Making Sense with Sam Harris - #111 — The Science of Meditation

Episode Date: December 28, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson about the current scientific understanding of meditation practice. They speak about the original stigma associated with meditation, the history of introspection in eastern and western cultures, the recent collaboration between Buddhism and western science, the difference between altered states and altered traits, an alternate conception of mental health, “meta-awareness,” the relationship between mindfulness and “flow,” the difference between pain and suffering, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Today I'm speaking with Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson. Daniel is known for his best-selling books on emotional intelligence. Daniel is known for his best-selling books on emotional intelligence. His book, Emotional Intelligence, I believe was the best-selling nonfiction book of the 90s. It's not literally true, it is close. And Danny's interest in meditation goes way back to his years spent in India as a graduate student at Harvard. He's a trained psychologist who for many years reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for the New York Times. He's been a visiting faculty member at Harvard. He's received many journalistic awards, including two nominations for the Pulitzer Prize.

And he received the Career Achievement Award for Journalism from the American Psychological Association. And my experience with Danny goes way back. We have spent many, many months on retreats together. Back in the day, we've traveled to India and Nepal to study with various meditation teachers together. And Danny has, over the years, given me advice with respect to publishing, so it's great to be able to get him on the podcast. with respect to publishing, so it's great to be able to get him on the podcast. And Richard, known as Richie to those who know him, is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he's the director of the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior there. He's also the founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the Waisman

Center. Ritchie also received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard and has been at Wisconsin since 1984. And he's been a very prolific experimental scientist. He has published more than 300 papers, as well as numerous chapters and reviews, and he has edited 14 books. And I think it's beyond dispute that Ritchie has done the most important neuroimaging research on meditation to date. He generally works with

functional magnetic resonance imaging and EEG as well. All of those articles you've seen with the French monk Mathieu Ricard with EEG electrodes on his head. That research was done in Ritchie's lab. And really, there's no one better to talk about the current state of the science for our understanding of mindfulness and meditation. And as luck would have it, Danny and Ritchie have just published a book together presenting all of the relevant science. And that book is Altered Traits. Science Reveals How Meditation

Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body. And we get into all of that in this conversation. We talk about the original stigma associated with studying meditation, the history of introspection in Eastern and Western culture, the more recent collaboration between Buddhists mainly and Western scientists, the difference between altered statesists mainly and Western scientists, the difference between altered states of consciousness and altered traits, the importance of actually practicing meditation. We talk about an alternate conception of mental health, what it means to be identified with thought and how non-optimal that is,

the relationship between mindfulness meditation and so-called flow states, and many other topics here. This really is the conversation that will get you most grounded in the why and the what of meditation from a scientific point of view. So now, without further delay, I bring you Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson. further delay, I bring you Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson. So I'm here with Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson. Dan, Richie, thanks for coming on the podcast. Pleasure, Sam. Happy to be here. So just to clarify, this is not an undue sign of familiarity. You actually go by Dan and Richie among friends, and I certainly consider myself a friend, so you'll be referred to thusly. Let's talk about your history together and my history with you briefly, just to orient people,

because you guys go way back. I guess starting with you, Dan, just say how you view your intellectual history briefly and how you came to this topic, and then we'll talk about how you guys met. Dr. So my intellectual history took an unexpected detour. When I was a graduate student at Harvard and I had a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, I had met Ram Dass, who five years before had been fired from my own department at Harvard as Richard Alpert, gone to India and come back with the name Ram Dass as a yogi and a teacher and a lecturer. I ran into him by accident, and I was very impressed by what he was saying about his

teacher in India named Neem Krolli Baba. So I went to India. Harvard was nice enough to give me a free ride there. And I went to see Neem Krollibaba, who was unlike anyone I'd met before. He was completely present, completely loving to everybody, it seemed, open to anyone, high caste, low caste, anybody, and didn't seem to want anything for himself. And I never met anyone like that. So I go back to Harvard and I say, you know, there's a positive side to human nature that we don't look at. I was studying clinical psychology, which is how to diagnose what's wrong with people. And my professors were basically uninterested. There was one graduate student there who was interested, and his name was Richie Davidson.

And so Richie and I became friends, and both of us did our research on meditation. And we've circled back to that with our book, Altered Traits, after being under the radar for many years and then finding that the field of meditation research has just exploded. It's been flourishing. When we did our dissertations, there were three peer-reviewed articles we could cite. When we reviewed the literature some decades later, there are now more than 6,000 on the topic, and we use very rigorous standards to winnow them down to about 60. And that field has been flourishing largely because of the neuroimaging work that Richie

has been doing in his lab at Wisconsin. So Richie, give us your brief CV here and take us back to the 70s. whose demeanor and whose presence was infectious to me. These were the kind of people I wanted to be more like. I wanted to know what their secret sauce was, and I learned that they were all meditators. I met Dan my very first day of graduate school, and I decided that after my second year of graduate school, I needed to find out more about this tradition and to get a taste of it more experientially. So I went to Sri Lanka and to India and spent part of the time with Dan that summer. I spent about three months in Asia. And that summer, I spent about three months in Asia. That was the summer during which I participated in my first meditation retreat. And so got a glimpse of what these practices were like and came back with a conviction that this was something important for Western psychology and neuroscience to take more serious account of,

but it was made very clear to me that if I wanted a successful career in science, studying meditation was a terrible way to begin. Let's talk about why that was the case. You are coming right on the heels of the psychedelic craze in the 60s that was largely kicked off by some of your elders at Harvard, Tim Leary and Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Dass. people's entrance into the topic of meditation at that point as being of interest had some connection to the altered states that people were encountering doing psychedelics. And this whole area was stigmatized to a significant degree in academia. Is the connection to psychedelics relevant there, or was it just stigmatized on its own? Well, I think it is relevant. was it just stigmatized on its own? Well, I think it is relevant. Richie, you probably add to this, but basically the department people who are professors then were pretty much the people who had been traumatized by all the publicity, the adverse

publicity around Leary and Alpert and their firing. And I think that anything that had to do with consciousness in any way was rather anathema to me. I think it was, to them, rather it was scary. And so I think they reacted to us and our interest in meditation from that framework. Richie, what would you say? I would agree that that played a role, but I also think there are other factors at play as well. Remember, this was at the end of the behavioral era. Behaviorism was still a force in the academy within psychology. And in fact, another encounter that I had during my first year in graduate school was running into Skinner in the elevator in William James Hall. And there's a very extraordinary encounter that I had with him because this was actually my first couple of weeks at Harvard. And I didn't

know exactly where I was going. And I pushed a button on the elevator and then I mumbled to myself, whoops, I changed my mind. And I hit another button realizing that I needed to go to another floor. And Skinner was standing next to me in the elevator. And he put his arm on my shoulder and he said, son, you did not change your mind, you changed your behavior. That's hilarious. The sixth floor of our building had his pigeons, along with Dick Ernstein. That was another element that we had to contend with. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you brought that up because the influence of behaviorism, I think it's to some degree still felt, although very few people would answer to the name of

behaviorism now, but it's one of those intellectual influences that in retrospect seems almost impossible. The idea that people thought, and most of the people who made it their business to study something about the human mind and human nature thought, that all of this could be captured in terms of the outputs and inputs to the system, and that the brain and mind in between could be treated like this black box that really was doing nothing of interest. That was the view then. But, you know, on another floor in that same building was a subversive guy, Jerome Bruner, who was starting to found what's now cognitive science. And as cognitive science and then neuroscience developed better methodologies, really they swept behaviorism

aside. Behaviorism was only interested, as you point out, in what you could observe. But cognitive science was a way of cleverly tracking what's going on within the mind. And now, of course, cognitive science is quite ascendant. Behaviorism is pretty irrelevant. I think there's another piece here, which is that introspection was always more or less stillborn in the Western tradition. Briefly in your book, you talk about the Western precursors to meditation. You point out that the Greeks had a piece of this. Aristotle had a concept of human flourishing or eudaimonia, which many Greek philosophers thought about. Presumably,

there was some methodology there among the Stoics and the skeptics that was analogous to what we're calling meditation, but it really died out in Western philosophy, this idea that you could train the mind to be different than it is, and that the point of philosophy would be a life well-lived or a way of maximizing human well-being. And even then in psychology, you had people like William James try their hand at introspection, but it did peter out into some kind of cul-de-sac by virtue of just a lack of depth of experience and a methodology to take it forward. Go ahead, Richie. I was going to say, I think to some extent it's still that way today, largely because there is still the presumption that the instrument of our mind that we use to interrogate the nature of our mind is relatively constant across people. And the notion that we can train our mind to, in some sense, polish the lens

and have a more accurate observing apparatus is still something quite foreign to most people in the academy. And so, you know, it's always been interesting to reflect on the project of looking at correlations between what's going on in the brain and what people report in their experience. And those correlations historically, while when you arrange the experimental situation in the right way, you can find positive correlations. They've never been particularly strong or overwhelming. And there's never really been the questioning of the veridicality of the reports themselves and asking whether an individual who has trained his or her mind to clean the lens, so to speak, might actually have better introspective access, more accurate introspective access,

and therefore the correlation between the reports of experience and what's going on in the brain potentially might be higher. And of course, this is the project of neurophenomenology that Francisco Varela, the biologist who co-founded the Mind and Life Institute, was really pushing. and Life Institute, was really pushing. But in his life, which ended prematurely because he died of liver cancer, he really never saw the fruition of that dream. And we still haven't. But I think that the framework is now in place to actually do this in a systematic way. I'm glad you mentioned Francisco. I want to just come back and speak about him a little bit more here. But just to not give people the wrong picture here,

this notion of mental training is actually esoteric even in the East, even among Buddhists. I mean, most Buddhists don't meditate, and I've even met Buddhist monks who don't meditate. I've even met Buddhist monks who don't meditate. I've even met Western Buddhist monks, Westerners who have gone to Thailand and ordained and become monks who themselves didn't meditate. So meditation is esoteric as a practice even among Buddhists, and that's just something that is especially strange in that context to me, but it's not like everyone east of the Bosporus is spending half their day in meditation. Well, Sam, if I could say, I think

every major spiritual tradition, certainly in Eurasia, has had an esoteric center, which is training the mind. Now, in modern day, we talk about neuroplasticity, but you know, in the second century, there were Christian monks in the desert of Egypt who were meditating, essentially, and they're doing the same thing a yogi in India might be doing. And I think you're right that, you know, being a full-time meditator, as occurs in some Asian cultures, but means you have to be a monk or a nun or a yogi. And even among monks and nuns, not everybody will do that. It takes a particular kind of dedication. And it's a narrow slice. Those are the people who go the deepest. Then there are the meditative traditions as they've

been brought from Asia to the West. And a lot's been left behind, but it's accessible to a larger swath of people. And then there's the remove beyond that, where you've got, you know, mindfulness, you have mindfulness of every kind in schools and businesses and so on. And that's a pretty thin experience, but it goes to scale. So I think that generally there's a trade-off between doing a little bit and lots of people doing it, or doing it very intensely and very deeply. And every, you know, Sufis do a kind of meditation. Certainly there are Hindu meditations among yogis. There are, the Christian tradition of meditation, by the way, was wiped out

by the church as heresy. It's too bad because it ended that tradition in the West. But I think that what we were able to capture in looking at the meditative traditions that have had research done on them, it's interesting, it was mostly Buddhist. It's mindfulness, it's Zen and Vipassana, which is another Buddhist method, and then Dzogchen or Mahamudra, which is done by Tibetan yogis. And that's the bulk of the research so far. It's not an accident that you and Western science in general has focused the collaboration between third-person scientific methods and first-person contemplative methods along Buddhist lines, because there's so much in Buddhism that is just perfectly designed for export into a secular context. It's not to say that Buddhism

doesn't have its literature on magic and iconography and rituals that seems as religious as anything else, but there's a central strand there that is empirical in a way that doesn't presuppose any religiosity or any doctrines that need to be accepted on faith. And it's much harder to say that of these other contemplative traditions. And on your point about the stamping out Christian esotericism as a heresy, the problem has always been that the moment Christians become too contemplative, people like Meister Eckhart, they begin to sound like Buddhists. It's not an accident that the fires of the Inquisition had more or less reached Eckhart's door. It's more sinister than that. They're saying that, hey, I can have an unmediated

relationship with something greater than myself. I don't need the church. Yeah, yeah. And of course, the church didn't like hearing that for a minute. So one of you or both of you briefly describe the recent history, I guess going back to Francisco's time, of collaboration between Western scientists and Buddhism? Let me give some background, then Richie can fill in the answer to that. The background has to do with the upsurge in meditation research itself. And I think a lot of that has to do with the efforts of the Mind and Life Institute.

Richie and I are now stepping down as board members. It was originally founded by the Dalai Lama Francisco Varela, the scientist and a businessman, Adam Engel. And the idea was to create dialogues with the Dalai Lama about different sciences. And they're quite in-depth, you know, and they cover the quantum physics and astrophysics, you know, all kinds of things, including neuroscience. all kinds of things, including neuroscience. And that said, the institute also very early started having summer research institutes. Ritchie actually was one of the most active people in founding, where graduate students and postdocs in cognitive and neuroscience came together

who were interested in meditation, but lonely in their own institutions. Nobody else cared. But here they found a network, a supportive family, if you will, of fellow scientists. And that's encouraged a lot of the research. Many of the studies that we cite in our book actually were done by graduates at Institute. And at the same time, in parallel, there was the impetus given by the Dalai Lama at a Mind and Life meeting where he turns to Ritchie and he says, this is around 2000, year 2000, our tradition has many methods for managing disturbing, upsetting emotions. Take them out of the religious context, study them rigorously in

the lab, and if they're a benefit, spread them widely. Now you're spreading them widely with this book, which we will get into in a minute. But I guess just to describe my point of contact with the history you just sketched, I knew you already, Dan, but I met up with you guys in Dharamsala for one of your Mind and Life meetings. And that's where I met Francisco for the first time. And Francisco was the one who strongly recommended that I go to Nepal at that point and study Dzogchen. I had had years as a Vipassana meditator and I had studied with various Advaita teachers in India, but I hadn't yet connected with a Dzogchen master.

So Francisco recommended that I go to Nepal to study with Tukul Uygan, and he was instrumental in that happening. Also, he wrote me a letter of recommendation to graduate school for neuroscience. And so that was, as you know, he's a neuroscientist. So he straddled both these worlds before I really knew these worlds were being straddled by anyone. And then I think I went to your first summer research institute, Richie, and also was, I at least collaborated with you in setting up that first Vipassana retreat at IMS for scientists, where we put up 100 scientists in silence around, I don't know, it's like 2006 or somewhere around

there. Let's get into the book, because this book is really the most comprehensive and up-to-the-minute presentation of the scientific research on meditation in general, and specifically mindfulness, which, as you just pointed out, Dan, is everywhere, and people are making extravagant claims for its benefits, some of which are grounded in the science and some of which aren't, or at least aren't yet. Richie, give us this basic distinction that you make early in the book, which carries throughout it, between altered states and altered traits. Well, altered states refer to the experiences that we have sitting on the cushion or sitting on a chair when we're meditating. sitting on the cushion or sitting on a chair when we're meditating. And the importance of meditation lies not really in the transitory experiences that we have when we're meditating,

but it is in the impact of these practices in every nook and cranny of our everyday life. And this is what we refer to as altered traits. Altered traits are enduring changes that are consequences of our practice that impact every aspect of our lives and can be discerned in specific kinds of measures that are taken when we are not explicitly meditating. And so while much of the early work, including the early work from my own lab, was focused on the changes during the meditation period itself, what really counts in terms of the impact of these practices are the enduring changes. And so one of the central questions that we ask in the book is how do the more fleeting experiences that we have when we're practicing ultimately become more enduring changes that persist? And one of the key answers to that is practice.

And one of the key answers to that is practice. Practice really makes a difference. And there is no substitute for practice. This is a question that we get so often, particularly in America. How can we shorten the process? Are there strategies or technological aids that we can use to shorten the time? But I don't think this is fundamentally different than learning any other kind of skill. It takes time to become a chess master. It takes time to learn to play the violin. It takes time to learn to be a collegiate athlete. In the same way, practice is important here. You can sort of flip it and acknowledge that at every moment in your life, you are practicing something. You're using your attention in a certain way. And for the most part, if you're like most people, you're using it in ways that lead to predictable

sorts of dissatisfaction. You're practicing a kind of meditation on all the things you want, all the things that make you anxious, and a kind of a perpetual distraction for which a method like mindfulness is put forward as an antidote. But as your mind is, your life becomes. And so you're ingraining various tendencies and habits and neurophysiological states moment by moment, every moment of your life. One of the things I frequently say is that neuroplasticity occurs winningly or unwittingly.

Most of the time it's occurring unwittingly. Most of the time we're being shaped by forces around us about which we have little insight and little control. And the invitation in this work is that we can actually more intentionally take responsibility for our own minds and brains by cultivating healthier habits of mind. Your brain is constantly changing in response to experience. If the three of us remember having had this conversation, that will be by virtue of having laid down a physical memory trace in our brains. Genes get transcribed, receptors get made. This is a change in the physical structure of the brain to encode any memory. So neuroplasticity is just a background

fact of our brains all the time. And what's happening with meditation or any kind of practice of anything, you know, learning to play golf, learning to play the piano, you are deciding to change your brain in a way that, you know, in this case, takes attention and effort. There's another point here, Sam, and I think it's the social context and technological context in which this is now happening. Because we're living in an age that's never been more distracted and never had more luscious, seductive distractions available day or night on our tech devices. I just was witnessing or hearing one of the guys who was on the team that developed the iPod and the iPhone

at Apple, the very first one. He said, we're all single 20-somethings. We had no life, and we tried to make it as seductive as we could. Now I'm a parent, and I really regret that. try to make it as seductive as we could. Now I'm a parent and I really regret that. And I think any parent knows what he's talking about. You don't want your kids to spend all their time pulled in to staring at a video screen for hours and hours. You want them to be, you know, relating, looking around, experiencing the world. So things are changing in a direction I think people may feel a little helpless about, but meditation or cultivating the ability to concentrate and ignore distractions, I think has a special cachet and virtue now that wasn't true in the past, if only as an antidote to a social trend. There was a research at Harvard that, you know, that famous paper in science where

they monitored how distracted people are during the day, and the title was, A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind, because the more your mind wanders in distraction, the more depressed you get. There really is a different conception of mental health here that we are tacitly endorsing, because the assumption has been for most people, and certainly for most of science, that certain default facts about our mind are normal, and the idea of changing them just simply wouldn't occur to a person. Most people don't even know that their minds are continuously lost in thought. And it's not even considered, it really is just the white noise of our worldview. And then when you enter a contemplative

tradition, and in particular, a discussion of mental training in the Buddhist tradition, you see it really as almost your first claim that this is absolutely pathological to have your attention continually buffeted by the winds of discursive thought, and you're helplessly carried away by every single thought that enters consciousness. And not only are you carried away by the emotions that it invokes, desire and fear and boredom and all the rest, you are identified with it such that it seems to be you. I mean, your sense of self is bound up in the flow of thought in a way that most people have never, it's never occurred to them to question. And there's very little in, has been heretofore, very little in Western science that has inspired questioning it. And I want to talk about how you both view

the self, but do you want to say anything about what it means to have a healthy human mind in light of this meditation research? Rishi's done a lot of work on that recently. There is a growing body of scientific research which is suggesting that attentional distraction, mind-wandering, as well as reification of the self. Rishi, what do you mean reification of the self? Can you translate that? Yeah. Believing the thoughts that we have about ourselves as a true depiction of reality, considering them to be veridical. That you see in depressed people, for example. One of the characteristics of depression is that negative self-thoughts are actually taken to be a veridical description of who the individual is.

What if it's a positive thought? Well, for a positive thought, I think that there's less of an obvious deleterious consequence, but I think there's another more subtle kind of suffering that may be associated with that as well, which certainly the Buddhist tradition speaks to. associated with that as well, which certainly the Buddhist tradition speaks to. And this whole idea we call experiential fusion, where you have the experience of being completely fused with the thought rather than having a quality of meta-awareness, which is knowing that there is actually a thought occurring and being able to see it as a thought. And that's something that, of course, we know can be taught

through the kinds of contemplative practices that we're considering. And one of the most important findings, really, is the finding that meta-awareness can be strengthened. And meta-awareness is simply knowing that you're knowing, recognizing that a thought is a thought rather than being swept up in its content. One of the main principles of cognitive therapy is that you don't have to believe your thoughts. That's a very revolutionary idea for most of us. We should probably define mindfulness at this point.

Most of the listeners to this podcast will be familiar with this concept because I've spoken about it before and I've had our mutual friend Joseph Goldstein on twice. And so this is not the first time I've hit this. But for those who are new to the topic, and this really is the center of the bullseye as far as the meditation instruction that has been mostly studied by Ritchie and others at this point. How would you define mindfulness? I'll take a crack. I think mindfulness, as it's taught in the classic traditions, encourages us to take an equanimous position amidst the coming and going of our own feelings and thoughts,

and to see them as feelings and thoughts rather than that's me, and to just note them without judgment or without reactivity and let them come and let them go. That's a very radical stance internally. And so is there any distinction between what you're calling meta-awareness, Richie, and mindfulness, as you just used it? It includes remembering to bring a certain view to each and every encounter. And what is it that we mean by a view? Well, in part, it means recognizing that every human being shares the same wish to be happy and to be free of suffering, and also a view that has an altruistic intent, the disposition to help relieve the suffering of others whenever it's encountered, and remembering to bring that conviction, if you will, that stance to every

encounter is also part of mindfulness. Now, it's not typically how it's defined by psychologists or neuroscientists, but in the contemplative traditions, it certainly in part has that flavor. When we talk about meta-awareness, I think meta-awareness is a psychological feature that is strengthened by mindfulness training. There are very specific ways that psychologists have devised to measure meta-awareness objectively. And all of them, in one way or another, have to do with recognizing the nature of what is occurring in our mind, recognizing that we are knowing, recognizing that we are engaged in certain kinds of behavior. We often experience things and actually behave and not have that sense of recognition. We do it in the absence

of meta-awareness. And one metaphor which might be helpful for listeners to better appreciate this is one that we sometimes use. Most people have had this experience of being in a movie theater, watching a very engrossing movie, and completely losing awareness that you're in the theater, that you're sitting in a chair, you're just so wrapped up in the plot. That is what we would call experiential fusion, where there's no meta awareness. But we can be equally attentive to the movie and sitting in the theater and in the background recognize that we're sitting in a theater. And that would be akin to having meta awareness, which is that background recognition. And in the case of thoughts, it's recognizing that these are thoughts. This is not who we are, but rather these are thoughts.

I like that analogy for many reasons, although it's potentially misleading for some people because what you just described about movie watching, this experiential fusion, is what is so good about movies. We want to disappear into the movie because it's much less fun to be constantly reminded that you're sitting in a theater with a bunch of people and you're looking at light on a wall. But what we should remember is that the movie of our lives with which we are fused in every moment that we're not aware of being lost in thought is very often a bad movie. It's a depressing movie. It's a scary movie. It's a movie that's just filled with feelings of sadness or at least dissatisfaction

much of the time. And what you're describing is the ability to recognize thoughts as thoughts and emotions as transitory appearances in the flow of consciousness. And those moments of recognition provide real relief from the dissatisfaction and mediocrity and even extreme physical pain that may be arising in consciousness in each moment. Right. in each moment. Right. But to go back to a point that Dan made, even if the movie was a good movie, so to speak, even if they're positive thoughts, the same would be true. And so, you know, I often get the question whether meditation is like flow. And, you know, Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who studied flow, studied rock climbers, for example, who have this extremely ecstatic state when they're rock climbing and are totally engrossed in what they're doing.

But that is a case, again, of experiential fusion. There is no meta-awareness. Rock climbers, you know, or else all rock climbers would be enlightened people. Not necessarily. Yeah, well, that's an important distinction because this connection with flow is often made and it's often meditation as an idea is often sold by kind of advertising this possible connection. And I've done it myself in emphasizing that the moments in life that we all love are the moments in life where attention is fully captured by the present moment, where we're lost in our work or we're lost in the pleasure of some athletic

experience. People very frequently reference things like athletics and sex and peak experiences as moments where there's no distance between attention and its object. You're not wondering what you're going to have for lunch because you're fully engrossed in what you're doing. It really is the concentration component of meditation that is being echoed there. And some meditation types, TM, a mantra, what's called the jhana practices in Vipassana or insight meditation, are concentrative methods that get you into a blissful state in much the same way, because it's using your attention fully, concentrating 100%, and then you feel wonderful when you do it. But there's a different path, which has to do with pulling back into meta-awareness. And I think that shifts from joy, bliss to equanimity, which is a different kind of

contentment. It's a different way of feeling good. But one other consideration here is that when you are no longer in that concentrated state, the monkey mind rears its ugly head again. It's back to where it was. It is an altered state and not an altered trait. Well, this is true. And in our original formulation, way back when we were at Harvard together, Richie, remember we said, the problem with altered states is that after you come down, you're the same schmuck you were before you went up.

And that got us to think about altered traits. What's really lasting? What are the real benefits? Yeah, actually, there's a very poignant story about that from Rishi's first time sitting with Goenka in India that you tell in the book, where he had this peak experience of having quite a wonderful alteration in his state. And then, well, Rishi, you can tell the story. You had, this is your, I believe, your first 10-day retreat with Goenka that got you something like meditative success. And then you came home. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast,

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