Sam Harris - Death and the Present Moment

[Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you so much well it it's uh it's wonderful to be here uh it's been a great pleasure to get a chance to meet so many are you getting feedback here um it's been a great pleasure to meet so many of you in the audience it's uh I don't often get a chance to do that and needless to say it's it's a great honor to share the stage with Dan and Richard and Aon and Lawrence and so many other exceptional people uh I'd like to take a moment as many people have to

just acknowledge the void that is left by the death of our friend hitch while it it might be possible to guess what he would have thought about a number of the topics raised here it's almost impossible to imagine how well he would have expressed those thoughts um the man had more wit and style and substance than a few civilizations I could name so just there's nothing to do but just take another moment to miss him I I actually want to talk talked today about death in fact I had I had planned to speak about Free

Will I've written a book on the subject and uh I dedicated it to Hitch in fact uh but it occurred to me that that many of you may have already seen this book or or watched a YouTube video of a lecture I gave on it that that has hit the the net about a week ago uh so I've decided to uh and I would I would recommend that you do one of those two things because I think Free Will is a an important subject and I think people are powerfully confused about it and I think

this confusion actually matters uh but I've decided to change course and talk about death which might be the only subject that people find more depressing than the idea that they don't have free will so my apparent aim is to depress you uh through no free will of my own I might add add uh but I hope to build you back up over the course of the hour now the reality of death is absolutely Central to religion and and and its denial is Central to religion and without death faith-based religion would be Unthinkable and from the

point of view of the faithful atheism appears to be the mere assertion of death I we actually appear to be a death cult because we're the only people who admit that death is real most views every other view either leaves the question open or asserts that death is an illusion and that the good people or the people who believe the right things about an Iron Age war god get everything they want after they die and that that everything that seems to be anomalous or uh undesirable or merely accidental in this life gets sorted out in

the end now a convention like this is really just an open declaration that there's no reasonable likelihood of any of that happening okay that the good news of atheism the gospel of atheism is essentially nothing that nothing happens after death there's nothing to worry about there's nothing to fear when after you die you are returned to that nothingness that you were before you were born now this is very this proposition is very difficult to understand and most people seem to mistake nothing for something many have said that my friend Lawrence Krauss does that but in

the case of death people seem to think that they imagine something like a an eternity of Silent darkness which does sound just a little boring but if we are right and nothing happens after death then every religion ever devised is false okay but if we are right and nothing happens after death death therefore is not a problem life is the problem but the problem is that without God and without a promise of of an eternal uh existence after death life appears to be an emergency it's it's a long emergency for many of us but it

is an emergency you can't help but notice that things are going very wrong in this place I no matter how much fun you are having a glance at a newspaper will show you that it's possible to have no fun at all okay and everyone seems to have a run of bad luck in the end now it's hard not to see the the absurdity of this situation you you unwrap your shiny new iPad upon which you hope to squander an unconscionable amount of time and attention only to discover perhaps on the iPad itself that the people

who built this gorgeous device live lives of such unendurable drudgery that they regularly hurl themselves off the rooftops at the factory where they work you Nets have been installed to catch their falling bodies is is there any sense to be made of disparities in luck of this kind religion makes sense of it you know it's my karma it's it's God's will that I'm so lucky if God had wanted me to do dangerous and deadly boring work for a few dollars a day that's what I would be doing but as it happens he wants me to

have a new iPad [Applause] Hallelujah to not believe in God is to have no recourse to those Illusions to not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place we we have barely emerged from centuries of of barbarism it's not it's not a surprise that there are shocking inequities in this world it it is hard work to to climb down out of the trees walk upright and build a viable Global civilization when when you start with technology that's made of rocks and sticks and fur this is

this is this is a project and and progress is difficult just just picture going back a 100 Generations within your own family me just picture picture it kind of mapped onto this room maybe this this front row just a 100 people your father's father's mother's fathers mothers fathers fathers on bag now I don't I don't care how cultured you are what how well educated your family you can be Matthew Chapman whose great great-grandfather was Charles Darwin but if you just keep going in no more than a hundred conversations you are going to meet someone who

thinks that sacrificing your firstborn child just might be a good way to control the weather we is some of you probably don't have to go back quite that far you just have to go home for Christmas [Applause] so so real progress is a very recent phenomenon and as you know religion generally keeps its foot on the break okay in the United States we still have to argue about contraception about whether women should have access to birth control for forget about abortion contraception is still something we're fighting for the Catholic Church one of the richest institutions

on Earth will oppose contraception with its last breath and in so doing it imagines it's exercising the most finely calibrated morality the Earth has ever seen all the while nurturing an army of child rapists and and prot protecting them from from secular Justice and and shuttling them from Parish to Parish so so they can find fresh victims and threatening these victims VI IMS with endless litigation in this life and and hellfire in the next the The misuse of human energy that the needless manufacturing of unhappiness just boggles the mind so so moral and political progress

is difficult even in Rich Nations where there should be nothing but progress but most of us know that no matter how much progress we make it's very unlikely we're going to make this this world a paradise we're not going to truly make it invulnerable to insult and injury and death now it's true there are a few serious people who think that we might cure all disease and even aging itself or upload our consciousnesses onto some perfected AI artificial intelligence um I think when you look closely at those efforts it begins to look like science enabled

religion at this point I you know I I don't I'm sure they're fans of the singularity here but you know I don't expect to have my Consciousness backed up on the iPad 25 I'll be happy to be proven wrong but but I'm not going to hold my breath so I think it's safe to say that the reality of death is something we're all going to have to face okay and and the loss of those we love there's there's no perfecting this place e even if you play your game perfectly okay and you become as healthy

as a vampire you if you just live long enough you are going to witness the death of everyone you love at a certain point the phone is just going to start ringing with bad news even our memories are precarious but my daughter is 3 and a half years old and I'm a astonished at how much of her life I've forgotten to to see a video of her taken a year ago is to be astonished at how unfamiliar it is I she's she's a completely different person now so there there's no satisfying way to hold on

to the Past in fact when we look closely there there's there's no unsatisfying way of doing it either it's we are locked in the present moment the p a memory is a thought arising in the present what we are locked in the present moment with our thoughts and our iPads so so what does atheism have to offer people in this circumstance people like ourselves and people more fearful and self- deceived than us that great body of humanity that that recoils at the mere suggestion that a first century Carpenter may not be able to hear their

thoughts much less answer their prayers well well atheism as mere disbelief in God doesn't have much to offer it's a corrective to a whole raft of bad ideas but it doesn't put anything in place of bad ideas it's a necessary corrective but but what what fills the void is science and art and philosophy atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations and and the problem we face of course is a problem of committing of of convincing the better part of humanity to have those better conversations and this is a political problem

it's a scientific problem it's it's an interpersonal problem is a problem of Education but the problem is that most people most of the time are desperate to believe ridiculous and divisive ideas for for patently emotional reasons and and while rarely explicit what they're really worried about is death and when we're arguing about teaching evolution in the schools I would argue that we are really arguing about death it seems to me the only reason why why any religious person cares about evolution is because if their holy books are wrong about our Origins they are very likely

wrong about our destiny after death so so when you say to someone that you're a fool for not believing an evolution or a fool to think the universe is 6,000 years old I think that gets translated as you are a fool to think that your daughter who died in a car accident is really in heaven with God and that that is a very different communication before I can get to the end of this sentence something unforeseen and terrible will happen to somebody somewhere and and we will read about it in the newspaper tomorrow the the

question is how can people close to these tragedies make sense of them and religion provides an answer for that it it's an unjustified answer it's a bad answer it's an answer that comes with a host of other liabilities because it one being that it it has birthed a a many competing and irreconcilable answers and therefore religious conflict and and political tribalism seem impossible to overcome but religion does provide an answer that most people think they they need and and the Schism among secularists the fact that so many people at this conference are regularly attacked for

criticizing religion follows from this point and people are worried about the grief of other people the the scientists and journalists who have made a career out of attacking the so-called new atheists are worried about the grief of other people if your child died in a car accident believing that she is now in heaven with Jesus has to be consoling it has to be consoling in a way that no other belief can be it's true that there's a shadow side to this kind of thinking I've heard from people who have suffered tragedies like this in the

context of their faith and found that the belief in an afterlife was actually a way for their friends not to connect with their grief and in fact to grieve too much in such a circumstance is is tant amount to it's a little embarrassing it it's a sign that that you lack faith I mean what what are you really grieving about if you think that the the one you love most in this world is now in a better place and you're going to be rejoined with her in the twinkling of an eye but I think we

can admit that atheism doesn't offer real consolation on this point and that's that's not an accident if you're open to New Evidence there's no guarantee that the revisions in your worldview are going to be consoling you know when when you lose Santa Claus what you get in his place is not as fun you know the sight of your parents maxing out their credit cards and wrapping presence in their pajamas is not as consoling as The Elves and the sleigh and the eight tiny reindeer so when we think about what is lost when we jettison religion

it's not the holidays and the architecture and the music and the humility and the awe and the profund day all of that can be had very much within the purview of reason and it can be had without lying to ourselves or to our children or to other people and their children about the nature of reality the the thing that gets lost the thing for which there is no real substitute is total consolation in the phase of death and it seems to me if we want to build a bridge to a rational world that the better

part of humanity can cross we have to deal with this fact now most of us do our best not to think about death but but there's always part of our minds that knows this can't go on forever we part of us always knows that we're just a doctor's visit away or a phone call away from being starkly reminded with with the fact of our own mortality or of those closest to us now I'm sure many of you in this room have experienced this in some form you you you must know how uncanny it is to

suddenly be be thrown out of the normal course of your life and just be given the full-time job of not dying or caring for someone who is Hitch wrote brilliantly about this in in Vanity Fair and uh I suggest you read his articles if you haven't but the the one thing people tend to realize at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time when life was normal okay it's not just what they it's not just what they did with their time it's not just that they spend too much time working or or

compulsively checking email it's that they they cared about the wrong things they they regret what they cared about their their attention was bound up in Petty concerns that year after year when life was normal and this is a paradox of course because we all know this Epiphany is coming don't you know this is coming don't you know that there's going to come a day when you'll be sick or someone close to you will die and you'll look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention and you'll think what what was I doing you

know this and yet if you're like most people you will spend most of your time in life tacitly Pres presuming you'll live forever Ian it's like watching a bad movie for the fourth time or or bickering with your spouse this these things only make sense in light of Eternity there better be a heaven if we're going to waste our time like [Applause] [Music] [Applause] that so so unlike religious people we atheists really have a good reason to make the most of life to make the most of the present moment because because even if you live

to be a hundred there just not that many days in life so what what is the point of life is anything sacred does such a question even make sense but this is what religious people are worried about and I think these questions do make sense and there are answers to them but the answers are not a matter of getting more information the answer is a change in Attitude there are ways of experiencing life as sacred without without believing anything and certainly without believing anything on insufficient evidence okay there are ways to to really live in

the present moment he what what's the alternative it is always now however much you feel you may need to plan for the future to anticipate it to mitigate risks the reality of your life is now now this may sound trit this may sound perilously close to to what Dan called deepity in his talk but it's the truth it it's not quite true as a matter of physics in fact there's there is no now that encompasses the entire universe you can't talk of an event being simultaneously occurring here in one at the same moment occurring in

Andromeda the truth is now is not even well defined as a matter of Neurology because we know that inputs to the brain come at different moments and that Consciousness is is built upon layers of inputs whose timings have to be different just consider the sensation of of touching your finger to your nose it seems simultaneous as a matter of conscious experience but we know that the input from the finger to sensory cortex must take longer than the input from your nose and this is true no matter how short your arms or long your nose so

so so the brain buffers these inputs in some way in memory and then promotes the seeming simultaneity to Consciousness and and so you're so our conscious awareness of the present moment is in some relevant sense already a memory but as a matter of conscious experience the reality of your life is always now and I think this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind in fact I think there's probably nothing more important to understand about your mind than that if you want to be happy in this world the past is a memory

it's a thought arising in the present the the future is merely anticipated it is another thought arising now okay what we truly have is this moment and this and and we spend most of our Lives forgetting this truth repudiating it fleeing it overlooking it and and the the horror is that we succeed we we manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are we are continually hoping to become happy in the future and the future never arrives even when we think we're in the present moment we're we're in

very subtle ways always looking over its shoulder anticipating what's coming next we are always solving a problem and it's possible to Simply drop your problem if only for a moment and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present now again as you can see the the line between Timeless wisdom and banality is a little difficult to find and I I'm I'm a little worried that some of you have begun to gag on what seems like new age pum but and you must know that I don't want to stand in front of 4,000 atheists

and do my best impression of L Su so but the the if I'm going to talk about this crucial point I do have to say a few things that you've probably heard before and probably dismissed because it came bundled with religious metaphysics and Superstition this is not a matter of new information or more information it it requires a change in Attitude requires a change in in the attentiveness you pay to the to your experience in the present moment now of course when we talk about conscious experience we're all once again talking about death because if

Consciousness is just ing dependent upon the brain then death is real and every religion ever devised is false and needless to say most people are walking around with an intuition that that's not true that Consciousness is in some sense independent of the body now there are very good reasons to doubt that intuition of course yeah we know that introspection offers us a very poor view of the material basis of our inner lives there are 100 billion neurons in the brain okay there there are more each making thousands of connections to other cells there are more

Connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue than stars in our galaxy and yet our inner experience offers absolutely no clue that this is the case and so so we're not just slightly out of touch with the material basis of our inner lives we're completely out of touch with it I I actually think about the human brain a fair amount but it almost never occurs to me that I actually have one so so so we have a a very limited view of what's going on we are sub subjectively unaware of most of what our

minds are doing and yet when we think about what what matters what matters is consciousness and its contents okay Consciousness is everything our experience of the world the experience of those we care about is a matter of Consciousness and its contents so so whatever the origins of Consciousness the the most important question for us is how can we truly be fulfilled in life how how can we create lives that are truly worth living given that these lives come to an end we are all in the business of seeking fulfillment and relief from suffering I this

is not to say that we want Mere pleasure or the easiest possible life that that much of what we want in life much of what we want to experience entails struggle and many of us learn to enjoy the struggle itself in some measure you any athlete knows that there's certain kinds of pain that are actually pleasurable you know if if the burn of lifting weights was was actually the symptom of a disease it would be intolerable but because it's it's happening in the context of of of a strenuous exercise and progress there most people learn

to enjoy it so so the the the conceptual lens through which we view even very intense sensation largely determines how we feel about it and and this is one one of the many ways in which our thinking about experience changes the character of of experience so the frame we put around the present moment is important and largely determines our experience of it but it seems possible in fact to experience life more nakedly than this to experience it without an obvious frame to to pay attention to the present moment closely enough so that you're not doing

anything to it and there there are techniques for doing this so I want to try a little experiment with you please close your eyes and you might want to adjust your posture so that you're comfortable sitting and just feel yourself sitting there in your seat take a few deep breaths and just let gravity settle you in your seat then you can let your breath just come and go naturally become aware of this sensation of sitting feel the weight of your body feel the weight of your arms and shoulders feel your back and your legs against

the seat and just notice your body however it appears whatever Sensations you notice sensations of pressure or vibration or warmth tension aching whatever arises but try to feel this as closely as possible now gradually become aware of the sensation of breathing wherever you happen to feel it either at the tip of the nose or the rising and falling of your chest or the rising and falling of your abdomen just pay attention to the the sensation ations associated with each inhalation and each exhalation there's no need to control the breath just let it come and go

see if you can feel the next inhalation from the moment it arises and just cover it until the moment it stops and do the same with your exhalations listen to The Sounds in the room just just let your mind now be the open space in which sounds and sensation arise now you don't need to make any heroic effort to focus just notice what you notice notice everything that you notice arises spontaneously you don't have to move toward it just relax and notice the next sensation the next sound now see if you can pay even closer

attention there there's a layer of Concepts here that you can get behind Okay for instance feel feel the sensations in your hands if you really pay attention you will see that you don't actually feel their shape okay you have a mental image of your hands but if you pay close attention you will feel just the raw sensations of tingling vibration pressure a much more diffuse cloud of sensation so see if you can feel your hands closely enough to relinquish their shape so too with the rest of your body see if you can just let it

dissolve into a cloud of sensation just be the space in which each new raw sensation arises feel the sensations of your face and head now you might feel that your your Consciousness is in your head or behind your face okay but as a matter of experience these are just more Sensations arising in Consciousness the only evidence of your face and head is as sensation arising in Consciousness at this moment now notice what sort of mood you were in if if you feel Restless or bored take that constellation of energy itself as an object of Consciousness

you feel these states of Mind however they appear in the body if you're sleepy notice that feeling what it is a pattern of sensation on your face in the eyes so sounds and Sensations and feelings are are just announcing this open space of consciousness now you you may notice as you try to pay attention to Raw Sensation that thoughts continually intrude you're you you find yourself thinking without knowing that you were thinking that the moment you notice that the moment you notice a thought in the mind take that as an object of Consciousness just watch

it if it's a visual image or if this language and then come back to Sensations and sounds we're just going to do this for a few more moments so allow yourself to begin again as though for the first time here just feel the next breath okay so now you can open your eyes now it's easy to feel when you open your eyes that something has fundamentally changed you know a moment ago you seem to be in in your head focusing on your inner experience but now you open your eyes and you're your out in the

world again but but nothing has fundamentally changed the the world you see with your open eyes is in the same place you were with your eyes closed it is this is consciousness okay I'm not saying the world isn't real but as a matter of your experience it's more accurate to say that that I and everyone here are in your consci ious then that your Consciousness is in this room it's a matter of experience here's one way you can see that just just visualize a diamond but this size between my two hands you just project it

there now depending on your powers of visualization I I should appear to be very very rich even if you're even if you're bad at this you probably can project something something something changes when I ask you to do this change it to a tomato is there can I can I see a show of hand does how many people have something change as a visual percept when you project here how many of you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about okay I I am in your brain right now okay everyone here is in your your

brain cuz I am pinching your brain this is consciousness pinching Consciousness what whatever you can possibly notice in your body in your mind in the world has only one place to appear in your conscious experience now I'm not saying this is all just a dream but as a neurological matter it is very much like a dream it is a dream that is constrained by inputs from the external world and the dreams we call dreams at night are are dreams that are not constrained by the external world and that's why you seem to be able to

get away with everything but your mind is all you have it's all you've ever had it's all you have to offer other people and this might sound callous to say when when they're Maybe many other aspects of your life that seem in need of of being addressed when you when you're trying to struggling to find a career or or you're sick but it's still true if if you perpetually angry and depressed and confused and unloving it doesn't matter how much success you have or who is in your life you're not going to enjoy any of

it I suspect you could all make a list of things you want to accomplish of things you that really need to be changed about your life what is the significance of everything on that list each thing on the list seems to promise that if if you could only do it you would have reason to just be happy in the present moment we are all trying to find a path back to the present moment and good enough reason to just be happy here and and the practice of meditation I I just showed you often called mindfulness

meditation is just a trick for doing that it's it's a trick for setting aside your to-do list if only for a few moments and and actually locate a feeling of fulfillment in the present and again I'm not saying that everything on your on your list is absurd or not worth accomplishing but how dissatisfied with the present do you have to be in order to prepare a satisfying future how neuronic do you have to be how unhappy do you have to be how much stressed do you have to feel how unpleasant do you have to be

for other people to be around we if you're constantly ruminating about what you just did or what you should have done or what you would have done if you if you only had the chance you will miss your life and you you'll fail to connect with it you'll fail to connect with other people when other people talk you'll be waiting for them to shut up so that you can say what's on your mind to say even when you don't have an opportunity to talk in a moment like this when you're just when you just need

to listen the your the conversation as an automaticity continues you have a voice in your head that keeps saying things haven't you noticed the conversation we have with ourselves every minute of the day comes at a cost it's I'm not saying that discursive thought is not necessary or useful but it is the mechanism by which most of our suffering is inflicted the sorrow and the self-doubt and the anxiety and the fear and yes the fear of death being thinking is useful but being perpetually lost in thought isn't okay being the mere hostage of the next

thought that comes kinian into Consciousness isn't useful so if there if there's an antidote to the fear of death and the experience of loss that's compatible with reason I think it's to be found here the purpose of life is pretty obvious we are we are constantly why do we create culture and form relationships but beyond matters of mere survival okay we are constantly trying to create and repair a world that our minds want to be in and and we alone among Humanity for the most part have realized that religion is a bad way to do

that so we have to start a new conversation thank you very [Applause] much thank you questions yep there's time for questions I told you he was a Jedi uh up the top there above the exit sign man in a white shirt hello um I'd like your response to a a sort of a middle way I've been trying to convince people about um middleway between death as the end and your uh iPad 2. or 25 Consciousness upload idea uhhuh um so we don't have that iPad 25 but we do have 4,000 cons Consciousness simulators here um

tomorrow we're or this afternoon we're going to be simulating the sort of hitch processes various of them on a distributed system um now it's not embodied and it's not as consoling as having him around but um it's real in some sense and it's active and and in some sort of weak way um we are keeping part of that Consciousness going um it also sort of Demands Our intention uh attention and effort to do and it also sort of means I I fear that I I missed a few crucial nouns in what has already been said

so I I Sor I've got a call so I think it's uh going on all right as a question please okay the the question is can we act as this iPad 25 for uh people who've died right a kind of mtic afterlife I believe I understand that question I I think if I'm not mistaken uh Douglas hoffstead uh who thinks that's the case that it's possible to have so fully em bibed another person's Consciousness that you their thoughts their way of thinking that your memory of them has is kind of an emulation of them and

that's that suggests a kind of uh way of thinking about their their continuing um that doesn't work for me and I mean it does doesn't work it's not going to work for the rest of humanity that really C care about the difference between you know getting a dial tone at death and having an experience I mean it's your uh there are many paradoxes to to to that arise here when you think about copying uh really copying a human mind uh and and it's very it's very difficult to to to think of of what it would

mean if we actually could back ourselves up but the idea that somehow everyone's memory of us uh is a way of living on in in the relevant sense uh I don't think it is it's important I mean I think it's it's very it's nice to think about how one's influence in the world propagates and and how people uh live on in that sense but it's not it's not living on in the sense that that that people I think really care about uh so yep there's a question down here on the floor Sam near the door

just near the door just down here good day Sam um thanks first of all um just a fairly broad question but um I'm just wondering uh what your opinions on DMT are and um and well I don't know how much you know assume you know more than me but um perhaps maybe if it's found naturally in the human brain perhaps why or if there's anything you'd like to say about that yeah well I'm I'm unqualified to uh talk about it because I haven't done it uh for those of you who don't know DMT is a

is famous as the most potent psychedelic uh in the sense that it's not not in terms of the size of the dose required to to uh get you off but but the the effects of taking it's the it's um uh and it also distinguishes itself because it's it's the shortest acting and it is an endogenous molecule that we already have uh in our brains and elsewhere and so it's it's to some in some sense it's this is a an illegal neurotransmitter uh that people can uh it becomes available when you smoke it or inject it

and it leads to the shortest uh and yet most stratospheric uh change in in Consciousness so a whole Tri you an acid trip could be an LSD trip could be 10 hours DMT could be 10 minutes you know full course uh and the phenomenology of this experience is interesting because it's not like it's you with a changed perception uh what people tend to report if they if they get a sufficient amount of DMT on board and apparently that's hard because it's very unpleasant to smoke but they they report getting kind of shot out of themselves

and Landing elsewhere and the phenomenology of this experience is is is there's almost no classical religious imagery at all no matter who you are taking this drug you don't meet Jesus and you don't meet your grandma and you don't you don't meet Buddha but what people tend to report is very bizarre kind of alien insectile like creatures that they come into the presence of uh so there's this probably what I just said sounds like complete Insanity to most people in this room but you you go online and you get smart serious people trying to make

sense of this phenomenology um but I I've never done it and and so I I can't you know I can't speak as one who has had to integrate that experience one more question uh up the top here above the exit signs Hi Sam uh as an atheist I have really started valuing uh life like and the dignity of life but the problem is that now when I hear of any loss of life which has happened due to some deliberate actions of others or due to some carelessness of others it's it saddens me you know it

Grieves makes me angry because earlier I used to just feel oh accident happened because it it just had to happen and it happened but now I can see the responsibility of other peoples that others are being robbed of their right to live and so how do I deal with this like this anger this grief me or other aths like me who can clearly see the responsibilities of others right right well as I said this this uh the change in attitude that I just recommended that I kind of smuggled mindfulness meditation into this talk and and

voed it on 4,000 atheists uh so you're now all Buddhists that's a I'm sorry to have done that to you um but it is an antidote to that kind of suffering when you look closely at the mechanics of your own suffering you find that when you're suffering you are lost in thought now that may seem like a the pushback you immediately get from that is that well some things are worth suffering over you mean you mean to tell me that you know my child died and I could stop to suff stop suffering if I just

you know break the spell of thought yes to some degree I mean it's but it's it's damn hard to do when when the bar is set that high when you're dealing with with the death of someone close to you but it is the experience of of so the thing you just did for five minutes is something that I have done I've gone on Retreat for weeks and months once at a time and in silence for 18 hours a day just did that exercise uh and so the the it takes a long time to realize how

much thought is clouding your your experience at the present moment and and how much it's um how much of our kind of mediocrity and how we feel moment to moment is just a matter of us continually thinking this is undercurrent of thought and so when some so when something terrible happens the undercurrent of your thought is you know all of the these these kind of grief stricken ideas I'll never see her again uh the memory of how uh much you loved her back and forth back and forth and and and you're buffeted by thought ceaselessly

and and for most of us there is no alternative but we're just Hostage to the contents of the next thought uh and there is if there's relief to be found in the face of death and loss that the relief is to be bear down upon the present moment and become interested enough in the present moment so that you you can notice that that to some degree Consciousness is is a quanus even in the presence of that kind of emotional pain and it does and then um uh it does it does erode the pain of of

that pain and again to some degree it's a kind of framing issue it's like it's the difference between thinking that the pain in your arm is because you're now getting getting uh so good at lifting weights uh or thinking that it's because you've got bone cancer it could be the exact same sensation but that the framing is the difference is total and so what I'm recommending to you is many good things come from training we give no thought to training the mind we give a lot of thought to training our body we give a lot

of thought to training uh to physical health we give a lot of thought to getting more information you education understanding more about the world more facts we give very little thought to training attention itself and one of the dividends paid and there's there's a fair amount of neur neuroscientific research on this point uh on specifically the point of mindfulness meditation uh is that emotional self-regulation and and many Cog cognitive improvements many good things happen when you can actually just drop your stress and the automaticity of thinking for a moment and and just be aware of

the next sensation the next thought the next moment of a mood and there's just our experiences a flow in the present moment and there's there's relief to be found there but it it can be kind of hard one it takes training it takes it takes a commitment to um not merely brooding and thinking uh and that's uh again and and I'm not I'm not discounting the utility of thought and I'm not discounting the the importance of sorting out the world you know that there's a quietistic bias among meditators that I think is completely dysfunctional and

we don't want a culture of people who are not engaged and not trying to improve the world uh but if there's any kernel of Truth in the religions we so deplore and they are just a carnival of Errors the truth is that it's possible to s into the present moment in such a way as to find it sacred and to and to cease to have a problem and that's that's just a fact that which there's so much testimony and unfortunately most of the testimony is contaminated with religious so that's do