Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Sam Harris: Transcend the Illusion of Self

Episode Date: March 25, 2021

Mayim explains the benefits and historical role of meditation with her former colleague and UCLA PHD graduate buddy Sam Harris. Sam talks about his journey discovering mindfulness through an altered state as a teenager which led him to a life dedicated to encouraging others to get in touch with their base desires through a meditative practice. How do you unlink your thoughts and uncover patterns of emotion, behavior, and beliefs that no longer serve you? How do you transcend the constructed notion of who you are to access your soul? Mayim and Jonathan get put into a meditative trance by the silky timber of Sam's voice as he tackles misperceptions about meditation and explains how to access different realms of consciousness and connect to your true self. BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Suddenly something happens that makes you feel fear or anger. At minimum, there's something worth attending to. That person's worth paying attention to. You've only just to back away quickly, right? That's what your brain's for. It's to tell you stay away when you feel that. We have millions of years of evolution making us very good at navigating moments like that. And yet sometimes we are still drawn to those people.

I'm looking at Jonathan over here. I'm Myambiolic and welcome to my breakdown. This is the place where we break down all of the things that make us break down. Today we're breaking down. Today we're breaking down something that can help you not break down. And that thing is meditation. Specifically mindfulness meditation. And we're going to welcome in a little bit one of the first people I ever knew who had a podcast, Sam Harris. Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times bestsellers. He's a host of the podcast making sense and has his own meditation app. Also, we went to grad school together. So Sam Harris is going to help us

break down meditation and its impact on our mental health. Let's welcome a study in meditation himself, Jonathan Cohen. Hello, Jonathan. Hello, ma'am. Hello, everyone. I'm excited for Sam. I'm a big fan of Sam. I passed you a podcast of his to listen to. You have told me to listen to of Sam. Mostly because his voice is so melodic. Like butter. I thought it would help you calm down. You don't even have to listen to what he's actually saying. Just the tone of his voice. The tone, the timber, the pay. Everybody just get ready. Jonathan, let's do some housekeeping. Get your apron on. Sweep, sweep. If you are listening to the audio version of this podcast, please subscribe, review it. Give us a five-star review. It helps us make more and recommend it to a friend because Lord knows someone needs it. If you are listening to the audio version, you might consider going to the YouTube channel. We're adorable in the flesh.

And you can see all the facial expressions my makes, which are plentiful. Also, we wear matching outfits, and that's worth. Her disapproval is evident. It's ever-present and evident. It sure is. What else? We have a website. Biallicbreakdown.com.

B-I-A. L-I-K. Breakdown.com. We post all of our episodes there and also references. from these episodes of other things that people might want to learn about, know about, read about. Anything I mentioned that sounds vaguely scientific and like you might not believe it, I'll include the reference so you know that it's actually from a good source, as it were. I'm going to go out on the limb and say this is the most useful podcast website that has ever been built.

What is going on over there? I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts and I spend a lot of time. No one would have guessed that about it. Trying to find the references that are mentioned going back. No one would have guessed that about you. I screenshot things. I write little notes on the screenshots and I save them to my pictures and then I never find them again. And so with this podcast, I was like, we should put everything that is important on the website.

And nothing that isn't. On the website, there's a little submission form, which I just like saying submission form. And you can ask me anything. It's called Ask My Am Anything. That's true. And you can submit a question about really anything relating to your life, mental health, mental wellness. There's not a thing that you can. submit that I won't find some way to make about mental health or mental wellness. So you can submit

a question by typing it in, recording audio, or recording a little video, which is fun. And then we can use it on the episode. Ask my anything. Yeah. Allison from Nebraska asks, what if I cannot learn to meditate? Are there people who really just meditation will never work for? I'm going to say that there is not a human who does not have the capacity to meditate, it may be harder for some people rather than others. There are different challenges that we have, but I'm not saying that you're going to become a meditator on the level of the Buddha himself, but the capacity to create quiet and calm and mindfulness is available to every single human. Period.

And although this section is called Ask Mime Anything, I'm going to chime in and say, Who asked you? When you do mindfulness meditation, there is no wrong way of doing it. Even if you don't achieve calm, even if you don't quiet your mind, just the act of doing it is success. You feeling pretty good about yourself right now? I'm going to start another section of the website that says, ask Jonathan. Almost anything. Ask Jonathan some things that Mime might have skipped over.

Okay. Meditation is nothing new. Sometimes, you know, there are things that come up in our culture that it's like, oh, what's that? Like, colonics. What is that, my mind? Right. It's not a good example. It is a good example. There are people who irrigate the colon to release toxins.

And when I first heard about that, I was like, wow. Is that necessary? Some people say it is. But meditation is one of those things that's not new for thousands of years. Many religious traditions, specifically Eastern traditions, have used meditation as a fundamental component of the spiritual experience, which also translates to kind of mental fitness. And while the great Eastern tradition. and the thousands of years of people meditating has not been for the purpose necessarily of mental

fitness. You know, Buddha meditated, Moses meditated, Jesus meditated, thousands of years have practiced ways to quiet the mind and have access to different elements of our consciousness. Eastern philosophy and Eastern meditation, Eastern religions have been known. I mean, I don't think that The Spanish invaders were fascinated in particular with Eastern traditions. But one of the main things that brought a concept of Eastern philosophy to the United States, to the West, was the Beatles. That's right. The Beatles and specifically George Harrison went to India. They met with the Dalai Lama.

They did all sorts of interesting things. and they incorporated a lot of the music of that part of the world. Like, would you have ever known what a sitar sounded like, were it not for George Harrison, traveling to the east? And I'm not just sort of like throwing it out there and trying to be cute. For many people, until the 60s and the 70s, the notion of understanding, I mean, there wasn't an internet then, you know, the notion of understanding Eastern philosophy, Eastern meditation was not very known to the Western world.

Sam Harris is a person who's going to come on and talk to us. And, you know, I really wanted a particular thing from my conversation with Sam Harris, and I didn't get it. And I'm also in acceptance of that because what I wanted Sam to come on and say was a very selfish Western thing. I wanted him to come on and say, for thousands of years, meditation's been amazing. And now, you know, Western people finally understand it and it's so good for your brain, and it's good for your heart, and it's good for your blood pressure and all these things. but Sam doesn't really like to talk about kind of the data of meditation,

not because it doesn't exist and not because it's not valid. But Sam's focus is on expanding our understanding of our conscious experience as humans. Sam and I were neuroscience undergrads together. And so we lived in a very academic space. And he was always different. And he's really, you know, kind of made a name for himself as an expert of thinking deeply. he uses a lot of big words. Take out your dictionary folks for this one. Sam likes to talk about transcending the illusion of the self. You know, who doesn't? Who doesn't like to talk about that?

What does that mean to you, Maim? Well, you know, Sam is a, he's a philosopher and, you know, he studied philosophy of mind and he worked in functional neuroimaging in the neuroscience department, and that's where his thesis was. And what Sam talks a lot about is that we have a, an anatomical, set of things that make us who we are. It's how we move our arms and our legs and how we move around and how we poop and how we eat and how we do all these things with our body. But what distinguishes us and what distinguishes our experience from that of other animals in particular is that we have a conscious knowledge of our existence and of ourselves in space and time. Like I'm sitting here. I'm in this chair. I'm talking to my, there's a camera,

there's a microphone. Right, and that we construct who we are based on not only our experiences, but our perception of those experiences and what they mean. So what we do is we take all of our experiences, all of our trauma, all of our drama, all of that stuff, and we have preconceived notions about ourselves, about other people. We have organizing principles that, like, I'm broken, no one will love me, or I can only be loved if a lot of them do revolve around relationships. but that is the illusion of self.

And what Sam talks about is that at the core, like at our true core of who we are, is essentially what many religious people call the soul. Sam is talking about transcending, meaning going above, above and beyond, literally, above and beyond, our constructed notion of who we are to get to the core of who we can be.

And so often who we are, that construct, our interpretation of our experience, the labeling. The judgment. The judgment, the labeling. Often that is painful and can keep us trapped in a way. I mean, what I've noticed about how Sam talks is like painful sounds like a negative word. Like everything just is to Sam. But yes, a lot of the repetition of patterns that don't serve us can be remedied and intercepted

by altering your consciousness. and that doesn't just mean through altered states of existence, through drugs, through alcohol. It really involves tuning in to a frequency that almost none of us are trained to tune into. I think the word consciousness, breaking that down and giving people a little bit more understanding of what is meant when the word consciousness is used will help in this conversation. Jonathan, this is hard. I'll help you. Everyone wants to hear what comes out of your mouth next. Again, the section on the website is ask Jonathan almost anything that Mime doesn't want to talk about.

No, I didn't. What would you like to say about consciousness? Okay, correct me if I'm wrong. That's another section. This is another section. Okay, go ahead. Correct me if I'm wrong. Go ahead.

Consciousness is often used to describe what we are aware of. it is part of our attention. It can also be the summation of the collection of patterns of the self that we are aware of that we just spoke about. So if, for example, my normal consciousness is that I'm sitting in this chair and that I'm talking to my name and there's a microphone and my back hurts a little bit maybe or it's a little hot in this room, a change in my consciousness may be introducing something that I'm not currently aware of or focused on. So consciousness and focus in some ways can be, or sorry, consciousness and awareness can often go together. A change in my awareness can be a change in my consciousness. Is this getting any clearer to anyone else?

Here's the problem. I think that you're speaking colloquially about consciousness more as a state of awareness. But when we talk about consciousness or when Sam talks about consciousness, he's talking about the experience of knowing you're here and alive and capable of. that's awareness. I am like some people may have a profound experience in nature, for example. That's more of a, you can have a shift in consciousness, but it's kind of like you're conscious or you're not, right? We talk about the unconscious, not this. I don't believe in the subconscious. I don't use that term. But that sounds like similar to the way the kids these days say you're so woke, you're conscious. No, that's not what they mean. I mean, that's a different kind of literally

being consciously aware of something. This kind of consciousness we're talking about. is your soul. It's being aware of your existence. That's the kind of consciousness, I think, that Sam is talking about. And being able to transcend your preconceived notions and judgments about yourself is a way to have literally an altered state of consciousness, where you are no longer bound by the worries, the woes, the preoccupations of this conscious experience. And, And, you know, one of my favorite things that he talked about was essentially, it's okay to be angry. It's okay to have negative mood states. It's okay to experience grief and loss.

The degree to which you feel those things and the amount of time with which they persist, which should sound a lot like diagnostic criteria. Those are the things that determine how long you will be in that state. So it's almost like Sam were telling us, you can have the diagnosis of angry as long as you want. You can have the diagnosis of rageful, of resentful, of full of shame. You can have that diagnosis as long as you want. But you are absolutely in control. This is one thing you are in control of how intense it is and how long it goes on. And so many people who are unhappy are unhappy with their evidence being how much they've been wronged. And you'd be mad too. If he did to you what he did to me, you'd be mad too. I am justified in this. And what Sam talks about is everyone has. exactly the same ability to allow those emotions to be processed, the more you practice, the quicker you can process them and move through them. And they don't define you. I love that. It's unlinking the thoughts that perpetuate, because if you're angry and then you're upset about being angry,

you can just fly free. See, look, we work together. We do work together. We explain stuff. That was a pretty good explanation at the end there. If you do say so. Jonathan, do you meditate? I do meditate. Have there been times in your life when you meditate it a lot more than you do now? There were... Did you spend time in an ashram? Well, I was about to say that there was a period of time where I was living half-time at an ashram in San Francisco.

What's an ashram? It is a place where you live collectively. People have their own rooms or own spaces. You share main areas. And part of being there, it does require you to have a certain amount of time meditating. so you're expected to meditate with everyone together every morning and every evening. Was this a Buddhist ashram? It was not.

Was it another kind of ashram? It was. I won't go too deep into that. They practiced yoga. It was... Was it an Eastern-based? Yes. Okay.

It was an Eastern based. And it was actually... So being there with that two-a-day meditation, it was profound, actually, that it's not that it's like one time you do meditation. at least for me, that I was drastically changed, but starting to build that practice in, the effects became cumulative where all of a sudden I felt a much higher level of resilience. And I know people have a problem with that word and it could have judgment of, oh, if I, you know, have a big emotion, I'm not resilient.

But what it meant for me was that my general baseline of stress was lower. Great. I felt my cycling of thoughts was slower and that, you know, I could be excited about things, which you don't think I can be. But it just meant to me that I had more clarity. I felt calmer. And, yeah, building that into a routine. The first time that I started exploring that the way I was thinking

didn't necessarily need to be the be-all and end-all. And that there was a way to change the frequency patterns of my thought actually happened at 17 when I began. to do a specific type of hands-on body work and started getting connected to... Does I like sex work? It is not. It is about somatic release where the traumas, stressors that we have in our body get released and that we begin to merge the mind-body connection or start to map those two things together. So it's almost a meditation through our physical sensation of the body.

That's a complicated notion of meditation, is that meditation is a focus and, an inability to be distracted or to place yourself in a situation where you can be distracted. That's a more sophisticated concept of meditation. Well, the reason I bring it up is because it was the first time both giving treatment and receiving where I was put in a situation where my only job was to notice and that there was no good, no bad, but the goal was to notice and breathe. And often the breath was used to help the mind not focus on the next thing because we have patterns of thought, and I love the neuroscience behind why one thought leads to another,

or why, you know, it's, I think I'm, oh, I'm worried about my taxes. Oh, I didn't pay my taxes. Oh, I'm going to get in trouble. And, like, thoughts seem to have sequences to them. And the goal in that time period of my life or in that specific experience was that the goal was to notice a thought and not follow it, to then use the breath to say, okay, I acknowledge that thought. I breathe, it shifts. If it comes back, I breathe again. And there was a sort of dedicated time to that, which was my understanding of mindfulness. One of the most noticeable things for me is I started getting heartburn the last handful of years. It is connected to two things. The news, when I'm in an already agitated state and not meditating. And with regular meditation, I use Insight Timer, I use a free app,

all of the Western medication that I was, that I finally gave into still was not doing anything. And meditation did it. That made me a true believer. And let's bring on Sam. Let me just say a bit about Sam. Sam's writing and his public lectures cover a huge range of topics. Neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, also human violence, rationality. He generally focuses on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world changes our sense of how we should live. Sam actually received his philosophy degree from Stanford and his PhD from my alma mater, UCLA in neuroscience. And he and I were in class together. He also has practiced meditation for more than 30 years. I didn't even know he's older than 30.

He looks so young. I heard meditation is good for your skin. It's good for your skin. He's practiced meditation for more than 30 years. He has studied with Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, look that up on a map, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. And he has created the waking up app for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern and scientific context. I use it. It's a good app.

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Make sure to mention Miami-Biolet's Breakdown to help support the show. Welcome, Sam. Thank you, Maya. To my breakdown. Great to be here. Obviously, you are the expert on many, many things, which is a wonderful person to have join us today. The main thing that I think I'd like for us to sort of start our conversation,

acknowledging is that meditation we know has tremendous scientific advantage. It lowers blood pressure, it decreases anxiety. You can see a decrease in pretty much all symptoms that are associated with depression and agitation and trauma, pain, and emotional distress. And Eastern medicine has known a lot of this literally for thousands of years. And it's really only, you know, more recently, that we've started bringing it into our cultural vernacular as something that people should do and know about. So I will say that you consulted with me on this podcast in terms of me.

I think you were one of the first people I knew who had a podcast and not being a podcast person. I really appreciate really you getting me here. We have a really, really nice connection that I'm very proud of. We went to grad school together. We were colleagues in the IDP, the interdepartmental program in neuroscience at UCLA. That means we took essentially two years of core curriculum together-ish. We slogged through neuroanatomy and dissecting brains with Arnie Sheibel and, you know, Marie-François Chesley and Michael Levine were the head of my universe and yours as well for years. And you actually ended up working in neuroimaging, which is where I did my undergraduate thesis.

Correct? Yeah, I'd forgotten that you did your undergraduate in neuroscience. Yeah, and so I did my Ph.D. in the brain mapping center, so using functional MRI. And what was your specific specialization for your thesis? I was studying belief and disbelief and uncertainty. So, and I believe, my memory is degraded here, but I think I had that topic in hand before 9-11, right? So like when 9-11 happened, I was scanning brains looking at for, that's right,

the difference between belief and disbelief. And as you know, my academic career almost got completely sidelined by my career as a controversial writer at that point. So I took about four years off. Okay, so this is what I was going to say. This is what I was going to say is that you were a wee bit older than others of us. I mean, I was older already because I was two years out of high school after working on Blossom. So I was already older-ish.

And also I had my first son in grad school. So, like, I felt like, and I always feel like an old lady. But I remember you were a little bit older, and something came up about Blossom and someone was talking about it. And you were like, oh, I was gallivanting through, I don't remember, India, something, when y'all were teenagers. So there was this air about Sam Harris that he was like, he was like a real adult in our program. Not for real adult, but I was definitely older. I was, I had to be, you know, at least, well, I took, I took 11 years off between would have been my sophomore and junior year. as undergraduates. I returned as a junior at 30 or 31, something like that, and then went into grad school

after that. So I was probably 10 years older than some people and, you know, maybe six years older than others, thereabouts. Right. And the other thing about, you know, sort of who you were and what you chose to study, that's not typical. I mean, what I did also for my thesis was not typical. I worked, you know, in Prater Willey syndrome. I worked in mental retardation and, you know, we were two of the people who did human studies, as opposed to many of our colleagues who did animal studies. But I remember that at the time, you know, the notion of the study of belief was very like, what? How do we do that? I wanted to study musical ability in the brain for my thesis, and no one would even touch it because no one was doing it. And obviously, several years down the line,

the brain mapping center themselves actually ended up, you know, starting to explore more creative aspect. But you were a revolutionary, as it were in our department in that you were really dipping very deep into fields that many of us, you know, didn't have access to. And yes, you went on to really make a separate and really beautiful and successful career around, yes, a lot of controversial things, which, you know, I feel are well earned. So I want you to talk a little bit about all that process. Where did you go for those years? What were the missing years of Sam Harris. Where'd you go and what did you find? Well, so, yeah, so my time in the neuroscience program was so odd because I was really doing

everything backwards. I had my midlife crisis essentially in my 20s, right? And I recapitulated the 60s for myself. I did psychedelics. I spent a lot of time on meditation retreats. And the people I was with at that point, you know, my friends were 20 years older than I was. There was no one my age doing what I was doing when I was doing it in my 20s. Now, I think that's changed now. But when I was going on meditation retreats or when I was in an India, Nepal, studying with mostly Buddhists, but not exclusively Buddhist teachers, there were very few people of my generation doing that. And when I decided finally that I had to go back to school, my intellectual interests were very well formed. I mean, because I had spent about a decade reading philosophy mostly, but also some relevant.

psychology and mind science. I knew I went into neuroscience, I knew I wanted to know more about the brain, but I knew that I was essentially approaching it as a philosopher of mind. I knew I was not going to be in a lab, you know, as a professor, you know, at the end of all that. I knew I wanted to write and speak about the mind and do it from a place of just greater information about the brain. So I've always been in my own mind, if not on my CV, a moral philosopher and a philosopher of mind first, and then I just wanted the tools of neuroscience to, I mean, I say that really also I should acknowledge, I don't really, I don't respect the boundaries between disciplines, just as a matter of principle. I'm a big fan of the notion of the unity of knowledge and, you know,

the notion of conciliance, this term that E.O. Wilson resurrected, which is to say that there really are no divisions really between these various domains of specialization. These divisions are a function of just what it takes to specialize and, you know, and university budgets and university architecture. I mean, our knowledge is really not parcelated in the way it seems when you're looking at the course curriculum at a university, right? So, you know, whether you're a physicist making contributions to neuroscience or a neuroscientist making contributions to psychology or a philosopher, waiting into all of those areas. It just doesn't matter as long as you're actually making sense. I knew I was going to be trying to do my work at the intersection of many different

fields, but the important distinction is I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to spend a lot of time running experiments myself. Because now I look out of the world and it looks like there tens of thousands of neuroscientists who are essentially working for me. I can read their papers and judge what I think about those papers as well, right? So I don't actually feel the need, you know, occasionally I'll get an idea for an experiment and want to run it, but for the most part, it's more about thinking about what the sum total of our knowledge and how that's developing. Yeah, so anyway, I did a lot of self-study on the topic of meditation. And I should say that meditation is something that has a lot of bad PR and misconception around it.

So there are many different types of meditation, and so it's legitimate confusion about what people are doing with their attention there when they refer to meditation. But the meditation that I do and that I teach in the waking up app, which I think is most useful, it really is the center of the bull's eye from a contemplative point of view. It's not actually something you're doing. It's something you're ceasing to do. It only seems like a practice in the beginning. It's actually, in the end, nothing more than no longer being distracted by thought.

So you're paying attention to whatever you're paying attention to, sights, sound, sensations, emotions. Your attention is totally open. It's not fixated on any arbitrary object. But what you are aware of is no longer being viewed through this, you know, scrim of discursive thought that you, you're not aware of, right? So if thoughts are still arising, too, it's not a matter of blocking thought. We obviously need linguistic thought and conceptual thought, but you're aware of thoughts as

appearances in consciousness. And that's a, that may not sound like such a revolutionary state of mind, but it actually is when you look at how much of our waking life is spent being distracted by thought. Sure. Okay, wait. So yes, and take me back a little bit to, you know, young Sam Harris, Maybe just tell us a little bit, like, where you grew up and what young Sam was like? Was meditation part of your home of origin? Did you have a, you know, a religious or spiritual practice that was part of your family? How did we get to the person who was seeking what you were seeking when you, you know, went on your journey? There's not much of a story to tell there.

I mean, it did sort of come out of the blue. in, I mean, I can tell you the proximate cause of a couple of changes here. But so I had a totally secular upbringing, you know, functionally atheist, but not identified as atheists, right? So there was no atheist talk in the house. There was no God talk in the house. There was just not, it was just the absence of indoctrination. So I'm proof that if you don't indoctrinate anyone into a belief in God, they don't acquire a

belief in God, right? They just, they just become people. That was a great experiment. It's like an N of one. There you go. There would have been no point where I would have acquired a belief in anything. Now, I was raised Jewish, but, you know, that this is the sort of Judaism that gives you an appreciation of Woody Allen movies and how much money your friends are getting at their bar mitzvahs. And which diseases you might have because we're a genetically small pool, whether you believe in God or not.

So I don't have Tasex disease. Masalsab. So, yeah, I had Jewish friends. I went to bar mitzvahs. I was not bar mitzvahed myself. My mom gave me, she asked me whether I wanted to go to Sunday school like my friends. And I remember saying, why would I want to do that? And she had no answer for that. And so then I didn't do that. And it was not bar mitzvah. So there was zero religion in the house. But there were a few things that happened that sort of kind of bent my attention toward deeper thoughts,

you know, which is what is it all about? One, my best friend died when I was 13. So, you know, I was a 13-year-old, I had a very clear sense of how fragile life was. My dad died when I was 17, so that kind of ramified that epiphany. And then when I was 18, I did MDMA for the first time. So I had minor drug experiences, you know, with pot and alcohol before that. I think I'd actually taken mushrooms recreationally once and hadn't had any kind of breakthrough there. It just was a trippy experience, but it was just, there was no implore.

for understanding the mind or living a better life or anything that came out of that the first time I took mushrooms. But when I took MDMA, I took it very much in the spirit. This is kind of around my 18th birthday. I knew I wanted to understand something about my mind. This was not, and I didn't know anyone in my age bracket who had taken MDMA at this point. It was a little, it had just become illegal, but it was kind of a recent export from the therapeutic community. A lot of therapists who, had been working with it, you know, it was a revelation to me that I had no idea how neurotic and unhappy and needlessly so I was tending to be. I mean, I just, it was like the scales fell from my eyes and I realized, oh, there's a totally different way of being in the world. And this was

something I was never going to discover, apparently, by my own devices. I mean, this was not something I was thinking my way into. This was unmasking a strata of the mind. that was completely invisible to me. So when I came down, the one thing I couldn't do in the aftermath of that experience is convince myself, it was just a matter of the drug being a drug, and wow, drugs are amazing.

Isn't that incredible that you can have this experience on drugs? No, it actually had psychological and ethical implications and spiritual implications for my life. This was clearly a property of consciousness and it was possible to have a mind like this. And now the scriptures of the world's religions, which were otherwise uninteresting to me, as muddied as they were by concepts that I still,

I never adopted any kind of fondness for, they were attesting to this far end on the continuum of human experience, you know, a very positive end of experience. So let's take one obvious example. I mean, whoever Jesus was and whatever mythology has grown up around him, I couldn't, on the basis of this experience, think, okay, well, Jesus was clearly a fraud or a schizophrenic or an epileptic, or, I mean, like, those are the only

explanations for the Jesus phenomenon. No, there's, it's quite possible to have an experience that you're talking about very much in those terms that, you know, that might have given us the beatitudes or, or any of those other books of the New Testament. So then I got really into meditation and dropped out of school and the rest followed. How does one happen? into meditation, meaning what was your introduction to it? Were you running from something or running to something, you know, as kind of part of this experience? Well, both. I mean, I was running from the sort of ordinary spectrum of unhappiness that is, will be familiar to almost anyone on Earth, right? I mean, just, I mean, I had a few unique things that happened to me, but none of them were

especially unique. Obviously, lots of people have close people die, you know, before they're you know, reached the age of 20 or so. I mean, not everybody, but many people do. I knew loss to some degree. I had a girlfriend break up with me around that time or, you know, some prior to, yeah, prior to taking MDMA, actually, yeah. And so that was another loss. So I sort of knew what it was like to be unhappy and basically uncertain about what I wanted

to do with my life. And I was running toward this peak experience that I'd had. MDMA. I mean, I knew that it was possible to be just overwhelmed by, you know, unconditional love for not only one's friends and family, but for all sentient beings. Whatever someone like the Dalai Lama was talking about, I knew there was, there had to be some truth in advertising there, you know, whatever else might be dispensable about his, you know, belief system. There was something, there's a landscape of mind that could be, explored and certain states of consciousness could be experienced and whether they could become

permanent features of one's consciousness or not. That wasn't clear to me. But I just knew that there's a whole ethical and psychological integration I was looking for in my life that had just, that wasn't even a project I could have articulated before that experience with MDMA. What's the ethical part? I mean, I think of you as a good person. But what's the, what is the ethical part. Well, so it falls directly from this, the possibility of feeling unconditional love for a stranger, right? Like that would have been a non sequitur to me before having this experience. It would be like, well, how could you love a stranger? You love people because of your shared experience with them, right? Like, I love my mom or I love my best friend because of their place in my

life. And loving a stranger, that's, I mean, that's mental illness. I mean, there's no, you need a reason why you would love somebody, right? But this was one of the insights I had in this first experience with MDMA. I took it with one of my best friends at the time. Have you ever taken MDMA? Am I speaking to one who knows? Yeah. Perhaps. There's obviously a range of experience people have here. And many people aren't bowled over by it in the way that I was. I mean, people take it at parties or in raves and they just think, wow, this makes me feel good. But it's not, doesn't really upgrade the firmware on my hard drive. But for me, I was sitting with my best friend

and at a certain point, realized that there was layers of self-concern that had dropped away that I had never known were even there. So I just was no longer seeing myself through his eyes. I was merely seeing him. Like there was just zero triangulating on myself, worrying how I was appearing to another person, right? I was completely effaced in that sense.

And therefore, I had just perfect free attention to pay attention to him. And in that attention, I realized that I loved him really without reservation. I mean, I just wanted, you know, all of his dreams in life realized. There was zero competition between us. You know, it's like, this is somebody

who was better looking than me and a better athlete than me. And it's like, this is somebody who, He was one of my best friends, but I realized in losing my self-concern in his presence that there had been a lot of comparison going on throughout our friendship, you know, where I just, you know, he was somebody who I had on some level, some residue of a kind of a zero-sum contest with, like, you know, his success was not identical to my success, right? And presumably I would have that with everyone else on Earth at that point. And once that was stripped of, way, I just, I mean, the freedom from that way of being was so exquisite and deep. And so I just, as though for the first time in my life, I realized just how much I loved this friend of mine. And then at one point, I realized, wait a minute, if the pizza delivery man stepped into the room, I would feel the same way about him. On some basic level, love at that point was a state of being.

There was nothing transactional about it. There was nothing. It needed, no justification. It was sort of a place. It was like a well into which I had fallen. And the point of view from which I was viewing any encounter with any conscious being really at that point, all I wanted was for people to be happy, right? And that was synonymous, that kind of loving kindness was synonymous with a truly non-transactional form of love. That's the connection to the ethics of it. It's just when you realize that it's possible to deeply care about people from a place of true loving kindness, which is like if you put it in the presence of someone else's happiness, and now I'm kind of using Buddhist terminology here, but it becomes

what's called sympathetic joy. It's like rather than like somebody, something great happens with your friend or even, you know, a stranger, and rather than feel envious or rather than feel that your happiness has somehow been diminished. And we all know that we've all had this ghastly experience of, you know, your friend, you know, tells you some great news. and you feel this sort of miserly inability to truly celebrate this good news in their life because you're busy looking at your little life and all the good things that haven't happened for you

and there's this kind of bizarre zero-sum comparison that happens there. And to be completely free of that is to realize that in the presence of other people's happiness their happiness becomes your happiness because you actually want them to be happy, right? That's what you, that is your heartfelt wish for them. and to be in the presence of their suffering

provokes nothing but compassion because you actually want them to be free of suffering. Okay, so... I love how I give you such great soundbites that you can use here. That's the best eight-minute soundbite ever. That's why I like you, Sam. So this is, I do want to get into, you know,

kind of like meditation per se, and I do want to get into more specifics. But I'm going to share something that I wasn't planning on talking to you about, But I think throughout the time that I've known you, I've wanted to be like that person who convinces you that, like, God exists. You've been on MBMA continuously and you just haven't told me? No, no, no, no.

No, I feel like it's kind of like when you meet that guy who you know doesn't want to date you, you kind of keep trying to go out of your way to show him why he should. And like when I first learned what you're all about, I love him. You were trying to get Sam to date God? I was trying to get Sam to date God. No, but what you describe is, A, beautiful. What you describe, I do not believe is unattainable, meaning like, you know, me personally. I know that the Dalai Lama does not need MDMA to get there.

I know that you and many of us do not always need MDMA or other things to get there. but you and I have arrived at a very similar place by two completely different paths. And for me, as I studied more the philosophy and mysticism of my religion of origin and my ethnic line, and as I found more recovery as a psychological being who comes from, you know, two sides of my family with name it and we've got it. like for me the process by which I have started you know recovery from all of the various you know things and traumas and challenges that I came from along with that an increased level of observance for the purpose of being in touch with this feeling this is the place that I strive to try and live in and I don't do it perfectly I mean I think you're a far more perfect person than I am I'll take that as a backhanded compliment. But, and this is something we've also talked about a lot on this podcast, you know, people who find solace in recovery, be it from childhood stuff, alcohol, drug addiction. It kind of like keeps finding its way into the guests that I speak to.

Many, many people who revolve in a program of spiritual recovery, not specifically focused around any religious denominational organization. organization or fundamentalism. The notion of this sense of compassion and the notion of this sense of connectedness is a familiar one. And it's one that I feel, to me, it only emphasizes the sort of oneness in the universe that you can have so many different paths to this. Now, part of me is thinking, Sam Harris is looking at me and saying, that's not really it, Miami. If you still believe that you should light Shabbat candles were not the same person. I also think that, like, it's important to address that there is still a sort of oneness to our experience as humans that still does allow for multiple pathways to this kind of existence. I'd like that to be true, and I hope that you

will tell me that it is. Well, I have a lot to say on that topic. I mean, this is certainly my wheelhouse. Let me think of the line I want to take with you, Maya. Well, so first let me acknowledge that what we're talking about are universal properties of the human mind, right? So it is not, in fact, surprising that people in every tradition and none can echo these kinds of insights because these are just properties of consciousness in the end. So there are people who have realized profound things by getting into car accidents. But we wouldn't recommend car accidents as a method for real. for realizing those profound things. Sam, of course not.

That's just a corner condition, though. So let's just, so this is true in, you know, you can find Muslims and Christians and Jews and Buddhists and Hindus. And they all converge on specific insights that I think are interesting and worth having. Sort of another side, I don't know how this is kind of a rate on the map here, but another box I would check here is that there can be something beautiful and useful in observing more or less. tradition, however arbitrary it is in the end. So the lighting of a candle and the saying of a prayer and all of that can be a framework that if you've had certain insights can be a beautiful expression of those insights. But you can't necessarily flip it around and say it's a valid path to those insights. A million percent. A million percent. The additional thing that I think is

really the deal breaker for me with respect to religion is that all of these religions come with a great raft of divisive dogma that I think we have to outgrow, right? It's necessary that we grow as a species, right? Agree. So we can't be provincial and sectarian in the medieval way anymore. And various religions understand that better than others, right? So all religions aren't at the same place in their history of colliding with modernity. I love you, Sam Harris. Yes. So there's a, there's a, there's a taboo, there's several taboos here that I'm kind of stepping around. but now I can kind of land on, which is one, it is taboo among secular people to acknowledge that our religions are different, right? They're not all equally wise. They don't teach precisely the same thing. Yes, there's, there is a kind of perennial philosophy and there's, and you can, so if you squint your eyes, you can get the good stuff that you might have gotten from Buddhism everywhere, right? Or you can, you can, you can read Meister Eckhart and take him as an exemplar of Christianity and forget, about the fact that the Inquisition was getting ready

to burn him alive for his heresy, right? So it's like you can do a new age pass on every religion and get something, you know, spiritual and non-deviceive out of it or seem to. But the reality is that, you know, center of the fairway Islam is not Rumi, right? And it's much more like Osama bin Laden

than it is like Rumi, right? And so I'm not deny, you know, I love Rumi as much as the next guy, but it's just roomy is not, not, you know, the normal take on what it means to be a Muslim. This has been a source of a lot of complexity for you also, and one of the only podcasts that I've ever listened to all the way through was yours surrounding this discussion. So those who don't know, I spent a lot of time colliding with apologists for Islam and apologists for fundamentalist Christianity, those two in particular. But I've debated rabbis. And so I've been an atheist who has been very critical. religion, but all the while acknowledging that there's this baby in the bathwater that we don't

want to throw out, which is self-transcending spirituality and a real ethical engagement with the world. And I don't consider myself the most well-informed student of Judaism, but insofar as I understand the doctrine, there are aspects of it that seem to deny the reality of certain experiences that I think are very close to the center of the bullseye contemplative. Like the meditation in the end is about transcending the illusion of the self. And, you know, from reading Gersham Sholem or Martin Buber, I mean, people like that, I get the sense that there's something actually dualistic about the metaphysics of Judaism, such that, you know, the soul is really thought to be separate from reality, to use, you know,

perhaps non-Jewish terms there. But there's kind of an indissoluble gap between the knowing subject and the reality. that can be known. So that's not my experience and that's so any tradition that would teach that and this is also this is part of my problem with Abrahamic religion in general. I mean this is this is true of Christianity and Islam. There's a relationship to God, you know, whatever that is, which is propitiatory and ultimately dualistic. And that's, you know, based on my, my adventures in meditation and, you know, with psychedelics and, you know, there's just more to consciousness than that is my view.

I'm not one of those people who, you know, as we like to say, has dessert before dinner. I'm not a person who, you know, says, like, dive into the Kabbalah, like learn about the highest mystical and, you know, transcendental concepts of religious practice before reading the actual main text that it's all originally based on. But what my experience has been, you know, is that coming from not being raised religious and choosing to take on certain aspects of ritual, which also did involve, you know, some heavy concentration on some of the mystical texts where appropriate. For me, personally, it's just added a tremendous amount and has allowed a larger understanding of the role of mysticism. And, you know, Aria Kaplan is one of our favorites,

who also was a renowned physicist for his work, specifically in meditation. Many methods that I, as a child didn't even realize I was doing. I did a lot of a lot of breathing and a lot of experimenting with visual stimulus, just really laying in bed and experimenting with how darkness, you know, made its way into my optical visual field and was startled to read one of the exercises in Jewish mysticism by Aria Kaplan that describes that, you know, the great mystics used to actually do this as a practice. So I'm going to be the person. I do, I will introduce, you know, this topic. But I really wanted, you are a scientist and a meditation person, give us like the thumbnail, what's the science

behind meditation? My approach to that is also fairly iconoclastic because it's very popular now to promote mindfulness as increasingly within the province of experimental psychology and neuroscience as such as just a wellness tool, right? And I mean, you said a few things along those lines at the beginning here. And I don't dispute any of that research, but I actually don't put any weight on it, right? So, like, in my view, it's sort of just the wrong emphasis. I mean, meditation, from my point of view, is so interesting and profound that it would be worth doing even if we knew it was bad for you, right? Like that, it's a little bit like, you know, Brazilian jiu-zitsu, which is my favorite

martial art. I mean, Brazilian jiu- I did Brazilian jiu-jitsu at UCLA. Yeah, I did. While I knew you, I would have Look to spar. Yeah, that's what I did at UCLA. That's amazing. Well, that would be the perfect time for me to spar with you. Yeah, so that was my midlife, my real midlife crisis was me getting really into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. But it would be odd to say that the reason to do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is because it's good

for you, right? Because people get injured doing it. I mean, obviously it's a great way to get in shape, but sort of a great way to get in shape because there's lots of injury and it's not, it's not really targeted for that. There's so much more to it than that. in terms of the benefits and there's so much discomfort you can experience while doing it. So it's not, you can't even say that there's any linear relationship to getting more and more comfortable while doing it, right? It's an ego-canceling encounter with a totally

unforgiving art. I mean, it's really, it's quite an amazing experience to get into it. Again, whether or not meditation actually reduces stress and whether or not it staves off, you know, thinning of the cortex and boosts your immune system and anything else that, that it is touted to do at this point, I think it is a profoundly interesting thing to do for two reasons. I mean, one is the sheer intellectual interest of it. I mean, just if you're curious as to what there may be

to discover about the nature of the mind from the first person's side, well, then it makes sense to pay attention more and more carefully to what it's like to be you. And meditation is the method by which you do that. But the other component, the other doorway in, just to become more and more sensitive

to the mechanics of your own suffering. I mean, why is it that you're not as happy as you might be in any given moment? And what is actually happening that is conspiring to make you miserable? And the more you pay attention to that, the more you notice that, well, you're spending basically every moment

of your waking life having a conversation with yourself. And this conversation has a character that is mostly unhappy. I mean, mostly you're worrying about the future or regretting the past or judging everything around, judging yourself and everyone around you, or you're just distracted

from things you're attempting to pay attention to, right? It's even hard to read a page of text and get to the bottom of it without having been derailed 15 times by your own thoughts, right? So this is automaticity of thought that goes uninspected whose character is at best benign but often very unpleasant,

which is formative of our psychological states moment to moment. And then it produces negative emotions like anxiety and envy and shame. And we live with this basically every moment of our waking lives. And meditation is a way of noticing that to the point of actually breaking the spell. So you're actually no longer identified with the thoughts that would otherwise make you miserable. So it can become either just purely interesting or it becomes the doorway to out of suffering, you know, out of ordinary forms of suffering. And so those are the two reasons to pay attention to it.

But again, this is somewhat orthogonal to a lot of the research that's telling us this is one of the best things you can do for your well-being. Right. So and I think also, you know, in my defense and that of, you know, I think many, you know, I think many, people. We live in a Western society that is dominated by a need for reasons and numbers and things that they can put on a Kaiser pamphlet, you know, in a waiting room. So I bring it up to you not out of, you know, I know you're not trying to make me defensive. I do feel defensive, just in terms of what I'm trying to do with this podcast, which is to introduce to people other windows into improving their mental wellness that may not be the things that we've ever

been taught to explore. So, for example, I did not start this podcast so that I can diagnose people and tell them what drugs I think they should take. The notion is to try and introduce the concept of mind-body syndrome in that when we have unresolved things, issues, for lack of a better word, they will live in us and they will impact the way we function, the way we interact with other people and the way, you know, ultimately our body functions. When my father of blessed memory, he had multisystematric and he had a prolonged and very difficult journey really with his mental health for his entire life and specifically with his physical body for the last several years of his life. And, you know, he was plagued by many, you know, diseases of lack of mindfulness.

And so many times they would try and get him to meditate. You know, he would hear from this doctor, have you tried this? When he passed away, I found, you know, unopened meditation CDs that he had been given by, you know, wherever he was at whichever Kaiser Clinic. And what I know is that the amount of fear and anxiety, you know, that he lived with, while it may not have been able to go away, this is the kind of information that I think has the possibility to help so many people understand. This is not a trend. this is not, it's not a quick fix. It is a decision to make a commitment to approach your existence differently, and it actually has an impact on how you then live your life. I mean, does that feel better?

And it can be a quick fix. I mean, it's really, there's no, there's no, it's nowhere written that it indeed take you a long time to have the kinds of fundamental insights that change. that change your moment-to-moment experience permanently. It's like once you recognize the psychophysics of negative emotion, there are things you see that you can't unsee. And one of them is that, you know, though you may have causes for, let's say, take an emotion like anger,

something makes you angry out in the world, right? Somebody behaves badly, someone cuts you off in traffic, whatever it is, someone insults you on Twitter, and you suddenly feel angry, there are a few things that are objectively true about this situation that a person can take a lifetime, you know, to ignore and or someone can realize in an instant. One is whatever happened in the outside world, it's not true to say that it is making you angry moment to moment. I mean, the actual mechanics of your anger requires some collaboration from your side, right? You have to be identified with the thoughts that are telling you why you have every right to.

be angry about this thing. And once you unhook from those thoughts, you actually can't stay angry for more than a few moments at a time. I mean, the way you stay angry for hours and days and weeks and do all of the life-darranging things that you can do from that place is to be lost in thought all that time, right? The moment you can see thoughts arise as appearances and consciousness and feel consciousness to be a prior condition in which those thoughts arise and pass away and the anger itself, the physiology of anger in that moment,

it doesn't disappear as quickly as the thoughts, but again, the half-life of anger when you're no longer thinking about why you should be angry is on the order of tens of seconds. I mean, it is not tens of minutes, it's not hours, it's not days, there's just literally no way to stay angry, but to be captivated by the thoughts that would argue that you should be angry.

I love that. At minimum, this gives you a choice to, once you have this ability, and again, this ability is meditation, it gives you a choice to decide whether it's worth being angry over this thing. It's like just how long do you want to stay angry and how angry do you want to be over this thing that just happened? Well, and the fact is that serves its own purpose, even if it's not a healthy one. there is a reason that we choose to stay there. It serves us in some way, and when we're done, we can be done. Yeah, and I'm not even, I'm not saying that anger is never appropriate.

It is, all of these negative emotions are appropriate if only as, as salience signals. I mean, so if suddenly something happens that makes you feel fear or anger, at minimum, there's something worth attending to in your environment, right? Something's just happened, right? You just got some, you know, you got a bad vibe off of somebody, you know, in a public space. And that person's worth paying attention to. You've only just to back away quickly, right? Like you just...

That's what your brain's for. It's to tell you stay away when you feel that. We have millions of years of evolution making us very good at navigating moments like that. And yet sometimes we are still drawn to those people. I'm looking at Jonathan over here. It's worth taking those negative. negative affect in that sense seriously, but the question is how long should it last for, right? And if you can't meditate, if you can't be mindful, if you don't know the difference between being

lost and thought and noticing thought arise and pass away, you will be as angry and as fearful and as anxious and as regretful and as shame-filled for as long as those emotions endure based on the sheer happenstance of your, you know, your conditioning, you know, the nature of whatever's happening with your mind, then your relationships will ramify all that. And it really is a kind of superpower to be able to get off the ride the moment you decide, okay, there's no longer a point in feeling this way. Okay, so that leads me to my next question. I have two more questions. The first question is, I find this with people regarding two things, meditation and yoga. There are certain people who, when you bring up those terms, their reaction is, I can't do that.

I don't want to sit still. That's not for me. Right. You know, one of my, and I'll talk about this when I sum this up, because it's one of my main things, if you're the kind of person who does not believe that you can or should, find a way to quiet your mind, you are exactly the kind of person that other people wish you would learn to be silent and quiet your mind. Who are those people who say that? What would you tell them, Sam?

Well, first, there are people who deal with an unusual amount of restlessness who do find it hard to sit still. But I would just say to them, you can do walking meditation. I mean, you don't actually have to sit still to meditate. I mean, you could be, if you actually know what to do with your attention, you could be jogging while you meditate. Like, there's just no, there's no, what you're doing with your body is not really the point. I mean, if you're lying down, people tend to fall asleep. And so that's just, you know, it's not recommended as a way to start meditating to be lying down. But other than that, it really is all a matter of what you're noticing with your attention.

And it just so happens that most beginning meditation instruction, at least in this kind of tradition that teaches mindfulness, starts with mindfulness of the body and mindfulness of the breath in particular in the beginning. But that's not the way it has to be. I mean, you can be mindful of just seeing. You know, you could be walking on the beach, looking at the ocean. There's nothing in principle that can't be an object of meditation because all meditation is, all this kind of meditation is.

Mindfulness is noticing what you notice clearly. You're noticing things moment by moment anyway, right? You can't help but notice sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts. But the question is, are you lost in thought while you're doing that and ceaselessly tiling over the phenomenal world with your concepts, right? I mean, is everything being conceptualized and driven from below by your discursivity, you know, linguistically. Or have you dropped down to a layer beneath that where you just can notice things clearly? Like when you're looking at your visual field, can you notice rather than specific objects which you have names for?

can you notice that it really is an undifferentiated field of color and light? And it's just presenting itself moment to moment. And so it is with sounds. I mean, can you notice that rather than hearing a bird which you're mapping to someplace far away, can you notice just the actual sheer impingement of that sound on your eardrum and notice that bird is an added concept on top of that raw datum of sound? And so once you drop down, down past the concepts, literally it is compatible with anything else you might be doing. I mean, we can be having a conversation like this and I can be connecting with precisely the same kind of awareness that I would be connecting with eyes closed in a formal session of meditation.

While I have done walking meditation, you know, I came to meditation at a point in my life when a lot of other things were not helping, essentially. And I reached out to a friend of mine, her name's Carla Nalmberg and she's written some really, really lovely, lovely books about how turning to a life of mindfulness and meditation really allowed her essentially to stop screaming at her children, which was kind of her most salient reminder. And, you know, and so I reached out to her because I was having, I had been, you know, recently divorced and I was having a very, very hard time. And I finally said, I just turned it over to her. I said, Carla, I'm done living this way. Tell me what to do and I'll do it. And the hardest thing, you know, I'm a person who's in constant motion.

You know, I choose not to be medicated for that. And, you know, even speaking to someone like you is very hard for me because it takes a tremendous amount, you know, of energy for me to drop into the place where people like you can speak. It feels very meditative to listen to you also. But for me, I had to learn to sit my butt down. And I have a lot of somatic stuff. I have chronic pain.

Like, it'll move around when I try and sit still. So for me, forcing myself to learn to find the position where the pain in my body was not interfering with the ability to start tuning in the way Sharon Salzberg taught me to, you know, and all the people that I used. But the other opportunity I had and kind of my first introduction to this was I had, I had two children with no drugs. And I don't consider myself a superwoman. I don't have a, quote, high pain tolerance. I mean, I might, but that's not why. What I did was self-hypnosis, which essentially is a way to interpret all sensation that you feel, especially during labor, as indications that you can and should go deeper into a meditative state. And I had two very different births.

One took three days on and off, and one took under three hours by myself. and I used the same exact techniques, obviously they varied, but I used the same exact techniques to be present, to be joyful, and to move through, I mean, a lot of it is just shifting the linguistics of labor and calling them surges instead of contractions and intensity instead of pain, but it was the first time that I had been told every increased sensation that adds to your discomfort is a signal to go deeper. And that's what I then get to apply to, you know, to a life trying to live in a meditative, not a meditative state, but in a place where it serves me.

The frame you put around it is often completely dominates the sensations themselves. And I can't speak to the pain of labor, obviously, right? That's pretty intense. I'm sure it's what it's cracked up to be. but if you just take the difference between, you take something like the pain and physical stress of a very intense workout, right? Now, people who get really into weight training

or jiu-jitsu or anything like that, seek out that experience, right? But now if you felt those exact same sensations in a different context, it would obviously be a medical emergency and it would terrify you, right? You woke up in the middle of the night. Or abuse. You know, feeling that way.

if you felt the peak stress of a bench press in the middle of the night in bed, you'd think, okay, I'm calling 911 here. This is, this is, this is. That's just called a Saturday night over here, Sam Harris. So anyway, so it's just, it's worth noticing how much your concepts can, can determine your, your relationship to, you know, raw sensation that's quite intense. And obviously, as, as someone who studied oxytocin and neuroendocrinology, it's very important to me to also experience the other things that came along with labor and birth and for all of the reasons that I, you know, support them and believe in them. So that's also the belief system, you know, that contributes to that commitment. The final question I want to ask you before we let you tell us where we can find all of the amazing things that are Sam Harris. I'm going to tell you a very Hollywood experience that I'm sure you've heard before. Okay.

I'm going to be super vague about any specifics here. I was invited to someone's home with a hands. handful of other people who were also invited there. We did not know each other. One of them, I happened to know because we both worked at Warner Brothers. She was a, she was in the business department and I am an actor. But I recognized her and I was like, oh, thank goodness. Like someone I know just to, you know, so we were in a person's home. Can you feel it's coming yet? Yeah. Okay. It's either I-waska or you'll put your keys in a bowl. No. No. No, but we can talk about that. It's either a cult or a key party.

It's not, well, so what we were, we were, there was a little seminar that was given by the person who's in charge. And what he was describing was the way to enlightenment, essentially. And, you know, we were told that there's a very, very attainable and accessible and beautiful way of thinking and practice, which could free us of addiction, trauma, really any ailments. What we were told is that there is a form of meditation, and it's called transcendental meditation, called TM. And this is from other people I've spoken to in Los Angeles and other urban centers, this is a thing that happens. And while I do not want to take away from what I imagine is the skills and the journey of this particular gentleman, what we were told is that for the equivalent of a week or two of a month's salary, Yeah, yeah.

Which I'm an actor and we make a stupid amount of money. So already I'm like, does that apply to me too? But I didn't ask that. I asked it after. Anyway, for the equivalent of a week or two or two of your month's salary, you will meet with this person and they will give you a mantra. And that, oh, I'm not done. And that mantra is what you will use to attain this state on this journey that we're all part of.

You know, the notion that any access to mental health or this kind of work, you know, is an elitist one is very offensive to me. And part of why I am choosing to do this podcast because I feel like it's a human right, you know, to have access to to your best and most, you know, healthy mental state. This is a lot of money, though, that we're talking about to receive a mantra. And while mantras are significant, very important, I have used mantras. I've listened to chants. This is a thing that happens where you are told, you know, we're going to give you a mantra and that's going to be it. Can you please, Sam, tell me what's up with transcendental meditation and the people who are trying to sell it to us? First, I should say, I like David Lynch's movies as much as the next guy.

So, I mean, TM, yes, TM is, shows all the signs of being a cult, certainly of sorts, right? So as an organization, I don't respect the organization. Sure. And they are, as you point out, fairly mercenary, right? And they're trading on this notion that this seed syllable or phrase that they may give you as a mantra has magic properties, right? And it's important that you get, you know, you keep it secret and that, you know, it has to be given to you in the right way. I think they give the same one to everyone, Sam. But there are dozens and dozens of them that they might be given out.

Sure. There's nothing magical about any of that. So most of all of that is religious bullshit, except for the fact that if you orient towards something, if you grant something your attention in this way and your attention can be successfully gamed by the framework around it, all the money you paid for it, and your belief that this is this magic seed syllable that was uttered by the birth of the universe and, you know, contains all, you know, Ome contains all the sound. the human voice box can make, right? And that's why it's a precious sound and blah, blah, blah. If that changes what you do with it, well, then we have to price those changes in. Maybe those changes are important, right?

But the reality is that the principle, the underlying principle of why mantra meditation works is really twofold. One is just sheer concentration. You can concentrate on any arbitrary object as a mode of meta, as a type of meditation. And you will find that the more concentrated your mind becomes, the less you'll be lost in thought,

and the more you'll experience certain kinds of mental pleasure that are really interesting to experience them. You can experience really drug-like states of rapture and bliss by merely becoming concentrated. And again, it matters not at all what the object of concentration is. there's an additional top spin you can give to concentration when what you're concentrating on has a positive connotation. So like loving kindness, very much the state I experienced on MDMA, is a type of concentration practice within Buddhism. You do a practice called meta meditation,

which wherein you repeat to yourself phrases of well-wishing toward, you know, people you love and then neutral people and then ultimately even enemies. But you're saying the words, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you be free from suffering. And insofar as you become concentrated on those mantras, those mantras actually mean something to you, right? The meaning is being made explicit emotionally for you. Well, then not only are you concentrated, you are kindling a very specific emotion on the basis of those concepts. So mantra meditation can be explicitly devotional within like a Hindu or Buddhist concept context. You can be thinking of your guru or Ram or Shiva or Vadrasatva or what I can say.

You've got some pantheon that you have given credence to. And spiritual devotion becomes part of what you're getting, you know, you're suffusing your mind with. And obviously in a Christian context or any other context, I mean, this is, you know, it's like, the Jesus prayer is essentially the same game, but it's a Christian version of it. From my point of view, concentration and even very positive mental states like devotion and loving kindness

are not the center of the bullseye for meditation, from meditation point of view. Really what you want to recognize is that there's something about ordinary consciousness itself. I mean, just the very consciousness you would point toward checking your inbox. box of your emails, right? You know, without any special thought to how much you love anybody or what you're

aspiring to in life, there's something to recognize about the sheer light of consciousness that is self-transcending and is actually an answer to your default states of mental suffering and entanglement with your neurosis. And so targeting that and recognizing that, that's the thing that potentially can equalize all the moments in life, you know, whether you're with your kids or you're stuck in traffic or you're reading a book or you're having a baby, whatever it is, recognizing the space around all mental phenomenon and what that space is like and how it doesn't feel like a self. It doesn't feel like I. There's not a, it's not you, there's no subject in the middle of it. There's simply the totality of experience and it includes everything you could possibly notice. That's worth noticing. And that's, so mindfulness is appropriately targeted toward that as opposed to, any state you would intentionally try to produce. So when you're doing TM or any mantra-based practice,

any other thought that would arise is really an enemy of the practice. I mean, really the goal is to get rid of those thoughts. You want to be so concentrated on your object of meditation that those kinds of thoughts are no longer arising. Whereas with mindfulness, the next thought that arises, whatever it is, is just as good an object of meditation as anything else, if in fact you can notice it.

And that takes a certain degree of concentration. Well, please tell us where we can learn that degree of concentration. How can we hit the center of the bullseye of meditation, the Sam Harris way? Well, so I really have two things I'm mainly doing. One is I have a meditation app, which you can find out more about at wakingup.com, but that is app-based, although there's a web-based version of it if you don't like your phone. And then I have a podcast, which is making sense. And so Samharris.org is my website where you can find out more about me and my nefarious activities.

Sam, thank you so much. Thank you for your guidance. Thank you for your friendship. And thank you for walking me and Jonathan this far. It's really, I really did not expect you to come on and do this. I'm so appreciative. And I just plan to re-listen to this before bed every night. This is going to be how I go to sleep.

Yeah, it's a pleasure. And good luck with everything. I'm very happy your podcasting. Take care, Sam. Thank you. Thank you. I feel really calm. He has a very soothing voice.

He has a very soothing voice. I don't talk slower than him. He makes more sense than you do. He uses a lot, many bigger words than I do. He's got a lot of words, that man. I wrote them all down, and maybe for anyone who wants to not have to look them up on Google. Do you know what Sam Harris meant when he said this game?

That's a very intelligent human. He's shared a lot of good information. But he's like another level of intelligent. I feel so stupid in his presence. I always did. But sometimes I feel stupid in people's presence when they're calm. I think I always imagine they're like, you know, silently judge it, which he's not, he's a lovely person. I even made him laugh a couple times.

I love making dudes like that laugh. Just a tiny crack of a smile on that. Oh, he's adorable. He's lovely. But I feel very stupid around. I mean, I just like, I feel like everything I say is like, anyway, I don't know. I think you did very well. Oh, thank you.

Do you think people understand meditation better now? A little bit. I mean, I think he, I think Sam was talking about, you know, more like a worldview of which meditation is a part for him. And, you know, that he's a philosopher. It's what he is. You know, he's taken a tremendous amount of a flack, you know, for some of his comments about or his discussions about, about religion. but I never felt disrespected, you know, in the years that we were colleagues. I never felt disrespected by him because I was observant and he was not.

He's a very different kind of person, you know, in terms of how he speaks and how he presents himself. And he was always kind of, he was, he was older than us. And as you heard, he'd been on a very big journey. He had been in a real other realm of existence. So then, yes, to come back and kind of start learning physics again and the neuroanatic. and biochemistry, like, that's a whole thing. I will say that I've listened to a lot of Sam Harris's podcasts. Yes.

If you want to think deeply and you want long-form podcast conversations. He's your man. He's your man. He has an amazing app. A lot of very practical tools. I highly recommend. He works for a good cause. You know, I don't feel like Sam is out there to, I mean, he has.

I have five bestseller. But he's not out there for that. He really believes that he has. has found a way, and I think he has, to communicate very, very complicated ideas about our consciousness. And existence and what it means. But also, like, let's just review the Dalai Lama doesn't need MDMA to get where Sam did. So here's a couple points. I mean, put that on a t-shirt. The first one, if I have to summarize in a simplistic form as possible, the notion between a concentrated... Simplified, not simplistic. Well, okay. Well, well, simplified form. The difference between a concentrified

meditation practice and his approach to mindfulness. The concentration practice is I'm going to block all thoughts out and I'm only going to focus on a mantra, a candle, a feeling of happiness and I'm going to push all those others out. And if those other things try and come in, I push them out more. Push them out and go deeper into my thing. And not that it's a failure, but that that's what you're heading towards. And that is one form of meditation. I know lots of people who do TM and have... Do they pay all that money? I have... I don't know that...

Why they make you pay all that money? I don't know that side of it. I don't know the sales... I don't know the sales pitch. It's a good one. I can't speak to how they got into it, but they claim to have had life transforming experiences from that. So no knocking on it from my perspective. I'm not judging. The other side, and there was a meditation teacher that I listened to quite a bit.

His name is Adashante. He has a lot of books, some of them very little. you can get through them very easily. He doesn't have a lot to say. He knows the things to say and he says it. That's it. That's it. His perspective was more like Sam's, which it was you allow the mind to be open and you allow the things to be noticed. So if a thought comes in, you notice it. You acknowledge that it's you don't judge it. You don't judge it. You don't label it. You try not to go from. Don't change it. Oh, this, that's a thought of X. It's a bird. And then what do you do with it? gray, whatever it is. So you just notice the thought. Yep. And you allow it to go. Correct. It goes like

like you're on the bottom of a riverbed. It's just going over you. You are not that thought. You are not connected to that thought. That thought exists. It's not good or bad. It just is. And it is a practice. Even though it can happen in a moment and you can have a revelatory experience, I think for most of us, it's a muscle that you have to exercise. It takes time. Versus the TM, which is you're also building a muscle. Right. But, and again, these are not my words what I'm about to say. What I've heard is that when you try to build that muscle through contraction, you can never hold onto something tight enough that once you let go, it's not going to go back to where it was. I made this, you might need help if, you might need meditation if, you might need meditation if you're

alive. Because meditation is a tool with which to better understand yourself. And just a little throwback, which is related to the you might need help, but a little bit longer than our normal ones, which Mime is already upset about. It's, I've already forgotten what you're talking about. There were so many caveats. Oh, sure, you can follow Sam. But as soon as I get a little lengthy, Sam said, the mechanisms of your own suffering. Anyone who doesn't think they have some mechanism of suffering.

You might need, if you're alive, but you might need help if you have any experience of suffering. That's loss, that's grief, stress. I like to say you might need meditation if you have children, parents, siblings. A boss. A boss. The notion of mindfulness, which can be achieved other ways, but which are primarily achieved through the practices of meditation, are scientifically viable. They are scientifically verifiable. And for those of you who needed to know that, there it is.

And for those of you like Sam, who just know it because it's true, that is meditation. I think you two are actually saying the same thing at one point. We are. Which was that by addressing the mechanisms of your own suffering, you address health benefits. Correct. That the mechanisms of our own suffering are often a huge contributor to negative health. And I think that Sam is also reacting to, yes, the last three years, two or three years have seen an explosion of meditation apps and pay for this and do that, which is a lot of what many of us notice. has happened to yoga, you know, over the years, and it becomes like power yoga, and it becomes

like, wear these clothes to do yoga best and have an Instagram account that shows all your sexy yoga poses. Or on dating apps, if you are female, you have to be in wheel or some yoga pose. Pigeon. No, that's not a sexy pose. That's not a sexy pose at all. What are the sexiest poses? I mean, I could do headstand. I don't know the name in Sanskrit off the top of my head. It's always the legs, they're open. It's like, you know. Anyway, what's happened to meditation is a lot of what's happened to yoga. And I think Sam really wants to distinguish himself from that notion and that trend, you know, of meditation. But like I said, the web that has no weaver, you know, which is one of the first books to introduce Eastern philosophy into Western culture, had to bring with it data because we are a data-driven society.

Western medicine is governed by data. And yeah, you can say, I don't want any part of that. But like I said, my dad was told to meditate by strictly Western doctors, you know, because it started to make its way into our consciousness as something that does help. It helps you stop complaining. You know, I think we should give a shout out to the book that you and I reconnected over. It's right there. The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer.

Now, it got popularized by Oprah on her book. That book changed my life. and not just because it had me reach out to you again. So the interesting story here is that a day before my... Jonathan! The day before Maim emailed me asking me, have I read The Untethered Soul? After I hadn't spoken to her in six years,

I had been talking about the untethered soul and recommending it to an entire room of people that I was working with at a startup that we were looking to think about how we would address mental health on a wide scale. Look at us now. And that book... We're in matching outfits.

Michael Singer was an economist. He came to meditation and mindfulness from a very different perspective. It's a very simple book, and it also describes some of the fundamentals. But, you know, strap on your seatbelt. It's a very intense book. Then Miami emailed me asking me that. And here we are making a podcast. I skipped a few steps.

If you want to hear more, go to Bialicbreakdown.com in the Ask My Many Things section. you can recommend stuff for us to talk about. We might talk about it. Also subscribe to the podcast. If you're listening only in audio, check out the YouTube version on Myambiolix YouTube channel. We do dress like twins. And you'll see all of the facial reactions

that she has when I speak, which are usually... Everything you say, I'm thinking of it in Sam Harris's voice right now. Cringeworthy. That's the faces that she's making. And you're missing that if you're only listening to the audio version.

From my breakdown to the one I hope you never have. I'll see you next time. This is what happens when I don't get to ask any questions. Cut his mic.