A Rational Mystics Guide To Consciousness & Awakening | Sam Harris

It's just a fact about us that we're thinking basically every moment of the day. We're having a conversation with ourselves. We're remembering the past. We're anticipating the future. We're subtly failing to make actual contact with the present moment.

If you're angry for 10 hours, there's a lot you can do in 10 hours to derange your life and your relationships. I've always found it so interesting that we can spend a lifetime suffering something that is essentially a nonevent. You know, you're making a cup of tea and you're thinking about a meeting that you're going to have in 5 days, and you're getting anxious.

Meditation is the remedy for that. And once you can practice mindfulness, negative states of mind like fear and anger begin to function like mindfulness alarms. You know, the truth is, breaking the spell doesn't even require the contents of consciousness to change.

What do you feel as a likelihood that we will engineer consciousness into superintelligent AGI? Yeah, that's a difficult question to resolve.

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Hello, beautiful beings. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast, where every single week, we get the honor and privilege to sit down with a brilliant mind and open heart to see how we can learn more about the true nature of self and the world around us at deeper and deeper levels. My guest today is the creator of the Waking Up app. He is a bestselling author, a philosopher, a neuroscientist, and host of The Making Sense podcast. Uh, he really needs no introduction, but I will say that his life, his message, the work that he does in the world has been profoundly influential for me over the years in my development and study, um, about a lot of the things that we're going to be diving into today. It's not just the topics of life that he's so emphatically interested in, and that I also share deep passions for and that hold, that I hold close to my heart, but the way in which he engages in exploring such topics like consciousness, free will, the nature of self, um, who and what we are. And it's been such a pleasure to be able to recently connect with him, and I've been looking forward to this for for quite some time. So, the goal with my conversation and stewarding the, this, the framework for this conversation today, is to really demystify what it means to awaken and to go on the journey of tangibly exploring what that, what that really means, and, uh, and much, much more. So, without further ado, uh, let's welcome to the Know Thyself podcast, the rational mystic himself, Dr. Sam Harris.

Aspired to be that. Nice. Yeah, cool. Well, great to meet you again, and happy to be here. My pleasure, my honor. Been looking forward to this, like I said, for for a while. And, uh, let's just dive right in. You know, this being the Know Thyself show, figured no better place to start than the self, and something that we both share a lot of, uh, deep personal, uh, passions for inquiring within experientially, but then also intellectually. And I would love for you to open and share your thoughts on what do you feel like most people mean when they refer to themselves as a self, and how the process of suffering and imagined self essentially unfolds.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, good question. Well, uh, I don't know that I have any like, a final answer on that topic, but I think, uh, there's a few things I believe that are, that I believe pretty firmly here. One is that the conventional sense of self that people are walking around with is an illusion, which can be discovered to be such. Right? So, you can, you can, uh, inspect it to the point where you no longer feel that way in the same sense. And it's not to say that you would never use the word self again, or that, you know, you find yourself, uh, to be the same as other people, or just you can't differentiate yourself from the world. Or, I mean, there's, there are, um, things that don't happen. But it's important to just say at the outset that that there's this is worth looking into because psychologically, it's incredibly helpful. And I think ultimately ethically, it's incredibly helpful to come down to some understanding that what you take yourself to be subjectively, moment to moment, matters and can be the, the linchpin of, of really all of your unnecessary suffering. Right? So, you, um, it's worth looking into. So, the feeling of self that I think most people are walking around with by default is the sense that there's a subject interior to the body that is the thinker and doer and a true agent of conscious life. Uh, so it's, it's not that people feel identical to their bodies. They feel almost like passengers in their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. Um, now, you know, I think there's a lot of rational people who don't believe that to be true. If you tell a, if you tell a scientist that he doesn't feel identical to his body, body, um, he might object because he knows himself to be, you know, conceptually identical to his body. He knows that there's, if he doesn't believe in an immortal soul that can be separated from the body, well, then he believes that he's identical to his brain and the totality of what it's doing neurologically in his body. Um, but as a matter of experience, nevertheless, most people, what, whatever they believe, they feel that they're not quite identical to their whole body. They don't, they have hands. They can imagine being without hands. They, uh, and that, that sense of dualism extends really to everything they can notice about their, their, their physical bodies. Um, and I think, you know, most people would imagine that, you know, even if they're materialists, the, what they are as conscious agents is a matter of what the brain is doing. And if you could, you know, have a brain transplant, you would expect to go with the brain and not remain with the body. Right? So, if you took my brain and put it in another body, I would expect to move over there. Um, you know, at minimum, people feel like they are their brains, but their experience doesn't give us any evidence of, of even having brains, right? Much less that the brain is, is, is relevant to, to the nature of consciousness or the nature of what our minds are doing. So, um, you, uh, it's worth differentiating what people conceptually know about the biology and, you know, and the mind's dependency on the brain, uh, and what they feel subjectively. And, and just phenomenologically, how they, they move through life. And there, I think virtually everyone feels like they are a thinker of thoughts, a, an experiencer of experience, a subject, very likely in the head behind their eyes, looking at, at a world that is not them, that is separate from what they are as, as conscious agents. And in some sense, that world includes the body. And the body can malfunction. You've got a pain in your knee, and you feel as the subject, not identical to that pain, but in relation to it. And you're resisting it from a point outside the pain. You are receiving the pain as a, as a kind of locus of conscious, consciousness. You can pay attention to it. You can try to be distracted from it. Uh, uh, and then you, the pain can draw you back. Um, and yet, you are up here somehow as a subject. And if you do a practice like meditation, something like mindfulness, and you inspect that feeling of dualism, where there's a sense of a, a subject that can pay attention to experience and then get distracted by thought and then come back and pay attention to experience, um, that sense that there's a place from which you can focus, uh, and then be, be, that's the meditator. That's, you know, you now trying to meditate. Uh, that dualism gets maintained. Even in our spiritual efforts to recognize something about the illusoriness of the self. I mean, there are many people who are practicing meditation, even quite diligently, and even going on retreats, you know, silent retreats for 10 days at a stretch or more, um, and yet still they feel like they are the, the observer of experience. Now, they're, they're the one being mindful or struggling to be mind, mindful. They're the one who gets concentrated on the breath or on a mantra, or it can be any practice, really. Um, and yet, there's still this dualism of, there's the consciousness feels like it's a, a kind of spotlight of attention that you can aim from a place in the head at experience. And ultimately, that's an illusion. Ultimately, there, if you pay close enough attention, you recognize that there's only experience as a matter of, of, of subjectivity. Right now, I'm not making any claims about how consciousness relates to the universe, or, you know, that it was here before the Big Bang, or that there's no, no physical world. We can leave all that aside for the moment. I'm happy, happy to talk about that, but I'm just talking about what, what is available to experience if you're really paying attention, if you really notice what is happening moment to moment. And the crucial difference between dualism and not, and ultimately suffering and not, is at bottom, identification with the stream of thought that's arising in consciousness. So, it just, it's just a fact about us that we're thinking, basically every moment of the day. We're having a conversation with ourselves. We're, we're remembering the past. We're anticipating the future. We're subtly fail, you subtly or grossly failing to make actual contact with the present moment because everything is being conceptualized and rehearsed and reiterated and reacted to, judged, etc. Um, and it's through this sort of scrim of, of thought that everything is perceived. And, and even one's initial efforts to, to meditate and break through to something non-conceptual gets kind of bent and conformed to this pattern of thinking. Now you're thinking that you're being mindful. Now you're thinking, oh, and now I need to pay closer attention to the breath. And, oh, why did I get distracted? And, but that, that sense of, of self that seems to, seems to persist even as you notice thoughts arise and then you come back to the object of meditation and you notice thought, that there's still this undercurrent of thinking that's not being fully inspected and fully released. And so, ultimately, me to come a very long-winded way of answering your question, ultimately, this sense of self that I think most people are experiencing moment to moment, and that is really the, the string upon which all of their states of psychological suffering is, is are strung, is, um, identification with thought, with conceptual thought. And that identification with conceptual thought is very analogous to, like being in a dream of sorts, right? And I've always found it so interesting that we, and many people can spend a lifetime suffering something that is essentially a non-event, that if they did the proper practices and had the understanding, um, that they could actually create space from their own thought and emotion to experience self in a more vast context, would be so much more freeing, so much more liberating. And so, could you share your thoughts on how thought in general, um, and the close identification with thought, is is very much like being asleep, and what it means to essentially become awake from the slumber?

Yeah, it's a good analogy. And, and it really is more than an analogy. Neurologically, I think we, when we're thinking, we are doing something quite similar to, to what we're doing when we're dreaming. I mean, that, when, when you're asleep and dreaming, your thinking is no longer constrained by your sensory experience, right? You're no longer perceiving the world and interacting with the world, and so it's no longer, it's no longer getting trimmed down and interrupted, punctuated by, by the, you know, your, your P, your perceptual apparatus. All when you're dreaming, it's just, it's all thought, right? So you get fully captured by it. Um, but it's, it's still very much the same process. Um, and, uh, so it is a kind of hallucina, it's a kind of, you know, just as when you're asleep and dreaming, unless you're having a lucid dream, you're not aware that you're asleep and dreaming. Your mind just seamlessly transitions into this new condition, and you don't even remember enough about your life to, to be to be surprised, right? You go to sleep, and then all of a sudden you're, you know, arguing with a, a friend you haven't seen in 10 years, right? In a restaurant you've never been to. And, you know, the, you, you are so unaware of the reality of your life that you're not, you don't even think to be surprised by this transition. I mean, literally a moment ago, you were asleep and, you know, safely in your bed, and now you're in some new, circum, impossible circumstance, rather often. And sometimes it's a total emergency. And yet, you are so fully identified with being the dreamer of the dream that you don't, you don't even register surprise. The most surprising thing about ordinary dreams is that we're not surprised when they appear, because we, it's a complete failure of reality testing. That is, there's something very similar happening every moment of the day when we're thinking and we're unaware that we're thinking. I mean, you're just, you know, you're making a cup of tea, and you're thinking about a meeting that you're, you're going to have in five days, and you're getting anxious, right? That is a kind, it's, it's a miniature psychosis, right? It's, it's completely crazy to have to be unaware of this process where you, you begin to imagine this future circumstance, which may in fact not even resemble the circumstance you're going to find yourself in in five days. U, and it is so, and you're unaware of this process. The thought sneaks up on you, uh, just as a dream does, and you don't register any surprise that all of a sudden you're no longer aware of even making tea. You don't, you don't even feel your body in space. You're not, you barely see what your hand are doing, and you're, you're elsewhere, talking to yourself about some, and, and perhaps visualizing some circumstance. And it's, it's discouraging this negative emotional state, which you're then now, you know, living the consequences of. And that your next thought very likely is going to be, oh my God, why am I this sort of person? How do I, you know, why, why am I anxious about public speaking? What, like, I gotta, you know, maybe I should go to Toastmasters. And you're, you're, you're thinking, right? And you're unaware of this conversation. And it is completely trimming down your mind to conform to this, you know, in this case, in an anxious state. I mean, this is our, this is the character of our lives, moment to moment, when we don't see a difference between being identified with thought and not, and just recognizing thought as this automaticity that, that just appears in consciousness all by itself. So, I mean, there's, there's something very similar between ordinary thinking and ordinary dreaming. And there's something similar between those two states and what we recognize to be psychosis in people who are, you know, actually mad and, you know, walking the streets talking to themselves and talking to people who aren't there and just, just living out the consequences of their psychopathology in front of all of us. The crucial difference is that they're, you know, they're much more, you know, their behavior is so unconstrained. You know, like, like the difference is, you know, we're all talking to ourselves, but we know enough not to move our mouths, right? Throughout, throughout the day, a psychotic, I mean, the bright line between normal psychopathology and psychosis for many of us is just the people who can't help but, you know, actually verbalize what they're thinking. And they, they may know it's inappropriate, or they may just be so caught, they have, they're completely unaware that anyone is listening to them. Um, but we are, we have this basic psychosis already in normal consciousness. I, we are talking to people who aren't there, you know, we are talk, you're talking to, when you're, when you're rehearsing the argument you just had with your mom, or your wife, or your, you know, somebody in a store, and you're playing it out in memory, and it is kindling this negative emotion of anger, or impatience, or frustration, or regret, or whatever it is. And you're not aware of all of this. And you may be driving your car, and you're, you're having this conversation covertly in your, in your head. I mean, it's totally normal, but it's completely crazy. It's just, it is, it is, you know, it's nine-tenths of what a psychotic has. And, and yet, it's normal. So meditation, by, for lack of a better word, is the remedy for that. And that's, and, uh, breaking that spell. It's not an, it's not an accident that waking up is the, the ancient metaphor for just, you know, what the process is of, of, of breaking that spell and, and no longer being identified with thought.

Yeah, I'd love to keep pulling on this thread here, right? Because meditation does allow us to more quickly recognize the transitory nature of thought and be often less under the illusion of being identified as them, right? And so, as somebody who, with your Waking Up app now, is probably sharing non-dual mindfulness with more people on the planet than anyone else, you have a lot of understanding and, and context for how meditation and mindfulness in this process of realizing, uh, experientially, the transitory nature of thought, and how by doing that on a repeated basis, you can actually start to have more of that, uh, lighter experience of life throughout anytime you have thought throughout the day. Uh, is it extremely liberating? So, I would love for you to dive a little bit more, uh, into that, and how meditation supports and alleviates the suffering.

Well, I think most people, I, I think virtually everyone has, uh, very frequent breaks in this sense of, of self and in the continuity of, of selfhood. They just don't recognize it, right? So, it's, it's meditation is the art of recognizing what is already the case and, and just looking closely enough at the, at the nature of experience to recognize that there, you know, the gap between thoughts actually reveals something, right? That there, there are breaks between thoughts naturally. And it's even possible to recognize thought as thought, just appearing and disappearing without ever feeling identified with it. So, there's a larger space in awareness that you can drop back into and recognize that it feels a certain way. It doesn't feel like a self when you're just, rec, recognizing the flow of thought as an appearance in consciousness. Um, but, you know, with or without meditating, I think the, the sense of self is, there's a discontinuity that people can notice, if only retrospectively. And it, it offers some clues to why we find certain experiences very rewarding, like, like watching a film or, uh, television. When you re, when you're really captivated by it, when you really just lose your sense that you're, you know, sitting in a darkened theater or sitting in front of a, a screen watching actors do their thing, when you actually just become fully immersed in the story and you're just reacting, you know, you might be emotionally reacting to what's playing out on the screen, uh, but you're not, you know, you, you are, you're fully entranced. One property of that experience, and I think it's what, you know, one aspect of, of what people find so rewarding, is that you're, you're losing your sense of self for much of that time. You're just, you're, you're sort of disappearing, you're becoming effectively effaced, you're certainly no longer self-conscious, right? There's no, I mean, the thing that's truly rewarding about watching, you know, film and television is that it is a kind of super stimulus in evolutionary terms, because what we're, what we're evolved to experience and to be able to navigate are, you know, face-to-face social encounters with other primates. And we, you know, so we make eye contact and we, and then we look away, and, you know, we notice what people are doing with their eyes. But, and when two people are talking in front of us, we know that at any moment, one of them can turn toward us and, and engage us in the conversation, or engage us in some physical conflict. We know that our reputations are always on the line. And so, there's a, there's a sort of a war of selves that is always happening in, in physical space with other people. And, and that, you know, nothing matters more to us, just genetically, than than kind of maintaining all the integrity of all of that. Um, and yet, what happens when we watch a film or, or watch television is that we're thrust into this completely novel social situation for which our genes have not prepared us. We're, we're now having face-to-face encounters, and even larger than face-to-face encounters, if you're sitting in a movie theater, you're see, you're seeing a face that's, you know, 10 feet tall, you know, the close-up has delivered us an experience of a human face that just never existed in nature unless you were, you know, just, you know, kissing somebody, I suppose. So, you're, you're making, you, you have this face-to-face encounter with other people, and you might even be making eye contact with them. I mean, if somebody's making direct eye contact with the camera, you know, you're, you're looking into another person's eyes. And yet, you know, that you're totally unimpeded, right? You're not. And therefore, you can be totally unselfconscious in the presence of other people. And, and so it's a, it's a, it's a very pristine experience of, of voyeurism, right? You're just, you are, you're just looking at the lives of others up close. I mean, not far away, not through a telescope. I mean, you're right there in the scene, effectively, and yet totally unimplicated. And therefore, totally free to relax and just process it. And so, it is a kind of super stimulus. And, but the, the crucial piece, you, I think, is that most people can just let their feeling of, of selfhood relax in the presence of others. And that tends to be the hardest place to do it. In the real world, in the real world, you know, you're sitting in a, a cafe, you know, drinking a cup of coffee, and you're looking at, you know, the crowd, but you know, you're not making eye contact with strangers because they're all just drinking and, you know, reading the newspaper, say. And at some point, you look and you see that somebody's staring at you, right? That change, when you suddenly realize that you're an object in the world for another person, um, that sudden, you know, contraction, really, where you suddenly become self-conscious in the presence of another person, that is the self, right? I mean, that is that feeling that, that is a, that is a ramification of what we feel all the time when we feel that we are the subject, when we, when we feel implicated as objects in the world and in relation to the world. Um, and when you can drop that feeling in the presence of other people, then, then its absence even becomes more salient. Because then, because like when somebody's looking back at you, the normal experience is a, a feeling that you're, you're being seen, you're implicated by that person's gaze. And it's almost like you're behind your face, you're sort of wearing your face as a mask, and they're looking at you, right? And you're, you're reading, you're reading the, the, the faces of others to see how you're doing, in some sense, like, like their, their reaction to you is being played back on you as, okay, this is information that now I need to, to take stock of, right? When you're actually free of the feeling of self, you're, there really is just other people in the world, right? Like, you're just, it's somewhat analogous to watching a movie, right? Like, you are, you're, you're no longer, like, the theater is empty, right? Like, you're just, you're, you're just, there's just the movie, and you're just enjoying it. And you can, you can be, it's not to say that you become an idiot and you can't figure out how to, you know, shake some person's hand, or walk across, cross a room, or, or, you know, figure out what you want on a menu, or, but you're, you're no longer the center that is implicated by everything that is happening around you. You're not, um, in some sense, it's just a, a totality of experience. And so, that's some key to the, the freedom that, that exists there. Because not only are you not identified with each next thought that's telling you what a schmuck you are, and how anxious you should, should be about the next thing that's happening, uh, and how regretful you should be about the last thing that you just failed to accomplish, um, you're just at rest and available to notice what's happening now. And so, it's, I mean, that, that is the, even if you can't, even if a person hasn't experienced this yet, uh, they can recognize in the experiences they value, in the kind of flow experiences they value, whether it's, you know, performing some athletic of, you know, action, like, you know, hitting a tennis ball, like the moment when tennis really feels like it's working is a moment when you're not thinking about how to do it, what you should have done, the fact that you just missed it, oh my God, you know, how much, how many points have I lost in this game. You're just, you, you're at one with the action of hitting the ball, and there's a kind of effortlessness to it, like, you, you don't even know how you're doing it, right? Like, it's, it's a kind of, the mysteriousness of the whole thing is, is salient. Um, those kinds of flow experiences are once again, experiences where there's less and less of you as the experiencer, and there's more and more of just the pure experience. And, and so that's, that's what people tend to want in life, and they tend to find it in a haphazard way when they're pushed into some, you know, extremely narrow, uh, or, uh, unusual event. I mean, it can be kind of a peak experience, it could be a drug experience, it could be sex, it could be an emergency, could be, you know, watching television or watching film that becomes for whatever reason, super captivating. I mean, I think that's a, that's a, it is, you know, people can disappear into their work where they're just, you know, the hour flies by and you were unaware of, of what, what, you know, it was kind of effortless. Um, so there, there are glimmers of this state for people. Um, but meditation is really the only activity where you are directly targeting this insight that the insight that consciousness is this way already. It's not that it's not that the, the ego is really there and you successfully meditated out of existence. You, you recognize that it's actually not there in the first place. And, and, and then therefore, then any experience, however mundane, you know, even as something as boring as checking your email, can be an experience in which you recognize this, once you know how to meditate. And it's not that sometimes, in cases, for example, being robbed, it might be useful to identify as your body and do what's necessary in the actions that being identified as someone and a person. But the, for the vast majority of us, and especially people that are listening to this right now, we live in a society with more comfort and convenience that we ever have. The suffering then mainly comes from this language that we use internally that is constantly self-referential and reinforces this construct and notion of a self. And I'd love for us to just dive a little bit deeper here into how really language, in, in the construct of thought, continues to, uh, reinforce this idea of self, yet we're completely suffering something that if we paid close enough attention to, we would see that it's not fully graspable. It's something that is very much like we were speaking to earlier, being in a dream.

Well, I want to go back to the, the example you, you raised of just being, of being robbed, which seems like a situation where, you know, much of what I just said is completely irrelevant, and you, you just want to be a self who can defend itself. And, um, but when you think about that kind of experience, one, it's totally appropriate to feel adrenalized, to feel fear, to feel anger, to feel, to feel that an emergency is, has to be responded to, because in certain cases, there is an emergency that it has to be responded to. But the question is, how long do you want to be the, in the grip of one of those emotions in order to solve your problem, right? Like, is, is the problem that you've just noticed and reacted to and contracted around, best solved in a state of contraction and fear and anger? And sometimes it might be. I mean, sometimes, you know, you might need just the, the, just pure adrenaline to solve a situation. But those are super brief moments in life. And, you know, seconds later, you very likely want to be in a different state and need to be in a different state to function intelligently. Um, because the alternative is, is panic, in some sense. Uh, so it's not that I would say that the ideal is to never feel fear or anger, any, any, you know, classically negative emotion, ever again, because for me, they are, they contain information, right? They, they, they reveal that something has just happened in the world that is, that you really have to pay attention to, if only to just recognize it's actually not what you thought it was, and you now can, you know, no longer worry about it. But, you know, if suddenly, if something happens, some, some, you know, you hear a window smash and someone's climbing through it, and it's, you know, the middle of the night, okay, there's something that you need to respond to. But, um, once the, once you experience that initial surge of adrenaline, it's not that useful to, to be lost in sort of this, this catastrophic, uh, you know, implosion of self where you're, you know, you're terrified, you're, you know, uh, what you'd want to be, I mean, to take the self-defense analogies, like you'd want to be somebody who has been in this situation a thousand times before, can completely own it. You want to be a Navy SEAL who just like, this is, this is my bread and butter, responding to the precisely this sort of emergency, right? Like, that's the, how much fear is that guy going to be feeling in that moment? So, in so far as you're not that guy, it's understandable that you're, you might be super afraid. But the, I think everyone recognizes that the difference between being able to process, you know, an emergency like that in a psychologically healthy way and being traumatized by it, is a difference in just how long those emotions last, right? And how, and what you, what you're able to do when you remember the experience, you know, a day later, a year, year later. Um, and so, so much of, you know, psychological health and growth in, in any kind of spiritual practice, is an ability to, to shorten the half-life of, of these negative emotions. So, it's not that you never get angry again, but there's an enormous difference between being angry for 10 seconds and being angry for 10 hours, or 10 days, or, or, and, and then acting on the basis of that negative emotion, given those, those very different time windows. I, if you're Ang, if you're angry for 10 hours, there's a lot you can do in 10 hours to derange your life and your relationships. I mean, there's a lot of dumb things you can say when talking to, you know, the person you're angry at, or to, you know, when reacting to your colleagues at work, you know, from that state. Um, or getting on Twitter and, and, uh, you know, tweeting about it. I mean, it's just, there's, there's almost, there's almost no telling how much damage you can do, given, you know, given that period of time, you helplessly surrendered to a profoundly negative and antisocial state of mind. I mean, and then we see, we see that happen in people's lives. Um, so getting better at, at breaking the spell earlier and earlier is, um, is really everything. And, and once you can practice, you know, mindfulness, for lack of a of a better word, um, negative states of mind like fear and anger begin to function like mindfulness alarms, where, like, suddenly you're going along, there's nothing out of the ordinary happening, and then suddenly something happens, and you feel lousy. And say, you know, you know, some form of lousy that becomes a, a go-to looking into the nature of consciousness and recognizing that there's no center to it, and that, and that this next thought is a mere appearance in consciousness. And so, that, and so, rather than being taken in by this next thought of, that's, that's rehearsing the reasons why you should be angry, or should be afraid, or should be anxious, you just see it as a thought. And you, you, it really is a kind of superpower. You can decide at that moment, is there any reason to stay angry here? And if the answer is no, you can actually get off the ride. And, and yet, getting off the ride is synonymous with recognizing that there's no one there on the ride in the first place, right? I mean, like, it is, it can sound paradoxical when I'm talking about it, but there is no one who is angry. There's just this appearance of, of there, there's just this change in the, in the energy, in the contents of consciousness, and there was this, just the physiology of anger. You know, the truth is, breaking the spell doesn't even require the, the content, contents of consciousness to change. Like, they will change if you, if you actually are no longer thinking about why you should be angry. But you can re, the moment you recognize that there's no center, that there's no subject in the middle of the anger, that there's no one who is angry, you can, the physiology can, you know, it'll take 10 seconds to dissipate, right? But even in that first second, you can recognize that there's just consciousness and its contents, and there's no center to it. And that, and so you're already free, even before there's been a change in, in the, in the character of experience. It, that switch, that change of perception from things that are just continually happening, unfortunately, and I'm the victim of it, to using life and its continual opportunities to wake up and to dig deeper into the true nature of self in reality, that what you spoke to in this constant arising and passing away phenomena that we all experience in life on a moment-to-moment basis, that life is truly impermanent, and that our continual denial and resistance to that flow of change is why we suffer. And I feel like the more that you actually lose that identification with you being the person that things are happening to, then you can become like that witness and observer, somebody watching the TV, right? And you're not as absorbed in the experience, uh, and that controlling the way and you needing to force the movie in a certain outcome, right? So I'd love for you to speak a little bit more about impermanence, our denial with it, how that causes suffering, and then also your thoughts on the Bud, Buddhist view of consciousness and self, there like no-self versus perhaps the Vedantic view of consciousness as self. And is that a little too woo-woo for you, or what are your thoughts there as well?

Yeah, well, so impermanence is really the, the central fact that we have to get our heads around to be motivated to, to look into any of these esoteric ideas, right? Because for, but for impermanence, experience could be perfect, right? Like, like you could just, you could figure, present, at least in principle, you could figure out how to arrange your life. You could become wealthy enough, and healthy enough, and kind enough, and have enough, you know, good friends who love you around you, you could be careful enough, you could maintain it all enough so that your well-being would be truly invulnerable, right? Like, it just, that you, you could create a kind of paradise for yourself. But there's a problem with that. We know in the gross sense that the problem is death, right? We all die. You know, like, if you just, even if you're the luckiest one in the world, and you're going to live, you're going to be healthy to 130, what is that synonymous with? That's synonymous with you being on the receiving end of lots of phone calls, learning that people close to you have died and disappeared, right? So you're going to lose everyone you love, if you're too lucky to be the healthiest person, you know, right? Um, nothing lasts, right? That's the, that is the problem. That no matter how good experience gets, anything that, that wasn't here a moment ago and it suddenly appears, any state of mind that wasn't here a moment ago and suddenly appears, you know, joy, and, you know, creative fulfillment, and love, and ecstasy, and rapture, you know, any drug experience or non-drug experience, any psychedelic, you know, insight, or, um, insight had any other way, if it wasn't there a moment ago and it's here now, by definition, it will disappear, right? And so your, your well, a durable form of well-being can't be predicated on the appearance of any change in the, in the contents of consciousness, because it just, nothing lasts. Right? What, what you will be left with by definition is a memory of that experience. And rehearsing that memory is itself a transitory experience that you can only extract so much joy from. I mean, you can think about how good that party was a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, but it's your thoughts about it are not as good as the party. And your thoughts about it are not that good when you've, you know, you know, on the hundredth reiteration, right? It's just not, it's, and so it is with any spiritual insight that is a matter of something you're remembering, uh, you know, some peak experience you had yesterday, you know, whether you were, you know, on a meditation retreat or on acid, or whatever it was. If it was a change in state, and now you're thinking about it, it's, it's a memory, right? It's so, like, so, so the ground truth of, of our contemplative lives has to be what is available to be noticed now. Or like, what you really have is what you can locate now. And if you, uh, you know, this will frustrate many people, because many people are living understandably with the experience that now is kind of mediocre. It's not, you know, like they can't locate anything especially profound now, but they have had some great experiences that they can remember, and that, that they're using as kind of landmarks on their spiritual journey, what they want to get back to, right? So they did take MDMA, uh, you know, a year ago, and that was completely transformative, and they, they recognized a state of consciousness that they previously had no clue existed, and they, they, they now know that their life's journey is completely different than than they had assumed. But it's still a memory, right? They don't feel that way now, right? Life isn't that good now. And so, if you're, you know, get, most, most people are in that situation, in some sense. Most people are seeking happiness, seeking insight, seeking fulfillment, seeking some stable basis to feeling good in a context in which everything is changing, right? And there's just no way to secure a, an experience that is so good that it becomes truly indelible, and it becomes the person you now are, you know, moment by moment, you know, thereafter. What is ever present? What is there always to be noticed is consciousness. Is, is just the, the sheer fact that it feels like something to be what you are, to be aware of experience, to be, to be, uh, awake, even, you know, even in the dream state, you know, know, potentially even in, in states of sleep between dreams. I mean, some of us have had experiences where we think, um, we think we know from the first-person side that sleep itself is not synonymous with a loss of consciousness, but that's a fairly esoteric claim, uh, scientifically. But in any case, in, in, in normal waking life, and even in dreams, there is the sheer fact that it's like something to be what you are. And, and that, that is consciousness, for lack of a of a better term. I would also call that awareness. Um, and it, it is, it is always the ground truth of, of your living and caring about anything. I mean, there's nothing you can value outside of its potential implications for consciousness, you know, whether it's your consciousness, or the consciousness of those you care about, or the consciousnesses of perfect strangers who you, who you'll never meet, if you care about the difference between happiness and suffering in this universe, you know, your own, or, or your children's, or strangers, as you are, right? To do, um, and really, all of our morality and ethics is based on that kind of caring. Um, what you're talking about is consciousness and its contents. You're talking about the, the character of experience for conscious beings. Um, and so consciousness is the, is the basis of all experience, and it does, does have a certain character that can be recognized. And its character is, in the, in the Buddha sense, it is selflessness. It is another term which is is profoundly misleading in, in English. It's often used in Buddhism is emptiness, right? The, the Sanskrit is, is shunyata. Um, emptiness is a very, is kind of a depressing term. I mean, people don't, they don't, they tend not to want more of it, more of it when they hear about it. It's like, why would I want, why would I want the punchline of spiritual life to be emptiness? Right? That just sounds like the most boring, depressing thing in the world. But it's, you know, it's not, um, it's not me, certainly not meant to be, and it's not when you see its implications. I mean, it's not, it's, it, it has implications of freedom and lack of contrivance and lack of, you know, it's centerless, and, uh, it's, it's, it's unconstrained, it's, um, it's, you know, unborn is another word that you, the comes up in Buddhism, um, uncontaminated, um, and it's not constructed of anything. It's not, it's not built on anything. It's not predicated, it's not, it's not contingent, it's not, it doesn't require any specific contents of consciousness to be, to be real, right? It's the prior reality of, of the fact that anything is happening at all, subjectively speaking. And when you recognize that reality, and you recognize that you are identical to it, as a matter of experience, there is real freedom, even in the midst of classically negative experience, even in the midst of physical pain, even in the midst of of profoundly negative thoughts. You know, profoundly negative thoughts recognized are like, you know, very ugly images, you know, on a, on a movie screen. They don't, they just don't hurt the screen, right? They, or, or very ugly things, you know, held up in front of a mirror. The mirror doesn't contract, the mirror doesn't recoil from ugly images, right? The mirror is just this, this, this condition in which anything can kind of effortlessly appear. And consciousness can be recognized to be that way. And so, so from the Buddha side, you know, just linguistically, they tend to emphasize what it's not. It's not a self, it's not compounded, it's not conditional, it's not constructed. Um, and so there's just this sort of ne, this, this negative effort of sort of disavow any assumption about what it is, right? And not, not reify it, not making something of it. Whereas in the, on the Advaita side, coming from a, a an Indian tradition that was, is just, just filled to bursting with sort of positive assertions of religiosity. I mean, just the kind of the Hindu context in which Advaita is the, the ultimate expression of wisdom, there's just a lot of assertion about, um, you know, spiritual reality and a lot of metaphysics. Um, so Buddhism traditionally is a reaction against all of that, uh, and it tends to maintain this reaction even against some of the language that is used in Advaita to, uh, you know, you know, the main indiscretion being, you know, capital S Self, right? Like the punch line for Advaita is, you, you are the Self. You're not the little self, you're the big Self. Uh, but, you know, I'm convinced that they're talking about the same experience ultimately. They're just, they're just asserting different things about it. Uh, and here we're up against the, the limitations of language, I think. There's, and I think there's a danger with both ways of talking about it. I mean, the, in the, in the Buddhist framing, the danger is it becomes so dry and analytical that people get the wrong idea. They think that there's something kind of life-canceling about this whole project, right? This is like, it's no self, Nirvana is the, you know, is the extinguishing of, of, of suffering, but it's the kind of the extinguishing of everything else. You're, you're losing your identity. You know, life is, is this is often, it's a very current

Mistranslation. But you know, most people think, "But the Buddha said life is suffering, right? Like, it's all suffering, there's no happiness, right?" That's not what the Pali term *dukkha* means. But it includes suffering. But the basic meaning is unsatisfactoriness, very, very much because of, uh, what I just said about the implications of impermanence, right? Like, because everything is changing, there's nothing you can successfully hold on to that is unsatisfactory. If you're seeking a, a, a permanent state of satisfaction, you're not going to find it here because everything is changing, right? Uh, and, and you, amid that change, if you think your happiness depends on gratifying desire, getting the next thing you want, you are, you are engaged, by definition, in a ceaseless search for gratification. I mean, you just have to, you have to keep building the house anew every day, right? Because it's all, you know, the walls are always falling down, right? It's just a continuous project of maintenance. And that's true of our world. I mean, we're continually maintaining the kind of the material requisites of our well-being. But the question is, what are we doing with our attention moment by moment while we do that? And when, once you learn to meditate, you can recognize that it's actually possible to be happy before the next good thing happens, right? Before, and before you, you solve the problem that has just appeared. So, before you got rid of the next negative thing that has happened, right? So you, you, you know, you have a pain, and you have to figure out, "Okay, now what am I going to do about it?" Well, do I have to call a doctor? Okay, I'm going to, this is bad enough, it's not going away, I don't know what it is. I'm going to call a doctor, right? At each stage along the way, there's an opportunity to either be at rest and just simply do the next thing from the point of view of already being okay, you know, psychologically and, and spiritually, contemplatively, or you can be thrust into this, uh, dreamscape of, you know, one anxious thought following the next, you know, thinking about the past and future and feeling, feeling at each moment along the way that your well-being is entirely dependent on resolving this situation, right? Like, you could, you're not going to be okay until this pain is gone, until you have figured out what it is, you've seen the necessary doctor, and now, and now it's gone, right? There is no, there's no possibility of being okay until you have solved that problem. Uh, and so it is with desire. Like, you have now figured out the next thing you want, you're not going to be okay until you get that thing, right? Because the feeling of desire itself is a kind of discomfort, right? Like, you have, you recognize that, okay, you've got a, you've got a problem, you've got a problem in your, in your life that, that, that can only be filled by a certain shaped object, right? And until you, until you figure out how to get united with that object, whether it's a relationship or a change in your business or a change in your health or an understanding of, of, uh, what's happening in the world, um, you know, you're living, you're living with a mental state in the presence of which you're sufficiently uncomfortable that you have to rearrange the world so as to get rid of that state.

Meditation allows you to recognize that consciousness is already free and open and without center, even in the presence of that mental state. And the thought you were just thinking that delivered that state itself was just an appearance that was, you know, happening all by itself. And you break the spell and, and you recognize, "Okay, now you're at rest." It's not to say there's, there's nothing that needs to be done. You might still have a pain that you, that you should go to a doctor for. You might still have a business problem you need to solve. But you can do it from a, from a state of being that recognizes we're all going to die, right? Like, like your well-being can't be predicated on winning this game. It can't be a matter of not dying. It can't be a matter of not having pains. It can't be a matter of not having business problems that you have to solve, right? Like, this is a, this is a, uh, it's like you're playing a video game where the, you know, there are various boss fights and their various challenges. And at every level, it's interesting and complicated, and it's always something new appearing. I mean, what did you expect? Were you expecting a video game where nothing new appeared? You, like, like you're expecting a place in the game where it's just like, just smooth sailing without any, you know, impediment, and you just get to stay there, right? Like, it's just, that's just not the game we're in.

What a boring game. Yeah, it would be boring. And it's, um, I mean, there, the truth is, there are kind of meditative equivalents of that where you can get. I mean, you can, the truth is, I mean, you can become a monk or a nun, right? You can become a monastic where all you do every hour of the day is meditate. And so you have no business problems, you have no relationship problems, you have no kids, you have no, you have health problems, but you, like, you've limited the things that are on the menu to worry about. You're not going to be political, you're not going to worry about what's happening, you know, in the news. You're not, you have absented yourself from any conversation that requires you to add your voice to the, the, the complications of the world. And now you're just going to pay attention to the contents of consciousness and meditate. There's a way to, you know, I'm not, um, criticizing that project. I, I've spent, I spent a fair amount of time on silent meditation retreats doing just that. Was, you know, it's, I know what that life is like, you know, at least for increments as long as three months at a time. But, um, it's possible to engage all of that very much like a, you know, trying to smooth out the video game to the point where it is boring but ecstatic, right? I mean, it's not really boring because boredom is really, boredom as a state is really just our failure to pay attention to, like, what the ordinary state of boredom that most people are familiar with is just nothing is, nothing interesting or good enough is happening to capture your attention, and you don't know how to meditate. So you're waiting for something good to happen to capture your attention. You're scrolling for something that's going to give you a hit, you know, of dopamine, uh, or you're, you're changing the channels looking for something that you can disappear into because you're uncomfortable enough in your own skin. You can't just stare at a wall and be happy. Where, when you know how to meditate, you actually can just stare at a wall and be happy. You just, there's just the mystery of your own being there, just as available when you're looking at a, at a wall. Um, so a monk or a nun, you know, won't have that problem. But what they can have is the availability of a very different project, which is, you know, you know, universally condemned in contemplative circles as a kind of error. But it's a very pleasurable and, and arcane error, which is to become, to become a kind of junkie of concentration, where the concentrated mind is incredibly pleasurable, right? So it's just, and you can be, you can be explicitly concentrated in states of mind like loving-kindness, where you're just overwhelmed by feelings of love and compassion for all sentient beings, right? You can just be sort of cruising in that stream for as long as you maintain that practice. So you could just be blissed out on meditation. And, you know, it's not that it's a bad thing. It's not that it's a necessarily a misuse of a person's life. I mean, because when you, because if that person is functioning in the world at all and meeting other people or teaching meditation to people, that you, that can be one of the most inspiring people you're ever going to meet. I mean, you meet someone who's doing nothing but meditate on loving-kindness, you know, it's just, you can get just blissed out just hanging out with that person because all they're thinking is how much they love you and how much they want you to be well, and they've got no, they're not thinking about their career, they're not thinking about their relationship, they're not thinking about, um, anything, you know, other than they're just pushing their good vibes out to the universe. Um, and that's real, that's felt, that's very real. And they're, and they're very stoned, you know, I mean, in a, in a very good way, high on their own supply. Yeah.

Uh, but there are two things wrong with this. One is, it's also impermanent, right? Like, like it is, those high states of concentration are based on this very contingent effort to pay attention to a very specific thing to the exclusion of everything else, right? You're just, you're not available to everything else. You are meditating on something very specific. And you're also, you can, you can fail to recognize that the real freedom of emptiness, the real freedom of non-duality, the real freedom of selflessness is just as available in ordinary states of consciousness as it is in this very rarified state of just, you know, unconditional love for all sentient beings, right? So, you, the ultimate wisdom of meditation, and again, both in the Buddhist tradition and in the Indian Advaita one, is to recognize what consciousness is like always and already coincident with every possible experience, not just the, the classically spiritual states of mind. So that experience of freedom that you beautifully shared in both the Advaita approach and Buddhist approach of emptiness, uh, once you experience, once you feel and you taste that, it's like, often times there can be kind of this evangelical fervor of wanting to share that because it's so good, you know? It's like you found the biggest pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and you want to share that. One of the pitfalls on the path, and the irony of the spiritual process, right, is that putting freedom off. Like, if you're going to take up the project of being spiritual, going on the spiritual path, walking that life, doing those practices, the very idea or thought of putting enlightenment into the future admits to yourself of your own unenlightenment in this present moment. And so the idea of putting freedom into some future state denies yourself of its possible realization that that's already available to you. So I'd love for you to share a little bit more about this kind of dichotomy in, uh, how we can still feel the immense benefits from meditation and realize that it's a worthwhile practice to take up and to develop mindfulness within our reality, but to go on this path as sort of an initiate to some goal in the future is also to deny yourself the possible reality now.

Yeah, that's a difficult question to resolve, you know. So on one level, it's true. In the beginning, or at least seems to be true enough so as to be everyone's default starting point. I mean, in the beginning, you recognize that you have a problem, right? You're not as happy as you want to be, you, you suffer unnecessarily, you, you know, your attention is continually bound up in thought, you feel like a self, you don't know what the hell I'm talking about when I say the self is an illusion, right? I mean, like, it's just, you're stuck. But you, you become sufficiently convinced, let's say, through a drug experience or through some, you know, peak experience that just comes over you for whatever reason, you, you get a glimpse of a different way of being, and you're, you're absolutely convinced that there is a there there. It's not just, you know, a matter of religious belief or, or, you know, some new age fraudulence, right? Like, like, you don't have to believe it, it's not that you're, you've taken on a new set of ideas, you've, you've had a taste of something where you recognize, "Okay, consciousness, it's possible to have a very different experience. Consciousness can be different than it is tending to be in my case." So how do I get there, right? Like, I'm not, I have to recognize I'm not having that experience on a daily basis, and that is felt as a problem because I'm seeking to be happy, and I'm just not as happy as I could be, and I'm just gratifying one desire after the next, and yet there's this way of being that I know is possible. Um, how to get there? So there is this duality of path and goal already set up, and it seems like it seems unavoidable. And when you're given a technique like mindfulness, again, start at that starting point, which is universally everyone's starting point. You can't help but engage it dualistically, where you're just, "Okay, now you're trying to meditate. You recognize that distraction in thought is the problem. It's not that thought itself is the problem. You're not trying to suppress thought, but you do, you are trying to recognize thought as thought." And you're finding that difficult because thoughts sneak up on you, and all of a sudden you're dreaming about lunch, and you forgot that you were trying to meditate, right? You were trying to follow the breath. You're following it, in and out, and in and out, and then you're, "I wonder what's going to be for lunch." And you didn't see that happen, you didn't feel that happen, it just became you. And for a moment there, the whole project of meditation seemed to be interrupted by the dream about lunch. So it's within that, that's the frame in which you're, you're now engaging this spiritual path, and it is dualistic. You're, you're lost and found, right? You're meditating, and then you're not meditating, then you're coming back to meditating. And when, even when you're being mindful, the experience of being mindful is, I mean, they really, in my framing, there are really two stages to the path of mindfulness. There's the dualistic starting stage, which can last for a very long time, and then there's the non-dual stage of where you can actually locate freedom and selflessness directly and become mindful of that, right? And so, and so it's the dualistic stage I'm now describing, which seems, which, you know, where the problem you just posed is just very, uh, captivating for people. It's like, "Yeah, I can't, I can't pretend that I'm at the top of the mountain because I'm at the bottom of the mountain, and I see the path, you know, disappearing into the mist up there, and I'm trying to walk it." Um, and yet I'm being told by everyone who's teaching this technique that it's not that the ego is real and that you meditated out of existence. It's not that you actually polish a brick into a mirror. It's not that you, you know, there's nothing to really accomplish. You just have to pay sufficient attention to recognize that it's the paying sufficient attention part that can seem laborious and can seem like, you know, you're, you're doing something, and it's gradual, because it doesn't appear to be here now. But the truth is, it's actually not. It's, there's an illusion here that just has to be penetrated. And when that, when that happens for anyone is just a matter of, uh, you know, luck on some level. Uh, you know, it's not that you can't do things that are valuable to sort of orient toward it. And the practice of meditation is the most valuable thing, I think, anyone can do to become available to this insight. But when you have this insight into selflessness or into non-duality or emptiness, depending on how you want to talk about it, one of its hallmarks is you recognize, "Okay, that this, this was always already the situation." Right? It's not, this is not something newly created by my meditative efforts. This is, I mean, here's, there are many analogies. None, no analogy is great. But these are various analogies that I've used. One is that, have you ever been to a restaurant or a store and there's a, there's a full-length mirror along one wall, like, you know, floor-to-ceiling mirror? And you might have, say, it's a restaurant, you might be halfway through your meal before you recognize that everyone over there on that side of the room is just in the same people you're sitting with, but they're in a mirror, right? So, like, the restaurant is like half the size you thought it was, right? That sudden phase transition is idyllic and perceptually interesting because nothing has actually changed about the visual experience, right? Like, the light and the color and the shadow is all the same, but you suddenly have this new understanding of what is real, right? And you can make, and, you know, one way to sharpen that up is like, let's say, let's say the mirror is such that it's really just not clear, even if someone told you that over there, that's not the world, that's a mirror, right? You're not, you're being confused by your eyes. But you could imagine a mirror, you know, sufficiently set up, you know, in an artful enough way and reflecting just, you know, the right part of the world such that that would not even be obvious, even if you were staring straight at it and given the instruction, "No, no, you just have to look at it closely enough, you'll see that there's no depth to that circumstance, it's just, you're looking at light on a wall, you're not looking at people and events and, you know, beautiful and ugly, and nothing's happening over there, right?" You're confused. Um, but imagine what would happen if, you know, let's say a teacher, you know, a Zen master, somebody who could actually get through to you on this topic, they walk over to the mirror and they just put their hand right on it, you know, they just rap their knuckles on the glass, and all of a sudden, given that stimulus, you might say, "Oh, okay, now, now I see it." Right? But nothing has really changed, right? It's like it was there, you were looking at it the whole time, and yet now you have this conclusive understanding of what is what. Uh, an analogous thing happens with mindfulness, where you are paying attention to thoughts and sensations and emotions and, you know, getting lost in thought and coming back to the breath and coming back to the feeling of walking or whatever the object of mindfulness is at the moment. Uh, at a certain point, the sense that there is a, a meditator, the sense that there's a center to this experience, the sense that there's a thinker in addition to the flow of thought, the sense that there's a place from which you can aim attention to be meditating on anything, all of that just disappears, right? Like the center drops out, and you discover your own absence in a very conclusive sense. And then that becomes the thing you can be mindful of, right? And then there are few paths of practice that teach this very explicitly and target it in a very precise way. Uh, and, you know, the one that was most useful to me came from the Tibetan tradition. It's called the, the Zen teachings also Mahamudra within the Tibetan tradition does this. There are certain variants of Zen that kind of hit this point in a precise way, although, you know, I would argue with less precision. I mean, you can spend a lot more time in the Zen tradition, to my eye, wondering whether you're doing it right, whereas in a Zen context, it's just, you know, you know you're not doing it right, and then you, then you know you're doing it right. Like, like it's much more precise. Um, in the Advaita tradition, the same is true. I, you know, it's again, differences in emphasis begin to matter. Like, you can spend a lot of time in an Advaita context, depending on the teacher, just talking about all this stuff and feeling that there is no methodology beyond just talking about it, because with Advaita, you get such a, you tend to get such an uncompromising criticism of every dualistic method that, I mean, that Advaita is so alert to the problem you posed, which is the sense that I'm far away from the goal, right? Like, I'm even conceiving of enlightenment proves to me that I'm not enlightened, right? Because I'm, you know, here, what I'm left to be aware of is, in some sense, the evidence of my unenlightenment. I mean, that's what I'm mindful of. I'm mindful of the fact that a moment ago I was lost in thought, and I now I'm now I'm trying to pay attention to the breath so to not do that again, right? Like, it's just me here meditating, right? That, um, so but in Advaita, you know, this is, people will have heard of people like Ramana Maharshi or Nisargadatta Maharaj or Papaji, who I studied with, who was a disciple of Ramana Maharshi, or Ramesh Balsekar, who was a disciple of Nisargadatta. These are two couple of modern teachers, but there are many others. The emphasis on the utterer of duality, the fact there is no path, there is no goal, there's no one to accomplish it, it's always already the case. That becomes so that path is so steep that for many people, it's just like a brick wall. I mean, you just kind of slam into it, and you're left with somebody saying effectively like, "Either you're going to understand what I'm saying right now, you know, before I get to the end of the sentence, or it's hopeless." Like, like, it's just, you know, there's no one to do it, there's no one to try. Consciousness is already free of self, and you either recognize that right now, or you're going to leave this room telling yourself a story that you have to meditate and you have to be a spiritual seeker, and that's all part of the bad dream that you haven't woken up from. So either you wake up now, or not, right? And that, that is the methodology that Advaita implements again and again and again, ad nauseam. And that's why you have people who spend, you know, they can spend years just hanging out with their favorite guru, just talking the talk of Advaita, and maybe not recognizing this thing, or maybe having peak experiences which they then remember as, you know, the moment where they glimpsed it, but they can't find it again in their moment-to-moment paying attention to experience. Um, so what I think, I mean, the sweet spot for me, and again, it's not that there aren't pitfalls, you know, in various moments depending on how you talk about it, but the sweet spot is to acknowledge the utterer of this, to acknowledge that it's consciousness is already this way, but to recognize that there is a precision required and an honesty, like an intellectual honesty required. And it's just like, what is it that you can notice now, right? What is available to attention now? And it, in my experience, it requires a certain amount of training and mindfulness to actually be rigorously honest about what is, you know, what experience is like now, and to validate it within your own experience versus it's just like an intellectual thing, right?

Yeah, and also just a pretense. I mean, you know, I've met people who spent a lot of time with Papaji. I mean, Papaji was kind of a unique case because he was this amazingly charismatic teacher. He was just this, you know, to all appearances, just this wonderfully free being, right? And he certainly claimed to be enlightened. He was not hiding his light under a bushel. I mean, he just, he claimed to be the real deal, and he seemed like the real deal. And he was totally uncompromising in his, in the non-duality of his non-duality, right? He would not, more so than his teacher Ramana Maharshi. I mean, Ramana would say things like, "You must make every effort to become effortless," right? Like he would, he would play with the duality-non-duality component of it and acknowledge that for many people, even for him in certain cases, there was a path-like precursor to his being stably aware of this truth he was talking about. Um, but Papaji tended not to acknowledge any validity to anything path-like, right? So if you'd say, so he would just, his analogy for what meditation was like, you've come to him with, like, 20 kilograms of bricks on your head and you're complaining of how uncomfortable you are. And what every tradition of meditation does is just add more bricks to the pile. Like, "Here, we've got a brick made of jade, we're going to put that on here to see if you feel better." Right? And so, like, it's just completely, it's completely ill-conceived. The logic is just backwards. You know, there's nothing you're going to pay attention to now strategically as a spiritual practice that is going to be any use at all in this project because the, the effort you're making is predicated on a false assumption. Everything about it, the beliefs, the affectations, the changes in your identity, the wearing of beads, your interest in certain books versus other books, the whole project is just an adumbration of your, of the very thing that's making you unhappy, right? It's like, your problem is seeking, and you can't seek your way out of it, right? That's the. And so emphasizing that to the exclusion of every other message leaves a lot of people feeling like, "Okay, like, like that door is closed. I'm not going to become a Buddhist. I'm not going to become a meditator. I'm going to get rid of my beads. I'm not going to have any spiritual identity. It's just, it's all a waste of time." And now I'm just here considering the project anew. And what happened to two things happened to many people with Papaji. One is, there are many people who claimed to be enlightened who obviously weren't, right? Like, they had some brief moment with him and then they went away and set up shop as gurus, and they, you know, were just, it worked for some people and it didn't work for others. But it, they had a belief about themselves that they're now these realized beings, again, it was a new self-concept, right? And in some cases, it was not that it was totally unwarranted. I mean, they were having very compelling spiritual experiences, they were very meditative people, they spent a lot of time on this project, and they got to Papaji, and he basically deputized them as gurus. Uh, which he did to everyone. I mean, literally anyone who would say anything positive in his presence, he would basically just say, "You're going to do great work in America." And if you were the kind of person who wanted to set up shop as a guru, you could take the ball and run with it. Um, so either that happened, or people just felt that all spiritual efforts were doomed. But then they just went on to live ordinary lives where they're making all kinds of other efforts to be happy, all the ordinary ones, to figure out how to have good relationships and not be addicted to alcohol and like, they're just trying to solve all the ordinary problems everyone's trying to solve, trying to feel good. And yet they now know that meditation is right. It's like, so they were left in a worse place on some level. I mean, it's almost like being told, "At bottom, you really are an Olympic-level athlete. Like, if you could only just sit properly, just get into the right posture, you'd recognize that you're Hussein Bolt, you're as fast as any man who's ever run the 100-meter dash." Right? And now you have this belief about yourself, but you just can't quite, I mean, and you're trying to pretend to be a great athlete, you know, or but you can't actually function that way. Or you just have this belief that it's, working out is hopeless, dieting is hopeless, getting in shape is hopeless. And you hope someday you're going to be fit. It's like, it's just the door to the Dharma gets closed, and there's no alternative.

So, and this is actually some clue as to why within the Zen tradition, they're very concerned that you not give the non-dual teachings out without the proper context, because people can get the wrong idea. And, you know, honestly, I mean, I walk that line, however I do over at Waking Up. And it's not, I'm not sure I always walk it correctly in every instance. Um, my feeling is you want to be rigorously honest about what is actually true for you in each moment, what seems to be true for you in each moment. You need a certain amount of mindfulness to do that. I think people should be disabused of all kinds of spiritual and religious illusions that, you know, you don't have to take anything on faith to engage this project. But I do think it's important at the soonest possible opportunity to be told that actually, you can realize something truly fundamental and life-changing very soon. And it, and it is the hallmark of it is that it's always available. It's not something that you have to get a lot of momentum behind you to get back to. Right? It's not something, it's not a peak experience that by definition will require a week of silence on retreat to get back to or another tab of acid to get back to. It's like, is it, is it coincident with this moment, however ordinary it seems? And it could be arrived at by as simple as this one deep breath, and you're back in that state, right? That you can experience. I think it's so valuable to have teachers and individuals that can point out and slap their hand on the mirror and point out things with and help guide your attention to the nature of reality in a more true sense. Yet, there's also, and you kind of touched on it a little bit, which I want to dive a little bit deeper here, is that it is possible to wake up beyond the illusion of self and still not have grown up beyond your own characterological defects. You can have a profound disidentification with your own thought, and yet still act like an or worse. And we've seen many cases of this, right? Yeah. And so I would love to dive into this a little bit more, because it's one half of the pie, or potentially less. But to just pursue the disidentification with thought in this path of waking up without realizing that your characterological defects and essentially shadow material that you have not worked through will have a profound impact on people in your relationships in the outer world if you don't resolve as well. Yeah.

And also just differences in culture, right? Like becoming enlightened doesn't get you a new culture. All like it's like, and if you don't know anything about quantum mechanics before you become a Buddha, you're not going to know anything about quantum mechanics after you become a Buddha. I mean, leaving aside what people believe about the powers of a Buddha. And there's just the fact that there can be quite a distance in time between having genuine insight into what I'm talking about here, selflessness or non-duality, and truly stabilizing that insight so that you never overlook it again, right? So, I mean, for me, I'm not, I make no pretense of being fully enlightened or a Buddha or at the end of this project, right? Like, I'm, I try to be rigorously honest about just what I can authenticate as a matter of my direct experience, what is plausible to me to believe in on the basis of what I know or think I know, and what it's pretty clear to me I'm not experiencing or haven't experienced. And so, you know, I, I still definitely get lost in thought, right? The dream reasserts itself. Now, what it's like to wake up from the dream is different than it is if I were practicing dualistically, right? Like, when you're practicing mindfulness dualistically, you get lost in thought, and you notice it, and then, let's say, you come back. Let's say you're meditating on the breath, you come back to the breath. That there's still a lot of power in that. I mean, just the learning to exercise this particular muscle of just getting distracted and then recognizing it and being no longer being distracted, coming back to the breath or coming back to sounds or anything you could notice, even dualistically, that allows you to unhook from the emotional and behavioral implications of any one of those thoughts, right? So if it's a thought of anger, and you notice it, and then you come back to just breathing, that gives you a degree of freedom that most people don't have. Most people are just angry from that moment on, and they're just going to say or do whatever they do on that basis. They see no alternative but to feel identical to their thoughts. But if you're doing this dualistically, it seems like the sense of self is maintained throughout that whole process. Like, "I feel angry, and oh, I'm supposed to be meditating. Why did I? Okay, back to the breath." But it's the meditator has been preserved. Like, you're still me in here meditating, making an effort. Um, once you have really broken the spell and can practice in a non-dual way, the moment you notice the thought, the moment you notice you've become angry and the dreamscape of thought has captured you, not only does the thought just unravel the way all thoughts do, I mean, they're just, it's amazing that thoughts do anything at all to push us around because, I mean, when you actually look at them, these are just the most gossamer bits of language or imagery. I mean, there's nothing there, really. So the thoughts unravel whether you're looking at them dualistically or non-dualistically. But the moment you recognize a thought is a thought, coincident with that recognition, you notice there's no one recognizing it. I mean, there's no center to consciousness, it's just consciousness and its contents. And there's freedom in that, right? So you're not left with the problem of, "Okay, I better get back to the breath because this is a long project." Right? Like, this is, I've been on this retreat for a week, and this is still happening. I'm getting angry. What is, like, "Oh, now I'm thinking again. What the." So, like, that iteration just perpetually feels like a problem that proves you're unenlightened and far from your goal, as you put it at the outset, right? And yet, when you can practice non-dualistically, you recognize that the goal is already here. You can, in Zen terminology, you can take the goal as the path. Like, your next moment of path is enjoying the freedom of non-duality in that moment, you know, maybe only for a moment. Right?

So, the crucial point here, though, is that even if you're practicing non-dualistically, you still, very unless you're some adept or prodigy who, the moment you break through for the first time, you're done, you're stable for the rest of your life, you're still going to be fluctuating between enjoying consciousness as it is without distraction and being lost in the dreamscape of thought, right? And because you're still going to be caught by thought, it matters what kinds of thoughts you have, right? Because you're going to be doing something on the basis of those thoughts. You're going to be saying something, you're going to be captivated by something, you're going to be wanting something. And if you're a guru who really wants to have sex with his prettiest students, that's who you're going to be, right? Like, you could be punctuating that with genuine insights into non-duality, but if you don't have an ethic, if you've come from a culture where that's actually not even a bad thing, like that's just Tantra, right? You're just, of course, you could have sex with anyone you want, you're the guru, right? You're like that. If you come from a theocracy and there's no HR department who's going to say, "Hey, listen, actually, it's not a great thing to be. I mean, some of these students are married, there's a power differential here, you know, this is unfair, this is ethically unwise, this is, you're actually," and in each one of those moments, you're being selfish and you're not recognizing it because you don't have that much mindfulness. You're not going to see the problem. And, yes, we have lived with the consequences of that in many spiritual communities, many gurus who were not actually frauds in the normal sense have behaved terribly with their students because they essentially became rock stars in a very isolated community and gratified their desires, their still extant desires on that basis, right? I mean, just think of how tempting it is to be, I mean, basically you're like, you're John Bon Jovi, you know, but you're on an island of people who are projecting all of their spiritual hopes and fears onto you, right? It's like, it's like you're a rock star with power, right? You know, you're like, it's ridiculous, you know? And most egos in that situation don't handle it very well. Um, so it's not especially mysterious that spiritual teachers misbehave. And it's also not mysterious that even people with genuine spiritual insights can misbehave in those ways because they're again, they're getting lost in thought much of the time because they're not, they're not fully done with this process of recognizing the nature of consciousness. Um, and as to whether anyone has, I'm not sure I've met anyone who's totally fulfilled the process. I've certainly met people who have claimed to have done so, but, and I've met people who I felt were further along than I was and were very inspiring to me on that basis. But, no, I think it's, it's important to recognize that on some level, spiritual insight and even non-duality isn't enough to get us everything we want and a right to want in this world. I mean, we're, it's not enough. A bunch of enlightened Buddhas, even, is not enough to help us build a civilization that really works, right? There's a lot, there's just a tremendous amount of knowledge that we want that you don't get by just meditating more, even correctly on the nature of emptiness. I mean, you don't spontaneously understand how to improve an economy, right, or a medical system, you know, or to make to engineer airplanes so that they crash less and less and less and ultimately don't crash at all, right? Like, that's all a matter of very specific forms of iterative knowledge acquisition that perfectly unenlightened people are qualified to do, right? Like, this is the whole project. These projects are orthogonal to one another. It's just, we want good aircraft engineers, and we want Buddhas. And occasionally you might want, if you're an aircraft engineer, it might be nice to be a Buddha. If you're a Buddha, you probably don't care about being an aircraft engineer. But we need both. And they are different projects. And the crucial piece for your question with respect to the ethics is, ethics has a lot in common with aircraft engineering and is not fully captured by the project of just recognizing the self as an illusion, right? Because especially in this interval where you're still just working out the consequences for yourself of this insight, and you're not fully stable, because if you're not fully stable, all you have are ideas and thoughts and culture with which to manifest. And if you have a culture that just hasn't figured out certain core ethical principles, as many cultures haven't, you know, it's like when Papaji had to get his, had to find his niece a husband, you know, in India, he had no brighter idea about how to go about doing that than to put out a classified ad with her picture in it, you know, strategically lightened to make her look more light-skinned than she was, because that's valuable in Indian culture, right? They, you know, like it's racism is the wrong concept, I guess, but there's some version of bias, prejudice against dark skin even within Indian culture, that that's a completely rational marketing tool for his niece to find a husband. This is what the Buddha, the self-proclaimed enlightened adept is doing to find a husband for his niece. Okay? Is that the optimal way to solve the social problem of how do you get young people together to have satisfying marriages? I doubt it, right? It's like, so he didn't have, by virtue of being the most blissed out and wise and compassionate person I had ever met at that point, he had exactly zero insight into how to solve this kind of social problem. There's just more you need more than just the deliverance of your own personal freedom.

Powerful. I think it's such an important understanding and framework for people just to tap into a little bit here as well, because they are both very, very important, and one without the other is incomplete. The mere recognition that consciousness is like a mirror is inherently liberating. And I'm just curious for you, a little bit more into your own personal journey and into your story, what have been a few pivotal moments where it's shifted something and allowed you to pivot into an even more honest and devoted inquiry to this path? Because you very much devoted your life into this understanding, this work, sharing with people, in your own personal life, going on retreat earlier in your life, and exploration with psychedelics. And I think it's really important for people to firsthand have these different experiences where they can validate within their own reality what we're speaking to. And so I'd love for you just to share a little bit more, a couple of those big pivots for you.

Yeah, um, so yeah, my first experience that was relevant to any of this was with MDMA. So I think I was 18, and, um, it had been, it was given to me. Like, at that point, it was 1980, that was 19, I was, I think it was like 1986. It had just become Schedule I, I think, in '85, but like until then, it was very actively being used in the therapeutic community, very much for, you know, spiritual and, and, uh, you know, psychological insight. I mean, it was just, it was not yet a club drug. It was not, I mean, maybe it was, I was too young to know, but it was, there was no rave scene, and it was, I knew of no one my age who had taken it. And there were no parties where it was being passed around. So MDMA, otherwise known as Molly or Ecstasy. So I took it very much, you know, it had been given to me.

You know, really, it is just kind of a prompt to spiritual realizations. Like someone said, "Listen, you might really learn something if you took this." And, and I think I, um, think I waited, I think I waited like two years until I actually thought, "All right, maybe that, maybe that's worth trying."

But when I finally took it, I, I took it therefore very much with the intention of realizing something about the nature of my own mind that I hadn't yet realized. And that's what happened. I mean, I was, I was sitting with one of my best friends at the time, and we're just having a conversation, waiting for this, this, the drug to arrive. And I recognized at some point along the way that we suddenly were very different people. That we just, that we were, for the first time. I mean, he had an analogous experience, but I really can only speak about my own. Um, for the first time in my life, I was just, I was unencumbered by concerns about myself that I didn't even know had been operative. Right? It's like, for the first time, I was not paying attention to the, the way the person was looking at me. Like, like the, like the change in expression from the, on the other person's face was no longer getting read back into a, um, a self-conscious mapping of my own, you know, performance, my own worth, my own. Like, I was just not, I was not looking at myself through another person's eyes on any level. I was just, I had 100% free attention to just look at my friend. Right? And so he's talking, and I'm just listening, and there's no, and I was not comparing myself to him anymore. I was not, it was like, and when all this got stripped away, it was just the freedom of, of having it gone was, um, just astounding. Like, like it was like I had, it really was analogous to having carried a tremendous burden and never, you know, never having anything to compare it to. Right? And to suddenly have be relieved of it. It's only in its absence that you, you feel how painful it was to be that sort of person. Right?

And so it's, so it's, I, I must have, the fact that I took the drug in the first place with the intention I had means that I had some awareness that there was some project here to, you know, to at least give my attention to, uh, that something wasn't optimal about my moment-to-moment experience. But I really was, I mean, it's very hard for me to recapture who I was before that experience because it was, you know, it was such a revelation that there was so much more to me and my own being, you know, psychologically, than I had experienced up until, until that point. You know? And if I just have no, I don't know what it would be like if I could go back in time and talk to the teenager I was before I had that experience. I just, I mean, I, I, there would have been no basis to get through to that person about any of these, any of these topics. Right? So it was just, you know, it's very hard to say that taking an illegal drug is an indispensable experience, but, you know, in my case, it felt like it was. Like, I don't, I just don't think, I think I was so closed down and unavailable. It's not that I was profoundly unhappy. I was, you know, I was a pretty happy, high-functioning kid. But it's just, I had no interest in it pointed in this direction. Like, I was just interested in the world. I was interested in, in doing fun, creative things in the world. But the nature of mind did not interest me. The nature of consciousness did not interest me. And my own, uh, religion and all of its promises, you know, certainly seemed just intrinsically false. Um, so I just was, um, I, I, I guess on some level, I was just convinced that there was no more interesting game to play than being a successful ego. Right? And a, a knowledgeable ego. And a, just, it just, you know, you, there, there's a way to win this game as an ego, and that's what I wanted to do. Right? And so, and the cramp of that, the confinement of that, was not at all obvious to me.

I mean, the one, the one thing that that made it clear, but I had forgotten it, and when I, until after I took MDMA, but the, the one moment in my life, really, I think the, the only moment in my life that where I recognized that there was some interesting riddle to solve that I just wasn't even entertaining, was a moment when I, I went on Outward Bound, which was, which was this, um, probably still is, this kind of outdoor leadership, uh, school that lasted, in my case, it was like 23 days in the mountains of Colorado over, over a summer when I was 16. And so you're hiking, you know, endless miles, you know, between clouds of mosquitoes for, you know, day after day. But it culminates with a, a three-day, what they call a solo, where you're just, you're not hiking, you're not moving around, you're just camped somewhere by yourself and fasting. All you have is water and a journal. Right? And so you're, I was up at 11,000 feet, just in front of this gorgeous Alpine Lake, you know, it's just like with, you know, more stars overhead than I'd ever seen in my life, uh, for three days and nights, fasting and writing in my journal. And all I could think to write in my journal were just like lists of foods I wanted to eat when I got home, and the experiences I wanted to have, and all the people I missed. And I mean, nothing came out of me in those 72 hours but just a, a litany of complaint about how lonely I was, how sad I was, how, how uncomfortable I was in isolation. I was just, I was profoundly unhappy. Like, I was like, I was the kind, the person who, if you put him in solitary confinement, would just have died of exposure to his own mind. Right? I mean, it was just, it was, it was a catastrophe. And yet, I came off those three days, it's like there was like a, the last day of the, maybe those were like days, you know, maybe 18 through 21 of a 23-day course. So the last couple of days of, of, you know, integration, um, were days where I could see that those three days of isolation had a very different effect on many other people in the group. Right? So like, and most people were older than me. I was 16, which I think is the youngest you could be on Outward Bound. And, but so a lot of people were in their late 20s, you know, or mid-20s, and they had a profoundly different experience. I mean, they, they came off three days of solitude having had had a like a life-changing, you know, insight of some kind. And I remember thinking, "I have no idea how that's possible." Like, like, and that was like just barely, just barely interesting to me. Like, "Wait, like, I don't know what happened for them, but like, that's like, I'm now surrounded by people who just told me that like having nails drilled into their head was, you know, a, a life-changing positive experience." So I knew there was something I was missing, but I didn't think about that until like two years later after I took MDMA. I just thought, "Oh, okay, now I understand that there's like, I'm in sort of a mansion of mental life, and I've been confined to the pantry, you know, just trying to figure out how many Oreos I can eat, and, you know, there's just, you know, everything else awaits my discovery."

So, um, so it was at, so after I had that experience on MDMA, I started reading books about, you know, meditation and spirituality and religion. And that started a, you know, more than a decade of me spending most of my time just focused on these kinds of questions. And, and I did, uh, you know, many, many retreats, mostly in a, in a Buddhist context. I mean, many of Vipassana retreats, you know, practicing mindfulness dualistically for a very long time. And I probably spent about a year on retreat where I think it would be safe to say that, you know, even after a year on retreat, I, I wouldn't fully understand the kinds of things I've been talking about with you today. Like, I was still very much a, a, a dualistic practitioner of mindfulness where, even if I had had glimpses of selflessness, like there, there definitely moments on, like a three-month retreat where I was concentrated enough where there seemed to be, you know, clear breaks in my sense of self. Like, I'm just, you, I'm listening to the sound of a bird, say, and for a moment, there, there's just hearing. Right? There's just, there's not a, there's not one hearing, there's not the thing heard, there's just like a pure experience of hearing. Right? But I didn't know how to get back there. And it seemed to be contingent upon me building up many, many continuous moments of mindfulness and really kind of heroic levels of concentration, doing nothing but practice and silence for, you know, 16 hours a day. Right? I mean, that's what these retreats were. So I spent about a, a year like that on silent retreat, uh, before again, in like increments of, you know, one week to three months long, uh, mostly in the States, but I also made many trips to India and Nepal, um, to study with various teachers. And, but it wasn't until I connected with, uh, Zen and, and a few specific teachers in Nepal and, uh, Poonaji, you know, the, the one Advaita teacher who I spent a fair amount of time with in India, where that sort of the, the criticism of my dualistic efforts to practice kind of got under my skin enough that I actually began to practice differently. And that, that sort of changed everything. And then I did, I did some retreats thereafter in a more non-dual way. But, um, yeah, I mean, that was, you know, that had, my, my 20s were the project of my 20s was really all of that, going to India, studying in Nepal, and coming back and doing retreat, and then going back and studying with various teachers. And so, uh, I think that, so you, you went on various, where like you said, upwards of three months, you would go on retreat, right? And this was all throughout your 20s. I'm also curious, did Alan Watts, in particular, have any impact on you and your 20s as a writer or speaker?

Yeah, well, I listened to pretty much all of his stuff online. Not online, on audio cassette. It's now all online. It's now, we have his full archive, yeah, on Waking Up, which is wonderful. Um, I mean, Watts was one of the, the great communicators of this, and it was just so entertaining to listen to him. Um, I mean, he's not, he's not, he's not focused on the, the detailed mechanics of, of meditation, right? He's, you're not getting a lot of practice talk from him. But like, as far as the big picture insights of, you know, just what, what is Eastern wisdom and, you know, how should we think about it, he's, he's one of the best speakers we've ever had. He's really, really wonderful.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I was curious because I know you guys got the, got them all on your platform. And, yeah, before we move on, because there's, there's still quite a few things I want to dive into here, uh, in regards to consciousness. If you had to, right now, put in a time capsule, your best answer, and thesis, and final thoughts and words on the hard problem of consciousness, and we fast forward to the moment that problem is solved, if it is, right? And we then go back and look at Sam Harris's words and thoughts on the matter, what would you say? If you had to put, put that in, put that in there?

Well, so, so depends on what the solution is. So, so the hard problem is that, and this, this comes to us courtesy of the philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the phrase. Um, he pointed out that there's, there are all the quote easy problems of understanding the mind, which is just, you can understand how, for instance, with vision, you know, there's, there's light that comes in and hits the retina and gets, you know, so you have, you have electromagnetic energy that gets transformed into electrochemical energy in the nervous system. You have a, just a concat, a series of of neuronal firings as a result of of light hitting the retina. Um, and that gets encoded in visual cortex in various patterns. And, and there's what's called a retinotopic mapping of the visual scene on visual cortex. And there's certain cells that are responsive to lines at a certain angle. And we've, we've come to understand all of this. Um, it's very complicated, but nothing in principle is profoundly counterintuitive. And we can, every step along the way, we can, we can understand what light is doing to specific molecules in the retina, how those molecules affect you downstream neuronal firing, uh, and then what happens, how neurons function physically, chemically, electrochemically, um, how, how, how genetic, you know, encoding of protein relates to all of that, receptors and, and neurotransmitters. Like, there's just, it's, it's clockwork at bottom. It's, it's, it's a very, it's, you know, it's wet, it's messy, it's complicated, but it is really, um, our intuitions run all the way through as you, as you, as you drill down on the micro of details. There are no surprises. Like, like the causality makes sense all the way through. What doesn't make sense at all, and what, what is profoundly counterintuitive, is that at some point along the way, there's something that it's like to see. Right? Like, like we could imagine building a robot on the principles of of our visual system and having it visually navigate the world based on, based on visual data, but have it effectively be unconscious. There'd be nothing that it's like to be that robot. That robot would not experience vision in any way, all the while performing functionally in the world as a visual, as a system that that's making use of visual data. Um, in our case, we have the full pyrotechnics of conscious life. We have, we, we have the conscious experience of vision. And that is fundamentally mysterious. There's no description of the, the micro events that makes the emergence of, of conscious vision perspicuous, understandable. Um, and what's more, worse, and the reason why this is really truly the hard problem, as opposed to just yet another easy problem that we may one day solve, is that it's, it seems impossible to imagine what could be an explanation that would be, would intuitively run through. It's like, you can't say, "Oh, but if only neurons were firing at this frequency," well, then, okay, then I understand why there's something that it's like to see. Right? No, no frequency seems even relevant. Right? Like, it, it just, it simply does not matter what frequency it is, or how many neurons you get, or what their pattern of connectivity is, or what neurotransmitters are involved. Or none of that matters. Like, that all of that is as strange as saying that, you know, if a, if a wind blows across a trailer park at exactly 146 miles an hour, and the trailer park is filled with watermelons and, and beer, uh, that whole system becomes conscious, becomes a conscious mind. There's something that it's like to be a trailer park. Right? But if you take away the watermelon, it's not conscious anymore. Right? That's, it's a mere statement of a miracle. Right? And that's what it seems like it would be, would be happening in the case of any story about the, the, um, the wheelworks of neurophysiology. So that's, so the, so the hard problem is, if consciousness emerges on the basis of unconscious complexity, you know, first you have unconscious information processing, first you have unconscious, uh, molecules, you know, chemicals bouncing around, but that at a certain point of integration, at a certain point of of encoding, the lights come on. Right? If that's the way things work, that, you know, those of us who are enamored of the, the hard problem, uh, would say it's always going to seem like a miracle. Right? Like, that's not understandable. That's, that's the equivalent of saying, "Before the Big Bang, bang, there was truly nothing, and then everything exploded into being." Right? Like, there's not just, not just that there was, there was nothing, there was no heat, and no energy, and no matter, there were no laws of nature either. There was like nothing. But then in a certain moment, everything appeared, including the laws of nature by which anything would further appear. Right? Okay, that if you believe that, and as you know, as Terence McKenna once said, "If you can believe that, you can believe anything." Like that, it seems to be the, the limit case for extreme credulity, I think is what he said. Right? So, like, it's, like, that is the, the hardest thing possible to believe, because because nothing is real, nothing, not just, you know, not having space-time, but like nothing, not having laws of nature, not having anything, right? Real nothing is precisely what can't give rise to something, let alone everything. Um, analogously true unconsciousness, you, true nothing that it's like to be this system is precisely the thing that can't give rise to the something of consciousness. Right? And so there's, it doesn't matter how you order it, it doesn't matter, it's just not going to be intelligible. Now, that doesn't mean that it isn't true. Right? So, like, like I'm willing to say that it could just be a fact that neurons of in a certain configuration give rise to consciousness, and if you change your configuration slightly, there's nothing that is like to be that set of neurons. Right? U, so consciousness could truly be an emergent property of unconscious complexity, and I'm just not capable of understanding how. It's just that that's, it's just a brute fact. Right? And, okay, so that's, that's just, we would have to acknowledge that that is a condition in which we don't actually have a normal scientific explanation. Like our, our science, scientific explanation of of life is truly a reduction that works. And like, you, it used to be that people thought there was a profound mystery between distinguishing living and and non-living objects. Right? So, like, there's a living system, like an animal, and a non-living system, like a machine, and there must be some, like, life force that explains this difference. Now, if you leave consciousness aside, right, and you're, and you're actually just talking about the, the, you know, how we define life, and just what a system has to be to qualify as as living, you know, how it, how it metabolizes energy and reproduces, and I mean, like the definition of life is, is a little fuzzy at the boundaries, but, um, for instance, it's, it's not entirely clear whether, you know, it applies to something like a virus, say. But it's just, it's a semantic judgment as to whether it would. But, um, once you, once you define your terms, and you, and you understand something like, you know, the molecular basis of inheritance, you know, just how DNA works, and how, you know, cells divide, and how, U, you know, gametes, uh, uh, you know, form, and, and, uh, get together, and how it's like, like, there is no, there is no more to the mystery. Like, we know, we now know how babies get made, and, and we know how we pass on our genes, and we know why kids resemble their parents, and we know, and we, the biology of inheritance is, you know, again, it's very complex, there's still things we don't totally understand about it, but there are no real mysteries. Right? Like, it's, it is a, it is a concatenation of physical facts that when you drill down far enough, it's, it's amazing, but it's not confounding. Right? Yeah. But add consciousness to this picture, it just, there's no place for it. Like, there's just no, there's no evidence of consciousness in the universe apart from our direct experience of it. And there's no indication that it would exist or should exist apart from our direct experience of it. It's just, it's, and, and yet, our direct experience of it is the most, is the only thing really that we can be certain of. Right? It's like, so, so far be it, there are some, you know, imbecilic statements that occasionally come out of philosophy and neuroscience that suggest that consciousness might be an illusion. Right? Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that simply cannot be an illusion. Right? Because it is the thing that would give rise to any possible illusion. Right? Like, if even if you were completely confused about what reality is, even if you're in the Matrix, right, or this is all a simulation, you know, on in some alien supercomputer, or you're, you know, you're a brain in a vat, or you're psychotic and you're me, you could be confused about everything. You can't be confused that something seems to be happening. That that seeming is what we mean by consciousness. Um, so, so par, you know, semi-paradoxically, though we don't understand it, we don't understand how it, it arises, or even, you know, at bottom, whether it does in fact arise. I mean, it could be a more fundamental constituent of the universe. Um, though I'm not sure what I believe about that. Um, though we don't understand it, and we don't understand its place in nature, we can understand that it's the one thing we are absolutely certain of in each moment. Uh, and it's the basis upon which any further certainty would be, would be granted to us about anything. I mean, it is, it is our, it is our conscious life that is the, the, it's the only condition in which we do science, in which we think, think about, you know, eternal truths of mathematics, or anything else. I mean, like, we, we, co all of cognition, effectively, even though it's, we understand that in our case, it very likely has unconscious precursors. Right? They're, cognitive operations, there's, there's a lot to our mental lives that seems to be happening in the dark. But anything that we can actually notice and talk about and directly experience is, by definition, something that's happening in consciousness.

That was, uh, so fascinating for me as a listener, just aside from being the host of the show, which I now need to continue on with being. Um, the, so if you had to give your answer, it's, would you say it's then consciousness, awareness, aware? Oh, yes, I didn't give you the time capsule answer after all that roll. I did not give you the answer. So, so my answer is just that there's two possibilities. If it emerges from unconscious complexity at some level, um, that may be true. That may actually be the right answer. U, if that's true, I think we will never understand that in the way we, we want to understand any other thing. Like, we don't, there are things we understand, we, we really do understand them, and that will not be one of those things. Again, we understand how DNA works, works, at least to a first approximation, right? We understand how it's like, if you shatter a window, we understand why it shatters and why it doesn't just melt, right? Like, because we understand about the lattice structure of the, the molecules, right? We, it's like brittleness at the higher level is the thing you would expect to emerge given the way the, the, the atoms in that substance are arranged. Um, and so it is with the wetness of water, right? Like, there are emerging properties, and, but yet they're understandable. Consciousness is not that sort of emergent property. So if this is, in fact, true, in, in 100 years, if we just, you know, you, the aliens land and us, this is, this is how consciousness arises. It's exactly this kind of unconscious processing that gives it, you know, that turns the lights on. And look, we turn the dial a little bit, and the lights go out, and then they're back on, they're out, they, like, they hear, you can play with this dial as much as you want. Um, and you'll notice that it's just, ex, this is exactly what consciousness is in any physical system. Okay, that's just, that's amazing. That's a miracle. That's, we don't understand it, but we can just, we can then live on that basis. We could design conscious computers on that basis, right? Like, we could, and we could design, you know, as I think we would want to, unconscious computers that can't suffer and can't be happy, and, you know, when you turn them off, it's, you're not murdering them, because they're not, there's nothing that it's like to be those computers. We cannot make the mistake of accidentally building conscious computers, because now we understand that consciousness is, you know, the way the lights go on is this way, and, and we can decide when we, when we do that. But I think it's more likely that we will, um, in the near term, far before we actually think we understand the, the, the true neural correlates of consciousness, I think we'll build computers that we think are conscious, because they just seem to be conscious, you know, they, and we might get, build them in such a way where they, they claim to be conscious, but those of us who understand the hard problem won't know. You know, it'll just be, it'll fundamentally be mysterious as to whether they're conscious. And, and yet, we'll helplessly relate to them as though they are conscious, because it'll seem psychopathic not to. I especially if you build anything like a, a humanoid robot that really has appropriate facial expressions and and tones of voice, and is obviously passing the Turing test because it's smarter than you are, and it's, you know, it's more, it's totally aware of your emotions, and it's seems to have emotions of its own, because it's been built that way. And, uh, you're now, you're, you'll helplessly feel like you're in relationship to another conscious being. And I think most of us will just lose sight of whether the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness was ever an interesting problem. We just won't know, you know, and we'll forget about it.

Yeah, so I'm asking you to speak into some obvious unknowns here, right? So you said you would say, essentially, to boil it down, your best guess is that it's probably unconscious complexity. If you had a, well, so the alternative to that is that no, it doesn't, in fact, emerge. It goes all the way down into the most basic constituents of matter, or this opposition between matter and consciousness is at bottom misconceived, and there's some, you know, the, the technical phrase for this in philosophy is is neutral monism. I think, I think it was Bur and Russell who gave us this phrase, but there's some neutral position conceptually from which to understand mind and matter that doesn't admit of this dualism. So it's like, I currently, it just seemed like there's, there's a mystery. There's the physics of things, and then there's mind and consciousness. But, you know, now, even mind, it's mind without consciousness isn't even that all that mysterious. So it's really just, there's physics that's unconscious, and then there's consciousness, and we don't know how to marry them. We don't know where consciousness comes into the picture. Um, let's just say it doesn't come into the picture. Let's say it goes all the way down. Let's say that there's something that it's like to be an electron on some level, right? Um, doesn't mean that electron is thinking, it doesn't mean that it uses language, but like, there's some interior dimension to everything that we would recognize as consciousness. The lights are on, in some sense, all the way down. Now, I think there are reasons to be doubtful of that. I, I think that doesn't truly solve the hard problem, because it's still, we still have the problem of this apparent difference between everything we can be consciously aware of in our experience, and the stuff that still seems to be going on in the dark that we know is related to the stuff we can be aware of. Right? So, I mean, you asked me a few minutes ago, um, about, uh, uh, gurus who misbehave, and I, um, gave you an example of a rock star. And the best I could do was John Bon Jovi. Right? Right? So, like, like, so I'm thinking, I, I go into, uh, rock star, rock star search mode. I'm looking for rock stars in my memory. And for whatever reason, I know the names of many performers, but John, John Bon Jovi is the one that came up, uh, you know, dating me and, you know, scandalizing everyone who actually cares about modern music, presumably. Um, but, it's it fundamental. So, so as aware as I can possibly be of my experience, I can't be aware of the search algorithm that's happening in my brain that is promoting various rock stars from memory. Yeah. And I mean, I could keep, I could consciously decide, okay, no, John, there's no way I'm saying John Bon Jovi. I'm just going to wait here until I get something else. Right? And, uh, something else will come. But I, but there's, there's some set of physical events that is conspiring to, you know, to curate those, you know, deliverances from memory that I can't inspect. Right? And it's still, I know, I know my brain is doing it, but it seems not to be associated with consciousness. Now, it's possible that there's some other way of understanding consciousness where, no, there's actually, that would push consciousness back even into that, which is, yeah, you know, maybe there's a, maybe there are multiple conscious points of view, even in a single brain. Right? Maybe, you know, we, and there is something that is like to be the part of me that was just doing the math on, you know, old memories. Right? But I somehow doubt it. Like, that doesn't, that seems, that doesn't seem like the most parsimonious way to to explain our experience in light of what we know about the brain. So, but these are, these are fundamentally different pictures. If consciousness goes all the way down to the to bedrock, um, well, then that's hard. That's also hard to understand. But it's hard to understand anything that goes down to bedrock. I mean, we don't, at a certain point in science, you just have to admit that you have to say, you take certain things as given. I mean, it's just, you know, and whether space and time are among those givens is is a matter of debate. I mean, there are physicists who are trying to to find ways of thinking about physics that don't take space and time as primitive, say space and time are emergent phenomena of some more basic physics. But there are other approaches to physics that take space time as primitive. Um, so anyway, at a certain point, you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you can't be pretending to understand the straps. Right? Like, there's, there's a brute fact of something that you're, that you're assuming actually, axiomatically, in order to do any kind of further work of understanding anything. This is true mathematically, it's true, uh, scientifically, and it's possible that consciousness is just one of those things. So, um, so then, so then in a thousand years, we might say, no, consciousness is one of the things you don't have to understand. You know, consciousness is like space-time, right? That's, it's just the condition in which all of this is happening. Right? Or consciousness is like, you know, causality, right? Like, causes precede events. We're not going to, we're not going to spend any time trying to figure out if there's something other than deeper than causality. You know, the beginning of everything was the beginning. We're not going to ask ourselves how the beginning began. I mean, like, like, there's just, you know, there's, I think scientists, there might be some exceptions here, but basically science has given up on coming up with a set of laws that become perfectly self-explanatory. There's going to be some brute, you know, axiomatic fact that is just a starting point.

So, diving, diving, because I want to, I'm mindful of the time that we have left. I do want to touch on free will here a little bit. You would, uh, kind of final thought is that you would probably lean towards, if you had to say, the best guess, unconscious complexity. Like, if, in a succinct way, got, I mean, because you're more qualified to speak on this than most people. I mean, I just, the truth is, I just don't know how consciousness arises. Like, I would not, on some level, I would not be surprised by any any variant of this thesis. It's like, you know, if, if in fact, consciousness is integrated with matter in a way that we just fundamentally don't understand, and we're misled by all of our interrogation of the brain, and, you know, general anesthesia, and the consciousness seems to get, you know, turned off in in those that case, and it's like, we just, there's some other purview from which this whole problem intellectually seems different, and, uh, we're just confused. You know, analogous to like, you know, we're, we're dealing with, you know, three dimensions of space, and we just have not thought about the possibility of a fourth dimension of anything, right? Like, we just haven't done the math. And, you know, the cur, curvature of space is, um, much less, space-time is not something we just can't imagine because we just don't have the concept for it. Maybe there's something analogous there that would just make the problem seem different. But, um, that wouldn't surprise me. And it also wouldn't surprise me if it's emerging on the basis of of information processing in some configuration, and that's always going to seem like a miracle to us, right? So, wonderful. So, uh, again, quickly, if you had to say a best guess probability, what do you feel as a likelihood that we will engineer consciousness into super intelligent AGI?

Well, as I said, I think the pro, the far more likely situation is that we will create the intelligence and have no idea whether it's conscious. It'll be indistinguishable. Yeah, it'll just be, it'll, it'll seem more conscious than us because it'll be more intelligent than us. I have no doubt. There is simply no doubt that intelligence is substrate independent. I mean, there's just, there's just no reason to think that there's something magical about biology with respect to what we mean by intelligence. And we've just, what we have now is already so effectively intelligent that, you know, even if you're going to go come at it in a piecemeal way, even if, even, even if forget about trying to perfectly emulate human intelligence, let's just take the top hundred things we care about as as, you know, acts of cognition, uh, and intelligence. Each one of those can, you know, just, we already know it's like arithmetic. Yes, you can build a superhuman calculator, and all of us have one in our pockets right now. You know, it's just your smartphone is better at arithmetic than you will ever be. And just, just add up all of those capacities. We know they're all substrate independent. And we know recognizing faces, and recognizing the gender of faces, and recognizing voices, and all of that is, you know, all of these human attributes, um, are accomplished in in silico now, right? So I think it's, it's not going to be much longer before we have systems that pass the Turing test in all the ways that could matter to us. I mean, even if they seem weird in some other ways, or just not quite human, I mean, they, they, they won't, they'll fail the Turing test the moment they pass it, because they'll pass it so spectacularly, it'll be obvious they're not human. It's like, it's already obvious that no human knows it has inst, no human has instantaneous access to everything on the internet, right? So the fact that I can ask ChatGPT something and it can give me facts more comprehensively and in a more orderly way and faster than any person can, even if it's not perfect in other areas, the fact that I can say, "You know, what are the causes of World War II?" and it within five seconds can give me a mini-essay on the causes of World War II that's better than, you know, any, you know, academic historian can accomplish in the in the same span of time. All right, it's already superhuman. It's already, I already know there's not a little man in the box, you know, typing, you know, his answer to me. Um, so, so they will be, the moment they're general, they'll be not human level, but superhuman. And the moment we give them any kind of relational capacity that matters, the moment they become sensitive to our tone of voice and our facial expression, and the moment we're integrated with them, you know, you're, you're piping your watch data or your ring data to your AI assistant, so it's been tracking your heart rate and sleep cycles too, right? It's integrating all that information for you. Then you're going to be talking to a machine, you know, forget about a humanoid robot where that's, you know, going to make it seem like Westworld. I mean, even if it's just Siri on your phone, but just the next iteration of Siri that is, you know, essentially ChatGPT 5, you know, plus all of your, your, uh, health data, you're going to be in the presence of something that is more observant of your inner life than any person can be from the outside. So it's going to know you better than your spouse knows you on some level, right? Especially if it's reading your emails and reading your texts, and it's read everything you've ever published and listened to all, like in my case, you know, my wife hasn't listened to my podcasts, right? Like, I've got 300 episodes in my podcast that my virtual assistant will have heard, right? My wife hasn't heard them, so she doesn't know what I was thinking about on all those for all those hours, right? I'm going to be in the presence of Siri that can say, "Sam, you know, you definitely, you look tired, you sound tired. Um, you're not, you, here are five things I want you to pay attention to, you know, this is what you forgot you wanted to do today, but you sent that email to, uh, uh, it's like, it will be, you'll suddenly, the moment the thing is responsive to you relationally, you, you are going to feel helplessly feel that you're in the presence of the smartest, most perceptive person you've ever met. And that's going to feel like being in the presence of consciousness. Right? Especially if we don't, I mean, if we hamstring the, the thing to say at every moment, to remind us at every moment, "Listen, I'm just a dumb machine. You're not killing me when you turn me off. I'm not conscious, and nothing that's like to be me. You haven't solved the hard problem problem." You know, that's possible. But at a certain point, I don't know. I mean, like, again, for me, Westworld is unimaginable because in the presence of perfectly humanoid robots, which is to say, we're out of the uncanny valley, they no longer look weird, they look human. And they're, and so their facial displays of emotion are not spooky, they're just like, they look human. The, if we ever get there, and I, you know, I don't think there's any reason to think we won't, um, there's no way you could have a place like Westworld where you're treating them badly, and you know, raping them and killing them, and like, like, because you will feel like a psychopath. You will be viewed as a psychopath by other people. Like, you, like, if that's your idea of fun, if your idea of fun is to rape and kill Dolores, right, you're a rapist murderer, right? Like, like, that's, like, it doesn't matter that she's a robot, right? Because it's too compelling an illusion. The fact that you were able to give yourself over to the illusion with that kind of, you know, rapacity, um, proves that there's something wrong with you, right? And, and so that, like, so Westworld, I think, is unthinkable, or at least, otherwise, it would just function as a, a bug light for psychopaths. But, um, yeah, so, which is to say that once we're in the presence of anything like a, a perfectly compelling humanoid robot, it's going to be a very weird world, and we're, we're not going to know, you know, very likely, we're not going to know whether they're conscious, and yet we're going to helplessly relate to them as though they're their people.

Going into a little bit of free will. So I want to actually take a moment to let everyone know that I'll link down in the description a longer podcast you did on your final thoughts on free will for people that want to dive deeper into this. But to share, uh, to share like a few minutes on, like your consensus on your thoughts on free will, I think would be very valuable here, because it is one of those things that once you start to dive into and realize the illusory nature of it, it can actually become very freeing. This, this inner control and arrogance that we kind of have that we're in charge of reality starts to diminish a little bit. And also can increase compassion that we have for all beings, and this, this awareness that we are not the first author of different causes that are happening that are springing forth within us, like John Bon Jovi, yeah, is, uh, is rather fascinating. It doesn't remove the fact that we have choice, that we have responsibility, but where it's originally coming from, we are not, uh, we are not in a vacuum of sorts where we can actually choose to, to choose, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so to say that free will is an illusion is really just the flip side of saying that the self is an illusion. I, what, what people mean by free will is that they are the true, they, the subject, the inner subject, the conscious experiencer of their experience is the true author of thought and action and will, right? So, like, you, you feel yourself to be, again, not the totality of your body, not your beliefs about your brain, but the, the subject, the, the one who can move his attention from, you know, from, you can, you can direct your attention to, to part of your visual field, and then you can decide to get up and, and go make a cup of tea. Like, that, the, the one who can seize the reins of attention, the one who can decide to, to change a behavioral plan or to initiate one. It feels like something to be at the center of that causality. And that feeling is the, is what we're calling, I, I mean, that, that, that's this feeling of, of being a self. And when you penetrate that illusion, then you notice that everything is just happening all by itself. Like, it does not nullify the difference between voluntary and involuntary action. I mean, there's still a difference between deciding you want to reach for a glass of water versus, you know, inadvertently knocking the glass over, or having a, you know, a tremor that, that you can't control, right? And you're not consciously initiating. Those are all differences. I mean, the one difference is, in my reaching for a glass of water, it's preceded by the thought that I want to take a drink of water, and the, the felt intention to reach. If my arm was just moving, and I wasn't feeling any associated intention, well, then I would feel like I had alien hand syndrome. I, there, there are neurological conditions like this. I mean, that's, that's what alien hand syndrome is, where the, the hand just starts behaving in ways where the, the inner subject doesn't feel any associated intention. And so it's like, it's really, it's like a foreign arm, you know, and it's, you know, as you can imagine, quite disconcerting. Um, so getting rid of free will doesn't obviate any of those distinctions. It's, it's just, it gets, it gets rid of this fundamental illusion that there's, that there's someone in, there's a subject in the driver's seat who can do the willing, who can do the desiring, who can do the, who can initiate the next thought, as though, who, who stands upstream of all of these, of all of this, uh, all these patterns that produce, uh, intentions and, and further actions. So, but, but again, the illusion is so powerful for people that they, they feel that there really is a mystery here where, so like, they, they know that they have free will because they know that they are selves, right? And they know that they can decide to do one thing versus the other, and they know that it feels a certain way to do that. And so the buck really seems to stop here in my, my conscious sense of my own subjectivity and agency. And then they're told, "Okay, but actually, in the dark, behind..."

All that there's this whole concatenation of causes for which you're totally unresponsible. I mean, you're you're you didn't pick your parents, you didn't pick your genes, you didn't pick all of the influences to the nervous system that got built on the on the basis of your genetic inheritance. So literally like everything, the fact that you have a brain, the fact you have a brain in precisely this conformity, the fact that it was, you know, tuned by all of it, its collisions for all these years with, you know, an environment, you did none of that, right? And yet that is all of that, that whole mechanism is 100% of the explanation for the next thing you do, right?

So when when I have to think of of a a rock star and I think of B John Bon Jovi, in what sense, like the conscious subject in me is just waiting to hear what comes out of the dark, right? It's like it's like I'm just it's like I went for it's like I I I I pushed the, you know, deliver rock star name button. And the truth is, I, you know, there's no place to stand where my authorship really is is um visible because like upstream of of that choice was, well, why was I looking for a rock star? I could have, I could have been thinking of something else. Like the category Rockstar was not something I consciously initiated. Everything is being promoted out of the dark on some level. I mean, you you you can't think a thought until you think it, right? Like you, there's an, there would be an infinite regress. You, me, you can't, at a certain point, something just emerges out of this mystery that's at your back, you know, as a matter of consciousness. Um, and we know as a matter of causality that it pushes all the way back to again your genome and every prior influence. So at what point can you claim to be responsible for all of that?

And um, when you pay attention to what it's like to be you, you can notice that you don't even feel responsible for it in some sense. You're always in the presence of a mystery. Now, that's not to say that it doesn't matter what you do and what you decide and what kind of person you are. I mean, like it's not like everyone gets gets off the hook by reason of insanity. It's like it's it's still possible to be ethical versus unethical and to be compassionate versus, you know, malignantly selfish. I mean, all of these differences matter because they have very different consequences in the world and they and they link up to very different kinds of minds and motivations. And um, so but at bottom, it, an insight into the ucer of free will does change a few things ethically. And one thing it it changes is the the basis for hating other people really does go away because on some level, you begin to view people as as more analogous to forces of nature or as, you know, wild animals or malfunctioning robots or, I mean, people who are behaving badly on some level are are are doing precisely the only thing they could do in that moment. And yeah, the idea that they could have done otherwise or should have done otherwise, it's not that it it's totally inadmissible. But but when you when you begin saying you should have done otherwise, you could have done otherwise, what you're really admonishing a person to about is not the past, but the future. I mean, you're trying to, in so far as a person can be changed by by your criticism and your argument and your reaction to their misbehavior, the reason to react in that way and to and to feel the validity of reacting in that way is to change them for the future. You can't go back into the past and and change what they did.

So if you're so and so, and this is very clear with, you know, you raising kids, like you want kids to grow up to be honest, compassionate, well-integrated members of society. So yeah, they don't start out that way. And so you have to keep saying, okay, you shouldn't, you shouldn't have done that, next time do this. But you're not, you're not imagining at each stage along the way that they could really be different than they were at that stage. And ultimately, that's true for even, you know, quintessentially, you know, evil, uh, adults, right? Like you're just, you know, the just the the mustache-twirling psychopath who's, you know, who murdered lots of people because he likes to murder people. Well, okay, you still want to put that person in prison because you want to keep everyone safe from him. But you have to recognize that on some level, once you get rid of the illusion of free will, you recognize that that person is some is basically analogous to, you know, a great white shark or a grizzly bear or a tiger or any other, you know, system that is intrinsically dangerous to be close to. Yeah, like there just, there, he's not available to to argument. He's, he's basic, just, he's fundamentally incorrigible, just as a tiger would be, you know, a wild tiger would be. Um, so it doesn't mean you can't try to avoid that person, put that person in prison, find a cure for that person. If if we ever get a cure for psychopathy, we would we would use that. But it's not that it doesn't mean it's not a problem. But it's not a free, it's not a problem of free will being misused, right? Like no one picked their, even if you think people have souls, right? Like no one picked their soul. No, there's no psychopath walking around with a psychopathic soul who's responsible for having made his soul psychopathic. It's like he's, he's unlucky, he got a bad soul, right? If if souls exist, if without souls, he got bad genes and a bad environment and a bad, you know, contingent, yeah, neurology.

So it creates so much, uh, compassion on one hand, as well, because you look at someone like Hitler or, uh, the mustache-twirling sociopath, psychopath murderer. And if you, like, you spoke in your book, Free Will, you give these examples, if you then discovered on the other hand that there was a brain tumor pushing upon someone's amygdala, that would completely change how you view them. But if it's essentially that all the way down, right? Yeah. And you can just, without even referencing the neurology of it, just look at the, the timeline of somebody in somebody's life. It's like, you take Hitler, okay, well, Hitler is, you know, the the quintessentially evil person who everyone should just kill, right? It's like, like, assass, we we wish that the plots against Hitler, trying to assassinate him, had actually worked, right? So, and they would, they were completely justified, right? Um, but at what point in his life would it, would it have been justified to kill Hitler? I mean, killing the 25-year-old Hitler before he has done anything especially egregious, well, you know, he's going to become the, the 40-year-old Hitler who's just awful. Um, yeah, you might want to stop that. But I, I think even Lou K has a joke about this, like, do, do you go back and kill Hitler in his crib? Like, like you're going to kill a baby? Like, you're really going to kill a baby? Like, it's a baby, like, now we're talking about a baby. Okay, the truth is, Hitler, the baby, is just unlucky. It's like, it's, it's a baby who's, for for whatever reason, is going to grow up to be Hitler, right? But as a baby, it's just a baby, right? So, it's, it's like the baby is not culpable for becoming the one-year-old who becomes the two-year-old who becomes a three-year-old who, like, at what point does the, does Hitler become culpable for being Hitler? I don't think he does. That, that doesn't mean you don't kill Hitler at a certain, like, if, if there's nothing else to do, you know, if you can't lock him up, I'm completely in favor of killing Hitler at a certain point. Now, which day you pick in his life is is a judgment call. But, um, it's, uh, at no point did he make himself. And that's true of everybody else. That was that was great.

And the last line in your book on Free Will, you say that you're not in control of the storm, you are not lost in it, you are the storm. And uh, I think that's a beautiful note to wrap up the Free Will topic there. Yeah.

Last, last little thing. You've shared that on one level, you can't go wrong if you live a life motivated by love and guided by reason. I'd love for you to share a little bit about that in your kind of final notes here. Your vision for what an awakened humanity looks like, because uh, I see you as somebody that has such a profound and deep understanding of the human condition. And yet, we find ourselves in a time with a lot of problems that can be solved and freedom to be discovered on an individual and collective level. What is your vision for an awakened humanity? And uh, we'll wrap there.

Yeah, I think I would add one piece. I'm not sure it's, I think maybe you can get everything out of love and and reason. Um, but there's one piece that I, I would add that, um, does a lot of work that seems at least conceptually separable. And and that's gratitude. I think there's something about gratitude that that heals so much that's wrong with us personally, psychologically. It's just like, it, it, um, so, so like if you push, if you push far enough in the direction of gratitude, it, there's so many psychological and ethical errors you can no longer make, right? Like, it, it, it, it almost contains everything we mean by love as well. Um, but I mean, just, you just recognize that, I mean, for virtually anyone, I mean, unless you're literally the the least lucky person who's ever lived, there's just so much to be grateful for. I mean, it's just like, there just, there's so much that is good about even a, a very ordinary, conflicted, difficult life when you compare it to to everything else that is possible, right? Um, and this is where, like, the philosophy of stoicism is is so useful to so many people. I mean, the Stoics often recommend a a reflection of just this sort. I mean, just think about all the terrible things that haven't happened to you, right? And that that have happening to somebody else, right now, right? And just, there are people who would consider all of their prayers answered if they could just trade places with you right now, even when you're in the midst of something that you consider to be genuinely difficult, right? You've got some problem that really is capturing 100% of your attention. It's like, it's still so much better than so many, so much of what's possible. And on that b, when you recognize that, when you be, when you, the more more you can see your life in those terms, kindness and compassion almost by definition fall out of that. It's like you just, you, that's synonymous with having compassion for all the people who and all the, you know, beyond people, all the people and conscious beings that that have it so much worse than you have it, right? And through, through just pure luck, right? I mean, it's just, it is just, it's unearned on some level, right? Um, and it's on that basis that you just, you want to be kind to people because you just don't know. One, you, in, in, in some, first of all, you, you know everyone's going to die. You know everyone's going to lose everything they love and everyone close to them, right? Like no matter how it's like, we're, we're all united in this, in this circumstance of of fundamental impermanence and and and fragility. Um, so I don't know, it's like we're all moving through life where, you know, most of us, I mean, certainly anyone who has the free attention to to listen to a conversation like this and find any of this interesting, you know, that's almost synonymous with having escaped some of the worst, you know, variants of suffering on offer, at least for a significant period of time. And, you know, so we're all just, it's like, it's like, it's like the cl, it's like we, the sun is continually coming out from behind the clouds and we're get, we're, we're enjoying this, this moment in of sunlight and then it goes behind the clouds again and there's lots to struggle through and then we get these moments of sunlight and it's just, it's, we should be so grateful for for these moments and um, for all that we have and all that we don't have to to suffer. And, uh, the only thing that is safeguarding the this project collectively, that that ensures that even the luckiest among us can cooperate with one another and collaborate in an open-ended way and build, you know, and make the future look better than the past, the all really, the only tool beyond just the goodwill that wants to wants that project to succeed, you know, the love and and kindness and gratitude that that would grease those gears is reason. I mean, we just all we have is a disposition to talk about facts, to care about facts, to be consistent, to be self-aware of our own ignorance and our own capacity for self-deception and wishful thinking and cognitive bias, to to meet other people. We've got, we've got the circumstance, we've got 8 billion strangers, you know, more virtually everyone is a, no matter how many people you know, virtually everyone is a stranger. And all you can do is reason with them from a from a basic inclination to cooperate and find some, you know, future that's compatible with with more and more of us, more of the time, leading better lives, right? And so it's like, either we're going to recognize that we're all in principle on the same team in the limit and, um, try to solve some, you know, increasingly complex coordination problems, um, and build the tools to do that, and or we're going to fail spectacularly at the attempt to do that. And our failure will, it's totally predictable, our failure will be born of of failures of rationality and failures of of, um, goodwill, right? I mean, failures of love, failures of of, um, kindness, failures of of to act in our what really is in our own best interest if we could only see it. I mean, the the idea that that we could ever wind up in a condition that is permanently zero-sum is just, it's just a crazy illusion given the circumstance we're actually in. I mean, given how, given how good life could be if we just got our heads screwed on straight and cooperated without political division and dogmatism and you all of these other these structures that reliably cause conversations to fail, you know, I mean, it just, um, it, it really doesn't seem wrong to expect something like a Utopia if we could only get over our very, you know, basic, uh, political and apish, you know, you know, disinclination to cooperate with one another. Um, but reason is the, is really, it's the only tool for the job because it's the only algorithm you can run where even if people don't like each other and are emotionally unavailable, they're, they're resisting, uh, playing well with others. Reason, because of its universal characteristics, because you can show people, you can, you can show your enemies that they're not even that they're be, that they're contradicting themselves, right? It has a capacity to force convergence and really drag, drag people kicking and screaming to across the finish line of of cooperation because at bottom, reality has a certain structure. I mean, things, certain things are true and and certain things are false and C, certain maps fit the territory better than other maps. And we all, even if we are confused about in the game we're playing, people tend not to like to bump into hard objects in the dark, right? I mean, they want to know where they're going. And, uh, so that in so far as there, so far as there are right answers to any questions of importance, reason is the thing that will ensure our that we're, we're tracking that. And so, um, yeah, apart from PE, people who are completely psychotic or and completely psychopathic, these are just fundamentally unavailable to any kind of, you know, cooperative effort. You know, reason is the thing that is going to, you know, even in the absence of of appropriate love and and good feeling, is going to align all of our interests and and so we just, um, yeah, I mean, on some level, it's the only game in town for strangers to play.

Just what you shared about how, yeah, reason really being the modality in which we can find ourselves to solutions that are necessary in this time, right? But without like empathy and gratitude, without reason has no guide. And reason without empathy or gratitude is not alive, it's not fully alive. And this talk and how we've been walking this dance throughout this whole conversation and much of the work that you do of this integrating rational thinking with the spiritual dimensions of life to catch up to a 21st century viewpoint, I think is so needed. And I really see you as a pioneer. So as we're speaking about gratitude, I just want to share some, say thank you so much for coming on the show and and sharing yourself in this way. It's been so fulfilling for me. I'm just as much of a joyful participant and listener to this conversation as I am, uh, you know, stewarding it with you. So, uh, just thank you so much. And I'm really looking forward to how this conversation evolves.

Nice. Well, great to be here. Great to meet you. And, uh, keep it up.

Thank you so much. And for everybody that's been tuning in, I have found the Waking Up app extremely profound and and powerful. I spent hours and hours on walks listening to different theories and talks, and they have amazing meditations. So I'll leave a link in the description below where you can find that and check that out if you haven't already. They have a free trial. It's, it's, it's amazing. Highly, highly recommend it. Everywhere you can find Sam, uh, will be linked in the description as well below.

And is there anything else you want to share before we wrap up?

Uh, I don't think so. No. You can find me in fewer and fewer places now. It's just, uh, noticed that. Yeah, it's really just, um, I guess Sam Harris.org and Waking Up.com. Those are the two points of contact.

So amazing. Thank you so much. Uh, looking forward to maybe running it back one day. And for everybody that's been tuning in to this episode of the No Self Podcast, thank you for coming on this journey with us. And until next time, be well.

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