Huberman Lab - Essentials: Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind | Dr. Sam Harris

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, my guest is Dr. Sam Harris, PhD, a neuroscientist, bestselling author, and world-renowned meditation teacher whose work focuses on consciousness, ethics, and religion. We discuss how meditation can help us better understand the nature of the self and transform the conscious experience. Sam also explains how meditation can help overcome universal challenges such as distractibility, mental chatter and emotional reactivity, which can allow for greater focus and fulfillment in the present moment. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Waking Up: https://wakingup.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Sam Harris (00:00:21) Sense of Self, Meditation Purpose; Flow (00:08:37) Sponsor: Eight Sleep (00:09:55) Self Awareness, Self-Talk & Mental Chatter (00:14:44) Mindfulness, Distractibility (00:19:55) Sponsor: Waking Up (00:21:30) Meditation, Benefits, "Sky-like Mind"; States of Self (00:27:33) Meditation Practice, Mindfulness & Freedom (00:30:17) Psychedelics, Consciousness (00:34:15) Sponsor: AG1 (00:35:34) Process vs Achieving Goals, Fulfillment in Present Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Sam Harris. Dr. Sam Harris, what is this thing that we call a self? As far as I know, we have not localized the region in the brain that can entice. account for our awareness of self. The problem is we use the term self in so many different ways, right? And there's one sense of that term, which is the target of meditation, and you'll hear it

from me, that this self is an illusion, right? And that there's a psychological freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering it to be an illusion. And some people don't like that framing. Some people would insist that it's not so much an illusion, but it's a construct. and it's not what it seems. The thing that doesn't exist, it certainly doesn't exist as it seems,

and I would want to argue that it actually is just a proper illusion, is the sense that there is a subject interior to experience, in addition to experience. And most people feel like they're having an experience of the world, and they're having an experience of their bodies in the world. And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body.

Most people feel like they're behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought and intention. It's almost like you're a passenger inside your body. Most people don't feel identical to their experience. They feel like they're on the edge of experience, somehow appropriating it from the side. You're kind of on the edge of the world, and the world is out there. Your body is, in some sense, an object in the world, which it's different from the world. you know, the boundary of your skin is still meaningful. You can sort of loosely control your body.

I mean, you can control your gross and subtle, you know, voluntary motor movements, but you're not controlling everything your body is doing. You're not controlling your heartbeat and your hormonal secretions and all of that. And so there's a lot that's going on that is in the dark for you. Then you give someone an instruction to meditate, say, and you say, okay, let's examine all of this from the first person's side. Let's look for this thing you're calling eye. They're going to close their eyes for very.

likely. And now they're going to pay attention to something. They're going to pay attention to the breath or to sounds. And it's from the point of view of being a locus of attention that is now aiming attention strategically at an object like the breath, that there's this dualism that is set up. And the ultimate promise of meditation, I mean, there are really two levels at which you could be interested in meditation. One is, you know, very straightforward and remedial and non-paradoxical and very well subscribed, and it's the usual set of claims about all the benefits you're going to get for meditation. So you're going to lower your stress and you're going to increase your focus and you're going to stave off cortical thinning and there's all kinds of good things that science is saying meditation will give you.

But from my point of view, the real purpose of meditation and its real promise is not in this long list of benefits. I'm not discounting any of those, though the science for many of them is quite provisional. it's in this deeper claim that if you look for this thing you're calling eye, if you look for the sense that there's a thinker in addition to the mirror rising of the next thought, say, you won't find that thing. And you cannot find it in a way that's conclusive. And that matters, right? And it has a, there's a host of benefits that follow from that discovery,

which are quite a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits. it's distressing, increasing focus, and all the rest. Many people think meditation is about changing the contents of consciousness. There's some contents you want to get rid of, like anxiety, other contents you want to encourage, like calm and unconditional love or some other classically pleasant pro-social emotion. And that's all fine, that's all possible. But the real wisdom of, you know, the 2,000-year-old wisdom of meditation

that really is the chewy center of the tostie pop is a recognition of what consciousness itself is always already like regardless of the contents and the changes in contents. And classic flow experiences have this quality where there's, and this tends to be why they're so rewarding, where there's just, if you're in some athletic activity or an aesthetic one, or you could be having sex,

or you could be whatever it is, some peak experience its peakness usually entails there being some brief period where there was no distance between you and the experience, right? For that moment, you were no longer looking over your own shoulder or anticipating the next moment or trying to get somewhere where you weren't or, you know, micromanaging errors or, you know, there's not, there's just the flow of unity with whatever the experience is.

a surfer on the wave, right? And we love those experiences. We are continually abstracted away from them by our thinking about them. We were thinking, oh, my God, that was so good, or how do I get back to that? Or, you know, you're looking at a sunset. It's the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen. And then you're continually interrupting the experience of merely seeing it

with a commentary about how amazing this is. And I wonder, you know, what a real estate prices are here? I mean, is it possible to actually, We could move here. And like your mind is just continually narrating a conversation you're having with yourself, however paradoxically. I mean, you're telling yourself things that you already know as though there were two of you rather often.

Right. Like, you know, you're just, you know, I'm looking for, you know, which is the water? And I said, oh, there it is. Right. But like, I'm the one seeing it. Who am I saying, oh, you know, there it is too, is though there's someone else who needs to be informed about the thing I already saw, right? So there's something about our internal dialogue that is paradoxical.

And that's what ultimately meditation is. I mean, this kind of meditation. You ultimately learn to recognize that there's no separation from you between you and your experience, right? There's not the experience on the one hand and the self on the other. There's just experience. It's not that you're on the river. bank, and this is how it can seem in the beginning, even when you're practicing meditation, fairly diligently. It can seem like you're on the riverbank watching the contents of consciousness

flow by. And meditation is the act of doing that more and more dispassionately. So you're no longer grabbing at the pleasant or pushing the unpleasant away. You're just kind of relaxing and in the most non-judgmental frame of mind, just witnessing the flow, right? But, if you're doing that dualistically, you feel like the meditator. You feel like the subject aiming attention. And so now you're on the riverbank watching everything go past. But the truth is, you are the river. There's a process by which you would eventually recognize that there's no distance between

you and your experience. And again, you can wait for those moments in life where experience gets so good or so terrifying, you know, or just so salient. right? Your amygdala is driving so hard. I mean, so you're in a war and you can't think about anything because, you know, the enemy is shooting at you, and this is the most thrilling video game you've ever played in your life, and your life is on the line, or you're, you know, at the peak of some, you know, athletic event where there's just, you don't know how you're doing the things you're doing, but it's all happening automatically, right? But those are one, one hundredth

of one's life. And what I'm calling meditation is a way of simply, understanding the mechanics of attention whereby you are denying yourself that unity of experience so much of the time and recognizing that that's, you know, it's based on a misperception of the way consciousness always already is. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, 8Sleep. 8Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. One of the best ways to ensure you get a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct.

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Right. And so what you're really talking about is a deliberate intervention to understand and resolve that gap in the algorithm. So what are your thoughts about the organization of the circuitry to essentially under normal conditions to not reveal it's what seems to be one of it's more important and profound and for, you know, dare I say, enlightening features, right? It's almost as if that we have to intervene in the self in order to reveal the self. We are not set up by evolution to be as happy as we possibly can be and to do almost anything that interests us well. I mean, we're not set up by evolution to be mathematicians or musicians or to create democracies that are healthy.

We are doing these things based on cognitive and emotional hardware that we are leveraging in new directions, right? I mean, we are primates, and we are, you know, we're communicating with, you know, small mouth noises. I mean, we're language using primates, and all of that is clearly evolved. And we're doing these amazing things, including science, you know, however improbably, we're actually able to, you know, almost entirely with language, understand reality that at a scale that exceeds us in both directions. I mean, the very vast and the very small and, you know, also temporally, the very old.

It's amazing that we can do all those things, but evolution, is blind to all of that. We have flown the perch that was created for us by evolution. I mean, it's not just the primate things. So it is with learning how to regulate our emotions and, you know, punch through to a self-concept or beyond a self-concept

that is more normative psychologically that allows us to, you know, not be terrorized by our apish genes. Evolution never thought to build us an off-switch for this, right? I mean, language is so useful, and it gets tuned up so strongly for us. And there was never a reason to shut it off, right? There was never a reason to give you this ability to say, it wouldn't it be nice to have four hours of quiet now, like no self-talk?

For most of us, we are covertly talking basically all the time. And there's an imagistic component of this for many people. You're visualizing things as well. But there's just a lot, a ton of white noise. in the mind that feels a certain way. And what you discover in meditation ultimately is that the self is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking.

So like you and I are talking now, you know, people are listening to us. They're struggling to follow the train of this conversation because it is competing with the conversation that's happening in their heads. So it's, you know, the first discovery people make in meditation is that it's just so hard to pay attention to anything, the breath or a mantra or a sound, whatever it is,

because you're thinking about the thing you need to do in an hour and oh, it's so good that I downloaded this app. I'm like, this is really good, this is going to be good for me. But that chatter isn't showing up. You're not far back enough in the kind of the theater of consciousness so as to see it emerge. It is just sneaking up behind you and it feels like me again, It feels like when someone is thinking the thought,

what the hell does that mean, right? They're not seeing it as an emerging object in consciousness. It just feels like me. It just feels that that's, it is, it, the, you know, subjectively, it's like the mind contracts around this appearance in consciousness. And it really is just, it is just a, you know, it's just a sound with the voice of the mind. If you actually can inspect it, it is, it is deep.

inscrutable that we ever feel identified with our thoughts. I mean, how is it that we could be a thought? These thoughts, a thought just arises and passes away. And when you inspect it, when you go to inspect it, it's, you know, it unravels. It's just, it's, it's, it's, it's the least substantial possible thing. And it could, and it could, but yet it could be a thought of self-hatred. You know, it could be a thought that, that unrecognized totally defines your mood. If you could elaborate a bit on this notion of internal chatter and external stimuli, is just the recognition that there's a dialogue ongoing internally? Is that itself valuable?

Yeah. So here's a claim I would make that some people might find surprising, but I think this is an objectively true claim about the subjectivity of most people, which is that unless you have a fair amount of training, unless you just happen to be some kind of savant in this area, which most people, by definition, aren't, I believe this is a true claim that if we just put a stopwatch on this table and people could just watch it, you know, 30 seconds elapse.

And I set all of our listeners or your viewers the task, for the next 30 seconds, just pay attention to anything, your breath, you know, or, you know, the sight of your hand or the side of the clock or any object without getting lost in thought, without getting momentarily distracted by this conversation you're having with yourself. A couple of things would happen. One is no one would be able to do it. This is not just a superficial inability.

I mean, if your life depended on it, you wouldn't be able to do it. I mean, if the fate of civilization depended on it, none of our listeners would be able to do this. and yet some percentage of them are so distracted by thought that they will actually try this experiment and think they succeeded. And for these people, what happens is you put them on a meditation retreat and you have them spend 12 hours a day in silence doing nothing but this, right? So the practice is just pay attention to the breath when they're sitting and then eventually you incorporate everything sounds and other sensations.

And then you interleave that with walking meditation where they're paying attention, just to the sensations of lifting and moving and placing their feet. And then, you know, once the practice is going, you incorporate sounds and sights and everything. So you can pay attention to everything, but the goal is for every moment, you are going to cultivate

this faculty of mind, which, you know, increasingly is known as mindfulness, right? And mindfulness is nothing other than this very careful attention to the contents of consciousness. But the crucial piece is it is not a moment of being lost in thought, right? You're not blocking thoughts.

Thoughts themselves can arise, but in those moments of being truly mindful, you're noticing thoughts as thoughts, whether it's language in the mind or images. You're noticing those two as spontaneous appearances in consciousness. Most people, you know, certainly anyone who thinks they can pay attention to something for 30 seconds without being lost in thought,

you put those people on a meditation retreat. what they're going to experience is, you know, on the first day, they're going to feel like, oh, yeah, I was, you know, I was with the breath or I was walking, you know, I was with the sensations of walking. And I'd be there for like five minutes, you know, solid. And then I would get lost in thought. Then I'd come back.

And, you know, five more minutes, it'd be lost in thought and then get back. But as the day has progressed, you know, even, you know, 10 days into a silent meditation retreat, they're going to experience more and more distraction. They're going to, it's going to seem like, okay, wait a minute. now I can't pay attention to anything for more than five seconds, right? Because what they're discovering is just how distractable they are. If you train your attention in this way to notice the particularities of sensory experience and emotional experience, like you're looking for the

atoms of experience, you know, you get better and better at that and certain things happen. But one thing that I really do think happens is there's a kind of frame rate change in the data stream where you really are just noticing much, much more. This whole dance of I'm lost in thought, now I'm strategically directing my attention again. All of this seems to ramify this sense of self, the sense of there's one to be doing this. There's somebody holding the spotlight of attention. and getting better at coming back to the object of meditation. But the thing I like to do when I talk about all of this

is undercut the false assumptions that are anchoring all of that as early as possible. Because where I think you want to be is recognizing that there is no place from which to aim attention. This whole dualistic setup of subject and object is the thing that is already not there. And it's not that it's there and you meditate it out of existence successfully. It's really not there.

And if you learn how to look for it, you can see that it's not there and feel that it's not there. And it no longer seems to be there, right? It's like it's not. And it becomes like, again, like a bi-stable percept where you looked at it long enough and you thought, okay, now I see the vase and the face. And I can't unsee it. And every time I look, it's there again.

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in which to meditate. If you'd like to try the waking up app, please go to wakingup.com slash Huberman where you can access a free 30-day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com slash Huberman to access a free 30-day trial. If we were to break it down meditation into some basic component parts, what are the component parts and where I'm really going with this is, why would those component parts eventually allow for the realization that there is no distinction between actor and observer and so on. Ultimately, meditation is not a practice that you're adding to your life. It's not doing more of anything.

It's actually ceasing to do something. It's ultimately non-distraction. I mean, it's ultimately you're recognizing what consciousness is like when you're no longer distracted by the automatic arising of thought. It's not the thoughts don't arise. It's not that you can't use them. It's not that you become irrational or, you know, unintelligent. I mean, all of that, you still have all of your tools,

but everything is in plain view. I mean, there's an analogy in Tibetan Buddhism, which I love, which is thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house. You know, there's nothing for them to steal, right? So in the usual case, thoughts are, there really is something in jeopardy. Every time a thought comes, I'm not meditating anymore. And not only that, I feel terrible because of what I'm thinking about. most of the time, right? So it's totally understandable that thought seem like a problem in the

beginning. And for certain types of meditation, they are explicitly thought of as a problem because you're trying to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, including thought. And that's a training that can be good to do. It becomes a tool that you can use for other kinds of of insight, but it's a very specific and kind of brittle skill in the end. I mean, it's a skill. It's a skill, just like I'm going to pay attention to one thing, and I'm going to do that so well that everything else is going to fade out. Meditatively, if you have a laser focus on any one thing, whether it's the breath or whatever it is, you can lose all sense of everything. I mean, you can lose all sense of hearing and your physical body can disappear. I mean, like literally

can become incredibly subtle and vast and drug-like. And many people approach meditation thinking, kind of climbing the ladder of those changes. into subtlety and vastness, that's the whole, that's the whole game, right? And it can be a deeply rewarding game to play, and it also does come with all kinds of ancillary benefits. I mean, all the focus and the calm and the kind of smoothness of emotional states. I mean, all that comes with greater concentration, and it can be quite wonderful.

But again, at best, that's a tool to aim in the direction that I'm talking about now with respect to meditation, which relates to more whatever, would call, you know, mindfulness generically and ultimately kind of non-dual mindfulness. The underlying goal is to be more and more equanimous with changes. So it's not to grasp at what's pleasant or interesting and not to push what's unpleasant or, you know, boring or, you know, or otherwise non-engaging a way. What you want is just a kind of a sky-like mind that just allows everything to appear. And you're not clinging to anything or, or, or, or, you know, or, you're

or reacting to anything. This applies not just to something like mindfulness, but even to something like the self, right? So the sense of self is also a process. I mean, it's a verb. It's not, so we're selfing more than we are selves, right? And even appropriate uses of the term self that don't go away even when you recognize

that the core subject self is an illusion, there are states of self, right, where you can recognize in your life that you inhabit very different modes of being depending on the context. So like there are moments where you just by walking into a certain building, you suddenly transition into a different state of self. Like suddenly you pass through a door and now you're a customer in a store. Right. So we know what that customer feeling is.

Like you're now the person who's getting the attention. It's a very kind of formalized type of attention from the person who's running the store. You can be a student in the presence of a teacher. You can be a parent in the presence of a son or a daughter. You can be a spouse in the presence of your spouse. The change in context really does usher in some fundamental psychological changes in just the states of consciousness that are available. More and more as you become sensitive to these changes

and you become sensitive to what it's like to actually not be psychologically reactive and not be definable by your own self-concept, your own idea. You're not identifying with anything. You're not hanging your hat on anything. You're not thinking about yourself in the kind of terms that you would export to others and then care about what they think about you.

Right? Like there's a kind of invulnerability that arises that's not born of being well defended. It's born of being evaporated. Right? It's like you're no longer keeping score in those ways. You can leave aside all those circumstances where it's appropriate to react to someone. And, you know, I'm into martial arts and self-defense. And yes, you're not supposed to be just this puddle of goo out in the world

who can be just mistreated by people and, you know, never put up, you know, resistance. But it's psychologically, you know, even if a state like anger or contraction is sometimes normative, and appropriate. The question is, how long is it normative and appropriate for? Like, how long do you want to stay angry for? In my experience, it's kind of classically negative emotions like anger and fear are appropriate as salience cues. You know, they orient you to, you know, an emergency or a potential emergency. But then in dealing with the emergency, they're almost never the state you want to be in. It's better to actually be calm in an emergency. Would you say that meditation as a practice done for a few minutes each day or with the app that it's a kind of a step function is a very nonlinear in terms of

people's progress. What does the meditation practice look like over time? The first step function is to very clearly experience the difference between being lost and thought and being clearly aware of any part of experience, including thought. And to notice the freedom, the comparative psychological freedom that gives you, right? So you can like, you're, something's made you angry. and now you're thinking about all the reasons why you should be angry and have every right to be angry and what you're going to tell that person when you see them. And then you notice you're thinking, right?

And you notice the connection between the thought and the anger, right? You're like the minute spent lost in thought about what's making you angry is the thing that dragged through the physiology of anger. And from the point of view of the one who's being mindful, this is tremendous relief. I mean, and at minimum, it's a degree of freedom. You can at that point decide, well, how long do I want to be angry for? Is it useful to stay angry?

Do I want to be angry for one minute, two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes? And before you have that capacity to be mindful, you're going to helplessly be as angry as you're going to be for as long as you're going to be that way, just based on the kind of the time course of you're thinking about it, brooding about it, telling your wife about it, you are going to be the hostage of that for as long as you'll be the hostage of that.

you'll have nothing you can do apart from just deciding to, you know, check out and watch Game of Thrones again for the third time, right? Like it's just you can divert your attention to something else, which is, you know, sometimes a good thing to do. But mindfulness, even dualistic mindfulness, gives you this capacity to just observe the mechanics of this and then get off the ride when you, whenever you want. The other step function is noticing that there is no one who is

doing that. I mean, this is the non-duality, the selflessness, the centrallessness of awareness, right? The fact that there's no place from which the mindfulness is being aimed, but the fact that there's just this open condition in which everything is appearing, you know, thoughts included. At that point, your mindfulness no longer becomes, it's no longer this, this dualistic effort to strategically pay attention to anything as opposed to being lost in thought. It's just what's left when the present recognized thought unravels, even before it unravels, what's recognized is you are simply identical to the condition in which everything is appearing. Could you tell us why psychedelics can be useful, used safely and responsibly, age appropriate,

context appropriate, ideally with some clinical or other type of guidance, all that stated. What are your thoughts about psychedelics in terms of how? they intersect with the discussion that we've been having and what utility do they play in recognition of the self or in other sorts of brain changes? I would just say that for many of us, I mean, certainly for me, psychedelics were indispensable in the beginning in proving to me that a first person interrogation of the mind was worth doing. For somebody like me at 18, the noun meditation meant absolutely nothing to me before I, before I, took my first dose of, in this case it was MDMA.

One of the limitations of a drug is that, you know, obviously no matter how good the experience, the drug wears off, and then you're back in more or less your usual form, and now you have a memory of the experience. And it can be a fairly dim memory. I mean, some of these experiences are so discontinuous with normal waking consciousness that it can be like trying to remember a dream, where you recognize, okay, there was a way of being,

that is quite different than what I'm tending to access by default. And it is different in ways that are obviously better and psychologically more healthy. I mean, it's possible to be healthy psychologically in a way that I never imagined. Once you have one of these experiences on psychedelics or on a drug like MDMA, you know that there's a there there. You know that unconditional love is a possibility. If your only framework is the good experiences, the good feels you had on whatever drug it was, I think you can be misled to just seek lots of peak experiences.

You're just trying to string together a lot of peak experiences, hoping they're going to change you, every one of which by definition is going to be impermanent. What everyone really wants, whether they know it or not, and their right to want, is a type of freedom that is compatible with even ordinary states of consciousness. I mean, so what I hadn't done psychedelics for 25 years, because I mean, again, they were super useful for me in the beginning. Then I discovered meditation on the basis of, of those experiences, got really into meditation and realized, okay, this is a much more, you know, conceptually,

this makes much more sense to me. This is delivering the goods, you know, in terms of my experience. There's no need to keep having these, you know, seeking these peak experiences with drugs. So what I think people want is a way of having free attention and unconditional love in this, you know, totally ordinary and potentially chaotic human experience, you know, which can be psychologically fraught and you can meet, you know, iterations of yourself that you don't like, that are not equipping you to be the best possible person in that relationship. and what we want to do is cut through all of that and actually be in love with our lives

and with the people in our lives more and more of the time. I'm not saying that's repeated psychedelic journeys can't be integral to that project, but you know that the project can't be being high all the time. So whatever is extractable from the occasional, you know, psychedelic trip has got to be mapable into ordinary waking consciousness. And the real point of contact does kind of run through this, you know, what I've been calling the illusion of the self.

And again, it is that part is discoverable without any changes in contents. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. I discovered AG1 way back in 2012. long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. The reason I started taking AG1, and the reason I still take it every day, is because AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market.

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Omega-3 and co-enzyme Q10 are known to support cardiovascular health, cellular health and energy generally, brain health, and much more. I personally take them both every day. Again, go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to get a free bottle of the new Omega3 coenzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription. None of this can really be solved in a single practice, it sounds like, but it does seem to me,

based on what you've told us today, is that only through a deep understanding of the self as it really is, as opposed to this illusion that you framed up, could we actually arrive at some man about like what's actually right for each and every one of us. I mean, there's one generic answer that I think can be extracted both from psychedelics

and from meditation and just from just thinking more clearly about the nature of our lives. And it's to become more process oriented and to be more and more sensitive to the mirage-like character of achieving our goals. Right now, I'm not, I'm not against achieving goals. I have a lot of goals. I'm very busy. There are lots of things I want to get done. And I'm satisfied as anyone to finish a project.

But if you look at the time course of all of that, you know, fulfillment, and there are a few lessons that everyone, I think, has to draw. One is most of your life is spent in the process, right? Like the moment at which the goal is, you know, fully conquered, that is just, I mean, that has a, you know, it's a tiny direct. and it has a very short half-life. And the moment you arrive at it, it begins to recede because in the meantime, you have all these other goals that have appeared on the horizon.

And in some sense, if you're focused on goals, you really can never arrive. I think what we're all looking for in life, we're looking for good enough reasons to let our attention fully rest in the present. is the logic of success. Like the sense, like I've got all these things I want to do. If I could just get rich enough or fit enough or, you know, dial in my sleep well enough or, you know, improve my life in all these ways, get the right relationship, wouldn't it be great to be married?

You know, I want to start a family. I want all of these things, right? I'm not discounting those relative forms of happiness or sources of happiness. But one thing is absolutely clear. It's possible to be miserable in the presence of all. all those things, right? And you can add great wealth and fame and everything on top of that. It's possible to be absolutely miserable having everything anyone could seemingly want. So what is it that we actually want in all of our seeking to arrange the props in our lives

and the story to have a convincing enough story to tell about ourselves that we're doing the right thing? What is all of that effort predicated on? It's predicated on this desire and that this expectation that if we could get all of this stuff in the right place and not have anything terrifying to worry about, right? Everyone we love is healthy for the moment, right? And we're healthy. And we've got something to look forward to on the weekend. And there's not some, there's not a, you know, a plumbing leak in the house that we have to

immediately respond to. And we like our house. And, you know, our career is going fine. Now can we just actually give up the war, right? can we fully locate our sense of well-being in the present moment? Can we relax the impulse to brood about the past or think anxiously about the future for long enough to discover that all of this here is enough?

Even if we're guarding our time to do the things that are most important to us, we can spend all of that time regretting the past or anxiously expecting the future and just bouncing between past and future in our thinking about ourselves and our lives and basically just dancing over the present and never making contact with it. So I think what we want is a circumstance

where attention can be located in the present in a way that's truly fulfilling. And unless you have had some kind of radical insight that allows you to do that on demand, you are in some sense hostage to the circumstances of your life to do that for you. You're constantly trying to engineer a state of the world that will propagate back on a state of self that will make the present moment good enough. And what meditation does, and psychedelics to some degree does this,

but meditation very directly does this, it reverses the causality and lets you actually change states such that you can be fulfilled before anything happens, right? Nothing, your happiness is no longer predicated on the next good thing happening. You can be in the presence of the next good or bad thing already being fulfilled. It's like how much can you puncture that seeking happiness project with the recognition that you're already free? It's not that you just need to be a pushover when you, learn how to meditate or you do any, you work on yourself in any of these ways. But

what I think you, I think you want to find is you want to find your point of rest in the midst of, of any struggle. I feel very blessed in no small part because of our conversation today. Thank you so much. Nice. Well, to be continued. To be continued. We'll do it again. Yeah, yeah. And again and again.