job that we hate Are they do you feel like people are running from something or is it just because we've trained ourselves not to be present? well, I think it can be both but part of it is just this this um unhappy accident of evolution. I think what's happened is that Language in particular, you know your conceptual thought in general, but linguistic thought in particular Is so useful for us. I mean just as social primates We have evolved this capacity and it is the thing that makes us human. I mean it is it is the why it is why we are So much more interesting than our ape cousins And it's it's you know, it is how we create culture. It's how we pass down knowledge You know, you know, brain to brain and and across generations it's the basis of everything we do and it's And yet it is it is a kind of curse psychologically For most of us most of the time right because because once this gets Once this conversation gets started Once it and it gets internalized. I mean just look at what happens with them You know with a young child a young child is is More or less You know discovered in his or her crib by others but before He or she discovers Himself there right like you like there's no there's there can't be a significant sense of self Certainly not a you know a consciously, you know recursive one in a in a six month old child right now the some rudiments of of Individuation there, but What's what's happening is that you have a You have a mind which is is continually confronted with by other people for whom It is an object in the world right and they're like you're being perceived as an object in the world by your parents mainly and they're talking to you and you have this, you know, you you come into this world with the the operating system that that is Is poise to learn language and poise to learn how to differentiate self from world and This gets tuned up in dialogue with your parents, but it gets it's it's really it takes a takes a while and you You begin to participate in this language game And you're always, you know, once you can learn to talk you're you're you're talking to your parents Uh, and then you begin to talk to them on in some sense when they're not there, right? They leave the room and you're still chattering And you're talking to yourself As though that made any sense, right? I mean so let me just look at the structure of our subjectivity here and how peculiar it is I mean when when we're alone with our thoughts We are very often in conversation explicit conversation With ourselves, right and we'll be narrating our experience to ourselves As though there was some part of us that wasn't also having the experience I you know, who are we who are we telling right like what you leave if if You know, I'm looking for something on my desk And I find it I might think oh there it is Right, like but I I see it right. Who am I telling like is there somebody else in the search party? Right who needs to be told that we found this thing, right? um, there's a there's an implied duality here that makes absolutely no sense and To just to get a kind of triangulate on yourself and get a sense of how crazy and Non-normative your your default thinking is Just imagine how crazy you would seem If all of your thoughts were broadcast on a loudspeaker for everyone to hear, right? Wherever you walked, you know, you walk into a room And you just helplessly Externalized every single judgment and comparison and self judgment and half noticing and It's like, well, why is she doing that? And what's what's what's with that hair? Like just like just you you compulsively fragment experience with this this just Loguria, right? I mean you're just you're just vomiting words on everything all the time inside and the only the the real difference between A normal, you know healthy mind and the mind of a psychotic is the You know, we have the good sense to keep our mouths shut, right? If you're doing if you're talking to yourself, you know out loud In public well, then people you know within three seconds people understand that you're crazy Right and all of us have done that too. I mean some of us, you know, we talk to ourselves when we're when we're alone We'll say something out loud. I mean sometimes You know your thoughts escape your lips But if if that happens compulsively well, then that is kind of the bright dividing line between mental illness and normal unhappiness But the normal unhappiness is so similar to mental illness, right? It's so similar to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming and and so on some level the the The um the real context here for meditation is to Is to form a different expectation about what it means to be Healthy and and quote normal and you know like what is what is a you just have What can you expect of your mind on a on a day-to-day basis? and What would you What what is what are you right to to expect here and It does it just it does take some training to Even see the see a glimmer of daylight here so that you can see that okay. It's actually possible to Be at peace more and more of the time and and actually most of the time and and when you get destabilized by anxiety or anger or you know something you know there's some is there is some real emergency in your life Well, then that that swing into Into obvious mental suffering Need not last very long, right? Like most people's before you know how to meditate And you know if you get angry if something something in the world makes you angry You will be as angry for as long as you'll you'll be angry, right? Like there's nothing There's there's nothing but just the The the dynamics of your own conditioning that will determine Or or some intervention from the world that will determine how much of an emergency that becomes for you and how and how how fully you You De-stabilized your own life based on on the things you might say and do based on being angry, right? Like what are you going to say to the people you're angry at right and how Deranging of your relationships is that going to be right? You're just you're complete You're just hurled on on the winds of of your conditioning And Yet once you develop even a little bit of mindfulness You then have the ability to just to decide How long you want to stay on that ride for right and you can you can literally just step off And and decide okay anger is serving no purpose here I'm you know I'm over it and you can do that Very very quickly because again the half-life of a of an emotion like anger Is very very short when you're no longer lost in in the thoughts that are telling you That you should be angry about this thing. Yeah, so it's it becomes a kind of superpower to be able to do that Yeah, I always say The the path of growth for most people is realizing that something happens And there's a reaction to it and that reaction can last You know Someone can do something to me and I can be pissed off at her for a week Before I start working on myself and trying to become mindful and start reading and better myself and grow Then as I work on myself for a year or two years that that thing can happen again And maybe it's five days this time instead of seven days and then I work myself for a few more days Maybe it's three days. Maybe it's one day and then you get it down to maybe it's 30 minutes And then the real path is that you know something could happen And you might not even react to it because you might reframe the situation that just happened And really that's the the paths or growth that that people are working for is that no matter what circumstances come at me I will be able to handle them by building up my strong mind and um, and I want to I want to take a really Weird pivot because I'm really really curious for this as well One thing that that that you're really good at obviously is mindfulness meditation Understand the human mind, but I know that you also have, you know, your thumb on the pulse of what's going on in the world um Politics that type of stuff that's happening and I'm really curious there's One thing that you said in one of the interviews I was listening to and this was actually a few years ago Was that we have to be open to the fact that we might be wrong and in fact probably are wrong a lot of the time And I'm I love that because I've actually tried to be like hey, maybe I'm always wrong and and I feel like Lately I don't know if you felt this way a lot of people Are so stuck into who they are in their beliefs their political beliefs whatever happens and I've noticed and I'm sure everybody else listening has that it seems like over the past year Maybe the divide between one side and another side whatever side those are Um has gotten really strong from one side to the other and I'm curious with you Do you feel like it's it's a psychological thing of tribalism of you know, I am a democrat or I'm a republican or I believe in this and I believe in this and and that people are the the psychological You know, this is who we are and this is how I've been for millions of years that the tribalism that's kicking in And it's really hard because of all of the circumstances have gotten harder over the past year or do you feel? That maybe there is a system that's actually working against in Against us in our own psychology and creating the circumstances. That's making us divide faster Well, there's a lot of tribalism and tribalism is something that we're Evolved to participate in right so this this is really old Legacy code, you know Predates our humanity even right Um, so there's that layer of things and then it's being Leveraged by technology again because now Your tribalism Can be can be amplified. It can be it can be brought to scale, you know, your tweet can go viral right so you can be seemingly leading the tribe in any moment, right and You can also silo yourself so that you're not getting any kind of information Corrective from from you know any other Tribe right so you're you're you can become You know informationally xenophobic, you know and and and really succeed at that right you can you can kind of pre stigmatize any inconvenient information in such a way that you You live in a in a hermetically sealed worldview and And because of the internet because just how much information there is on anything right now because it's not just you and A few crazy people in your village It's it's you know thousands Of people at minimum for anything you want to get embedded in right so you can get almost Yeah, you can get endless reinforcement for the craziest possible idea if that's if you want to go down that rabbit hole and You know and you know, I mean literally you can be a flat earther and just spend full days seemingly having your your You know genuinely genuinely crazy idea confirmed right and what's more the the The provenance of this information It can be rendered opaque in a way that that it never could be in the real world right so like if if you were let's say going going to be You know totally obsessed with The idea that people are getting abducted by ufo's right like you're the abduction phenomenon or something you take a strong interest in Uh, you you believe it's it's really happening And you read a bunch of books on it and and yeah, it just it seems like it's really worth your attention and intergalactic travelers have come here for no purpose other than to to uh, You know Probe us anally and kill our cattle and and and it's a kind of a strange A strange agenda, but clearly it's happening right? um It used to be that if you were going to get really into that Well, then you you would have to kind of physically go to one of these conferences and meet the people who are also really into that And it would just so happen that you there'd be many other social cues That would begin to you know reveal other you know other aspects of this project that are That give some clues to why it's you know Fairly disreputable right i mean you're you're you're meeting people who um are For the most for the most part advertising their capacity to believe in lots of crazy things, right? um This doesn't capture everyone who's ever paid attention to that phenomenon, but it's it's just there's a there's a um Uh, there are many tells you know to to to the the problem of of somebody you know devoting their lives to something that is is Fringe and and requires a lot of you know conspiratorial Thinking that is not governed by the most careful principles of reasoning right and there's a kind of a hey You know, it's not an accident that you know people who believe one outlandish conspiracy theory tend to believe Many of them if not all of them right and many of them are working in at cross purposes and people are comfortable with the the incoherence there um but so Having to do that in the in the in the brick and mortar world was one thing but now doing it online you just it's stripped away from all of those those uh contextualizing cues right you're not meeting the the the people who You know don't bathe quite enough Right, you're seeing a fairly slickly produced Video that you may have been produced by some 18 year old and in his mother's basement But right is really pretty well done right and you're you're not in a position to to debunk it right and all of a sudden it becomes yet another data point in your worldview that is that may in fact be just uh You know Every bit is persuasive to you as a a documentary You know that took a million dollars to produce and is getting run on front line on pbs that night Right and and just you basically you think you have in hand the the front line version of the confirmation of of uh, whatever it is and so there's there's a a leveling of of um Kind of a reputational leveling and and a um uh A coincident loss of trust in the normal gatekeepers of information and some of this, you know loss of trust has been Has been earned, right? I mean many of these these institutions have degraded themselves in how in how partisan they've become or how um Yeah, just how just how gamified they've been by That the change in business models of you know, you know online, right? I mean the the click beatification of everything has crept into even you know, the new york times and and You know our best organs of journalism. So, you know, that's a problem with the business model and and um, you know the technology, but It has left us. We just don't have a cognitive immune system for this yet We have to build one and it's it's left us in in this very precarious place where You know our politics and Our ability to to collaborate with one another generally and just to find common projects that we agree on, right? You know, how do how do we respond to a pandemic, right? What do we do about global warming? Is global warming even a thing? Right? Is that is it a chinese hoax? The president just said it's a chinese hoax. Well, what do I think about that? Uh, how can I know? Oh, let's listen to alex jones for the next four hours, right? That it's it's completely deranging and um We so we have to find some way to to put our house in order and it's it's it's a real challenge I think what it all comes back to whether it's meditation whether it's all this is is Full self-reliance and realizing that you're in control of every thought that you have whether you want to be crazy and completely out there And you want to go out and and google it and see if you can reinforce that thought or if you just You know see every see every thought that's coming in and go all right. Well, you know, that's a thought that's coming in I'm not attached to it and you know Don't put any emotion behind it as well The thing that I love about about what you preach is, you know, it's it's kind of you have to go out there and experience it Right? There's no dogma behind it. It's it's it's for you to go out and experience and see What works for you? What doesn't work for you? But ultimately the power is in your hands Which is the most beautiful part about it But um, but I appreciate your time. Oh, go ahead Robert just add one thing here. So I mean a crucial piece here is to become sensitive to the The mechanics of all of this and again, this is the meditations the tool you would use to to become sensitive but I mean for instance to notice that the way certain facts or arguments or information Make you feel right is separable from the truth of any proposition, right? So if you know, somebody tells you something that is a fact And this causes you anxiety or you know, you're disgusted that that such a thing could even be true Or you're your You you notice that you you hope it's true, right? Like all of these the the the emotional veil valence to any With which your mind greets any proposition That is separable from evidence for or against that proposition And so so when someone is challenging one of your your cherished beliefs And you feel angry or anxious or you know, it's just some some You're in the grip of some psychological rejection state, right? that that should Most most people's default setting is that that the very feeling itself Is evidence against the proposition, right or you know for it in the opposite case when you when you want to believe something and The first thing to notice is that that's just not true, right? I mean that is a guaranteed way to be misled in life, right? that is the that is the The the emotional code that gives us You know confirmation bias and wishful thinking and several, you know, you know obvious you know reasoning fallacies and and you know bad heuristics and so to to step out of the the the mechanics of that is really important and and You know the the alternate piece of code you could be could be running here is is just to become interested In your reactions to things like that. I mean to have to kind of have the metacognitive layer of of Just just being curious about what does it say about me that I'm so Uh reactive to this proposition that I'm you know, I'm spending all my my fuel now trying to figure out What's wrong with it and how to knock it down rather than just Entertaining the argument for a few more seconds, right? Um, and it's a philosophy is is very good training for this because in philosophy you You're often especially moral philosophy you're you're often entertaining things that You know Just, you know Would would bother anyone else, right? Like and I did a podcast with with someone who's a um You know, it was called an anti natalist, right somebody who thinks that you're you're by bringing Children into the world you're creating great harm because life is is is really unendurable in the end and And as it is you're basically committing a crime on anyone who you bring into the world And therefore, you know, it's a good thing not to have kids it'd be a good thing for all of us to disappear Right, there are many different flavors of this This kind of nihilism, but anyway, there are people who are committed to this idea that like life is not worth living We should admit it If we all died in our sleep tonight That would be a net positive And it's um And a few a few things follow from that that, you know strike many people as starkly unethical or at least undesirable and and so you sort of get into into the the thicket of these thoughts and You can you can just have a bad taste in your mouth. You can think I don't you know I don't want to think about this. This is awful and you know, who is this person who would who would try to spread these ideas, right, but You can completely flip the script here and just become interested in both the ideas and in in the in the game of trying to figure out where you know, what's wrong with them and and In the discover I mean the the thing you you should learn to find mental pleasure in Is to discover that you are wrong about something of consequence, right? Yep, and that's uh that is that is a a Kind of a firmware upgrade that most people have not Downloaded at this point most people do not want to discover where they're wrong and they certainly take no pleasure in it, right? And this is this is something that I I really I strongly recommend that That you that people find this gear and and begin to to seek it out because it's that is the The ultimate error correcting mechanism, right to to to be asking the question What if you're wrong be interested in it and ultimately to be rewarded by it because the thing is You don't I mean what we see so often is this this doubling down phenomenon where where it becomes obvious that somebody's wrong It's it's certainly obvious to most of the people in the audience And yet you see this person doubling down and tripling down on a bad idea, right? And it's it's it's mortifying or it should be it should be mortifying, right? This is that you you shouldn't want to be wrong publicly emphatically Longer than you need to be right and So you you know what you want is the cognitive flexibility I mean even if if your only concern is for how you appear as an ego in the world The way you want to appear Is flexible enough to realize that you were wrong before your opponents do right or or or the Or you're so fast to recognize it that when they point it out They don't even get the satisfaction of landing a blow on you because you're already pivoting you're already saying oh Yeah, well, that's a good point of course and you they get the pleasure of instructing you And they don't even feel like they've consummated a debate anymore. It just feels like okay This is just he wasn't you know, I tried to hit him in the face, but his face wasn't there long enough, right? um And so again, even if ego centricity is your you know your your true operating system, right? You still don't want to be one of these people who is doubling down on an obvious error ever, right? And and yet so many people just can't it really is a kind of childlike You know automaticity where they just it's a reflex. It's like okay. I I've got it It's some version of the sunk cost fallacy, right? You've you've been committed to this thing and So you've invested in it and now you're going to throw good money after bad until you know, essentially you go broke Reputationally and you know, you see so much of that on social media and it's so reinforced within the echo chamber of any kind of digital tribe that I mean that what is so Disfunctional here is that there's so many ecosystems now you can find where Nobody's keeping score in any kind of honest way. I mean in my view the ultimate example of this is Is in Trump's bubble, right? I mean like like Nobody nobody who is a fan of Trump Is actually keeping track of his errors, right? I mean they don't they don't care about his errors, right? And so he has learned not to care about his errors and It becomes a kind of I'm sure you've seen these These fake martial art videos, right where you have the the the grand master of some Yeah, completely fake martial art someone who falls over Yeah, but but but the truth is you can get deep enough into that world where apparently You the fake martial artist who's knocking people over with magic Believes that he actually has magical powers, right? Because no one has discovered it's been decades since anyone resisted you, right? Everyone has been collaborating with your bullshit for years and I mean it's it's gotten to the point I don't know if you've seen these videos, but there's been a couple of cases where These fake martial artists have issued challenges to out to the world of other martial artists You know people who are people who are not part of their cult to come in and test my powers And you know they there's this one ghastly video of this, you know 80-year-old master of Hocus Pocus just getting repeatedly punched in the face by a real martial artist Yeah, I've seen the one like that that disconfirmation You know where you you bump into hard objects in in reality That doesn't happen enough in in I mean there's certain places where it is guaranteed to happen and That's um, but you know, unfortunately those are those corrections are coming from The the unspoken world, right? Like, you know the world of a pandemic You know the coronavirus doesn't care about our politics. It just cares about the actual dynamics of The the epidemiology, right? So it'll spread by its purpose, you know by its its, you know Principles and it will affect us to whatever degree it does and Then there's the layer of all of our talking about it and disagreeing about it and fighting about whether or not to wear masks and you know and and it's If if we're going to thrive as a species we have to Get the map To fit the territory better and better and what we're seeing More and more now is that you know, the the cartographers have lost their minds And they're they're shrieking at one another and they're not making any sense, right and so that's um And it certainly doesn't help when you see that style of conversation begin to invade science and and journalism and as it as it has Yeah Yeah, I completely agree and it's it seems like with both of them It's more of like whether it's the meditation whether it's realizing that you're wrong and admitting it It's a mental gym. It's it's it's realizing that there's growth through all of it There's growth through sitting through a meditation when you don't want to and seeking that growth. There's growth in going Damn, I was wrong, you know, there's growth in that versus and and that's where people should get their their dopamine release from is from Oh, i'm getting growth from this of realizing that I was wrong versus my dopamine release is proving to myself that i'm right And I think if if we could all if we could all kind of take a page from that book I think a lot of people would Well, what would be a better place if more people meditated more people admitted they were wrong. That's for sure So, um, I appreciate your time, man I know it's your busy and I know you've got an app You've also got a podcast as well that are perfect for my listeners and people that are out there So if people want to find you out on the internet, what's the best places to find you? uh, well for the app it's just waking up.com and For the podcast the podcast is called making sense So you just search under that and you'll you'll get it But my website is sam harris.org which can give you all the other information about me Amazing. Well, I thank you rob. It's great to talk to you. Absolutely, man. I hope you have a great day Thank you for everything you too. Take care Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you love this video, I've got another one you're gonna love Just click right here and watch it