Making Sense with Sam Harris - #209 — A Good Life

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with Scott Barry Kaufman about human well-being. They discuss intelligence and creativity, wisdom and transcendence, the history of humanistic psychology, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the connection between well-being and ethics, self-esteem, psychedelics and meditation, peak and plateau experiences, mortality salience, the pre-trans fallacy, fear of uncertainty, work and meaning, intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards, pathological altruism, intimacy vs. belonging, two aspects of self-transcendence, 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.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher along with other subscriber-only content.

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and we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked. Okay, just a brief announcement here. I have a new book coming out. It publishes August 11th. It is available for pre-order now on Amazon. And this is the first volume related to the podcast. It is called Making Sense,

Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity. And in it, we've taken some of the best conversations from the first 200 episodes of the podcast and refined them for print. I edited my side of the conversation, the guests edited theirs, so this was an interesting opportunity to make sure we had said exactly what we wanted to say on the topic at hand. So for those of you who'd want to revisit some of these conversations and see them in their final form, the book is available. And for the people in your life who haven't figured out how to listen to podcasts, this would be a great way to share some of the more interesting conversations I've had here with them. These are the conversations

I had with Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, David Deutsch, Daniel Kahneman, David Krakauer, Glenn Lowry, Thomas Metzinger, Robert Sapolsky, Anil Seth, Timothy Snyder, and Max Tegmark. Anyway, enjoy that. And that's it for housekeeping. As you know, I recently did a podcast on racism and police violence, and then I went on to the cheerful topic of existential risk. My next podcast is going to be on the ongoing threat of nuclear war, so it is a grim season on the podcast. But today there's a spot of sunlight, because today I'm speaking with Scott Barry Kaufman about human well-being. Scott is the author of the book Transcend, the new science of self-actualization. Scott is a humanistic psychologist who has taught at Columbia University,

the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and elsewhere. He writes the column Beautiful Minds for Scientific American, and he hosts the Psychology Podcast. He's also written for the Atlantic and Harvard Business Review, and his previous books include Ungifted, Wired to Create, Twice Exceptional, which he edited, and he also edited the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence. Anyway, we cover a lot of ground in this episode. We talk about the difference between intelligence and creativity. We talk about wisdom and transcendence, the history of humanistic psychology, Maslow's hierarchy of needs,

the connection between well-being and ethics, self-esteem, psychedelics and meditation, peak and plateau experiences, mortality salience, the pre-trans fallacy, fear of uncertainty, work and meaning, intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards, pathological altruism, intimacy versus belonging, two aspects of self-transcendence, and other topics. I now bring you Scott Barry Kaufman. I am here with Scott Barry Kaufman. Scott, thanks for joining me. Oh, thanks for having me on your show, Sam. So you've written a fascinating book titled Transcend, The New Science of Self-Actualization, and you also have a podcast of your own, The Psychology Podcast. Maybe let's start with just an introduction to

your background in psychology. What sorts of issues have you focused on, and how do you describe your work at this point? Sure. I think we have lots of mutual interests. your work at this point? Sure. I think we have lots of mutual interests. When I first started off, I got my PhD in cognitive science and cognitive psychology and was really interested in the cognition of intelligence. And I actually started off in real traditional intelligence research, so studying IQ testing. And I was absolutely fascinated with what are the cognitive processes underlining intelligence and IQ. And then it branched off a little bit to other forms of cognition like implicit learning and unconscious learning. I was curious if unconscious learning was related to conscious learning and whether it was such a thing as unconscious intelligence that would correlate or not correlate with IQ.

And that's what my dissertation was on. that would correlate or not correlate with IQ. And that's what my dissertation was on. And then it moved on to creativity work and understanding the distinction and similarities between intelligence and creativity. And then in the past four or five years, I've really gotten into positive psychology and humanistic psychology

and trying to understand above just our mind and human intelligence, but how can we realize our whole being, not just one slice of us? Yeah, I want to focus mostly on the humanistic and positive side of things and talk about self-transcendence and the furthest reaches of human well-being, but maybe we can take a moment to tie it to some of your earlier work. How would you differentiate intelligence, creativity, and wisdom? How do you think about those things? Yeah, it's a great, great, great question. So intelligence, I view as the, we can just really shorthand it and say it's the ability to

apprehend and perceive what is. And when I got into imagination research, I defined imagination as the ability to apprehend and perceive what could be. And so I actually view creativity as a combination of intelligence and imagination. So creativity is having the ability to apprehend what is and really learn and understand the real true nature of the world without any prior beliefs or biases. But we have to go beyond that for creativity. We also have to have that foresight into what society could be, what could humans become, you know? And I see creativity as a combination of both intelligence and imagination. Does that make sense?

Creativity is somewhat paradoxical, it seems to me, because if you're too creative, right, if you're not obeying any of the rules, well, then it suddenly becomes worthless or next to worthless. Like you're extracting meaning that either isn't there or is there only for you, but it can't be communicated to others. And so this is sort of where the psychedelic experience can become obviously not normative and not all that useful, even though, and I hope we'll talk about psychedelics as well. But how do you view- I hope we'll talk about psychedelics as well, but how do you view the rule following and rule breaking with respect to creativity?

Yeah, one of the key aspects of creative people, and I did a research project when I was working on this book with the journalist Carolyn Gregoire, the book was called Wired to Create, and I was working on that. I was trying to look to see what do creative people do differently. And one of the most obvious things they do differently is that they do things differently. You know, they, creative people are rule breakers in the sense that maybe they're not necessarily provocateurs, and that's a different kind of rule breaking. And I think it's actually important to distinguish between those who are intentional, like I would say compulsive rule breakers versus those who do it as a means to an end for greater meaning and creative realization. So then where does wisdom come in?

Okay, wisdom. It has been defined in lots of different ways. In the psychological literature, it's been defined not just through the psychological literature, but throughout the course of human history. But in my book, Transcend, that's the climax. That's where we end up in understanding what wisdom could mean from a self-actualization perspective or a transcendence perspective. from a self-actualization perspective or a transcendence perspective. And I view wisdom as really encompassing this dichotomy transcendence that one of my favorite psychologists, Abraham Maslow, talked a lot about. He said at the highest state of consciousness, lots of dichotomies that

everyone else in our society is really interested and obsessed with, and these false dichotomies, we're able to transcend them in some way and we're able to see how everything is just part of a larger whole. This might even have to be, to make it concrete, it could be like the distinction between selfishness and altruism. You know, at the highest level of consciousness, if you're, and being the highest level of motivation, if you're selfish in the sense that you're getting really enjoyment out of what you're doing, but you are also connected to the world and your enjoyment brings enjoyment to others simultaneously, you know, the word selfishness starts to lose meaning. Evil versus good. You start to have a more realistic understanding of human nature and

you, on the one hand, can recognize the human frailties, but you also have the capacity to see that there's good in humans, so dialecticals. Wisdom to me is really this ability to hold seemingly incompatible things in your head as well as with yourself, recognize your own contradictions and zoom out on yourself and see all those contradictions as part of a integrated whole that could be integrated. My gosh, if you can find a way to take all these warring factions that exist within ourselves, we were evolved to be that way. There was no unitary system that through the course of human evolution that tried to make sure that we were integrated humans. But my gosh, these humans who exist, who can work towards integration and feeling inner wholeness to some degree, those are very wise people, in my opinion. Let's talk about your book and how you sort of scale that mountain where wisdom is the place one hopes to arrive.

Why has positive psychology and humanistic psychology and the various branches that, I'm not sure how stable these labels are now, but why has the positive side of the human experience traditionally been given such little attention in psychology? I mean, I know that's changed of late with Seligman, perhaps, first in my lifetime. And as you show in your book, we had people like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers and other people who went by the label humanistic psychology, struggling to focus on this. And is it a legacy of sort of what Freud did to our thinking about the prospects of human happiness? How do you view the last century or so of psychology's

emphasis on all that is wrong with the human mind or potentially wrong and basic ignorance of the possibility of things going right with the mind. Well, I will long believe that we should have listened to William James and not Freud. We should have listened to, in some senses, the originator of research psychology or empirical data psychology. A lot of Freud's ideas were very armchair and were, ironically, projections of his own soul, so to speak, or his own issues, projecting that onto all of humanity. But you ask a very good question because humanistic psychology was quite popular in a 10 to 20 year period in 50s, 60s. It caught the time of hippies, the sort of spirit of the 60s and, you know, LSD and the

beat writers, all this sort of idea of creativity and spirituality. It was part of the culture. And, you know, I try to think why it died out, because it did die out from like the 70s till Martin Seligman really brought it back in a big way by putting positive psychology on a scientific foundation in 1998 or so. And what happened between the 70s and 1998? Well, you know, there's lots of ways of trying to answer that question. One way is recognizing that the bad is stronger than the good. We are more focused on when we have deprivations, and there's certainly no shortage of deprivations among humans to work on.

Depression, anxiety, these things become more pressing concerns for us when we're in that deprived state. If we're feeling satisfied, we don't seek a therapist so that we are even more satisfied. I mean, if you go to a therapist and you say, Doc, I only feel average life satisfaction, but I want to be like these positive psychologists. You find something else. You find a coach, maybe, or you don't go to a therapist for that. You're not clinical psychology, not psychology. You know what I'm saying. So the bad is stronger than good in a lot of ways. And it is important, you know, a purpose of the field of psychology, the stated mission

of the APA and what I think psychology should be about is improving human life. And improving human life, like I said, there's no shortage of suffering. So that can take up a lot of it. So yeah, I don't know the exact answer to that question, but I think part of it is connected to the spirit of the times in the 50s and 60s. And we don't really have that 60s spirit right now, do we? Yeah, well, the 60s died in various ways and for some reasons that make sense. There was an explosion of dysfunction.

In addition to all the enthusiasm and insight, there was a fair amount of dysfunction and chaos being advertised. And it's just, you know, I'm a big proponent of the wise use of psychedelics, as you probably know, but the haphazard use of them obviously comes with its significant risk, and that risk was borne out in many people's lives. I had another thought, and that's that they're definitely outside of psychology. There was no lack of the Tony Robbins of the world or books on how to be your best self, how to realize your potential. So outside of psychology, you know, and the pop help, and I wonder if to a certain extent, the field of psychology, which likes to see itself as a, like physics, you know, like a science, at least a lot of psychologists do,

we're really put off by, you know, by that world and wanted to distinguish itself from, you know, we're not self-help, you know, woo-woo, you know, we're more scientific. And I just wonder if that has part to do with it as well. woo-woo, you know, we're more scientific. And I just wonder if that has part to do with it as well. Yeah, I think it does. And also the explicit religious and Eastern influence on humanistic psychology. I know we'll get into this, but people like Maslow were influenced by teachers like Krishnamurti or Buddhist writers like Alan Watts. And the brain trust for this movement, positive psychology before it called itself positive, would often meet at places like Esalen Institute. And that became a hub for the New Age. And it gathered all of

these influences, some of which are really the antithesis of science. I once taught a weekend at Esalen a long time ago, but simultaneous with that, I'm sure there were things in the catalog like how crystals can balance your chakras. And the sky's the limit in terms of what people will believe in the esoteric vein, whether Eastern or Western in its influence. And it has much more in common with traditional religion than it does with scientific rigor. And so the stink of the new age on all of this is probably what academic psychology is reacting to as well. I think that's right. And that stigma is still there. Sometimes when you say is reacting to as well. I think that's right. And that stigma is still there. Sometimes when you say you do research in positive psychology, there's some sectors of psychologists that look down on that as maybe not as scientifically rigorous.

Right, right. Okay, so now people have heard of Maslow. If they haven't really heard of him as a person or even humanistic psychology. Most people have heard of his hierarchy of needs, and this is one of these exports from somebody's work that got somewhat falsified in the transit to the rest of culture. So what is it that people think they know about this pyramid, and what is it that Maslow thought he was teaching about it? Well, a lot of people may have seen the pyramid. They may not even heard the name Abraham Maslow, but certainly they've seen it on the internet,

maybe diagrammed as a pyramid with like, now you see toilet paper at the bottom of the pyramid or in the age of COVID or Wi-Fi battery was popular before that. It's a meme. And it's suggesting there's different levels of needs. Some are more foundational than others. And Maslow's original theory, he never drew a pyramid in his writings. I mean, I was looking through the writings. I was like, where's the pyramid? Where is it? I couldn't find a pyramid. And he was talking about a hierarchy of prepotency.

We have some needs that are more prepotent over others, that when they're deprived, they take up more of our attention. And we really focus all of our energy and resources to satisfying that. So he argued at the base, although it's not a pyramid, but our most prepotent need, I should say, is the physiological needs like food, shelter, water. is the physiological needs like food, shelter, water. And then the next prepotent need is the need for love and belonging, according to Maslow. And then the next prepotent need is the need for esteem, esteem from others as well as self-esteem. And then the argument was,

if we could have these basic needs met, then we can really be free to self-actualize, to become all that we're uniquely capable of becoming. All of those basic needs are things that we share with other animals, and we also share with other humans. So it doesn't make you particularly special if you say, I'm lonely, or I'm hungry, or I want respect. Yeah, stand in line. Everyone wants respect. You know, so, but if you start to say something like, I can play a violin concerto like no one else in the world can play a violin concerto. Now we're starting to talk about self-actualization. You know, what is this unique core potentiality within you that can make the greatest positive

impact on the world? And that's what I think he meant by self-actualization. That's the original theory, but there was no pyramid. He actually made it very clear that life wasn't like this kind of video game. He never used that metaphor, but I use that metaphor in the sense that you don't reach one level of need, like the need for belonging. And then some voice from above is like, congrats, you've unlocked the need for esteem. And then you can go up a level, and then you never have to worry about connection ever again.

He made it very clear that life is always a two-step forward, one-step back dynamic, where we're always choosing growth, we're always trying to choose growth, but the fear response is always prepotent. Fear is always going to loom over us in uncertainty, but we have to consciously keep choosing the growth option. He made that very clear. And then it's germane to this idea that we're both interested in transcendence. He argued that the last couple

years of his life that self-actualization wasn't the highest motivation in his hierarchy of needs, that there was a higher motivation. In fact, he realized that there were different types of self-actualizing people. This is an insight he wrote in a journal, personal journal entry of his that I found. He's like, big insight today. I realized that there are actually different types of self-actualizing people. There are self-actualizers who are perfectly content going their entire lives, realizing their own potential. And maybe they read all the books, How to Realize Your Full Potential. They're obsessed with realizing their potential

and maximizing their potential. But they really don't care much about maximizing the potential of society or maximizing the potential of others. There's not a great connection between self and others. They may dazzle with their talents or or at work, they may be doing good work, and they feel self-actualized. But they're not what Maslow called the transcenders. He argued that transcenders were a different kind of self-actualizers who were consistently motivated

by higher values. He called them the B-values, the values of being itself, things where there's no means to an end. There are ends in themselves, like the search for beauty, the values of being itself, things where there's no means to an end. There ends in themselves like the search for beauty, the search for justice, for meaningfulness in the world, for goodness. And you're motivated by these values, but also you're motivated by peak experiences in life. So these sort of spiritual, I guess you call them transcendent experiences in your life. And these transcenders, this is what they lived for, is these sort of spiritual, I guess you call them transcendent experiences in your life. And these transcendors, this is what they lived for, is these kinds of experiences and the realization of these kinds of values.

Yeah, that opens up a lot of interesting questions because many of us who are in the transcendence business have noticed that there's the connection between so-called peak experiences or even more durable experiences of self-transcendence, which do seem normative within their purview. I mean, they have beneficial effects psychologically, they mitigate psychological suffering, but the connection to ethics and an intelligent commitment to helping other people, say, the kind of normative pro-social emotions in action, that is, I think it's there. It's certainly advertised to be there in an Eastern context, especially in a Buddhist one, especially. But it's not as direct or as reliable as I think we would hope. And to testify to that fact, all you need to do is look at the

careers of great meditators and teachers of meditation who have gathered students. Many of them have come from Eastern countries and come to the West to teach, and this was obviously happening in Maslow's time. And so many of them have produced incredible suffering among their students and mixed messages, to put it charitably, with respect to their teaching, because they become, in many cases, we're probably talking about fraud. These people are not who they say they are. But in the most interesting cases, I don't think that is what's happening. I think we're talking about people who have genuine insights, genuine access to fairly rarefied

states of mind. These are not people who are failed meditators or failed yogis. These are, again, to one degree or another, spiritual athletes, but who still have whatever level of narcissism and ego needs and just unfulfilled desires that lead them to misbehave, sometimes with the abandon of a rock star trashing a hotel room. And it's left many people thinking that there's no there there, which is a real integration of self-transcending wisdom and ethics that survive the normal tests, free of paradox that strains one's sanity and actually just leads people to be good and reliably harmless in proximity to others. And so that, you know, I've come away from my collisions with this literature and to some degree these people feeling that there's more needed in

the toolkit for living a truly examined life and becoming a better person than just having certain self-transcending experiences. I mean, certainly, I think the peak experience is the wrong model. I mean, whatever the peak is, it comes, it goes. It's not the ultimate insight into the nature of consciousness that will transform you because by definition, it came and it went. But what's needed is an actual conscious integration with ethics that makes sense. And this is where culture comes in and just the relationship between the individual and society,

right? So it's just, yes, it's possible to have real breakthroughs privately in solitude, but when one comes out and interacts with the rest of the world, what one has to do that with are, by definition, one's beliefs, assumptions, one's culture on some level. And in the Eastern case, you've had many of these people come from effectively theocracies with all of those norms and have used those norms as a template through which to interact with people. And that hasn't worked out so well. So anyway, I realize I've dumped a lot on you, but I guess I'm interested to know what

you think about the larger footprint of wisdom and how it relates to things like self-transcendence and peak experience and the general project of becoming a better person. Yeah, there's a lot there. And I've spent a lot of time when I was writing this book thinking about pseudo-transcendence. What does pseudo-transcendence look like? Maslow actually talked about pseudo-growth. He talked about people who tried to jump to the top of his hierarchy of needs without addressing their other needs, thinking that it'll somehow, if they just meditate or if

they just do LSD or they do spiritual practices, then suddenly they won't have these abiding concerns anymore that they had. He called that pseudo growth. So in my book, I try to distinguish between pseudo transcendence and healthy transcendence. In my book, I try to distinguish between pseudo-transcendence and healthy transcendence. So everything, so this is a framework that Maslow used, but I started to see the whole world in that way. Everything, so nothing in and of itself is good or bad. Everything has a D flavor to it and a B flavor to it.

So the D flavor is a deficiency-motivated flavor to it. So you do it because you're trying to satisfy some hole in yourself in some way, and anything can apply to that. You can have de-humor versus being or growth-motivated humor. Love, you can have, or belonging, you can have de-belonging where you have

a desperate need to belong with others because you severely lack belonging and you're trying to change and control the world in some way, or be belonging, where you see people for who they are, or be love, love for the being of others, not what use they exist to satisfy some hole in yourself. So I think the big key is recognizing that integration is what matters here. And I have a section in my book called The Hitler Problem. So when I get to the need for purpose, I ask, well, was Hitler self-actualized? Because he clearly had a sense of purpose. He had a purpose. I'm arguing purpose is a higher level of need.

The point here is that life is not like a mountain or a pyramid like it's been depicted in Maslow's. I actually have a new metaphor, a sailboat. And in a sailboat model, and the reason why I think it works, and I'd love to get your thoughts on that, is that it clearly shows that you need to have a safe and secure boat. Your basic needs need to be met. There's no holes in the boat, no severely deprived aspects of your needs, or else you won't go anywhere. You can't move in your desired direction when all you're focused on is securing the boat.

And for the boat, I talk about the needs for safety, the needs for connection, and the need for self-esteem. But once our boat is secure, we can open the sail. And we open the sail and face the vulnerability and the unknown of the sea. We move with purpose and direction with that sail. But we move with integration of the spirit of exploration, not fear, and love, universal love, or what Maslow called be love, love for the being of others. It's moving in that purposeful direction, but with an integration of these other things. So the whole point here is that we operate as a

whole vehicle experiencing the unknown of the sea. Even though we each move in our own direction with our own purpose, there can be a great unknown, a great wave can come crashing down on all the boats at once. And then suddenly we were all moving our own direction and now we realize, wait a minute, we're all actually in the same sea together. So I think this metaphor works in a number of ways better than the static pyramid. And also the pyramid doesn't show that the point here of wisdom is the integration aspect. So people who appear as though they're, or will tell you because they're gurus, or that I'm a transcendent being, you know, and they go abuse people in their, or do whatever,

you know, you see all these atrocities from people who say they're enlightened. Not all, of course, but the kinds you point out. I would argue that they're pseudo-transcending. They have built their spiritual practices on a very faulty foundation. They still have deeply unresolved belonging needs or deeply unresolved safety needs or esteem needs. They desperately need esteem. And so it's built on a very faulty foundation. So that's why I think that this healthy transcendence model I talk about in the book, I specifically define as healthy transcendence is defined as the harmonious integration of the whole self in the service of realizing the good society. That's how I define healthy transcendence, to make clear that it's the connection between self and world, not being

above the world in some way. My conceptualization of transcendence might differ from other people's notions of transcendence, but I wanted to make it very clear that it wasn't a horizontal thing. It's not like we're transcending other people in some sense. It's actually quite the opposite. Healthy transcendence is when we have this great unity with the world. Yeah, well, I think the sailboat analogy is really a good one. And I could see it break down at one point at the extreme end of transcendence, really, where the things that seem to be needs for most of us, certainly most of the time, which is the things that are part of the whole, the deficiency needs, the safety, the connection,

the self-esteem, it really is possible or certainly seems to be possible to transcend those in some basic sense. Now, that's not really a norm you can recommend to other people, but it does seem like a way of resolving some of the paradoxes you mentioned that Maslow was focused on, or seeming paradoxes, or the dialectic between extremes where if in fact it's possible to achieve a sort of mind that sees fame and shame as being equally empty, well? Well, then one has to question just what this need for self-esteem is really about in the end. If seeing yourself reviled on Twitter can be as meaningless as seeing yourself praised on Twitter, then you've surmounted something there and you're no longer vulnerable to the vicissitudes by which most people would

define their effort to secure self-esteem or being in good standing with a community, say. There are practices in the contemplative tradition that explicitly target these opposites for this purpose, right? Like if you're a great meditator who thinks he's transcended his concerns about self-esteem, well then your teacher may recommend that you do something that you would normally find just absolutely mortifying just to see how you can inhabit that channel of human experience, right? So you deliberately embarrass yourself or engage some way of life that reduces your status so that people begin treating you

differently and you begin to feel what that's like and play with that mode of human experience. Many people have done even just school projects where you go out in a wheelchair, even though you're not, you don't need one, right? You just see what it's like to be in a wheelchair and have everyone think you're a paraplegic and treat you with all the weirdness that often evokes from people. There are many insights you can get from doing something like that, but the thing you begin to notice is just how vulnerable you normally are to the changes in affect and attitude and assumption that can happen just based on some very simple social cues. So apart from that, I guess we should talk about just how far this project of transcendence can likely go, because there is almost certainly false

advertising here. Born of thousands of years of quasi-religious philosophizing, unconstrained by science. But, you know, in my experience, the assumptions that most Westerners and most, you know, most people, it's not just Westerners at this point, make about the superficiality of the project of, let's say, learning to meditate. Those assumptions can be proven false in a variety of ways. And it's interesting that that's kind of a limiting factor on how people think about transcendence and its prospects. Well, you said a lot of wise things there. I mean, I think it's very important to not treat these practices as panaceas, right, as quick fixes. Maslow called them quick hits of transcendence. He was very much against that. He

thought self-actualization took a lot of work. And he actually was very, very wary of psychedelics. Did he take psychedelics? No, no, he didn't. That's interesting. I mean, he was surrounded by people who were both the major researchers and proponents of psychedelics at that time. So he must have just decided based on some reasons why not to. What were those reasons? I don't remember encountering that in your book. Yeah. He used to rib a lot with Timothy Leary. And there's a famous story of them walking together,

Harvard Square, and Maslow saying something like, would you want to take an elevator to the top of Mount Everest? And so he was teasing him about LSDs being a shortcut. And Maslow very much viewed it as a shortcut. And I read all these letters that he had written personal correspondence to various people about his thoughts on LSD. But during that same conversation, there was a time where I think they were exhausted from walking, and Maslow said, should we get a taxi or something? And then Timothy Leary kind of made fun of him as well. He said, I thought you said you didn't want any shortcuts. So anyway, that was funny, kind of joking back and forth. But yeah, Maslow really was trying to hold off on that because he really railed against these easy answers to self-actualization. He really viewed self-actualization

as being committed to a calling or something deep within yourself that you love, that brings out the best in you, and that you are committed to working towards day in and day out. He very much was in that sort of meaning mode, similar to Viktor Frankl. And there's some fascinating discussions between Viktor Frankl and Maslow about meaning, and there are similarities and differences about their way of thinking about that. But he really railed against it. And he would kind of go back and forth, like in his book on peak experiences in religion,

he says something to the effect, well, I know psychedelics are becoming popular now, and this may scientifically someday show to have benefits. But he was very tentative about it. I think if he were alive today and he saw the science and saw a lot of the positive benefits, I actually think he'd change his mind a little bit and would be a bit more excited about it have you taken psychedelics i haven't i haven't i'm like mazlo yeah so what's behind that well i personally am have always been prone biologically dispositionally to to hypomania which is not the same as manic you know and sort of bipolar there's actually hypomania is a personality trait that we all vary on.

It's correlated with schizotypy. And this is actually what led into a whole rabbit hole of research I've been conducting on schizotypy and its relationship to creativity and how, in some sense, it can be related to schizophrenia. But I've been really interested in that paradox of when does it tip over to schizophrenia versus when does it tip over into creative thinking? paradox of when does it tip over to schizophrenia versus when does it tip over into creative thinking. So I've just noticed in myself that I've been prone to this kind of, you know, like, I can see beauty somewhere and then just start crying, you know, over it. And without psychedelics,

I'm kind of scared. I want to do it with someone that's a good guide, you know, or someone who's really experienced with it. Because I'm kind of scared of being high and then, or being kind of having this wonderful experience. And then can you have too much of this kind of transcendent experience where it becomes overwhelming? Can you tell me? Yeah. Oh, yeah, you certainly can.

And I think being, I don't know much about hypomania, but I can imagine just wanting to be cautious if you feel like there's something that, if you have a concern that you could be destabilized in some way that wouldn't be healthy. Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, for instance, someone who has a greater than normal reason to worry that they might be prone to schizophrenia, that's a real, I say this without any clinical experience, but just from what I understand of the literature, that that seems like a contraindication for certainly psychedelics, real psychedelics. So, you know, I would leave MDMA aside, but LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, you know, DMT,

I think you would be wise to, at the very least, be cautious there if there's any kind of clinical risk in the offing. Yeah, I mean, for me, the utility of psychedelics, and I guess this does relate somewhat, you wrote an article on mindfulness that I also wanted to talk about, and it relates to your take on meditation there. There are many reasons to take psychedelics, but for me, the one that applies to most people, and I think the one that integrates most directly with this larger project of getting to Everest by the means of growth rather than the elevator that takes you up there and then you promptly die of exposure or hypoxia, It's that without having had certain experiences, you really have no sense of how limited your normal experience is. This is in terms of affect and cognition and

the ethical implications of both. I mean, you just don't know how confined the prison of your mind is, or even that it is a prison, until one of the walls has been broken down for you and you've seen some vast horizon that you didn't even imagine existed. Or even if you did, even if you paid lip service to the possibility, you just didn't know what it would be like to confront it. And I guess the analogy that works for me is to think of mental training and meditation as a species of that, somewhat analogous to physical training. And physical training is obviously something, it's a thing, we know it's uncontroversial that you can get stronger and more flexible and improve your balance. and you can become an Olympic gymnast, right? And so everyone who begins working out does it in a context that they know that while they may not become an Olympic

gymnast, they know just how far this can be taken. You know, when you're just struggling to touch your toes or do one pull-up or one push-up because you've been sedentary for the last 10 years, you know that extraordinary transformations of the body are possible. And then the question is just how far are you going to take this? How dissatisfied are you going to be with your inability to do much of anything? And how inspired are you going to be by watching the Olympics or seeing pictures of people who have completely transformed their bodies? And the problem with the contemplative life and meditation and other tools is that the changes are for the most part invisible. It's not that they don't have

emotional correlates and therefore behavioral ones, and that's why the rampages of various gurus seem to be disqualifying of the whole project. But for the most part, this is an inner landscape and therefore a hidden one, and therefore all we have is the testimony of people to say how far this landscape actually goes. And so you can't see the gold medal floor exercise at the Olympics to prove beyond any possibility of doubt that it is possible to take the project of becoming stronger and more flexible and getting greater balance and all that. You can take it to a level of perfection that you wouldn't otherwise be able to imagine, right? And so with psychedelics, it's a little bit like suddenly being dropped into the gold medal routine of the floor exercise. Modulo, a few ways this

analogy breaks down. I mean, it's not that everything you can experience on psychedelics is normative or, you know, worth getting by some other route. I mean, you can experience things that are terrifying and clearly not normative. But if you hit the sweet spot on LSD or psilocybin or MDMA, again, not a classic psychedelic, but it shows you a different room in the mansion of understanding. If you hit any of those sweet spots that do within their purview seem normative. If you experience something like unconditional love on MDMA or you experience self-transcending unity with nature, let's say, on psilocybin, it is like experiencing physical perfection of a know, only the most highly trained athlete would ever touch, and you're just dropped into it, and then you lose it again. You come down, but you realize,

okay, that's possible. Even though you can forget it on a, you know, day-by-day basis, you have seen something that you know there's a there there, and then the question is, what are you going to do about it? And then meditation, if you take it up as a practice, can be practiced in the context of knowing that this is not a false project, right? Just knowing that when someone says they've had this kind of experience, you know from within that this is an actual potential of the human mind, and therefore the human brain, and there's no reason why it couldn't be a potential of yours given the right changes. So the virtue is, again, it's not the only virtue, but

for me, the primary virtue is almost rhetorical. It's the only thing that would have convinced a skeptic like me that there was a path to go anywhere, really. That's its utility. Again, we could talk about other things that it does for people, but for me, it is the perfect rejoinder to the otherwise necessary skepticism, which is, because again, we're surrounded on all sides by bullshit, things that are clearly bullshit, and it's hard to find the diamond in the bag of glass. And yeah, psychedelics can help you distinguish the two. Yeah, there's a lot there. And I really enjoy listening to your experiences. I enjoy listening to other people's experiences. We often can intellectualize this stuff as much

as we want, but until we actually experience it, we sometimes don't fully understand something to be the case. And I'm really impressed with the scientific research that's coming out on showing that psychedelics in combination with spiritual practices show the greatest effects, like meditation, but also prayer. There's some new studies, large-scale studies, that show that the combination is better than either alone. And so the more you can integrate those psychedelic experiences into the rest of your life, the more productive it'll be. But, you know, what's interesting to me, though, is that there's lots of different roots to this certain transcendent state of being. There's lots of different roots. I'm wondering, is psychedelics,

is that, do you think there's nothing else, practices that can take us to that same, to those same insights? What are your thoughts on that? It depends which insights and experiences you're talking about. I mean, it's really, it's a Venn diagram for me, which in certain cases barely overlaps between what is the real purpose of meditation or the kinds of experiences people can have in meditation and really the essence of it, the real utility of it, and the kinds of experiences people can have on psychedelics. The way I distinguish them is that there's consciousness and its contents. Almost any attempt, successful or otherwise otherwise to change experience is a matter of changing the

contents of consciousness. That is really the goal. And, you know, whether it's thought about in those terms or not, and that is the effect. And, you know, by definition, all of these changes are temporary. You know, so you can have a peak experience through taking psychedelics. You can have a peak experience through, youics. You can have a peak experience through going on a meditation retreat and meditating for 14 hours a day for a month. And these kinds of experiences can be pretty similar. The difference with psychedelics is you're guaranteed to have a radical change in the contents of your consciousness, and it's guaranteed to happen more or less within the hour, right? So it's like if someone gives you an effective dose of LSD or

psilocybin, there's no question something's going to happen, right? Now, it may be a terrifying something, but if nothing else, it will prove to you that experience is a highly plastic thing, and it is possible to inhabit states of consciousness that you never dreamed were possible a mere hour ago. And again, you can get there with meditation, and you can get there in a much more orderly way without the downside. I mean, some people can go crazy on a meditation retreat as well, so it's not that there's no risk, but it's not the same kind of spin of the roulette wheel where you're really not sure what you're going to get until you get it, all your attempts to control set and setting notwithstanding. So it is more orderly, and it can go into very rarefied terrain,

but the actual sweet spot for meditation, which is to say the transcendence that actually matters, is something that you can recognize about the nature of consciousness in any moment that's coincident with any contents. You don't actually need the pyrotechnics of the psychedelic experience or even the pyrotechnics of changes in state born of intense concentration and meditation, to recognize this thing about the nature of consciousness. And this thing is referred to by many names, but it's cutting through the illusion of the self, or recognizing emptiness, or non-duality. I mean, there are many sort of facets by which you could talk about it, but it's the loss of this sense of subject-object perception. And this is completely coincident with

ordinary perception. You can drive a car in this state of consciousness. This is a perfectly functional state because it's not actually a state. I mean, this is the way consciousness is when you're no longer constructing this sense of being the center of consciousness. To speak of it in representational terms, it's like you can represent the world without representing a subject in your head, in your body, in the world. Most people have this additional sense that there's a homunculus in the head that's doing the thinking and the feeling and the reacting, and that can be taken offline. And how that relates to neurophysiology or what the default mode network is doing,

I mean, that's an open question, but based on the current literature, it seems like it's probably at least part of what the default mode network is doing. In addition to just producing mind-wandering or daydreaming or just random thinking, there's a strain of thinking that is explicitly self-referential. And again, I don't know if this has actually been studied, but more than just self-referential thought, And again, I don't know if this has actually been studied, but more than just self-referential thought, there's the difference between noticing thought as an appearance in consciousness, among all the other appearances, and being identified with thought, which is to say, thinking without knowing that you're thinking. And that's the subtlest entanglement with thought, which does give this feeling of subject

in the head, being the thinker. give this feeling of subject in the head, being the thinker. And so meditation can break that spell, and breaking that identification leaves everything else untouched. Now, it is in fact true that the more you do that, and the longer those moments of true non-duality or perception of emptiness last, then that does begin to change the character of the contents of consciousness as well, right? So that can begin to, you know, seem more rarefied and more psychedelic and more dreamlike. That's where some of that explicitly mystical language can come in to even this sort of discussion. But it's never the point, and it's never the thing you're trying to maximize. In fact, when you begin to practice in this non-dual way, it's explicitly part of the

instruction that you need to break your attachment to any of those changes in consciousness that you think are a sign of something good happening. I mean, this is where the being mode versus the becoming mode or the being mode versus the deficiency mode, which isn't your terminology. That's where that emphasis as a matter of practice becomes the entire game, right? Which is if being is really the point, if you've recognized something about the nature of consciousness that cannot be improved. It neither admits of being improved or suggests that there's any need to improve it, and it's compatible with anything else that can be noticed as the contents of consciousness. It's compatible with noticing physical pain or an ugly thought or anything that might arise. Well, then it's, at that point, it's not a matter of changing

anything. It's a matter of continuing to notice this quality of consciousness, which is its centerlessness, its openness, its clarity. And then anything that changes, I mean the feeling of joy or the feeling of bliss, I mean anything that becomes, for most people, certainly in the beginning of meditation, a sign that meditation is actually working, all of that gets disavowed as an appearance in a dream that is meaningless. It has no meaning at that point. The fact that you suddenly feel good, that's not the point of meditation. And in that sense, most of what people experience with psychedelics, just the experience of being bowled over by

incredibly intense and often very positive experience, right? Bliss and seeing colors of a sort, colors in the natural world that you never imagined possible and a feeling that the energy of your body is inseparable from the energy of the world and the energetics of all of that, whatever the knob is in the brain that somewhere near the nucleus accumbens that you can grab and turn up to 11, well, then it got turned up to 12 there. And none of that is ultimately the point, right? None of that can be the point. And yet, again, it's the thing that if you've never experienced it, you're someone who just can't imagine how different

a human experience can be. And that lack of imagination becomes the reason why you are satisfied with Netflix and not hating your life. You get up each day and merely repeat that project. I don't know if that answered your question, but it gets somewhat paradoxical in terms of trying to equate what the project is from the point of view of meditation and the utility of psychedelics. Yeah, it was really elucidating. I really appreciated that. I'm trying to square that away with something you said earlier about you kind of were pushing back against, when I said Transcenders, they live for peak experiences. You were kind of doubtful or criticizing that's a worthy project. You noted how peak experiences were so ephemeral. And yet now you're talking about you're advocating for these kind of LSD type experiences that are ephemeral. Only insofar as they can get you to be sufficiently interested

in something deeper than what you're tending to experience by the happenstance of your own conditioning, right? So we've all been conditioned by culture to think certain things are possible and to hope for certain outcomes in our lives. And we're continually having various states of consciousness advertised to us as desirable and take the hull of the boat that we're trying to shore up. We all have various self-esteem needs, say, and needs for belonging and connection, and then the fulfillment of those needs get advertised to us and modulated by culture. So what does self-esteem mean now? Well, it means something different than in the 1980s, before anyone had even heard of social media or imagined that such a thing was possible.

Now it means something online, and we're all trying to navigate the consequences of that. So I would say that the role of a peak experience, which again by definition is going to come and go like every experience, is to convince you that there's more to the landscape of mind than you may have assumed, and which you're tacitly assuming by prioritizing the way you're spending your time and attention in the way that you are, right? I mean, like, you might not think that you have, you know, bounded the horizon of your aspirations so narrowly, but if you're spending more or less every moment of your life just trying to come out on the winning side of a skirmish on Twitter and eke out a few more publications and earn 50% more money than you did last year, right? Like if that is taking up 90% of a person's bandwidth, well, you know, embedded in that use of energy and attention are certain assumptions about what will be ultimately satisfying.

And it's a very common experience to arrive at the fulfillment of all of that. You make a little more money, you publish a little more, your start lands appropriately on Twitter. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs

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