The Tim Ferriss Show - #342: Sam Harris, Ph.D. — How to Master Your Mind

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen a perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom, which more than 2 million Americans have used to help start their businesses. Past guests even, such as, well, WordPress lead developer,

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Starting point is 00:02:34 Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim for your free travel pack with any purchase. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is an experimental episode and my guest, so to speak, is someone I've known for quite a long time now, Sam Harris. Sam Harris, you may know the name, received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. He's the author of many bestselling books, including The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance, a dialogue, which he co-authored. He also hosts the popular podcast Waking Up with Sam Harris. You can find him on Twitter at SamHarrisOrg, that's H-A-R-R-I-S, SamHarrisOrg, and on the web at SamHarris.org. But this episode came about because Sam asked me somewhere between six and nine months ago

Starting point is 00:03:33 to be a beta tester for a new app he was creating. And ostensibly, it was a meditation app. It's called Waking Up, and you can find it at wakingup.com, which I highly recommend. I anticipated it would be good, because Sam is always good, and he's one of those rare humans who very irritably seems to think and speak in finished prose. He also has a voice, one of the few voices that can put you into a semi-psychedelic state while you are completely sober. And if that makes no sense, it will make sense experientially once you get to the end of this episode. In any case, there are some great apps out there for different purposes. Among them, Oak, made by my friend Kevin Rose from Meditation,

Starting point is 00:04:17 also fantastic. Sam's approach is a little different. And as he puts it in the audio that you're going to listen to, in part, he says, you do not have to be the best at anything to be almost uniquely qualified for something. He has a very unusual combination of experiences and areas of expertise. And his particular approach here is that of a progression. And what I like is that there's a logical progression, one, two, three, white belt, yellow belt, et cetera, in terms of layering on different types of training for learning the skill of meditation. And it's really an experience of exploring consciousness. He also gets into quite a bit more. He talks about his experiences with MDMA, his spiritual exploration, God forbid, see what I did there in India,

Starting point is 00:05:06 contact with so-called gurus, dueling masters, the goal is the path, duality versus non-duality. And there are a lot of gems within that you can apply to business, your personal life, et cetera, because guess what? The precursor to all of this is your mind and consciousness. So learning how to hone the mind and your perceptions is really paramount to mastering on some level everything else. If you want to just jump to the meditations and lessons that he presents, you can jump to about 47 minutes after he starts. And those of you who are even more impatient, I'm going to be publishing a companion episode to this immediately after this one. So think of it as simultaneously.

Starting point is 00:05:50 If you go back to wherever you got this podcast, you'll find a shorter one of say 10 or 20 minutes, I'm not sure exactly how long, that will take you through meditations and lessons. I did one meditation first thing in the morning and one lesson in the late afternoon to wind down. That's how I approached it so that you can just hit play and jump immediately into guided meditations. And they will offer different approaches to give you a flavor. In any case,

Starting point is 00:06:20 the lessons themselves will jump into thinking about death, the mystery of being, and in the companion episode, the logic of practice. This is a somewhat dense episode. I encourage you to stick with it. If it's too tough, if you find yourself wandering in the mind, which, of course, you're going to be training in a sense against, then you can jump to minute 47 after Sam starts for the meditations, or you can go to the companion episode. In either case, I really suggest checking out waking up.com. That is the app itself. I have no financial stake, nothing to gain other than recommending you to a tool that I found to be

Starting point is 00:06:59 incredibly powerful. And that is shared by some people I also respect greatly who are beta testers, like Dr. Peter Attia, who's also been on the podcast. So without further ado, that was a lot of ado, but I think necessary context, please enjoy this exploration of your own mind. This is Sam Harris of the Waking Up Podcast, and now the Waking Up Course, which is a app that I just released on iOS and soon to be on Android. And my friend Tim has very generously invited me onto his podcast to preview this course for you and to speak a little bit about meditation, and I am very happy to do that. First, a warning. In addition to just talking about the course and about meditation, Tim has asked me to preview a few of the guided meditations from the app. So parts of this podcast won't make for very good listening in the car, or at the gym, or while multitasking. To get value from these sections, and to not be bored by the periods of silence,

Starting point is 00:08:11 you really need to be paying attention. So if you're not in that situation now, you might save this whole podcast for another time. I'll let you know when I'm dropping them in and how long they are. So if you insist on listening to this while you are kite surfing or hacking some government installation or staggering around South by Southwest in full ketosis or whatever it is that the average Tim Ferriss fan does on a day like today, you will be okay. Okay, so I'm going to talk for a while about what I'm attempting to do with this course and why I've released it as an app. Of course, there are several meditation apps out there, and many of them are quite good. There's Calm and Headspace, and my friends Dan Harris and Joseph Goldstein have the 10% Happier app.

Starting point is 00:09:00 Tim's buddy Kevin Rose has the Oak app. These apps really are quite good, and they will definitely teach you how to meditate. And while I cover similar ground in the Waking Up course, it's not just a meditation app. I'm attempting something else, too. But before I get into the app, first let me tell you a little bit about my background, for those of you who are not familiar with it. I got into meditation at the end of my sophomore year in college, just when I turned 20, and this was on the heels of a psychedelic experience that provided a fairly startling firmware upgrade of my mind. I've written about psychedelics in supportive and

Starting point is 00:09:40 also in fairly cautionary ways, especially in my book, Waking Up. And actually, there's a main chapter on that topic that's available both in print and in audio on my website under the title, Drugs and the Meaning of Life. In fact, Tim has not only referenced it on this podcast, but I think the audio is available in one of his earlier podcasts. And I'll say a few words about how I view the difference between psychedelics and meditation in a minute. Actually, I think I should just read you the first few pages of my book, Waking Up, because it gives the full context about how I came to this topic and how I think about the nature of mind and the role that my experience with psychedelics played here, and also how I think about the nature of mind and the role that my experience with

Starting point is 00:10:26 psychedelics played here, and also how I came to the practice of meditation. So here's how the book begins. I once participated in a 23-day wilderness program in the mountains of Colorado. If the purpose of this course was to expose students to dangerous lightning and half the world's mosquitoes, it was fulfilled on the first day. What was, in essence, a forced march through hundreds of miles of backcountry culminated in a ritual known as the Solo, where we were finally permitted to rest, alone on the outskirts of a gorgeous alpine lake,

Starting point is 00:11:00 for three days of fasting and contemplation. I had just turned 16, and this was my first taste of true solitude since exiting my mother's womb. It proved a sufficient provocation. After a long nap and a glance at the icy waters of the lake, the promising young man I imagined myself to be was quickly cut down by loneliness and boredom. I filled the pages of my journal

Starting point is 00:11:23 not with the insights of a budding naturalist, philosopher, or mystic, but with a list of the foods on which I intended to gorge myself the instant I returned to civilization. Judging from the state of my consciousness at the time, millions of years of hominid evolution had produced nothing more transcendent

Starting point is 00:11:40 than a craving for a cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake. I found the experience of sitting undisturbed for three days amid pristine breezes and starlight, with nothing to do but contemplate the mystery of my existence, to be a source of perfect misery, for which I could see not so much as a glimmer of my own contribution. My letters home, in their plaintiveness and self-pity, rivaled any written at Shiloh or Gallipoli. So I was more than a little surprised when several members of our party, most of whom were a decade older than I,

Starting point is 00:12:11 described their days and nights of solitude in positive, even transformational terms. I simply didn't know what to make of their claims to happiness. How could someone's happiness increase when all the material sources of pleasure and distraction had been removed? At that age, the nature of my mind did not seem to interest me. Only my life did, and I was utterly oblivious to how different life would be if the quality of my mind were to change. Our minds are all we have, they are all we have ever had, and they are all we can offer others. This might not be obvious, especially when there are aspects of your life that seem in need of improvement, when your goals are unrealized,

Starting point is 00:12:50 or you're struggling to find a career, or you have relationships that need repairing. But it's the truth. Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won't matter how successful you become or who is in your life. You won't enjoy any of it. Most of us could easily compile a list of goals we want to achieve or personal problems that need to be solved. But what is the real significance of every item on compile a list of goals we want to achieve, or personal problems that need

Starting point is 00:13:25 to be solved. But what is the real significance of every item on such a list? Everything we want to accomplish—to paint the house, to learn a new language, to find a better job—is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking, this is a false hope. I'm not denying the importance of achieving one's goals, maintaining one's health, or keeping one's children clothed and fed. But most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present.

Starting point is 00:14:04 We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now. Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game that we're playing allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience, and therefore the quality of our lives. Mystics and contemplatives have made this claim for ages, but a growing body of scientific research now bears it out. A few years after my first painful encounter with solitude, in the winter of 1987,

Starting point is 00:14:34 I took the drug 3,4-methylenedioxyn-methylamphetamine, MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, and my sense of the human mind's potential shifted profoundly. Although MDMA would become ubiquitous at dance clubs and raves in the 1990s, at the time I didn't know anyone of my generation who had tried it. One evening, a few months before my 20th birthday, a close friend and I decided to take the drug. The setting of our experiment bore little resemblance to the conditions of Dionysian abandon under which MDMA is now often consumed. We were alone in a house,

Starting point is 00:15:12 seated across from each other on opposite ends of a couch, and engaged in quiet conversation as the chemical worked its way into our heads. Unlike other drugs, with which we were by then familiar, marijuana and alcohol, MDMA produced no feeling of distortion in our senses. Our minds seemed completely clear. In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by the knowledge that I loved my friend. This shouldn't have surprised me. He was, after all, one of my best friends. However, at that age I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the men in my life. Now I could feel that I loved him, and this feeling had ethical implications

Starting point is 00:15:51 that suddenly seemed as profound as they now seem pedestrian on the page. I wanted him to be happy. That conviction came crashing down with such force that something seemed to give way inside me. In fact, the insight appeared to restructure my mind. My capacity for envy, for instance, the sense of being diminished by the happiness or success of another person, seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. I could no more have felt envy at that moment than I could have wanted to poke out my own eyes. What did I care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was? If I could have bestowed these gifts on him, I would have. Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own. A certain euphoria was creeping into these reflections, perhaps, but the general feeling remained one of absolute sobriety

Starting point is 00:16:41 and of moral and emotional clarity unlike any I had ever known. It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend, about what I don't recall, and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person's eyes. And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends and I suddenly realized that if a

Starting point is 00:17:32 stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love, I love you because, now made no sense at all. The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love. The insight had more the character of a geometric proof. It was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what must be common to them all. The moment I could find a voice with which to speak,

Starting point is 00:18:13 I discovered that this epiphany about the universality of love could be readily communicated. My friend got the point at once. All I had to do was ask him how he would feel in the presence of a total stranger at that moment, and the same door opened in his mind. It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit. The experience was not of love growing, but of its being no longer obscured. Love was, as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages,

Starting point is 00:18:46 a state of being. How had we not seen this before? And how could we overlook it ever again? It would take me many years to put this experience into context. Until that moment, I had viewed organized religion as merely a monument to the ignorance and superstition of our ancestors. But I now knew that Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other saints and sages of history had not all been epileptics, schizophrenics,

Starting point is 00:19:11 or frauds. I still considered the world's religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost. But I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble. Okay, so that's how I started my book, Waking Up, which is a book about the nature of consciousness and how we can understand some of the life-changing experiences people can have, experiences often described as mystical or spiritual, but understand them in a 21st century rational scientific context. As some of you probably know, I've been a fairly vociferous critic of religion over the years. I've written several books and participated in many debates spelling out the reasons why. My basic view is

Starting point is 00:19:58 this. There's a difference between believing things for good reasons and believing things for bad reasons. And this is a difference that we all recognize in every area of our lives until the conversation turns to things like God and what happens after death and the origins of certain books like the Bible and the Quran. So my argument is that we can get what is most profound out of human life without lying to ourselves or to our children about the nature of reality. That's not to say that the universe might not be incredibly strange or that science has everything figured out. In fact, the universe is incredibly strange and science does not have everything figured out. But one thing should be absolutely clear.

Starting point is 00:20:43 The men and women who lived 2,000 years ago didn't have everything figured out either. And on many crucial points, they were ignorant of things that every child learns in school today. Like, for instance, that brains are somehow involved in producing minds. No one knew this 2,000 years ago. And to deny it today is intellectually irresponsible. So after I had the experience on MDMA I just described, I spent the better part of my 20s seeking out a fairly esoteric education. It wouldn't have been so esoteric in the 60s, when many people were dropping out and going to India with the Beatles, but it was fairly rare to see someone my age doing this

Starting point is 00:21:25 in the late 80s. So most of my friends at the time were 20 years older than I was, and I made many trips to India and Nepal to study with various meditation masters. I spent around a year and a half or two years on silent retreat, never for longer than three months at a time. That was spread out over my 20s. I did a couple of three-month retreats and several two-month retreats and one-month retreats and many shorter ones, mostly in the context of practicing Vipassana, otherwise known as mindfulness meditation, but ultimately practicing Dzogchen, which is a Tibetan practice that I'll talk about. In fact, I should just read you another section of my book, Waking Up, because I spell out some important distinctions there. There's a distinction,

Starting point is 00:22:10 generally speaking, between gradual versus sudden notions of realization or awakening. And this can seem totally paradoxical to people. So I'm going to read you a little bit about this, and you'll get more of my background here. This is from a section in the book titled Gradual vs. Sudden Realization. We wouldn't attempt to meditate or engage in any other contemplative practice if we didn't feel that something about our experience needed to be improved. But here lies one of the central paradoxes of spiritual life, because this very feeling of dissatisfaction causes us to overlook the intrinsic freedom of consciousness in the present.

Starting point is 00:22:55 As we have seen, there are good reasons to believe that adopting a practice like meditation can lead to positive changes in one's life. But the deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self. And to seek such freedom, as though it were a future state to be attained through effort, is to reinforce the chains of one's apparent bondage in each moment. Traditionally, there have been two solutions to this paradox. One is to simply ignore it, and to adopt various techniques of meditation in the hope that

Starting point is 00:23:25 a breakthrough will occur. Some people appear to succeed at this, but many fail. It is true that good things often happen in the meantime. We can become happier and more concentrated, but we can also despair of the whole project. The words of the sages may begin to sound like empty promises, and we're left hoping for transcendent experiences that never arrive, or prove merely temporary. The ultimate wisdom of enlightenment, whatever it is, cannot be a matter of having fleeting experiences. The goal of meditation is to uncover a form of well-being that is inherent to the nature of our minds. It must, therefore, be available in the context of ordinary sights, sounds, sensations, and even thoughts. Peak experiences are fine, but real freedom must be coincident with normal

Starting point is 00:24:13 waking life. And as a sidebar to this, this is now me speaking off book, this is one of the crucial distinctions between meditation and psychedelics as tools. It's very easy to draw the lesson from psychedelic experiences, however useful, that freedom somehow lies in radically transforming the contents and character of consciousness. Whereas the goal of meditation is to recognize that there's something about ordinary consciousness, the very awareness in you that is experiencing the sound of my voice in this moment, that is already radically free of self. It's already open. It's already undefined.

Starting point is 00:24:59 Consciousness never is truly confined by its contents. And so while psychedelics have been very useful for me and many others, the center of the bullseye for me is something that is actually coincident with normal waking consciousness, right? Precisely the kind of consciousness that could allow you to safely drive a car, right? Which, if you've ever taken acid or mushrooms, is not where one tends to be pitched on those drugs. So, back to the text. The other traditional response to the paradox of spiritual seeking is to fully acknowledge it and concede that all efforts are doomed. Because the urge to attain self-transcendence or any other mystical experience is a symptom of the very disease we want to cure. There is nothing to do but give up the search.

Starting point is 00:25:50 These paths may appear antithetical, and they are often presented as such. The path of gradual ascent is typical of Theravada Buddhism and most other approaches to meditation in the Indian tradition. And gradualism is the natural starting point for any search, spiritual or otherwise. Such goal-oriented modes of practice have the virtue of being easily taught because a person can begin them without having had any fundamental insight into the nature of consciousness or the illusoriness of the self. He need only adopt new patterns of attention, thought, and behavior, and the path will unfold before him.

Starting point is 00:26:26 By contrast, the path of sudden realization can appear impossibly steep. It is often described as quote, non-dualistic, because it refuses to validate the point of view from which one would meditate or practice any other spiritual discipline. Consciousness is already free of anything that remotely resembles a self, and there is nothing you can do, as an illusionary ego, to realize this. Such a perspective can be found in the Indian tradition of Advaita Vedanta, and in a few schools of Buddhism. Those who begin to practice in the spirit of gradualism often assume that the goal of self-transcendence is far away, and they may spend years overlooking the very freedom they yearn to realize.

Starting point is 00:27:09 The liability of this approach became clear to me when I studied under the Burmese meditation master Sayadaw Upandita. I sat through several retreats with Upandita, each a month or two in length. These retreats were based on the monastic discipline of Theravadan Buddhism. We did not eat after noon, and were encouraged to sleep no more than four hours each night. Outwardly, the goal was to engage in 18 hours of formal meditation each day. Inwardly, it was to follow the stages of insight laid out in

Starting point is 00:27:35 Buddhaghosa's 5th century treatise, the Vasudhimagga, and elaborated in the writings of Upandita's own legendary teacher, Mahasi Sayadaw. The logic of this practice is explicitly goal-oriented. According to this view, one practices mindfulness not because the intrinsic freedom of consciousness can be fully realized in the present, but because being mindful is a means for attaining an experience often described as, quote, cessation, which is thought to decisively uproot the illusion of the self, along with other mental afflictions, depending on one's stage of practice. Cessation is believed to be a direct insight into an unconditioned reality, in Pali this is called nibbana, in Sanskrit nirvana, that lies behind all manifest phenomena. This conception of the

Starting point is 00:28:24 path to enlightenment is open to several criticisms. The first is that it is misleading with respect to what can be realized in the present moment, in a state of ordinary awareness. Thus it encourages confusion at the outset regarding the nature of the problem one is trying to solve. It is true, however, that striving toward the distant goal of enlightenment, as well as the nearer goal of cessation, can lead one to practice with an intensity that might otherwise be difficult to achieve. I never made more effort than I did when practicing under Upandita, but most of this

Starting point is 00:28:57 effort arose from the very illusion of bondage to the self that I was seeking to overcome. The model of this practice is that one must climb the mountain so that freedom can be found at the top. But the self is already an illusion, and that truth can be glimpsed directly at the mountain's base or anywhere else along the path. One can then return to this insight

Starting point is 00:29:20 again and again as one's sole method of meditation, thereby arriving at the goal in each moment of actual practice. This isn't merely a matter of choosing to think differently about the significance of mindfulness. It is a difference in what one is able to be mindful of. Dualistic mindfulness, paying attention to the breath, for instance, generally proceeds on the basis of an illusion. One feels that one is a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head, that can strategically pay attention to the breath

Starting point is 00:29:51 or to some other object of awareness, because of all the good that it will do. This is gradualism in action, and yet from a non-dualistic point of view, one could just as well be mindful of selflessness directly. To do this, however, one must recognize that this is how consciousness is, and such an insight can be difficult to achieve. However, it does not require the meditative attainment of cessation. Another problem with the goal of cessation is that most traditions of Buddhism do not share it, and yet they produce long lineages of contemplative masters,

Starting point is 00:30:23 many of whom have spent decades doing nothing but meditating on the nature of consciousness. If freedom is possible, there must be some mode of ordinary consciousness in which it can be expressed. Why not realize this frame of mind directly? Nevertheless, I spent several years deeply preoccupied with reaching the goal of cessation, and at least one year of that time was spent on silent retreat. Although I had many interesting experiences, none seemed to fit the specific requirements of this path. There were periods during which all thought subsided, and any sense

Starting point is 00:30:56 of having a body disappeared. What remained was a blissful expanse of conscious peace that had no reference point in any of the usual sensory channels. Many scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is always tied to one of the five senses, and that the idea of, quote, pure consciousness, apart from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, is a category error and a spiritual fantasy. I am confident that they are mistaken. But cessation never arrived. Given my gradualist views at that point, this became very frustrating. Most of my time on retreat was extremely pleasant, but it seemed to me that I had been merely given the tools with which to contemplate the evidence of my non-enlightenment. My practice had become a vigil, a method of waiting, however patiently,

Starting point is 00:31:42 for a future reward. The pendulum swung when I met an Indian teacher named H.W.L. Punja, called Punjaji or Papaji by his students. Punjaji was a disciple of Ramana Maharshi, arguably the most widely revered Indian sage of the 20th century. Ramana's own awakening had been quite unusual because he had had no apparent spiritual interest or contact with a teacher. As a boy of sixteen, living in a middle-class family of South Indian Brahmins, he spontaneously became a spiritual adept. While sitting alone in his uncle's study, Ramana suddenly became paralyzed by a fear of death. He lay down on the floor, convinced that he would soon die.

Starting point is 00:32:23 But rather than remaining terrified, he decided to locate the self that was about to disappear. He focused on the feeling of I, a process he later called self-inquiry, and found it to be absent from the field of consciousness. Ramana the person didn't die that day, but he claimed that the feeling of being a separate self never darkened his consciousness again. After fruitlessly attempting to behave like the ordinary boy he had once been, Ramana left home and traveled to Tiruvannamalai, an ancient pilgrimage site for followers of Shiva. He spent the rest of his life there, in proximity to the mountain Arunachala, with which he claimed to have a mystical connection. In the early years

Starting point is 00:33:05 after his awakening, Ramana seemed to lose his ability to speak, and he was said to grow so absorbed in his experience of transfigured consciousness that he remained motionless for days at a time. His body grew weak, developed sores, and had to be tended by the few locals who had taken an interest in him. After a decade of silence, around 1906, Ramana began to conduct dialogues about the nature of consciousness. Until the end of his life, a steady stream of students came to study with him. These are the sorts of things he was apt to say. These are quotes from Ramana Maharshi.

Starting point is 00:33:40 The mind is a bundle of thoughts. The thoughts arise because there is the thinker. The thinker is the ego. Here's another quote. This is the direct method. Because ego is no entity, it will automatically vanish and reality will shine forth by itself. This is the direct method, whereas all other methods are done only retaining the ego. No sadhanas, spiritual practices, are necessary for engaging in this quest. And finally, here's one more quote. There is no mystery greater than this, that being reality, we seek to gain reality. We think that there is something hiding our reality,

Starting point is 00:34:32 and that it must be destroyed before the reality is gained. It is ridiculous. A day will dawn when you will laugh at your past efforts. That which will be on the day you laugh is also here and now. Back to my text. Any attempt to make sense of such teachings in third-person scientific terms

Starting point is 00:34:53 quickly produces monstrosities. From the point of view of psychological science, for instance, the mind is not just a, quote, bundle of thoughts. And in what sense can reality be, quote,

Starting point is 00:35:06 simply the loss of the ego? Does this reality include quasars and hantavirus? But these are the kinds of quibbles that will cause one to miss Ramana's point. While the philosophy of Advaita, and that's the word for non-dualism in Sanskrit, while the philosophy of Advaita and Ramana's own words may tend to support a metaphysical reading of teachings of this kind, their validity is not metaphysical. Rather, it is experiential. The whole of Advaita reduces to a series of very simple and testable assertions. Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience. The self, or ego, is an illusory appearance within it. Look closely for what you are calling I, and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear. What remains,

Starting point is 00:35:56 as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness, free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents. These are the simple truths that Poonjaji taught. In fact, he was even more uncompromising than his guru in his non-duality. Whereas Ramana would often concede the utility of certain dualistic practices, Poonjaji never gave an inch. The effect was intoxicating, especially to those of us who had spent years practicing meditation. Poonjaji was also given to spontaneous bouts of weeping and laughter, both apparently from sheer joy. The man did not hide his light under a bushel. When I first met him, he had not yet been discovered by the throngs of western devotees who would soon turn his tiny house in Lucknow into a spiritual circus. Like

Starting point is 00:36:45 his teacher Ramana, Poonjaji claimed to be perfectly free from the illusion of the self, and by all appearances he was. And like Ramana, and every other Indian guru, Poonjaji would occasionally say something deeply unscientific. On the whole, however, his teaching was remarkably free from Hindu religiosity, or unwarranted assertions about the nature of the cosmos. He appeared to simply speak from experience about the nature of experience itself. Poonjaji's influence on me was profound, especially because it came as a corrective to all the strenuous and unsatisfying efforts I had been making in meditation up until that point.

Starting point is 00:37:22 But the dangers inherent to his approach soon became obvious. The all-or-nothing quality of Poonjaji's teaching obliged him to acknowledge the full enlightenment of any person who was grandiose or manic enough to claim it. Thus, I repeatedly witnessed fellow students declare their complete and undying freedom, all the while appearing quite ordinary, or worse. In certain cases, these people had clearly had some sort of breakthrough, but Poonjaji's insistence upon the finality of every legitimate insight led many of them to delude themselves about their spiritual attainments. Some left India and became gurus. From what I could tell, Poonjaji gave everyone his blessing

Starting point is 00:38:00 to spread his teachings in this way. He once suggested that I do it, and yet it was clear to me that I do it. And yet it was clear to me that I was not qualified to be anyone's guru. Nearly 20 years have passed, and I'm still not. Of course, from Poonjaji's point of view, this is an illusion. And yet there simply is a difference between a person like myself, who is generally distracted by thought, and one who isn't and cannot be. I don't know where to place Poonjaji on this continuum of wisdom, but he appeared to be a lot farther along than his students. Whether Poonjaji was capable

Starting point is 00:38:31 of seeing the difference between himself and other people, I do not know. But his insistence that no difference existed began to seem either dogmatic or delusional. On one occasion, events conspired to perfectly illuminate the flaw in Poonjaji's teaching. A small group of experienced practitioners, among us several teachers of meditation, had organized a trip to India and Nepal to spend ten days with Poonjaji in Lucknow, followed by ten days in Kathmandu, to receive teachings on the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Dzogchen. As it happened, during our time in Lucknow, a woman from Switzerland became, quote, enlightened in Poonjaji's presence. For the better part of a week, she was celebrated as something

Starting point is 00:39:11 akin to the next Buddha. Poonjaji repeatedly put her forward as evidence of how fully the truth could be realized without making any effort at all in meditation. And we had the pleasure of seeing this woman sit beside Poonjaji on a raised platform, expounding upon how blissful it now was in her corner of the universe. She was, in fact, radiantly happy, and it was by no means clear that Poonjaji had made a mistake in recognizing her. She would say things like, there is nothing but consciousness, and there is no difference between it and reality itself. Coming from such a nice, guileless person, there was little reason to doubt the profundity of her experience.

Starting point is 00:39:50 When it came time for our group to leave India for Nepal, this woman asked if she could join us. Because she was such good company, we encouraged her to come along. A few of us were also curious to see how her realization would appear in another context. And so it came to pass that a woman whose enlightenment had just been confirmed by one of the greatest living exponents of Advaita was in the room when we received our first teachings from Tukurgan Rinpoche, who was generally thought to be one of the greatest living Dzogchen masters.

Starting point is 00:40:19 Of all the Buddhist teachings, those of Dzogchen most closely resemble the teachings of Advaita. The two traditions seek to provoke the same insight into the non-duality of consciousness. But generally speaking, only Dzogchen makes it absolutely clear that one must practice this insight to the point of stability, and that one can do so without succumbing to the dualistic striving that haunts most other paths. At a certain point in our discussions with Tuku Ugin, our Swiss prodigy declared her boundless freedom in terms similar to those she had used to such great effect with Poonjiji. After a few highly amusing exchanges, during which we watched Tuku Ugin struggle to understand what our translator was telling him, he gave a short laugh and looked the woman over with renewed interest. How long has it been since you were last lost in thought? he asked.

Starting point is 00:41:07 I haven't had any thoughts for over a week, the woman replied. Tooka Urigan smiled. A week? Yes. No thoughts? No, my mind is completely still. It's just pure consciousness. That's very interesting.

Starting point is 00:41:22 Okay, so this is what's going to happen now. We're all going to wait for you to have your next thought. There's very interesting. Okay, so this is what's going to happen now. We're all going to wait for you to have your next thought. There's no hurry. We're all very patient people. We're just going to sit here and wait. So please tell us when you notice a thought arise in your mind. It is difficult to convey what a brilliant and subtle intervention this was.

Starting point is 00:41:45 It may have been the most inspired moment of teaching I have ever witnessed. After a few moments, a look of doubt appeared on our friend's face. Okay, wait a minute. Oh, that could have been a thought there. Okay. Over the next 30 seconds, we watched this woman's enlightenment completely unravel. It became clear that she had been merely thinking about how expansive her experience of consciousness had become, how it was perfectly free of thought, immaculate, just like space, without noticing that she was thinking incessantly. She had been telling herself the story of her enlightenment, and she had been getting away with it because she happened to be an extraordinarily happy person for whom everything was going well for the time being.

Starting point is 00:42:27 This was the danger of non-dual teachings of the sort that Poonjaji was handing out to all comers. It was easy to delude oneself into thinking that one had achieved a permanent breakthrough, especially because he insisted that all breakthroughs must be permanent. What the Dzogchen teachings made clear, however, is that thinking about what is beyond thought is still thinking. And a glimpse of selflessness is generally only the beginning of a process that must reach fruition. Being able to stand perfectly free of the feeling of self is the start of one's spiritual journey, not its end. I think I'll read one more section here because this will give you more context

Starting point is 00:43:06 for how I think about meditation. It's the next section here, titled Dzogchen, Taking the Goal as the Path. Tuka Ugin Rinpoche lived in a hermitage on the southern slope of Shivapuri Mountain, overlooking Kathmandu Valley. He spent more than 20 years of his life on formal retreat and was deservedly famous for

Starting point is 00:43:25 the clarity with which he gave the, quote, pointing out instruction of Dzogchen, a formal initiation in which a teacher seeks to impart the experience of self-transcendence directly to a student. I received this teaching from several Dzogchen masters, but I never met anyone who spoke about the nature of consciousness as precisely as Tukurgan. In the last five years of his life, I made several trips to Nepal to study with him. The practice of Dzogchen requires that one be able to experience the intrinsic selflessness of awareness in every moment, that is, when one is not otherwise distracted by thought, which is to say that for a Dzogchen meditator, mindfulness must be synonymous with dispelling the illusion of the

Starting point is 00:44:05 self. Rather than teach a technique of meditation, such as paying close attention to one's breathing, a Dzogchen master must precipitate an insight on the basis of which a student can thereafter practice a form of awareness, the Tibetan term is Rigpa, that is unencumbered by subject-object dualism. Thus it is often said in Dzogchen that one, quote, takes the goal as the path, because the freedom from self that one might otherwise seek is the very thing that one practices.

Starting point is 00:44:33 The goal of Dzogchen, if one can call it such, is to grow increasingly familiar with this way of being in the world. In my experience, some Dzogchen masters are better teachers than others. I've been in the presence of several of the most revered Tibetan lamas of our time,

Starting point is 00:44:48 while they were ostensibly teaching Dzogchen, and most of them simply described this view of consciousness without giving clear instructions on how to glimpse it. The genius of Tugurgen was that he could point out the nature of mind with the precision and matter-of-factness of teaching a person how to thread a needle, and could get an ordinary meditator like me to recognize that consciousness is intrinsically free of self. There might be some initial struggle and uncertainty, depending on the student, but once the truth of non-duality had been glimpsed, it became obvious that it was always

Starting point is 00:45:19 available, and there was never any doubt about how to see it again. I came to Tuka Uragin yearning for the experience of self-transcendence and in a few minutes he showed me that I had no self to transcend. In my view, there's nothing supernatural or even mysterious about this transmission of wisdom from master to disciple. Tuka Uragin's effect on me came purely from the clarity of his teaching. As it is with any challenging endeavor, the difference between being utterly misled by false information, on me came purely from the clarity of his teaching. As it is with any challenging endeavor, the difference between being utterly misled by false information, being nudged in the general direction, and being precisely guided by an expert is difficult to overstate. The direct

Starting point is 00:45:56 perception of the optic blind spot provides a useful analogy. Imagine that perceiving the blind spot will completely transform a person's life. Next, imagine that whole religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are predicated on the denial of the blind spot's existence. Let us say that their central doctrines assert the perfect uniformity of the visual field. Perhaps other traditions acknowledge the blind spot, but purely in poetical terms, without giving any clear indication of how to recognize it. A few lineages may actually teach techniques whereby one can see the blind spot for oneself,

Starting point is 00:46:32 but only gradually, after months and years of effort, and even then one glimpses of it will see more a matter of luck than anything else. In a more esoteric tradition still, a quote blind spot master gives the quote pointing out instruction, but without much precision. Perhaps he tells you to close one eye, for reasons that are never made explicit, and then says that the spot you seek is right on the surface of your vision. No doubt some people will succeed in discovering the blind spot under these conditions, but the teacher certainly could be clearer than this.

Starting point is 00:47:04 How much clearer? If Tukewurgen had been pointing out the blind spot, he would have produced a figure like the one below and given these instructions. And then I have the classic image you would use to glimpse your own blind spot of a fixation cross on one side and a large dot on the other. And then I give the instructions here. I'll just read them through to remind you about how clear this could be. One, hold this figure in front of you at arm's length. Two, close your left eye and stare at the cross with your right. Three, gradually move the page closer to your face while keeping your gaze fixed on the cross. Four, notice when the dot on the right disappears. 5. Once you find your blind spot,

Starting point is 00:47:48 continue to experiment with this figure by moving the page back and forth until any possibility of doubt about the existence of the blind spot has disappeared. It's considered bad form in most spiritual circles, especially among Buddhists, to make claims about one's own realization. However, I think this taboo comes at a high price, because it allows people to remain confused about how to practice. So I will describe my experience plainly. Before meeting Tukorgen, I had spent at least a year practicing Vipassana on silent retreats. The experience of self-transcendence was not entirely unknown to me. I could remember moments when the distance between the observer and the observed had seemed to vanish. But I viewed these experiences as being dependent

Starting point is 00:48:30 on conditions of extreme mental concentration. Consequently, I thought that they were unavailable in more ordinary moments, outside intensive retreat. But after a few minutes, Tukorgan simply handed me the ability to cut through the illusion of the self directly, even in ordinary states of consciousness. This instruction was, without question, the most important thing I have ever been explicitly taught by another human being. It has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering, fear, anger, shame, in an instant. At my level of practice, this freedom lasts only a few moments, but these moments can be repeated, and they can grow in duration. Punctuating ordinary experience

Starting point is 00:49:11 in this way makes all the difference. In fact, when I pay attention, it is impossible for me to feel like a self at all. The implied center of cognition and emotion simply falls away, and it is obvious that consciousness is never truly confined by what it knows. That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I am as confused as anyone else. Given this change in my perception of the world, I understand the attractions of traditional spirituality. I also recognize attractions of traditional spirituality. I also recognize the needless confusion and harm that inevitably arise from the doctrines of faith-based religion. I did not have to believe anything irrational about the universe or about

Starting point is 00:49:55 my place within it to learn the practice of Dzogchen. I didn't have to accept Tibetan Buddhist beliefs about karma and rebirth or imagine that Tuka Organ or the other meditation masters I met possessed magic powers. And whatever the traditional liabilities of the guru-devotee relationship, I know from direct experience that it's possible to meet a teacher who can deliver the goods. Okay, so, that's the end of my reading. So that's how I come to the practice of meditation.

Starting point is 00:50:24 And after I spent the decades of my 20s largely focused on meditation, as well as reading the relevant Eastern and Western philosophy, I decided to go back to school because I was writing nonfiction about the nature of the mind. Happily, I had dropped out of Stanford University, where you can never really drop out. I think Stanford is one of the few schools in the United States that has the policy of never making you reapply. So I just showed up like some Rip Van Winkle character after 11 years away and finished my degree in philosophy. And then went on to do a PhD in neuroscience at UCLA. So I bring a philosophical and scientific and secular perspective to meditation.

Starting point is 00:51:09 Ultimately, I think we should all be practicing non-dual mindfulness without believing any bullshit. That is a human future worth wanting. And that's what I'm attempting to equip people to do in the Waking Up Course. In producing the Waking Up Course, I'm attempting to do in the waking up course. In producing the waking up course, I'm attempting to do something that I'm especially qualified to do. I mean, I don't consider myself the best at any one thing, but you don't have to be the best at anything to be almost uniquely qualified for something. The waking up course is in part a meditation course, so obviously there are guided meditations. I'll be continually adding to those as time goes on. And I would say that even if you're an experienced meditator,

Starting point is 00:51:50 using guided meditations can be extremely helpful. And this is one of the things that's unique about audio. You can't do this with a book. There's no alternative to having an actual voice remind you that you're supposed to be paying attention. And I find guided meditations extremely helpful, and I've been meditating for now nearly 30 years. In addition to the guided meditations, there's also an expanding curriculum of short talks on a variety of topics. I call these talks lessons. Some explain concepts that are directly relevant to meditation. Others are more like philosophical interventions, where I have you reflect on a specific topic for a few minutes, sometimes starting with a scientific finding or quotation that inspires a particular line of thought.

Starting point is 00:52:32 So here I'd like to give you a taste of the course. I'll start with one of the early meditations, very much designed for someone new to the practice of mindfulness. So if you're not bored already, this is the part of the podcast that really will bore you to tears if you're working out of the gym or commuting. But if you're in a already, this is the part of the podcast that really will bore you to tears, if you're working out of the gym or commuting. But if you're in a spot where you can meditate, here's the first 10-minute meditation.

Starting point is 00:53:05 Once again, take a seat, either in a chair or cross-legged on a cushion. It's good to sit as comfortably as you can. And it's usually best to be sitting as straight as you can. Now, close your eyes and become aware of the sensations of sitting. Feel your arms at your sides. And perhaps take a few deep breaths. just allow gravity to settle you into your seat. Now, as you did yesterday, become aware of the sensations of breathing.

Starting point is 00:54:06 Notice where you feel the breath most clearly. Either at the tip of the nose or in the rise and falling of your abdomen or chest. It doesn't matter where you pay attention to the breath. And you can change your focus from session to session if you like. But for the moment, just pick one spot and focus there. There's nothing especially significant about the breath.

Starting point is 00:54:58 But it's something you always have with you. And it's as good as any other sense object as a basis for training your powers of attention. Eventually the practice will incorporate everything that arises in consciousness. Just feel the mere sensations of breathing. From the beginning of the inhalation to the pause between breaths and follow the exhalation

Starting point is 00:55:47 to the end. Try to cover the breath with your awareness. And once again, there's no need to control your breathing. Just let it come however it comes. Thank you. What we're doing here is sharpening the only tool you really have, your mind. This is what you take with you in any situation in life. This is what determines how you respond to emotional stress and physical pain and every other difficulty you encounter. This is the basis for every decision you make

Starting point is 00:57:20 and every interaction you have with other people. And as you begin to observe it, you will notice, perhaps with growing amazement, that your mind is totally out of control. and as you try to pay attention to the breath you'll begin to notice that the primary obstacle to your paying attention is thinking thoughts continually arise and you forget that you're even trying to meditate at all.

Starting point is 00:58:08 And this happens over the course of mere seconds. Just try to count the next ten breaths without getting distracted. You can silently in in your mind, count one on the inhalation and one again on the exhalation, and then two. See if you can get to ten. Thank you.... Unless you have a lot of concentration,

Starting point is 01:00:08 you probably were unable to tell how precarious your awareness of the breath actually was, how your attention was being buffeted on all sides by discursive thought. Now, the goal isn't to stop your thoughts or to suppress any emotion that might arise along with them. It is rather to notice these mental events clearly and to experience them fully, more fully, in fact.

Starting point is 01:00:44 To recognize them as appearances in consciousness the moment they arise. But that is generally a very difficult thing to do in the beginning. So for the time being, the moment you discover that you're thinking, just observe it and come back to the breath. In this final minute of the meditation, just start again. Just feel the next breath as it comes. Okay. Okay. Well, just take a moment to take stock of how you're feeling.

Starting point is 01:02:29 Whether you're tired, or restless, or calm, whether your experience was pleasant or unpleasant isn't really the point. What you're learning here is a new skill. And unless you're coming to this course already knowing how to meditate, you can't expect to be able to do it well in the beginning. And as the practice develops over the next days and weeks, you'll see that you do less, not more, than you normally do. You're not adding an artifice to your experience in the present moment. Rather, you're simply becoming less distracted. The purpose of meditation is to discover what your mind is like when you're

Starting point is 01:03:06 no longer perpetually identified with the contents of your thoughts. And to make progress, you simply need to be willing to begin again. Okay, so that's what an early guided meditation sounds like. Now I'll give you a lesson. And these are, again, these are short talks on many different topics. Here's one on the topic of death. Well, today's topic is a topic we all think about, while doing our best not to think about it. The topic is death. And how we think about death changes depending on whether we're thinking about dying ourselves or about losing the people we love. But whichever side of the coin we take here, death is really an ever-present reality for us.

Starting point is 01:04:14 And it is so whether we're thinking about it or not. It's always announcing itself in the background, on the news, in the stories we hear about the lives of others, in our concerns about our own health, in the attention we pay when crossing the street. If you observe yourself closely, you'll see that you spend a fair amount of energy each day trying not to die. And as long been noted by philosophers and contemplatives and poets, death makes a mockery of almost everything else we spend our lives doing.

Starting point is 01:04:59 Just take a moment to reflect on how you've spent your day so far. The kinds of things that captured your attention. The things that you've been genuinely worried about. Think of the last argument you had with your spouse. Think of the last hour you spent on social media. Over the last few days, I've been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find a new font for my podcast.

Starting point is 01:05:26 This has literally absorbed hours of my time. So if you had stopped me at any point in the last 48 hours and asked me what I'm up to, what really concerns me, what deep problem I'm attempting to solve, the solution to which seems most likely to bring order to the chaos in my corner of the universe? The honest answer would have been, I'm looking for a font. Now, I'm not saying that everything we do has to be profound in every moment. I mean, sometimes you just have to find a font. But contemplating the brevity of life brings some perspective to how we use our attention. It's not so much what we pay attention to

Starting point is 01:06:11 it's the quality of attention. It's how we feel while doing it. If you need to spend the next hour looking for a font you might as well enjoy it because the truth is none of us know how much time we have in this life. And taking that fact to heart brings a kind of moral and emotional clarity and energy to the present. Or at least it can. And it can bring a resolve to not suffer over stupid things. I mean, take something like road rage.

Starting point is 01:06:47 This is probably the quintessential example of misspent energy. You're behind the wheel of your car and somebody does something erratic or they're probably just driving more slowly than you want and you find yourself getting angry. Now, I would submit to you that that kind of thing is impossible if you're being

Starting point is 01:07:08 mindful of the shortness of life. If you're aware that you're going to die and that the other person is going to die and that you're both going to lose everyone you love and you don't know when. You've got this moment of life, this beautiful moment, this moment where your consciousness is bright, where it's not dimmed by morphine in the hospital on your last day among the living. And the sun is out, or it's raining.

Starting point is 01:07:41 Both are beautiful. And your spouse is alive. And your children are alive. And you're driving. And you're not in some failed state where civilians are being rounded up and murdered by the thousands. You're just running an errand.

Starting point is 01:08:01 And that person in front of you, who you will never meet, whose hopes and sorrows you know nothing about, but which if you could know them, you would recognize are impressively similar to your own, is just driving slow. This is your life, the only one you've got, and you will never get this moment back again. And you don't know how many more moments you have.

Starting point is 01:08:33 No matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time. You've had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them, in a way that they feel it, and in a way that you feel it. And you've missed most of them. And you don't know how many more you're going to get. You've got this next interaction with another human being to make the world a marginally better place. You've got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence.

Starting point is 01:09:12 So why not relax and enjoy your life? Really relax. Even in the midst of struggle. Even while doing hard work. Even under uncertainty. You are in a game right now, and you can't see the clock. So you don't know how much time you have left. And yet you're free to make the game as interesting as possible.

Starting point is 01:09:42 You can even change the rules. You can discover new games that no one has thought of yet. You can make games that used to be impossible suddenly possible and get others to play them with you. You can literally build a rocket to go to Mars so that you can start a colony there. I actually know people who will spend some part of today doing that. But whatever you do, however seemingly ordinary, you can feel the preciousness of life. And an awareness of death is the doorway into that way of being in the world.

Starting point is 01:10:37 Okay, here's a lesson titled, The Mystery of Being. Of all the solar systems in this universe that might sustain complex life, we find ourselves in this one. It took billions of years of evolution on this Earth to produce the people we now are. Our brains and bodies have evolved through millions of generations, reaching back to creatures totally unlike us, to animals so strange that we wouldn't even want them as pets, and finally to single-celled organisms.

Starting point is 01:11:11 For ages, the world got on without us. But now we're here. And among all the possible people that could exist, we are among the tiny minority that actually do. And of all the periods in human history where we might have appeared, we live among the tiny minority that actually do. And of all the periods in human history where we might have appeared, we live in this one, arguably the first in which it was possible to understand our circumstance in a truly universal sense. For the first time, a person's view of the world need not be dictated by the mere location of his birth

Starting point is 01:11:41 or the religion of his parents. For the first time, the barriers of language and geography have totally fallen away. At this moment, you have instantaneous access to more information than even the greatest scholar or world leader did a generation ago. And yet, on some level, we confront the same mystery of our existence that Socrates or the Buddha faced. The fact that you are you, the fact that you exist in this moment, is a miracle of sorts. There's something fundamentally inexplicable about it. There's no amount of knowledge that seems adequate to dispel the mystery of our appearance here. And whatever you know, whatever you believe, whatever you have done or hope to do, you have this moment of conscious life to contemplate.

Starting point is 01:12:33 You have this minute, this hour, this day, and it will never come again. So I want to talk for a few minutes about the intrinsic mystery of this circumstance. It really is the mystery of being. In science and philosophy, we often claim that we're in the business of getting rid of mysteries. And there is, of course, a sense in which that's true. If we don't know why people are getting sick, for instance, and we discover the virus that's causing it, well, then the mystery has been solved. But there's another sense in which mystery never recedes. And if you pay attention, you can see that it's an ever-present fact

Starting point is 01:13:11 of even the most well-understood phenomena. The philosopher Bertrand Russell described our most rudimentary knowledge of the world as knowledge by acquaintance. For instance, the color of a table standing before you. And here's a quote. The particular shade of color that I'm seeing may have many things said about it. I might say that it is brown, that it is rather dark, and so on. But such statements, though they make me know truths about the color, do not make me know the color itself any better than I did before. So far as concerns the knowledge of the color itself, as opposed to knowledge of truths about it, I know the color perfectly and completely when I see it,

Starting point is 01:13:54 and no further knowledge of it is even theoretically possible. Thus the sense data which make up the appearance of my table are things with which I have acquaintance, and things immediately known to me, just as they are. End quote. Now, what Russell seems to overlook here is that this basic knowledge, to which no knowledge can even be theoretically added, is a place where we uncover an intrinsic limit to understanding. When we consider any facet of experience, in this case a vision of color, if we can then stem the tide of our thoughts long enough to merely observe it as it is, the fact that we're in total ignorance of what it is can become obvious. I mean, what is

Starting point is 01:14:41 the color blue? Not as a function of wavelengths of light or neurophysiology, but as it is directly perceived. We're really left with nothing to say but that it's blue, which of course does nothing to clarify things. In fact, it's not even blue, which is just a word. It's a noise we're making. Or what we see before us is whatever it ineffably is. Focusing on this distance between concepts and experience is a means of sneaking

Starting point is 01:15:13 up on a truth that is generally described in Buddhism as the truth of emptiness. The idea that no thing has intrinsic independent existence in the way that it seems. Now, there are many ways to come at this insight into emptiness. And frankly, this line of inquiry may be too steep for some of you at this point. So I encourage you to return to it after you have more experience in the practice of meditation. But it is worth reflecting on even in the beginning. The moment we suspend the conceptual associations we have with a given object or perception, our knowledge about it, our direct experience of it can grade into this experience of just pure mystery. We're left with this wordless intuition of consciousness and its contents,

Starting point is 01:15:59 about which nothing more really can be said. Right now, as you listen to me speak, pay careful attention to the process of listening, the feeling of sitting in your chair. Look closely at everything around you. I'd like to suggest that while you know many things about the present moment, you do not know what anything in itself is. Now look at your hand. What is it? You can define this part of your body in language. You can call it hand. You can consider the fact that it's made of bone and muscle and threaded with blood vessels and nerves. But this is all a description about the object that you're now looking at. If you simply look at your hand and ask yourself, what is it? You might realize in a moment of rare open-mindedness that it is an absolute mystery. It is, in fact, as mysterious an appearance as any you could ever hope to find.

Starting point is 01:17:09 Now, there are scientific arguments that can be arrayed against the mysteriousness of any object. We can point to the fact that the atoms in your hand were born billions of years ago in the belly of a star. And, in fact, some of these atoms may have inhabited several stars in succession. It's even possible that some atoms that were once in the bodies of historical figures, like Churchill or Cleopatra, are now in you. In fact, it might be descriptively true to implicate the entire universe in your hand, or in any objects being what it is. But no such litany of concepts or connections can account for the mystery that looms whenever you just look at something,

Starting point is 01:17:43 closely, anything, however commonplace, and realize that while you might have volumes of knowledge about it, you don't have the slightest understanding of what it is in itself. Now, others have noticed this fact. Walter Benjamin, the German literary critic, stumbled upon this mystery in Marseilles after smoking hashish for the first time. He distilled it in the phrase, how things withstand the gaze. And all things really do withstand the gaze. We confront the mystery of being in every moment, but we don't notice it

Starting point is 01:18:21 because this mystery is tiled over with concepts. Now, meditation isn't about understanding things conceptually. It's the ability to experience things more clearly, prior to concepts. It is the knowledge by acquaintance that Russell spoke of here, taken to the ultimate degree. And the more you practice it, you'll find that it really is a new form of intelligence. It leads to another way of being in the world, and one that can allow for a kind of psychological freedom that a continuous entanglement with concepts doesn't. There's a famous parable from the Buddha meant to get at this difference. A man is struck in the chest with a poison arrow,

Starting point is 01:19:06 and a surgeon rushes to his side to begin the work of saving his life. But the man resists. He first wants to know the name of the fletcher who fashioned the arrow's shaft, and the type of wood from which it was cut, and the motive of the man who shot it, and the name of the horse upon which he rode, and a thousand other things that have no bearing at all upon his present suffering or ultimate survival. So this man needs to get his priorities straight. His commitment to thinking about the world results from a basic misunderstanding of his predicament.

Starting point is 01:19:40 And though we may be only dimly aware of it, we too have problems that will not be solved by more thinking. Finally, here's a 12-minute guided meditation that comes a little later in the course. As you get comfortable in your seat, you might keep your eyes open for the beginning of this session. And take a few deep breaths, and just let yourself settle into the feeling of resting in space.... And as you gaze in front of you, just let your gaze be as wide as possible. No need to focus on anything in particular. just stare into space

Starting point is 01:21:34 with soft eyes feeling the breath come and go. Listen to the sounds in the room arising and passing away. And as you stare into your visual field, take a moment to look for what is looking. See if you can look back with your attention at the one who is seen. Now, this may sound paradoxical,

Starting point is 01:22:56 but see what happens the moment you look. There was a teacher named Douglas Harding who wrote a book titled On Having No Head and the exercise he recommended to his students was to gaze at whatever is before you and look for your own head notice that your head is not one of the things you see. What is it like to see the world and simultaneously notice that your head is not appearing in it. See if that does anything to your sense of awareness.

Starting point is 01:24:05 Harding used to say that where his head was supposed to be there was just the world see if you can be mindful of that in each moment... and now gently close your eyes and pay attention to this feeling that you might have that you're now inside your head that your attention is in something but again what you're calling your head, that your attention is in something.

Starting point is 01:25:07 But again, what you're calling your head, the sensations you get from your skin, the muscles in your face, all of that is appearing in consciousness. That which is aware is not inside of something. Everything is in it. See if you can feel that. open your eyes again and ask yourself what has changed is there a sense that the world comes rushing in? That space just got bigger?

Starting point is 01:26:17 You might play with this, opening and closing your eyes periodically. Is there really a change? There's a change in the contents of consciousness, clearly. There are things you can see with your eyes open that you can't with your eyes closed. But you still have a visual field in both cases. When you close your eyes, your visual field doesn't disappear.

Starting point is 01:27:36 All that is changing are the contents that consciousness has a center that there's a meditator in the middle of each moment of meditation, a thinker of thoughts, a seer of sights, a hearer of sounds. We'll be looking into that, that feeling that awareness emanates from a single point inside the head. And in some ways this is even easier to do with eyes open, because we use vision to define ourselves in opposition to our environment more than we do with the other senses. There's a clear feeling that most of us have most of the time that we are behind our face looking out at the world through our eyes.

Starting point is 01:28:37 But as you look out at the world in this moment, see if that feeling is true. You might look to see if there's any evidence that you are behind your face at this moment. Thank you. And the moment you notice you're lost in thought, come back to this exercise, keeping attention very wide, with our eyes open or closed. and seeing if this feeling of being inside the head survives scrutiny. In the last minute of this session, just give up all efforts and notice whatever appears on its own. Thank you. Well, today I introduced a slightly different exercise, and there'll be some more of that coming from time to time. Because it's good to use this growing facility with mindfulness

Starting point is 01:32:10 to engage a kind of structured analysis of experience. You can definitely precipitate certain insights by doing something a little more directed than just noticing whatever happens to arise. And if you're interested, you might get that book I mentioned on Having No Head by Douglas Harding, because he, in a way that was quite unique to him, developed analogies and exercises that can provoke an insight into the illusoriness of subject-object perception. It's not to say that consciousness isn't arising in the brain. It's not making any claims about your mind being coterminous with the rest of the physical world. What Harding was doing was showing that this sense of being inside the head from the side of experience changes when you

Starting point is 01:33:17 actually look to see if it's true. And as you play with that exercise you might find that a very expansive and centerless sense of what awareness is can emerge in place of this feeling that you would otherwise call I. Okay. Well, hopefully that gives you a sense of what I'm doing with the Waking Up course. Again, this is an ongoing project for me. And as I add content to the course, I'll be attempting to synthesize everything I've discovered in my own practice, and in philosophy and science generally. This seems helpful for increasing our understanding of our own minds. Of course, many of these things have been discussed by philosophers and contemplatives for thousands

Starting point is 01:34:12 of years, but they can now be viewed in a 21st century context. So unlike my own podcast, which deals with politics and recent developments in science and a host of topical and controversial issues, The Waking Up Course is really a chance for me to talk about the most important things I've ever learned. So if you're interested in practicing meditation with me and engaging in philosophical and scientific considerations about the nature of mind, you can check it out at wakingup.com. And thank you, Tim, for inviting me on your podcast. Your audience should know that I consider myself not only a friend of yours, but I'm also one of your true fans,

Starting point is 01:34:50 because yours is one of the podcasts that I regularly listen to. In fact, with some regularity, I steal your guests. I discovered Eric Weinstein on your podcast, and he and I now have done a few together. I found Will McCaskill here, along with the inimitable Jocko Willink. I think there may be a few others. And all those guys became not only podcast guests, but friends as well. So apart from being grateful that you're in my life, Tim, I am hugely benefiting from what you are doing in the world. So keep it up,

Starting point is 01:35:24 my friend. And thanks again for introducing me to your audience. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend.

Starting point is 01:35:46 And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and

Starting point is 01:36:26 you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? My answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in the 4-Hour Body, did not get paid for that. And I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the 4-Hour Body, did not get paid for that, and I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases if I can't get what I need through whole food meals throughout the rest of the day. If you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they are offering a free 20-count travel pack for first-time users. I always travel with at least three or four of these.

Starting point is 01:37:03 This represents a $100 value. So if you buy Athletic Greens, you get an extra $100 in free product. So check it out, athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim for your free travel pack with any purchase. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom, which more than 2 million Americans have used to help start their businesses. Past guests even, such as WordPress lead developer, CEO of Automatic, Matt Mullenweg, now valued at more than a billion dollars, have used LegalZoom to help with their business needs, specifically in his case,

Starting point is 01:37:39 to form his company. But LegalZoom isn't just for launching your business. Their services include everything from helping you to manage changing tax laws, reviewing contracts, creating NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, important stuff, handling lease agreements, and assisting with really any other legal challenge, hurdle, inconvenience that typically takes time and effort away from running your business. The best part is that you won't get charged by the hour because LegalZoom isn't a law firm. So they won't be running the clock up and spinning circles just to raise your bill. Instead, they just ask you to pay one low upfront price for whatever it is that you're looking to get a la carte style. So visit LegalZoom.com and check out their business section

Starting point is 01:38:22 for all of their services. And if you want special savings, that's the terminology in the copy that they suggest. I don't know what the special savings is, folks, but it's titillating. If you want special savings, enter promo code TIM, T-I-M, at checkout. Capital T, lowercase I-M. Again, take a peek, LegalZoom.com,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #342: Sam Harris, Ph.D. — How to Master Your Mind

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #342: Sam Harris, Ph.D. — How to Master Your Mind

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