The School of Greatness - 823 Mindfulness vs. Happiness with Sam Harris, Part 1

Episode Date: July 15, 2019

ALMOST ALL OF YOUR SUFFERING COMES FROM YOUR THOUGHTS. We all get stuck in the past. We worry about the future. We’re full of anxiety. It can consume us. And makes us ungrateful for what is happening now. In fact, you could say that the root of all our unhappiness is our thoughts. So how can we get more present? It’s not something that happens automatically. You have to practice every day. On today’s episode of The School of Greatness, I dive deep into the idea of eliminating suffering with an expert in meditation: Sam Harris. Sam Harris is a New York Times best-selling author, podcast host, and creator of the Waking Up Course. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live. Sam explains how experiencing unconditional love got him interested in meditation and how he reframes the “bad things” that happen to him in life. So get ready to learn all about consciousness on Episode 823. Some Questions I Ask: When did you get into meditation? (6:00) Had you ever felt unconditional love before taking MDMA? (10:30) When did you start to focus on the desire to be happy? (15:50) Why do so many people believe so firmly in religion? (19:30) How do we unlock our consciousness? (32:40) If you could control your thoughts, what would you want to think? (41:00) In This Episode You Will Learn: The goal of meditation (14:00) The main tool we have is human conversation (18:00) The only important thing in the universe (30:00) How to reframe anxiety (35:00) Why worry is pointless (45:30) If you liked this episode, check out the video, show notes and more at http://www.lewishowes.com/823 and follow at instagram.com/lewishowes

This is episode number 823 with New York Times best-selling author Sam Harris. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro-athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Ram Dass said, as we grow in our consciousness, there will be more compassion and more love.

And then the barriers between people, between religions, and between nations will begin to fall. This is a powerful two-part series with Sam Harris, who is a five-time New York Times bestselling author, whose writing and public lectures cover a range of topics, including neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, and rationality. His work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in the New York Times, Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. Sam has practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan,

Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation, and he created the waking up course for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern scientific context. Sam also hosts the Making Sense podcast, which explores some of the most important questions about the human mind, society, and current events. And in this interview, we talk about how Sam discovered feeling unconditional love for all beings and what he did to maintain that feeling of unconditional love. The strong power of belief, which can make good people do horrible things. Deconstructing consciousness and using meditation as a tool for breaking the spell of our emotions. Consciousness and using meditation as a tool for breaking the spell of our emotions.

How to skillfully curate the contents of your thinking. This is a powerful part. The superpower of being indifferent to both good and bad thoughts and how to develop it. I'm telling you, I did not want to stop this interview. That's why we made it into two parts. I could have gone seven parts. But this first one is going to really open you up to thinking in a different way. And Sam has a different way of thinking.

And part two is just as powerful, if not more, on the personal side of Sam, which he's never shared about these certain things anywhere publicly. So I'm excited for you to listen to both parts. Make sure to share this with a friend today. Text a friend and be a champion in their life by sending them some positive information. lewishouse.com slash 823 to get the message out on social media or just text a couple friends right now individually or in a group chat. lewishouse.com slash 823, or this link wherever you're listening to it on your podcast app.

Without further ado, guys, let's dive into this part one with Sam Harris. Welcome back to one of the School of Greatness podcasts. We've got the iconic and legendary Sam Harris in the house. Good to see you, sir. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for being here. I've heard about you for many years, all incredible things, and I'm excited to dive into your whole life.

Yeah, all right. Let's start from childhood. No, I'm just kidding. Now, you've been really known for meditation over the last few years more and more, from what I've heard from you. It's more about meditation. You've got this incredible app, the Waking Up app, and your voice is so soothing that it's very relaxing as well.

Yeah, or soporific, depending on. Exactly. When did you get into meditation, and why did you feel like it was necessary for your life? I was 18, and I had a drug experience with MDMA, and this was before MDMA was the— Get cool. Yeah. I mean, I knew no one of my generation who had tried it or had even heard of it.

I mean, I'm sure someone had, but this was 86, I think, 85, 86. And so Reno Raves, as far as I know, hadn't been invented. And this was kind of an export from the psychotherapeutic community that had been using it for quite some time. And so it was given to me explicitly as a tool to explore the nature of consciousness and to realize something fundamental about, especially kind of relationships and my own emotional life. And I really didn't know what to expect, again, because I had only known one person who had taken it. And so I sat down with my best friend and we tried this drug and it really amounted

to a total firmware upgrade of my brain. I mean, it was just, you know, it's not, and again, I don't want to sound like a booster for psychedelics entirely. I mean, there are downsides to all these drugs. I think MDMA in particular stands a chance of being somewhat neurotoxic. The data at least is ambiguous on that. People can have bad experiences certainly on LSD and psilocybin, and I've had those experiences.

And so it's a mixed message. And I have a chapter in my book, Waking Up, titled Drugs and the Meaning of Life. And there's actually an audio version of that on my podcast. It might even be the first podcast. So if people want the full story there, they can get it. But the reality for me was that this, and this is true for many people, MDMA showed me a landscape of mind and a way of being that I didn't realize

was possible. You know, I was an 18 year old who was very egocentric and, you know, my ego was well defended and, and, you know, I had no, you know, the notion of experiencing unconditional love had not occurred to me. And, you know, and there's just many things that I just was not, if you had asked me, what was someone like Jesus talking about? What's the core of all of the religions that people take so seriously? The experiential core of it. I think I had just an empty file on that. I just had no sense of what people had been doing for the last 2,000 years to transform their experience. So I had this experience of unconditional love

is not too strong a word. So during this experience you felt unconditional love? Yeah. Gotcha. What I felt was layers of self-concern there that I didn't even know existed gets stripped away and what was left was a state of being that was just wide open and has had as its ethical core just unlimited good intention toward other people, whether they're friends or strangers. And I realized that

I loved strangers in the same way that I loved friends and family at the most basic level because I just wanted everyone to be happy. And that desire was just turned up to 11. You realize that's if the real ballast for you emotionally and ethically is that you want other people to be happy. You want them to have beautiful lives. You want them to have beautiful lives. You want them to realize their dreams. You want their, basically, you realize that there's, the sense that there's a zero-sum contest between your well-being or your happiness and others is an illusion, right?

I mean, you want all boats to rise with some tide. Win-win experience with everyone, yeah. So you want positive sum interactions with people. That was, it just bowled over every other wrinkle in my mind for the period of, you know, four hours, right? So there was just, there was no, there was no limit to that. And it's not transactional. You realize that that is actually a state of being. That's the way you're, that could be the default state of your own consciousness if you could only locate it. And then coming down from an experience like that,

the drug wears off and then you're returned to who you used to be with the memory of what it was like a few hours before. So then there was an imperative to figure out what was possible in terms of techniques like meditation or new understandings of how the mind works. There's clearly a path. There must be a path by which one can have that experience more and more of the time. And so then my notion of just what the goal of meditation was,

that has actually changed a bit. It's not about producing this state of unconditional love all the time. I mean, I think that's not actually the center of the bullseye, but that was the first experience I had, which gave me a sense that there's a path and there's something to do. Did you ever feel like you had a sense of unconditional love before that moment? Oh, no, no. I mean, I had no reference point. No reference. I mean, I had love for, you know, I love my mom, right? Like there's no, love was a noun that I could use, honestly, but no, there was no, I mean, there hadn't been a glimmer of that experience, really. I mean, it was actually the first moment in my life that I felt sane and I hadn't realized. At 18. Yeah. I mean, well, and it was only by comparison to all previous states. I mean, I had this experience, and I realized, okay, this is sanity, right?

It's how it should be. Yeah, and the return to one's normal, waking, narcissistic, neurotic consciousness was one of not being restored. One problem is that we have this word drug that is the word we use to cover this vast class of compounds that are psychoactive. And some drugs are awful and not worth taking and just intrinsically bad for you, both in terms of what they do to you neurophysiologically

and the kinds of states of consciousness that people experience there. And other drugs, I would argue, have immense therapeutic value and are worth taking under the right conditions. And MDMA is certainly one of those drugs, and it's being used as a remedy for PTSD now in a lot of research to great effect. But people think, oh, you've taken a drug, so this, by definition, this is artificial. So whatever you experience there is less like the real you than whatever returns when the drug wears off, right? But that wasn't the experience, and that's certainly not the experience as you get deeper into things like meditation that don't entail drugs, right? You can actually discover that the way you're tending to be,

the way you've been conditioned to be by life and biology, frankly, I mean, we're not, you know, evolution has not designed us to maximize our well-being. Evolution has designed us to be fairly paranoid. To try to stay safe, right? Yeah, yeah. To protect ourselves. We're apes, right? This is not about our happiness. From the gene's eye view of what we're doing here is not maximizing human

happiness and building a global civilization that will endure for a million years, right? That's just not what our genes care about. They care about being safe or? Well, they care about, I mean, all we've evolved to do is maximize the likelihood that we will successfully spawn and stay around long enough to see that our progeny survive and spawn. Once you're 40 years old, evolution doesn't care about you, you know, for the most part. I mean, I guess there's some argument that grandparents are a value or even great- great grandparents are a value, but it's just, it can't see so much of what we need to be happy. We're deeply conditioned for tribal violence, right? Now, tribal violence is just something that we obviously have to outgrow, globally speaking. we're deeply conditioned to perceive ourselves in at least potentially hostile relationships with all other apes like ourselves. And yet the self, the feeling of self,

and this is actually getting closer to what I think the goal of meditation is, the sense of self is an illusion, right? This is a construct that can be felt through and discovered to actually be false. There is an immense amount of good that comes with that discovery, but it's not something that has paid adaptive dividends in the past, and it's something that, you know, it might actually be hostile to what would keep an ape safe for the millions of years we and our ancestors have evolved. So there are many good things, I would argue most good things, that we want to be able to pay attention to in the year 2019. want to have the free attention to explore would be counterproductive if you were returned to the savannah and just in a contest of all against all. So everything from conversations like this.

We're going to talk about almost nothing that apes like ourselves have needed to focus on for 500,000 years. When did we start to focus on the desire to be happy? Like what year or years or decades was this where we really said, okay, we've got our needs met or basic needs met. Let's focus on being happy and feeling unconditional love more. Well, it depends who you're talking about because most of humanity, even at this moment, doesn't have the free attention to really think seriously about what it means to be happy.

You just look at the economic comparatives of most people in most situations. It's not about really having the free attention to do whatever you want or what you would think at the end of the day would be most satisfying. It's about survival, more basic needs. Yeah, yeah. And or just you're living in a situation of stark political insecurity, right? You're just worried about what sort of violence may happen in the street later today or what you may or may not say that could get you jailed, right? Crazy.

It's nuts. So much of human history has been just figuring out how to get strangers to cooperate reliably enough so that they have the free attention to explore the things we want to explore so that, yeah, we can figure out why we're dying from diseases and then cancel them, right? So just to be able to do science is a luxury. And this is where, I mean, as you probably know, I've spent a lot of time criticizing organized religion because historically and even currently so much of it is hostile to,

I mean, so much of it is putting in place of real curiosity and a real search for answers, Iron Age fictions that just got codified in books that can't be edited. So in my view, the main tool we have to navigate now, and this has always been the case, but it's just more and more imperative that we realize this, the main tool is human conversation. that we realize is the main tool is human conversation. And what every religion is, is an insistence by a certain group of people that we anchor ourselves to a conversation

that was held hundreds or thousands of years ago. So it's like either you want to have the best ideas actionable and interpretable now, or you want to be hostage to what your great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather and grandmother thought was true about the nature of reality. And if you go back far enough, you're talking to people who knew absolutely nothing that a sixth grader knows today. I mean, literally, if you could build a time machine and send a sixth grader back a thousand years, that boy or girl would be the smartest and wisest person on earth on so many topics. Just to know that electricity exists, you're a savant.

Or that DNA has something to do with biological inheritance. Or the germ theory of disease. Imagine being the lone person on earth who understood that you should wash your hands before you deliver babies. You save the world. Yeah, exactly. You save humanity from that, yeah. So it's insane that we are captive to doctrines that just were never in contact with the knowledge base that we have currently.

Why do so many people believe so strongly in their religion? And I'm not here to say someone's right or wrong, but why do they believe so strongly? I am, that's why. Okay, Brian, you can do what you want to say. Why do so many people, I mean, there's billions of people that still believe in religion, that have a religion, and that believe so firmly in the beliefs of the books from their religion, yet they can't prove any of those things from those books.

Is that right? Is that fair to say? Yeah. Can't prove factually. Certainly can't prove those things. Certain things actually happened in certain books. Right. Except for just that someone wrote a story about it.

Yeah, I mean some imagine that they have proof, but it's often... There's no actual physical proof today that these things happen. No, and it's worse still. The books themselves say that they're inerrant. The Koran says that it's inerrant, and the Bible says that it's inerrant in various places. And that is taken as evidence of its inerrancy. Well, I mean, the Lord of the Rings could...

I mean, Tolkien could have put a line in there which said this is, you know, perfectly true and any doubt otherwise would get you consigned to hell. And that wouldn't prove that the book is true. So it's just, you know, it doesn't. And the amazing thing is that, you know, every Christian looks at the Quran and looks at the whole discourse around it within Islam and finds it completely unpersuasive. And every Muslim returns the favor with respect to Christianity. So it's not, if you stand outside of one of these traditions, you can see that the language game that they're playing within it

to justify everything is illegitimate. But in defense of religious people, it's true that there are these core needs in life, emotionally and socially, that secular culture has been very slow to meet, and in certain cases has almost nothing to say, especially with respect to the kinds of experiences we started this conversation on. I mean, it's just the experience of self-transcendence, or the experience of unconditional love. If you have that experience, if you wake up tomorrow morning feeling unconditional love for all sentient beings, right, you traditionally, there has been no language with which to greet that epiphany but religious language.

epiphany but religious language. I mean, so if you go into a church and say, listen, I've just had this experience, they have a lot to tell you about Jesus and his grace and the power of prayer. And it links up with 2,000 years seeking experiences of that kind in a contemplative context, you know, monks and nuns. And if you go too far, then they begin to worry that you're too heterodox. And in the 14th century, if you went too far, you know, they would burn you with a stake because you're claiming to be God yourself or you're claiming to be the equivalent of Jesus, right? So there's a hierarchy there that you have to respect. The same is true for Islam. Yeah, I mean, so there is a baby in the bathwater that religious people are right to worry is being disregarded or being thrown out when you criticize faith and criticize these doctrines. The other reason that religion endures and it's really the main one is that we all die and the people we love die.

And that is intolerable. and the people we love die, and that is intolerable. And it's true that if you can believe a sufficiently consoling story about what death means or what it doesn't mean, a lot of the stress of life goes away. Gives you more peace. Yeah. I mean, in certain cases, total peace. I mean, in certain cases, if you believe the sufficient doctrines, it's a good thing.

I mean, you can literally get yourself into a situation, as often happens under Islam, where a mother can legitimately celebrate the suicide bombing perpetrated by her jihadist son. Because she knows she'll see it. Because she knows she'll see it. Because she knows. He got into paradise as a martyr, and he got the whole family in there, too. Right? This is like, you know. The ultimate sacrifice.

Yeah. And it's all good. I mean, if you really believe it, it's all good. Nothing has gone wrong there. Right. And so that's the power of belief, and that's what, you know, it's the insidious power of belief because it's the thing that, I mean, something like suicide bombing should be impossible. It should be impossible to convince somebody to do that, right? It should be synonymous with

severe depression and just inability to find any goodness in life. That's not the kind of person who becomes a jihadist and becomes a suicide bomber. These are not the depressed people who would otherwise be medicated in a mental hospital because their depression is so severe. No, these are people who have a lot to live for, for the most part. They're disproportionately well-educated.

These are people who come out of engineering programs and colleges. They can get jobs. There's economic opportunity. They have sincere beliefs, in this case, martyrdom and the reality of paradise. So, yeah, so I've spent a lot of time worrying out loud about the consequences

of those kinds of ideas because, for me, the most concerning thing about our world is not that there are a lot of bad people doing bad things. It's a lot of good people doing bad things under the sway of unfounded and dangerous and divisive beliefs. Ideas are way more powerful than the 1% of us or the half of 1% of us who just happen to be psychopaths. Right. If you put a belief in, it's like inception.

It's like you planted an idea so deeply in someone's mind that this is going to happen. They believe it so much that they're willing to do whatever it takes to make it a reality. I'm curious, what do you believe happens when we die? I don't know. I just, I don't know. I mean, that would require that we understand exactly how consciousness arises, and we don't understand that yet. There's certainly good reason to doubt that you, as you experience yourself most of the time, as the English-speaking person or subject who has the episodic memories you have of your life, that that entity floats off the brain and goes elsewhere.

And that's the expectation that most people have who believe in souls. And when you hear people use so-called near-death experiences to justify a belief in an afterlife, it's that kind of arithmetic that's being done. They say, well, I saw myself in a tunnel of light, or I rose up off the table. They were performing surgery on me. I could see myself. But then I realized I was not connected to my body. And then I, you know, then there's some story about how they met entities or met, even met members of their own family who had died, you know, and, and they're,

you know, so if you can recognize your grandma and still understand English and then still have a memory of, of, of the life you're leaving, all, all of those are modes of cognition that we know a fair amount about at the level of the brain now, and we know they can be disrupted piecemeal in life, right? You know that, we know that if you get a stroke or if you just, if you go into the lab and they do TMS on you, transcranial magnetic stimulation, they can interrupt certain functions which really are no longer there anymore just because that neural real estate has been perturbed. So the proposition here is that if you interrupt one part of neuronal function, you lose, let's say, your capacity to understand English, right? But if you destroy the brain at death, everything about yourself that's familiar persists.

That doesn't make a lot of sense. So we know a lot about mind being dependent on the brain. Any function you could point to in yourself. Mind versus brain, what's the difference? Well, I mean, the mind on some basic level is what the brain is doing. And if the brain stops doing that, it's reasonable to expect that the functions of mind will stop. But consciousness is the fact that it's like something to be associated with that information processing. And that is still fundamentally mysterious.

I mean, there's a lot that our brain is doing that seems unconscious, right, and seems unavailable to consciousness in principle. And these unconscious processes are delivering the contents of consciousness in each moment, right? So you and I are having a conversation. I can see you. I can hear you. I can, you know, there are things that are stable that I can inspect because they're among the contents of consciousness. But how all of this stuff is showing up is being unconsciously mediated and really can't be inspected. So, you know, like I'm,

I mean, the example I always use is, you know, because I'm always talking when I have to use an example, but so like to some degree, however imperfectly, I am managing to follow the rules of English grammar without knowing how I do that. Sure. And you're able to effortlessly interpret. Listen and understand, yeah. And, in fact, you don't even have a choice. If I say the word pigeon, right, you can understand it. I mean, provided you're a native English speaker and that's in your vocabulary.

You can't help but understand it, provided you're a native English speaker and that's in your vocabulary. You can't help but understand it. It's like you can't say, whatever that next word is going to be, I'm just going to block the semantics of it. The semantics just come in. And so you're doing all of this, your brain is doing all of this unconsciously, and you can't get to a place where you are standing upstream of the parsing of the sounds I'm making.

I'm just making a bunch of small mouth noises, right? And you know the difference. When you're in the presence of someone who's speaking a language which you know not a single word, right, whatever that is, Thai, say, it just sounds like pure gibberish. And the surprising thing there is that it's very hard to even imagine that anyone can decode those sounds and extract meaning at all, right? It just sounds like, well, it's amazing that that's a language, right? And yet, once you know the language, you can't help but decode it. So all of that's unconscious. And yet, the fundamental mystery of our being and the most important thing in the universe, really, I would argue the only important thing in the universe is the fact that the lights are on in and as what we are here subjectively, which is consciousness.

You know, if the lights were off, right, if it was all just, if there was no distinction between biological systems and this table, right, you know, if there was nothing that it was like to be you and there could never become something that it was like to be you or any other physical system, well, then there is no, there's no important distinction between the wet stuff we have in our heads and rocks and you know you know the water and the ocean i mean it's just it's all just stuff that has can they can have no interests it can't can't suffer it can't experience happiness it can't be deprived of happiness it can't be creative it can't so the good thing about this universe is consciousness and so and that's and the thing we can care about you know your your your life is as your your consciousness is in each moment and i mean you all you have is your experience and your possible experiences and and that's the core of our morality too it's like like we we are in a position with one another where we can affect each other's states of well-being and our opportunities to to experience further well-being in the future

and that matters our conversation around that is our conversation around morality and ethics and and you know politics and yeah you know so how do we how do we unlock our consciousness or expand it in a positive way? Besides meditation, obviously, but how can we think differently so we can unlock this consciousness for ourselves? Yeah, well, there are many levels at which to do that. So meditation is, there are many different kinds of meditation, but the kind that interests me most and which I most recommend is it often goes by the name of mindfulness now. I mean, mindfulness is very widespread, but there's a sort of trivial versions of mindfulness and there's the deeper version. And the deeper version is really to understand the mechanics of your own mental suffering and put yourself in a position to cease to suffer unnecessarily. So you notice that you're lost in thought

almost every moment of your life and much of your thinking has this mediocre character of causing you to worry about the future and regret the past and just feel a baseline dis-ease with life, right? Whether it is just, you know, what it was like for me to drive here in traffic and, like, am I going to be late? You know, I was supposed to be here at 10 o'clock.

Like, so much of our life is the steady hum of that kind of thinking, right? And not to mention, you to mention the bigger concerns about disease and whether your child is sick. We're thinking, we're plunged into thought in each moment and we don't notice it. And until you learn to be mindful, you can't notice it. You might have this abstract idea that, yeah, of course I'm thinking a lot of the time,

but so what? Or like, what's the alternative, right? There is no alternative. You're just, each thought will arise and completely capture your attention, and then you are hostage to the emotional and behavioral imperatives of that thought, right? So, and it's necessary to some degree to be that way because we need thought. Thought is the way we organize our lives and form plans and understand what's happening. Almost everything that makes us human is born of our capacity for abstract thought and planning and goal formation and all the rest.

But it's possible to recognize thought as a stream of appearances in consciousness and to recognize that consciousness is the prior condition of their arising. And when you can do that, you can actually break the link between thought and psychological suffering. So the thought is an anxiety-producing thought. You can notice this whole process where a thought arises and you feel anxious, and that feeling of anxiety in your body, once uninspected, begins to generate the motive for further thoughts along those lines. So you're thinking about the thing that makes you anxious.

And because you're anxious, you're finding the anxiety intolerable. You've got resistance to feeling this feeling. And you're thinking about, like, how can I get out of this? And like, clearly, I've got a lot. I've got to change here. Let me get a, you know, I'm going to start writing some things down on a checklist. You're thinking without knowing that you're thinking. And you're feeling the motive force of

this, this emotion. But once you can become mindful of, which is, which is to just be aware of what's arising in consciousness without judgment, without reaction, without resistance, right? I mean, so, so to be able to notice anxiety as a, just a pattern of sensation in the body, right? And then when you can do that, you can see that, first of all, it's not that bad, right? In fact, you're not dying. Yeah, no. And under a different framing, it's a sensation that is often pleasant, right? Like the excitement you feel or even the anxiety you feel before you get on a roller coaster, right, if that's your thing, is something you're willing to pay to do.

You want this thing. That's part of the experience. You go skydiving. Whatever. Like that's, you know, being able to – the thrill is a thrill because you felt some of that, right? I mean, the thrill is a thrill because you felt some of that, right? And that's why I say there are other levels at which you can work with the contents of consciousness so as to cease to be unhappy. And one is to change the frame around an experience like that. So, I mean, to recognize that anxiety, you know, the anxiety you might feel before going out on stage in front of a thousand people,

just the raw sensation in your torso and in your face, I mean, just the physiology of it. Tenseness. Yeah. That is importantly similar to something that can have a positive frame which you seek out, like excitement. I mean, a much more extreme case of this is like you can, when you think of what the physical sensations are when you're working out, and you're working out as hard like you can, when you think of what the physical sensations are when you're working out and, you know, working out as hard as you can work out and in the most satisfying way,

precisely the workout you'll feel good for having done, the actual sensations can be extremely unpleasant. And if they just came upon you in a different context, you would call 911, you'd be absolutely terrified, right? I'm sweating profusely. My muscles are ripping. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just the conceptual frame around experience does a tremendous amount. But mindfulness is a more basic ability to notice this mechanism of becoming identified with thought and resisting certain emotions and mood states and being able to just unlock from all of that and recognize that consciousness itself,

that which is simply aware of experience, is not actually changed by its contents. I mean, so like that which is aware of joy is the same thing, that which is aware of sadness, right? And on some level, it's not diminished by sadness or improved by joy. And you keep dropping back into that state. And paradoxically and happily, that state begins to have its own kind of qualitative character,

which is more toward the good side of things. I mean, it's more joyful and compassionate and loving and positive. And because the antithesis of all those states is what is happening, is being kindled by our entanglement with thought and reactivity. It's like the resistance to, you know, I feel the sensations of anxiety, say, because I was lost in thought about how afraid of failure I am a moment ago.

I can break that spell with mindfulness and then notice that the physiology, which still may take a few seconds to dissipate, is fine. It's fine to feel that way. take a few seconds to dissipate, it's fine, right? It's just, it's fine to feel that way. It's like, it has no more meaning in that moment than a pain in the knee or indigestion or something, which is, you completely can contextualize and it has no implication for who you are as a person, right? Like I don't, you know, you don't feel pain in the knee and abstract from that, those, you know, unpleasant sensations back upon yourself and think, I'm such a fucking schmuck, right? Like, well, who am I? How did I become this person? But people with anxiety,

if you've got stage fright, right? You're going out on stage and you feel nerves, the potential for self-judgment, the potential to read into that mere peripheral display of sensation that you're this person who didn't work out in the end. People fall into that hole again and again. And it's completely, it's not just sort of unnecessary, it's completely unnecessary. And mindfulness is a tool that would allow you to discover that. Yeah, if you could wave a magic wand or set the parameters for how you wanted to think each day, the thoughts that you actually came in your mind,

you could control it. I'm assuming you control them in a lot of your own ways with your own strategies and techniques and awareness. But if you could just say, I'm sick of trying to control it or reframing things when they come up, if you could just say, I'm sick of trying to control it or reframing things when they come up. And you could just say, I want to think these thoughts every day. What would you want to think? What type of thoughts would you want to think? And what would you want to eliminate? First, more fundamentally, I'd want to

recognize that the mind has no shame. It just thinks. It just thinks. So thoughts just keep coming. And the goal from a meditative point of view, and this is an analogy that's used in Tibetan Buddhism, is to get into a position where thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house. So there's just no possible problem. Can't steal anything. There's just nothing to steal.

That's interesting. So to truly be indifferent between a good thought and a bad thought, that's the real superpower. That is cool. So that's the more fundamental level of addressing the problem. But it's also true that you can skillfully kind of curate the contents of your thinking and think better thoughts deliberately. And you can think more creative thoughts. You can think more compassionate thoughts, ethical thoughts. Yeah, I mean, so I'm interested in many, many things. I want to know more about many, many things. I want to be right more often than I'm wrong. I mean,

so all of that's happening at the level of the conversation you're having with yourself and other people and with good books. And so, yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, there are philosophies like, you know, the Western philosophy of Stoicism, you know, like the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. There's so many good thoughts, you know, that if you were looking for a script that would generate a reliable baseline of psychological well-being and ethical conduct, that's certainly part of the script. I mean, to be able to think, and again, it comes down to reframing a lot. So, like, if you know, again, to make it trivial, you're driving in traffic and, you know, someone cuts you off. to make it trivial, you're driving in traffic and someone cuts you off, the natural state, sort of the road rage state, is just to be irate and to essentially hate that person, the person whose face you can't even see.

You can't even tell whether the person's 90 years old or 20 years old, right? And that should matter to you, right? You should have a different feeling about a 90-year-old than a 20-year-old in that moment, given the implications. But a stoical kind of reframing of that is to recognize you don't know what is going on in this person's life. And nine times out of ten, if you could know it, you would feel compassion for what's going on there. And you'd feel gratitude that you're not suffering the same problem. I mean, the one reframing I use all the time now is that whenever something bad is happening or something, you know, quote bad, something that is causing me stress is happening, I

think of all of the worst things that are not happening. And I just think of how much I would pay, you know, literally pay, to get back to the situation, what precisely the circumstance I'm now in that I'm now stressing about. If you have worse conditions. Yeah, right.

So like just... If you had no legs, if you were sick. Exactly. If you're in the hospital. If you find out, you know, I did not find out today that I have a brain tumor, right? So whatever I was stressing about today, if I got the call that I have a brain tumor, how much would I pay to get back into precisely this situation where I was just stressing about whatever it was,

on my schedule or some hassle? Everything is a non-issue until it's a real issue. And then so when you take something that's a real issue is a non-issue until it's a real issue and then so you when you take something That's a real issue like a brain tumor Then the question is how much of the day are you going to spend having a brain tumor? Right, I may be being busy having a brain ring about the exactly and suffering about your uncertainty about the future, right? So there's a time course to all of this. So, you know like at each point And this is, you know, like at each point, and this is where, you know, worry

is almost always pointless because like in each moment, there's either something you can do to solve a problem or there isn't, right? Now, if there is something to do, well, then just do that thing, right? Solve the problem, right? If there isn't, there's actually nothing to worry about. Like the worry adds nothing to that situation, right? So, you know, if you have a brain tumor, yes, you need to go from one doctor and probably to a second doctor for a second opinion. And if you find the surgeon you want, and there's a whole process. You're going to get an MRI.

You know, all of it, you're having to deal with a lot of, yes, objectively stressful things. But, I mean, big picture, we're all in this situation. I mean, life itself is a brain tumor. I mean, we're all going to die. We're all going to go on this. We're going to get the full tour. Now, I mean, for some of us, you know, some of us will be very lucky and it will be very orderly and free of pain and we'll be surrounded by everyone we love. We're 100 years old. Yeah, it's just going to go perfectly. And for some people, it'll be chaotic and terrifying and short or long.

It's every permutation. And I'm not denying that it's rational to have preferences there. You do want the orderly, loving, and not untimely unraveling of it all rather than the opposite. But whatever is happening, you have this moment, and then you're thinking. And you're thinking about the future, and you're thinking about the past, is the mechanism by which you will truly suffer in each moment. the mechanism by which you will truly suffer in each moment. Because it is, in fact, true to say that even physical pain is something around which you can develop an impressive ability to be a quantumist. And we also have, for extreme pain, we have painkillers.

I mean, happily, we're not living in 1700, where someone is just kind of sawing off your limb after the leeches didn't work. So 99% of our suffering around everything, even objectively horrible things like brain tumors, is our thought about past and future, is the regret. And it's the story we're telling ourselves. How do we move on from the story or how do you do it? Do you live with a lot of worry each day or are you so good now at just saying, this doesn't matter, this is in the past, or I'm concerned about something that's not going to happen potentially in the future, so let me get back to present. How do you not worry?

So let me get back to present. And how do you not worry? There you have it, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Powerful one on mindfulness versus happiness with Sam Harris. What a game changer. We are just getting started. Part two is coming very soon. So if this is your first time here on the podcast, hit that subscribe button.

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