Know Thyself - E47 - Sam Harris: A Rational Mystics Guide To Consciousness & Awakening

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

Sam Harris joins the Know Thyself Podcast today for a deep dive into consciousness, free will, and artificial intelligence. He explains the illusory nature of self, our daily psychosis, and why it's essential to wake up from the 'dream' of our thoughts. Sam shares how the practice of meditation can help set us free, and how to break the spell of negative emotions.  He also dives deep on the pitfalls of the spiritual path, explaining the drawbacks of non-dual thinking, emptiness in Buddhism, and why some Gurus misbehave.  Sam gives a thorough explanation into his present thesis on solving the hard problem of consciousness, explains how the concept of free will can be limiting with understanding psychopaths, and if he believes that artificial intelligence will one day become conscious. https://www.wakingup.com/knowthyself for free 30 days of Waking Up App ___________ Timecodes: (0:00) Intro (2:41) The Illusion of Self and the Process of Suffering  (11:08) Our daily psychosis - Identification with thought  (16:35) The Transitory Nature of Thought and the Benefits of Meditation (27:14) When ego is useful, and when to let go  (32:40) Breaking the Spell of Negative Emotions (35:19) Understanding Impermanence and its Relation to Suffering  (43:31) The concept of "Emptiness" in Buddhism (56:32) Pitfalls of the ‘goal’ of enlightenment (59:11) The Duality of the Spiritual Path (1:12:15) The Illusion of Seeking and False Beliefs in Meditation Practice (1:14:58) How non-dual teachings got twisted (1:17:31) Waking up vs embodiment  (1:25:21) Why spiritual teachers misbehave  (1:30:57) Sam’s Personal Pivotal Moments in the Journey of Self Inquiry (1:44:46) The hard problem of consciousness  (2:09:24) Consciousness and Intelligence in AGI (2:17:42) Do we really have Free will? (2:29:57) Why Gratitude & Reason Heals Us (2:40:02) Conclusion ___________ Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times best sellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live. Sam’s work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), The Annals of Neurology, among others. He also hosts the Making Sense Podcast, which was selected by Apple as one of the “iTunes Best” and has won a Webby Award for best podcast in the Science & Education category. Sam received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has also practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. Sam has created the Waking Up app for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern, scientific context. https://www.samharris.org https://www.wakingup.com/knowthyself for free 30 days of Waking Up App ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/

It's just a fact about us that we're thinking basically every moment of the day. We're having a conversation with ourselves. We're remembering the past. We're anticipating the future. We're subtly failing to make actual contact with the present moment. If you're angry for 10 hours, there's a lot you can do in 10 hours to derange your life and your relationships. I've always found it so interesting that we can spend a lifetime suffering something that is essentially a non-event. You know, you're making a cup of tea and you're thinking about a meeting that you're going to have.

in five days and you're getting anxious. Meditation is the remedy for that. And once you can practice mindfulness, negative states of mind like fear and anger begin to function like mindfulness alarms. You know, the truth is breaking the spell doesn't even require the contents of consciousness to change. What do you feel as a likelihood that we will engineer consciousness into super intelligent AGI? Yeah, that's a difficult question to resolve. Hello, beautiful beings. Welcome back to the Know They Self podcast where every single week we get the honor and privilege to sit down with a brilliant mind and open heart to see how we can learn more about the true nature of self and the world around us at deeper and deeper levels. My guest today is the creator of the waking

up app. He is a bestselling author, a philosopher, a neuroscientist, and host of the Making Sense podcast. He really needs no introduction, but I will say that his life, his message, the work that he does in the world has been profoundly influential for me over the years in my development and study about a lot of the things I were going to be diving into today. It's not just the topics of life that he's so emphatically interested in that I also share deep passions for and that I hold close to my heart, but the way in which he engages in exploring such topics like consciousness, free will, the nature of self, who and what we are. And it's been such a pleasure to be able to recently connect with him and I've been looking forward to this for quite some time. So the goal with my

conversation and stewarding the framework for this conversation today is to really demystify what it means to awaken and to go on the journey of tangibly exploring what that really means and much, much more. So without further ado, let's welcome to the Know Myself podcast, the Rational Mystic himself, Dr. Sam Harris. I aspire to be that. Nice. Yeah, cool. Great to meet you again and happy to be here. My pleasure, my honor, I've been looking forward to this. Like I said, for a while. And let's just dive right in.

You know, this being the know-thyself show, figured no better place to start than the self and something that we both share a lot of deep personal passions for inquiring within experientially, but then also intellectually. And I would love for you to open and share your thoughts on what do you feel like most people mean when they refer to themselves as a self?

And how the process of suffering and imagined self essentially unfolds? Yeah, yeah. Good question. Well, I don't know that I have anything like a final answer on that topic, but I think there's a few things I believe that are that I believe pretty firmly here. One is that the conventional sense of self that people are walking around with is an illusion, which can be discovered to be such, right? So you can inspect it to the point where you no longer feel that way in the same sense.

And it's not to say that you would never use the word self again or that, you know, you find yourself to be the same as other people or just you can't differentiate yourself from the world. I mean, there are things that don't happen. But it's important to just say at the outset that this is worth looking into because psychological, psychologically, it's incredibly helpful, and I think ultimately ethically, it's incredibly helpful to come to some understanding that what you take yourself to be subjectively moment to moment matters and can be the linchpin of really all of your unnecessary suffering. So you, it's worth looking into. So the feeling of self that I think most people are walking around

with by default is the sense that there's a subject interior to the body that is the thinker and doer and true agent of conscious life. So it's not that people feel identical to their bodies. They feel almost like passengers in their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. Now, I think there's a lot of rational people who don't believe that to be true. If you tell a scientist that he doesn't feel identical to his body, he might object because he knows himself to be, you know, conceptually identical to his body. He knows that there's, if he doesn't believe in an immortal soul

that can be separated from the body, well, then he believes that he's identical to his brain and the totality of what it's doing neurologically in his body. But as a matter of experience, nevertheless, most people, whatever they believe, they feel that they're not quite identical to their whole body.

They have hands. They can imagine being without hands. They, and that sense of dualism extends really to everything they can notice about their physical bodies. And I think, you know,

most people would imagine that, you know, even if they're materialists, what they are as conscious agents, is a matter of what the brain is doing, and if you could have a brain transplant, you would expect to go with the brain and not remain with the body, right? So if you took my brain and put it in another body,

I would expect to move over there. You know, at minimum, people feel like they are their brains, but they experience doesn't give us any evidence of even having brains, right, much less that the brain is relevant to the nature of consciousness or the nature of what our minds are doing. So it's worth differentiating

what people conceptually know about the biology and the mind's dependency on the brain and what they feel subjectively and just phenomenologically how they move through life. And there I think virtually everyone feels like they are a thinker of thoughts, an experiencer of experience, a subject very likely in the head behind their eyes

looking out at a world that is not them that is separate from what they are as conscious agents and in some sense that world includes the body and the body can malfunction you've got a pain in your knee and you feel as the subject not identical to that pain but in relation to it and you're resisting it from a point outside the pain you are receiving the pain as a kind of locus of consciousness. You can pay attention to it. You can try to be distracted from it.

And then the pain can draw you back. And yet you are up here somehow as a subject. And if you do a practice like meditation or something like mindfulness and you inspect that feeling of dualism where there's a sense of a subject that can pay attention to experience and then get distracted by thought and then come back and pay attention to experience, that sense. That sense, that there's a place from which you can focus, and then be, that's the meditator, that's, you know, you now trying to meditate, that dualism gets maintained

even in our spiritual efforts to recognize something about the illusoryness of the self. I mean, there are many people who are practicing meditation even quite diligently and even going on retreats, you know, silent retreats for 10 days at a stretch or more. And yet still they feel like they are the observer of experience now.

They're the one being mindful or struggling to be mindful. They're the one who gets concentrated on the breath or on a mantra. It can be any practice, really. And yet there's still this dualism of, there's the consciousness feels like it's a kind of spotlight of attention that you can aim from a place in the head at experience. and ultimately that's an illusion. Ultimately, if you pay close enough attention,

you recognize that there's only experience as a matter of subjectivity. Now, I'm not making any claims about how consciousness relates to the universe or that it was here before the Big Bang or that there's no physical world. We can leave all that aside for the moment. I'm happy to talk about that. But I'm just talking about what is available to experience

if you're really paying attention, if you really notice what is happening moment to moment. And the crucial difference between dualism and not and ultimately suffering and not is at bottom identification with the stream of thought

that's arising in consciousness. So it's just a fact about us that we're thinking basically every moment of the day, we're having a conversation with ourselves, we're remembering the past, we're anticipating the future, we're subtly,

sadly or grossly failing to make actual contact with the present moment because everything is being conceptualized and rehearsed and reiterated and reacted to, judged, etc. And it's through this sort of scrim of thought that everything is perceived

and even one's initial efforts to meditate and break through to something non-conceptual gets kind of bent and conformed to this pattern of thinking. Now you're thinking that you're being mindful. Now you're thinking, oh, now I need to pay closer attention to the breath

and, oh, why did I get distracted? And, but that sense of self that seems to persist, even as you notice thoughts arise and then you come back to the object of meditation and you notice thought, there's still this undercurrent of thinking that's not being fully inspected and fully released.

And so ultimately, there's a very long-winded way of answering your question, ultimately the sense of self that I think most people are experiencing moment to moment and that is really the string upon which all of their states of psychological suffering are strung is identification with thought,

with conceptual thought. And that identification with conceptual thought is very analogous to being in a dream of sorts, right? And I've always found it so interesting that we and many people can spend a lifetime suffering something that is essentially a non-event, that if they did the proper practices and had the understanding, that they could actually create space from their own thought and emotion to experience self in a more vast context, would be so much more freeing, so much more liberating. And so could you share your thoughts on how thought in general, and the close identification with thought is very much like being asleep and what it means to essentially become awake from the slumber? Yeah, it's a good analogy, and it really is more than an analogy neurologically.

I think when we're thinking, we are doing something quite similar to what, what we're doing when we're dreaming. I mean, when you're asleep and dreaming, your thinking is no longer constrained by your sensory experience, right? You're no longer perceiving the world and interacting with the world. And so it's no longer, it's no longer getting

trimmed down and interrupted, punctuated by, by, you know, your perceptual apparatus. When you're dreaming, it's just, it's all thought, right? so you get fully captured by it. But it's still very much the same process. And so it is a kind of hallucination. It's a kind of, just as when you're asleep and dreaming, unless you're having a lucid dream,

you're not aware that you're asleep and dreaming. Your mind just seamlessly transitions into this new condition. And you don't even remember enough about your life to be surprised, right? You go to sleep and then all of a sudden you're, you know, arguing with a friend you haven't seen in 10 years, right, in a restaurant you've never been to. And, you know, you are so unaware of the reality of your life that you're not, you don't even think to be surprised by this transition. I mean, literally a moment ago, you were asleep and you're safely in your bed and now you're in some new, impossible circumstance, rather often. and sometimes it's a total emergency,

and yet you are so fully identified with being the dreamer of the dream that you don't even register surprise. The most surprising thing about ordinary dreams is that we're not surprised when they appear, because it's a complete failure of reality testing. There's something very similar happening every moment of the day when we're thinking,

and we're unaware that we're thinking. I mean, you're just, you know, you're making a cup of tea and you're thinking about a meeting that you're going to have in five days and you're getting anxious, right? That is a kind, it's a miniature psychosis, right? It's completely crazy to have, to be unaware of this process

where you begin to imagine this future circumstance, which may in fact not even resemble the circumstance you're going to find yourself in in five days. And it is so, and you're unaware of this process The thought sneaks up on you just as a dream does, and you don't register any surprise, that all of a sudden you're no longer aware of even making tea. You don't even feel your body in space.

You're barely see what your hands are doing, and you're elsewhere talking to yourself about something and perhaps visualizing some circumstance, and it's disgorging this negative emotional state, which you're then now, you know, living the consequences of. And that your next thought, very likely is going to be, oh, my God, why am I this sort of person? How do I, well, you know, why am I anxious about public speaking?

What, like, I got to, you know, maybe I should go to Toastmasters. And you're thinking, right? And you're unaware of this conversation. And it is completely trimming down your mind to conform to this, you know, in this case, an anxious state. I mean, this is our, this is the character of our lives moment to moment when we, we don't see a difference between being identified with thought and just recognizing thought as this automaticity

that just appears in consciousness all by itself. So, I mean, there's something very similar between ordinary thinking and ordinary dreaming, and there's something similar between those two states and what we recognize to be psychosis and people who are actually mad and walking the streets to talk to themselves and talking to people who aren't there

and just living out the consequences of their psychopathology in front of all of us, the crucial difference is that they're much more, their behavior is so unconstrained. You know, like the difference is, you know, we're all talking to ourselves, but we know enough not to move our mouths, right? Throughout the day, a psychotic,

I mean, the bright line between normal psychopathology and psychosis for many of us is just the people who can't help but actually verbalize what they're thinking. And they may know it's inappropriate or they may just be so caught. They're completely unaware that anyone is listening to them.

But we have this basic psychosis already in normal consciousness. We are talking to people who aren't there. You know, you're talking to you. When you're rehearsing the argument you just had with your mom or your wife or you're somebody in a store and you're playing it out in memory

and it is kindling this negative emotion of anger or impatience or frustration or regret or whatever it is and you're not aware of all of this and you may be driving your car and you're having this conversation covertly in your head I mean it's totally normal but it's completely crazy

it's just it is it is you know it's nine-tenths of what a psychotic has and and yet it's normal So meditation, for lack of a better word, is the remedy for that. And that's, and breaking that spell. It's not an accident that waking up is the ancient metaphor for just what the process is of breaking that spell and no longer being identified with thought. Yeah, I'd love to keep pulling on this thread here, right, because meditation does allow us

to more quickly recognize the transitory nature of thought. and be often less under the illusion of being identified as them, right? And so as somebody who with your waking up app now is probably sharing non-dual mindfulness with more people on the planet than anyone else, you have a lot of understanding and context for how meditation and mindfulness and this process of realizing experientially the transitory nature of thought and how by doing that on a repeated basis, you can actually start to have more of that lighter extent.

experience of life throughout anytime you have thought throughout the day, is it extremely liberating. So I would love for you to dive a little bit more into that and how meditation supports and alleviates the suffering. Well, I think most people, I think virtually everyone, has very frequent breaks in this sense of self and in the continuity of selfhood. They just don't recognize it. So meditation is, the art of recognizing what is already the case. And just looking closely enough at the nature of experience to recognize that the gap between thoughts

actually reveals something, right? That there are breaks between thoughts naturally. And it's even possible to recognize thought as thought just appear and disappear without ever feeling identified with it. So there's a larger space in awareness that you can drop back into and recognize that it feels a certain way. It doesn't feel like a self

when you're just recognizing the flow of thought as an appearance in consciousness. But with or without meditating, I think the sense of self is there's a discontinuity that people can notice, if only retrospectively. And it offers some clues to why we find certain experiences very rewarding.

Like watching a film or television when you're really captivated by it, when you really just lose your sense that you're sitting in a darkened theater or sitting in front of a screen watching actors do their thing, when you actually just become fully immersed in the story and you're just reacting,

you know, you might be emotionally reacting to what's playing out on the screen, but you're not, you know, you're fully entranced one property of that experience, and I think it's what, you know, one aspect of what people find so rewarding is that you're, you're losing your sense of self for much of that time. You're just, you're, you're sort of disappearing, you're becoming effectively effaced. You're certainly no longer self-conscious, right?

There's no, I mean, the thing that's truly rewarding about watching, you know, film and television is that it is a kind of super stimulus in evolutionary terms, because what we're evolved to experience and to be able to navigate are face-to-face social encounters with other primates. And we, you know, so we make eye contact and then we look away and, you know, we notice what people are doing with their eyes. But, and when two people are talking in front of us, we know that at any moment one of them can turn toward us and engage us in the conversation or engage us in some physical conflict. We know that our reputations are always on the line.

And so there's a, there's a sort of a war of selves that is always happening in physical. space with other people. And that, you know, nothing matters more to us, just genetically than kind of maintaining the integrity of all of that. And yet what happens when we watch a film or watch television is that we're thrust into this completely novel social situation for which our genes have not prepared us. We're now having face-to-face encounters

and even larger than face-to-face encounters. If you're sitting in a movie theater, you're seeing a face that's, you know, 10 feet tall, you know, the close-up has delivered us an experience of a human face that just never existed in nature unless you were, you know, just, you know, kissing somebody, I suppose.

So you're making, you have this face-to-face encounter with other people and you might even be making eye contact with them. I mean, if somebody's making direct eye contact with the camera, you know, you're looking into another person's eyes and yet you know that you're totally unimplicated in the scene. You can't be observed, right? You're not, and therefore you can be totally unselfconscious

in the presence of other people. And so it's a very pristine experience of voyeurism, right? You're just looking at the lives of others up close. I mean, not far away, not through a telescope. I mean, you're right there in the scene, effectively. and yet totally unimplicated and therefore totally free to relax and just process it.

And so it's, it is a kind of super stimulus but the crucial piece, I think, is that most people can just let their feeling of selfhood relax in the presence of others and that tends to be the hardest place to do it in the real world. In the real world, you know, you're sitting in a cafe

say, drinking a cup of coffee and you're looking at, you know, the crowd, but, you know, you're not making eye contact with strangers, because they're all just drinking and, you know, reading the newspaper, say, and at some point you look and you see that somebody's staring at you, right? That change, when you suddenly realize that you're an object in the world for another person, that sudden, you know, contraction, really, where you suddenly become self-conscious in the presence of another person, that is the self, right? I mean, that feeling, that is a, that is a ramification of what we feel all the time when

we feel that we are the subject, when we feel implicated as objects in the world and in relation to the world. And when you can drop that feeling in the presence of other people, then its absence even becomes more salient because then, because when somebody is looking back at you, the normal experience is of a feeling that you're being seen, you're implicated by that person's gaze, and it's almost like you're behind your face, you're sort of wearing your face as a mask,

and they're looking at you, right? And you're reading, you're reading the faces of others to see how you're doing in some sense. Like their reaction to you is being played back on you as, okay, this is information that now I need to take stock of, right? when you're actually free of the feeling of self, there really is just other people in the world, right? Like, you're just, it's somewhat analogous to watching a movie, right?

You are, you're no, like, the theater is empty, right? Like, you're just, you're just, there's just the movie, and you're just enjoying it. And you can, you can be, it's not to say that you become an idiot and you can't figure out how to, you know, shakes a person's hand or walk across a room or, you know, figure out what you want on a menu, right? but you're no longer the center that is implicated by everything that is happening around you.

You're not, in some sense, it's just a totality of experience. And so that's some key to the freedom that exists there, because not only are you not identified with each next thought that's telling you what a schmuck you are and how anxious you should be about the next thing that's happening and how regretful you should be about the last thing that you just failed to accomplish, you're just at rest and available to notice what's happening now. And so that is the, even if a person hasn't experienced this yet, they can recognize in the experiences they value,

in the kind of flow experiences they value, whether it's performing some athletic action, like hitting a tennis ball. Like the moment when tennis really feels like it's working, is a moment when you're not thinking about how to do it, what you should have done, the fact that you just missed it, oh my God, you know, how many points have I lost in this game? You're just, you're at one with the action of hitting the ball,

and there's a kind of effortlessness to it. Like you don't even know how you're doing it, right? Like it's a kind of a, the mysteriousness of the whole thing is selling it. Those kinds of flow experiences are, once again, where there's less and less of you as the experiencer, and there's more and more of just the pure experience. And so that's what people tend to want in life, and they tend to find it in a haphazard way

when they're pushed into some extremely narrow or unusual event. I mean, it can be kind of a peak experience. It could be a drug experience. It could be sex. It could be an emergency. It could be watching television or watching film that becomes for whatever reason super captivating. I mean, I think that's a, that's a, it is, you know,

people can disappear into their work where they're just, you know, the hour flies by and you were unaware of, of what, you know, it was kind of effortless. So there are glimmers of this state for people, but meditation is really the only activity where you are directly targeting this insight, the insight that consciousness is this way already,

It's not that the ego is really there and you successfully meditated out of existence. You recognize that it's actually not there in the first place. And then therefore, then any experience, however mundane, even as something as boring as checking your email, can be an experience in which you recognize this once you know how to meditate. And it's not that sometimes in cases, for example, being robbed, it might be useful to you identify as your body. and do what's necessary in the actions that being identified as a someone and a person. But for the vast majority of us, and especially people that are listening to this right now, we live in a society with more comfort and convenience that we ever have. The suffering then mainly comes from this language that we use internally that is constantly

self-referential and reinforces this construct and notion of a self. And I'd love for us to just dive a little bit deeper here into how really language in the the construct of thought continues to reinforce this idea of self. Yet we're completely suffering something that if we paid close enough attention to, we would see that it's not fully graspable. It's something that is very much like we were speaking to earlier being in a dream. I want to go back to the example you raised of just being robbed, which seems like a situation where much of what I just said is completely irrelevant.

and you just want to be a self who can defend itself. But when you think about that kind of experience, but one is it's totally appropriate to feel adrenalized, to feel fear, to feel anger, to feel that an emergency has to be responded to because in certain cases there is an emergency that has to be responded to. But the question is, how long do you want to be in the grip

of one of those emotions in order to solve your problem? Is the problem that you've just noticed and reacted to and contracted around best solved in a state of contraction and fear and anger? Sometimes it might be. I mean, sometimes you might need just pure adrenaline to solve a situation, but those are super brief moments in life.

And, you know, seconds later, you very likely want to be in a different state and need to be in a different state. and need to be in a different state to function intelligently, because the alternative is panic in some sense. So it's not that I would say that the ideal is to never feel fear or anger any classically negative emotion ever again, because for me they are, they contain information, right?

They reveal that something has just happened in the world that you really have to pay attention to, if only to just recognize that it's actually not what you thought it was and you now can no longer worry about it. But, you know, if suddenly something happens, you hear a window smash and someone's climbing through it and it's, you know, the middle of the night, okay, there's something that you need to respond to.

But once you experience that initial surge of adrenaline, it's not that useful to be, be lost in sort of this, this catastrophic, you know, implosion of self, where you're, you know, you're terrified, you know, uh, misters, what you'd want to be, I mean, to take the self-defense analogy, it's like, you'd want to be somebody who has been in this situation a thousand times before, can completely own it. You want to be a Navy seal who just like, this is, this is my bread and butter responding to the precisely this sort of. of emergency, right?

Like, that's the, so how much fear is that guy going to be feeling in that moment? So insofar as you're not that guy, it's understandable that you're, you might be super afraid, but I think everyone recognizes that the difference between being able to process, you know, an emergency like that in a psychologically healthy way and being traumatized by it is a difference in just how long those emotions last, right? And how, and what you, what you're able to do when you remember the experience. you know, a day later, a year later. And so so much of, you know, psychological health and growth

in any kind of spiritual practice is an ability to shorten the half-life of these negative emotion. So it's not that you never get angry again, but there's an enormous difference between being angry for 10 seconds and being angry for 10 hours or 10 days and then acting on the basis of that negative emotion. given those very different time windows. I mean, if you're angry, if you're angry for 10 hours, there's a lot you can do in 10 hours to derange your life and your relationships.

I mean, there's a lot of dumb things you can say when talking to, you know, the person you're angry at or to, you know, reacting to your colleagues at work, you know, from that state, or getting on Twitter and, you know, tweeting about it. I mean, there's just, there's almost no telling how much damage you can do given that period of time, you know, helplessly surrendered to a profoundly negative and antisocial state of mind. And then we see that happen in people's lives.

So getting better at breaking the spell earlier and earlier is really everything. And once you can practice, mindfulness, for lack of a better word, negative states of mind like fear and anger begin to function like mindfulness alarms where you suddenly you're going along there's nothing out of the ordinary happening

and then suddenly something happens and you feel lousy in some form of lousy that becomes a goad to looking into the nature of consciousness and recognizing that there's no center to it and that this next thought

is a mere appearance in consciousness. And so rather than being taken in by this next thought of that's rehearsing the reasons why you should be angry or should be afraid or should be anxious, you just see it as a thought and it really is a kind of superpower. You can decide at that moment, is there any reason to stay angry here?

And if the answer is no, you can actually get off the ride. And yet getting off the ride is synonymous, with recognizing that there's no one there on the ride in the first place, right? I mean, like, it is, you know, it can sound paradoxical when I'm talking about it, but there is no one who is angry. There's just this appearance of, there's just this change in the energy and the contents of consciousness. And it was just the physiology of anger. You know, the truth is breaking the spell doesn't even require the contents,

the contents of consciousness to change. Like they will change if you actually are no longer thinking about why you should be angry. But the moment you recognize that there's no center, that there's no subject in the middle of the anger, that there's no one who is angry, you can, the physiology can, you know, it'll take 10 seconds to dissipate, right?

But even in that first second, you can recognize that there's just consciousness and its contents and there's no center to it. And so you're already free even before there's been a change in the character of experience. That switch, that change of perception from things that are just continually happening unfortunately and on the victim of it to using life and its continual opportunities to wake up and to dig deeper into the true nature of self and reality, that what you spoke to in this constant arising and passing away,

phenomena that we all experience in life on a moment-to-moment basis, that life is truly impermanent and that our continual denial and resistance to that flow of change is why we suffer. And I feel like the more that you actually lose that identification with you being the person that things are happening to, then you can become like that witness and observer somebody watching the TV, right? And you're not as absorbed in the experience and that controlling the way and you needing to force the movie in a certain outcome, right? So I'd love for you to speak a little bit more about impermanence, our denial with it, how that causes suffering. And then also your thoughts on the Buddhist view of consciousness and self, which is like no self, versus perhaps the Vedantic view of consciousness as self.

And is that a little too woo-woo for you, or what are your thoughts there as well? So impermanence is really the central fact that we have to get our heads around to be motivated to look into any of the, you know, these esoteric ideas, right? Because, but for impermanence, experience could be perfect, right? Like you could just, you could figure, at least in principle, you could figure out how to arrange your life.

You know, you could become wealthy enough and healthy enough and kind enough and have enough, you know, good friends who love you around you. You could be careful enough, you could maintain it all enough so that you would, your well-being would be truly invulnerable, right?

It's just that you could create a kind of paradise for yourself. But there's a problem with that. In the grossest sense, the problem is death, right? We all die. You know, even if you're the luckiest one in the world and you're going to live, you're going to be healthy to 130, what is that synonymous with? That's synonymous with you being on the receiving end

of lots of phone calls, learning that people close to you have died and disappeared, right? So you're going to lose everyone you love if you're too lucky to be the healthiest person you know, right? Nothing lasts, right? That is the problem. No matter how good experience gets, anything that wasn't here a moment ago and it suddenly appears, any state of mind that wasn't here a moment ago and suddenly appears, you know, joy and, you know, creative fulfillment and love and ecstasy and rapture. or any drug experience or non-drug experience,

any psychedelic insight or insight had any other way, if it wasn't there a moment ago and it's here now, by definition it will disappear, right? And so a durable form of well-being can't be predicated on the appearance of any change in the contents of consciousness because it just nothing less, right? What you will be left with, by definition, is a memory of that experience.

And rehearsing that memory is itself a transitory experience that you can only extract so much joy from. I mean, you can think about how good that party was a week ago, a month ago, a year ago. But your thoughts about it are not as good as the party. And your thoughts about it are not that good when you've, you know, on the 100th reiteration, right? It's just not, it's, and so it is with any spiritual insight that is a matter of something you're remembering, you know, some peak experience you had yesterday. You know, whether you were, you know, on a meditation retreat or on acid or whatever it was, if it was a change in state and now you're thinking about it, it's a memory, right? So the ground truth of our contemplative lives has to be what is available to be noticed now. Or like what you really have is what you can locate now.

And if you, you know, this will frustrate many people because many people are living understandably with the experience that now is kind of mediocre. It's not, you know, they can't locate anything especially, profound now, but they have had some great experiences that they can remember and that they're using as kind of landmarks on their spiritual journey, what they want to get back to, right? So they did take MDMA, you know, a year ago, and that was completely transformative, and they, they recognized a state of consciousness that they previously had no clue existed, and they, they now know that their life's journey is completely different than they had assumed, but it's still a memory, right? They don't feel that way now, right? Life is,

isn't that good now. And so if you're, you know, again, most people are in that situation in some sense. Most people are seeking happiness, seeking insight, seeking fulfillment, seeking some stable basis of feeling good in a context in which everything is changing, right? And there's just no way to secure an experience that is so good that it becomes truly indelible and it becomes the person you now are, you know, moment by moment, you know, thereafter. What is ever present, what is there always to be noticed is consciousness, is just the sheer fact that it feels like something to be what you are, to be aware of experience, to be, to be

awake, even, you know, even in the dream state, you know, potentially even in the states of sleep, between dreams. I mean, some of us have had experiences where we think, we think we know from the first person's eye that sleep itself is not synonymous with the loss of consciousness, but that's a fairly esoteric claim

scientifically. But in any case, in normal waking life and even in dreams, there is the sheer fact that it's like something to be what you are. And that, you know, that is consciousness for lack of a better

term. I would also call that awareness. And it is always the ground truth of your living and caring about anything. I mean, there's nothing you can value outside of its potential implications for consciousness. Whether it's your consciousness or the consciousness of those you care about or the consciousnesses of perfect strangers who you'll never meet, if you care about the difference between happiness and suffering in this universe, your own or your children's or strangers, as you are right to do. And really all of our morality and ethics

is based on that kind of caring. What you're talking about is consciousness and its contents. You're talking about the character of experience for conscious beings. And so consciousness is the basis of all experience, and it does have a certain character

that can be recognized. And its character is, in the Buddhist sense, it is selflessness. It is another term, which is profoundly misleading in English, that's often used in Buddhism, is emptiness, right? The Sanskrit is Shunata.

Emptiness is a kind of a depressing term. I mean, people don't, they tend not to want more of it, more of it when they hear about it. It's like, why would I want to, why would I want the punchline of spiritual life to be? the emptiness, right?

That just sounds like the most boring, depressing thing in the world. But it's not, it's not, certainly not meant to be, and it's not when you see its implications. I mean, it's not, it has implications of freedom and lack of contrivance and lack of, you know, it's centerlessness and it's unconstrained, it's, it's unborn as another word

that comes up in Buddhism. uncontaminated, and it's not constructed of anything. It's not built on anything. It's not predicated. It's not contingent. It doesn't require any specific contents of consciousness to be real, right? It's the prior reality of the fact that anything is happening at all, subjectively speaking. And when you recognize that reality and you recognize that you are identical to it as a matter of experience,

there is real freedom even in the midst of classically negative experience, even in the midst of physical pain, even in the midst of profoundly negative thoughts. You know, profoundly negative thoughts recognized are like, you know, very ugly images, you know, on a movie screen. They just don't hurt the screen, right? They are very ugly things, you know, held up in front of a mirror. The mirror doesn't contract.

The mirror doesn't recoil from ugly. images, right? The mirror is just this this condition in which anything can kind of effortlessly appear. And consciousness can be recognized to be that way. And so from the Buddhist side, you know, just linguistically, they tend to emphasize what it's not. It's not a self.

It's not compounded. It's not conditional. It's not constructed. And so there's just this sort of this negative effort of sort of disavowal any assumption about what it is, right, and not reaffying it and not making something of it. Whereas on the Advaita side, coming from an Indian tradition that was just filled to bursting

with sort of positive assertions of religiosity, I mean, just kind of the Hindu context in which Advaita Vedante is the ultimate expression of wisdom, there's just a lot of assertion about, you know, spiritual reality and a lot of metaphysics. So Buddhism traditionally is a reaction against all of that And it tends to maintain this reaction Even against some of the language that is used in Advaita You know the main Indiscretion being you know capital S self right

Like the punchline for Advaita is you are the self You're not the little self you're the big self But you know I'm convinced that they're talking about the same experience Ultimately they're just they're just asserting different things about it. And here we're up against the limitations of language. I think there's a danger

with both ways of talking about it. I mean, in the Buddhist framing, the danger is it becomes so dry and analytical that people get the wrong idea. They think that there's something kind of life cancelling about this whole project. Right? This is like

it's no self. Nirvana is the, you know, is the extinguishing of suffering. but it's the kind of the extinguishing of everything else. You're losing your identity. You know, life is, is, this is often, it's a very current mistranslation, but, you know, most people think the Buddhist had life is suffering, right? Like, it's all suffering. There's no happiness, right?

That's not what the poly term duca means, but it includes suffering, but the basic meaning is unsatisfactoriness, very much because of what I just said about the implications of impermanence, right? Like because everything is changing, there's nothing you can successfully hold on to. That is unsatisfactory. If you're seeking a permanent state of satisfaction, you're not going to find it here because everything is changing, right? And amid that change, if you think your happiness depends on gratifying desire, getting the next thing you want, want, you are engaged by definition in a ceaseless search for gratification. I mean, you have to keep building the house anew every day, right?

Because it's all, you know, the walls are always falling down, right? There's just a continuous project of maintenance. And that's true of our world. I mean, we're continually maintaining the kind of the material requisites of our well-being. but the question is what are we doing with our attention moment by moment while we do that and once you learn to meditate you can recognize that it's actually possible to be happy

before the next good thing happens and before you solve the problem that has just appeared so before you got rid of the next negative thing that has happened right so you you have a pain and you have to figure out, okay, now what am I going to do about it?

Well, do I have to call a doctor? Okay, I'm going to call it. This is bad enough. It's not going away. I don't know what it is. I'm going to call a doctor, right? At each stage along the way, there's an opportunity to either be at rest

and just simply do the next thing from the point of view of already being okay, you know, psychologically and spiritually, contemplatively. Or you can be thrust into this dreamtesting. of one anxious thought following the next, thinking about the past and future, and feeling at each moment along the way

that your well-being is entirely dependent on resolving this situation. You're not gonna be okay until this pain is gone. Until you have figured out what it is, you've seen the necessary doctor, and now it's gone, right? There is no possibility of being okay until you have solved that problem.

And so it is with desire, Like you have now figured out the next thing you want, you're not going to be okay until you get that thing, right? Because the feeling of desire itself is a kind of discomfort, right? Like you have, you recognize that, okay, you've got a problem. You've got a problem in your life that can only be filled by a certain shaped object, right? And until you figure out how to get united with that object,

whether it's a relationship or a change in your business or a change in your health or an understanding of what's happening in the world. You're living with a mental state in the presence of which you're sufficiently uncomfortable that you have to rearrange the world so as to get rid of that state. Meditation allows you to recognize that consciousness is already free and open

and without center, even in the presence of that mental state. And the thought you were just thinking that delivered that state, itself was just an appearance that was, you know, happening all by itself. And you break the spell and you recognize, okay, now you're at rest. It's not to say that there's nothing that needs to be done. You might still have a pain that you should go to a doctor for. You might still have a business problem you need to solve.

But you can do it from a state of being that recognizes we're all going to die, right? Like your well-being can't be predicated. winning this game can't be a matter of not dying. It can't be a matter of not having pains. It can't be a matter of not having business problems that you have to solve. Right? Like this is a... It's like you're playing a video game

where there are various boss fights and their various challenges and at every level, it's interesting and complicated and it's always something new appearing. I mean, what did you expect? Were you expecting a video game where nothing new appeared? You know, like you're expecting

a place in the game where it's just like just smooth sailing without any impediment and you just get to stay there. It's just that's just not the game we're in. What a boring game. Yeah, it would be boring and it's I mean the truth is there are kind of

meditative equivalence of that where you can get I mean you can, the truth is I mean you can become a monk or a nun right, you can become a monastic where all you do every hour of the day is meditate and so you have no business problems,

you have no relationship problems, you have no kids, you have no, you have health problems, but you've limited the things that are on the menu to worry about. You're not going to be political, you're not going to worry about what's happening in the news. You have absented yourself from any conversation that requires you to add your voice

to the complications of the world. And now you're just going to pay attention to the contents of consciousness and meditate there's a way to, you know, I'm not criticizing that project. I mean, I've spent a fair amount of time on silent meditation retreats doing just that. So it was, you know, it's, I know what that life is like, you know, at least for increments as long as three months at a time. But it's possible to engage all of that very much like a, you know, trying to smooth out the video game to the point where

it is boring but ecstatic, right? I mean, it's not really boring because boredom is really, boredom as a state is really just our failure to pay attention to, like the ordinary state of boredom that most people are familiar with is just nothing interesting

or good enough is happening to capture your attention and you don't know how to meditate so you're waiting for something good to happen to capture your attention. You're scrolling for something that's going to give you a hit, you know, of dover.

dopamine or you're changing the channels looking for something that you can disappear into because you're uncomfortable enough in your own skin. You can't just stare at a wall and be happy. When you know how to meditate, you actually can't just stare at a wall and be happy. There's just the mystery of your own being there just as available when you're looking at a wall.

So a monk or none won't have that problem, but what they can have is the availability of a very different project which is, you know, universally condemned in contemplative circles as a kind of error, but it's a very pleasurable and arcane error, which is to become a kind of junkie of concentration. The concentrated mind is incredibly pleasurable, right? So it's just, and you can be explicitly concentrated

in states of mind like loving kindness, where you're just overwhelmed by feelings of love and compassion for all sentient beings, right? And you can just be sort of cruising in that stream for as long as you maintain that practice. So you could just be blissed out on meditation. And, you know, it's not that it's a bad thing. It's not that it's necessarily a misuse of a person's life. I mean, because if that person is functioning in the world at all and meeting other people

or teaching meditation to people, that can be one of the most inspiring people you're ever going to meet. I mean, you meet someone who's doing nothing but meditate on loving kindness, you know, it's just, you can get just blist out just hanging out with that person. Because all they're thinking is how much they love you and how much they want you to be well. And they've got no, they're not thinking about their career.

They're not thinking about their relationship. They're not thinking about anything. And, you know, other than they're just pushing their good vibes out to the universe. And that's real. That's felt. It's very real. And they're very stoned. You know, I mean, they're in a very good way. High on their own supply.

Yeah. But there is, there are two things wrong with this. One is, it's also impermanent, right? Like it is, those high states of concentration are based on this very contingent effort to pay attention to a very specific thing to the exclusion of everything else, right? You're just, you're not available to everything else. You are meditating on something very specific. and you're also, you can fail to recognize that the real freedom of emptiness, the real freedom of non-duality, the real freedom of selflessness is just as available in ordinary states of consciousness as it is in this very rarefied state of just unconditional love for all sentient beings.

So the ultimate wisdom of meditation, and again, both in the Buddhist tradition and in the Indian Advaitic one, is to recognize what consciousness is like always and already coincident with every possible experience, not just the classically spiritual states of mind. So that experience of freedom that you beautifully shared in both the Advaita Vedanta approach and Buddhist, approach of emptiness. Once you experience, once you feel and you taste that, it's like, oftentimes there can be kind of this evangelical fervor of wanting to share that because it's so good. You know, it's like you found the biggest pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and you want to share that. One of the pitfalls on the path and the irony of the spiritual process, right, is that putting freedom off, like if you're going to take up the project of being spiritual, going on the spiritual path, walking that life, doing those practices, the very,

idea or thought of putting enlightenment into the future, it admits to yourself of your own unenlightment in this present moment. And so the idea of putting freedom into some future state denies yourself of its possible realization that's already available to you. So I'd love for you to share a little bit more about this kind of dichotomy in how we can still feel the immense benefits for meditation and realize that it's a worthwhile practice to take up and to develop mindfulness is within our reality. But to go on this path as sort of an initiate to some goal in the future is also to deny yourself the possible reality now. Yeah, that's a difficult question to resolve. So on one level, it's true in the beginning, or it seems to be true enough so as to be

everyone's default starting point. In the beginning, you recognize that you have a problem, You're not as happy as you want to be. You suffer unnecessarily. Your attention is continually bound up in thought. You feel like a self. You don't know what the hell I'm talking about when I say the self is an illusion. I mean, like it's just, you're stuck.

But you become sufficiently, let's say, through a drug experience or through some peak experience that just comes over you for whatever reason, you get a glimpse of a different way of being and you become absolutely convinced. that there is a there there. That's not just, you know, a matter of religious belief or, or, you know, some new age fraudulence, right? Like, you don't have to believe, it's not that you're, you've taken on a new set of ideas.

You've, you've had a taste of something where you recognize, okay, conscious, it's possible to have a very different experience. Consciousness is, it can be different than I'm, it's tending to be in my case. So how do I get there? I have to recognize I'm not having that experience on a daily basis. And that is felt as a problem because I'm seeking to be happy. And I'm just not as happy as I could be. And I'm just gratifying one desire after the next. And yet there's this way of being that I know is possible how to get there.

So there is this duality of path. goal already set up and it seems it seems unavoidable and when you're given a technique like mindfulness again start at that starting point which is universally everyone's starting point you can't help but engage it dualistically where you're just you can now you're trying to meditate you recognize that distraction in thought is the problem it's not that thought itself is the problem you're not trying to suppress thought but you do you are trying to recognize thought as thought and you're finding that difficult because thoughts sneak up on you and all of a sudden you're dreaming about lunch and you forgot that you were trying to meditate right you were trying to follow the breath you're following

you know in and out and in and out and there's i wonder what's going to be for lunch and you didn't see that happen you didn't feel that happen it just became you and for a moment there the whole project of meditation seemed to be interrupted by the dream about lunch so it's within that that's the frame in which you're now engaging this spiritual path and it is dualistic. You're you're lost and found, right? You're meditating and then you're not meditating and then you're coming back to meditating. And even when you're being mindful, the experience of being mindful is, I mean, they're really, in my framing, there are really two stages to the path of mindfulness. There's the dualistic starting stage, which can last for a very long time. And then there's the non-dual stage of where you can

actually locate freedom and selflessness directly and become mindful of that. Right. And so it's the dualistic stage I'm now describing, which seem, which, you know, where the problem you just posed is is just very captivating for people. It's like, yeah, I'm, I can't, I can't pretend that I'm at the top of the mountain because I'm at the bottom of the mountain and I see the path, you know, disappearing into the mist up there and I'm trying to walk it. And yet I'm being told by everyone who's teaching this technique that it's not that the ego is real and that you meditated out of existence. It's not that you actually polish a brick into a mirror. It's not that you, you know, there's nothing to really accomplish.

You just have to pay sufficient attention to recognize that. it's the paying sufficient attention part that can seem laborious and can seem like you know you're you're doing something and it's almost by definition gradual because it doesn't appear to be here now

but the truth is it's actually not it's there's an illusion here that just has to be penetrated and when that happens for anyone is just a matter of you know luck on some level you know it's not that you can't do things that are

that are valuable to sort of orient toward it and the practice of meditation is the most valuable thing I think anyone can do to become available to this insight. But when you have this insight into selflessness or into non-duality or emptiness, depending on how you want to talk about it, one of its hallmarks is you recognize,

okay, this was always already the situation, right? This is not something newly created by my meditative efforts. This is, I mean, here's, there are many analogies. No analogy is great, but these are various analogies that I've used. One is, I mean, have you ever been, you go into a restaurant or a store, and there's a full-length mirror along one wall,

like floor-to-ceiling mirror, and you might have a, let's say it's a restaurant, you might be halfway through your meal before you recognize that everyone over there on that side of the room is just in the same people you're sitting with but they're in a mirror, right?

So like the restaurant is like half the size you thought it was, right? That sudden phase transition is psychologically and perceptually interesting because nothing has actually changed about the visual experience, right?

Like the light and the color and the shadow is all the same, but you suddenly have this new understanding of what is real, right? And you can make, And one way to sharpen that up is like, let's say the mirror is such that it's really just not clear, even if someone told you, that over there, that's not the world. That's a mirror, right? You're not, you're being confused by your eyes. But you could imagine a mirror, you know, sufficiently set up, you know, in an artful enough way and reflecting just, you know, the right part of the world such that that would not even be obvious even if you were staring straight at it and given the instruction. you just have to look at it closely enough, you'll see that's just, there's no depth

to that circumstance. There's just this, you're looking at light on a wall. You're not looking at people and events and beautiful and ugly, and nothing's happening over there, right? You're confused. But to imagine what would happen if, you know, let's say a teacher, you know,

a Zokgen master, a Zen master, somebody who could actually get through to you on this topic, they walk over to the mirror and they just put their hand right on it. They just wrapped their knuckles on the glass. And all of a sudden, given that stimulus, you might say, oh, okay, well, now I see it, right? But nothing has really changed, right?

It was there, you were looking at it the whole time. And yet now you have this conclusive understanding of what is what. An analogous thing happens with mindfulness where you are paying attention to thoughts and sensations and emotions. and getting lost in thought and coming back to the breath and coming back to the feeling of walking

or whatever the object of mindfulness is at the moment. At a certain point, the sense that there is a meditator, the sense that there's a center to this experience, sense that there's a thinker in addition to the flow of thought, the sense that there's a place from which you can aim attention to be meditating on anything, all of that just disappears, right? Like the center drops out

and you discover your own absence in a very conclusive sense. And then that becomes the thing you can be mindful of, right? And then there are a few paths of practice that teach this very explicitly and target it in a very precise way. And, you know, the one that was most useful to me

came from the Tibetan tradition and it's called the Zokchen teachings also Mahamudra within a Tibetan tradition does this. There are certain variants of Zen that kind of hit this point in a precise way, although you know, I would argue with less precision. I mean, you can spend a lot

more time in the Zen tradition to my eye wondering whether you're doing it right. Whereas in a Zokchen context, it's just, you know, you know you're not doing it right and then you know you're doing it right. Like it's much more precise. In the Advaita tradition, the same is true. It's, again, differences in emphasis

begin to matter. Like you can spend a lot of time in an Advaita context, depending on the teacher, just talking about all this stuff and feeling that there is no methodology beyond just talking about it. Because with Advita, you get such a, you tend to get such an uncompromising criticism of every dualistic method that, I mean, Advaita is so alert to the problem you posed, which is the sense that I'm far away from the goal, right? Like, even conceiving of enlightenment

proves to me that I'm not enlightened, right? Because I'm, you know, here I'm, what I'm left to be aware of is, in some sense, the evidence of my unenlightenment. I mean, that's what I'm mindful of. I'm mindful of the fact that a moment ago I was lost in thought, and now I'm trying to pay attention to the breath. so it's to not do that again, right?

Like it's just me here meditating, right? So, but in Invita, you know, and this is the, people will have heard of people like Ramana Maharshi or Nasar Gadata Maharaj or Punjaji, who I studied with who was a disciple of Ramana Maharshi. Or Ramesh Balsakar, who was a disciple of Nasar Gadas. These are a couple of modern teachers, but there are many others.

The emphasis on the illusoryness of duality, the fact there is no path, there is no goal, there's no one to accomplish it, it's always already the case, that becomes so, that path is so steep that for many people it's just like a brick wall.

I mean, you just kind of slam into it and you're left with somebody saying, effectively, like either you're going to understand what I'm saying right now, before I get to the end of the sentence, or it's hopeless. Like, it's just, you know, there's no one to do it,

There's no one to try. Consciousness is already free of self. And you either recognize that right now, or you're going to leave this room telling yourself a story that you have to meditate and you have to be a spiritual seeker. And that's all part of the bad dream that you haven't woken up from. So either you wake up now or not, right? And that is the methodology that Advaita implements again and again and again,

ad nauseum. And that's why you have people who spend, you know, they can spend years just hanging out with their favorite guru just talking the talk of Advaita and maybe not recognizing this thing, right? Or maybe having peak experiences which they then remember

as the moment where they glimpsed it, but they can't find it again in their moment to moment paying attention to experience. So what I think, I mean, the sweet spot for me, and again, it's not that there aren't pitfalls in various moments

depending on how you talk about it, but the sweet spot is to acknowledge the illusoriness of this, to acknowledge that its consciousness is already this way, but to recognize that there is a precision required and an honesty, like an intellectual honesty required

and just like, what is it that you can notice now? What is available to attention now? And in my experience, it requires a certain amount of training in mindfulness to actually be rigorously honest about what is, you know, what experience is like now. To like validate it within your own experience versus it's just like an intellectual thing, right? Yeah. And also, or just a pretense. I mean, I've met people who spent a lot of time with Punjiji. I mean, Punji was kind of a unique case because he was, I mean, he was just amazingly charismatic. teacher. I mean, he was just this, you know, to all appearances, just this wonderfully free being, right? And he certainly claimed to be enlightened. I mean, he was not hiding his light under a

bushel. I mean, he just, he was, he claimed to be the real deal, and he seemed like the real deal. And he was totally uncompromising in his, in the non-duality of his non-duality, right? He would not, more so than his teacher, Ramana Maharshi, I mean, Ramana would say things like, you must make every effort to become effortless, right? Like he would play with the duality, non-duality component of it and acknowledge that for many people, even for him in certain cases,

there was a path-like precursor to his being stably aware of this truth he was talking about. But Punji tended not to acknowledge any validity to anything path-like, right? So if you'd say, so he would just, you know, his analogy for what meditation was, like, you've come to him

with like, you know, 20 kilograms of, you know, bricks on your head and you're complaining of how uncomfortable you are and what every, you know, tradition of meditation does is just add more bricks to the pile.

Like, here, we've got a brick made of jade. We're going to put that on here to see if you feel better, right? And so, like, it's just completely, it's completely ill-conceived. The logic is just backwards. There's nothing you are going to pay attention to now strategically as a spiritual practice

that is going to be any use at all in this project. Because the effort you are making is predicated on a false assumption. Everything about it, the beliefs, the affectations, the changes in your identity, the wearing of beads, your interest in certain books versus other books. The whole project is just an adambration

of the very thing that's making you unhappy. It's like your problem is seeking and you can't seek your way out of it. And so, that's the... And so, emphasizing that to the exclusion of every other message leaves a lot of people feeling like,

okay, like that door is closed, right? not going to become a Buddhist. I'm not going to become a meditator. I'm not going to get rid of my beads. I'm not going to have any spiritual identity. It's just, it's all, all of that's a waste of time. And now I'm just here considering the project anew. And what happened with, two things happened to many people with Poonji. One is there are many people who claim to be enlightened, who obviously weren't, right? Like they had some brief moment with him. And then they went away and set up shop as gurus and they, you know, were just, you know, it worked for some people and it

didn't work for others, but it was just they had a belief about themselves, that they're now these, these, you know, realized beings. Again, it was a new self-concept, right? And in some cases, it was, it was not that it was totally unwarranted. I mean, they were having, you know, very compelling spiritual experiences. They were, they were very meditative people. They had spent a lot of time on this project and they got to Punjaji and he basically deputized them as gurus, but, which he did to everyone. I mean, literally anyone who would say anything positive in his presence, he would basically just say, you're going to go, you're going to do great work in America, right? And if you were the kind of person who, who, you know, wanted to do, you know, wanted to set up shop as a guru, you, you know,

you could take the ball and run with it. So either that happened or people just felt that all spiritual efforts were doomed, but then they just went on to live ordinary lives where they're making all kinds of other efforts to be happy, all the ordinary ones, to just figure out how to have good relationships and not be addicted to alcohol. They're just trying to solve all the ordinary problems

that everyone's trying to solve, trying to feel good, and yet they now know that meditation is bullshit. Right. So they were left in a way, worst place on some level, right? I mean, it's almost like being told, you know, at bottom, you really are, you know, an Olympic level athlete, right? Like, you are, like, if you could only just sit properly, like, just get into the right posture, you'd recognize that you're just, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're as fast as any man who's ever run the 100 meter

dash, right? And now you have this belief about yourself, but you just can't quite, I mean, and you're trying to, You might be trying to pretend to be a great athlete, you know, but you can't actually function that way. Or you just, you have this belief that it's, you know, working out is hopeless, dieting is hopeless, getting in shape is hopeless, and you hope someday you're going to be fit, right? It's like it's just the door to the Dharma gets closed

and there's no alternative. So, and this is actually some clue as to why within the Zogshan tradition, they're very concerned that, that you not give the non-dual teachings out without a proper context because people can get the wrong idea. And honestly, I walk that line however I do over at waking up and it's not, you know, I'm not sure I always walk it correctly

in every instance. My feeling is you want to be rigorously honest about what is actually true for you in each moment, what seems to be true for you in each moment, you need a certain amount of mindfulness to do that. I think people should be disabused of all kinds of spiritual and religious illusions that, you know, you don't have to, you don't have to take anything on faith to engage this project. But I do think it's important at the soon as possible opportunity to be told that actually you can realize something truly fundamental and life-changing. very soon.

And it is, the hallmark of it is that it's always available. It's not something that you have to, you know, get a lot of momentum behind you to get it, to get back to, right? It's not something, it's not a peak experience that, by definition, will require, you know, a week of silence on retreat to get back to, or another tab of acid to get back to him. It's like, it is coincident with,

with this moment, however ordinary. seems. And it could be arrived at by as simple as this one deep breath and you're back in that state, right, that you can experience. I think it's so valuable to have teachers and individuals that can point out and slap their hand on the mirror and point out things with and help guide your attention to the nature of reality in a more true sense. Yeah, there's also, and you kind of touched on it a little bit, which I want to dive a little bit deeper here, is that it is possible to wake up beyond the illusion of self and still. not have grown up beyond your own characterological defects. You can have a profound

disidentification with your own thought and yet still act like an asshole or worse. And we've seen many cases of this, right? And so I would love to dive into this a little bit more because it's one half of the pie, right, or potentially less, but to just pursue the disidentification with thought and this path of waking up without really. realizing that your characterological defects in essentially shadow material that you have not worked through will have a profound impact on people and your relationships in the outer world if you don't resolve as well. Yeah, and also just differences in culture, right?

Becoming enlightened doesn't get you a new culture. If you don't know anything about quantum mechanics before you become a Buddha, you're not going to know anything about quantum mechanics after you become a Buddha. I mean, leaving aside what people believe about the powers of a Buddha. And there's just the fact that there can be quite a distance in time between having genuine insight in what I'm talking about here,

selflessness or non-duality, and truly stabilizing that insight so that you never overlook it again, right? So, I mean, for me, I'm not, I make no pretense of being fully enlightened or a Buddha or like at the end of this project, right? Like I'm, you know, I try to be rigorously honest about just what I can authenticate as a matter of my direct experience, what is plausible to me to believe in on the basis of

what I know or think I know, and what it's pretty clear to me I'm not experiencing or have an experience. And so, you know, I'm, I still definitely get lost in thought, right? the dream reasserts itself. Now, what it's like to wake up from the dream is different than it. It's different than it would be if I were practicing dualistically, right? Like when you're practicing mindfulness dualistically, you get lost in thought and you notice it,

and then let's say you come back, let's see you meditate on the breath, you come back to the breath, there's still a lot of power in that. I mean, just learning to exercise this particular, muscle of just getting distracted and then recognizing it and then being no longer being distracted coming back to the breath or coming back to sounds or anything you can notice, even dualistically, that allows you to unhook from the emotional and behavioral implications of any one of those thoughts, right? So if it's a thought of anger and you notice it and then you come back to just breathing, that gives you a degree of freedom that most people don't have. I mean, most people are just

angry from that moment on and they're just going to say or do whatever they do on that basis. They see no alternative but to feel identical to their thoughts. But if you're doing this dualistically, it seems like the sense of self is maintained throughout that whole process. Like, I feel angry and I'm supposed to be meditating. Okay, back to the breath. But the meditator has been preserved. Like you're just, it's still me in here meditating, making an effort. Once you have really broken the spell and can practice in a non-dual way, the moment you notice the thought, the moments you notice you've become angry and the dreamscape of thought has captured you, not only does the thought just unravel the way all thoughts do, I mean, they're just,

it's amazing that thoughts do anything at all to push us around because, I mean, when you actually look at them, it's just the most gossamer, you know, bits of language or imagery. I mean, there's nothing there, really. So the thoughts unravel, whether you're looking at them dualistically or not, or non-duilistically, but the moment you recognize a thought is a thought, coincident with that recognition, you notice there's no one recognizing it.

I mean, there's no center to consciousness. It's just consciousness and it's contents. And there's freedom in that, right? So you're not left with the problem of, okay, I better get the fuck back to the breath because this is a long project, right? Like this is, I've been on this retreat for a week and this is still happening. I'm getting angry.

What is, like, oh, now I'm thinking again. What the? Like that, so like, it's that, that iteration just is perpetually feels like a problem that proves you're unenlightened and far from your goal, as you, you know, put it at the outset. Right. And yet when you can practice non-duilistically, you recognize that the goal is already here. In Zogchen terminology, you can take the goal as the path. Like your next moment of path is enjoying the freedom of non-duality in that moment. Maybe only for a moment, right?

So the crucial point here, though, is that even if you're practicing non-duilistically, you're still very, unless you're some adept or prodigy who, the moment you break through for the first time, you're done, you're stable for the rest of your life. You're still going to be fluctuating between enjoying consciousness as it is without distraction and being lost in the dreamscape of thought, right? And because you're still going to be caught by thought, it matters what kinds of thoughts you have, right?

Because you're going to be doing something on the basis of those thoughts. You're going to be saying something. You're going to be captivated by something. you're going to be wanting something. And if you're a guru who really wants to have sex with his prettiest students, that's who you're going to be. Right?

Like, you could be punctuating that with genuine insights into non-duality. But if you don't have an ethic, if you've come from a culture where that's actually not even a bad thing, like that's just tantra, right? You're just, of course you could have sex with anyone you want.

You're the guru, right? You're like, if you come from a theocracy and there's no, you know, HR department who's going to say, hey, listen, actually, it's not a great thing. to be, I mean, some of these students are married. There's a power differential here.

You know, like they, there's a lot of projection going on. You know, this is unfair. This is ethically unwise. This is, you know, you're actually, and in each one of those moments, you're being a selfish asshole and you're not recognizing it because you don't have that much mindfulness. You know, you're not going to see the problem. And yes, we have, you know, lived with the consequences of that in many spiritual communities, many gurus who were not actually frauds in the normal sense have behaved terribly with their students

because they essentially they became rock stars in a very, you know, isolated community and gratified their desires, there's still extant desires on that basis, right? I mean, just think of how tempting it is to be. I mean, basically you're like, you know, you're John Bon Jovi, you know, but you're on an island of people who are projecting all of their spiritual hopes and fears onto you. It's like you're a rock star with power, right? You know, you're like, it's ridiculous, you know, and most egos in that situation don't handle it very well. So it's not especially mysterious that spiritual teachers misbehave.

And it's also not mysterious that even people, with genuine spiritual insights can misbehave in those ways because they're, again, they're getting lost and thought much of the time because they're not fully done with this process of recognizing the nature of consciousness. And as to whether anyone actually, you know, I'm not sure I've met anyone who's totally fulfilled the process. I've certainly met people who have claimed to have done so, but, and I've met people who I felt were further along that, than I was, and we're very inspiring to me on that basis. But, no, I think it's important to recognize that on some level,

spiritual insight and even non-duality isn't enough to get us everything we want and a right to want in this world. I mean, it's not enough. you know, a bunch of enlightened Buddhas, even, is not enough to help us build a civilization that really works, right? There's just a tremendous amount of knowledge that we want that you don't get

by just meditating more, even correctly on the nature of emptiness. I mean, you don't spontaneously understand how to improve an economy, right? or a medical system, you know, or to make, to engineer airplanes so that they crash less and less and less and ultimately don't crash at all, right?

It's like, that's all a matter of very specific forms of, you know, iterative knowledge acquisition that, you know, perfectly unenlightened people are qualified to do, right? Like, the whole project, these projects are orthogonal to one another. It's just, it's, we want good aircraft engineers and we want Buddhas and occasionally you might want you know if you're an aircraft engineer it might be nice to be a Buddha if you're a Buddha you probably don't care about being an

aircraft engineer but we need both and they are they are different projects and the crucial piece for your question with respect to the ethics is ethics has a lot in common with aircraft engineering and is not fully captured by the project of just recognizing the self as an illusion, right? Because especially in this interval of where you're still just working out the consequences for yourself of this insight, right? And you're not fully stable.

Because if you're not fully stable, all you have are ideas and thoughts and culture with which to manifest. And if you have a culture that just hasn't figured out, certain core ethical principles, as many cultures haven't. You know, it's like, when Poonji had to get his, had to find his niece a husband in India,

he had no brighter idea about how to go about doing that than to put, you know, to take out, you know, classified ad with her picture in it, you know, strategically lightened to make her look more light-skinned than she was because that's valuable in Indian culture, right? It's just like, it's, it's, it's like, racism is the wrong concept, I guess, but there's some version of, of, you know, bias, you know, prejudice against dark skin, even within Indian culture, uh, that, that, that's a completely rational, uh, marketing tool for his niece, you know, to find a husband.

And this is what the Buddha's, you know, the self-proclaimed, enlightened adept is doing to get to find a husband for his niece. Okay, is that the optimal way to solve this social problem of how do you get young people together to have satisfying marriages? I doubt it, right? It's like, so he didn't have, by virtue of being the most blest out and wise and compassionate person, you know, I had ever. met at that point, he had exactly zero insight into how to solve this kind of social problem. There's just more, you need more than just the deliverance of your own personal freedom. Powerful. I think it's such an important understanding and framework for people just to tap into a little bit here as well because they are both very, very important and one without the other is

is incomplete, the mere recognition that consciousness is like a mirror is inherently liberating. And I'm just curious for you a little bit more into your own personal journey and into your story. What have been a few pivotal moments into where it's shifted something and allowed you to pivot into an even more honest and devoted inquiry to this path? Because you very much devoted your life into this understanding, this work, sharing with people and your own personal life going on retreat earlier in your life and exploration with psychedelics and I think it's really important for people to firsthand have these different experiences where they can validate within their own reality what we're speaking to and so I'd love for you just to share a little bit

more a couple of those big pivots for you yeah so yeah my first experience that was relevant to any of this was with MDMA so I think I was 18 and it had been it had been it was It was given to me, like at that point, it was 1980, I think it was like 1986, it had just become Schedule I think in 85, but like until then it was very actively being used in the therapeutic community very much for, you know, spiritual and, and, you know, psychological insight. I mean, it was just, it was a, you know,

it was not yet a club drug, it was not, I mean, maybe it was, I was too young to know, but it was, there was no rave, scene. I knew of no one my age who had taken it and there were no parties where it was being passed around. So MDMA, otherwise known as Molly or Ecstasy. So I took it very much, you know, it had been given to me really is just kind of a prompt to spiritual realizations. Like someone said, listen, you might really learn something if you took this. And I think I waited. I I think I waited like two years until I actually thought,

all right, maybe that's worth trying this. But when I finally took it, I took it therefore very much with the intention of realizing something about the nature of my own mind that I hadn't yet realized. And that's what happened. I mean, I was sitting with one of my best friends at the time and we were just having a conversation waiting for this,

this, you know, the drug to arrive. And recognize at some point, along the way that we suddenly were very different people that we just, that we were, for the first time, I mean, this, he had an analogous experience, but I really can only speak about my own. For the first time in my life, I was just, I was unencumbered by concerns about myself that I didn't even know had been operative, right? It's like for the first time I was not paying attention to the way the person was looking at me.

Like the change in expression on the other person's face was no longer getting read back into a self-conscious mapping of my own performance, my own worth, my own. Like I was just not looking at myself through another person's eyes

I was just, I had a hundred percent free attention to just look at my friend, right? And so he's talking and I'm just listening and there's no, and I was not comparing myself to him anymore. I was not, it was like, and when all this got stripped away, it was just that the freedom of having it gone was just astounding. Like it really was analogous to having carried a tremendous burden and, and, you know, it was, like, it was, like, it was, it really was analogous to having carried a tremendous burden. and never having anything to compare it to, right? And to suddenly be relieved of it, it's only in its absence that you feel how painful it was to be that sort of person, right?

And so it's, I must have, the fact that I took the drug in the first place with the intention I had means that I had some awareness that there was some project here to, you know, to at least give my attention to, that something wasn't optimal about my moment-to-moment experience. But I really was, I mean, it's very hard for me to recapture

who I was before that experience because it was, you know, it was such a revelation that there was so much more to me and my own being, you know, psychologically, than I had experienced up until that point. You know, and if I just have no, I don't know what it would, like if I could go back in time and talk to the teenager I was

before I had that experience, I just, I mean, I, there would have been no basis to get through to that person about any of these, any of these topics, right? So it was just, you know, it's very hard to say that taking an illegal drug is an indispensable experience, but, you know, in my case, it felt like it was. Like, I just don't think,

I think I was so closed down and unavailable. It's not that I was profoundly unhappy. I was a pretty happy, high-functioning kid, but it's just I had no interest pointed in this direction. Like I was just interested in the world. I was interested in doing fun, creative things in the world,

but the nature of mind did not interest me, the nature of consciousness did not interest me, and my own religion and all of its promises certainly seemed just intrinsically false. So I just was, I guess on some level, I was just convinced that there was no more interesting game to play than being a successful ego, right? And a knowledgeable ego. And I just, you know, there's a way to win this game as an ego. And that's what I wanted to do.

Right. And the cramp of that, the confinement of that was not. at all obvious to me. The one thing that made it clear, I had forgotten it until after I took MDMA, but the one moment of my life, really, I think the only moment in my life where I recognized

that there was some interesting riddle to solve that I just wasn't even entertaining was a moment when I went on outward bound, which was this probably still is, this outdoor leadership school that lasted.

In my case, it was like 23 days in the mountains of Colorado over a summer when I was 16. And so you're hiking for endless miles between clouds of mosquitoes for day after day. But it culminates with a three days, what they call a solo, where you're just, you're not hiking, you're not moving around, you're just camped somewhere

by yourself and fasting. All you have is, water and a journal, right? And so I was up at 11,000 feet, just in front of this gorgeous Alpine Lake, you know, it was just like, with, you know, more stars overhead than I'd ever seen in my life. For three days and nights, fasting and writing in my journal and all I could think to write in my journal were just like lists of foods I wanted to eat when I got home and the experiences I wanted to have and all the people I missed. And, I mean, nothing. came out of me in those 72 hours, but just a litany of complaint about how lonely I was, how

sad I was, how uncomfortable I was in isolated. I was just, I was profoundly unhappy. I was like, I was the kind of the person who, if you put him in solitary confinement, would just have died of exposure to his own mind. Right. I mean, it was just, it was a catastrophe. And yet I came off those three days, it's like there was like a, you know, the last day of the, maybe the, those was like days, you know, maybe 18 through 21 of a 23 day course. So the last couple of days of, you know, integration were days where I could see that those three days of isolation had a very different effect on many other people in the group, right? So like, and most people were older than me. I was 16, which I think is the youngest you could be on outward bound. And so a lot of people were

in their late 20s, you know, or mid-20s. And they had a profoundly different experience. I mean, they came off three days of solitude, having had a life-changing, you know, insight of some kind. And I remember thinking, I have no idea how that's possible. Like, like, and that was like just barely, just barely interesting to me.

Like, wait, like, I don't know what happened for them, but like that's, like, I'm now surrounded by people who just told me that having nails drilled into their head was a life-changing, positive experience. So I knew there was something I was missing, but I didn't think about that until like two years later, after I took the MDMA, I just thought, oh, okay, now I understand that there's like I'm in sort of a mansion of mental life,

and I've been confined to the pantry, you know, just trying to figure out how many Oreos I can eat. And, you know, there's just, you know, everything else awaits my discovery. So, so after I had that experience on MDMA, I started reading books about meditation and spirituality and religion. And that started a, you know, more than a decade of me spending most of my time, just focused on these kinds of questions.

and I did, you know, many, many retreats, mostly in a Buddhist context. I mean, many of apostana retreats, you know, practicing mindfulness dualistically for a very long time. And I probably spent about a year on retreat where I think it would be safe to say that, you know, even after a year on retreat, I wouldn't fully understand the kinds of things I've been talking about with you today. Like, I was still very much a dualistic. practitioner of mindfulness where even if I had had glimpses of selflessness,

like there are definitely moments on like a three month retreat where I was concentrated enough where there seemed to be, you know, clear breaks in my sense of self. Like I'm just, you know, I'm listening to the sound of a bird, say, and for a moment there, there's just hearing, right? There's just, there's not a one, there's not one hearing. There's not the thing heard. There's just like a pure experience of hearing, right? But I didn't know how to get back. there and it seemed to be contingent upon me building up many, many continuous moments of mindfulness and really kind of heroic levels of concentration doing nothing but practice in silence for 16 hours a day. That's what these retreats were. So I spent about a year like that on

silent retreat before, again, in like increments of, you know, one week to three months long, mostly in the States, but I also made many trips to India and Nepal. The study with various teachers had, but it wasn't until I connected with Zogchen and a few specific teachers in Nepal and Poonji, you know, the one invited teacher I spent a fair amount of time within India, where that sort of the criticism of my dualistic efforts to practice

kind of got under my skin enough that I actually began to practice differently and that sort of changed everything and then I did some retreats thereafter in a more non-dual way but yeah I mean that was you know that had my 20s

the project of my 20s was really all of that going to India studying in Nepal and coming back and doing retreat and then going back and studying with various teachers and so I think that, so you went on various, where like you said upwards of three months you would go on retreat, right? And this was all throughout your 20s. I'm also curious, did Alan Watts in particular have any impact on you in your 20s as a writer or speaker? Yeah, well, I listened to pretty much all of his stuff online. I mean, not online on audio cassette. It's now all online. It's now we have his full archive on waking up, which is wonderful. I mean, Watts was one of the great communicators of this. And it was just,

so entertaining to listen to him. I mean, he's not, he's not, he's not focused on the, the detailed mechanics of meditation, right? You're not getting a lot of practice talk from him, but like as far as the big picture insights of, you know, just what is Eastern wisdom and, you know, how should we think about it? And he's, he's one of the best speakers we've ever had. It's really wonderful.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I was curious because I know you guys got the, got them all. on your platform. And before we move on, because there's still quite a few things I wanna dive into here, in regards to consciousness, if you had to right now put in a time capsule, your best answer and thesis and final thoughts and words on the hard problem of consciousness.

And we fast forward to the moment that problem is solved if it is, right? And we then go back and look at Sam Harris's words and thoughts on the matter. what would you say if you had to put that in there? Well, so it depends on what the solution is. So the hard problem is that, and this comes to us courtesy of the philosopher David Chalmers,

who coined the phrase, he pointed out that there's, they're all the, quote, easy problems of understanding the mind, which is just you can understand how, for instance, with vision, you know, there's light that comes in and hits the retina and gets, so you have electromagnetic energy that gets transformed into electrochemical energy

in the nervous system. You have just a concatna series of neuronal firings as a result of light hitting the retina. And that gets encoded in visual cortex in various patterns. And there's what's called a retinotopic mapping of the visual scene on visual cortex, and there's certain cells that are responsive to lines at a certain angle.

And we've come to understand all of this. It's very complicated, but nothing in principle is profoundly counterintuitive. And every step along the way, we can understand what light is doing to specific molecules in the retina, how those molecules affect downstream neuronal firing, and then what happens, how neurons function physically, chemically, electrochemically. how genetic encoding of protein relates to all of that, receptors and neurotransmitters. Like there's just, it's clockwork at bottom.

It's a very, you know, it's wet, it's messy, it's complicated, but it is really, our intuitions run all the way through as you drill down on the micro details. There are no surprises, like the causality makes sense all the way through. What doesn't make sense at all, and what is profoundly counterintuitive is that at some point along the way,

there's something that it's like to see. Right. Like, like, we could imagine building a robot on the principles of our visual system and having it visually navigate the world based on visual data, but have it effectively be, unconscious. There'd be nothing that it's like to be that robot. That robot would not experience vision in any way, all the while performing functionally in the world as a system that's making

use of visual data. In our case, we have the full pyrotechnics of conscious life. We have the conscious experience of vision. And that is fundamentally mysterious. There's no description of the micro events that makes the emergence of conscious vision perspicuous, understandable. And what's more, worse, and the reason why this is truly the hard problem, as opposed to just yet another easy problem that we may one day solve,

is that it seems impossible to imagine what could be an explanation that would intuitively run through. It's like, you can't say, oh, but if only neurons, were firing at this frequency, well then, okay, then I understand why there's something that it's like to see, right? No frequency seems even relevant, right? It just simply does not matter

what frequency it is or how many neurons you get or what their pattern of connectivity is or what neurotransmitters are involved. None of that matters. All of that is as strange as saying that, you know, if a wind blows across a trailer park

at exactly 146 miles an hour, and the trailer park is filled with watermelons and beer, that whole system becomes conscious, becomes a conscious mind. There's something that it's like to be a trailer park, right? But if you take away the watermelon, it's not conscious anymore, right?

It's a mere statement of a miracle, right? And that's what it seems like, would be happening in the case of any story about the wheelworks of neurophysiology. So the hard problem is, if consciousness emerges on the basis of unconscious complexity, you know, first you have unconscious information processing,

first you have unconscious molecules, you know, chemicals, bouncing around, but at a certain point of integration, a certain point of encoding, the lights come on, right? If that's the way things work, that, you know, those of us who are enamored of the hard problem

would say, it's always going to seem like a miracle. Like that's not understandable. That's the equivalent of saying before the Big Bang, there was truly nothing, and then everything exploded into being. Like there's,

not just that there was nothing, there was no heat and no energy and no matter, there were no laws of nature either. There was like nothing. But then in a certain moment, everything appeared including the laws of nature by which anything would further appear. Okay, if you believe that,

as Terrence McKenna one said, if you can believe that, you can believe anything. Like that seems to be the limit case for extreme credulity, I think is what he said. Right? That is the hardest thing possible to believe, because nothing is real nothing,

not just not having space time, but like nothing, not having laws of nature, not having anything, right? Real nothing is precisely what can't give rise to something, let alone everything. Analogously, true unconsciousness, true nothing that it's like to be this system, is precisely the thing that can't give rise

to the something of consciousness, right? And so it doesn't matter how you order it. It just, it's not going to be intelligible. Now, that doesn't mean that it isn't true, right? So, like, I'm willing to say that it could just be a fact that neurons in a certain configuration give rise to consciousness, and if you change a configuration slightly,

there's nothing that it's like to be that set of neurons, right? So consciousness could truly be an emergent property of unconscious complexity, and I'm just not capable of understanding how it's just a brute fact, right? And okay, so that's just, we would have to acknowledge that that is a condition in which we don't actually have a normal scientific explanation.

Like our scientific explanation of life is truly a reduction that works. It used to be that people thought there was a profound mystery between distinguishing living and non-living objects. Right. So like there's a living system like an animal and a non-living system like a machine. And there must be some life force that explains this difference. Now, if you leave consciousness aside, And you're actually just talking about the, you know, how we define life

and just what a system has to be to qualify as living, you know, how it metabolizes energy and reproduces. And I mean, the definition of life is a little fuzzy at the boundaries, but for instance, it's not entirely clear whether, you know, it applies to something like a virus, say. But it's just a semantic judgment as to whether it would. But once you define your terms

and you understand something like, you know, the molecular basis of inheritance, you know, just how DNA works, and how, you know, cells divide, and how, you know, gametes, you know, form and get together and how, it's like, like, there is no more to the mystery. Like we now know how babies get made

and we know how we know how we pass on our genes and we know why kids resemble their parents and we know and we the biology of inheritance is you know again it's very complex there's still things we don't totally understand about it but there are no real mysteries right like it's it's just it is a it is a concatenation of physical facts that when you drill down far enough it's it's amazing but it's not confounding right but add consciousness to this picture, it just, there's no place for it. Like, there's just no, there's no evidence of consciousness

in the universe, apart from our direct experience of it. And there's no indication that it would exist or should exist, apart from our direct experience of it. It's just, it's, and, and yet, our direct experience of it is the most, is the only thing, really,

that we can be certain of, right? So far be it, there's some, imbecilic statements that occasionally come out of philosophy and neuroscience that suggest that consciousness might be an illusion, right? Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that simply cannot be an illusion, right? Because it is the thing that would give rise to any possible illusion. Even if you are completely confused about what reality is, even if you're in the matrix, right, or this is all a simulation in some alien supercomputer, or you're a brain and a vet. or you're psychotic and you're, I mean,

you could be confused about everything. You can't be confused that something seems to be happening. That seeming is what we mean by consciousness. So, semi-paradoxically, though we don't understand it. We don't understand how it arises or even, you know, at bottom, whether it does in fact arise, I mean, it could be a more fundamental constituent of the universe. Though I'm not sure what I believe about that.

Though we don't understand it and we don't understand its place in nature, we can understand that it's the one thing we are absolutely certain of in each moment. And it's the basis upon which any further certainty would be granted to us about anything. I mean, it is our conscious life. that is the only condition in which we do science in which we think about, you know, eternal truths of mathematics or anything else. I mean, it's like we caught all of cognition effectively,

even though it's, we understand that in our case, it very likely has unconscious precursors, right? I mean, they're cognitive operations. There's a lot to our mental lives that seems to be happening in the dark, but anything that we can actually notice and talk about and directly experience is by definition something that's happening in consciousness. That was so fascinating for me as a listener, just aside from being the host of this show,

which I now need to continue on with being. So if you had to give your answer, would you say it's then consciousness? awareness, aware. I didn't give you the time capsule answer after all that rigmarole. I did not give you the answer. So my answer is just that there's two possibilities.

If it emerges from unconscious complexity at some level, that may be true. That may actually be the right answer. If that's true, I think we will never understand that in the way we want to understand any other thing.

There are things we understand. We really do understand them, and that will not be one of those things. Again, we understand how DNA works, at least to a first approximation, right? We understand how, it's like if you shatter a window, we understand why it shatters and why it doesn't just melt, right?

Because we understand about the lattice structure of the molecules, right? It's like brittleness at the higher level is the thing you would expect to emerge given the way the atoms in that substance are arranged. And so it is with the wetness of water, right? Like there are emergent properties,

but yet they're understandable. Consciousness is not that sort of immersion property. So if this is, in fact, true in 100 years, if we just, you know, the aliens land and tell us, this is how consciousness arises, it's exactly this kind of unconscious processing that turns the lights on and look, we turn the dial a little bit and the lights go out

and then they're back on, they're out, they're like, you can play with this dial, as much as you want and you'll notice that it's just this is exactly what consciousness is in any physical system

okay that's just that's amazing that's a miracle that's we don't understand it but we can just we can then live on that basis we could design

conscious computers on that basis right like we could and we could design you know as I think we would want to unconscious computers that can't suffer and can't be happy

and you know when you turn them off it's you're not murdering them right because they're not there's nothing that's like be those computers. We cannot make the mistake of accidentally building conscious computers

because now we understand that consciousness is, you know, the way the lights go on is this way and we can decide when we do that. But I think it's more likely that we will, in the near term, far before we actually think we understand the true neural correlates of consciousness, I think we'll build computers that we think are conscious because they just seem to be conscious. and we might build them in such a way

where they claim to be conscious. But those of us who understand the heart problem won't know. It'll fundamentally be mysterious as to whether they're conscious and yet will helplessly relate to them as though they are conscious because it'll seem psychopathic not to.

Especially if you build anything like a humanoid robot that really has appropriate facial expression. and tones of voice and is obviously passing the touring test because it's smarter than you are and it's more, it's totally aware of your emotions and it seems to have emotions of its own because it's been built that way.

And you're now, you'll helplessly feel like you're in relationship to another conscious being. And I think most of us will just lose sight of whether the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness was ever an interesting problem. We just won't know. And we'll forget about it. Yeah.

So I'm asking you to speak in to some obvious unknowns here, right? So you would say essentially, to boil it down, your best guess is that it's probably unconscious complexity if you had a point. So the alternative to that is that no, it doesn't in fact emerge. It goes all the way down into the most basic constituents of matter. Or this opposition between matter and consciousness is, I bought a misconduct. conceived and there's some, you know, the technical phrase for this in philosophy is neutral monism. I think it was Bertrand Russell who gave us this phrase, but there's some neutral position

conceptually from which to understand mind and matter that doesn't admit of this dualism. So it's like currently it just seemed like there's a mystery, there's the physics of things, and then there's mind and consciousness, but, you know, now, even mind. Mind without consciousness isn't even all that mysterious. So it's really just

there's physics that's unconscious and then there's consciousness and we don't know how to marry them. We don't know where consciousness comes into the picture. Let's just say

it doesn't come into the picture. Let's say it goes all the way down. Let's say that there's something that it's like to be an electron on some level, right? It doesn't mean that electron is thinking.

It doesn't mean that it uses language but there's some interior dimension to everything that we would recognize as consciousness. The lights are on, in some sense, all the way down. Now, I think there are reasons to be doubtful of that. I mean, I think that it's, that, it doesn't truly solve the hard problem because it's still, we still have the problem of this apparent difference between everything we can be consciously aware of in our experience and the stuff that still seems to be going on in the dark, that we know is related to the stuff we can be aware of, right?

So, I mean, you asked me a few minutes ago about gurus who misbehave, and I gave you an example of a rock star, and the best I could do was John Bon Jovi, right? Right. So, like, so I'm thinking, like, I go into rock star search mode, right? I'm looking for rock stars in my memory, and for whatever reason, and I know the name. of many performers, but John Bon Jovi is the one that came up, you know, dating me and, you know, scandalizing everyone who actually cares about modern music, presumably.

But it's fundamental, so as aware as I can possibly be of my experience, I can't be aware of the search algorithm that's happening in my brain that is promoting various rock stars from memory. and I mean I could keep, I could consciously decide, okay, no, John, there's no way I'm saying John Bon Jovi, I'm just gonna wait here until I get something else, right?

And something else will come, but I, but there's some set of physical events that is conspiring to, you know, to curate those, you know, deliverances from memory that I can't inspect, right? And it's still, I know, I know my brain is doing it, but it seems not to be associated with consciousness. Now it's possible that there's some other way

of understanding consciousness where, no, there's actually, that would push consciousness back even into that, which is, you know, maybe there's a, maybe there are multiple conscious points of view even in a single brain, right? Maybe, you know, we, and there is something that it's like to be the part of me

that was just doing the math on, you know, old memories, right? But I somehow doubt it. Like that doesn't, that seems, that doesn't seem like the most parsimonious way to explain our experience in light of what we know about the brain. So,

but these are fundamentally different pictures. If consciousness goes all the way down to bedrock, well then that's hard, that's also hard to understand, but it's hard to understand anything that goes down to bedrock. I mean, we don't,

at a certain point, in science, you just have to admit that you have to say you take certain things as given. I mean, it's just, you know, and whether space and time or among those givens is a matter of debate. I mean, there are physicists who are trying to find ways of thinking about physics that don't take space and time as primitive. Space and time are emergent phenomenon of some more basic physics, but there are other approaches to physics that take space time as primitive. of, so anyway, as a certain point, you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps

and you can't be pretending to understand the straps, right? Like there's a brute fact of something that you're assuming axiomatically in order to do any kind of further work of understanding anything. This is true mathematically, it's true scientifically. And it's possible that consciousness is just one of those things.

So then in a thousand years, we might say, no consciousness is one of the things you don't have to understand you know consciousness is like space time right that's it's just the condition in which all of this is happening right or consciousness is like you know causality right like causes precede events we're not gonna we're not gonna spend any time trying to figure out if there's something other than deeper than causality you know the beginning of everything was the beginning. We're not going to ask ourselves how the beginning began. I mean, like there's just, you know, there's, you, again, there's no, I think scientists,

there might be some exceptions here, but basically science has given up on coming up with a set of laws that become perfectly self-explanatory. There's going to be some brute, you know, axiomatic fact that is just, a starting point. So diving, diving, because I want to, I'm mindful of the time

that we have left, I do want to touch on free will here a little bit. You would kind of final thought is that you would probably lean towards if you had to say the best guess unconscious complexity. Like in a succinct way,

I mean, because you're more qualified to speak on this than most people. I mean, I just, the truth is I just don't know how consciousness arises. I would not,

On some level, I would not be surprised by any variant of this thesis. It's like if in fact consciousness is integrated with matter in a way that we just fundamentally don't understand and we're misled by all of our interrogation of the brain and, you know, general anesthesia and the consciousness seems to get, you know, turned off in that case. It's like we just, there's some other purview from which this whole problem intellectually seems different. And we're just confused, you know, analogous to like, you know, we're dealing with, you know, three dimensions of space. And we just have not thought about the possibility of a fourth dimension of anything, right? Like we just haven't done the math. And, you know, a curvature of space is, or much less space time, is not something we just, can't imagine because we just don't have the concept for it. Maybe there's something analogous

there that just makes the problem seem different. But that wouldn't surprise me, and it also wouldn't surprise me if it's emerging on the basis of information processing in some configuration, and that's always going to seem like a miracle to us. Wonderful. So again, quickly, if you had to say a best guess probability, what do you feel? feel as a likelihood that we will engineer consciousness into super intelligent AGI.I. Well, as I said, I think the far more likely situation is that we will create the intelligence

and have no idea whether it's conscious. It'll be indistinguishable. Yeah, it'll just be, it'll seem more conscious than us because it'll be more intelligent than us. I have no doubt, there is simply no doubt that intelligence is substrate independent. I mean, there's just, there's just no real reason to think that there's something magical about biology with respect to what we mean by

intelligence. What we have now is already so effectively intelligent that even if you're going to go, come at it in a piecemeal way, even forget about trying to perfectly emulate human intelligence. Let's just take the top hundred things we care about as acts of cognition and intelligence. And each one of those can, you know, just, we already know, it's like arithmetic. Yes, you can build a superhuman calculator and all of us have one in our pockets right now. You know, it's just your smartphone is better at arithmetic than you will ever be.

And just add up all of those capacities. We know they're all substrate independent. And we know recognizing faces and recognizing the gender of faces and recognizing voices and recognizing voices. And all of that is, you know, all of these human. attributes are accomplished in silico now, right? So I think it's not gonna be much longer before we have systems that pass the Turing test in all the ways that could matter to us.

I mean, even if they seem weird in some other ways or just not quite human. I mean, they won't, they'll fail the Turing test the moment they pass it because they'll pass it so spectacularly, it'll be obviously, they're not human. It's like it's already obvious that no human knows it has instant, no human has instantaneous access to everything on the internet, right? So the fact that I can ask

chat GPT something and it can give me facts more comprehensively and in a more orderly way and faster than any person can, even if it's not perfect in other areas, the fact that I can say, you know, what are the causes of World War II? And it within five seconds can give me, a mini essay on the causes of World War II that's better than any academic historian can accomplish in the same a span of time, all right, it's already

superhuman. I already know there's not a little man in the box typing his answer to me. So, they will be the moment they're general, they'll be not human level, but superhuman.

And the moment we give them any kind of relational capacity that matters, the moment they become sensitive to our tone of voice and our facial expression and the moment we're integrated with it, you're piping your watch data or your ring data to your AI assistance.

So it's been tracking your heart rate and sleep cycles too, right? It's integrating all that information for you. Then you're going to be talking to a machine forget about a humanoid robot that's going to make it seem like Westworld. I mean, even if it's just Siri on your phone, but just the next iteration of Siri

that is essentially chat GPT5 plus all of your health data, you're going to be in the presence of something that is more observant of your inner life than any person can be from the outside. So it's going to know you, better than your spouse knows you on some level, right? Especially if it's reading your emails and reading your texts and it's read everything

you've ever published and listened to all. Like in my case, you know, my wife hasn't listened to my podcasts, right? Like I've got 300 episodes of my podcast that my virtual assistant will have heard, right? My wife hasn't heard them, so she doesn't know what I was thinking about for all those hours, right? I'm going to be in the presence of Siri that can say, Sam, you know, you definitely you look tired, you sound tired, you're not, you know, here are five things

I want you to pay attention to, you know, this is what you forgot you wanted to do today, but you sent that email to, uh, uh, it's like it will be, you'll sudden, the moment the thing is responsive to you relationally,

you are going to feel, helplessly feel that you're in the presence of the smartest, most perceptive person you've ever met. And that's going to feel like being in the presence of consciousness, right? Especially if we don't, I mean, if we hamstring the thing to say

at every moment, to remind us at every moment, listen, I'm just a dumb machine, you're not killing me when you turn me off, I'm not conscious, and nothing that's like to be me. You haven't solved the hard problem. You know, that's possible, but at a certain point, I don't know. I mean, like, again, for me, Westworld is unimaginable

because in the presence of perfectly humanoid robots, which is to say we're out of the uncanny valley, they no longer look weird, they look human, and so their facial displays of emotion are not spooky, they're just like, they look human. If we ever get there, and I, you know, I don't think there's any reason to think we want, won't.

There's no way you could have a place like Westworld where you're treating them badly and raping them and killing them and like, like, because you will feel like a psychopath. You will be viewed as a psychopath by other people. Like you're like, if that's your idea of fun, if your idea of fun is to rape and kill Dolores, right, you're a rapist murder, right? Like that's, like, and it doesn't matter that she's a robot, right? because it's too compelling an illusion. The fact that you were able to give yourself over

to the illusion with that kind of repacity proves that there's something wrong with you, right? And so Westworld, I think, is unthinkable or at least like otherwise it would just function as a bug light for a psychopaths. But yeah, so what should say that once we're in the presence of anything like a perfectly compelling

humanoid robot it's going to be a very weird world and we're not going to know very likely we're not going to know whether they're conscious and yet we're going to helplessly relate to them as though they're people going into a little bit of free will

so I want to actually take a moment to let everyone know that I'll link down in the description a longer podcast you did on your final thoughts on free will for people that want to dive deeper into this but to share to share like a few minutes on your consensus

on your thoughts on free will I think would be very valuable here because it is one of those things that once you start to dive into and realize the illusory nature of it can actually become very freeing this inner control and arrogance that we kind of have

that we're in charge of reality starts to diminish a little bit and also can increase compassion that we have for all beings and this awareness that we are not the first author of different causes that are happening that are springing forth within us like John Bon Jovi is rather fascinating. It doesn't remove the fact that we have choice, that we have responsibility, but where it's originally coming from, we are not in a vacuum of sorts

where we can actually choose that fully, to choose to choose, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so to say that free will is an illusion is really just, just the flip side of saying that the self is an illusion. What people mean by free will is that they are the true, they, the subject, the inner subject,

the conscious experiencer of their experience, is the true author of thought and action and will. So like the you you feel yourself to be, again, not the totality of your body, not your beliefs about your brain, but the subject, the one who, can move his attention from, you know, from, you can see, you can direct your attention to, to a part of your visual field. And then you can decide to get up and, and go make a cup of tea.

Like that, the, the, the one who can seize the reins of attention, the one who can decide to change a behavioral plan or to initiate one, it feels like something to be at the center of that causality and that feeling is that is what we're calling I. I mean that that that's this feeling of of of being a self and when you penetrate that illusion then you notice that everything is just happening all by itself like it does not nullify the difference between voluntary and involuntary and involuntary action I mean there's still a difference between deciding you want to reach for a glass of water versus you know inadvertently knocking the glass of over or having a tremor that you can't control, right,

and you're not consciously initiating. Those are all differences. I mean, the one difference is in my reaching for a glass of water, it's preceded by the thought that I want to take a drink of water and the felt intention to reach. If my arm was just moving and I wasn't feeling any associated intention, well, then I would feel like I had alien hand syndrome. I mean, there are neurological conditions like this.

I mean, that's what alien hand syndrome is, where the hand just starts behaving in ways where the inner subject doesn't feel any associated intention. And so it's like, it really is like a foreign arm, you know, and it's, you know, as you can imagine, quite disconcerting. So getting rid of free will doesn't obviate any of those distinctions. It's just, it gets rid of this fundamental illusion that there's someone in,

there's a subject in the driver's seat who can do the willing, who can do the desiring, who can do the, who can initiate the next thought as though, who stands upstream of all of these,

of all of this, all these patterns that produce intentions and further actions. So, but again, the illusion is so powerful for people that they, they feel that there really is a mystery here

where it's so like they they know that they have free will because they know that they are selves right and they know that they can decide to do one thing versus the other and they know that it feels a certain way to do that and so the buck really seems to stop here

in my conscious sense of my own subjectivity and agency and then they're told okay but actually in the dark behind all that there's this whole concatenation of causes for which you're totally unresponsible. I mean, you're, you didn't pick your parents, you didn't pick your genes, you didn't pick all of the influences to the nervous system that got built on the basis of your genetic inheritance. So literally, like everything, the fact that you have a brain, the fact you have a brain

in precisely this conformity, the fact that it was, you know, tuned by all of its collisions for all these years with an environment, you did none of that, right? And yet that is all of that, that whole mechanism is 100% of the explanation for the next thing you do. Right. So when I have to think of a rock star

and I think of John Bon Jovi, in what sense, like the conscious subject in me is just waiting to hear what, comes out of the dark, right? It's like, I'm just, it's like I went for, it's like I, I push the, you know, deliver rock star name button.

And the truth is, I, you know, there's no place to stand where my authorship really is, is visible because, like, upstream of, of that choice was, well, why was I looking for a rock star? I could have been thinking of something else. Like the category rock star was not something I consciously initiated.

Everything is being promoted out of the dark on some level. I mean, you can't think a thought until you think it, right? Like there would be an infinite regress. You mean, you can't, at a certain point, something just emerges out of this mystery that's at your back, you know, as a matter of consciousness. And we know as a matter of causality that it pushes all the way back to, again, your genome and every, prior influence. So at what point can you claim to be responsible for all of that?

And when you pay attention to what it's like to be you, you can notice that you don't even feel responsible for it. I mean, in some sense, you're always in the presence of a mystery. Now, that's not to say that

it doesn't matter what you do and what you decide and what kind of person you are. I mean, it's not like everyone gets off the hook by reason of insanity. It's still possible to be ethical versus unethical and to be compassionate versus malignantly selfish. All of these differences matter because they have very different consequences in the world and they link up to very different kinds of minds and motivations. And so, but at bottom, an insight into the illusoryness of free will does change a few things ethically. And one thing it changes is the basis for hating other people really does go away.

Because on some level, you begin to view people as more analogous to forces of nature or as wild animals or malfunctioning robots. People who are behaving badly on some level are doing precisely the only thing they could do in that moment. And the idea that they could have done otherwise or should. have done otherwise, it's not that it's totally inadmissible, but when you begin saying you should have done otherwise, you could have done otherwise, what you're really admonishing a person about is not the past, but the future. I mean, you're trying to, insofar as a person can be changed by your criticism and your argument and your reaction to their misbehavior, the reason

to react in that way and to feel the validity of reacting in that way is to change them for the future. You can't go back into the past and change what they did. So if you're, and so this is very clear with, you know, raising kids. Like you want kids to grow up to be honest, compassionate, well-integrated members of society.

So, yeah, they don't start out that way. And so you have to keep saying, okay, you shouldn't have done that next time, do this. But you're not, you're not imagining at each stage along the way that they could really be different than they were. at that stage. And ultimately, that's true for even, you know, quintessentially evil adults, right?

Like, you're just, you know, the mustache twirling psychopath who's, you know, who murdered lots of people because he likes to murder people. Well, okay, you still want to put that person in prison because you want to keep everyone safe from him. But you have to recognize that on some level, Once you get rid of the illusion of free will, you recognize that that person is basically analogous to a great white shark or a grizzly bear or a tiger or any other system that is intrinsically dangerous to be close to.

He's not available to argument. He's fundamentally incorrigible just as a tiger would be, a wild tiger would be. So it doesn't mean you can't try, try to avoid that person, put that person in prison, find a cure for that person. If we ever get a cure for psychopathy, we would use that.

But it's not that it doesn't mean it's not a problem, but it's not a problem of free will being misused, right? Like no one picked their, even if you think people have souls, right? Like no one picked their soul. No, there's no psychopath walking around with a psychopathic soul who's responsible for having made his soul psychopathic. It's like he's unlucky.

He got a bad soul, right, if souls exist. Without souls, he got bad genes and a bad environment and a bad, you know, contingent neurology. And it creates so much compassion on one hand as well because you look at someone like Hitler or the mustache twirling sociopath, psychopath, psychopath, murderer. And if you, like, you spoke in your book Free Will, you give these examples, if you then discovered on the other hand that there was a brain tumor

pushing upon someone's amygdala that would completely change how you view them. But it's essentially that all the way down, right? Yeah. And you can just, without even referencing the neurology of it, just look at the timeline of somebody in somebody's life.

It's like you take Hitler, okay, well Hitler is, you know, the quintessentially evil person who everyone should just kill, right? It's like like, we wish that the plots against Hitler trying to assassinate him had actually worked, right? So they were completely justified, right?

But at what point in his life would it have been justified to kill Hitler? I mean, killing the 25-year-old Hitler before he has done anything especially egregious? Well, you know he's going to become the 40-year-old Hitler who's just awful. Yeah, you might want to stop that, but I mean, I think even Louis C.K. has a joke about this. Like, do you go back and kill Hitler in his crib? Like, you're going to kill a baby? Like, you're really going to kill a baby? Like, it's a baby.

Like, now we're talking about a baby. Okay, the truth is, Hitler, the baby, is just unlucky. It's like, is it a baby who's, for whatever reason, is going to grow up to be Hitler, right? But as a baby, it's just a baby, right? So it's like, the baby is not culpable for becoming the one-year-old, who becomes a two-year-old, who becomes a two-year-old, who becomes a three-year-old,

who, like, at what point does Hitler become culpable for being Hitler? I don't think he does. That doesn't mean you don't kill Hitler. At a certain, like, if there's nothing else to do, you know, if you can't lock him up, I am completely in favor of killing Hitler at a certain point. Now, which day you pick in his life is, is a judgment call. But it's, at no point did he make himself.

And that's true of everybody else. that was that was great and the last line in your book on free will you say that you are not in control of the storm you are not lost in it you are the storm and i think that's a beautiful note to wrap up the free will topic there yeah last last little thing you've shared that on one level you can't go wrong if you live a life motivated by love and guided by reason i love for you to share a little bit about that in your kind of final notes here your vision for what an awakening humanity looks like because I see you as somebody that has such a profound and deep understanding of the human condition and yet we find ourselves in a time with a lot of problems that can be

solved and freedom to be discovered on an individual and collective level what is your vision for an awakened humanity and yeah I think I would add one piece I'm not sure it's I think maybe you can get everything out of love and reason. But there's one piece that I would add that does a lot of work that seems at least conceptually separable, and that's gratitude. I think there's something about gratitude that heals so much that's wrong with us personally, psychologically.

It's just like it's, I mean, so, If you push far enough in the direction of gratitude, there's so many psychological and ethical errors you can no longer make. It almost contains everything we mean by love as well. But I mean, you just recognize that for virtually anyone, I mean, unless you're literally the least lucky person who's ever lived, there's just so much to be grateful for. I mean, it's just like, there's so much that is good about even a very ordinary,

conflicted, difficult life when you compare it to everything else that is possible, right? And this is where, like, the philosophy of stoicism is so useful to so many people. I mean, the stoics often recommend a reflection of just this sort. I mean, you just think about all the terrible things that haven't had. happen to you, right? And that it happened to somebody else right now, right? And just, there are people who would consider all of their prayers answered if they could just trade places with you right now, even when you're in the midst of something that you consider to be genuinely difficult, right? You've got some problem that really is capturing 100% of your attention.

It's like, it's still so much better than so many, so much of what's possible. And on that, But when you recognize that, the more you can see your life in those terms, kindness and compassion almost by definition fall out of that. It's like you just, that's synonymous with having compassion for all the people who, and all the, you know, beyond people, all the people and conscious beings that have it so much worse than you have it. Right. And through just pure luck, right? I mean, it's just, it's unearned.

on some level, right? And it's on that basis that you just, you want to be kind to people because you just don't know, one, in some say, first of all, you know everyone's gonna die, you know everyone's gonna lose everything they love and everyone close to them, right?

Like, no matter how, it's like we're all united in this circumstance of fundamental impermanence and fragility. So, I don't know, it's like we're all moving through life where, you know, most of us, I mean, certainly anyone who has the free attention to listen to a conversation like this and find any of this interesting, you know, that's almost synonymous with having escaped some of the worst, you know, variants of suffering on offer, at least for a significant period of time. And, you know, so we're all just, it's like, it's like the class, it's like we, the sun is

continually coming out from behind the clouds and we're enjoying this this moment in of sunlight and then it goes behind the clouds again and there's lots to struggle through and then we get these moments of sunlight and it's just it's we should be so grateful for for these moments and for these moments and for all that we have and all that we don't have to to suffer and the only thing that is safeguarding this project collectively that ensures that even the luckiest among us can cooperate with one another and collaborate in an open-ended way and build, you know, and make the future look better than the past. Really the only tool beyond just the goodwill that wants to, wants that project to succeed,

you know, the love and kindness and gratitude. that would grease those gears is reason. I mean, we just, all we have is a disposition to talk about facts, to care about facts, to be consistent, to be self-aware of our own ignorance and our own capacity for self-deception and wishful thinking and cognitive bias to meet other people.

I mean, we've got the circumstance. We've got eight billion strangers, you know, more like virtually everyone is, no matter how many people you know, virtually everyone is a stranger. And all you can do is reason with them from a basic inclination to cooperate and find some future that's compatible with more and more of us, more of the time leading better lives, right? And so it's like either we're going to recognize that we're all in principle on the same team

in the limit and try to some. solve some, you know, increasingly complex coordination problems and build the tools to do that. And or we're going to fail spectacularly at the attempt to do that. And our failure will, it's totally predictable. Our failure will be born of failures of rationality and failures of goodwill, right? I mean, failures of love, failures of kindness, failures of to, act in our, what really is in our own best interest if we could only see it. I mean, the, the idea that that we could ever wind up in a condition that is permanently zero sum is just, it's just a crazy illusion given the circumstance we're actually in. I mean, given how, given how good life could be

if we just got our head screwed on straight and cooperated without political division and dogmatism and all of these other, all these structures that reliably cause conversations to fail, you know, I mean, it just,

um, it, it, it, it, it, it, it,

it, it, it, it, expect something like a utopia if we could only get over our, our, very,

you know, basic, uh, political and apish, you know, disinclinations to cooperate, you know, with one another.

Um, but reason is, is the only tool for the job because it's the only algorithm you can run where even if people don't like each other and are emotionally unavailable,

they're resisting playing well with others. Reason, because of its universal characteristics, because you can show people, you can show your enemies that they're not even, that they're contradicting themselves, It has a capacity to force convergence and really drag people kicking and screaming to across the finish line of cooperation because at bottom reality has a certain structure.

I mean, certain things are true and certain things are false. And certain maps fit the territory better than other maps. And we all, even if we are confused about in the game we're playing, people tend not to like to bump into hard objects in the dark, right? I mean, they want to know where they're going. And so far as there are right answers to any questions of importance, reason is the thing that will ensure that we're tracking that. And so, yeah, apart from people who are completely psychotic and are completely psychopathic, they're just fundamentally unavailable to any kind of, you know, cooperative effort, you know, reason is the thing that is going to, you know,

even in the absence of appropriate love and good feeling, is going to align all of our interests. And so we just, yeah, I mean, on something. level is the only game in town for strangers to play. Just what you shared about how, yeah, reason really being the modality in which we can find ourselves to solutions that are necessary in this time, right? But without, like, empathy and gratitude without reason has no guide. And reason without empathy or gratitude is not alive. It's not fully alive. And this talk and how we've been walk in this dance throughout this whole conversation and much of the work that you do of this

integrating rational thinking with the spiritual dimensions of life to catch up to a 21st century viewpoint, I think is so needed. And I really see you as a pioneer. So as we're speaking about gratitude, I just want to share someone to say thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing yourself in this way. It's been so fulfilling for me. I'm just as much of a joyful participant and listener to this conversation as I am, you know, stewarding it with you. So just thank you so much. And I'm really looking forward to how this conversation evolves. It continues. Well, great to be here. Great to meet you and keep it up. Thank you so much. And for everybody that's been tuning in, I have found the waking up app extremely profound and

powerful. I spent hours and hours on walks listening to different theories and talks and they have amazing meditation. So I'll leave a link in the description below where you can find that and check that out. If you haven't already, they have a free trial. It's amazing. Highly, highly recommend it. Everywhere you can find Sam will be linked in the description as well. below. And is there anything else you want to share before we wrap up? I don't think so. No, you can find me in fewer and fewer places now. It's just, I noticed that. Yeah, it's really just, I guess samharris.org and wakingup.com. Those are the two points of contact. Amazing. Thank you so much. Looking forward to maybe running you back one day.

And for everybody that's been tuning into this episode of the Know They Self podcast, thank you for coming on this journey with us. And until next time, be well.