Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 306: A Meditator in the Arena | Sam Harris

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

Sam Harris (no relation to me, by the way -- although I wouldn’t mind it) has had a formative impact on my contemplative development. He was one of the first “normal” (at least that’s how I computed it, back when I was still a rather judgmental skeptic) people I met who was really into meditation, which gave me a lot of courage and inspiration to pursue the practice myself. He later helped me get into my first meditation retreat with his old friend Joseph Goldstein, which was a massively important event in my life and the beginning of a deep relationship with Joseph. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Sam, he is a neuroscientist, philosopher, author, podcaster, and app founder. I first heard of him in the mid-aughts, when he wrote a book called The End of Faith, which was a jeremiad against organized religion. I was surprised to learn that he had spent, cumulatively, several years on meditation retreats. He later wrote a book which touched on those subjects, called Waking Up. That is also the name of his meditation app. But while he has one foot firmly in the contemplative world, he is also very much in the arena, mixing it up on Twitter and on his wildly popular podcast, called Making Sense, with his controversial views on hot-button issues from Trump to race to Islam. Sam really believes that the future of civilization depends on our ability to have rational conversations on thorny issues. And he has a new book called Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity, in which some of his podcast conversations are revised and extended. I wanted to have him on to talk about the book, and to explore with him how somebody who is so fiercely engaged in the public square uses meditation to guide and sustain him. I suspect many of you may disagree with him on key issues -- I often wrestle with his ideas quite a bit, personally -- but no matter where you stand, I think you’ll find his answers to these questions fascinating. Take Part in the New Year’s Series To submit a question or share a reflection dial 646-883-8326 and leave us a voicemail. If you’re outside the United States, you can email us a voice memo file in mp3 format to [e-mail]. The deadline for submissions is Monday December 7th. Where to find Sam Harris online: Website: https://samharris.org Twitter: https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Samharrisorg/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samharrisorg YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNAxrHudMfdzNi6NxruKPLw Books Mentioned: Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris: https://bookshop.org/books/waking-up-a-guide-to-spirituality-without-religion/9781451636024 The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris: https://bookshop.org/books/the-end-of-faith-religion-terror-and-the-future-of-reason/9780393327656 On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious by Douglas E. Harding: https://bookshop.org/books/on-having-no-head/9781908774064 If you're looking for a sign that you're supposed to start actually meditating - this is it. And, you can bring a friend or family member along for the ride. For a limited time, if you buy yourself a subscription to Ten Percent Happier, we'll send you a free gift subscription to share with whomever you'd like. Note that nothing is permanent, and this offer is no exception: get it before it ends by going to www.tenpercent.com/december. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/sam-harris-306 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast, Dan Harris. Hey guys, Sam Harris, who by the way has no relation to me, although I wouldn't mind it. Sam has had a formative impact on my contemplative development. He was one of the first, quote unquote, normal people, at least that's how I computed it back when

I was still a rather judgmental skeptic. He was one of the first normal people I met who was really into meditation, which gave me a lot of courage and inspiration to pursue the practice myself. Sam later helped me get into my first meditation retreat with his old friend Joseph Goldstein, which was a massively important event in my life and the beginning of a deep and important relationship for me with Joseph. For those of you who are not familiar with Sam, he is a neuroscientist, philosopher, author, podcaster, and app founder. He first came to my attention in the mid-Auts when he wrote a best-selling book called

The End of Faith, which was a Jeremiah against organized religion. I was surprised to learn that notwithstanding his hostility to religion, he had spent cumulatively several years on meditation retreats, often in the company of Joseph. Sam later wrote another best-selling book, which touched on his meditation career and contemplative subjects in general. It was called Waking Up. Waking Up is also the name of his meditation app. But while he has one foot firmly placed in the contemplative world, he's also very much

in the arena, mixing it up on Twitter and on his extremely popular podcast called Making Sense with his controversial views on hot button issues from Trump to race to Islam. Sam believes that the future of civilization depends on our ability to have rational conversations on thorny issues. And he has a new book called Making Sense, Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity, in which some of his podcast conversations are revised and extended. So I wanted to have him on here to talk about the book and to explore with him how somebody who is so fiercely engaged in the public square uses meditation to guide and sustain him. I'll say before we dive in here that I suspect many of you may disagree with Sam on key issues.

I know personally I wrestle with some of his ideas quite a bit, but no matter where you stand, I think you'll find his answers to all of the questions I pose to him fascinating. So here we go with Sam Harris. Hey, Dan. Hi, cousin Sam. So what's happening here? I got a million things I could talk about but what are we talking about today? Well, you know what? I'm just you know, I follow your podcast very closely and I follow your utterances on Twitter very closely and I had a question for you that I've asked you in private that I wanted to ask you in public, which was given that you have such a long history with

meditation, and given that you engage so ferociously in public events, how does one inform the other? Yeah, that's interesting. Well, there are a few answers to that or a few levels to that. I mean, one is on one level, some of what I do in public, and I said, certainly on Twitter, has seemed like a painful distraction at times from my core interest and my core values. And then meditation or your insight into the nature of the mechanics of my own, you know, mental suffering is an antidote to that problem, right? So, you know, I recover from things I shouldn't have said and shouldn't have done as anyone does by recognizing that the

real basis for mental ease and well-being. And I'm just, you know, it's an absolute lifeline for me to have that training and have that awareness. So, I mean, that's just mission critical. But the line isn't where many people, certainly many Buddhists, many meditators, many Dharma people think it is. It's not that, I mean, so for instance, you and I both have meditation apps, so we have many people who are aware that we're identified with this whole pursuit of just living an examined life, amplifying compassion and wisdom, both our own and other people's and advocating for that whole project. And then our politics takes a turn toward authoritarian capture in my view.

And in the last week, I've been very active on Twitter, just hammering away on Trump and the misinformation we've seen polluting our public conversation. And there are many people who see that and think, hey, well, it looks like you could use your own meditation app. What the hell are you doing? You know, who are you going to teach the meditative? You're so caught by politics. That's the wrong place to draw the line. Right? I actually think that emotions like outrage and anger and fear are salience signals that are worth paying attention to and I'm not spending all my time or even much of my time angry and afraid when I am signaling on Twitter that something just happened that is outrageous that we really need to pay attention to. us to get into a car and put it on your seatbelt. And you do that because you don't want to die, right? You don't want to be needlessly injured. You're aware of all of the bad things that follow

when you spend your life driving in cars without a seatbelt. They've been well advertised to us. And it is an awareness of all of that that causes you to buckle your seatbelt, but you don't actually have to be feeling afraid every time you get in a car to buckle your seatbelt. The norm is not enforced by a feeling of terror, you know, of death and of dying in a car accident. So people get a false sense of how just the nature of my mind, it's not that I never get bent out of shape or around the things I'm reacting to, but there's compassion and there's idiot compassion. I mean, this is a phrase that,

one may have heard in various Dharma circles, and it really is, there's an idiotic norm of There's an idiotic norm of quiescence and non-engagement, and both sides is them that can get tuned up based on a naive consideration of the Dharma and mindfulness and the whole project of cutting through your identity with anything. And it's important not to be captured by that. I mean, there are, you know, yes, feeling compassion for someone like Trump is a reasonable thing to want to do, but that's not synonymous with failing to notice how dangerous his behavior is, right? And so to be silent as the arsonist is busily lighting a fire to everything you are right to care about

That is a failure to understand what the same project is of maintaining human well-being So as I watch you post on Twitter or as we those who follow you watch you post on Twitter or listen to you Holding forth many times, quite strenuously on the podcast, we should know that your mind is reasonably equanimous even as you take these steps. Yeah, or that when it's not equanimous, I recover quickly. For me, maybe there is some state of enlightenment where you never feel anger again, right? That just doesn't seem like what's happening from my point of view. I see

that what happens is something, well, you know, something in the world occurs that it is appropriate to be worried about, concerned about, outraged about, I mean, depending on, you know, fearful of, depending on the nature I mean, depending on, you know, a fearful of, depending on the nature of the case, right? You know, if a lion escapes the zoo and winds up on your doorstep, right, it is appropriate to see that as a kind of emergency, right? And to respond to the emergency the way you would, I mean, either you run or you grab a gun or you, something has to happen unless you just want to be eaten by a lion. And the question is, how bad do you have to feel to have an appropriately motivated response

to real danger in the world? And danger that not just impacts you, but impacts everyone around you who you care about. Now granted, it's possible to be confused about what's really happening in the world. You can be the victim of misinformation and disinformation. You can be paranoid. You can be biased. All of that's true. And any of that might be true of me in any given moment. I mean, I'm fairly careful when I decide to go to the mat. You know, I live in perpetual fear that I might be wrong about a pitch that I'm taking a really hard swing at because I do all of this publicly. And I'm very quick to apologize and correct errors when I,

in those cases, where I am wrong. But the truth is, I am rarely going to the mat for something unless I've made a lot of effort to make sure that the likelihood that I am completely mistaken about what I'm now going to bang on about, that likelihood is fairly low. And again, my master of value here is intellectual honesty. I think we really do have to apologize when we get it wrong, even when the target of our errant blow is genuinely contemptible as I think someone like Trump is. So if I say something about Trump that is wrong, I will correct it. Even if the thing is in the direction of something I know to be still true.

It's important not to exaggerate this man's flaws. He has so many flaws that it's unnecessary to exaggerate this man's flaws. He has so many flaws that it's unnecessary to exaggerate them, but it also just destroys your credibility to exaggerate them. I try to be very careful there. Honestly, I spend even more time, as I think you know, criticizing the far left, then I spend criticizing Trump. I'm right in the middle of, it really is a kind of high wire act where, you know, on both sides, I notice the capacity for serious error. And, you know, I don't want to fall off the wire. Yes, I'm aware that you spend a lot of time invading against the far left, as well as

against the current occupant of the White House. I spend sometimes, and again, this is something I've said to you privately, sometimes I watch it, I'm thinking, why are you putting yourself through this? You know, like given this prolonged, pronounced interest you have in mental well-being, contemplation, cultivation of mindfulness, wisdom, and compassion, why make yourself a target? I've heard you answer this privately,

but how would you answer it publicly? Well, I mean, making myself a target isn't the concern from my point of view. I do spend a fair amount of time rethinking many of these moments. I've recalibrated my engagement with social media in particular. I used Twitter up until the last week, up until the election really. My behavior on Twitter had completely changed for at least a year, if not more.

I just was not looking at what was coming back at me. I was never engaged with anything. I would just put out what I thought needed to be put out. So I feel a responsibility having a reasonably large platform that when I think I can discredit bad ideas or amplify good ones, I feel a responsibility to do that. In the same way that I feel a responsibility to say something that makes sense on my podcast.

It's just like we're in the game of trying to influence public opinion to the good. Otherwise, what are we doing having conversations in public anyway, right? But I definitely have course corrected because I was noticing that I was, yeah, I was just not intelligently curating the contents of my own mind.

I was just spending a lot of time thinking about things. I don't actually have to think about that. I couldn't really influence much for the better. And it was painful to do it. But even the stuff that is necessary to do, which after thinking once and twice and three times about it before doing it, that stuff makes me just as much of a target as anything else. So being a target is no longer something that I need to

think about. It just goes with the territory. If you say something on these topics ever in public, you will have an army of people who think you should be canceled for it on some level and the real correction for that at least in my life has been To Make myself very hard to cancel, right? And that would be quite a feat at this point not to say it's impossible, but it's just you know, I am I Have deliberately for a couple of years You know, and you're in in my whole operation to the prospect of cancellation. It never feels like a

significantly reckless business decision to say what I think in public. And I'm sensitive to the fact that not everyone can achieve that in their lives. And that's why I, you know, I can't say that people should draw, that everyone should follow my example, because I don't know what my example is, really, practically speaking for many people. It's just, you know, people have to worry about getting fired, they have to worry about getting de-platformed, and those are real concerns. And so, you know, I'm trying to create a space, and this signals, you know, much more of my criticism of the left here, I'm trying to create a space where it is safer

and safer for smart, well-intentioned people to speak honestly in public. And if they do, it's just in fact the case that they will violate many taboos now that are having us all in. And so I see that as one of my primary roles is to have kind of short up my own spaceship against obvious leaks so that I can actually make sense at scale and make it safer for other people to travel in this direction. But in terms of why you do it, why you, to use my terms, put yourself through it, it seems to me that there's, in your mind, a service aspect here, that the world's troubled and voicing sometimes unpopular opinions and having difficult, yet hopefully constructive

conversations seems like a necessary act. Yeah, if you're thinking about human well-being and how to safeguard it and increase it, I think the longest lever we can get in hand ever is ideas, right? I mean every idea, you know, good and bad is far more potent in the end than the individuals who traffic in them. The world is not filled with bad people doing bad things for the most part. It's filled with good people, doing bad things for the most part. It's filled with good people, people who could certainly be good in other circumstances, doing bad things or misguided things or dangerously stupid things under the sway of bad ideas. I am quite convinced that's the world we live in. It's not to say there

aren't some bad people. For the most part, we're living in a world where people are incentivized badly, right? And this is where we can get immense leverage in discovering bad ideas and all the bad work they're doing and correcting them and amplifying better ideas. You talked a while ago about developing compassion for Trump, given though that you contend with people on the left and on the right. Can you generate compassion for people with whom you disagree and if so, how? Well, there are many ways. I mean, one is just to recognize that everyone is going to lose everything they love in this world.

Everyone is suffering or will suffer. Everyone is confused. Everyone is afraid to die. Everyone is trailing just an endless series of disappointments. And we're all in a mess together. And one of the things that makes it so hard to feel compassion for Trump in particular is He doesn't seem to be somebody who is suffering or capable of suffering in the normal range in which we experience that and notice it in others, right?

He doesn't seem like someone who has any others, right? He doesn't seem like someone who has any ethical engagement with the world, and he doesn't seem like someone who's capable of deep relationships. So he doesn't even seem like someone who is capable of suffering all that much when the people close to him die, right? I mean, it's like this is this is he seems like he's missing a module in his brain that is critical to the ordinary functioning of an ordinary person. He does not seem like a normal person to me. There are very few people I've ever come across personally or seen in public life who I would say that about. This is not granted on some level, this is just my opinion, but it's an opinion formed by knowing a tremendous amount about him as a person, right? This person has been living

in public view for, you know, almost as long as we've been alive, right? I mean, this is, we're talking about decades of data on this guy. Much more of my conversation with Sam Harris right after this. Hey, I'm Ericia, and I'm Brooke. And where the hosts of Wonder E's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee

father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. I do want to see if I can redirect us back to contemplative practice in particular yours. Sure.

You have spent so much time cultivating compassion and in your own mind. And I just be curious to hear for those of us who are interested in doing the same, given the profound divisions we're facing in this country and in the world, How do you cultivate compassion in your own mind and how would you recommend others do it? Well, the biggest lever for me is not the usual Buddhist one. I rarely almost never do compassion meditation specifically. I mean, like you know, met a meditation and kind of bending it toward human suffering

and cultivating compassion. For me, it's much more based on a philosophical and scientific understanding of the role that luck plays in everything. I recognize myself to be just fantastically lucky, right? And I recognize that everyone around me, all the differences in outcome in life is advertising one or another degree of good or bad luck. Being healthy is to be lucky and to have people around you who are healthy is to be lucky and to be born into a society where you can take advantage of opportunities to

become wealthy is to be extraordinarily lucky. I mean, and to be born into a society that has a reasonably safe and functioning democracy compared to what's happening in the rest of the world is to be lucky. And no individual has created their own luck. You didn't pick your parents, you didn't pick this aside into which you were born. And compassion is the only appropriate attitude to have toward all that. There's just no other code that compiles. Right? There's just no, maybe you didn't make yourself. Even the people who are as self-made as anyone can ever be, right?

The people who started poor, started orphaned, and then pick themselves up by their bootstraps and became entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and made tens of millions of dollars, you know, and they know whenever gave them a handout of any kind, right? Well, these people were almost certainly very intelligent, right? They have zero responsibility for that, right? There's like, you did not create your own brain, right? You didn't create the fact that specific skills produce disproportionate advantages in our society given the way it is.

The fact that you happen to be good at software engineering, right? That proclivity is something that could have taken root in you as a person is one, something you can't account for, and two, you didn't create the society into which that proved a massive advantage. So it is just a luck all the way down even if you literally climbed your way out of an orphanage and made it happen and built a billion-dollar business in Silicon Valley. So people are confused about that. And we have an ethic of kind of iron-randing pseudo-philosophy

that is disproportionately influential in very wealthy successful circles at the moment, whereas just, I did it myself. I don't owe anyone anything. I've got nothing to apologize for. I don't want to pay any more in taxes. I'm done. You guys sort yourselves out.

That's the libertarian vibe when gets among the billionaire class rather often. And that, again, that's another thing that Trump tapped into. It's a moral error because even for self-interest alone, it should be obvious that we all, no matter how wealthy you are, no matter how isolated you are from the moment to moment concerns of average people, I think you want to live in a society where you can walk the sidewalks and not have to step over the bodies of the homeless, right? Or worry about rising levels of crime. Even the richest among us have to understand that

their self-interest entails all boats rising with some tide here. And compassion is readily available once you recognize just the nature of causality. entails all boats rising with some tide here. And compassion is readily available once you recognize just the nature of causality in this world. So it sounds like you're cultivating compassion through what you just described as looking at the world through the lens of causality

and not doing it on the cushion per se. So what is your on the cushion practice look like? How much meditation is the guy running the meditation app doing? Well, I occasionally sit formally, but I do it sporadically now, honestly. For me, at this point in my life, erasing the boundary between formal practice and the rest of life is the whole game for me. Right? It's like my practice for many years has been not to acknowledge this conceptual difference between meditation and life, right? Because there really is no difference. Right?

Now, there's a difference in certain kinds of meditation. Like, it's true that if you're doing concentration practice, well, then success in meditation is obviously state bound. I mean, you're trying to cultivate a certain state. You're trying to not let other things happen, right? I mean, there's a kind of control of experience that is the actual method and the goal, right? You're trying to get concentrated. And in a situation like that, thought is the actual method and the goal, right? You're trying to get concentrated. And in a situation like that, thought is the enemy, right? I mean, you're like, success is, thoughts are no longer arising in concentration practice, or the thoughts apart from the one thought

that you might be using in something like meta. But even there, ultimately, thoughts are no longer arising and you're one-pointed. Now, that's, as you know, in Vapassana, that's not the practice one does, but there's still an illusion that gets ramified for many of us, which is that, yeah, I get that, you know, ideally,

there's no difference between practice and life, but boy, that must be a long way off, right? Like that's, you know, you've got to do a lot of practice before you can even pretend to be talking about there being a difference, then there being no difference between a formal session of practice and the rest of life. And that's not strictly true. I mean, there's no good reason why that's true. Descriptively, it may be true for many of us. And I have done, obviously, I've done a fair amount of practice.

And I've logged my 10,000 hours, certainly. But there are just many illusions that get endorsed around this difference between formal practice and other ordinary moments. And, you know, this kind of a coarse-grained one is the difference between retreat and the rest of life. You know, that we've all noticed that. You're on retreat, you have a whole set of expectations. And you go deep into this kind of cultivation of various states, even when you think you're... It's not about cultivating states.

You know, you certainly notice the signature of success seems to be, wow, this is really different than me just being on Twitter in normal life, right? I mean, this is very peaceful and it's very expansive. And, oh man, look how beautiful the sky is. And, you know, and then, oh, that was just a thought. And now I'm just, oh, this is mindfulness of a sort that, man, I can only, I can link these moments together in my normal life.

This would, I would be, if not a Buddha, it would be, maybe it would be good enough. Oh, that was just another thought. And so we get a kind of, there's a kind of drug trip quality to meditative states that becomes the signature of being closer to the goal and being kind of hitting the target. Like, this is, okay, this is why I'm meditating, right? This thing I'm feeling right now.

Now, from a non-dual perspective, from a zogue-chen perspective, or from an adviative perspective, whatever the canonical non-dual description is for you, all of that is a symptom of confusion. And it's on some level, it's never too soon to realize that. Now again, many people conceptually realize it and that becomes its own deviation point. I mean, the truth is, it's necessary to actualize it, right?

You actually need to be experiencing non-duality, not just thinking about it, right? I mean the truth is it's necessary to actualize it right you like actually need to be Experiencing Nonduality not just thinking about it, right? but once I started doing Zogchen practice and this is now, you know many years ago Mindfulness for me became really synonymous with recognizing that the nature of mind is already free. There's no problem to solve here, really. And the sense that there is one is a dream that one just kind of fell back asleep into.

And you know, the next moment of mindfulness is really powerful enough to wake up from that dream, right? It really is a breaking of the spell. There was a story that I discovered recently. I talk about it in one lesson on my app, but I think it's more, I think it's like 10 years old or so, but now I forget whether it was in Norway or Sweden, Iceland, somewhere in northern Europe, the story of a tourist bus that pulls into a rest stop and people get off the bus to go get something to eat, use the bathroom. And one of the tourists, I believe she was an Asian woman, believes she was described as an Asian woman, not sure, got off the bus and changed her clothes in the rest stop.

And everyone got back on the bus. And at a certain point, someone recognized that someone on the bus was missing. There was an Asian woman who hadn't gotten back on the bus. And the word spread among all the tourists that someone was studying. We can't leave the rest stop yet because someone's missing. And this person didn't materialize into that. So a search party was formed to find this missing Asian woman. And the Asian woman herself joined the search party, right? So she was like, you know, surely there

might have been a language barrier here, who knows, but she did not recognize the description of herself in this initial emergency and set out along with all the others to go find the missing tourist. And this went on for hours, and a helicopter was prepared to take off at first light. And somewhere around like three in the morning, this woman realized that she was the missing person. Right? Now, this is just an amazing, like, you know, found poem. Right? And this is just a perfect Dharma analogy. But it's an analogy that runs pretty deep. It's like when you think of what that the fulfillment of that search was. Right? Like, It's not true to say that they found the missing

tourist. That's not what happened. The search evaporated and the search itself, its goal, the project itself, the logic by which it was prosecuted, the methodology, all of it was part of the problem. And on some level, it was the only problem, right? Like there's confusion even in the preferred remedy here. And that, you know, it's again, it's just an analogy, but it That, again, is just an analogy, but it significantly applies to the project of meditation. There is something that we cultivate that is an illusion here around the boundary between formal practice and the rest of life. So, Inzochen is often recommended that rather than sitting long sessions, they recommend many shorter sessions.

As a way of no longer falling into this pattern of feeling like, okay, here's the practice part of my life. And then whether it's an hour or two hours or whatever it is, and then now I get up and now I'm going out with my day, and here's the samsaric portion of my life. And tomorrow, in the morning, when I've had my coffee, I'll do the practice part of my life. Again, rather than that, the framing is to punctuate every period of the day with actual practice. And ultimately, it's to view every... I mean, more and more, I'm viewing my day to day life. And this

is actually, this has been, I hadn't really thought about this, but I think this has been enhanced under COVID because, you know, for like, now nearly nine months, I've been functionally locked down, right? I mean, I've just been almost on like a spaceship, right? I'm literally like, I almost never got out of my house, right? So it just been almost on like a spaceship. I'm literally like, I almost never got in my house, right? So it's a very weird circumstance, but it feels a little bit like a retreat, right? And it's, you know, it's not a retreat that wherein I'm practicing formally very much, but I'm viewing every moment in my day as one of these transitional moments, whereas like, okay, now I'm getting up, it's like the way you feel on a retreat where like, now I'm getting up from the sitting session

and it's going into the walking session. I don't know how many times a day my experience is punctuated with this transitional, the next thing that I'm going to do is framed by a really clear, and again, this is not so much, so deliberate as it is sort of happening automatically, like a really clear moment of, okay, practice oriented framing of the next thing, whether it's checking my email, getting up to get something to eat, flipping on the microphone to do a podcast with you. I mean, this just keeps happening. The truth is, I feel like I'm practicing more than I ever have at this point in my life.

But in terms of sitting formally, I'm not doing much of that at all. I'm out sit for five minutes here and there 10 minutes here and there But I'm definitely not sitting for an hour In the morning or at any point during the day And what you're seeing in these little moments, you know, one of the Maybe worth before I get to this question. Maybe worth my clarifying some terms it the passin or Buddhist mindfulness meditation or insight meditation is a practice that many of listeners will be familiar with

where you sit, try to focus on your breath and then every time you get distracted, you return to the breath and that can then lead to variations of practice where you're specifically noting the things that carry you away and then you may even drop the object altogether and just note whatever's coming up in your mind. Zogchen by contrast, which is a Tibetan practice, but also very similar schools grew up in Hindu Advaita practice. And there are many people who subscribe to Neether's Ogchen or Advaita and just call themselves non-dual practitioners. That practice is more directly looking for who's the knower of experience, who's this elucary self, and as soon as you start to look, you see that

there's nothing to find. So in those moments that you're describing of the short, and in Zoggen-Eff, I often say the way to practice is short moments many times. And in this, in the noticing you're doing, can you describe that experience that you're having many times throughout the day as you go from one activity to the next? Yeah, so I mean, this comes back to the difference as I see it between dualistic and non-dualistic mindfulness. And this is something that you know I've sparred with our mutual friend Joseph about a bunch. I don't know that we actually disagree so much as we just had very different experiences. We sort of came to this place from very different roots and we've drawn different implications

from sort of the path dependence or apparent path dependence of getting there. But this will be familiar to many people, I think, probably every person listening to us who practices mindfulness. The place most of us start with mindfulness practice is to feel like we are a source of attention, very likely in the head, that can strategically point attention at various objects. You're told to notice the breath, right? And that can be easy to do, it can be hard to do, but you feel like you can aim the light of attention, very likely down at your

nostrils or at your chest or at the abdomen. And then there's, there's a problem that arises at your nostrils or at your chest or at the abdomen. And then there's a problem that arises because then you get distracted by thought and then the game becomes noticing that sooner and more often. And thoughts are another strata of subjective reality that you can then pay attention to strategically. And so you find yourself aiming attention at thoughts, instantations, and emotions.

And ultimately, everything can become a kind of choiceless awareness where you're no longer fixating on any object strategically, but you're letting your attention point to various things, you know, whether deliberately or spontaneously, but it does feel dualistic. It feels like you are the seer or the hearer or the meditator in the end. It feels like you're standing on the bank of the river of consciousness watching it flow by.

Right, there's a contents of consciousness flow by and you are on the edge of things. And just many intrinsically wholesome and exciting and transformative things can happen while standing on the river bank. I'm not denying that. It is the kind of superpower to notice a thought as a thought and unhook from it and notice negative emotions and decide to not give the energy and to feel more concentrated and

to feel the positive mental affect that comes with concentration and all of that. But the dorma promises something more than that. It promises an insight into the illusoryness of the self. And so by the normal vipassana path, you occasionally can have this experience of, you're noticing things go by clearly enough, such that for brief moments, the sense of there being a notice or goes away, right?

Just collapses. In the scene, there's just seen. There's no seer and thing seen. In the hearing, there's just hearing. And so, you know, I was of a Phapasna yogi early on, and, you know, this kind of experience would happen to me much more on retreat than it would happen in normal waking life and hence the significance of the difference between being on retreat and being in normal waking life.

But it wasn't something I could bring on intentionally. And moreover, it was not something I recognized to be just always true about the nature of consciousness, whatever I was paying attention to. It seemed to be something that required fairly continuous mindfulness and some significant measure of concentration to have happened. It's happening was haphazard. It was was not under my any kind of control couldn't be produced on demand and there seemed to be nothing in the not nothing that the teaching seemed to be kind of confusing on this point while yes this seemed to be something that would be the nature of mind under certain descriptions

it was also true in the kind of straight, teravada presentation of a pasta teaching under somebody like Saida Upandita, for instance, this Burmese meditation master who many of us, Joseph and Sharon, in particular, spent a lot of time practicing with, it seemed to be the very logic of the practice was, you know, actually, there isn't much to notice about the nature of consciousness in this moment that is redeeming

or transformative other than to notice the evidence of your unenlightenment, right? I mean, you should just notice Anitya, Dukha, and Anata, but the Anata you're noticing, the selflessness, you're noticing, it's not any kind of fundamental freedom from self, you know, radically cutting through the illusion of the self, it's more selflessness by virtue of impermanence. It's Anata by virtue of Anitia. It's like you're noticing everything arise and pass away and you're drawing the implication that there can't be a stable self in this clockwork because where would it be? It's like it is a kind of inference. Now, non-dual mindfulness or exoction practice or the insight, you know, convinced that the insight into, in the Indian Indian tradition is the same thing,

although it is a different methodology. And, you know, in some ways it's a, there pitfalls to any teaching really. I mean, this, again, there's a needle, there's a needle that has to be threaded here. I mean, in Advaita, you can get the sense that really, there is no methodology beyond just talking about this, stuff endlessly with a guru.

And either you get the point or you don't. And if you get the point, there's never a reason to practice. And if you don't get the point, your practice is always hopeless. So it's like, it's too steep a path as often taught. And it seems to me that Zogchen has really about the best compromise there between these two messages. The one message being, yes, you really are unenlightened and you got a lot of work to do

to dig yourself out of this hole and Mindfulness is the rope you could climb here to actually get out You can do it one moment at a time. Who knows how long it's gonna take you big project almost nobody gets out of this hole Good luck, right? So the message is while that you don't, there's no point in worrying about any of that, it takes as long as it takes. You do absorb the impression that really the project is to kind of spectate on the evidence of your unenlightenment in each moment as equanimously as possible, as mindfully as possible, but recognizing the mind of the Buddha

in this moment is not actually in the cards. That's not you. You're going to have a major spiritual adventure in front of you before that. Anything like that is true. The analogy that Upandita used on retreat often was the project is you're rubbing two sticks together to get fire. The moment you stop rubbing, they cool off. Every. So every interruption in the continuity of your mindfulness is this colossal failure that has real consequences. Right. You're not going to get anywhere. You're not going to get fire. If you keep intermittently rubbing these sticks together, and then only to let them cool off. Right now, and as you know, this is predicated on that version

of Buddhist psychology, which suggests that the progress of insight happens along this one path where you have to have these cessation experiences to uproot wrong view and various defilements and that is the path of practice, right? There's just no other logic by which minds would get freed in this place. Now, there is no other logic by which minds would get freed in this place. Now there is a contradiction, but whether or not some semblance of that is ultimately true

that could be debated. But what seems obvious from the non-dual side is that ordinary conscious awareness is already free of self, right? It is already free of self. It's already free of self. It's not like you figure out how to annihilate yourself through practice. It's not like the really existing self gets uprooted through the progress of insight. It's not like the tourist who was lost gets found. There was a false problem here. It was actually a false problem. It's not a real problem that got solved.

You can discover that directly. So non-dol mindfulness becomes rather than being the person on the bank, the meditator, the locus of attention in the head, noticing objects go by. You recognize that you're actually the river, you're identical to it. You're not aware of consciousness and its contents. You're aware as consciousness and its contents, right? You're not watching Experience you are identical to it. There's no place to stand Where you are not identical to the sphere of experience, you know, you're not on the edge of it looking into it Right, you are it and

That's a difference. There's a shift. There's a subtle shift there that is clarifying of an illusion that you, you know, you took for granted as being true that you made, you didn't know was an illusion. And it really is decisively clarifying. It's not like it's we can debate about whether or not one or the other is true. It's a shift. Again, one group's for analogies here, but all analogies have their flaws, but a clear analogy for me in terms of this binary in terms of the shift is, and maybe we talked about this on a prior podcast. I don't remember, I use this analogy a lot, but it is very much like, you know, in the days before COVID, when one would go into a restaurant, you know, going into a restaurant

and getting halfway through your meal and suddenly realizing that the entire wall on one side of the restaurant was a mirror rather than a restaurant that was twice the size that you you know, and in fact it is right What you thought was a room that was double the size was in fact just a floor-to-ceiling mirror that was Unrecognized as a mirror right so something happens there, but what happens is not a change in your visual percept, right? It's not like the light changes or that, you know, it's just all the visual data is the same, but there is a shift and it's decisive. Like you just, you know, you don't go back to imagining that there's more people over there, right?

You see that those people are the same people, that's the people over here, and that's just a piece of glass, and there's no depth to it. There's just light on a wall. It's not a perfect analogy. I'm in the mirror, kind of complicating things a little bit, but it captures the clarity of the difference, and the kind of decisiveness of it, the kind kind of the unforgettable of it, right? You don't go back to thinking that the mirror might be the world. And the simplicity, in so far as you could overlook it, right, in so far as you could be confused in any moment,

the simplicity of recognizing it again, right? So each moment, it's like, it's not like you really recognized it in that great moment on retreat six months ago. And now you can sort of dimly understand it, right? No, it's not like that at all. Like each moment of being mindful of it again is clear. Like you can touch the glass. You can't lose this thing, right? But the clarity of it can be interrupted. Like you can, you can forget about it. You can go to sleep, you can be bewitched by your meal or whatever. You can be distracted, right? You can be just, there's no question that I spend much of my life

distracted by thought, right? So that's true. And that, that, that has consequences, right? You know, I can be in a right, like my, much of my life, much of my practice is to be less of a **** more of the time, right? I mean, this is still part of the project, but every moment of mindfulness really delivers the goods, right? It really punches through to something that seems uncontaminated by concepts. It's not a remedial effort to calm down, to get some balance, to relax, to de-stress. And it used to be, right?

And it used to be even after I'd spent a year on retreat, right, and accumulative. I never did a year retreat, but you know, three month retreats and two month retreats and one month retreats. You know, even after I had practiced Fapasana for a Full year over the course of you know a few years I was still the kind of person who couldn't say what I'm saying now, right? So it took an additional

Pointing to this and I mean that's what I'm trying to get across when I talk about mindfulness. This is available to people and it's available sooner than they may expect. And the difference matters. And yet, for most of us, most of life is still a matter of trying to be as mindful as we can moment to moment in every circumstance. And I see no reason to believe that that project is hopeless. I think there may be some of the great meditation masters I have spent time with. I have no doubt that they were more stable in this recognition than I am. recognition than I am, and I have no doubt that practice is part of that project, but it's also true that there is no boundary between meditation and this moment. There's no boundary between meditation and doing a podcast. And so I'm really, in my own life, undermining the notion that there might be a boundary. And so that's, and COVID is a kind of unusual experience because it is just, it is groundhog

day over here. I mean, it's just very weird to be, it means very much like retreat. For people, this is another way in which I consider myself incredibly lucky, but I can't imagine what the experience is like for people who have never been on retreat. It's like this is, having been on retreat is a great preparation for this totally bizarre experience we're all having collectively, right? And it's just, it's, yeah, as many silver linings as I have found in this personally, I will be very eager to

get inoculated against this, this bad born illness and get out there and eat in a restaurant again. So I have a comment and an anecdote and then a question. The comment is if people are interested in practicing this non-dual mindfulness that Sam is describing, there are a number of resources out there. One would be Sam's app waking up. Another would be a book that Sam recommended to me many years ago, which was simultaneously blessed by the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein, that book is called On Having No Head. By the way, speaking of books, Sam's book waking up also has a lot of practices.

And one just simple way to think about this and this is described very well in Sam's book and on having no head. Just the simple move of in any given moment, turning your attention back in on yourself and trying to find what is knowing or seeing or hearing all the data that's being taken in right now. And just in that moment, you can see that there's nobody home and that is, it just throws you right up against this mystery of consciousness and really fascinating. And I believe and have experienced kind of freeing way. So that's the comment that the the anecdote and Sam you may, you may ask me to exercise this later, but I have a very funny memory coming up in relation to the notion of retreat. You and your wife and your daughters were over at the apartment, my wife and my son, and I used to occupy until we escaped to the suburbs. And we were having dinner one night.

Joseph Goldstein was there and we were talking about the difficulty of going on retreat. And I said to your wife and one of your daughters, I said to your daughter, would it be okay if mommy went on retreat? And she said, no. And I said, what if dad went, she was like, oh, no, would it be okay if mommy went on retreat? She said, no. And I said, what if dad went? She was like, oh, no, that'd be fine. Right. Right. Right.

My son feels the exact same way. He's totally fine with my going on on retreat. Yeah, I have not yet called for bluff, but I have no reason to believe it's not a bluff. I mean, you know, that just measures a relative importance of proximity to mom and dad in his household. The truth is I wouldn't, you know, I'm very involved with my daughters and again, we've been locked up in a house together for nine months and that's really been a great silver lining here. I mean, just to see them more than ever, it's been fantastic. I can see the basis for being unhappy to notice that difference, it being an attachment, but there's also a basis for happiness in it.

I mean, I just, you know, I'm in Antarctica. It's such a good mom. And it's just, you know, it's like, it's obvious to me why my daughter would feel that way about, you know, one of us going on a retreat. If I could grab those dials and I'm not sure I would change the settings at all there. No, I really do agree with what you're saying there. And then here's the question, which is the proximate cause of my asking you to get together and talk here was that you not that long ago released a book about civilizational importance of conversations that we need to be able to understand one another if we're going to be able to coexist on this rock

hurling through space. And you're trying to put on sort of a clinic in conversation on your podcast on the regular. I guess my question is, given your belief that in the Supreme importance of conversation, is that operationalizable for the rest of us in our own lives, not being recorded? How can we practice the importance of conversation in our own lives. Well, I think it's just as important, but it is different. I feel a responsibility to be absolutely clear and honest, and as comprehensive as the medium allows in public, in a forum like this, and you're knowing that we're going to have an audience, and that's different from the way I would feel at a dinner party.

Like one-to-one social conversation does not require that each of us go to the mat, guided by nothing but intellectual honesty on the most provocative topics of the day. That's not what I'm recommended. So, even I will pick my moments and pick my battles and decide to privilege, you know, just civility above all in certain contexts, right? But if someone is going to ask what I really believe, I'm not going to lie about it, right? I think honesty is a master value here. And in public, I think we do have a duty knowing that, you know, knowing just the way ideas spread, we have a duty to be as honest and as clear as we can be on important topics and to not run away from them. And it's all too easy to do that. So I do think that the rules of the game change a little bit in public and in private.

Again, not with respect to honesty, but with respect to change a little bit in public and in private. Again, not with respect to honesty, but with respect to whether it's worth having a specific conversation at all. But yeah, I mean, this thing to notice about conversation is that it really is the only tool we have to modify other people's behavior and to converge with, to have an open-ended entanglement with other human beings, you know, friends or strangers, that stays cooperative and creative and onward leading rather than just an engine of conflict, right? I mean, conversation is it, like, we have to be able to persuade other people to share our values or to be persuaded ourselves to adopt their values.

And we have to converge. And conversation is the only method. Conversation in all his forms, face to face, written. It doesn't have to be asynchronous. Reading a book is being being party to a conversation. But other than that, we have violence, we have coercion, we have, stop doing that, we'll put you in jail, we've got laws, we have force, and it's a pretty stark opposition between those two things. And I don't see anything else on the menu.

Right? So it's like that's it, you know, always. And so when things really matter, right? You know, what is the society going to do with its resources? It's just, it's say, well, yeah, we're often faced with these apparently zero-sum contests that have to be resolved, and we have to get better and better at resolving them through conversation. And this is why dogmatism and identity politics in particular are obviously the wrong

algorithms. This is why the work that has been done in philosophy actually matters and it matters that we have these intellectual tools to draw on. Someone like John Rawls, who's a political philosopher, who famously gave us this notion of what he called the original position and the veil of ignorance behind which one can decide whether a certain society is just or fair or just, you know, how should we do? What should we do as social policy? He argued that the algorithm you want to run to decide whether something is fair or

just is to think about it from what he called this original position where you don't know who you're going to be in that society, right? You don't know whether you're black or white or healthy or sick or young or old or gay or straight. And then from that position, virtually all of us will be able to converge on what sounds like a fair situation. Right? Now, there'll be some outliers.

There'll be some people who are not up to having this conversation. There will be. But even the truth is, even psychopaths in that situation, when they're just trying to figure out their own interests, if they don't know what their identity is in that situation, when they're just trying to figure out their own interests, if they don't know what their identity is in that society, they will tend to land on a reasonably fair alternative, just based on game theoretic grounds. So that's not the last word on how to think about justice or fairness, but it is so much better than any group saying, this is because we're women, this is because we're black,

this is because we're white, this is because we're Asian, this is we have primacy because of our identity here. I mean, so having a society where we have to keep doing the algebra of identities, you know, where it's just this game of dungeons and dragons and you we keep rolling the dice to see who's got more hit points against the other. It's some that can't be the way we get out of this mess. And so, yeah, I mean, I think most of what I'm doing is standing at the intersection between Yeah, I mean, I think most of what I'm doing is standing at the intersection between

philosophy, you know often moral philosophy and philosophy of mind and science and This other area of concern that you and I just talked about in the at the end here and just what it means to To truly live an examined life what it means to live a life that we really couldn't possibly regret, you know, and what would it mean to die without regret? You know, how do we put ourselves in position to be, have that sort of mind, right, and how do we make a society where the most people can do that? I mean, those are my concerns. And again, on my podcast and in the app, the part of the app is essentially another podcast. I wasn't really aware of spawning and other podcasts,

but I have this conversation section in the waking up app, where I have conversations just with meditation teachers or scholars on topics related to the topic of practice mostly. So yeah, more and more, I spend my time talking to people or talking at people and not writing, which is much to the consternation of my book agent. I'm a terrible writing client at this moment. Well, I spend a lot of time writing and never completing. So I get to mix me equally bad, but, or maybe worse. Is there something I should have asked, but didn't ask? I don't think so. I think we covered a lot of ground. Well, really, I took way more time

than I was planning to take of yours, and I'm grateful. So thank you. Oh, always a pleasure. And on our, and we always have more to talk about. So let's do this again. Be careful what you offer there, because I'll take you up on. Big thanks to Sam. Really appreciate him coming on the show. You've just heard from two similarly named, but unrelated sources me and Sam about how meditation can help you stay engaged in what's going on in the world without losing your mind. If you're looking for a sign that you're supposed to actually start meditating if you haven't already, this is a sign.

And you can bring a friend or family member along for the ride for a limited time if you buy yourself a subscription to 10% happier. We'll send you a free gift subscription to share with anybody you'd like. Of course, nothing is permanent and this offer is no exception. Get it before it ends by going to 10% dot com slash December. That's 10% one word all spelled out dot com slash December. We'll put that link in the show notes. Before we go, a big thank you to everybody who works so hard to make the show a reality. Samuel Johns is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our producer,

Jules Dodson is our AP, our sound designer is Matt Boynton of Ultraviolet Audio, Maria Whartell is our production coordinator. We get a massive amount of incredibly useful input from fellow TPHers such as Jen Poient, Nate Toby, Ben Rubin, and Liz Levin. Also a big thank you to my ABC News Comrades, where I am Kessler and Josh Cohan from ABC. And we'll see you all on Wednesday for a great episode with Daniel Goldman, author of Emotional Intelligence, a bestselling book, really a landmark book that is celebrating its 25th anniversary. That's coming up on Wednesday.

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