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

1. 0:00 – 0:21

   Sam Harris

   1. AHAndrew Huberman0:00

      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.

2. 0:21 – 8:37

   Sense of Self, Meditation Purpose; Flow

   1. AHAndrew Huberman0:21

      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-

   2. SHDr. Sam Harris0:29

      Hmm

   3. AHAndrew Huberman0:29

      ... that can entirely account for our awareness of self.

   4. SHDr. Sam Harris0:33

      The problem is we, we use the term self in so many different ways, right? And, and there's o- there's one sense of that term which, um, is the target of meditation, and you'll hear it from me, that this self is an illusion, right? And, and that there's a, there's a psychological freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering it to be an illusion. And some people don't like that framing. Some people would, would insist that it's not so much an, an illusion, but it's a, it's a construct, and it's not what, what it seems. The thing that doesn't exist, uh, certainly doesn't exist as it seems, and I would w- I would want to argue that it actually is just a proper illusion, is this, the sense that there is a subject interior to experience, in addition to experience. So most people feel like they're having an experience of the world, and they're having their... 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 they're-- 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, is in some sense an object in the world, uh, which you, you know, you-- it's different from the world. You know, the, the boundary of your skin is still meaningful. You can sort of lo- loosely control your body. I mean, you can't control-- you can control your gross and subtle, you know, 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. And 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, 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 to 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, in meditation. Um, 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, 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, of benefits. And, uh, you know, I'm not discounting any of those, though, you know, the science, uh, 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, that there's a thinker in addition to the, the, the mirror rising of the next thought, say, you won't find that thing. And you cannot find it in a way that's conclusive, uh, and that matters, right? And it, and it, and it has a, uh, 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. You-- There's some con- some contents you want to get rid of, like anxiety. Other contents you want to, to encourage, like calm and, you know, unconditional love or, you know, some other, you know, classically pleasant pro-social emotion. Um, and that's all fine. That's all possible. But the real, you know, wisdom of, you know, the, the two thousand year old wisdom of meditation that really is the, you know, the, the chewy center of the, the Tootsie Pop is a recognition of what consciousness itself is always already like regardless of the contents and, and the changes in contents. And classic flow experiences have this, this quality where there's the-- and this, this tends to be why they're so rewarding, um, where there's just if you're in, in some, you know, athletic activity or, you know, 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? There-- For that moment, you were no longer looking over your own shoulder or anticipating the next moment or trying to get s- somewhere where, where you weren't or, you know, micromanaging errors or, you know, like this, you know, there's not-- there's just the flow of unity with whatever the, the, you know, whatever the experience is. You know, a surfer on h- on the wave, right? And we love those experiences. We are continually abstracted away from them by our thinking about them. We're thinking, "Oh my God, that, that was so good," or, "How do I get back to that?" Or, you know, 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, I wonder, you know, what are real estate prices are here? I mean, is it possible that we could, we could move here? And, like, your, your, your mind is just continually narrating a c- conversation you're having with yourself, however paradoxically. I mean, you're telling yourself thing, yourself things that you already know uh, as though there were two of you rather often, right? Like, you know, you're just, you know, I'm looking for, um, you know, which, 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, the..." you know, "There it is" to, as though there's someone else who needs to be informed about the thing I already saw, right? So it's, it's, um, there's something about our internal dialogue that is paradoxical, and that's what ultimately meditation is. I mean, th- this kind of meditation. You, 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, uh, and this is, 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, and, and meditation is the act of doing that more and more dispassionately. So you're no longer grabbing at the, at the pleasant or pushing the unpleasant away. You're just kind of relaxing and in an, 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 y- you are the river. There's a process by which you would event- eventually recognize that there's no distance between you and your experience. And again, you can, you can wait for those moments in life where experience gets so good or so terrifying, you know, or it's just so salient, right? Your amygdala is driving so hard. I mean, so you're in, in a war, and you can't think about anything because the, uh, the, you know, the enemy's shooting at you, and this is the most thrilling video game you've ever played in your life, uh, and your life is on the line. Or you're, you're, you know, at the peak of, of some, you know, 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 one one-hundredth of 1% of one's life, and what I'm calling meditation is a way of simply understanding the mechanics of attention w- whereby you are denying yourself that unity of experience so much of the time and recognizing that that's, y- you know, it's, it's based on a, a misperception of, of the way consciousness, uh, always already is.

3. 8:37 – 13:26

   Self Awareness, Self-Talk & Mental Chatter

   1. AHAndrew Huberman8:37

      Something about our developmental wiring and the algorithms that these neural circuits run tend to bias most people, the non-practice meditators, to l- live a somewhat functional life at least, um, without this awareness of actor and observer.

   2. SHDr. Sam Harris8:57

      Right.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman8:58

      And so what you're really talking about is a, a deliberate intervention to understand and resolve that gap in the algorithm. So what are your thoughts about, uh, the organization of the circuitry to, to essentially under normal conditions to not reveal its, what seems to be one of its more important and profound and, um, for, you know, dare I say enlightening features, right?

   4. SHDr. Sam Harris9:22

      Yeah.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman9:22

      It's almost as if that we have to intervene in the self in order to reveal the self.

   6. SHDr. Sam Harris9:27

      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, to create democracies that are healthy. We're doing these things based on cognitive and emotional hardware, uh, that we're leveraging in new directions, right? I mean, we have, 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 is clearly evolved. And we're doing these amazing things including science, you know, however improbably we're, we're actually able to, to, you know, almost entirely with language, uh, understand reality that a- at, at a scale that exceeds us in both directions. I mean, the, the very, the very vast and the very small and, and, you know, also temporally, the very old. It's amazing that we can do all of those things, but evolution is blind to all of that. We have flown the perch that was created for us by evolution. I mean, we're just not, it's not just the primate things. So so it is with learning how to regulate our emotions and, and, you know, punch through to a self-concept or beyond a self-concept that is more normative psychologically that allows us to, you know, f- not be, um, terrorized by our ape-ish genes. Evolution never thought to build us an off switch for this, right? I mean, uh, uh, language is so useful, and it gets tuned up so strongly for us. Uh, and there was never a reason to shut it off, right? There was never a reason to give you this ability to say, "Oh, I, I, uh, wouldn't it be nice to have four hours of quiet now? Uh, like no self-talk?" For most of us, um, we are covertly talking basically all the time and, and th- there's an imagistic component of, of this for many people. You're, you're visualizing things as well. But there's just a lot, a ton of white noise in the mind that feels a certain way and, you know, what I w- 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. You're, you know, people are listening to us. They're struggling to follow the train of this conversation because it is competing with their, the conversation that's happening in their heads. So it's, you know, the f- 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, I downloaded this app. I'm like, "Oh, this is really good. This is gonna be good for me." But, and you're, but you're, that, that chatter isn't showing up. You, you're not far back enough Uh, in the, i- in the kind of the theater of consciousness so as to see it emerge. It's, it is just sneaking up behind you, and it feels like me again, right? 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 feel... That, that, that's... It is, it... The, the, you know, subjectively, it's like the mind contracts around this appearance in consciousness, and it really is just, it is just a s- you know, it's just a sound with the voice of the mind. If you actually can inspect it, it is, it 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 it, it's, it, you know, it unravels. It's, it's just, it's, it- it's the least substantial possible thing and it, and it could, but yet it could be a thought of self-hatred. You know? It could be a th- a thought that, that unrecognized totally defines your, your mood.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman13:25

      If you

4. 13:26 – 18:37

   Mindfulness, Distractibility

   1. AHAndrew Huberman13:26

      could elaborate a bit on this notion of internal chatter and external stimuli.

   2. SHDr. Sam Harris13:31

      Hmm.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman13:31

      Is just the recognition that there's an, a dialogue ongoing internally, is that itself valuable?

   4. SHDr. Sam Harris13:37

      Yeah. I mean, so here, here's a claim I would make that some people might find surprising, but I, I think, uh, this is an objectively true claim about the subjectivity of most people, which is that unless you, you know, have a fair amount of train... Un- unless you just happen to be some kind of savant in this area, which, you know, most people by definition aren't, I th- I believe this is a, a true claim that, you know, if we just, you put a cl- you know, a stopwatch on this table and, and, you know, people could just watch it, you know, the 30 seconds elapse, and I set, you know, set all of our listeners or, you know, viewers the task, uh, for the next 30 seconds, just pay attention to anything, your breath, you know, or, you know, uh, the s- you know, the sight of your hand or the sight of the clock or, uh, 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, i- if your life depended on it, you wouldn't be able to do it. I mean, if the, if the fate of civilization depended on it, none of, none of our listeners would be able to do this. Um, and yet some percentage of them are, are so distracted by thought that they would th- that they will actually try this experiment and think they succeeded, right? And for these people, what, 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 know, 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 m- lifting and moving and placing their feet and then, you know, o- once the practice is going, you, you incorporate sounds and sights and everything. But so you can pay attention to everything, but the goal is for every moment, um, you are going to y- you are going to cultivate the what, this, this faculty of mind which, you know, increasingly is known a- as mindfulness, right? So and mindfulness is nothing other than this very careful attention to the contents of consciousness. Uh, but the crucial piece is it is not a moment of being lost in thought, right? You're not, you c- y- you're not blocking thoughts. Thoughts themselves can arise, but in those moments of being truly mindful, you're noticing thoughts as thoughts. Whether they're, whether it's language in the mind or images, you're noticing those two as spontaneous appearances in consciousness. Most people, you know, 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, you know, on the first day, they're gonna feel like, "Oh, yeah, I was, you know, I was with the breath," or, "I was walk- you know, "I was with the sensations of walking, and I'd be there for, like, five minutes, you know, solid, and then I would get lost in thought. Then I'd come back. And then, you know, five more minutes, I'd be lost in thought and then get back." But as the days progressed, you know, even, you know, 10 days into a silent meditation retreat, they're going to experience more and more distraction. They're gonna... It's gonna 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 s- of sensory experience and emotional experience, like you're looking for the atoms of experience, you know, um, you get better and better at that, and certain things happen, but one thing that, you know, one thing that I, I really do, do think happens is there's a kind of frame rate change in, in the, 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, now I'm strategically directing my attention again, all of this seems to ramify this sense of self, the sense of, of there, there's one to be doing this. There's, 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, where, where I think you wanna be is recognizing that there is no place from which to aim attention, right? There, this whole dualistic setup of subject and object is the thing that is already not there, and it's not that you, it's not that it's there and you meditate it out of existence successfully. It's really not there, and if you l- 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, 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, um, I can't unsee it, and every time I look, it's, it's there again."

   5. AHAndrew Huberman18:36

      If we

5. 18:37 – 24:39

   Meditation, Benefits, “Sky-like Mind”; States of Self

   1. AHAndrew Huberman18:37

      were to kind of break it down meditation into some basic component parts-

   2. SHDr. Sam Harris18:42

      Hmm

   3. AHAndrew Huberman18:42

      ... 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, um, distinction between, uh, actor and observer and so on?

   4. SHDr. Sam Harris18:54

      Ultimately, meditation is not a practice that you're adding to your life. It's not, it's not a doing more of anything. It's a actually ceasing to do something. It, it's ultimately non-distraction. I mean, it's ultimately you're recognizing what consciousness is like when you're no longer distracted by the, the automatic arising of, of thought. It's not that thoughts don't arise. It's not that you can't use them. It's not that you become irrational or, or, um, uh, you know, unintelligent. I mean, like, all of that, you still have all of your tools, but everything is in plain view. I mean, there's an analogy in, in Tibetan Buddhism, which I love, which is, um, thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house. You know, there's nothing for them to steal, right? So, you know, in, in the usual case, thoughts are... There really is something in jeopardy. The, uh... Every time a thought comes, I'm not meditating anymore, and, and not only that, I feel terrible because of what I'm thinking about most of the time, right? So it's totally understandable that thoughts seem like a problem in the beginning, and i- 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, uh, other kinds of, of, of insight. But it's a very specific and kind of brittle skill in the end. I mean, it's, it is, it's a skill, just like I'm gonna pay attention to one thing, and I'm gonna do that so well that everything else is gonna fade out. But meditatively, if you have a laser focus on any one thing, whe-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, your physical body can disappear. I mean, like, literally, it can become incredibly subtle and vast and drug-like. Um, 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 h- does come with all kinds of ancillary benefits. I mean, all the focus and the calm and the, and the, the kind of smoothness of emotional states. I mean, all, all that comes with greater concentration, and it, 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, with respect to meditation, which relates to more what I would call, you know, mindfulness generically and ultimately kind of non-dual mindfulness. The underlying goal is to be more and more equanimous with changes, so it's not to grasp at what's pleasant or interesting and not to push what's unpleasant or, or, you know, boring or, or, you know, or otherwise not engaging away. Um, what you want is just a kind of a sky-like mind that just allows everything to appear, and you're not clinging to anything or, or, or reacting to anything. This applies not just to something like mindfulness, but e- even to something like the self, right? So the sense of self is also a process. I mean, it's, it's, it's a verb. It's not... It's a work. We're selfing more than we are selves, right? And even ap- appropriate uses of, of, of the term self that don't go away even when you, when you recognize that the, the s- the core subject self is an illusion. There, there are states of self, right? Where you, you can recognize in your life that you inhabit very d- different modes of, 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, like, suddenly you pass through a door, and now you're 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, of a son or a daughter. You can be a, a spouse in presence o- in presence of your spouse. The change in context really does ch- s- uh, 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, and not be definable by your own self-concept, your own iden... You're not identifying with anything. You're not hanging your hat on anything. You're not thinking about yourself in the, in the kind of terms that you would export to others and then care about what they think about you, right? Like, you're... There's a kind of invulnerability, uh, that, that arises that's not born of being well defended. It's born of, of, 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, I'm-

   5. AHAndrew Huberman23:51

      Sure

   6. SHDr. Sam Harris23:51

      ... 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, and, you know, never put up, uh, you know, resistance. But it's, um, psychologically, you know, even if, even if a state like anger or contraction is sometimes normative and appropriate, the question is, how long is it normative and appropriate for? Like, how, how long do you wanna stay angry for? In my experience, you know, it's 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.

6. 24:39 – 27:23

   Meditation Practice, Mindfulness & Freedom

   1. AHAndrew Huberman24:39

      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 non-linear in terms of people's progress? What does a meditation practice look like over time?

   2. SHDr. Sam Harris24:52

      The first step function is to very clearly experience the difference 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 going to tell that person when you see them. And then you notice you're thinking, right? And you notice the connection between the thought and the anger, right? Like the minute spent lost in thought about what's making you angry is the thing that drags through the physiology of anger. And from the point of view of the one who's being mindful, this is tremendous relief. I mean, 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, right? Is it useful to stay angry? Do I want to be angry for one minute, two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes? 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, right? Like 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 centralness 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

7. 27:23 – 31:21

   Psychedelics, Consciousness

   1. SHDr. Sam Harris27:23

      is appearing.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman27:23

      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?

   3. SHDr. Sam Harris27:48

      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 obviously no matter how good the experience, the drug wears off and then you're back 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 they're right to want, is a type of freedom that is compatible with even ordinary states of consciousness. I mean, 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 those experiences, got really into meditation and realized, okay, this is a much more, conceptually this makes much more sense to me. This is delivering the goods in terms of my experience. There's no need to keep seeking these peak experiences with drugs. So what I think people want is a way of having free attention and unconditional love in this totally ordinary and potentially chaotic human experience, which can be psychologically fraught and you can meet iterations of yourself that you don't like 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, but you know that it ca- that the project can't be being high all the time, right? So whatever is extractable from that, the, the, the occasional, you know, psychedelic trip has got to be mappable into ordinary waking consciousness. And the point of con- the real point of contact does kind of run through this, you know, what I've been calling the illusion of the self. And a- again, it is d- that part is discoverable without any changes in contents.

8. 31:21 – 37:00

   Process vs Achieving Goals, Fulfillment in Present

   1. AHAndrew Huberman31:21

      None of this can really be solved in a single practice, it sounds like. But it does seem to me based on what you've told us today, is that only through a, um, a deep understanding of the self as it really is-

   2. SHDr. Sam Harris31:34

      Right

   3. AHAndrew Huberman31:34

      ... as opposed to this illusion that you framed up, could we actually arrive at some answers about, like, what's actually right for each and every one of us?

   4. SHDr. Sam Harris31:43

      I mean, there's one generic answer that, uh, I think can be extracted both from the psychede- the psychedelics and from meditation, and just from just thinking more clearly about the nature of, of our lives, and it's, it's to become more process-oriented and to be more and more sensitive to the, the mira- mirage-like character of, of achieving our goals. Right now, I'm not, I'm not against achieving goals. I have a lot of goals. I've, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm very busy. There are lots of things I wanna get done, and I'm as satisfied as anyone to finish a project and... But if you look at the time course of all of that, you know, fulfillment, and you, you, you, you just, you... 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 go- like the moment at which the goal is f- you know, fully conquered, that is just, I mean, that has a, you know, uh, it's a tiny duration, and it, it, it has a very short half-life. And the moment you, you arrive at it, it begins to recede because in the meantime, you have all these other goals that are, have a- appeared on the horizon. And in some sense, if you're, if you're focused on goals, you really c- you can never arrive. I think what we're, 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 b- of success. Like the, the sense, the sense like, "I've got all these things I wanna do. If I could just get rich enough or fit enough or, you know, dial in my sleep well enough or, you know, improve my life in all these ways, get the right relationship, wouldn't it be great to be married or ma- you know, I, I wanna start a family. I want all of these, these things," right? So I'm not, 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, right? It's... A- and you can add, you can add great wealth and fame and everything on top of that, and it's possible, it is 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 our, and our, and the story, to have a, a, a convincing enough story to tell about ourselves that we're doing the right thing? Uh, what are, what is all of that effort predicated on? It's predicated on this desire, uh, 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, right? And we're healthy, and it's, you know, we've got something to look forward to on the weekend, and there's not some, there's not a, a, a, you know, a plumbing leak in the house that we have to immediately respond to. And we like our house, and, uh, you know, our career is going fine. Now, can we just actually give up the war, right? Can we, can we, can we fully locate our f- our sense of wellbeing in the present moment? Is it can we relax the impulse to brood about the past or think anxiously about the future l- 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 wor- uh, regretting the past or anxiously expecting the future and telling it, t- 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, right? So what we... I, 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 it, do that for you. You're, you're, you're constantly trying to, to engineer a state of the world that will propagate back on a state of self that will make the, 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, and, and lets you actually change st- uh, change states such that you can be fulfilled before anything happens, right? Nothing... N- Your, 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 you do any, you, when you work on yourself in any of these ways. But, um, what I think you, I think you want to find is you want to find your point of rest in the midst of, of a- any struggle.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman36:47

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

   6. SHDr. Sam Harris36:51

      Nice. Well, to be continued.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman36:52

      To be continued.

   8. SHDr. Sam Harris36:53

      Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman36:53

      We'll do it again.

   10. SHDr. Sam Harris36:54

       Yeah.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman36:54

       And again and again. [outro music]

Episode duration: 37:00