How 20 Years Of Meditation Changed My Reality : Yuval Noah Harari Opens Up

the question I have for you and you can begin by answering it in three or four sentences the question is will meditation on a global scale lead to human evolution yes but I don't think it can scale when I did my first course and it completely blew my mind and and changed my world I thought ah everybody should do that and with the years I realized it won't work on on a big scale because it's difficult uh first of all if you force people to do something it will not work it will become a kind

of another religion that forces people to think in a certain way to behave in a certain way and the other thing is that it's it's just very difficult when and and the difficulty is it's it's surprising that when you give the Mind two things to do one simple easy and one difficult the Mind always goes for the easy thing and this also happens in meditation like you tell people okay you need to sit down for one hour without moving close your eyes and just focus on your breath coming in and out of your nostrils what

you see happens on a large scale is that sitting without moving for one hour is actually very easy anybody can train themselves to do that if I tell you you never meditate in your in your life and I tell you if you can sit for one hour without moving a single tiny movement I will give you a million dollars even though it will be excruciatingly painful you could do it you could give a command to your legs to your hands don't move a million dollars don't move and you will somehow do it but if I

tell you I will give you a million dollars if you can focus your entire attention just on your breath just feel the breath coming in and out and don't lose the attention of the breath for one moment if you can do that for 10 minutes not one hour for 10 minutes I give you a million dollars you can't do that you try with all your Force some fantasy will arise some memory will arise and will kidnap your attention um because the we have no control of the mind we have control of of of the legs

we have control of the eyes we have very little control of the mind so if you give people this exercise of meditation on a large scale you will see very soon people develop a ritual oh I sit for every day one hour without moving I'm a very serious meditator and somebody says I can sit without moving for two hours I can sit without moving for 3 hours and it becomes just this ritual or exercise which does nothing for the true development of your mind people forget all about the more difficult exercises of really understanding your

mind really getting in touch with your mind and and understanding why is the mind so easily distracted why is it that I can't do this simple exercise of just feeling the breath coming in and out of my nostrils for 10 minutes or even for for one minute um so this I think is what will happen if you try to do it on on a very big scale and it will not be effective why don't we talk about the results of the meditation especially for you it's been 23 years mhm right yeah now in 23 years

as a human being of course aging also makes you wiser m but if I ask you well in the last 23 years if you completely remove meditation from the process would the books have happened would you have been the same person how have the 23 years of also meditating added to your mind what has been the result of this grind that you've put yourself through I couldn't write any of these books not sapiens not Nexus none of these books uh because I wouldn't have the clarity of mind again the exercise of meditation is to be

in touch to let go of all the thoughts and Fantasies and imaginations and be in touch with the reality when I talked about this this exercise of feeling the breath coming in and out of the nostrils the thing about the your breath is that this is reality if you don't breathe for a mo for a minute you die it's as simple as that there is a constant reality there which is very deep because this is your uh uh um your communion with the universe Every Breath You the universe gives you something and then you give

back and you give Universe gives you something and then you give back this is the breath if people have uh say no I don't want I I want to be completely independent you die within one minute when you try to focus on this reality what happens is that some thought some memory some fantasy arises in the mind and hijacks your attention after five or 10 seconds and you lose touch with reality and you start rolling in the fantasy and anybody who ever meditated knows this and the training of meditation is you tell the mind let

go of the fantasy let go of the thought come back to the reality what is really happening right now what is really happening is that the the breath is now coming in and you have you don't notice it so notice it so the whole exercise of meditation is let go of all the fantasies all the fictions all the stories and just be in touch with reality and when you train the mind like that for many years you gain the clarity or at least some clarity to understand reality on a much bigger scale not just the

reality of the breath coming in and out of your nostrils but also the reality of history of historical processes of biological processes because when your mind is not clear it's full of all the fantasies and thoughts that you are very attached to so anything you try to study like you try to study history you will not be able to observe the reality you will only observe the stories you're attached to if you're a Jew then the Jewish mythology about history will again and again come up in the mind and you will write a history of

the world which is actually Jewish mythology and if you are attached to Hindu mythology then you will just see Hindu mythology and if you're attached to communist mythology or capitalist mythology this will what is what will come up in your mind and for me meditation is about being able to some I don't say I'm perfect I also have my own attachments my own mythologies but to some extent yes I am able to let go of it and let's see what let's observe the reality of imperialism the reality of the history of religion okay what I

have understood over the years based on reading your stuff is that you've studied a lot in your life at the same time you've put your own mind through this process of Vias based meditations now the luxury of being in India is you have access to a lot of different schools of meditation but the one thing I know about vipasana especially and a friend of mine Omar put this really well he said that it's a very powerful form of meditation that increases the distance between your thoughts and your perception so so imagine that your thoughts are

automatic your mind is completely throwing it up all the time in your own head and your perception is your mind's own ability to see those thoughts but as you keep meditating your perception moves away from the thoughts and it's able to see it from more of a distance now if you're combining it with the kind of study that you have done you're able to see a lot of uh data and accumulate it into very crisp sentences and crisper versions of itself which is what I feel you've done through all your books fair to say okay

um my question to you uh is that on on some level especially when you're growing up in India like the kind of meditations I into are more Tantra based where we use mantras and we go deeper into it and effectively meditation is about focusing on one point so what I have learned about vasana is that you focus on your breath I think this region you keep trying to you bring your attention back to your breath in the meditations we do it's about bringing the attention to a mantra or a daty but I've read enough of

your work to know how much you speak about fictions and religion but do you feel that sometimes there's power and believing in fiction and religion and it can be a power yes but the question is power or truth the again a very a very deep truth about the human mind it's very easy to focus on Fiction it's very difficult to focus on reality if you create a fictional object an imaginary object uh from a single sentence or image to an entire religion it's very easy to be absorbed in that everybody knows that like when you

watch TV there was a good movie very easy to stay focused on the movie so uh if your aim is simply to get the Mind very very focused and it's usually very pleasant when your mind is very focused then you don't need techniques like vas is very very hard because it's hard to focus on reality if you just want Focus absorption in something go for fiction but the then you don't get through truth then you do get power it it creates even on a social level you have millions of people all focused on one thing

this is very powerful movement but it completely loses touch with the reality with reality this is truth but the thing is it's very difficult to stay focused on the truth because the truth is often painful whereas the experience of being absorbed in an imaginary object is Pleasant the experience of trying to just focus on what is really happening is often painful because pain is true it's part of reality not just physical pain in the body also mental pain if you think about politics so let's say there is elections and you want to gain people's support

if you tell them the truth about the country the nation including the ugly Parts in including the dark sides many people wouldn't like it they wouldn't vote for you if you tell them a kind of uh sanitized version the kind of Mythology about the nation and people would like it ah yes this is good I I want to see myself like this I want to see my and then you gain power but you don't know the truth that that's the big difference um while I wish to break down this spiritual depth conversation a lot more

I think we'll come back to it later later on the episode because it can keep being a bit of a ping pong I do wish to ask you at some point if there's any part of you all that believes in any kind of a higher Divinity or some kind of higher power that's running this world on I never saw any evidence for that if there is it's not doing a good job you look at how much suffering there is in the world if there is some higher power kind of taking care of everything it's not

taking very good care okay of the people and the animals on on this planet [Music]