Thought is incessant. Every morning you just we wake up and you're just chased out of bed by your thoughts and you're just thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking every moment of the day if you're in some kind of psychological pain. That is a story of thinking without knowing that you're thinking.
Sam Harris, neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author. He divides his genius between two interwoven missions: bringing reason to our culture wars on Making Sense and bringing equipoise to our minds through the Waking Up app. This week in part two, we explore his Waking Up brain, diving into the mechanics of non-duality, the illusion of the self, and how to find true equanimity in an age of anxiety.
Mindfulness is the thing that allows you to pay enough attention so that you can see thoughts for what they are. There is no self in the center of it.
You start to really notice that we have this stereophonic, kind of polyphonic universe out here.
Sort of an ethereal soup.
Every feeling of anger you have ever felt arose and passed away and it's not here anymore. It's just like the chirp of a bird.
If you want to directly experience Sam's approach to meditation and mindfulness, go to onecommune.com/sam to get the first 7 days of his introductory course for free. Welcome to Commune.
In terms of being able to confront or manage one's own, or is it confront the chaos of the world and really manage one's own nervous system? Sort of to return to the notion of mindfulness for a moment.
You know, what is the way in the door there? And I guess, you know, I spent years working torch-bearing for my wife to sort of demystify yoga, right? Big tent for yoga. We want to get a lot of people in downward dog because, you know, if we get more, yeah, it makes you stronger and, you know, more flexible, but maybe a little ahimsa will kind of slip in the back door there. Um, but what I found was that my efforts to demystify yoga really just kind of led to a soaring Lululemon stock price or whatever. So I wonder, like, how do you scale mindfulness without kind of stripping it of its true value? Because I think I came across the other day like meditation for productivity, you know? And I'm like, oh, really? We're just going to like mint more with a practice, you know, or something. I wonder how you spread this ancient practice without denuding it of its true value.
Well, for me it's a bit of a high-wire act because I, on the one hand, don't want to endorse any of the religious superstition and otherworldliness and, you know, kind of frank confusion around just, you know, what's really a reasonable belief. So I'm very critical of organized religion and to varying degrees. I mean, this is again, this is something that can get you a fair amount of hate mail, but all the world's religions aren't equally culpable for the chaos and irrationality we see in the world. I mean, there are some religions which are intrinsically benign. I mean, it's not to say that they're rational, but you mentioned ahimsa, right? So it's like this is the Jain principle of non-harming, is, you know, that the crazier you get as a Jain, the less and less anyone has to worry about you because you're just, I mean, you become somebody the Jain ascetics are spending all their time trying not to step on ants and not to swallow bugs and they're obviously vegetarian and they're just not going to, you know, they're pacifists. I mean, Gandhi got his pacifism from Jainism. So these are not the kinds of people, even they might be religious fanatics but believing things, you know, that are insupportable, you know, under the harsh glare of reason, but they're not going to blow themselves up on an airplane, right? I mean, this is just not, it's not what we're... Jainism, there's no attractor on the landscape of fanaticism, believing what you have to believe to be a fanatical Jain that's going to give you a group like Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State or Hamas.
Yeah, you're not running from a group of sadhus, generally.
I mean, but Hinduism's got its own, you know, the Hindu, they're not like, you know, the...
The Shaivites are not like the Jains.
So, you can get a fair amount of barbarity in India under a Hindu guise, but still it's all different. Hinduism is much more relaxed than the Abrahamic faiths in the sense that because its pantheon is so vast and just elastic, it can absorb basically anything you throw at it. So, it'll take Jesus as an avatar of Vishnu and it's like there's no problem, right? They'll just honor everybody's gods because we've got a thousand. But Islam cannot return the favor. I mean, from the point of view of Islam, Hinduism is the prototypical case of polytheism, which is, you know, shirk, you know, in the Quran, and which is a killing offense, right? I mean, you should be killing these barbarians who can't figure out there's only one god and that Muhammad is his final prophet, right? They're not even supposed to live under the protection, like, of dhimmitude with which Christians and Jews, being quote people of the book, are afforded under an Islamic regime. So there are a lot of asymmetries here. It really matters what people believe.
So, for the purpose of teaching mindfulness, I'm really, I mean, mindfulness is unlike most other spiritual practices something you can adopt and look into without believing anything on insufficient evidence. I mean, the only thing you need to believe really is kind of comes in the form of something that's obviously true logically or just, you know, at worst a scientific hypothesis. It's just if you want to understand your mind from the first-person point of view, if there's something there to be discovered directly through the use of your own attention to your experience, well, then it makes sense to pay more attention, right? All you have to do is, I mean, the mindfulness really is just paying close attention to the nature of your experience in each moment. And there's nothing you need to add to your experience that is cultural at all. You don't have to believe in anything. You don't have to start chanting a mantra. You don't have to, I mean, there's nothing to explain. There's just, can you pay attention? And what is it like to try, right? And so if I told, you know, our listeners to pay attention to anything for the next 30 seconds, you know, their breath, the sight of the, you know, the floor in front of them, the sound of the birds outside their window. I mean, they could pick any arbitrary channel of their sensory experience. Just 30 seconds. Just pay attention without getting lost in thought.
Almost no one can do it. I mean, like 99.9% of people will fail. Now, some won't know that they have failed. Some will try this exercise, and I would invite people to, you know, pause this conversation and actually try this experiment. Some people will think they've succeeded, but what's really happened there is that they're so distracted by thought, they're so lost in thought that they couldn't actually even engage the exercise in any meaningful way. They were just thinking for 30 seconds, thinking, 'What's this guy talking about? I'm paying attention. I mean, this is easy. I can see that thing on,' and they're talking to themselves. It's an automaticity. They, it's, [clears throat] the noise is so incessant that it is white noise that they can't even notice as noise. So they can't notice they're distracted. So this is an experiment that anyone can perform, and the failure mode here should be interesting because this really is the basis of everyone's psychological suffering. I mean, the underlying claim here is that if you're unhappy, if you're in some kind of psychological pain, if you're anxious or, you know, resentful or envious or, you know, worried or filled with regret or disappointed or whatever it is, whatever the character of your suffering or just the kind of mediocrity of your moment-to-moment sense of yourself in the world, that is a story of thinking without knowing that you're thinking, without clearly noticing thoughts arise in the mind and change and pass away moment-to-moment.
And mindfulness is the only, whatever you call it, mindfulness is the thing that allows you to pay enough attention so that you can see thoughts for what they are and you can see the way they unnoticed kindle resulting negative emotions and the way negative emotions, you know, ramify certain patterns of thought and that whole wheel works of unhappiness gets started there and it can be interrupted just by paying attention. And so that is a very long way of answering your question: how do I not lose the profundity of what is taught here while still divorcing it from its religious underpinnings? The thing I don't do, which many secularizers of mindfulness do unfortunately, is I don't minimize the profundity and even sacredness of what can be found on the other side of being distracted by thought. I mean, there really is something to recognize here which is every bit as wonderful and in some cases even seemingly mystical as what is claimed in some of the traditional texts. I mean, once when the Buddhists talk about the illusiveness of the self and, you know, states of unconditional love and compassion, all of that really is there to be experienced. I mean, there are far reaches of human well-being that can be explored just by paying attention. They can be explored with psychedelics too. I mean, less systematically, but many people who have taken psychedelics have some intimation of what is there to be discovered. But the way you don't lose the good stuff is to not lose the good stuff. I mean, to really, it's not a matter of stress reduction or becoming more productive or getting better sleep or whatever the low-hanging fruit seems to be for people when talking about the benefits of meditation. It is much more important than that.
Yeah. I mean, those can be the happy byproducts of it.
But, you know, when I look at the rising popularity in psychedelics, for example, it appears to me to be a direct product of an era of extreme individualism. Like, on some level, like, we don't have the communities and institutions that provide a sense of community or a feeling of the universe is something greater than oneself. You know, I think about like mystical experiences, right? Sort of this transformation from the feeling of being a separate self to the sensation of being kind of integrated with the totality of the universe. And, you know, psychedelics in many ways provide, I think, a shortcut and sometimes a peak experience that can be like very useful. It sort of gets you out of the harbor sometimes. But kind of day-to-day in a practice can be, you know, very, I mean, it's very, very useful. And, you know, I just think that anyone listening has to be honest with themselves. Like, their attention has degraded. You know, I don't know really anyone, and I look at myself, I have a sort of clunky daily practice, but I still have a hard time sitting down and reading a book for an hour.
I kind of have to sequester myself, turn everything off, go up to my little cabin.
And even then, you know, my mind is wandering every three or four pages. So this idea of having a single point of and returning to that single point of attention over and over and over and over again. I mean, it's great as part of the practice, but it then begins to punctuate and spill into your life in other happy ways, I think.
Yeah. Well, I mean, there's no separation really between practice and the rest of life. I mean, that's something I try to get across in Waking Up. Is it's, I think there are ways to be misled, certainly ways to be misled by the experiences one has on psychedelics. And there are ways to be misled, frankly, by practicing meditation and thinking you understand, thinking there's some point of demarcation between practice and life. And to some degree the artifice of just having a formal practice or, you know, going on retreat, going on silent retreat, which I've done a bunch, though not recently, that can give you the sense that there really is this, there's a difference between, it's like, the real question is why isn't this moment a moment of real insight? Or like, why are you letting yourself off the hook? The fact that you really, in my view, you don't get any credit for having sat an hour in the morning. Like, this is the moment. Like, this is your life. Yeah. So like, are you awake now or not? I mean, so there's a way in which we keep score of our spiritual progress, which is encouraging of certain illusions and I think bad habits of attention. So I think on the one hand you should let go of any spiritual identity. I mean, like the idea that you're now a meditator, and even a good one, or whatever it is, like that's not part of this project, right? Like that's more of delusion.
So this is which part of you wants to be a better meditator, more in line with this is this if you turn that on yourself, it's the ego saying that.
Yeah, that person is not going to arrive, right? You're not actually going to successfully take that person along for the full journey.
And it's, but conversely there really is in each present moment the opportunity to embody the deepest wisdom you've ever found, right? And my argument is that, and this is a kind of, this is sort of the difference between dualistic and non-dualistic practice, right? So from the point of view of dualism, you really are somebody who needs to go on a journey. I mean, you really do have a problem. You're not enlightened. You're actually far away from the goal. And you're at the base of the mountain, and there are many different paths that promise some way of ascending to the peak, but you can't lie to yourself. You're at the base, you're not at the peak, you're not a Buddha. And you really have to schlepp from here to the top of the mountain. And by the looks of it that's going to be an arduous journey, right? I mean, it's just like there's no, you know, can there be any doubt how far away you were? I mean, you were just having an argument with your wife, you know, 15 minutes ago. That felt shitty. You know, should be asked her, she, you know, anyway, she'll tell anyone who asks you're not enlightened because she had to put up with you 15 minutes ago. So of course, dualism is the kind of the punchline here. Like, you're not a Buddha, you're far away. Here's the practice. It's going to be hard. You got to pay attention to the breath, you know, chant a mantra, go on a vision quest, take a lot of acid, you know, you're going to go up and down and up and down. You might have a peak experience, but it's going to wear off. And it's just going to be little you there sitting in your skin again, waiting for some change that seems auspicious. And it's not going to happen by itself, so you're going to have to produce that change by now. Oh, here, there, here's a meditation app. You're going to use this seriously and it's teaching you this practice of mindfulness and maybe you should go on a silent retreat and it's a lot of work.
Now all of that can seem very real and it is, and unfortunately it is kind of self-confirming as a philosophy. I mean, like you really can practice in such a way, even on silent retreat, even for months at a stretch, where you're doing nothing but meditate for 18 hours a day. You can practice in such a way as to seem to confirm that distance from your goal, right? You like, you're not, and even you can do that even when the spirit of the practice becomes very effortless and people are, you know, the teachings are explicitly trying to give you this feeling that you're not far from the goal, that, you know, the wisdom is already here, that consciousness is already empty, the self already doesn't exist. You're not going to, you don't have to meditate it out of existence. Still, given the starting point that everyone has, which is that they feel like a subject in their heads that now has to pay attention to experience through, you know, through mindfulness and can get distracted by thought and you have to come back to the object of meditation or there's the breath or whatever. There still seems to be this feeling of subject or self that is the starting point.
It is this feeling of confinement. And it seems like you can actually meditate on the evidence of your unenlightenment moment to moment. I mean, you can feel, you know, I don't feel bliss right now. I feel a little contracted. I feel, you know, I was just distracted for two minutes. I was supposed to be meditating. Now I'm back. I was thinking about something stupid about, you know, where I'm going to have lunch today. And now I'm back. And so like I'm clearly like, this is, I'm not even good at this. And now I'm just going to pay attention to the breath and okay, that's a thought. I'm back to the breath. Okay, it feels all right, but it's like this is not, it's not nearly as good as MDMA or acid. So it's like this is, you know, I know what it's like to be really high because I've taken those drugs and that's got to be way closer to what the Buddha or Jesus or any other real spiritual patriarch or matriarch was like. So I still, I'm definitely far away from this goal. Now, what non-dual insight into the nature of mind yields is a puncturing of all of that where you recognize that consciousness itself, the quality in you that's aware of anything, the condition that is experiencing anything, whether it's the highs of, you know, the perfect acid trip or the lows of you just feeling terrible about yourself and terrible about your life and you're stuck in thinking about it all, right? That the thing that is aware of either of those extremes and anything in between is just this open space of conscious awareness wherein if you pay attention clearly enough and in the right way, you can notice it is all in fact already free of this thing you're calling I.
There is no self in the center of it or on the edge of it. And when you can be mindful of that itself, that condition of, you know, what in Buddhism is called emptiness. I mean, it's a kind of a misleading word for what we're talking about, but we can talk about why they name it that. But, you know, or I prefer just talking about non-dual awareness. When you can rest in that openness and clarity, you recognize that there is a kind of equalization where it's just on some level the blissful, you know, light-filled, you know, full high, you know, hierophany of the psychedelic experience isn't really better than just, you know, the next taste of your tea or even just you looking at your inbox, you know, your email inbox from this condition of open centerless awareness.
And so there's this kind of equalizing function, but crucially from the point of view of meditation practice, it is the type of practice wherein it's true to say in each moment you can actually arrive at the goal, right? Like in each moment of just paying attention you are on the mountaintop. You're not at its base. You're not confronted with this felt sense of distance from your goal, rather you've surrendered all goals. You're just, there's just this open awareness wherein everything is just appearing all by itself.
Mhm. Yeah, to ground that dichotomy between dualism and non-dualistic practice or sensation, I suppose. Like for me, and feel free to coach me here.
It's like I will engage in a practice of sound awareness from time to time.
Where I will get really quiet and sort of open my ear balls and, you know, we tend to experience sound the moment-to-moment kind of monophonically. It's just one big wave.
But when you get quiet and start paying attention, you know, you start to notice, I mean, just doing it now even a little bit, like, you know, the buzz of that sound of that sign a little bit or there was a car that just went by a minute ago or, you know, you're just kind of rustling around in the seat. I mean, you start to really notice that we have this stereophonic kind of polyphonic universe out here.
And, you know, there's another car and you become the sound engineer, the producer of that and, you know, you become more and more aware and you can almost start to like separate each track as it like as you're sitting at a mixing board. And for me that's like a useful practice in honing this spotlight, if you will, of my awareness or, you know, even maybe opening up to a more sort of floodlight style awareness. But I am still the subject there, right? There's still a feeler of the feelings. There's still a hearer of the sounds. Versus the experience that I sometimes have with, I will engage in a what I think of as a half-lidded meditation and I think this might actually be in one of, as one of the segments in Waking Up. I could be wrong but you could correct me. But I will sit and look out at a cluster of trees and plants. And I will kind of squint slightly, so I'm half-lidded.
And I will stop labeling what appears in the foreground or the background, and everything just seems to become sort of a mix of like light and shadow. It's not the trees anymore. It's just kind of this sort of ethereal soup. Yeah, I do think this is in your app because then after, you know, five or ten minutes of doing that, you know, I try to turn that same quality of attention back on myself. And then...
Notice if there really is a self there at all.
Mhm.
And this is my glimpse into non-dualism on the best of days. Yeah. Is that a fair understanding of how different practices might yield slightly different sensations or experiences?
Yeah, yeah. Generically, it's true to say that any experience can be the basis of recognizing what I'm talking about here. So it's like this: there's no experience that is intrinsically better than any other for noticing that there is no one noticing that experience, right? And so, sound, sights, any other sensation — I mean, it's amazing. There's not that many things to be aware of. We got our five senses.
And we have objects of mind like thoughts and emotions and moods, which are more of a kind of seemingly stable coloration of the mind. And I mean, there are other things that we're — we have other senses that we don't really think about much as senses, like things like proprioception, and you know, there's even echolocation. I mean, to some degree we echolocate. If you kind of hum and put your hand in front of your face at various distances, you can notice that you sort of echolocate. And then we have the interoception. So there's a lot we're potentially aware of, but basically we've got, you know, five sensory channels and then the sixth channel of the objects of mind. I can tell you what's especially good about hearing and what's especially good about having your eyes open.
But again, anything is potentially good enough to recognize this. So don't be misled by privileging one over the other. But what's great about sound, especially when you're sitting with your eyes closed as many people do when they meditate, immediately reveals the kind of spaciousness of awareness. When you're just noticing these kind of punctate changes in the soundscape, you know, you hear a bird chirp, you hear a car go by, you hear the rustling of the leaves. A few things are communicated very quickly in that channel, which aren't so obvious when you're just seeing, like if I'm just staring at the floor with open eyes.
First, you're hearing very directly lots of impermanence, right? Just things are arising and passing away. And you can't hold on to — you literally could not hold on to the sound for an instant longer than it persists, right? And you have no control. You have no control over what you hear. And the impingement reveals this prior condition of you. You're just the space in which these punctate deliverances are appearing. And that can seem different, but the visual field doesn't strike people that way. If I'm going to stare at something static in the visual field where there's no obvious changes, well then it's not quite true to say that impermanence is undeniable or that the lack of control is undeniable, because I can decide to look at the carpet and I can decide to look at the wall. I can look back at the carpet and I can see my — what's it — I've got total control over that, right? But sound is not like that. I mean, sound is just you hear this, you know, someone listening to us can't decide not to hear that, right? This is just going to come and it's going to keep coming as long as I do it.
And so there's a kind of surrender and the non-graspability, all of that starts to come through. And so you can emphasize that in your practice and it can be really a really wonderful way of recognizing those qualities of experience.
