Making Sense with Sam Harris - Making Sense of Meditation | Episode 10 of The Essential Sam Harris

Episode Date: June 18, 2023

In this episode, we traverse a decade of Sam’s conversations on the topic of meditation.  We start with the very first recorded episode from the archives: a conversation with Sam’s meditation teacher and friend, Joseph Goldstein. Goldstein recalls how his thinking was unlocked—allowing him to fully realize the power of the practice—by the utterance of one single word. We then hear from author Richard Lang as he guides us towards a strangely obvious insight that came to be known as “the headless way.” Next, philosopher and neuroscientist Thomas Metzinger employs his vast expertise in both neurobiology and meditation to show how our brains generate a model of the world and self, and how meditation can help us catch that process in the act. Psychiatrist Judson Brewer then shifts the conversation to some very practical applications of mindfulness meditation, addressing the problem of addiction to things like food, smoking, or drugs by retraining the reward centers in our brains. Next, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson dig into the neuroscience of meditation and discuss how experienced meditators may actually be physically altering their brains.  We then listen in on Sam’s conversation with author Robert Wright, who defends the claim that “Buddhism is true.” Sam and Wright discuss the validity of this claim while ensuring they keep it separate from the political and moral behaviors of Buddhist nations and individuals. We conclude with Sam delivering the answer to a question posed by the Belgian neuroscientist Steven Laureys. In doing so, Sam provides a comprehensive tour of his philosophies. He ties together his personal brand of moral analysis, his reverence for science and truth seeking, and his reasoning as to why he still meditates and why he proudly promotes the practice.   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.  

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, 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. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to The Essential Sam Harris. This is Making Sense of Meditation and Eastern Spirituality. 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 identity and the self, consciousness, belief and unbelief, and death. So, get ready. Let's make sense of meditation and Eastern spirituality. The topic of this compilation is arguably the one that is closest to Sam's heart, so it's only fitting that it serves as the conclusion to this series. There are at least 20 conversations in the Making Sense archive that could have been

included here, and we'll be sure to point you to some of those in the final recommendations. Sam eventually launched a standalone platform completely dedicated to the practice of meditation and mindfulness, called Waking Up. It goes without saying that we encourage you to check that out if any of this piques your interest. This particular compilation will be curated towards the meditation novice, or even the meditation skeptic, though fresh perspectives and revisits to the fundamentals are always valuable, even for a well-practiced listener who is already convinced by the practice. In fact, in many ways, so much of the entire practice of meditation is all about returning to the basic, apparent, obvious, and discoverable truths which are always available to access.

In all of the concepts we'll be discussing, one is constantly rediscovering the hidden surface of an obvious truth, but once that surface is felt, one can plunge to new depths of exploration as the practices and techniques become more habitual and familiar. and techniques become more habitual and familiar. The whole idea of meditation strikes some as intimidating and daunting, or even pretentious and pseudo-religious. Some of Sam's listeners who are initially attracted to his political and moral analysis and enjoy his sharp critiques of religious dogma can be a bit baffled by his interest in and

promotion of this practice. Deep investigations of meditation force one to dance around vaguely spiritual concepts that often flirt with insights espoused within compromised religious traditions. And more recently, the public arena of meditation has become saturated with a confusing amount of hype and fluff about productivity and efficiency. Goal-obsessed versions of mindfulness, all of which Sam goes to great lengths to distinguish himself from. What we hope you'll hear in this compilation is an easy, open, and sometimes humorous invitation. We hope to provide an admittedly overly simplified presentation of the concepts and techniques that Sam insists carry with them profound insights and opportunities to pay closer attention

to the experience of experience itself. Sam's book, Waking Up, is his most relevant outline of an atheistic approach to the mystery of the mind and the secular foundations for a meditative practice. Our compilation on consciousness is the most natural companion to this episode. In that compilation, you'll hear Sam insist that the one thing that you certainly have is your mind. So why not get to know it? And better yet, why not learn some techniques to understand and train in? As it was put by one teacher whom Sam admires, and whom you'll get to know in these conversations, you needn't have happened,

but you did happen. You occurred. So the first motive for looking at this is curiosity. And I say it's pretty chicken-hearted, pretty unenterprising to live and die without ever looking to see who is doing that. What a challenge. What an opportunity. One important note up front. The common image of sitting with crossed legs and eyes closed while focusing on the breath, that's just one particular method of meditation, and it may not be the one that suits you best. There are thousands of ways to meditate that prescribe very different techniques, from walking with a certain intention, to sitting with open eyes, to focusing on a specific object in vision, hearing, or sensation,

or even focusing on an idea, to chanting, to dancing, to committing to silent observation of the mind for days, weeks, or years. So, with the caveat that any summary of meditation would be inadequate, we'll introduce two popular approaches which attempt to usher you to the same place by taking divergent routes. One path is called Dzogchen, and the other is called Vipassana. These are words you'll hear frequently in the following conversations, along with other Sanskrit words which come from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition,

like Anapanasadi, which is the focusing on the breath, or Rigpa, or Trecho, which are both about resting in a state of open awareness. Don't worry too much about these foreign-sounding words, and please forgive my pronunciations, because the concepts they teach are graspable and universal. But somewhat unfortunately, many of the concepts in meditation are ineffable. The word choices by which we describe something like an experience of open, clear awareness are poetic and subjective, though the descriptions tend to overlap in interesting ways across time and culture. It's sometimes taught that when one

is in a state of deep meditation, the very moment that a name, label, or a set of conceptual words creep into the mind and attempt to package and deliver the experience as a coded linguistic expression, even to oneself, is the very moment that one knows they have lost touch with the pure experience itself. And the instinct to try to contain and cling to the experience is an ironic signal of failure and disconnection. Words and descriptions in this topic are something akin to trying to grasp and present a handful of smoke. So, with the caveats of inadequate language

and incomplete knowledge in mind, let's forge ahead. Vipassana tends to use techniques which focus on an object, oftentimes the breath, though it can be body scanning or even an idea like compassion or love which is taken as an object of focus. The meditation attempts to groom the mind to notice how attention tends to drift away from ideas, seemingly on its own. There are frequent reminders in Vipassana to gently return one's attention back to the object when you notice that it has slipped. You'll hear several of Sam's guests relay the common experience of frustration and surprise with just how difficult this seemingly simple-sounding task can be.

The techniques of Dzogchen attempt to point the mind away from objects and directly towards the recognition of the openness of the mind and the illusory nature of thoughts and perceptions which appear within it. The idea is to rest in a state of non-conceptual awareness. It's difficult to speak about a destination or goal for meditation, as we've already noted, but the place that each of these paths would hopefully lead one to is something like the dissolution of the idea of the self, or the continual identification with thoughts and concepts. This place where the notion of self drops out from the picture

of consciousness is expressed in many different ways that you'll hear in these conversations. Sometimes it's nothingness, or emptiness, or non-being, or transparency. But in this first clip, you'll hear it expressed as something like non-occurrence or zero-ness. And you'll hear how a particular word was what thrust the meditator towards this sudden realization. The guest is Joseph Goldstein, who is Sam's longtime friend and meditation teacher. He's appeared on Making Sense three times and frequents the Waking Up app as well. In this clip, you'll hear him and Sam go back to their first encounters with meditation.

To attest to just how important this subject is to Sam, this is from episode four of Making Sense, and actually was the first ever episode of the podcast which featured a recorded conversation. It was called The Path and the Goal. Before we get into esoterica, tell us a little bit about how you got into meditation and how this became your life's work. Well, I was studying philosophy at Columbia University in New York as an undergraduate. And by the time my senior year came around, I was really anxious just to get out and see the world. And this was in 1965. And it was just soon after the Peace Corps was established. So that seemed to me a really good vehicle for getting out and seeing new parts of

the world. So I applied to the Peace Corps, and I actually applied to go to East Africa, but as fate or karma or accident or whatever, whatever the conditions may be, whatever the conditions may be, happened, they sent me to Thailand, which turned out to be a very fortunate happening. Because while I was in Thailand, I had my first contact really with Buddhism and Buddhist teachings and meditation. Soon after I started teaching in Bangkok, I was teaching English, I started going to a discussion group at the Marble Temple, which is quite a famous temple in Bangkok. There were some Western monks who were leading the discussion, kind of introducing Westerners to some of the buddhist ideas and concepts of course having just graduated college in philosophy i went there full of my own ideas about things and i would be asking so many

questions in the group that people would stop coming you know it's like i think we've all been in groups like that right uh and we've probably both been that person you were the insufferable blowhard. Exactly. So finally, this one monk says, Joseph, I think you ought to meditate. I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know anybody who meditated. I was 21, 22 years old in the Far East. It was all extremely exotic to me. And it just seemed like a really interesting thing to do.

So he gave me some initial instruction, and I also began a little reading. There's one classic book called The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, which laid out the basic methodology. And so I gathered kind of all the sitting paraphernalia, cushions and this and that, you know, to sit. And the very first time I set my alarm clock for five minutes because I didn't want to over sit. But something quite amazing happened in that first five minutes. And it really changed the whole course of my life. So the first time you sat, you actually connected with the practice and realized it was something worth looking into. Well, what I realized, it wasn't that I had any great enlightenment experience, but what

I realized was that there was a way to look into the mind as well as looking out through it. And my whole life, I had just been looking out, out of my mind rather than looking into it. So it was like a turning in place. And just that was so extraordinary to me. I got so excited, I started inviting my friends over to watch me meditate. Right.

Arguably the most narcissistic thing you could possibly do. Well, more charitably, it was naive. It really came out of this tremendous enthusiasm for, you know, what I felt I was discovering. Right. Obviously, they didn't come back very often. It made for a poor viewing experience. Very poor. But that was the beginning. And then over the course of my time in the Peace Corps,

I extended time past five minutes a little bit, but still. So how long did it take for you to actually go on intensive retreat? Oh, at the end of my Peace Corps stay, I had an experience. Somebody was reading from a Tibetan text. A friend was reading. So at this point, you had been meditating for, what, a year? Yeah, maybe a year, but very intermittently.

Just an hour a day or something? Probably not even. But I was dabbling. I was just dabbling in it and reading and going to some classes and trying to find out more about it. But just at the end of my Peace Corps stay, before I left for home, I had a really transformative experience listening to somebody read from a Tibetan text. And it just was an experience of opening to an understanding of the mind.

an understanding of the mind. And kind of in classical Buddhist terms, they talk about the unborn or the unformed, or using words like that to describe the freest aspect of the mind. So something happened. What the hell happened? Somebody was reading this text a tibetan text and that edition that was a very early translation of it

which a translation which has now been so so a faulty translation a faulty faulty translation by evans wentz called the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. There have since been much more careful translations of it. Right. And very powerful ones. But even in that faulty translations... Have the new translations revised the very line you found so useful? Okay.

No. All right. So back up. You've got this faulty Victorian translation of the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, and you have a friend who's reading it out loud to you? Right. And then

at one point in the reading, just on the word unborn, the mind opened to that experience. Right. Say more about that. You hear this word unborn.

You're looking into your mind all the while. What changes? So it's a momentary experience that has the power of a lightning bolt. So it's a unique moment of the mind going from being aware of different things arising moment after moment, you know, what sights and sounds and breath, the mind itself, and then upon hearing the word unborn. And it's, it's very hard to describe, describe but it was if you think literally of what that word means

unborn it's it's the experience of non-occurrence so right being born is something occurring it's so moment after moment experience is being born and dying being born and dying moment after moment unborn is a moment of non-occurrence which broke that stream of continual birth of continual occurrence and the the metaphor, or simile, one of those, right after that moment, I described it to myself as zero. It was the experience of zero. Right. So the experience was,

however difficult it is to characterize it entailed the loss of ordinary sensory experience you're no longer seeing hearing smelling tasting touching thinking right so the lights went out in some sense the lights went out in some sense but there was a knowing of that right right and And this gets into another deeper discussion of that experience, which we might have later. So it is the knowing of a reality. It doesn't entail ordinary sensory perception. It's zero.

Right. It's like a rebooting of the hard drive yeah yeah but one of the things that became so apparent is that zero is not nothing right zero is a powerful number yeah and perhaps the most powerful number and the fruit of the fruit of that experience was the immediate understanding and realization of the selflessness of this whole process we call life, that there's no one to whom it's happening. Goldstein's later appearances on Making Sense in episodes 15 and 63 get further into the minutia of meditation and also respond to some audience questions, including some relevant ones on the

moral, or immoral as it were, behavior of some meditation practitioners. Goldstein's Insight Meditation Society is also a great resource to investigate for those interested in attending a retreat. The passage which struck Goldstein so deeply from the Tibetan book of the Great Liberation, which his friend was reading aloud, was this one. The self-originated clear light, eternally unborn, is a parentless babe of wisdom. Eternally unborn is a parentless babe of wisdom. Wondrous is this. Being non-created, it is natural wisdom. Wondrous is this.

Not having known birth, it knows not death. That unborn feeling of zero but not nothingness is obviously a bit difficult to grasp or convey in words. But as we mentioned in the introduction, it's a concept which resurfaces constantly in discussions of meditation and mind. The next guest is going to take another run at that idea, but through a remarkably simple set of experiments, which he will invite you to participate in. through a remarkably simple set of experiments, which he will invite you to participate in. If you recall Goldstein's final line,

that there is no one to whom life is happening, that is an expression of the selflessness of consciousness, and we're going to try to stay there, but with a slightly different emphasis. Our next guest would like you to take a look at yourself. As he often repeats, he's in the business of trying to help people take a look at who they really, really are. And if you do grasp this perspective, you are very likely to discover that you are something very different than what the world has been telling you you are. He means this in a deceptively straightforward way.

Richard Lang is our guest, but he's coming to us as a devoted student of Douglas Harding, whom he studied extensively with and has also written a biography about. Lang has continued to spread Harding's teachings and messages, making them more accessible to a wider audience. In this clip, he'll tell you a little about Harding's life and give you a tour of his central insight, which is profound in its obviousness. And that is this one. You have no head. Now, don't be too alarmed. If you go check in a mirror, you'll most likely see a head there. And we're quite sure that if you ask the people around you

to confirm that you have a head, they'll do so, probably after giving you a pretty perplexed look. But what Harding, and now Lange, will ask you to do is try to take real account of the fact that your head actually does not exist in your universe. You will never see it directly, and you are forced to take everyone's word, or the information of a mirror, as evidence of its existence. There is an artistic sketch referenced in this clip,

drawn by the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, which provided the aha moment for Harding's headless insight. We'll describe the sketch now, given the audible medium of this podcast. The sketch shows Mach's first-person point of view with his right eye closed while reclining on his chair in his office. His dark mustache frames the bottom of the sketch. The right side is the ridge of his nose, and the top is his brow bone. His torso and legs extend away from this point of view while a pen rests in his right hand. The walls and window of his office appear beyond his shoes. If you take a moment and consider where you are right now and you close one eye and you attempt to draw

exactly what you see, you will not be drawing your head. If you recall Goldstein's line about looking inward rather than outward for the first time in his life during his fateful five-minute meditation. This next method of introspection is very nearly an exact flipping of that sentence to pay close attention and wonder exactly what we are looking outward from. If this strikes you as silly or mundane, don't worry. Sam will do you a favor and play skeptic

after Richard Lang attempts to give you a tour of what came to be known as the Headless Way. This is Richard Lang from episode 181, The Illusory Self. What's so interesting about Douglass is that he came up with truly novel practices and analogies and framings and ways of looking into awareness. It's his own methodology, which really is very effective for so many people. But before we get there, let's just talk about Douglass, the man, for a moment. You've published essentially a graphic biography, The Man with No Head. So maybe you can just give us a brief tour of Douglass's spiritual biography. Yes. Well, he grew up in an exclusive Plymouth Brethren, which was a very strict Christian group. And his father was very keen, very dedicated, a very small group in the east of England. And they used to, you know, have prayers twice a day and four times on Sundays and God knows what.

But at 21, he left. And his reason for leaving was that, well, you might be right, but I am not going to accept that you're right just because you say you are. I want to find out for myself. And it hurt his father. His father cut off from him. But he had been profoundly affected by his father. During the First World War, the Germans bombed the town where they were. It was a seaside town. And his father refused to go into the cinema to seek shelter, but got the whole family on their knees praying while the bombs came over or the shells came over. And he said, I'm going to put my faith in God. or the shells gave over. And he said, I'm going to put my faith in God. Well, Douglas rejected the sort of kind of, you know, the peripherals of the religion, but he was affected by this deep

faith somehow. And this sense of the importance of meaning of, yeah, something like that. Anyway, at 21, he left. And then he started inquiring. He was training and then working as an architect in London. And he started inquiring into what he was. And I think he often used to say, the basic thing that amazes me is that I am. You know, I mean, just how amazing just to be. I mean, I might not be. And while I am, I'd like to find out who I am, what I am. And he'd already rejected what the Plymouth Brethren was saying. So at this point, he wasn't going to take on another dogma. He was going to look for himself. And he started really by recognizing that he was made of layers, depending on where the observer was. So,

that he was made of layers depending on where the observer was. So, you know, at six feet he was human, but closer to his cells. And then further away he was a city or a species. And this sort of enabled him to sort of cross the boundary between his skin and the rest of the world. And he began developing this feeling, this view view that he was like an onion with layers and of course when you realize that you must ask what's at the center and he went to india with his wife and and they they had two children there and the war broke out anyway Anyway, in about 1943, he'd come to the position that he realized he was made of layers, and that the nearer you got to the center, the less there was. So it made sense

that he was kind of nothing at the center, but he couldn't seem to experience that. It was just a guess. And then he was reading a book where there was an article or a section by Ernst Mark, physicist. And Mark, it's a fairly well-known picture, drew a self-portrait, not of what he looked like at six feet, but of what he looked like from his own point of view, which of course is headless. And when Douglas saw this, and he was probably sitting in the Imperial Library or somewhere in Calcutta, he suddenly thought, that's it. And it was not a big wow, he used to say. It was just like a cool recognition. Ah, that's what I am at zero. That's what I am. Ah, you see. that's what I am ah you see okay so let's

jump into the experience and do our best to introduce people to it I guess we should say that unfortunately many of the experiments that Douglas devised are highly visual and we can talk a little bit about

the primacy of vision as a context in which to see this experience. And this is the kind of thing that can be recognized with your eyes closed, too. But many of us have found that that's a subtler thing to recognize. So I guess with that limitation, just knowing that we can give people instructions that they do with their open eyes, that reference vision as the primary sense, but we just have to recognize that this is going out in pure audio form, so it all has to be intelligible. So with that proviso, how would you instruct, how do you instruct someone who is contemplating this for the first time? Yes. Well, I could just take you and them or whatever through just a little process that includes closed eyes and being aware that we're just audio here. Okay, well, as you say, a lot of the experiments are visual,

and you can just notice you can't see your face now. But a very simple, direct thing to do, which I think is worth doing, is to actually point. So if the listener is willing to play a bit, I would ask you just to get your index finger of your right hand or something and point out. So you've actually got to do it because it's just making clear the arrow of attention is out. So you might be pointing at the table or a vase or a window and you're looking along your finger and there's a thing. Now what I want you to do is just

turn your finger 180 degrees around to point back at the place you're looking out of and notice what you see there or what you don't see. Because I don't see anything right now. I don't see my face, don't see my eyes, don't see any shape or movement or anything so i'm pointing i would say i'm pointing at my no face at this space here this stillness this silence even and this is outward and inward is a two-way pointing thing so that's a kind of useful gesture to bear in mind. So just starting visually, I said, well, you can't see your face. I'd say the inward pointing arrow of attention is pointing at nothing, space. Now this is a nonverbal experience, so I'm putting words on it. I'm absolutely convinced everyone is aware, you know, can see this because you can't see your

head. Instead, you see the world. But you may choose different words from me so that we accept that. So I'd just like you first to notice several things about the view out from this space. That it's a sort of oval view, the field of view, and it fades out all the way around. So whatever you're looking at is most in focus. And then when you get to the edge, as it were, it fades out and then you can see nothing around it. And I take that seriously. It's sort of hanging in nowhere. The view, there's nothing above it, nothing below it, nothing this side of it. It's just hanging in space. And it's single.

So if you look at any two objects, you say, well, that one's bigger than that. You can compare the size. It's relative. I say now, look at the whole view. How big is it? And there isn't a second one to compare it with, so I can't say how big it is. And so the two things to notice here, well, two or three. One, it's single, the view out. And so there are two things to notice here. Well, two or three. One, it's single, the view out. I might hear about your view, but I don't experience it.

In my own experience, like you say in the app, it's a matter of experience. There's just one view. It fades out into nothing. It's not inside anything. I can't say how big it is. Now, close your eyes. See?

Now, so you've got a kind of darkness, which, again, is in your app. As you say, it's kind of lit up. It's not just nothing. There's something there. Let's call it darkness. It's not uniform darkness. Now, how big is that darkness? Well, there isn't a second one to compare it with. It's single, so I can't say. And is it inside anything? Well, just like the visual view, no. I could say it's in space or awareness or consciousness.

Now I move my attention to sounds, and I hear this voice coming and going, and other sounds. So if I use the same kind of words, the field of sound, like the field of vision, that's all the sounds. How big is it? Well, there isn't a second one to compare it with. And is it inside anything? No. Or I could say it's in silence. So these sounds are coming out of the silence, going back in.

And I think you see here, developing the first person language. I am the space in which the darkness is happening. I am the silence in which the sounds are happening. Now I move my attention to body sensations. And if I put aside my memory, my sort of map, and just go by the sensation, see, lots of different sensations. Now, how big is the whole field of sensation? Well, there isn't a second one to compare it with. It's single's single see I can't see how big it is and is it inside everything?

mm-mm in this awareness now I identify with my body sensation as often enough so if I say that I can't say how big the field of sensation is I can say I can't say how big I am

I'm not inside anything. Yes, I'm single, I'm alone. And then finally, we can move our attention to thoughts and feelings. So think of a number, there's a thought, you see, and think of the face of a friend and the affection you feel, feelings, or anything, problem and anxiety that comes up, challenge you've got. Now, how big is this very complicated field of mind? Well, I don't experience a second one to compare it with. And where is it? Well, I think as the Zen people say, it's in no mind. My thoughts, like my voice, are coming out of nowhere and disappearing again. And this is who I am, this open space. And this is who we all are, you see. So I don't know what

you're thinking, Sam, or what you're feeling, but I'm convinced you're the same indivisible space containing your particular view, you see. So now when we open our eyes, well, what really changes? The space is full of colors and shapes, magic, but one is still this single space that contains everything. So that's pointing out the obvious. Yeah, well, that was a great tour. So let's start with the place we started with the open-eyed considerations of pointing at one's own face and noticing that there's nothing to see. And I want to just try to channel the skepticism that some listeners may feel. And this may be the kind of thing you've heard a lot, but if you can think of other challenges

that don't occur to me, feel free to raise them. But I can imagine someone saying, well, of course I can't see my face. I can't see my own eyes, but I know they're there, right? And so what's the significance of this? You seem to be suggesting that there's something profound about the eye not being able to see itself, but I know I have a head, I know I have a face, I know I have eyes in the middle of it. What's the point of this? Yes, I think there are different ways of approaching this, and I'm really not in the business of trying to persuade

or convince anyone for a start. I'm just happy to be this. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast along with other subscriber-only content including bonus episodes

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