Making Sense - Sam Harris - #181 — The Illusory Self

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, some housekeeping today.

00:00:23.800 So I want to clear up a little confusion about the difference between Waking Up, my meditation

00:00:31.440 app, and this podcast, Making Sense, and also talk about how I see them interacting going

00:00:39.900 forward. The podcast, as many of you know, was originally called Waking Up, and why that

00:00:46.860 was? I have no idea. I had written a book by that title, and apparently I just felt I had

00:00:54.340 run out of titles. And so for the first hundred episodes or so, that's what the podcast was

00:00:59.340 called. And then I realized I wanted to release a meditation app, which was a direct descendant

00:01:04.700 of the book, and Waking Up was obviously the perfect title for that. And it really had never

00:01:10.160 been the best name for the podcast. So we renamed the podcast Making Sense at that point, which

00:01:15.760 was a much better name for it, given the diversity of topics I touch here. But the net result is that

00:01:21.620 many people are still confused about what the podcast is called. And when someone refers to the

00:01:26.580 Waking Up app online, many people think they're talking about the podcast. And this confusion is

00:01:33.200 compounded because I've now opened a separate conversation track in the app, which is essentially

00:01:38.980 a new podcast on topics more narrowly focused on meditation and the nature of mind and ethics

00:01:45.600 and generally what it means to live an examined life. And to make matters worse, sometimes one

00:01:51.320 of these conversations seems worth airing both on the app and on the podcast, like the one on

00:01:57.240 psychedelics with Roland Griffiths, or on addiction and craving with Judson Brewer. So I occasionally do

00:02:02.920 that, and this is also confusing. And even if the conversation is just on the Waking Up app,

00:02:09.560 Making Sense podcast subscribers get access to those conversations when they're logged into my website.

00:02:14.880 So I understand why some of you don't know what the hell I'm up to over here. First, waking up and

00:02:20.220 making sense really are separate endeavors, despite the occasional sharing of content. So the basic

00:02:27.240 picture is if you want all of my podcast content, plus the podcast-like conversations I have on the

00:02:34.500 Waking Up app, you need to subscribe to the Making Sense podcast through my website, samharris.org.

00:02:40.940 And if you're not subscribed to the podcast, you'll be hearing half episodes and missing

00:02:46.400 other content that's behind the paywall. If you want to use the Waking Up app, which is actually much

00:02:51.860 more than the conversations I've been having there, it's a whole curriculum that I'm continuing to

00:02:57.440 develop, and I'm bringing on other teachers as well. The way to get that is to subscribe to Waking Up,

00:03:03.980 either through the iOS or Android apps, or you can use the web-based version at wakingup.com.

00:03:09.940 And in either case, if you can't afford a subscription, you can have one for free.

00:03:14.420 For Making Sense, you just need to send an email to support at samharris.org,

00:03:18.820 and for Waking Up, send one to support at wakingup.com.

00:03:22.440 And I've talked about my reasoning here before. It's very important to me that money not be the

00:03:28.760 reason why someone doesn't get access to my digital content. That's true both for the podcast

00:03:33.980 and for the app. Now, as far as the difference between these two platforms, the Waking Up app is

00:03:40.840 where I'm talking about first-person approaches to understanding the nature of the mind. And by

00:03:46.340 understanding, I don't mean just conceptual understanding. I mean experiencing the mind

00:03:52.240 in a new way. So this is where I'm focused on things like meditation and now psychedelics and

00:03:58.780 ethics and related topics. The Making Sense podcast is where I'm talking about everything that interests

00:04:05.360 me, from physics to politics. And as I said, from time to time, a conversation will appear in both

00:04:10.500 places because I think it will be of interest to both audiences. But most of what I have to say about

00:04:15.600 meditation and first-person methods of exploring consciousness will be said on the app, not on

00:04:21.860 this podcast. Because it still seems like most people who are listening to this podcast are not

00:04:27.340 really interested in meditation. I've heard from many people some version of, I really like it when

00:04:34.580 you talk about current events and science and things like AI or the brain and behavior or the conflict

00:04:41.160 between religion and science. But I'm just not interested in the meditation stuff because it's got

00:04:45.580 the stink of religion all over it. And the fact that it's Buddhism and not Christianity or Islam 0.98

00:04:51.040 just doesn't matter. It's still irrational and probably bullshit. And other people say things 1.00

00:04:57.520 like, well, I've tried meditation and it did nothing for me. And I think you're probably just fooling

00:05:02.360 yourself. Just like people who believe in God. There's no way you can know you're not fooling

00:05:07.280 yourself. You're just imagining that you're having certain experiences in meditation or you're just

00:05:11.860 imagining that they have any significance. Well, there's only so much pushing I can do on a locked

00:05:18.820 door. And as I said, generally this podcast will cover topics of a much wider interest than meditation

00:05:24.380 or the nature of consciousness. But in today's podcast, I want to give you skeptics one more shot

00:05:30.640 at understanding what I'm up to. So I'm going to present a conversation that I recently recorded for

00:05:36.280 the Waking Up app. And I'm doing this for two reasons. The first is that there are specific

00:05:41.160 insights into the nature of mind that I consider to be the most important things I've ever learned.

00:05:47.460 And they're not a matter of simply believing something new. And they're certainly not matters

00:05:52.880 of faith. And the fact that some of these insights have been best described in Eastern traditions like

00:05:59.800 Buddhism doesn't make them Buddhist. No more than the fact that Isaac Newton was Christian

00:06:05.180 makes the laws of motion somehow Christian. And these insights are not merely important for one's

00:06:11.880 well-being. They're important intellectually. They clear up philosophical and ethical and even

00:06:18.280 scientific confusion. And the truth is, I've been very slow to appreciate this. I've been slow to

00:06:24.180 understand just how much intellectual work is being done for me by the fact that I've had certain

00:06:29.420 experiences in meditation. And these experiences have made certain features of the mind obvious.

00:06:36.320 So there are questions about things like free will, or the hard problem of consciousness,

00:06:41.780 or the nature of morality, that people continually get hung up on. And I often can't see the basis for

00:06:49.360 their confusion. And more and more I see that this basis is not conceptual. It's that they can't

00:06:55.440 actually notice certain things about their own experience. Take free will, for instance. This is a

00:07:02.080 topic I've covered a lot. People find it endlessly bewildering. The truth is, we have every reason to

00:07:10.780 believe that free will is an incoherent concept. It just doesn't make sense in a deterministic universe.

00:07:18.220 And it doesn't make any sense if you add a dose of randomness to the universe either. And this has

00:07:24.720 been obvious for probably 400 years. And yet I keep running into smart people who think that free

00:07:32.520 will is a real intellectual problem. That we know we have it in some sense, or we have some purified

00:07:40.560 version of it, and that we find ourselves at a kind of intellectual stalemate when debating it

00:07:45.780 philosophically or scientifically. Now, of course, there have been people on the podcast who have

00:07:50.360 agreed with me. People like Robert Sapolsky and Jerry Coyne. But even in agreement, they are taken

00:07:56.840 in by the illusion of free will. The reality is that if you can pay sufficient attention to your mind,

00:08:04.640 the illusion disappears. And it becomes obvious that everything is just arising on its own, including

00:08:11.340 one's thoughts and intentions and other mental precursors to action. There is just no fine-grained

00:08:18.460 experiential correlate to the common notion of free will. That's why I say in my book on the topic

00:08:24.040 that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. There is no illusion of free will.

00:08:30.360 So being a better observer of the nature of one's own mind isn't just a matter of improving one's

00:08:37.060 well-being, though that is one of the core purposes of meditation. It's also an intellectual project.

00:08:44.280 It's a matter of bringing one's first-person understanding, one's subjective experience,

00:08:49.540 into closer alignment with a third-person understanding, that is an objective understanding,

00:08:55.460 of how the world is. And meditation is the training that allows you to do this.

00:09:01.860 Consider the analogy that I've sometimes used to the optic blind spot. You all know you have a blind

00:09:09.300 spot in your visual field, and I'm sure most of you were taught to see it in school. You made two marks

00:09:15.200 on a piece of paper, you closed one eye, you stared at one of those marks, and brought the paper closer

00:09:21.800 until the second mark disappeared. This is a very simple procedure, subjectively, that allows you to see

00:09:29.780 something right on the surface of consciousness that you would otherwise spend your lifetime

00:09:34.360 overlooking. And the blind spot was actually predicted based on our growing understanding of

00:09:40.520 the anatomy of the eye. And then someone developed this simple procedure by which one can find it.

00:09:46.400 So in seeing the blind spot, you're actually seeing something subjectively, as a matter of direct

00:09:52.920 experience, that reveals a deeper truth about the eye. Well, I can also say that the non-existence

00:10:01.320 of an unchanging self in the middle of experience, an ego, the feeling that we call I, is also predicted

00:10:11.500 by the structure and function of the brain. The feeling of being an ego in your head,

00:10:17.480 a thinker in addition to the next arising thought can't be one's true point of view. And in fact,

00:10:26.460 the feeling that such a self exists is the same feeling to which people attach this notion of free

00:10:33.560 will. There is no self who could enjoy the spurious power of free will. And this is directly suggested

00:10:41.140 by what we know is going on in the world and in the world inside our heads. There's no account of

00:10:48.400 neuroanatomy or neurophysiology that would make sense of an unchanging self freely exercising its will.

00:10:57.380 And meditation, ultimately, is a very simple procedure that allows one to discover the absence of this

00:11:05.940 fake self directly. And here you can see that reasonable-sounding objections from skeptics

00:11:12.780 aren't reasonable. Consider the one I just mentioned, right? What if you're wrong? What if you're just

00:11:19.960 fooling yourself? How is this different from believing in God? Right, well, okay, imagine if someone said this

00:11:28.020 to you about the optic blind spot. I mean, you've run this experiment, and you can do it again right

00:11:35.420 now. You can interrogate your conscious perception of the visual field directly right now and see that

00:11:44.060 dot on the page disappear and reappear and disappear and reappear. You can do this on demand. You can do it

00:11:51.220 a dozen times in the next 30 seconds. And what have you found yourself talking to an otherwise

00:11:56.560 brilliant person, a professional philosopher or physicist, but this is a person who clearly had

00:12:04.280 not picked up a piece of paper, much less put a mark on it, to do the experiment. And then imagine

00:12:09.560 that when you explain the procedure to them, they had an argument for why there was no point in doing it,

00:12:14.800 or they said they'd had bad experiences with paper in the past. Their mother was really into paper,

00:12:20.380 and they just have bad associations with it. Or maybe they claim to have done the experiment,

00:12:25.100 but from everything they say about their experience, you can tell they were holding the paper wrong,

00:12:30.760 or they had failed to close one eye, or they didn't know which dot they should be looking at.

00:12:35.900 Perform the blind spot experiment now, or just remember clearly how decisive it is, and take a moment to

00:12:42.660 imagine hearing these kinds of objections from smart people. And then you'll get a sense of what my

00:12:49.860 experience is like in these conversations. And the truth is, this analogy isn't sufficient,

00:12:56.020 because you also have to imagine that seeing the blind spot directly is much more valuable than it is.

00:13:04.480 Imagine that seeing the blind spot significantly improved your life. Imagine that it gave you a

00:13:12.260 capacity to let go of negative emotions more or less immediately. And what if it allowed you to

00:13:17.160 understand other things, intellectually and ethically, that you couldn't understand before? If you add

00:13:23.940 that component, you'll get a sense of why I've been banging on about the importance of meditation.

00:13:29.980 Even in situations where the person I'm speaking with seems less than interested. The podcast I did

00:13:36.240 with Adam Grant and Richard Dawkins last year are good examples of this. I'm riding my hobby horse

00:13:42.960 about meditation to the evident frustration of my guest. The reality is there's not many people in a

00:13:50.780 position to do this. There are not many people who understand the science and the relevant philosophy

00:13:57.640 and are committed to fully coming out from under the shadow of religion, who know down to their toes

00:14:05.500 we have to get out of the religion business, and who yet understand what consciousness is like

00:14:12.420 beyond the illusion of the self. And if you've heard me talk about this before, you'll know I'm not

00:14:18.580 holding myself up as a perfect example of this understanding. I still consider myself a student

00:14:25.080 of it. I'm merely practicing this understanding. And again, the recommendation I make about meditation

00:14:31.860 is not narrowly based on the peripheral scientific claims for it that have been so hyped in the media

00:14:38.620 as a tool of stress reduction or for improving one's health. It probably does reduce stress,

00:14:45.800 and that's probably good for you. But that's not its core purpose. It's of much deeper interest

00:14:52.000 psychologically and intellectually than that. Imagine hearing that someone is playing grandmaster

00:14:58.580 level chess just to reduce stress. That's not likely the whole motivation, whether or not chess can

00:15:06.340 reduce stress in the end. So if I've established any credibility with you as a thinker, as an honest

00:15:15.680 broker of information, and as a critic of religion, please take this for what it's worth. There is something

00:15:23.400 to understand here. More precisely, there is something to experience here that will change your

00:15:29.700 understanding of many other things. And the fact that traditional efforts to have these insights have tended to

00:15:36.860 occur in religious contexts and in New Age and cultic contexts, the fact that some people who talk about the

00:15:44.460 illusion of the self turn out to be New Age frauds, for instance, that's inconvenient, yes. It's distracting.

00:15:52.360 But it's irrelevant in the end. James Watson's user interface issues as a person and his resulting

00:16:00.740 professional problems have no implications for the actual structure of DNA. So in this episode of the

00:16:08.680 podcast, I want to give you one more look at the kinds of things I'm talking about almost entirely in

00:16:15.880 the waking up. And to do that, I want to introduce you to Richard Lang. He was a longtime student of

00:16:22.440 Douglas Harding, who I've mentioned several times. Douglas was an architect by training, and then devised

00:16:30.680 his own very creative way of talking about the nature of awareness. He really stepped out of every

00:16:39.340 traditional way of teaching and came up with his own metaphors and procedures. And the core of his

00:16:46.900 teaching surrounds this experience of what he called having no head. And he wrote a book by that title on

00:16:54.100 having no head. And I've long thought that while there are some liabilities with this way of teaching

00:17:02.460 and practicing. And I discussed some of those with Richard here. It is a uniquely accessible way of

00:17:10.200 unmasking this experience of selflessness. Many people get it who I'm convinced would not get it

00:17:17.740 by being given more traditional instructions. Now, what they make of it is another thing. It's quite

00:17:24.480 possible to not see its significance initially. And again, I talk about that with Richard. But introducing

00:17:32.060 Richard in this context seems especially apropos because Douglas Harding and his teaching were at one

00:17:40.080 point singled out for criticism by some very smart people. In fact, by my friend Dan Dennett and his

00:17:48.520 collaborator, Douglas Hofstadter, in their book The Mind's Eye. And I wrote about this in my book Waking

00:17:55.160 Up because this was really a crystal clear moment of, again, very smart people who consider it their

00:18:02.900 full-time job to think about the nature of the mind having no idea what they're talking about when it

00:18:10.480 comes to a first-person method of investigating it. So before I bring Richard into the conversation,

00:18:15.940 I want to read the section from my book Waking Up titled, Having No Head. The basic insight is this,

00:18:23.540 that Douglas noticed that from the first-person point of view, when he looked out at the world,

00:18:30.900 he did not see his own face. He did not see his own head. Rather, where he knew his head to be,

00:18:39.080 there was simply the world, right? So when he was looking at another person's face,

00:18:44.560 and they were looking back at him, and he was feeling implicated by their gaze, because he knew

00:18:51.920 what they were staring at. They were staring at his face. He noticed that as a matter of direct

00:18:57.660 experience, there's no face there. And he found that he was simply the space in which they were

00:19:04.340 appearing. I'll give you the quotation that Hofstadter and Dennett excerpted in their book,

00:19:10.620 and then criticized. Just give you a sense of the intellectual impasse here. So this is a

00:19:17.720 quotation from Douglas Harding. Then I'll give you Hofstadter's reaction to it.

00:19:22.920 What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular. I stopped thinking.

00:19:30.280 A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness came over me. Reason and imagination

00:19:37.660 and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away.

00:19:45.080 I forgot who and what I was. My name, manhood, animalhood, all that can be called mine. It was as

00:19:53.820 if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the

00:20:01.340 now, that present moment, and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was

00:20:09.620 khaki trouser legs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in

00:20:16.600 a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirt front terminating upwards in absolutely nothing whatsoever.

00:20:24.080 Certainly not in a head. It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head

00:20:30.700 should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied.

00:20:37.240 It was a vast emptiness, vastly filled. A nothing that found room for everything. Room for grass,

00:20:45.360 trees, shadowy distant hills. And far above them, snow peaks, like a row of angular clouds riding the

00:20:52.960 blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly shining in the

00:21:01.040 clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void. And, and this was the

00:21:07.940 real miracle, the wonder and delight, utterly free of me, unstained by any observer. Its total presence

00:21:16.200 was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from

00:21:23.700 myself. I was nowhere around. There arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience

00:21:30.560 itself, but only peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden.

00:21:38.160 I had been blind to the one thing that is always present, and without which I am blind indeed to this

00:21:43.660 marvelous substitute for a head, this unbounded clarity, this luminous and absolutely pure void,

00:21:50.580 which nevertheless is, rather than contains, all things. For however carefully I attend,

00:21:58.240 I fail to find here even so much as a blank screen on which these mountains and sun and sky are

00:22:03.960 projected, or a clear mirror in which they are reflected, or a transparent lens or aperture through

00:22:10.900 which they are viewed, still less a soul or a mind to which they are presented, or a viewer,

00:22:16.880 however shadowy, who is distinguishable from the view. Nothing whatever intervenes, not even the

00:22:23.660 baffling and elusive obstacle called distance. The huge blue sky, the pink-edged whiteness of the snows,

00:22:31.300 the sparkling green of the grass, how can these be remote when there's nothing to be remote from?

00:22:37.460 The headless void refuses all definition and location. It is not round, or small, or big,

00:22:44.740 or even here as distinct from there. Okay, so that's the end of Harding's quotation, and then here

00:22:52.660 is my follow-up text. Harding's assertion that he has no head must be read in the first-person sense.

00:23:00.720 The man was not claiming to have been literally decapitated. From a first-person point of view,

00:23:05.880 his emphasis on headlessness is a stroke of genius that offers an unusually clear description of what

00:23:11.080 it's like to glimpse the non-duality of consciousness. Here are Hofstetter's, quote,

00:23:15.960 reflections on Harding's account. So now I'm quoting Hofstetter in the book he co-authored with

00:23:22.120 my friend Dan Dennett. We have here been presented with a charmingly childish and solipsistic view of

00:23:28.220 the human condition. It is something that, at an intellectual level, offends and appalls us. Can anyone

00:23:34.780 sincerely entertain such notions without embarrassment? Yet to some primitive level in us, it speaks

00:23:40.460 clearly. That is the level at which we cannot accept the notion of our own death. End quote.

00:23:46.460 Okay, so back to me. Having expressed his pity for batty old Harding, Hofstetter proceeds to explain 0.99

00:23:53.400 away his insights as a solipsistic denial of mortality, a perpetuation of the childish illusion that,

00:23:59.260 quote, I am a necessary ingredient of the universe. End quote. However, Harding's point was that I

00:24:06.860 is not even an ingredient, necessary or otherwise, of his own mind. What Hofstetter fails to realize is

00:24:13.380 that Harding's account contains a precise empirical instruction. Look for whatever it is you are calling

00:24:19.020 I, without being distracted by even the subtlest undercurrent of thought, and notice what happens

00:24:24.880 the moment you turn consciousness upon itself. This illustrates a very common phenomenon in scientific

00:24:30.580 and secular circles. We have a contemplative like Harding, who, to the eye of anyone familiar with the

00:24:36.140 experience of self-transcendence, has described it in a manner approaching perfect clarity. And we have

00:24:41.780 a scholar like Hofstetter, a celebrated contributor to our modern understanding of the mind, who dismisses

00:24:47.860 him as a child. Okay, so that's a very clear illustration of the intellectual impasse. And upon hearing my

00:24:55.660 conversation with Richard Lang, many of you may still be stuck on Hofstetter's side of the impasse. You

00:25:04.220 might just think, what are they talking about? Of course I can't see my head. What are you, crazy? Again, if that's

00:25:12.900 where you're stuck, all I can do is encourage you to keep looking. And Richard Lang was a longtime student

00:25:20.560 of Douglas Harding's and studied with him for 30 years or so. He's written several books based on his

00:25:28.420 own experience teaching and also brought together much of Douglas's work. And you can find more of his

00:25:34.980 material at headless.org. And Richard, while I haven't met him, I think you'll hear sounds like just about

00:25:42.840 the nicest person on earth. If we held a global contest for the nicest person, I think I would

00:25:50.680 nominate Richard just based on his voice alone. In any case, this is not a podcast that you can profit

00:25:57.480 from while multitasking. You shouldn't be working out in the gym. You really have to give this your

00:26:04.800 full attention if you're going to get anything from it. In the first half, we talk about Richard's life

00:26:10.220 and his experience with Douglas. And in the second, we get into the details of the practice. And

00:26:17.680 there's no paywall on this episode. I consider this a public service announcement. And now I bring you

00:26:24.280 Richard Lang. I am here with Richard Lang. Richard, thanks for joining me.

00:26:33.120 A pleasure to be here, Sam.

00:26:35.500 So how do you describe what it is you do?

00:26:39.720 Ah. Well, I don't know, really. I describe it as seeing who you really are. And it is paying

00:26:49.980 attention to what it's like to be yourself from your own point of view, as opposed to what you are

00:26:57.940 for others. So if someone was looking at me, they'd see Richard sitting at the desk and obviously see

00:27:05.800 my head and background. But my point of view, the first person point of view, is quite different.

00:27:13.560 I don't see my head. I'm looking out of open space. I am a space for the world, I would say.

00:27:22.780 So it's a very different point of view from the objective one, where I'm a person. And I accept

00:27:30.920 both. I love both. And I would say that this experience, which is so obvious, I mean, all the

00:27:38.120 listener has to do is look and notice whether they can see their own face. I'm sure they can't, and

00:27:45.940 instead you see the world. But it is essentially a non-verbal experience. And you can't get it wrong.

00:27:54.160 You can't half see your no-face or see it a bit blurry. And I would say I'm convinced it's the same

00:28:00.600 for us all. We're all looking out of this single eye, this openness. But we've got a different view

00:28:07.360 out and different responses to it. So, well, how's that for a starter?

00:28:14.040 Yeah, well, so I want to get into the experiential component of this. But we should talk about how you

00:28:19.940 got into this position of teaching people about the nature of awareness. And we'll talk about your

00:28:27.800 teacher, Douglas Harding, who I've mentioned many times, both in my app and on my podcast. But before

00:28:34.280 we get to Douglas, did you have a background in meditation or any other contemplative tradition

00:28:39.760 before you stumbled upon Douglas?

00:28:42.660 Well, in a way I did. I mean, I met Douglas when I was young. I was 17. But I had, when I was about 10,

00:28:51.520 the headmaster at my school told a story, which was a story from someone called the Venerable Bede,

00:28:59.040 who was this holy man in the north of England in, I don't know, 9th century or something. And Bede

00:29:05.800 tells this story of a king and having a kind of feast in winter in a big hall. And there's a big

00:29:15.040 fire. And in through a window flies a bird across the room and out the other window. And Bede said,

00:29:22.860 this is what our life is. And who knows where we came from? And who knows where we're going?

00:29:28.340 And the headmaster at my school told this story when I was about 10. And it got my imagination. I

00:29:34.320 thought, what is out that window? And so I got interested in Christianity at the time. That was

00:29:44.340 the context and really in the mystical side of it. But at the next school, there was no one sort of

00:29:52.460 really interested in that. And it was the late 60s. So I started reading around and reading about

00:29:58.600 other religions. And I got interested in Hinduism in particular, and Buddhism. And I wanted to get

00:30:07.180 enlightened, you know, 15, 16. And then I read a book on Zen by a guy called Christmas Humphreys. And

00:30:18.840 there was a note about the Buddhist Society Summer School. This is in England. And so I decided to go

00:30:26.340 with my brother. And we went from the north of England down to near London. And we went to this

00:30:32.040 summer school. It was very confusing to begin with, all kinds of different approaches. And then one day,

00:30:37.160 someone said, oh, you ought to go to the workshop, informal workshop with Douglas Harding this

00:30:42.660 afternoon. And I hadn't heard of him. But we went. And Douglas got us to point a finger back at our

00:30:49.040 no face and look. And rather fortuitously, I found what I was looking for. And Douglas was very friendly.

00:31:02.280 And he said, anyone interested, come and visit. He lived in Suffolk, in the sort of east of England.

00:31:10.040 So when I got back home with my brother, my mom looked at us. She was worried we were going to

00:31:16.960 join a cult or something, realized we were fine, and then was interested herself. So around Christmas

00:31:22.720 time, we all went down by train and stayed with Douglas. Well, there was, as usual, about 10,

00:31:29.360 15 people there. And it was a weekend. He had two houses. And one of them was used solely for people

00:31:37.520 interested in, well, what we called seeing. And that really was the beginning of a friendship with

00:31:44.860 Douglas. And he had many, many friends. And he never charged a penny. It was always just come and

00:31:52.000 come and be with us, you know, if you're interested in this. And for whatever reason, I also felt drawn

00:32:02.080 to actually sharing it. Most people don't really, but I did. And I recognized somehow at an early age

00:32:11.660 that this was a fantastically effective, simple way forwards for in terms, way in terms of sharing

00:32:21.180 the experience of who one is. And so shortly after that, I went to university not far from him in

00:32:29.000 Cambridge. And I used to go down every other weekend and started to go to his workshops and

00:32:35.860 just to help out. And I sort of got used to the experiments and making them up and all of that.

00:32:47.580 So I started, it was just the way it occurred to me to, ah, I want to be involved in sharing this.

00:32:55.280 So even while I was at university, I was running workshops in my college room.

00:32:59.660 What were you studying at Cambridge?

00:33:03.780 Well, I was studying history. Although the main thing I was studying was seeing who you really are.

00:33:09.920 And, you know, as I say, I used to go down to Douglas's house all the time and made many friends. And

00:33:17.880 one of the things that was true about that community, because he really made friends,

00:33:26.900 his friends, his friends were people who were interested in this. And it was clear that there

00:33:32.800 was no hierarchy at this level, because you can't half see your no face or see it better than someone

00:33:37.600 else. And Douglas always was very kind of strong on that. So I sort of, looking back, I kind of grew

00:33:47.740 up in a mini community where seeing who you are, as we call it, was normal. All my friends were headless.

00:33:56.900 So, yeah, so people who have heard me speak about Douglas will know that it's been in the context

00:34:04.560 of his, really his central empirical injunction, which is to look for your head and notice that

00:34:12.040 you fail to find it. And we'll go over that a bit. But what's so interesting about Douglas is that he

00:34:19.360 came up with truly novel practices and analogies and framings and ways of looking into awareness.

00:34:30.020 It's his own methodology, which really is very effective for so many people. I would argue it has a, at

00:34:40.360 least one pitfall, which we'll get into. And it touches this point you made about there being no hierarchy

00:34:46.360 and no way of doing it wrong or no way of, you know, once you've seen it, you've seen it.

00:34:51.920 And I think there's definitely some caveat to issue there. But before we get there, let's just talk

00:34:57.500 about Douglas, the man, for a moment. Because I think I was mistaken about a few points of his

00:35:05.260 biography. When I've spoken about his insight, I believe I have this from his book on having no head,

00:35:11.540 that he first noticed this when he was in Nepal, staring out at the Himalayas from this place called

00:35:19.920 Nagarkot. But from reading your, you've published a, essentially a graphic biography,

00:35:28.100 The Man With No Head. And it seemed that he had this insight into headlessness earlier. So maybe you can

00:35:36.980 just give us a brief tour of Douglas's spiritual biography.

00:35:43.100 Yes. Well, he grew up in an exclusive Plymouth Brethren, which was a very strict Christian group. And his

00:35:51.120 father was very keen, very dedicated, a very small group in the east of England. And they used to, you know,

00:35:58.180 have prayers twice a day and four times on Sundays and God knows what. But at 21, he left.

00:36:04.640 And his reason for leaving was that, well, you might be right, but I am not going to accept that

00:36:12.040 you're right just because you say you are. I want to find out for myself. And it hurt his father. His

00:36:17.160 father cut off from him. And anyway, Douglas went his own way. But he had been profoundly affected by

00:36:25.000 his father. During the First World War, the Germans bombed the town where they were. It was a seaside town.

00:36:32.760 And his father refused to go into the cinema to seek shelter, but got the whole family on their knees

00:36:40.200 praying while the bombs came over, or the shells came over. And he said, I'm going to put my faith

00:36:45.920 in God. Well, Douglas rejected the sort of kind of, you know, the peripherals of the religion,

00:36:54.460 but he was affected by this deep faith somehow. And this sense of the importance of meaning of,

00:37:05.200 yeah, something like that. Anyway, at 21, he left. And then he started inquiring. He was training and

00:37:11.220 then working as an architect in London. And he started inquiring into what he was. And I think

00:37:17.240 he often used to say, the basic thing that amazes me is that I am. You know, I mean, just how amazing

00:37:24.440 just to be. I mean, I might not be. And while I am, I'd like to find out who I am, what I am. And he'd

00:37:32.520 already rejected what the Plymouth Brethren was saying. So at this point, he wasn't going to take

00:37:37.240 on another dogma. He was going to look for himself. And he started really by recognizing that he was made

00:37:44.640 of layers, depending on where the observer was. So, you know, at six feet, he was human, but closer

00:37:50.360 to his cells. And then further away, he was a city or a species. And this sort of enabled him to

00:37:58.240 sort of cross the boundary between his skin and the rest of the world. And he began developing this

00:38:06.760 feeling that he was, this view that he was like an onion with layers. And of course, when you realize

00:38:13.520 that, you must ask what's at the center. And in 1937, he, he'd already written a book by then.

00:38:21.880 And he went to India with his wife and they, they had two children there and the war broke out.

00:38:30.180 And although he was a successful architect there, his main interest was this inquiry into

00:38:35.380 what am I? I've got books of notes from those years, drawings and maps and, you know,

00:38:43.140 mandala kind of things with these layers. Anyway, he, in about 1943, he'd come to

00:38:49.880 the position that he realized he was made of layers and that the nearer you got to the center,

00:38:56.840 the less there was. So it made sense that he was kind of no thing at the center, but he,

00:39:03.900 he couldn't seem to experience that. It was just a guess. And then he was reading a book

00:39:11.140 where there was an article or a section by Ernst Mark, physicist. And Mark, it's a fairly well-known

00:39:19.420 picture, drew a self-portrait, not of what he looked like at six feet, but of what he looked

00:39:25.580 like from his own point of view, which of course is headless, with his nose, you know, about 10 feet

00:39:31.000 tall. Because if you close one eye, you know, your nose goes from the ceiling to the floor.

00:39:36.240 And when Douglas saw this, and he was probably sitting in the Imperial Library or somewhere in

00:39:41.780 Calcutta, he suddenly thought, that's it. And it was not a big wow, he used to say. It was just like

00:39:48.620 a cool recognition. Ah, that's what I am at zero. That's what I am. Ah, you see. Now, in On Having No

00:39:59.400 Head, as you quite rightly say, he talks about walking in the Himalayas and seeing it there.

00:40:05.900 And he used to say, oh, well, you know, I did walk in the Himalayas. And I did see it there. But that

00:40:11.840 was just a sort of way of starting the book. But recently, I was going through all his books. And I

00:40:17.700 was going through, he's got a whole load of books by Suzuki. And I was reading, I was looking through,

00:40:24.040 because he made notes in all the books, and when he read them, and when he re-read them, and so on.

00:40:30.120 And there's a little section on Satori, on the wow experience. And just underneath it,

00:40:39.260 Douglas has written, Darjeeling! And so I think, you know, after seeing it down in Calcutta, he did go

00:40:47.480 up several times up to that part to, you know, walk in the hills. And he must have had a, you know,

00:40:55.120 understandably a powerful experience of being spaced for the mountains. So I think it's all true in a

00:41:01.520 way. And what was his connection to other contemplatives and teachers of the time? And so

00:41:10.100 he began teaching, when did he begin teaching in earnest? Was it the 50s?

00:41:14.720 Well, what happened was, he was very much on his own in India. It wasn't, he didn't go around any 0.89

00:41:21.340 gurus. He was totally working on his own, doing research, you know. And when he saw this, he

00:41:27.780 realized it, in 43, he realized it hit gold. He came back to England in 1945, just towards the end of

00:41:34.880 the war. And he said to his wife, who'd already returned, I'm going to take a year off to write

00:41:40.140 my book. Well, in the end, a year turned into five years. And he was on his own. Five years,

00:41:49.300 14 hours a day, seven days a week. One holiday in all that time. And the first, the book is The

00:41:56.740 Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. It is huge. 600 pages, just huge. And then he condensed it,

00:42:03.700 because he knew he couldn't really publish that. And C.S. Lewis read it, and that's how it took off.

00:42:10.140 C.S. Lewis wrote back and said, I've never been so drunk with a book, you know, since I read

00:42:15.420 Berkson in World War I or something. And so that began to put him on the map. But he wasn't teaching.

00:42:21.540 He was a writer. He was a thinker. And then he got back, this was in the 50s, got back into

00:42:27.740 architecture, because he hadn't been earning any money, became very successful, continued to write

00:42:33.020 a bit here and there. But at the end of the 50s, he felt he was in the doldrums, and he wasn't

00:42:39.840 getting his message across. And at that time, he came across Zen, through Suzuki, really. And for the

00:42:48.880 first time, he came across people, the old Zen masters, who were talking about their original face,

00:42:54.700 you know, the face you had before. They were speaking his language. And at the same time,

00:43:00.540 he also came across Raman Maharshi, who influenced him and affected him, I think with his just total

00:43:08.200 dedication. You know, that's what Raman was about, wasn't it? So at the end of the 50s, because of this

00:43:15.740 discovery of Zen, he then got in touch with the Buddhist society, thought, oh, well, maybe there are some

00:43:20.800 people there who will understand what I'm talking about, because he had not shared it really with

00:43:26.440 anyone. He was on his own with it. And they, Christmas Humphries and Weiwuwei, recognized that

00:43:36.020 Douglas had something here. And they published On Having No Head. And that was his first really

00:43:42.160 popular book, which, of course, he starts with that, you know, the best day of my life, I was walking

00:43:48.180 in them layers, all of that. And so I had no head. But it wasn't until 1964, that book was published in

00:43:55.940 61, that he really shared it for the first time with someone, who was his secretary in his architectural

00:44:01.800 practice. And it blew her mind. And it blew his mind that it blew her mind. And he thought, oh, I can die

00:44:09.520 now. I've shared it with one person. And then the next year, up in the north, Manchester, he said,

00:44:17.180 my God, things are taking off. I shared it with two more people. So this is early days. Now, around

00:44:23.840 that time, he built his second house just over the road from his first house. And that became just,

00:44:31.380 you know, I hadn't known why really he was building it. That became a potential meeting place for people

00:44:36.400 interested in this. And he was teaching comparative religion. And in the course, he would share the

00:44:44.180 headless experience. And so people began gradually to meet. And that's where the community started

00:44:50.300 in the mid-60s. And it was at the, towards the end of the 60s, that he began to invent his experiments.

00:45:00.440 And he always wanted to share. And he was doing, before the experiments really, I mean, the experiments

00:45:08.800 were always there in a way, because the experience of your headless nature is so direct, you know.

00:45:16.040 But he got the idea of the experiments. And in the late 60s and early 70s, I mean, in 1972,

00:45:23.320 he produced a toolkit with all the experiments. And I was around then, and we were making them up.

00:45:29.060 And I helped him make the toolkit. We used to go down for a week and, you know, work on it. And he was very

00:45:35.880 creative. He was always coming up with a new way of kind of sharing it. He was on the job 24-7.

00:45:49.420 So if you went to his house, you couldn't go unless you were interested in seeing. And as soon as you

00:45:55.200 walked in the door, before you walked in the door, you were aware of who you were, you know, because

00:45:59.160 that's what it was all about. And everyone else was. And at the Buddhist Society, they said,

00:46:05.100 you'll always know where Douglas Harding's friends are, because they laugh a lot.

00:46:11.020 So he really, he just followed his instinct. He knew he wanted to share it. He knew he'd got something

00:46:19.240 really powerful. I mean, he just believed in it. He thought, this is a breakthrough.

00:46:24.960 We've been talking about a true nature for centuries. Now you can see it, you see. Now you can

00:46:29.720 point at it. Now you can see your face to no face. It's not abstract. This is concrete. Face to no face

00:46:37.340 with others. You're looking out of a single eye. So he wrote a book in the 70s called The Science of the

00:46:44.060 First Person. This is a science. The science of objects, you look at them, the science of the

00:46:49.980 subject. And he said, your experience of yourself, which is space for the world, is as valid as other

00:46:58.000 people's experience of you, which is an object in the world. Yeah. So he never stopped. I mean,

00:47:07.920 he just never stopped. He was always on the job. He developed a model in the 1970s, the Universe

00:47:14.560 Explorer model. He wrote many books, articles, traveled incessantly. In The Man With No Head,

00:47:21.280 you detail at least two of his meetings with prominent Buddhists at the time, one with Alan

00:47:27.420 Watts and one with Philip Kaplow. Yeah.

00:47:29.880 It seemed like with Watts, he had a meeting of the minds and with Kaplow, he didn't, or at least it was

00:47:34.880 an odd encounter. Is there more to that story? Well, with Kaplow, the first meeting was good.

00:47:42.420 And Kaplow first came and visited Douglas at his house. And it was a warm occasion. And he came all

00:47:51.100 the way into the country. He was passing through England with a monk. They made the trip. And he

00:47:56.940 said, this is the spiritual center of England. That was his comment. And invited Douglas to Rochester.

00:48:02.640 And, but the second time, like in my book, Kaplow sort of did this Zen testing thing where,

00:48:12.220 you know, and, and Douglas didn't go for that. He said, I've just come to share something. I'm

00:48:17.660 come to be tested. But I've, there's letters. I've got all Douglas's letters and stuff. And there's

00:48:23.720 letters afterwards where they're warm between each other. And Douglas didn't hold a grudge at all.

00:48:29.040 You know, that's kind of a Zen shtick to use paradox and, and weird tests to demonstrate the nature of

00:48:40.920 mind. But it can certainly misfire. And there's a famous story of Kala Rinpoche, who was a great

00:48:47.100 Tibetan meditation master meeting, I think it was Sasaki Roshi. I forget which Zen master. I think it was

00:48:54.680 Sasaki. And at one point, the Roshi held up an orange and said, what is it? And Kala turned to

00:49:03.640 his translator and said, don't they have oranges in Japan?

00:49:06.040 Yeah, the culture sort of missed each other there.

00:49:12.440 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let's, let's jump into the, the experience and do our best to introduce

00:49:19.540 people to it. I guess we should say that, unfortunately, many of the experiments that

00:49:26.260 Douglas devised are highly visual. And we can talk a little bit about the primacy of vision as a,

00:49:34.100 as a context in which to, to see this experience. And this is the kind of thing that it can be

00:49:40.460 recognized with your eyes closed too. But, you know, many of us have found that that's a, a, a

00:49:47.300 subtler thing to recognize. So I guess with that limitation on, I mean, just knowing that

00:49:52.700 we can give people instructions that they do with their open eyes, that, that reference vision as the

00:49:58.660 primary sense, but we just have to recognize that, you know, this is going out in pure audio form. So

00:50:04.080 we have to, and it all has to be intelligible. So with that proviso, how would you instruct,

00:50:11.200 how do you instruct someone who is contemplating this for the first time?

00:50:17.020 Yes. Well, I, I, I could, uh, just take you and them or whatever through just a little

00:50:24.860 process that includes closed eyes. Mm-hmm. And, you know, being aware that we're just audio here.

00:50:32.720 Okay. Well, as you say, it is, a lot of the experiments are visual and you can just notice

00:50:40.900 you can't see your face now, but a very simple direct thing to do, which I think is worth doing,

00:50:48.920 is to actually point. So if the listener is willing to play a bit, I would ask you just to get

00:50:55.180 your index finger of your right hand or something and point out. So you've actually got to do it

00:51:00.920 because it's just, uh, making clear the arrow of attention is out. So you might be pointing at

00:51:06.200 the table or a vase or a window and you're looking along your finger and there's a thing.

00:51:12.820 Now what I want you to do is just turn your finger 180 degrees around to point back at the place

00:51:20.900 you're looking out of and notice what you see there or what you don't see. Because I don't see

00:51:28.060 anything right now. I don't see my face, don't see my eyes, don't see any shape or movement or

00:51:34.480 anything. So I'm pointing, I would say I'm pointing at my no face, at this space here, this stillness,

00:51:41.120 this silence even. And this outward and inward is a two-way pointing thing. So that's a kind of

00:51:50.820 useful gesture to bear in mind. So just starting visually, I'd say, well, you can't see your face.

00:51:59.320 I'd say the inward pointing arrow of attention is pointing at no thing, space. Now this is a

00:52:06.080 non-verbal experience. So I'm putting words on it. I'm absolutely convinced everyone is aware,

00:52:12.040 you know, can see this because you can't see your head. Instead, you see the world.

00:52:15.780 But you may choose different words from me. So that we accept that. So I'd just like you first

00:52:21.600 to notice several things about the view out from this space. That it's a sort of oval view,

00:52:27.780 the field of view, and it fades out all the way around. So whatever you're looking at is most in focus.

00:52:33.820 And then when you get to the edge, as it were, it fades out. And then you can see nothing around it.

00:52:39.720 And I take that seriously. It's sort of hanging in nowhere. The view, there's nothing above it,

00:52:45.760 nothing below it, nothing this side of it. It's just hanging in space. And it's single.

00:52:52.860 So if you look at any two objects, you say, well, that one's bigger than that. You can compare the size.

00:52:58.740 It's relative. I say now, look at the whole view. How big is it? And there isn't a second one to

00:53:06.660 compare it with. So I can't say how big it is. And so the two things to notice here, well, two or three.

00:53:12.900 One, it's single, the view out. I might hear about your view, but I don't experience it.

00:53:17.960 In my own experience, like you say, in the app, it's a matter of experience. It's just one view.

00:53:23.640 It fades out into nothing. It's not inside anything. I can't say how big it is. Now, close

00:53:31.720 your eyes. See? Now, so you've got a kind of darkness, which, again, is in your app. As you say,

00:53:40.640 it's kind of lit up. It's not just nothing. There's something there. Let's call it darkness. It's not

00:53:47.420 uniform darkness. Now, how big is that darkness? Well, there isn't a second one to compare it with.

00:53:55.920 It's single. So I can't say. And is it inside anything? Well, just like the visual view, no. I

00:54:05.020 could say it's in space or awareness or consciousness. Now I move my attention to sounds. And I hear this

00:54:13.980 voice coming and going. And other sounds. So if I use the same kind of words, the field of sound,

00:54:25.320 like the field of vision, that's all the sounds. How big is it? Well, there isn't a second one to

00:54:31.540 compare it with. And is it inside anything? No. Or I say it's in silence. So these sounds are coming

00:54:39.700 out of the silence, going back in. And I, I, I think you'll see here developing the first person

00:54:45.580 language. I am the space in which the darkness is happening. I am the silence in which the sounds

00:54:51.400 are happening. Now I move my attention to body sensations. And if I put aside my memory, my sort of

00:54:59.780 map, and just go by the sensation. See? Lots of different sensations. Now, how big is the whole field of

00:55:08.740 sensation? Well, there isn't a second one to compare it with. It's single. See? I can't say

00:55:15.620 how big it is. And is it inside anything? Mm-mm. In this awareness. Now I identify with my body

00:55:24.780 sensations often enough. So if, if I say that, uh, I can't say how big the field of sensation is, I can

00:55:31.440 say, I can't say how big I am. I'm not inside anything. Yes. I'm single. I'm alone. And then,

00:55:42.100 finally, we can move our attention to thoughts and feelings. So think of a number. There's a thought,

00:55:47.660 you see? And, uh, think of the face of a friend and the affection you feel, feelings. See? Or,

00:55:54.820 anything, problem and anxiety that comes up. Challenge you've got. Now, how big is this very

00:56:03.860 complicated field of mind? Well, I don't experience a second one to compare it with. See? And where

00:56:13.660 is it? Well, I think as the Zen people say, it's, it's in no mind. Or, my thoughts like my voice are

00:56:20.740 coming out of nowhere and disappearing again. And this is who I am. This, this open space. And this

00:56:28.520 is who we all are. You see? So I don't know what you're thinking, Sam, or what you're feeling. But I'm

00:56:34.280 convinced you're, you're the same indivisible space containing your particular view, you see?

00:56:42.980 So now when we open our eyes, well, what really changes? The space is full of colors and shapes,

00:56:49.720 magic. But one is, one is still this single space that contains everything. So that's a kind,

00:57:00.100 that's, that's pointing out the obvious. Yeah, well, that was a great tour. So let's,

00:57:05.860 let's start with the, the place we started with the, the open-eyed considerations of pointing at one's

00:57:11.420 own face and noticing that there's nothing to see. And I want to just try to channel the,

00:57:19.220 the skepticism that some listeners may feel. And this, this may be the kind of thing you've heard

00:57:27.640 a lot, but, and if you can think of other challenges that don't occur to me, feel free to, to raise them.

00:57:34.120 But I can imagine someone saying, well, of course I can't see my face. I can't see my own eyes,

00:57:41.380 but I know they're there, right? And so what's the, what's the significance of this? You seem to be

00:57:48.020 suggesting that there's something profound about the eye not being able to see itself, but I know I

00:57:54.220 have a head. I know I have a face. I know I have eyes in the middle of it. What's the point of this?

00:57:58.980 Yes. I think there are different ways of approaching this. And I'm really not in the

00:58:06.680 business of trying to persuade or convince anyone for a start. I'm just happy to be this. And if

00:58:12.060 people are interested, I'll respond. But if they are interested, I say, well, you, you say that my

00:58:17.960 head is here. You see my eyes. And I know you can see it from say three feet or six feet away.

00:58:24.100 But what I am depends on the range, you know, on where you are looking from. And if you come up to

00:58:31.660 me, then you'll see my, you see my face, but come closer, you'll see a patch of skin and come

00:58:39.120 even closer if you've got the right instruments and you'll find cells, molecules, atoms, particles,

00:58:46.480 almost nothing. And I'm right at zero and I say, well, absolutely nothing here. But I'm aware and

00:58:53.300 full of everything. So I say, well, of course, I've got a head, I've got eyes. But it's a matter of

00:58:59.140 where I keep them. And I keep them out there in the mirror. And I keep them in other people at a

00:59:06.380 range there. I need them, but they're not central. Now, obviously, this is a very different way of

00:59:12.480 appreciating what one is. But it does actually fit with what science says. And what we've done,

00:59:20.800 you see, is accept what everyone tells us about who we are from their point of view and say, well,

00:59:27.020 you must know more about what I am than I do. And what I'm suggesting is my point of view,

00:59:34.480 which is headless, eyeless, tongueless, you know, without anything here, is valid here.

00:59:40.340 And when I touch my head, you say, well, look, you can touch your head. I say, well,

00:59:45.760 for you, I'm touching my head. But for me, my hands disappear. And there are sensations in awareness.

00:59:51.180 And this is taking it as it's given. And if someone doesn't, you know, go along with that,

00:59:56.420 well, there's nothing I can do really. And, you know, this does make sense. But whether someone says

01:00:05.840 yes, no, or maybe to it is rather mysterious to me.

01:00:09.960 This gets to what really are the unique strengths and liabilities of this way of pointing. Because,

01:00:20.720 you know, I've been convinced for a long time that what Douglas was getting at here,

01:00:25.680 it really is the fundamental insight into selflessness that is provoked in

01:00:31.180 Dzogchen pointing out instruction or is sought by really every method of meditation,

01:00:36.880 certainly in the East. And it's what the Advaita teachers are talking about, people like Ramana

01:00:42.680 Maharshi. And the thing that the headlessness insight gets at almost uniquely well is how 0.60

01:00:50.600 available the glimpse of this quality of consciousness is, how it's right on the surface,

01:00:57.000 how there's really, there's no such thing as depth. There's no, there's no place to go deep

01:01:01.920 within through a practice of meditation to see this. And, you know, and there are many analogies

01:01:07.960 that I've used to indicate how on the surface this is. And so, you know, one analogy I've used is,

01:01:14.240 is seeing the optic blind spot. I mean, once you are taught how to do that, well, then, then that thing

01:01:20.600 you're seeing isn't far away. It's not deep within. It's in some, some place on the surface of

01:01:26.620 consciousness that you didn't realize existed until you saw this particular effect. And another

01:01:33.380 example I use is the difference between looking through a window at the scene outside or inside

01:01:40.700 and seeing your face reflected on the surface of the glass. And that if the goal were to see your face

01:01:47.420 face and someone is, is looking through their face out at the, at the scene, you know, how do you tell

01:01:54.100 them to recognize their face? Just how long should it take? How deep must they go? And really the answer

01:02:00.800 there is that they just have to change their plane of focus and they'll see their face instantly.

01:02:05.840 And that does get at, again, these are all, these analogies are imperfect, but it gets at something

01:02:12.880 that this method, when it works, reveals really well, which is that there really is no distance

01:02:19.600 here. And what's being pointed out is already true of the nature of awareness. It just has to be

01:02:25.940 recognized and there's, there's really no distance to go. But the flip side of that is that people who

01:02:32.260 haven't spent a lot of time meditating and haven't deeply ingrained this search for insight into

01:02:42.320 selflessness may glimpse this thing, you know, very briefly and not see it as the answer to their

01:02:53.440 search, because they really haven't had a search and they're not, they haven't become connoisseurs of

01:02:57.780 their, they're unenlightenment. And so they don't see that this glimpse of openness and centerlessness

01:03:03.960 immediately balances the equation they've been struggling to solve.

01:03:10.200 Yes.

01:03:10.400 And, and I believe Douglas, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that he once said in some context that

01:03:18.120 the voice of the devil says, so what? And do I have that right? Did he notice this as a problem

01:03:25.460 where people would glimpse this and then say, well, well, so what? And then it was hard to kind of get

01:03:30.460 them past that point.

01:03:31.960 Well, yes. I mean, you show them their true nature and they go, oh, okay, well, what's on TV tonight?

01:03:39.980 You know, it is astonishing. Douglas was astonished that you could show this and people would not value

01:03:46.800 it. But he took that with a pinch of salt. And, you know, he, he, in the end, he shared it with so

01:03:54.960 many people. And I think I probably have the same approach. You, you, you go around sharing it as

01:04:03.040 widely as you can and affirming everyone's got it. And then you stand back and see what happens.

01:04:08.320 And, and some accept it and some don't. And it's really mysterious and really interesting for that

01:04:14.580 reason. I mean, fascinating. And, uh, we have, uh, regular online video meetings, you know, so quite a

01:04:23.020 few a week. And I've started asking people, why do you value this? What, you know, and everyone's story

01:04:28.680 is different and, uh, sort of unpredictable really. And my feeling is that one just goes and shares

01:04:38.180 it and affirms everyone's got it and that their response, whatever it is, even if it's so what is

01:04:46.620 valid. And as you go around, gradually, it seems to me more and more people say yes to it and value it.

01:04:57.060 And that is infectious. And it's a long-term project, but I am part of a community where I can see how

01:05:05.400 powerful that is and how wonderful and how much fun it is. And I just think, well, we've got a great

01:05:11.860 party going. There's no need to advertise it really, you know, um, it will speak for itself and, and it

01:05:19.300 does. And, uh, so yes, I mean, I, I'm re I really don't think one can judge whether someone is ready for

01:05:30.120 it or not. I say everyone is ready and here you are, do what you like with it. Well, so let's map

01:05:35.500 this on to a more traditional way of thinking about this, which, you know, exists in many places, but

01:05:41.520 I would say Dzogchen has been the most systematic in talking about both sides of this, the seeming

01:05:51.860 paradox of this already being true of the nature of mind. And on that's, on that account, you have

01:06:00.420 people from, you know, the Zen tradition and the Advaita tradition, sometimes speaking as though

01:06:06.500 practice doesn't make any sense because this thing is already true. But the other side of that is

01:06:13.460 a glimpse of this isn't sufficient. That's actually the beginning of someone's practice and

01:06:20.560 what your job is thereafter is not to seek this as dualistically as though this were some goal that

01:06:27.060 had to be attained, but to get used to this and more used to this and grow in into it so that you're

01:06:36.080 living from that place more and more. And it becomes more and more obvious such that at a certain point

01:06:41.560 it can't be overlooked. So how do you think about or speak about the difference between

01:06:50.360 an initial glimpse of headlessness and a stabilizing of this glimpse or a living from that place more

01:07:01.200 and more? Well, I think it's both ends of the spectrum. I did a workshop just a couple of days

01:07:06.340 ago and at the end of it, about 40 people, someone said, but how do I keep this going?

01:07:11.560 I said, well, it's like anything you've got to practice. And here's something that you can do if

01:07:19.300 you're serious about wanting to get it going. I said, I want you each day to commit yourself to

01:07:26.980 noticing three times when you're with people that it's face to no face. And I want you to sit for

01:07:35.560 two minutes and just on your own quietly and notice your single eye. And thirdly, I want you,

01:07:43.940 when you're walking down the street, at least once in the day to notice you're still in the scenery moves.

01:07:50.100 You know, it's both, you've got it, you can't lose it, you're home, but you have to practice it.

01:07:56.360 You have to draw on it. You have to, yes, let it into your life. Yes.

01:08:04.740 Yeah. And I think it's important to recognize that doing this in the presence of other people

01:08:11.520 makes it especially vivid because our sense of separateness is not only visually anchored

01:08:18.820 more than in any other sense domain, but it really is ramified socially, right? So we feel this

01:08:26.700 contraction of self very much in relationship to others. And it's what, you know, this self-other

01:08:36.460 dichotomy, one could argue, is two sides of a single coin that gets forged at some point in our

01:08:44.460 development. And if you can just imagine the difference between, you're looking across,

01:08:50.840 let's say you're sitting in a cafe and you're looking across at somebody else sitting at another

01:08:55.420 table, a stranger, and they're reading a book, say, and they're not aware of you. And then in the next

01:09:02.960 moment, the person looks up and is looking directly into your eyes. And so there's that moment of eye

01:09:07.900 contact with a stranger. And that transition from merely observing someone in the world,

01:09:14.460 to feeling in a very visceral way that you are now an object in the world for them. They're aware

01:09:21.760 of you. You know, for most of us, that heightens this feeling. It's not an accident that we call it,

01:09:29.360 you know, self-consciousness. We become aware that others are looking at us. We sort of project

01:09:34.980 our eyes outward and, you know, objectify ourselves by the direction of their gaze.

01:09:41.020 And if in moments like that, you know, whether you're looking at a stranger or with more appropriate

01:09:48.700 social cues, actually talking to someone who has invited the relationship, so you could be talking

01:09:56.440 to a friend or whoever, if you look for yourself, if you look for your head in those moments and fail

01:10:03.520 to find it clearly, if there really is just this openness where you thought yourself to be a moment

01:10:08.820 before, in which the other person is appearing, that can make this non-dual awareness especially

01:10:15.500 vivid.

01:10:17.160 Absolutely. It may be helpful just to briefly describe what I think of as the four stages of

01:10:25.560 development, because it includes discovering the self. So shall I just do that?

01:10:31.160 Yeah, that'd be great.

01:10:32.540 Okay, so stage one is the baby, and I'm using my own language here, but the baby is first

01:10:38.700 person, headless, at large. You have no idea of what you look like. You look at another

01:10:43.640 person. You don't feel under inspection. The eyes don't have that power yet. So that's stage

01:10:50.320 one. Stage two is the child, where you're learning language, and through language you're learning

01:10:55.600 that others can see you, and you're developing the capacity to sort of, in imagination, go

01:11:01.260 out and look back at yourself through their eyes as a thing. And as a child, you're not

01:11:07.580 yet really sure what kind of box you're in, so it's as easy to be a train or a bird as a

01:11:14.800 little boy or girl. And all of these stages are infectious. If you're with a baby, in my

01:11:21.680 language, it's just giving you permission to be headless. You know, it's just open.

01:11:25.600 And if you're with a child, it's giving you permission to be flexible and playful and get

01:11:29.880 down on the floor and be a train, you see. Because now you keep growing up, and the feedback

01:11:35.980 through language from society is that 24-7, you are what you look like. You are the one

01:11:42.080 in the mirror. Look, there's your face. That's what you are at center. We can see it. You can't

01:11:47.540 but trust us. And so you learn to see yourself as the others see you and profoundly identify

01:11:54.380 with that, and act as if you're behind a face, and act as if they are behind a face

01:11:58.980 there. So now when you look at someone, and they look at you, as you're saying, you feel

01:12:06.260 looked at. That's a kind of learned thing. And you're doing the same. So you're communicating,

01:12:11.640 I'm in a body, you're in a body. I can see you, you can see me. And you feel looked at.

01:12:18.500 So that's the third stage, which is infectious. You walk into a room and everybody's doing it.

01:12:23.140 You know, someone looks at you, you feel looked at. You're a thing.

01:12:25.980 Now, potentially, the fourth stage is when you reawaken to your own point of view, which, as you said,

01:12:33.220 is headless. And you are space for the world. And when you look at someone else, now here's the

01:12:43.180 little experiment to do. They turn their gaze to you, and normally you feel, you know, put on the spot

01:12:49.440 and looked at and thinged. Now you can look at that gaze and see it's directed into nothing,

01:12:56.060 like you were saying. And so what sort of put you in the box, someone else's gaze, is now an

01:13:02.180 opportunity to see that you're not in the box. And this fourth stage is as infectious as all the

01:13:09.100 others. And so when you're with friends who are enjoying being headless, of course, we're still

01:13:14.760 feeling looked at. But at the same time, we're aware that we're space for each other. And I hope

01:13:21.900 that this is, you know, I've got, you know, I have many friends I share this with, and it's wonderful

01:13:27.920 to finally bring into the public domain awareness of our true nature. And many people find that, you

01:13:37.700 know, a friend who's a guitarist, and he said as soon as he saw this, and he went and performed,

01:13:42.620 he suddenly wasn't on stage, he was space for the audience. And, you know, it's very healing in

01:13:50.360 lots of kinds of ways. It's healing in precisely the way that mindfulness is healing, because it is

01:13:57.720 a kind of mindfulness of the centralistness of awareness. I mean, you're basically, you're taking

01:14:04.240 that as your object of mindfulness rather than any other object of consciousness.

01:14:09.820 So it has the effect of, for those moments where you're aware of this, you're not identified

01:14:19.120 with thought, you're not clinging to the pleasantness of experience or pushing unpleasant experience

01:14:25.720 away. You're simply this openness in which whatever is appearing is appearing. And so it's

01:14:32.560 got its own intrinsic equanimity and serenity to it. You're just recognizing this quality of

01:14:39.000 consciousness. So when you teach people about this, do you talk about being lost in thought

01:14:46.600 as the obstacle to seeing this in the next moment? How much of your discussion of this has a similar

01:14:54.660 character to the way in which we tend to talk about practice of mindfulness or meditation generally?

01:15:00.740 I think they dovetail perfectly, really. I suppose one slightly different angle maybe is that I talk

01:15:10.940 about placing your mind, placing your thoughts. So normally we think of thoughts somehow at the

01:15:18.900 center here in the mind, in our head. But when you are mindful, they're just objects like you're saying

01:15:24.520 really, and they're out there with the table and with everything else. So your mind is at large,

01:15:32.120 and there's no mind here. And this is, the mind loves it. It's very freeing. To see your mind is the

01:15:41.240 world is big. The thoughts and feelings don't affect your no mind. They don't affect this space.

01:15:47.940 But you're not in denial, and you experience the whole range of things. It's wonderful. But they're

01:15:54.700 there and not here, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the way I have put that before is that the

01:16:01.400 world you see with your open eyes is the same place where you're thinking and feeling.

01:16:08.760 Exactly.

01:16:09.580 I mean, you can actually see that, at least visually, you can see that in just superimposing a visual

01:16:16.260 image onto the physical world you're looking at, right? So it's just, you know, people can do that

01:16:21.640 with a greater or lesser degree of vividness. But something happens there. If you're staring at your

01:16:27.200 table and you imagine a, you know, a very small horse and carriage on it, right? Something there is

01:16:34.680 different than when I say, you know, imagine an elephant on it. And that superimposition of something

01:16:41.380 shows you that your visual mind is, in some basic sense, before your eyes. And we just know,

01:16:49.760 as a matter of the underlying neurology, this is all happening in the same place.

01:16:55.820 And, I mean, that really opens up some profound things. Because, I mean, how on earth do you

01:17:01.820 actually imagine an elephant? I mean, it just pops up out of nowhere, right? I mean, it's just

01:17:07.720 extraordinary. But it pops up in the same place as the table. And so I say, well, you know, the whole

01:17:13.560 thing is popping up out of the great void. Now, this is magical. It is, yes. One pays attention

01:17:24.200 because it's so interesting.

01:17:25.960 Do you have any specific instructions for people when they look at their face in a mirror?

01:17:31.760 Because that seems like a very good, you can do that on demand in a way that you can't necessarily

01:17:37.640 get someone to make sustained eye contact with you on demand. What practice would you recommend there?

01:17:43.620 Well, very similar to, as you do on your app, I would say, okay. I mean, we always do this in a

01:17:49.080 workshop. I take mirrors, you know, and you get people to hold the mirror out in their, you know,

01:17:54.680 arm's length in their hand. And you just simply say to them, well, on present evidence,

01:18:00.420 where's your face, you see? Well, it's there in the mirror. And there isn't one at the near end of

01:18:06.680 your arm, so to speak. And so just as your space for another person, face to no face, so you are

01:18:12.760 with your image in the mirror, with yourself, which is a rather compassionate thing to do, actually.

01:18:20.360 And you can say to people, all right, well, I mean, the mirror is telling you what you look like,

01:18:25.360 you know, this evening. But it's also telling you where your face is. And so I get people to

01:18:30.960 bring it up towards them and see how it changes. And you've got to keep it at arm's length to see

01:18:35.780 it, you know. Well, then I might say, well, you know, imagine we had a big, long mirror,

01:18:40.700 and I held it on the other side of the room, where you could see your whole body. Now imagine

01:18:44.840 one on the moon. What would you see? You'd see your planetary face. So the mirror is showing you

01:18:50.860 where you keep your appearances, you know. I've got a planetary face out at that range. I've got

01:18:55.780 my human individual face at about three feet, you know, and no face at center. And, you know,

01:19:03.900 when you're growing up, you're taught to sort of reach into the mirror. I take people through this.

01:19:08.680 I say, so imagine, you know, looking in the mirror. Now imagine reaching in and getting hold of that face,

01:19:15.280 pulling it out towards you, flipping it the other way around, because it's facing the wrong way,

01:19:20.920 enlarging it, because it's too small, and imagine putting it on. Now that's what you, those are the

01:19:26.620 tricks you learn to do as you grow up, in order to get this idea, you're behind a face. You know,

01:19:32.280 that's where you get it from, plus what others say. And, but you don't actually do it. It's

01:19:37.960 imagination. And when you actually look, I mean, you've got that going, and that enables you to

01:19:43.160 function as a separate individual, which I think is terribly important. I'm not at all

01:19:50.140 in favor of denying that. There's room for both. So you've got that going, but now that's your sort

01:19:57.080 of public self. But privately, now you see, oh, my face is over there in the mirror. See, I'm not

01:20:03.540 like that here. And that face is growing older, but the space here doesn't grow older. Now this is,

01:20:12.620 you know, a fantastic meditation.

01:20:15.120 Yeah. One of the things I love about this emphasis in practice is that it seems to bypass a pitfall

01:20:23.500 that many of us have noticed in ordinary mindfulness, because ordinarily with mindfulness,

01:20:30.260 you're being taught to become more and more aware of the kind of the micro changes in physiology.

01:20:40.460 Most people start with the breath and become very aware of your body and ultimately appearances in

01:20:49.100 mind, thoughts, and feelings, intentions. And until you can do that in a non-dualistic way,

01:20:57.400 there can be this kind of uncanny valley effect where what you're becoming is more and more

01:21:03.420 self-conscious in many circumstances, right? So you become more aware of your own

01:21:09.520 kind of neurotic entanglement in each moment. And it can lead to a stage in your practice where

01:21:18.400 you actually, you're not, you don't feel that you're being benefited by doing so much meditation.

01:21:23.680 In fact, you're becoming somebody who is less functional in some way, because you're, you know,

01:21:29.160 you walk up to the cashier in a store and, you know, you've just got so much attention on yourself.

01:21:35.900 And it's in some way less freeing than just being, you know, blithely unaware that it's possible to

01:21:45.100 live an examined life in the first place. And so what this approach does is anchor mindfulness to

01:21:55.080 simply openness and free attention in, particularly in those moments of social interaction,

01:22:01.720 where you have no attention on yourself because you can't find yourself. You're simply the space

01:22:09.320 of free attention in which this other person is appearing moment to moment.

01:22:14.600 Yes, yes. I don't think that the endless way bypasses any of these challenges, by the way. You know,

01:22:22.860 I think that one still has to work through all kinds of things. But yes, but this is life,

01:22:32.500 isn't it? Life is full of challenges. I mean, about 15 years ago, after being with the headless

01:22:38.740 way for, you know, 35 years, I suddenly began getting panic attacks. And that was rather shocking.

01:22:46.020 And I don't know if you've ever had a panic attack, but it's rather disturbing. It's out of your control.

01:22:53.560 And what I realized this panic attack was about was fear of others, but feeling separate. It went

01:23:01.800 right, you know, finally, I suppose, looking back, this deep sense of separation that I'd sort of managed

01:23:08.980 in the space, you know, erupted. And I didn't really know what to do. But I said, I did know

01:23:16.940 what to do, just remain open, inquire and pay attention and trust and all that. But, you know,

01:23:23.320 I tried various strategies, you know, there are no others, there are no others, there are no others,

01:23:27.760 there's no self. It doesn't work, you know, you can only go so far and then you, you know.

01:23:33.320 So, and what it, in the end, what it came, what, the way I found myself through this was

01:23:40.840 I can't get rid of this sense of others and self. I've been trying, I can't do it. And

01:23:48.480 I accepted it. And of course, I could see that accepting the sense of separation didn't disturb

01:23:57.020 the space. It was in the openness. It was yet another thing arising. And I'd been trying

01:24:02.360 to get rid of it. Well, of course, what you resist, persists. And as soon as I began to

01:24:07.160 accept it, actually something wonderful came out of it, which was a profound valuing of the otherness

01:24:16.020 of people and of the self within the one. The one was many and the many were one. I didn't have to

01:24:24.820 try and cancel out the many in order to be the one. So I'm saying this that, you know, I think that

01:24:31.120 even when you're seeing who you are, I mean, perhaps even more so, it shines a light everywhere

01:24:36.280 in the end and it doesn't let you off anything. But these, what seem to be such difficult, strange

01:24:43.500 things, you know, God, why is this happening to me? They teach one something about the world that

01:24:50.200 nothing else could teach. And this sense of, you know, the world is me, profoundly me, yet it is

01:24:57.220 profoundly other, is glorious. Yeah, that's interesting because it does get at a distinction

01:25:05.420 that the Buddhists really emphasize, you know, to a point of pedantry, it seems in the end. But I think 0.99

01:25:13.320 the distinction is important, which is the difference between asserting the oneness of what remains when

01:25:21.900 you're no longer taken in by the subject-object perception and not asserting, you know, anything

01:25:30.880 really essentially is the notion of emptiness, you know. So it's not even one, it's not one, it's not

01:25:36.240 many. There is simply this unity of cognition and appearances, right? And so there's no, many of us

01:25:46.780 have experienced this at various points in practice and certainly met people who seem to be stuck in

01:25:52.160 this place of kind of reifying an experience of oneness. And there's a kind of subtle undercurrent

01:25:59.600 of conceptualization continually happening there that's going unrecognized. Yes, you have to sort

01:26:06.180 of work through those things, don't you? And in a workshop, one of the good things about doing a

01:26:11.660 workshop is that there are lots of people there and they can see that people react in different ways.

01:26:18.520 And so you'll get someone who is going, wow, everything's in me, there's only one. And someone

01:26:23.620 else goes, well, I can't see my head, but I don't get that. And my job at that point is to say,

01:26:28.200 you've got it, you're just having a different experience and it will change. And, you know,

01:26:36.460 in effect, you don't get stuck in anything really. And sometimes I will say, you know, if you wake up

01:26:46.000 tomorrow morning after the workshop and you think, what on earth was all that about, all those

01:26:50.300 experiments, you know, don't try and remember, look again now. Don't try and hold on to any feeling

01:26:58.080 of oneness or whatever it was. Just be clueless. Like right now, for me, pay attention and see

01:27:05.580 what's happening. Yeah. And this is life unfolding. This is living. This is glorious. This is spontaneous

01:27:12.980 and unpredictable, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

01:27:16.100 So, Richard, is there anything that we haven't covered here that you think would be useful for

01:27:20.800 people to recognize what we're talking about and work with it?

01:27:26.080 Well, I'm aware we're, you know, we've just got audio. It's like, you know, speaking on the phone.

01:27:31.820 And one of my jobs in my life has been a psychotherapist. I've done a lot of counseling

01:27:36.860 and a lot of it on the phone. And why I say it is that, I mean, I don't talk about the headless

01:27:43.720 way on the phone. They haven't come for that. You know, they might come for six sessions because

01:27:48.640 they're suffering bereavement, oral health, whatever. Anyway, what I do is I just be the

01:27:54.960 silence. And I listen to their voice and my voice. And so, what I'm paying attention to

01:28:03.160 is two voices, like now, yours and mine, in the one consciousness. And obviously, I know

01:28:09.280 my voice is, you know, this is my voice and that's your voice. But from the point of view

01:28:13.840 my true nature, they're both mine. Now, this means in a certain sense that I position myself

01:28:20.340 right where you are or where the client is. And I'm looking out of the same space in, you

01:28:27.880 know, and trying to feel my way into their world. Now, I find that people sort of recognize that

01:28:34.120 instinctively because you're on their side. And so, I'm saying this, that in my experience,

01:28:40.880 this has so many applications in everyday life. And it's exciting and interesting.

01:28:50.820 That's an interesting way to frame it because when you put it like that, it can become obvious

01:28:57.480 that when I'm hearing you speak, I'm hearing your thoughts for the first time. I don't know

01:29:03.920 what you are going to say next. But the truth is, I'm in the same position with respect to my

01:29:09.820 own thoughts. Right? I don't know what I'm going to think until the thought itself appears. And

01:29:14.440 when I'm speaking like this, unless I've been, you know, thinking and preparing what I was going

01:29:20.620 to say and kind of waiting for you to stop talking so that I could insert what I had already thought

01:29:25.480 out, the normal experience is to simply be thinking out loud. I mean, to be hearing my utterance

01:29:33.200 precisely when you hear it. So, I stand in the same relationship to both of our utterances,

01:29:40.860 which is to merely hear them for the first time when spoken.

01:29:44.520 And it's magical. It's magical. They're just coming out of the no mind or the silence or

01:29:51.540 consciousness, whatever you want to call it, and going back in. I mean, how does that happen?

01:29:57.000 I mean, it's just, yes, yes. And it's so intimate, isn't it? Two voices in one consciousness.

01:30:03.680 Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a pleasure to bring your voice to this conversation. If people want to

01:30:10.700 reach out or find one of your workshops or get your books, where would you direct them online?

01:30:17.780 Well, our website is headless.org. And if people are interested in joining any of our online video

01:30:26.680 meetings, they can just contact me through the website. And all our books are on the website

01:30:33.260 and information about workshops. So, feel very welcome to get in touch with me through the website,

01:30:42.480 I suppose. Nice, nice.

01:30:44.480 And thank you, Sam. You know, often I get people, you know, many times people saying,

01:30:51.640 oh, I heard about you through Sam Harris. Oh, great.

01:30:54.300 Yeah. So, really, lots of friends come to workshops or contact me online, and it's through reading your

01:31:02.380 book or your excellent app or the podcast. And so, I just want to appreciate how you have,

01:31:11.720 well, thank you for that. Yeah.

01:31:13.160 Yeah. Well, get ready. You're about to get a few more.

01:31:15.820 Oh, good. Oh, good. Well, well, thank you very much, Sam. A delight to be you.

01:31:20.940 Likewise.

01:31:21.280 Likewise.

01:31:24.300 Okay. Well, I hope you found that useful. Again, if you were left wondering what the hell

01:31:33.420 are those guys talking about, there is an experience there that could become quite clear.

01:31:41.120 It can be very brief in the beginning, and then it can be expanded and elaborated through practice.

01:31:49.820 And did you see what I mean about him being the nicest guy on earth?

01:31:53.400 What a voice. Actually, I've invited him to record guided meditations for the Waking Up app,

01:31:59.960 and he has accepted. So, hopefully, those will be coming soon. And if you want more information

01:32:05.600 about that, you can find it at wakingup.com. And with that, I leave you. Until next time.

01:32:35.600 Thank you.

01:32:36.600 Thank you.

01:32:36.620 Thank you.

01:32:37.600 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 13, 2020

#181 — The Illusory Self

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