Making Sense with Sam Harris - Making Sense of Death | Episode 9 of The Essential Sam Harris

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

In this episode, we explore Sam’s conversations about the phenomenon of death. We begin with an introduction from Sam as he urges us to use our awareness of death to become more present in our day-to-day lives. We then hear a conversation between Sam and Frank Ostaseski, founder of the Zen Hospice Project, who shares the valuable lessons he has learned through caring for those in their very last days. Next, we move on to a conversation with Scott Barry Kaufman, who explains what it means to pursue a good life by putting a modern spin on Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. Researcher and professor of neuroscience Roland Griffiths then details his findings on psychedelic therapies. He and Sam discuss the inexplicable powers of psychedelics in easing the anxiety around death, and how these experiences can potentially help us live fuller lives. Shifting perspectives, we move on by hearing NYU professor Scott Galloway explain the social and economic impacts of a society made painfully aware of death by the COVID-19 pandemic. We then listen in to author Oliver Burkeman as he outlines how the knowledge of our mortality can inform practical time management techniques before addressing an age-old question with physicist Geoffrey West: Theoretically, could we engineer humans to live forever? Sam closes this episode with a solo talk, explaining that we needn’t be cynical about the fact that all life must come to an end. Instead, it is the transient nature of life that might be the very thing which makes it beautiful in the first place.   About the Series Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.  

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Welcome to The Essential Sam Harris. This is Making Sense of Death. The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam Harris into specific areas of interest. This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's perspectives and arguments, the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements, and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced. The purpose of these compilations is not to provide

a complete picture of any issue, but to entice you to go deeper into these subjects. Along the way, we'll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest. And at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions, which range from fun and light to densely academic. One note to keep in mind for this series. Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge where the barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of unnecessarily partitioned thought. The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into, and greatly affects, others. You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold. And your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships

with others. In this topic, you'll hear the natural overlap with theories of belief and unbelief, consciousness, and free will. So, get ready. Let's make sense of death. Let's start with an image inspired by one of the guests you'll hear in this compilation. Picture a large hourglass that sits in your living room, perhaps on your bookshelf or mantle. Somewhere that's always on the periphery,

available to focus on if you choose, but most of the time, it just lingers in the background rhythm of your environment. When you decide to look at the thing, you see that you have a clear view of the bottom bulb, where the grains are falling. You see a mound of sand which has been forming for as long as you can remember, culminating. There's plenty of room in the bulb,

or perhaps it's getting a bit full. You would think that both of those might provide clues as to how long this whole process might last. But then you try to look at the top bulb, which holds the remaining sand grains yet to fall. But the top bulb is shrouded by an opaque curtain which hangs just above the narrow channel. You don't know how many grains remain,

but yet more grains continue to fall. This hourglass is something like the human condition, an awareness of death, the impossibility of seeing the full picture, and a paralyzingly strange situation which constantly teeters between anxiety, denial, stoicism, gratitude, and urgency, with the knowledge that this hourglass exists somewhere on the periphery.

This compilation will adjust that hourglass to a place of central focus, making it available for earnest contemplation. This is something Sam insists can and should be done in an honest and intimate way, and that being mindful of death's ever-present seat at the table of our experience is actually in direct service of bringing us back to life, ourselves, and each other. You will hear this same insight arrived at through many different paths in these conversations. As this 10-part series nears its conclusion with the final two episodes, it's a good time to remind ourselves of its overall purpose. The modern human condition is one which is subject to an onslaught

of seemingly novel technological hurdles, relentlessly morphing geopolitical configurations, and up-to-the-second information updates. It can feel like a dizzying bombardment where the struggle just to stay current and in contact with today's problems is the entire battle. is the entire battle. The act of revisiting thoughts, observations, conversations, and considerations from years ago is out of fashion and lately seems to take extra concerted efforts. But some topics and conversations have an eternally relevant and evergreen quality to them. Some observations, even the ones with logical mistakes

which have been exposed by the benefit of hindsight, take on an important light upon revisitation. But perhaps no other topic fits the descriptor of evergreen as much as the one featured in this compilation. There will be three themes braided together throughout the conversations you're about to hear. Life, death, and dying. These three threads are fundamentally intertwined, yet distinct.

The death thread has an infinite and homogenous quality to it. The way in which death is experienced, which is to say not experienced, the very absence of experience, is something like the surprisingly controversial philosophical notion of nothing. Without diverting our path too much at the start, we'll note that a deep contemplation on the nature of nothingness is bewildering, and constantly borders on mistakenly giving a somethingness quality to nothing. Nothing may be impossible to conceive. It may even cancel itself out.

When speaking about death, this mistake is often made when death is imagined or feared as something like darkness and silence forever. Analogizing nothing to death is like saying that you will experience death in the same manner in which you experienced Paris, France at 1113 a.m. in the year 1292, which is to say that you didn't. And before you existed, the idea of Paris, France in that year carried no meaning, no connotation, and would therefore be unimaginable. This is the same realization which underpins the classic observation from the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus when he wrote, death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.

So, of the three ideas braided together in this compilation, death does not actually leave us much to say about it on its own. But the way in which its ever-present stitching and the fabric of our existence informs the other two ideas, dying and life, is the source from which many important and illuminating ideas unfurl. Let's now hear from Sam himself, from the introduction to episode 104 with Frank Ostasecki, an episode entitled The Lessons of Death. This will be our first clip to lay out how being mindful of death paints a shade of absurdity over many of our daily interactions, non-interactions, and flights from life.

Well, today's topic is a topic we all think about while doing our best not to think about it. The topic is death. And how we think about death changes depending on whether we're thinking about dying ourselves or about losing the people we love. But whichever side of the coin we take here, death is really an ever-present reality for us. And it is so whether we're thinking about it or not. It's always announcing itself in the background, on the news, in the stories we hear about the lives of others,

in the stories we hear about the lives of others, in our concerns about our own health, in the attention we pay when crossing the street. If you observe yourself closely, you'll see that you spend a fair amount of energy each day trying not to die, and has long been noted by philosophers and contemplatives and poets, death makes a mockery of almost everything else we spend our lives doing. Just take a moment to reflect on how you've spent your day so far, the kinds of things that captured

your attention, the things that you've been genuinely worried about. Think of the last argument you had with your spouse. Think of the last hour you spent on social media. Over the last few days, I've been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find a new font for my podcast. This has literally absorbed hours of my time. So if you had stopped me at any point in the last 48 hours and asked me what I'm up to, what really concerns me, what deep problem I'm attempting to solve, the solution to which seems most likely to bring

order to the chaos in my corner of the universe? The honest answer would have been, I'm looking for a font. Now, I'm not saying that everything we do has to be profound in every moment. I mean, sometimes you just have to find a font. But contemplating the brevity of life brings some perspective to how we use our attention. It's not so much what we pay attention to, it's the quality of attention. It's how we feel while doing it. If you need to spend the next hour looking for a font, you might as well enjoy it. Because the truth is, none of us know how much time we have in this life. And taking that fact to heart brings a kind of moral and emotional clarity and energy to the present, or at least it can. And it can bring a resolve to not suffer

over stupid things. I mean, take something like road rage. This is probably the quintessential example of misspent energy. You're behind the wheel of your car and somebody does something erratic or they're probably just driving more slowly than you want and you find yourself getting angry. Now I would submit to you that that kind of thing is impossible if you're being mindful of the shortness of life. If you're aware that you're going to die and that the other person is going to die and that you're both going to lose everyone you love and you don't know when, you've got this moment of life, this beautiful moment,

this moment where your consciousness is bright, where it's not dimmed by morphine in the hospital on your last day among the living, and the sun is out, or it's raining, both are beautiful, and your spouse is alive, and your children are alive. And you're driving. And you're not in some failed state where civilians are being rounded up and murdered by the thousands.

You're just running an errand. And that person in front of you, who you will never meet, whose hopes and sorrows you know nothing about, will never meet, whose hopes and sorrows you know nothing about, but which if you could know them, you would recognize are impressively similar to your own, is just driving slow. This is your life, the only one you've got, and you will never get this moment back again. And you don't know how many more moments you have. No matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time. You've had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them.

In a way that they feel it. And in a way that they feel it, and in a way that you feel it. And you've missed most of them. And you don't know how many more you're going to get. You've got this next interaction with another human being to make the world a marginally better place. You've got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence. So why not relax and enjoy your life? Really relax. Even in the midst of struggle.

Even while doing hard work. Even under uncertainty. You are in a game right now, and you can't see the clock, so you don't know how much time you have left. And yet you're free to make the game as interesting as possible. You can even change the rules. You can discover new games that no one has thought of yet. rules. You can discover new games that no one has thought of yet. You can make games that used to be impossible suddenly possible and get others to play them with you. But whatever you do,

however seemingly ordinary, you can feel the preciousness of life. And an awareness of death is the doorway into that way of being in the world. We'll now listen in on Sam's conversation with Ostaseki. Here, they stay on the theme of being mindful of the reality of death as a way to enrich our lives. as a way to enrich our lives. Frank Ostasecki co-founded the Zen Hospice Project in 1987, which integrated Buddhist mindfulness practices into end-of-life care. He authored a book entitled,

"'The Five Invitations' Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully," which is where you can find deeper contemplations of the ideas that you'll hear introduced in this clip. This comes from the same episode as the previous clip, episode 104, The Lessons of Death. What are the things that people are most confused about, most surprised by? What is waiting there to be discovered by someone who really hasn't thought much about death and has avoided thinking about it, frankly? And what is the value of learning those lessons

sooner rather than later? Yeah, great question. I mean, I don't know what happens after we die, Sam. I don't know. We'll find out, right? But I think that without a reminder of death, we tend to take our life for granted and we become lost in these endless pursuits of self-gratification, you know? But, you know, as I was mentioning, when we keep it close at hand, you know,

at our fingertips, I think it reminds us not to hold on so tightly. And I think we take ourselves and our ideas a on so tightly. And I think we take ourselves and our ideas a little less seriously. And I think we let go a little more easily. And what I find is that when there's a reflection on death, we come to understand that we're all in the boat together. And I think this helps us to be kinder and gentler to one another, actually. You know, the habits of our life, they have a powerful momentum, right? They propel us toward, you know, right onto the moment of death.

And so the obvious question arises, what habits do I want to create? Not whether or not they'll give me a better afterlife, but here in this life, you know, my thoughts are not harmless. My thoughts take shape as actions. And, you know, you know the old story. They develop into habits and harden into character. So an unconscious relationship with my thoughts leads me to reactivity. And I want to live a life that's more responsible and more, I want to say, clean. That's the best way I would describe it. Yeah.

Living with an awareness of death is obviously an ancient spiritual practice. I mean, an admonition that one should do this dates back as far as Socrates and the Buddha and several books in the Old Testament, like Ecclesiastes, and I think all three of those are more or less contemporaneous with one another, but it must go back further than that. And so it's no accident that monks and renunciates and contemplatives do this very deliberately. They focus on death and they live their lives, they seek to live their lives as though they could end at any moment, and they're trying to, they seek to live their lives as though they could end at any moment. And they're trying to prioritize those things that will be the things that make sense in one's last hour of life. Again, this is often framed by a kind of otherworldly belief, but

certainly not always. And I remember Stephen Levine, who you just mentioned, at one point decided to live a year consciously doing this, consciously living a year as he would want to live a year if it were going to be his last year. And this struck me as an amazing thing to do. But of course, he had more than one more year to live. In fact, I think he had at least 20 at that point. He died a couple of years ago. I mean, there's a bit of a paradox here because there are many things, many good things in life, not merely superficial things, that we can only engage, that we can only seek with real energy based on the assumption that we will live a fairly long time. And I mean, something like the decision to have a child or to spend five or more years on your next project. And in most cases,

it is a safe assumption that we have at least an average span of time in which to do these things. How do you square that with this imperative that we not take life for granted and that we use the clarifying wisdom of impermanence in each moment insofar as we're able. Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that, one of the ways we can shift the conversation, even the one that you and I are having, is that it isn't all about preparing for my death. It isn't all about this moment at which I stop breathing, but more about how do I live my life on an ongoing basis. You know, I had a heart attack a few years ago. And one of the things I did after that heart attack is I did some reading about other people who had

heart attacks. And one of the people I met up on was Maslow. You know, Maslow suffered a near fatal heart attack at one point in his life. And afterwards, he wrote this beautiful thing. He said, the confrontation with death and the reprieve from it makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. He said, my river has never looked so beautiful. Death in its ever-present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. Now that's beautiful, huh? It's not just about preparing for this final moment, really, but really looking and seeing how does it, what happens if these, if we stop separating life

and death, if we stop pulling them apart, you know, if we saw them as one thing. So for me, one of the things that that does is help me really see the beauty of life. I mean, you know, think about the cherry blossoms that cover the hillsides of Japan every spring, right? Or this place where I teach in northern Idaho, where there are these blue flax flowers that last for a single day. How come they're so much more beautiful than plastic flowers? I mean, isn't it their brevity? Isn't it the fact that they will end that is part of their beauty? So I think that's true with our human lives as well. It's not like, get ready, death is coming, you know, don't screw it up. It's more like, oh, how do I appreciate this? So for me, being with dying is a lot, you know, has built

up in me a tremendous sense of gratitude and appreciation for the fact that I'm alive. And so it isn't just about, you know, trying to cram for a test, you know, this final test where we think we're going to pass, fail. I don't know what happens after we die. I don't know. We'll find out how it is. But what I do know, and this is interesting, Sam, is that everybody's got a story about what happens after they die. And my experience is that that story shapes the way in which they die, and in some ways, even the way in which they live their life. We could talk about that. And that's, you know, I remember being with the president of the California Atheist Association who came to Zen Hospice to die. I was really proud that he came there, that he didn't feel anyone was going to push any dogma on him,

that we weren't going to try and talk him into some kind of belief system, and that it could go the way he needed it to go. It's not my job to convince him of something otherwise. It's my job to find out what's his vision. How does he need to go through this? Actually, I want to ask you about that because it has struck me more and more that secularists and atheists are really lacking resources to guide them, both when they get sick and need to think about their own deaths or confront the deaths of those close to them.

It just is a fact that there isn't a strong, familiar secular tradition around how to perform a funeral, right? I mean, who do you call when someone close to you dies? No matter how atheistic you are, many people are left calling their rabbi or their priest and just asking them to dumb it down because the only people who know how to perform funerals and the only language around these moments in life is just explicitly framed by religion. And it needn't be. I mean, you know, I did hundreds of memorials for people through the AIDS epidemic, you know? And most of them had no,

you know, as you say, some of them had an early religious training. And we can talk about how that influences the way in which we die, by the way. But, you know, so we had to create things. We had to draw, you know, ritual, you know how it is with ritual. Ritual has this way of bringing forward the truth that's already there in the room, in a way. True ritual, different than ceremony, evokes something fundamental in us, we could say. It might draw on an ancient wisdom or some ancient practice, but really it's about how do we evoke the truth that's right here, right now? That's often what characterized a lot of the memorial services that I did. But one of the things that I saw with people, whether they had religious training or not,

one of the things that really mattered most to them was relationship. What's their relationship with themselves, with the people that they cared about in their lives, you know, with reality, however we might define that. And so one of the tickets in, if you will, or one of the paths in for people who even had sworn off religion years ago, was some sense of interdependence, we might call it, or connection is a better way to say it. That was their religion. I could share hundreds of stories with you about people who had no religious training at all, but loved their time in nature. And so we would work with that. We'd work with that experience as a way of helping them ease into the mystery of what happens in dying.

I mean, look, dying is, we know at least this much. we know that dying is much more than a medical event you know and so the profundity of what occurs in the dying process is too big to fit into any model whether that's a medical model or a religious model it's too big it shakes us loose of all of our you know all the ways we've defined ourself all the identities we've carried over all these years, they're either stripped away by illness or they're gracefully given up, but they all go. And then who are we? And I think these are questions that people wrestle with in a time as they come closer to the end of their lives. Of course, if they have some religious or spiritual training, it influences that exploration. But it you know, it doesn't, it comes up for people anyway.

Even those people who think dying is a dial tone, you know, that, you know, where there's nothing that happens. Even then, the reflection on their relationships and how they've conducted those relationships is really important. I mean, this really big question at the end of people's lives is usually something not like, you know, is there life after death? But it's something more like, am I loved? And did I love?

You heard Ostaseki mention the American psychologist Abraham Maslow and his encounter with a medical diagnosis which brought him psychologically closer to his own death. Our next clip features an author and psychologist who wrote specifically about Maslow, and will flesh out this story completely. You've likely heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This was his attempt to model a sort of ordered checklist of universal human needs, which are contingent on one another.

ordered checklist of universal human needs, which are contingent on one another. It's been popularly presented as a pyramid, with the lowest and more urgent needs at the bottom, and the higher, more transcendent needs at the top, only reachable if the foundations below them are met. Maslow never actually drew this hierarchy as a pyramid, and it's difficult to tell if he would have ever endorsed this specific presentation. But regardless, the idea clearly resonated with the public and persists today. At the base of his hierarchy were physiological needs such as food, water, and shelter. Once these basic needs are met, individuals then seek safety and security, followed by love and belonging,

esteem, and ultimately, self-actualization. That last piece, the self-actualization one, is the one which really piqued the interest of the next guest. The guest is Scott Barry Kaufman. He wrote a book entitled Transcend, which was his effort to understand what Maslow may have meant by self-actualization, and how it might be applied to our own psychological journeys. and how this reminder of his own mortality significantly impacted his work,

and in some ways, threw a wrench into his entire theory of the hierarchy of needs, and may have crumbled the orderly pyramid model. This conversation was recorded while uncertainties around mortality and the COVID pandemic occupied the world's attention, which provided an interesting backdrop for thinking about death and transcendence. This is from episode 209, entitled A Good Life. You know, there's a twist ending to my book, and it's not all about the peak experiences. What Maslow realized towards the end of his life is that really life is about the plateau experiences. And that's not a phrase that's used often.

When people talk about Maslow, they may talk about peak experiences, but his great insight, perhaps his greatest insight was just the past couple of years of his life when he was facing his own mortality. And he was confused because according to his hierarchy of needs model, if he goes down to the bottom of the hierarchy all of a sudden and has these concerns about safety, well, that should block self-factualization and block feelings of transcendence. But he wrote in his personal diaries, how can it be that this experience is giving me a greater appreciation of my life and I'm feeling these transcendent experiences more than I ever

have in my entire life? And it took me facing this mortality to get there. So that was confusing to him. That was very paradoxical to him. It kind of threw out of whack his whole hierarchy in a sense. It kind of threw out of whack his whole hierarchy, in a sense. And in my book, I try to reconcile that paradox. That's one of the most fundamental paradoxes I try to reconcile because there's one literature in psychology showing that when you face mortality salience on a daily basis, like you live in impoverished neighborhoods or you grow up with a lot of discord or chaos in your environment, you don't experience a lot of these kinds of transcendent experiences. You are focused on most immediate concerns. You tend to, Daniel Nettle and other evolutionary psychologists have shown you focus on mating, you focus on food acquisition, I mean, you focus on the things that you need for survival and reproduction.

But it seems like if you can transcend living in that constant state of chaos and you face mortality, then there's a group of people in the psychological literature that report their fear of death is gone. They report a really newfound sense of meaning in life, new projects they want to take on, new creative aspects. And the way I reconcile this is so much of that literature on mortality salience doesn't look at individual differences in deprivation of needs. So I think there is a great value in transcending your need for your basic needs. So transcending your incessant need for esteem, self-esteem, transcending your incessant need for connection with only the people that you feel connection to, as opposed to a connection to all of humanity, you can transcend. And this is a big one because obviously some people don't have a choice in the matter if they're born

in certain neighborhoods or environments where there's a lot of violence and chaos in their environment. It's easier said than done to just transcend it. But if you can transcend it so these basic needs, you're not preoccupied with them anymore. The research I've seen shows that mortality salience under that state of consciousness actually gives you the most heightened states of transcendence that a person could possibly have. So this was a big sort of paradox I was trying to reconcile with these two dueling literatures. On the one hand, mortality salience leading to momentary concerns of survival and reproduction, and then this other literature in positive

psychology showing that mortality salience can lead to greater meaning and post-traumatic growth. I guess almost everything we're talking about is susceptible to this dual, you know, it's almost the pre-trans distinction that Ken Wilber made. I have not found a lot of use for Ken Wilber in my thinking about these things, but perhaps we could go there if you're a student of his. But he famously gave us this pre-trans fallacy, which is the pre-rational can sound a lot like the trans-rational. And this sort of contextualizes Freud's And this sort of contextualizes Freud's dismissal of mystical experience as the oceanic feeling. This is a return to childhood, a return to infancy.

This is the pre-rational mind wallowing in its own energies. And Ken Wilber, I think, quite usefully pointed out that it can sound like that, but the transcendence of separation that one can experience after one has the full toolkit of rationality on board is not the same thing as a return to infancy. It's the trans-rational, so it's hence the pre-trans fallacy. But yeah, many of these points, like when you think about, this is somewhere near the hull of the boat, the feeling of like a self-efficacy, that you can do things well and that you can master various challenges and, you know, the antithesis of the learned helplessness that coincides with a kind of depression. You want that, but if you keep going in that healthy direction, you also recognize that you basically don't control anything. Ultimately, it's a mystery as to whether or not I'm going to

get to the end of the sentence in grammatically complete form, right? And when I make a mistake, I didn't control that. When I do it successfully, I didn't control that. You know, on some level, I'm a witness to this performance. And so it is with all of life. Anything can happen at any moment. We're hanging out over the precipice every moment. I mean, just as a matter of physical health, when are you going to have a stroke or a heart attack? Who the hell knows, right? This is just a probability distribution over each moment that you have to learn to live with. And yeah, this pandemic has taught many of us that history can swallow up a society with nothing more than a microbe born of a sneeze or cough on a moment's notice.

And we're still trying to dig out from the implications of all this with the understanding that it could have been 10 times worse and may yet be 10 times worse the next time around. So it's the sense that we really can control anything is an illusion, and yet at one level, and that's not to nullify the difference between feeling self-efficacy in the midst of one's various projects and feeling like one can't do anything worth doing. I mean, that's still an enormous difference. You know, I don't know if I've resolved that paradox, but I think it's the degree of focus, kind of the wide angle or the microscopic focus.

Each can be useful by turns, and the microscopic focus reveals that control is imaginary. The wide angle is there's orderly behavior and getting what one wants out of life and all the failures to do that. And those are different. Yeah, at the heart of a lot of what you're saying, and you're saying a lot of really good stuff, at the heart of a lot of it is the fear of uncertainty. This just cuts through it all. You can live your life with a fear of uncertainty,

and in sort of a linear way, the greater the fear, the more we go into this state psychologists have identified, psychological entropy, where at the ultimate extreme, we just can't cope and we get depression, we feel helpless, as you mentioned. Or you can live in a constant state of exploration. And exploration means that you are actively exploring the unknown. The unknown excites you. The unknown entices you. The more you can master and challenge the unknown, the happier you are in your life. So I think that we're constantly, to be human is to be constantly pulled in one way or another. I'm a big fan of not acting as though anyone's above anyone else and they've reached some highest state that they're no longer human. To me, to become fully human is recognizing that

you have these tendencies within you, and you have to constantly choose the exploration option and learn how to manage the uncertainty that's inevitable in your lives, you're so right in the sense that this moment puts a lot of things in context for people. You know, it's funny, not funny, it's tragic, but you hear people talking about as though it just dawned on them for the first time in their lives that there's uncertainty in their lives. You know, for some people, maybe this is the first time they've really thought about that, you know. But you could remind them of all the many other things that they've had throughout their lives before this moment that were incredibly uncertain and could have led to a lot of danger. And people still made decisions and people still did certain things. This is kind of like, because it's on the news, you know, we're all so focused on this

being the great uncertainty when we could create a news program with 40 million other forms of uncertainty that you have during the course of your day. I, you know, I say, I bet you didn't know about this could happen to you today too. So I think just the heart of a lot of what you're saying is living a life of, are you really gonna live that life with a spirit of exploration and openness to new experiences and curiosity for the unknown? Or are you committed to fearing it

and having that illusion of control. Because obviously, you know, and Alan Watts wrote so beautifully about this, the only certainty is that there's uncertainty. In that clip, you heard some echoes of Sam's arguments relating to the illusory nature of free will. We have compilations dedicated to both free will and consciousness, which are both natural partners for the subject of death. For what is death other than a place where consciousness ceases to carry its own mystery? At this intersection of the exploration of consciousness and the awareness of death, we're going to introduce Roland Griffiths.

Griffiths has been spearheading psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Most of his research is focused on the use of psilocybin and its effects on spirituality and well-being. He often speaks about the profoundly transformative effects of targeted, limited use of psilocybin. And among those who have taken it, there are near-universal subjective observations that it produced experiences that were not only beautiful and meaningful, but also true. Sam shares Griffith's interest in this area of study, and in particular, is interested in how it relates to anxieties about dying and the suffering associated with it. In 2021, Griffith posted a video to his website in which he was providing a regular update on his research program. After a few minutes of outlining the importance of the program generally, Griffiths shifted to a more personal announcement. In my remaining minutes, I'd like to conclude by sharing some very personal observations

that bear on this topic of spirituality and well-being. Ten months ago, I went in for a routine screening called Oskam and I didn't listen very well 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

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