"Waking Up" with Sam Harris

[Music] [Music] thank you thank you uh well thank you all for coming i've really been looking forward to giving this talk i'm going to speak for about an hour and i think undoubtedly say a few things that are going to confuse many of you and then we'll have a short intermission and i will try to clean up the mess that i've made in the q a now as most of you know over the last 10 years i've been thinking out loud about the the problem of religion and i've really only argued three things i've argued

that our religions are almost certainly false given all that we've learned about the world in the last 2000 years i've argued that they are on balance harmful in that they needlessly divide humanity from itself and inevitably cause conflict and i've argued that that the good things that people think they need and can get out of religion can be had in other ways and can be had in ways that are not hostile to understanding the world scientifically or to the project of of building a viable global and pluralistic civil society now in this talk i'm going

to take that third path a little further and argue to you that we need a secular approach to spirituality and the the details of this argument this may sound slightly esoteric and and some of the details are especially as they they relate to things like meditation but the the context for this discussion is as blood-soaked and as tear-stained as any we can find anywhere and i would urge you not to forget that it seems to me that one of the most important challenges we face now is to find our way to a future where religious

tribalism and religious conflict are unthinkable and to do that we need to find a way of talking about people's deepest experiences in non-sectarian terms and so that for that we need a secular approach to spirituality now it just so happens that 20 of americans depending on how the question is asked declare themselves ready for such an approach and already described themselves as spiritual but not religious now there are problems here much of what spiritual people believe is every bit as incredible as what religious people believe anyone who was waiting around on december 21st 2012 for

the world to end out of deference to the mayan calendar got a taste of this when nothing happened right on schedule and if one wanted to find a position that could annoy believers and atheists equally it's hard to improve on this it's you know to say that you're spiritual but not religious in both camps just sounds like a confession of intellectual weakness and a loss of nerve among the faithful it sounds like you want all the consolations of faith without any of the discipline you love jesus and you sure hope he loves you but you

don't want to think about the day of judgment when i debated rick warren he summarized this attitude when he said you know what your problem is you don't want to have a boss and this was this was very much the attitude in which he said that now obviously as a defense of christianity this made no sense but whether or not i want to have a boss says nothing about the plausibility of that a first century carpenter who had the bad luck to get crucified managed to survive his death and is now just hovering over everybody's

business like an omniscient peeping tom but you can hear how this would apply to the spiritual but not religious crowd spiritual people are just in it to feel good they want their yoga and their strange diets and their alternative medicine and their crystals and they don't want any traditional constraints on their search for happiness now among atheists when you say you're spiritual but not religious you just sound like someone who's afraid to die and didn't pay enough attention in science class it sounds like you don't have the intellectual courage to renounce the false consolations of

religion but i want to argue to you that separating spirituality from religion is an an important thing to do and if we want to understand the human mind scientifically and live the best lives we can personally it's a necessary thing to do and making the distinction between spirituality and religion is to assert two important truths simultaneously it's it's to acknowledge that our world has been shattered quite unnecessarily by competing religious dogmas and these dogmas are not only independently ridiculous they are collectively incompatible which actually gives us two reasons to reject them as false it's just

however implausible these dogmas are on their own there's just no way for islam and christianity to both be right and once you add hindus and mormons and scientologists to the mix we know that every denomination is wrong in its assertions about the nature of reality and yet people are holding to these false certainties generation after generation now this dogmatism is bad for us it's bad for us intellectually for obvious reasons but it's also bad ethically because it enforces in-group loyalty and solidarity and out-group hostility even when members of your own group are behaving like psychopaths

believing things for bad reasons divides people inevitably because because bad reasons don't survive export very well you know you say this is our land why because it it says so in a holy book that was written a thousand years ago in a language half of us can't read that is a bad conversation starter the second reason for separating spirituality from religion is to acknowledge that there's more to understanding human experience than science and secular culture generally admit this is a cast of of bernini's famous sculpture of the ecstasy of saint teresa and here's what it

might look like on the inside you know or maybe not there's certainly states of consciousness that answer to this description especially if you add psychedelics to the arsenal but the problem is that if you someday feel better than you ever have in your life this is saint francis realizing that he's incredibly stoked to be alive the problem is if this happens to you if you feel completely stripped of personal neurosis and you just love your humanity unconditionally there is no context in which this experience can be appropriately valued a apart from an iron age religion

or a new age cult this is rajneesh working his magic now you might just think this is the effect you can have on people when you have 99 rolls-royces parked in the garage but ecstasy and devotion and self-transcending awe happen to people in a variety of contexts and sometimes in embarrassing context now this is a problem for the forces of reason because the most transformative experiences people have the the experiences they tend to value more than any in their lives are currently anchored to the worst parts of culture and to ways of thinking that merely

amplify superstition and self-deception and conflict talking about spirituality outside the context of religion is a way of changing that now i'm not the only atheist who's found this term spiritual or spirituality indispensable christopher hitchens and carl sagan both used the word and if this is not going to inoculate us against our allergy to this term i don't know what would but they used it to describe a range of aesthetic and intellectual insights that they thought were too beautiful or too profound for ordinary language something like this for instance this is one of the most sensitive

images ever taken of space this is the hubble deep field and this is a tiny area of visible sky this for those of you in the back road be as though i held up a nickel or a quarter here on stage this is what a deep gaze into so tiny a patch of sky looks like it's such a tiny patch of sky there's only a couple of stars in our own galaxy that appear in this image everything else you see here every other object and there are over 8 000 of them is another galaxy like

our own filled with billions of earth-like planets now whether you think of these galaxies as teeming with other life forms and perhaps advanced civilizations or you think that we're the only ones here the feeling of strangeness is overwhelming it's hard to know which of those truths would be stranger but there's no question that if you spend any amount of time contemplating this image it delivers a more profound and beautiful context to our existence than any offered by the bible or any other ancient book and we can use the term spiritual to signify this kind of

beauty and profundity but there's something a little misleading about that because it it leaves out other experiences and insights and and these experiences have nothing in principle to do with thinking about the universe or our place within it now in this talk and in my book i use the term spiritual and spirituality to describe ways in which we can deliberately investigate and transform our experience in the present moment and come to understand some durable truths about the nature of human consciousness there's a sense in which everything that appears in consciousness everything even the most ordinary

thing is as profound and as beautiful and as mysterious as that vision of deep space and time in fact the most ordinary experience of being awake and aware in the present moment the feeling of just being you sitting in your seat is as deep a scientific mystery as we have a rivaled only by the mystery of why there's a universe in the first place and and the reality of consciousness is much more relevant to your experience than cosmology is because here we're talking about the very substance of experience itself the fact that the universe is

illuminated where you sit the fact that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character is a mystery and i argue in my book at some length that it will probably remain one but the truth is even if we do come to fully understand consciousness in terms of information processing in in the brain or any other complex system that would not make it any less significant or profound now there's a lot of confusion on this point because most people seem to think that science has delivered us a vision of an impersonal world this is

true in one sense science has revealed a world that does not care about us or if it does it has a strange way of showing it the universe cares about us exactly this much it loves us as much as it loves the dinosaurs the universe is older than we are and bigger than we are and it will outlast us and it seems quite happy to casually destroy us in the meantime however spirituality has nothing in principle to do with thinking that the universe cares about you now people who attempt to build a bridge between science

and spirituality tend to make one of two mistakes they either start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience thinking that it's just a grandiose way of talking about ordinary states of mind parental love or artistic inspiration or awe at the beauty of the night sky now unlike hitch and sagan this leads many people to just reject the term outright and you know many people have written me wondering why i just don't use words like awe and love and happiness and well-being and perhaps some of you in this room have have objected to my use of

the word spirituality but the problem is that what most people understand by these terms has very little to do with the kinds of insights and experiences i want to talk about there's more to realize about the nature of your own consciousness in this moment than whatever it is you happen to feel when looking at the hubble deep field or while listening to mozart or while having sex or all doing all three of those things at the same time which should probably be illegal but then their people have the opposite problem they're people like deepak chopra

who will tell you that that the buddha and other contemplatives anticipated all of the insights of quantum mechanics and modern cosmology and that by simply transcending your sense of self in the darkness of your closed eyes you can realize your identity with the one mind that gave birth to the cosmos this is a specious claim there's nothing about meditation that is akin to doing cosmology and you don't get insights about what preceded the big bang from doing any of these practices but this is where we encounter true intellectual atrocities like the book the secret and

the film what the bleep do we know now i hope none of you bought this book i suspect many of you saw this film i saw it it practically gave me a seizure just as a sanity check when a chiropractor is telling you about the implications of quantum mechanics you know you have opened the wrong door in the mansion of understanding so in the end we seem to be offered a choice between pseudo-spirituality and pseudoscience and one problem is that the very few western philosophers and scientists have developed strong skills of introspection in in in

terms of a disciplined training like meditation you know i know absolutely brilliant people who seem to have no ability to make the most basic discriminations about their moment-to-moment experience i won't name any names conversely i've met tibetan lamas who spent years in caves doing nothing but meditate on the nature of consciousness who obviously knew nothing about science and may well have thought the earth was flat but there is a connection between scientific fact and spiritual wisdom and it's more direct than most people suppose the insights a person can have as i said tell you nothing

about the universe and cosmology but they do confirm some well-established truths about the nature of the human mind and certain of these truths are worth knowing in that they enable us to live better lives they enable us to suffer less and undermine our reasons for creating unnecessary suffering for others now i know what it's like to have no idea that this was the case when i was 16 i did a wilderness course in the mountains of colorado outward bound it was this 23 day slog through the mountains of colorado and it culminated in a ritual

called the solo where we were all put on the the outskirts of this beautiful mountain lake very much like this one and told to just contemplate the universe for three days and three nights and there was no food so we fasted and there was nothing to do but right in our journals now i found this to be a crushing experience of loneliness and boredom and in my journal i just made lists of foods i was planning to eat when i returned to civilization and when i found that other people on this trip came off their

solos feeling transformed by the experience most of the people were were 10 years older than i was at the time i didn't know what to make of this and if you had told me that i would one day spend months in conditions like this voluntarily i would have thought you were completely insane but i then went on to study with a variety of monks and llamas and yogis and other contemplatives and spent about a year and a half or so on silent retreat practicing various techniques of meditation and when you do this you discover that

you have certain habits of mind that keep you blind to features of your experience that you really ought to know about and the principal habit is spending every waking moment lost in thought now we need to think to form beliefs about the world to plan to reason to almost anything else that makes us human thinking is is the foundation of every social relationship and every cultural institution and obviously it's the foundation of science so so thinking is not the problem but thinking without knowing that you're thinking is a problem it gives rise to the illusion

that you have a separate self living inside your head the first thing to recognize is just how incessant this process is so let's try a little experiment see if you can stop thinking for just one minute now you can you can pay attention to the breath or you can just watch the numbers change on this clock but do your best not to let your mind wander in thought even for an instant all right let's let's try that again i couldn't even hear myself think with all the thinking that was going on let's let's try 15

seconds okay just imagine that your life depends on this okay you you could probably hold your hand in fire for that long if you had to just try not to think about anything for 15 seconds okay well some of you might be so distracted by thought as to imagine that you actually succeeded this is a very common phenomenon in the beginning when you're learning to meditate you people think they can stay on the object of meditation whether it's the breath or a mantra or a candle flame for minutes at a time and then after days

or weeks of intensive practice they they say that their mind is carried away every few seconds now this is actually progress it takes a certain amount of concentration to realize how distracted you are now this is a remarkable fact about the human mind we are capable of astonishing feats of creativity and insight we can endure almost any torment but it is not within our power to simply stop talking to ourselves for a full minute whatever the stakes we spend our lives lost in thought and the question is what should we make of this fact now

in the west the answer has been not much okay in the east especially in a contemplative tradition like like those found in buddhism it's understood that that thinking without knowing that you're thinking is a principle source of human suffering now this fact should be of interest to everyone because life is difficult in case you hadn't noticed we're not living in syria now and and we can be thankful for that but our minds are such as to make even lives of of privilege very difficult i don't know about you but my my days are are filled

with emergencies you know if just just putting sunblock on my daughter before she goes to school if i could call in the navy seals to help me with that i would our minds are not often our friends it's amazing how much stress arises in even a totally ordinary and and well-ordered life and and the center of the center of this problem is the illusion of self that we call i now what does it mean to say the self is an illusion we use this term self in a variety of ways and sometimes we use it

to refer to the whole person the self is your body and your every feature of your mind your autobiographical memory your emotions your powers of cognition okay that's not the self that is an illusion i'm not saying that people don't exist am i really standing here on stage at this moment talking to you yes i really am am i also riding a bicycle through the streets of london at this moment not that i can tell so it makes sense to talk about me as a discreet person in the world there's no no problem with that

but we use this term self in another way we use it to refer to the sense that almost all of us have that we are subjects of our experience we don't feel identical to our bodies we feel like we have bodies we feel like we're passengers in these bodies in a way we feel like we're riding around in our heads as subjects as thinkers of thoughts and experiences of experience we feel like we're appropriating our experience in each moment we don't feel identical to our experience you know as you sit there you undoubtedly feel that

you're behind your eyes now in a way that you're not behind your knees you know your knees are down there they're your property in a way and if they hurt you're worried and if they don't you're not but we feel that we're subjects we feel that we're in the head behind the eyes and that we are in some strange sense pulling the levers and gears of this vehicle that is our bodies now of course we know our subjectivity can't be structured this way because there can't be a little subject inside our heads or a cartesian

theater as dan dennett calls it because that would invite an infinite regress you have to explain the subjectivity of the subject the subject we need a subject we need a subject the buck of consciousness has to stop somewhere we also know that neuroanatomically it makes no sense there's no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding there's no place anatomically where it all comes together but the fact is that most of us feel that we are in our heads as subjects and when you ask people of any age and across cultures to judge

when an object is closest to a person they will judge it to be closest when it's near that person's head as opposed to their chest or their feet or any other point on the body and they'll judge it to be closest of all when it's near the eyes as opposed to the mouth or the back of the head this is data from paul bloom at yale and along with his colleagues but this feeling of being a self does not survive scrutiny which is to say that if you look closely enough at it the feeling will

disappear and and this experience of self-transcendence is the center of what i'm calling spirituality and it really is a profound tool for the alleviation of psychological suffering now in arguing for the importance of a secular spirituality i'm arguing that disciplined introspection is an indispensable means of discovery now this may sound a little strange because from a scientific point of view we know that reality exceeds our our potential awareness of it the science is in the business of understanding things objectively in third person terms and so how is introspection an important part of this process i

want to take a few minutes to describe and explain to you why consciousness is unique and why consciousness can't be understood purely as a matter of third person phenomenon in terms of brains and their states for instance now again there are reasons why we don't rely on introspection for everything because every fact you can be aware of is preceded by facts that you can't be aware of so you have 40 trillion cells in your body at this moment and 10 times that number that are bacterial all of these entities are doing their work for good

or for ill without your knowledge or control and without your potential knowledge or control most of our internal organs may as well not exist for all we know of them directly this is a cartoon of a human pancreas do i have a pancreas i don't know i hope so just assert your experience at this moment are you aware of having a pancreas how where could you be unless you have pancreatitis and are in pain you'd have to be clairvoyant to know anything about your pancreas who's crazy or someone who goes into a police station offering

to find a missing person with her psychic powers or someone who claims to be consciously aware of the workings of her pancreas it's probably a toss-up so what can we be aware of what are the boundaries of subjectivity in this moment well you can feel yourself sitting there in your seat you hear the sound of my voice you see the light and color and shadow of this room your conscious experience in this moment has a certain qualitative character but we know that it reaches into a wilderness of other facts that you can never know directly

for instance this is what the motor nerve pathway looks like in the human brain you've got regions in your frontal cortex that connect to fiber tracts that descend through your brain stem and spinal cord and then terminate at the neuromuscular junction where you have motor neurons that affect muscle fibers but if you search your experience you're not aware of any of this now now consciously move one of your hands how do you do this okay now just really pay attention because this is as intentional as it ever gets this is you know you are in

complete control of this you whatever you are are doing this but when you look for what underwrites this behavior your neurotransmitters muscle fibers you can't feel or see a thing and how do you initiate it and how do you stop it that's very difficult to say the truth is none of us has a clue and yet there's clearly some internal signature we're reading by which we can discriminate volitional from involuntary behavior otherwise everything would seem involuntary now it's hard to say what this feeling consists of but it's surely something that there's some signature in consciousness

otherwise everything would be completely confusing there'd be no feeling of agency and despite the obvious importance of all of these unconscious mechanisms consciousness is what we care about in most of what's happening in the world and even in our own bodies is happening in the dark but it's what's happening in the light of consciousness that matters to us in in terms of our lived experience we are simply consciousness and its contents now it's very easy to get confused about this because scientists and philosophers spend a lot of time trying to understand consciousness in third person

terms in terms of brain processing for instance but the reality of consciousness is first person now when talking about this i like to use the philosopher thomas nagel's formulation that a creature is conscious if there's something that it's like to be that creature now this this gets at this this split between first and and third person it's whether or not we can judge a creature to be conscious from the outside is never quite the point the reality of whether or not it is conscious exists on its own side is a cricket conscious if you could

trade places with a cricket with the lights go out would it be the same thing as trading places with a ham sandwich okay i don't know but the truth about whether or not a cricket is conscious exists on the side of the cricket okay only a cricket knows for sure whether there's something that it's like to be a cricket and even if we fully understood how consciousness emerges in the world and we can answer this question that still would not change the irreducibly subjective first-person character of consciousness again many people are confused about this in

cognitive science and the sciences of mind generally you have something called the turing test based on the work of the mathematician alan turing and it's thought that if one day we build computers which we can't distinguish from human minds well then our computers must be conscious now this has always been based on a misreading of turin because turin talked about this is a test of intelligence not consciousness but but this is important to see how this idea of judging consciousness from the outside misses the point because i have no doubt that we will one day

build computers that will be indistinguishable from human minds in fact they'll be obviously superior to human minds and yet unless we understand how consciousness emerges in the world we won't know whether or not they're conscious and yet they may claim they're conscious and they will certainly push all of our buttons intuitively we will feel that they're conscious we may just forget whether it's an interesting question to wonder whether or not they're conscious but we will in fact not know if they're conscious and conversely they're obviously systems that are conscious that don't pass the turing test

that that where we can't judge that this this creature this system is having an experience from the outside i know someone who was um underwent a surgery under a general anesthetic and he woke up in the middle of the surgery but because of the paralytic component of the anesthesia he couldn't signal to the doctors or nurses that he was awake and feeling rather more of the procedure than he cared to and this was inconvenient to say the least because they were in the process of replacing his liver okay so so if you think that the

important part of consciousness is it's link to speech and behavior just spare a moment to contemplate the problem of anesthesia awareness it's the cure for a hundred years of bad philosophy the truth is there is nothing about a physical brain as a physical system that suggests the reality of consciousness there's nothing from the outside that indicates that there's something that it's like to be that collection of cells if we were not already brimming with consciousness ourselves we would find no evidence for it in the universe and we would have no inkling of the about the

kinds of states it can give rise to and to say that consciousness may only seem to exist as certain philosophers and scientists have done in the past is to admit its existence in full if things seem any way at all that is consciousness you could be a brain in a vat at this moment all your memories are false all your perceptions are of a world that does not exist you're confused about absolutely everything but the the fact that you're having an experience at this moment is indisputable to you which is all that any sentient creature

requires to fully establish the reality of consciousness but consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion let me say that again consciousness is the one thing in this universe including the universe that cannot be an illusion so there need be nothing deflationary about the intrusion of science and secular philosophy into our lives consciousness is the is the very substance of our existence whatever its relationship to the physical world and and fully understanding how it emerges based on unconscious complexity will not change that but to understand human experience in terms of

brain states for instance we must correlate changes in the brain with changes in consciousness but the the cash value of these correlations are the changes in consciousness so this is a study comparing the experience of having happy memories with some control condition now but the happiness of these memories is defined in terms of the experience of having them if these memories were making people angry this this experiment wouldn't make any sense so we're always in the game in the game of correlating first person reports what it's like to be you with third-person changes in the

brain so we're never going to be able to say or so i argue as francis crick once did you're nothing but a pack of neurons okay this this is philosophically confused it's as though you thought if you only flipped a coin long enough you could you would realize it has only one side okay you it's true that you could be committed to talking about only one side you can say that tails being up is just a matter of heads being down but you but you can't actually reduce one side of reality to the other in

that way now many philosophers have made this point before me thomas nagle who i just mentioned and david chalmers and john searle and while i don't agree with everything they've said about consciousness i agree with them about this but here we run into another problem many people seem to think that you can't make objective claims about subjective experience but this is untrue this is i'm going to make an objective claim about the subjective experience of every person in this room at this moment very few of you probably none of you were thinking about this person

a few minutes ago okay and now you all are in some fashion a moment ago none of you were factoring this number in your head and still none of you are don't don't try it's prime you'll just damage your brain now how do i know these things about you these are educated guesses but these are these are objective claims about first person experience they're objective in the sense that they're based on reason and logic and evidence and they're not merely personal they're not woefully biased these first-person claims are every bit as objective as a third

person claim like everyone in this room has a pancreas so there are truths to be known about human experience and i'm arguing to you that certain of these truths are worth knowing and they can help us lead better lives for instance not to know that there's an alternative to being lost in thought is to be a kind of prisoner of sorts now some of you may be lucky you just may think happy and interesting thoughts all day long okay but i'm imagining that most of you are more like me where it's like you've been kidnapped

by the most boring person on earth and just forced to have the same conversation over and over again being identified with thought is analogous to being asleep and dreaming it's a mode of not knowing what's going on in the present moment you could even call a form of psychosis but consider what happens in dreams you're lying there you fall asleep well you probably don't look this good doing it does this look like a stock photo to anyone this is it's amazing when you when you look for photographs of people sleeping you have a choice between

models who are pretending to sleep on pristine sheets and just the open mouth chaos of you know someone who just looks like they fell asleep on the sofa in a meth lab okay so you you lie down to sleep right and then you suddenly find yourself wandering an airport all alone and then you're in the company of a gorilla and the mind doesn't even blink right it seems to have no expectation of continuity most surprising thing about dreams is surely our lack of surprise when they arise this is probably due to the diminished activity of

the frontal lobes during rem sleep but an analogous thing happens to us in the waking state with our thoughts we will tell ourselves the same thing 15 times in a row just imagine if other people could hear your thoughts broadcast on a speaker all day long you would seem completely insane and who are we talking to in the first place most of us feel that we're the thinker of our thoughts we feel that we're there's a thinker in independent of the thoughts themselves and i hope to convince you in this hour that that's an illusion

but the thinker is playing both sides of the conversations you know i walk out here and i think oh good they put water on the table i can see that there's water on the table okay who am i telling okay is there someone inside me who can't see the water the eye and the me are keeping each other company it really doesn't matter if your mind is wandering over current problems in mathematical logic or cancer research if you are thinking without knowing that you're thinking you are confused about who and what you are and when

we're lost in thought there are things we don't notice about our minds so you know that anger you felt yesterday or a year ago isn't here anymore and if it arises again in the next moment based upon you thinking about its reasons it will subside again the moment you're no longer thinking about it and this can be a profoundly liberating truth to understand about the nature of the mind to understand it deeply really does change your life if you think you can be angry for a whole day or even an hour without continually manufacturing this

emotion by by thinking without knowing that you're thinking you were mistaken again this is an objective claim about the mechanics of your own unhappiness and i invite you to test it the difference between moments and hours and days and weeks when you're talking about an emotion like anger are impossible to exaggerate in terms of the effects in your life and the lives of others now this is not to say that external circumstances don't matter but it's our minds rather than the circumstances themselves that will define the character of our experience there are people who are

truly content in circumstances of great deprivation and danger and then there are people who are miserable despite having all the luck in the world now by tendency i tend to fall in the latter camp i mean you you give me a palace with a storeroom filled with diamonds and i'm still going to complain that the internet connection is too slow but our minds are the substance of our experience in each moment they define how we react to external circumstances and given this fact it makes sense to train them because our minds are are the basis

of every relationship we have they're the basis of every contribution we can make to the lives of others and there are practices that allow us to break this spell of thought and to simply become aware of experience in the present moment now for beginners i usually recommend a practice called vipassana which comes from the pali word insight and this comes from the oldest tradition of buddhism the theravada and the type of attention you train in this practice is called mindfulness and mindfulness is now very well subscribed it's being talked about in a wide range of

contexts it's very much in vogue and this has a certain liability to it because it's often presented as just a glorified version of an executive stress ball you know it's just a one one tool you want in the tool kit to be a better ceo or to kind of optimize various aspects of your life and it is in fact nothing wrong with using it that way but mindfulness is actually more like the large hadron collider it's a tool for making some fundamental discoveries in this case about the nature of our minds now there's nothing spooky

about mindfulness mindfulness is simply a state of clear and undistracted and ultimately unconceptual attention to the contents of the present moment whether it's pleasant or unpleasant and it's been shown to have a wide range of effects on perception and emotion and attention and cognition and then these are correlated with both functional and structural changes in our brains now this field of research is quickly growing and some of these studies are very well run and some aren't but there seems to be a lot of data at this point that this practice is generally good for us

so let's try it for a few minutes just take a moment and and get more comfortable in your seat you might want to sit up straighter and then you can close your eyes and just feel the weight of your body and just feel gravity settling you into your seat and then gradually become aware of the process of breathing just feel the breath wherever you feel it most distinctly either at the tip of the nose or the rise and falling of your abdomen now it doesn't matter whether the breath is deep or shallow you don't have

to try to control it this is an exercise of attention not a breathing exercise and every time your mind wanders into thought just gently bring it back to the raw sensation of breathing and as you do this you'll notice that you have other sensations you have other feelings in your body of pressure or warmth or stiffness you you hear sounds just notice all these things too just let your mind be the space in which the sensations in the body the sounds in the room just appear spontaneously the moment you notice a thought coloring your attention

just see if you can notice the thought itself whether it's a bit of language or an image watch it disappear and then come back to the sensation of breathing or the sounds or other feelings in the body see if you can notice the next inhalation the moment it arises and just cover it with your attention for its full duration see if you can notice the next sound the moment it impinges on your eardrum see if you can notice the next thought the moment it arises okay so now you can open your eyes there's a few

things i'd like to point out about this exercise there's nothing passive about mindfulness you could even say that it expresses a certain kind of passion a passion for for accurately discerning what is subjectively real in each moment being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about the nature of experience it's a matter of experiencing more clearly including the arising of thoughts themselves now one of the great strengths of this practice from a secular point of view and this is why it's been widely adopted in science and and in clinical practice is that there's

nothing you need to add to your experience in order to do it and and in principle it's open to the full range of your experience there's nothing that is falling outside of the meditation you could be mindful walking down madison avenue at rush hour and there's no you don't have to believe anything on insufficient evidence in order to do this you you merely need to accept the proposition that if you want to discover what your consciousness is actually like it makes sense to pay attention to it okay and this is just a it's just a

tool for paying attention in a very systematic way and one of the effects of mindfulness is to diminish activity in regions of the medial part of the brain now called the default mode network and the default mode network is called that because it's what the brain seems to do by default in neuroimaging experiments when a subject is just left with their mind wandering you see activity heightened in these these midline regions now these regions become especially active when you're thinking about yourself so they're active when your mind is just wandering they're especially active when you're

thinking about yourself as opposed to other people so this is this is often described as a self representation area of the brain and mindfulness diminishes activity here and mindfulness also uh diminishes activity in in a kind of a linear fashion with respect to how practiced a person is at it so experts show a greater effect than novices and psilocybin also diminishes activity here that's the the active component in magic mushrooms and the truth is paying attention to anything diminishes activity here and this is this lends some neural anatomical credence to the idea that you can

just lose yourself and your work this is an experience that many of us have of focusing on something to the exclusion of of everything else and we lose our sense of of uh self at that moment now i think it's too early to make strong claims based on these data but it suggests that there's a common pathway between our sense of self and the mere wandering of mind and a and as well as a physical mechanism by which meditation could reduce both and as i've said i think this cutting through the illusion of the self

is the most important consequence of getting good at a practice like mindfulness more than stress reduction or any other conventional benefit and it's this experience of self-transcendence that makes sense of the traditional claims of yogis and mystics and other spiritual people who have been making seemingly outrageous claims about their experience for millennia and it's also it's this experience that captures much of the allure of religion because if you want to take seriously the project of being like jesus whoever he was in fact or the buddha or what your favorite contemplative or you want to give

another context in which to value the the ecstasy that a a jihadist feels when putting his life on the line for allah you need to be talking about more than stress reduction there's there's more to it than that there's a landscape of deeper experience that we want to talk about and people get glimpses of self-transcendence in a wide variety of contexts and often in quite pathological ones which is to say that they have experiences that are framed by divisive and and ridiculous ideas and then they become mightily attached to these ideas and these ideas can

lead to tremendous harms and merely personal harms like the the consequences of living in a cult or doing you know yoga postures that that make no anatomical sense but it can lead potentially to the downfall of whole societies and when you think about mass religious movements or just any mass movement i mean just you look at those pictures of the nuremberg rallies you know just the sheer power of a crowd we're often talking about a more expansive sense of self or in fact a loss of sense of self the ground truth here is that the

self is a painful illusion and and this pain motivates people in a variety of ways and when they find this pain assuaged in the context of dangerous and divisive ideas these ideas become the center of their lives and these ideas become something that they're willing very often to die for or to have their children die for but the truth is we can talk about these transformative experiences in particular the experience of self-transcendence in a context that is non-sectarian and very much in the context of science now there are logical and scientific reasons to accept what

i'm saying about the illusoriness of the self but cutting through this illusion is not a matter of understanding these reasons now here it's worth pausing to consider the difference between a conceptual and an experiential understanding there was a parable that the buddha used on this topic he told a story of a man who was struck in the chest with a poison arrow and a surgeon rushes to his side to begin the work of saving his life but the man resists he he first wants to know the name of the fletcher who fashioned the arrows shaft

and the genus of wood from which it was cut and the disposition of the man who shot it and the breed of horse upon which he rode and a thousand other things that have no relevance to his present suffering or his ultimate survival there's a a misunderstanding of his predicament i mean the man had to get his priorities straight and we too have a problem for which more thinking is not the answer now the feeling that we call i the the ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking and

the ego is a burden it's a burden to everyone who has one even when things are good just think of it think about the experience of pride for instance how good is that you know you've all felt this you just you've done something good and then you've been praised for it in high places and you you know the feeling there's just some part of your mind that's just you know lapping it up with this little cat's tongue okay how good does that feel this is the same part of you that's always terrified that's always comparing

yourself to other people it's always poised to be miserable okay this is the rewards are not good enough and we're just talking about patterns of thought or just one thought following the next here's a pattern of thought for you that may sound familiar what is sam talking about i i know i'm thinking i'm thinking right now i'm i'm doing this i can think about anything i want to think about how am i not the thinker of these thoughts i'll picture the eiffel tower yep there it is done okay these tickets cost a fortune what the

hell is going on here this is how the knot of self is tied okay it's not enough to know in the abstract that you're thinking every moment of the day it's not enough to think about thinking you have to break this spell you have to be able to observe what consciousness is like between thoughts which is prior to the arising of the next one it's the identification with thought that the feeling that this next piece of language that comes through your mind is you the the the experience of having your consciousness trimmed down by the

net by this automaticity that is that what what gives rise to the feeling of self and we have to be able to pay attention closely enough to intuit what the character of consciousness is like prior to this identification and consciousness does not feel like a self what we're calling ourselves this feeling this feeling of being in the head a locus of consciousness a subject is itself an appearance in consciousness that's how in fact we we feel it consciousness is prior to it and therefore therefore free of it in principle and selflessness is not a deep

feature of consciousness it's right on the surface and yet people can can spend years even you know seasoned meditators can spend years not discovering this how is it that something can be right on the surface and yet be difficult to see well consider by analogy the optic blind spot you've all probably seen an image like this in school at one point if you cover your left eye and focus on the star the circle will disappear now obviously most people in human history did not know anything about the optic blind spot and most of us who

know about it go for decades without noticing it and yet it's theirs it's almost it's almost too close to us to notice it's not a matter of being deep within or far away or even particularly subtle it's just it's it's in a place we we don't normally look now the absence of self is also there to be noticed again it's not far away it's not deep within and there's an intuition that especially when you start to do a practice like the practice i just gave you of mindfulness there's an intuition that you start in this

place in your head and now you're trying to pay attention to the breath you're trying to pay attention to sensations and then the journey is somehow deep within you have to go in search of this of the truth of selflessness that that is a a misunderstanding now how can we know that the conventional sense of self is an illusion if you have this experience of of noticing its absence well it's like with any illusion what what does not survive scrutiny cannot be real now perhaps you can see a similar effect here now this is it's

very easy to feel that this is a white square in the center of this figure but when you look more closely you see that the white square has been merely implied the only thing in this figure are four partial circles this is a trick of the visual system our edge detectors have been fooled and so when you scrutinize this image the square falls away now what would we say to a skeptic who said well the the white square is just as real as the four partial circles but all we could do is is urge him

or her to look more closely the same is true about the feeling we call i the feeling that there's a thinker in addition to thoughts themselves this does not survive scrutiny if you really look for it it will disappear now there are several methods of pointing this out and in addition to the one i just recommended to you i would recommend a trick that that douglas harding came up with douglas harding was a architect who grew up in england in a cult of fundamentalist christians and he expressed his his doubts at some point with sufficient

fervor as to get excommunicated and then he went to india and his journey of self-discovery culminated in a insight that he described as having no head and he then went on to write a book on that topic and for decades spoke about it much to the consternation of many people who had no idea what he was talking about and some of these were very smart people like douglas hofstetter the cognitive scientist now i never met harding but i think he was clearly trying to introduce people to the same experience i'm talking about and and he

did find an original way to do it now he was led to this insight by seeing a a self-portrait that was drawn by the the austrian physicist and philosopher ernst mock who drew himself rather rigorously from his own point of view and noticed that all he saw was his body stretched out in space and as he wrote it was framed by the ridge of his brow and his nose and his mustache now harding was in the himalayas when the relevance of this image fully took possession of his mind and he was standing at a place

called nagarcote outside of kathmandu which offers a beautiful view of the mountains pictured here and he suddenly realized that where that he didn't perceive his head that where his head was supposed to be there was just mountains and sky and if you look out into the space of this room at this moment you too can have this intuition unless you're in the front row you're in a room filled with heads but yours is not among them if you look for your head at this moment you might notice that in its place you just have the

world this may sound like a completely crazy instruction but bear with me this is not it's not a matter of going deep within it's a matter of just turning attention upon itself turning just looking in the direction of where you know your head to be and seeing if anything about your perception of visual space changes just pay attention to that first moment it's not a matter of plunging inward or producing some remarkable experience just the first instant of looking for yourself see if there's anything any change in that sense that you're behind your eyes looking

out at a world of objects seeing a few perplexed faces it can take some training to be able to do this but this is a a very useful trick this is just a trick to get your attention pointed in the right direction but it is possible to look for this thing you're calling i and to fail to find it in a way that's conclusive some people find it easier to trigger this intuition along harding's lines by just imagining not having a head it's not so much a matter of turning attention but just imagine just forget

about your head for a moment and put the world there now again if you have this if you if you if if this has any effect on you you will it will be very brief and then thoughts will intervene and then it's just it's not something to struggle with it's just it's a it's a thing to keep considering and keep looking for now in my view the realistic goal of practices like mindfulness or any other kind of practice is not some permanent state of selflessness that admits of no further efforts but the ability to drop

your sense of self in the present moment more or less no matter what's happening now if you can do that it seems to me that you you have solved many of life's problems because doing that is coincident with no longer being hostage to the contents of the next thought that is arising in consciousness the angry thought the self-hating thought the judgmental thought this breaks the spell it's possible to have the center just drop out of experience and then in some sense as a matter of conscious experience only the world remains or that there is experience

and there are the stories we tell about it and so some stories give people meaning in their lives some religious stories give them meaning but many meanings are divisive and productive of unnecessary harms and there many are patently false what does a spiritual experience mean what does the experience of self-transcendence mean what does unconditional love mean what does bliss mean if you're if you're a christian sitting in church undoubtedly it's going to mean that the doctrines of the church are somehow true that jesus survived his death and he's now taking an interest in the fate

of your soul if you're a hindu praying to shiva you're gonna you're gonna have an entirely different story to tell so there has to be a deeper principle at work and and we have to understand these experiences in non-sectarian terms but altered states of consciousness are empirical facts but to understand this and to live lives that are compatible with rationality to live spiritual lives compatible with rationality without deluding ourselves we have to strip away the the the iron age philosophy now of all the harms caused by religion i think this is probably the most subtle

at this point it even when religion seems to be benign even when it seems to be beneficial when it's just inspiring people to go to beautiful buildings and contemplate the the mystery of existence and their their ethical commitments to one another it still imparts this message that there's no intellectually defensible way to do this it it still tacitly claims that you need some measure of myth and unreason in order to get these value-laden projects off the ground but it's not true it's not true we can have rich ethical spiritual lives without believing anything on insufficient

evidence right consciousness is is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life it's everything that we can see directly and it's that which does the scene yes the cosmos is vast and it's in it is by all signs indifferent to our aims but each moment of consciousness is profound each of us is identical as a matter of experience each of us is identical to the very thing that brings value to the universe the consciousness is the only space in which anything can matter to to experience this deeply to to be this if only

for moments at a time cashes out all of the claims that people are making in otherwise irrational contexts all of the experiential claims it's really it's really a reverence for the ordinary that can lead to extraordinary experiences and we we don't have to believe anything on insufficient evidence to do it we just have to pay attention thank you very much okay so i was expecting to be able to see you better for some reason but that was totally irrational um i guess i i can't see anyone but i am standing here in front of the

mic um listen i'm a huge fan i uh there's a lot of people who think i'm smarter than i actually am because i plagiarize a lot of your arguments especially with my religious friends um well i think i'm smarter than i actually am too so okay good but i i'm having i'm struggling with this a lot one of the things is i i wanted to i was thinking to myself before i came up i want to ask a question and i stopped listening to your lecture because i was you know i was i was sort

of consumed with the idea of what i was going to say and then i started to think about that well what do i want to say what i want to ask well i look up to you you know sort of sort of a sink there's a sycophantic thing here where i want you to remember what i said um and then i then i sort of acknowledged that and i sort of let it go and i sort of thought myself out of it and it was to a certain extent i transcended my thought by thought and

i'm a writer and i spent a lot of time trying to get to the heart of things but in the end it feels like if i start meditating or if i start removing myself from that experience i'm removing something of my humanity and part of who i am as a person and it not only frightens me and i'm i'm gonna acknowledge the fact that it that it concerns me in that level um but also intellectually i feel like well where am i then if i get so much out of my thought process and through my

thoughts i do escape myself right right well rest assured i will never forget that question as long as i live but uh no it's a good question and it's i think it's a it's a common fear that smart people have certainly it's a fear that science people who have a are identified with having an intellectual life have this concern that if you if you if you don't if thinking isn't the ultimate good of human consciousness well then somehow if you're going to change the game and and just and describe thinking as in any way problematic

even inherently problematic well then then seems to devalue most of what they most of what seems to be the the good things in their lives now a lot of people again it i think this is more of a bias that that intellectual people have and right you know scientists and big readers and writers as the thoughts are are captivating and you want good ones as opposed to boring ones and people and many people have careers where the the beauty of their thoughts or the utility of their thoughts is the is why they have their careers

in the first place but uh as you said you know you were trying to pay attention to what i was saying and then your mind wandered into the question yeah but i realized that in the end i came back to myself and i realized where i was and who i was and what was important to me at that moment through my thoughts right so to me it feels to devalue it to remove myself in that experience i'm sorry everybody paid a lot of money i'll get off in a second no no um it's all it's

all going to come back down to the same point i think there's not that many different ways to be dissatisfied with with this topic but whether whether anyone knows it or not we all want to be free of dilemma in each moment i mean most of our thinking presupposes that if we could just think ourselves to some point of completion we would have a reason to just be happy now you know when you're thinking about some problem in your life or something you want to achieve or something you're hoping to to be able to say

well or whatever the the the the plan is you are trying to guide your guide yourself through the uncertainty of you know each subsequent moment of the future so that you can finally just be totally satisfied and at rest and no longer neurotic and no longer afraid and no longer judging yourself and just just settle into the present moment you've suggested in one of your articles that you think that apart from the five senses if we if you strip the senses away it's your suspicion that that consciousness is still there that it still exists right

and i i didn't know if you were sort of you know sort of going over into the chalmers territory of thinking that somehow it's consciousness is fundamental or what what you're thinking there if you could elaborate on that and how you maybe came to that conclusion well there's a deeply held conviction in the sciences of mind that consciousness is is there's no such thing as pure consciousness the consciousness is always in one of his channels of seeing hearing smelling taste and touching and and if you lost seen and lost hearing and lost smelling lost tasting

lost touching and there's there are other modes of consciousness like proprioception and other things we don't think about so much but if you lost every one of those channels well then the lights would go out completely and yet there are people you know experienced meditators have experiences that seem to contradict that intuition where you can have an experience whereas it's absolutely clear you're not hearing seeing smelling tasting touching thinking and you're you don't even feel you have a body anymore i mean there's not you're it's just you all of that has been relaxed to the

point where there's just consciousness and there are many different states that have this character but but you can have a feeling of just just kind of wide open conscious piece that has no reference point in in those usual channels and so if you've had those experiences then this notion of if pure consciousness makes some sense uh so i'm i'm you know whether or not there's a subtle residue of of all those channels there and there's no such thing as pure consciousness or whether there's whether it's more accurate to describe it as pure consciousness i i'm

not sure but the pure consciousness experience is definitely there to be had um and i and the and the channel the way in which people study consciousness at the level of the brain looking for it exclusively in the visual stream for instance as christoph koch does did with francis craig i think that is almost guaranteed to be misleading if consciousness is more fundamental than that but no i don't actually chalmers thinks that consciousness arises on by virtue of all information processing so that you know even a thermostat is conscious to the degree that it's processing

information and i that's not really where my intuition's run but i don't actually have a better intuition it just that seems so spooky to me that you know it's hard to really feel you believe that when you say the words thank you okay when we take away our eyes we don't imagine that everything just all the light disappears right when we take away the activities in our brains that that manufactures the sense of self we don't imagine that ourselves disappears so why would you say that that's an illusion but photons are not it's hard to

say what is really really real when paying attention changes the changes the nature of what's there to be noticed and this comes down to this even it links up with what's there in the real world if you think of like wine tasting for instance you know what does what does a given wine taste like well for me it just tastes like it's a red wine or a white wine and that's basically as far as i go if you know what you're doing if you've got a palette and you've actually ch if you actually by virtue

of exercising that palette you've changed the neuronal real estate allocated to you tasting wine you literally have a different brain than i do and you will find different things in that wine by virtue of having a different brain now it's i guess you could say that it's somehow really in the wine all the flavors of chocolate and persimmon and all the other stuff you pretend to find in that wine [Applause] but so on one level it's really there because if we did an enough study yet we could find the molecules that are maybe wine tasters

would all converge on you know what's what's giving them those experiences but maybe not maybe that's it's just uh in part just the consequence of changing your brain but to answer your question directly it was that the slide i put up there about the white square if you if paying attention to something more closely always forces that thing you thought was there to collapse into some other condition that that is the definition of an illusion it's it's something that if that that you you thought it was real and you paid closer attention to it and

discovered that it wasn't as it seemed now the self the sense of self has that same character so it's like you know how many times do you have to look at that white square to assure yourself that it's not really there you know 5 10 15 20 at a certain point you you just know that you're being fooled when you see it there and if you look more closely it disappears now some illusions are more robust than that which is which is to say that you know their illusions because you look at them and they

and you see how they're made but you can never see them otherwise you always see the white square there's no way to not see it there and yet you know it's an illusion and the white square is sort of like that for some people it's very hard to look at that image and not see a white square there but you can do it it's actually easier to see the absence of self than it is to see that image without a white square uh i mean it's it's but so i mean there's there's a an analogy

in the in the buddhist and also the indian tradition in general of a of a a coiled rope that a person mistakes for a snake you know so you see a coiled thing in the corner of the room and you immediate all of your you know your amygdala response kicks in you see a snake and you're freaked out and then you look more closely and you see that what you thought were scales is just strands of fiber and now that snake collapses into a rope and so how many times you have to do that to

be if if it always collapses if the snake always becomes a rope and the rope never becomes a snake when you're paying attention it biases you to on one side of that inquiry where you feel like okay well this is when i'm paying attention when i'm actually paying attention the world is this way when i'm confused uh or distracted the world seems to be another way and and so then attention sort of has the its own primacy there my question is i know what it feels like when i think when you say to be behind

your eyes that sense of self i don't know what it feels like not to feel that and i get the sense that you either do or you have some insight to what it might be like so i'm wondering if you can articulate what that which could replace that through meditation or spirituality what that feels like well so what does it feel like to to lose the sense of self right once i've lost that what will i then feel well at my so it can be very in the beginning it's very brief i mean unless you're

some kind of meditational prodigy you'll you'll glimpse this thing and it'll just be glimpses it'll be you know a few seconds it's not going to it's not going to open up and you're and you're going to have a week without yourself though that would be nice but it's so it's it's a glimpse which uh can it kind of its duration can can extend and the more it extends the more the sort of experiential qualities of it become salient so the more you you begin to feel the good stuff of of just being no longer burdened

with the problem of of yourself and so states like compassion and and and bliss and the positive character of the of consciousness that you hear described in buddhist and other contemplative literature that that stuff happens by simply by virtue of no longer being that can happen just by virtue of being concentrated but it can happen by virtue of no longer feeling this sense of self but it's very momentary and because it's momentary especially in the beginning it doesn't necessarily feel like anything important has happened at all and this is this is something that douglas harding

i know ran into when he was teaching because i think he said somewhere he said the voice of the devil is so what you know he was teaching this to people he was giving these kind of headlessness seminars and people were having this experience of headlessness for half a second and then they'd say so what and that is a a liability of teaching this stuff to people too early because unless you've spent a lot of time meditating and really seeking incl increasingly rarefied breakthroughs in your in your conscious experience you don't it's hard to value

this thing if you do in fact experience it and it's it's not it's not obvious that it's the answer to any problem until you've really defined the problem for yourself but um the more you get used to it it it does become the answer to a problem and mention compassion and bliss are those well those are those are transitory states within this those can be transitory states even when you're feeling like a self too but it's a what i'm saying is it doesn't necessarily feel like much of anything initially but what it does is it

interrupts the process of thinking and conceptualizing and creating all of whatever conscious state was being manufactured by being identified with thought so if you're thinking angry thoughts or envious thoughts or whatever whatever the problem is and you're totally identified with those thoughts well then you are hostage to whatever the emotional implications of those thoughts are you know if you're it's just you don't see the thought as a thought it just comes up from behind in some weird way and it becomes you you know you're just you're that thought so if it's a it's a thought

of hatred for somebody or hatred for yourself or whatever it is it's just you that is you for that moment being able to see to witness that present thought disappear and to feel that consciousness is actually just unencumbered by it uh in that if only for a moment that it punctuates the problem uh in a way that that makes it much less solid so if your anger is punctuated you know a thousand times a day with moments of just seeing a thought as a thought and and better yet feeling that there's no thinker of that

thought that that erodes the moment that that diminishes the momentum of any of these states to a remarkable degree so it is it's therapeutic in that way thanks so i spent decades never using the word faith and then i read the end of faith and i i had some long discussions about the word belief in the word faith and i ended up deciding that really i shouldn't use the word belief because everybody hears the word belief and they put into it whichever interpretation of belief they want to put into it they either say well he

just he's taking that on faith which is one of the ways that you can see the word belief or they understand what i'm saying so in order to be in order not to be misunderstood i decided to use the word faith and something like accepting the fact for belief i think i'm much more clear that way and now you've you've introduced this idea of spirituality which starts with the word spirit and has such a strong implication to i would presume a vast majority of people on the planet of the supernatural right and it seems like

a really bad choice yeah yeah and um uh i'm an avid backpacker i was just up in the sierras a little while ago and this intense feeling of awe standing on top of a mountain and i would never call it spirituality right and i'm wondering um how'd you come up with this and and and why um yeah well the uh that's something i i i i try to take the stink off of it in the first chapter of my book uh but and it's so deep it's into it it's the problem is we really there's

no word in english that captures this project you have words like that you have words that are worse like mysticism i use the word contemplative a lot but what you need is a word which does not allow someone who thinks all you're talking about is awe loving your kids loving to paint you know all of these ordinary experiences that that that everyone has had um you need a word that that suggests that there's something more rarefied here that this goes deeper than most people tend to explore in their lives and you need a word that

links up with the traditional ways in which people have made this effort so because because this what i'm talking about really is of a piece is of a continuum it's on a continuum with the kinds of things people experience you know tibetan llamas who go into caves for years at a time or christian monastics who spend 20 years in monasteries and have these these rarefied experiences granted they tend to interpret those experiences by the light of their religious doctrines and that is illegitimate and that's something that i've spent a decade criticizing and i criticized to

some degree in this book but there is this there is a far end of the continuum of of human well-being and states of consciousness that can be really rare and hard won and and you know people experience them through practices like meditation they experience them through psychedelics they some people get lucky and just experience them and they don't know why but it's not everyone and it's certainly not you know every backpacker who loves you know to look at the milky way and it's it's not um uh it is it is an area of specialization it

it goes very deep and to just talk about awe and well-being and happiness everyone thinks they know what you're talking about and and you're 99 times out of 100. what was that i love to be clear when i'm talking i like to i look i i have that sensation that i i want people to understand exactly what i'm talking about yeah if i think about i think i use the word spirituality well it starts the conversation i think the the problem is that it's um i mean i hate i hate jargon and when you when

you come up with a new word for this thing it's just the most arrogant move imaginable where you think okay now everyone's got to start using my word you know we're going to uh uh you know we're gonna call this you know omega point or something and now i expect you all to to make the appropriate noises you know so it's not that never works and uh it's not positive psychology isn't enough it's not because what people mean by positive psychology just doesn't capture this this you know far end of you know several sigmas beyond

the norm in terms of what people experience so i just i'm rolling the dice with spirituality knowing that it's going to produce a fair amount of pain but it's uh there is just there's no better word in english good luck with that thank you hi um i realize this is kind of an old question for me i mean i've wanted to know this since uh beyond belief 2007. so it's going to be off topic um i believe you're an atheist with respect to religions i think you're an eight and i know you don't like the

word i think you're an atheist with respect to gods but i believe that you are agnostic with respect to reincarnation maybe you can contrast those differently well i'm i'm not the truth is i'm agnostic with respect to every crazy thing except for so so all that you need to be an atheist a functional atheist with respect to islam or christianity or judaism is to deny that the books were written by an omniscient being and that i'm is there's just there's no evidence that they were written by an omniscient being and so once you once you

disparage the books you you're an atheist with respect to those religions and it's just that's just the end of the conversation and and it just it's it's patently obvious that those books could not have been written by an omniscient being or if they were they were they're written by an omniscient being who was pretending to be a 1st century or 7th century ignoramus so so that's all but as to whether or not some weird omniscient sadist exists and deny and devise this universe i i can't claim to be certain that that's not the case so

there's there are many highly improbable an infinite number of highly improbable things uh that i wouldn't i would never say i'm certain don't exist you they're they're totally sensible people at this moment who are wondering whether our universe is being run as a simulation on some alien supercomputer now you know if this alien supercomputer or a super computer built in the in by humans in the future we just imagine so so our our computation uh gets stronger and stronger and we crack the neural code we figure out how to implement consciousness in in computers and

um and our descendants get better and better at this and then they build these simulated worlds and by just by dint of sheer numbers simulated worlds are going to outnumber real worlds there's no question of that you're going to have functionally infinite number of simulated worlds there's only one real world so what what's more likely that we're living in the real world or that we're living in one of these infinite simulated worlds but run by our descendants and if those descendants happen to be mormons well maybe they could have created the more a true mormon

universe that we're living in right now you know and so really the mormons are right in our universe now that that's possible but i so i mean i would put reincarnation in that zone okay right and but but except for the fact that reincarnation and psychic phenomenon are especially psychic phenomena are eminently testable i mean this is just this is something that could if anyone had strong psychic powers this would be the easiest thing in the world to test in the lab and the fact that no one has come forward proving their psychic abilities is

suggestive that these abilities don't really exist in any strong form but there are people who claim to have reams and reams of data of weak psychic abilities that have not been taken seriously and that who people like james randy have have you know kind of bullied out of out of everyone's fair hearing and and that i think is is um i mean that may be the case so i'm again i'm not you know i'm just trying to be rigorously honest where i where i draw the line between something i would bet my life on and

the life of every sentient being on and where i would say show me the evidence and for all of these spooky things including the simulation argument show me the evidence nick bostrom is not an unintelligent person and this is you know we read his argument for for us living in a simulated universe it's interesting uh it's and that's that would be the strangest thing imaginable so i actually have a very simple question do you feel like when you travel when you travel to india and you practice with great yogis and all those people do you

feel like intellectual honesty goes up the more enlightened you are or is it a requirement to begin with to be able to really see what you're trying to not communicate that's an interesting question i've never thought about that but i have a very clear opinion i think that i think those are orthogonal i don't think there's necessarily a relationship between intellectual honesty and realizing this about the nature of consciousness you can be someone who who when you're thinking when you're lost in thought has your worldview trimmed down by all of the dogmas that were hammered

into you on mother's knee and whether those are buddhist dogmas or christian dogmas you can and then you can have these clear experiences of not of being no longer being identified as the thinker of your thoughts and you can oscillate between those two but there's nothing about that oscillation that's going to make you understand 21st century physics or give you a scientific worldview or even make you interested in necessarily finding all the ways in which you might be self-deceived when you're it might not open you up to more of the not at all not necessarily

i mean again i haven't really thought about it but it doesn't seem to me that there's a there's a real um there's a necessary connection there i'll just tie down like real quick um the real reason i'm asking this question is because i have a lot of very smart friends but they seem to have a hard time really wanting to understand what's going on even if they can't how do you communicate to someone who's really smart really is committed to understand the universe the way it is but completely is missing the point with something is

so much on the surface right well i guess i i might have taken your question in an unintended unintended direction intellectual honesty covers a lot of real estate and it seems to me that you can get very good at playing an intellectual game without being rigorously honest in any kind of global sense and or without even being interested to be honest you know so you can be as we've witnessed you can be a fundamentalist christian and be a physicist as as strange as that sounds i i hear from these people you know so that there

are people you know i heard from i'll never forget this email i got an email from a guy who was doing his phd in biophysics he said i just want you to know he's like typing from a bunker but so i just want you to know i'm at a conference now and 15 minutes ago i was in a room with four other physicists and i was the only person in that room who didn't believe that jesus was resurrected and will be coming back to resurrect the dead so it's possible to to and you have someone

like francis collins running the nih who believes in the resurrection and and uh other just unwarranted ideas and there's something about i guess there's there's there's one dividing point so i you know i told you guys to try to not think for a few seconds and um and if any of you get interested in meditation you're going to very quickly have this experience of paying attention trying to pay attention to your breath or anything and finding it very difficult to do and you're just you're just going to keep getting lost in thought and if you're

one type of person is going to find that very interesting just that there's just a sheer inability to to direct his or her attention that's going to be there's going to be something captivating about that failure and he or she's going to see the implications there because they're going to see how that failure is the engine of unhappiness in every other moment of their lives there are other people who look inside for five or ten minutes and find yeah fine they can't pay attention to anything very clearly oh yeah they're just thinking but so what

you know they're just not interested in they don't see the implication for their well-being in the future and it's not even intellectually interesting that the mind would have that character and so that's it's hard to force someone to be interested you sort of have to wait for them to suffer you know you just they something makes them miserable you know they embarrass themselves publicly and they can never stop thinking about it and you say wouldn't you like to step out of the stream of thought for a moment thank you for you know someone is a

scientist and a skeptic exploring consciousness and talking about it and writing about it is uh was sorely lacking especially for someone who has a hard time always differentiating the but knowing that there's something here so thank you uh in the first chapter you mentioned enlightenment and my exposure to the concept is more of a sort of a kind of a peak maybe ultimate experience rather than a you know never-ending constant state even the philosopher and long-time meditator ken wilbur says he doesn't know of anyone that has it as an uninterrupted state and for him the

longest was 11 days of you know non-dual awareness or whatever it's called um do you believe or know from experience that there is some kind of a ultimate experience of that realization or seeing the most unfiltered state of consciousness that becomes like this at least even if experienced once an ultimate realization that kind of carries a better understanding of consciousness uh well i certainly don't know from experience that there's a permanent state of selflessness or non-duality because mine even 11 days is is is that's at least 10.9 days too many days by my account but

i i know that it's possible to feel far more stable than in this experience than i've tended to feel and that i tend to feel on any given day when i'm you know just uh devoted to you know all of the chaos of of normal life but i mean to be like you if i could just sample my experience you the best hour at the best moment of a three-month retreat where i've just been doing nothing but meditate uh yeah if you could just say well this this this some some there's some people you have

met who you know that would be their worst hour in the last year and that basically everything is better it doesn't get worse than this that seems to me to be psychologically possible i don't see any good reason why it wouldn't be possible my question for you sam is i imagine there's a fair amount of writers screenwriters musicians songwriters in the crowd here what is as an author your writing process to get you into flow if you have such a process i'd be interested to get a peek under the hood of your brain as to

what you do to get there yeah i can't say that i get there i i or that i that getting there is any different from getting there doing anything else i just occasionally i i i notice that i don't know what i'm going to think next you know the next thought just appears right it's just not i'm not authoring my thoughts one follow-up do you rework your material or is it coming out about eighty ninety percent you know i i missed the first part do you rework your material oh yeah yeah yeah and i should

i should say um i guess this is the right time to say that i and i've said this in various contexts unfortunately there's not a great context where i can say it loudly enough that it just it never gets forgotten but my wife annika edits all my stuff and she's she's a brilliant editor and if i make sense for any significant amount of time she has a lot to do with it and and so she's here all right thank you very much my my flow experience comes when when i write something and then annika tells

me it's terrible and then i get over my reaction my experience with any meditation practice has been that as soon as i try to evacuate my thoughts i'm aware of discomfort in my body and and pain and just old injuries and it's very hard for me to not then think about that and if you have any techniques homework for achieving a mindful state yeah well the vipassana approach is really tailor-made for dealing with that kind of thing because you're constantly noticing discomfort in the body and then there's an idea about what the discomfort means and

then there's the resistance to feeling it and much of the the suffering of physical pain albeit probably not all of it but certainly a lot of it is the resistance to feeling it and the ideas about what it means and so just imagine if if you've ever played a sport really hard or worked out with weights intensely you know that you can there's certain kinds of physical discomfort they can become really enjoyable because they mean something that seems good they mean you're getting health stronger and healthier and you're really working out hard or whatever it

is but if you woke up in the morning feeling you know the burn of lifting weights but you weren't lifting weights and you know your doctor told you well that's so sorry to say that's you know just the scariest disease we've got the meaning you would give to that feeling the sensations could be exactly the same and yet that that sensation that you would otherwise seek in the gym and actually love it and be disappointed if it didn't visit you at some point in the hour that sensation would be the worst thing that has ever

happened to you and you just be complaining to everyone about it and and yet and it's it's the the concept around it that is doing such heavy lifting there so if you can just get out of the thoughts about what this sensation means forget about prior injuries and and just pay raw attention to this the flow of sensation that's not to say that you shouldn't sit as comfortably as you can sit and you might want to get up and move if something is feeling like it's you know you can injure yourself sitting still for too

long i mean people do people really get into into this will do vow sittings where they they'll decide not to move for hours at a time and that that the kind of pain you experience just by not moving is unbelievable uh and it can really concentrate the mind and so people get addicted to the ease of getting concentrated that way but you can also hurt your body so i would move but then don't worry about it thank you are you saying that my consciousness is 100 the product of the brain body organism that thinks it's

me or have you left room for the possibility that there are qualities of consciousness which are not bound by space or time well that that's a i go into that some length in the book because consciousness is at this point still a mystery it's just a fundamental mystery we don't know how it arises now there are very good reasons to suspect that it arises by virtue of information processing in some way in in in our case in in the brain with some numbers of neurons in some particular conformity but and it seems like there are

areas of our brains that are not giving rise to consciousness the consciousness is not is not spread over the entirety of the brain so it's not just neurons and it's not just information processing this there's something you know whether it's you know gamma frequency activity or there's some there's some magic that happens except the problem is that really is the statement of a miracle i mean that that if the answer at the back of the book of nature is just you need 10 000 neurons wired in x y and z way and they have to

be humming along at 70 hertz that is just what you that's the recipe for consciousness and if it's 65 hertz there's just there's nothing that it's like to be those neurons but you you increase the activity and and the lights go on that's a miracle i mean that that doesn't actually explain consciousness and it seems to me that whatever final answer we get about consciousness would it will have that character and so there's something intrinsically mysterious about consciousness and it may in fact be the consciousness goes all the way down in some way that it

may not be crazy to say that a single neuron is conscious conscious or even a single atom is conscious now that granted sounds pretty spooky and that's that the philosophical view is called pan psychism it seems to me there's no reason to believe that i but there's no reason to fundamentally doubt it either because i wouldn't expect the universe to appear any differently one way or the other i wouldn't expect this if atoms if there was an interior dimension to atoms if atoms were kind of buzzing with just pure beingness i wouldn't expect this chair

to behave any differently i wouldn't expect the chair to be to talk to me or to me there's just there would be no obvious mindedness in in the physical world and so i just i don't know but it's not it's certainly reasonable to think that consciousness is the product of brain activity it's also reasonable to think that it doesn't have to be the wet wear of of human brains and it could be instantiated in computers would you strongly disagree with the belief or the idea that non-local consciousness is the ground of all being i would

find good reason to doubt that that is uh that there's any need for that hypothesis i mean if you're talking about kind of giving primacy to the copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and and the observer effect that somehow things aren't real until they're observed that the view the views of physicists on that subject have have changed in the last 80 years and it's not maybe this is what happens to a lot of people like deepak chopra the only physics they they tend to refer to tends to be the physics of 1930 where there were you

know half a dozen or a dozen very smart physicists who were talking as though reality was more thought-like than than rock-like you know that that mind was somehow entwined with the very fabric of reality and there are experiments that that can give some motivation to that way of talking but most physicists are not there now in terms of the way they interpret those experiments and so um my my deeper point is that you don't need any of the spooky physics or any thoughts about non-locality to become interested in the nature of your own consciousness and

to find that there's no self at the center of it and that's and to discover all the benefits of doing that you don't need to believe anything about the universe i mean my experience of consciousness is not vulnerable to the next thing that's going to happen in physics because my beliefs about consciousness have nothing to do with what we already know about physics because it's just consciousness is a mystery and it's uh it has whatever character it has from a first person side and you can explore explore it directly in your talk on it or

in your book on free will and the moral landscape and now waking up have you ever maybe just out of curiosity envisioned a world where or or maybe just a community or a small group that that did have a very solid grasp on a lot of these concepts and what what a kind of society would look like at all where they had uh maybe a in the free will context a very deep kind of empathy with everything around them a very good understanding of of the world's impact on them and maybe in this case less

of a uh internal view and less of a self-oriented perspective and how how that would look possibly i you know i haven't thought a lot about the the consequences of everyone thinking the way i think because it doesn't seem likely to occur in my lifetime or anyone's but the i think there's there are a few implications the the the other side of this no self argument is the no free will argument they're really two sides of the same coin subjectively and so my my talks on free will and my book about free will i don't

think i discussed the nature of the self uh very much at all in that context but the feeling of having free will is of a piece with the feeling of being a self the feeling of being the thinker of the thoughts the feeling of authoring your actions and and uh as i argued in free will there's there are ethical implications to losing this sense of free will and and one of and as far as i can tell nothing bad happens you you can still find reasons to be motivated you can still find ways to get

what you want out of life but what you can't find is an enduring basis to hate other people because hatred of other people really you can be angry you can be you can you can be you can recoil at something somebody has done you can be motivated to stop them but you can't really hate them in any sense because you're not they're not the actual no one has fully authored themselves no one is everyone is a a confluence of of influences you know the person who's waking up tomorrow thinking it's going to be the best

thing in the world to join isis didn't make himself he didn't make his genes he didn't make his parents he didn't make the society in which he it was born he didn't make the ideas that got into his head and convinced him that that isis was was represented a glorious opportunity to live in in the one true caliphate um he didn't he didn't do it all he's a he's a kind of weather pattern when when looked at from a kind of a bird's eye view and so so hatred becomes less durable in that condition and

if you can find a way of eroding hatred i think i think that's if if it achieves nothing else i think that that's a useful leverage to pull hard in your spiritual experience or in spiritual experiences you think me you may yet have because i understand you don't make claims to enlightenment do you think there that there's an answer to that question that that meaning to one's existence can be found through a spiritual quest of the type that you talk yeah i think it's the wrong question it's just it's a question that seems to create

a space that for an answer that now needs to be filled in and the fact that we can't fill it in perfectly is considered some kind of problem but i do think it's it's the wrong question because the meaning you don't ask that whenever you're having an experience that is deeply fulfilling and you're really just you're not distracted by thought you're you're not waiting for the next good thing to happen you're not looking over the shoulder of the present moment to see what's coming you're just totally with whatever it is you're not then worrying about

what it means i mean that's this is something that's a it's a you have to do something in order to find that question interesting and the thing you're doing is less interesting than really being connected to the present moment and if in the present moment there is there's no if you're not lost in thought and you're truly just kind of surrendered to consciousness in the present moment whether it's pleasant or unpleasant there's no you don't have to think of the grand design of your life now it's not to say that there's you can't ask big

questions about you know the arc of your life you know what you want your life to look at and what would be you know if you look at what would be a great way to spend the next 10 years i mean those those are value-laden questions that we can ask and plan for and all that's fine but the meaning of existence that that or reason for your existence i mean but i don't you know i i almost never you know to to get up in the morning and get to the coffee pot i don't need

a reason other than i want coffee you know and basically the rest most of life works that way and even the most profound moments work that way so it's like when i'm holding my my eight-month-old daughter in my hands and she smiles and i smile back and there's that moment of just just you know she's now like the cutest thing in the world um there's no i don't need to to to abstract away from that and say well what does this mean and i mean that that's like that's a failure to connect that that i

would that that the answer to that question would help me overcome presumably right it's only the implicit in that question is if we had an answer well then life would be better but why not just do the thing with your attention that would actually make life better that's you've spoken in the past about your experience in your 20s in india and i believe i've heard you say that you pretty much fell for a lot of the religious bamboozlement along with the good stuff no no i wouldn't okay i would like actually that no i would

like that clarified because i would like to know how you manage i've known people that went there and went to ashrams and so on and the things that happened to them there right i would like to know more about how you dealt with the religious requirements versus the actual experience how did you tease out about the stuff that was of value well for me the crucial distinction between religious thinking and spiritual practice and its associated thinking is the e in spirituality in the sense that i'm talking about it you really are just making claims about

the nature of experience and the possibilities of experience and and the mechanics of your own suffering and the way the things you can do with your attention to make your suffering go away essentially so you're just talking about consciousness and its contents and you're not making any claims about the nature of reality you're not making any claims about history or invisible beings or invisible worlds you could reach after death or none of that right that's all the province of religion so i don't feel the need to make any of this it's just and that's also

the province of a lot of new age thinking so again that's where someone like uh deepak deepak chopra and and uh i disa diverge because he's even if we totally agreed about the experiences which i'm not sure we do uh we might i have no idea but but even if we totally agreed about the character of of conscious experience and and the implications of meditation he wants to draw further implications about the nature of of the cosmos and so then and that so he's in the religion business in that respect and and so um yeah

and so i've never i'm just wondering how in your 20s you had the wherewithal to not fall for that well it's just you see i mean i'm sure there were moments in my 20s which you if you would just you know caught me coming down from an acid trip you know i would have said some things that would it wouldn't have pleased james randy you know but undoubtedly but in terms of the basically that the punch line i drew from that decade of my life it's just clear it can't be about any of these incompatible

religious claims and i found myself surrounded with people who were you usually see a lot of motivated reasoning you see people who want to believe in miracles and they're do they're making their best effort to believe in miracles and then they're it's it's a it's just a confirmation bias as as far as the eye can see in in these situations and none of that's necessary to be the experiences that you have are just are the experiences you have and you don't have to make it further assertions about in any kind of doctrinal way so you

can actually as i say in the book lift the diamond out of the dunghill of religion in this respect you can you can you can connect with the the practices without believing any any of the the associated metaphysics do you think there is an unspoken transmission from an awakened teacher to a receptive student that can aid the student in more directly realizing this selflessness that you talk about yeah you know [Music] it's a really hard question because i've on one level my answer is is no or certainly there needn't be because i think i think

it really is a matter of clear instruction so the clearest moments i ever had with a with this one tibetan zogchen master it seemed to me that his effect on me was fully understandable in terms of just the one that i was sufficiently concentrated to actually follow his instructions but but two just the precision with which he was guiding me in in real time so it was just it was it was a matter of information but i've also had experiences with you know kind of great yogis and llamas and people who have devoted their lives

to meditation where it's not that i walked away believing in anything magical but there's something i mean this the claim about somebody's energy being sort of overpowering i've certainly had that experience where there's a you know whether you want to call it charisma or whether just some people have certain pheromones that just you know destroy your olympic system i mean you know i've been in the presence of people who it where you know i came into the room and it was suddenly like i had been on retreat for two months just by sitting with them

and i don't have i'm so before you all get on twitter and tell everyone i lost my mind i i'm not making any claims about magic there there's some you know there could be some totally straightforward explanation for this but i just don't know what it is i'm just attesting to the experience and the reason why i don't think there's so much confirmation bias in my own experience of this is that i've had this experience with people who i really didn't want to like all that much you know like like whether i didn't like their

teachings as much as i like someone some other person's teachings but when i sat with with person number one his presence kind of blew me away and where whereas when i'm sitting with this other genius who who is giving me exactly what i think the true teachings are his presence wasn't it wasn't doing it so my bias was opposite the effect and so so there may be something going on there but i just have no idea what it is thank you in some of your recent online talks you've talked you've kind of talked about the

comparison of these experiences with being fully immersed in the film as contrasted with being able to see the projector and the play of light on a screen and it's and today you kind of mentioned you know like being immersed fully in a math problem or um martial arts for example you can this sense of self can drop out and that's and that's the experience that you're after but you seem to place the the emphasis more on the being able to see the projector in the play of light on the screen could you explain um maybe

or talk a little bit more about why you and maybe emphasize more right right on new one well i guess there are ways of being totally immersed like so losing yourself in your work or being totally uh immersed in a film is not quite the same thing as clearly cutting through the illusion of the self and this is something there's something haphazard about it you're not it's happening to you because you're focused on something but there's not the clarity of awareness where you actually are understanding something about consciousness and it's not an obvious antidote to

psychological pain so if you're feeling you know if you're feeling angry uh i mean it's true that you can just go watch a good movie and forget about your anger i mean doing something else with your attention or read a good book or do you paying attention to something else is an antidote to psychological suffering that's true but it's not the same thing as clearly inspecting the contents of consciousness in that moment and and recognizing that the self is an illusion so it's it's not uh i mean there's the self is an illusion so it

like it it it's not surprising that it it falls away in various moments it's vulnerable to the vicissitudes of just how we pay attention and it's something that it keeps retrospectively seeming to always be there because whenever we're thinking whereas now we're back you know it's just me here again but it's in all those moments we're not noticing how it's been it's kind of falling away because we were just you know reacting to something or totally immersed i was wondering what you thought about the possibility of using technology to expedite the benefits of meditation for

example i've read about some scientists who are experimenting with hooking up a meditator to an fmri yeah and showing them a kind of screen that had like a live neurofeedback and it would show them when they're going towards a more deep meditative state and when they're drifting off and getting caught up in thoughts yeah yeah that had that experiment had the inconvenient result of seeming to reveal that one revered llama was not really a very good meditator [Applause] that was not not very well publicized but but uh embarrassing um so yeah no i think that

would that's great you know that work is obviously in its infancy but there's no reason why you couldn't have a very effective some form of neurofeedback where you can just whatever state it could be mindfulness it could be some other target state of mind where you could be getting real-time information about how closely you're essentially playing a video game with your with your emotions or you're playing a video game with your cognition and you're you're hitting the target state based on this this feedback mechanism and i you know i think that's that's great i mean

and that would probably be very helpful for for all of us thank you it's expensive because you know the magnet costs three million dollars so yeah we need some other mode but i think it will eventually come yeah i have a practical question yeah that is do you think that your experience with meditation and selflessness has uh contributed to your unusual skill at thinking and communicating clearly on your feet um [Applause] well that's really one of those questions one can't answer i think it's um i i can't really own that because i obviously if you

just wait long enough and i will fail to think clearly on my feet but uh it's st it's helped me it's that it's helped me in in every area i used to be morbidly afraid of public speaking that just that was a real obstacle for me uh now meditation isn't the only antidote to that problem i you can't i wouldn't recommend so if you have a fear of public speaking i wouldn't recommend that you just do do enough meditating so that you know you finally then feel like you can go speak because it's you you'll

be meditating for a very long time and that's that's not you you may just always just feel anxiety and you're mindful of your anxiety and and you you then you're kind of dancing around the problem but the thing you actually want to accomplish is to actually feel good doing it you know you actually want to get over that hump and there's no alternative but to then do it so mindfulness was was helpful in me feeling better doing it and and being in situations like this but i can't really honestly credit meditation entirely with that because

it's just part of it's just doing it in fact most i think most of it is just doing it and having decent experiences doing it so but in terms of you know the quality of my thinking i think um i mean it's so variable i find myself in situations where i really i'm struggling to get the words out and then i'm just worried about you dementia i'm not i'm not exaggerating so it it it's uh you know you've seen me at good moments as part of it as people put something up on youtube that they

don't tend to put up the parts where i'm just stammering you know so it's kind of a selection bias as a lifelong atheist who joined a 12-step program a few years ago i'm always asked to identify a higher power and i'm told this is a spiritual quest and i'm curious if you have any thoughts about how that alleged spiritual activity could be framed within the context of what you've talked about of selflessness yeah well i think there's definitely a i think of one that i think there's just a need for a secular alternative to aaa

i i don't i've got nothing against a.a except i keep hearing from people who wish there was an alter alternative that didn't require this sort of sign on the dotted line of what seemed to be like something like religion but i think you can just reframe that and actually sign on the dotted line because it's all a higher power i mean it's all you your your sense of who you are in the present moment can't explain anything again you can't explain how you're able to do this this is this is a high as far as

i'm concerned this is a higher power this is a total mystery i don't know how i start it i don't know how i stop it and everything is like that and so it's you're in a condition that is intrinsically mysterious and you're thinking and then thoughts keep arising and that's you know and so it's um yeah i don't it doesn't seem like a stretch to me to to accept a higher power thank you so um not to harp on the split brain but i found that to be an interesting part um especially as you talked

about that it may be indicative of what the normal brain is to loosely coupled systems right um with respect to another part of your book that you mentioned tonight about the talking to yourself not being useful i've wondered about that and sort of looked in my own life last few days i wonder if there's an argument to be made that you're making sort of a commissure of sorts by virtue of speaking and then hearing with another easily coupled part of your brain i wonder if there's any neuroscience to back that up or what you would

say yeah that's an interesting idea i don't know of any science to back that up but i think it's i'm not saying it's never useful it's it's what's not useful is to have no alternative you know it's the automaticity that you do it's just the spell that can't be broken and the feeling that this is just you doing it uh but uh yeah clearly self-talk serves some purpose and because it just you know just giving yourself a pep talk can change the way the way you feel and the way you engage the next experience and

it's um and it clearly they're probably some things we can't actually adequately think through without engaging this this kind of speech we just can't maybe this would be again i don't know what it would like it'd be like to be so mindful or so free of this illusion that you know you just kind of rest that way for hours and days at a time you know what what could one get done in that state i have no idea but so it's it's a um it's quite it's quite possible that you know full enlightenment if such

a thing exists could be totally dysfunctional in many ways you're not gonna you're not gonna be one of the leading lights of silicon valley if you're just sitting there in a non-conceptual state of peace all day long so this somebody has to do the work of building civilization and it's not going to be the buddhists but it's uh yeah i don't i don't know but the fact that that talking to your that you might be creating a kind of a commissure in a way that or that's that's necessary for information transfer uh from one side

to another that i hadn't thought about that yeah in the last chapter of your book when you're talking about psychedelics uh and yogis you said something like if lsd is like being strapped to a rocket then learning to meditate is like raising a raisin a sale yeah um is there anything in between those two modes of transport is is there nothing yet that it's just you want a motor boat did you not include anything because you couldn't find it or is there anything promising in that domain it kind of comes back to somebody put a

motor on this boat please yeah um mean there's there's no reason in principle why there there couldn't be better drugs i think you know that i think we we should hope for better drugs in the end you know uh and i think that research is something we want to encourage because this just lsd is like being strapped to a rocket and you just don't know where you're going to wind up and and uh you know and all the drugs we have as far as i know are incredibly blunt instruments that have lots of side effects

but you know we yeah we we do want insofar as it's our specific problems and and aspirations admit of biochemical answers because it is all biochemistry that we're we're working with and those answers can be delivered from the outside i think we we definitely want to get better and better at doing that and then eventually the only reason why drugs are so stigmatized is because they they're so bad really they have they have effects that you don't want you know they you get into car accidents you know it's just not but if we had a

drug that that just reliably made you less distracted and there were no negative side effects then we'd all i mean maybe coffee is that drug but but it's it's uh we would all there'd be no problem using that drug and so that would become a it would become a food it wouldn't be a drug at that point so you know whether we'll ever get there i have no idea my question has to do with the project of creating a secular institution of spirituality and it seems to me that the creation of moral teamwork and community

that happens in religion is part of the diamond and not part of the dunghill and i'm wondering uh when you think about that um this project that lies before us of creating cultural institutions that have rights of passages and buildings to go to on sundays and so on could you just talk about whatever that what are the issues that come up for you or what your vision looks like when you think about that project yeah it's uh it's a big project i i don't know i'm on one level it's it's money i mean so it's

just just imagine what it would take to build a beautiful building in san francisco that was dedicated to whatever this vision is you know we named this thing and then we now all of us here and all of our friends decide well we want to we want to build a building okay that's it's a huge project and uh the amazing thing is that you can't walk for two minutes without running into a church or a synagogue or a mosque so that you know religions have done this and it's just amazing that they so we don't

have um uh it's a big it's a you know a generational project and but there are we have piecemeal ways of getting it and and i i think we have to notice that those piecemeal ways are are surrogates for what people are getting out of religion you know so you have like a conference like ted which is you know great and fun and brings a lot of people together and and smart things are talked about and then it gets disseminated and and that's you know i would love it if we had a sort of a

mini ted conference in every city every sunday you know in a hundred different buildings i mean that would be and you could make it better than the ted conference where you could make it slanted in more toward this area than just you know this the usual ted fair but it would be great to have a building that you could go to where every sunday you get together with like-minded people and something incredibly profound and interesting was being talked about and then you could all hang out for a few hours that would be that would be

great there are many pieces to this but the pieces are not in place and i think you know having rituals that that mark different moments in life that are not religious but but uh totally rational and yet empowering i think we need those things you know how you need a a rite of passage you know instead of a bar mitzvah or a bat mitzvah in judaism i think you need a rite of passage for teenagers that just is incredibly important for them that doesn't presuppose any divisive religious nonsense and but you know the task is

for rational people everywhere to create those things we're sort of left having to do it ourselves at this moment and that's that's a uh you know we don't have the problem for secular people and this is this is just a hole in secularism we don't have a cannon of off-the-shelf uh material so when somebody dies right you just you who do you call when you're an atheist so people a lot of people find themselves calling a rabbi or a priest and just asking him to dumb it down so that you know it's like we don't

believe this she didn't believe this so just don't mention god but you know we're really happy you came because we don't know what the hell to do and and that's and that's the situation we're in i think it's it's a something we we need to solve so that's that's just takes some effort yeah [Music]