Making Sense with Sam Harris - #147 — Stephen Fry

Episode Date: January 28, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Stephen Fry about comedy, atheism, political correctness, meditation, ambition, empathy, psychedelics, Christopher Hitchens, Stephen's experience of manic depression, and much else. 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.

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Today I'm speaking with Stephen Fry. Stephen is a comedian, actor, writer, presenter, voiceover artist, and activist. Some of his most well-known acting work includes A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, Blackadder, Kingdom, and the film V for Vendetta. He's also written and presented several documentary series, including the Emmy Award-winning Stephen Fry, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. Stephen's contributed columns and articles for newspapers and magazines, and written four novels and three volumes of autobiography. And he also frequently appears on British radio.

And as you will soon hear, Stephen is just a wonderfully erudite man who fairly reeks of the most basic human decency. He really is one of the nicest guys in the world. And we cover a fair amount of ground. We discuss comedy and atheism and political correctness. There's a lot of talk about meditation and mindfulness. Talk about negative emotions, ambition, empathy, psychedelics. He was a close friend of Christopher Hitchens, so we speak about Hitch.

And we cover much else. All I can say is that if you take even a fraction of the pleasure in Stephen's company that I did, you will enjoy the next two hours. And now I bring you Stephen Fry. I'm here with Stephen Fry. Stephen, thanks for coming on the podcast. Sam, it's a pleasure. A long-held ambition finally realized. Oh, nice. Nice. Well, yeah, that's most mutual. First of all, in preparing for this, and in just looking at it, I mean, normally my experience is I invite someone on whose work I

have absorbed because they've written one book or two books. I look into your bio and there is such a profusion of creativity. It is just ridiculous. You are a comedian, a writer. You've both written nonfiction and novels. You are a presenter of many different things. You are a voiceover artist. I just started listening to your Sherlock Holmes. I believe my daughter has listened to your Sherlock Holmes. I believe

my daughter has listened to your voice more than most through Harry Potter. How do you think of your own creative output? Is one of your identities more locked up in one of these bins than another, or do you just float freely between them all? No, it's a good question, and I'm not quite sure of the answer on any given day. I might give a different response. But generally speaking, I cleave to the truth that writing is the thing that gives me the deepest satisfaction. And indeed, the highest highs, you know, the most extreme feelings of whatever that creative impulse is, it doesn't mean that what you're writing is good,

but the feeling you get from a sense of achievement in writing is the most, it's bigger than the burst of applause on stage or anything like that. But where it all comes from, I have no idea. My current theory is greed, essentially. I've accreted a lot of material that I've made and done in the same way that my body has accreted a lot of fat because I'm very greedy. I can't help eating a lot. And the result is you'll get fat. And if you're greedy to write, to perform, to try all kinds of different things. And so in the end, you have a subcutaneous layer of material that you can't quite believe. It does surprise me I've done so much.

And I think, again, without sounding over paradoxical, it may be a result of having no particular talent. I think if I were really smart, if I was smart enough to be an academic philosopher or a literary professor or something, I would have stuck to that. If I had any musical gift, I would have embraced that. If I really felt that I was a supreme actor, I would have stuck to finding good roles to play in films and TV rather than just sweeping up the odd, unconsidered

trifle. So it's the advantage of being a jack of all trades and master of none rather than the disadvantage. All right. Well, you either lack self-awareness or you're guilty of false humility or some combination of the two. Guilty of Britishness, which I'm sure we'll come to. We will come to, yeah, no doubt. So as an actor, as a comedic actor, has Hugh Laurie been your most frequent collaborator? Yes.

We met at university when we were both in our late teens, early twenties, and instantly I hit it off. I sort of have described it before as like falling in love and in a non-sexual or even bromantic way, although there was a bromance, we were best friends, I guess. It was just an instant collaborative and creative fitting and meshing.

Somehow we just had the same sense of humor as much as anything, I think, especially when you're young, because the young are very unforgiving and very knowledgeable, unlike the older, we absolutely agreed on what we hated in comedy. And I think you'll find that amongst adolescents and late adolescents when they're in a garage band.

It's as much they're doing this to piss off fans of X, Y, or Z style of music that they just hate. That's what powers the young. Can you disclose your hatreds or would you be trampling on the reputations of friends? The obvious. I think actually, I mean, we were quite, we'd like to think we were quite advanced. I mean, we used to write sketches in which we never performed because they were almost too, sketches in which we which we never performed because they were almost too we felt people didn't weren't as annoyed as we were by the cliche of the stand-up comedian even then even back in the early 80s there was starting to be these waves of comedians who were just i remember creating one

who was an american stand-up who who uh did this thing about being a drug dog sniffer and how that would be the greatest job in the world so that the stand-up comedian could be a dog and go, woo, and then could do sniffing because I thought it was such a crap, cheap, obvious, pathetic. Since that, 10 years later, I've seen comedians doing that same material. Hey, wouldn't that be a great gig? Can you imagine? You're a sniffer dog, for God's sakes. Yeah. You go, what?

How is that funny? How isn't that the most base, pathetic? I mean, if someone can do it as a vague remark in a saloon bar in the evening, it is not worthy of professional comedy. And I suppose Hugh and I had a very high doctrine of what comedy should be. It should surprise and be unlike anything you'd ever heard before. And each generation will want to tear away what they see as the clichés

and the sort of cookie-cutter approaches of the generation before. Do you feel that comedy does not age as well as many other products of creativity? Because I'm always mortified to go back to something I thought was hilarious, only to find that not only is it deeply unfunny, but I hate my former self for having found it as funny as it is. I do know embarrassment is the the word which we may come back to and and i think there are some sort of golden jewels of comedy that you seem never to

age i mean uh i played to a godchild of mine not long ago bob newhart doing his driving lessons and walter raleigh they still are just rock solid pieces of work. Partly because, I guess, they slightly suggest a sort of Mad Men era of a guy in a suit with a cigarette standing on a stage being kind of easy. But other than that, they don't really date. Whereas some early Steve Martin

that I thought was the greatest comedy I ever heard, you think, well, that wild and crazy guy isn't quite as wild and crazy as I thought he was. And maybe that's as it should be. And not only that, of course, comedian's age. And I do think certainly sketch comedy, dressing up as a bishop or a lawyer or a judge or something, is funnier when a young person does it. It's a bit like the school. It's a bit like the school. It's a bit like doing an impression of your school teacher.

Right. And when you're actually old enough to be a judge or a bishop, it's character acting. It isn't quite the same as the sort of Python-esque. The wonderful thing about seeing Python playing brigadier generals and bishops and things is that they're still in their 20s. Yeah. So I only met Hugh once very briefly,

but he seems like an extraordinarily nice guy. Yeah, he came to see you, didn't he? Yeah, he's a big admirer of yours. He came to the event I did with Steve Pinker. That's right. Yeah, so that was great to meet him. So you and I met at Hitch's Memorial. I'm surprised it took so long for us to meet because we were in

similar circles for a while as voluble atheists. I was the groom to the four horsemen or the ostler, just sort of holding the reins. Off you go, sir, as you go and gallop off and spread the news, I'll be back here with a point for you when you're on your way back. Well, yeah. So that I should probably flag that at the outset here. So the nominal pretext for our conversation is that we're releasing the book version of the conversation, the Four Horsemen conversation that Hitch, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett and I had in 2007, which was recorded happily, really was recorded as an afterthought. We almost did, we just got together in Hitch's apartment and- Yes, filled in his DC apartment.

Yeah. And I was surprised to realize that that was actually the only conversation the four of us ever had. It's counterintuitive even to me, knowing my own life, but I'm sure it will be counterintuitive to the people who hear this. And so anyway, we refined the transcript of that conversation, and then each wrote introductory essays, and you were generous enough to write a forward to it. And so that's coming out in, I believe, March. Obviously, it's available on Amazon now for pre-order and we're shamelessly plugging this here. All the proceeds go to the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science which I believe is now

joined at the hip with the Center for Inquiry. It is indeed. They very kindly gave me an award at Las Vegas this year. So I went to meet with the other. They're fused as one body. And it's worth remembering that at that time you four four were, you were characterized as the new atheists.

There was this idea of a new atheism, a rather more intellectually rigorous, open, free thinking, unafraid way of addressing secularity, humanism, and the burdens and torments that religion was imposing on the world. And 2007 isn't that long ago, and yet we have to remember that's the year the iPhone came out. The year Twitter came out. You know, a lot has changed since then. And it's fascinating to hear and watch you four talking about the world

and wondering whether this has been made irrelevant by the rise of social media and the rise of all the things that have risen since then. But actually, one finds that, as I think I say in the introduction, that talking about religion and the dangers of accepting religion or being bound by religion or allowing religious doctrine to inform policy and to be sort of allowing religious doctrine to inform policy and to be sort of unquestioned in government and the world. The dangers of that are as apparent now as they were then, and they actually leech outside and things become a subset of religion in a way that is just as important.

The same kind of heresies and blasphemies, no longer pertaining to God and Jesus and Allah, but pertaining to gender politics and to all kinds of other issues now. And we're still in the same position of thinking, gosh, there are still inquisitions. There are still utter defes. You see people falling, tumbling, disgraced because they've said something heretical, foolish. And it's actually greater now than it was in 2007 when the power of religion was still strong then and the church, particularly the Roman church, but also evangelical Christianity in this country, United States, where we're speaking, was on the rise, the Tea Party and all those things would be going to happen. But it's- Yeah, I wouldn't count religion out just yet. I think, I mean, we see the pendulum keep swinging, but yeah, you're right to see the parallel with this new orthodoxy of political

correctness, which was, you know, has always been a term and a concept, at least for the last few decades. But this is really a front on which Hitch is so dearly missed. On more than 100 occasions, I'm sure I have thought, man, wouldn't it be great for Hitch to respond to this horror that just appeared. We'll get to the free speech stuff. that just appeared. We'll get to the free speech stuff. Actually, I just want to reference something that you wrote in your forward to the book, which caught my eye now that I've spent some time in the mindfulness minds producing a meditation app. You wrote in your description of me, you described me as being, quote, proficient in forms of meditation that an Englishman of my cast finds incomprehensible and deeply embarrassing. I can't even say the word mindfulness without blushing. Now, of course, I'm in the terrible province.

I'm hearing your voice, and your voice, because I have subscribed. You kindly showed me how to subscribe to your waking up course of meditation and mindfulness, and I've subscribed to it, and I've been obediently following through. And your voice now has a very special place in my head because it's that irritating voice which you're fully aware of you flag this that just as one's mind is beginning to spin off into a nothingness or whatever it is that as one concentrates on one's breathing and obeys the instructions you're giving there's a nice silence and there silence and inhalation and exhalation. Then, damn it, your voice comes in again and plucks one up. And as you're aware, it can be something one's got to get used to because my instinct is

simply to fall asleep. The moment I start concentrating on my breathing, I'm falling asleep. And I know meditation and sleep aren't the same thing. No, no, both are good, but they're distinct. Yes, no. Both are good, but they're distinct. Yes, they are indeed. But I'm very fascinated by this and fascinated by your role in this because, yes, I am embarrassed by words like mindfulness because I'm not quite sure what they mean. And that's an embarrassment.

It gives me an awkwardness. It's perhaps a kind of similar word, not quite synonymous, but close to it. I even came across wellfulness the other day, which made me laugh a great deal. I haven't heard that one, no. That embarrasses even me. And one used to use the word to be mindful, to be aware. And so awareness, as we know,

is an Anglo-Saxon version of conscious. So we're talking about consciousness, awareness, heightened consciousness. I remember having a big row with john cleese once about that he nearly stalked out of a restaurant because i i genuinely said to him i don't understand how you can have levels of consciousness what what are they what is a higher level of consciousness does it mean i'm seeing the red as redder or hearing the music more keenly or understanding a situation more accurately with greater acuity how what are these levels and i'm a very very empirical person and i love to see how things are true and with mindfulness and let me just be a devil's

advocate with sure i'm not going to attack you i know i really i've got great value already out of your course and i'm finding it fascinating but i think we we all know that brain training games have been found to have zero applicability as far as actually improving the brain is concerned they might make you slightly better at the game you're training at so yeah for example whether it's a crossword or it's a memory game or something you slightly better at the game you're training at. For example, whether it's a crossword or it's a memory game or something, you're better at the crossword and better at the memory game. There may be some slight advantage in delaying forms of dementia by playing these games, which again, I mean, that makes rational sense,

but there may be empirical evidence, epidemiological evidence that that works. But I am puzzled to think that you make claims for meditation, for example, that it has cognitive effects. And I, you know, I did a, I went to documentary series going around America. I remember when we were in Iowa, I went to this town in Iowa, which is owned by transcendental meditation people. They have a university there. And I went to interview them. And they covered me in electrodes and tried to baffle me with science about alpha and you would say theta, which is theta in English.

But, you know, waves. And I'm aware of this, that you can be in a position of such concentration and relaxation at the same time that you can probably think off the top of your head a thousand uses for a paper clip which are creative and amusing which someone who's trying too hard wouldn't be able to it's it's a bit like the the salmon alive salmon is is what an idea is what what a thought is and and if you try and clutch it it's because it's alive and it's wet, it slips out of your grasp.

But if you hold it just right, you know. And that's what I know some of the claims of meditation are, that they allow this simultaneous relaxation and concentration. And I think that's good. And I like the idea of it. But I've always been propelled by, as I say, by greed and by ambition and by all the sort of darker sides of lust and awkwardness

and embarrassment, as I've said, that drive one to a fascination with things. And the very torment and difficulty of a human mind and its need for things and its greed for things has been for me what energizes and what makes me who i am and i see i've always had this terrible fear of almost anything whether it's a pharmaceutical or psychoanalytical psychotherapeutic or or to do with meditation. I've seen it as a kind of zombifying, a kind of taking the edge off my mind. I want my anger. The seven deadly sins to me are the seven deadly propellants or the fuel that get me forward in life. And I know that's nonsensical. No, it's not nonsensical at all. There's truth to many of those claims. I think,

let's take the first piece. So yeah, the research on the benefits of training, forget about just mental training, this is even true of physical training, suggests that you get better at what you train, very specifically. And in many cases, there's much less of a transfer effect than you'd expect. And this, again, this can be true even of physical training in a gym. It's like you get stronger in precisely the ways in which you exercise. And people who could be just hulking with muscle and look like fantastically strong athletes, if you put them in a paradigm that has to be working the same muscle groups, but it's not the way

they train, they're not nearly as impressive as they are. Hence cross-training and things like that. Exactly. That's why people mix it up endlessly to be very well-rounded athletes. The same is true of the mind. As you say, if you do these brain training games that work, some aspect of working memory say, well, you get better at that particular task, but it doesn't transfer into the rest of your intellectual life, or at least there's no evidence that I'm aware of that it does at this

point. And we should also just acknowledge that meditation can mean many different things. There are different types of meditation, and so people can be training different things under that guise. But with mindfulness, what you're training is the very thing you want more of, arguably, once you understand how it can function in the economy of your emotional and cognitive life, which is you're becoming more aware of the dynamics of your own mental suffering.

Just the way in which being captured by thought moment to moment is leaving you hostage to whatever the contents of those thoughts are. And once you learn there's some modicum of mindfulness, you actually see there's a choice between being lost in thought, and by lost I mean thinking without even being dimly aware for those moments or minutes or hours that you're thinking. It's very much like being asleep and dreaming, right? You're just ruled by your thoughts.

And then you're just laid bare to whatever emotional and behavioral implications are there. So you're angry, you're sad, you're saying the life deranging and relationship deranging things you say as an angry or sad person to your spouse or whoever. And mindfulness simply gives you the ability to, if nothing else, choose how long you want to be angry or sad for, really. Because you can just punctuate that you want to be angry or sad for, really. You can just punctuate that wheelworks of reactivity and pause, if only for a few moments. And those pauses can be enormously beneficial. Now, to your point about, I guess, classically negative emotions being a source of creativity and energy. I think that's true for many of us some of the time, but I think it's

easy to either just in a delusory way make a virtue of necessity there. I mean, those of us who are ruled by negative emotion are finding some silver lining to them, whereas mostly they're just a source of suffering that would be great to get rid of. I mean, if you could put on one hat, of suffering that would be great to get rid of. I mean, if you could put on one hat, which would allow you to feel the optimum motivational component of one, positive emotions that you're not tending to feel, and two, you could titrate your negative emotions just to like their creative optimum, but then not suffer whenever you didn't feel like suffering, right? If there's some happy balance there, you might understand that very few of us find it just by accident. Because if you can't be mindful, if you can't notice the next

thought arise and capture your conscious life for moments or minutes or hours, you are simply living out the consequences of your past conditioning and just who you were yesterday. There is actually no choice to make. Whereas if you train this particular skill, again, the awareness of the process and an ability to step back can give you another degree of freedom. And if it is just, listen, this is, it's good to be angry for the next 10 minutes because that's how I'm going to write this scene. Well, then use it that way. Yeah. Yes, and I wouldn't want to overstate the values

of what we tend to call negative emotions like anger and fear and so on. I suppose, I remember once I was filming years ago and Maggie Smith, the wonderful Maggie Smith was in it and we were in a sort of typical English country house and there were fields around it. And she looked and in that very Maggie Smith way, she looked at these cows. She said, don't they ever get bored? And it was a sort of funny remark, but I still thought that's a very obvious, profound remark. Children must think that. There's a cow in a field.

And if we project ourselves into that cow for just a minute. We are absolutely, absolutely distraught with boredom. The idea that all we have to do is haul these calories into our interior, cropping grass, never stopping, always standing up, occasionally looking around, bits of rainfall on you, and then you wander around and you break wind and then you drop a cow pat and then you move on and that's your day. There's no books, there's no television, there's no conversation, there's no imagining. Haven't they though achieved the absolute height of mindfulness?

They have, they're concentrating purely on being a cow. They're achieving their cowness 100% of the time. What it is when you're a human is that we are constantly feeling we're falling short of what we should be. That a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? Browning rather wonderfully put it. We're constantly with something else up on the hill. It's both mad, and we know it's mad because whenever we get to the top of the hill, we

want another hill to climb to. And, you know, Alexander wept when he saw there were no more kingdoms to conquer, whatever phrase it is. But at least I'm not a cow, you know? And yet we look- Didn't Caesar also weep when he contemplated how much Alexander had conquered? Yes, exactly. Oh, there's always going to be envy as well. But, you know, and at their best, you look at an animal i always think of the amazonian tree frog i once encountered and its face was just it's like like the face of someone you fell in love with when you just briefly glanced them getting onto an underground train and never saw them again for the rest of your life but you always know they

were the one you know and this tree frog was standing you know with an arm on one branch and an arm on another legs open with an enormous grin on its face and was standing, you know, with an arm on one branch and an arm on another, legs open, with an enormous grin on its face. And I remember thinking, you know, you don't, as a tree frog, you never wake up in the morning thinking, was I a good tree frog yesterday? And I thought, oh, I let myself down. I let my family down. Oh, I'm going to have to apologize to someone tomorrow morning. We can be pretty sure they don't think that.

What they are is 100% of the time fully realized as a tree frog. They fully achieve their destiny. And we don't. We never do. And if I met someone who had, I would just think they were just like some joke, you know, smiling Buddhist who always just gave me the truth in reverse all the time. You know, you must not sit down on the sofa. You must let the sofa stand up on you. I'm not interested. Go away. Don't talk nonsense. And you know that we're actually annoyed by placidity

by the cow in the field. When we meet it amongst humans, we think, come on, where's the juice, the bite, the vinegar, the fun, the snap. And again, I am definitely being devil's advocate here. I'm not saying that I genuinely, I genuinely don't disparage these ideas of mindfulness. And I'm fully aware that unhappiness and its wider forms, as we all know, the epidemiology on suicide and self-harm that is sweeping our culture. It's huge. Although, again, there's a lot of misreading of those data. You know, WHO will tell you that there is no higher instance of depression in the so-called developed world than there is in the undeveloped world. That actually is pretty even.

Interesting. I feel like we've been propagandized with another message recently. Exactly. That we must be guilty because we live in an emotionally constipated, difficult, bad, awful culture that needs released into a nice, sweet world of friendliness and empathy. And I agree with that. But then I see empathy as coming from exactly things like embarrassment. Embarrassment are a result of empathy.

You're embarrassed for other people when you see them making a mistake. Because embarrassment, there's one's own shame, pudeur, whatever word you want to use, that one can feel about one's naked state, one's desires, all the things that we're ashamed of inside the primal genesis. We were naked and we were ashamed, we say to God, you know. But there's the real embarrassment is the embarrassment you feel for other people. I think it's a form of real empathy to feel awkward about others. That's why I can't watch any reality TV. I'm just screaming.

Mortifying, yeah. Just cannot bear seeing people put in that position, even if they're happy or clearly believe they are and think they've triumphed. I just want, I weep. Yeah. It's strange. I can't explain. I have a problem watching ice skating.

The failures in ice skating I find more painful than anywhere in athletics because the mismatch between what was gracefully being accomplished a moment before and what happens when they splatter all over the ice. It's just ghastly. Do you know Paul Bloom's work on empathy? I've heard of it, but I don't know it. Yeah, maybe we'll touch that in a second because it's fascinating. To come back to your point

about the cows, the mindful cows, no one who studies mindfulness or who gets deep into the practice thinks that mere placidity, and certainly not bovine placidity, is an exemplar of the practice. And this is actually a misunderstanding that you can persist for a long time while one's practicing. It's not really passive. I mean, time while one's practicing, it's not really passive. I mean, there's something very active about mindfulness because you are keenly aware of the actual character of your experience in a way that you're tending not to be in every other moment. I mean, the moment where you're consumed by thought, where your reach is exceeding your grasp, tends to be a moment where you are actually not, your attention is bound up by thought and reactivity and prejudice, you know, and in ways where you're not actually

cognitively and emotionally available in all kinds of other ways that you could recognize the value of and the rewarding nature of if you could inhabit that band of consciousness long enough. So I mean, just like socially, like when you are in the mode of your ambition in relationship to other people, there are all kinds of experiences you're not having with other people that if you could have them, you might recognize they're actually preferable, right? So when you're ambitious, when there are many things you desire, you walk into a room with a bunch of other people and they're beginning to function like props in your world where you either have to

get around them, you have to use them, they all have kind of instrumental value. If somebody's incredibly wealthy, that may be relevant to you're a you know a fundraiser or you have something if that if that completes part of the puzzle of your own ambition you know you should begin to see people in ways which are again instrumentalizing of them and it makes you unavailable to actually connect in ways that you would otherwise connect if your attention were free of your own desire can i do a bit simpler in a way? I mean, if you're talking about body, mind or body, brain, and obviously that's a whole thorny issue about brain and mind, but let's just say for the moment they're roughly the same thing. If someone's been to the gym, if someone has body fullness,

if someone runs and goes to the gym and is brilliantly trained and very fit, I can see it straight away. And what's more, I can go upstairs with them, next to them, and I'm puffing at the top of the stairs and they aren't. There's so many obvious signs of their superiority and of the achievement that their training has given them. It's just apparent. Now, can you say to me that we can have a random test in which I meet 20 people and I will be able to see straight away which 10 of them have had mindfulness training and which 10 haven't. If they're just a random bunch of people, is there some equivalent to that? My God, look at what they can lift. Look how fast they can go up the stairs without getting out of breath. Look at what their balance. Look at the physical

achievement they've made through all this training. Can I see that? Or is it only comparing it with oneself? Well, the comparison to oneself, provided one does enough training, that can be, in the end, all the comparison one needs. That's all that matters. Yes, of course. I see that. But I just wondered, just purely as a... I would argue it's a false standard. I mean, the truth is, in the extreme case, yes, it can become apparent. You can meet extraordinary examples of stability in this kind of practice or related practices like loving-kindness practice, where you meet someone who's just trained up this one style of relating to other people, where they've been meditating for years on wishing others,

strangers, anyone you know all conscious beings actually to be free of demonism yeah kind of just giving out of so there's just yeah there's just a kind of a surplus of good intention that you can you can feel that's something that's not innate in their characteristic but that they have trained themselves to yeah yeah and you can train you know you can train it yourself i mean mean, obviously there are pharmacological examples of these kinds of changes. I mean, people who take MDMA know what it's like for the span of eight hours to feel... Have you ever done any psychedelic too? Yes. And you've only once had to take LSD for it to be with you for the rest of your life, just to the effect that it can have on one. All those Huxley kind of things about doors

of perception are lamentably true let's talk about that for a second so so yeah so you've taken it you when did you take lsd not for i mean decades ago but i remember almost the entire it was like over a weekend with some friends and it was extremely profound and remarkable experience and it was it extremely positive or was it it was positive there was one tiny moment when i was alone at one point where i got terribly, terribly afraid and had a recursive image in my head that wouldn't go away, which was beginning to frighten me.

And I was tumbling down it, but I was brought out of that. But that was an important part of it. And I remember all the, you know, there's, I'm never quite sure the difference between them, but quiddity and hegcity, the thisness and thatness of things. One would look at one's fingernail and see the fingernailness of a fingernail and how extraordinarily fingernaily it was.

I felt as doing it that I would never lose that, that I would be able to bring back this way of looking at things so that I could see the grain and the absolute whatness of them. And that was a very valuable and extraordinary experience. And it chimed with everything I'd read and then continued to read from people like Butler Huxley and I guess to

some extent. All right. So let me ask you, so imagine the most normative component of that experience or the place in that experience where if you could maintain that state of consciousness, you would say, okay, well, that's obviously more fulfilling, more drenched in clarity or meaning than the experiences I'm tending to have say two things to notice about that one is that there's not necessarily anything someone could have noticed about you from the outside that would have advertised that state of consciousness especially well right so you would have just been sitting on a couch staring at your fingernail wow slightly too much more than i usually ever would wow this man likes his

fingernails yeah exactly there's a lot of wowing but no you're right there's no no no other other difference other than this absolute openness to to the experience especially of the senses i mean every one of them so the the coldness and the wetness of water in the mouth and as well as this you know sight of flowers and all the cliches, which reminded me of my, I think we can all remember times, if we're lucky at least, in adolescence in particular, where we are become convinced in a quite solipsistic way that only we really see how beautiful a dawn is or an animal or a flower or the nature or love and that we are particularly privileged to have this access to the staggering beauty of everything.

And it overwhelms us, and it's a very teenage thing. And as a teenager, I didn't want to lose it. I was aware, at a different sort of consciousness, a more intellectual consciousness, or one that had done a lot of reading, precocious kind of consciousness, I was aware that this would pass, that this this was a phase i had read enough autobiographies and spiritual autobiographies of writers and you wouldn't be a teenager to know that this would leave me and i felt savagely that

i never wanted it to and of course i always believed that art art and music in particular were pathways to to to retaining that. So if I listen to a Schubert sonata or something, it's an instant access straight away to these profound feelings and revelations, this terrific sense of the beauty and the majesty and the glory as well as the fear of the power of the way things are at an atomic level or at a great sort of huge natural level. You'll know. Anybody listening will know that.

We don't talk about it much because it's embarrassing slightly because it's just so diffusive. More for Englishmen, I think. Yeah, it probably is. Which is why I suppose they become poets. It's why Keats is so Keats and Shakespeare is so Shakespeare because they have to find a way because they're not allowed to talk like that in the pub. So yeah, not to give a false impression here. So what I'm saying about LSD is not that the experiences one tends to have on LSD are exactly like what the goal is of

sustained mindfulness, but there's a few lessons to draw there. One is that no matter how glorious that experience has been for many of us who've taken those drugs, there's not necessarily an outward sign. There's no physical aura that says, ah, I see you have taken that.

Yeah, and you can, you know, those of us who have related to people in those states recognize that if you interact with them long enough, you begin to see more or less vivid signs that their state of mind is transformed. But it can be very subtle, and depending on how your attention is bound up and how you view other people,

you may not notice anything out of the ordinary at all. But also the other point is that there's nothing that your brain is doing on LSD or any other drug that your brain in principle isn't capable of doing without those drugs. Because if you just look at the pharmacology of any drug, all a drug does is mimic the behavior of existing neurotransmitters or cause those neurotransmitters to be in the synapse longer or less long. There are not many levers in the brain for a drug to pull, and they're all part of the brain.

So you can be fairly confident that whatever experience anyone has had on any drug, there's somebody somewhere who's had a very similar experience without any drug, right? Just whether they're based on neurological injury or- William Blake, which is why poets and mystics like that were so appealing to the first generation to discover drugs like LSD, you know, to the Timothy Leary's and the Huxley's and so on, was because they thought this, people have been there before. They have pulled back this membrane or they've entered this tunnel and they've seen things that this drug is allowing me to do it now they've done it through their own their own insight or their own ability to let go and whatever it might be

or indeed their own discipline in their own craft i mean if if i to me, I remember when I first read the four words of Whitman as a teenager, which I couldn't understand as words, but which hit me like a lightning bolt. I sing the body electric famous line. It's a cliche almost, but to me, that did everything that an acid trip could do, but also a mindfulness experience or a meditation period is I would stare at those words and my mind would go through, why do they have this effect on me? What is it meaning? Who am I connecting with? Who else feels like this? Who was this man? And by penetrating poetry or art or music, I'm getting all the benefits of mindfulness, but they're not solipsistic or egotistical

because they involve learning about this other person who's given it to me. Who was this Schubert? Who was this Wagner? Who was the, oh, it doesn't matter, Jimmy Hendrix or Duke Ellington, it doesn't matter what sort of art it is, but you know, that you're actually learning, you're getting cultural, social history, racial history, European history,

all kinds of incredible histories, as well as technique and craft of prosody and poetic writing and music and chord shifting. And how do all these things make me feel so extraordinary and it it it's it's a full-on investigation rather than sitting cross-legged looking at my omphalos and i'm wondering about myself because i've always felt this powerful counterintuitive thing that the less one inspects oneself, the more rewarding it is to oneself. And that's one of my fears, if you like, or embarrassments about meditation is that it's a bit egotistical. It's a bit vain and therefore not helpful. There's nothing wrong with being vain and egotistical, no there there is a lot wrong with it there is no no i would well so again i think that's a misapprehension of the project first i would say is that mindfulness is definitely not a surrogate for all of the other

things you just mentioned no and it's not the same mention that in your in your films and you know in your talks and so on. It's not a replacement for being artistically creative or appreciating the creativity of others. Those are just separate things to do. Now, it's not incompatible with those things. You can be mindful and do all of those things while being mindful. That's also true. And I would argue that you'd be more appreciative of many of the products of your own creativity or others because you can actually pay attention. You're just not as distractible, right?

So it is, you know, the distraction is the enemy of everything we want to pay attention to, whether it's our own creativity, a movie we're trying to watch, a telephone call that we're on the phone with our mothers or whatever, and we're losing the train of her thought because we're multitasking. You and I, and I bet most people listening would agree that if we could bottle concentration, if we could learn how to just instantly zoom in and focus on the job that has to be done without having to look out of the window for half an hour first or traipse around the room or go off to drive and pick up some eggs and milk and come back again and then face the dreaded blinking screen or whatever it is, the job, then yes, the distraction. And that actually is one of the primary skills that is transferable from meditation because meditation is the ability to pay close attention to any arbitrary object, right? So if you, say, stare at that water bottle for five minutes, somebody who really knows how to meditate, who has trained it as a skill,

can stare at it and be one-pointed enough such that not much else is happening, right? So if the goal is to just keep eyes on the water bottle and attention inwardly on the water bottle and attention inwardly on the water bottle, that is an impossible task for most people. It becomes increasingly possible the more you learn to meditate. So then swap out that water bottle for anything else, you know, the laughing face of your child, right? When you have your smartphone competing for your attention, but your child is there and you've got this one opportunity to pay attention.

attention, but your child is there and you've got this one opportunity to pay attention. We're constantly faced with this triaging of our attention in our lives. And it is the one thing we never get back. How we use each moment of attention is how we use them. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content,

including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.