Sam Harris - Death and the Present Moment

[Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you so much. Well, it, it's, uh, it's wonderful to be here. Uh, it's been a great pleasure to get a chance to meet so many, are you getting feedback here? Um, it's been a great pleasure to meet so many of you in the audience. It's, uh, I don't often get a chance to do that. And needless to say, it's, it's a great honor to share the stage with Dan and Richard and Aon and Lawrence and so many other exceptional people. Uh, I'd like to take a moment, as many people have, to just acknowledge the void that is left by the death of our friend Hitch. While it, it might be possible to guess what he would have thought about a number of the topics raised here, it's almost impossible to imagine how well he would have expressed those thoughts. Um, the man had more wit and style and substance than a few civilizations I could name. So, just, there's nothing to do but just take another moment to miss him.

I, I actually want to talk, talked today about death. In fact, I had, I had planned to speak about Free Will. I've written a book on the subject and, uh, I dedicated it to Hitch, in fact. Uh, but it occurred to me that, that many of you may have already seen this book, or, or watched a YouTube video of a lecture I gave on it that has hit the, the net about a week ago. Uh, so I've decided to, and I would, I would recommend that you do one of those two things because I think Free Will is an important subject, and I think people are powerfully confused about it, and I think this confusion actually matters. Uh, but I've decided to change course and talk about death, which might be the only subject that people find more depressing than the idea that they don't have free will. So, my apparent aim is to depress you, uh, through no free will of my own, I might add. Add, uh, but I hope to build you back up over the course of the hour.

Now, the reality of death is absolutely central to religion, and, and, and its denial is central to religion. And without death, faith-based religion would be unthinkable. And from the point of view of the faithful, atheism appears to be the mere assertion of death. We, we actually appear to be a death cult because we're the only people who admit that death is real. Most views, every other view either leaves the question open or asserts that death is an illusion, and that the good people, or the people who believe the right things about an Iron Age war god, get everything they want after they die, and that, that everything that seems to be anomalous or, uh, undesirable or merely accidental in this life gets sorted out in the end. Now, a convention like this is really just an open declaration that there's no reasonable likelihood of any of that happening. Okay? That the good news of atheism, the gospel of atheism, is essentially nothing. That nothing happens after death. There's nothing to worry about. There's nothing to fear. When after you die, you are returned to that nothingness that you were before you were born. Now, this is very, this proposition is very difficult to understand, and most people seem to mistake nothing for something. Many have said that my friend Lawrence Krauss does that. But in the case of death, people seem to think that they imagine something like an eternity of silent darkness, which does sound just a little boring. But if we are right and nothing happens after death, then every religion ever devised is false. Okay? But if we are right and nothing happens after death, death therefore is not a problem. Life is the problem. But the problem is that without God and without a promise of, of an eternal, uh, existence after death, life appears to be an emergency. It's, it's a long emergency for many of us, but it is an emergency. You can't help but notice that things are going very wrong in this place. I, no matter how much fun you are having, a glance at a newspaper will show you that it's possible to have no fun at all. Okay? And everyone seems to have a run of bad luck in the end. Now, it's hard not to see the, the absurdity of this situation. You, you unwrap your shiny new iPad upon which you hope to squander an unconscionable amount of time and attention, only to discover, perhaps on the iPad itself, that the people who built this gorgeous device live lives of such unendurable drudgery that they regularly hurl themselves off the rooftops at the factory where they work. Nets have been installed to catch their falling bodies. Is, is there any sense to be made of disparities in luck of this kind? Religion makes sense of it. You know, it's my karma. It's, it's God's will that I'm so lucky. If God had wanted me to do dangerous and deadly boring work for a few dollars a day, that's what I would be doing. But as it happens, he wants me to have a new iPad. [Applause] Hallelujah.

To not believe in God is to have no recourse to those illusions. To not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place. We, we have barely emerged from centuries of, of barbarism. It's not, it's not a surprise that there are shocking inequities in this world. It, it is hard work to, to climb down out of the trees, walk upright, and build a viable global civilization when, when you start with technology that's made of rocks and sticks and fur. This is, this is, this is a project, and, and progress is difficult. Just, just picture going back a hundred generations within your own family. Me, just picture, picture it kind of mapped onto this room, maybe this, this front row, just a hundred people, your father's father's mother's father's mother's father's father's on back. Now, I don't, I don't care how cultured you are, what, how well-educated your family. You can be Matthew Chapman, whose great-great-grandfather was Charles Darwin, but if you just keep going in no more than a hundred conversations, you are going to meet someone who thinks that sacrificing your firstborn child just might be a good way to control the weather. We, some of you probably don't have to go back quite that far. You just have to go home for Christmas. [Applause]

So, so real progress is a very recent phenomenon. And as you know, religion generally keeps its foot on the break. Okay? In the United States, we still have to argue about contraception, about whether women should have access to birth control. Forget about abortion, contraception is still something we're fighting for. The Catholic Church, one of the richest institutions on Earth, will oppose contraception with its last breath. And in so doing, it imagines it's exercising the most finely calibrated morality the Earth has ever seen, all the while nurturing an army of child rapists and, and protecting them from, from secular justice, and, and shuttling them from parish to parish so they can find fresh victims, and threatening these victims, victims with endless litigation in this life and, and hellfire in the next. The, the misuse of human energy, the needless manufacturing of unhappiness, just boggles the mind. So, so moral and political progress is difficult, even in rich nations where there should be nothing but progress. But most of us know that no matter how much progress we make, it's very unlikely we're going to make this, this world a paradise. We're not going to truly make it invulnerable to insult and injury and death. Now, it's true, there are a few serious people who think that we might cure all disease and even aging itself, or upload our consciousnesses onto some perfected AI, artificial intelligence. Um, I think when you look closely at those efforts, it begins to look like science-enabled religion at this point. I, you know, I, I'm sure they're fans of the singularity here, but, you know, I don't expect to have my consciousness backed up on the iPad 25. I'll be happy to be proven wrong, but, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

So, I think it's safe to say that the reality of death is something we're all going to have to face. Okay? And, and the loss of those we love. There's, there's no perfecting this place. Even if you play your game perfectly, okay, and you become as healthy as a vampire, if you just live long enough, you are going to witness the death of everyone you love. At a certain point, the phone is just going to start ringing with bad news. Even our memories are precarious. But my daughter is three and a half years old, and I'm astonished at how much of her life I've forgotten. To see a video of her taken a year ago is to be astonished at how unfamiliar it is. I, she's, she's a completely different person now. So, there, there's no satisfying way to hold on to the past. In fact, when we look closely, there, there's, there's no unsatisfying way of doing it either. It's, we are locked in the present moment. The, a memory is a thought arising in the present. What we are locked in the present moment with our thoughts and our iPads. So, so what does atheism have to offer people in this circumstance? People like ourselves, and people more fearful and self-deceived than us, that great body of humanity that recoils at the mere suggestion that a first-century carpenter may not be able to hear their thoughts, much less answer their prayers. Well, well, atheism as mere disbelief in God doesn't have much to offer. It's a corrective to a whole raft of bad ideas, but it doesn't put anything in place of bad ideas. It's a necessary corrective, but, but what, what fills the void is science and art and philosophy. Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations. And, and the problem we face, of course, is a problem of committing, of, of convincing the better part of humanity to have those better conversations. And this is a political problem. It's a scientific problem. It's, it's an interpersonal problem. It's a problem of education. But the problem is that most people, most of the time, are desperate to believe ridiculous and divisive ideas for, for patently emotional reasons. And, and while rarely explicit, what they're really worried about is death. And when we're arguing about teaching evolution in the schools, I would argue that we are really arguing about death. It seems to me the only reason why, why any religious person cares about evolution is because if their holy books are wrong about our origins, they are very likely wrong about our destiny after death. So, so when you say to someone that you're a fool for not believing in evolution, or a fool to think the universe is 6,000 years old, I think that gets translated as, you are a fool to think that your daughter who died in a car accident is really in heaven with God. And that, that is a very different communication.

Before I can get to the end of this sentence, something unforeseen and terrible will happen to somebody somewhere, and, and we will read about it in the newspaper tomorrow. The, the question is, how can people close to these tragedies make sense of them? And religion provides an answer for that. It, it's an unjustified answer. It's a bad answer. It's an answer that comes with a host of other liabilities because it, one being that it, it has birthed a, a many competing and irreconcilable answers, and therefore religious conflict and, and political tribalism seem impossible to overcome. But religion does provide an answer that most people think they, they need. And, and the schism among secularists, the fact that so many people at this conference are regularly attacked for criticizing religion, follows from this point. And people are worried about the grief of other people. The, the scientists and journalists who have made a career out of attacking the so-called new atheists are worried about the grief of other people. If your child died in a car accident, believing that she is now in heaven with Jesus has to be consoling. It has to be consoling in a way that no other belief can be. It's true that there's a shadow side to this kind of thinking. I've heard from people who have suffered tragedies like this in the context of their faith and found that the belief in an afterlife was actually a way for their friends not to connect with their grief. And in fact, to grieve too much in such a circumstance is, is tantamount to, it's a little embarrassing. It, it's a sign that, that you lack faith. I mean, what, what are you really grieving about if you think that the, the one you love most in this world is now in a better place, and you're going to be rejoined with her in the twinkling of an eye? But I think we can admit that atheism doesn't offer real consolation on this point. And that's, that's not an accident. If you're open to new evidence, there's no guarantee that the revisions in your worldview are going to be consoling. You know, when, when you lose Santa Claus, what you get in his place is not as fun. You know, the sight of your parents maxing out their credit cards and wrapping presents in their pajamas is not as consoling as the elves and the sleigh and the eight tiny reindeer. So, when we think about what is lost when we jettison religion, it's not the holidays and the architecture and the music and the humility and the awe and the profundity. All of that can be had very much within the purview of reason, and it can be had without lying to ourselves or to our children or to other people and their children about the nature of reality. The, the thing that gets lost, the thing for which there is no real substitute, is total consolation in the face of death. And it seems to me, if we want to build a bridge to a rational world that the better part of humanity can cross, we have to deal with this fact.

Now, most of us do our best not to think about death. But, but there's always part of our minds that knows this can't go on forever. We, part of us always knows that we're just a doctor's visit away, or a phone call away, from being starkly reminded of, with, with the fact of our own mortality, or of those closest to us. Now, I'm sure many of you in this room have experienced this in some form. You, you, you must know how uncanny it is to suddenly be, be thrown out of the normal course of your life and just be given the full-time job of not dying, or caring for someone who is. Hitch wrote brilliantly about this in, in Vanity Fair, and, uh, I suggest you read his articles if you haven't. But the, the one thing people tend to realize at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time when life was normal. Okay? It's not just what they, it's not just what they did with their time. It's not just that they spent too much time working, or, or compulsively checking email. It's that they, they cared about the wrong things. They, they regret what they cared about. Their, their attention was bound up in petty concerns that year after year, when life was normal. And this is a paradox, of course, because we all know this epiphany is coming. Don't you know this is coming? Don't you know that there's going to come a day when you'll be sick, or someone close to you will die, and you'll look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention and you'll think, what, what was I doing? You know, this? And yet, if you're like most people, you will spend most of your time in life tacitly presuming you'll live forever. And it's like watching a bad movie for the fourth time, or, or bickering with your spouse. These things only make sense in light of eternity. There better be a heaven if we're going to waste our time like this. [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

So, so unlike religious people, we atheists really have a good reason to make the most of life, to make the most of the present moment. Because, because even if you live to be a hundred, there just aren't that many days in life. So, what, what is the point of life? Is anything sacred? Does such a question even make sense? But this is what religious people are worried about. And I think these questions do make sense, and there are answers to them. But the answers are not a matter of getting more information. The answer is a change in attitude. There are ways of experiencing life as sacred without, without believing anything, and certainly without believing anything on insufficient evidence. Okay? There are ways to, to really live in the present moment. What, what's the alternative? It is always now. However much you feel you may need to plan for the future, to anticipate it, to mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. Now, this may sound trite. This may sound perilously close to, to what Dan called deepity in his talk, but it's the truth. It, it's not quite true as a matter of physics. In fact, there is no now that encompasses the entire universe. You can't talk of an event being simultaneously occurring here, in one, at the same moment, occurring in Andromeda. The truth is, now is not even well-defined as a matter of neurology, because we know that inputs to the brain come at different moments, and that consciousness is, is built upon layers of inputs whose timings have to be different. Just consider the sensation of, of touching your finger to your nose. It seems simultaneous as a matter of conscious experience, but we know that the input from the finger to sensory cortex must take longer than the input from your nose. And this is true no matter how short your arms or long your nose. So, so, so the brain buffers these inputs in some way, in memory, and then promotes the seeming simultaneity to consciousness. And, and so you're, so our conscious awareness of the present moment is, in some relevant sense, already a memory. But as a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. And I think this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind. In fact, I think there's probably nothing more important to understand about your mind than that. If you want to be happy in this world, the past is a memory. It's a thought arising in the present. The, the future is merely anticipated. It is another thought arising now. Okay? What we truly have is this moment. And this, and, and we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth, repudiating it, fleeing it, overlooking it. And, and the, the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there, because we are, we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives. Even when we think we're in the present moment, we're, we're in very subtle ways always looking over its shoulder, anticipating what's coming next. We are always solving a problem. And it's possible to simply drop your problem, if only for a moment, and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present. Now, again, as you can see, the line between timeless wisdom and banality is a little difficult to find. And I, I'm, I'm a little worried that some of you have begun to gag on what seems like new-age pum. But, and you must know that I don't want to stand in front of 4,000 atheists and do my best impression of Lao Tzu. So, but the, if I'm going to talk about this crucial point, I do have to say a few things that you've probably heard before and probably dismissed because it came bundled with religious metaphysics and superstition. This is not a matter of new information or more information. It, it requires a change in attitude. It requires a change in, in the attentiveness you pay to the, to your experience in the present moment.

Now, of course, when we talk about conscious experience, we're all once again talking about death. Because if consciousness is just dependent upon the brain, then death is real, and every religion ever devised is false. And needless to say, most people are walking around with an intuition that that's not true, that consciousness is in some sense independent of the body. Now, there are very good reasons to doubt that intuition, of course. Yeah, we know that introspection offers us a very poor view of the material basis of our inner lives. There are 100 billion neurons in the brain, okay? There, there are more, each making thousands of connections to other cells. There are more connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue than stars in our galaxy. And yet, our inner experience offers absolutely no clue that this is the case. And so, so we're not just slightly out of touch with the material basis of our inner lives, we're completely out of touch with it. I, I actually think about the human brain a fair amount, but it almost never occurs to me that I actually have one. So, so, so we have a, a very limited view of what's going on. We are subjectively unaware of most of what our minds are doing. And yet, when we think about what, what matters, what matters is consciousness and its contents. Okay? Consciousness is everything. Our experience of the world, the experience of those we care about, is a matter of consciousness and its contents. So, so whatever the origins of consciousness, the, the most important question for us is, how can we truly be fulfilled in life? How, how can we create lives that are truly worth living, given that these lives come to an end? We are all in the business of seeking fulfillment and relief from suffering. I, this is not to say that we want mere pleasure or the easiest possible life. That, that much of what we want in life, much of what we want to experience entails struggle. And many of us learn to enjoy the struggle itself, in some measure. You, any athlete knows that there's certain kinds of pain that are actually pleasurable. You know, if, if the burn of lifting weights was, was actually the symptom of a disease, it would be intolerable. But because it's, it's happening in the context of, of, of a strenuous exercise and progress, there, most people learn to enjoy it. So, so the, the, the conceptual lens through which we view even very intense sensation largely determines how we feel about it. And, and this is one, one of the many ways in which our thinking about experience changes the character of, of experience. So, the frame we put around the present moment is important and largely determines our experience of it. But it seems possible, in fact, to experience life more nakedly than this, to experience it without an obvious frame, to, to pay attention to the present moment closely enough so that you're not doing anything to it. And there, there are techniques for doing this.

So, I want to try a little experiment with you. Please close your eyes. And you might want to adjust your posture so that you're comfortable sitting, and just feel yourself sitting there in your seat. Take a few deep breaths, and just let gravity settle you in your seat. Then you can let your breath just come and go naturally. Become aware of the sensation of sitting. Feel the weight of your body. Feel the weight of your arms and shoulders. Feel your back and your legs against the seat. And just notice your body, however it appears, whatever sensations you notice. Sensations of pressure or vibration or warmth, tension, aching, whatever arises. But try to feel this as closely as possible. Now, gradually become aware of the sensation of breathing, wherever you happen to feel it, either at the tip of the nose, or the rising and falling of your chest, or the rising and falling of your abdomen. Just pay attention to the, the sensations associated with each inhalation and each exhalation. There's no need to control the breath. Just let it come and go. See if you can feel the next inhalation from the moment it arises, and just cover it until the moment it stops. And do the same with your exhalations. Listen to the sounds in the room. Just, just let your mind now be the open space in which sounds and sensations arise. Now, you don't need to make any heroic effort to focus. Just notice what you notice. Notice everything that you notice arises spontaneously. You don't have to move toward it. Just relax and notice the next sensation, the next sound. Now, see if you can pay even closer attention. There, there's a layer of concepts here that you can get behind. Okay? For instance, feel, feel the sensations in your hands. If you really pay attention, you will see that you don't actually feel their shape. Okay? You have a mental image of your hands, but if you pay close attention, you will feel just the raw sensations of tingling, vibration, pressure, a much more diffuse cloud of sensation. So, see if you can feel your hands closely enough to relinquish their shape. So too with the rest of your body. See if you can just let it dissolve into a cloud of sensation. Just be the space in which each new raw sensation arises. Feel the sensations of your face and head. Now, you might feel that your, your consciousness is in your head, or behind your face. Okay? But as a matter of experience, these are just more sensations arising in consciousness. The only evidence of your face and head is as sensation arising in consciousness at this moment. Now, notice what sort of mood you were in. If, if you feel restless or bored, take that constellation of energy itself as an object of consciousness. You feel these states of mind, however they appear in the body. If you're sleepy, notice that feeling. What it is, a pattern of sensation on your face, in the eyes. So, sounds and sensations and feelings are, are just announcing this open space of consciousness. Now, you, you may notice as you try to pay attention to raw sensation that thoughts continually intrude. You're, you, you find yourself thinking without knowing that you were thinking. That the moment you notice that, the moment you notice a thought in the mind, take that as an object of consciousness. Just watch it, if it's a visual image, or if it's language. And then come back to sensations and sounds. We're just going to do this for a few more moments. So, allow yourself to begin again, as though for the first time, here. Just feel the next breath. Okay. So, now you can open your eyes.

Now, it's easy to feel when you open your eyes that something has fundamentally changed. You know, a moment ago, you seemed to be in, in your head, focusing on your inner experience, but now you open your eyes and you're, you're out in the world again. But, but nothing has fundamentally changed. The, the world you see with your open eyes is in the same place you were with your eyes closed. It is, this is consciousness. Okay? I'm not saying the world isn't real, but as a matter of your experience, it's more accurate to say that that I and everyone here are in your consciousness than that your consciousness is in this room. It's a matter of experience. Here's one way you can see that. Just, just visualize a diamond this size between my two hands. You just project it there. Now, depending on your powers of visualization, I should appear to be very, very rich. Even if you're, even if you're bad at this, you probably can project something. Something, something changes when I ask you to do this. Change it to a tomato. Is there, can I, can I see a show of hands? Does, how many people have something change as a visual percept when you project here? How many of you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about? Okay. I, I am in your brain right now. Okay? Everyone here is in your, your brain, 'cause I am pinching your brain. This is consciousness pinching consciousness. Whatever you can possibly notice in your body, in your mind, in the world, has only one place to appear: in your conscious experience. Now, I'm not saying this is all just a dream, but as a neurological matter, it is very much like a dream. It is a dream that is constrained by inputs from the external world. And the dreams we call dreams at night are, are dreams that are not constrained by the external world. And that's why you seem to be able to get away with everything. But your mind is all you have. It's all you've ever had. It's all you have to offer other people. And this might sound callous to say when, when there are maybe many other aspects of your life that seem in need of, of being addressed, when you, when you're trying to, struggling to find a career, or, or you're sick. But it's still true. If, if you're perpetually angry and depressed and confused and unloving, it doesn't matter how much success you have, or who is in your life, you're not going to enjoy any of it. I suspect you could all make a list of things you want to accomplish, of things you, that really need to be changed about your life. What is the significance of everything on that list? Each thing on the list seems to promise that if, if you could only do it, you would have reason to just be happy in the present moment. We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment and good enough reason to just be happy here. And, and the practice of meditation, I, I just showed you, often called mindfulness meditation, is just a trick for doing that. It's, it's a trick for setting aside your to-do list, if only for a few moments, and, and actually locate a feeling of fulfillment in the present. And again, I'm not saying that everything on your, on your list is absurd or not worth accomplishing, but how dissatisfied with the present do you have to be in order to prepare a satisfying future? How neurotic do you have to be? How unhappy do you have to be? How much stressed do you have to feel? How unpleasant do you have to be for other people to be around? We, if you're constantly ruminating about what you just did, or what you should have done, or what you would have done if you, if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. And you, you'll fail to connect with it. You'll fail to connect with other people. When other people talk, you'll be waiting for them to shut up so that you can say what's on your mind to say. Even when you don't have an opportunity to talk, in a moment like this, when you're just, when you just need to listen, the, your, the conversation as an automaticity continues. You have a voice in your head that keeps saying things. Haven't you noticed the conversation we have with ourselves every minute of the day comes at a cost? It's, I'm not saying that discursive thought is not necessary or useful, but it is the mechanism by which most of our suffering is inflicted. The sorrow, and the self-doubt, and the anxiety, and the fear, and yes, the fear of death. Being thinking is useful, but being perpetually lost in thought isn't okay. Being the mere hostage of the next thought that comes into consciousness isn't useful. So, if, if there's an antidote to the fear of death and the experience of loss that's compatible with reason, I think it's to be found here. The purpose of life is pretty obvious. We are, we are constantly, why do we create culture and form relationships? But beyond matters of mere survival, okay, we are constantly trying to create and repair a world that our minds want to be in. And, and we alone among humanity, for the most part, have realized that religion is a bad way to do that. So we have to start a new conversation. Thank you very [Applause] much. Thank you.

Questions? Yep. There's time for questions. I told you he was a Jedi. Uh, up the top there, above the exit sign. Man in a white shirt. Hello. Um, I'd like your response to a, a sort of a middle way I've been trying to convince people about, um, middle way between death as the end and your, uh, iPad 2.0 or 25 consciousness upload idea. Uh-huh. Um, so we don't have that iPad 25, but we do have 4,000 consciousness simulators here. Um, tomorrow we're, or this afternoon, we're going to be simulating the sort of Hitch processes, various of them, on a distributed system. Um, now it's not embodied and it's not as consoling as having him around, but, um, it's real in some sense, and it's active, and, and in some sort of weak way, um, we are keeping part of that consciousness going. Um, it also sort of demands our intention, attention, and effort to do. And it also sort of means, I, I fear that I, I missed a few crucial nouns in what has already been said. So, I, I'm sorry. I've got a call. So, I think it's, uh, going on. All right. As a question, please. Okay. The, the question is, can we act as this iPad 25 for, uh, people who've died? Right? A kind of mimetic afterlife? I believe I understand that question. I, I think if I'm not mistaken, uh, Douglas Hofstadter, uh, who thinks that's the case, that it's possible to have so fully imbibed another person's consciousness, that you, their thoughts, their way of thinking, that your memory of them has is kind of an emulation of them. And that's, that suggests a kind of, uh, way of thinking about their, their continuing, um, that doesn't work for me. And I mean, it does, it doesn't work. It's not going to work for the rest of humanity that really cares about the difference between, you know, getting a dial tone at death and having an experience. I mean, it's your, uh, there are many paradoxes to, to, to arise here when you think about copying, really copying a human mind, and, and it's very, it's very difficult to, to think of what it would mean if we actually could back ourselves up. But the idea that somehow everyone's memory of us, uh, is a way of living on in, in the relevant sense, uh, I don't think it is. It's important. I mean, I think it's, it's very, it's nice to think about how one's influence in the world propagates and, and how people, uh, live on in that sense, but it's not, it's not living on in the sense that, that people, I think, really care about. Uh, so, yep. There's a question down here on the floor. Sam, near the door. Just near the door, just down here. Good day, Sam. Um, thanks, first of all. Um, just a fairly broad question, but, um, I'm just wondering, what your opinions on DMT are? And, um, and well, I don't know how much you know, assume you know more than me, but, um, perhaps maybe if it's found naturally in the human brain, perhaps why, or if there's anything you'd like to say about that. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm unqualified to, uh, talk about it because I haven't done it. Uh, for those of you who don't know, DMT is, is famous as the most potent psychedelic, uh, in the sense that it's not, not in terms of the size of the dose required to, uh, get you off, but, but the, the effects of taking it. It's, it's, um, uh, and it also distinguishes itself because it's, it's the shortest acting, and it is an endogenous molecule that we already have, uh, in our brains and elsewhere. And so, it's, it's, to some, in some sense, it's this is an illegal neurotransmitter, uh, that people can, uh, it becomes available when you smoke it or inject it, and it leads to the shortest, uh, and yet most stratospheric, uh, change in, in consciousness. So, a whole trip, you know, an acid trip could be 10 hours. DMT could be 10 minutes, you know, full course. Uh, and the phenomenology of this experience is interesting because it's not like it's you with a changed perception. Uh, what people tend to report, if they, if they get a sufficient amount of DMT on board, and apparently that's hard because it's very unpleasant to smoke, but they, they report getting kind of shot out of themselves and landing elsewhere. And the phenomenology of this experience is, is, there's almost no classical religious imagery at all. No matter who you are taking this drug, you don't meet Jesus, and you don't meet your grandma, and you don't, you don't meet Buddha. But what people tend to report is very bizarre, kind of alien, insectile-like creatures that they come into the presence of. Uh, so there's this, probably what I just said sounds like complete insanity to most people in this room, but you, you go online and you get smart, serious people trying to make sense of this phenomenology. Uh, but I, I've never done it, and, and so I, I can't, you know, I can't speak as one who has had to integrate that experience. One more question. Uh, up the top here, above the exit signs. Hi, Sam. Uh, as an atheist, I have really started valuing life, like, and the dignity of life. But the problem is that now, when I hear of any loss of life which has happened due to some deliberate actions of others, or due to some carelessness of others, it saddens me, you know, it grieves, makes me angry. Because earlier I used to just feel, oh, accident happened because it, it just had to happen, and it happened. But now I can see the responsibility of other people, that others are being robbed of their right to live. And so, how do I deal with this, like, this anger, this grief? Me, or other atheists like me, who can clearly see the responsibilities of others? Right, right. Well, as I said, this, this, uh, change in attitude that I just recommended, that I kind of smuggled mindfulness meditation into this talk and, uh, foisted it on 4,000 atheists. Uh, so you're now all Buddhists. That's a, I'm sorry to have done that to you. Um, but it is an antidote to that kind of suffering. When you look closely at the mechanics of your own suffering, you find that when you're suffering, you are lost in thought. Now, that may seem like, the pushback you immediately get from that is that, well, some things are worth suffering over. You mean, you mean to tell me that, you know, my child died, and I could stop to suff, stop suffering if I just, you know, break the spell of thought? Yes, to some degree. I mean, it's, but it's, it's damn hard to do when, when the bar is set that high, when you're dealing with, with the death of someone close to you. But it is the experience of, of, so the thing you just did for five minutes is something that I have done. I've gone on retreat for weeks and months at a time, and in silence for 18 hours a day, just did that exercise. Uh, and so the, the, it takes a long time to realize how much thought is clouding your, your experience at the present moment, and, and how much it's, uh, how much of our kind of mediocrity and how we feel moment to moment is just a matter of us continually thinking. This is the undercurrent of thought. And so, when some, so when something terrible happens, the undercurrent of your thought is, you know, all of these, these kind of grief-stricken ideas, I'll never see her again, uh, the memory of how, uh, much you loved her, back and forth, back and forth, and, and you're buffeted by thought ceaselessly. And, and for most of us, there is no alternative. We're just hostage to the contents of the next thought. Uh, and there is, if there's relief to be found in the face of death and loss, that the relief is to be bear down upon the present moment and become interested enough in the present moment so that you, you can notice that, that to some degree, consciousness is, is a quanus even in the presence of that kind of emotional pain. And it does, and then, uh, it does, it does erode the pain of, of that pain. And again, to some degree, it's a kind of framing issue. It's like, it's the difference between thinking that the pain in your arm is because you're now getting, getting, uh, so good at lifting weights, uh, or thinking that it's because you've got bone cancer. It could be the exact same sensation, but that the framing is the difference is total. And so, what I'm recommending to you, many good things come from training. We give no thought to training the mind. We give a lot of thought to training our body. We give a lot of thought to training, uh, to physical health. We give a lot of thought to getting more information, you know, education, understanding more about the world, more facts. We give very little thought to training attention itself. And one of the dividends paid, and there's, there's a fair amount of neuroscientific research on this point, uh, on specifically the point of mindfulness meditation, uh, is that emotional self-regulation and, and many cognitive improvements, many good things happen when you can actually just drop your stress and the automaticity of thinking for a moment, and, and just be aware of the next sensation, the next thought, the next moment of a mood. And there's just our experience is a flow in the present moment. And there's, there's relief to be found there. But it, it can be kind of hard-won. It takes training. It takes, it takes a commitment to, uh, not merely brooding and thinking. Uh, and that's, uh, again, and, and I'm not, I'm not discounting the utility of thought. And I'm not discounting the, the importance of sorting out the world. You know, that there's a quietistic bias among meditators that I think is completely dysfunctional. And we don't want a culture of people who are not engaged and not trying to improve the world. Uh, but if there's any kernel of truth in the religions we so deplore, and they are just a carnival of errors, the truth is that it's possible to sink into the present moment in such a way as to find it sacred and to, and to cease to have a problem. And that's, that's just a fact that which there's so much testimony. And unfortunately, most of the testimony is contaminated with religion. So that's do.