Why Should I Explore My Own Consciousness? | Jeff Warren

(wind blowing) Hello, hello, hello. It's time that we revisit the inside of our own minds. There are more connections in a single square centimeter of human brain tissue than there are stars in our galaxy. Our inner universe is infinitely more vast than we will ever notice, and yet our unexamined daily experience of life offers very little to suggest that this is the case. Today, I'm joined by someone who can hopefully help us map out exactly where we're going, why it is the case that we don't notice the nature of our own minds day-to-day, and how to work around it. Jeff Warren is a meditation teacher and a writer. He's the co-author of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics with Dan Harris, who is an American news anchor that very famously broke down and had a panic attack live on air. Dan then went on a journey of meditation, and Jeff was a big part of that journey. (inhales deeply) Now, I've wanted to get Jeff on for as long as I can remember, and his schedule is absolutely manic. I first discovered him on Joe Rogan's podcast and then read his and Dan's book subsequently after that. I'm also now rereading Waking Up by Sam Harris, which is an absolutely fantastic exploration into the sense of self, the nature of our own consciousness, and meditation and spirituality without religion. So it was very timely for me to, uh, sit down with Jeff. He gives us a lovely breakdown of why we should be concerned about exploring our own consciousness, as he calls it, interpersonal hygiene, the meditation practice which everyone should be doing as often as they're washing themselves (laughs) . And, yeah, it- it- it was, um, it was really eye-opening. Jeff's obviously an incredibly experienced guy in this field, and I felt like I learned a lot as someone who's read into it quite a bit already, so hopefully you do as well. Enjoy. Mr. Jeff Warren, welcome to Modern Wisdom. How are you, sir?

(laughs) I'm good. Nice to ha- nice to be on, Chris.

Ah, fantastic to hear from you. So for the listeners at home who don't know who you are, could you give us a little bit of a background to yourself, please?

Yeah, sure. Well, I, uh, I started out as a journalist. I was working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation writing, uh, scripts for a kind of big current affair show over in Canada, and I was, uh, you know, interested in ideas. I kinda became the ideas person for that, uh, show, where I was doing a lot of kind of big picture interviews. I was really interested in science in particular and neuroscience and I had a, a literature background, but got really into the brain stuff. My brother's a neuroscientist, so we have lots of talks, and I ended up getting into consciousness, the whole mystery of the mind and how the mind works. Uh, and I wrote a book called The Head Trip, which is sort of about, uh, the neuroscience, where the neuroscience meets our experience, like how and what these shifting states of consciousness mean for us, uh, you know, waking, sleeping, and dreaming, and the different variations and iterations. And through that, I got into meditation, and then that kinda ended up changing my life (laughs) . And I ended up really going kind of deep on the meditation path and just spending all my time, uh, practicing and going to as many retreats as I could and, uh, eventually found a really great teacher in this guy Shinzen Young, and he encouraged me to start teaching myself. I started a community of practitioners in Toronto called the Consciousness Explorers Club, uh, in 2011, and that grew really quickly. And it had sort of a unique way in which we approached the whole subject of exploring the mind and started teaching, and eventually just came out with a book with Dan Harris called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, which is sort of a, kind of no bullshit guide to what really goes on in a practice, why it's helpful, where it's maybe not helpful, what are the stumbling blocks that pre- prevent people from, um, getting into it, the common challenges that you hear and what are some of the best practices for addressing that, and it's sort of a road trip as well. And since that happened, it kinda just opened me up now to a larger demographic, so I'm doing lots of podcasts like these, and I have various, um, programs I'm starting to roll out around, around practice. That would be-