Everything WRONG With The Modern World ( A Hopeful Way Forward) | Sam Harris x Rich Roll

social media is poised to render us effectively ungovernable when we have differences of opinion they can't be in the center of the map where it's crucial to navigate my guest today is Sam Harris a renowned neuroscientist philosopher author host of The Making Sense podcast and founder of the waking up meditation app we have performed a psychological experiment on ourselves that's not going well we know that lies are traveling faster and farther than the truth my people have just different sets of facts Sam Ro to prominence for his criticism of religion and as a leading Authority

in new atheism many of these Trends have been advancing on us for many decades but when you see what's you happening on college campuses now where you've got people just openly supporting a death cult there's just so much confusion and misinformation is clearly a major part of it he's written many influential books on religion rationality Free Will mindfulness and ethical living it's possible to recognize that there is no problem to solve in this moment so much of the story of being happy is not a matter of changing the world it's a matter of changing your

response to the [Music] [Music] world today's episode is brought to you by the awesome organizations that make this show possible [Music] great to see you Sam thank you for doing this today been looking forward to this for a long time likewise so many things that we can cover today I think the subject matter terrain is is relatively Limitless but I wanted to kind of open with first just recognizing how formative your work has been for me you're somebody who I think has courageously modeled intellectual rigor in the public sphere you've demonstrated you know a truly

laudable degree of fearlessness in which you engage with ideas and you're an example I think of the power of conversation as this primary driver of positive change which is something I care a lot about and think a lot about um but I think right now we find ourselves in a curious moment a sort of unhinged moment depending upon how you define it where it feels like as a culture we've sort of lost touch with some of the best parts of of who we are we used to be a culture of high thinkers I think that

was something that defined us as a society a people who were mature enough to debate important issues with a level of rational decorum and it seems on some level that we've begun to lose these cognitive qualities uh there's a disintegration of critical thinking that is compounded by a decline in institutional trust and a derogation of expertise across media government business medicine and Science and I see you as somebody who's really trying to preserve this tradition of open dialogue and constructive disagreement and the stress testing of ideas um but it feels more and more like we

are untethered to this important fabric like we're losing the war of good ideas to misinformation and the Allure of bad incentives that are increasingly ruling the information and intellectual landscape and I think the implications of this are rather dire in terms of the coherence of decision-making our Democratic systems and and Society at large so you know I'm interested in how you are reflecting on this moment that we find ourselves in and how you are trying to make sense of it how we got here and where we go from here yeah yeah well first thank you

I'm I'm very glad you found my work useful and um it's great to see what's happened for you here it's just uh it's very impressive what you built and it's it's beautiful yeah I'm quite worried that um we have performed a a psychological experiment on ourselves that's not going well and I I credit social media with a lot of the the problem but uh it's not everything I was just reading the closing of the American mind which came out in 8 7 I think and so much of what alss US was was winged about in

that book by Alan Bloom many of these Trends have been have been advancing on us for many decades but when you see what's you know happening on college campuses now where you know everything is upside down you've got people just openly supporting a death cult and thinking that they're they're you know champion in human freedom is not to say there there isn't something perhaps to protest there but it's it's certainly not what's being articulated on on our in our finest Universities at the moment there's just so much confusion and it is misinformation is clearly a

major part of it it's not just that there are good faith differences of opinion about how we should respond to the same set of facts I me people have just different sets of facts and I feel like that uh process of amplifying confusion is getting away from us I've long thought you know at least at least for a year and a half since I you know deleted my own Twitter account that social media in particular is poised to render us effectively ungovernable right and we just if we can't agree about the most basic things that

are happening in the world this is a just a local example but it's ringing in my memory I know someone who over overheard a a teenage girl you a senior in high school actually no she's not she's now in college and this is a girl who got got in you she went to a private school here in Los Angeles she got into the finest colleges in America you know I'm talking like MIT and Caltech and you know colleges like that she was overheard to say that she had just heard someone say that Hamas wanted to

kill all the Jews and she knows that's not true to the contrary the Jews want to kill all the Palestinians right that's her truth right on the basis of what she's you know probably protesting somewhere that's the problem in microcosm but it's just if we can't agree about what Hamas is when Hamas has told us ad nauseum and then at every opportunity tried to to you know practice this uh you know their murderous ideology it's just I just don't see a Way Forward right it is something that worries me it's hard to not be pessimistic

I resist pessimism but when you really reflect on the landscape a situation in which we truly can't agree upon a shared sense of what is real and what is true there really isn't a Way Forward there is no way that a democratic system can cohere without that and I think amidst that um in terms of how you move forward there isn't a sense of being able to engage with the ideas themselves in any kind of good faith manner to arrive at a shared sense of what is true and what is real yeah and and the

problem especially right of Center at the moment is that any effort to contain the misinformation problem is perceived as censorship right so whether it's a platform you know trying to get aggressive with moderation whether it's a a government that's you know worrying about the you know malicious amplification of disinformation and misinformation whether it's just the acknowledgement that the algorithms are such that they preferentially amplify misinformation there's something wrong with that right it's not actually there just a Level Playing Field upon which everyone has their free speech no there's just there's there's a business model that

is just bursting to the seams with perverse incentives and we know that lies are traveling faster and farther than the truth any effort to address that even what I'm saying now even just acknowledging the misinformation problem itself makes you sound like an elitist sto anywhere right of Center in in America in particular right so it's a pro-censorship elitist stoe and you know the space we're in alternative media really plays into this because there's just this you know what I've been calling a new religion of contrarianism where every anti-establishment narrative just gets analyst ly extrapolated and

it doesn't matter if they don't all fit together right it's just what you want is just this this rapacious search for anomalies they don't have to all fit together it just can be like you know the the wall the wall with you know strings connecting nodes of Madness you know John Nash style and so you have a figure like Tucker Carlson who really gets lionized throughout you know the the podcast spere I I've just I've watched podcast after podcast have him on you know since he got kicked off of Fox and not ask him a

skeptical question whereas he's he's a demonstrated liar and demagogue and it really I could just think he's a he's an Entertainer you know he's a very cynical Entertainer really you know and he's he's entertaining A personality cult that is organized around Trump and and other figures out in you know out on the the populace right in America but it's not to say that nothing he says is ever true but many of these people have cultivated audiences that simply don't care about lies right this is the thing that's that's amazing this like there are people who

are uncan because they have found an audience that simply doesn't care about any normal indiscretion that would cancel somebody right like you know can't we can talk about cancel culture it's a it's a real problem it's not you know I'm not ignoring all of the craziness on the left that has gotten people you know fired and you know and you know reputationally murdered but you know when you're talking about someone like Trump or Tucker or any of these you know populous figures on the right the people who love them the people who support them don't

care when they are caught line right that doesn't matter that's just how you play the game and that's you know so it's they're playing by a different kind of reputational physics and it's it's totally dysfunctional for our politics all of the incentives out there in podcast landia and on social media incentivize this type of behavior what traffics is hypotheses that challenge the mainstream narrative and no matter how how unhinged these ideas are that seems to be what people are interested in and that comes at the cost of Truth and this shared sense of what is

real and what isn't just asking questions or yeah yeah I'm just asking questions I'm here for open and free dialogue and everything that you're seeing and reading in in mainstream news outlets is corrupted and co-opted uh and captured and yet there is no journalistic ethic at play in podcast landia or in you know social media at large so when somebody is platforming an individual with spurious ideas and allows them to basically just pontificate ad nauseum without any push back whatsoever I can't help but think like we could use a little bit of journalistic Ethics yeah

here yeah and I don't know that you could layer that in or compel anybody to do that but certainly the health of the ecosystem at large would would benefit from that but to your point around the idea that it doesn't matter if you're lying and nobody seems to care with respect to somebody like Tucker Carlson he strikes me as somebody who's smart enough to know what he's doing what is your sense of self-awareness that he has about that kind of behavior there is something I think deeply cynical about him as a person I I don't

know him I I've been interviewed by him a couple times but was a long time ago I met him a couple times but I want to just see how he operates it's um there's no question he's pandering consciously to an audience you know he he just knows how he's going to how his brand is built but what's amazing is the audience is such that there's no level of incoherence both you both with you know with just the facts as we know them about Evolution or about anything else or even incoherence with one's own self right

that matters and someone like Trump can contradict himself in the span of five minutes and he has a an audience that doesn't care which I don't know what to compare it to it's it's almost like the you know is the World Wrestling Federation audience it's like they on some level you know the thing is fake but you've agreed to take it seriously it's you know ironically it's dangerous but for different reasons than it seems to be dangerous I mean it's I'm not saying those guys aren't real athletes and but it's just it's all about a

kind of performance that creates a certain mood you know and in this case in the contrarian space it's a mood of Suspicion it's a mood of contempt for so-called Elites and for institutions you know the conspiracy thinking issue is a you know I view it as a kind of pornography of doubt you know it's a pornography of mistrust it's just the people at Davos are just twirling their mustaches and pulling you know the strings and the world economic Forum on some level it all comes back to the Jews for half of these people you know

there's a danger to this kind of thinking ultimately before you arrive at pograms or you know genocides there's there are many steps along the way where you have a even a very wealthy democracy like our own becoming less and less able to govern itself I think they mean we we made terrific missteps during covid obviously but we should have learned something from them and we should be better placed to respond to the next pandemic I think that if we had another pandemic today we would do work course right there's no question yeah I me people

are less ready to to trust anything coming nobody would be on board with any kind of mandate around anything yeah yeah and you know listen there are reasons why people distrust these institutions there have been missteps and mistakes um but the level of distrust seems to exceed the level at which it it's perhaps warranted I guess and something that you always talk about is the fact that we need to trust institutions and we need to listen to experts so on some level we must repair trust in our institutions and find a way to you know

value the experts in a way that when we are in a predicament a future predicament which will inevitably occur we're in a position to move forward in the best way that that we can but what is the means by which we get back to that place one thing is we have to recognize as a as consumers of information and you know as consumers of the the exports of from all of our institutions that there are moments where the stakes are much higher than normal and where trusting institutions and maintain even flawed institutions and maintaining order

is an intrinsic good and I mean the analogy I always draw here because it's you it's everyone has had this experience and they just they just get it is to what it's like to be in a plane at 30,000 ft right things change when you're in a plane at 30,000 ft I mean if the plane's on the ground fine it's just a it's just a an uncomfortable room right but once it's flying and your life is in the hands of two pilots who you haven't met and you're surrounded by strangers and you're in a conf

space our tolerance for diversity of opinion your really valuable intrusive diversity of opinion and you know the next guy's bright idea about what we should all do now right it goes down to zero when things matter I mean especially from the cockpit I mean just imagine a imagine what how little need be said over the PA system of an airplane that's flying to provoke an absolute emergency the could just get on uh and say you know Mommy Mommy is that you right like that's a you know that's a that's I I consider everything would immediately

you know go that would get your attention right like this is what the [ __ ] are we going to do now right there are moments in society and I think we've lived through some recently that are highly analogous to a plane in Flight right there were moments during Co that cons Ed this certainly at the beginning I think Trump uh not committing to a peaceful transfer of power and denying the election results and then giving us January 6th based on pure misinformation and lies um that was another moment uh we may yet have other

moments like that here in short order there are moments where it becomes irresponsible to play the just asking questions routine you know just turn on the mic and let Tucker Tucker or other blow hard roll for 4 hours in front of tens of millions of people it's just irresponsible you know it's just not it's not what anyone should be doing and it's not obvious in the way it should be obvious and the way it is obviously in an airplane right it's like you know to to be in an airplane at 30,000 fet I mean this

is something I I said in my podcast at one point I forget what I was responding to when the plane is flying that's not the moment where you want the person sitting next to you to get out their laptop and start doing research on that Boeing engine that is outside the window and start announcing to everyone on the plane that this is you know they've got their own ideas about the engineering of jet engines and you know here's an article in the epoch times that says that this engine is faulty right and to get us

all talking about this and you know wondering whether we should approach approach the cockpit and I mean like this is not no one wants any of that until the plane lands right we have to be alert to those moments where yeah I understand that the CDC isn't perfect but it's the best thing we have at that moment right we probably shouldn't go down the rabbit hole of doing a a postmortem on on covid because there's so much to talk about there but um we should have understood that the science around an emerging pandemic was by

definition a moving Target and then we were going to get it wrong and we were going to revise our opinion and we were going to recognize that the statement that the vaccines prevent transmission was vulnerable to our discovery that actually they don't pre prevent transmission they just dampen morbidity and and death and yet the people who will childishly seize on you know Biden's statement that he said it was going to prevent trans transmission and look at it doesn't right as as though that's the place to stop for all time you know it's all a hoax

it's all you know a planemic it's all again George Soros or some some nefarious person trying to exert or Welling control on society I mean these vaccines are are nothing but a tool of control um that's where all the crazy came out and yet we could have just understood that the story was going to change we've got imp imperfect institutions imperfect people uh working under significant duress without enough resources and having to message into a Maelstrom of misinformation and disinformation to a a frankly very very childish population we were in many ways behaving like terrified

children you know understandably perhaps but it's just Public Health messaging is a is not just the Comm communication of science it's a political apparatus and perhaps perhaps too much so and so I mean there were huge missteps I mean the noble lie about masks was idiotic and I mean yeah I mean I I I I wonder how much of this could have been avoided with better Public Health communication and a modum of transparency and humility around what we knew then and didn't know some responsibility and fault lies in the people who were crafting the messaging

that was going out to the public um that led people to believe certain definitives yeah you know and at the cost of understanding that it was a moving Target and I wonder had that been handled more appropriately if we would have avoided some of the insan ity that we see today maybe not I don't know but no I mean that that's certainly to be hoped I I worry that there was probably no even perfect communication of the truth and the truth was messy would have still doomed us to the experience that we had I mean

it's just I don't I don't know how to interpret a an information landscape wherein Hamas can admit again and again and again from their original charter onto their most recent utterances that they want to kill all the Jews and you can still have people at Columbia and Harvard and Stanford and who think that these are the good guys and I mean it's just there's something else going on and Choose Your Own epistemic Adventure moment yeah I mean what is your sense of what else is going on like what led to you know that sensibility is

it just a metastasizing of this this distrust of any kind of traditional mainstream narrative at large there's that I mean this you know this particular problem is leveraging our own political diseases right like so we you know in America we have this you know kind of social justice moral Panic that's been happening on the left for quite some time that's you know it's understandable how we got here but we're still it's still a moral Panic right so you know there are the people on the left who think that the problem of racism has not not

only not gone away it's it's more excruciating than ever and that what we see overseas just fits the same template of you know the oppressor oppressed narrative and you know white versus black or white versus brown and in this case the you know the Jews of Israel are white as as though that made any sense they're just not seeing what's actually happening there there's profound amount of misinformation being spread but it it's it's it's so sticky because it fits this template of you know anything that's essentially against the West that can be spun as throwing

off the Yoke of you know colonialist imperialist oppression that's supremely attractive left of center and it just just draws a ton of energy But ultimately you know hyper reductive in its perspective down to like a binary of oppressor oppressed and no room for any Nuance or sense of the long history that led to this intractable conflict yeah and it's just not even interacting with the underlying logic of the conflict I mean so I tend to come at this you know through a different lens I'm I'm I've been focused on the the problem of jihadism ever

since September 11th I was certainly aware of the problem before that but you know it became you know kind of my job to focus on it uh after that that is a much bigger issue than this problem that we're seeing in between Israel and and the Palestinians and it only partially overlaps with this this issue of anti-Semitism which you know I really have just not paid attention to for 20 years anti-Semitism is something that I've never really worried about I've been a student of it you know historically you know a student of the Holocaust and

and I'm aware that anti-Semitism has never really disappeared from the world but it's just it's it's been a a rounding error on my you know more moral and political concerns certainly in an American context right I can't say that's true anymore but I I still view the current moment with Israel and and the Palestinians and and Iran I should say you more properly Hamas Hezbollah and Iran but um as a subset of this this larger issue which is a conflict between open societies and a a death cult that has been brewing in in dozens of

you know scores of really probably a hundred countries uh for a very long time when you look at what these you know what jihadists want you know what their stated aspirations are and what their behavior tells us they're committed to it's got nothing to do with the idealism of people on the left right I mean this is a proper death cult and it's you know these people expect to get to Paradise one dying in the right circumstances and Hamas simply doesn't care about how many pal Indians die because it's they know it works to their

advantage and they sincerely believe that all the good Muslims go to paradise they're not just paying lip service to this they really believe this I mean I I stumbled upon an article I don't know how I found this but I stumbled upon an article in the New York Times published 15 years ago that I don't know if it would be published today but it was published in 2009 and it was just reporting a Hamas you know rocket barrage on Israel and they returned fire but because Hamas was shooting from this you know outside of Hospital

the Israelis you know hit hit part of a hospital they're reporting on this but the the the focus of the article was the Hamas fighter who was you know wounded and being treated in a hospital he was ecstatic over everything that was happening all the casualties and and his own injuries and the fact that he's going to get back into battle immediately and they were interviewing him why why are you so happy right this was actually the question put to him and he said don't you understand this is this is all great like everyone's going

to Paradise I want I'm going to get to Paradise there's just no Factor right like all of this the death is not a problem right and when they when they chant we love death more than the infidels love life or we love death more than the Americans love life or we love death more than the Jews love life most people most secular liberal people imagine that that is some kind of propagandistic posturing right whereas it is an actual statement of psychological truth it is is just a confession of a worldview and if you don't if

you doubt that you're just uninformed about what jihadism is and how it has leveraged the sincere religious beliefs and spiritual aspirations of many many people now what how many people we're talking about is is anyone's guess it's certainly not a majority of Muslims worldwide but it's not an accident that this is very hard to talk about in a Muslim context because it is not a distortion of Islam right it's not like you can read the Quran and the Hadith and the biography of Muhammad and say oh it's totally obvious where Hamas is going wrong or

where the Islamic state is going wrong because it's not obvious right and that's a problem it's a problem for the entire world it's a problem for the Muslim world most of the victims of jihadist atrocities are Muslim right so the Muslim world has to sort this out they need to win a war of ideas with themselves they need to win a civil war on you know dozens of fronts um there's something like 55 majority Muslim countries there's a score of countries that is just that are living with kind of unendurable jihadist you know terrorism that

we don't even think about because it's just it's not affecting us it's just Muslim on Muslim violence you know bokah Haram uses children as suicide bombers in [ __ ] neria right I it's like no one hears about it but it's the same logic it's got nothing to do with Israel it's got nothing to do with Jews it's the same death cult Behavior if you interview any of these guys they expect to get to get to Paradise right it's a belief system and we have to figure out how to inspire a a proper re reformation

and Renaissance in the Muslim World such that the belief system becomes more and more anathematized and you know Christianity would seem pretty crazy too if we were dealing with the Christians of the 14th century right but we're not you know because Christianity has been you know apart from a few Pockets beaten into submission by enduring a a slow motion collision with modernity for hundreds of years right it's just been it's been steadily bracketed by scientific insight and Democratic politics and secularism and you know more and more Christians more of the time realizing they just don't

want to live that way right they don't want witches being burned for for their witchcraft because they think probably witches don't exist and they don't want anyone being burned for Thought crimes right so we're not in the 14th century anymore right the criticism that gets levied in your direction on that perspective is that there how many Muslims are there a billion about two billion two billion Muslims worldwide and the jihadists and the Bad actors and the violent cohort is a tiny radicalized sliver of this gigantic you know religious movement that is global except I mean

there there many many caveat I would add to that that that dark in the picture but I mean there's this larger subset of of what I would call islamists around this radical core of jihadists people who still want Islam to determine DET politics and to determine the character of society but they're not willing to blow themselves up on a bus to advance that cause right they want to they want to bring this to about through Democratic processes or you know some non-violent means in many cases most cases but they still have a vision of life

where they want to live under Sharia law they would agree that blasphemy and apostasy are are killing offenses certainly if they if they become uh too pronounced you know these the people who think that you know Salon Salon rushy should have been killed for his novel and the Danish cartoonists right they they they should have been killed for drawing those cartoons right how how large is the the population of people that would raise their hands in favor of sharia law yeah it's a lot bigger than you would want it depends on which polls you trust

and where those polls are run but in the UK the the polling on this is um it's never a tiny segment I mean it's like you know 25% say they want to live under Sharia law draw a stark line between you know the principles of of an an open Democratic pluralistic society and something quite a bit more um Theocratic you get much higher percentages so if you ask and these are these are old polls because now we're talking about like the the Danish cartoon controversy so we're back in I guess 2006 the Charlie HDO thing

yeah like so but like if you ask you know should the the cartoonist have been punished punished for drawing those cartoons like you know and and punished you know I don't know that punished was spelled out in the poll but punished was probably you know thrown in prison right at a minimum you know then you get like you know 60 70% of of Muslims in the UK saying yes they should be punished right so there a lot of opinions need to change to be able to be sanguin about the attitudes of these two billion people

right it's just it's just not um it's not an accident you got 55 Muslim Maj majority countries none of them are free places to live right comparatively free places to live I mean you know there's there's places like the UAE where you can you know you and I could go there and have a very free experience but um still even there you can be thrown in jail for effectively thought crimes I think there are many Western societies that have a problem with a an kind of an ambient level of islamist public opinion uh you know

America is not we're not where Western Europe is Western Europe really has a problem London really has a problem you know I know people who say the kinds of things I'm saying now in public and you know the the Metropolitan Police in London tell them not to go to London right because they can't keep them safe right when was the last time you went to London hasn't been that long but you know I'm I'm less famous in London than the people I'm thinking about you know so I bet there's a lot of you out there

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to proliferate are you sanguin about the power of conversation to you know heal what ails us like as somebody who who's been a podcaster for over a decade when did you start probably around the same time I did I think yeah I don't when I I started and kind of piece me away I can't even tell you when I was formerly podcasting probably about 10 years ago yeah long time you know somebody who's who's offering your thoughts in monologue form but also you know hosting guests and engaging with other public intellectuals around the ideas that

we're grappling with do you have a sense that this is Curative is this a Fool's errand is this a A Drop in the Ocean I don't spend any time trying to figure out how optimistic or pessimistic I am you know I mean there there are many things that worry me and I and I I talk about them you know a lot I mean conversation is all we've got I've repeated this many times on my own podcast and elsewhere but I mean I I just think we it's a choice between conversation and violence right and when

conversation fails and things really matter we resort to force right again like it bring it back on an airplane at 30,000 ft if the guy next to you won't stop doing the crazy thing that's making everyone worried you're someone's going to choke him out and duct take him to the seat right for the rest of the flight I mean it's just that's what happens that's the world we're living in but it should be simple enough to converge ultimately through conversation I mean it's just it's we're misled to believe that everyone at bottom wants the same

thing because that that's just not true I me again you know jihadists don't want the same thing it's just and if you think that they they do and that the extremity of their behavior is just a symptom of how badly they've been treated you you are guaranteed to be confused about what's happening in the Middle East or anywhere jihadism is a problem you know I mean you literally have people dropping out of medical school in London to go join the Islamic State so that they can you know cut the heads off of yezidis and crucify

them and take sex slaves right it's just a it is not the same program that you and I are running or anyone we know is but most people want more or less the same thing right most of us can most of the time can Converge on shared values right we don't want to be radically out of touch with what's really going on in the world right we don't want to be we don't want our children to get sick and for us to be completely confused as to why right and we don't want there to be

real remedies for that problem and for us to not be able to figure them out or to you know to be you know wrong about what they are we want to be healthy and happy and surrounded by healthy and happy creative people who are well intentioned toward us with whom we can collaborate more or less effortlessly where we're trust we want to be in high trust societies right and we know a lot about how to build all that up and we know a lot about how to tear it down there's a lot we don't know

but we know what an open-ended good faith explorative conversation is on you know a 100 fronts and we know the variables that make it harder and harder to to collaborate in that way one of them is dogmatism you know I mean dogmatism is just it's a problem everywhere except in religion it's it's celebrated right I mean literally Dogma is a good word in explicitly a Catholic context um but we know that you know if if you come to the table with very strong opinions which you cannot actually defend right you because you got them in

a dream or on mother's knee or you know you just you don't know how but you didn't get reasoned into them and you and you you claim you can't get reasoned out of them because you're you're actually closed to evidence and argument right this is what I'm not going to talk about and if you persist in talking to me about it I'm going to get angrier and angrier and you know the conversation's going to end right that many people come to the table with with a set of those opinions right and again religion is the

in my view the prime offender here because it's the only space in which we don't immediately recognize how pathological that is right it's like we've carved out this kind of Walled Garden of taboo where you we've just agreed okay he's a Catholic she's a Jew he he's a Muslim don't challenge their their most cherished beliefs right that's just it's indecent to do so so I think that's dangerous [ __ ] I think our core values our our expectations about what's going to happen in the future even what's going to about what's going to happen after

death uh our our Prime motivations these are things we have to be able to talk about and we have to be able to converge uh and when we have differences of opinion they can't be in the center of the map where where it's crucial to navigate right like it's just someone has to win in the center because we have to figure out what to do next I mean I view morality as a as a navigation problem and we're always faced with this Force choice of what to do next right we're always going to do something

even when we decide okay let's just do nothing but just take a wait and see attitude that itself is a decision you know so you're always doing something individually and collectively and we have you know vast numbers of people who have um very strange ideas about how to navigate and one of the strangest is we have these dogmas that have come down on high that we've it's been we've been forbidden to challenge for thousands of years and they make less and less sense when when ju deposed with all that we've come to know about the

world in the in these Millennia and yet we are going to use them to back stop every decision of real consequence you know should we you know legalize gay marriage well you can have something like 40% of the population say absolutely not and here's why and here's why is a 2,000 year old book right that's becoming less and less serviceable I it was it was it hasn't been serviceable for centuries but now in the presence of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence I mean what does the Bible have to tell us about what to do about AI

right it's just nothing absolutely nothing what we need are smart well-intentioned well-educated people who are are willing to draw from all the best ideas whatever their Providence and if you know some of them come from the Bible great but to be Hostage to a you know an Iron Age conversation which is what any religious dogmatist is I mean they're basically saying there's a conversation that was had here in the 7th Century or in the first century ad or in you know you know 600 BC where the things that were ever said were said then they

can suffer no editing or bowdlerization they're just they're so good I'm going to say that they were dictated by the creator of the universe right and that takes precedence over any good idea with the brightest minds and the latest breakthroughs in science and understanding that we have today and there's nothing you know crisper AI stem cell research there nothing that can come over the transom stuff that could not possibly have been foreseen not only 2,000 years ago couldn't it couldn't have been foreseen 150 years ago nothing is going to supersede this source code uh that

uh we're attached to um and it's there's something strange this is a point I made long ago in my first book the end of Faith we've gotten so used to the idea that the Creator of the universe wrote or dictated books right it that doesn't somehow doesn't seem strange to people but it would immediately seem strange if someone thought that there were you know that they had a CD ROM that had been you know produced by the creator of the universe or um you know a film right just imagine a film that is now going

to be totally unchallengeable around which a cult of people is going to organize because they think the film is the product of I'm intelligence you know it's just these are human artifacts we know they are and so what we need is a again and I'm not saying they're all useless I mean there's there there are things in the Bible like the golden rule that contains a tremendous amount of wisdom you know and and we would ignore that wisdom at our Peril right I me I think the golden rule is is almost always a great heuristic

you know it's it's it's kind of the moral core of of most uh um moments you know certainly in society and but it has exceptions but it's not um it's deeply wise as it's not unique to the Bible but it's it's certainly there right so I just think we don't have the luxury anymore of being provincial we have access to the to totality of human knowledge now and and non-human knowledge as it's you know soon to be produced right and so the idea that people who had literally could never have foreseen anything that you currently

know that constitutes your most basic education on any topic right we're talking about people who didn't know about electricity they didn't know about you know information technology computation you know I mean just there there's nothing that that fills your mind that would constitute even a the rudiments of a seventh grade education at this point that they were aware of right or that they could have foreseen and yet most people in most places most of the time think that's the the most important literature on Earth for for moral guidance right it's literature that doesn't even get

slavery right right it's it's incredible they you like these are books that refute themselves when you see that they literally they I mean slavery on balance is supported in both the Bible and the Quran right it's not that it's not that you can't ch pick parts of the Bible and and find a reason to you know no longer keep slaves but you barely can do that and if you want to keep slaves you find endless justification not endless but straightforward justification um and that's what it's that's the simplest moral problem we have ever faced it

still exists to some degree and it's horrific you know the houthis who are being celebrated on college campuses uhh you from coast to coast now they um they have keep and sell slaves but uh you find you know find one who looks like Timothy Shalom and um they celebrated uh at Harvard and Columbia to your point that conversation is all we have behind that is another thing that you repeat often which is that truly all we have is our mind so I want to shift gears a little bit and kind of enter this world which

I think is the world you enjoy exploring more than these other political hot button issues well it's also the world from which or the the view from which all of this seems so unnecessary like everything we've just talked about is such a massive opportunity cost right I mean the fact that we even are tempted to talk about it is is an opportunity cost but the fact that so much of our lives have to be spent uh cognizant of all of the the the dangers and dysfunction born of you know everything we've been just indicating in

in the conversation thus far it just none of it has to happen this way it's all just a symptom of confusion a function of the mind and Consciousness and so the conversations that matter require an upleveling of our mind and an elevated sense of consciousness which I think is at the core of your work and Central to not just the podcast but the waking up app itself so I want to explore that a little bit but I want to go really to the beginning you and I were in the same freshman class at Stanford you

right yeah I and I don't think we ever met yeah I think we tried to figure this out and we couldn't figure out whether we have a whole bunch of friends in common friends that you know we both have stayed in touch with to this day but for some reason I don't think we ever cross paths and then after your freshman year that's when you decided to stop out and go to India is that correct yeah well it it became that I initially stopped out because I thought I was going to write a novel and

you know I was going to write the Great American novel and it just didn't matter if you were in school or had finished school if you're going to be a novelist that was the the original idea you going to literally write a book I had both things going on at the same time because I had gotten interested in meditation and and um esoteric topics like that too but I was also writing and so I just I I thought I had a kind of career a career path in mind that was just me being a novelist

and then I was also going to explore these topics of meditation and and Eastern philosophy and Etc so what was the introduction to meditation like that happened prior to college no it happened during my uh sophomore year through books it was it was the summer after my sophomore year that I uh sat my first Meditation Retreat so so you stay so you were at Sanford for two years before you I see and then I I didn't reenroll in the fall but it was during my sophomore year it was like spring winter spring of my sophomore

year that I I had had an MDMA experience that was really just completely changed my my view of the world I mean that that was the the the main Domino that fell and then I was just reading a lot of you know kind of relevant material around meditation and MH Eastern philosophy and then sat a Meditation Retreat in the summer guess that would have been ' 87 um and then just got really into you know sitting silent meditation Retreats and I went to India and and study with various teachers and I never spent that long

in India I me I never spent more than a couple of months um I never lived there but I made I think Seven Trips to Nepal and maybe six trips to India in that in a period of a handful of years and how did you decide where you were going to go or who you were going to study with or meditate with um did you just locate various ashrams and show up well it was kind of an accident what it was the first book I I read after I had this experience with MDMA was um

romos' book The only dance there is that was his a short book which I think was a transcript of of some talks he gave and romdas was this figure who I didn't know anything about at the time he was a former Harvard Professor who with Tim Timothy ly his name had been Richard Albert when he was at Harvard they both got fired for having fully democratized the the uh the research on on LSD and cybin by giving it out to undergraduates ironically Andrew W was the the student uh crimson wrer who got them fired I

had him here he told that whole story yeah yeah so he and I have spoken about it but I forgot where he landed on this maybe does he feel guilty about having done that or does he feel like that was the right thing to do I don't remember what I don't recall but he was on the whole cannabis thing before anybody uhuh writing about that yeah he was was he editor of the Crimson uh I think I don't know if he was editor but the article he wrote came out in the crimson and resulted it

got them got them fired summary dismissal of of those figures but you know he sort of catalyzed the Romos that we know today as a result of that technically I don't think romdas Richard Albert I think he was given a choice he he could have saved himself or at least to hear him tell it he could have saved himself you but Timothy lirry was definitely getting fired but ramdas just basically just went down with the ship because he just agreed that that was the right thing to do and then he went to India and he

met his Guru and he became you know he changed his name to ramdas and he became a teacher of people and you know some years later and had a very colorful career as a a spiritual figure he wrote this book be here now which was you know a huge bestseller back in I think probably came out in 19771 maybe and so I guess he'd been teaching very actively for maybe close to 15 years when I met him in ' 87 did you go to Massachusetts where he has that farm and no that was milbrook that

was before my time um but he was like teaching at various Retreat centers and so this one was up at Brighton bush in Oregon where I went since I think burned down in one of these recent fires we've had in on the west coast at least partially burned down and he was teaching at that point a very just in a very eclectic range of practices you know he had this kind of Hindu background with lots of you know um Guru yoga and you and devotional chanting and right so there was there was like Kiron of

A Sort that people recognized from you singers like Jai utal and you know who who was or bandas I me those are also people Christian dos they were all in the same scene with the same teacher maharaji in India um but then he was also a student of Buddhist Meditation Vasa meditation which has given us this this you know mindfulness Revolution which um is very different than kind of the Hindu side of things because there's really nothing you need to believe or take on as you know religious in any sense I there's no there's nothing

to worship there's nothing to there's no artwork Associated artwor you don't even have to be interested in the Buddha as a figure you know it's just mindfulness is just paying attention closely to your experience right and if you start by by paying attention to the breath but even that you know in most systems very soon it gets expanded to you're just paying attention to everything you can notice as you can notice it you know just the sights and sounds and Sensations and thoughts and emotions are rising continuously and you're just noticing what you notice systematically

and every time you get lost in thought which is to say every time you're distracted by thought you're thinking without knowing when you're thinking you just come back to noticing the breath sounds Sensations there's really nothing to believe it's just the only thing you have to believe is that it makes sense that if you want to know more about what it's like to be you it makes sense to pay attention you know it's like why not pay more attention to your experience if you really want to see what you are as a mind body system

uh from the first person side so that was the the other practice the main practice was teaching on this Retreat so I I left that first retreat with a lot of you know ideas in my head about just you know how I wanted to kind of recapitulate the 60s for myself and part of that was going to India and studying with various teachers you know Hindu and not and just you know seeing what happens there part of that was continuing to experiment with psychedelics I like actually that on that first Retreat I I actually took

acid for the first time it turns out my roommate on that Retreat had acid who would have thought and I had it you know lucky for me I mean because I I now know it can go you know very differently I've had you know horrific experiences on acid too but that first trip was about as good an acid trip as you know I could imagine having it was just a pure bath in the beatific Vision I mean it was just just you I could not imagine you know if you told me that bad trips were

possible after that Acid Trip as I had heard or had read in the literature I just had no idea you know what that could possibly mean I mean this what I had experienced there for 12 hours was just as close to psychological Freedom as I you know could imagine and it was just the the beautification of everything right it was just you know complete you know merging with nature again in a way that was was totally affirming and magnifying of of every pro-social emotion you know you want to dial up I me if you could

if you could just reach into your own mind and get a hold of the dials that you you know you want to turn to 11 and the others that you wanted to turn to zero you know it was just perfectly doing that you know gratitude and love and awe 1 to 11 and fear and neurotic uh you know self attachment and you know egocentricity and envy and all of that got turned to zero and if you had told me okay well this is what it was like to be the Buddha or this is what it

was like to be Jesus well then I would have you know had no doubt that that's pretty close to the center of the bullseye um i' I've since become a more you know weathered and sophisticated you know connoisseur of these these states and and you know kind of student of the mind and so I have slightly different opinions about what I had experienced there but it launched me into a decade of of kind of inner exploration wherein I absolutely knew that there was a there there right like like the the the thing that I couldn't

having come down from from that first acid trip I knew beyond any possibility of doubt that the the states of mind I was tending to live in were profoundly limiting and and just mediocre right and needlessly so and I couldn't figure out how to get back to to where I was you know in the in the center of the bullseye of that trip but the trip proved that it was possible to have that kind of experience erience of oneself and and one's being in the world it was a state a state of the brain that

was in fact possible and I also there was something very instructive about the coming down part of it I mean I have you have you done psyched never done it I've never done it I I don't know if I feel this way as much currently given all the meditation practice I've done subsequently but at the time coming down was such a grotesque re-education into selfhood I mean it was just I mean it was it was it was pretty brutal but but it was just it was it was deeply instructive like I could see my defenses

and all and my Neurosis just just this carus of armoring it just reassert itself just and it was you could almost hear the hear the you know the ratchets and the gears and just it was just is very poignant and painful and so like like you your confinement to self kind of reasserts itself and at that point you know I hadn't done enough meditation practice to know that this you know freedom from self was really a very different thing than I was then believed because it's it's actually coincident with even just the most ordinary States

Of Consciousness the false picture of spirituality that that psychedelics can give you apart from all the good things that they can give you when when things go well it's very easy to get the impression that freedom is elsewhere right you start out especially you know someone like me on on a first trip like that you start out with this sense of okay it's just me here I'm trying to figure all this stuff out I know I'm not nearly as happy as I want to be or should be I find it very difficult to meditate you

know I try to pay attention but I'm immediately distracted you know my mind wanders and five minutes later I'm I I wake up remembering I was trying to meditate so I'm not like a prodigy at meditation I know I'm not nearly as happy as as I could be or as you know 20% of the population already are for whatever reason and I'm just stuck and now I'm taking this chemical uh in the hopes of learning something about what's possible for my mind and then you get shot into the stratosphere of positively valenced being right where

the the present moment opens up and just discloses a depth and beauty that you really I mean you just couldn't imagine was was ever there and you know it's it's it's obvious your stone because you remember having taken a drug but what is also obvious is that on some level this is more true than what you've been living even when you come down and you and and you're you're back into sort of normal you know normal waking the cramp of normal a waking consciousness but at least part of what you experienced on the trip again

there's there's other sort of pyot Technics that are not fundamental to the to the inside I mean so like the the changes in in you know the visual field like like you the colors right just seeing beautiful colors everywhere it's not like you think okay well this this sort of shocking iridescence of everything that's more true that's how my visual system should really operate that's that's not what I'm talking about but just the the absolute freedom from self-concern and an ability to locate the profundity of of mere being in the present like there's a well

of being that you fall into there's an Associated Clarity with that where it's just like you're not I mean there are many different ways to be stoned where it's just obvious okay this is a drug experience you're less functional than you normally are it's good you're not driving a car you're you know you can barely have a conversation I mean this has some components of it you shouldn't obviously you shouldn't drive on asset or and and when you're really you know fully um uh immersed in what I'm talking about it could be impossible to have

a conversation right language is just the wrong tool for the job of trying to get a hold of what you're experiencing in that moment but there are aspects to it that are clearly more true or more real than what we tend to experience and The crucial Insight is that virtually all of our suffering is a matter of our entanglement with thought and are not noticing that that machinery and not seeing an alternative right so we're just think we're continually defining ourselves and losing our purchase on the present moment and Desiring and fearing and regretting and

Manufacturing disappointments and animosities and and defending an empty core of experience that doesn't need to be defended right like we there's a hallucinatory aspect to our think or even very normal thinking that is quite analogous to being asleep and dreaming and just not noticing that you're dreaming like and and most of us are having a bad dream most of the time and so what happens on psychedelics for you know again when when things go well you things again things can go very badly is you can have a very clear experience of waking up from the

dream of self this sense that the deepest gratification of one's desire is to be seeking something to be seeking happiness in the next moment to be seeking to arrive in the future um it's the experience of a full arrival in the present right which which very few people tend to have I mean even when you're even when things are going great and you're you're getting what you want there's always this superficiality again comes to down to our incapacity to really pay attention and really make contact with experience there's just you're just skating across the top

of experience and grabbing more more more you know whether it's a meal or it's a getting a massage or whatever what whatever the Pure Pleasure experience is there's there's a way which you're not really dropped back into the present you're leaning forward and you're just trying to extract this next moment of pleasure and then also your mind is wandering to the next thing you're going to do it's just the Mirage likee quality of even the best experiences is so amazing to notice because you never quite get there it begins to fall apart your mouth is

full of the thing is that you've been waiting to eat and it's and it's you still can't quite AR arrive and in the next instant you need a drink of water to offset the thing that is just too Clin and it's just too much and you've and now you're now you're uncomfortably stuffed and you're like like there's always a problem like the problem has never gone past anticipating the future lost in thought I mean it's very eloquently articulated um especially given that it's an experience that defies languages capacity to truly capture right we're brought to

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I love them I'm a big fan of the Hamilton style in gloss black that's this Frame right here as well as clear or I guess they call them vintage on the website and uh if you want to try them out for yourself you can do that right now and unlock 20% off your order with the code Rich Roll roka.com or you can click the link in the description below okay back to the [Music] show what's interesting to me about you is that listen there's lots of people that have had LSD experiences and great trips most

of them just returned to their lives some of them go and follow the Grateful Dead but there was something inside of you like a switch was flicked and this you know inner Seeker within you that wanted to better understand what this was all about like the idea of exploring the nature of Mind itself and this sense that we're capable of having a better conscious experience of life um that led you to go on all of these you know kind of adventures In India and Explorations with meditation yeah the the other piece of this is suffering

right it's like what what do you do with psych what do you do with psychological suffering the the the suffering you've already had the suffering you're going to fall into today the suffering that's guaranteed to be coming right the the the reality that that not only are you going to die but if you just live long enough everyone you love is going to die the unavoidability of all of that as much as we try to keep it out of sight and out of mind I I saw this experience as the antidote to that and I

really wanted an antidote to that i' had some moments of real suffering as a teenager and as a like my best friend died when when we were 13 right so like as a 13-year-old I I realized wow this this is not the game I thought I was playing right like the worst thing I can imagine can happen at a moment's notice and in you know from an angle that you know I didn't even you know know was possible I mean if you told me if you'd ask me as a 13-year-old do you think it's possible

that you know one of your friends might die well yeah obviously I would have rationally said yes but you know the the fact that it was really on the menu and it's on the menu every moment of the day came crashing down so I spent a lot of time thinking about death from that moment forward um then my dad died when I was uh 17 then I got to Stanford and uh I had a girlfriend break up with me after my uh freshman year my freshman year girlfriend broke up with me and that hit hit

me really hard I mean I was like I think the first months of sophomore year I was I mean I was like clinically depressed I I just was you know all I was I was just perseverating on having lost this relationship I was so bummed about myself and and yeah I was just in a black hole and the moment I had this exp this this first experience on MDMA I realized I I I just I saw the mechanism I saw how it was entirely self-imposed right I was just thinking in this endless loop about how

much I wished I you know had this relationship that I no longer have how I'm not going to have it tomorrow how I how good it was how I'm not still not going to have it you know I was like I was pinching myself and then wondering why I was uncomfortable um and until you can meditate the profundity of psychedelics for most of us is that it it shows you again I have to keep it issuing this caveat because it can Show You Frank psychosis too but in the best case it shows you a different

possibility but in my view it's not the method to actualize that possibility you can you can see the grass is greener on yeah but and you can't be in doubt about that but you actually need a practice to to change your your habits of attention moment to moment the really profound thing about meditation is that it shows you that there's something very misleading about the the high of psychedelics in that the real Freedom can be found in ordinary States Of Consciousness you don't actually have to feel this this incredible onrushing of energy that you know

causes your body to disappear and for you to feel like you're one with the cosmos you can actually just you can look for yourself and and fail to find it conclusively even when you're checking your email nothing suddenly becomes like a you you know a 400 microgram acid trip it's just your the clarity of there's no there is no egoo in the middle of experience there's just experience right and then we can talk about more more about how that's possible and how one might find that but it's a very different Discovery it doesn't require any

physiological change it just requires you to break the spell of thought right so I was suffering a lot before ID had that uh first experience on on MDMA and so it was a revelation to me that I could I could suddenly see everything from this other perspective where just me getting endlessly wrapped around the axle of self was my problem right I and past and future you know the truth is I was practicing something very diligently I was practicing a meditation on loss and disappointment and loneliness and like I mean I was I was fully

immersed I had deep concentration in those states of mind and it was a you know a thought-based uh reflection that was going on from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep for months I mean everyone has had or most people have had some version of this experience and there there instructive moments that you can find even you know short of psychedelics and short of meditation you can find these moments where for instance many people have had this experience you know someone has died or they you know they've they've gotten a

divorce or some you know some huge cataclysm in their life has happened but you know there's often this moment of you wake up from sleep and there's this interval where you know if you've woken up and you haven't yet the the memory of how [ __ ] up your life is has not come come online yet and you just have this open you know attention and awareness and then then you remember the problem right and the blows to you are are Meed out by thought right it is it requires the thought to feel that miserable

in the next moment more accurately it requires having no perspective on the thought it requires being identified with the thought and that's what that's the spell that meditation breaks I'm reminded of of this story I don't know if it's apocryphal or not um and I can't remember whether it's Romos or or bavand do but one of them decided to give LSD to to the guru the Maharishi you know the story yeah he was like let me try it right and he took some massive dose and it did nothing yeah and so what we take from

that is that this is a person who's already existing in that state of heightened Consciousness yeah of presence truth is I don't know what I think about some of those stories there a lot of crazy stories around maharaji but there's no question that it's possible to have a mind that doesn't cling to thought right and and that's a big deal right even if you can if you can only experience it for short stretches at a time you know just punctuating your life with two seconds of truly open free attention you know doing that 100 times

a day it's a very different day and a very different life than never doing it at all or having it happen to you by accident you know once a week when you're surfing right and then you you come away thinking surfing is so good right like it's it's all about the surfing right no it's about the capacity of the mind to become fully immersed in the present moment such that you're no longer abstracting yourself away from experience and looking over your own shoulder and constructing a self that is in relation to experience I mean most

people feel like they're having an experience they're they're appropriating it from some place outside experience but that whole thing is an experience right there's just subjectively speaking I'm not talking about the metaphysics right we can talk about how you all of this relates to the brain and the body and and the cosmos but I don't follow people like Deepak choa into you know making metaphysical claims about you know how what you experience on acid or in meditation tells you a lot about cosmology or about what happened before the Big Bang Etc uh but when you're

talking about the character of experience there's only experience right there's only Consciousness and its contents and there is no there's no ego in the middle of it and there's no ego on the edge of it and what you feel your ego to be in each moment the feeling of I the feeling there's a subject in the middle that's part of that that's part of the contents of Consciousness right that is but another experience within the context of Consciousness so Consciousness itself doesn't feel that way [ __ ] there's a lot of threads I want to

pull on this but I think before we go further it might be instructive to Define what you mean when you say Consciousness like what is consciousness by your estimation right there's a lot of debate about this you know much of which is is um not especially productive in The Sciences of Mind in in neuroscience and cognitive science psychology Etc and in the philosophy of mind I happen to think that that consciousness is conceptually irreducible you know there are people who want to who have tried to reduce it and and I think those efforts have been

unsuccessful how it arises in the the the physics of things is an open question you know it may very well be just a matter of information processing in in brains or in any system like a brain that can process information in these specific ways you're on very firm ground scientifically if you're biased in that direction um it may push deeper into the physics of things or it may be you know a fundamental constituent of reality I mean there's just there really the jury is out on that nothing in my account of the first person side

hinges on any of those stories being true or false I mean it's just if it's just what brains do and when you're dead you're dead that's all that none of that changes what I'm saying about the power of meditation or the the nature of conscious experience Consciousness from the first person side and again I think this is irreducible conceptually it's just that it's the fact that there's something that it's like to be you or to be any system that is conscious right so if if there's something this and this is a definition that that the

philosopher Thomas Nagel came up with in a very famous article what is it like to be a bat that he published in the 70s again there are people on the other side of this debate who think this is just a the wrong turn in philosophy and Science and we should have a different definition of Consciousness but it seems obvious to me that the right definition of Consciousness is that there is something that is like to be that system so on Nagel's account if there's something that is like to be a bat right even if we

can't know what it's like bats are that that is consciousness in the case of a bat right you know the question is if you could trade places with a bat is that the same thing as Trading Places with this table or is it different do the lights go out in every possible way that they could go out or is there something that is like to be a bat right and if there is that's Consciousness in the case of a pat now it's a kind of circular definition but any of our any of our most fundamental

kind of brute facts are are circular in in how we Define them I mean defining causality is Circ there's no there's no definition of of a Cause that isn't in some sense circular the notion of cause and effect is a basic constituent of our thinking about anything I would argue that the difference between there being nothing that it's like to be and there being something however inscrutable however minimal however weird however undefinable the transition from something to nothing subjectively that is the transition from unconsciousness to Consciousness in it's very much analogous to the transition from

you know in in third person terms or you know objective terms the difference between there being nothing and something you know like I think it was the philosopher shelling who gave us this this initial question you know why is there something rather than nothing right like that so it but the the concept of nothing is very hard to get your your head around I mean it's not nothing's not just empty space because it's nothing because space is already something nothing is not just this this avoid pregnant with the laws of nature because the laws of

nature already have to be something otherwise they couldn't do their work nothing's really nothing you right the concept of zero is is very hard to get your mind around but the moment you got something more than zero this transition from nothing to something it's a conceptually irreducible intuition we have but that allows us to to form any other intuitions about anything happening or not happening or I mean just it's it's Bedrock epistemologically for us and I think so it is with Consciousness Consciousness is the fact that something seems to be happening and The crucial point

to make here is that it is no less present it's no less true it's no less real even if we're confused about everything even if even if we're you know we're all psychotic or we're all brains in in Vats we're all in the Matrix you know our physics is totally wrong because all of this is just a simulation on the hard drive of an alien supercomputer we're not in touch with the Bas layer of reality in any way this is a pure illusion right the presence of Illusion is just as much a a demonstration of

Consciousness as the presence of any kind of veridical perception of anything right so on my view Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion right to say that Consciousness might be an illusion is is just pure non Seer it's just not it's just not what we mean by Consciousness and it's not what we mean by illusion it seems to me that Consciousness either exists on some sliding scale that is calibrated with the complexity of of a brain how many neurons do you have or it's endemic to everything what's known as

pan psychism and it sounds like you're relatively agnostic on that and that exploring the truth behind that isn't necessarily the best use of time and energy because at the end of the day we have this experience and that's what you're interested in trying to better understand yeah and and I think the the gradations of Consciousness are more a matter of the contents of Consciousness right so what you obviously get as you scale up in information processing and intelligence is more mind right you get more distinctions you can make you get more you know you get

ideas I mean we get language I mean just having language is an enormous difference right you know it's just like everything about us that's recognizably human is a matter of us leveraging the power of language right and are being able to conceive of a past and a future in in ex explicit terms and to plan across that that time Horizon I mean that's you know that's something that you know chimpanzees can't do you know I have no doubt that chimps are conscious there's something that like to be a chimp some of that would be recognizable

to us but the fact that they're not not language using in any deep sense deprives them of of so much that is there's so much mental real estate that can't be actualized without language much of the experience you have on psychedelics is about more mind right you get pushed into areas of of of conscious contents that most people wouldn't suspect are there and it's very easy to to get enamored of all that and to think that that profundity is a matter of of of more of of changing the contents of Consciousness and and expanding them

and having more of that you having more of those experiences and bigger experiences but I mean the crucial thing to notice is that all of these experiences are impermanent right I mean you first you you don't have them and then you have them and then you don't have them and so if there if there's a a more fundamental freedom to recognize about the nature of Consciousness it should be not at the level of changing experience it should be it should be coincident with all experience right I mean that's that's the certainly the hope and that's

what that's I think what meditation at least certain kinds of meditation appropriately targets right it's just not it's not making a fetish of of the highs of experience that certainly can be explored with psychedelics and without I mean there there styles of meditation that get you very high in a drug-like sense and they're very goal oriented I mean these are people who are becoming through their training kinds of spiritual athletes who are really trying to get somewhere and there's a logic of of of seeking to change experience but you know through the practice but that's

not what I'm recommending kind of the wisest Traditions within Buddhism and and the the Indian tradition or you know draw a very clear line between that style of of meditation practice where you're see seeking to have more and more ethereal you know temporary experiences and and what's called wisdom practice there's a clear you know firewall there or disjunction there the first step in a mindfulness practice is to notice that there is some distinction between what I guess you could deem higher awareness or perhaps you could call it the self and the ramblings and vicissitudes of

the mind and thought right and I think that that awareness like oh there's me and then there's me observing all of these thoughts that are passing on the surface of Consciousness and I think that that creates this dualistic sense that there is a self that's observing the mind and the practice that you teach and Advocate through your app and through the talks that you give Etc your books is characterized as non-dualism this idea that you referenced earlier that this sense of the self that is very indelible is in fact an illusion and just yet another

appearance in Consciousness yeah and that's a very like when I'm doing your daily guided meditations no matter how I've been doing it for a long time like that's a steep Mountain de climb to get to that place where you can really Embrace that as truth yeah yeah it took me a while too I mean I think I had spent about a year on silent meditation Retreats before um what was the longest that you sat in silent meditation uh three months wow so but I did that tce every day yeah two three Monon Retreats and then

a lot of shorter Retreats you know two months and one months and three weeks and things like that but uh but then all the way down to like just one day they're very powerful I mean going into silence is it's a it's a real Crucible and it you know it's not it's not for everyone it's a little bit like psychedelics and that you know it's it's not for everyone but it can be incredibly useful it can also be a little misleading right I mean so it's really is a two-edged sword here because and this is

the difference between a dualistic conception of of the goal and a non-d dual one I mean you you it's easy to form the impression under a certain style of practice and certainly the way I was practicing you know mindfulness uh at that point that again freedom is elsewhere is is and here it's not at the heights of something you're achieving through LSD it's at the heights of the mountain you've climbed very systematically on Retreat through concentration born of very intensive practice I mean doing you go into silence you're formally sitting probably 12 hours a day

but every waking moment is is a moment of where you're trying to string each moment together with with a continuity mind of mindfulness where you know you the moment you get up from meditation to walk to lunch you know you're walking to lunch is a walking meditation and the eating of lunch in silence is an eating meditation and you're all you're doing is trying to Bear Down on the present moment such that you can notice notice everything right you just want to notice every the finest grained distinctions again not you're not thinking about it it's

not a matter of understanding anything conceptually more what you're noticing at least under you know in this system what's being emphasized and this is this is very standard terava Buddhist vasana mindfulness of A Sort that you we also teach in waking up on the app it's held in a slightly different context um what you're not noticing are the so-called three characteristics within Buddhism of um impermanence unsatisfactoriness and self selflessness and so you're noticing impermanence you're noticing that that the more closely you look the more fleeting experience becomes right so it's like when you start and

you have very little concentration and you know you're told to just feel your body sitting in the chair or sitting on the cushion well you just have this kind of gross feeling of okay I I just I feel I feel my body I like basic propr reception I feel the energy in my body I feel my knee I feel my shoulder I feel my back I got a pain in my in my neck neck I hope that goes away okay and back to the back to the body as you do this hour by hour by

hour you you get more concentration the difference between being lost in thought and being really present with your sensory experience becomes clearer and clearer such that eventually the the present moment gets enough kind of gravity to it where your attention more and more naturally rests there and you can actually pay attention to the breath and to sounds and to Sensations and the moment that begins to happen the mo you begin to notice impermanence just rains right like nothing is solid nothing is stable you thought you had a body but when you pay attention you just

have this cloud of fleeting sensation you have these tiny points of pressure and tingling and temperature and pain and tightness and movement and you know your hands disappear into this poist painting you know of of sensation and so it is with everything you can pay attention to sounds or everything becomes very punctate and fleeting you begin to pass through this layer of Concepts where you're no longer hearing traffic and birds and the the rustling of somebody's rain jacket you're hearing just the raw data of sound you haven't become a [ __ ] you can you

can still think about what you're hearing but you notice that the that automatic conceptualization is something you can relax and you get more into the flow of just raw data of seeing hearing smelling tasting touching and then thoughts arise to and try to grab hold of it and you just notice them too as appearances in Consciousness but for the longest time it can feel like there's a subject doing this right like there's still you there's still a meditator you know aiming at objects right and even even if the aiming becomes effortless even if even if

you're just noticing attention go out to the sound and go or go down to the to the feeling of pressure in the body or whatever it is the locus of which is in the head yeah I mean most people start with a very clear sense that there's a you know they're up there in their head and now they're paying attention to the body and the body is down there right they're aiming attention to to Sensations in the knee say or when you're doing walking meditation you're aiming attention down to the sensations in your feet or

your legs but it can become very effortless and and it can become you can notice so much impermanence that you can begin to extrapolate from this this kind of just blizzard of change that there can be no stable self to be to be made out of all of this right there's just this next moment of hearing this next moment of seeing this next moment of sensing sensation there can be a lot of great feelings of Freedom that come with this because you're there just like a real relaxation into the flow of the present moment and

you're not trying to do anything with it you're not trying to change anything the goal here of noticing all of this is to at least in this system to increase the the mental factor of equinity because so you're noticing the pleasant stuff disappears you can't there's nothing to hold on to there in a pleasant taste or a pleasant sound you're also noticing the unpleasant stuff disappears the moment you notice it so there's nothing to there's no problem there's nothing to push away even in very strong feelings of physical discomfort I you can get to a

point where you can have really strong pain in your body you know excruciating pain in your body or certainly would have been excruciating yesterday but now you've got such equinity that it's just it's just change just changing you know it's twisting and burning and stabbing and but it's just like there's no there there even like the moment you try to to find the stabbing Sensation that was a problem a moment ago it's not there there's something new but it's gone the moment you notice it right so everything's just falling away from attention the more the

more you pay attention and there's a an immense Freedom that comes with that I told you about the three characteristics the second characteristic is is is what's often translated as as suffering but that's not quite right it's more the poly word is Dua but it's um unsatisfactoriness is a translation and it's it's again it's it's this principle that there's no there there based on change right like it's just no matter how good it is no matter how bad it is there's just there's just nothing to hold on to and so there's nothing worth clinging to

you know there nothing worth pushing away there's nothing worth grasping just let everything flow and the third characteristic is selflessness but again under this system it's more an extrapolation BAS based on impermanence it's like it there because everything's changing there really can't be a subject and the more you pay attention it begins to feel like even subjectivity itself is just arising by itself almost as a kind of punctate thing you know it's just going it's the sound it's just seeing hearing smelling tasting touching there's kind of this peace meal aspect and impermanent aspect to everything

and it's all just part of the flow and when you have a lot of concentration on Retreat especially you can have the experience of in brief moments the self really seems to disappear because in this moment of hearing the normal moment of hearing is just this this kind of subject object perception there's a subject doing the hearing there's the thing heard and there's this operation of hearing between them what you have more and more with concentration is just the this just hearing it's just a pure experience of hearing there's not two sides to the thing

there's just hearing there's just seeing there's just sensation and so that begins to break through and that happened to me when I was on you know some of these long Retreats how long did it take for you to have that type of experience well for the longest time it was just lots of impermanence with a with a still a fairly you know strong sense of there being a subject experiencing all the impermanence right I think on you know some of my longer Retreats I mean what's interesting about doing Retreat is that with the next Retreat

you sort of start where you left off in in the previous one like if you if you do a a one month Retreat and then you know a few months later you you decide to sit you know a week-long retreat day two of that second Retreat is a lot like you know the the the third week of of that month you know like you you can just ramp up very very quickly because it's it is a skill you're learning a skill uh and so you can just drop in and that's pretty amazing because it's almost

like you you've discovered that there's this other world there's like this Kingdom of Silence that you can only reach by going into silence and deciding to go on Retreat and but once you do you know you discover that the transition from kind of normal life to this new place is very very brief I mean like some of the some of my Retreats I felt like in a in a few hours I had just gone crossed over into this into the land of Silence it's really it's really quite beautiful that's on the back of having Having

learned to do this having done previous Retreats is it something in your daily practice now that you can drop into quickly and relatively effortlessly or is it a chore or more aus because there's time and distance between you and the last time that you sat for great periods of time yeah well so now we're getting to the difference between practicing dualistically and practicing you know what I would call non-d dualistically because that that framing changes for me and so so so again much of what I'm much of what I just said about Retreat is still

holding Retreat aside as a very special kind of precious different experience than normal Waking Life and it is somewhat analogous to a drug experience right like this is just a non-standard neurophysiological displacement from the ordinary and you clearly can't live this way right like I mean you can you can decide to spend you can become a monk decide to spend you know years on Retreat and I I know people have done that I know people have done you know 10 years on on silent Retreat right and I've studied with people who' done you know double

that but from a non-dual perspective there really is the the the center of the bullseye is available right here in the middle of this podcast right like the thing that I'm really paying attention to and that I recommend people pay attention to as their medit as their meditation practice once they can recognize it really does equalize these these different occasions right it equalizes Retreat and and non- Retreat it equalizes you know the the work day and the time you spend actually meditating the boundary between formal practice and the rest of life is really at bottom

just a concept it's just it's a it's a story you're telling yourself very often it's a story you're telling yourself about why it makes sense to not expect this moment to be it right and to be good enough and to be fully actualized with with your highest wisdom right and it's um it's a copout on some level to close that chapter on Retreat so the so so the best moments that I experienced on Retreat and after even a a collective year spent on Retreat were not moments that allowed me to recognize selflessness on demand you

know as my practice of mindfulness like I I could recognize sensation on demand I could recognize impermanence on demand if you know I could hear a sound and notice you know I could notice the hearing of it and notice that it just came and went that's a kind of a a mini insight into impermanence but it wasn't a clear insight into selflessness and unless I had just a ton of concentration on Retreat you know having done nothing but meditate you know not talking to anyone for weeks and months and now I'm having these kind of

breakthrough experiences of just hearing just seeing but from a non-dual side you can actually just take a monum of that concentration and look for the self in such a way as to notice that it's not there and to have the sense of subject object dualism drop out of any experience and it doesn't take a a heroic Act of of continuity of mindfulness it doesn't take some extraordinary concentration it just takes it takes enough mindfulness so that you can not be lost in thought for that moment and you can look and notice that there's just experience

and there's no Center to it you're not on the edge of it there's and so that I mean we can talk more about how to do that but once you can do that then there's just there there it's always a story of this next moment being an opportunity to do that right there's no imperative that you frame frame it out as okay this is going to be a retreat this is my formal practice you know this is I'll get to that when I you know when I pull over you know I'm no longer like you

can do this while driving you can do this while having a conversation you this is compatible with any possible experience and the the freedom that it gives you isn't a matter of suddenly having a different experience it's not a matter of okay the I now no longer feel pain in my body okay the physiology of anxiety has totally changed and I don't feel any of that energy in my chest that I that I was you know a moment ago was a problem from the point of view of of of non-d dual awareness none of those

experiences are a problem n of those experiences implicate a self as the hostage you know that has to be rescued there is no hostage here that has to be rescued there's just experience and and and once you allow the center to drop out of any experience even if a moment ago you were anxious you let's say you're I mean the example I always use is public speaking because you know people are so worried about it and and I and you know I used to be very worried about it um you know the anxiety of of

stepping out on stage right is a problem if you're trying you're fighting it you're you you wish you weren't this person you wish you were more comfortable you're thinking thoughts about how to change it I wish I you know should I have taken a beta blocker like like like what if you could just let the center of that drop out that does solve the problem even before the physiology changes the physiology of anxiety or any other emotion changes over the course of seconds and and you know tens of seconds but it's Downstream yeah it's it's

all Downstream of this initial clinging to self and this ini initial being lost and thought and it does change I mean if you can if you can keep punctuating your experience of anxiety say with these moments of clear scene of no Center well then it does dissipate because you're no longer you're no longer building the machine of anxiety or or running those gears or at least you're interrupting it you know to tend of times over the course of a minute but the thing you recognize and the thing that's really is a kind of a non-d

du Insight is that your freedom from self and from suffering psychological suffering isn't actually predicated on the on the contents of Consciousness changing like the anxiety doesn't have to go away for you to be free of it right it will go away if you're no longer manufacturing it but you can actually drop your problem faster than the physiology will dissipate the issue with that is that I mean from a dualistic perspective one would say well the way that you cure your stage fright is to uh disidentify the self with the fear or the anxiety but

that presumes a self the non-dualist would say there's no self to be anxious to begin with everything just is and the idea that there isn't a self um defies every intuition and Instinct we have about what it means or feels like to be alive which makes it very difficult I mean you have I've had very kind of fleeting flirtations with with you know very brief momentary experiences with this they go away quickly but they're the result of you know conscious prompts that you have in the meditations like look for the looker like who is doing

the looking right now yeah and the more you can kind of focus on that like pretend you're looking on yourself and like what are you seeing you know the idea that there is no head yeah yeah yeah that's that's that one's very useful that comes from this this really self-invented teacher um Douglas Harding he he was influenced by Zen but he was an architect whoo like on having no head or something like that he wrote a book called on having no head which is quite it's this beautiful little primer on on his method but yeah

so it's I mean just this technique is especially powerful because it can can easily be mapped on to a social situation like this I mean so when you and are having a conversation very much of your sense of self is born of a feeling that you're behind your face you're in your head I can see you I'm looking at you right and you're four feet away yeah but so you feel in relationship to me because you feel like you're behind your face looking out across space at me right but if you look for your head

if you look for yourself this is the only face you can see right like you like I you see my face yeah you can't see your face I mean I can see my nose if you some of us with big noses can get get part of the nose in there but the way Harding described it is that when you look for your head you find that in in place of where your head is supposed to be there's just the world right there's just this open space in which everything's appearing and and including the heads of

other people it's not that you think you've been decapitated or you think you you don't have a head you you understand you're a person but your actual wrw experience is of this openness and the other person is part of this field of openness I mean this I have a visual field in which you're appearing and the the sense of self is born of you and I are making eye contact there there's two modes I could be in here I could follow your gaze back to to where I think I am I could feel implicated by

your gaze right and and sometimes that could be tempting like you could you know you could say something or you change your expression I'm talking and you could look confused or you could look like it you know sounds like you don't agree with what it doesn't looks like you don't agree with what I'm saying so there can be this facial play that I I can be cogniz cognizant of that that could cast me back upon my myself in a in a way where I I feel I'm no longer freely just looking at you right because

you're lost in thought trying to understand the signals that I'm giving you through my facial reaction yeah Ian it could be born of something you say or it could just be born of again a change in your facial expression the sense of of being in relationship the sense of being implicate scrutinized by another seen by another uh the sense that I'm an object in the world for you right that is constantly being imposed upon us we it seems like it's imposed upon us all the time by other people in the world you just actually Jean

Paul SAR the the existential philosopher in his book I think it was being and nothingness he describes the what he considers the Primal circumstance of the Voyer I mean I don't agree with much of his philosophy but this is kind of a brilliant thought experiment or or example imagine being a Voyer you've you have crept up to somebody's bedroom window you're looking at the object of your lust through the window uh just fully just 100% committed to the experience of seeing and then you hear someone stepping up behind you right like at that moment you

don't even have to turn around you don't know but you just the moment you know someone's behind you you you suddenly feel this collapse into selfhood you now know you're the object you're of another right you there's another perspective that has that's taken you as its object it's that recoil from Pure experience in this case the pure experience of seeing into this kind of collapse into self that again this is is happening to to us thousand times a day in fact it happens to us so often that we think it's our it's just it's is

our default Condition it's real we're we're selves you know I'm I'm over here right but it is a kind of collapse it's a kind of action and it's not really coming from the other right it just seems that way it's something you're doing with your attention now and you can not do it and the way to to kind of roll it back is this kind of method you know one one method is you know this Douglas Harding technique of just looking looking for yourself looking for your head and you cannot find it in a way

that perhaps just for a moment opens you to the the realization that there's just this pure scene right like so if I'm experiencing this pure scene of you it doesn't matter what your eyes are doing or what your face is doing I'm just noticing that it's not forcing me to to recoil back into this feeling of oh my God I'm over here and and he sees me right like it's like I'm vulnerable like like it was kind of a different structure to the real ation but it was very much what happened to me on MDMA

the first time which was such a revelation I was just totally free of self-concern I was just I mean the experience was I was just talking to one of my best friends and we were just sitting across from each other on you know two couches having a conversation and at one point in the conversation I realized there wasn't a cell in my brain that was concerned about what he thought of me it's like I was I just recognized that it's my best friend I love this guy I just was feeling nothing but love and admiration

and gratitude to be with my best friend and I was just seeing him right just like I was just free to see him the part of me that I didn't even know was there which was constantly cycling on how am I being perceived by even someone who ostensibly was one of the closest people to me in my life how how am I being perceived that just went offline and I was just free to just see him and that preoccupation being a a barrier to True experience yeah yeah and it's also just it is the source

code of neurosis it is the thing that makes you uncomfortable with other people it's the thing that makes you every part of it I mean whether it's shyness or you know any kind of social anxiety or just interpersonal fears and weirdness like every wrinkle of of just feeling less than comfortable in the world in your own skin has this character of this reassertion of Self in the midst of what's ever happening and it's a thing that prevents you from it's the antithesis of the classic flow experience where you you know you're in the middle of

an athletic event or whatever it is you're just there's no distance between you and thing you're doing you're just doing it it's just it's just you're part of the flow when there is a distance it's usually in the mode of either you're distracted you're just lost in thought and you're thinking about all the stuff you have to do after the bike ride or whatever it is or you could be in some sort of airor correcting mode where things are not going the way you've imperfectly learned the skill you know you don't really know how to

swing a golf club so you're always thinking about what you should be doing you're making errors you're not performing the way you want to perform so there's just there's all kinds of you're grinding your gears over the actual the performance of it but when things are really in the flow when you're just throwing the the football or you throwing the Frisbee or whatever it is and it just Everything feels great and you're not you're not looking over your own shoulder you're just having the experience um that's what people want out of life you know certainly

there much of what they want out of life that's a quality of attention it's not the thing it's not the thing you're doing it's just that certain things we do [Music] are more optimized to pull that out of untrained minds but training your mind you can actually have that experience in any arbitrary context it doesn't matter what the what the experience is the idea that when you look for the looker and there's nothing to be found or this sense of self that we're convinced resides within our heads is nothing but an appearance in Consciousness begs

the question of what is reality like what is base reality like I have this sense that you're sitting 4 feet away from me that we're having this conversation in a certain space at a particular time but you're just an appearance in my Consciousness yeah yeah everything that I'm experiencing right now that I can hear taste feel smell the thoughts are nothing but appearances in Consciousness including that intractable sense of self yeah yeah so then what is reality like that's the question that that comes to mind if everything is but an appearance in Consciousness and Consciousness

is truly all that there is from our point of view it becomes you know another intractable question to answer yeah yeah I mean so from my point of view nothing of importance for our well-being hinges upon that our answering that question so I I remain agnostic with respect to the metaphysics everything you said is true so just just purely as a matter of Neurology so whatever let's just say that the the standard you know physicalist materialist picture of the mind is true right so there's just what we have is an unconscious Universe wherein certain systems

process information in such a way that the lights come on you know under some conditions of you know complex information processing remains to be seen what those are in my view if that's true it's always going to seem like a miracle it's never going to be self-explaining we're never going to say oh yeah so it makes sense that functioning at at 40 Hertz you know in a system of 100,000 units is sufficient for Consciousness but otherwise not right that's just going to seem like a miracle but let's just say that it is just at bottom

a matter of information processing it opens the question as to whether or not this is could be substrate independent so whether we can build conscious AI is is a is a question that follows from that based on the fact that intelligence and everything else any other consequence of information processing we know about is clearly substrate independent I would say that if Consciousness is born of information processing then we certainly should expect conscious machines because I I just don't see what is important about having the the computer made of meat and a sufficient faximile or approximation

of Consciousness at some point becomes indistinguishable from Consciousness as we understand it so is there well from the outside yeah but at some level does that even matter like question of of sentience in in an artificial intelligence well let's table that I think it doesn't matter that's a whole other thing we might not have time to get to that today I mean I think it's it's super interesting I think it's consequential but I guess I can actually deal with it pretty briefly if we build machines that are conscious then we've built machines that can actually

suffer right or be made Happy we've built machines that are really having experiences right they're not just seeming from the outside to be having experiences my concern is that we won't actually know whether or not we've done that what's very likely is that we're going to build machines that seem conscious because we're going to build them that way we're going to want them to at least with certain kinds of machines we're going to want them to seem conscious and the more intelligent they they get the more they're going to pass that the touring test in

that sense yeah mean so certainly you just imagine what would be like to have something like you know truly humanoid robots that are out out of The Uncanny Valley and so it's like Westworld where it's these people look like people but they're robots they're being driven by the you know these amazing large language models and they know everything and they can notice how you're doing they could they've read all your email and you've got this perfect robot companion you that's going to drive all of your your empathy circuits such that it's just going to feel

like you're in relationship to a conscious being and we will build them so as to seem that way right so if we don't understand how Consciousness actually arises or if it does arise on the basis of information processing we're at bottom not going to know whether that system is conscious but it will be very important to know if it's seeming to suffer is real suffering right like are you committing a murder when you turn on your conscious robot if its portrayal of suffering or happiness is so thoroughly convincing to the bright human mind we will

interface with it accordingly yeah and and that's why I think I actually published a an oped in the New York Times with the psychologist Paul Bloom back when Westworld came out we were both fans of the of the show and I mean the Insight we had there is that westworld's impossible because in the presence of humanoid robots this comp comping no human would treat them the way that they are treated you're you will you will not only seem like a psychopath to other humans you would have to be a psychopath to want to behave that

way it's like to really rape Dolores but isn't that part of the premise though that these are psychopaths these rich Psychopaths who go there to live out there some of them certainly are Dark Fantasy it's just either so Westworld would act like a like a bug light for the world Psychopaths right the non psychopath Among Us would look at this and say I mean you would you wouldn't be able to say yeah I just went to Westworld and I just I just raped you know raped and killed children right it was just awesome right everyone

who was a non non lunatic would say dude you've just lost your mind right we you know we no longer respect you you need to get help right like so there's no way we would behave this way so my concern is we will lose sight of the the interesting problem as to whether or not they're conscious because they're just going to seem conscious and in truth we won't know right but I agree they certainly will seem conscious if we keep making progress but to to go back to your your question about reality here if the

Mind including Consciousness is really just what the brain is doing it's just purely is purely a product of of brain chemistry and obviously that means when you're dead this disappears you know the candle goes out it's not like there's some continuity of Consciousness because this really was just what your brain was doing um the brain's not a receiver of Consciousness from somewhere else right it's the pure physicalist Vision even under those conditions everything you're experiencing right now is just a vision produced by neurophysiological changes moment to moment in your brain so you're you're already a

brain and a vat in some sense you're already it's like I'm not saying there is no world out there impinging upon your no neurophysiology through your your senses there's every reason to believe there is but it's your experience of it really is this Visionary phenomenon it is very much like what you experience in a dream you know that it's possible to have a dream in which you're taken in by this the illusion that you're in relationship to some other person who you're now talking to who you might now feel neurotic in the presence of you

know let's say you're meeting some famous person who you're a fan of in a dream and you're you know you're embarrassed that you can't get the words out and they're they they're looking at you like well who is this [ __ ] and now you feel like [ __ ] I wish this was going better and you're having none of this exists this all just a f fantasy right but you don't you're not having a lucid dream you're not you haven't recognize your circumstance we know that the brain is a kind of hallucination machine like

this where you can abstract self into an experience in relation to some someone else who doesn't even exist right you're doing this all the time whatever status I really have out in the world your version of me is very much a a a neurophysiological vision for you that is its ontology the cash value of everything is in you as a in the in the in the theater of your neurological changes right and so it's never really out there in the world again there's there's some there's some correlate to it in the world very likely that

is that is sinking up with the changes you're experiencing but rather often not right rather often you're having an experience that is pretty uncoupled to the world and I would argue in almost every case the experience of being unhappy the experience of being in Conflict the experience of worrying about what's happening next the experience of feeling you know that the thoughts of others are really you know mattering in a way that is is diminishing your well-being all of that is is again much more of the Dreamscape of unnecessary suffering than it is you know here

is something that really came from the world and imposed itself on you and you know the cash value was yeah you bumped into a hard object in the dark that you didn't know was there and it's real it's outside of you and it's real and you and you're reformulating your acts of attention aren't going to change matters The Leverage is because you and I are both having Visionary experiences all the time based on the fact that again it's all happening on the hard drive over here that you know that is not the world right it's

just part of the world it offers an immense freedom to change your experience you can try to change the world right yeah I'm not saying there aren't things in the world we we we shouldn't want to change and we should work to change them but so much of of the story of being happy or happier than you are tending to be is not a matter of changing the world it's a matter of changing your your response to the world it's interesting that we all live in a prison of our own mind and the suffering that

we experience and the unhappiness Etc is all a function of our Consciousness and yet there is this key that if we insert it in the lock and turn it appropriately uh we can liberate ourselves from so much of that suffering um and yet this path feels elusive to so many we see gyms all over the world we know we go to the gym if we want to get stronger if we want to feel better in our bodies we need to exercise them and I think we're growing into this awareness that we can do the same

for our minds um but I feel like there's still a long way to go for people to truly understand the level of Liberation that exists and the downstream consequences you know for a Devotion to this type of practice as individuals but also as a collective I mean we open this podcast talking about the many problems that we we face as a society and the solutions to all of those problems reside in the quality of our minds yeah when we started this chapter I said so much of what we had previously talked about is just this

massive opportunity cost including the talking about it right and the fact that we have to spend our time worrying about war and our abject failures to solve all these Collective action problems you know in the face of pandemics or any any other challenge I mean it's just it's you know bad ideas are ascendant and um so many bad ideas are captivating but again we're talking about human beings and their thoughts right and they're and they're having no perspective on thoughts right strong opinions without any sense that you don't necessarily have to be identified with your

opinion these thoughts are coming out of nowhere really you don't and you don't know what you're going to think next and the ability to step back and not be identified with your sense of of what you think right like what which is again the stream of of thought right it is analogous to kind of waking up from a dream right and it has the same kind of it's not to say that there are no thoughts that you know no thoughts are better than any other thoughts right yes it's you know the cure for cancer when

it arrives will be you know a very uh important thought for somebody to think and communicate as widely as possible right I mean like this is this it's not I mean information has consequences but we're spending basically all our time talking to ourselves and not noticing it right I mean that is the state that's the default state for every person you see out there you know and so much of that story we're telling we're telling ourselves is a story of delusion and fear and hatred and a Litany of self-justifications and anchorings to bad ideas and

it's just it's it's just like at the end of the day there's very little that ails us that seems necessary right like like the cure for cancer is like cancer is one thing that's like we haven't figured it out yet right so that's there's a lot of profitable work that could be done to do that there's no reason in principle why we we shouldn't be able to cure cancer there a lot of suffering on this side of not having cured it like that that's there there's a lot that we should do there where I would

never say was just totally unnecessary that we got so you know spun up over cancer and it's you know lack of cure and you know it's like no it's a lot of work to be done but so much of our suffering is totally self-imposed and there many layers of this but if you just look at lying alone as just a single variable just like a capacity to lie the numbers of people on Earth who feel no compunction in line right you know it just the lack of penalty for lying now in the culture right the

people seem to manage to maintain their careers and reputations even being shown to lie again and again and again on even the most consequential topics just closing the door to that would be such an immense societal change you know I have hope that at the end of the day you know conversation is is eventually going to con Converge on uh the wisdom of doing that but it it does seem a long way off did you read three body problem or watch I I got sidetracked I I didn't finish it but I I'm an unreliable reader

of Science Fiction because I I um I don't know I guess it's the the literary snob in me just recoils from some of the you know some of the dialogue and the writing I I I tend to hit in that genre where I just feel like this is actually not as good as as a book should be for me to be spending this much time with you short circuit it and watch the limited series right I thought of that simply because you know the alien who is going to be arriving on planet Earth and is

trying to figure out whether they can cooperate with humanity is all on board until they realize that humans lie which was a great Revelation to them and they immediately shift their perspective and decide that they're going to have to destroy Humanity right because of their incapacity or their their relationship with truth I saw I I kind of get it I mean it is such a it is a night and day difference in dealing with people and as a culture as a it's a cultural difference I mean it's just to have as a norm that people

are basically lying you know if not all the time a lot of the time certainly when they're you know when strangers are talking to one another to have that as just a norm of business and you know obviously we cut through it with laws around fraud and and and you know we punish people if it if it gets too egregious but for us to all always just to be walking around with that layer of dishonesty gumming up everything yeah it seems starkly dysfunctional this distinction between lying and and bullshitting which is very interesting and useful

and fun I don't know if you ever read Harry Frankford it's short very short book really just an essay on it's on [ __ ] but he he he published this book um which became it's a actually it's a proper work of philosophy but it became a bestseller maybe 20 years ago 30 years ago mhm on [ __ ] but you know the distinction he made is that the difference between a liar and a bullshitter is that at least a liar is trying to craft his his misrepresentation of the truth in such a way as

to meet The Logical expectations of his audience like like I know what you think and believe I don't want my lie to be detected so it has to like the math has to work out I have to insert the LIE carefully into the space provided so that you don't detect anything wrong logically or historically or you your memory is not playing tricks on you Etc so the liar has to be cognizant of the truth and and of the the the kind of the truth processing of his audience the bullshitter doesn't do any of that [

__ ] is just talking I mean that so Trump in addition to being probably the greatest liar anyone has ever seen he's even more guilty of just bullshitting all the time he's not not even keeping track of what he's saying he's because he's contradicting himself from you know mere mere moments before and so it's just this stream of [ __ ] that honestly is even more destabilizing than than lying with with respect to what what is done to our kind of information landscape and our expectations of you know political norms and and the way that

it's so welcomely received by so many at the same time you know I think it speaks to this conundrum on the one hand uh uh human beings have this you know sort of outsized capacity to think that we are the Pinnacle of intelligence that our brains are so developed that there is absolutely nothing that we can't fathom make sense of or understand no problem that will go unsolved but in truth we're pretty rudimentary animals in a lot of ways um and I often wonder what would happen if if another life form or perhaps human being

suddenly developed like a a giant extra lobe on their brain that suddenly allowed them to perceive conceptualize and understand multi-dimensionality or you know T time space as it actually exists not in the linear construct that our limited brains understand it to be and what that would mean in terms of how we would evolve M as a conscious species but we're limited we don't have that capacity but we have this hubris right I think we need a little more humility around our capacity and what's curious about you Sam is that you're somebody who's who's thinking a

lot spending a lot of time thinking about these great mysteries of what it means to be human and what Consciousness is or isn't and you know is there a self all of these things that to me provides room for some level of faith in the unknown or what can't be known yeah U but as you know this very famous atheist this is something that you resist like the more mysterious the universe is and Consciousness Etc to me makes it feel like there's all the more terrain to have some kind of spiritual relationship with that which

we can't understand but which we know on some level must be true yeah no I I don't doubt that at all I just I locate it in a different spot than than classically religious people would locate it so yeah religion aside yeah I'm talking about awe and wonder yeah yeah so so I don't think we get rid of mystery I think mystery is intrinsic to being I think Consciousness even if we understood it conceptually you know in a third person way or any other way the experience of it is mysterious I I don't know what

this is like this experience This Moment's experience is as much as I can understand it conceptually the conceptual layer doesn't actually Purge it of mystery it's like I I you're basically like hurling thoughts at it but it's not removing the sort of the the the suchness of it I mean you can take the most ordinary object you can just mean anything the the cup on you like I have the I have the word Cup right and I can say cup over and over again and I can then form thoughts about how this was probably manufactured

but as an appearance if I actually pay close attention to anything you know the most prosaic object it's as mysterious as anything you could produce something that I've never seen right which for which I have no name right but as an experience as a raw experience everything discourages its intrinsic mystery if you pay attention the level of our un of our conceptual understanding doesn't actually banish that experience it just it just kind of sort of tiles over it and causes us to take it for granted right like this is this is a total like I

can say cup I will never have this exact experience again right like this this moment this encounter in Consciousness as Consciousness with the the objects of Consciousness this is only superficially like any other in that I have you know I I can have two ideas that I could juxtapose I could say well you know I was holding a cup on Rich rolls podcast and you know I've I've certainly held a cup before you know it's it's like this is yet another yet another experience of holding a cup right but I mean the details of anything

are I mean it's it's it's it's completely unique I mean there's a there's a sameness to everything in the sense that again we're talking about Consciousness and its contents right that's always the the ground truth of any experience and in so far as Consciousness has a perennial quality you know and I think it does I mean there's like the the again centerless openness Clarity the fact that things are you know appearing but the mystery doesn't go away right you're just adding thoughts to a condition that is at bottom prior to thought it's like if you're

married it's like trying to reduce your spouse to their name right it's like like you could say their name over and over again but doesn't reach into like that doesn't explain them the actual experience of sharing your life with a person it's not at all one thing like to to call it like to to wrap it up in a concept and say yeah she's my wife you know ANUK is my wife you know she was born in 1976 you know I could write a paragraph about her that summarizes her biography that's the level at which

we conceptualize everything right and and any given thing any given given experience when you're actually going to collide with it fully prior to Concepts prior to thinking about it prior to sort of disregarding it by just telling yourself the story of it as opposed to actually having the experience it is it is all just this kind of this Visionary phenomenon that can't be explained you know it's like you can know you can know everything there is to know about the brain the neurophysiology of language production or of motor engagement right and you still don't know

from the from the first person side you know I have no idea how I do this like I can I can talk to you about acetylcholine I can bathe this whole experience in thoughts about neurophysiology but the the actual experience of moving my arm is a total mystery it's intrinsically mysterious it it doesn't get less mysterious the more language you can hurl at it and so what do you make of that the thing to really make of it is to experience that more and more to experience that layer more and more it's not to think

anything about it it's not to make religion of it it's not to say well this is what Jesus was talking about so maybe Christianity might be right the reason why I'm an atheist effectively with respect to the world's religion certainly the the the major Western religions is that each of them rests on a claim a claim about specific books right these are claims about the the Divine Providence and the omniscient authorship of in the case of Jud Judaism Christianity and Islam we're talking about the Bible and the Quran and you just look at the books

and you just know that can't be true I mean if you're I would argue that you cannot be a a a smart person an hon hly think that there's anything in those books apart from your desire to believe it to be so that that announces their omniscient authorship any remotely educated person in 10 seconds could recognize two things one is it would take them about a minute to improve these books right I mean just by editing you just take out the all the parts that seem to support slavery in in in these books and you've

already improved them morally so that's a problem if these are the product of omniscience shouldn't be trivially easy for anyone literally anyone you know to improve these books but on the other side just think of how good a book would be if an omniscient being wrote it if we just wanted to blow the minds of the people of the first century you and I could put in it could insert a page of text into the Bible that would give them like a thousand years worth of stuff to work on right like like hey guys we

just spent a lot of time telling you how to sacrifice goats and you know and urging you to kill your neighbor for working on the Sabbath but here we're going to drop in something that's even more interesting than that and we're going to tell you about DNA you know the amount of information that's encoded in the nucleus of your cells you don't know what cells are yet but you're going to figure that out and literally in a thousand words we could just map out the next 2,000 years of Science and Math right an omniscient being

could have done that in such a way so that the smartest people currently alive in any subdomain of a subdomain would still be finding stuff that was a pointer to a pointer to a pointer that they don't yet even understand you know that's going to discourage The Next Century of science right that's what an omniscient being would do with a book and at at minimum it would be the book that would be most conducive to human flourishing that we could possibly conceive and these books aren't anything like that literally the Bible tells you to kill

your neighbor if he works on the Sabbath right I mean that's that's the bottom line yeah I mean your your atheism atheism is you know anti- any theistic notion that relates to a Dogma or a religious institution but I would contend that your perspective and what you teach is very Buddhist in its Origins and it's nature like I think you're you're sort of Buddhist adjacent in most things if you had to identify with some strain of you know spiritual lineage yeah I disavow Buddhist the sort of the organized religion faith-based aspect of Buddhism I I

don't think there's anything you have to take on faith and I don't call myself a Buddhist I've certainly been influenced by Buddhism more than any other tradition but there's the advit to non-d duel tradition Within what's nominally called Hinduism although it's kind of a misnomer uh but I mean the other thing here is that there there really is just an asymmetry between East and West with respect to the kind of wisdom and empiricism we've been talking about I mean you know this is a a claim I've made before and just it's just true it's like

you can literally walk blindfolded into the sort of the Buddhist section of a bookstore and open a book at random and you are likely to hit page that has a much more useful and non-dogmatic glimpse of of you the possibility of of Awakening and you know wisdom and and you know training attention you I.E meditation you're much more likely to find that than than exists at in any place in the Bible or in the Quran and literally you could you could look at random in any in in the Canon of any any part of Buddhism

it's not to say you're not going to find some stuff about magic and miracles or and and some stuff that's just frankly boring and and not especially important but M so much of what you find in Buddhism is just a very patiently and you know granted Fair fairly boring kind of endless repetition of a recipe for living an orderly examined life that is ethically scrupulous and uh increasingly wise with respect to the the profundity that's there to be found in the in experience in the present moment and doesn't require belief in in anything this comes

back to us not having the right to our provincialism anymore I just think what we need what we have to recognize is that whatever is true in Buddhism or any other spiritual tradition is true at a deeper layer than culture it's not it's not B certainly not Burmese or Thai or Indian or Sri Lankan or in the same way that physics isn't you know Christian or English or American or the Christians really did effectively invent physics I mean physics as we know it you know he like Newton did I mean something like a century or

two of scientific work on his own in like 18 months I mean it's just he's a Christian he was a Christian uh imbecile on on many levels I mean he spent half his time trying to to cash out biblical prophecy I he was really was confused about a lot of things but he was brilliant and he invented you know physics for all intents and purposes there's East West asymmetry with respect to science and I I would put like you science and medicine in the west is is real and it's really in touch with principles of

you know knowledge Gathering and deepening in a way that it never quite was in the East I mean what the you the real science in the East and the real medicine in the East is not Eastern science and Eastern medicine it's not aruva it's not I mean whatever is true in aruva or any other Eastern modality conforms by you know by some principle that very likely they're confused about with something that we're increasingly understanding in in the context of Western science and you know biological science Western medicine and biological science it's not to say that

we don't make terrific mistakes in in science and biology in biology and medicine but but there's a similar shocking asymmetry spiritually in the running in the other direction with respect to the power of of introspection in particular you know specific techniques like meditation and in what is to be found there and I just think abrahamic religion you know Christianity Judaism and Islam have so confused us for centuries CES the dogmatism the intolerance the fact that science and all of our emerging rationality and and and you know secular politics had to fight its way out from

under that all that dogmatism and intolerance you know that the dialectic there you know between Galileo and the inquisitors right you know the fact that they're showing you know one of the Brilliant Minds of science the instruments of torture and getting him to recant his his thesis the fact that we have that experience [ __ ] us up so royally with respect to integrating the wisdom of of contemplation and and spiritual insight into a a rational picture of the world that we've had to to import it from the East again I I think it's it's

at a deeper layer than culture it's like there's it's a human Universal now we need to talk about the capacity of the human mind to be increasingly free and we have to talk about it in the in the same space in the same trans cultural transracial transnational trans everything space where we do science well the Great Barrier or challenge of course is the fact that you know this Art and Science of self-transcendence that is the legacy of the East becomes a very difficult message to deliver to a western culture that puts the the self at

the center of everything the Primacy of self is sort of the defining nature of our culture and our society and the wisdom of the East requires a dismantling of that on some level which is a it's like an identity threat yeah and and I think there are reasons to for us to take this allart and pick the good and bad parts of both East and West because I you know I think the I don't think it's an accident that you know Eastern Society has not produced a political regime that we admire right I I think

I think the group isness of Eastern culture you know the this the the lack of a focus on individual rights has not been a good thing and I don't think we'd want to emulate it so paradoxically you know though there is no self taking individual rights as primary politically is a very good algorithm to run and and taking the benefit of the group as primary is it's not to say it doesn't have its moments but it shouldn't get Primacy I mean I just think the the dysfunction of of group isness of sacrificing the one to

the men the interest of the one to the many it's so easy to see how that goes wrong I there's so many historical examples of it going wrong that that tendency is something we should we should synthesis there but there's a synthesis yeah and you know and our failure to cooperate with one another under the shadow of a pandemic is that's one of those examples where you know to have a norm of being a good citizen is something we should have more of to be willing to make sacrifices because you know that if it's not

strictly rational for you selfishly to optimize your own life to make the sacrifice there is a there's a free riter problem there's a there's a coordination problem to solve it's better for all of us to agree to implement something fairly as a group that isn't optimal necessarily for any one of us because it's much better for all of us and if we all if we all def defect in a peace meal way the system breaks sure this is what's fractured right now this overemphasis on on personal Liberty without an adequate appreciation that the Liberties that

we enjoy are premised upon some level of collective respon ibility yeah it's hard this is the level at which thoughts and arguments and con and conversations that converge are super important because it's a um it's not a matter of all of us just being successfully mindful in the middle of the ruination of everything right like that's possible right it's possible to be a monk who's happy and you know the people around you are living on a dollar though to the common good no but it could even be helpful to the common good in a certain

sense in that you know you can meet you can meet very happy poor sickly people MH right like you you go to you go to Northern India you hang out with the Tibetans was I just did I just came from dhala yeah so very happy people right I don't know if you had that experience but Tibetans have a very high level of of kind of natural happiness we want to win this game at each level at which we're playing it like I think we we do want longer lives disease-free lives we want to have discovered

you know the seat belt that kept us from flying through our windshields when we you know have car accidents right like that those are all good changes and there are presumably millions of of changes we could make at every level of of our living that will make make human life better you know incrementally better and I don't think we should forsake any of that but it's nonetheless possible and this is just this is how much Freedom we have in our minds it's possible to have almost nothing right to have a body that's not working to

have a society that's not working around you to have everyone you love already dead and to be happy right it's literally possible to be happy in a cave alone with no other life prospects that experiment's been run and people have found that that is possible right it's just it is it's based on the quality of your attention conversely it's also possible to have everything I mean to literally be a billionaire on a mega yacht surrounded by beautiful people who love you and to be so miserable that you're going to kill yourself right it's not that

you're not that you're just thinking of killing yourself you're actually going to kill yourself right like that's possible it's possible to be that unhappy and have everything that just articulates the reality that you know spiritual Insight ethical depth real profundity you know from the first person's side is in some basic sense at every moment of however we want to improve our lives or the world and I I think we should want both of those things the real opportunity to be happy and to to be at rest is orthogonal to all of that it's just like

at any wherever you are in that spectrum of good and bad luck it's possible to recognize that Consciousness is open and already free of self and there is no problem to solve In This Moment In in this precise moment where you feel the pain that is in the next moment is true it's rational to call your doctor because you've had this pain for a week and it it seems somehow you know inauspicious and you read online that this sort of pain can mean this sort of thing and now you're worried and now you know you

should go get an MRI like that's the frame at every moment along the way it's possible to drop that problem and just be at rest and just leave space recognize that you you are simply the open space this open condition in which this thing you're calling pain is appearing all by itself and changing in every moment and it's not even one thing it's not even you have a name for it but it's already changed and you know the the mechanism of your worry about the results of the MRI that you haven't had yet that's a

thought arising In This Moment from who knows where and the moment you notice it it disappears and there's no one really who's noticing it it's just appearing in this open condition right and and you keep dropping back you can be free at every moment along the way the mo and yet still the frame is is in place you're still going to get that MRI you still should get that MRI it's still important that you get that MRI because you know there there may be something to do about your pain right so we can play this

game at both levels but there's um the difference between playing it at both and playing it at only one is night and day I mean it's just there's no you know that's it's everything and the port to that Liberation is meditation it is again with with the the the caveat that that that word can mean many many things yeah before we completely end it though if you had to grade yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 your level of Mastery with respect to what you just shared what is your honest assessment of your own

ability to practice what you just articulated well again that plunges us back into Paradox because um this reminds me of a very funny moment I had with my friend Joseph Goldstein who's a great meditation teacher one of my first meditation teachers and the truth is that when you can practice in the way that we've I've been talking about in kind of the second half of this conversation in a non-dual way the the evidence of your unenlightenment is always in the past I it's always a memory right it's always that thing you screwed up a moment

ago it's the moment of contraction that happened that's that's that now you notice and now it's just appearing in this open space of Consciousness with no Center so there's no problem but a moment ago you were the uptight guy right and presumably a Buddha wouldn't have been that guy so you can only keep score with reference to what happened a moment ago now before you can practice non-d when you're when you're practicing dualistically you can seem to find the evidence of your unenlightenment in the present moment like like it's like like like like your mindfulness

can actually reveal no I'm still stuck right but once you can practice in a non-dualistic way it then becomes impossible to grade yourself but it's always just a memory it's always it's it's always a memory it's always just a story you're telling yourself about who you've been up until the moment but I mean if you ask my wife you'll get a one answer from My Wife anuka and it's just I'm not doing so good that's just a story also but the truth is it's not it's also her experience of living with me right which is

attesting to the character of my experience much of the time in the past so what's her grade of you oh I think it it's not not good not good no no you get there we go that'll be the next podcast you have her on uh well I have a great app that you should check out might be helpful with that it's called uh it's called waking up yeah I love waking up you know I I subscribe to all the apps but waking up truly is the one that I find myself using the most and I

love it because not only do you have these daily meditations it's just this amazing robust library of all kinds of fantastic wisdom yeah there's some great people on there that you have nothing to do with me it's the app is in the process of out growing me which is which is great it's really a special thing thank you for creating it and and particularly thank you for acquiring that incredible collection of Talks by Ellen Watts which I found myself revisiting all the time I love that stuff yeah it's really cool yeah we got the whole

cat that was one of the things I I lost but back in the days of uh cassette tapes I had like a whole like 150 hours of him and uh in in some move I I lost all those tapes they just the Box didn't arrive and uh so it was yeah it was personally it was just great fun to acquire the digital and it did how many hours total it's like 150 hours that yeah yeah yeah yeah it's extraordinary well there were so many other things I wanted to talk to you about veganism AI all

kinds of other stuff so please come back and and let's do round two thank you okay excellent [Music] peace that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive my books Finding Ultra voicing change and the plant power as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. roll.com if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you

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