"Waking Up" with Sam Harris

[Music] [Music] Thank you. Thank you. Uh, well, thank you all for coming. I've really been looking forward to giving this talk. I'm going to speak for about an hour, and I think undoubtedly say a few things that are going to confuse many of you. And then we'll have a short intermission, and I will try to clean up the mess that I've made in the Q&A.

Now, as most of you know, over the last 10 years, I've been thinking out loud about the, the problem of religion. And I've really only argued three things. I've argued that our religions are almost certainly false, given all that we've learned about the world in the last 2,000 years. I've argued that they are, on balance, harmful, in that they needlessly divide humanity from itself and inevitably cause conflict. And I've argued that, that the good things that people think they need and can get out of religion can be had in other ways, and can be had in ways that are not hostile to understanding the world scientifically, or to the project of, of building a viable global and pluralistic civil society.

Now, in this talk, I'm going to take that third path a little further and argue to you that we need a secular approach to spirituality. And the, the details of this argument, this may sound slightly esoteric, and, and some of the details are, especially as they, they relate to things like meditation. But the, the context for this discussion is as blood-soaked and as tear-stained as any we can find anywhere. And I would urge you not to forget that. It seems to me that one of the most important challenges we face now is to find our way to a future where religious tribalism and religious conflict are unthinkable. And to do that, we need to find a way of talking about people's deepest experiences in non-sectarian terms. And so that, for that, we need a secular approach to spirituality.

Now, it just so happens that 20% of Americans, depending on how the question is asked, declare themselves ready for such an approach and already describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. Now, there are problems here. Much of what spiritual people believe is every bit as incredible as what religious people believe. Anyone who was waiting around on December 21st, 2012, for the world to end out of deference to the Mayan calendar got a taste of this when nothing happened right on schedule. And if one wanted to find a position that could annoy believers and atheists equally, it's hard to improve on this. It's, you know, to say that you're spiritual but not religious. In both camps, it just sounds like a confession of intellectual weakness and a loss of nerve. Among the faithful, it sounds like you want all the consolations of faith without any of the discipline. You love Jesus, and you sure hope he loves you, but you don't want to think about the day of judgment. When I debated Rick Warren, he summarized this attitude when he said, you know what your problem is? You don't want to have a boss. And this was, this was very much the attitude in which he said that.

Now, obviously, as a defense of Christianity, this made no sense. But whether or not I want to have a boss says nothing about the plausibility of that a first-century carpenter who had the bad luck to get crucified managed to survive his death and is now just hovering over everybody's business like an omniscient peeping tom. But you can hear how this would apply to the spiritual but not religious crowd. Spiritual people are just in it to feel good. They want their yoga and their strange diets and their alternative medicine and their crystals, and they don't want any traditional constraints on their search for happiness.

Now, among atheists, when you say you're spiritual but not religious, you just sound like someone who's afraid to die and didn't pay enough attention in science class. It sounds like you don't have the intellectual courage to renounce the false consolations of religion. But I want to argue to you that separating spirituality from religion is an, an important thing to do. And if we want to understand the human mind scientifically and live the best lives we can personally, it's a necessary thing to do. And making the distinction between spirituality and religion is to assert two important truths simultaneously. It's, it's to acknowledge that our world has been shattered, quite unnecessarily, by competing religious dogmas. And these dogmas are not only independently ridiculous, they are collectively incompatible, which actually gives us two reasons to reject them as false. It's just, however implausible these dogmas are on their own, there's just no way for Islam and Christianity to both be right. And once you add Hindus and Mormons and Scientologists to the mix, we know that every denomination is wrong in its assertions about the nature of reality. And yet, people are holding to these false certainties generation after generation.

Now, this dogmatism is bad for us. It's bad for us intellectually, for obvious reasons. But it's also bad ethically, because it enforces in-group loyalty and solidarity and out-group hostility, even when members of your own group are behaving like psychopaths. Believing things for bad reasons divides people inevitably, because, because bad reasons don't survive export very well. You know, you say, "This is our land." Why? Because it, it says so in a holy book that was written a thousand years ago in a language half of us can't read. That is a bad conversation starter.

The second reason for separating spirituality from religion is to acknowledge that there's more to understanding human experience than science and secular culture generally admit. This is a cast of, of Bernini's famous sculpture of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. And here's what it might look like on the inside. You know, or maybe not. There's certainly states of consciousness that answer to this description, especially if you add psychedelics to the arsenal. But the problem is that if you someday feel better than you ever have in your life, this is Saint Francis realizing that he's incredibly stoked to be alive. The problem is, if this happens to you, if you feel completely stripped of personal neurosis and you just love your humanity unconditionally, there is no context in which this experience can be appropriately valued apart from an Iron Age religion or a New Age cult. This is Rajneesh working his magic.

Now, you might just think this is the effect you can have on people when you have 99 Rolls-Royces parked in the garage. But ecstasy and devotion and self-transcending awe happen to people in a variety of contexts, and sometimes in embarrassing contexts. Now, this is a problem for the forces of reason, because the most transformative experiences people have, the, the experiences they tend to value more than any in their lives, are currently anchored to the worst parts of culture and to ways of thinking that merely amplify superstition and self-deception and conflict. Talking about spirituality outside the context of religion is a way of changing that.

Now, I'm not the only atheist who's found this term spiritual or spirituality indispensable. Christopher Hitchens and Carl Sagan both used the word. And if this is not going to inoculate us against our allergy to this term, I don't know what would. But they used it to describe a range of aesthetic and intellectual insights that they thought were too beautiful or too profound for ordinary language. Something like this, for instance. This is one of the most sensitive images ever taken of space. This is the Hubble Deep Field. And this is a tiny area of visible sky. This, for those of you in the back row, would be as though I held up a nickel or a quarter here on stage. This is what a deep gaze into so tiny a patch of sky looks like. It's such a tiny patch of sky. There's only a couple of stars in our own galaxy that appear in this image. Everything else you see here, every other object, and there are over 8,000 of them, is another galaxy like our own, filled with billions of Earth-like planets.

Now, whether you think of these galaxies as teeming with other life forms and perhaps advanced civilizations, or you think that we're the only ones here, the feeling of strangeness is overwhelming. It's hard to know which of those truths would be stranger. But there's no question that if you spend any amount of time contemplating this image, it delivers a more profound and beautiful context to our existence than any offered by the Bible or any other ancient book. And we can use the term spiritual to signify this kind of beauty and profundity. But there's something a little misleading about that, because it, it leaves out other experiences and insights. And, and these experiences have nothing in principle to do with thinking about the universe or our place within it.

In this talk, and in my book, I use the term spiritual and spirituality to describe ways in which we can deliberately investigate and transform our experience in the present moment and come to understand some durable truths about the nature of human consciousness. There's a sense in which everything that appears in consciousness, everything, even the most ordinary thing, is as profound and as beautiful and as mysterious as that vision of deep space and time. In fact, the most ordinary experience of being awake and aware in the present moment, the feeling of just being you, sitting in your seat, is as deep a scientific mystery as we have, unrivaled only by the mystery of why there's a universe in the first place. And, and the reality of consciousness is much more relevant to your experience than cosmology is, because here we're talking about the very substance of experience itself. The fact that the universe is illuminated where you sit, the fact that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character is a mystery. And I argue in my book at some length that it will probably remain one. But the truth is, even if we do come to fully understand consciousness in terms of information processing in, in the brain or any other complex system, that would not make it any less significant or profound.

Now, there's a lot of confusion on this point, because most people seem to think that science has delivered us a vision of an impersonal world. This is true in one sense. Science has revealed a world that does not care about us. Or if it does, it has a strange way of showing it. The universe cares about us exactly this much. It loves us as much as it loves the dinosaurs. The universe is older than we are and bigger than we are, and it will outlast us, and it seems quite happy to casually destroy us in the meantime. However, spirituality has nothing in principle to do with thinking that the universe cares about you.

Now, people who attempt to build a bridge between science and spirituality tend to make one of two mistakes. They either start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience, thinking that it's just a grandiose way of talking about ordinary states of mind, parental love, or artistic inspiration, or awe at the beauty of the night sky. Now, unlike Hitch and Sagan, this leads many people to just reject the term outright. And, you know, many people have written me wondering why I just don't use words like awe and love and happiness and well-being. And perhaps some of you in this room have, have objected to my use of the word spirituality. But the problem is that what most people understand by these terms has very little to do with the kinds of insights and experiences I want to talk about. There's more to realize about the nature of your own consciousness in this moment than whatever it is you happen to feel when looking at the Hubble Deep Field, or while listening to Mozart, or while having sex, or all doing all three of those things at the same time, which should probably be illegal.

But then there are people who have the opposite problem. They're people like Deepak Chopra, who will tell you that that the Buddha and other contemplatives anticipated all of the insights of quantum mechanics and modern cosmology, and that by simply transcending your sense of self in the darkness of your closed eyes, you can realize your identity with the one mind that gave birth to the cosmos. This is a specious claim. There's nothing about meditation that is akin to doing cosmology, and you don't get insights about what preceded the Big Bang from doing any of these practices. But this is where we encounter true intellectual atrocities like the book *The Secret* and the film *What the Bleep Do We Know?* Now, I hope none of you bought this book. I suspect many of you saw this film. I saw it. It practically gave me a seizure. Just as a sanity check, when a chiropractor is telling you about the implications of quantum mechanics, you know you have opened the wrong door in the mansion of understanding.

So, in the end, we seem to be offered a choice between pseudo-spirituality and pseudoscience. And one problem is that the very few Western philosophers and scientists have developed strong skills of introspection in, in terms of a disciplined training like meditation. You know, I know absolutely brilliant people who seem to have no ability to make the most basic discriminations about their moment-to-moment experience. I won't name any names. Conversely, I've met Tibetan lamas who spent years in caves doing nothing but meditate on the nature of consciousness, who obviously knew nothing about science and may well have thought the Earth was flat. But there is a connection between scientific fact and spiritual wisdom, and it's more direct than most people suppose. The insights a person can have, as I said, tell you nothing about the universe and cosmology, but they do confirm some well-established truths about the nature of the human mind. And certain of these truths are worth knowing, in that they enable us to live better lives. They enable us to suffer less and undermine our reasons for creating unnecessary suffering for others.

Now, I know what it's like to have no idea that this was the case. When I was 16, I did a wilderness course in the mountains of Colorado, Outward Bound. It was this 23-day slog through the mountains of Colorado, and it culminated in a ritual called the Solo, where we were all put on the, the outskirts of this beautiful mountain lake, very much like this one, and told to just contemplate the universe for three days and three nights. And there was no food, so we fasted, and there was nothing to do but write in our journals. Now, I found this to be a crushing experience of loneliness and boredom. And in my journal, I just made lists of foods I was planning to eat when I returned to civilization. And when I found that other people on this trip came off their solos feeling transformed by the experience, most of the people were, were 10 years older than I was at the time, I didn't know what to make of this. And if you had told me that I would one day spend months in conditions like this voluntarily, I would have thought you were completely insane.

But I then went on to study with a variety of monks and lamas and yogis and other contemplatives, and spent about a year and a half or so on silent retreat, practicing various techniques of meditation. And when you do this, you discover that you have certain habits of mind that keep you blind to features of your experience that you really ought to know about. And the principal habit is spending every waking moment lost in thought. Now, we need to think to form beliefs about the world, to plan, to reason, to almost anything else that makes us human. Thinking is, is the foundation of every social relationship and every cultural institution, and obviously, it's the foundation of science. So, so thinking is not the problem. But thinking without knowing that you're thinking is a problem. It gives rise to the illusion that you have a separate self living inside your head.

The first thing to recognize is just how incessant this process is. So let's try a little experiment. See if you can stop thinking for just one minute. Now, you can, you can pay attention to the breath, or you can just watch the numbers change on this clock. But do your best not to let your mind wander in thought, even for an instant. All right, let's, let's try that again. I couldn't even hear myself think with all the thinking that was going on. Let's, let's try 15 seconds. Okay? Just imagine that your life depends on this. Okay? You, you could probably hold your hand in fire for that long if you had to. Just try not to think about anything for 15 seconds. Okay?

Well, some of you might be so distracted by thought as to imagine that you actually succeeded. This is a very common phenomenon. In the beginning, when you're learning to meditate, people think they can stay on the object of meditation, whether it's the breath or a mantra or a candle flame, for minutes at a time. And then after days or weeks of intensive practice, they, they say that their mind is carried away every few seconds. Now, this is actually progress. It takes a certain amount of concentration to realize how distracted you are.

Now, this is a remarkable fact about the human mind. We are capable of astonishing feats of creativity and insight. We can endure almost any torment. But it is not within our power to simply stop talking to ourselves for a full minute, whatever the stakes. We spend our lives lost in thought. And the question is, what should we make of this fact?

Now, in the West, the answer has been, not much. Okay? In the East, especially in a contemplative tradition like, like those found in Buddhism, it's understood that that thinking without knowing that you're thinking is a principal source of human suffering. Now, this fact should be of interest to everyone, because life is difficult, in case you hadn't noticed. We're not living in Syria, now, and, and we can be thankful for that. But our minds are such as to make even lives of, of privilege very difficult. I don't know about you, but my, my days are, are filled with emergencies. You know, if, just, just putting sunblock on my daughter before she goes to school, if I could call in the Navy SEALs to help me with that, I would. Our minds are not often our friends. It's amazing how much stress arises in even a totally ordinary and, and well-ordered life. And, and the center of the center of this problem is the illusion of self that we call "I."

Now, what does it mean to say the self is an illusion? We use this term "self" in a variety of ways. And sometimes we use it to refer to the whole person. The self is your body and your every feature of your mind, your autobiographical memory, your emotions, your powers of cognition. Okay? That's not the self that is an illusion. I'm not saying that people don't exist. Am I really standing here on stage at this moment talking to you? Yes, I really am. Am I also riding a bicycle through the streets of London at this moment? Not that I can tell. So it makes sense to talk about me as a discreet person in the world. There's no, no problem with that.

But we use this term "self" in another way. We use it to refer to the sense that almost all of us have that we are subjects of our experience. We don't feel identical to our bodies. We feel like we have bodies. We feel like we're passengers in these bodies, in a way. We feel like we're riding around in our heads as subjects, as thinkers of thoughts and experiences of experience. We feel like we're appropriating our experience in each moment. We don't feel identical to our experience. You know, as you sit there, you undoubtedly feel that you're behind your eyes, in a way that you're not behind your knees. You know, your knees are down there, they're your property, in a way. And if they hurt, you're worried. And if they don't, you're not. But we feel that we're subjects. We feel that we're in the head, behind the eyes, and that we are in some strange sense pulling the levers and gears of this vehicle that is our bodies.

Now, of course, we know our subjectivity can't be structured this way, because there can't be a little subject inside our heads, or a Cartesian theater, as Dan Dennett calls it, because that would invite an infinite regress. You have to explain the subjectivity of the subject. The subject, we need a subject. We need a subject. The buck of consciousness has to stop somewhere. We also know that neuroanatomically, it makes no sense. There's no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. There's no place anatomically where it all comes together. But the fact is, most of us feel that we are in our heads as subjects. And when you ask people of any age and across cultures to judge when an object is closest to a person, they will judge it to be closest when it's near that person's head, as opposed to their chest or their feet or any other point on the body. And they'll judge it to be closest of all when it's near the eyes, as opposed to the mouth or the back of the head. This is data from Paul Bloom at Yale, and along with his colleagues.

But this feeling of being a self does not survive scrutiny. Which is to say that if you look closely enough at it, the feeling will disappear. And, and this experience of self-transcendence is the center of what I'm calling spirituality. And it really is a profound tool for the alleviation of psychological suffering.

In arguing for the importance of a secular spirituality, I'm arguing that disciplined introspection is an indispensable means of discovery. Now, this may sound a little strange, because from a scientific point of view, we know that reality exceeds our, our potential awareness of it. Science is in the business of understanding things objectively in third-person terms. And so how is introspection an important part of this process? I want to take a few minutes to describe and explain to you why consciousness is unique and why consciousness can't be understood purely as a matter of third-person phenomenon, in terms of brains and their states.

For instance, now, again, there are reasons why we don't rely on introspection for everything, because every fact you can be aware of is preceded by facts that you can't be aware of. So you have 40 trillion cells in your body at this moment, and 10 times that number that are bacterial. All of these entities are doing their work for good or for ill without your knowledge or control. And without your potential knowledge or control, most of our internal organs may as well not exist for all we know of them directly. This is a cartoon of a human pancreas. Do I have a pancreas? I don't know. I hope so. Just assert your experience at this moment. Are you aware of having a pancreas? How? Where could you be, unless you have pancreatitis and are in pain? You'd have to be clairvoyant to know anything about your pancreas. Who's crazy? Or someone who goes into a police station offering to find a missing person with her psychic powers? Or someone who claims to be consciously aware of the workings of her pancreas? It's probably a toss-up.

So, what can we be aware of? What are the boundaries of subjectivity in this moment? Well, you can feel yourself sitting there in your seat. You hear the sound of my voice. You see the light and color and shadow of this room. Your conscious experience in this moment has a certain qualitative character. But we know that it reaches into a wilderness of other facts that you can never know directly. For instance, this is what the motor nerve pathway looks like in the human brain. You've got regions in your frontal cortex that connect to fiber tracts that descend through your brain stem and spinal cord, and then terminate at the neuromuscular junction, where you have motor neurons that affect muscle fibers. But if you search your experience, you're not aware of any of this.

Now, now consciously move one of your hands. How do you do this? Okay? Now, just really pay attention, because this is as intentional as it ever gets. This is, you know, you are in complete control of this. You, whatever you are, are doing this. But when you look for what underwrites this behavior, your neurotransmitters, muscle fibers, you can't feel or see a thing. And how do you initiate it? And how do you stop it? That's very difficult to say. The truth is, none of us has a clue. And yet, there's clearly some internal signature we're reading by which we can discriminate volitional from involuntary behavior. Otherwise, everything would seem involuntary.

It's hard to say what this feeling consists of, but it's surely something that there's some signature in consciousness, otherwise everything would be completely confusing. There'd be no feeling of agency. And despite the obvious importance of all of these unconscious mechanisms, consciousness is what we care about. And most of what's happening in the world, and even in our own bodies, is happening in the dark. But it's what's happening in the light of consciousness that matters to us. In, in terms of our lived experience, we are simply consciousness and its contents.

It's very easy to get confused about this, because scientists and philosophers spend a lot of time trying to understand consciousness in third-person terms, in terms of brain processing, for instance. But the reality of consciousness is first-person. Now, when talking about this, I like to use the philosopher Thomas Nagel's formulation that a creature is conscious if there's something that it's like to be that creature. This gets at this, this split between first and, and third person. It's whether or not we can judge a creature to be conscious from the outside is never quite the point. The reality of whether or not it is conscious exists on its own side. Is a cricket conscious? If you could trade places with a cricket, with the lights go out, would it be the same thing as trading places with a ham sandwich? Okay? I don't know. But the truth about whether or not a cricket is conscious exists on the side of the cricket. Okay? Only a cricket knows for sure whether there's something that it's like to be a cricket. And even if we fully understood how consciousness emerges in the world and we can answer this question, that still would not change the irreducibly subjective, first-person character of consciousness.

Again, many people are confused about this. In cognitive science and the sciences of mind generally, you have something called the Turing Test, based on the work of the mathematician Alan Turing. And it's thought that if one day we build computers which we can't distinguish from human minds, well, then our computers must be conscious. Now, this has always been based on a misreading of Turing, because Turing talked about this as a test of intelligence, not consciousness. But, but this is important to see how this idea of judging consciousness from the outside misses the point. Because I have no doubt that we will one day build computers that will be indistinguishable from human minds. In fact, they'll be obviously superior to human minds. And yet, unless we understand how consciousness emerges in the world, we won't know whether or not they're conscious. And yet, they may claim they're conscious, and they will certainly push all of our buttons. Intuitively, we will feel that they're conscious. We may just forget whether it's an interesting question to wonder whether or not they're conscious, but we will, in fact, not know if they're conscious.

And conversely, there are obviously systems that are conscious that don't pass the Turing Test, that, that where we can't judge that this, this creature, this system, is having an experience from the outside. I know someone who was, um, underwent a surgery under a general anesthetic, and he woke up in the middle of the surgery. But because of the paralytic component of the anesthesia, he couldn't signal to the doctors or nurses that he was awake and feeling rather more of the procedure than he cared to. And this was inconvenient, to say the least, because they were in the process of replacing his liver. Okay? So, so if you think that the important part of consciousness is its link to speech and behavior, just spare a moment to contemplate the problem of anesthesia awareness. It's the cure for a hundred years of bad philosophy.

The truth is, there is nothing about a physical brain as a physical system that suggests the reality of consciousness. There's nothing from the outside that indicates that there's something that it's like to be that collection of cells. If we were not already brimming with consciousness ourselves, we would find no evidence for it in the universe, and we would have no inkling of the about the kinds of states it can give rise to. And to say that consciousness may only seem to exist, as certain philosophers and scientists have done in the past, is to admit its existence in full. If things seem any way at all, that is consciousness. You could be a brain in a vat at this moment. All your memories are false. All your perceptions are of a world that does not exist. You're confused about absolutely everything. But the, the fact that you're having an experience at this moment is indisputable to you, which is all that any sentient creature requires to fully establish the reality of consciousness. But consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion. Let me say that again: consciousness is the one thing in this universe, including the universe, that cannot be an illusion.

So, there need be nothing deflationary about the intrusion of science and secular philosophy into our lives. Consciousness is the, is the very substance of our existence, whatever its relationship to the physical world. And, and fully understanding how it emerges based on unconscious complexity will not change that. But to understand human experience in terms of brain states, for instance, we must correlate changes in the brain with changes in consciousness. But the, the cash value of these correlations are the changes in consciousness. So, this is a study comparing the experience of having happy memories with some control condition. But the happiness of these memories is defined in terms of the experience of having them. If these memories were making people angry, this, this experiment wouldn't make any sense. So we're always in the game, in the game of correlating first-person reports, what it's like to be you, with third-person changes in the brain.

So, we're never going to be able to say, or so I argue, as Francis Crick once did, "You're nothing but a pack of neurons." Okay? This, this is philosophically confused. It's as though you thought if you only flipped a coin long enough, you could, you would realize it has only one side. Okay? You, it's true that you could be committed to talking about only one side. You can say that tails being up is just a matter of heads being down. But you, but you can't actually reduce one side of reality to the other in that way.

Now, many philosophers have made this point before me: Thomas Nagel, who I just mentioned, and David Chalmers and John Searle. And while I don't agree with everything they've said about consciousness, I agree with them about this. But here we run into another problem. Many people seem to think that you can't make objective claims about subjective experience. But this is untrue. This is, I'm going to make an objective claim about the subjective experience of every person in this room at this moment. Very few of you, probably none of you, were thinking about this person a few minutes ago. Okay? And now you all are, in some fashion. A moment ago, none of you were factoring this number in your head. And still, none of you are. Don't, don't try it. It's prime. You'll just damage your brain.

Now, how do I know these things about you? These are educated guesses, but these are, these are objective claims about first-person experience. They're objective in the sense that they're based on reason and logic and evidence, and they're not merely personal. They're not woefully biased. These first-person claims are every bit as objective as a third-person claim like, "Everyone in this room has a pancreas."

So, there are truths to be known about human experience. And I'm arguing to you that certain of these truths are worth knowing, and they can help us lead better lives. For instance, not to know that there's an alternative to being lost in thought is to be a kind of prisoner, of sorts. Now, some of you may be lucky. You just may think happy and interesting thoughts all day long. Okay? But I'm imagining that most of you are more like me, where it's like you've been kidnapped by the most boring person on Earth and just forced to have the same conversation over and over again. Being identified with thought is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It's a mode of not knowing what's going on in the present moment. You could even call it a form of psychosis.

But consider what happens in dreams. You're lying there, you fall asleep. Well, you probably don't look this good doing it. Does this look like a stock photo to anyone? This is, it's amazing when you, when you look for photographs of people sleeping, you have a choice between models who are pretending to sleep on pristine sheets and just the open-mouth chaos of, you know, someone who just looks like they fell asleep on the sofa in a meth lab. Okay? So you, you lie down to sleep, right? And then you suddenly find yourself wandering an airport all alone, and then you're in the company of a gorilla. And the mind doesn't even blink, right? It seems to have no expectation of continuity. Most surprising thing about dreams is surely our lack of surprise when they arise. This is probably due to the diminished activity of the frontal lobes during REM sleep. But an analogous thing happens to us in the waking state with our thoughts. We will tell ourselves the same thing 15 times in a row. Just imagine if other people could hear your thoughts broadcast on a speaker all day long. You would seem completely insane. And who are we talking to in the first place? Most of us feel that we are the thinker of our thoughts. We feel that we're, there's a thinker independent of the thoughts themselves. And I hope to convince you in this hour that that's an illusion. But the thinker is playing both sides of the conversation. You know, I walk out here and I think, "Oh, good, they put water on the table. I can see that there's water on the table." Okay, who am I telling? Okay, is there someone inside me who can't see the water? The "I" and the "me" are keeping each other company. It really doesn't matter if your mind is wandering over current problems in mathematical logic or cancer research. If you are thinking without knowing that you're thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.

And when we're lost in thought, there are things we don't notice about our minds. So, you know, that anger you felt yesterday or a year ago isn't here anymore. And if it arises again in the next moment based upon you thinking about its reasons, it will subside again the moment you're no longer thinking about it. And this can be a profoundly liberating truth to understand about the nature of the mind. To understand it deeply really does change your life. If you think you can be angry for a whole day, or even an hour, without continually manufacturing this emotion by, by thinking without knowing that you're thinking, you were mistaken. Again, this is an objective claim about the mechanics of your own unhappiness. And I invite you to test it. The difference between moments and hours and days and weeks when you're talking about an emotion like anger are impossible to exaggerate in terms of the effects in your life and the lives of others.

Now, this is not to say that external circumstances don't matter. But it's our minds, rather than the circumstances themselves, that will define the character of our experience. There are people who are truly content in circumstances of great deprivation and danger. And then there are people who are miserable despite having all the luck in the world. By tendency, I tend to fall in the latter camp. I mean, you, you give me a palace with a storeroom filled with diamonds, and I'm still going to complain that the internet connection is too slow. But our minds are the substance of our experience in each moment. They define how we react to external circumstances. And given this fact, it makes sense to train them, because our minds are, are the basis of every relationship we have. They're the basis of every contribution we can make to the lives of others. And there are practices that allow us to break this spell of thought and to simply become aware of experience in the present moment.

For beginners, I usually recommend a practice called Vipassana, which comes from the Pali word "insight." And this comes from the oldest tradition of Buddhism, the Theravada. And the type of attention you train in this practice is called mindfulness. And mindfulness is now very well subscribed. It's being talked about in a wide range of contexts. It's very much in vogue. And this has a certain liability to it, because it's often presented as just a glorified version of an executive stress ball. You know, it's just a one, one tool you want in the toolkit to be a better CEO or to kind of optimize various aspects of your life. And it is, in fact, nothing wrong with using it that way. But mindfulness is actually more like the Large Hadron Collider. It's a tool for making some fundamental discoveries, in this case, about the nature of our minds.

There's nothing spooky about mindfulness. Mindfulness is simply a state of clear and undistracted and ultimately unconceptual attention to the contents of the present moment, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant. And it's been shown to have a wide range of effects on perception and emotion and attention and cognition. And then these are correlated with both functional and structural changes in our brains. Now, this field of research is quickly growing. And some of these studies are very well run, and some aren't. But there seems to be a lot of data at this point that this practice is generally good for us.

So, let's try it for a few minutes. Just take a moment and, and get more comfortable in your seat. You might want to sit up straighter. And then you can close your eyes. And just feel the weight of your body. And just feel gravity settling you into your seat. And then gradually become aware of the process of breathing. Just feel the breath wherever you feel it most distinctly, either at the tip of the nose or the rise and falling of your abdomen. Now, it doesn't matter whether the breath is deep or shallow. You don't have to try to control it. This is an exercise of attention, not a breathing exercise. And every time your mind wanders into thought, just gently bring it back to the raw sensation of breathing. And as you do this, you'll notice that you have other sensations. You have other feelings in your body of pressure or warmth or stiffness. You, you hear sounds. Just notice all these things too. Just let your mind be the space in which the sensations in the body, the sounds in the room, just appear spontaneously. The moment you notice a thought coloring your attention, just see if you can notice the thought itself, whether it's a bit of language or an image. Watch it disappear. And then come back to the sensation of breathing, or the sounds, or other feelings in the body. See if you can notice the next inhalation the moment it arises, and just cover it with your attention for its full duration. See if you can notice the next sound the moment it impinges on your eardrum. See if you can notice the next thought the moment it arises. Okay.

So now you can open your eyes. There's a few things I'd like to point out about this exercise. There's nothing passive about mindfulness. You could even say that it expresses a certain kind of passion, a passion for, for accurately discerning what is subjectively real in each moment. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about the nature of experience. It's a matter of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves.

Now, one of the great strengths of this practice from a secular point of view, and this is why it's been widely adopted in science and, and in clinical practice, is that there's nothing you need to add to your experience in order to do it. And, and in principle, it's open to the full range of your experience. There's nothing that is falling outside of the meditation. You could be mindful walking down Madison Avenue at rush hour. And there's no, you don't have to believe anything on insufficient evidence in order to do this. You, you merely need to accept the proposition that if you want to discover what your consciousness is actually like, it makes sense to pay attention to it. Okay? And this is just a, it's just a tool for paying attention in a very systematic way.

And one of the effects of mindfulness is to diminish activity in regions of the medial part of the brain, now called the default mode network. And the default mode network is called that because it's what the brain seems to do by default in neuroimaging experiments when a subject is just left with their mind wandering. You see activity heightened in these, these midline regions. Now, these regions become especially active when you're thinking about yourself. So they're active when your mind is just wandering. They're especially active when you're thinking about yourself as opposed to other people. So this is, this is often described as a self-representation area of the brain. And mindfulness diminishes activity here. And mindfulness also, uh, diminishes activity here in a, a kind of a linear fashion with respect to how practiced a person is at it. So experts show a greater effect than novices. And psilocybin also diminishes activity here. That's the, the active component in magic mushrooms. And the truth is, paying attention to anything diminishes activity here. And this is, this lends some neural anatomical credence to the idea that you can just lose yourself and your work. This is an experience that many of us have of focusing on something to the exclusion of, of everything else, and we lose our sense of, of, uh, self at that moment.

Now, I think it's too early to make strong claims based on these data, but it suggests that there's a common pathway between our sense of self and the mere wandering of mind, and a, and as well as a physical mechanism by which meditation could reduce both. And as I've said, I think this cutting through the illusion of the self is the most important consequence of getting good at a practice like mindfulness, more than stress reduction or any other conventional benefit. And it's this experience of self-transcendence that makes sense of the traditional claims of yogis and mystics and other spiritual people who have been making seemingly outrageous claims about their experience for millennia. And it's also, it's this experience that captures much of the allure of religion. Because if you want to take seriously the project of being like Jesus, whoever he was, in fact, or the Buddha, or what your favorite contemplative, or you want to give another context in which to value the, the ecstasy that a, a jihadist feels when putting his life on the line for Allah, you need to be talking about more than stress reduction. There's, there's more to it than that. There's a landscape of deeper experience that we want to talk about.

And people get glimpses of self-transcendence in a wide variety of contexts, and often in quite pathological ones. Which is to say that they have experiences that are framed by divisive and, and ridiculous ideas, and then they become mightily attached to these ideas. And these ideas can lead to tremendous harms. And merely personal harms, like the, the consequences of living in a cult, or doing, you know, yoga postures that, that make no anatomical sense. But it can lead potentially to the downfall of whole societies. And when you think about mass religious movements, or just any mass movement, I mean, just look at those pictures of the Nuremberg rallies, you know, just the sheer power of a crowd. We're often talking about a more expansive sense of self, or in fact, a loss of sense of self. The ground truth here is that the self is a painful illusion. And, and this pain motivates people in a variety of ways. And when they find this pain assuaged in the context of dangerous and divisive ideas, these ideas become the center of their lives. And these ideas become something that they're willing, very often, to die for, or to have their children die for.

But the truth is, we can talk about these transformative experiences, in particular, the experience of self-transcendence, in a context that is non-sectarian and very much in the context of science. Now, there are logical and scientific reasons to accept what I'm saying about the illusoriness of the self. But cutting through this illusion is not a matter of understanding these reasons. Now, here it's worth pausing to consider the difference between a conceptual and an experiential understanding. There was a parable that the Buddha used on this topic. He told a story of a man who was struck in the chest with a poison arrow. And a surgeon rushes to his side to begin the work of saving his life. But the man resists. He, he first wants to know the name of the fletcher who fashioned the arrow's shaft.

And the genus of wood from which it was cut, and the disposition of the man who shot it, and the breed of horse upon which he rode, and a thousand other things that have no relevance to his present suffering or his ultimate survival. There's a a misunderstanding of his predicament. I mean, the man had to get his priorities straight. And we too have a problem for which more thinking is not the answer.

Now, the feeling that we call "I," the the ego, is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking. And the ego is a burden. It's a burden to everyone who has one, even when things are good. Just think of it. Think about the experience of pride, for instance. How good is that? You know, you've all felt this. You just, you've done something good, and then you've been praised for it in high places, and you, you know the feeling. There's just some part of your mind that's just, you know, lapping it up with this little cat's tongue. Okay, how good does that feel? This is the same part of you that's always terrified, that's always comparing yourself to other people, it's always poised to be miserable. Okay, this is the rewards are not good enough.

And we're just talking about patterns of thought, or just one thought following the next. Here's a pattern of thought for you that may sound familiar. "What is Sam talking about? I, I know I'm thinking. I'm thinking right now. I'm, I'm doing this. I can think about anything I want to think about. How am I not the thinker of these thoughts? I'll picture the Eiffel Tower. Yep, there it is. Done. Okay, these tickets cost a fortune. What the hell is going on here?" This is how the knot of self is tied. Okay, it's not enough to know in the abstract that you're thinking every moment of the day. It's not enough to think about thinking. You have to break this spell. You have to be able to observe what consciousness is like between thoughts, which is prior to the arising of the next one. It's the identification with thought, the feeling that this next piece of language that comes through your mind is you. The, the, the experience of having your consciousness trimmed down by the net, by this automaticity, that is, that, what, what gives rise to the feeling of self. And we have to be able to pay attention closely enough to intuit what the character of consciousness is like prior to this identification. And consciousness does not feel like a self. What we're calling ourselves, this feeling, this feeling of being in the head, a locus of consciousness, a subject, is itself an appearance in consciousness. That's how, in fact, we, we feel it. Consciousness is prior to it, and therefore, therefore free of it, in principle. And selflessness is not a deep feature of consciousness, it's right on the surface. And yet, people can, can spend years, even, you know, seasoned meditators, can spend years not discovering this.

How is it that something can be right on the surface and yet be difficult to see? Well, consider by analogy the optic blind spot. You've all probably seen an image like this in school at one point. If you cover your left eye and focus on the star, the circle will disappear. Now, obviously, most people in human history did not know anything about the optic blind spot. And most of us who know about it go for decades without noticing it. And yet, it's there. It's almost, it's almost too close to us to notice. It's not a matter of being deep within or far away, or even particularly subtle. It's just, it's, it's in a place we, we don't normally look.

Now, the absence of self is also there to be noticed. Again, it's not far away, it's not deep within. And there's an intuition that, especially when you start to do a practice like the practice I just gave you of mindfulness, there's an intuition that you start in this place in your head, and now you're trying to pay attention to the breath, you're trying to pay attention to sensations, and then the journey is somehow deep within. You have to go in search of this, of the truth of selflessness. That, that is a, a misunderstanding.

Now, how can we know that the conventional sense of self is an illusion? If you have this experience of of noticing its absence, well, it's like with any illusion. What, what does not survive scrutiny cannot be real. Now, perhaps you can see a similar effect here. Now, this is, it's very easy to feel that this is a white square in the center of this figure. But when you look more closely, you see that the white square has been merely implied. The only thing in this figure are four partial circles. This is a trick of the visual system. Our edge detectors have been fooled. And so when you scrutinize this image, the square falls away.

Now, what would we say to a skeptic who said, "Well, the, the white square is just as real as the four partial circles"? But all we could do is is urge him or her to look more closely. The same is true about the feeling we call "I." The feeling that there's a thinker in addition to thoughts themselves. This does not survive scrutiny. If you really look for it, it will disappear.

Now, there are several methods of pointing this out. And in addition to the one I just recommended to you, I would recommend a trick that, that Douglas Harding came up with. Douglas Harding was an architect who grew up in England in a cult of fundamentalist Christians. And he expressed his his doubts at some point with sufficient fervor as to get excommunicated. And then he went to India. And his journey of self-discovery culminated in an insight that he described as having no head. And he then went on to write a book on that topic and for decades spoke about it, much to the consternation of many people who had no idea what he was talking about. And some of these were very smart people, like Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist.

Now, I never met Harding, but I think he was clearly trying to introduce people to the same experience I'm talking about. And, and he did find an original way to do it. Now, he was led to this insight by seeing a, a self-portrait that was drawn by the, the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, who drew himself rather rigorously from his own point of view and noticed that all he saw was his body stretched out in space. And as he wrote, it was framed by the ridge of his brow and his nose and his mustache. Now, Harding was in the Himalayas when the relevance of this image fully took possession of his mind. And he was standing at a place called Nagarcote, outside of Kathmandu, which offers a beautiful view of the mountains pictured here. And he suddenly realized that where, that he didn't perceive his head. That where his head was supposed to be, there was just mountains and sky. And if you look out into the space of this room at this moment, you too can have this intuition. Unless you're in the front row, you're in a room filled with heads, but yours is not among them. If you look for your head at this moment, you might notice that in its place, you just have the world.

This may sound like a completely crazy instruction, but bear with me. This is not, it's not a matter of going deep within. It's a matter of just turning attention upon itself. Turning, just looking in the direction of where you know your head to be, and seeing if anything about your perception of visual space changes. Just pay attention to that first moment. It's not a matter of plunging inward or producing some remarkable experience. Just the first instant of looking for yourself. See if there's anything, any change in that sense that you're behind your eyes, looking out at a world of objects, seeing a few perplexed faces. It can take some training to be able to do this, but this is a, a very useful trick. This is just a trick to get your attention pointed in the right direction. But it is possible to look for this thing you're calling "I" and to fail to find it in a way that's conclusive.

Some people find it easier to trigger this intuition along Harding's lines by just imagining not having a head. It's not so much a matter of turning attention, but just imagine, just forget about your head for a moment, and put the world there. Now, again, if you have this, if you, if, if this has any effect on you, you will, it will be very brief, and then thoughts will intervene. And then it's just, it's not something to struggle with. It's just, it's a, it's a thing to keep considering and keep looking for.

Now, in my view, the realistic goal of practices like mindfulness, or any other kind of practice, is not some permanent state of selflessness that admits of no further efforts, but the ability to drop your sense of self in the present moment, more or less, no matter what's happening. Now, if you can do that, it seems to me that you, you have solved many of life's problems. Because doing that is coincident with no longer being hostage to the contents of the next thought that is arising in consciousness. The angry thought, the self-hating thought, the judgmental thought. This breaks the spell. It's possible to have the center just drop out of experience. And then, in some sense, as a matter of conscious experience, only the world remains. Or that there is experience, and there are the stories we tell about it. And so, some stories give people meaning in their lives. Some religious stories give them meaning. But many meanings are divisive and productive of unnecessary harms. And there are many that are patently false.

What does a spiritual experience mean? What does the experience of self-transcendence mean? What does unconditional love mean? What does bliss mean? If you're, if you're a Christian sitting in church, undoubtedly it's going to mean that the doctrines of the church are somehow true, that Jesus survived his death and he's now taking an interest in the fate of your soul. If you're a Hindu praying to Shiva, you're gonna, you're gonna have an entirely different story to tell. So there has to be a deeper principle at work. And, and we have to understand these experiences in non-sectarian terms. But altered states of consciousness are empirical facts. But to understand this, and to live lives that are compatible with rationality, to live spiritual lives compatible with rationality without deluding ourselves, we have to strip away the, the, the Iron Age philosophy.

Now, of all the harms caused by religion, I think this is probably the most subtle at this point. It, even when religion seems to be benign, even when it seems to be beneficial, when it's just inspiring people to go to beautiful buildings and contemplate the, the mystery of existence and their their ethical commitments to one another, it still imparts this message that there's no intellectually defensible way to do this. It, it still tacitly claims that you need some measure of myth and unreason in order to get these value-laden projects off the ground. But it's not true. It's not true. We can have rich ethical, spiritual lives without believing anything on insufficient evidence. Right. Consciousness is, is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life. It's everything that we can see directly, and it's that which does the seeing. Yes, the cosmos is vast, and it's, and it is by all signs indifferent to our aims. But each moment of consciousness is profound. Each of us is identical, as a matter of experience, each of us is identical to the very thing that brings value to the universe. Consciousness is the only space in which anything can matter. To, to experience this deeply, to, to be this, if only for moments at a time, cashes out all of the claims that people are making in otherwise irrational contexts, all of the experiential claims. It's really, it's really a reverence for the ordinary that can lead to extraordinary experiences. And we, we don't have to believe anything on insufficient evidence to do it. We just have to pay attention. Thank you very much.

Okay, so I was expecting to be able to see you better for some reason, but that was totally irrational. Um, I guess I, I can't see anyone, but I am standing here in front of the mic. Um, listen, I'm a huge fan. I, uh, there's a lot of people who think I'm smarter than I actually am because I plagiarize a lot of your arguments, especially with my religious friends.

Well, I think I'm smarter than I actually am too. So, okay, good. But I, I'm having, I'm struggling with this a lot. One of the things is, I, I wanted to, I was thinking to myself before I came up, I want to ask a question, and I stopped listening to your lecture because I was, you know, I was, I was sort of consumed with the idea of what I was going to say. And then I started to think about that, well, what do I want to say? What do I want to ask? Well, I look up to you, you know, sort of, sort of a sink, there's a sycophantic thing here where I want you to remember what I said. Um, and then I, then I sort of acknowledged that, and I sort of let it go, and I sort of thought myself out of it. And it was, to a certain extent, I transcended my thought by thought. And I'm a writer, and I spend a lot of time trying to get to the heart of things. But in the end, it feels like if I start meditating, or if I start removing myself from that experience, I'm removing something of my humanity, and part of who I am as a person. And it not only frightens me, and I'm, I'm going to acknowledge the fact that it that it concerns me on that level, um, but also intellectually, I feel like, well, where am I then? If I get so much out of my thought process, and through my thoughts, I do escape myself.

Right, right. Well, rest assured, I will never forget that question as long as I live. But, uh, no, it's a good question. And it's, I think it's a, it's a common fear that smart people have. Certainly, it's a fear that science people who have a, are identified with having an intellectual life have this concern that if you, if you don't, if thinking isn't the ultimate good of human consciousness, well, then somehow, if you're going to change the game and, and just, and describe thinking as in any way problematic, even inherently problematic, well, then, then seems to devalue most of what they, most of what seems to be the, the good things in their lives. Now, a lot of people, again, it, I think this is more of a bias that that intellectual people have. And, right, you know, scientists and big readers and writers, as the thoughts are are captivating, and you want good ones as opposed to boring ones. And people, and many people have careers where the, the beauty of their thoughts, or the utility of their thoughts, is the, is why they have their careers in the first place. But, as you said, you know, you were trying to pay attention to what I was saying, and then your mind wandered into the question.

Yeah, but I realized that in the end, I came back to myself, and I realized where I was, and who I was, and what was important to me at that moment, through my thoughts. Right. So to me, it feels to devalue it, to remove myself in that experience. I'm sorry, everybody paid a lot of money. I'll get off in a second. No, no.

It's all, it's all going to come back down to the same point. I think there's not that many different ways to be dissatisfied with with this topic. But whether, whether anyone knows it or not, we all want to be free of dilemma in each moment. I mean, most of our thinking presupposes that if we could just think ourselves to some point of completion, we would have a reason to just be happy. Now, you know, when you're thinking about some problem in your life, or something you want to achieve, or something you're hoping to to be able to say well, or whatever the, the, the, the plan is, you are trying to guide your, guide yourself through the uncertainty of, you know, each subsequent moment of the future, so that you can finally just be totally satisfied and at rest, and no longer neurotic, and no longer afraid, and no longer judging yourself, and just, just settle into the present moment.

You've suggested in one of your articles that you think that apart from the five senses, if we, if you strip the senses away, it's your suspicion that that consciousness is still there, that it still exists, right? And I, I didn't know if you were sort of, you know, sort of going over into the Chalmers territory of thinking that somehow consciousness is fundamental, or what, what you're thinking there, if you could elaborate on that, and how you maybe came to that conclusion.

Well, there's a deeply held conviction in the sciences of mind that consciousness is, is, there's no such thing as pure consciousness. The consciousness is always in one of its channels of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. And, if you lost seeing, and lost hearing, and lost smelling, lost tasting, lost touching, and there are, there are other modes of consciousness like proprioception and other things we don't think about so much. But if you lost every one of those channels, well, then the lights would go out completely. And yet, there are people, you know, experienced meditators, have experiences that seem to contradict that intuition, where you can have an experience where it's absolutely clear you're not hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, and you're, you don't even feel you have a body anymore. I mean, there's not, you're, it's just you. All of that has been relaxed to the point where there's just consciousness. And there are many different states that have this character. But, but you can have a feeling of just, just kind of wide-open conscious peace that has no reference point in, in those usual channels. And so, if you've had those experiences, then this notion of, of pure consciousness makes some sense. Uh, so I'm, I'm, you know, whether or not there's a subtle residue of of all those channels there, and there's no such thing as pure consciousness, or whether there's, whether it's more accurate to describe it as pure consciousness, I, I'm not sure. But the pure consciousness experience is definitely there to be had. Um, and I, and the, and the channel, the way in which people study consciousness at the level of the brain, looking for it exclusively in the visual stream, for instance, as Christoph Koch does, did with Francis Crick, I think that is almost guaranteed to be misleading if consciousness is more fundamental than that. But no, I don't, actually, Chalmers thinks that consciousness arises on by virtue of all information processing. So that, you know, even a thermostat is conscious to the degree that it's processing information. And I, that's not really where my intuition's run. But I don't actually have a better intuition. It just, that seems so spooky to me that, you know, it's hard to really feel you believe that when you say the words. Thank you.

Okay, when we take away our eyes, we don't imagine that everything just, all the light disappears, right? When we take away the activities in our brains that that manufactures the sense of self, we don't imagine that ourselves disappears. So why would you say that that's an illusion? But photons are not. It's hard to say what is really, really real when paying attention changes the, changes the nature of what's there to be noticed. And this comes down to this, even it links up with what's there in the real world. If you think of, like, wine tasting, for instance. You know, what does, what does a given wine taste like? Well, for me, it just tastes like it's a red wine or a white wine, and that's basically as far as I go. If, you know, what you're doing, if you've got a palate, and you've actually ch, if you actually by virtue of exercising that palate, you've changed the neuronal real estate allocated to you tasting wine, you literally have a different brain than I do. And you will find different things in that wine by virtue of having a different brain. Now, it's, I guess you could say that it's somehow really in the wine, all the flavors of chocolate and persimmon and all the other stuff you pretend to find in that wine.

[Applause]

But so on one level, it's really there because if we did an enough study, yet we could find the molecules that are maybe wine tasters would all converge on, you know, what's, what's giving them those experiences. But maybe not. Maybe that's, it's just, uh, in part, just the consequence of changing your brain. But to answer your question directly, it was that the slide I put up there about the white square. If you, if paying attention to something more closely always forces that thing you thought was there to collapse into some other condition, that, that is the definition of an illusion. It's, it's something that, if that, that you, you thought it was real, and you paid closer attention to it, and discovered that it wasn't as it seemed. Now, the self, the sense of self, has that same character. So it's like, you know, how many times do you have to look at that white square to assure yourself that it's not really there? You know, five, ten, fifteen, twenty? At a certain point, you, you just know that you're being fooled when you see it there. And if you look more closely, it disappears. Now, some illusions are more robust than that, which is, which is to say that, you know, their illusions because you look at them, and they, and you see how they're made, but you can never see them otherwise. You always see the white square there. There's no way to not see it there. And yet, you know it's an illusion. And the white square is sort of like that for some people. It's very hard to look at that image and not see a white square there. But you can do it. It's actually easier to see the absence of self than it is to see that image without a white square. Uh, I mean, it's, it's, but so, I mean, there's, there's an analogy in the, in the Buddhist and also the Indian tradition in general, of a, of a, a coiled rope that a person mistakes for a snake. You know, so you see a coiled thing in the corner of the room, and you immediately, all of your, you know, your amygdala response kicks in, you see a snake, and you're freaked out. And then you look more closely, and you see that what you thought were scales is just strands of fiber. And now that snake collapses into a rope. And so how many times you have to do that to be, if it always collapses, if the snake always becomes a rope, and the rope never becomes a snake when you're paying attention, it biases you to on one side of that inquiry, where you feel like, okay, well, this is when I'm paying attention, when I'm actually paying attention, the world is this way. When I'm confused, uh, or distracted, the world seems to be another way. And, and so then attention sort of has the, its own primacy there.

My question is, I know what it feels like when you think, when you say to be behind your eyes, that sense of self. I don't know what it feels like not to feel that. And I get the sense that you either do, or you have some insight into what it might be like. So I'm wondering if you can articulate what that, which could replace that through meditation or spirituality, what that feels like.

Well, so what does it feel like to, to lose the sense of self? Right. Once I've lost that, what will I then feel? Well, at my, so it can be very, in the beginning, it's very brief. I mean, unless you're some kind of meditational prodigy, you'll, you'll glimpse this thing, and it'll just be glimpses. It'll be, you know, a few seconds. It's not going to, it's not going to open up, and you're, and you're going to have a week without yourself. Though that would be nice. But it's, so it's, it's a glimpse which, uh, can, its duration can, can extend. And the more it extends, the more the sort of experiential qualities of it become salient. So the more you, you begin to feel the good stuff of of just being, no longer burdened with the problem of of yourself. And so states like compassion and, and, and bliss, and the positive character of the, of consciousness that you hear described in Buddhist and other contemplative literature, that, that stuff happens by simply by virtue of no longer being. That can happen just by virtue of being concentrated. But it can happen by virtue of no longer feeling this sense of self. But it's very momentary. And because it's momentary, especially in the beginning, it doesn't necessarily feel like anything important has happened at all. And this is, this is something that Douglas Harding, I know, ran into when he was teaching, because I think he said somewhere, he said, "The voice of the devil is, 'So what?'" You know, he was teaching this to people, he was giving these kind of headlessness seminars, and people were having this experience of headlessness for half a second, and then they'd say, "So what?" And that is a, a liability of teaching this stuff to people too early, because unless you've spent a lot of time meditating and really seeking increasingly rarefied breakthroughs in your, in your conscious experience, you don't, it's hard to value this thing. If you do, in fact, experience it, and it's, it's not obvious that it's the answer to any problem until you've really defined the problem for yourself. But, um, the more you get used to it, it, it does become the answer to a problem.

And mention compassion and bliss. Are those? Those are, those are transitory states within this. Those can be transitory states even when you're feeling like a self, too. But it's a, what I'm saying is, it doesn't necessarily feel like much of anything initially. But what it does is, it interrupts the process of thinking and conceptualizing and creating all of whatever conscious state was being manufactured by being identified with thought. So if you're thinking angry thoughts, or envious thoughts, or whatever, whatever the problem is, and you're totally identified with those thoughts, well, then you are hostage to whatever the emotional implications of those thoughts are. You know, if you're, it's just, you don't see the thought as a thought. It just comes up from behind, in some weird way, and it becomes you. You know, you're just, you're that thought. So if it's a, it's a thought of hatred for somebody, or hatred for yourself, or whatever it is, it's just you that is you for that moment. Being able to see, to witness that present thought disappear, and to feel that consciousness is actually just unencumbered by it, uh, in that, if only for a moment, that it punctuates the problem, uh, in a way that, that makes it much less solid. So if your anger is punctuated, you know, a thousand times a day with moments of just seeing a thought as a thought, and, and better yet, feeling that there's no thinker of that thought, that, that erodes the moment, that diminishes the momentum of any of these states to a remarkable degree. So it is, it's therapeutic in that way.

Thanks. So I spent decades never using the word faith. And then I read "The End of Faith," and I, I had some long discussions about the word belief and the word faith. And I ended up deciding that really, I shouldn't use the word belief, because everybody hears the word belief and they put into it whichever interpretation of belief they want to put into it. They either say, "Well, he just, he's taking that on faith," which is one of the ways that you can see the word belief, or they understand what I'm saying. So in order to be, in order not to be misunderstood, I decided to use the word faith, and something like accepting the fact for belief. I think I'm much more clear that way. And now you've, you've introduced this idea of spirituality, which starts with the word spirit, and has such a strong implication to, I would presume, a vast majority of people on the planet, of the supernatural. Right. And it seems like a really bad choice.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the, that's something I, I, I, I try to take the stink off of it in the first chapter of my book. Uh, but, and it's so deep, it's into it. It's the problem is, we really, there's no word in English that captures this project. You have words like that. You have words that are worse, like mysticism. I use the word contemplative a lot. But what you need is a word which does not allow someone who thinks all you're talking about is awe, loving your kids, loving to paint, you know, all of these ordinary experiences that, that, that everyone has had. Um, you need a word that, that suggests that there's something more rarefied here, that this goes deeper than most people tend to explore in their lives. And you need a word that links up with the traditional ways in which people have made this effort. So, because, because this, what I'm talking about really is of a piece, is of a continuum. It's on a continuum with the kinds of things people experience, you know, Tibetan lamas who go into caves for years at a time, or Christian monastics who spend 20 years in monasteries and have these, these rarefied experiences. Granted, they tend to interpret those experiences by the light of their religious doctrines, and that is illegitimate, and that's something that I've spent a decade criticizing, and I criticize to some degree in this book. But there is this, there is a far end of the continuum of of human well-being and states of consciousness that can be really rare and hard-won. And, and, you know, people experience them through practices like meditation, they experience them through psychedelics, they, some people get lucky and just experience them and they don't know why. But it's not everyone. And it's certainly not, you know, every backpacker who loves, you know, to look at the Milky Way. And it's, it's not, uh, it is, it is an area of specialization. It, it goes very deep. And to just talk about awe and well-being and happiness, everyone thinks they know what you're talking about. And, and you're 99 times out of 100.

What was that? I love to be clear when I'm talking. I like to, I look, I have that sensation that I, I want people to understand exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah. If I think about, I think I use the word spirituality. Well, it starts the conversation. I think the, the problem is that it's, um, I mean, I hate, I hate jargon. And when you, when you come up with a new word for this thing, it's just the most arrogant move imaginable, where you think, "Okay, now everyone's got to start using my word. You know, we're going to, uh, uh, you know, we're gonna call this, you know, Omega Point, or something." And now I expect you all to to make the appropriate noises. You know, so it's not that. Never works. And, uh, it's not positive psychology isn't enough. It's not, because what people mean by positive psychology just doesn't capture this, this, you know, far end of, you know, several sigmas beyond the norm in terms of what people experience. So I just, I'm rolling the dice with spirituality, knowing that it's going to produce a fair amount of pain. But it's, uh, there is just, there's no better word in English. Good luck with that. Thank you.

Hi. Um, I realize this is kind of an old question for me. I mean, I've wanted to know this since, uh, "Beyond Belief" 2007. So it's going to be off-topic. Um, I believe you're an atheist with respect to religions. I think you're an, and I know you don't like the word. I think you're an atheist with respect to gods. But I believe that you are agnostic with respect to reincarnation. Maybe you can contrast those differently.

Well, I'm, I'm not. The truth is, I'm agnostic with respect to every crazy thing except for. So, so all that you need to be an atheist, a functional atheist, with respect to Islam, or Christianity, or Judaism, is to deny that the books were written by an omniscient being. And that I'm, there's just, there's no evidence that they were written by an omniscient being. And so once you, once you disparage the books, you, you're an atheist with respect to those religions. And it's just, that's just the end of the conversation. And, and it just, it's, it's patently obvious that those books could not have been written by an omniscient being, or if they were, they were, they're written by an omniscient being who was pretending to be a first-century or seventh-century ignoramus. So, so that's all. But as to whether or not some weird omniscient sadist exists and devised this universe, I, I can't claim to be certain that that's not the case. So there are, there are many highly improbable, an infinite number of highly improbable things, uh, that I wouldn't, I would never say I'm certain don't exist. You, they're, they're totally sensible people at this moment who are wondering whether our universe is being run as a simulation on some alien supercomputer. Now, you know, if this alien supercomputer, or a supercomputer built in the, in by humans in the future, we just imagine, so, so our, our computation gets stronger and stronger, and we crack the neural code, we figure out how to implement consciousness in, in computers, and, and our descendants get better and better at this, and then they build these simulated worlds, and by just by dint of sheer numbers, simulated worlds are going to outnumber real worlds. There's no question of that. You're going to have a functionally infinite number of simulated worlds. There's only one real world. So what, what's more likely? That we're living in the real world, or that we're living in one of these infinite simulated worlds? But run by our descendants. And if those descendants happen to be Mormons, well, maybe they could have created the more, a true Mormon universe that we're living in right now. You know, and so really, the Mormons are right in our universe now. That, that's possible. But I, so I mean, I would put reincarnation in that zone. Okay. Right. But, but except for the fact that reincarnation and psychic phenomena, especially psychic phenomena, are eminently testable. I mean, this is just, this is something that could, if anyone had strong psychic powers, this would be the easiest thing in the world to test in the lab. And the fact that no one has come forward proving their psychic abilities is suggestive that these abilities don't really exist in any strong form. But there are people who claim to have reams and reams of data of weak psychic abilities that have not been taken seriously, and that who people like James Randi have have, you know, kind of bullied out of out of everyone's fair hearing. And, and that, I think, is, is, um, I mean, that may be the case. So I'm, again, I'm not, you know, I'm just trying to be rigorously honest where I, where I draw the line between something I would bet my life on, and the life of every sentient being on, and where I would say, "Show me the evidence." And for all of these spooky things, including the simulation argument, show me the evidence. Nick Bostrom is not an unintelligent person. And this is, you know, we read his argument for for us living in a simulated universe. It's interesting. Uh, it's, and that would be the strangest thing imaginable. So I actually have a very simple question. Do you feel like when you travel, when you travel to India and you practice with great yogis and all those people, do you feel like intellectual honesty goes up the more enlightened you are, or is it a requirement to begin with to be able to really see what you're trying to not communicate?

That's an interesting question. I've never thought about that, but I have a very clear opinion. I think that I think those are orthogonal. I don't think there's necessarily a relationship between intellectual honesty and realizing this about the nature of consciousness. You can be someone who, who, when you're thinking, when you're lost in thought, has your worldview trimmed down by all of the dogmas that were hammered into you on mother's knee. And whether those are Buddhist dogmas or Christian dogmas, you can, and then you can have these clear experiences of not, of being no longer being identified as the thinker of your thoughts. And you can oscillate between those two. But there's nothing about that oscillation that's going to make you understand 21st-century physics, or give you a scientific worldview, or even make you interested in necessarily finding all the ways in which you might be self-deceived when you're, it might not open you up to more of the, not at all, not necessarily. I mean, again, I haven't really thought about it, but it doesn't seem to me that there's a, there's a necessary connection there.

I'll just tie down like, real quick. The real reason I'm asking this question is because I have a lot of very smart friends, but they seem to have a hard time really wanting to understand what's going on, even if they can't. How do you communicate to someone who's really smart, really is committed to understand the universe the way it is, but completely is missing the point with something that's so on the surface?

Well, I guess I, I might have taken your question in an unintended, unintended direction. Intellectual honesty covers a lot of real estate, and it seems to me that you can get very good at playing an intellectual game without being rigorously honest in any kind of global sense, or without even being interested to be honest. You know, so you can be, as we've witnessed, you can be a fundamentalist Christian and be a physicist, as as strange as that sounds. I, I hear from these people, you know, so that there are people, you know, I heard from, I'll never forget this email I got, an email from a guy who was doing his PhD in biophysics. He said, "I just want you to know," he's like typing from a bunker, "but so I just want you to know, I'm at a conference now, and 15 minutes ago, I was in a room with four other physicists, and I was the only person in that room who didn't believe that Jesus was resurrected and will be coming back to resurrect the dead." So it's possible to, to, and you have someone like Francis Collins running the NIH who believes in the resurrection and, uh, other just unwarranted ideas. And there's something about, I guess, there's, there's one dividing point. So I, you know, I told you guys to try to not think for a few seconds. And, um, and if any of you get interested in meditation, you're going to very quickly have this experience of paying attention, trying to pay attention to your breath or anything, and finding it very difficult to do. And you're just, you're just going to keep getting lost in thought. And if you're one type of person, is going to find that very interesting. Just that there's just a sheer inability to to direct his or her attention. That's going to be, there's going to be something captivating about that failure. And he or she's going to see the implications there, because they're going to see how that failure is the engine of unhappiness in every other moment of their lives. There are other people who look inside for five or ten minutes and find, "Yeah, fine. They can't pay attention to anything very clearly. Oh, yeah, they're just thinking. But so what?" You know, they're just not interested in, they don't see the implication for their well-being in the future. And it's not even intellectually interesting that the mind would have that character. And so that's, it's hard to force someone to be interested. You sort of have to wait for them to suffer, you know, you just, they, something makes them miserable, you know, they embarrass themselves publicly, and they can never stop thinking about it. And you say, "Wouldn't you like to step out of the stream of thought for a moment?"

Thank you for, you know, someone is a scientist and a skeptic exploring consciousness and talking about it and writing about it is, was sorely lacking, especially for someone who has a hard time always differentiating the, but knowing that there's something here. So thank you.

In the first chapter, you mentioned enlightenment, and my exposure to the concept is more of a sort of a kind of a peak, maybe ultimate experience, rather than a, you know, never-ending constant state. Even the philosopher and long-time meditator Ken Wilber says he doesn't know of anyone that has it as an uninterrupted state. And for him, the longest was 11 days of, you know, non-dual awareness, or whatever it's called. Um, do you believe, or know from experience, that there is some kind of an ultimate experience of that realization, or seeing the most unfiltered state of consciousness, that becomes like this, at least, even if experienced once, an ultimate realization that kind of carries a better understanding of consciousness?

Well, I certainly don't know from experience that there's a permanent state of selflessness or non-duality, because mine, even 11 days is, is, is that's at least 10.9 days too many days, by my account. But I, I know that it's possible to feel far more stable than in this experience than I've tended to feel, and that I tend to feel on any given day when I'm, you know, just, uh, devoted to, you know, all of the chaos of of normal life. But I mean, to be like you, if I could just sample my experience, the best hour at the best moment of a three-month retreat where I've just been doing nothing but meditate, uh, yeah, if you could just say, "Well, this, this, this, some, there's some people you have met who, you know, that would be their worst hour in the last year, and that basically everything is better. It doesn't get worse than this." That seems to me to be psychologically possible. I don't see any good reason why it wouldn't be possible.

My question for you, Sam, is, I imagine there's a fair amount of writers, screenwriters, musicians, songwriters in the crowd here. What is, as an author, your writing process to get you into flow, if you have such a process? I'd be interested to get a peek under the hood of your brain as to what you do to get there.

Yeah, I can't say that I get there, I, or that I, that getting there is any different from getting there doing anything else. I just occasionally, I, I, I notice that I don't know what I'm going to think next. You know, the next thought just appears. Right. It's just not, I'm not authoring my thoughts.

One follow-up. Do you rework your material, or is it coming out about 80, 90 percent? You know, I, I missed the first part. Do you rework your material?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I should, I should say, um, I guess this is the right time to say that I, and I've said this in various contexts, unfortunately, there's not a great context where I can say it loudly enough that it just, it never gets forgotten. But my wife Annika edits all my stuff, and she's, she's a brilliant editor. And if I make sense for any significant amount of time, she has a lot to do with it. And, and so she's here. All right. Thank you very much. My, my flow experience comes when, when I write something, and then Annika tells me it's terrible, and then I get over my reaction.

My experience with any meditation practice has been that as soon as I try to evacuate my thoughts, I'm aware of discomfort in my body and pain and just old injuries. And it's very hard for me to not then think about that. And if you have any techniques, homework for achieving a mindful state?

Yeah, well, the Vipassana approach is really tailor-made for dealing with that kind of thing, because you're constantly noticing discomfort in the body, and then there's an idea about what the discomfort means, and then there's the resistance to feeling it. And much of the, the suffering of physical pain, albeit probably not all of it, but certainly a lot of it, is the resistance to feeling it and the ideas about what it means. And so just imagine if, if you've ever played a sport really hard, or worked out with weights intensely, you know that you can, there's certain kinds of physical discomfort, they can become really enjoyable because they mean something that seems good. They mean you're getting health, stronger and healthier, and you're really working out hard, or whatever it is.

Is but if you woke up in the morning feeling, you know, the burn of lifting weights, but you weren't lifting weights, and you know your doctor told you, "Well, that's, so sorry to say, that's, you know, just the scariest disease we've got." The meaning you would give to that feeling, the sensations could be exactly the same. And yet, that that sensation that you would otherwise seek in the gym and actually love it and be disappointed if it didn't visit you at some point in the hour, that sensation would be the worst thing that has ever happened to you, and you'd just be complaining to everyone about it. And and yet, and it's, it's the, the concept around it that is doing such heavy lifting there.

So if you can just get out of the thoughts about what this sensation means, forget about prior injuries, and and just pay raw attention to this, the flow of sensation. That's not to say that you shouldn't sit as comfortably as you can sit, and you might want to get up and move if something is feeling like it's, you know, you can injure yourself sitting still for too long. I mean, people do. People really get into into this will do vow sittings where they, they'll decide not to move for hours at a time. And that that the kind of pain you experience just by not moving is unbelievable. Uh, and it can really concentrate the mind. And so people get addicted to the ease of getting concentrated that way, but you can also hurt your body. So I would move, but then don't worry about it.

Thank you. Are you saying that my consciousness is 100% the product of the brain-body organism that thinks it's me? Or have you left room for the possibility that there are qualities of consciousness which are not bound by space or time?

Well, that that's a, I go into that some length in the book because consciousness is at this point still a mystery. It's just a fundamental mystery. We don't know how it arises. Now, there are very good reasons to suspect that it arises by virtue of information processing in some way. In in in our case, in in the brain with some numbers of neurons in some particular conformity. But, and it seems like there are areas of our brains that are not giving rise to consciousness. Consciousness is not is not spread over the entirety of the brain. So it's not just neurons, and it's not just information processing. This, there's something. You know, whether it's, you know, gamma frequency activity or there's some, there's some magic that happens. Except the problem is that really is the statement of a miracle. I mean, that that if the answer at the back of the book of nature is just, "You need 10,000 neurons wired in X, Y, and Z way, and they have to be humming along at 70 hertz," that is just what you, that's the recipe for consciousness. And if it's 65 hertz, there's just, there's nothing that it's like to be those neurons. But you, you increase the activity and and the lights go on. That's a miracle. I mean, that that doesn't actually explain consciousness. And it seems to me that whatever final answer we get about consciousness, would it will have that character. And so there's something intrinsically mysterious about consciousness. And it may, in fact, be the consciousness goes all the way down in some way. That it may not be crazy to say that a single neuron is conscious, conscious, or even a single atom is conscious. Now, that granted, sounds pretty spooky. And that's that the philosophical view is called panpsychism. It seems to me there's no reason to believe that I, but there's no reason to fundamentally doubt it either, because I wouldn't expect the universe to appear any differently one way or the other. I wouldn't expect this if atoms, if there was an interior dimension to atoms, if atoms were kind of buzzing with just pure beingness, I wouldn't expect this chair to behave any differently. I wouldn't expect the chair to be to talk to me or to me. There's just, there would be no obvious mindedness in in the physical world. And so I just, I don't know. But it's not, it's certainly reasonable to think that consciousness is the product of brain activity. It's also reasonable to think that it doesn't have to be the wetware of of human brains, and it could be instantiated in computers.

Would you strongly disagree with the belief or the idea that non-local consciousness is the ground of all being?

I would find good reason to doubt that that is, uh, that there's any need for that hypothesis. I mean, if you're talking about kind of giving primacy to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and and the observer effect, that somehow things aren't real until they're observed, that the view, the views of physicists on that subject have have changed in the last 80 years. And it's not, maybe this is what happens to a lot of people like Deepak Chopra. The only physics they they tend to refer to tends to be the physics of 1930, where there were, you know, half a dozen or a dozen very smart physicists who were talking as though reality was more thought-like than than rock-like. You know, that that mind was somehow entwined with the very fabric of reality. And there are experiments that that can give some motivation to that way of talking. But most physicists are not there now in terms of the way they interpret those experiments. And so, um, my my deeper point is that you don't need any of the spooky physics or any thoughts about non-locality to become interested in the nature of your own consciousness and to find that there's no self at the center of it. And that's, and to discover all the benefits of doing that, you don't need to believe anything about the universe. I mean, my experience of consciousness is not vulnerable to the next thing that's going to happen in physics, because my beliefs about consciousness have nothing to do with what we already know about physics, because it's just consciousness is a mystery, and it's, uh, it has whatever character it has from a first-person side, and you can explore explore it directly.

In your talk on it, or in your book on free will and the moral landscape, and now waking up, have you ever, maybe just out of curiosity, envisioned a world where, or or maybe just a community or a small group that that did have a very solid grasp on a lot of these concepts, and what what a kind of society would look like at all where they had, uh, maybe in the free will context, a very deep kind of empathy with everything around them, a very good understanding of of the world's impact on them, and maybe in this case, less of an internal view and less of a self-oriented perspective, and how how that would look, possibly?

I, you know, I haven't thought a lot about the the consequences of everyone thinking the way I think, because it doesn't seem likely to occur in my lifetime or anyone's. But the, I think there's there are a few implications. The the other side of this no-self argument is the no-free-will argument. They're really two sides of the same coin subjectively. And so my my talks on free will and my book about free will, I don't think I discussed the nature of the self, uh, very much at all in that context. But the feeling of having free will is of a piece with the feeling of being a self, the feeling of being the thinker of the thoughts, the feeling of authoring your actions. And, uh, as I argued in free will, there are ethical implications to losing this sense of free will. And, and one of, and as far as I can tell, nothing bad happens. You, you can still find reasons to be motivated, you can still find ways to get what you want out of life. But what you can't find is an enduring basis to hate other people. Because hatred of other people, really, you can be angry, you can be, you can be, you can recoil at something somebody has done, you can be motivated to stop them, but you can't really hate them in any sense. Because you're not, they're not the actual, no one has fully authored themselves. No one is, everyone is a a confluence of of influences. You know, the person who's waking up tomorrow thinking it's going to be the best thing in the world to join ISIS, didn't make himself. He didn't make his genes, he didn't make his parents, he didn't make the society in which he it was born, he didn't make the ideas that got into his head and convinced him that that ISIS was was represented a glorious opportunity to live in in the one true caliphate. Um, he didn't, he didn't do it all. He's a, he's a kind of weather pattern when when looked at from a kind of a bird's-eye view. And so, so hatred becomes less durable in that condition. And if you can find a way of eroding hatred, I think I think that's, if if it achieves nothing else, I think that's a useful leverage to pull hard.

In your spiritual experience, or in spiritual experiences you may yet have, because I understand you don't make claims to enlightenment, do you think that there's an answer to that question, that that meaning to one's existence can be found through a spiritual quest of the type that you talk?

Yeah, I think it's the wrong question. It's just, it's a question that seems to create a space that for an answer that now needs to be filled in. And the fact that we can't fill it in perfectly is considered some kind of problem. But I do think it's, it's the wrong question. Because the meaning, you don't ask that whenever you're having an experience that is deeply fulfilling, and you're really just, you're not distracted by thought, you're, you're not waiting for the next good thing to happen, you're not looking over the shoulder of the present moment to see what's coming, you're just totally with whatever it is. You're not then worrying about what it means. I mean, that's this is something that's a, you have to do something in order to find that question interesting. And the thing you're doing is less interesting than really being connected to the present moment. And if in the present moment, there is, there's no, if you're not lost in thought, and you're truly just kind of surrendered to consciousness in the present moment, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, there's no, you don't have to think of the grand design of your life. Now, it's not to say that there's, you can't ask big questions about, you know, the arc of your life, you know, what you want your life to look at, and what would be, you know, if you look at what would be a great way to spend the next 10 years. I mean, those those are value-laden questions that we can ask and plan for, and all that's fine. But the meaning of existence, that that or reason for your existence, I mean, but I don't, you know, I almost never, you know, to to get up in the morning and get to the coffee pot, I don't need a reason other than I want coffee. You know, and basically the rest, most of life works that way. And even the most profound moments work that way. So it's like when I'm holding my my eight-month-old daughter in my hands, and she smiles, and I smile back, and there's that moment of just, just, you know, she's now like the cutest thing in the world. Um, there's no, I don't need to to abstract away from that and say, well, what does this mean? And I mean, that that's like, that's a failure to connect. That that I would, that that the answer to that question would help me overcome, presumably, right? It's only the implicit in that question is if we had an answer, well, then life would be better. But why not just do the thing with your attention that would actually make life better?

You've spoken in the past about your experience in your 20s in India, and I believe I've heard you say that you pretty much fell for a lot of the religious bamboozlement along with the good stuff.

No, no, I wouldn't. Okay. I would like, actually, that no. I would like that clarified. Because I would like to know how you manage. I've known people that went there and went to ashrams and so on, and the things that happened to them there, right? I would like to know more about how you dealt with the religious requirements versus the actual experience. How did you tease out about the stuff that was of value?

Well, for me, the crucial distinction between religious thinking and spiritual practice and its associated thinking is the "e" in spirituality. In the sense that I'm talking about it, you really are just making claims about the nature of experience and the possibilities of experience, and and the mechanics of your own suffering, and the way the things you can do with your attention to make your suffering go away, essentially. So you're just talking about consciousness and its contents, and you're not making any claims about the nature of reality. You're not making any claims about history or invisible beings or invisible worlds you could reach after death or none of that, right? That's all the province of religion. So I don't feel the need to make any of this. It's just, and that's also the province of a lot of new age thinking. So again, that's where someone like, uh, Deepak, Deepak Chopra, and and, uh, I diverge. Because he's, even if we totally agreed about the experiences, which I'm not sure we do, uh, we might, I have no idea, but but even if we totally agreed about the character of of conscious experience and and the implications of meditation, he wants to draw further implications about the nature of of the cosmos. And so then, and that, so he's in the religion business in that respect. And and so, um, yeah, and so I've never.

I'm just wondering how in your 20s you had the wherewithal to not fall for that.

Well, it's just, you see, I mean, I'm sure there were moments in my 20s which you, if you would just, you know, caught me coming down from an acid trip, you know, I would have said some things that would, it wouldn't have pleased James Randi, you know, but undoubtedly. But in terms of the basically, the punch line I drew from that decade of my life, it's just clear it can't be about any of these incompatible religious claims. And I found myself surrounded with people who were, you usually see a lot of motivated reasoning. You see people who want to believe in miracles, and they're doing, they're making their best effort to believe in miracles, and then they're, it's, it's a, it's just a confirmation bias as as far as the eye can see in in these situations. And none of that's necessary. To be the experiences that you have are just are the experiences you have, and you don't have to make it further assertions about in any kind of doctrinal way. So you can actually, as I say in the book, lift the diamond out of the dunghill of religion in this respect. You can, you can, you can connect with the the practices without believing any any of the the associated metaphysics.

Do you think there is an unspoken transmission from an awakened teacher to a receptive student that can aid the student in more directly realizing this selflessness that you talk about?

Yeah, you know. [Music] It's a really hard question because I've, on one level, my answer is is no, or certainly there needn't be. Because I think I think it really is a matter of clear instruction. So the clearest moments I ever had with a with this one Tibetan Zogchen master, it seemed to me that his effect on me was fully understandable in terms of just the one that I was sufficiently concentrated to actually follow his instructions. But but two, just the precision with which he was guiding me in in real time. So it was just, it was it was a matter of information. But I've also had experiences with, you know, kind of great yogis and lamas and people who have devoted their lives to meditation, where it's not that I walked away believing in anything magical, but there's something. I mean, this the claim about somebody's energy being sort of overpowering, I've certainly had that experience where there's a, you know, whether you want to call it charisma, or whether just some people have certain pheromones that just, you know, destroy your Olympic system. I mean, you know, I've been in the presence of people who, where, you know, I came into the room and it was suddenly like I had been on retreat for two months, just by sitting with them. And I don't have, I'm so before you all get on Twitter and tell everyone I lost my mind, I I'm not making any claims about magic. There there's some, you know, there could be some totally straightforward explanation for this, but I just don't know what it is. I'm just attesting to the experience. And the reason why I don't think there's so much confirmation bias in my own experience of this is that I've had this experience with people who I really didn't want to like all that much. You know, like like whether I didn't like their teachings as much as I like someone some other person's teachings, but when I sat with with person number one, his presence kind of blew me away. And where whereas when I'm sitting with this other genius who who is giving me exactly what I think the true teachings are, his presence wasn't, it wasn't doing it. So my bias was opposite the effect. And so, so there may be something going on there, but I just have no idea what it is.

Thank you. In some of your recent online talks, you've talked, you've kind of talked about the comparison of these experiences with being fully immersed in the film, as contrasted with being able to see the projector and the play of light on a screen. And it's, and today you kind of mentioned, you know, like being immersed fully in a math problem or, um, martial arts, for example, you can, this sense of self can drop out, and that's, and that's the experience that you're after. But you seem to place the the emphasis more on the being able to see the projector in the play of light on the screen. Could you explain, um, maybe or talk a little bit more about why you, and maybe emphasize more, right, right on one?

Well, I guess there are ways of being totally immersed, like so losing yourself in your work or being totally, uh, immersed in a film. It's not quite the same thing as clearly cutting through the illusion of the self. And this is something, there's something haphazard about it. You're not, it's happening to you because you're focused on something, but there's not the clarity of awareness where you actually are understanding something about consciousness. And it's not an obvious antidote to psychological pain. So if you're feeling, you know, if you're feeling angry, uh, I mean, it's true that you can just go watch a good movie and forget about your anger. I mean, doing something else with your attention, or read a good book, or do you paying attention to something else is an antidote to psychological suffering. That's true. But it's not the same thing as clearly inspecting the contents of consciousness in that moment and and recognizing that the self is an illusion. So it's not, uh, I mean, the self is an illusion, so it like, it, it, it's not surprising that it it falls away in various moments. It's vulnerable to the vicissitudes of just how we pay attention. And it's something that it keeps retrospectively seeming to always be there because whenever we're thinking, whereas now we're back, you know, it's just me here again. But it's in all those moments we're not noticing how it's been, it's kind of falling away because we were just, you know, reacting to something or totally immersed.

I was wondering what you thought about the possibility of using technology to expedite the benefits of meditation. For example, I've read about some scientists who are experimenting with hooking up a meditator to an FMRI, yeah, and showing them a kind of screen that had like a live neurofeedback, and it would show them when they're going towards a more deep meditative state and when they're drifting off and getting caught up in thoughts. Yeah, yeah.

That had that experiment had the inconvenient result of seeming to reveal that one revered lama was not really a very good meditator. [Applause] That was not not very well publicized, but but, uh, embarrassing. So, yeah, no, I think that would that's great. You know, that work is obviously in its infancy, but there's no reason why you couldn't have a very effective some form of neurofeedback where you can just, whatever state it could be mindfulness, it could be some other target state of mind, where you could be getting real-time information about how closely you're essentially playing a video game with your with your emotions, or you're playing a video game with your cognition, and you're, you're hitting the target state based on this, this feedback mechanism. And I, you know, I think that's that's great. I mean, and that would probably be very helpful for for all of us.

Thank you. It's expensive because, you know, the magnet costs three million dollars. So, yeah, we need some other mode. But I think it will eventually come. Yeah.

I have a practical question. Yeah. That is, do you think that your experience with meditation and selflessness has, uh, contributed to your unusual skill at thinking and communicating clearly on your feet?

[Applause] Well, that's really one of those questions one can't answer. I think it's, um, I I can't really own that because I obviously, if you just wait long enough, and I will fail to think clearly on my feet. But, uh, it's st, it's helped me. It's that it's helped me in in every area. I used to be morbidly afraid of public speaking. That just, that was a real obstacle for me. Now, meditation isn't the only antidote to that problem. You can't, I wouldn't recommend so if you have a fear of public speaking, I wouldn't recommend that you just do do enough meditating so that you know, you finally then feel like you can go speak. Because it's, you, you'll be meditating for a very long time, and that's that's not, you may just always just feel anxiety, and you're mindful of your anxiety, and and you, you then you're kind of dancing around the problem. But the thing you actually want to accomplish is to actually feel good doing it. You know, you actually want to get over that hump. And there's no alternative but to then do it. So mindfulness was was helpful in me feeling better doing it and and being in situations like this. But I can't really honestly credit meditation entirely with that, because it's just part of it's just doing it. In fact, most, I think most of it is just doing it and having decent experiences doing it. So, but in terms of, you know, the quality of my thinking, I think, um, I mean, it's so variable. I find myself in situations where I really, I'm struggling to get the words out, and then I'm just worried about you, dementia. I'm not, I'm not exaggerating. So it, it, it's, uh, you know, you've seen me at good moments. As part of it, as people put something up on YouTube, they don't tend to put up the parts where I'm just stammering, you know, so it's kind of a selection bias.

As a lifelong atheist who joined a 12-step program a few years ago, I'm always asked to identify a higher power, and I'm told this is a spiritual quest. And I'm curious if you have any thoughts about how that alleged spiritual activity could be framed within the context of what you've talked about of selflessness.

Yeah, well, I think there's definitely a, I think of one that I think there's just a need for a secular alternative to AAA. I I don't, I've got nothing against AA, except I keep hearing from people who wish there was an alternative that didn't require this sort of sign on the dotted line of what seemed to be like something like religion. But I think you can just reframe that and actually sign on the dotted line, because it's all a higher power. I mean, it's all, you, your your sense of who you are in the present moment can't explain anything. Again, you can't explain how you're able to do this. This is this is a high, as far as I'm concerned, this is a higher power. This is a total mystery. I don't know how I start it. I don't know how I stop it. And everything is like that. And so it's, you're in a condition that is intrinsically mysterious, and you're thinking, and then thoughts keep arising, and that's, you know, and so it's, um, yeah, I don't, it doesn't seem like a stretch to me to to accept a higher power.

Thank you. So, um, not to harp on the split brain, but I found that to be an interesting part, um, especially as you talked about that it may be indicative of what the normal brain is to loosely coupled systems, right? With respect to another part of your book that you mentioned tonight about the talking to yourself not being useful. I've wondered about that and sort of looked in my own life the last few days. I wonder if there's an argument to be made that you're making sort of a commissure of sorts by virtue of speaking and then hearing with another easily coupled part of your brain. I wonder if there's any neuroscience to back that up or what you would say.

Yeah, that's an interesting idea. I don't know of any science to back that up. But I think it's, I'm not saying it's never useful. It's what's not useful is to have no alternative. You know, it's the automaticity that you do. It's just the spell that can't be broken, and the feeling that this is just you doing it. Uh, but, uh, yeah, clearly self-talk serves some purpose. And because it just, you know, just giving yourself a pep talk can change the way the way you feel and the way you engage the next experience. And it's, um, and it clearly, there are probably some things we can't actually adequately think through without engaging this, this kind of speech. We just can't. Maybe this would be, again, I don't know what it would like, it'd be like to be so mindful or so free of this illusion that, you know, you just kind of rest that way for hours and days at a time. You know, what what could one get done in that state? I have no idea. But so it's, it's quite possible that, you know, full enlightenment, if such a thing exists, could be totally dysfunctional in many ways. You're not going to be, you're not going to be one of the leading lights of Silicon Valley if you're just sitting there in a non-conceptual state of peace all day long. So this somebody has to do the work of building civilization, and it's not going to be the Buddhists. But it's, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know. But the fact that that talking to your, that you might be creating a kind of a commissure in a way that, or that's that's necessary for information transfer, uh, from one side to another, that I hadn't thought about that. Yeah.

In the last chapter of your book, when you're talking about psychedelics and yogis, you said something like, "If LSD is like being strapped to a rocket, then learning to meditate is like raising a sail." Is there anything in between those two modes of transport? Is there nothing yet? Is it just, you want a motorboat? Did you not include anything because you couldn't find it, or is there anything promising in that domain?

It kind of comes back to, somebody put a motor on this boat, please. Um, mean, there's, there's no reason in principle why there there couldn't be better drugs. I think, you know, that I think we we should hope for better drugs in the end, you know, uh, and I think that research is something we want to encourage. Because this just LSD is like being strapped to a rocket, and you just don't know where you're going to wind up. And, uh, you know, and all the drugs we have, as far as I know, are incredibly blunt instruments that have lots of side effects. But, you know, we, yeah, we do want, insofar as it's our specific problems and and aspirations admit of biochemical answers, because it is all biochemistry that we're we're working with, and those answers can be delivered from the outside, I think we we definitely want to get better and better at doing that. And then eventually, the only reason why drugs are so stigmatized is because they they're so bad, really. They have they have effects that you don't want. You know, they, you get into car accidents. You know, it's just not. But if we had a drug that that just reliably made you less distracted, and there were no negative side effects, then we'd all, I mean, maybe coffee is that drug. But but it's, uh, we would all, there'd be no problem using that drug. And so that would become a, it would become a food. It wouldn't be a drug at that point. So, you know, whether we'll ever get there, I have no idea.

My question has to do with the project of creating a secular institution of spirituality. And it seems to me that the creation of moral teamwork and community that happens in religion is part of the diamond and not part of the dunghill. And I'm wondering, uh, when you think about that, this project that lies before us of creating cultural institutions that have rites of passages and buildings to go to on Sundays and so on, could you just talk about whatever that, what are the issues that come up for you, or what your vision looks like when you think about that project?

Yeah, it's, uh, it's a big project. I I don't know. I'm on one level, it's, it's money. I mean, so it's just, just imagine what it would take to build a beautiful building in San Francisco that was dedicated to whatever this vision is, you know, we named this thing, and then we now all of us here and all of our friends decide, well, we want to, we want to build a building. Okay, that's, it's a huge project. And the amazing thing is that you can't walk for two minutes without running into a church or a synagogue or a mosque. So that, you know, religions have done this, and it's just amazing that they. So we don't have, uh, it's a big, it's a, you know, a generational project. But there are, we have piecemeal ways of getting it. And, and I, I think we have to notice that those piecemeal ways are are surrogates for what people are getting out of religion. You know, so you have like a conference like TED, which is, you know, great and fun, and brings a lot of people together, and and smart things are talked about, and then it gets disseminated. And and that's, you know, I would love it if we had a sort of a mini TED conference in every city, every Sunday, you know, in a hundred different buildings. I mean, that would be, and you could make it better than the TED conference, where you could make it slanted in more toward this area than just, you know, this the usual TED fare. But it would be great to have a building that you could go to, where every Sunday you get together with like-minded people, and something incredibly profound and interesting was being talked about, and then you could all hang out for a few hours. That would be that would be great. There are many pieces to this, but the pieces are not in place. And I think, you know, having rituals that that mark different moments in life that are not religious, but but totally rational and yet empowering, I think we need those things. You know, how you need a, a rite of passage, you know, instead of a Bar Mitzvah or a Bat Mitzvah in Judaism. I think you need a rite of passage for teenagers that just is incredibly important for them, that doesn't presuppose any divisive religious nonsense. But, you know, the task is for rational people everywhere to create those things. We're sort of left having to do it ourselves at this moment. And that's that's a, you know, we don't have the problem for secular people, and this is this is just a hole in secularism. We don't have a canon of off-the-shelf, uh, material. So when somebody dies, right, you just, you, who do you call when you're an atheist? So people, a lot of people find themselves calling a rabbi or a priest, and just asking him to dumb it down so that, you know, it's like, we don't believe this, she didn't believe this, so just don't mention God. But, you know, we're really happy you came because we don't know what the hell to do. And and that's, and that's the situation we're in. I think it's, it's a, something we we need to solve. So that's, that's just takes some effort. Yeah. [Music]