Making Sense with Sam Harris - #493 — Two Reasons to Meditate

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Meditation can help us live better. It can also help us understand what is true about our own minds. These motivations might seem fundamentally different, but Sam explains why they're two aspects of the same project. 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.

There are many reasons to meditate, but they tend to fall into two basic categories. The first is psychological and ethical. One wants to live a better life. One wants to suffer less. This is the reason that's emphasized in Buddhism, and it's what motivates most contemplative traditions. In Buddhism, meditation is part of what's called the eightfold path that includes right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right. mindfulness and right concentration. And the last three, effort, mindfulness, and concentration encapsulate the practice of meditation. The other aspects of the Buddhist path relate to one's

worldview and one's ethics and one's behavior altogether. The point is that meditation isn't traditionally recommended as a mere tool of stress reduction. It's part of a larger effort to live a better life. The goal really is to become more sane and ethical. and to experience less psychological suffering, less anxiety and regret and anger and despair, and to experience deeper states of well-being, love and compassion in particular, and to have better relationships on that basis,

to find a better way of being in the world altogether. Many people seem to have no idea that such a project exists, but some understand that it must exist. It must be possible to live a much better life than we have tended to until this moment. Such people begin to suspect that merely achieving things out in the world, or even in their personal lives, gratifying their desires, meeting their goals, becoming more successful, having a family, and conforming to the norms of whatever culture they happen to have been born into

isn't necessarily the path that leads to the deepest happiness. To see the problem with an ordinary search for happiness, one need only reflect on how common it is for some of the most successful people in any society to nevertheless be spectacularly miserable. I'm not talking about the occasional lottery winner or some random billionaire who made their money in some terribly boring way. Think of all the extremely creative people

who produce amazing work and earn all the recognition a person could hope for. The artists, musicians, actors, entrepreneurs, and others that succeed at the highest level and get invited to all the parties. Think of people like Picasso or Prince. or Steve Jobs. People who got a chance to do exactly what they wanted in life

and what they were best at. They were fully recognized for their talents and got rich on that basis and were surrounded by other famous and successful people who admired them. But they were still unhappy, obviously unhappy. On one level, these people were geniuses, but they were also deeply uninspiring people.

Being great at something and being recognized for your talents, again, not for something trivial, but for something amazing, isn't the same as living a good life. Think of all the creative and successful people who have killed themselves because they didn't want to live another hour. Finding a way of being in the world that is genuinely good and communicating that goodness to others requires something beyond intelligence and talent and success. It requires wisdom and love. It requires a capacity to step out side oneself. This isn't at all in conflict with professional or material success, but it obviously doesn't come along with them either. And it is well understood that striving toward various goals in life,

on the assumption that the fulfillment of any one of them will be the thing that makes you happy can be the path to a deeper failure, a failure to truly put your house in order, psychologically and ethically. So this first set of reasons for practicing meditation is psychological and ethical. One wants to live a better life. One wants to be sane, really sane, whatever that means, ultimately. And one approaches meditation and the surrounding philosophy as a method for changing one's moment-to-moment experience of life. The second set of reasons to practice meditation is intellectual and motivated more by curiosity than by dissatisfaction. One simply wants to understand what is true in each moment,

what is true about the nature of oneself, the nature of the mind, and how one's brief existence in this world fits into the wider context of reality at large. And in meditation, one takes a scientific attitude toward exploring the evidence of first-person experience directly. Just what is going on here, really? What is possible to discover about the mind directly? What is this mysterious reality of consciousness?

From its own side, whatever its relationship to the brain, what is consciousness in itself? Is there something profound to discover about the nature of experience? Once one has developed the ability to pay attention to it? When I talk about meditation and the nature of the mind, I tend to move freely between these two types of motivation,

because they both animate my practice, and they're actually connected. Understanding certain facts about the mind can lead directly to the mitigation of suffering. Deepening one's understanding of certain concepts can help one recognize a type of freedom that is beyond concepts. So while I might seem to emphasize

the mitigation of suffering in some moments and the discovery of what is true and others, please understand that these two motivations are really two aspects of a single project, to wake up from the often unpleasant dream of separateness and confinement to self, and to recognize a wider reality of mind prior to the identification with thought. And identification with thought really is the heart of the problem. Thinking isn't the enemy, but thinking without knowing that your thinking is.

And this is how we spend most of our time. There are many symptoms of this condition, but two stand out very close. clearly. In addition to creating an immense amount of psychological suffering and conflict, it's tempting to say all of our psychological suffering and conflict, our identification with thought is what produces the feeling that each of us has of being a separate self, an ego, an inner subject endowed with freedom of will. Throughout waking up, I discuss what I consider to be one of the most important truths about the mind that we can discover directly through meditation, a truth that I often summarize by saying that the self is an illusion. In other contexts,

I might say that free will is an illusion. And while it is a different emphasis, the same point is being made. As it happens, both claims inspire a fair amount of confusion and even alarm. So I want to talk about what exactly is being claimed and why it matters. And my emphasis here that the purpose of mindfulness is to undermine some primary illusions that define our subjectivity, in each moment. This is what differentiates much of the instruction in waking up from what you'll find in many other meditation apps. I believe that cutting through the illusion of the self

and experiencing consciousness prior to the identification with thought in every moment of mindfulness is the ultimate form of meditation. It reveals a basic freedom that is inherent in the present moment and that you would otherwise seek in the future. And seeking in this way you may spend the rest of your life struggling to find it. And it really is true to say that practicing in this way allows us to arrive at our destination with each step. Because it is simply obvious in this moment that consciousness

is already free without impediment, without form, without confinement, and without any problem to solve. This insight isn't mere stress reduction or relaxation or self-improvement. It's a direct recognition of the nature of experience itself, any experience. And focusing on this deeper truth directly is what distinguishes what I'm attempting to do in waking up from most other efforts to popularize mindfulness. Meditation isn't principally about stress reduction or becoming more productive, though it can be good for things like that. It isn't about creating temporary states of calm, though it's good for that too. It's about having a radical, insight into the nature of your own subjectivity that transforms your experience of everything,

and in a way that erases the boundary between formal meditation and the rest of your life. Spiritual practice has often been likened to a war. There's the opposing army of your thoughts and tendencies and habits and preoccupations armed with negative emotions, fear and anger and self-doubt and envy and sadness. There's this perpetual siege, psychologically speaking. And of course, the outer circumstances of your life require continuous upkeep and improvement. So inwardly, many of us are often seething with reactivity and self-concern, and outwardly we're just very, very busy. Now, it's true that one can work to pacify all this chaos and try to win the war against this opposing army. It's not that nothing can be accomplished in this

way, but there is no final victory. The truth is you will never successfully pacify your mind. You will never stop your thoughts and emotions from horizon or ensure that they're always positive. You will always be vulnerable to the next thing that appears, and you will suffer major losses and disappointments and injuries and unpleasant surprises in life. Only freedom from the illusion of the self offers a durable, remedy for this. It is true that you can be mindful dualistically with your sense of self-intact and successfully dampen your negative reactions and regulate your behavior and improve your ethics and generally straighten yourself out. And all of that is worth doing. And in the beginning of

one's practice, there's no alternative but to practice in this way. And yet the war continues, and you will find yourself outnumbered by your enemies most of the time. The insight into self-south selflessness into non-duality, cutting through the illusion that there's a thinking subject in your head in the first place who can now decide to be mindful. This is analogous to capturing the general of the opposing army, because it accomplishes everything all at once. The battlefield is unchanged, but the war is suddenly over, if only for a few moments at a time. Once you can truly break your identification with thought and mindfulness becomes non-dualistic, that is free of the feeling that there is one who is being mindful, you recognize that there's nothing more to do. You can feel

that there's nothing more to do, and no one to do it, and then you can leave everything just as it is. And here the intrinsic freedom of mind becomes obvious, and meditation at that point is just a matter of getting used to what is obvious. And that is the type of practice I'm trying to introduce to in waking up, and all of the surrounding theory and conversations and analysis is designed to support that insight. Again, this comes back to the two reasons to practice, which are not truly separate. It simply is the case that understanding certain truths about the mind can lead to a form of psychological freedom that most people simply don't know is here.